The Tunnels of Cu Chi (5 page)

Both guerrilla warfare and the military use of tunnels in Vietnam preceded the American involvement. There was a historical background to the tunnel war.

The tunnels in Cu Chi were originally dug as hiding places for the Viet Minh, the nationalist guerrillas who fought the colonial power, France, in the 1940s and 1950s. As with their successors, the Viet Cong, Communists dominated the independence movement. Ho Chi Minh was its undisputed leader. Until his death in 1969, “Uncle Ho” personified his people's tenacious pursuit of independence and unity. His shrewd and open face with the wispy white beard now stares down from almost every Vietnamese wall: the founder of the state, Vietnam's Lenin or George Washington, depending on one's point of view.

In 1940, the collaborationist French colonists allowed the Imperial Japanese Army access to Vietnam's ports and other facilities for their expansionist war. In 1945, when Japan surrendered, Ho Chi Minh seized power in Hanoi and proclaimed Vietnam's independence. The victorious allies of World War II disagreed about the old colonial empires. President Franklin Roosevelt had wanted the former subject peoples of Asia to have independence in the postwar world. France, Britain, and
Holland, however, saw the repossession of their imperial territories as legal and correct. After Roosevelt's death in 1945, American policy changed. Ho Chi Minh's tenure of power in Hanoi led to negotiations with France, which broke down, and a nine-year war of independence resulted. British troops landed in Saigon in September 1945 to help reestablish French authority; to maintain order, they delayed disarming the surrendered Japanese soldiery.

But history had turned the corner in Asia. Europeans had recently been defeated by the Japanese; Singapore's surrender was the symbol of the end of the white man's empire in the East. Ho Chi Minh had temporarily held power in Hanoi. From then on Vietnam's nationalists were unyielding. To wage guerrilla war against the arriving French army, nationalists of different political hues coalesced to form the Viet Minh League.

The tunnels were dug for the Viet Minh—for communication from one hamlet to another so that guerrillas could evade French army sweeps or spotter planes. Major Nguyen Quot, a short, wiry, cadaverous officer, who spent the best part of ten years living in Cu Chi's tunnels, explained their origin. “The tunnels were started in areas temporarily occupied by the enemy. The revolutionary forces were small. It would have been impossible to conserve our forces if we had fought in the open. We had to be in a position to choose the time, the place, and the target of an attack. By 1948 we had already dug a tunnel system: Each family, each hamlet, had a tunnel communicating it with others.”

In October 1949, Mao Zedong's Communist victory in neighboring China's civil war gave General Vo Nguyen Giap a safe sanctuary for the training of Viet Minh forces, rearmed with American artillery captured from the defeated Chinese nationalists. Despite Vietnam's historic antipathy toward China (which has resurfaced in recent years), the Chinese Communists were pleased to assist their fellow revolutionaries; China would be supplying arms and equipment to North Vietnam in the sixties and early seventies.

But in Vietnam in 1949, the French were suffering military reverses, and Viet Minh control spread across most of the countryside. In June 1950, Communist North Korea invaded its southern neighbor and drew the United States and its allies into an Asian anti-Communist war. At the same time America,
concerned by Soviet and Chinese recognition of Ho Chi Minh's rebel government, began pouring military and economic aid into France's Vietnam struggle. When the Korean War ceased in 1953, Communist aid to the Viet Minh was stepped up. France made the fatal error of trying for a set-piece confrontation with the Viet Minh in a remote northern valley, Dien Bien Phu. Giap's men besieged and finally overran the French fortress, and thereby terminated France's involvement in his country. During the siege, the Viet Minh approached the perimeter in tunnels, and burrowed underneath the French defenses. Professional soldiers, including the legendary Foreign Legion, had been defeated by an Asian guerrilla army—a lesson for the future that few Americans heeded.

