Vietnam (8 page)

The diary of one of these women, Duong Thi Xuan Quy, records her three-month journey to the South with a heavy rucksack on her back:

Pontoon bridges were used to cross rivers, so they could be dismantled quickly to prevent them being targets for American air strikes. In other places, her party had to build makeshift bamboo bridges across razor-backed ridges and where the trail had been washed out by the monsoon rains. They would see young NVA men heavily laden with weapons and ammunition passing them at night. After three months, Quy had to make the dangerous crossing of Highway 9 which ran from Laos into Quang Tri province. After snatching a brief nap in the early morning chill and eating a little of the cooked rice balls they carried, she set off to cross it:

Towards the end of 1965, General Giap began to test the Americans by putting large NVA units into the field. The US brass relished the idea that they would now be facing a conventional army, rather than guerrilla bands, believing that no regular army could resist American might. The NVA suffered huge losses, but still managed to kill Americans. However, the fact that the NVA could take the losses and continue fighting gave them a huge psychological advantage. They, too, were fighting a war of attrition.

In November 1965 the British tried to make peace once again. Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart flew to Moscow in an effort to persuade the Soviets to reopen the Geneva conference. The Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko said that the talks could not begin again until the US had pulled all its troops out of South Vietnam and stopped bombing the North. Meanwhile, on a flying visit to Saigon, Senator Richard Nixon pledged Republican support for the administration's policy, saying, 'There is only one basis for negotiations... a Communist withdrawal'.

The Vietcong seemed more amenable though. In December, they proposed a Christmas truce. The US and South Vietnamese forces accepted and suspended the bombing of the North in the hope that the ceasefire might lead to talks. They proposed extending it, but Vietcong attacks forced the US and ARVN back into action and the bombing of the North resumed on 31 January after a thirty-seven-day bombing pause. By then, Senator Strom Thurmond was calling for the use of nuclear weapons.

Westmoreland also considered using tactical nuclear weapons until he was banned from doing so by the administration. Westmoreland later condemned the ban, arguing that two atomic bombs had 'spoken convincingly' to the Japanese during World War II. As it was, he had 200,000 US troops in Vietnam by the end of 1965, but he had already sent a memo asking for 443,000 by the end of 1966, upping his demand to 460,000 in January 1966. Despite his pessimistic view, McNamara backed Westmoreland's demands, though warning that this would not ensure success. The Senate took a similarly gloomy view, with majority leader Mike Mansfield warning that the whole of Southeast Asia was a potential battlefield.

On the ground, things were going from bad to worse. A Special Forces camp at Khe Sanh, near the DMZ, came under fire from 120mm mortars, the first time the Vietcong had deployed such an awesome weapon. Meanwhile, the VC managed to kidnap US diplomat Douglas Ramsey. However, the Australians managed some success in a full-scale search-and-destroy sweep called Operation Crimp through the 'Iron Triangle', a Vietcong stronghold northwest of Saigon. The troops came up empty handed for the first few days until Sergeant Stewart Green saw what he thought at first was a scorpion on the jungle floor. It turned out to be a nail in a trapdoor. Under it was the mouth of a narrow shaft that led down to a tunnel. Green explored part of the tunnel, but the darkness and claustrophobia soon drove him back. They tried pumping coloured smoke down the shaft and found that it came up out of hidden openings all over the surrounding jungle. At last, they had discovered how the Vietcong could vanish so easily. They were standing on top of a huge complex of tunnels, much of which they destroyed, though they could not confirm a high body count.

