This presentation of In Their Own Words is brought to you by the Honor Project

and is dedicated to the brave men and women of the United States Armed Forces.

Arguably, the biggest advantage the North Vietnamese army had over the Allied forces was the element of surprise.

Masters of the sneak attack, the Vietnamese crept through miles of tunnels that they had dug underneath the field of battle.

To combat this subterranean enemy, U.S. soldiers armed with nothing more than a 45-caliber automatic pistol

and a flashlight, voluntarily dropped into the tunnels,

and crawled through pitch-black passageways in search of their elusive foe.

This unheralded group of American soldiers, the so-called tunnel rats, infiltrated the

underground web of the Viet Cong. C.W. Bowman went to Vietnam as an infantryman with

the 25th Division in January, 1967.

We heard about tunnels, and that was mostly from the old-timers that were already there.

You know, they talked about, you know, Charlie popping up in tunnels and ambushing,

or setting an ambush and ambushing the squad or the platoon,

and then they'd melt away in the jungle. You'd never find them. And what they were doing was going down in tunnels.

Actually, the first thing I went into was a big bunker.

We were doing a S&D, a search and destroy mission and going through a village.

And they came across a lot of the people in the

villages had bunkers underneath their hootches and stuff and there was a

particularly large bunker and they said okay Bowman you're the new guy you know

you're going down in there you know and I said well you know I don't know if I

like this or not but you know I was the new guy you know and I wasn't going to show that I was afraid to go down in this, you know, and I said, well, you know, I don't know if I liked this or not, but, you know, I was the new guy, you know, and I wasn't going to show that I was afraid to go down in this bunker, you know, I lens, but had my M6, I remember had my M16 and

that fast light, and I went down the steps into the bunker, and it was pitch black, but I could

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