This is an extra chapter that did not appear in Shadow Warrior.
The Cheeky Monkey backpackers was just off Pat Pong road in Bangkok. It had this courtyard where they would screen outdoor movies every night. On a couple of days R & R, a week or so after the dam job, I was stretched out in a canvas chair enjoying a beer and Raiders of the Lost Ark when I thought of Wyman, an American dope head Baz and I had met in the Madrid Bar when I first came here. I wondered if he ever managed to find the lost tunnels. I reckon there was only one way to find out so I left Harrison Ford in a room full of snakes and strolled down to the Madrid Bar. Sure enough Wyman was right where Baz and I had left him more than a year ago, propped up against the bar in the corner.
I watched him for a while and saw him leave his beer on the bar behind him a couple of times and then looked surprised and delighted to turn around and see it there. Probably thought some stranger was buying him drinks. I pulled up a stool next to him and said g’day. He didn’t remember me and it was no wonder.
“Wyman Something hyphen Something the third” he said and shook my hand. I still can’t recall his last name but I know it was impressive. “Documentary film maker and adventurer, pleased to meet you”. I don’t think Wyman normally spoke in such polite tones but he was deliberately measuring each syllable like most people who are drunk, stoned or high and trying to appear straight. He was probably all three.
“The names Paul Hogan” I said. “Film producer and investor, looking around Bangers, seeing if I can set up a few contacts, keen to invest some money if the right project turns up, if you know what I mean.”
I gave him a wink. Poor old Wyman was too off his face to see that I was taking the piss. He didn’t nearly fall off his chair, he actually did crash onto the floor; such was his haste to drag me off into a quiet corner and hit me up for some cash.
It was just a bit of fun really. I didn’t buy a beer for the rest of the night, which is a fine night out in my book, and hearing Wyman crap on about secret maps was better than any movie. After about a dozen beers I was feeling a bit wobbly myself so I waited for Wyman to go to the gents and slipped out. Walking back to my digs, one thing Wyman said stuck in my mind. The story of a couple of Karen kids that had been killed near the Mawdaung pass, playing around with Japanese WW2 era hand grenades. This was within 10 Battallion’s area of operations and would be easy enough to check. My mind was ticking over a million miles an hour.
Colonel Oliver suggested I run a sniper school for the next few month and being at a loose end, agreed.. During this time I asked a few questions and was surprised at the amount of good evidence I gathered. One story was common knowledge. In the late ‘70’s a group of Japanese businessmen had bought about one hundred acres of land at the base of a mountain pass not far over the border from Burma. Some of the locals who had survived Japanese occupation recognised these guys as officers who had served in the area. On the pretence of developing it into a park they excavated a deep hole, creating a nice dam for swimming and fishing. Before filling the hole with water they apparently excavated three old trucks from the ground, had these transported straight down to the port and freighted directly to Japan. As soon as the park was completed they disappeared and have never returned. The theory is that the trucks were loaded with gold bullion, which had been looted from Burma and buried in that spot during the retreat. They had come back to reclaim their fortune.
Recently, more old Japanese men had made their way into Karen territory in the vicinity of Mawdaung Pass, supposedly as tourists and game hunters, waving around old WW2 maps of the area. This pass runs through the Tenasserim Division and up to the Burmese town of Mergui on the Andaman Sea. It was a major supply route for the Japanese because of the convenience of the Thai port of Prachuap Khiri Khan as a point for dropping off supplies heading overland to their troops in Burma. If there was an ammunition dump, it would be somewhere along here.
I also sought out Karen WW2 veterans. They all remembered friends who had been used as slave labour by the Japs to carry supplies during the retreat and confirmed that huge caches of ammunition and weapons had been buried. The Japanese commander apparently had himself sealed inside the tunnels rather than return to Japan in shame, part of their bullshit bushido tradition – the same philosophy that allowed them to treat Aussie and British POW’s worse than livestock. The clincher for me was when I heard the story that a couple of kids had indeed been killed playing with old grenades near a village on the pass. Like of lot of these stories it had become a bit of a fable and in the re-telling it had always happened ‘recently’. But the truth was it had happened not long after the war.
I was definitely keen now. Finding the tunnels would be an excellent adventure, especially if the weapons cache could be found. The only problem was convincing Colonel Oliver. Talking him into dropping the dam was hard enough. Over the next week or soI tried to nut out the best approach to take.
It turns out I didn’t need to convince him in the end. Whilst yarning with Colonel Marvel one night, he pointed out that this was a civilian operation. We weren’t attacking anybody so it didn’t really come under Colonel Oliver’s command. Colonel Marvel also got more interested when I mentioned a couple of freelance journalists that I knew would be keen on a story like this. It was another good opportunity to get the Karen some publicity.
It turned out that Colonel Marvel had to head down to the region to carry out an inspection, so I went along for the ride. We met the local area commander, a Major Huji and the Karen National Defence Organisation (KNDO) commanders. The KNDO are a village militia and local police force. They’re also responsible for collecting customs on goods being smuggled in and out of Burma through Karen customs gates. They are as heavily armed as the KNLA troops and there is a bit of rivalry, as much as you’d get between the army reserve and regular soldiers anywhere in the world. The venture would have to be negotiated with the KNDO – if we ran into a tatmadaw fighting column while wandering around in the jungle looking for the tunnels - they’d be the ones pulling us out of the mud.
We got the blessing of the local commanders so I took off to Bangkok to track down the two journalists. I made a few phone calls and found them; where else but a small bar just off Pat Pong road? Thankfully it wasn’t the Madrid Bar or I’d have had to negotiate with Wyman the pie in the sky man. They took about three seconds to say yes and grab their gear. We were back in Thee Tha before Colonel Marvel made it back up from down south.
