The Tunnels of Cu Chi (31 page)

There were other even more cunning uses of loudspeakers than Operation Wandering Soul. If a Viet Cong was induced to desert and become a Hoi Chanh, his defection was exploited for propaganda purposes as early as possible. He was made to record a taped message to his former comrades, to talk them out of their tunnel hideouts. This procedure was streamlined still further with the invention of the Early Word system by Big Red One officers. This eliminated the need for the Hoi Chanh to tape-record a message. Instead he could be told to coax his former comrades to join him in real time straight after his reception by American or South Vietnamese troops—even in
the heat of battle. If the Hoi Chanh could point to the general vicinity where he thought the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese soldiers might be located, he was handed a PRC-25 field radio set and told to ask his former friends, by name, to surrender. The ground transmission was picked up by a receiver in the loudspeaker helicopter hovering overhead and broadcast live to the enemy below. The system was automatic and required only a pilot in the helicopter.

Whenever an area or village was swept by American or South Vietnamese troops, all the men between fifteen and forty-five were taken into custody and sent to the provincial headquarters of the national police for interrogation. Of the hundreds of detainees, invariably some were found to be Viet Cong suspects, and others draft-dodgers or deserters from the ARVN. Any thought to be high-ranking Viet Cong were sent on to the Combined Military Interrogation Center. The rest usually went to Chieu Hoi centers, before being inducted into the South Vietnamese armed forces. Whatever their former existence had actually been, their numbers swelled and probably distorted the Chieu Hoi statistics, which for most of the war averaged over 20,000 a year. At Chieu Hoi centers, conditions were reasonably comfortable and the regime easygoing; this special treatment was designed to win defectors' cooperation. There were about forty such centers in all South Vietnam, and the Hoi Chanhs spent about eight weeks being “reeducated.” Afterward, if possible, they were sent back to their home villages, often in NLF territory, to talk round their families and friends. But most were drafted into the ARVN; others joined the South Vietnamese armed propaganda teams touring the countryside, or volunteered to become scouts for the American army.

American infantry platoons came increasingly to depend upon Hoi Chanh Kit Carson scouts, named after the hero of the Old West who guided the U.S. Cavalry through hostile Indian country. These Vietnamese scouts could instinctively assess dangerous situations that young, green, and annually rotated GIs would have stumbled into and discovered the hard way. They had local knowledge, spoke the language, and were intimately familiar with Viet Cong methods. They could communicate with prisoners, villagers, and the ARVN troops. Trained as soldiers, and properly fed and looked after, they added to the strength of American rifle platoons, depleted by
soldiers going sick, being wounded, or taking rest and recreation.

The tunnel rats were particular beneficiaries of the Chieu Hoi program. Rat teams always included Kit Carson scouts, who had often worked in the tunnels in their Viet Cong days. They knew the probable layout of any tunnel system and the likely location of booby traps. They undertook the task of coaxing cornered VC or NVA out. They were full-time and served continuously. As a result, any one of them soon acquired more experience of tunnel warfare from the
American
side than the members of the teams they assisted, where the personnel changed constantly with the annual rotation system. But they were never completely trusted.

An official American report,
Sharpening the Combat Edge
, acknowledged that Kit Carson scouts were under-used, owing to “a certain subconscious uneasiness at having Communist defectors in front-line units.” The ARVN regarded them with suspicion and contempt. “All ralliers are untrustworthy and a waste of time,” said one ARVN officer to his American opposite number, Colonel Stuart Herrington. After all, in following the Communists and then defecting to the South Vietnamese government, a Hoi Chanh had been a traitor twice. Or possibly more than twice. American military analyst “Cincinattus” wrote in his book
Self Destruction:

Even so, the existence of hundreds of defectors was a constant worry to the National Liberation Front, and contributed to its gradual disintegration.

At Trung Lap village in Cu Chi district lives former Viet Cong commander Pham Van Nhanh. Now in his late forties, with six children, he has a shock of upright black hair, gold teeth, and, oddly and distinctively, two thumbs on his left hand. During the war, he and a squad of fellow guerrillas were hiding in a tunnel near Trung Lap that was betrayed to the South Vietnamese special branch by a Chieu Hoi defector called Bay, a former member of his own unit. (In fact, most of the special police were Hoi Chanhs.) Bay's special skill was locating and dismantling the Viet Cong mines and booby traps, some of which he had formerly made and set himself. He was able to lead the police squad straight to Pham Van Nhanh's trapdoor and disarm the mines around it.

Why had former guerrilla Bay defected and betrayed his former comrades? “He surrendered because he could not endure the fierce bombing, shelling, and toxic chemicals anymore,” said Pham Van Nhanh. “He could no longer bear the hardship and danger. Once he had defected from the fight against the Americans, he tried to perform difficult tasks like mine-disposal to redeem his past.” What happened to Bay? He vanished after the Communist victory in 1975; he probably got out of the country. Pham Van Nhanh grudgingly admitted that the Chieu Hoi ralliers were a formidable problem for the Viet Cong and were the Americans' strongest card. They knew where to lead the troops and where the mines and traps were; they set up cruel conflicts of loyalty among their families and other villagers who succored the guerrillas. And Hoi Chanhs were central to the intelligence campaign called the Phoenix program that aimed to identify Communist cadres.

