The Tunnels of Cu Chi (14 page)

Nguyen Van Binh joined the Viet Minh in 1951 and went to North Vietnam in 1954. There he received five months of basic training and finally returned to South Vietnam in October 1962, and was assigned to the Cu Chi district. He completed a ten-day course run by the regional North Vietnamese army cadre on the characteristics of various chemical agents used in warfare, and eventually he was assigned as the Cu Chi chemical defense officer, working from his base camp at An Nhon Tay village. He not only taught the theory of chemical defense training for all the VC units in his district but also involved himself in the practical. He had to identify visually any chemical agents dropped in his area by American aircraft and report these to the district chief. There were three main chemicals that he knew: a spray emitted from aircraft, which “killed trees and plants but was harmless to human beings and
animals”—presumably the now-notorious defoliating chemical Agent Orange; “smoke pellets” dropped from aircraft, which would cause tears, dry throat, and difficulty in breathing—probably Cry Baby tear-gas grenades; and finally, a powder dropped from aircraft in drums or sacks, which caused vomiting, dry throat, and general nausea. Cu Chi district and the Iron Triangle were to take the brunt of American chemical warfare attacks throughout the war.

The only individual defense against these gases was a locally produced gas mask made of nylon fabric (often taken from parachutes), with a filter consisting of cotton charcoal grains and linen. The masks were made with elastic bands for quick and easy pulling over the head and were usually found to be effective. Binh also referred to the use by the Americans of one mystery chemical, which he called “ypheric.” This agent burned the skin, and the only defense was to hide in the tunnels for several hours until the chemical had settled on the ground. As the war grew in intensity, even the comparative luxury of homemade gas masks began to disappear. Combatants and civilians were increasingly forced to use strips of cloth soaked in urine, clamped over the nose and mouth. Occasionally, the VC would capture gas masks from the Americans.

Captain William Pelfrey, who was to spend some time fighting in the tunnels, saw them from a typically Western perspective. “It was foul down there. The Vietnamese used to urinate and defecate in the tunnels, the body odors and sweat were unbelievable. After you were down there thirty or forty minutes it was all right, but then when you'd come up and hit air, you'd just faint sometimes, literally faint.”

Latrine systems were necessarily primitive. Where it was possible, large stone jars were buried in chambers and used as excrement receptacles. When full, they were simply plugged with earth and left. Often this luxury was not available, in which case one dug a hole and filled it up. It is difficult to imagine the sanitary conditions in the fetid and airless tunnels, where large numbers of people were often forced to stay for several days without a break.

“If our rice got wet, there was no place to dry it. We then had to cook and eat the rotten rice. Do you know what that means?” asked Vien Phuong. An American GI who had been exploring the tunnels came across a stench so awful, so overpowering
that he instantly retched. He was convinced he had stumbled into another tunnel graveyard—in fact, he had come across a cache of rotten rice.

“Food went bad very quickly in the tunnels,” explained Vien Phuong. “The most precious currency below ground was the plastic or steel containers the Americans left as litter on the battlefield above us. They were strong and we used them to keep our food dry. We covered each box with nylon sheets made from old parachutes. My own personal possessions for nearly five years were just those I could fit inside a shoulder bag. I had a big American army belt to which was attached an American water bottle. I had a nylon roof sheet made from parachutes, 2.5 meters long, which, where possible, was pegged to the roof to prevent earth falling all over me, especially during American operations. I had a nylon waterproof cape during the rainy season, a hammock, a lamp made out of an old menthol bottle, a dagger, a rifle, and a rice bag. The heaviest thing I had was the rice bag, which weighed ten kilograms. The main problems, the ones that never left us, were malnutrition and malaria.”

Even the smallest irritants, literally, soon grew into one of the most tiresome and eventually insufferable problems. The tunnels were breeding grounds for tiny organisms, invisible to the naked eye; said to be half animal and half plant, and variously called Vets or Chiggers. They bred and survived—together with squadrons of mosquitoes—on the walls and ceilings of the tunnels. Upon physical contact, even with the clothed body, these organisms enter the body and live just under the skin, remaining there for about three months and causing—as the authors themselves were to discover—unbearable itching. Captain Linh, whose life was plagued by them, claimed the parasites lived originally at the very tips of tree roots. They were particularly unpleasant because they would enter any part of the body, causing acute local irritation, which, even when it subsided, would be easily triggered off through friction. They could be extracted only by a paramedic with a needle and some alcohol (when available) for disinfectant. Even Captain Linh was forced to admit: “After a time people were afraid of going down the tunnels because of these creatures. They caused us all much hardships.”

Sometimes the tunnels
did
collapse under the weight of
tanks, and the victims were crushed or buried alive, and sometimes bombs and shells did make direct hits on the tunnel roof, with devastating consequences. Sometimes, people were just plain unlucky. The man who is now chief of police in Tay Ninh City was granted one day's leave by his VC commander to visit his wife, who was working as a nurse in the tunnels. They had only just been married and saw virtually nothing of each other. Because it was a marital visit, the couple were allowed a chamber for the night. While the couple were together, a stray bomb fell right through the roof. It didn't explode, but its fins severed the husband's leg.

In a comment that might have been made specifically about the tunnel dwellers of Cu Chi, Robert McNamara, when secretary of defense, reminding his audience of the ineffectiveness of America's bombing strategy in North Vietnam, said: “Their economy is agrarian and simple, their population unfamiliar with the modern comforts and conveniences that most of us in the Western world take for granted … their morale has not been broken, since they are accustomed to discipline and are no strangers to deprivation and death.”

Even as he was making this prescient assessment, the district of Cu Chi was already on its way to becoming the Land of Iron.

