The Tunnels of Cu Chi (7 page)

Haldane spent half the day by the river. Then, late in the afternoon, the communications net began to reveal that the 173rd Airborne, and the Australians to the north, had at last made contact with the Viet Cong—in tunnels. On Tuesday morning at first light, Haldane's battalion began to retrace its steps. It was beginning to dawn on the commander what had happened. He had actually walked over the enemy. He began a detailed search for tunnel entrances. But nothing was obvious to the eye. A few GIs, very reluctantly, lowered themselves into a trench, explored it, and discovered an air-raid shelter large enough to house several men. But no tunnels. The men, now hot, tired, and nervous at their inability to fight the kind of infantry war they had been taught to fight, waited for further instructions. Platoon Sergeant Stewart Green, a slim, wiry 130-pound NCO, hunched down to relax. Suddenly he leaped up cursing. The country was full of scorpions, huge fire ants, and snakes, and he had just been bitten on his backside, or at least assumed he had. But as he searched the dead leaves on the ground with his rufle butt, ready to crush his tormentor, he discovered the bite had come from a nail. A further, gingerly conducted search disclosed a small wooden trapdoor, perforated with air holes and with beveled sides that prevented it from falling into the tunnel below. The first tunnel had been found.

Haldane ran almost gratefully toward it, but as he stood at the entrance he realized that there were no training manuals to tell him precisely what to do next. When the battalion had trained for combat back at Fort Riley in Kansas, the program
had not included instruction in tunnel warfare. The lessons of the stunning Viet Minh victory at Dien Bien Phu, if studied, had not been digested. Neither the Americans nor the Australians had any experience of dealing with what to them was a new phenomenon. But they were relatively unconcerned; the famous OJT principle (On-the-Job Training) would somehow see them through. But in January 1966, muddling through, adapting, applying combat empiricism, would not be enough to wipe out the Communist presence in the “liberated zones” of Cu Chi district.

Stewart Green volunteered to explore the tunnel he had uncovered with his behind. He leaped in and, with Haldane's encouragement, others joined the platoon sergeant to explore the black depths. The men penetrated a short distance and found hospital supplies, which were brought up and handed to the unit's S-2 (intelligence officer), Captain Marvin Kennedy. As Kennedy was analyzing the packages in detail he suddenly heard shouts; he turned and was astonished to see the tunnel explorers shoot out of the tunnel hole in breathless haste. Stewart Green was last out, sweating and covered in dirt. He told Kennedy that they had found a side passage from the main tunnel and had suddenly stumbled on some thirty Viet Cong soldiers, whom he could see in the dim light of a candle one of them was holding, which the Communists had rapidly extinguished as the GIs blundered near to them. Captain Kennedy, delighted that he had some thirty enemy trapped under his very feet, called a Vietnamese interpreter and ordered him to return to the tunnel with the unfortunate Stewart Green and order the enemy to surrender. The two men reluctantly went back down. Their mission lasted all of a few minutes and they returned embarrassed and empty-handed. Green explained to Captain Kennedy that the interpreter had actually refused to talk to the enemy. The captain quizzed the interpreter, who balefully informed the American officer that he had to “hold his breath” in the tunnel because “there was no air” and he would have “died if he had started to talk.” From a military rather than a medical point of view, that last statement might have been extremely accurate. In the event, the VC escaped.

Sensing the overpowering reluctance to investigate the tunnels that had descended on his men and their ARVN interpreter, Lieutenant Colonel Haldane decided to smoke the enemy out,
and ordered a lightweight gasoline-powered blower to be brought to the tunnel entrance. Several red smoke grenades were dropped into the hole and blown through the tunnel. Within a few minutes the GIs were astonished to see red smoke emerging from numerous exit points all over the ground. However, the smoke made no impact on the enemy, so the battalion commander ordered CS, a nonlethal riot-control gas, to be pumped through the tunnel. Once again this brought no result. So finally, Stewart Green was prevailed upon to make his third and last trip into the hole, accompanied this time by a demolitions expert. The men placed charges on each side of the main and secondary tunnels, and crawled quickly back to the surface. The earth exploded and with grim satisfaction Haldane moved his unit on to catch up with the 2nd Battalion.