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, the Communists were able to seize all the records of the Chieu Hoi program intact. They forced all those identified as genuine defectors to return to their original units to be dealt with by their former comrades. Their fate can be imagined.

   Fighting Science

Even before the ground war in Vietnam had begun to settle down into one of grinding attrition—a strategy that is proof of a lack of strategy—the Americans had already begun to rely heavily on their overwhelming superiority in weapons technology. It was, after all, the most shattering high-technology weapon of all that had abruptly ended World War II in Japan. There remained in the American collective military consciousness a strong awareness of the advantages that could be reaped from the use of the most advanced weapons.

But in the guerrilla war in Vietnam this dependence produced serious difficulties. If the enemy could not fight that kind of war, but was unsporting enough to resort to primitive tactics, then the crutch of high-tech weapons might prove extremely unsupportive. This is what happened in the tunnels war.

At first, the Americans were somewhat bemused at the idea of finding themselves in conflict with a bunch of little guys living in holes in the ground. A MACV instructional manual, “Hole Huntin',” took a patronizing and jocular view of this kind of combat: “Find, fix, and finish” was the sum of the author's suggested tactics for dealing with the Viet Cong in the
tunnels. It represented the early and simplistic attitude that technological inferiority, poverty, and stupidity somehow went together inside the black tunnels.

It was a view held by the commander in chief himself. Senator William Fulbright, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, recalled that President Johnson “believed that with the primitive society the Vietnamese had, they couldn't possibly prevail against the United States with its unlimited power.”

There was also a prevailing view among senior commanders that because Vietnam was not a full-fledged war but rather an extended police action, it was not necessary to endure the usual hardships of war. Unlike the conflict in Korea, which had sometimes been unbearably difficult for the United Nations forces, the war in Vietnam was made easier and more comfortable for the troops by the deliberate will of the senior commanders. For every grunt who hunkered down in a grubby bunker in some remote and dangerous firebase out in the jungle, another four or five slept snugly between sheets, often in air-conditioned rooms, in the relative security of a huge base.

As we have already shown, the tunnel rat was one of a handful of outstanding exceptions to the overlong ranks of those who chose, or had chosen for them, a reasonably easy rotation in Vietnam. With his knife, handgun, and flashlight, the rat looked and behaved like a warrior. His consuming interest in physical fitness, mental alertness, and the mechanics of his humble fighting tools made him more of a professional soldier—a samurai—than the typical overequipped and overfed GI of the 1960s.

There is little evidence to show that unit commanders fully understood the long-term significance of the tunnels of Cu Chi, or precisely how to deal with them. Consequently, the comfortable reliance upon technological solutions—ones without too risky a human investment—never lost its appeal. Vietnam became the laboratory and testing ground for many new weapons systems. Some worked well; others were laughably ineffective. Even if their intention was to make the GIs' lives safer, many turned out to be incompatible with the extraordinary war that was being fought underground.

Sometimes it seemed as if the only winners from this cornucopia of new weaponry were the eager young scientists back
home, from whom the financial leash had been slipped. Research and development funds cascaded through the government laboratories and the offices of the major industrial contractors, eager for a piece of the war action. Out of this flood were washed weapons and equipment, some useful, some just nasty, some more than a little cranky.

There were 1,000-pound parcel bombs that opened in the air, spewing out hundreds of lethal little antipersonnel bombs (some disguised as oranges, which exploded when picked up). Mobile radar units could spot infiltrators at a thousand yards. There was the “daisy cutter,” a 15,000-pound monster bomb, which would blow a hole 300 feet in diameter on a hilltop, to create an instant fire support base. There was the dreadful “earthquake bomb,” the CBU-55, which sucked all air from its huge explosion area. There was “spooky,” a propeller-driven plane carrying enough flares to floodlight an area with a mile radius at night, while firing 6,000 rounds a minute. Whatever new military problem might be troubling the high-technology-conscious general, some scientist somewhere would come up with the answer, regardless of cost.

If the scientists thought they could seal the South from the North (and for a while they did), then detecting and destroying the tunnels of Cu Chi should surely have proved to be a minor operation. So they embarked on projects that would have made Heath Robinson and Rube Goldberg pale with jealousy. Firstly, the scientists reasoned, since it was difficult to find a man underground, the thing to do was wait until he surfaced and then find and destroy him. So they came up with the People Sniffer—officially, the Olfractronic Personnel Detector. This heliborne contraption was used in the “detection of humans by acquisition and sensing of natural human exudates and effluvia, either vaporous or particulate.” In other words, it smelled people through the ammonia and methane gas they or their excrement and urine gave off. The General Electric Company was awarded the Pentagon contract, which was initially designated the XM2 Concealed Personnel Detector—Aircraft Mounted. Strapped to a helicopter, the People Sniffer was flown over areas where tunnel dwellers were likely to come up for air. It was not a complete triumph. It broke down a lot and was unable to distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys. As most above-ground VC gatherings tended to disperse hastily
on hearing any helicopter at all, it was difficult to find and attack the enemy. Because the People Sniffer got excited about any bad air, the Viet Cong began laying false trails for it, including—rather unsportingly—rigging up bags of buffalo urine along the likely path of Sniffer helicopter patrols. The urine fetched retaliatory air strikes like flies. General Westmoreland's closest military adviser, Major General William Depuy, had the last word: “They were never very successful. The fact we don't have them today may be sufficient evidence that they weren't.”