The Tunnels of Cu Chi (26 page)

As the war intensified in 1965, Ben Suc was bombed for the first time, and several buildings were destroyed—this despite the Viet Cong's mockingly flying the South Vietnamese flag in the village center in the hope of winning immunity from bombing. Thereafter people dug bomb shelters under their homes, and even shelters for their farm animals. As air-raid-shelter life became more customary, connecting tunnels were dug between homes and between parts of the village. The population of Ben Suc was increasingly swollen by bombed-out refugees from other villages, like Phu My Hung across the river. Pham Van Chinh admitted that Ben Suc was “the gateway to Saigon” and that main-force Viet Cong units were constantly passing through. Chinh himself had sixty-five local guerrillas under his command, and two hundred more scattered through adjoining hamlets, who, like minutemen, kept rifles in their homes ready for action. He also had hundreds of meters of real tunnels. They ran from the river crossing point back underneath the village toward the Viet Cong sanctuaries farther north in the Thanh Dien forest and the “Long Nguyen Secret Zone.”

Late in 1966 the Viet Cong high command at COSVN received advance intelligence of Cedar Falls. As usual, the choice of whether or not to do battle rested with the local Viet Cong commander, Colonel Tran Hai Phung of Military Region IV.
Forewarned, he sensibly withdrew the largest main-force unit in the area, the 272nd Regiment, back to sanctuary nearer Cambodia. Meanwhile the local guerrillas were ordered to stay
in situ
—to “cling to the land.” Pham Van Chinh said he was not given the exact date of Cedar Falls but was warned that an operation was imminent, and that Ben Suc would bear the brunt of it.

Because the Americans assumed that approaches to Ben Suc would be mined and booby-trapped, and that a battalion of Viet Cong would be defending the village, a new form of attack was planned. An entire battalion, five hundred men of the 1st/26th Infantry, the “Blue Spaders,” commanded by a future secretary of state, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander M. Haig, were airlifted into the middle of the village by sixty UH-1 helicopters. This was the largest number of helicopters ever used for such an attack. This great sky-blackening armada, resembling nothing so much as a throbbing and malevolent cloud of giant locusts, lifted off from Dau Tieng base at 7:30 a.m. Flying in two parallel lines of thirty, the “slicks” clattered across the hazy morning countryside and into what the apprehensive GIs aboard imagined would be a hot landing zone and the battle for Ben Suc. It was a rocky ride, as each helicopter created a turbulent wake for the one following. They flew at safe height, but after an hour swooped down to treetop level and flew
away
from Ben Suc, to confuse enemy observers on the ground. Then there was a sudden U-turn as sixty ear-splitting machines startled peasants and their water buffaloes, and charged low across the paddy fields and into the center of the village. There the battalion swiftly unloaded and ran to take up defensive positions. As the soldiers landed in the village, preplanned artillery and air strikes exploded in the Thanh Dien forest to the north, to cut off any escape route. Soon afterward, helicopters carrying loudspeakers and South Vietnamese announcers circled the village. In Vietnamese they made this proclamation: “Attention people of Ben Suc! You are surrounded by Republic of Vietnam and Allied forces. Do not run away or you will be shot as VC. Stay in your homes and wait for further instructions.”

There was no significant resistance in Ben Suc; the only American casualties were caused by booby-trap mines. The village was sealed and secured, and in a short while a battalion of the ARVN was helicoptered in to search the village and
interrogate the inhabitants. It was the same ARVN unit as had been driven out of Ben Suc three years earlier. The ARVN interrogators sorted through about 6,000 men, women, and children from the village and surrounding hamlets, who had been ordered to gather in an old school building. Of these they concluded twenty-eight might be Viet Cong. The ARVN troops used their habitually rigorous methods of questioning—beating up those whose answers were not those desired. A reporter, Jonathan Schell, witnessed the ARVN soldiers administering water torture to a villager, choking him with a soaked rag and pouring water down his nose. That same day, all the men in the village between fifteen and forty-five were flown out in Chinooks for further interrogation at the provincial police headquarters. Those thought not to be Viet Cong would be inducted into the South Vietnamese army.

