The Tunnels of Cu Chi (23 page)

As late as February 1969, after three years of Cu Chi base's existence, the camp was the victim of a daring and destructive Viet Cong attack that penetrated right inside its security perimeter.
It came from the least expected quarter: not from the notorious Ho Bo woods or Fil Hol sides, but from the side facing Cu Chi town, which was normally government-controlled. Local guerrillas like Mrs Mo had guided the Viet Cong main force around the belt to the side chosen for the attack. They slept the previous day in the tunnels. In the dead of night, Dac Cong, or special force, sappers crawled forward to clear a path through the protective minefield and barbed wire, unobserved by the patrolling sentries. Then the thirty-nine Viet Cong, three squads of thirteen, some of them women, entered the base. Their main aim, as with so many Viet Cong attacks, was to destroy their enemies' most feared and hated weapon—helicopters. They knew exactly where to find them. Using satchel charges, the guerrillas blew up fourteen of the big troop-carrying CH-47 Chinook helicopters on the ground, all those in Cu Chi at the time. The realization that the Viet Cong were “inside the wire” created some panic. The defenders fired ghostly parachute flares into the air to illuminate the base and help spot the attackers. Firing broke out on all sides; there was the whoosh and boom of rocket grenades. A medical orderly in the 12th Evacuation Hospital later recalled that night: “Guys confirmed that the VC were inside the base. They said the enemy had killed some of our people and had blown up some helicopters. That the VC were inside our wire scared the wounded guys pretty bad. It scared me, too, and for the rest of the night, whenever the door opened on either ward my heart flipped and I froze, half expecting it would be VC. The shooting and the rockets and the flares kept up for hours.” Thirty-eight Americans were killed, but all but thirteen of the attackers escaped safely and unharmed when they melted away before dawn. They left in a direction different from the one they had taken to reach the base; they knew that artillery fire would rake the area from which it was thought they had traveled.

By a cruel stroke of irony, the commander of the 25th Infantry by that time was Major General Ellis W. Williamson. He was the officer who had commanded the 173rd Airborne in 1966, and had been so scornful of the 25th's early tribulations with tunnels underneath the base. The destruction of so many helicopters during his command was, he said, heartbreaking.

But back in 1966, when Cu Chi base was just completed, that raid was three years away. By establishing such a huge
base (and others like it), General Westmoreland had grafted a little piece of America onto Cu Chi. But the Viet Cong were not displaced, and emulated the Americans by fighting and playing just as hard.

   Pham Sang—The Story of an
   Entertainer

On Christmas day, 1966, Pham Sang, an entertainer, was boosting Viet Cong morale in a tunnel beneath Cu Chi district within artillery range of Cu Chi base camp—while Bob Hope was doing the same for the 25th Infantry Division. Pham Sang arranged that word-of-mouth invitations be delivered to cadres and guerrillas, to attend a small entertainment underground.

Up above, thousands of GIs were sitting in the sunshine on the same Vietnamese earth, beer cans in hand, emitting piercing rebel yells at the obvious charms of the current Miss World. They hooted at the wisecracks and patriotic sentiments of the army's best-loved comedian, dressed in a grotesquely over-decorated fatigue jacket and armed with a golf club. “When I landed at Tan Son Nhut,” quipped Hope, “I got a nineteen-gun salute. One of them was ours.” Through the roars of encouragement he continued: “We have a very mixed audience today at Cu Chi.” The grin, the famous pause, then: “We're so close to the fighting we had to give the Viet Cong half the tickets!” A classic one-liner, nor far removed from the truth. Ten minutes into Hope's show, two VC who had sneaked in through Cu Chi's base's perimeter were killed and one was captured; the artists heard the firing.

Hope's entourage included the Golddiggers, a troupe of thirteen leggy girl entertainers; they sang and danced to Les Brown and his Band of Renown. Superstars like Raquel Welch and Jill St. John had only to trip on stage in the then-fashionable miniskirts and the audience broke up. Singers like Connie Francis or Nancy Sinatra crooned the latest hits.

