The Tunnels of Cu Chi (12 page)

Only one year after he married Nguyen Thi Tan in Hanoi, Captain Linh was ordered south to take command of the newly formed 7th VC Battalion in Cu Chi. Linh left behind a son, Nguyen Hoa Vinh; his wife was pregnant with a daughter he would not see until she was ten years old. When Captain Linh came marching home on 6 June 1975, his children refused to let him touch them for three days. “My wife and I treated our reunion like a new marriage. For ten years I had had no relationship with another woman. When we met again my wife only said to me, ‘How thin you are.' Everyone in the street had come out to welcome me and my wife and I could say nothing in front of the crowd.”

He is clearly proud of his ten years' service—five years underground—but too sensitive to have fully buried all the horror he lived through. For example, if the wounded couldn't be transported to a safe above-ground hospital, they had to be kept in the tunnels to recover. “They used to beg us to kill them,” said Linh. “They used to scream for one look at light and one breath of air, not fresh air, just air. The wounded, their discipline diminished, their minds and bodies hurt, preferred death to lying underground. It was unpleasant to hear them.
We offered them nothing: neither death, nor light nor more air.”

The Vietnamese rarely display emotion. Only very occasionally did the fixed, impassive faces of the villagers break into tears or shouts as they saw their homes or their families destroyed. For a Westerner to ask, “What was it
really
like, living in the tunnels?” is in itself to challenge Vietnamese, and therefore different, concepts of pleasure, pain, endurance, suffering, sharing, and self-discipline. There is common ground, of course—the wounded soldier begging for death as the only relief from hell under earth—but the cultural differences and subtleties make comparisons difficult. Vietnamese culture has its roots in the village, where material possessions are seen as a mark of selfishness, denying one's friends or neighbors the right to equality. This is not a political attitude but, like the close relationship with the earth itself, is based on long historical accommodation with the village experience, the lack of social and physical mobility, and an acceptance of one's role in life.

It is easier for a Westerner to try to understand the tunnels experience in a historical context as the final spasm in a ten-thousand-day war for complete independence from foreign domination. Only the certainty that Communist victory was inevitable protected mind and body from the true horrors of tunnel life. When victory would come was academic—perhaps in five more years, perhaps in ten or twenty. America was a formidable fighting power; one would have to be patient. But there were no doubts, no self-questioning.

To Asians steeped in Confucian concepts, time is an endless river flowing from an infinitely regenerative source It is a commodity to be valued, but because it is of such unlimited abundance, one can hardly use too much of it. Time to Westerners is always precious; to the Oriental it is something that can be spent with generosity. Even Western calendars are different—they have starting and stopping points graphically shown in linear symbols. Each page has a beginning and an end. A year is a very long time. But the Oriental calendar is in the form of a wheel, a symbol with neither beginning nor end—a continuum. Quick victory is a Western concept.

The remarkable confidence of the Communists was based not solely on what they saw as the justice of their cause but
also, more simply, on the fact that time was on their side. All they had to do was not lose.

For the thousands who were to live and die in them, the tunnels' paramount importance was to maintain the fight against the enemy. Captured VC documents carry a refrain, an exhortation to cadres to remind the people that combat had absolute priority; shelter came only second. So there were not only the sleeping chambers, air-raid shelters, latrines, hospitals, cleaning areas, and kitchens, but also chambers for political theater, military store rooms, conference centers, printing works, and even chambers to hide the precious water buffalo—and, above all, the chambers that became workshops to produce homemade armaments, with which the VC kept the fight alive until Hanoi sent down fresh supplies. Within this dark, subterranean metropolis there were primitive forges making antipersonnel mines. There were huge caches of rice. There were temporary graveyards. There were chambers where complete 105-mm field-artillery howitzers were kept stripped and oiled, ready for reassembly and action. Meanwhile, above, the tanks rumbled and flailed, the bombs hurtled down, the shells fell in devastating barrages. Later, the foot soldiers gingerly picked their way through the foliage, unaware that the enemy had literally gone to ground, taking his goods and chattels with him. When the Americans were around, not a whisper, nothing stirred, the earth belonged, or seemed to belong, to the dead. But once the Americans had gone, once night fell, the subterranean buzz and hum would begin.

