The Tunnels of Cu Chi (30 page)

“We were short of instruments for brain surgery. I bought a drill that mechanics use for drilling steel, with 10 mm to 12 mm bits, and used it to trepan the skulls of wounded soldiers. I once operated on the skull of the second-in-command of the Thai My village platoon in Cu Chi district. He was wounded by a mortar fragment that penetrated three centimeters into his head. I thought at first it was a simple wound and let another doctor operate on him. But when the fragment was taken out, the doctor realized it had cut through the vein that runs from front to back inside the skull, known as the sagittal sinus. Once perforated it bleeds a lot, and if the bleeding isn't stopped, the patient will die in five to ten minutes. The blood spurted out and could not be stopped. You cannot stop a hemorrhage inside the skull with a plug, as you can a flesh wound. If you want to pinch or sew a vein inside the skull, you have to open the skull. When my colleague could not stop the bleeding, he sent for me. When I arrived I stuck my little finger inside the wound to staunch the bleeding, then used a gouge—pliers for cutting bone—to gnaw away at the bone on both sides and expose the vein to tie it up. We had to operate quickly. The enemy were all around us, and we had to finish by four in the morning to move the patient to a safe hiding place.

“The vein turned out to be broken and it was impossible to
pinch it closed. Left as it was, the patient would have died. I thought of a new idea. I twisted a long piece of gauze into a plug and soaked it in Thrombin Roussel, a solution that stops hemorrhage, and pressed it onto the vein temporarily to stop the bleeding. Then we carried the patient away and hid him. We put up his hammock in the middle of an open field and concealed him with grass; we hid in the tunnels. The enemy attacked the area that morning. That evening I operated on him a second time. In the end I could not find any way of tying up the vein. I changed the plug, again soaking it in Thrombin Roussel to stop the bleeding temporarily. Then we took the patient to the tunnel hospital C5 at Ho Bo to be cared for there. I suggested that he be taken to the big hospital in the COSVN area, where a specialist could see him, but there was so much enemy activity in the Ho Bo area that it was impossible to move him. Twenty days later I went back to C5 and was surprised to learn that the patient was leaving the hospital. I had left instructions for the plug to be changed after fifteen days, and the procedure to be repeated if the bleeding restarted. I was told that when the plug was removed the vein had not bled, the patient was well and was returning to his unit. I asked Dr Trong Quang Trung, who had been my teacher, whether such a treatment had been done before. He said it had never happened, it was a new technique—one which Dr Hoi Nam, an army doctor and friend of mine, used to save many people.

“After the Tet offensive of 1968, we had surgical teams who followed the units that had mounted attacks inside Saigon. We were in Hoc Mon, on the northern outskirts of Saigon, and many kilometers from the nearest tunnel aid station or hospital. The enemy counterattacked and sent their troops scouring the area. How were we to treat the wounded? We could not stay among the people in the villages. We were forced to operate at night in the middle of flooded fields. We tied a small sampan to four posts to prevent it from rocking, and put a plank over it for an operating table. To work, I stood up to my waist in water. The enemy's helicopters passed overhead, shining searchlights. If we had worn white gowns they would have been conspicuous and we would have been shot at. For camouflage we built a frame over the sampan and covered it with marsh vegetation. I operated by the light of a small electric torch, with the reflector covered, leaving only a small pinpoint
of light. The nurse who held the torch had to follow the surgeon's scalpel and the movement of his hands. In the daytime, the wounded were hidden in specially made concrete shelters, semisubmerged in the waterlogged fields. The medical teams hid wherever they could, in bushes and bamboo clumps. If we could, we moved the patients at night by boat, but when the enemy cut off our routes along the Hoc Mon canal and the Saigon River, we were forced to leave the wounded in the care of the local people. Our nurses hid drugs in boats, and traveled by water to treat the wounded in their hiding places.”

In July 1969, in the Thai Thanh woods, Le, accompanied by two guerrilla bodyguards, was ambushed by an American patrol. The bodyguards fired back, but a hand grenade fell in front of Dr Le. “I saw a flash of light in front of me and heard the explosion. I fell, and felt pains all over my body. I was bleeding, did not know where the wounds were, but had to get away from the scene of the ambush. I ran on, but felt blood escaping from a wound in my chest, air blowing through it when I breathed. I realized my lung was punctured and used one hand to stop the air entering through the wound. I kept running, but was soon exhausted and could run no farther. I asked my companions to bandage the wound with the piece of nylon sheet we used to shelter from the monsoon rain. I simply could not walk, so they made a hammock and slung it from a pole they made from the branch of a tree. But it became impossible for them to move through the forest carrying the hammock. I told them to support me and help me walk; every few meters we stopped, for me to catch my breath. Finally, we reached an old hospital tunnel complex that we had abandoned when the 11th Armored Cavalry had overrun the area. There was no one there. I asked my companions if they had a needle for stitching up clothes and told them to sew up my wound. They thought I would die of the pain, for there was no anesthetic, but I assured them I would die if they
didn't
stitch it up; so they did.

“The wound has healed, but the scar is somewhat irregular; it wasn't stitched according to strict surgical methods. I survived, but became increasingly breathless because blood was filling my wounded lung. I had a needle and syringe with me, and told one of my companions to plunge the needle into my chest to extract the blood—regardless of the unsterile needle.
He took out some of the blood, and I could breathe better. We repeated this procedure every time I felt breathless. We stayed in the tunnel for some days. We sterilized the needle and syringe by boiling it in an old American C-ration tin. I had an ampoule of the antibiotic streptomycin, and in the evenings told them to carry me outside and inject me with it. I also had a pot of honey, which I applied to the wound. After fifteen days, my wound healed.” Honey was known by generations of Vietnamese to be an antiseptic; as it acidifies, it kills bacteria. It was typical of the practical folk medicine that necessity drove Dr Le and his colleagues to employ, and it saved his life.