On arrival, Colonel Marvel held a full briefing that included Colonel Oliver I could tell he was pissed because I went around him to get approval for the mission. Plus he thought the tunnels were just another bullshit story. Although the mission wasn’t under his direct command we still needed his approval as we’d be moving in B Company’s area of operation. At one point in proceedings he gave the slightest nod to me and another hard ‘don’t fuck up’ stare. The last hurdle was down and we were underway.
The entrance to the site of the arms dump would no doubt be sealed with concrete, without a conveniently placed shaft like in the dam job. We would need cratering charges this time, to blow a hole big enough to place the charges that would do the business. The only problem was that we had no military shaped charges.
With shaped charges it’s all about the Munroe effect. In 1888 Charles E. Munroe discovered this when a block of guncotton stored next to a sheet of metal accidentally ignited. The manufacturer’s name that had been stamped into the guncotton was itself perfectly stamped into the sheet metal by the explosion. Creating a hollow void in the explosive material somehow concentrated its blast. By WW2 people had worked out that a conically shaped charge would blow a hole in solid steel up to five times deeper than the diameter of the shaped charge and this with an amount of TNT that would normally only dent the metal.
A modern shaped charge is a cone of dense metal, usually copper, backed by high explosive. When the charge goes off it collapses into the hollow formed by the metal, liquefying it into a jet of molten plasma travelling at about 14 kilometres a second. This will bore a hole seven times the diameter of the charge into armoured steel, let alone concrete. Of course the difference between a focussed jet of plasma and a messy explosion is a pretty fine one and getting the perfect conical shape requires lots of trial and error and a probably degree in physics.
I didn’t fancy going cap-in-hand to Colonel Oliver, asking for the money to buy a shaped charge on the black market. I was a bit stuck with what to do when I remembered a conversation I’d had with Captain Hung, the Cambodian fellow running the commando camp up in Mannerplaw. He reckoned that if you disassembled the warhead of an RPG7 round you could salvage the hollow charge without using the rest of the detonation train and rocket body.
So I raided the ammo hut again and liberated a couple of rockets. I found a secluded part of the old saw mill and told everyone else to stay clear and got ready for some delicate surgery. I had the film crew set the camera up at a distance, zoom in close on me and take cover. One of the Karen boys offered to help but I told him to watch from a distance with binoculars. If I got blown up my legacy would be a good training film on how not to do it.
Like an inexperienced surgeon hesitating before making the first scalpel cut I was a bit nervous as I poised with the hacksaw over the base of the rocket. An RPG is designed to take out a tank so it would make short work of me. Then I figured I wouldn’t feel much if it did; the last thing to go through my mind would be my face, so I just got on with it
Hung had told me to beware of the primer charge. When he first removed one of these he just tossed it aside and it exploded, spraying the back of one of his legs and torso with shrapnel and nearly killing him. Not taking any chances with mine I dropped them down the nearest toilet pit. So it was no longer my problem, just an embarrassing incident for the next poor bastard who squeezed off a log in just the right spot to set it off and get sprayed with shit.
The journalists and their camera also came in handy for filming my potential early demise when I decided to have a crack at making plastic explosives. Nowadays it would be a simple matter of looking it up on the internet but in those pre-home-computer times getting given a recipe for plastic explosives by our old Chinese supplier in Bangkok was like getting the keys to a whole world of pyrotechnic fun. He even rounded up few special ingredients needed.
“Lots of hiss, lot’s of smoke when you mix, no worry, it ok” he said. He wasn’t wrong. I was a bit apprehensive about making this concoction up as I had to heat up one lot of chemicals and pour the resultant liquefied concentrate onto powdered chemicals, then thoroughly mixed the two together.
So here I was, relying on the advice of a cackling toothless Chinaman who as far as I could tell had ‘running a restaurant’ and ‘importing fertiliser’ ahead of ‘explosives expert’ on his resume. I got the journalist to set up the camera a fair distance away and have me on a long zoom. I measured out a cup full of each ingredient figuring it was better to lose a finger or two and my pride rather than splatter myself all over the jungle. As soon as the heated chemical hit the powder there was a fearsome hiss and the little hut filled with noxious fumes. I closed my eyes, mixing like mad and waited for the bang. .
No explosion. It seemed safe. I still had all my fingers. So now it was time for a bigger batch. I heated a couple of kilograms of liquid and poured it onto the powder. This time the white vapour shot out at an alarming rate, filling the hut and spewing out into the yard, enveloping the whole structure in a white cloud, like an erupting volcano. The fumes went straight up my nose and burned my lungs. I staggered out of the hut coughing and wheezing violently and the blood on the back of my hand told me that I hadn’t done my lungs much good. The spectators were vocal. “Are you ok Dave? Is it going to blow up?” Then the cameraman, professional as always said “the camera’s still rolling Dave, smile”.
Once the smoke had cleared we poured the noxious mix into moulds and had our plastic explosives. The finished product was grey putty that looked like baby poo. I wasn’t sure how effective it would be so I scrounged some scrap ‘I’ beams to test its cutting power. We set a shearing charge on these and it went through them like a hot knife through butter. It might have been home made but Dave’s special plastic explosives certainly did the business. We set to work for the next couple of days, mixing up some large batches to stockpile for future use and replace what I had scavenged from the claymore mines in the ammo dump for the dam job.
A new basic training school had started so we decided to give them some training in blasting into concrete structures. The old saw mill, which by now was very much the worse for wear after being used for a few months of demolitions practice, was chosen because of a metre thick concrete pad that had once been the footings for the main mill.
Of course the journalists were keen to film this as well so they set up the cameras at the perimeter of the mill. One of the cameras was a bit close and I told the journalist to move it back. He insisted that it was in the best place to get good footage and wasn’t keen to move it, so we let it stay. I didn’t have the time to argue with him in front of the troops but I filed it away for later, planning to tell him never to fucking debate with me when I give an instruction. Especially in front of my men.