With the cease-fire in 1954 came the agreement between the world powers and Viet Minh at Geneva: Provisionally, Vietnam was divided into two halves at the 17th parallel. Ho Chi Minh was able to consolidate his Communist rule in the northern half, while in the South an independent republic was set up with generous American aid, based on Saigon; the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem became its first president. Under the Geneva agreement, nationwide elections were to take place in 1956. Meanwhile, active Viet Minh soldiers and organizers were to “regroup” in North Vietnam. About 90,000 men and women active in fighting the French traveled north, assuming they would return home with the inevitable victory of Ho Chi Minh and his Lao Dong (Workers', in fact, Communist) party in the 1956 election. Thousands of active Viet Minh, however, were instructed to stay behind, continue political activity, and store their weapons in secret caches for possible future use.

At the same time, nearly a million Roman Catholic Vietnamese from North Vietnam took the opportunity offered by the armistice to relocate in the South. Many of the northern Catholics, who settled around Saigon, became government officials or army officers (which often amounted to the same thing). Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, for example, who ran South Vietnam's air force, became president and (from 1967 to 1975) deputy to President Nguyen Van Thieu, was of northern origin. Most of the Communist cadres, or organizers, who came south down the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos were southerners by birth. Le Duc Tho, who was to negotiate American troop withdrawal with Henry Kissinger in Paris, was a
southerner. Leaders of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front, such as Nguyen Huu Tho, are today ministers in the Hanoi government.

America always made a distinction between the southern guerrillas and the North Vietnamese army, which, it said, was “invading” South Vietnam, the victim of “aggression.” Nationalist Vietnamese saw it differently: The social revolution that was complete in the North was incomplete in the South, where only massive American help propped up what the Communists referred to as a “puppet” government.

The elections of 1956 did not take place, and Ho Chi Minh was cheated of his goal of a unified Vietnam. Diem argued that so tight was Ho Chi Minh's hold on power in Hanoi that elections in the North could not be free and fair. He was probably right, but his deeper fear—that Ho Chi Minh would have won decisively in the countryside of the South also—was almost certainly equally well-founded. As American money and equipment and military advisers arrived in Saigon, Diem set about establishing his regime along strong and uncompromising lines. In brief, he allowed his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, who ran the state security apparatus, to create a police state with a view to rooting out and liquidating all opposition. And opposition meant, in Nhu's eyes, not only armed gangs and armed religious sects but also those who had organized and fought for the Communist-led Viet Minh against the French. Cu Chi had always been a hotbed of revolutionary activity, and Nhu's police descended on the area with ferocity. Today, people estimate that three-quarters of the Viet Minh who remained in Cu Chi were apprehended. Some were imprisoned, usually after torture, and held in horrific conditions; others were publicly guillotined, in the French colonial manner.

In December 1958, several hundred suspected Communists or dissidents were poisoned to death with dosed bread at a prison camp at Phu Loi, a few miles to the east of Cu Chi across the Saigon River. This massacre generated a new mood of militancy; the famous Viet Cong Phu Loi battalion would be named after the event. Under Law 10/59 (the month of its enactment), President Diem specifically outlawed former Viet Minh fighters. Resistance to Diem increased. At the village of Phuoc Hiep, just north of Cu Chi town, is a memorial to marchers in a demonstration in April 1961, gunned down by
members of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (normally written ARVN and pronounced “Arvin” by the Americans). They had established a paratroop training school in the nearby Cu Chi village of Trung Lap.

At long last, in 1960, the Communists lifted the ban on armed resistance; the National Liberation Front (NLF), a Communist-dominated coalition of antigovernment groups, was formed to supervise the resumption of guerrilla war in the South. Coordinated armed attacks began on army and police posts, and for the first time the essential weakness of the Diem regime was exposed. Army posts were either easily overrun or sufficiently intimidated by demonstrators or persuaded by the threats and blandishments of villagers so that all the weapons were surrendered. To the exasperation of their American advisers, the ARVN units deliberately avoided enemy contact and the consequent casualties. One by one the villages of Cu Chi and adjoining districts disarmed local ARVN detachments and effectively cut themselves off from government control. The arms acquired by this means were the first and only weapons many nascent Viet Cong units had; enterprising villagers set about making copies, founding the huge cottage ordnance industry in the tunnels that would last until the late sixties, when newer guns came south from Hanoi.

