The Tunnels of Cu Chi (41 page)

In purely military terms, most of the Viet Cong's Tet operations were failures. But that was irrelevant. It was the moment at which American casualties surpassed those in the Korean War. It was a moment of painful truth—always a rare commodity in Vietnam. Public and political opinion in America never recovered from the impact; within two months President Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection.

Ironically, it was an experience from which the Viet Cong would never recover either. In theory, North Vietnamese infantry battalions were to follow up the initial attacks by the Viet Cong sappers, but the advantage of surprise could not be exploited. Despite the near-perfect coordination of attacks across the country, their impact was dissipated by being so scattered. The attacks were driven off—destructively—everywhere except Hue and Saigon, and the capital was pacified within a week. Over forty thousand Viet Cong guerrillas died in the fighting, crippling the movement beyond repair. There had been no popular uprising in their support; their chances of victory were too uncertain for the pragmatic Vietnamese city-dwellers. Nonetheless, there had been no betrayal of the complex preparations for the offensive. General Tran Van Tra himself conceded that the offensive hurt the attackers as much as the defenders. The Communist military commander in South Vietnam was to publish his memoirs after the war; in Hanoi they were banned immediately and he disappeared, probably purged. In them, he wrote:

But a month after Tet 1968, Tran Van Tra ordered further attacks, and yet more throughout 1968, to try to sustain the momentum of the war and dispel the disillusionment on the Communist side engendered by Tet's failure to live up to its idealistic promises. The Viet Cong had to be persuaded that victory was somehow within their grasp, and so the attacks—and the attrition—went on. The American response was a mailed fist. For the remainder of the 1968 dry season, and in the following winter's, waves of helicopters and APCs ferried in the troops for huge search-and-destroy operations that swept through Viet Cong base areas. (It was on one such operation that the massacre of villagers at My Lai occurred.)

The depleted guerrillas crept back to their tunnel hideouts, most of their fighting spirit exhausted. “There were only four of us fighters left at Nhuan Duc, next to Cu Chi base,” said Captain Nguyen Thanh Linh, their local commander. “We were fighting for a few days in the towns, and left the countryside empty. We poured all our forces out to fight and lost our key cadres. When the Americans counterattacked, we had no good men left. We were nearly out of ammunition. Our food reserve was being used up day by day. Between four men we had just fifty grams of rice a day. We ate fish from the Saigon River and plenty of rats. Some people were worried that Cu Chi might be lost. You could say that the Americans were winning tactically, if not strategically.”

The Tet attacks on Saigon had originated in the old hornets' nests of Viet Cong in Cu Chi district and the Iron Triangle.
This time, the American high command decided to obliterate the tunnel-riddled sanctuaries once and for all by the complete destruction of the ecology. Chemical defoliants had proved only temporarily effective. The Fil Hol plantation, the Ho Bo and Boi Loi woods, and the Iron Triangle were to be systematically flattened by Rome plows. “American grass” was planted from Chinook helicopters and periodically set on fire. This was a specially developed strain of coarse grass that burned easily and quickly. Colonel Thomas A. Ware commanded a battalion of the 25th Infantry on sweep operations. “We spent our time in the Ho Bo woods, and Fil Hol and the Iron Triangle. I think we cut something like 14,000 acres of trees. We'd run into tunnels every day. Sometimes our heavy bulldozers or tanks would collapse them. Sometimes we'd just blow the entrance.”

Recalled Mai Chi Tho: “Yes, the Americans bulldozed the whole area; there was not a house or a tree left. One could stand on the bank of the Saigon River and see to Route 1 about seven miles away without any obstruction. We had to stay in short sections of tunnel. Our fighting was limited. There were no activities in the daytime, only at night.”

The population of villagers had largely vanished already. On average, since 1965, over a million of South Vietnam's villagers a year had been displaced or fled the bombs, bullets, and defoliants and become refugees in government-controlled cities. This took away the Viet Cong's tax base, and its life support. And in a free strike zone, no one would survive for long above ground anyway.

