The Tunnels of Cu Chi (27 page)

For the 196th, the haul was impressive. In addition to the sacks of documents, there was a typewriter, furniture, women's clothing (including brassieres and
ao dais
, traditional costume), Viet Cong flags, and other indications that the tunnels were part of a headquarters. The half million documents, once translated, yielded information that led Lieutenant General Jonathan Seaman to call the find “the biggest intelligence breakthrough of the war.” Among other discoveries there was some “crypto-material”—coded messages that could help unlock other intelligence intercepts. There were detailed maps of the Saigon area and Tan Son Nhut air base, including the plans for an unsuccessful Viet Cong attack that had taken place a month earlier. Brigadier General Richard Knowles hurried to the scene of the discovery. He remembered that the document “showed
how they moved squads down from Cambodia into the Cu Chi area, and then down to Tan Son Nhut. It showed where they stayed in the tunnels during the daylight, and where they collected their weapons. They had the parking places of all our aircraft laid out in detail. Even the symbols for the aircraft looked like the real things. Everything was numbered in logical sequence: when each gun was to fire, how many mortar rounds, how many rockets—a classic! In addition to that we found a map with considerable detail, showing where they'd planned to ambush and kill Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the middle of Saigon.” (The plot, in mid 1966, had been frustrated by a change in the target's schedule; the intended assassin, Nguyen Van Troi, was arrested and executed.) In the same pile of documents were lists of addresses of prominent Americans in Saigon, including General Westmoreland. Bill Pelfrey, who led the exploration, said: “The biggest part was tax receipts dating back twenty years. There were lists of their sympathizers—who needed political training, or punishment or whatever. They had American technical manuals translated into Vietnamese.” This was the haul that provided a list of Viet Cong sympathizers including all the barbers working at Cu Chi base.

Because the find was regarded as such a major coup, General Westmoreland himself was helicoptered into the area to talk with the tunnel rats, accompanied by other VIPs, reporters, and television crews—even though there were still booby traps in the tunnels, and some VC hiding in recesses in the system. The tunnel rats pursued them, but gave up after crawling over a thousand yards. The senior NCO on the team, Sergeant James Lindsay, was killed underground by an explosive booby trap. Once Pelfrey decided that no more of the system was worth exploring, it was filled with CS gas, then blasted with explosives.

No official conclusion was reached as to what the tunnel complex the 196th Light Infantry had stumbled across actually was. Because of the volume of documents discovered, General Bernard Rogers believed that “this discovery probably uncovered the headquarters of Military Region IV, or at least a significant part of it.” In fact, Cedar Falls missed that target, and the political headquarters of the Viet Cong for the Saigon area as well; they were both slightly farther north in the Ho Bo woods. The area of the tunnel that had been found and destroyed
is today clearly marked on maps and records at the Ho Chi Minh City military headquarters. It was the Viet Cong's headquarters for the Cu Chi district only. Escape tunnels are shown to have burrowed away from it southward.

For most of the three weeks in which the army stayed in the Cedar Falls operational area, its main task was to make the Iron Triangle unusable as a sanctuary for Viet Cong forces ever again. Two specialized arms of the engineers were entrusted this task: the bulldozer teams and the tunnel rats. No fewer than fifty-eight bulldozers of various kinds were employed in Operation Cedar Falls, including tankdozers and four Rome plow tractors. The tankdozer was an M-48 medium tank, fitted with a bulldozer blade. The armor protected the crew from mines and snipers; infantry would follow along to search and destroy. This 'dozer-infantry team was the leading edge of the ground assault on the Iron Triangle, putting engineers where they were unaccustomed to being—in the vanguard of the army. The Rome plow tractor, nicknamed “hogjaws,” was a formidable land-clearing machine: a sixty-ton tracked vehicle, the D7E, was fitted with a specially curved bulldozer blade with a sharp, protruding lower edge of hardened steel that could splinter trees of up to three feet in diameter. The blade was named after its town of manufacture, Rome, Georgia. A “headache bar” over the driver's seat protected him from falling debris, and a heavy-duty protective cab guarded him from attack. Teams of bulldozers stripped great eighty-yard-wide avenues across the length and breadth of the Iron Triangle so that anyone moving about the free strike zone in the future could be seen and shot at from the air.

The engineers of the 1st Infantry Division left their signature on the smoldering countryside. With their bulldozers they carved out huge clearings on the jungle floor in the shape of both the insignia of the division—a giant figure one—and the badge of the engineers, a three-towered castle. In all, eleven square kilometers of jungle were flattened, about a quarter of the Triangle. As one reporter concluded, toward the end of the operation: “If the United States has its way, even a crow flying across the Triangle will have to carry lunch from now on.”

By the time of Cedar Falls, the tunnel rats in various units were refining techniques of exploration and destruction. The problem in that operation was that because tunnels were discovered
so often, too many untrained and inexperienced men went underground. Consequently, there were mishaps that resulted in “noncombat” deaths. A private in the 4th/503rd Infantry, for example, suffocated to death on 22 January because an earlier grenade explosion had burned up all the oxygen in a tunnel. Several ad hoc tunnel rats lost their bearings and came up to the surface completely lost. On one occasion two separate tunnel teams were exploring the same system independently and only good luck prevented their shooting at each other underground. Cedar Falls had the effect of establishing tunnel-ratting as a skilled specialty, and the rats would be better organized in the future.