The Vietnamese people had a special affinity with the soil of their country and their guerrilla armies had been using tunnels for centuries. Extensive tunnel systems had been used during the French Indochina War, but when the Americans arrived these were extended rapidly. Underground they had dormitories and workshops, hospitals, kitchens, headquarters facilities and supply depots. Some tunnel systems ran for hundreds of miles, from the Cambodian border to the gates of Saigon itself. They were dug by villagers in the laterite clay which set as hard as concrete and, where the water table permitted, were several storeys deep. Levels were separated by airtight doors and U-bends in tunnel floors filled with water to stop the spread of gases and impede the shock waves from explosions. Short tunnels often looked like they were dead ends when, in fact, a concealed trap door connected to a vast network. The tunnels were narrow, which suited the small Vietnamese soldiers, but not the larger Americans or Australians. And they were filled with booby traps: rigged grenades, tethered poisonous snakes and punji sticks, sharpened bamboo stakes. Pits of these stakes were concealed along jungle trails, deadly to anyone who stumbled into them.

Other types of punji traps sprang up, impaling the luckless grunt. Wooden or metal spikes would often be smeared with human excrement to give anyone not killed directly blood poisoning. Trails also concealed mines and grenades rigged to tripwires. These were often hidden under water in places where patrols had to wade through swamps. The VC also littered areas with 'toe-poppers,' upright bullets half-buried with the primer resting on a nail or firing pin. When a GI stood on one it would blow his foot off. Some 10,000 US servicemen lost at least one limb in Vietnam – more than in World War II and Korea put together. Grenades were attached to bamboo arches over the trails so that their shrapnel caused messy head and face wounds. The idea was to sap the morale of the grunts. It also had an added political bonus. An eighteen-year-old GI who had just seen a buddy mutilated by a booby trap was more likely to commit atrocities. Even experienced jungle fighters used local peasants as human booby-trap detectors, causing the Vietnamese people to hate and mistrust the Americans.

The entrances to tunnel complexes were usually surrounded by mines – GIs tended to avoid places where their buddies had been killed or wounded. The entrance shafts were often booby-trapped with a slit at about the level of the eyes of anyone hanging by his fingertips from the lip before dropping down. A spear would be thrust through the slit. Items GIs liked to take as souvenirs were booby-trapped. Even coconuts were filled with explosives. Nowhere in Vietnam was safe. It was even rumoured that prostitutes in Saigon would booby trap their sexual parts with broken glass. Among the Australians there was talk of a young squaddie whose penis was sliced in two by a razor blade mounted on a cork inside a prostitute's vagina – though no one ever met the man or woman concerned. But bad things did happen. One young GI was bought a prostitute by his buddies for his birthday so that he could lose his virginity. After she had relieved him of it, she left a bomb under his bed which blew his arms and legs off. Marine fliers were not allowed downtown in Da Nang in 1965 after a booby-trapped cigarette lighter bought from the street vendor blew a Marine's head off. In another case, a toddler was booby-trapped with explosives so when a kindly GI picked it up, the two of them were blown to smithereens. The GIs got their own back, salting enemy ammunition dumps with doctored rifle bullets and mortar rounds that would blow up in the weapon. The idea was to wound the enemy, not kill him. The VC and NVA had limited medical facilities and an injured man put a lot of strain on their resources. It also bred in the enemy soldiers a mistrust of their own weapons.

Even without the booby traps, life for the grunts in the jungles was bad enough. It was full of blood-sucking insects and leeches that had to be burnt off with a cigarette. There are also 133 species of snake in the jungles of Vietnam – 131 of them poisonous. Some had venom that killed within hours. The damp rotted everything. Monsoon rains turned jungle tracks to mudslides, chilled GIs who had acclimatised to the stifling heat, gave them trench foot, rotted their kit, and turned C-rations into a greasy, cold soup. And twenty-four hours a day they had to be ready for ambush by an unseen enemy.

Conditions for the VC were even worse. Vietnamese peasants were used to life in the paddy fields and were no more at home in the jungle than Americans were, and they were less well prepared. Wearing sandals made them very vulnerable to snake bites. Thousands would have been saved if they had solid army boots. Antivenin tablets were issued, one to be swallowed; a second to be chewed and placed on the bite. However, the Vietcong had no defence against mosquitoes. More Vietcong died of malaria than of any other cause. Even those who survived were permanently weakened. With few medical supplies, Vietcong soldiers did their best with traditional remedies, but any wound almost inevitably resulted in a painful and lingering death.

