The Tunnels of Cu Chi (22 page)

Some of the more startling pieces of military hardware housed behind the ramparts and barbed wire of Cu Chi base were the UNIVAC 1005 and NCR 500 computers, the first time they had gone to war. The army's war managers placed increasing faith in their ability to solve the intractable problems of the Vietnam War. They were mounted in expandable mobile vans parked outside the division's tactical operations center. Every little contact that the 25th had with the surrounding Viet Cong was fed into the machines to create a huge intelligence
bank, which, it was hoped, might analytically predict where the enemy might next be found, and which type of operation would be most likely to succeed against him. The computers contained constantly updated lists of known or suspected Viet Cong sympathizers, and interfaced with other military computers in Vietnam, such as the Hamlet Evaluation System, maintained at U.S. Army headquarters in Saigon. HES categorized supposed degrees of sympathy with the Viet Cong in each village across the country. The evaluation was notoriously overoptimistic. It relied on suspect intelligence supplied by often corrupt ARVN local officials, who tended to portray the running of their areas of responsibility in the most flattering light.

Supplying the occupants of this colossal base with their expected comforts, and the wherewithal to fight, became a military operation in itself; they called it Operation Roadrunner, and it sapped a significant part of the 25th Infantry's energies. Cu Chi base was resupplied by road from nearby Saigon and Long Binh, the army's biggest depot in Vietnam. An average of four convoys of about sixty vehicles, known as the Cu Chi Express, would make this short but hazardous journey each day. For the first two years that the 25th was at Cu Chi, there was a constant attrition of men and vehicles from Viet Cong mines and ambushes. There could be no travel after dark. After running over mines, crippled or burning vehicles would halt a convoy and make it a sitting target for mortar, rocket, or small-arms fire. Former 1st Infantry Division commander General John H. Hay ruefully admitted that “effective convoy operations were possible only because of the mutually supporting artillery fire bases along the route.” Search-and-destroy operations had to be conducted just to clear main roads. By 1968, the 25th had developed procedures to reduce convoy losses. Ammunition and fuel vehicles were placed at the rear so that the entire convoy would not be blocked by burning trucks, and tractors were brought along to move disabled vehicles off the road. The convoy commander would accompany his vehicles by helicopter, and gunship cover was arranged ahead of time over potential ambush sites. Roadside vegetation was progressively cleared by bulldozers fitted with Rome plows, which cut down trees.

Battle-weary troops from the countryside were given privileged
treatment on large bases at rest centers known as Holiday Inns. Waikiki East (named after the Hawaiian beach) was one such at Cu Chi base, where company-sized units could stand down and relax. It was within walking distance of the main post exchange, a large swimming pool, and the enlisted men's club. Units that had been out in the field for over a month were given forty-eight hours to recuperate. Their fatigue uniforms and boots were renewed. Personnel officers sorted out pay and other problems. Every evening saw a steak barbeque and entertainment by pop groups from Saigon, or by visiting American entertainers. Cold beer was consumed in quantity and Vietnamese dancing girls gyrated to the blare of electric guitars. Every grunt could also look forward to five days R & R during his one-year tour in Vietnam. Men were flown out monthly to Bangkok, Tokyo, Manila, Australia, Hawaii, and other suitably supplied venues.

There were even pretty young American girls around the base. Known as Doughnut Dollies, they were American Red Cross recreation volunteers. They wore light blue seersucker outfits, floppy field hats, tennis shoes, and big smiles. They entertained the troops with games and refreshments. These friendly girls were a popular feature of many army bases in Vietnam.