With the resumption of guerrilla warfare the old redoubts of the Viet Minh had to be reactivated. The French had used aircraft to spot and bomb the Vietnamese fighters; Diem's army was increasingly transported by American helicopters. In villages all over Cu Chi, Tay Ninh, the Iron Triangle, and wherever possible, old tunnel networks were repaired, and a great program of tunnel-digging began. “When we got orders to set up a secure base here,” related one Cu Chi survivor of that period, ex-guerrilla Ba Huyet, “the first thing we did was to start digging thirty kilometers of underground tunnels. It was in 1960. Not only was this one of our closest outposts to Saigon, but it was our advanced command post throughout the war. The Americans were sure something was going on here, but they were not sure what.” Tunnel veteran Major Nguyen Quot estimated that forty-eight kilometers of tunnel excavated during the war against the French had grown to two hundred kilometers by the time the American army arrived in 1965. After 1961, hitherto piecemeal local digging was connected up to form an
integrated network. The Americans would nickname it the little IRT, after part of the New York City subway system.

Diem's reaction to the guerrilla offensive was to seek the best available advice on rural pacification. He hired as an adviser Sir Robert Thompson, architect of Britain's successful “strategic hamlet” policy to overcome the Chinese Communist-led insurgency in Malaya (as it then was). Acting on his advice, the ARVN began concentrating the rural population into special encampments fortified by government troops. Ngo Dinh Nhu himself supervised the inauguration of the first strategic hamlet in Cu Chi district in 1961. Most of the population was rehoused in this compulsory fashion, to separate them from the guerrillas; the exceptions were the villages in the Ho Bo woods, which remained “liberated” and under Viet Cong control. On 3 February 1963, the ARVN launched Operation Sunrise into the adjoining district of Ben Cat. The Viet Cong avoided contact, and the peasants were herded into a new showpiece strategic hamlet at Ben Thuong. In fact, the Viet Cong usually remained in the countryside, hidden in the tunnel system, when their families were displaced into “agrovilles.” Supplying the guerrillas with the strictly rationed rice and other food became an elaborate operation of smuggling and concealment, ruthlessly punished when detected. Meanwhile, propaganda was created to distance the villagers from the guerrillas. The disparaging name Viet Cong (Vietnamese Communist) was coined to describe all those South Vietnamese groups that opposed President Diem and to give them an image of ruthless and fanatical cruelty. (The names Viet Cong, VC, and Charlie—short for Victor Charlie—have survived the war and are now used without any pejorative overtone.) The Viet Cong could be murderous, in that they saw themselves as at war, and executed appointed officials and sympathizers of the government, such as the district chief of Cu Chi. However, the peasants did not in the main have to be terrorized into acquiescence by such tactics. The Viet Cong were themselves villagers, or their sons and daughters, and operated most of the time with the consent and assistance of the people among whom they lived.

President John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, and found that his administration's resolve in confronting Communism was on the line in Southeast Asia. Anxious to avoid the slur of being “soft” on Communism, he was embarrassed by early
upsets like the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba. After his unhappy summit with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, Kennedy said, “Now we have a problem making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.” The internal threat to Diem's regime was perceived as the tide of Communism engulfing Asia; South Vietnam, said Kennedy, was “a proving ground for democracy.” Both he and his successor, Lyndon Johnson, were confident that American military might would reverse Communist successes. Gradually, its presence in Vietnam was stepped up: U.S. advisers to the ARVN were increased to 12,000 by mid-1962. Earlier that year American Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV, pronounced “Macvee”) was set up in Saigon. Kennedy was consciously edging his country into what French president Charles de Gaulle had warned him would be “a bottomless military and political swamp.”

The strategic hamlet program progressively decayed and collapsed. The peasants returned to their native villages and the ARVN was unable to restrain them. In August 1963 the Viet Cong even overran the showpiece hamlet of Ben Thuong near Ben Cat. ARVN military disasters multiplied, despite superior equipment, aircraft, and American advisers. Of particular psychological impact in South Vietnam was the destruction by the Viet Cong Phu Loi battalion of the elite ARVN unit, the Black Tiger (or Panther) battalion. It was at Duong Long, about a mile north of the village of Ben Suc, on 31 December 1963. The Black Tigers were notorious for their cruelty, rape, and looting, and were alleged to have eaten the livers of dead Viet Cong.