The Tunnels of Cu Chi (20 page)

“There were a lot of things that scared the hell out of you. The bats used to scare the hell out of me. You'd be crawling through a really small tunnel, you had just enough room to crawl and you'd kick all these bats up and they'd come flying at you and they'd go right down your back and you could feel them, and they'd get tangled in your hair … you could feel them all the way down your back, over your butt, down your legs, and gone. They used to give me the shivers.”

“Sometimes you'd be scared and open fire and the bats started coming out through the tunnel. One bat grabbed a man in the groin area here, and just bit him, and he took his .38 and blew him away.”

“One kind of venomous snake sometimes encountered in the tunnels was from forty to fifty centimeters long, triangular-shaped body and red in color; another kind was about thirty centimeters long, red and black in color and had a round body. Persons bitten by these snakes died instantly.”

“They had snakes down there, they really had snakes. I remember finding them tied up in a sewing room and in one hospital chamber. They had the bamboo viper, which was very poisonous, and everyone is very knowledgeable of them. Well, if you're climbing down a tunnel with a flashlight in your hand and you see a damn snake of any kind the first inclination is to kill the thing. And since you can't get a good swing at a snake in a tunnel, you're going to shoot him. Well, that tips them off down the tunnel that you're coming. The snakes were held in place with a piece of wire. Charlie, he had a way he could lift the wire and pull the snake out of the way.”

“They would take a snake, we used to call them one-step, two-step, or three-step snakes, and they were bamboo vipers. They weren't very long, but they had a very potent bite; once bitten you could only take one or two more steps. The Vietnamese somehow tied the viper into a piece of bamboo with a piece of string and as the tunnel rat goes through he knocks it, and the snakes comes out and bites you in the neck or the face and then the blood gets to the heart very quickly. You just had to make sure when you went through a tunnel you not only looked at all sides with your flashlight, but you also looked at the ceiling.”

“He was an infantryman and the snake crawled into his pants so what they did, they touched the snake and when the snake moved its head they grabbed him through the pants. They grabbed the snake and they cut the pants off him and they killed the snake. In the process the GI fainted. In the ceiling they used to hang—well, we used to call him quarter-step snake
because you take one quarter of a step after he bite you, you're dead. They used to take a piece of bamboo about that long, take the snake, tie him by his neck, insert him into the bamboo tube and they put the tube in the ceiling. And then you hit the tube and the snake is on you.”

“Well-equipped and specially trained, these ‘tunnel rats' however did not take the invisible and the unforeseeable into enough account … one day a tunnel rat handling a mine detector cautiously entered a tunnel … although trained to avoid traps on the ground, he slowly proceeded forward. Suddenly his head touched something like a big salami; he reached out to push it away but this long cold thing wound round his neck. He had no time to scream or unsheathe his knife, the snake had already knotted tighter around his neck and badly bit his face. Outside, the other tunnel rats waited for their comrade. At last the team leader pushed one of them into the tunnel. This man emerged soon after, panting and pale, dragging after him the violet-colored corpse of the tunnel rat.”

“One hole, I pulled out a six-and-a-half-foot boa constrictor and we killed it, and then everyone in the tunnel rat section skinned it and we all had snake headbands and stuff.”

   Cu Chi Base Camp

By the end of 1966, as Captain Linh and his unit of battle-weary and underfed troglodytes lay in their vermin-infested tunnels beneath the district of Cu Chi, a few miles away American soldiers lived in an air-conditioned comfort beyond the reach of his imagination. One of the largest and most impressive fortified base camps the Americans built in Vietnam was at Cu Chi. It was one of the ring of bases that General Westmoreland had decided to place around Saigon.

The huge sprawling base camp that became a temporary city in the middle of the countryside was a military creation unique to the Vietnam War. On the one hand, from 1965 on, massive troop formations were deployed with armor, artillery, and helicopter support, with all the consequent maintenance, logistical, and supply requirements. On the other hand, there was no front line. The war occurred wherever opposing forces made contact. It was an “area war,” and the only secure area for an American commander was his base camp, supplied by heavily defended convoys of trucks. “Because of the nature of the war,” explained Westmoreland, “tactical units had to be scattered throughout the nation at widespread locations. The lack of a sophisticated transportation system necessitated major
units establishing their own logistical bases rather than one central depot serving a number of units.” In other words, large parts of South Vietnam could not be, and never were, secured. The Viet Cong's commanders took a pragmatic and sanguine view of the U.S. bases that they spasmodically bombarded with rockets and mortar shells. Camps always provided lucrative targets. Any missile fired into a base was certain to do some damage to men or equipment and keep the Americans nervous and on their guard. No U.S. base, even in Saigon itself, would escape bombardment.

Cu Chi base camp was built in 1966 on an area known to the Vietnamese as Dong Zu, meaning the paratroops' field. The ARVN paras had trained on the huge disused peanut farm in the Diem days. It lay between Cu Chi town, about twenty-five miles northwest of Saigon, and the disused Fil Hol rubber plantation, which in turn touched the southern bank of the Saigon River, across which was the Iron Triangle. Its location was not only between the main strategic road and river approaches to Saigon, but close to what were rightly considered to be some of the worst hotbeds of Viet Cong activity—in Communist eyes, liberated areas. The abandoned rubber plantation would be a constant origin of rocket and mortar attacks; a little farther north the so-called Ho Bo woods embraced the village of Phu My Hung, site of the Viet Cong's Saigon area headquarters, two hospitals, and training depots.

Cu Chi base was, in fact, in the heart of the most tunnel-riddled countryside in South Vietnam, scene of the most destructive operations of the war. The tunnel network was to plague the Americans from the moment of their arrival to the time they left.

