The Tunnels of Cu Chi (9 page)

The commander of the 173rd Airborne, Brigadier General Ellis W. Williamson, was to write hugely enthusiastic after-action reports on Operation Crimp. Hindsight gives us all twenty-twenty vision, but history shows some of his optimism to have been either premature or hollow. “Most of January 13th was spent destroying and contaminating the tunnel and bunker system,” he wrote eight days after Crimp had finished. “CS-1, a powder contaminant with long-lasting effects, was used for the first time and should prove quite effective. It was placed throughout the tunnel systems by placing a long line of detonation cord where desired. Crystallized CS-1 was then placed along the detonation cord just prior to the explosion. It is hoped that this approach will prove to be a lasting deterrent.” It was an ill-founded hope. The water traps and the tightly sealed trapdoors connecting the various levels were to ensure that contamination usually failed.

In
his
after-action report, Colonel William D. Brodbeck of the Big Red One was considerably less sanguine, but more prescient. “CS riot-control agent was used without much success,” he wrote. “Tunnels were baffled by the VC to prevent effective use of CS. Positive results were obtained when men went into the tunnels. A different combat technique is required when a man goes into a tunnel after a VC. However the same amount of courage is required in this type of fighting.”

As Crimp and Buckskin drew to a close the “Sky Soldiers” remounted their noisy winged horses and flew back to base; the trucks and the APCs ground out of the hostile woods, leaving burned and empty villages. Most of the local population had been evacuated by the Americans because “they had lived under VC rule for many years, consequently they were thoroughly indoctrinated by the VC and willingly supported them.”

Colonel Nguyen Van Minh of the Vietnamese People's Army is compiling the full military history of all the campaigns in the old Saigon—Gia Dinh districts throughout the war. He is a crewcut professional soldier, and his views about the Americans are almost wholly political. Nevertheless, there is some truth in his assessment of Crimp as an American failure. Nothing was lost that could not be replaced, he claimed, and such
was the mobility and flexibility of the Viet Cong military structure that it could survive those short, drastic American hammer blows and re-emerge fighting.

Operation Crimp failed to clear the target area of the enemy for very long, failed to destroy his infrastructure, and highlighted the inherent weakness of the search-and-destroy tactic that was to become standard operating procedure for the U.S. Army. The operation's major achievement was the discovery of some parts of the enormous tunnel complex that ran underneath Cu Chi district, a discovery that concentrated minds on how to deal with the problem in the future.

Ultimately, what was self-evident was that the United States armed forces were not facing a bunch of Communist terrorists who had somehow infiltrated from the North and held a placid South Vietnamese peasantry at knife-point. The Americans had discovered a new enemy. He was better armed than they had imagined; he was far more elusive than they had imagined; he seemed to set his own conditions for combat; and he must have found willing support from the inhabitants of the Cu Chi villages to operate with the subtlety that allowed such room for maneuver. The Americans had begun to discover the real Viet Cong.

   The Guerrillas of the Viet Cong

The mortally wounded Lieutenant Colonel George Eyster called the Viet Cong “those incredible men in the tunnels.” They were spartan and resilient guerrillas, whose existence was very different from that of their enemies. They dressed like the peasants, often in black silken pajamas and wore no badges of rank—a checkered scarf identified them as guerrillas. Their footwear was Ho Chi Minh sandals, cut from truck tires, with a strip of inner tube between the toes. They slept in roll-up hammocks, often made of U.S. parachute nylon and wrapped their daily ration, a little ball of rice, in similar material. They carried a water bottle, or canteen, usually made in China, and an improvised oil lamp, made from a perfume or medicine bottle with a wick, for the frequent journeys they would make underground. Some wore leather wrist-straps to enable their comrades to drag them easily into a tunnel if they were wounded or killed. They moved around on foot or on bicycles.

The cadres, or political officers, of the Viet Cong were in the main southerners, who had trained in North Vietnam for about eight years after the French surrendered in 1954, and had returned down the Ho Chi Minh trail to take up the fight. By the late sixties thousands of North Vietnamese soldiers
would also make that wearying and hazardous journey to join Viet Cong battalions. (Some of these soldiers wore more conventional uniforms, with ammunition pouches and other accoutrements, even sun helmets.) All Communist troops in the South were known as the People's Liberation Army, under the command of COSVN, the party's southern headquarters. They were divided into local guerrillas, regional forces, and regular, or main-force, units. All structures were in threes, from three regiments per division to the three-man cell—of which three formed a squad, three squads a platoon, and so on. The three-man cell was a Chinese Communist idea; the group was intended to be mutually supportive (when one member was wounded, for example) but also to deny all privacy and to prevent desertion or deviation from the Viet Cong's puritanical standards of conduct. The political commissars enjoyed equal authority with commanding officers, and worked on the maintenance of morale, commitment, and group loyalty.

The guerrillas, male and female, were usually barely educated peasants and were recruited in their early teens. The Front devoted many hours a week to “educating,” or indoctrinating, its soldiers, but encouraged discussion and criticism at such sessions. Both the southern guerrillas and the North Vietnamese grew up in what one American officer called a “tightly controlled cocoon of information” that convinced them of the justice of their cause. “Everything possible was done,” said Le Vinh, a former Viet Cong political commissar, “to ensure that not a single soldier should have a single doubt as to why and for whom he was fighting.” This training was based on the precepts of Mao Zedong, who had written: “The basis for guerrilla discipline must be the individual conscience. With guerrillas, a discipline of coercion is ineffective.” Without adequate motivation the guerrillas would have found the danger and discomfort of their existence unbearable. In fact, thousands did defect to the government side during the latter part of the war, and this was one of the VC high command's worst headaches.

