The name ‘Tunnel Rats’ was given to the Australian Army combat engineers who were given the task of, among other things, going down into the underground tunnels and bunkers of the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1972. These combat engineers were specialist sappers who discovered and learned about how the communist North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong (VC) constructed and operated vast networks of tunnels and interconnected underground rooms below the surface in the Vietnam jungle. As previously reported in The Circular Head Chronicle, Smithton born Geoffrey John Coombs enlisted for the Australian Army as an engineer, otherwise known as a Tunnel Rat, and joined the 3 Troop 1st Field Squadron, departing Australia and arriving in Vietnam to defend his country.
Read more about the Tunnel Rats in the Peter Scott's A Night in the Year of the Monkey, in the Chronicle, April 26 edition