Adjoining Cu Chi base was the village of Nhuan Duc. Arguably, Nhuan Duc was the most front-line village in South Vietnam. In 1976 it was honored as a Heroic Village by Vietnam's national assembly, and it was the home of several medal-winning Viet Cong heroes during the war, including To Van Duc, the farmer who invented the cane-pressure mine that disabled so many helicopters. Today, some agriculture has resumed in Nhuan Duc; during the war just about everything above ground was obliterated. Decades will have to pass before the forests and plantations are as thick as they were in 1965. Before the 173rd Airborne Brigade and the 3rd Brigade of the
1st Infantry Division mounted Operation Crimp in January 1966 to clear the area to build Cu Chi base, the entire locality was bombarded by artillery and with high-explosive bombs from specially adapted B-52 strategic bombers. All the houses were destroyed. The women, children, and old people of Nhuan Duc were moved out by ARVN soldiers to the strategic hamlet at Trung Lap. But the able-bodied men and girls remained hidden in the tunnels, ordered by the NLF to stay close to the enemy. Their attempts to continue to cultivate some green vegetables at night were frustrated by crop poisons sprayed from aircraft. A white area was created. Operation Crimp was meant to sweep the area clear of Viet Cong and make it safe for the 25th Infantry Division to establish its base at Dong Zu, next to Cu Chi town. But Crimp was a partial failure; many of the guerrillas were not displaced, nor was much of their underground fortifications found or destroyed. When the new division arrived in early 1966, it unknowingly pitched its tents right on top of an existing network of Viet Cong tunnels.

Huynh Van Co, an enterprising twenty-nine-year-old local guerrilla, could not believe his good fortune. He and the other two members of his cell decided to hide in a tunnel for a week with a little store of dried rice. Each night they stealthily emerged from their trapdoor and created havoc with directional claymore mines and grenades, killing and wounding GIs in their tents, who had no idea where the attack originated. Mortar shells lobbed in from outside the perimeter by other Viet Cong added to the confusion, and helped disguise Huynh Van Co's infiltration. Co and his men made a point of stealing food from the Americans each night before returning to the tunnel in the darkness and hiding and sleeping for the day. This went on for seven nights until the three-man Viet Cong cell withdrew back through the tunnel, which rejoined the larger system known as the belt near the village of Trung Lap. Neither they nor their tunnel was ever detected.

Huynh Van Co went on to become a captain in the Viet Cong main force and to command a platoon of Dac Cong—special forces, or commandos. He was killed in 1969 by napalm dropped from a U.S. aircraft while he was fighting ARVN troops. His citation as a Hero now hangs in the little bamboo-and-corrugated-iron house of his sister, Mrs. Huynh Thi Bia, in a leafy hamlet a mile from Cu Chi town. His faded photograph,
showing a youthful and strangely innocent face, sits next to a cobwebbed official portrait of Ho Chi Minh. The citation, signed by Premier Pham Van Dong, reads “The nation remembers.”

Another local hero was Pham Van Coi, who led a daring attack on Cu Chi base at night in April 1966, while the Americans were still vulnerably under canvas. Neighboring Vietnamese villagers who remember him unanimously credit him and his two colleagues with killing dozens of Americans. All three survived the raid. Pham Van Coi commanded the Nhuan Duc guerrillas until he was killed in an ambush in 1967.

The siting of Cu Chi base over existing tunnels was, to say the least, fortunate for the Viet Cong. The American 173rd Airborne Brigade had operated in the Cu Chi area since January 1966, and its job was to facilitate the arrival of larger units. Its commander, Brigadier General Ellis W. Williamson, observed the arrival of the 25th Infantry Division with amusement. “They brought quite a lot of little shelters,” he said, “little huts and things, with them from Hawaii. They started putting these things up and we were very envious of them. We were also somewhat critical of them. We couldn't understand why in God's green earth they couldn't sit down and make themselves secure where they were. The 25th Division came in, set up in Cu Chi, and was constantly feuding and fussing with the enemy around its own headquarters. We literally laughed at them. We thought: What kind of an outfit is it that can't even secure its own headquarters? And it began to come to light that the tunnel system was in fact a reality.

“The 25th Division didn't realize that they had bivouac'd on a volcano. There they were, right on top of a very explosive situation. They just couldn't imagine how it could be that they put out patrols—had men walk and walk over an area absolutely devoid of any enemy, and then that night—brap! brap! brap! The quartermaster tent gets shot up. The ordnance tent gets shot up. A support unit gets itself all bunged up. And everybody says: ‘Where did they come from? My perimeter is secure. Nobody penetrated my perimeter last night. I know they didn't.' But there they are. Come under the ground and climbed up.”

The commanding general of the 25th Division, Major General Fred Weyand, himself admitted that his choice of site for the
divisional base had caused problems at first. “We used to talk laughingly about when we moved into Cu Chi base, thinking that the area was already secured. But in a sense we had to fight our way in there. Once we got in, we thought we could bed down and sleep in open tents. That turned out to be wrong. The Viet Cong could, at that time, with impunity come up in the middle of the night and fire away and cause us that kind of grief. We realized that there were tunnels. And gradually we realized the extent of them. Now, as that realization dawned, we dealt with the problem as best we could.”

He sent for the newly formed tunnel rat section of the 1st Infantry Division to help seek out Cu Chi base's underworld. Sergeant Bernard Justen used a napalm flame-thrower to burn up some of the tunnels they found. In his words, “Ain't nobody going to argue with a flame-thrower.” He sent one of the rats to explore a tunnel and the man came to the surface—to the astonishment of all concerned—in the middle of the 25th Division's motor pool. Justen added that the GIs got little sleep in the early days of the base; the nightly attacks went on.