The Tunnels of Cu Chi (13 page)

Most of the ordinary lighting came from oil lamps made from old American shell-casings, and a simple wick coiled into nut oil. A slightly larger and more popular lamp was simply a brown bottle about the size of a smallish medicine bottle with a drilled nut where the cap would be, and at the base a crude piece of metal as a weight. Again a wick, and nut oil, provided the light.

Only a few GIs ever penetrated the second or third tunnel levels. Jan Shrader, of the Combined Matériel Exploitation Center, attached to Military Assistance Command Vietnam, explored one second-level section, and recalled finding chambers over five meters high. “It was incredible, all that space, what they'd kept there or done in there I cannot imagine … the thing we found more than anything else was arms and matériel, but in very good storage. For instance, artillery ammunition for 57-mm recoilless rifles; each round was in an individually handmade little tin can with a sweated-lead joint and cap, also laboriously handmade. Each rifle we found was wrapped in rags and Cosmoline and very nicely done up with
a little tag, a little metal tag tied with a little piece of wire; you wouldn't want to write anything on paper, because that wouldn't last very long in the tunnels, and they knew that because they had been doing it so damn long. So they had little pieces of soft metal that they wrote on with a stylus in their little symbols, of what was wrapped up in that package.” Shrader also found tunnel workshops where fairly sophisticated armaments were being copied. “There were these workshops set up where they actually made small arms, Chinese copies of Thompson submachine guns and different French designs. They'd take a French machine gun which they'd captured from the French and set up a little tunnel workshop and start turning out copies by hand. They made hand grenades, ammunition, and lots of mines.”

Sergeant Arnie Gutierrez did discover what some of the largest underground store rooms were for. “In the chambers, which were fifteen feet high, they were assembling artillery pieces and big mortars. They would be stripped down outside the tunnels, carried through, assembled during the night inside the tunnel, for maintenance or whatever, stripped, and then taken back through the tunnels and out again, reassembled and used. No wonder we never found their guns outside. In one set of underground chambers we found two 105 field guns. These two 105s were over forty years old and they were still in perfect condition. Can you imagine it, putting damn great field howitzers to bed every night in a tunnel? One reason our casualties ran so high, you could never figure where Charlie would get his weapons from, his rocket launchers and big pieces, fire them, then hide them, and then fire again. It was hard work for him to do it, but it was damn harder for us to figure it out. The first time we found this stuff deep inside a tunnel, we couldn't believe it.”

In 1966, the Viet Cong managed to steal an M-48 tank from an ARVN unit north of Lai Khe, an event which caused understandable consternation on the government side. Three years later the Americans found it—in a tunnel. It had been buried about six feet down and tunnels had been dug around it. The tank itself was used by the VC as a command center; the batteries, the lights, and the radio were still working.

On 24 November 1966, ARVN military intelligence passed on to the Americans the interrogation report of a captured VC
platoon leader. The prisoner had reported being ordered to turn on a generator to recharge batteries for a large signals unit in the Boi Loi forest (a few miles north of the Ho Bo woods). It was located deep underground and its members were involved in radio interception, telephone tapping, and codebreaking, and were fluent in many languages. This was a SIGINT (signals intelligence) unit. In 1970, the U.S. 25th Infantry found a North Vietnamese SIGINT facility hidden underground near the Thi Tinh River; all the radio communications of the 1st and 25th Divisions had been logged, and the intercepts translated into Vietnamese.

About halfway between Cu Chi town and Saigon, just north of Route 1, U.S. Special Forces Captain William Pelfrey was leading his unit on a routine search-and-destroy mission in the Hoc Mon area. It was 6 August 1967 and Pelfrey was taking part in Operation Kole Kole, an eight-month operation mounted by the 2nd Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division—a long, grinding exercise in attrition. The thirty-two-year-old Arkansas-born farm boy enjoyed life with the Special Forces and learned his jungle craft while serving in the northern provinces of South Vietnam. He'd already been in-country since December 1966, when, perversely, in his eyes, the brass had ordered him to leave Special Forces duty and rejoin an infantry unit for a while—“Get back to the army” was the way they had put it. He resisted as long as he could, and was then moved south, where he joined the 1st Battalion of the 5th Mechanized Infantry with the 25th Infantry Division.