Despite the comforts they enjoyed on the base, soldiers of the 25th Infantry were occasionally reminded of the prevailing hostility of the surrounding population they had supposedly come to defend. Admittedly the children smiled, and teenagers hung around the GIs hoping for castoffs of their wondrous technological and consumer civilization; but every GI knew that no Vietnamese could be completely trusted. Soldiers were not allowed off base unless given official permission for some specified duty. Cu Chi town itself was off limits, and there was no traveling under any circumstances after seven at night. Contact with the Vietnamese was normally restricted to flying to villages in force to search homes for Viet Cong; or dealing with some of the thousand or so civilians allowed to work inside the base. These had such jobs as laborers, barbers, laundry-workers, bookkeepers, waitresses, mortuary attendants, and “shit burners,” whose task was to ignite the contents of fifty-five-gallon drums that contained the base's sewage, having first mixed in gasoline. Soldiers also constantly smuggled
prostitutes, or boom-boom girls, onto the base. One system was to drive one in in an ambulance, the beds of which would then be utilized by a succession of young soldiers, at three to four dollars a time. Sometimes the whores were smuggled into the base inside an empty water-tank trailer. Colonel John Fairbank, formerly the information officer at Cu Chi, remembered one occasion when GIs put a dozen girls inside an empty gasoline tanker; by the time they had got them past the military police on the main gate, the girls had all died from asphyxiation. There were “laundries” and “car washes”—Eve, Fairlady, Sexy—lined up just outside the base to service those GIs who had permission to go out. Marijuana and heroin were cheaply available at such places—a trade which the U.S. authorities were convinced was one way in which the Viet Cong financed their war. By the main gate a little restaurant run by the wives of Korean construction workers served as a cover for a brothel for the officers, in case visiting chaplains or movie stars asked embarrassing questions. Cu Chi hosted not just clergy and entertainers. Robert McNamara came, as secretary of defense, in 1966, and there was a stream of reporters and television crews. The base was, after all, conveniently near to Saigon.

But despite these distractions the 25th was at war—and not just with an unseen enemy outside the wire. There was a fifth column inside as well, an enemy that found it easy to operate within the comparatively lax security system that took into account the entertainment needs of the soldiers and the necessity to use local labor to service the huge complex. The Vietnamese workers on the base lived in nearby strategic hamlets. In theory they were screened by the national police. In fact, some were guerrillas using tunnels round the base, and most workers were in touch with their local NLF organization. The Viet Cong cracked down heavily on fraternizing with the Americans, except on a commercial basis. For example, a Vietnamese girl who worked in the PX was known to be seeking permission to marry a GI. One morning her head was found on a post outside the main gate, with a note that said, “This is what happens to Vietnamese people who go around with the enemy.” A special mobile punishment unit of Viet Cong was responsible for such executions.

The Vietnamese workers on Cu Chi base lined up to be counted and checked as they arrived and left each day. However,
an explosive device or booby trap was found inside the base once or twice each week. Mess hall walls seemed to be a favorite place to leave them. One such bomb caused dozens of casualties in a mess hall on 5 January 1969. Today, few of the civilian workers are happy to admit that they ever worked for the Americans. Mrs Le Thi Tien, for example, is a self-employed seamstress with one child in the village of Phuoc Hiep, a short distance up Route 1, north of Cu Chi town. During the war she worked as a waitress in the officers' club on the base. She recalled: “I had to work there because my family was so poor. Most of the villages in this area were destroyed by bombs, so we all had to live temporarily in the villages along the road. I was forced to work for the Americans to support my mother, who was blind. I was told to observe everything in the base and report it to the local cadre.” The man to whom she reported was Ho Van Nhien, who is still the party cadre in Phuoc Hiep today. “Each village sent in spies,” he said. “I had many report to me. Some were laborers filling sandbags. They reported whenever the Americans launched an operation. The bar girl (Mrs Le Thi Tien) reported whatever conversations she overheard that she could understand. I reported back to the district committee so that they could prepare to deal with any attack.” He described how intelligence messages detailing future search-and-destroy operations were written on small sheets of paper, wrapped in nylon, and hidden in the hair of women couriers, who attracted less suspicion from the police. Another of Ho's agents worked at the graves registration point, the mortuary on Cu Chi base, preparing American dead for shipment home. By this means, the Viet Cong had a far more accurate picture of American casualty figures than was ever made public. The camp barbers, too, were well placed to gather intelligence.