Shaped charges also need a ‘stand off height’. The cone needs to be about the same distance off the surface of the concrete as the height of the cone itself. This gives the charge the time and space to fold in on itself to create the plasma jet. We made a cone and casing out scrap sheet metal, fashioning steel legs from old bolts. Then some of the new plastic explosive was packed into the casing, along with an electric detonator and set in the centre of the old pad. We pulled back to cover as there would be a lot of shrapnel whizzing around. I signalled the journalists to start the cameras rolling and the charge was cranked off.
It went off with a sharp crack and bright flash. The next thing we heard was one of the journalists yelling “Oh fuck, Oh fuck, my camera, my camera.” The fella, like most photojournalists, didn’t just sleep with his camera; he respected it in the morning. We looked up to see him standing over his mortally wounded pride and joy, which was lying in a battered heap on the ground next to its shredded bipod, video tape spewing out like intestines.
He was a big fella, and worked as a bouncer in his spare time, so none of us were game to get too close to him as he stood there quivering with rage. The boys couldn’t contain themselves and they started hooting with laughter.
“I told you it was too close” I said soothingly. “Next time you might want to listen to the someone who knows what they are talking about aye?”
“Fuck off” he said. Still staring down at the camera.
“Don’t worry about it” I said. “The next shot will be a lot more spectacular. It’ll more than make up for this one.”
“Fuck off” he said again as he went to set up his spare camera. They are funny like that, journos; used to pushing in where they aren’t wanted, they’ll often take an instruction as a first offer to be bargained with. Which of course in a war zone usually gets them shot at, or their camera hit with shrapnel..”Well fuck you to you dick” I said.and walked ooff to the pad.
Inspecting the blast site revealed a perfect round hole, 12 centimetres in diameter and a metre deep. Now for the real big bang. Two kilograms of ammonium nitrate, a quarter of a stick of dynamite with det-chord attached was pushed down the hole and tucked under the pad. The whole lot was tamped down with soil before we rolled out the electric cable for the detonator. The two blokes initiating the charge set themselves up in a bamboo thicket 20 metres away and down a slight slope. They wouldn’t have flying shrapnel to worry about this time, just raining lumps of concrete.
The rest of us scarpered over to the other side of the valley to watch. I gave the signal to crank the charge and the earth unfolded like a giant brown flower, sending mounds of earth and concrete high into the sky. Very spectacular spectacular in this enclosed jungle setting. Once all the heavy bits had landed, we raced down to check it out. The boys were most impressed with the devastation that such a little charge could reap. Tons of concrete was now a large crater.
We were standing around, laughing and chattering while the photographer was trying to film us and getting annoyed. “Can you get these blokes to be serious Dave?” he said. I suppose our fun and games was spoiling the look of his hard core war documentary but this was typical of the Karen, even when bullets are cracking past they always seem to see the funny side of things. That’s one of the reasons I like them so much, they have a great sense of humour.
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We were ready to head down to the Mawdaung Pass now. The only tricky bit was that we’d have to go back into Thailand then cross back over into Burma further south, carrying explosives with us. The detonators were easily hidden but we had to be creative with the rest. The det chord was platted and fitted to a backpack to make it look like shoulder straps. We drilled a hole through the tops of the shaped charges from the RPG 7 rounds and then threaded electrical chords through, attaching a light socket and light globe and a stand so they didn’t just look like lamps, they actually worked. Packed in with the filming gear they’d pass as lighting equipment.
Colonel Marvel couldn’t make the trip as he had to go up to Manerplaw for a meeting, so he lent me his Colt .45. We knew I’d have to borrow a firearm from the KNDO otherwise and would end upgetting a piece of junk that no one else wanted. I’m not a fan of pistols as they aren’t much good over 25 metres. But it was better than nothing and at least it was heavy enough to belt somebody over the head with if I couldn’t hit them with a round.
We went out into Thailand and did an overnighter down the Malay Peninsula to Prachuap. The Burmese share of the peninsula bulges is widest at this point and the Thai share is only a thin strip of land a few kilometres wide. Understandably the border crossing is heavily guarded. The Thai’s were given advance warning of our expedition but we lucked out with our timing. The captain in charge had gone into town and a new lieutenant was running the show. He was young, his uniform was perfectly pressed and he had that jack-russell terrier hyper-alertness about him; fresh out of the military academy no doubt and keen to impress. Most of the Karen boys had gone ahead so it was just the journalists, myself and one Karen escort. The young lieutenant seemed thrilled to discover three white guys with bags of camera gear trying to cross the border – no doubt part of an international conspiracy. He barked at us to stay put and got straight on the phone to headquarters. Half an hour later a Thai colonel, major and military intelligence officer, dressed in civis, rocked up.
Anybody who knows anything about the Thai police, military or justice system knows that they are not to be messed with. If they think you are up to something they’ll beat the crap out of you, throw you in a smelly overcrowded cell full of people with AIDS and hepatitis for a few days; then ask questions later. I was pretty comfortable about the RPG7 blast cones masquerading as camera lights, but not the holstered Colt .45, sitting in the small of my back .
We were taken into a tiny, airless almost unbearably stuffy room and given the third degree. The cover story was that we were doing a documentary on Karen village life, and it seemed to satisfy them. A good customs officer usually has one eye on you when they search your gear, to see how you react as it usually gives them a clue if you are hiding anything. We all stayed as relaxed as we could while they fondled the camera gear and the lights with me praying that they hadn’t seen the insides of an RPG7 before. They passed inspection but I didn’t feel much relief because they were probably going to do a body search next. The .45 was almost dragging the back of my trousers down.
