The Tunnels of Cu Chi (21 page)

Before long, construction crews with bulldozers and concrete began turning Cu Chi base into a more permanent structure. But the tunnels were still there. Colonel Thomas A. Ware was a battalion commander with the 25th Infantry. He recalled: “When the division built that camp they were uncovering tunnels for months, if not a year. One of my best lieutenants was killed there. His platoon had seen this VC fire a rocket-propelled grenade and pop down into his tunnel. They were right behind him, and this lieutenant went down there and tried to get the trapdoor up. They shot him, killed him with an AK-47 through the trapdoor. They just fired up. You had to be pretty cautious about trying to get too brave and show too much initiative there.” At length the 25th succeeded in stopping up all the tunnels, if only with bulldozers leveling the site for buildings. All, that is, except those Viet Cong tunnels that would be used for training future tunnel rats. The problem of access to the base from underneath was licked, but its troubles were far from over. There were to be more attacks from both inside and outside the perimeter in the years that followed.

For four of those years Cu Chi was the headquarters of the American unit that had begun arriving in the early spring of 1966—the Tropic Lightning Division. The 25th Infantry Division
is in a sense America's Foreign Legion; it has never served on the American mainland. It was formed from existing smaller units in the islands of Hawaii in November 1941, one month before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor—and machine-gunned the 25th's barracks. In 1942 the division was thrown into the Pacific war and earned its (now official) nickname Tropic Lightning from the speed with which it relieved the U.S. Marines on Guadalcanal. Division troops saw continuing action in the South Pacific and the Philippines and, after the Japanese surrender, occupied Osaka. In 1950 the 25th was sent to the snows of Korea and saw prominent action throughout that war. It returned to its home base, Schofield Barracks just outside Honolulu on the island of Oahu, in 1955. The division's identifying shoulder-flash is a bolt of lightning superimposed upon a red taro leaf (taro is a leafy root crop native to the Pacific islands); its motto is “Ready to strike … anywhere, anytime.”

In Hawaii from 1955 to 1963, the 25th was prepared for counter-guerrilla jungle war in Asia and was the only unit in the U.S. Army to undergo such training. With shrewd anticipation of Communist insurgency in Asia, the Pentagon had 25th Infantry troops experience jungle conditions and learn to handle tropical dangers like insects, snakes, and diseases. The Special Asian Warfare Training & Oriental Center (SAWTOC) was established in the foothills of Oahu's Koolau mountains in 1956. It was modeled on the British jungle warfare school in Malaya. In Hawaii, in addition to the guerrilla warfare training center with its twelve mock Asian villages, there was a Code of Conduct Station—a simulated North Korean prisoner-of-war compound, in which the GIs were subjected to controlled humiliation and brutality. So-called Red torture techniques were demonstrated to the troops by guards in North Korean uniforms—all of Asian ethnic origin. Some of the GIs were seriously disturbed by the frightening realism of the camp, which was kept secret for several years. When it was exposed, public protests followed, and it was closed down.

By 1962 the “special war” in Vietnam between the Communists and the ARVN (with U.S. advisers) was in full swing. Units of the 25th were then sent to Camp Cobra at Korat in Thailand, then an ally of the United States in SEATO. There a simulated area of Vietnam was constructed, complete with a
Potemkin village called Ban Kara Eboo, populated by truculent and aggressive GIs in peasant dress, along with a few helpful Thais. The emphasis of the training was on civic action: cajoling villagers into transferring their sympathies to the government, and therefore betraying any guerrillas whose whereabouts they might know. The setting was authentically Southeast Asian, but it was hopelessly unlike the reality of the situation in Vietnam. It overlooked the centuries-old xenophobia of the Vietnamese, and their tradition of wily dissimulation in the face of authority. Nor did it anticipate the Viet Cong's greatest tactical asset—the tunnel system. And ironically, for all the 25th's training in guerrilla warfare, many of the operations in which the division would take part in Vietnam would be “big war” operations, with thousands of troops, armored vehicles, and helicopters crashing across the countryside in search of an elusive enemy.

