The Tunnels of Cu Chi (29 page)

“We chatted while we lay in our hammocks. I said: ‘In
tomorrow's battle, perhaps one of us will die. I may be killed, or wounded, or taken prisoner. If you could choose one of these alternatives, which would it be?' My wife thought for a while, then answered: ‘I would rather not choose any of these alternatives. But if I had to choose, I would prefer you to die. Our son and I would be very unhappy, but I would take him to visit your grave and tell him the story of your life; we would live with the image of you. I do not want you to be captured, because the enemy would have inhuman means to torture and interrogate you, or would corrupt you. You would not be able to resist; you would give them information and become a traitor. Once you had betrayed our side, the enemy would spare your life. You would be reunited with me and our son, who would have to live all his life with the shame of having a traitor for a father; he would be unhappy and not respect you. As for me, if I had to live with a traitorous husband, I would reluctantly endure it because of our vows, but I would not be happy. I would rather choose your death.'

“So, before the battle, my wife strengthened my determination. At dawn, I went to inspect our positions, then returned to our bunker. My wife broke off a ball of rice, sprinkled some sugar on it, and told me to eat it because once the fighting started there would be no time to eat. I had just taken one bite when I heard footsteps crackling the twigs. I looked up and saw three Americans advancing. They were big, strong, and frightening. I signaled to the others and said, ‘The Americans are coming!' To tell the truth, seeing that the Americans were so big, and not having seen them before, I was a little frightened. When they came to within five meters I fired three bullets and all three fell. The others behind them immediately pulled back and responded by firing all kinds of weapons: machine guns, grenade launchers, everything they had. They fired continuously for about fifteen minutes. When they stopped, I raised my head; about five meters away the three Americans were dead. I told my wife and comrades who were in the bunker that it was not difficult to shoot and kill Americans; I told them to come up and see the bodies. My wife noticed there were three guns, and told me to give her covering fire while she was in the open collecting them. She ran out the short distance and came back with three M-16 automatic rifles, plus some ammunition.
An American crawled forward and tried to pull away one of the dead Americans by his legs. I shot at him and he lay there.”

The after-action report of the 3rd Brigade of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division on that incident on 10 January reads:

Dr Le's account continued: “Their retreat had been followed by intense bombing and shelling. Our position was showered with napalm bombs and the acrid smell of the burning American bodies invaded our bunkers. Burning napalm trickled down into the tunnel and we had to use sticks of wood to push it aside. Twice they failed to advance to our position, but I reckoned that if we continued fighting we would run out of ammunition and be captured. So I decided to pull back to C4. I suggested that one of us should volunteer to go to C4 to get them to fire at the enemy and create a diversion while we ran up to join them. There was no connecting tunnel; it was open ground. At first there were no volunteers, but finally my wife offered. I was shocked, but since I had asked the others I could not refuse to let her go. I was sure she would be killed. I gave her an M-16, and she said good-bye to us all. I told her to climb out of the bunker and run after I had counted to three. When she went I was surprised not to hear anyone shooting at her.

“Half an hour later I heard C4 start to attack the enemy at their rear, and the pharmacy squad and I left along the only path where they hadn't planted mines. On our way I picked up an American satchel which contained a map. It showed the positions of C6 and C4 with arrows pointing at them. So we knew that the enemy did not encounter us by chance, but had advance intelligence and aimed to wipe us out. I reorganized the defense of the hospital, and gave a weapon to any wounded soldier who could still fight. We repulsed three enemy assaults on C4's position between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m., but by 5:00 p.m. the enemy had occupied C6's position and started pouring down
shells and bombs on us; not a single tunnel shelter was left intact.

“That night I raised the question of withdrawing. Some of my comrades were against the idea. They asked: In what direction can we go? How do we know where the enemy troops are? How can we carry all the wounded? I told them that if we stayed, we would not be able to withstand the next day's assault. Even a well-armed battalion would not be able to defend our base against the next attack, never mind a bunch of medics. So we made preparations to go. We left six of the wounded behind in secret tunnels; they had lost legs, or had head wounds and could not walk. Two nurses stayed to look after them. I decided to withdraw northward through the forest. The enemy was shelling it, and some comrades said we would be killed. I agreed that some of us might, but it would be a success if half of us survived, or even two or three of us. If we stayed, the enemy would kill or capture all of us. So we left, with fifty-four wounded soldiers. We went through the shellfire; anyone killed would be left temporarily in a bomb crater, to be buried properly later. Anyone wounded would be bandaged up and helped to continue their journey. In the event, two men were wounded during the journey, but none was killed.”

By the time the troops of the Big Red One overran the second of the two medical bases the next day, Dr Le and most of the staff and patients had vanished into the jungle. The pharmacy section had had to abandon a ton of medicine, including 500,000 ampoules of penicillin; there were medical books and journals belonging to Dr Le, and sets of surgical instruments. Major General William Depuy himself, the divisional commander, helicoptered in to inspect the haul. He called it “one ginormous medical depot.”

Both of Military Region IV's surgical teams had been put out of action by Cedar Falls. C5 was knocked out by heavy artillery fire. Four of its staff were killed, one surgeon wounded, the rest vanished. All its equipment and medicines were lost when they were discovered by men of the 2nd/22nd Mechanized Infantry, part of the Tropic Lightning Division, at the Ho Bo site on 13 January.