The military intelligence officer was a hard nut and still looked very suspicious. The mood was very tense. He was about to take our photographs and I seized the opportunity. “Stop! Stop!” I shouted as I hurried to my bag and started rummaging around in it. The two journos looked at me like I was mad and the guards started unslinging their rifles. Quick as a flash I whipped out my comb and mirror. Tossing my head back with my best leading-man flourish I stared longingly into the mirror and proceeded to comb my hair.
That broke the ice and everyone cracked up laughing. The military intelligence bloke still took our picture but we were all best mates now. I draped an arm over his shoulder and had one of the journos take a picture like it was a holiday snap; the .45 in my waistband the whole time. We got delayed further as they insisted we stay and have a meal with them. Next time we’d cut through the jungle instead of going through the bloody gate.
We arrived in Mawdaung village a few hours later and I got a nice surprise. Franco, one of the sergeants from the original demolitions school in Manerplaw, was there. He was now a sergeant major in the KNDO. We held a brief pow wow and it was decided that Franco and a rifle section would come with us.
Franco had recently returned from a tax collecting trip to the Andaman Sea. The Karen operate speed boats from secret bases dotted along the coast. The fast, shallow-draft, boats easily dodge Burmese naval patrol boats and they charge a tax on any fishing or trading boat, Burmese or Thai, which operates near the coast. If the boats didn’t stop, a 40mm grenade is lobbed across their bows and the skipper charged extra for the cost of the grenade, which is only fair. If anybody fitted the quintessential image of a pirate of the high seas it was Franco. He was short, thick set, bow legged, bald and had some of his front teeth going rotten. All that was missing was a bandanna, cutlass and eye patch.
Franco organised for a bloke smuggle ammonium nitrate in from Thailand. We scavenged up some diesel, dynamite and detonators for the job. Local Karen villagers were hired to carry the gear.
The trip in was about sixty kilometres and followed the old road that the Japanese used during WW2. Track would be a better description as much of it had reverted to jungle, only kept clear by the numerous cattle that were smuggled along it to sell in Thailand. A small KNDO police post is located about half way along the valley. An old man from this post was to be our guide to the tunnels and around the minefields.
Three months before, the Burmese had sent in a thousand troops to capture Mawdaung village and there had been a huge week-long battle. They had tried to conceal their approach by cutting a new track through the jungle. This is a huge effort and they used slave labour to do it. Prior to the operation they had gone to Karen and Mon villages on the other side of the ranges and rounded them up to use as porters and track cutters. This is a common practice for the tatmadaw and hundreds of innocent villagers, many of them children, die during these forced marches. They are fed very little food and are bayoneted or beaten to death if they can’t keep up. It is far worse for the women as they are usually gang raped of an evening.
It’s impossible to move that many troops without being seen and the Karen hit them with several ambushes on the way in. The base was well prepared for the attack and Tatmadaw losses were in the hundreds.
The Thai’s, hearing this much action going on so close to their precious port, moved up 155mm howitzers as well as a couple of battalions of troops. The tatmadaw was warned not to stray into Thai territory during the battle. A couple of stray mortar rounds fell near Thai positions so the 155s returned fire with devastating effect. This was too much for the tatmadaw and they retreated down the track we were about to follow, laying mines and burning Karen villages as they went.
It was decided to head off in two groups. Franco and I would lead an advanced party to secure the area. Intelligence updates suggested there wasn’t any military activity occurring in the mountains, but that could change at a moments notice. We had to be sure any tatmadaw patrols or fighting columns were well clear of the area before we started the search. Colonel Marvel’s son in law, Thaw Thi, would bring up the rear with the film crew, porters and equipment.
We set out just before sunrise. The initial part of the walk in was easy. The track meandered along a valley floor, through endless groves of thick bamboo. We strung out into a loose column with a couple of the lead scouts well in front. The scouts were two Rakhine Muslims from Arakan State in south-west Burma, which borders on Bangladesh, who had travelled overland to fight with the KNLA. They were markedly taller than the Karen lads and could set a mean marching pace on their long spindly legs.
The bamboo groves don’t support the same volume of wildlife as the rainforest so it was unnaturally quiet. I could hear the flip-flops of the blokes in front and the occasional murmur. From time to time a big hornbill would fly overhead, it’s wings beating a leathery, whoof-whoof sound; it wasn’t hard to imagine it being a pterodactyl from a few billion years ago. The thick groves of bamboo also created a uniform yellow green wall in front that only parted to reveal the track at the last moment, making the whole experience surreal and a bit spooky. I knew we were very unlikely to be bumped by an ambush but still couldn’t shake the nervous feeling.
The valley floor was criss-crossed with streams and the mud was knee-deep at times. Boots were useless, the mud would just suck them off and they provided a nice dark wet place for leeches to hide. Everyone was wearing flip-flops which were easily removed to go bare foot through the mud. The track narrowed down to a footpad in many places. Fallen trees and bamboo clumps had to be constantly negotiated. We came across plenty of cattle carcases, new and old, which showed what a tough place it was to smuggle them through.
We reached the KNDO police post towards late afternoon. It was just a couple of huts with a few bunkers connected by a ring of trenches; manned by one platoon. Some of the lads had shot a couple of gibbons on the way in, so we had a good money-meat curry for dinner which was a big improvement on fish paste and rice. The boys also boiled up the intestines for soup; just like up in Manerplaw, they did this for the quinine it contained to help ward off malaria. Having tasted it once, I’d rather have Malaria. It stunk out the whole camp for hours.
One of the blokes went off to get the old man who was to be our guide. He came down later in the evening and must have been eighty years old. He didn’t speak a word of English but still had all his faculties. He’d helped guide British troops through the area during WW2 and hide pow escapees.
Most of the Karen villagers in this area were Animist. Almost every occurrence in their lives, from someone getting sick to catching a fish, was caused by Nats or forest spirits. Life was lived according to the mood of these spirits. Most bad events were ascribed to someone offending the spirits, causing them to seek revenge. The villagers took all kinds of hallucinogenic potions and chanted for hours in a trance when they wanted to speak with the spirits.