Major General William Depuy, commander of the Big Red One, was helicoptered into Ben Suc soon after Haig and his men. “I had no doubt,” he said, “that there were a lot of agencies of the VC in there. When Al Haig's battalion went into Ben Suc, we picked up two chaps who were in charge of the education of the Viet Cong youth. They both spoke Russian and had been trained in Moscow. They were very intelligent men. I spoke some Russian, and was able to talk to them.”

The next day, all the remaining villagers were shipped out, with whatever belongings they could carry and such animals as they could round up. They were transported in trucks, World War II landing craft, or Chinook transport helicopters. Even General Bernard Rogers (then an assistant divisional commander of the Big Red One) in an army-sponsored and rose-tinted account of Cedar Falls, was moved to call this mass removal of the population a “pathetic and pitiful” sight. “It was to be expected,” he wrote in 1973, “that uprooting these villagers would evoke resentment, and it did.”

The forced depopulation of Ben Suc was the precursor of similar clearances all over South Vietnam, which emptied the countryside of people who might have succored the guerrillas and NVA, and ended the cultivation of food that might have fed them. A large refugee population was created around Saigon and other towns. General Westmoreland, in his memoir
A Soldier Reports
, tried to dispel the “misunderstanding” that this policy caused at home in the United States. He wrote:

At My Lai in March 1968 hundreds of noncombatant villagers were mown down in cold blood by a company of the 23rd (Americal) Division on a search-and-destroy operation. Westmoreland's brutal logic points up the frustrating fact about the Vietnam War that was such a source of pride to the Communists It was a people's war: the Viet Cong were inextricably mixed in with the civilians, and American boys from cities and farms found it impossible to distinguish between them.

When the last truckload of people and boatload of animals had left Ben Suc, the demolition teams moved in. The grass-roofed houses were soaked in gasoline and razed, leaving spindly black frames, charred furniture, and the entrances to the ubiquitous bomb shelters. Then the bulldozers went to work, flattening all the more solid buildings, fences, and graveyards. Afterward 1st Division engineers stacked ten thousand pounds of explosives and a thousand gallons of napalm in a crater in the center of the ruined village, covered them with earth, and tamped it all down with bulldozers. A chemical fuse triggered the five-ton explosion; it was hoped that it would blast any undiscovered tunnels in the vicinity. “One of the major objectives of Cedar Falls had been achieved,” wrote Rogers. “The village of Ben Suc no longer existed.”

But that was just the overture to Cedar Falls. The bulk of the American troops were to be thrown into the rest of the Iron Triangle. By the end of the first day, an entire American corps had moved into position along its sides. East of the Thi Tinh River were Depuy's 1st Infantry Division and the 173rd Airborne Brigade. West of the Saigon River in Cu Chi district
were Weyand's 25th Infantry Division and Knowles's 196th Light Infantry Brigade. In the imagery of the overall commander, Lieutenant General “Jack” Seaman, the “hammer” of the eastern forces was poised to strike the “anvil” of the blocking forces west of the Saigon River, and crush any Viet Cong caught in between. Air cavalry screened the whole area from above. At dawn on 9 January, this mighty leviathan stirred and rolled into action.

As the operation began, the 196th swept through the tunnel-riddled Ho Bo woods in Cu Chi. At first all they achieved was “the uncovering of a small quantity of enemy supplies.” Brigadier General Richard T. Knowles realized that he had to devise a way of finding well-camouflaged tunnel entrances as a matter of urgency; tunnel detection would be vital to the conduct of Cedar Falls. He had a bright idea. He had vehicles, such as APCs, drag whole trees behind them through the woods, creating avenues of swept dust as clear as virgin snow. “Then in the morning,” he said, “we could see where the VC had come out of their holes, and how they got back. You could see where they crawled, then where they stood up and ran. One thing led to another and we found the openings.” These early tunnel finds would lead to more substantial success later in the three-week operation.

