The Tunnels of Cu Chi (4 page)

His adversary had been shot in the head. The bullet had made a small hole in the temple and the wound had stopped bleeding. The man was still breathing. Gutierrez took the wire he had brought and carefully wrapped it round the muzzle of the AK-47. If the gun was booby-trapped, this was the only way to find out. Gutierrez then holstered his .22 and began to back out of the tunnel, playing the wire out in front of himself, making sure the gun was never jerked. They were already coming in to help him as he appeared, butt first, round a corner. He hissed at his corporal to back out, too, and one by one they reached the light and the air. Only then did Gutierrez pull the wire—there was no booby-trap explosion—and drag out the AK-47 as well.

He went back in carrying a rope, with an additional rope tied to his ankle in case they had to drag him out, too. Inch by inch he crawled back to where the wounded VC still lay. If the AK-47 had not been booby-trapped it was unlikely the body had been. Nevertheless, Gutierrez gently explored it for any telltale wires before tying the rope around the man's neck. He was not going to take the risk of lifting the body to tie the rope under the VC's armpits. Once again, Gutierrez backed out of the tunnel, playing the rope out in front of him. Once out, he had the squad pull the VC out. When the body emerged from the hole, the man was already dead.

For the last time, Gutierrez went into the tunnel complex. Nobody knew what was in there. They discovered they had killed a solitary guard, posted there to allow wounded VC from some earlier battle to be carried away from the small underground
hospital at the end of the communication tunnel. Gutierrez's squad eventually found two chambers, with soiled clothes and bloody bandages inside. How and where the inhabitants had escaped was, as ever, the mystery. Gutierrez was now past caring. It was dusk and time to return to the comparative safety of the base.

Gutierrez sat silently inside the APC as they bumped and bounced their way back to Cu Chi. Everything he had learned about fighting seemed to have no relevance to what he had been doing today. Every infantry course, all the technology, the backup artillery and air support, the choppers that could fly half a division into and out of the battlefield within a few hours—what did any of this have to do with any enemy you never saw alive, who existed in holes in the ground, and against whom only a man's brute strength and luck seemed to prevail?

They had told him in Hawaii and during special training in Alaska that this was a war against only a handful of Communist terrorists. Yet wherever his unit traveled, the turf seemed to belong to the enemy. Even the American fortress at Cu Chi was not safe. How could this be, when it was so close to Saigon itself? Just how far away were they, anyway? “Only twenty miles,” said his corporal, “and the tunnels stretch right up to the edge of the city.”

   Cu Chi District

The underground tunnels of Cu Chi were the most complex part of a network that—at the height of the Vietnam War in the mid sixties—stretched from the gates of Saigon to the border with Cambodia (today, Ho Chi Minh City and Kampuchea). There were hundreds of kilometers of tunnels connecting villages, districts, and even provinces. They held living areas, storage depots, ordnance factories, hospitals, headquarters, and almost every other facility that was necessary to the pursuit of the war by South Vietnam's Communists and that could be accommodated below ground. General William Westmoreland, who commanded the American forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, said in his memoirs: “No one has ever demonstrated more ability to hide his installations than the Viet Cong; they were human moles.”

No single military engineer designed this vast labyrinth, nor—despite Vo Nguyen Giap's overall generalship in Hanoi—did any one commander order it to be built. The tunnels evolved as the natural response of a poorly equipped and mainly local guerrilla army to mid-twentieth-century technological warfare. Aircraft, bombs, artillery, and chemicals obliged the Viet Cong to live and fight underground. Ironically, by becoming an army
of moles pitched against armies winged into battle by helicopter, the Viet Cong guerrillas, and later the North Vietnamese army, protracted the war to the point of persuading the United States that it was unwinnable. And once America began disengaging itself from Vietnam, complete victory for the Communists moved irresistibly nearer.

The district of Cu Chi, in what was South Vietnam, became the most bombed, shelled, gassed, defoliated, and generally devastated area in the history of warfare. For years, most of Cu Chi suffered the fate of being a “free strike zone.” That meant that random artillery fire, known as “harassment and interdiction,” rained upon it by night; bomber pilots were encouraged to offload unused explosives and napalm over Cu Chi before returning to base.

The area has since been glorified in the accounts of the Communist victors with honorific titles, such as Iron Land, or Land of Fire. Nearly every village or hamlet is a “heroic village” or enjoys some other decoration or citation. The area is dotted with the graves of fallen “heroes” of both sexes, grouped around memorial obelisks engraved “The Nation Remembers.” In independent Vietnam's short history the name of Cu Chi already carries the mystique and historical resonance of Agincourt and Bunker Hill. The Vietnamese fought for thirty years throughout the thousand-mile length of their country to finish with the unified territory they now have. But the war in Cu Chi has come to epitomize the horror, the heroism, and the endurance of the Vietnamese struggle for Ho Chi Minh's dream of freedom and independence.

Cu Chi district, administered from the small market town of the same name, is today part of greater Ho Chi Minh City, which lies to the southeast; formerly called Saigon, it was the capital of the Republic of Vietnam—South Vietnam—which existed from 1954 to 1975. To its south lies the delta of the Mekong River, the rice bowl of Southeast Asia, a region of paddyfields, swamps, and canals. To Saigon's north are the foothills of the central highlands, which stretch back up the spine of Vietnam past the 1954 demarcation line (known as the demilitarized zone, or DMZ) and into what, until 1975, was called North Vietnam. The hills are steep, rugged, covered in deep jungle, infertile, and thinly populated with native tribes. Between the delta and the mountains lies the plain, known as
the piedmont, or Mekong terrace. It runs northwest from Saigon to the Cambodian border like a huge slice of cake with its apex in the former capital. At the narrow end of this triangle is Cu Chi.

