It was one of the
weirdest tourism experiences we've ever had. As though Fellini and
Disney had teamed up to do 'Nam....
At the beginning of the tunnel complex, there's a wall draped with
clothing ... vests, cone shaped peasant hats, capes in camouflage
colors. Oh yes, and rifles. Real rifles, but thankfully without the
ammo.
You can rent these things. And wear them while crawling through the
tunnels. So much the better to feel like a guerilla.
The Cu Chi tunnels of Vietnam are one of
those horrible remnants of a horrible war that most folks would probably
rather forget. So, of course, they've become a tourist attraction.
The Cu Chi Tunnels lie 75 km northwest of Saigon ... which nobody these
days but the government and maps call Ho Chi Minh City.
At the height of the Vietnam war, the tunnel system stretched from the
outskirts of Saigon all the way to the Cambodian border ... something
like 250 kilometers of tunnels.
The tunnel system, built over 25 years starting in the 1940s, let the
Viet Minh and, later, the Viet Cong, control a huge rural area. It was
an underground city with living areas, kitchens, storage, weapons
factories, field hospitals, command centers. In places, it was several
stories deep and housed up to 10,000 people who virtually lived
underground for years.... getting married, giving birth, going to
school. They only came out at night to furtively tend their crops.The
ground here is hard clay, which made this whole thing possible. But
even so, the planning and construction was incredible. People dug all
this with hand tools, filling reed baskets and dumping the dirt into
bomb craters. They installed large vents so they could hear approaching
helicopters, smaller vents for air and baffled vents to dissipate
cooking smoke. There were also hidden trap doors and gruesomely
effective bamboo-stake booby traps.
Of course, the U.S.
military knew about the tunnels. The tunnels not only allowed guerilla
communication, they allowed surprise attacks, even within the perimeters
of U.S. military bases. The U.S. retaliated with bombs, eventually
turning the region into what writers Tom Mangold and John Penycate
called "the most bombed, shelled, gassed, defoliated and generally
devastated area in the history of warfare."
That was then.
Today, the trees and bushes have grown back. And since 1988, two
sections of tunnels have been open for tourism. There are what some
guidebooks call the "real" tunnels at Ben Binh. They remain unlit and
mostly unreconstructed, which means chunky Westerners shouldn't even
try.
Re-creation of
underground conference room from which Tet offensive was planned
The "fake" tunnels at Ben Duoc
aren't fake at all. They're merely renovated, widened for tourists and
come complete with lights and displays underground.
After declining the guerilla costumes and gear we went for a hike
through the woods while our guide pointed out bomb craters (labeled by
shell type) and smoke vents, thoughtfully steered us around booby traps
and let us play a brief game of "try to find the trap door" ... which,
of course, we couldn't.
Finally, we came to the tunnels. We dropped through a trap door to the
first level, 10 feet below the surface, and squeezed through narrow
passageways to see bunkers, a hospital, a kitchen and the actual command
room from which the 1968 Tet offensive was planned.
There are tables and chairs, bunk beds, crude cooking stoves, dummies
outfitted in guerilla garb and, for effect, the occasional live person
to give an authentic touch.
Even with the tunnels widened it was a squeeze, especially one
serpentine stretch at the second level where we had to drop to our knees
and crawl while the ceiling scraped our spines. There was a third level,
which is hardly 18 inches high and definitely would have required
wriggling on our stomachs. We gratefully declined.
The day we did all this, the temperature was 98 degrees with
correspondingly high humidity, and the sweat gushed so heavily we could
hardly hold onto our cameras. It gave us an incredible admiration for
the people who lived and struggled here.
After one last wriggle, we came up at a snack stand where we got to
taste the taro root and green tea that tunnel residents ate.
Then off to the souvenir stand, zoo and shooting range (where, if you
knock down the target with your AK47 or M16, you can win a gen-u-ine
guerilla scarf).....
War is hell, and, sometimes, the aftermath is just plain weird.
