Vietnam veteran C.W. Bowman has fascinated audiences at the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum several times with lectures about his war experiences. Last year, in an offsite program at the public library in West Columbia, he drew the largest audience ever for the museum’s Noon Debrief series. (See photo above.)
There’s a reason for that. C.W. Bowman was a tunnel rat.
If you don’t know what that means, come hear him at noon on Friday, Feb. 13, in the Theater of the Richland Library main location on Assembly Street in Columbia, where he will again tell his story in a free lecture, “A Tunnel Rat in Vietnam.”
A tunnel rat was a soldier with a singularly lonely and terrifying job. And he performed this mission over and over again, whenever his unit ran across the opening to one of the tunnels in the jungle dirt that the Viet Cong used as subterranean bases.
The “rat” would drop his weapons and gear, strip off his shirt and climb down into the hole – alone – with a .45-calibre pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other. And nothing else.
He would then slither down through the earth in search of the enemy, encountering whatever traps the V.C. had set – punji sticks, explosives, occasionally a poisonous snake – and deal with whatever he found the best he could with those limited tools.
Only volunteers became tunnel rats. But once a man did it once, he became his unit’s new expert, and the job was his for good. The experience he gained that first time was too valuable to waste by sending someone else down into the dirt. He knew too much that might save his life – and the lives of his comrades above – at a critical moment.
And a large part of his mission was finding out more. Bowman was asked at a previous lecture why American soldiers didn’t simply drop explosives down the hole and move on. (That’s what units that had no qualified “rat” actually did.) His answer was “intelligence.” You never knew what you might find – a map, a radio setup, a weapons cache – that would tell your side something critical about what the other side was up to.
When he wasn’t in a tunnel, Bowman frequently walked ‘point’ ahead of his unit.
One time, Bowman brought up a map showing V.C. camps all over the area, and his unit’s operation was extended another two weeks, checking them out. His buddies showed their appreciation by telling him, “Next time you find a map, leave the son of a bitch in the tunnel.”
Bowman was originally from Bordentown, N.J., but has called South Carolina home since 1973. He retired here after serving as a drill sergeant at Fort Jackson.
He was drafted into the Army when he was 19, and first went to Vietnam at the start of 1967. When he was there, he weighed 138 pounds, and had a 28-inch waist. Those were ideal proportions for his special duty.
Crawling down dark holes wasn’t all he did in Vietnam, of course. (See above photo of him leading a patrol.) He has a lot of stories to tell. Come hear him on Feb. 13.
Bowman exiting a tunnel.
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