Less fertile than the delta, but heavily settled and cultivated, Cu Chi district is a network of villages astride Route 1, the road that links Saigon with Phnom Penh (in what was Cambodia) and with Tay Ninh, the adjoining border province. Cu Chi district is bordered to the north by the Saigon River. Just across it is a district that takes its name from the largest town, Ben Cat. This area, like Cu Chi, was to earn a fearsome reputation as a Viet Cong stronghold. “The Commies always seem to have an Iron Triangle,” wrote Melvin Walthall, historian of the U.S. 25th Infantry Division, referring to the area in Korea that was given that name in 1951. Ben Cat district—plus neighboring overlaps—became Vietnam's Iron Triangle. Beyond it to the north is the town of Loc Ninh, which for years was wholly controlled by the Viet Cong. Cu Chi and the Iron Triangle lay between it and the South Vietnamese capital—in the words of an American general, “a dagger pointing at Saigon.”

The strategic significance of this part of South Vietnam is self-evident: It straddled the main land and river routes into Saigon. During the war these were the Viet Cong's supply routes from Cambodia, where the Ho Chi Minh trail from North Vietnam ended. Secondly, Cu Chi district covers the only sizeable territory in South Vietnam across which troops and vehicles can move easily, even in the monsoon rains that fall on the area in the summer months every year. The significance of this was not lost upon any of the warring parties and nations that engulfed Vietnam in conflict for thirty years, and the area was to be dotted with the military bases and headquarters of them all. It was called the III Corps Tactical Zone by the South Vietnamese army, which divided the South into four zones. The Viet Cong, on the other hand, called the whole area surrounding Saigon their Military Region IV.

Mai Chi Tho fought the war from its headquarters. The brother of Hanoi Politburo member Le Duc Tho, today he runs Ho Chi Minh City as party chairman. But in 1965 he was the political commissar of the Viet Cong in the Saigon area, and was based in the Cu Chi tunnels. He remembered: “Cu Chi was a springboard for attacking Saigon, the enemy's brain
center. It was like a thorn stabbing in the eye. The enemy had to find some way of sweeping Cu Chi and Ben Cat districts clean; the fight was a fierce one. We used the area for infiltrating Saigon—intelligence agents, party cadres, sabotage teams. The Tet offensive of 1968 [on Saigon and other towns] was prepared—the necessary troops and supplies assembled—in the Cu Chi tunnels. The Americans appreciated the area's importance because it constantly threatened the security of Saigon, of their own headquarters. If they could not solve the problem of the tunnels of Cu Chi, how could they deal with the problem of Vietnam?”

The people of Cu Chi had such a reputation for secret revolutionary activity and resistance that Ngo Dinh Diem, the former imperial mandarin who was the first president of South Vietnam, from 1955 till his murder in 1963, abolished the district administration. New provinces were created in 1956, and towns and villages were renamed to wipe out the memory of the anti-French insurgency. Cu Chi was divided between the provinces of Hau Nghia in the south and Binh Duong to the north. The Vietnamese Communists, however, continued to use the old names and base their regional, district, and village organizations, civil and military, upon the old forms. The United States Army found place-names a headache, and so adapted some and made up others. They described as the “Ho Bo woods” the two critical Cu Chi villages of An Nhon Tay and Phu My Hung (the latter the Viet Cong's Saigon area command post). They invented names like War Zone C, the Trapezoid, and the Long Nguyen Secret Zone for the tunnel-riddled VC base areas that they came to regard with well-deserved caution. Since the Communist victory in 1975 there has been more redrawing of provinces and districts and renaming of towns and villages. Place-names in this book are those most commonly used during the war.

Cu Chi used to be a green area of intensive agriculture, especially rice paddies, orchards, nut trees, and rubber plantations. The people kept a few chickens and pigs, and water buffalo dragged plows or wallowed in the irrigation canals between the fields. At work, the peasants wore black silken pajamas and wide conical hats. The huge Fil Hol rubber plantation used to lie to the north of Cu Chi town along the Saigon River, facing the Iron Triangle. Its French management abandoned
it during the anticolonial agitation of the late forties, but its orderly lines of rubber trees became a Viet Cong sanctuary. Further north, near Dau Tieng in Tay Ninh province, was the Michelin rubber plantation. It continued production throughout the war. Some French planters dutifully paid taxes to both the Saigon government and the unofficial nocturnal government of the Viet Cong. Because the French were still there, the American army left the Michelin plantation alone. The VC took full advantage of its immunity and located base camps in the vicinity. Where cultivation ceased, wild vegetation began: either bamboo thickets or dense jungle. But at the height of the Vietnam War, Cu Chi had been turned into a barren chemical desert, pitted with cavernous bomb craters, denuded of trees, where the air itself was noxious with gas. The Americans called it a white area, for surveillance from the air was so easy. On their military maps, over what had been villages and plantations, they printed—repeatedly and brutally—the word “destroyed.” Nevertheless, it stayed a battlefield. Viet Cong guerrillas remained in the area for most of the war in the tunnel system.