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A few steps to the left, a strange noise in the darkness, three loud shots – then silence.
Those moments alone, deep inside a tunnel within a Vietnamese mountainside, were some of the scariest of Bob Coleman’s life.
During the Vietnam War, the Buninyong man was one of a select group known as the “Tunnel Rats”.
The Australian Tunnel Rats – or “ferrets” as they were referred to at the time – were given a torch, a handgun and not much else.
They lived by their unofficial motto “non gratum anus rodentum”, which translated to “not worth a rat’s arse”.
Their mission was to crawl down bunkers, shafts and the sometimes elaborate underground networks built by the Viet Cong – capturing or destroying weapons, documents, drugs and enemy soldiers.
They also had to destroy the holes they’d just crawled down.
Just 700 men formed this group throughout the war, which ravaged the Vietnamese countryside during the 1960s and 1970s.
Mr Coleman and his fellow Tunnel Rats were members of the Engineer Field Troops, a group which received one of the highest casualty rates of the war – as high as 30 per cent some years.
As the war hearted up in the 1960s, the guerilla Viet Cong had constructed weapons dumps, briefing rooms, headquarters and even hospitals underground.
They’d created false floors, hidden spikes, explosive booby traps and trip wires to discourage anyone from following them down their underground lairs.
But that was the job the Tunnel Rats were given and, for Bob, being a Rat was only part of his job.
His big adventure began as an apprentice panel beater in the suburbs of Melbourne.
After getting sick of constantly fixing salt damage to cars caused by a nearby smallgoods manufacturer, a teenage Mr Coleman decided he would join the armed forces in 1964, following in the footsteps of his father who served with the famed New Zealand force commandos.
“I had something to live up to, that’s for sure,” he said.
“Dad was very supportive, but he did joke that I’d last about six weeks.”
After three months of basic training, Mr Coleman and his fellow recruits embarked on a gruelling six-week jungle-training exercise at Canungra in Queensland.
Overseas units such as the US infantry’s first division travelled to Canungra to take part in the demanding course.
“At Canungra, it was ‘get off the bus, now you double-time if you go anywhere’,” Mr Coleman said.
“Whether you’re going to the toilet, going to the mess, going anywhere – you run.”
Mr Coleman said the trainers were “henchmen”.
“John Wayne’s got nothing on these guys,” he recalls from the contrasting comfort of his lounge room, complete with slouch hat displayed proudly atop a bookshelf.
Joining 21 Construction Squadron, Mr Coleman made his first trip overseas to Borneo in 1965.
There he and his fellow engineers were tasked with building a road, including removing all trees within 100 metres of the road’s proposed path.
On one occasion, he was halfway through cutting down a particularly large teak tree with a chainsaw when blood appeared to gush from everywhere.
“I thought I’d hit my offsider with the chainsaw,” Mr Coleman said.
“The whole trunk was hollow and, during the rainy season, it filled up with water and the wood tannin turned it to a blood-red colour.”
After returning to Australia in July 1966, Mr Coleman was again shipped overseas two days after Anzac Day in 1967.
His destination: Vietnam.
As part of 1 Field Squadron, Mr Coleman stepped off the plane and was immediately asked whether he wanted to fill sandbags or lay mines.
“I said ‘well, I’ve done sandbags before, I’ll go out to the minefields’,” he said.
“We went out in two troops and it took us 10 weeks to lay 23,000 mines. In that process, seven of us were killed.”
Mr Coleman said the mine layers worked in teams of two, with teams “leap-frogging” each other as progress was made.
On one occasion, the teams gathered to have some lunch, but Mr Coleman and his teammate arrived to the campfire late.
Minutes later, disaster struck.
“I was sitting on a 20-litre drum, having a smoke, then the other blokes finished and moved on,” he said.
“The staff sergeant said ‘c’mon move yourself’. I said ‘I haven’t finished my bloody smoke yet’.
“As I said that, bang. One of our mates stood on a mine a couple of metres away.”
The soldier instantly lost an arm and a leg and another had been “peppered” with what looked like the equivalent of six shotgun shells.
“If I hadn’t have been finishing off that smoke, I would have probably been right next to them.”
Mr Coleman and his troop had some “downtime” in between laying mines with the infantry – the engineers acting as the battalions’ “bunker busters” whenever enemy underground assets were discovered.
This was how Mr Coleman became a Tunnel Rat.
“If we found a hole in the ground, it was our job to go down and search it out,” he said.
“There was no basic training for clearing a tunnel – you knew how to crawl and the rest you learnt as you went.”
Mr Coleman said he almost preferred the underground work to the mine laying.
“You didn’t sweat so much with the tunnels – one slip with a mine and the instantaneous fuse becomes a little bit scary,” he said.
“When we came to a bunker system, the forward scout would notify the officer in charge and he would decide if it was safe enough for engineers to go into the bunker.
“Hopefully there was no enemy – but you didn’t know until you got inside.”
Once down a Viet Cong-constructed hole, there was a whole lot more to be found than bugs or cobwebs.
“It was amazing the amount of documents, weapons, ammunition and rice we found,” Mr Coleman said.
“One day, I found this plastic bag and it was full of white stuff. I came out with the bag and the intelligence officer said ‘I’ll have that’.
“It was opium – I reckon he sold it.”
Gas and lack of air was a constant problem for the Tunnel Rats, as was an enemy soldier lurking around the tight, winding corners of the Viet Cong underground labyrinths.
“One one op, I heard click click, so I spun around and fired three times – bang, bang, bang.”
“It turned out to be water dripping into some plastic sheeting – but that was the scariest time of my life.”
Mr Coleman found traps, spikes and even a ration tin stuffed with explosives.
Once, he found an enemy soldier.
“I just went around the corner and he was coming down towards me,” he said.
“He died – it was just a case of him or me.”
Mr Coleman remembers the remainder of his time in Vietnam involving massive drinking sessions with Kiwi soldiers, saving allied soldiers who had accidentally strayed into minefields and crawling down dozens more tunnels.
Today, he’s proud of the name Tunnel Rat and has even registered his vehicle “NAMRAT”.
He marches in the Anzac Day parade and catches up with his fellow Rats several times a year.
Last year, he went back to Vietnam and met up with a Viet Cong woman who had been injured by stepping on a mine – a mine laid by an engineer just like Mr Coleman.
“We wandered down the streets, mingled with locals,” he said.
“They look at you and sort of nod, but when you say you are Australian their face lights up.
“There’s a lot of respect there.”