The Tunnels of Cu Chi (25 page)

Sang again pulled the pin from one of his grenades and held the weapon in his fist. With the other hand he hung on to the trapdoor lock, a crude stick threaded through the eye of a wire loop. If he lost the silent struggle and the trapdoor flew open, or the wire broke, he would fling the grenade. Drenched in sweat, his fingers bleeding from the increasingly unequal struggle, which was now continued for the best part of fifteen minutes, Sang withdrew his hand and allowed the trapdoor to fly open. As he prepared to hurl the grenade a voice said in Vietnamese, “It's me, it's me, Uncle Pham.” It was one of the young guerrillas who had been ordered to stay behind and defend the rear. He had seen Pham Sang enter the tunnel and now asked for shelter, too—for himself and no less than eight of his comrades.

Sang's little tunnel could hold only four at most, and only with extreme difficulty and discomfort. If the trapdoor was closed they would all suffocate; if it was left open and the American infantry arrived and saw it, they would be captured or die. Somebody would have to stay awake all night and guard the open trapdoor, allowing the young guerrillas to survive underground. Sang told the men: “We are in a difficult situation. I'll give you my shelter, but I will guard the trapdoor. I will not let anyone else guard it. I will stay on the ground and let you sleep. If the enemy come I'll pull the trapdoor
down. Even if you suffocate and die under me, you will have to keep quiet. If any of you scream, I will explode a hand grenade and we will all die.” The soldiers agreed. It was a small gesture but for Pham Sang it was a brave one. The bluster and the revolutionary rhetoric that sounded so impressive on the stage was displaced by the earthy reality of trying to survive.

Next morning, as the sun rose over the battlefield and the men wearily came up from the tunnel, Sang joined them to search for and identify the many bodies of the dead and wounded. For several hours this work preoccupied him, so much so that he did not realize that the Americans were leaving. The battle was over. His song-and-dance troupe, who had managed to slip out of the American noose with less difficulty than he, assumed he'd been killed. They even sent an ox and cart with a local driver especially to find and return Pham Sang's body from the battlefield. Instead, their leader, having refused to travel in the undertaker's cart sent for his corpse, walked back to the base at Phu My Hung. When he was reunited with the ensemble, they wept at seeing him alive. Pham Sang cried a little, too.

In 1972, all Pham Sang's sketches, song sheets, and scripts were lost when the box containing them was buried in a tunnel, following a direct hit during a B-52 strike. Misfortune continued to dog him when he came back from the war in 1975. His wife had taken a lover who was a “puppet,” a police informer. The man was arrested by the victorious Communists but subsequently freed. He then married Sang's wife.

By 1979, Pham Sang was working at the Ho Chi Minh City Cultural and Information Department. But that seed of independence and stubbornness that had been sown at Suoi Loi refused to wither away. He was not so naïve as to imagine that peace would bring the solution to all Vietnam's problems, but there were pertinent questions to be asked about the direction of the new united nation. As differences of opinion grew between Pham Sang and his superiors, he asked to be released from the Cultural and Information Department. He was out of show business.

Since then most of his entertainers have died or dispersed; the excitement of the war has, inevitably, been replaced by the anticlimax of peace. Besides, Hanoi today needs different writers to achieve different aims, to mobilize the people against
new enemies of the state. Peace has not brought cultural freedom, but Pham Sang remains optimistic.

Pham Sang has turned his back on all theater. He has learned too much about the real world to believe in the stage any more.

He has remarried and is a tax inspector in Binh Thanh district.

