Be a Tunnel Rat at Cu Chi
If you are slender and fit you can be a tunnel rat inside the Cu Chi tunnels Viet Cong soldiers used.
by Jack Corbett
They say it took a special breed to become a tunnel rat. That it took a man without fear, a man who loved to be in tight spaces that cause most mortals to shrink into quivering masses of jelly. Whenever I dwelt on the subject and asked myself, "Had I served in Vietnam on the front lines, could I have done it?" Then the mere thought of it brought up images of being eaten by sharks, crushed to death by giant snakes and being pulled under by a crocodile until my body had putrefied enough to be consumed by the craggy beast. I had been in crawl spaces underneath old houses only 24 inches high where I had to inch along on my back while tucking in my stomach to get past even narrower spots and each time I had gotten so nervous that I couldn't wait to get out. It took a special kind of man who had a killer instinct whose senses were carefully tuned to his environment, who could smell an enemy and feel the presence of a booby trap before coming into contact with it. Or that's what I had read. One might compare him to a mongoose confronting a Cobra, which couldn't wait to tear into its mortal enemy while being nearly impervious to the dangers around it.
I finally got my chance to get into a tunnel the way the tunnels really were, but without booby traps, poisonous snakes, or Viet Cong itching to stab or shoot me. But I quickly found out that I was right all along, that I'd never cut it in the tunnels. But not for the reasons I suspected. In today's Tunnels of Cu Chi where they let the tourists go in, there are two types of tunnels. There's the tunnels as they originally were. Then there's special tunnels which have had their entrances widened by the Vietnamese just to give the tourists a sense of what it must have been like to be down there in wartime. In our little group only two of us attempted to get into the first type of tunnel. As you can see below, the tunnel is only as wide as my shoulders if that wide while being as high as the length of a man's foot. I was able to get in up to my chest and that's as far as I could go due to the width of my shoulders. I'm about 170 pounds now and just a hair shy of being six feet tall. Even in college when I was on the varsity cross country running team and ran at 162 pounds, I'm almost certain that my shoulders would have not allowed me to pass in those tunnel entrances. As for nearly all young Americans today, no way, because most of them are far too fat. In our little group out of five women only one tried--my Thai girlfriend and she passed the tunnel course in spades. The rest of the women were too flabby.
My girlfriend is about five foot two and weighs only ninety-five pounds. She's probably nearly a carbon copy of most of those V.C. women who lived in these tunnels. When challenged by the tunnel she deftly jumped in, pulled her arms over her head and ducked the rest of the way in while pulling her arms and shoulders through. A second or two later she was able to start worming her way through the horizontal section that would have taken her deeper into the tunnel complex.
The successful tunnel rat