The Viet Cong depended for their survival on the collaboration and protection of the villagers. The NLF organized in the towns but drew most of its strength and succor from the rural villages, where 85 percent of South Vietnam's population lived. Murder or intimidation was ordered only for specific acts
of collaboration with the government and was carried out by special squads; sometimes the deterrent purpose was emphasized by displaying severed heads with warnings. Guerrillas were involved in food cultivation, both to supply themselves and to assist the peasants they lived among—and beneath. Until a late stage in the war, the Viet Cong's weapons and equipment tended to be stolen, homemade, or improvised. After 1966 the Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifle became the usual Communist sidearm, shipped in down the Trail or by sea and through Cambodia. VC officers wore the Polish K-54 pistol.

Guerrillas hold the military initiative; the Viet Cong could choose the time and place of battle. In fighting the United States forces, their tactics were dictated by their extreme technological inferiority. Without air power or artillery, upon which the Americans relied, the Viet Cong resorted to ambush, hit-and-run attacks, and close-in fighting—“grabbing the enemy by the belt”; fighting close to the Americans protected them from air strikes or shelling. For a guerrilla army, stalemate—pinning down a larger force in its huge bases—is equivalent to winning.

The NLF campaigned vigorously among the people, making special efforts to undermine the loyalty of the ARVN troops and government officials, often by using their relatives to persuade them. It was an effective technique: Despite the wholesale conscription of young men, on average 21 percent of the conscripted ARVN soldiers deserted back to their homes each year. The Viet Cong often had at least eight hours' notice of any operation launched against them, and sometimes were warned many days in advance. The Viet Cong's own military operations were always rehearsed. Models of targets were built for briefings, and local guerrillas—or even children—would gather fresh intelligence on the spot. Arms and equipment were sometimes placed in tunnel caches, to be picked up by regional or main-force guerrillas on the day of the operation. Targets would often be approached through the tunnel network. Sappers would blast their way through the target's wire or other defenses, and whistles or bugles would signal the attack, which invariably took place at night. For obvious reasons, aircraft or helicopters on the ground were habitual targets.

Viet Cong morale and dedication continue to amaze their erstwhile adversaries. How did they fight so well against such
odds and in such appalling conditions? How did the Communists come to bear such devastating casualties or carry out missions of such suicidal bravery? How, in short, did such a backward nation outface the world's greatest superpower and break its will to pursue the war? High-level political shrewdness is one answer. But in the field it was a triumph of organization and motivation by the Communist cadres—and the fact that the youths of Vietnam were already receptive to what they were taught. Most of the GIs had only a sketchy idea of what they were fighting for in Vietnam. But for the guerrillas, there were often personal blood-debts to settle—home villages bombed, relatives killed, or arrested and tortured, by a government funded and armed by the United States.

The Viet Cong fought on their own land, to which they felt closely tied. And Mother Earth herself became their protection in the tunnels dug beneath their ancestral fields and villages. “Your entrails, Mother, are unfathomable,” wrote the poet Duong Huong Ly. The tunnels hid the guerrillas from searching enemy soldiers and from bombs and shells. In the tunnels were the sinews of their war—the arms factories, the rice stores, the hospitals, the headquarters. In the dark, damp chambers carved out of Cu Chi's clay was the essential statement of Vietnamese resistance to those whom they perceived to be the invaders of their land.

   The Tunnels

Captain Nguyen Thanh Linh of the People's Army of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam spent five years in the tunnels of Cu Chi. Today, at forty-nine, he has a lean, sparse figure and a taut face. His sad eyes always forget to smile with the mouth. Something has gone from the man. He tires easily, as if he were a stranger to Ho Chi Minh City's crushing midday heat. At the 7th Military Region headquarters he sometimes catnaps during the long committee meetings, but no one chastises him. He has earned the respect and uncritical admiration of his peers and the new young officers around him. But at Phu My Hung, twenty miles out, in Cu Chi and on the banks of the slow brown Saigon River, Captain Linh comes to life as he explains the history and the philosophy, the tactics and the mechanics of the huge tunnel complex that was his home for half a decade. Of the 300 men under his command during Operation Crimp in January 1966, only four were to survive the war: two officers and two noncommissioned officers. His VC 7th Battalion was “wiped out” and reconstructed so many times that he lost count. “In Cu Chi we lost 12,000 people—guerrillas and civilians—in the course of the war,” he points out.

Today Linh sits comfortably on the dusty red earth that marks one of the major tunnel sites. He explains the tunnels within a historical and sociological context. “They are something very Vietnamese,” he says, “and one must understand what the relationship is between the Vietnamese peasant and the earth,
his
earth. Without that, then everything here”—his hand sweeps across the bunker complex—“is without real meaning. But I fear you will not understand.” The mouth smiles slightly and the eyes stay dull. “You are from the West.” It is not meant as an insulting remark; it is said with gentle despair, rather like the mixture of sadness and anger the Irish express in trying to explain their history of the British.