Fishing for Tigers (27 page)

Matthew suggested Cal and I take a half-day tour to the Cu Chi Tunnels. I thought it was a terrible idea and argued for the Cao Dai Temple instead, but Cal was insistent. ‘I'm a bloke, I like guns and shit,' he said and Matthew laughed proudly. I wanted to slap them both. Instead I went downstairs and booked the tour.

The mini-bus was as old as me and in far worse condition. The tour was fully booked so Cal and I had to sit squished in the corner of the back seat. Our arms stuck together, the skin pulling and stinging at each sharp turn. Every time we hit a pothole or bump I was lifted half an inch off the seat. Once we cleared the Ho Chi Minh City limits, there was nothing but potholes and bumps. By the time we arrived in Cu Chi I felt my spine was made of glass. With every step I risked shattering.

The day was drizzly, though no cooler for it. Our group huddled under a tin roof at the entrance of the historical site as our guide, a sad-eyed young man with German-accented English, explained the history. During the American War, a revolutionary compound was established under the town of Cu Chi. Eventually, the tunnels stretched 200 kilometres and encompassed underground classrooms, meeting rooms, even a field hospital. Air slid in through bamboo plants or tiny vents disguised as ant hills. Cu Chi became the most bombed, defoliated, and gassed region in the history of modern warfare.

Now the compound is a popular tourist destination, necessitating a ticket office and orderly queues, introductory videos and reminders to stay with the group. But the ­jungle remains the jungle, dense enough to keep our heads dry for minutes at a time, dark and full of the sweet stench of rotting vegetation. Our guide pointed out historically significant lumps of earth and clusters of bamboo and bomb craters blanketed in weeds.

He stopped at a cordoned-off patch of grass and picked up a nearby branch. ‘Look!' He poked the ground and it flipped up. Metal teeth snapped the branch in two. People giggled or sucked in their breath. Cal asked if it was real.

‘Of course. All over here there were traps. After the war, they're mostly removed, but we leave some like this to show how it happened. American try to sneak up on tunnel entries. Snap!' He clapped his hands, once. ‘Americans are tall. Usually, the teeth cut them here.' He indicated his stomach. ‘Sometimes higher, sometimes lower. Always they scream. No more sneaking.'

We moved on to a replica bunker. Cal and the other men in the group posed with the replica rifles. The sound of real gunfire echoed through the jungle. ‘Firing range over there,' the guide explained. ‘We can go soon. Shoot the real war weapons.'

The drizzle hadn't stopped. I couldn't tell anymore whether I was drenched in sweat or rainwater. The gunshots got louder as we walked further into the jungle. We came to a shoebox-sized hole in the ground and a middle-aged man dressed in camouflage folded himself into it and dis­appeared underground.

‘Anyone want to try?' our guide asked, and we tourists shook our heads, ashamed of our largeness, amused by the idea of being Vietnamese, of living in the ground like spiders.

‘How about you,
?'

Cal stepped forward as though he'd expected to be called on all along. Several among our group cheered.

‘Yes. Good. Come on. You have camera? I can take photo for you.'

‘No camera,' Cal said. He knelt next to the hole and peered in. ‘Is there a trick to this or do I just squeeze in?'

‘Vietnamese very small. This is the trick.'

Cal stood, grinned at the crowd, and stepped into the hole. His body dropped and my breath rushed into my throat. ‘Ugh,' Cal said. His arms hung out over the top of the hole. He wriggled a while, trying to get one or both arms down, but his torso filled the entire space. ‘So close,' he said. The group applauded as the guide helped him out.

‘Good try. Usually the tourists get only to here.' The guide pointed to his hips. ‘But you're part-Vietnamese, so you get halfway down.'

Cal frowned. ‘How did you know I'm part-Vietnamese?'

‘You have Vietnamese face, but you are bigger and paler.' The guide turned to me, smiled. ‘Now some Vietnamese boys and girls are big like this, too. If they study overseas, they get big. Yes. Sometimes they speak good English or German, they pretend to me they are not Vietnamese. They pretend they are from overseas. But I always know.' He gestured at Cal's chest. ‘When I call on overseas Vietnamese they smile and I see their teeth are like American movie teeth. ­Vietnamese have small teeth, not so white. They don't smile when I call them. And when they don't fit in the tunnel they are angry. Overseas Vietnamese are not angry. Always they laugh.'

The guide patted Cal's back and hurried to the front of his group.

‘Do I look like I'm laughing?' Cal muttered.

‘Very rarely these days.'

‘This place is sick. Woo-hoo – let's crawl in and out of holes where people were gassed to death! Let's poke murderous jungle traps! Let's go shoot the weapons used to kill Americans. What kind of a country turns this kind of shit into a goddamn tourist park?'

I sighed. ‘Every kind, Cal. Anyway, you're the one who wanted to come here. What did you think it was going to be like?'