In early 1963, the Tropic Lightning sent a hundred aerial door-gunners to Vietnam at the request of MACV to “ride shotgun” on helicopters carrying ARVN troops. They were the first Americans committed in a capacity other than as “advisers.” In 1965, the main deployment of U.S. troops to Vietnam began, and a brigade of the 25th was airlifted to Pleiku in the central highlands, where General Giap's most potent threat was then perceived to be. The bulk of the division, however, was destined for Cu Chi, which became its headquarters in the spring of 1966, under the command of Major General Fred Weyand, a lanky and slow-talking Californian. Weyand commanded the division until March 1967, and went on to become a corps commander, and later the last commander of all American troops in Vietnam. Because it stayed at the base throughout the war, the division earned the nickname the Cu Chi National Guard.

The site of Cu Chi base was carefully surveyed. Officers of the 25th Infantry studied maps of the area back in the comfort of Hawaii, and an advance party under the division's support commander made an on-site inspection. The base would be what the army called semipermanent. The location had been chosen with an eye not just to defensibility but to water supply, drainage, and other real-estate considerations. “I selected Cu Chi,” said General Weyand, “as an area that was well away from the populated center of Saigon, to act as a sort of lightning
rod for the enemy. We picked the specific area because of the topography. It was the one place that was above the water table, where we could put trucks and tanks without having them sink out of sight during the monsoon season. Our artillery could reach out, so an area of about 5,000 meters in diameter around would be cleared of any continuous real activity.” Unfortunately, it was precisely because the land was twelve meters above the water table that it was possible for the Viet Cong to have burrowed so many tunnels underneath it.

Cantonments were designated in the base for the various battalions, and road and telephone networks laid out. But perimeter defense took priority. Bulldozers cleared surrounding farmland to ensure a field of fire. Observation towers were built looking out over it, and firing positions with overhead cover, an earth rampart, barbed-wire entanglements, floodlights, and minefields were put in place.

Given that they were at war, Tropic Lightning soldiers lived in conditions of luxury undreamed of by earlier generations of GIs serving in the tropics. Before the division left Hawaii, it had obtained precut tent and latrine kits, which were erected at Cu Chi. But these were used only while the wooden huts and air-conditioned steel offices were being built. The division also brought along ice-machine plants, sixty-five-cubic-foot walk-in refrigerators, ten-kilowatt generator sets, ice chests, and folding beds; in addition there were filing cabinets, desks, chairs, tables, safes, tools, and communications equipment. Until a proper water supply was installed, showers were taken under improvised water-tanks made from bomb casings. Construction crews built maintenance shelters, fuel storage tanks, ammunition bunkers, roads, and helicopter pads. The army would boast that Cu Chi had virtually all the facilities found at any permanent U.S. Army base, including clubs for officers, NCOs, and enlisted men; a USO club, a radio station, barber shops, sports fields, miniature golf courses, swimming pools, and chapels. Running the camp became a complex task in itself, consuming time, resources, and manpower beyond, as one commander put it, “the organic capabilities of battalions, brigades, and divisions.” For one combat commander the base devoured so many resources that it became “the tail that wagged the dog.”

When it was completed in mid-1966, Cu Chi base was an
imposing place. It covered 1,500 acres and its perimeter was six miles around. At any time, over 4,500 men and a few women lived, worked, and played inside it—not counting the army of Vietnamese workers who performed all the most basic tasks. Outside the main gate was a sign that read A
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. Inside was the divisional headquarters, an elegant and broad-fronted one-story building with three gables in its sloping tin roof. In front of it stood a lifesize bronze statue of a GI between two flagpoles, one flying the Stars and Stripes, the other the three red stripes on a yellow background of the Republic of Vietnam (a flag which gave rise to the unkind gibe “When they're not red, they're yellow”). In front of these was a parade ground with a huge helicopter landing pad shaped and painted exactly like the divisional shoulder-flash—yellow lightning upon a red taro leaf. But despite these and other attempts at beautification, the base was never peaceful. Artillery fire boomed constantly from the big guns inside the perimeter, “harassing and interdicting” any activity in the free strike zones within a huge radius of the base. The air throbbed with the clatter of arriving or departing helicopters.

Rocket and mortar attacks on Cu Chi base usually came from the direction of the Fil Hol plantation, and early on the army established an outlying observation post called Ann-Margaret (after the movie star), facing the forest of rubber trees. Ann-Margaret consisted of ten deeply dug bunkers surrounded by minefields. Each platoon of the 25th Infantry had to spend a month in this outpost. Tragedy struck soldiers of one platoon, who mistakenly walked into a minefield laid by earlier units. Each man going to help a wounded comrade was blown up by the Bouncing Betty mines, which exploded at waist level; some were killed, the rest grievously injured. Because of the mines, medics and ambulances refused to approach. The eventual helicopter rescue took twenty minutes to arrive. In 1967, observation post Ann-Margaret was abandoned as being unprofitable to maintain.