   Born in a Tunnel

Dang Thi Lanh was born in Saigon in 1945; twenty-two years later, on 23 February 1967, her first child was born in the tunnels of Cu Chi. The baby was a daughter, to be called Tranh Thi Hien; her birthplace was a hole in the ground at Phu My Hung near the Saigon River. The maternity ward was a tunnel chamber, its ceiling roughly hung with American parachute nylon to prevent earth falling on the mother. Tranh Thi Hien has grown up to be a healthy teenager. Her puppy fat and ruddy good looks give her the appearance of a well-fed farm girl; one would not guess she was once a skinny tunnel baby who screamed her way into life as battle raged above her head.

War had quickly brought death to the mother Dang Thi Lanh's family.
Her
mother and father were killed in separate, but coincidental, U.S. helicopter gunship attacks. Her only brother died during an ARVN operation in Bau Lach in 1964. But Dang Thi Lanh's face, with its hint of ethnic Chinese friendliness, betrays no shadow of the pain she felt at those losses. Small and sturdy, she was to have a second daughter after the war.

“I was with a cultural troupe in the tunnels: singing, dancing, and playing in a performance called
Cay Chong
(The Punji
Stake), which was all about the fighting. We performed inside a tunnel chamber, and the play was very successful. My husband, Tran Van Tien, was then a doctor's assistant working in Phu My Hung village. Sometimes we did not see each other for months. Once we were separated for a whole year. Before they destroyed the village, he could be working above ground and I below the earth, and we never met.

“I worked all the way through my pregnancy. During the Cedar Falls operation we had nothing to eat apart from dry rice and salt. I lived permanently underground during that operation; for fifteen days I did not see the light, or breathe the proper air. While the Americans were literally above us with their men and their tanks and their bulldozers, we still kept the troupe going. We did this every day and we even managed to rehearse. The chamber we used for the performances was on the first level, which was lucky because I was far too big with Tranh Thi Hien to be able to pass through the trapdoors to the second level. As we got nearer the time of the birth I found myself getting very tired and very hot. My leader agreed that I could do less. I knew the baby would come shortly and they promised me a doctor would be there.

“The day before my daughter was born I sang and I danced and I even managed to dig a little bit of tunnel with a short hoe from seven until ten in the evening. For the next hour and a half I cooked food for the thirty-six people in the troupe. I went to bed at about eleven-thirty, sleeping as usual in a hammock in a chamber I shared with nine other women from the troupe. The next day, I began to feel pains at about ten in the morning. My comrades called a doctor. I went to another tunnel, crawling through a connecting tunnel only one meter wide. It took a long time and I was very hot and felt bad from the lack of air. But then I went into a chamber they called the cool room because it had so many air holes. There was no bed but there was a hammock. The room was about eight meters by eight meters square and 1.8 meters high. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all covered with American parachute nylon. In order to eat I had to get off the hammock and lie on the floor. It was still rice and salt. Vien Phuong, the writer, was there.”

Vien Phuong also remembered the occasion well. “She was a very good dancer and member of the cultural group. She had been dancing at Nha Be, but when we heard she was pregnant
we called her back to Cu Chi because, though it is hard to believe, Cu Chi was safer than Nha Be. When she came back to Cu Chi we suggested she should go and live among the people, but she refused. She said she was a performer and anyway she was well known by the people and the puppets [those who worked for the South Vietnamese government]. She said if she lived in an enemy-controlled area she would be arrested. The woman was carrying her first baby. We were all living underground then; there were no more houses left above. When she felt her first pains we thought she would have the baby in the morning; usually the enemy raided in the morning. I knew it was time to get her a midwife nurse to deliver the baby, as the one nurse in our tunnel section could not do it herself. I left the tunnel to look for a midwife and bring her back. A plane was circling overhead and I was running and trying to hide from the plane. They only needed to see one person and the attacks would start again. Finally I got a message to a doctor at the military hospital. He arrived, but only just in time.”

Dang Thi Lanh continued: “I think the doctor arrived at about one o'clock. I was already off the hammock, lying on the floor on a mat, and that's just where my daughter was born. There was hot water, medicine, and a bandage. The birth took about an hour. It was very painful, very painful. There was no change of clothing, we had only a handkerchief for the baby. I was worried about infection, with so much earth around, but it must have been clean enough in there for there was no infection. They put my daughter in another hammock and I was able to give her milk from my breast, but there was very little. The baby stayed with me for twenty hours and drank a little sugared water when I was unable to give her milk. After the big American operation was over they took me and the baby to Trung Lap, where the local mothers' association looked after us. It was an enemy-controlled area during the day, but at night it was controlled by the Communists. Six months later I returned to the tunnels, singing and dancing with the original troupe. My grandfather looked after Tranh Thi Hien.

“I stayed in the tunnels until 1968 and then joined the Tet offensive in Go Vap. After that I returned to the tunnels until 1970, when I returned to Saigon city to work for the revolution. I was caught that July and sent to prison for three months. I
was tortured by the ARVN soldiers and an American who was in the cell. They beat me up and passed electricity through my body. Eventually, on 19 May 1975, I was reunited with my daughter. She was nearly eight years old. I had hardly seen her since I left her with my grandfather. All her childhood had gone by without me. Then I was reunited with my husband. He was very seriously wounded and has been unable to work since. We get a state pension; we live in one room. It was worth it. Would I do it again? That's a very hard question to answer. It was a valuable experience. Tranh Thi Hien is sixteen now, is at school, attends night classes, and wants to become a doctor. I had my second daughter, Tranh Dang Minh Hien, in a hospital. It was nice. It was all much easier.”