Vietcong troops were constantly hungry. Twice a day they ate a small ball of cold rice made palatable with a few small chillies and occasionally a little dried meat, fish or salt. One chicken would feed up to thirty men. Most suffered from vitamin deficiencies. Bomb craters filled with water were stocked with fish and ducks. Otherwise they would eat monkey, rat, dog, and even tiger and elephant, which is, apparently, tough and tasteless. Some ate moths attracted by the flame of their lamps. The Vietcong would also scavenge C rations discarded by the ARVN and their American allies, until the GIs started booby-trapping them. Vietcong soldiers were in constant danger of discovery. Where a cooking fire was lit, an elaborate chimney had to be constructed to carry the smoke away into the earth. They also lived in constant fear of artillery and air raids. If they stopped for more than half a day, they would dig in.

In base areas, they lived below ground in tunnels. This was no picnic. The air was bad and what food they had rotted quickly. The tunnels were full of mosquitoes, ants, spiders, and parasites called chiggers that burrowed under the skin causing intensive irritation. Often dead bodies were dragged below ground to foil the Americans' body counts. But their rotting flesh filled the tunnels with a sickening stench. The wounded operated on without anaesthetic in the underground hospitals often begged to be taken above ground to die. Nevertheless an underground lifestyle flourished. There were morale-boosting lectures and other entertainments. Weddings were held and babies born.

Initially, the Americans knew nothing about the tunnels. Indeed, the US Army's biggest base in South Vietnam was built right on top of a Vietcong tunnel system at Chu Chi. When the 25th Infantry Division arrived in 1966, an enterprising VC called Huynh Van Co and two comrades hid underground for a week while the GIs settled in. Then they began to emerge at night to steal food, sabotage equipment, and set off explosives: the newly arrived 25th thought they were being mortared from outside the perimeter. After seriously undermining the 25th's morale, Huynh Van Co and his comrades withdrew undetected and their tunnels were never discovered.

After Operation Crimp, the American forces tried destroying the tunnel systems with explosives or pumping burning acetylene gas down them. This was ineffective due to the hardness of the tunnel walls and the doors and seals the VC had installed. Dogs were sent down, but they were easily killed by the Vietcong or their booby traps. There was no alternative but to send men down. Special teams of volunteers called 'tunnel rats' were formed under a southerner named Captain Herbert Thornton, the Chemical Officer of the 1st Infantry Division. He narrowly escaped death when crawling behind a rookie tunnel rat who detonated a booby trap. The explosion in such a confined space deafened Thornton in one ear, though the rookie's body protected him from much of the blast.

While a high-tech war raged above ground, the tunnel rats took on the enemy on their own territory underground with nothing more than a flashlight, a handgun, and a knife. Facing all manner of booby traps along with armed men hidden in the dark recesses of their own tunnel systems, the tunnel rats earned enormous respect from their above-ground colleagues. Smaller men, often Hispanics, were used, often accompanied by 'Kit Carson Scouts': Vietcong who had defected to the Americans. They were used to negotiate with cornered VC and persuade them to surrender. Valuable intelligence was gained this way. Careful searches were made as the Vietcong's battle plans, along with other vital documents, were stored underground. The tunnel rats developed their own procedures. They never fired more than three shots without reloading, otherwise the enemy would know you were out of ammunition. They also whistled 'Dixie' when they emerged, as a mud-covered figure clambering out of a tunnel shaft might be mistaken for a VC. The tunnel rats had their own code of honour too. No dead tunnel rat was ever left underground and rats would often disobey direct orders to return underground and kill whoever had killed one of theirs. And they were not without a sense of irony: their unofficial motto was cod Latin for 'not worth a rat's ass'.