/**<js>*//**<js>*/{"id":775,"date":"2013-11-30T19:45:22","date_gmt":"2013-11-30T23:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jimmythomson.com\/?p=775"},"modified":"2013-11-30T19:45:22","modified_gmt":"2013-11-30T23:45:22","slug":"tunnel-rats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/tunnel-rats\/","title":{"rendered":"Tunnel Rats"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jimmythomson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/Tunnel-Rats.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-519\" src=\"http:\/\/www.jimmythomson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/Tunnel-Rats-199x300.jpg\" alt=\"Tunnel Rats\" width=\"199\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/Tunnel-Rats-199x300.jpg 199w, http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/Tunnel-Rats.jpg 591w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 199px) 100vw, 199px\" \/><\/a>Allen &amp; Unwin published\u00a0 <em><strong>Tunnel Rats<\/strong><\/em> at the beginning of July 2011.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a major rewrite of &#8216;No Need For Heroes&#8217; the first-person memoir I wrote for Sandy MacGregor about 15 years before, but updated and re-tooled as a full-blown military history rather than a personal memoir. It&#8217;s a real &#8220;Boys&#8217; Own&#8221; adventure &#8211; only for grown-up boys &#8211; telling the story of the young Australian Army engineers who, when they weren&#8217;t having a whale of a time, often at their own officers&#8217; expense, were the first Allied troops to go down the Vietcong tunnels and discovered their underground city.<\/p>\n<p>What I love about this story &#8211; and what made me want to go back and rework it after all this time &#8211; is that these guys were not only genuinely courageous and endlessly resourceful, they had a spirit of adventure and mischief that sustained them through what was a pretty horrific time.\u00a0 There are plenty of outrageous stories like the time they booby-trapped their own shower block &#8211; which they had built with money from their own little casino &#8211; rather than let it fall into the hands of recently arrived officers; then there was the &#8216;car chase&#8217; through the streets of Saigon in which two sappers evaded the combined might of the US, Australian and South Vietnamese military police by commandeering a tuk-tuk and, ultimately, driving it under the barrier gate of their camp.<\/p>\n<p>There was the investigation of the Tunnels, of course and the discovery of the underground city &#8211; they were the first Allied troops to venture down there, regardless of who lays claim to that honour.\u00a0 And then there was the day-to-day engineering tasks that varied from building bridges to &#8220;de-lousing&#8221; booby-trapped rice caches, embodying their unofficial motto <em>Facimus et Frangimus<\/em> &#8211; we make and we break.<\/p>\n<p>Tunnel Rats went into reprint in only its first week on sale and has been selling well in various formats since. The follow-up book A Sappers War was published in 2012. It traces the involvement of Australian Army engineers in Vietnam from the start of the &#8220;American War&#8217; &#8211; before Australia&#8217;s official involvement &#8211; to the very last convoy out of the country.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, you can listen to an interview with Sandy and me on Radio National, with Geraldine Doogue, <a href=\"http:\/\/mpegmedia.abc.net.au\/rn\/podcast\/2011\/07\/sea_20110709_0840.mp3\">HERE<\/a>,\u00a0 read an extract (as a PDF)\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.allenandunwin.com\/_uploads\/BookPdf\/Extract\/9781742374895.pdf\">HERE<\/a>, or buy the book, either as a paperback or an eBook <a href=\"http:\/\/www.allenandunwin.com\/default.aspx?page=94&amp;book=9781742374895\">HERE<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Allen &amp; Unwin published\u00a0 Tunnel Rats at the beginning of July 2011.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a major rewrite of &#8216;No Need For Heroes&#8217; the first-person memoir I wrote for Sandy MacGregor about&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-775","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-books"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}