Tunnel Rats (Stay Dead)

Gas was cleverly contained in sealed-off tunnel segments.

Tunnel rat - Wikipedia

The tunnels were infested with booby traps. If you somehow survived them, who was waiting for you in the dark? To penetrate such fortresses on the rare occasions when they would discover them, the Americans needed a special kind of soldier. At first, attack dogs had been sent down the holes. The dogs knew nothing about booby traps, and as a result of the inevitable carnage, their handlers flatly refused to sacrifice any more animals. The canine fiasco led in to the abrupt creation of an ad hoc human unit.

The job was to kill, capture or entomb Viet Cong with explosives. The favored weapon was a small-caliber revolver. The Americans were forbidden ever to fire off more than three shots in a row. Fire six and the enemy would know you were out of ammunition. We spent three years scouring the U. The attrition rate was appalling. When they came marching home, America, wracked by postwar trauma and recriminations, was not interested in their story. So they never told anybody. They remain lonely, isolated, very heroic men. Lean and as ascetic as the VC they hunted, the Tunnel Rats eschewed anything that would deaden their senses, even cologne or chewing gum.

The knife or bayonet, weapons as old as war itself, determined whether they lived or died. Booby traps had to be felt for in pitch darkness. Long dormant instincts were rehoned. Fingertips and ears became what walking sticks are to the blind. A onetime war resister who became a highly decorated Army officer, Flowers in served as ''Rat Six,'' commander of the crack Tunnel Rat unit of the 1st Infantry Division. He went down 97 holes after Viet Cong, each time in terror.

You made each movement with infinite care. Your senses never were more acute. In the tunnels, your adrenalin was pumping like a river. I swear I could hear my heart beating. It got so you could sense them. The same for VC. You could smell another human being in the tunnel. You knew he was waiting for you in the dark. Many times, I tried to talk VC into surrendering. They were bamboo vipers and once bitten, you could only take one or two more steps before you died.

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Charlie would tie the viper in a piece of bamboo with a piece of string. You learned to check the ceilings with your flashlight. One of the men got stung. He came out screaming and never went back in another tunnel. We also met hornets, centipedes, great moving masses of black spiders, bats.

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We met rats that carried bubonic plague. In the heat and stinking filth, fighting claustrophobia with every breath, the Americans had to squeeze their way along, often for hundreds of yards. Then squeezing down through it was scary. But going up through a trap door was the toughest thing a man could do. You had no idea what was up there above you. Or else the guerrillas might spear the GI through the throat, impaling him in the small opening.

As they tried to crawl out of the tunnels, more VC would be waiting. Like a flash, he wheeled, scrambled, and crawled far enough away to survive the blast. For years afterward, that grenade, twisting and falling in slow motion, would pervade his dreams. Flowers declines to estimate how many enemies he killed. His last mission occurred at a freshly dug bunker complex near the Saigon River. The Americans discovered seven holes. They all were cold--no VC.

Everybody had done a turn but me. The last hole had to be hot. Looking down the foot shaft, we could make out the tunnel entrance. We knew the Cong were in there. There was no way I could ask anybody else to go down that hole. Flowers was due to leave Vietnam soon. As his men lowered him down the shaft on a sling seat, he remembers, he saw tears in their eyes. His elbows and boots rubbed against the sides of the shaft, dislodging dirt. He pictured a VC waiting below with his AK set to automatic. He could blast 20 rounds through Flowers in 4 seconds. Flowers knew he had only one chance.

Danielle finds herself running. Her mind is not in the right place.

She has recently lost her friends at the hands of the undead. As she jumps from rooftop to rooftop, a man steps in her path. They struggle as this man tries to assist her while she thinks this man is one of the undead. Danielle calms down and follows her savior to his apartment, where he and his wife are holding up.

This older couple isn't what they claim to be. They hold a deep dark secret inside their home as they show Danielle some hospitality. For the young girl's sake, we can only hope they keep their secret to themselves.

Tunnel Rats There is a small community of homeless people living in underground tunnels. Bark, is one of these individuals.

The Stranger & Tunnel Rats

He is a homeless man that spends his day begging for change, eating breakfast and hanging at Jay's, a small pizza place. The owner has always been kind to Bark.

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He gives the homeless man scraps and makes him feel welcomed. Something is going on outside the doors of Jay's. People are panicking and the streets are filled with chaos. Bark is completely unaware of the mayhem, and calmly makes his way back home. In the underground sewer Bark is alone until a fellow dweller alarms him. Spotz, informs him of the dead but Bark doesn't believe him. They part ways, but when Bark comes face to face with the undead, he regrets not leaving with Spotz.

Bark runs after him and when he finds Spotz, they pair up and try to find a way out of the tunnels. First, let me thank Steve Wands for supplying me with a copy of Stay Dead. The Stranger in my honest opinion is a very unexciting story. It's one of those stories where the author totally ignores the fact that they are flesh eating zombies outside the door.

I really hate that about some stories. I want interaction between humans and zombies, that's what makes a story interesting. Yes, The Stranger did have a few very brief moments of interaction but not enough. The main characters basically stay indoors and Danielle starts doing nutty things. However, I can't say that I entirely hated this story. The beginning was a perfect set up and really caught my attention. It was short lived though.

I will give The Stranger, 2 Slashes. Moving on to Tunnel Rats. Unlike The Stranger, Tunnel Rats is in fact an interesting story. It has a fantastic plot and plays out wonderfully throughout the entire story. There are some very good, gore filled scenes that will make anyone cringe. I really enjoyed the interaction between the pizza joint owner and Bark. That was probably my favorite section in the story. I kind of wanted more of those two characters interacting.

Maybe the story would have been better if the author kept them together. Either way the story does go on great. There are some nice suspense filled scenes that kept me reading. This story is a wonderful addition to the book. I will give Tunnel Rats, 4 Slashes Now to look at the book as a whole. Stay Dead is extremely short and very tiny. It fits in my back pocket perfectly. I love and hate that at the same time. I love it because it's very portable and hate it because I can lose it very easily.

The format of the book threw me off. I have never seen a book have a header on blank pages. I'm not sure if that was intentional or the person doing the formatting didn't know how to remove the headers on Microsoft Word. Another thing that kind of turned me off was the double spacing after a period. Also, there were a few, very noticeable, spelling and grammar mistakes. There were also times when the author repeats himself.

Here's one example, page 23 "Clem, a few days after the town went to shitsville, had filled up whatever jugs and mason jars he could find and filled them up with water. There are a few more moments like this.