It had been exactly two days earlier and a few miles away at Phu My Hung that Lieutenant Nguyen Thanh Linh made
his
first contact with the Americans on the sweep. He had thought his tactics through very carefully. Everything depended on the tunnels. But did the Americans know about them and had
they
planned a tactical move to counter his considerable environmental advantage?

“I had divided my men into small cell-like units. I told them under no circumstances to concentrate. I spread my men into each hamlet where we had well-hidden firing positions to hold back the Americans. Each cell had some three or four soldiers. On 8 January, Crimp was a day old. I was at Goc Chang hamlet in An Nhon Tay village (in the Ho Bo woods). The troops had been pouring in by helicopter. They didn't attack right away. They set up positions and built a command post; then their troops advanced along the village paths, two to three soldiers walking ahead, more following behind. We saw they really
were
very big men. We waited until they were very close. We were in our spider-hold firing positions—the Americans never saw us at all. I ordered my men to fire, one GI fell down, the others just stood around looking at him. They were so bewildered, they did not hide or take defensive positions. They did not even know where the bullets had come from. We kept on shooting. In those days we did not have the AK-47 (later the standard Communist rifle) but very old Russian cavalry rifles, K-44s. The Americans just kept on looking. They were very naive, very brave. Although their fellows kept falling down,
they kept on advancing. They should have retreated. Then they called for artillery. When the first shells landed we simply went into the communication tunnels and went on to another place. The Americans continued advancing, but we'd gone. That was the pattern; there was nothing special.

“All that day we fought like snipers and killed many of them. If we had had good weapons and fired continuously, bang, bang, bang, I don't know how the Americans would have reacted. Instead we fired pop, pop, pop, bullet by bullet. They were so naive that when they did lie down, it was just as they had been taught at military school, not the way soldiers really do it on battlefields. They went down on their hands, spreading their legs. They looked silly. We did not seek to attack whole platoons or companies. As we moved back they moved forward and we just shot more. I made a handful of my men work hard, but that first day American soldiers were killed like that everywhere. Later they were more cautious; they no longer walked openly along hamlet paths. But then they started to fall into our traps or were killed by wired hand grenades.”

As Crimp was ending and its immediate follow-up, Operation Buckskin, was beginning, Associated Press war correspondent Peter Arnett reported precisely what Captain Linh was to describe seventeen years afterward:

Earlier that day a squad from B Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Infantry, found one of Linh's claymore mines hidden in the jungle beside a dusty track. All day the squad had been plagued with mines, snipers, and tunnels. As the men milled around the claymore, forty-three-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George S. Eyster, commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion, 28th Infantry (the Black Lions), approached the group and warned, “Cut the wires, don't pull them.” Then he took out a map and
began talking to the company commander, Captain George F. Dailey. It was nine-thirty in the morning. Suddenly a sniper opened up from a tunnel spider hole—a small, shallow one-man fighting pit with a connecting escape tunnel—and Lieutenant Colonel Eyster fell with a bullet in the chest. As the dying officer was lifted gently on to a field stretcher, he turned to a journalist who was there and said, “Before I go, I'd like to talk to the guy who controls those incredible men in the tunnels.”

That man was Lieutenant Nguyen Thanh Linh. “Those tunnels were everything to us in Crimp,” he explained nearly two decades after Lieutenant Colonel Eyster's grudging words of admiration. “There were no set battles, but everyone who could fire a rifle did so. We used them for constant surprise sniper attacks and we used them, most importantly, for observation. Thanks to the tunnels, we could remain with the Americans, see how their troops behaved and reacted, watch their mistakes. Our observations helped us decide what kinds of booby traps to set and where to set them.

“You know, we even saw helicopters bringing special water for the Americans to wash themselves, and we realized the soldiers used nothing Vietnamese. I had been ordered by my superiors to provide intelligence about American battlefield tactics, and the tunnels made all this possible.”