The atmosphere of a Viet Cong tunnel hospital during the war, like the bloodstained surgery of one of Nelson's ships, was nightmarish. Even the efficient and sterile operating rooms of U.S. bases like Cu Chi had their share of horrors and agony, of terribly mutilated bodies and shattered young lives. For the Viet Cong, there were multiple privations: not only the lack of medicines and equipment, but chiefly the need to work in holes in the ground to avoid bombing and artillery. Vo Hoang Le has what he most admired in his patients, who suffered amputations without anesthetics and bore the pain with fortitude. It is an aggressive spirit. “Military doctors in Vietnam,” he said, “are trained to fight, and take command in battle. You should not be surprised that we doctors fought in the war. People have asked me: A doctor's profession is to save life; did not fighting and killing take away your humanity? This is how I see humanity. When enemies come to your country, destroy the countryside and your village, kill your countrymen, your comrades and the defenseless wounded, you have to kill them and defend your compatriots; that is true humanity.”

   Psychological Operations

Operation Cedar Falls netted 576 Chieu Hoi ralliers, or defectors from the Viet Cong. The Chieu Hoi reception center for Binh Duong province (which covered Ben Cat and the Iron Triangle) took in more of these men during Cedar Falls than in the whole of the previous year, and almost half were former guerrillas. Their defection was the product of American PSYOPS—psychological operations—which were an increasingly potent weapon against the Viet Cong in the tunnels, and were a constant factor in their lives. PSYOPS were a success in Vietnam, undermining morale among the Communist guerrillas and troops. Revealingly, one of the first demands of the North Vietnamese at the Paris peace talks, which began in 1968, was that the United States end their leaflet drops and cease all psychological operations in Vietnam. It was an acknowledgment of the sophistication that PSYOPS had reached.

Even Captain Nguyen Thanh Linh, who steadfastly endured the horrors and privations of five years in Cu Chi's tunnels, singled out helicopter-borne loudspeakers as a serious threat. He recalled: “The most common form of psychological warfare was to threaten us—with B-52s, with tanks and modern weapons. But against us Vietnamese, who have been fighting invaders
for centuries, such threats were ineffective. But we had our weakness: We missed our wives and families. We fought the French and the Americans for twenty years. I was away from my wife for five years; I had never seen my second child. We missed the gentleness of life. Sometimes we were hungry for six or seven months. Four men would share a tin of rice soup; we'd look for plants in bomb craters to boil. Then at night when we came out of the tunnels, American loudspeakers would broadcast children's voices, crying in our language: ‘Mummy cannot sleep, she loves you and cries for you!' Or an actress's voice would say: ‘Dear husband, why are you away so long? Your mother is crying her eyes out.' Sometimes they even knew our names, and sometimes said our wives had taken other men. It went on all night. Can you imagine it, for a soldier in a tunnel away from his family for years at a time? It certainly had a psychological effect on the fighters' spirits.”

Captain Phan Van On belonged to the regional guerrilla force in Cu Chi; he too was separated from his family for years. He lives in Nhuan Duc village, adjacent to the former Cu Chi base. Surprisingly, he admitted with frankness that from time to time in the war, young guerrillas ran away and surrendered to the South Vietnamese. They lacked “a sound point of view”; they did not have enough “strong conviction.” The cohesive party discipline had a breaking point, and life in the tunnels, under the bombs and gas, was enough to tax any man's will to go on fighting. For some Vietnamese country boys, especially those press-ganged into the guerrillas' ranks, defection with a guarantee of clemency and financial aid was too hard to resist.

Chieu Hoi means “open arms”; the concept was introduced under President Ngo Dinh Diem on 17 April 1963, at the same time as the strategic hamlet program. As with so many schemes in South Vietnam, the program was not conceived by the Vietnamese but suggested to the Saigon government by American and British advisers, like Sir Robert Thompson. Those induced to defect were called Hoi Chanh—in English, ralliers or returnees. In the event, hardly any important Communists defected during the war. But thousands of rank-and-file guerrillas decided—as a Big Red One report put it—“they would rather switch than fight.” What were the PSYOPS techniques used to effect this apparent change of heart?

“Never in the history of the United States have we practiced
a more extensive use of psychological warfare tactics than in Vietnam,” boasted Captain Andris Endrijonas, PYSOPS officer of the 25th Infantry Division at Cu Chi base in July 1968. “Last month we dropped approximately 22 million leaflets over the division's area of operations, and ninety-eight hours of loudspeaker broadcasts were logged.” It was the art of aerial loudspeaker broadcasts that was to be perfected as the war went on. Speakers of up to 1,000 watts' power were mounted on observation helicopters or gunships, to play specially recorded Vietnamese tapes over areas where the Viet Cong were thought to be hiding. It was found that broadcasting conditions were better at night; night broadcasts also harassed any Viet Cong (or anyone else) who wanted to sleep. Captain Lee Robinson from Fort Pierce, Florida, another PSYOPS officer, served as G-5—PSYOPS and civil affairs officer—of the 1st Infantry Division. Interviewed at Lai Khe base during the war, he described his work: “One of the best themes we've found is the ‘family appeal broadcast.' This is basically a nostalgic theme that will make our audience think of home and the family they may have left behind. We also use a harassment theme called the Wandering Soul. This is a recording of eerie sounds intended to represent the souls of enemy dead who have not found peace. The enemy is supposedly very superstitious about being buried in an unmarked grave, with his soul not able to rest with his body because he was not buried properly. Superstition goes a long way—it's conscious but also subconscious. The enemy realizes these sounds are coming from a tape recorder on a chopper, but that still doesn't help to suppress the fear they evidently have of their souls some day wailing and moaning.”