Pham Sang, in the theater of the earth, the tunnels, performed songs such as “He who comes to Cu Chi, the Bronze Fortress in the Land of Iron, will count the Crimes accumulated by the Enemy.” His audience rose to its feet only if there was room to stand. Two of his wartime songs were intensely popular: One was a love song, “A Rose in the Land of Iron”; the other a satirical number about Saigon's revenue collectors entitled “400 Piastres of Tax.” Both he and Bob Hope were there to sustain the fighting spirit of weary and homesick boys. The Hope show was sufficiently big and professional to be filmed by an American TV network. The Viet Cong tunnel entertainers, however, performed in cramped caverns, on bare earth floors. While Bob Hope had the beauty of a Vietnamese sunset as his stage lighting, Pham Sang's only stage illumination came from small lamps made from bamboo cane filled with nut oil, and slow-burning wicks.

The Vietnamese tunnel entertainers were a unique group of artists who volunteered to share the life of the Viet Cong tunnel inhabitants. They were in the main Communist party members, strongly opposed to what they saw as the deliberate erosion of traditional Vietnamese culture by the Diem government. These entertainers were recruited as early as 1960 by the National Liberation Front. Within the next five years the arrival of the American soldiers with their alien cultural backgrounds, and the continued neglect of Vietnamese historical inheritance by successive Saigon governments, resulted in further confusion, which the Communists took advantage of. The party believed the Vietnamese needed to be reminded of their colonial past, with its foreign domination and exploitation. By mixing their brand of socialism with traditional Vietnamese nationalism, they hoped to create a new culture. As far as the tunnels were concerned, not only were audiences captive, but morale frequently needed boosting. What Bob Hope was doing at the headquarters of the 25th needed doing inside the tunnels, too, for similar reasons and often with similar results.

It was the rubicund and enthusiastic Pham Sang who was originally instructed by the NLF to create a theater and song-and-dance ensemble at Phu My Hung in the district of Cu Chi, where he was then working as a civil servant. He was first transferred to the propaganda department of the Hoc Mon district committee, and soon became secretary of the district front committee. Pham Sang began the war, but was not to end it, as a bit of a party hack. He is one of the very few leading tunnel entertainers who survived.

His was a non-theatrical background. In 1955 he was in prison for political crimes against the new government of President Diem. Out of sheer boredom he taught himself to write plays about guerrilla warfare. Unlike plays in the prevailing political style, his works were not three-hour pieces of great polemic content, but unusually tight fifteen-minute productions. It was this kind of dramatic format that tunnel productions needed, given the numerous interruptions caused by shelling, bombing, or ground assaults.

The district committee nominated Sang as the most promising and prolific songwriter and playwright of the area. Soon the neighboring provinces of Tay Ninh and Binh Duong began mounting his productions. His stewardship of the Phu My Hung tunnel entertainment group gave the one-time civil servant a unique opportunity in his new career. As manager, writer, hirer and firer of the talent, he was in a comfortable position to have his works performed. By 1965 and the arrival in Vietnam of the Americans, his ensemble had grown to over a hundred young men and women. The Front ordered him to divide the group into three troupes of some thirty each. Subsequently, as the facilities down below became increasingly odious and cramped, the troupes split into much smaller numbers.

Such was Pham Sang's growing fame and importance as an actor-manager-writer that wherever he traveled, local people dug a special tunnel chamber for him to stay in and write more music and plays. In an underground society that could hardly afford privilege, politically or environmentally, this was a rare honor.

