Into Vietnam. Shaun Clarke

7.62mm bullet hit the man’s lower body, just beside the spinal column, violently punching him forward. Even as the first man was splashing face down in the water, the other man was rushing past him to get to dry land and the villagers were looking up in surprise. He had just reached the dry earth at the edge of the paddy-field when several VC fired at him with their AK47s, making him shudder like a rag doll, tearing him to shreds, then hurling him to the ground as the dust billowed up all around him.

      A woman in the hamlet let out a long, piercing scream as the wounded man managed to make it to his knees, coughing water and blood from his lungs. Even as he was waving his arms frantically to correct his balance, pistols and assault rifles roared together. When he plunged backwards into the paddy-field, his clothes lacerated, the bullet holes pumping blood, wails of dread and despair arose from the hamlet.

      While the women gathered their children around them and ushered them into the thatched houses, the men trained by the Americans rushed to take up positions in the defensive slit trenches armed with 7.62mm M60 GPMGs – general-purpose machine-guns. Others rushed to their thatched huts and emerged carrying L1A1 SLR semi-automatic rifles of the same calibre as the machine-guns. They threw themselves on the ground overlooking the moat filled with lethal punji stakes and wooden palisades constructed by Australian SAS troops, taking aim at the attackers. The VC were now emerging from the paddy-field and marching directly towards the minefield that encircled the hamlet.

      Abruptly, the VC, who knew that the village was part of the US Strategic Hamlet Program and therefore well protected, split into three groups, two of which circled around the village, weaving through the palm trees just beyond the minefield. As they were doing so, the third group were taking positions in a hollow at the far side of the moat, between the paddy-field and the hamlet, and there setting up two Chinese 60mm mortars.

      Realizing with horror that the two VC groups could only be circling around the back of the hamlet because they knew the location of the patrol route exit through the minefield; and that they were also going to mortar-bomb a way through the minefield at the front – information they must have obtained from an informer – some of the villagers opened fire with their rifles and GPMGs as others raced back across the clearing to stop the guerrillas getting in. This second group was, however, badly decimated when a third VC mortar fired half a dozen shells in quick succession, blowing the running men apart and then exploding in a broad arc that took in some of the surrounding thatched huts and set them ablaze.

      As the flames burst ferociously from the thatched roofs and the wailing of women and children was heard from within, the first mortar shells aimed at the minefield exploded with a deafening roar. Soil, dust and smoke spewed skyward and then spread out to obscure the VC as some of them stood up and advanced at the crouch to the edge of the mined area. Kneeling there and checking where the mortars had exploded, the guerrillas saw that they nearly had a clear path and could complete the job with another few rounds.

      Using hand signals, the leader of this group indicated a slightly lower elevation, then dropped to the ground as a hail of gunfire came from the frantic villagers at the other side of the minefield. When the second round of mortar shells had exploded, throwing up more billowing smoke and dust, the first of the VC advanced along the path of charred holes created by the explosions. That crudely cleared route led them safely through the minefield and up to the edge of the moat, where some of them were chopped down by the villagers’ guns and the rest threw themselves to the ground to return fire.

      By now the other two groups of VC had managed to circle around to the back of the hamlet and, using the map given to them by the informer, had located the patrol route exit and started moving carefully along it in single file. Almost instantly, the first of them were cut down by the few armed peasants who had managed to escape the mortars exploding in the centre of the hamlet. As the first of the VC fell, however, the rest opened fire with their AK47s, felling the few peasants who had managed to get this far. The rest of the guerrillas then raced along the patrol route exit, into the centre of the hamlet, where, with the screams and weeping of women and children in their ears, they were able to come up behind the villagers defending the moat to the front.

      Some of the women kneeling in the clearing in front of their burning homes cried out warnings to their men, but it was too late. Caught in a withering crossfire from front and rear, the villagers firing across the moat, among them a few teenage girls, were chopped to pieces and died screaming and writhing in a convulsion of spewing soil and dust. Those who did not die immediately were put to death by the bayonet. When their mothers, wives or children tried to stop this, they too were dispatched in the same way. Within minutes the attack was over and the remaining VC were wading across the moat and clambering up to the clearing.

      In a state of shock and grief, and surrounded by their dead relatives and friends, the rest of the villagers were easily subdued and forced to kneel in the middle of the clearing. The remaining thatched huts were then searched by the guerrillas and those inside prodded out at bayonet or gun point. After a rigorous interrogation – faces were slapped and lots of insults were shouted, though no other form of torture was used – the villagers considered to be ‘traitors’ to the communists were led away and made to kneel by the moat. There they were shot, each with a single bullet to the back of the head, then their bodies were kicked over the edge into the water.

      When this grisly operation was over, the rest of the villagers, many in severe shock, were forced into separate work groups. One of these, composed only of men and teenage boys, was made to drag the dead bodies out of the moat with meat-hooks, then place them on ox carts and take them to a cleared area just outside the perimeter, where they were buried without ceremony in a shallow pit.

      When, about three hours later, this work party, now exhausted and in an even worse state of shock, returned to the hamlet, they found their friends already at work clearing away the burnt-out dwellings and unwanted foliage with machetes, hoes, short-handled spades and buckets under the impassive but watchful gaze of armed VC guards. Assigned their individual tasks in this joint effort, they began with the others what would be weeks of hard, nightmarish, ingenious work: the construction of an elaborate tunnel system directly under the devastated hamlet.

      First, a series of large, rectangular pits, each about fifteen feet deep, was dug on the sites of the destroyed huts. Over these pits were raised sloping thatched roofs of the type found on the other dwellings, though the newly built roofs were mere inches off the ground. Viewed from the air, they would suggest normal hamlet houses.

      Once the thatched roofs had been raised, work began on digging a series of tunnels leading down from the floor of each pit. Most of these were so narrow that there was only enough space for a single, slim body to wriggle along them, and in places they descended vertically, like a well, before continuing at a gentler slope in one direction or another. The only tunnel not beginning in one of the pits and not making any kind of bend was a well, its water table about forty feet deep and its surface access, level with the ground, camouflaged with a web of bamboo covered with soil and shrubbery.

      One of the pits served as a kitchen, complete with bamboo shelves and a stone-walled stove. Smoke was vented into a pipe that spewed it into a tunnel running about eight feet underground until it was 150 feet west of the kitchen, where it emerged through three vents hidden in the palm trees beyond the perimeter.

      An escape tunnel descended from the floor of the kitchen, curving west and crossing two concealed trapdoors before dividing into two even narrower tunnels. One of these was a false tunnel that led to a dead end; the other, concealed, rose steeply until it reached an escape hole hidden in the trees beyond the smoke outlets. A third escape tunnel, hidden by a concealed trapdoor, led away from the tunnel complex but linked up with another under the next village to the west. Of the other two trapdoors in this escape route, one had to be skirted, as the weight of a human body would make it collapse and drop that person to a hideous death in a trap filled with poisoned punji stakes. The third concealed trapdoor ran down into a large cavern hacked out of the earth about thirty feet down, to be used as a storage area for weapons, explosives and rice.

      A short tunnel running east from the entrance to the underground storage area led into the middle of the well, about halfway down. On the opposite side of the well, but slightly lower, where the man pulling water up with a bucket