“The trees were stripped of foliage,” Captain Linh recalled. “It was very hot in the tunnels. If we failed to conceal our footsteps on a path, the helicopters would have spotted them. The Americans' greatest success at that time was two armed helicopters from the 25th Aviation Battalion—Cobras—on the front of which were painted the pointed teeth and red mouth of a magical beast; we called them the red-headed beasts. They had two gunners—blacks—who were excellent sharp-shooters. Just a glimpse of us and they swiveled their gun pods to shoot and kill instantly; many of our soldiers died. They flew low and fast and were deadly accurate. We made dummies holding rifles up so that we could attract them and shoot at them, and one crashed at Cu Chi base camp. We buried the victims of the red-headed beasts all in the same place as a
warning to everyone. There were fifty or sixty graves, one added every two or three days. The cemetery no longer exists now.”

The writer Vien Phuong returned to Cu Chi district from the safety of Cambodia in 1971. “The whole of the Cu Chi area was covered with American grass and bamboo. There were only about four guerrillas left in each village; there were no other people.… The guerrillas ate leaves to survive and washed their wounds in salted water. I had to live in a bomb crater, a hole at the bottom of the crater underneath a nylon sheet.”

This was the darkest hour. Ironically, as the last American units pulled out in the early seventies, the Viet Cong was admitting defeat. Their hardships were so severe that even the resolute Captain Linh admitted that in 1969 and 1970 morale collapsed and there were many deserters from the Viet Cong, Hoi Chanhs. “There was just too much hardship at that time; the slightest mistake could have been fatal.”

In February 1970 he was living with the remnants of his squad in a tunnel a few hundred yards from the perimeter of Cu Chi base camp. It was the same tunnel from which the Dac Cong had emerged for the attack on 26 February 1969 that destroyed so many helicopters on the base. Linh recalled: “Every day American troops passed over my head. They had no idea we were there, so did not look for us. We heard the metal tracks of patrolling tanks screeching all night long. We heard the Americans joking and laughing. We lived there a whole month, but after I left that place I was caught.” Captain Linh's war was over; he was a prisoner after five years in the tunnels.

As a result of the growing number of Hoi Chanhs, the Viet Cong suffered yet another setback that hastened their collapse. Outside the free strike zones the Viet Cong still had a political and community infrastructure in the villages. Using intelligence derived from Hoi Chanhs, the Americans proposed to expose the tunnel hideouts of the cadres and root out the NLF infrastructure completely.

Phoenix, as this program was called, was devised by Robert Komer, a former CIA man and General Westmoreland's deputy for pacification. He was nicknamed Blowtorch, and created in 1967 a scheme called CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support), which he foisted upon President
Thieu's government. Phoenix was its key element, to be implemented by South Vietnamese police, troops, and irregulars under CIA direction, in accordance with President Nixon's policy of Vietnamization, applied from 1969 onward. The object of the Phoenix program was to identify and root out the secret Communist apparatus in South Vietnam. In the early sixties the Vieg Cong had crippled the administration of the Saigon government by the systematic murder of appointed village chiefs and other officials. If the NLF's local organization of cadres, activists, and helpers could be wiped out, then, it was hoped, a recurrent pattern could be broken: the cycle in which guerrilla units, ground down by American military action, were rebuilt time after time by the NLF working among the population. In the event, the Phoenix program produced a tangle of graft, inefficiency, brutality, and murder. But combined with the depopulation of the countryside, it succeeded in gravely damaging the Viet Cong's organization, compromising the tunnels, and forcing General Tran Van Tra to rely instead upon the regular divisions of the North Vietnamese army.