The old man knew of the tunnels and said he would show us where they were, but no way was he going near them himself. After the Jap retreat, his children had found pits in the ground filled with crates and they set fire to them, amused by the explosions until a case of grenades went off and a couple of the kids were killed. A taboo was put on the area after that. The nats had been upset and they’d punished the children for disturbing their peace. Nobody from the village had ventured back there since. This was sounding very promising.
Half an hour before sunrise, the camp began to stir as the jungle came alive with the early morning calls of the animals. The mournful cry of the gibbons was accompanied by a crescendo of birdcalls as they called to each other in the tangled canopy. We waited for the two Muslim boys to say their prayers; had cold monkey curry and rice for breakfast; then it was off into the gloom of the eternally shadowed jungle.
Another day’s hard march put us at the base of the mountain that looked over the western pass into the lowlands of coastal Burma. On the way the old man had pointed out spots where the British and Japanese had fought some big engagements during the war as well as sites where prisoner of war camps were located. Apart from a few old shell and bullet cases, there wasn’t much to see. The jungle had reclaimed everything. You couldn’t tell there’d been so much death and suffering in these spots unless it was pointed out.
The thick jungle also made it pretty easy to get lost. Wander more than five metres off the track and everything starts looking the same. Franco told be abut his last trip back when he’d got lost, carrying a backpack full of taxes in US currency. They’d hacked through the jungle for two weeks and had run out of food. It was ironic that they had over $100,000 in cash and it was worth nothing to them. Eventually they stumbled across a stream, made a bamboo raft and floated down to civilisation.
The going got very heavy ascending the pass. Thick mud sucked at our legs and heavy patches of thorny bamboo blocked the way. Then we rounded a corner and there, in the middle of the lost world, was a tow truck. I couldn’t believe my eyes. With hardly a spot of rust, it had bamboo and trees growing through it. It had Japanese lettering stamped into the chassis and it was facing east, so it must have been abandoned on the retreat nearly fifty years ago. It was certainly built to last better than the cars of today. I looked at the engine block and saw a connecting rod sticking out the block. Must have been its cause of death. It was hard to imagine this place as a busy thoroughfare.
We walked for another ten minutes or so and I was still pondering the truck when the two Muslim boys went to ground, which caused a ripple of diving scrambling soldiers looking for cover the whole way down the column. Rifles made ready with safeties off. I pulled out the .45, still not sure whether I’d be better off shooting it or throwing it at the enemy. We waited nervously, ears straining. I hadn’t trained with these boys and wondered how they’d respond in a contact.
We heard yelling from up front. The boys relaxed and picked themselves up. It was friendlies - A KNDO policing patrol returning from the coast. We had a brief yarn and their patrol leader mentioned reports of a tatmadaw column out on patrol. This was bad news as weren’t equipped that well for a fight, especially when we’d be trying to keep the journalists alive. To make matters worse, we couldn’t get a radio signal from where we were. We decided to set up a communications centre on the top of the pass. From there we could get through to KNLA bases both on the west coast and in Mawdaung village. These was manned around the clock and the operators could signal down to us in plenty of time if news of any enemy patrols came through.
As we crested the pass I saw a cairn of stones and a small wooden Buddha. The boys and old man placed small offerings at its base for giving us safe passage. Even the Muslim boys paid their respects, which wasn’t unusual; most people in this region are pretty flexible towards religion and reckon that if someone can think of a god then he must exist; plenty of room at the top it seemed
Camp was made for the night near the crest after finding a secure area to set up the HF radio. That night the old man told us stories of the Japanese occupation and one of these stays with me. The Japs had used elephants to move heavy artillery. Not far from where we camped, the Japanese soldiers had got so angry at the elephants for not moving fast enough that they shot them. The grieving mahouts were left stranded and the Japs had no means to move their big guns.
The next morning we left a couple of the blokes to man the radio made our way down the western slope. The site we were looking for was a major Japanese supply dump, so I expected a few clues like old buildings or signs of engineering. The first of these was a big grassed clearing and an old rock quarry. The track in the vicinity was more of a road and was cut into the side of the hill. The rock wall reinforcing its exposed banks was the most elaborate piece of engineering I’d seen on the entire track. There were also a couple of old concrete building pads and some rusted crushing machinery. The old man reckoned the tunnels were located a couple of kilometres to the north but there were no tracks.
If we found any buried treasure we’d have to keep it secret. It might be months before we could come back with enough gear to transport it back to Mawdaung village. Rather than cut a track straight from the building site, we went back up the mountain, formed an extended line and matrched individually into the jungle. ; thus avoiding a clear track of trampled undergrowth. About 50 metres in, we came together and started cutting a track towards the tunnels. It was heavy going until we reached a fold in the in the valley and the jungle thinned out into another bamboo grove.
It took the old man a while to get his bearings, trying to remember back forty years. We zigzagged around for a few hours before he suddenly said ‘ahh’ and we stood before some shallow pits that were strewn with rusting grenades, artillery, mortar and rifle ammunition. This was the site where the kids had been killed. I could see the sadness in the old man as he remembered. I’ve never been to Gallipoli. That place has become almost a spiritual shrine to Aussies who remember the ANZAC legend. But any Australian soldier has a strong connection to the places where diggers have suffered and died. Seeing all this rusting hardware lying around somehow made that real to me. I think we all had a bit of a ‘moment’.
The thinned out foliage was another clue. The Japs would have cut down plenty of trees in the area to shore up the tunnels. I was getting excited now and the rest of the day was spent scurrying around looking for the tunnel entrances which I felt sure would be easy to find, but the search proved fruitless.
