The Tunnels of Cu Chi (40 page)

He was to use this technique on several occasions when he felt the platoon's discipline was slipping. It was not a question of personal pride or face—he was far too good a soldier for that; but keeping a bunch of grunts involved in tunnel-ratting was not going to work unless there were sticks and carrots, and Rivera knew all about sticks. No one ever did accept a challenge from the sergeant. And more significantly, no one ever reported that the challenge had been offered. Rivera would, of course, have faced a court martial had he been found out.

Slowly, awkwardly, Rivera's rats began to shape up. “Chicago” was even smaller than Rivera and usually went point. OJT produced the obvious golden rules. No one ever went alone; the tunnel rats' standard equipment was soon adopted. Booby-trap training continued endlessly.

Jackson was a problem. It was not that he was unwilling or even a bad soldier. But he was too big and ungainly. He carried the platoon's machine gun on his broad shoulders, but it was useless as a tunnel-fighting weapon. More often than not he had no tunnel duties other than standing entrance guard duty. He remained, in Rivera's eyes, dangerously uninvolved, and
a weak link in the squad. One night, away from the base, the platoon camped out in hostile territory. Once the perimeter had been secured, Rivera detailed the guard and went to sleep. He woke during the night and went on an inspection of the guard, and found Jackson apparently asleep on duty. He took the burly private's M-14 rifle away from him and, as he did so, Jackson woke up and tried to pull his bayonet on Rivera. Rivera's knife was out in a second, and he cut the soldier's neck. At dawn, Rivera ordered the private to make his own formal report of the incident to the company commander, Captain Gavin. Both men were clearly guilty of serious court martial offenses. As Jackson walked over to the officer's tent, Rivera called Gavin on the field phone and told him exactly what had happened. The captain told Rivera not to worry, then told Jackson he was lucky to be alive. The incident was closed.

But tension between Rivera and Jackson remained. He still posed a threat in the sergeant's eyes to platoon discipline. Shortly afterward, when the platoon was living in bunkers on the perimeter of Cu Chi base, the Viet Cong began making extensive use of the tunnel belt around the headquarters to attack the men inside. Rivera's squad suddenly found itself under sniper attack every single day. At almost precisely the same time, a few minutes before their lunch, a sniper, using the same Red Butt K-44, would take a few pot shots at the platoon, and the platoon would spray the rubber plantation back in impotent rage, but always without success. Rivera began to study one particular tree in the undergrowth and fastened on it as the possible source of the sniper attacks. But what he could not begin to understand was how the sniper got into the tree, given that the surrounding area belonged to and was fully occupied by the squad.

Not for the first time Sergeant Flo Rivera committed a serious offense, punishable by court martial. He called Jackson over and ordered him to walk, fairly quickly, past the tree and to make that walk just before lunch time. “Don't stop,” Rivera warned the private. “You stop, you're gonna get zapped. When he fires, don't stop.” Jackson, who no longer argued with his NCO in charge, took the long walk as planned. Rivera had set up two machine guns. One pointed at the top of the tree and one at the bottom. Jackson was about a hundred yards from the tree when the sniper opened fire. The big GI fainted. Rivera
opened up simultaneously with both machine guns on the tree. Leaves, splinters, and one riddled body fell to the ground. They revived Jackson with water and went on to inspect the tree. The inside had been hollowed out and a rope hung there, falling down into a tunnel that had been dug below the tree. The sniper had been able to get up the tree through the
inside
, which was why he had remained invisible. Jackson asked the sergeant, nicely, not to use him as human bait again. The sergeant agreed and they called it quits.

Rather like Ellis over at Lai Khe, Rivera sensibly worked out what he called a buddy system of cover inside the tunnels. Nobody went in alone, nobody wandered too far ahead without cover. Before each tunnel investigation, Rivera began to rehearse his squad down to the finest detail: who would go point, who would cover, how far would they go, who would guard the entrance. The squad was beginning to synchronize, and Rivera grew proud of the men. They even began to gain a small reputation inside the base, although they were only one group of part-time tunnel rats among many.

There were no great heroic firefights in the holes. The policy of the 25th Infantry was to investigate and destroy if possible, but there were no particular tunnel imperatives. Rivera's squad had its moments. They found an underground conference room bedecked with a handsome hammer-and-sickle flag, and they frequently found documents, rice stores, and a few weapons. They also discovered the danger of leaving tunnels by newly explored ground-level trapdoors, and risking being shot at by their own side. Rivera did not invent a version of Ellis's subtle red flashlight system, but he did protect his men the hard way. After a couple of scares, he decided only
his
squad would stay in the vicinity of a tunnel while he had men down there. If other Wolfhounds came into that sacred area, they were quickly ordered out by the little sergeant. Most complied. Those who did not were bawled out and they then usually left. Those who did not respond to that invitation found themselves facing a half-maddened NCO with a drawn .38. Then they quit. He was reported for this kind of behavior so many times, it ceased to be news. His platoon commander never let him down, and never let a written complaint go up. None of the squad was ever killed or wounded in the tunnels. With luck and judgment, Rivera kept the compact he made with them when he volunteered
their services. They understood that he had kept his end of the bargain. In return, despite the frustrations of too many cold tunnels, they fought their hearts out above ground. Every member of the squad, including Jackson and Captain Gavin, was wounded.

Rivera was to receive two Silver Stars, three Bronze Stars, and the Army Commendation Medal. He left the 25th Infantry and Cu Chi for reassignment as a special U.S. adviser to the ARVN. After that he was sent to Korea, but the lack of action there bored him. He eventually returned to Hawaii to work, as a civilian, within a hundred yards of an army base.