Pelfrey, who was to win the coveted Silver Star, Bronze Star with “V” (for valor), Army Commendation Medal, and a couple of Purple Hearts during his double tour of twenty months in Vietnam, led his unit gingerly through the dry undergrowth. Just before ten the previous night three GIs had been wounded by VC mortar fire. The captain's instinct warned that there was something important in the area—it made him work his unit through the heat of midday, which earned him no applause. Just before 2:30 p.m. he noticed something odd about the way the bamboo was growing. It was just a little too neat. It was tall bamboo and it somehow looked a little too cultivated, almost as if it had been tied and trained for camouflage. It had.

The bamboo hid the entrance to a tunnel complex. Pelfrey ordered one of his men to blow the tunnel and the bunkers.
This often led to the discovery of new access holes, which themselves led to new discoveries underground. “Well, we found a complete munitions workshop underground,” said Pelfrey. “They'd dug a whole bunker complex, covered each bunker with bamboo roofs, had a whole string of communication tunnels.” Inside he found drill presses, little forges, a bellows system using charcoal—a complete workshop, where scrap metal was melted down in a pot and new casings made in sand molds. The grenades had handles made out of wood, with little firing chains on them. The drill presses were ancient upright models and hand-cranked. But they all worked. The official after-action report on the discovery somewhat grandly called the find a munitions factory. While it was certainly less than that, it did offer a perfect example of the light industry hidden inside the tunnels, which maintained supplies for the Viet Cong
and
maintained them under the noses of the Americans.

Lieutenant (now Lieutenant Colonel) David Sullivan of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, a tall and wiry Iowan, made an unusual discovery in a tunnel in April 1966. He and an SP4 from his platoon came across a hardboard false wall underground. They worked at it with their bayonets for hours. When they broke it down, they found a two-foot-long wooden box with Chinese writing on it. Sullivan recalled: “The lid was nailed down; it was a weatherworn box. We prized it open. It was full of gold bars. Each was about five inches long and one and a half inches thick. We sat there just looking at them for a long time. I have to tell you, we began discussing ways of keeping the gold. First we thought we'd leave it there and collect it after the war. Then we thought we'd somehow distribute it through the platoon without anyone else knowing. Then we thought we'd mail it home and keep it. I'm happy to say that in the end right prevailed. All the schemes were impractical, and, let's face it, wrong. I went out and called a helicopter. It came and picked up the box, and you know something funny? We never heard any mention of that gold again.”

The tunnels housed the living and the dead. As it became increasingly difficult for the Communist soldiers to bury the dead above ground, the bodies often had to be taken into the tunnels for temporary burial. They were generally buried in a foetuslike position in the walls of tunnels and covered with a
few inches of clay or wattle. It was offensive to leave a dead comrade unburied above ground; furthermore, it helped frustrate U.S body counts if the dead were hidden inside the tunnels, and there they were at least laid to rest near the ancestral home. The VC also hid the bodies of killed Americans in the tunnels to demoralize their comrades, who regarded it as an absolute priority to retrieve their dead for decent burial at home.

In December 1969, Alpha Troop, 3rd Squadron, 4th Cavalry, had spent three days blowing up bunkers in the Boi Loi woods northwest of Cu Chi. “I saw what looked like an air vent into a tunnel,” said Staff Sergeant Kermit Garrett. “We searched the area around, looking for a trapdoor, but couldn't find one, so we decided to dig around the air vent.” Garrett and his partner, SP4 Mike Hanh, began to dig through the soil. Mike Hanh then came across wood, sawed through it, and then, unusually, he came up against concrete. After he'd hacked his way through that, Hanh found the hole and was first in. “I couldn't believe my eyes,” he said later. “There was enough equipment in there to print a whole newspaper.” They found a 1500-pound printing press in perfect working order; rows and rows of type, thirty-seven trays altogether, stacked against the walls of the huge six-foot high, thirty-by-forty-foot chamber; a table with bottles of ink and dyes in five-gallon cans; and stacks of pamphlets and papers—two tons in all.