Towards evening, the radio post gave us a routine call. There was no news on the Burmese column and the supply group had not arrived yet. We set up a camp for the night and put out a defensive perimeter. Not that we’d have anybody sneaking up on us in the middle of the night as it was inky black and you’d hear somebody coming from miles away.
We got the radio message that the second group arrived the next day. I went up and guided them. We spent the next few days searching but just couldn’t find any sign of the tunnels. We started to doubt the old fella’s memory; after all it had been almost fifty years. We didn’t realise then that the entrance to the tunnels had collapsed. And become overgrown. We did a grid search, walking slowly back and forth over the area looking for some kind of sign.
“When you search Dave, don’t look for the thing itself.” Thaw Thi said. “Look for what isn’t there, look for what’s missing.” I couldn’t get exactly what he meant by that, it was a bit mystical for me but it was Thaw Thi who first noticed the irregularity in the contour of one of the slopes. It was the remnants of a track, heavily eroded and overgrown. The Japanese must have ripped the road up at the end of the war to conceal the way to the tunnels. Following this ghost of an outline, we came to a dead end at the foot of a big hill, but no sign of an entrance. Then we noticed something else that didn’t belong. There was a slight depression in the ground, like a trench, running up the hill from the end of the track. We wondered what the point of digging a trench up a hill was then we realised it must have been caused by the tunnel collapse. I kicked myself for not bringing shovels.
This didn’t faze the Karen boys. They fashioned some surprisingly effective implements out of bamboo and got to work. We traced the depression as far up the hill as we could and decided to dig down from there, hoping that this was the end of the collapsed section of tunnel. It was hard going, it seemed to be taking forever and we had explosives. I decided to help things along with a bit of ANFO.
You can add ‘post hole digger’ to the million and one uses for bamboo in the jungle. The boys cut and hollowed a fat piece of tubing that worked as well as anything I’ve bought from a hardware store. Pretty soon we had a clean hole that was six foot deep. We used a small charge that I hoped would be enough to kick the dirt up and out, as well as in along the tunnel, and not to cause another cave in. The KNDO boys hadn’t seen much demolition work and crowded around me as I rigged the charge. They were chattering away to each other in Karen but I didn’t need a translator. I could tell they were saying something like ‘Look, now he’s attaching that detonator to the stick of dynamite, that must be what set’s it off – ahh I see how it works’. The finished charge was lowered and earth tamped down on top of it.
We cleared everyone away and I cranked up the electric initiator, waited for the capacitors to reached full charge and pressed the button. Nothing happened. This was repeated three times, with the same result. Very embarrassing. We let it sit for half an hour then pulled on the electrical cables too drag the detonator to the surface. The detonator had gone off, but not the dynamite. If we had dud dynamite we would have to pack the expedition in and head back to Mawdaung village to see if we could score some better stuff.
It was only then that Franco told me that the detonators had been manufactured in Thailand and it required 4 of them taped together to set off a stick of dynamite.
“Thanks for bloody telling me before we wasted all that ANFO down that hole” I snapped. Franco just laughed at me.
“You supposed to be the master blaster” he said. “Anyway I couldn’t see what you were doing with the peanut gallery in the way”
We all had a laugh at that before working out how to rig a second charge without wasting that first lot of ANFO and without having to dig down six feet to retrieve it. We sunk a second posthole as close as possible to the first; I inserted four of the Thai detonators into the dynamite and lowered it down with just a half-kilo of ANFO. This, we hoped, would be enough to kick across and ignite the ANFO in the first hole.
Take two. A muffled thump and then it was raining dirt and leaves. At least the bloody thing went off this time. We waited for the last debris to fall before checking the hole. Franco was the first to scramble up and he waved us up excitedly. The charge had moved more than 10 feet of dirt and at the bottom was a gaping hole. One of the boys scrambled down with a rope attached and a long thin piece of bamboo to use as a breathing tube in case the tunnel collapsed. How he was planning on being able to breathe, with tons of dirt compressing his lungs, I don’t know. I’m glad it was him and not me. He emerged, covered in soot from the explosion, with the good news that the tunnel seemed to extend a fair way, so it wasn’t just an underground bunker or the like.
After clearing away the loose dirt we had about a five metre shaft. The boys were keen to go straight in and start looking for buried treasure but they didn’t appreciate how dangerous it was. Growing up around mines had taught me that this was very unstable ground; and likely to cave in at the slightest tremor. If it did, anybody in there would be as good as dead. The best way to tackle it was to take the time and shore the thing up properly.
The next day we organised work parties to cut timber and bamboo. The boys had the fever all right; probably imagining caverns of gold bullion down there. They worked frantically and by mid afternoon we’d widened the shaft, shored up the sides with solid timber beams and constructed a ladder down to the tunnel entrance. It was time to go in for a look.
I asked our guide if he wanted to come in but the old man backed away, terrified; he was probably thinking about the vengeful forest spirits and what they’d do to him now. Franco, Thaw Thi and I lowered ourselves in. The floor of the tunnel was spongy with decomposed plant matter but otherwise solid. The air was musty and dank. We played our torches around a bit before moving too far. I was surprised to see that the timbers the Japs had used to shore up the tunnel were still in good condition; they were probably teak.
We inched our way along carefully, still a bit twitchy about the whole thing caving in on us; expecting to see crates with Japanese writing stamped on the side at any moment. Tree roots had grown down through the roof of the tunnel and were so thick in places we had to cut our way through. After about seventy meters we came to a solid rock face. A dead end; with no sign of anything remotely valuable anywhere. ‘Fuck it’, I thought. ‘What a waste of bloody time’
We had an “O” group back on the surface. I was just about ready to pack it in but Thaw Thi and Franco were convinced that the Japs wouldn’t have put so much effort into this to just dig a tunnel in the middle of nowhere and leave it empty. Thaw Thi spoke with the old man and asked if he remembered how much timber had been cut down. With a wide sweep of his hand the old man suggested that most of this side of the hill had been felled, way more than could be accounted for by the props in the tunnel.