Other units, too, were finding tunnels. After the occupation of Ben Suc, 1st Infantry Division engineers began flattening the nearby jungle with bulldozers. Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph M. Kiernan (who was to die in a helicopter crash in June 1967) recalled at the time: “I guess it was about twenty acres of scrub jungle.… The place was so infested with tunnels that as my dozers would knock over the stumps of trees, the VC would pop out from behind the dozers. We captured about … six or eight VC one morning. They just popped out of the tunnels and we picked them up.”

Other Big Red One battalions were helicopter-lifted into the Thanh Dien forest north of Ben Suc. The Thanh Dien was known as a Viet Cong rest-and-resupply area, but most of the guerrillas had wisely melted away and there was little resistance. Indeed, some troops reported seeing “an unknown number of Viet Cong escaping to the south on bicycles.” Tunnels, bunkers, and rice caches were uncovered, and a significant find was made by the 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry. After coming
under fire from a Viet Cong unit that killed four GIs and wounded four, Company B of the battalion came across a huge underground medical complex, containing over a ton of medicine, much of it bought in Saigon. The defenders had held off the “Black Lions” until all the wounded guerrillas could be evacuated. The fighters had in fact been a scratch squad of pharmacists commanded by a doctor, Vo Hoang Le. They, too, melted back into the jungle. Dr Le was later decorated for that episode, and given charge of all the Viet Cong medical facilities in the Cu Chi and Iron Triangle areas.

Meanwhile, the tanks of the 11th Armored Cavalry had begun crashing right across the Iron Triangle from Ben Cat to the Saigon River. There was hardly any enemy contact. First, the tracked vehicles turned right and plowed northward through the tangled thickets to join up with the airlanded infantrymen in the ghost town of Ben Suc. Then the tanks turned back southward and battered their way to the far point of the Triangle at the junction of the two rivers. So, in theory at least, the Triangle had been overrun and conquered. Engineers and infantry swept along behind, making sporadic contact with those few Viet Cong local guerrillas who had been ordered to remain there. But an uncomfortable fact was by now becoming clear to the American commanders. Most of the unprecedented array of military might and technology might as well have stayed in its bases. It was not to be needed in battle, for the Viet Cong chose not to fight. Although all the Vietnamese people who were killed were counted as VC, and hundreds of others took the sensible course of “rallying,” or seeming to defect to the government side, the larger Communist units that normally frequented the Cedar Falls operational area just vanished away; we now know how.

The experience of the 173rd Airborne was typical, as described in its after-action report:

It had been the same pattern in Operation Crimp the year before.

There was one exception. The Tropic Lightning Division's second brigade was airlifted from Cu Chi base up to the western bank of the Saigon River at the village of Phu Hoa Dong. This was the first time that the army had operated outside its bases on both sides of the river simultaneously. Hitherto, Viet Cong units had easily evaded search by crossing from Cu Chi district into the Iron Triangle and vice versa. Despite repeated preliminary air strikes and artillery barrages, a trapped battalion of Viet Cong in Phu Hoa Dong decided to put up some resistance. As the 25th's after-action report said: “This was the only incident during the entire operation in which the Viet Cong elected to fight.”

The army came closest to the real objective of Cedar Falls on 18 January, ten days after the operation began. Tunnel rats from the 1st/5th Infantry—the “Bobcats”—under Captain Bill Pelfrey discovered an extensive tunnel complex beside the Rach Son stream, which flows into the Saigon River from the middle of Cu Chi district. The tunnels were beneath the narrow strip of open land between the Fil Hol plantation to the south and the Ho Bo woods. Thousands of documents were discovered, which were taken away in sacks by helicopter. The rats spent four days exploring the winding galleries of the system.