The Tunnels of Cu Chi (36 page)

She has a small handsome face with perfect white teeth that miraculously survived the calcium deficiency of the tunnel diet. Her skin is silk-soft, its texture belying her thirty-eight years. The malaria has left a tendency to early fatigue, as if she were aware before others of the rising heat of the day. The other scars remain mercifully invisible beneath her simple blue cotton work suit—the leg wound, the scar on the chest (both the least and the most painful to a woman), and the bullet fragment embedded forever in the top of her right arm, like all shrapnel wounds, an aching reminder of temperature changes. She is a truly reluctant heroine who needs help remembering the names of her medals. She has killed many tunnel rats. Her name is Vo Thi Mo.

In fact, there is nothing new about Vietnamese heroines. They have long occupied a cherished place of honor in the nation's history. Trung Trac led the first major Vietnamese insurrection against the Chinese in 40
A.D
., together with her sister, Trung Nhi, and a third titled lady, Phung Thi Chinh, who supposedly gave birth to a baby in the middle of the battle and continued with the infant strapped to her back. When the Chinese counterattacked two years later, the women committed
suicide by drowning. Two centuries after that, an even more famous heroine, Trieu Au, a sort of Vietnamese Joan of Arc, also launched a revolt against the Chinese conquerors. Gloriously defeated, she too killed herself at the age of twenty-three, implementing the by now traditional policy of defeat before surrender.

Vo Thi Mo was never forced to make the choice, but at the time she took to the tunnels of Cu Chi to fight the Americans, she was the inheritor of a uniquely Vietnamese feminist tradition, one of advanced emancipation by Asian or European standards. Vietnamese women can inherit land, share their husband's property, take charge of most financial matters relating to business and home, and of course, fight in war.

Even before the Americans came, the National Liberation Front created special women's associations, particularly in the safer Communist-dominated villages and hamlets—including naturally the fiercely nationalistic Cu Chi district. The women helped families whose sons had joined the regional forces. They took care of guerrillas who needed help, organized health education classes, and set up small maternity clinics and medical dispensaries. Others were carefully trained by the district party officials to proselytize uncommitted young men and even the ARVN troops.

One of the people credited with actually beginning the guerrilla war against the Saigon government, on 17 January 1960, was Nguyen Thi Dinh, a peasant woman from Ben Tre province. She was to become deputy commander in chief of the National Liberation Front's armed forces.

The elite members of the women's associations in Cu Chi became a fighting force in 1963. There was nothing very new about young women joining battle, fighting together with the men; what
was
original was a decision to create an exclusively female guerrilla fighting force. By 1965 a special company—C3—had been formed under the command of Tran Thi Gung. Her leadership was praised by her contemporaries as being bold, imaginative, and utterly ruthless. She died of illness in 1973, when a new female company commander, codenamed Trong, was appointed.

An early photograph shows two members of C3 posing rather rakishly in their uniforms—black pajamas, webbing belt, linen hat, and the distinctive black-and-white check scarf slung
round the neck and tied with a huge knot. The rest of the equipment was VC standard issue, including Ho Chi Minh sandals and, in the early days, “Red Butt” K-44 carbine rifles.

Within a year of C3's formation, the women scored their first significant combat success by overwhelming the small ARVN guard post at Phu My Hung and killing the commander. The unit was so respected that it was offered, and accepted, training with a detachment of the Viet Cong's F-100 Special Forces group. By the time Vo Thi Mo had become a deputy platoon leader within C3, the women had learned, and applied with considerable enthusiasm, the techniques of small-unit infantry fighting, the use of sidearms and rifles, the application of hand-grenade throwing, the wiring and detonation of mines, and assassination.

Vo Thi Mo was hardly a surprise candidate for officer status in C3. Her father had been a Viet Minh and fought the French with an old World War II rifle, and when that simply fell apart, he fought them with bamboo spears. Resistance against foreigners who occupied their land was endemic in the Mo household; it grew with the maize and the peanuts in their smallholding. She had a sister and nine brothers, of whom the sixth, the eighth, and the ninth all died in the war against the Americans. She was fifteen and still helping with the housework when her home was obliterated by bombs at five in the morning of the first day of Operation Crimp. Her parents had been warned the day before of the impending American assault and had taken the precaution of getting up before dawn and taking themselves and their daughter into the tunnel shelter their home, like nearly every other home in the hamlet, possessed.

