Cu Chi Tunnels

After a morning at the Cao Dai temple and a stop at a fairly nice and inexpensive cafe for lunch we made our way on an extremely bumpy road to the Cu Chi tunnels. I thought the tunnels were used by Americans but I was misinformed. The tunnels were dug by South Vietnamese communists who were resisting the capitalists.

The tour cost 70,000 dong, around four dollars. It started with a black and white film that looked like it was made in the late fifties. It was an exercise in cognizant dissonance--music that sounded like something accompanying a cartoon or a Three Stooges film was played as a grinning adolescent girl prepared booby traps and practiced with her rifle. The team that she headed was reported to have killed over a hundred American soldiers.

The people lived in the tunnels, manufactured weapons, cooked, etc.

This was the first tunnel we encountered. Note the door that is directly in front of the hole--it was covered with dirt and leaves and was completely hidden until the soldier uncovered it.
The soldier demonstrated how to enter the tunnel. He was followed by two tourists who were quite a bit larger than him.

This is a ventilation hole for the system of tunnels.
This is a swinging door trap. The unwary GI would step onto the wooden door and it would swing, dropping him onto a bed of bamboo spikes.

The tour guide is named Minh. He mentioned that he fought on the South Vietnamese side (with the Americans) and that he studied in the seminary to be a priest before the war.

Another larger tunnel entrance.

A model of what the soldiers might have looked like as they enjoyed the open air. Both male and female lived in the tunnels and attempted to fight the enemy.

Here my mother looks at an abandoned American tank. Note the phrase painted on its side--"American M41 tank was destroyed by a delay, Mine in 1970."

Various kinds of traps that were used to injure soldiers, along with painted depictions of their lethal use.

Some underground areas were easy to get too--they were not actual tunnels but were pits with thatch roofs built on top. This particular "room" was a workshop where weapons were recycled. Here two men saw a bomb in two in order to salvage its contents. The man on the left has a coconut cup used to pour water on the cut while sawing in order to cool it. If the metal got too hot the bomb would explode.

Toward the end of the trip we got a chance to enter a spider hole. This was under ground--we had already gone down one hole into this large area that lead to another much much smaller hole.

The passage was incredibly small, dark, and hot. I entered the tunnel behind the three French boys entering above, and I was followed by two American women. The boys were taking their time, taking photographs of each other. I started to panic and I asked the two women to back up and let me out. I wasn't more than ten feet past the entrance. The tunnel went on for about forty feet and there was an exit, then on for another forty feet to another exit. It seemed to get smaller and go deeper.

Last night as I was trying to go to sleep I kept thinking back on my few moments in the tunnel. I think I would have been okay if I had been at the head of the line or with nobody behind me, but I felt like I was trapped when I saw that those boys were not moving ahead and then looked behind me and saw those women pressing in on me.

I was about to take a photo in the tunnel when I decided to get out. This is a photo I found on the internet that is from this short stretch of tunnel. It is not as bright as this--the photo is lit by a flash camera. The orange lights near the man's knees are the only light and they are quite dim.

This is the middle exit to the tunnel. A man offered to take my photo coming out of the tunnel, as if I was coming out of it--but I was still too spooked from having entered it to go back.

This is the kitchen, which like the workshop was not completely underground but was a pit with a thatch roof that was barely above ground level.

This was the chimney exit for the kitchen stove, which was some distance away. There were several holes to disipate the smoke and make it as hard to spot as possible.

At the end of the tour the soldier served Viet Cong tea and tapioca that we dipped in salt. The tapioca tasted like potatoes.

As we exited the area the last display was a group of American bombs.

The Cu Chi tunnels was an interesting experience--seing the war from the other side. I've heard both sides of the American view--both pro and con. The Vietnamese side is quite different. I recalled how I felt when I lived in Hawaii and saw so many Japanese tourists visiting the Pearl Harbor Memorial and what an irony it was. I guess the soldier accopanying our tour guide might have felt the same irony.