The first phase of the Phoenix program was the collection and coordination of intelligence about the Viet Cong, chiefly from prisoners and Hoi Chanhs. Where possible, spies were placed inside the Viet Cong. Pham Van Nhanh, the former guerrilla commander at Trung Lap village in Cu Chi district, said that during Phoenix “one tactic of the enemy was to train pretty girls to infiltrate our organization. They seduced a number of our cadres and collected information about our organization and activities.” Families in strategic hamlets were pressured by the police to persuade their younger members to betray the guerrillas, enjoying Chieu Hoi privileges if they did. The veteran Viet Cong leader Mrs. Nguyen Thi Dinh told American reporter Stanley Karnow, “We never feared a division of troops, but the infiltration of a couple of guys into our ranks created tremendous difficulties for us.”

The second phase, exploitation, was carried out by specially trained squads of South Vietnamese national police and the ARVN. Equipped with names and addresses collected from the district Phoenix center, they slunk into the villages to deal with supposed Viet Cong officials or sympathizers. This usually meant assassination or arbitrary arrest. William Colby, the Saigon
station chief of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, who masterminded the program, was to admit that “Phoenix became a shorthand for all the negative aspects of the war.” But it succeeded. He estimated that over 60,000 authentic Viet Cong agents were killed, captured, or neutralized by the Phoenix program—a figure including Chieu Ho defectors. Of the 20,000 he admitted killed, Colby insisted to a congressional hearing in 1971 that most died in combat. But other witnesses testified as to the murderous and vengeful nature of the campaign and the prevalence of assassination and torture. At all events, the Viet Cong's rural structure was gravely disrupted. Since the end of the war, many top Communist figures in Vietnam have conceded that the period of Phoenix was the worst for them. One senior officer, Colonel Bui Tin, was quoted as calling it a “devious and cruel” operation that cost “the loss of thousands of our cadres.” The betrayal of their tunnel bases compelled the remaining guerrillas and the North Vietnamese army to withdraw increasingly to sanctuaries over the border in Cambodia to await the U.S. Army's departure. In the spring of 1970, American and ARVN troops made a short but disruptive incursion into Communist base areas in neutral Cambodia, forcing the NVA back farther for a while.

By late 1971 Phoenix was doing serious damage. A particularly valuable Hoi Chanh was Nguyen Van Tung, the Communist village secretary at An Tinh, in the district adjoining Cu Chi. He had ordered the execution for rape of a young guerrilla who turned out to be the nephew of a high-ranking Communist official. Fearful of revenge, he turned himself in to the ARVN. His debriefings led to the arrest of over three hundred Communist sympathizers, and the compromising of numerous tunnel bases. Among them was the secret headquarters at An Tinh of the F-100 commandos. This was overrun in an ARVN operation following an artillery barrage. A Hoi Chanh guided the ARVN through the mines to the tunnels. All the guerrillas found there were either killed or captured. Among the captured documents were scrapbooks of press cuttings on F-100 “victories”—bombings in Saigon—and a notebook listing more than sixty agents in Saigon with their cover names, addresses, and instructions for secret meetings or message drops; all the agents were leading legal lives. These names were passed to the Special Branch in Saigon, who arrested fifty, but failed
to find the battalion's chief of operations, a twenty-year-old girl called Nguyen Thi Kieu. She survived and was later acclaimed a revolutionary heroine. But the sapper team was finished. For the remainder of the war, there were no more major acts of sabotage in Saigon—largely because it was no longer possible to maintain guerrilla bases in the tunnels.

But the most decisive blow against the tunnels came from the air. On 31 October 1968, President Johnson had ordered an end to the bombing of North Vietnam as a gesture to hasten the convening of peace talks in Paris. Strategic Boeing B-52s, adapted to carry over a hundred “iron” bombs each, had long been flying missions from their bases at Andersen Air Force Base on Guam and U-Tapao, Thailand. These huge, high-flying aircraft never saw their targets; they were guided in and their bombing was directed by ground radar up to two hundred miles away. They were not allowed to bomb within a three-kilometer radius of error next to friendly forces. After the bombing halt in the North, they were more available to ground commanders in South Vietnam. The generals decided to use the bombers to saturate the free strike zones with 750- and 500-pound high-explosive bombs.