“It had been a prosperous area, there were many fruit trees, many cattle; life had not been easy but we had lived well enough by our honest endeavors. When the Americans came, they devastated the area. They bombed and shelled until ten in the morning, and then their troops landed at the Go Lap, An Phu, and Dat Thit plantations.”

Reasonably safe inside the tunnel, the fifteen-year-old contemplated the destruction of her home, her family's land, their cows, their ancestral graves, and their way of life. All this was being done by a country of which she knew only one thing: its name. From where she crouched, there were no larger concepts than her own small and insignificant existence; the slow turning
of the land's fruitful cycle. Even if she had believed the notion that the defense of the “free world” began here, and in this way, it would not have stopped the tears and the pain. It was no consolation that her father revealed a secret—their tunnel shelter was in fact connected with another tunnel and another, and they could make their way out of this hell, safely and silently, to a place where there was no death. It was no consolation that he told her that there were stores of cooked rice, rice mixed with sugar, and clean water to drink. The fifteen-year-old's pain as her childhood was obliterated ended only when a sharper emotion enveloped her. The hatred of the American soldier that was born in the flames of her burning home grew into her bones. For many months it was a comfort, a pillow to the cheek, a reason to stay alive. Within a year, she would be leading other women—widows, the orphaned, the homeless—in a long and painful battle to regain their heritage. They would be based inside the tunnels of Cu Chi.

Ironically, it took a man to describe some of the hardships the women fighters faced while living in the tunnels. There is a strong sense of modesty among the Vietnamese, shared by both sexes, which runs to the point of prudery by Western standards. However, Major Nguyen Quot, who spent nearly a decade in the Cu Chi tunnels, explained that life inside for women was particularly hard and unpleasant. “Women who had their periods had considerable difficulty in keeping themselves clean. If there were water shortages, and that happened frequently, or if the women had to stay down because of the fighting above, then personal washing problems were very great. Women often sacrificed water for cooking, to wash their clothes, but then of course it was almost impossible to dry them underground, so they would wear damp clothes until body heat dried them. In the early days we did have toilets—the large jars—but as life became more arduous because of the bombing and shelling, the jars became a luxury. There were times of great personal hardship.”

Vo Thi Mo found it possible in the early days to go above ground and wash in water-filled bomb craters during the predictable shelling lulls. Fortunately, the heavy field artillery from Cu Chi base and the batteries at Trung Hoa worked to a timetable. In 1966 there were still usable wells, although after a time, these were deliberately polluted by the enemy with bodies
of dead animals. There were times when conditions for a woman inside the tunnels were so unpleasant that she considered herself lucky to be able, as a guerrilla, to leave the underground caverns to go up and fight. Sometimes it meant the chance of fresh water from inside the strategic hamlets, or as a treat, some soap, or even a change of clothing.

Vo Thi Mo's first real battle took place at Xom Bung hamlet in the village of Cay Diep. She was already second in command of the village guerrilla platoon and was nominated at a meeting to lead an all-female hamlet guerrilla squad. A reconnaissance-in-force infantry unit from the 25th Infantry Division base at Cu Chi was advancing toward Bu Lap hamlet. They were attacked by her platoon; a helicopter brought reinforcements and, following a short and inconclusive firefight, the Americans withdrew and Vo Thi Mo took her squad into a tunnel to rest while she kept guard above. Within a couple of hours she heard the ominous rumble of tanks, approaching from the Rach Son bridge. They were roiling down Road Number 15, which had already been carefully mined and booby-trapped with iron spikes and punji stakes. Vo Thi Mo brought her girls back up to prepare for the tank battle. It was a textbook guerrilla warfare confrontation. On the one side, a heavily armed M-48 medium tank—the mainstay of U.S. armor in Vietnam—“versus a handful of teenaged guerillas, carrying obsolete Red Butt K-44 carbines and a few hand grenades, fighting from a road mined with homemade explosives and spiked with bamboo traps.

