Cu Chi Tunnels

The Cu Chi Tunnels were a series of tunnels in southern Vietnam used by the Vietcong to fight off American forces. They're located a short distance outside Saigon, and they're a popular visiting point for tourists.

8:30 a.m. and we're on a bus fighting it's way out of Vietnam through insane traffic. We're on a tour with some 20 odd other people, and Mr. Binh ("Mr. Bean", as he likes to refer to himself) is telling us the story of his life. Naturally, I'm not able to verify anything, but can only recite his life story as told.

His goal was to be a doctor, but the war interrupted his plans. His mother had concerns for his safety and sent him to the United States to be with his father. A dual U.S. citizen, he trained with the U.S. Navy, since his father was American.

He says he never saw actual combat, and after training a large part of his work was recovering remains of US soldiers along the Mekong Delta. After the war, he was arrested and spent 4 and a half years in a re-education camp where the communist officers running the place were apparently quite friendly and explained a lot about their tactics used.

By the time he got out, his family home was seized, all the money in his accounts went missing, and his 7 siblings had fled as boat people. With no way to contact his family, and his mother having passed away, there wasn't much left for him, so he worked as a smuggler to survive, smuggling luxury goods into the country past the U.S. embargo.

Then something happened. Bill Clinton came to visit Vietnam and normalized relations, ending the embargo. The internet and Coca-Cola come pouring into the country. Shortly thereafter, he is tracked down on the internet by some of his siblings, who were looking for the brother they left behind.

Later on he got a job as a tour guide which he continues to do to this day. At some point, one of his clients offered to help him publish a story about his war experiences, "Three Moons in Vietnam" which was published in London. And one of his brothers, who works for NBC in New York, wants to help him publish his biography. He's doing well, and he's proud of his children, the oldest of which is on finishing his father's dream and becoming a doctor.

He really likes Bill Clinton for dropping the embargo, and was pleased about John McCain's recent visit to Vietnam, emphasizing that the war is over and that everyone gets along now. With the embargo dropped, communications was available and his siblings have gotten in touch with him.

He thinks Oliver Stone movies are crap, and he hates how it bashes the Americans. He insists the Americans had no choice either once they were there. He isn't a fan of Ho Chi Minh, but respects him. He explains why: when the Vietnam War broke out, various communist countries offered to send their forces into Vietnam to fight against the Americans. While Ho Chi Minh accepted financial and technical assistance, he refused to let non-Vietnamese fight, recognizing that it would trigger a much larger war and probably believing that this was a nationalist struggle for an independent Vietnam, not a battle between ideologies. Sure enough, the Wikipedia entry on Ho Chi Minh points out that as a young man, he wrote to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, asking him for support in expelling the French from Vietnam, wanting to found a free Vietnam on the same principles as the Declaration of Independence, but was ignored. It was Soviet and Chinese assistance that helped expel the French during the Indochina War.

But, enough history, on to the actual tunnels.

They're insane. They span for kilometers underground, consist of as many as three levels at some points, metres below ground, with regular air vents and zig zags (similar to trenches, to make it more difficult for attackers to shoot straight down the line).

The tour itself begins with a bit of a weird propaganda video. Not only is the content of the video rather campy (black and white, extolling the virtues of the people who fought against the French and the Americans, all in black and white), but it's played on a very small monitor at the far end of a huge hall, making the experience that much weirder.

Then Mr. Bean shows us a map detailing the extent of the Cu Chi tunnels. They go all over the damn place, and apparently at one point the Americans had even built a military base on top of the tunnels itself, without realizing it. Wikipedia claims there was shooting going on there, that the VC would take potshots at soldiers in the base, but Mr. Bean disagrees. He says that, according to the communist soldiers guarding him in prison, that they'd go and steal weapons and supplies, and sometimes food and beer, from the base at night, but that they would never open fire from inside, because they didn't want to reveal the location of the base. Because the 5.56mm round used by the M16 was smaller than the 7.62mm round used in the AK-47s, the VC were able to modify stolen M16 bullets for use in AK-47s.. or maybe it was that they'd modify the AK-47 itself, I don't really know, the point being that there was a handy source of ammunition located directly above the Cu Chi tunnels at one point.