By 1966, Pham Sang could really work only in the tunnels, for above it was becoming too dangerous. Below, he would write endlessly by the light of a converted penicillin-bottle oil lamp. Like all creative artists, he maintained a running battle
with those he regarded as philistines, such as the tunnel security guards. They seemed to care more about his little bottle lamp than they did about his songs and plays. They ordered him to make a lampshade for it, and even when that was done, they further commanded him to cover the flame completely with material, leaving only a tiny hole the size of a coin for light to shine through. It was almost impossible for an artist to write under these conditions, and he complained bitterly. But still the security men scolded him, warning him of developments in technology that sounded more like fiction than his own plays. They spoke of low-flying American spotter planes that could detect tiny light sources that were invisible even to the human eye, and of American night-scopes capable of magnifying available light 70,000 times. Pham Sang found it hard to believe. After all, he was under the earth. “How can I write if I am not allowed to have light?” he grumbled. “All my best works against the Americans are written at night in the tunnels, that is when I need light most.” Like many of his artistic colleagues, the stage had become his world. Fighting, well, that was for soldiers.

His works were soon being performed in front of mixed audiences of soldiers and civilians, who themselves took great personal risks in making their way to the tunnels. Performances usually took place in tunnel conference chambers or even specially dug theater chambers, which could accommodate scores of people. If shelling or bombing began during the shows, the audiences could take to the smaller, safer communication tunnels. Some crawled to special bomb shelters inside the tunnels that had the greatly strengthened conical roofs. Sometimes, Pham Sang's ensemble was able to rehearse above ground in the lull between operations, or while the Americans changed over from day to night operations. But in the main, shelling was a considerable impediment to the continuity of Sang's productions. By 1967, the 25th Infantry alone was raining shells at the rate of nearly 200,000 a month into the Cu Chi district.

The most appreciative audiences were made up of men from the 267th (Quyet Thang) Regiment, the regional force that defended much of the Cu Chi area. Pham Sang was personally popular with many of the young soldiers, for whom Sang's songs were the only light relief from the alternating monotony and danger of their lives.

It was with the help of friends from the 267th that Pham Sang hit upon what everyone thought was a clever and audacious plan. Together with his close colleague Bay Lap, who was then in charge of the Cu Chi District Music Ensemble, Pham Sang decided it was time to give the enemy a chance to appreciate his songs and plays. It was also time the troupe did more to proselytize the puppets, and Sang was reasonably certain that his art would transcend the political gulf. Some of the tunnel shows had taken place only 200 meters away from the enemy military posts. Pham Sang became convinced that he would be able to organize an
above-ground
performance close to an ARVN military post that stood guard over a strategic hamlet. It was not inconceivable, thought Sang, that the sheer quality of the revolutionary performances might woo some of the misguided ARVN soldiers over to the Communist side. Such an event would not go unrecognized at district, or even regional, party headquarters.

First, he and Bay Lap needed to find a suitable location. It had to be within a couple of hundred meters of an ARVN post, yet also it needed to have suitable vegetation to act as cover, and to be near a tunnel entrance for speedy retreat. Once this location had been found, Pham Sang used his friends from the regiment to procure precious loudspeakers, microphones, and generators. Bay Lap's authority was crucial in forcing other tunnel sections to allow the precious equipment out of their hands for a few hours. Eventually all the necessary equipment was gathered together and the singers waited inside the tunnel.

Sang had chosen the period just after four-thirty in the afternoon, when the light was clear and the air beginning to cool a little. The equipment was carefully brought from the tunnels to the cover about 150 meters from the ARVN guard post. The singers moved stealthily into position; a handful of boys from the 267th crawled into the undergrowth to guard the ensemble. At a signal from Pham Sang the electricity was switched on and loudspeakers blurted out patriotic songs at full volume to the astonished ARVN soldiers. Interspersed among two songs were political commercials, enticing the South Vietnamese to defect to the Communists. It was, in retrospect, Pham Sang now admits, perhaps a somewhat naïve exercise. In the event, after a short silence, the entertainers received their answer. A barrage of small arms and rifle fire was hurled at them. In the
ensuing undignified scramble to dive back into the tunnels and save the equipment, considerable pride and a couple of loudspeakers were lost. The experiment was not repeated, and Pham Sang's political future stayed on a plateau for some time to come.