First they'd light up the Dien Bien Phu kitchens. These were specially adapted “smokeless” kitchens, first used in the trenches during the war against the French, and subsequently refined and adapted for the sixties. When a fire was lit inside a stove, the smoke was ducted through several channels and finally allowed to escape from various and separated ground-level chimneys. The effect was to dilute the smoke so that it was scarcely visible from the air, even to the relentlessly sharp-eyed Americans in their reconnaissance planes. “The system worked extremely well,” said Major Quot, “but it was most unpleasant for the cooks, and there were often leaks in the ducts, leading to some contamination within the tunnels.”

According to a former VC guerrilla, Le Van Nong, now farming again on the banks of the Saigon River at An Nhon
Tay, it was much worse than Major Quot claimed. “The tunnels we were in stank and we stank. We met many difficulties. The tunnels were usually very hot, and we were always sweating. We took with us rice compressed into balls, hid during the day, and at night tried to cook the rice for eating the next day. If there was no time to prepare the rice, we went without food for the whole day until the next night, and we tried to come up to cook. It really wasn't possible for us to cook underground, the smoke was always asphyxiating, you just could not breathe, there was no air down there anyway. Sometimes we were driven to attack the Americans and make them go away, just so we could come up and cook at night, cook in the open. You cannot imagine what pleasure it gave us.”

Colonel Dr. Vo Hoang Le, a senior Viet Cong medical officer, admitted frankly that it was difficult and unpleasant to cook underground. “Usually we ate only dry food. It was possible to cook properly above ground only; the smoke was unbearable if cooking was done underground.” Eventually, the demands of the wounded increasingly dictated whether or not the Dien Bien Phu kitchens were ever used. Ironically, as the American military presence grew, it played a small part in solving the problem of food inside the tunnels. “They inadvertently supplied us with food that was most suitable for the tunnels,” said Colonel Le, “because they always left food lying around after infantry attacks. It became quite plentiful in some areas. The Americans left tinned meat, dry rice, noodles with prawns, cigarettes and chocolate.”

Captain Linh recalls that the Saigon River was always a useful source for fish and prawns, but it was difficult to fish without being spotted. “As we grew short of food, we grew manioc, banana, sweet potato, and cassava to help us. The Americans were clever and knew whenever they spotted these plants that we must be nearby, but we had no choice. It was dangerous to grow these plants near the tunnels and it was just as dangerous to starve. In the end, the only meat we had was from rats. They are delicious and provide plenty of protein. I found grilled rat had a better flavor than chicken or duck.”

According to Captain Linh's account, few Westerners could have survived life in the tunnels for long without very special training and acclimatization. Although only a handful of GIs were taken prisoner in his sector, he had responsibility for them.
“We were kind to American prisoners of war; that was the National Liberation Front's policy. We had to look after them and send them back to Hanoi.” (Once in Hanoi, U.S. POWs were not treated with generosity. Conditions were poor, and some were subjected to intense psychological pressures to speak against the U.S. government's actions in Vietnam.) “Once we had captured them,” said Linh, “we kept them briefly in the tunnels, waiting for the chance to send them north. I had one who absolutely refused to go on to a rice diet. He insisted on being given a bread diet. We had no bread and we had no meat. He told me he could only eat bread and chicken. I asked him how much chicken he needed a day and he said about half a chicken. Well, half a chicken would have kept ten of my men for a day. Nevertheless, we made arrangements to steal bread and chicken for him. Once, I know, it came from the American base itself. I had two prisoners of war; they were given a higher standard of living than our soldiers because their health required it. I liked both the men, and we often spoke a little English. I think they liked me once they knew they would not be hurt or shot. Unfortunately they died of illness while being taken north. They could not endure the hardships of the jungle. They were with me for twenty days, then taken to the Cambodian border. They died there.”