   Operation Cedar Falls

By 1967 the Americans were clearly having difficulties with the tunnels in Cu Chi. The Viet Cong had so organized their local and regional forces that not only did bases like Cu Chi face attack, but the security of Saigon itself was threatened. General Westmoreland had to address this growing problem. Most of Cu Chi district was under ARVN or American control by day, but the Viet Cong dominated it by night. The guerrillas did not come from empty air—they had to have shelter, food, and weapons facilities. Many of these needs were supplied in the area adjoining Cu Chi, the large VC base nearest to Saigon, which rejoiced in the menacing name, the Iron Triangle. For two years the Americans treated the Triangle with respect and caution, but in 1967 Westmoreland decided to mount the largest and most destructive operation of the war. He planned to take out the Iron Triangle and its tunnels, to relieve the pressure on Saigon and the surrounding bases, such as Cu Chi.

The Triangle was a forty-square-mile natural citadel of jungle and briar, beneath which was a honeycomb of Viet Cong tunnels and bunkers. Its apex was the junction of the Saigon and Thi Tinh rivers, which formed two of its sides. The third was an imaginary line running from the village of Ben Suc
eastward to the district capital of Ben Cat. Like Cu Chi facing it across the Saigon River, the Iron Triangle dominated the strategic land and river routes into Saigon. In 1967 it had been a refuge for insurgents for twenty years and defied every attempt to conquer it. It was an extraordinary Communist enclave not two dozen miles from the capital city. It was given its name in 1963 by Peter Arnett, an Associated Press correspondent, who was the first to notice that with respect to enemy concentration, it resembled the Iron Triangle of the Korean War. Before the Americans arrived en masse in 1965, the ARVN had made sporadic forays against it without result. Operation Sunrise in 1963 was an attempt to herd the population into strategic hamlets. It was completely rebuffed, and the Viet Cong resumed control of the area.

In November 1964 a whole regiment of the ARVN, with air and artillery support, spent ten days futilely beating around in the jungle of the Triangle. Soon afterward Westmoreland invited the American captain who had accompanied the expedition as adviser to dine with him and his family at his villa in Saigon. During the evening the young officer described the difficulties of rooting out such an entrenched foe. The only solution, he thought, would be to burn the whole place to the ground. Westmoreland remembered the advice given him in 1964 by the legendary General Douglas MacArthur: To defeat the guerrilla, “you may have to resort to a scorched-earth policy.” He decided upon just that course.

At the beginning of the next dry season, he ordered the area to be saturated from the air with the chemical defoliant known as Agent Orange, which killed the vegetation. Two months later the Iron Triangle had become a tinder-dry fire trap. Leaflets and helicopter-borne loudspeakers warned noncombatants to get out. The area was doused from the air with gasoline and immediately set on fire by napalm and incendiary bombs. Raging flames leapt into the sky. Then an incredible phenomenon occurred. The intense heat triggered an atmospheric condition in the wet tropical air that created a giant cloudburst. As
Time
magazine described it: “A drenching downpour … doused the forest fire and left [the] Viet Cong safe and unsinged in their caves.” Monsoon rains soon revived the jungle's cover.

The expedition by the 173rd Airborne Brigade into the Iron Triangle in late 1965 did some damage but demonstrated yet
again the extreme difficulty of denying insurgents the use of the fastness. From then on U.S. units stayed well away from the area. When it became clear to Westmoreland that the Iron Triangle still functioned as Communist preserve, he resolved to mount a final assault so powerful that it could not fail to eliminate the fortress. It was to be a textbook example of the controversial strategy of search and destroy.

“It was unfortunate,” wrote Westmoreland, “that American strategy in Vietnam came to be known as search-and-destroy strategy.” Perhaps because the term became synonymous in the public mind with aimless thrashing about in the jungle and the purposeless destruction of property, Westmoreland later substituted other expressions, such as “offensive sweep” and “reconnaissance in force.” But the object remained the same. A large mechanized body of troops would seek out opponents to fight, installations to destroy, or both. Afterward the American forces would move on or return to their bases. There could be no territorial acquisition, so the only measure of success was attrition: maximizing the number of enemy killed while keeping one's own casualties to a minimum. Hence the size of the units of troops deployed on sweeps in the III Corps Tactical Zone, and the statistical obsession with the body count of supposed Viet Cong dead. In the war of attrition that Westmoreland found himself waging, there was no other way.