He toed the long grass. ‘Do you think there are leeches here?'

‘Probably. We're losing the group.'

He grunted and surged forward.

The gunshots grew louder. By the time we reached the tin hall that acted as an entry to the firing range, my hands were over my ears and I could barely breathe. ‘You look idiotic,' Cal hissed, but looking around, there were more people covering their ears or cowering against the far wall than doing as Cal was, sauntering casually up to the gun bank and handing over 200,000
dong
to fire ten rounds from his choice of carbine, M16 or AK-47.

‘You don't want to shoot?' the guide asked me. I shook my head.

‘Maybe you like some refreshments.' He pointed to a cloudy fridge at the far end of the hall. I bought a bottle of water from a woman old enough to have fired these guns the first time around. I wanted to ask her how she could stand working here. I covered my ears and cringed, but she only smiled toothlessly and turned to the next customer.

‘You should've had a go,' Cal said, taking my water and swigging down half.

‘I don't like guns.'

He handed back the bottle, let his hand rest against mine for a second. ‘You're all shaky. Are you sick?'

I shook my head. His sudden, familiar kindness made me speechless. He pressed his palm to my forehead and it must have felt okay, or else terrible, because he turned on his heel and stalked off to the fridge to buy a bottle of Coke.

The final activity of the tour was the walk through 20 metres of the original tunnel, specially ‘widened for westerners'. I immediately declared my intention to wait above ground, as did a middle-aged English couple who cited ‘back problems'. The guide ushered the others into the tunnel entrance and then led the three of us to a picnic table near the exit.

‘Are there snakes around here?' the English man asked the guide.

‘Yes, sure. Not too many now, because of all the ­people.' He stamped his feet a few times. ‘Snakes go further away from all the walking. Many, many years ago this whole place—' He arced his arms out over the jungle – ‘was full with snakes, wild pigs, buffalo, tigers.'

‘Tigers!' The English woman sat up straight, excited.

‘Yes. Once there were many tigers in Vietnam. Now they all gone. Maybe twenty, thirty very far north. Here, all gone.'

‘Was it the war?' the man asked.

The guide smiled, shook his head. ‘Long before this war, the ancient people here they feared the tiger above all else. For their fear, they had two solutions: first, they make cult of tiger, they sing and perform rituals to calm the tiger spirit so it won't hunger for their children and buffalo. But also, the people were not stupid. They did not only pray and hope. No. They pray to the tiger spirit, but they hunt the tiger flesh. Actually, tiger is easy to kill. Arrows and swords and poison bait. Easy. So soon the tigers run out.'

‘That's very sad,' I said.

‘Maybe yes. But more sad if tiger eats your baby for his dinner, I think! Yes?' He smiled. ‘I think for the tiger it is good to be killed fast like that. Sometimes the people try to catch the tigers, because they want to capture the power or something like this. To catch a tiger alive is very proud for a young man, you understand. The thing they do is, they climb the tree, very high so they can watch the tiger while it kills a pig or something. You see, after a kill, tigers would eat just a little and wander away, coming back later to eat some more. The hunter would watch and when the tiger left, he would climb down from the tree and push a barbed hook into the dead thing. The hook is tied to very fine silk, which is tied to a wooden pole.

‘When the tiger came back to finish its meal, it swallow the bait before reaching the wooden pole and trying to push it away. The bait hooks in its throat and the hunter could come forward and claim it. Now he is a hero. Now the tiger is roaring in pain. But still the man is proud of his catch. Soon the tiger has infection or is starving because throat and mouth is too damaged to eat. The man is still a hero but maybe a worried one. It takes some time, but the tiger dies. It is slow, the meat is no good, the skin is ruined. The hero is not a hero anymore. He said he captured the power of the tiger, but actually when he captured the tiger the power was gone. You can catch the tiger, but not the tiger's power. And without the power, the tiger is no good to itself and no good to the people. But people don't like to learn. They keep doing this thing, fishing for tigers, feeling proud, then burying tiger skin and bones.'

‘Imagine that,' said the English man. ‘Catching a great big tiger with a little tiny hook.'

The first person to emerge from the tunnel was a twenty-something Canadian girl. She was white and shaking. Her friend came up behind her and grasped her shoulders. ‘And that's been widened! God. Look at me! I scraped the walls and ceiling the whole way. That was the worst!'

Cal looked fine, but when he sat beside me and I asked how it was he shuddered. ‘Rather be shot to bits than have to live in a hole like a fucking rat.'

‘You say that now, but if you'd been—'

‘What do you know? You're too gutless to even try it.'

‘I have a bad back.'

‘Yeah, right.' He stalked off into the jungle, toward the souvenir stand.

As we boarded the bus for the trip home, Cal sucked in his breath, gripped my hand. I followed his gaze. An overweight bloke with silver hair and a long grey beard sat on the ground outside the toilet block. His hands were around his knees, his body heaving with silent sobs.