“What’s not there Dave?” Thaw Thi said. I wasn’t in the mood for more mystical bullshit but kept my opinion to myself and just shrugged instead.
“The rest of the timber” he said. “There must be another tunnel near this one. We should look along the tunnel floor for another entrance.”
The next day we carefully probed along the tunnel floor with machetes, pushing into the soft soil, hoping to strike something solid. About 40 metres from the end we heard a solid thunk as someone’s blade hit concrete. Thaw Thi was spot on. My heart beat a bit faster now.
It was time for the shaped charges. It was going to be tricky as it wouldn’t take much concussion to bring the whole roof down. We decided to reinforce the shoring around the concrete pad with timber and bamboo.. Then I set the shaped charge in the centre of the pad and packed a huge mound of dirt over it to prevent blast waves from loosening the structure of the tunnel. The cables were run to the surface and the tunnel cleared.
Hopefully the Japs hadn’t boobytrapped the plug, if they had then the side of the hill would probably go up. Everyone was moved back up the mountain. We didn’t have a great deal of electrical cable so I elected to fire the shot
Saying a little prayer, I cranked the charge off. Apart from a muffled thud and a puff of smoke, nothing happened. The place didn’t erupt with a titanic explosion and I was very much intact. I radioed everyone to come back down.
The journalists wanted to race in and start filming straight away as they though the charge would have opened the whole area up. Explosives create toxic gases and the tunnel was full of fumes. We waited a couple of hours before creeping in carefully, gingerly moving along, giving the timbers a gentle shake; scanning the roof and walls for any sign of movement. We got to the blast site without anything caving in. The mound of soil we’d used to tamp the charge hardly had a ripple in it. Even with a two hour wait the place still had an acrid smell from the spent explosive, which gave me a headache. Once the dirt was scraped clear I could see a small 4 cm diameter hole in the crumbling concrete, which appeared to be about 60 centimetres thick with no wire reinforcement. I shone my torch down the hole and could see a shaft underneath. We’d found it.
The concrete plug was still in place but it had deteriorated over the years from the moisture and acidity in the tunnel. We cut some of the dynamite, moulded it into a linear shaped charge and set it diagonally over the lid. This was simply a matter of making a tent shape out of the dynamite to concentrate the force of the blast downwards, in a line across the concrete – like hitting it with a giant axe. Before we covered this with another mound of dirt we cut a large piece of bamboo lengthwise and covered the shaped charge with it to stop the earth crushing it flat. Another day had flown by, so we fired the charge just on sunset and left the job for the next day. Hopefully the fumes would have cleared by the morning and we’d find what we were looking for.
Nobody slept much that night and next morning there was definite shiver of excitement in the air. The journalists had their cameras ready and bugging me to be allowed in first to capture the tunnels on film. I said they would have to wait for us to check it out first. The big guy opened his mouth to start another ‘negotiation’ but then Franco put a hand on his chest and waved a finger in front of his face. ‘You wait’ he said. The big fella didn’t argue with him.
Tha Thee approached me during the night and said he was not happy about the journalists filming what was inside. His main concern being that if it went to air before the Karen could empty the tunnel then the tatmadaw would surely send in their troops and seize the equipment. This threw a spanner in the works. But, it was KNU territory, so I couldn’t argue. We devised a plan to say the tunnel had caved in and we needed to get out of the area as a tatmadaw column was in the vicinity.
The tunnel was clear of fumes and all the timbers looked good. Everyone was ordered to stay on the surface as Tha Thee and I entered the tunnel. We reached the shaft and saw the mound of dirt had all but disappeared and no more concrete plug. There was a concrete shaft going straight down with steel rungs forming a ladder on one side. Tha Thee and I looked each other in the eye and our faces split into huge grins we did a little jig and could hardly compose ourselves. Time for some acting.
We both climbed out of the tunnel looking completely dejected. “The bastards completely caved in,” I said and flopped on the ground with my head in my hands. On cue, Franko came racing down the hillside. “We must go quickly, tatmadaw are very, very close.” “We go now!!” No protests from the jurno’s, they couldn’t be seen for flying mud as they raced back up the mountain. At the radio post at the top we stopped and organised for some of the boys to head off back to Maudung village with the jurno’s. Franco, Tha Thee, me and the rest would hang back and put in an ambush on the column and slow them down a bit. Once they were on the way, we quickly returned to the tunnel.
We cleared the loose dirt from around the lip of the shaft. I gave Thaw Thi the privilege of climbing down first then followed him. Inside the sealed section of the shaft the concrete was much less deteriorated and the steel rungs of the ladder were barely rusted. A minute or two of climbing, maybe 20 metres, and I was on the bottom with Thaw Thi. The concrete rubble and dirt from our blast had made a pile that almost blocked the way but I could see the circular tops of some side tunnels leading in. There was just enough room to squeeze over on our bellies.
We dropped down onto a hard concrete floor and I heard Thaw Thi say ‘Wahhh’ in surprise. We were looking at a massive space like an underground concrete cathedral, with head high tunnels spreading off in all directions. Every wall was stacked to the roof with crates, many of which had burst open, their contents littering the floors. The placed was slightly damp but pretty clean and dry considering the length of time it had been sealed up. We called up for the others to come down.
Our rubble and dirt was cleaned out of the way and the whole crew came clambering down the ladders. All our planning had gone into finding the tunnels. Nobody had given much thought to what we’d do when we did, especially a complex this vast. The boys were all running off in different directions and I could see things getting out of hand so we sent most of them to the surface and left just myself Thaw Thi, Franco. We needed to make sure the place was safe before the whole team ran amok through it. There was no ventilation system so the air was stale and carbon dioxide levels could get dangerously high with a lot of people.