Next to food for survival, the manufacture of ammunition and weapons had priority in the tunnels. In the early days of the American presence, there were serious shortages. “We hardly received any supply of weapons from the North,” said Captain Linh. “We received only mine detonators and delay fuses. We needed explosives and fortunately soon found them lying all around us on the ground.”

One single battalion of the newly arrived 25th Infantry Division in Cu Chi fired, in the course of one month, no less than 180,000 shells into the Cu Chi district, averaging 4,500 daily. In one month, throughout South Vietnam, the Americans fired about a trillion bullets, 10 million mortar rounds, and 4.8 million rockets. And this was just the beginning of the war.

As Captain Linh noted, a great deal of this ordnance fell on Cu Chi. And considerable numbers, as is the nature of these things, failed to explode. For once it was the Viet Cong that began a course of on-the-job training. “We tried to understand the American science,” explained Captain Linh. “We would
have teams of watchers during a bombing strike, looking for the bombs that did not explode. They would try to mark the location. Then after the raid we would hurry to the spot and try to retrieve the TNT. Sometimes accidents occurred. Once eight of my men were killed when the bomb they were sawing exploded. All that remained of them was a basketful of flesh. But remember, of a thousand shells the enemy fired at us, only about a hundred caused casualties; a percentage of the nine hundred that did not hurt did not explode either. The Americans used their weapons to fight us and we used their weapons to fight back.”

Captain Linh's cottage industry began to grow. “There were unexploded shells everywhere in the Cu Chi area. We organized special workshop chambers in the tunnels and we learned to take the ordnance in there. We dismantled their detonators, fitted our own, and changed the shells into powerful weapons, of which the Americans were very afraid. We exploded them with batteries or made booby traps with them. We also found claymore or directional mines, which did not explode because the bombers did not drop them from the proper height or at the right angle. Sometimes we even had more of these mines than we could use. With each claymore mine, suitably adapted in our tunnel workshops, we could inflict casualties of up to seven American soldiers. We did not need any great technical skill. They were very dangerous to the Americans, but harmless against us when we were in the tunnels.”

Coca-Cola cans, in an act of ironic cultural inversion, were carefully turned into hand grenades for use against the Americans by the artisans who worked by candlelight and paraffin lamp in the special tunnel workshops. First they poured used bomb fragments into the tin, then TNT was poured into the middle, and finally a homemade detonator was placed on the top. Major Quot recalled: “At every hamlet underground in the Cu Chi tunnels we had a productive team making mines and hand grenades and repairing firearms. The claymore-type mine was of great importance to us. We made the DH-5 and DH-10 in the tunnel workshops. One had five, the other ten, kilos of high explosive and ball bearings. A properly made DH-10 could wipe out a whole enemy platoon. Even with rudimentary tools one person could produce from three to five mines a day. We even organized a little assembly line—one person specialized
in taking the explosive out of the ‘dud' American shells, another prepared it, and a third fitted the detonator into the mine itself.” This underground arms industry was to be far more than just a nuisance to the Americans. It was to become the primary means for denying the GIs access to the tunnels complex.

The electrical power to run the workshops came principally from small hand or foot generators. “The signals unit had a small gasoline-driven generator,” said Captain Linh, “but these were rare. Usually there were pedal generators, some hand generators from China, and batteries. We were never short of electricity in Cu Chi; we even threw away dim torch batteries and used only bright ones. We were ‘presented' with batteries by the Americans; they were easy to pick up.”

Major Quot recalled that there were several generators in the tunnel sections in which he operated. “We even had neon lights powered by generators,” he said, “although that was a special luxury. We needed generators for running our signals communications, and also we used them for the film shows we had. You could not expect a man to crank a generator for three hours; we had to use the precious gasoline-driven one. We saw war films in the tunnels; one was
The Battle for Dien Bien Phu
. We liked the fighting films that Hanoi sent to us.”