“I saw the tank when it was about 500 meters away,” explained Vo Thi Mo, “and I called my squad to their positions. The girls were very nervous and some had never seen such a huge tank, and so near, and coming nearer. The mine that blew it up had been planted by the hero To Van Duc (the man who invented the cane-pressure mine, which brought down helicopters). The tank stopped immediately, and was quite badly damaged. It stopped by a small hut where we had been staying. The enemy fired their guns fiercely while they tried to repair it. They worked on the tank from eleven until four in the afternoon, but they could not repair it. We had been firing our rifles at the Americans, but we hit no one.”

The Americans sent a second tank to help the first, and it too hit a mine, which brought it shuddering to a halt. Vo Thi
Mo's squad found themselves fighting both broken-down tanks from trench positions between them. When they ran out of magazines for their rifles, they hurled grenades at both tanks. Slowly, inch by inch, and only by using their massive self-defense machine guns and personal weapons, the Americans managed to repair one tank, inch it toward the other (which was too badly damaged for local repair), and eventually tow it away. It was, like most battles, one that produced no victors or losers, although the Americans might have drawn some early and ominous after-action conclusions from achieving only a standoff in a skirmish between two M-48s and a handful of girl guerrillas and one ten-year-old messenger boy.

The district committee was not enthusiastic about allowing units from the C3 female company to come into close contact or hand-to-hand fighting with the Americans. Curiously, the committee did not object to the women's fighting the ARVN soldiers at close quarters, but generally they were persuaded away from the kind of combat that might lead to capture by the GIs. It was not a golden rule, it was effectively unspoken, but it was almost certainly based on cultural and racial prejudice rather than battle experience. Vo Thi Mo was consequently discouraged from fighting the American tunnel rats when they followed in hot pursuit during a battle. However, from what she saw, she was not always impressed by their performance. “Once after a battle we withdrew into the tunnel, went down into a lower level, moved along a bit and emerged to the upper level again. A tunnel rat was not far behind us. American people were big and could not get through all the trapdoors. This one got through to the lower level but when he came up again, he could not pass through the opening. I was with Uta, an old guerrilla, who is now dead. He was guarding the second trapdoor. When the American tried to pull himself through, he became stuck. The old man stabbed him and he died. We left him there.”

In fact, deliberately luring tunnel rats to their deaths inside the holes was an early Viet Cong tactic and often involved a particularly unpleasant way of killing them. Two or three tunnel rats would be encouraged to proceed without hindrance down one level, as Vo Thi Mo has described. Even the Viet Cong could not predict the girth of the lead tunnel rat, but what was inevitable was that he would have considerable difficulty when
trying to wriggle up through the narrow trapdoor that led back to ground level. He had to come up head first. There was no choice.

Originally, this one dreadful moment of weakness was exploited by the tunnel defenders by shooting the man as he emerged. But soon they refined a more practical technique. As the unfortunate point man cautiously put his arms and head through the hole, a guerrilla would wait with a sharpened bamboo or even an iron spear, which he would plunge through the GI's throat with tremendous two-handed force. The soldier remained impaled, his body wedged in the trapdoor, a grotesque human cork in a bottle, held in place by the spear resting on both sides of the shaft. The tunnel rats below could neither throw grenades up nor pull their dead point man back down. Their only option was to return the way they had come. Naturally, the Viet Cong had made appropriate plans for their perilous return journey.

Vo Thi Mo recalled the Americans' fury when their comrades died in this way. They would respond by hurling satchel charges or grenades down the tunnels, but of course this did not cause much structural damage. “When they used gas it was more of a problem for us,” she explained, “but we started to isolate the gas by keeping specially shaped rubber-tree trunks in the tunnels and then using them as plugs in the narrowest part of the tunnel, to prevent gas passing through. It worked well and sealed the tunnel, but we did run out of rubber trees after the Americans began using Agent Orange to poison our land.”