The tunnels were laid out in a grid pattern with three different levels. It took several hours to slowly move through them. I had a couple of moments of mild panic when I thought I was lost but I gradually learned my way around. Thaw Thi disappeared for a while as well but we eventually found him coming up from one of the lower levels.
We had to move carefully because of the ammunition scattered everywhere. Many of the casings on the shells and rifle ammunition had corroded through, adding to the mess on the floors. I saw all of this ordinance and realised that if we had ignited it while blasting in they’d have seen the mushroom cloud back in Mawduang village and I’d have been on my way to the moon. I’m not sure hiding on the other side of the hill would have helped. I’d have to put up a no-smoking sign.
It occurred to me that bringing along someone who could read Japanese would have been useful. That way we could have gone straight to the ones marked ‘gold’ instead of breaking open every crate to see what was inside. This seemed to take forever and there was every imaginable calibre of ammunition that the Japanese had been using during the war. The artillery rounds were no good as there wasn’t any big guns to fire them, but the explosive could be put to good use. None of the mortar rounds or shells had fused together, so we could assume they were stable. We didn’t find any gold.
The weapons were still in packing grease and tar paper, so were in excellent condition. Probably worth a small fortune as museum pieces, they would be put to active use by the KNLA. There were a few hundred bolt action rifles, fifty or so “woodpecker” type 92 machine guns as well as a hundred type 99 and 11 light machine guns. These were the Japanese equivalent of the British WW2 bren-gun and, besides the mortars, probably the best prize of the lot. The “woodpeckers” were not a very reliable machinegun and would only be good in a static defence position as they were pretty ungainly things to cart around. There were quite a few mortar tubes, which would come in very handy, especially considering the large number of mortar rounds. All the fuses for the grenades and various other ordinances were stacked in one room and in pretty good shape.
After a day we’d catalogued everything. Thaw Thi, Franco and I sat down and discussed what to do with the prize. It was pretty obvious that we couldn’t take too much back with us. Also, ‘how and where’ to use the weapons was Major Huji’s decision. We decided to take a few samples back with us and seal the place up.
We grabbed a case of mortar rounds, grenades, fuses, a mortar tube, a couple of the bren-guns, a “woodpecker”, rifles and ammunition and had them hauled to the surface. The entrance to the shaft was sealed up and concealed; we caved the entrance to the tunnel in and then camouflaged the whole area. The odds of someone just wandering this far in off the main track were pretty remote.
Thaw Thi had taken one of the rifles for himself. He had it wrapped in a blanket and slung over his shoulder. ‘Fair enough souvenir’, was all I thought about it. At our first rest stop after clearing the summit, Thaw Thi signalled me to follow him back down the track. He wanted to have a yarn in private, which wasn’t that unusual. We walked off the track a few hundred metres and he stopped to un-wrap the rifle. It wasn’t a rifle at all but two beautiful swords, both with the silk cord wrap and snakeskin sheaths. So that’s where Thaw Thi had snuck off to in the tunnels. I don’t know much about Katanas but I do know they had some sort of traditional markings in the blade and were at least 40 years old, but probably much, much more. Thaw Thi had wiped grease on the blades to prevent rust, carefully wrapped them in plastic then sealed them in tape. He found a large tree and buried them a few yards from its base. Then he chopped a deep mark into the tree, one that would still be visible years later as it weathered and grew.
“You remember this place Dave” He said. “In case something happens to me”. I made a note of where I thought we were on the map and left it at that.
That night we arrived at the KNDO checkpoint and the place was in despair. The head sergeant had gone off to hunt a wild guar that morning it had had killed him. The guars are the largest wild cattle in the world and can grow to over a thousand kilograms. They are a huge muscular beast and have a fearsome reputation in these parts. The story was that he’d shot it once, wounding it before his weapon jammed. The Gaur then attacked him and ripped him apart.
Their grieving threw a bit of a damper on the victorious celebration we had planned. But to try and cheer the blokes up a bit we decided to have a bit of a firepower demonstration with the newly gained weapons. A few of the mortar shells were duds but the majority went off to the delight of the assembled villagers and troops. The biggest draw card was the “woodpecker” but to the amusement of everyone watching we couldn’t work out how to get the bloody thing working. Then when we did it jammed after a couple of shots. Finally we managed to get one clip off in a continuous burst of fire, to the cheers of the assembly. It had the slowest rate of fire of any machine gun I’d ever operated and we were enveloped in a plume of smoke from the burning grease and the lousy cordite that was used in the ammunition. No wonder the Japanese lost the war with this thing as one of their main general-purpose machine guns.
A couple of artillery shells had been brought along, so one was rigged up with some detonator chord and cranked off as a finale for the show. The explosive in it was still as deadly as the day it was made. These would be useful for demolition work as well as improvised mines.
We arrived back Mawdaung village mid-afternoon on the third day of the walk home. Everyone was tired but elated. During the de-brief with major Huji he mentioned that our old friend from Thai military intelligence wanted to talk to us again and see the film. Rather than it being a crucial matter of Thai national security I was pretty sure they just wanted to confiscate the film and make us buy it back. We decided to walk the journalists over the border in the middle of the night, giving the checkpoint a wide berth. We put them on a bus back to Bangkok in Prachuap that morning then crossed back over to Mawduang village. The journos weren’t bad blokes but it was a weight off my mind not having them around.
Thaw Thi and I left things in the Majors hands after that. My part was done, so I bade Franco and the major a warm goodbye. Word had spread that things were happening again up in Mannerplaw so I was keen to get back up there as soon as I could tie up a few loose ends with 10 battalion.
Thaw Thi is dead now and I know for a fact that he never made it back to Mawduang. Those swords are still out there somewhere.
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