Clarence Medeiros; phony tunnel rat

Someone sent us their work on this Clarence Medeiros from Hawaii. He was featured in a story in West Hawaii Today about his time in the Army;

He enlisted at age 17, a natural step for someone whose male relatives had served in the armed forces.

But the U.S. Army was not going to send someone too young to vote to fight in Vietnam and stationed him outside of Washington, D.C., instead. While there he went to his commander, then the commanding general’s office, to get redeployed. Sens. Daniel Inouye and Spark Matsunaga both made sure he wanted the transfer.

It looks like he did enlist at the age of 17, but Senator Spark Matsunaga must have visited him from the future because he didn’t get to the Senate until 1977.

Medeiros wasn’t solely a tunnel man, as he was part of a group of specialists that recovered broken tanker trucks, built defenses, destroyed those defenses and what would be a public works project in a peacetime area.

That capacity wasn’t always safe, as seen during a firefight out of an abandoned LZ, but the tunnels have a special place for him. He avoided injury through the observation that delay was dangerous. If there was a lag between the tunnel being found and the soldier going in, the North Vietnamese would turn the tunnel deadly. So, whenever a service member found a hole, he was there as soon as possible.

“They were studying us as much as we were studying them,” he said.

They would vacate the area when the Americans showed up.

Sometimes the unit would send the unit’s dog in first to check to see if there was a trap or anyone down there. But it always came down to Medeiros going down into the unlit system, checking the way ahead with a flashlight, periodically prodding the tunnel for traps with his bayonet, with a .45 caliber pistol ready.

There is one in particular that has remained in his memory.

He was called in and went down into the complete blackness only possible in a hand-dug tunnel. The tunnel seemed to go on forever, but nothing sprang up at him. No traps poisoned him, no North Vietnamese shot him. Unexpectedly, the tunnel opened into a space with two coffins that was large enough to stand up in.

Blah-blah-blah, his story goes on, of course and you can read it at the link – about his derring-do.

Well, he joined the Army in 1969, a few months later, he was in Germany in the 507th Heavy Equipment Maintenance Company as a mechanic. by the end of 1970, he was an Engineer Equipment Repairman in the 43rd Engineer Detachment, which was part of the Da Nang Support Command, he wasn’t scurrying around in tunnels, but rather grease pits. Almost a year later, he was at Fort Hood, still an Engineer Equipment Repairman and he was honorably discharged (it appears) in 1972;

Clarence claims that he was an engineer which is a 12-series MOS, the Army says he was a 62-series maintenance guy.

Category: Phony soldiers, Valor Vultures