As the 25th Infantry established themselves in Vietnam, they realized the need to give their constantly rotating troops special training in local conditions, and even to share some of their hard-learned knowledge of Viet Cong tactics with ARVN local forces. At Cu Chi base they were proud to show visitors
the Tropic Lightning Academy, a controlled and encapsulated little version of the war. It included the Tunnels, Mines, and Booby-Traps School. In an area of heavy vegetation on the western side of the base, 500 feet of Viet Cong tunnels were maintained by local Vietnamese—but this time for the Americans, and for a payment of eighty piastres (less than a dollar) a day. Prospective tunnel rats were given supervised and safe experience of underground claustrophobia, complete with false walls, seeming dead-ends, and harmless booby traps.

When Lieutenant Colonel James Bushong was the 25th's divisional chemical officer, he was responsible for training tunnel rats. “The main thing about the tunnel rat school,” he said, “was that guys who were sent there who did not have that little bit of craziness, or whatever it took to survive and do well on that assignment, were weeded out early enough.” Sergeant Arnold Gutierrez was also an instructor at the tunnel rat school. He said that few of the students had the stability for the job, and most crawled back out of the training tunnel as soon as they went in; they would not go back and, in Gutierrez's words, “flunked.” Out of fifty students over five months, he remembered only five graduating as tunnel rats.

Alsatian or German shepherd dogs were schooled in the 25th's private tunnel system, as part of the dog-training school at Cu Chi. Hitherto, the U.S. Army had used dogs only as watchdogs or to sniff out drugs in its own barracks. In Vietnam they became scout dogs, or combat trackers, and they and their handlers were much in demand to give early warning of the ever-likely Viet Cong ambushes. At the school, the dogs were trained to respond to ultrasonic whistles inaudible to men, and to detect Viet Cong by scent. This was made easier when defoliants and other chemicals had been sprayed on VC-controlled areas like the Iron Triangle; the dogs could recognize anyone who had been in such an area. However, the Viet Cong found an ingenious way to foil the dogs. Having acquired quantities of American toilet soap on the black market, or stolen it from base camps, they made a practice of washing with it, thus giving off a scent immediately recognizable to the dogs as friendly. Pepper spread on the ground distracted bloodhounds from tunnel entrances.

Dogs proved to be of little use in tunnel exploration. The main reason was their inability to spot booby traps. In tunnels,
dogs were often killed or maimed by wire-triggered grenades; this was so distressing to the handlers that they refused to send dogs down tunnels. (This failure had been one of the reasons for the abrupt creation of human tunnel rats in 1966 after Operation Crimp.)

Cu Chi base also contained the 12th Evacuation Hospital, a 400-bed establishment of a dozen wards housed in Quonset huts. They were arranged around a U-shaped compound connected by covered walkways. A soldier wounded out in the countryside was first treated at a battalion aid station. There he was bandaged up, given morphine, and put onto a “dust-off” medical helicopter to be taken to the evacuation hospital. He could be on the operating table within an hour of being wounded. There he would find the latest equipment, the best facilities, and the most experienced surgical teams available. The “12th Evac” served Cu Chi, Tay Ninh, and Dau Tieng bases. It had two intensive-care units, one for medical-surgical cases, the other for burns. One ward was always kept empty for a sudden influx of casualties from a big battle, an emergency known as a “masscal,” or for prisoners. During the dry seasons of 1966 and 1967, there was a masscal about once a month. Dozens of wounded men, bloody and bandaged, were laid on their stretchers outside the operating rooms. There the army surgeons did triage—estimating whether a man needed urgent surgery or could wait an hour or two, or whether surgery would be wasted on a man unlikely to recover. A masscal was a frantic and noisy occasion of shouted instructions and bloodstained overalls. There was also a ward for Vietnamese civilians; they tended to be caught in the hail of bombs and artillery that would descend on any area thought to contain Viet Cong. The hospital had about thirty doctors and sixty female nurses, some of whom were married to officers of the 25th.