Linh's judgment remains harsh, but it is a fact that the general direction of training for the United States Army in the sixties was basically incompatible with what the troops were to face in Vietnam. GIs had been trained either for a set-piece confrontation with the Warsaw Pact powers on the plains of Central Europe, or for the kind of “human wave” battles they had fought a decade earlier in Korea. Military high technology, so liberating yet so full of constraints, was geared to saving American lives, while at the same time killing thousands of the enemy by remote control. The American army in effect entered the Vietnam War without a long-enough military memory. From the experience of state militias during the American Revolution, to the Spanish-American War; from the legendary Merrill's Marauders, the highly skilled and toughened American jungle fighters who served in the Burma-India theater in World War II, to the members of the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services), who on specific assignments fought alongside
native guerrilla forces, the Americans had a long and honorable guerrilla-fighting tradition. Where and why this was forgotten in Vietnam remains a mystery. However, when Lieutenant Linh was peeping through fieldglasses at the Americans from the relative safety of his tunnels, he at least was following the oldest military dictum: Know your enemy. For the GIs, both the enemy and his terrain were, inexplicably, a dangerous military and geographical novelty.

By Tuesday morning, 11 January, the rubber plantation on the perimeter of Landing Zone Jack was beginning to look like a World War II movie set. A tight defensive perimeter had been established, Crimp had been renamed Buckskin, but the U.S. casualties continued to mount alarmingly from the apparently random Viet Cong attacks. The Communists still appeared and disappeared like magic. At the northern edge of the landing zone Haldane's men were well dug in. By now dirt-streaked and acutely tunnel-conscious, the GIs were quick to check any suspicious-looking holes. They found one, about a foot in diameter, that entered the ground at 45 degrees. The hole remained a curiosity—in fact, it was a tunnel's ventilation hole. At dusk, as the Americans settled down for an uneasy rest, they suddenly heard several grenade explosions and carbine shots—
from within their own perimeter
. Colonel Haldane sprinted over to B Company's sector, where the explosions had been heard, and was met by the ubiquitous Sergeant Stewart Green and a number of other B Company soldiers, all standing around a tunnel trapdoor. One of the GIs told Haldane, “We were just sitting there, almost on top of it, when the friggin' thing pops open, out comes Charlie, throws two grenades, reaches down, grabs a carbine, sprays us, and before we can pick up our weapons, he's back down in the ground and that goddamn trapdoor shuts over him.”

Stewart Green, whom OJT had now developed into a reluctant expert on tunnels, was invited by Haldane to explore this one. He did not return for two and a half hours, and reckoned he had traveled a full mile and a half underground before returning. He had found what he called vestibules in the walls, but little else. Instinct alone prompted Green to ask for several rolls of communications wire, a field telephone, gas grenades, gas masks, flashlights, pistols, and compasses. Green and his squad went back down, now able to talk to the battalion,
and to defend themselves. After having traveled a mile and a quarter (scientifically gauged by the length of wire played out), Green saw a light ahead. In curt messages to Haldane above ground, Green described the first recorded tunnel firefight between Americans and Viet Cong. The GIs put on their gas masks and threw their gas grenades. Even above ground Green's buddies could hear the sound of the battle. The squad fought its way back to the tunnel entrance—save for one soldier, who completely missed it in the dark—and pulled out. Green himself returned to find the errant soldier and bring him back. The Viet Cong, as usual, simply melted away.

The following morning, renewed exploration began to show just what the Americans faced in Cu Chi. Not only were they confronting an army of moles, but they had to deal with them in mole holes, perhaps the most extraordinary battleground the American soldier would ever encounter. Haldane ordered the tunnels to be closely explored. This thoroughness paid off. The men found a basket of grenades covering a trapdoor to a second level. They went in and found a lower chamber containing 146 service records belonging to the D-308 Viet Cong Company. They even found a third level, in which a tunnel branched away in two directions. One branch contained a small escape hole only large enough for a diminutive Vietnamese to crawl through. The other branch led back to the main shaft Stewart Green had discovered.