When the operation ended, and the troops quit the operational area to return to their bases, their commanders assessed what they had achieved. As usual in Vietnam, the brightest possible picture was painted in the after-action reports. There could be no disputing the scale of destruction. Hundreds of bunkers, tunnels, and “structures” (buildings) were reported destroyed; the area was apparently depopulated. There was an impressive haul of captured Viet Cong matériel: hundreds of weapons and mines, over 7,000 uniforms, and nearly 4,000 tons of rice—enough to feed 13,000 guerrillas for a year. There were the half million pages of documents. The 750 dead Vietnamese were listed as “confirmed enemy,” and 280 suspected Viet Cong prisoners were taken. The statistic that gave the army most pride was the 576 “Chieu Hoi ralliers”—supposed VC induced to change sides by psychological warfare techniques. All turned out to be either local guerrillas—not main force—or “combat support elements,” in other words ordinary farmers and peasants. Seventy-two Americans had been killed, and 337 wounded; the ARVN casualties were eleven and eight respectively. Lieutenant General Seaman reported at the time: “In nineteen days, II Field Force Vietnam converted the Iron Triangle from a safe haven to a deathtrap, and then to a military desert. Years of work spent tunneling and hoarding supplies were nullified.… A strategic enemy base was decisively engaged and destroyed.” Unfortunately, this was just wishful thinking.

General Westmoreland reached a more modest and realistic verdict. He called Cedar Falls “very disruptive … for the enemy in the Iron Triangle area.” The evidence suggests that this
was the limit of its success—temporary disruption. At the provincial headquarters of the newly created province of Song Be, which covers what was the Iron Triangle, the authors were shown a hitherto secret Vietnamese army report entitled “Lessons of the War.” The U.S. Army claimed 525 tunnels destroyed during Cedar Falls. But Major Nguyen Quot, who was assigned by the commander of Viet Cong Military Region IV to assess the damage, said: “After the operation I inspected the tunnels and did not find any length more than fifty meters that had been discovered or damaged by the Americans. They had destroyed only about a hundred tunnels with explosives, and a lot of civilians' bomb shelters.” Every house in Ben Suc, for example, had an underground shelter connected by tunnel to other shelters. Naturally, most of these were collapsed, inflating the statistics of tunnels destroyed. But bombs and mechanized infantry sweeps in the operational area
had
knocked out all of the Viet Cong's medical facilities.

The jungle had supposedly been stripped away, baring the area for future surveillance. General Rogers was enthusiastic about the engineers' ability, with their tankdozers and Rome plows, to “change the face of Vietnam.” The clearance of the Iron Triangle, he wrote, was “particularly impressive. However, the discouraging aspect of such operations is that it takes but a short time for the jungle to grow again.” So it proved. As with so many other parts of Cedar Falls' program, the defoliation of the area would have to be repeated over again.

Worse still, just two days after Cedar Falls, General Rogers witnessed the failure of one of the operation's main objectives: denying the area to the enemy. “It was not long before there was evidence of the enemy's return. Only two days after the termination of Cedar Falls, I was checking out the Iron Triangle by helicopter and saw many persons who appeared to be Viet Cong riding bicycles or wandering round on foot.… During the cease-fire for Tet, 8–12 February, the Iron Triangle was again literally crawling with what appeared to be Viet Cong. They could be seen riding into, out of, and within the Triangle.”

Even the depopulation of Ben Suc had failed. Incredibly, Pham Van Chinh and many of his guerrillas remained clinging to the land as they had been ordered. They hid in part of the village's 1,700-meter tunnel system, much of which had survived despite the discovery and destruction of three of its entrances
during Cedar Falls. Acetylene gas and water from the river had been pumped into the tunnels, but they were complex and multileveled enough to ensure the safety of those guerrillas who had not fallen victim to the first wave of the assault. “When the people were taken away,” said Chinh, “it was difficult for us. The people had been supporting the guerrillas, their sons and brothers. The destruction of the people's houses caused my bitter hatred. The enemy turned the land into a desert. There was not a tree left. But I could still count on over 200 men to fight beside me during the Cedar Falls operation.” Chinh's orders were to lie low and wait for the Americans' inevitable departure before repairing the tunnel system. Through Viet Cong couriers, he made contact with the displaced villagers. Although Ben Suc and the rest of the Triangle was henceforth a free strike zone, with bombs and shells regularly falling upon it, and therefore no house could be rebuilt, the villagers began to trickle back to their ancestral land. By the end of the year, over a thousand villagers had drifted back to Ben Suc. As the guerrillas reconstructed the tunnels so necessary for bringing main-force Viet Cong from Cambodia down to the Iron Triangle, Cu Chi, and Saigon itself, so the returning villagers lived in their old bomb shelters or dug new chambers and tunnels, some shared by families. Grass grew on top of these refuges, concealing them from view.

Just four months after Cedar Falls, Sergeant Bill Wilson of the Black Lions battalion led a six-man ambush patrol into the ruins of Ben Suc from the Big Red One's base at Lai Khe. It was night, and the drenching monsoon rain was falling. They took up positions in a ruined house. Suddenly there was a flash of lightning and Wilson saw an entire battalion of the North Vietnamese army marching down the main street of the old village, on their way to the river and Cu Chi. They had handcarts and heavy weapons. The men in Wilson's patrol were so petrified they dared not fire a shot and reveal themselves. They waited till all the NVA had gone, then sheepishly radioed the artillery to fire in the general direction they had taken. Ben Suc had not been denied to the enemy. It was still a key transit point for them. Its guerrillas were still in the tunnels, tunnels that had protected them from the onslaught of Cedar Falls and defeated its aim.

But the most conclusive demonstration of the ineffectiveness
of Cedar Falls and search-and-destroy operations like it came almost exactly one year later. The Tet lunar new year festival of 1968 would see a countrywide series of Viet Cong attacks on bases and towns, including Saigon, that threw the Americans off balance and marked the beginning of the end of their involvement in Vietnam. And the most damaging thrust—that against Saigon itself—would come straight from the Iron Triangle.

   Dr Vo Hoang Le—Tunnel Surgeon