The tunnels spanned all the way to the river, which was used as an escape point. The three levels of the tunnels served various functions. The top level was used for combat and movement. The middle level was used primarily for communications, with runners going back and forth. The lowest level was intended for escape. The top level was often setup in a grid formation to avoid traffic jams, so that if some fighting was occurring in one area, the maximum number of soldiers could get from A to B. Regular air vents, carefully concealed in bamboo rods, were shot up at regular intervals to maintain circulation.

The multiple levels and directions of the tunnels served another, more sinister, purpose. Like the jungles around them, the tunnels were loaded with traps. There's a bit of a gory exhibit showing some of the common traps used by the VC. A lot of them involved taking metal spikes (the raw material obtained courtesy of bombs delivered by the Americans), coating them in feces or other disease causing substances, and leaving them hidden under a trap door, or shooting out of the sides, or in all manner of unpleasant systems.

The tunnels, aside from the obvious advantages of mobility and access, provided the VC with the ability to snipe the Americans from almost any direction. Mr. Bean took us to a patch of ground, saying "This is one of the sniping tunnels, it's very small".. and looking down we couldn't see a single thing. Sweeping aside the stuff covering it revealed a tiny little door, barely a foot wide, that led into the Cu Chi tunnels. Apparently snipers would crouch in here, then pop up, snipe at someone, and dive back down. The odds of finding the hole were small, and even if it was found, the sniper would be long gone.

As a result of this kind of activity, American efforts to combat the tunnels were fairly intensive. They tried flooding them, gassing them, filling them with petrol and setting them aflame, but these methods were grossly ineffective, probably because the tunnels were so expansive, but also because the multiple levels allowed the VC to easily block off a tunnel that was being flooded, etc. Some parts of the tunnels were actually intentionally underwater, so that people had to swim up into them, providing an easy escape directly into the rivers, etc.

The next effort involved sending men down there. Unfortunately the tunnels are tiny. They're cramped and claustrophobic, unless you're very small, which the Vietnamese tended to be (at least compared to the average American soldier). According to the propaganda video we watched, some of the fighters were actually women villagers. We had the opportunity to climb through the tunnels, and Cam immediately recognized her claustrophobia, offering to meet us on the other side. THB and Caroline gamely tried it, but THB was moving so slowly through the tunnels I couldn't help but burst out laughing.. and either my laughter or the narrow darkness of the tunnels led her to escape out the exit (the sample tunnel you climb through actually had additional exits every 30 metres for tourists to get out).

Mr. Bean also pointed out another way that the small size of Vietnamese soldiers helped: the Vietnamese have this weird squatting ability. They can squat down, and sit on their lower legs, with their feet flat on the ground. They can actually sit like this and even fall asleep in this position. In the jungle you could be right beside a fellow crouched like this and not even notice him. Apparently the VC would practice firing from this position.

The American soldiers sent to fight through the tunnels (known as "Tunnel Rats") were smaller men, normally latin american or filipino in ethnicity, and their casualty rates were extremely high because of the large number of traps I described, plus the fact that they were no doubt being fired upon in unfamiliar tunnels. Being a Tunnel Rat seems like the worst job in the Vietnam War.

The next strategy involved training dogs and sending them, but again the traps were so seriously gory, and the casualty rates of the dogs so high, that their handlers would eventually refuse to send them into the tunnels. Furthermore, the training of the dogs involved teaching them to attack people who smelled like the Vietnamese, and the dogs wouldn't attack anyone who bathed in american soap or smoked american cigarettes, etc. The VC began stealing these sorts of supplies to mask their odour from the dogs, and began using vietnamese smells, such as vietnamese food, as lures to their dog-killing traps.

Bombing was also frequently used, although most of it was less than useless. The earth around the area is clay, and the bombing only turned the tunnels into hardened ceramic bunkers. The real success came with bunker-buster bombs that were able to bore through the ground and explode sometime after penetrating. Still, the use of these bombs required a degree of accuracy in targeting the actual tunnels, and while the VC were afraid of them, they came too late and too infrequently to neutralize the threat posed by the tunnels.

I suppose the moral of the story is that, between the Indochina War, the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese intervention into Cambodia, and the brief skirmishes with the Chinese, is that you probably don't want to get in a war with the Vietnamese. The tunnels are testament to the morbid ingenuity of their forces, exploiting every possible advantage against a more modern army.