Sergeant Arnold Gutierrez recalled an episode concerning a barber. He and a patrol were in the Boi Loi woods and came under sniper fire from a tree. Gutierrez had the radio and was the prime target; he was wounded in the elbow. The patrol sprayed the tree with machine-gun fire and brought the sniper down. It turned out to be a thirteen-year-old girl, and—worse still—the daughter of one of the camp's Vietnamese barbers, a friend and confidant of the men. The girl had been in the tunnels since she was ten. That night the barber was hanged.
In January 1967, during Operation Cedar Falls, tunnel rats found a VC document that named dozens of sympathizers working inside Cu Chi base. It included all fourteen of the camp's barbers.

For attacks from outside, Cu Chi's intricate defensive perimeter turned out to be well justified. Because of the formidable American presence that descended on the area and the semipermanence of the buildings and structure, as well as the wholesale devastation and depopulation of the surrounding countryside, the Viet Cong always saw Cu Chi—like other U.S. bases—as an affront and a challenge. Truong Ky, a top Viet Cong staff officer, announced in 1967: “We will continue to encircle and hug their bases wherever they establish them.” The interrogation report of Viet Cong prisoner Ngo Van Giang (made in January 1968) bears this out. He said: “Some permanent U.S. troop bases are near VC areas. Prostitutes around these camps make it easy for us to learn the defensive system and the strength of the post. At night, the Americans fire flares to assist in their observation of the area, but unconsciously they also help our sappers observe how to enter the post.”

Not only did the Viet Cong lob mortar shells and rockets into Cu Chi base camp but, incredibly, they executed daring raids on it from the surrounding tunnels. These were carried out by parties of thirty or forty guerrillas at most, and often by smaller groups, even by the classic Viet Cong three-man cells. Some caused enormous damage, to helicopters and tanks for example, and loss of life among the American soldiers. The raids were profoundly unsettling and of psychological and propaganda value far beyond their military importance. The Viet Cong demonstrated to the Americans that none of their installations was impregnable; that their adversaries were self-sacrificially brave; and that the Viet Cong would keep coming back, even after the annihilation of their villages and apparently fearsome casualties. Twenty years earlier, Ho Chi Minh himself had warned the French: “You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.”

Once the Americans had succeeded in blocking up all the tunnels that ran underneath Cu Chi base, the Viet Cong created a complex structure of tunnels, trenches, and firing positions all around it. This ring of tunnels they called the belt. (The
same technique had been used against the French at the siege of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.) The belt connected most of the villages surrounding Cu Chi base, including Trung Lap, Nhuan Duc, and Phu Hoa Dong. Every fifty meters, branch tunnels headed off toward the base itself. One set of branch tunnels ended in well-defended firing positions placed in the banks of the stream that ran along the northern side of Cu Chi base. The firing position that ended each branch tunnel was well concealed and surrounded by punji traps and mines. These nests of resistance commanded wide fields of fire and often overlooked, and hence dominated, one or another of the roads that crisscrossed the district. Because the branch tunnels led back into the main Cu Chi tunnel system, Viet Cong using firing positions to harass the enemy had a safe escape route when detected or shelled. The tunnels themselves had the multilevel structure that prevented damage from explosives or CS gas.

The belt was constantly used for infiltration by main-force Viet Cong from the more secure areas of War Zone C in Tay Ninh province or from Cambodia, to attack Cu Chi base itself or to proceed to other attacks in or near Saigon. One of those who worked and fought in the belt was Mrs Vo Thi Mo, the one female guerrilla who survived the squad that stayed behind in Nhuan Duc. In 1966 she was still a teenager but dedicated to the cause she had espoused. “Our fighting area was the belt around Dong Zu (Cu Chi) base. My duty was to lead the way for the regular troops from Nhuan Duc to Dong Zu. In the daytime I went to Dong Zu openly by myself to observe the road, the fences, the terrain—the ways by which one could penetrate the base. Then at night I guided the reconaissance group to observe the base. The regular forces mounted attacks. My duty was to guide the troops on their way back and help carry the wounded. Sometimes I went there legally, with puppet identity cards, on a Honda moped. Inside the base I was guided by liaison agents. I collected information from women inside the base, like cleaners and prostitutes, about the Americans' activities. I ran fifteen secret cells. That way we knew in advance the names and times and places of some of the big operations, like Cedar Falls.”