   Winners and Losers

The Tet offensive of January 1968 was the climax of the tunnels' existence. The coordinated series of damaging attacks by the Viet Cong on the capital city, Saigon, was planned and prepared in tunnels in Cu Chi and the Iron Triangle a mere twenty miles away, and at a time when MACV was telling the American public that the war was going its way. Such was the psychological impact of the Tet offensive that it became the turning point of the war, the beginning of the end. “Without the tunnels,” said Lieutenant General Robert Knowles, “you wouldn't have had the Tet offensive.” After it, as the decimated guerrillas were increasingly replaced in the fighting by the regular army of North Vietnam, the tunnels' role diminished correspondingly. But in 1968 they were crucial.

Among those they sheltered were the elite of the South Vietnamese guerrillas, the Dac Cong. They were the sappers, or commandos, who carried out the most daring raids and acts of sabotage. Sometimes as few as three of them would penetrate huge U.S. or ARVN bases and create havoc. Today the Dac Cong is an element of Vietnam's army like the Special Forces or Britain's SAS. During the war they were organized in battalions, and the most important of these was F-100. Set up in
1965, it was based in tunnels at An Tinh village next to Cu Chi district. Its members were recruited from inside Saigon itself and trained for urban guerrilla warfare. Most of them wore city clothes and led apparently regular, legal lives “integrated with the enemy.” F-100 came under the personal command of the military head of the Communists' Military Region IV, Colonel Tran Hai Phung. His encrypted orders were communicated to the base by radio; girl couriers connected the headquarters with its agents in Saigon. No other Viet Cong knew the location of the battalion's secret base. It had a long history of rocket attacks and terror bombings in Saigon, including the one at the American embassy in 1967, and a regular succession of similar attacks on police stations, nightclubs, and restaurants, which made the capital a jumpy and dangerous place. But at Vietnam's sacred holiday period, the lunar new year festival on 31 January 1968, F-100 would spearhead a wholehearted military offensive inside the capital city.

The decision to mount the nationwide Tet offensive of 1968 was taken at the highest levels of the Lao Dong party in Hanoi. In July 1967 the funeral of General Nguyen Chi Thanh took place in the northern capital. He was the erstwhile military commander of COSVN, who died of cancer. The occasion was the opportunity for a conference of political and military leaders from all over Vietnam. At General Giap's urging they agreed to break the stalemate with a general offensive and general uprising at the next lunar new year festival. This would be almost sacrilegious, and cause deep resentment among ordinary Vietnamese. But its improbability would be its best concealment, as had been the case earlier in history when, in 1789, Vietnamese patriots had used the same trick on the occupying Chinese in Hanoi. The offensive was planned in complete secrecy. The war in South Vietnam was to be taken from the countryside to the towns and cities, where, it was hoped, the people would rally to the NLF's side and rise up against the government of President Thieu. This was intended to bring about the collapse of the regime in Saigon and convince the American public in an election year that the war was futile and unwinnable.

The men and the weapons for the attacks in Saigon were assembled in the tunnels of Cu Chi and the Iron Triangle. They were systematically moved up to the edge of the city, and on
the eve of the attack, to specially prepared safe houses inside it. The arms were transported in agricultural vehicles, fake funerals, and by other devious means. Four thousand guerrillas entered the city with the crowds anticipating the Tet holiday. The Americans were caught off-guard, and subsequent investigation would find a serious intelligence failure.

At the end of January, U.S. and South Vietnamese government installations were attacked at over one hundred cities, towns, and bases. Two long sieges—at remote Khe Sanh and the occupied citadel of Hue—prolonged the agony of Tet '68. But the attacks on offices in the heart of Saigon by F-100 had by far the greatest impact and psychological effect. These self-sacrificial Viet Cong raids turned the war in the Communists' favor. After Tet, many Americans began to doubt if they could achieve anything they might call victory in Vietnam.

The political commissar of the Viet Cong's Military Region IV, Mai Chi Tho, planned the attacks at a tunnel base near Ben Cat in the Iron Triangle. There is a photograph of him taken with a group of earnest young Viet Cong officers, some of them girls, grouped round a table of maps and plans. “During the Tet offensive,” he said, “I was in the Iron Triangle. We were working day and night. It was a time of very secret and intensive activity. Many of our officers had to secretly reconnoiter the enemy targets. They moved around in Saigon on forged identity papers. Our fifth columnists, soldiers and officers working inside enemy military installations, came to report. They could come and return to their posts within a few hours. That would not have been possible if the headquarters were too far away; that's why Cu Chi was important. The tunnels were where preparations were made for the offensive, a place for stocking weapons and supplies and assembling troops. They were especially valuable after the offensive failed to achieve its objectives, because they provided a base for preparing subsequent attacks.”

All over South Vietnam, towns and cities were hit by the Viet Cong. In Saigon itself, squads of commandos seized the radio station, the Philippine embassy, and other quarters of the city, and assaulted the presidential palace, the headquarters of MACV at Tan Son Nhut air base, and the U.S. embassy, then a newly built defensible structure in concrete on the city's main
boulevard. South Vietnamese police fled when the two Viet Cong vehicles drove up in the early hours. A hole was blown in the wall, and the defense was left to U.S. marines and military police on duty. Of the attacking squad, all but one were soon killed, and the raid was dismissed by an American officer on the spot as a “piddling platoon action.” But the incident shocked the whole world. Far greater damage was being done elsewhere in Vietnam, where ten provincial capitals fell under temporary Viet Cong control and key American supply bases and airstrips were bombarded. But the handful of guerrillas who got inside the embassy's wall attracted the attention of the entire Saigon-based press corps, and destroyed years of optimistic public relations efforts by the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office, the Americans' information operation.