Cu Chi Tunnels are located approximately 70km northwest of Ho Chi Minh City centre in Cu Chi Rural District.
Cu
Chi Tunnels consist of more than 200km of underground tunnels. This
main axis system has many branches connecting to underground hideouts,
shelters, and entrances to other tunnels.
Cu
Chi District is known nationwide as the base where the Vietnamese
mounted their operations of the Tet Offensive in 1968.The tunnels are
between 0.5 to 1m wide, just enough space for a person to walk along by
bending or dragging. However, parts of the tunnels have been modified to
accommodate visitors. The upper soil layer is between 3 to 4m thick and
can support the weight of a 50-ton tank and the damage of light cannons
and bombs. The underground network provided sleeping quarters, meeting
rooms, hospitals, and other social rooms. Visiting the Cu Chi Tunnels
provides a better understanding of the prolonged resistance war of the
Vietnamese people and also of the persistent and clever character of the
Vietnamese nation.
For
a place that’s physically invisible, the Cu Chi Tunnels have sure
carved themselves a celebrated niche in the history of guerilla warfare.
Its celebrated and unseen geography straddles – all of it underground –
something which the Americans eventually found as much to their
embarrassment as to their detriment. They were dug, before the American
War, in the late 1940s, as a peasant-army response to a more mobile and
ruthless French occupation. The plan was simple: take the resistance
briefly to the enemy and then, literally, vanish.
First
the French, then the Americans were baffled as to where they melted to,
presuming, that it was somewhere under cover of the night in the Cuu
Long (Mekong) Delta. But the answer lay in the sprawling city under
their feet – miles and miles of tunnels. In the gap between French
occupation and the arrival of the Americans the tunnels fell largely
into disrepair, but the area’s thick natural earth kept them intact and
maintained by nature. In turn it became not just a place of hasty
retreat or of refuge, but, in the words of one military historian, 'an
underground land of steel, home to the depth of hatred and the
incommutability of the people.' It became, against the Americans and
under their noses, a resistance base and the headquarters of the
southern Vietnam Liberation Forces. The linked threat from the Viet Cong
- the armed forces of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam -
against the southern city forced the unwitting Americans to select Cu
Chi as the best site for a massive supply base – smack on top of the
then 25-year old tunnel network. Even sporadic and American’s grudgingly
had to later admit, daring attacks on the new base, failed for months
to indicate where the attackers were coming from – and, importantly,
where they were retreating to. It was only when captives and defectors
talked that it became slightly more clear. But still the entries, exits,
and even the sheer scale of the tunnels weren’t even guessed at.
Chemicals,
smoke-outs, razing by fire, and bulldozing of whole areas, pinpointed
only a few of the well-hidden tunnels and their entrances. The emergence
of the Tunnel Rats, a detachment of southern Vietnamese working with
Americans small enough to fit in the tunnels, could only guess at the
sheer scale of Cu Chi. By the time peace had come, little of the
complex, and its infrastructure of schools, dormitories, hospitals, and
miles of tunnels, had been uncovered. Now, in peace, only some of it is
uncovered – as a much-visited part of the southern tourist trail. Many
of the tunnels are expanded replicas, to avoid any claustrophobia they
would induce in tourists. The wells that provided the vital drinking
water are still active, producing clear and clean water to the
three-tiered system of tunnels that sustained life. A detailed map is
almost impossible, for security reasons if nothing else: an innate sense
of direction guided the tunnellers and those who lived in them.
Some
routes linked to local rivers, including the Saigon River, their top
soil firm enough to take construction and the movement of heavy
machinery by American tanks, the middle tier from mortar attacks, and
the lower, 8-10m down was impregnable. A series of hidden, and sometimes
booby-trapped, doors connected the routes, down through a system of
narrow, often unlit and invented tunnels. At one point American troops
brought in a well-trained squad of 3000 sniffer dogs, but the German
Shepherds were too bulky to navigate the courses. One legend has it that
the dogs were deterred by Vietnamese using American soap to throw them
off their scent, but more usually pepper and chilly spray was laid at
entrances, often hidden in mounds disguised as molehills, to throw them
off. But the Americans were never passive about the tunnels, despite
being unaware of their sheer complexity. Large-scale raiding operations
used tanks, artillery and air raids, water was pumped through known
tunnels, and engineers laid toxic gas. But one American commander’s
report at the time said: 'It’s impossible to destroy the tunnels because
they are too deep and extremely tortuous.'
Today
the halls that showed propagandas films, housed educational meetings
and schooled Vietnamese in warfare are largely intact. So too are the
kitchens where visitors can dine on steamed manioc, pressed rice with
sesame and salt, a popular meal during the war, as they are assailed
with true stories of how life went on as near-normal, much of the time.
Ancestors were worshipped there, teaching was well-timetabled, poultry
was raised – and even couples trusted, fell in love, were wed, and
honeymooned there. But visitors have it easier: those re-constructed
tunnels give the flavour of the tunnels but not the claustrophobia and
the sacrifice of the estimated 18,000 who served their silent and unseen
war there with only around one-third surviving, the rest casualties of
American assaults, snakes, rats and insects.
Now
the unseen and undeclared No Man’s Land is undergoing a revival,
saluted as a Relic of National History and Culture with its Halls of
Tradition displaying pictures and exhibits. The nearby Ben Duoc-Cu Chi
War Memorial, where the reproduced tunnels have been built, stands as
an-above ground salute to a hidden war.
Vietnam