Search-and-destroy operations were usually named after American towns and cities, such as Attleboro and Junction City. Troops would be flown, or driven in APCs, to an area of suspected Viet Cong presence. The infantry would fan out and look for the enemy, while the senior officers hovered overhead in their helicopters, directing proceedings on their radios.

Brigadier General Joseph A. McChristian was Westmoreland's assistant chief of staff for intelligence. During 1966, he assiduously compiled and computerized every kind of intelligence tidbit available, from sampan traffic counts on the Saigon River to checking the amount of wood sent to an area for making coffins. Such “pattern activity analysis,” along with the more orthodox interrogation of prisoners and defectors, persuaded him that urgent action was needed in the Iron Triangle. In
The Role of Military Intelligence 1965–1967
he wrote: “While Vietnam provided many examples of the role of intelligence in support of operations, Cedar Falls was a classic. I conceived
the operation and recommended it to General Westmoreland.” McChristian knew that the Viet Cong's Military Region IV (the Saigon area) headquarters moved frequently to avoid detection. But he formed the impression that it was in the Trapezoid, as the Americans called the Thanh Dien forest on the northern side of the Triangle. (He was mistaken: It was usually across the Saigon River in Cu Chi district.) He believed that an urgent search-and-destroy operation against the Trapezoid and the Iron Triangle would uncover and disrupt the Viet Cong's imminent designs upon Saigon itself. In 1966 their saboteurs had seemed able to strike almost at will in the capital; there were more terrorist incidents in Saigon that year than ever before.

Cedar Falls (named after a town in Iowa) was set for 8 January 1967. Its objects were savage and uncompromising. First of all, the village of Ben Suc was to be emptied of people and razed; all the other villages in the Triangle would be treated likewise. The chief aim of the operation was to locate the tunnel headquarters of MR IV, explore it, and then destroy it, along with any other tunnels that were found. Once the civilian population had been cleared out of the Iron Triangle, it was to be stripped of vegetation and declared a free strike zone.

A week's softening-up bombing missions by B-52s preceded the operation. The Vietnam War had begun as a counterinsurgency war—stalking guerrillas in the jungle. Cedar Falls, however, was a multidivisional operation involving over 30,000 U.S. troops, the largest in Vietnam to date.

On 8 January 1967 the village of Ben Suc—former population about 3,500—was wiped off the face of the earth. Its subsequent survival and rebirth testify to the importance of the tunnels in frustrating America's aims in Operation Cedar Falls, and in the Vietnam War as a whole. So long as the tunnels were not eliminated, neither were the spirit and effectiveness of the guerrillas.

Ben Suc was strategically situated at the crossing point of the Saigon River, on the northern bank facing Phu My Hung in Cu Chi district; it was the western point of the Iron Triangle. It had been a prosperous village. Most of the villagers were peasant farmers, raising crops like melons, grapefruit, and cashew nuts. Because a market was held there each day, the place could boast many shops, a pharmacy, and some primitive
restaurants. When the National Liberation Front had gone on the offensive back in 1960, they terrorized a small ARVN post in Ben Suc into handing over its weapons. The movement's local leader was Pham Van Chinh, then twenty-three. Today, in his sixties, he is the village Communist party secretary, the local boss—a reward for fifteen years of tunnel existence leading the local guerrillas. He looks only about forty-five, with a mouthful of gold teeth, green-framed thick glasses, and a relaxed and authoritative manner. He recalled that in late 1964 the reinforced ARVN post was driven out altogether by the Viet Cong, who murdered the government-appointed village chief and set up their own administration. As inhabitants of a “liberated zone,” the people were obliged to help the Front: they were required to join party associations, such as those for youths and women, and compelled to pay Viet Cong taxes and perform such duties as digging tunnels. Young men were recruited as guerrillas; young girls became nurses, or set booby traps and warned the villagers of their location.