Vo Hoang Le and his party, having left C4, made their way northward through the Thanh Dien forest. “Soon after Bau Tran we ran into advance scouts of our regional military headquarters.
We were talking among ourselves as we walked through the shellfire, for there would be no enemy patrols where they were shelling. At about three in the morning we reached the headquarters of Military Region IV. They were happy to see us. We had with us a memento of battle: a shoulder-flash of the Big Red One. I was startled when I realized whom we had been fighting. Hai Thanh, the director of logistics, told me he'd written us off for dead.” Colonel Tran Hai Phung, the regional military commander, personally congratulated Le and his wife. Pharmacy unit C6 was awarded a “Killer of Americans” banner, and Le's wife was given the title American-Killer Heroine. Honors were also heaped upon the doctor.

The next day the regional headquarters suffered a B-52 raid. Dr Le said: “My wife was with two comrades in an underground shelter that was hit. After the bombing it took us forty minutes to locate the shelter and dig up the victims. Two were dead. My wife was seriously wounded; blood was oozing from her nose and ears and she had stopped breathing. I gave her the kiss of life. Then I discovered that her left lung was punctured and the pressure had pushed her heart to the right side of her chest. We did not have the equipment to operate on her chest where we were.” Nguyen Thi Tham was taken away to be treated for four months at the hospital at COSVN. When she recovered, she was sent back to her native Saigon to take part in secret preparations for the Tet offensive of January 1968. But it was from the effects of the wounds received in that air raid that she was to die in 1982.

Meanwhile, in January 1967, after her evacuation, Dr Le was ordered back to the Cu Chi area to try to reconstitute the remnants of the medical section. He began the process of reorganization. In April he became the overall director of medical services. By May, four months after Cedar Falls (and one month after Operation Manhattan, which also covered the Tranh Dien forest, and in which the empty C6 and C4 were discovered anew by the 2nd/28th Infantry), Dr Le was able to report that all his medical units had returned to their pre-Cedar Falls locations and were functioning again. The surgical hospital C5 was completely reconstructed and restaffed. This achievement highlights two key facts about the Vietnam War: One was the energy and speed with which the Viet Cong rebuilt its often-damaged tunnel installations; the other was the futility of the
army's sweeping through an area for a short time, only to allow the Viet Cong to move back in and resume their activities.

Dr Le's official report of this period was captured and translated in October 1967; it was declassified in Washington in 1984. It reveals that Cedar Falls was undoubtedly a complete disaster at the time for Viet Cong tunnel-based support units like his; the medical section was made almost totally inoperative. But the members' response to this appalling setback was positive and constructive. “After the battle and subsequent defeat of the American aggressors of C6,” reads the translated report, “the entire Party and Party headquarters realized our new potentiality for self-defense.” Henceforth, each of the Cs in the medical section was no longer noncombatant, but was armed with modern weapons and doubled as a guerrilla squad, including the girls. Secondly, Le and the other doctors embarked on a soul-searching program of self-criticism, picking on even the smallest oversights, to lick the shattered medical section back into shape. Surgeons had been too proud of their successes, and had failed to analyze the reasons why some patients had died. Medics had treated the wounded casually or roughly—one, Patton-like, had slapped a wounded soldier. The overstretched air stations were criticized for sending wounded men from one dispensary to another. The pressure on the Communists' medical system is vividly illustrated by this story from the report:

Vo Hoang Le returned to the Thanh Dien forest, just north of the Iron Triangle. It was April 1967, and the Americans were just launching their follow-up operation, Manhattan, into some of the places already devastated by Cedar Falls. Defending a hospital area against advancing American armor, Le was hit in the right hand by a sniper's bullet. “My little finger was attached to the rest of my hand by just a little strip of skin. I was bleeding a lot, so I tore the finger off. We always carried some bandaging, so I bandaged myself up. But I went on bleeding. I took the rubber thong from my sandal and made a tourniquet. As soon as I could, I left the area of fighting and was operated on by a comrade at a hospital. My hand was unusable, so I started to write with my left hand; now I can write with both. I had to learn to hold a scalpel, forceps, or needle with my left hand. After a year of practice I returned to surgery, operating on the brain or the abdomen, using my left hand.”

Le's attitude to his work was realistic and pragmatic. He knew that the conditions were so poor that many of his patients would die. For example, a wounded Viet Cong could easily become infected with gangrene. “Gangrene can spread two or three centimeters in an hour; left alone it is fatal. We had to amputate arms and legs, even when we were out of general or local anesthetics; otherwise the patients would have died. If the patient could not endure the pain, he might die of shock, but we had to take that 50/50 chance: if we amputated, he had a 50 percent chance of survival; if we didn't, he was certain to die. When we had it, we would use fifty cubic centimeters
of Novocaine for amputation; normally you'd need a liter to deaden the nerve ends. But in fact, the operation was practically like sawing raw flesh. The patient would faint with pain, and we'd revive him later. When we succeeded it was not just thanks to our techniques, but to the patients' spirit, their will and determination to live for revenge.

“When the enemy attacked the Dat Thit plantation, our surgery team was working behind the Quyet Thang regiment [of regional VC troops]. We were operating on a soldier wounded in the stomach when the enemy tanks arrived. We took off our gowns, put the patient in a hammock, grabbed our equipment and ran. We made it to the next village, where the guerrillas held off the tanks with mines. We halted to continue the operation in the hammock. The instruments were filthy by this time, so we sterilized them by burning alcohol. We sewed up the punctures in his intestines and stitched up his abdomen with nylon threads taken from enemy parachutes. The wounded soldier survived.