Veteran ‘Tunnel Rat’ will tell his story at Lexington County Library branch – May 2
April 24, 2025
On May 2, the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum’s Noon Debrief series of free lectures will debut in a new location. And it will be a particularly fascinating first-person program: “Tunnel Rats of Vietnam.”
The speaker will be one of the most popular and informative to appear at the museum in recent years: Vietnam veteran C.W. Bowman will speak at noon on Friday, May 2, at the Cayce-West Columbia Branch of Lexington County Public Library at 1500 Augusta Road in West Columbia.
As an American soldier in Vietnam, Bowman was a “tunnel rat.” His job was to crawl, alone with a flashlight and pistol, into the tight, claustrophobic tunnels that the Viet Cong dug to hide in, and kill the enemy.
The job was voluntary. But once a soldier volunteered for the duty once, he became the unit’s expert, and again and again, he’d be called on to slither once more down into the nightmarish dark.
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.
How did he get to be a tunnel rat? One day his sergeant told him to check out a VC bunker. He went into the dark chamber with his heart in his mouth. All he could see was the light at the other end of the bunker, so he headed straight for it, telling himself if he made it, he would live. His adrenaline was pumping like crazy, but he made it.
When he got out, he thought, “That was pretty cool.”
Some of the bunkers were connected by tunnels, so Bowman told another soldier that if he would check the bunkers, Bowman himself would take the tunnels. So from then on, he was the designated “rat.”
Units that had no such experts would generally just drop a grenade down the tunnel and move on. Which raises the question, why climb down in there at all? Bowman has a short answer: “Intelligence.” One time, he brought up a map showing VC 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.”
Crawling into dark holes wasn’t the only special duty for which Bowman volunteered. He also chose to walk the point, out ahead of his comrades, when the unit was on the move. Why? Come to the library on May 2, and ask him.
Bowman is one of many South Carolina veterans honored as part of the museum’s special exhibit, “A War with No Front Lines: South Carolina and the Vietnam War, 1965-1973.” You can come tour that exhibit and the whole museum after he speaks on that Friday. Free passes will be available to all who are interested.
Note that future Noon Debriefs will still happen at Richland Library, which has so generously hosted them for the past year while the museum has been renovated. This new location represents an expansion of the program of off-site presentations.
About the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum
Founded in 1896, the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum is an accredited museum focusing on South Carolina’s distinguished martial tradition through the Revolutionary War, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, Vietnam, the War on Terror, and other American conflicts. It serves as the state’s military history museum by collecting, preserving, and exhibiting South Carolina’s military heritage from the colonial era to the present, and by providing superior educational experiences and programming. It recently opened a major new exhibit, “A War With No Front Lines: South Carolina and the Vietnam War, 1965-1973.” The museum is located at 301 Gervais St. in Columbia, sharing the Columbia Mills building with the State Museum. For more information, go to https://crr.sc.gov/.