Writer and poet Vien Phuong, who is now chairman of the Cultural Association of Ho Chi Minh City, explained that a considerable amount of printing work was needed during the war, and most of it was done using these underground presses. For several years the Communist Association of Artists and Writers of Saigon was based in the tunnels; they were responsible for their own living quarters and offices underground. “We moved around constantly, either because we were attacked or because we needed to expand. We had tunnel offices at Ho Bo, Phu Trung, Xom Thuoc. Some of our tunnel chambers still exist. There were very few printing presses and we used them mainly to produce information for the villagers. It was important to remind them that we had not left them, that we were still there, in the earth, beneath them.” Phuong is a gentle and soft-spoken man. “When I got to Cu Chi district in 1962 there was already a major communication tunnel. Our office was there, and we had to dig a branch tunnel to the main one.
At the same time, the [Communist party] press office for Saigon also had its office underground near us. They too dug into the main tunnel system.

“It was a dreadful existence. One lived by the hour; one was alive one hour and might be killed the next. A person could be sitting and talking to you and be dead within five minutes. With the sheer quantity of ammunition the Americans used there were times when survival was just a lottery. The tunnels were the safest thing we had, but they were not impregnable. Personally, I had a small shelter in which I slept. It was 80 cm by 70 cm and one meter high. You can imagine what it was like for a man in that hole, night after night. I had not dug the shelter too deep, for we learned from bitter experience that the deeper the shelter, the greater the chance of being buried alive after a bombing attack, so I built a moderately strong shelter that could deal with the bomb fragments. When the enemy carried out their antiguerrilla operations above, I went into my sleeping shelter, lit a candle, and read books or wrote poems until the air was so foul I had to extinguish the candle and lie in the complete blackness of eternal night, listening to the tanks and guns above me. I did not know, and nor did my comrades, whether we had judged the depth of our tunnels correctly. One lay there, wondering if a tank would crash through the ceiling of your sleeping chamber and crush you to death, or worse, not quite to death.

“During the Manhattan operation [conducted in March 1967 by the Americans in the Long Nguyen base area just to the north of the Iron Triangle] a young man went mad in our tunnel. There had been a discussion among some of us whether we should go out of the tunnel in the evening for a few minutes to have our meal in the open. This was the greatest thing anyone could look forward to. But the Americans were around our tunnel entrances every day during Manhattan. One dead branch or one grain of rice dropped near the entrance would be sufficient for them to locate us. I felt we would be killed if we went up. That was my decision. The young man started to shout and became hysterical, saying he had to go up at that very minute, even while the Americans were still searching. He was going to go anyway, so I had him tied up.”

But the real nightmare for the tunnel dwellers was the gas. Air was as precious as life, and was continually being contaminated
by a variety of necessary activities—cooking, use of latrines, and so on. But when the Americans used gas, and the tunnel trapdoor and water-trap systems were inoperative or blown away or inefficient, then the tunnels became a place of slow, choking death. Whether the gas was acetylene or the antipersonnel CS riot gas, which burned the skin and tortured the eyes and nose, the effects were horrendous.

Vien Phuong remembered having to lie prone during gas attacks, staying alive only by breathing very slowly, sucking in the air remaining in a shallow layer on the tunnel floor underneath the creeping gas. Death, if it came, would be agonizingly slow asphyxiation, a dreadful retching in the stinking blackness of one's own ready-made grave.

Three members of the party press office were gassed in the tunnels. Vu Tung, a well-known Saigonese journalist; Huong Ngo, another Saigonese writer, and a Miss Tam, who had just joined the tunnel dwellers. All three were trapped in a large tunnel complex at Xom Phuoc when, according to Phuong, the Americans pumped “toxic gas” into it. When he and others were finally able to enter the tunnel after the Americans had left and sufficient time had elapsed to allow expulsion of the gas, they found Vu Tung, still wearing his felt hat, dead in a narrow communication tunnel. He had been trying to crawl out of the system. Huong Ngo lay dead, face up with a newspaper over his face, and Miss Tam lay nearby, with her face turned toward the earth.