PRESIDENT'S UNDERGROUND COMMAND CENTER

Military maps line the walls of the underground command center below the former Presidential Palace

It’s so quiet down here and empty. Lonely even. As far as I can tell, I’m the only one down here. I’m below ground, only this time I’m under Saigon's former Presidential Palace. I’m in what used to be the most technologically advanced basement in all of Vietnam. More than a basement, I’m in an underground military command center.

It’s late in the afternoon, and the other visitors have left, so I have the entire lower level all to myself, and it's eerie. I’m in the command room where maps line the dark red walls. The huge maps reach from the floor to the ceiling. There are even more maps down here, than there were outside the president’s office a few levels above me. In a military command center, field communications are crucial. That takes a lot of electronics equipment, so most of the rooms down in this maze are devoted to communications. Much of the old American made equipment still remains, although all the cables are gone. In room after room, I find transmitters, teletype machines, receivers, switchboards, and old rotary phones. Signs in imperfect English list the former function of each room: “THE SIGNAL TEAM CHIEF ROOM”, “FIXED RECEIVING SITE SECTION”, “TELETYPEWRITER SECTION”, and “THE HIGHFREQUENCY RADIO ROOM”. 

Once buzzing with military activity, the President's command center is now eerily empty

Farther down a hallway, I enter a small room with only a twin bed, and two phones on a night table. It’s nothing special; only the elaborate wood frame of the bed gives a hint of its former importance. The sign reads, “THE COMBAT DUTY BEDROOM OF THE PRESIDENT”. Thieu may have slept down here during the Tet offensive when the palace was briefly under attack, but he was long gone before the tanks arrived in 1975.

Captured US made radio equipment is still found in many rooms

Down the hall near the kitchen, I get to a nearly bare white walled room. It’s been emptied of its contents, leaving only a desk, chair, and an empty gun rack for M-16s. This was the “SECURITY SECTION” for the president’s guards. An elite group, the guards even had an indoor shooting range in the back of the palace to keep their shooting skills sharp. During Thieu’s years in power, his security team protected him well for most of the war years. But when the communist tanks finally invaded the city and broke through the front gates, they put up no resistance at all. With the palace captured, the remaining loyal palace staff and guards were arrested, with most were sent off to ‘re-education camps’. They joined hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese soldiers and government officials in the camps, some never to return. 

Old Motorola radio gear, originally given to South Vietnam as aid from the USA

Even though I’m below ground level in this bunker basement, I come across stairs going further underground. Access is blocked here, but I can’t help wondering if this is the escape tunnel going to the former Deputy Governor’s Palace, where the former dictator Diem hid before he was killed in the 1963 coup. As curious as I am, I go no further. I’ve heard that section of tunnel isn’t safe anymore. Plus, as an American in Vietnam, I wouldn’t expect much leniency if I was caught in a restricted area. I really don’t want to spend time in a Vietnamese jail.

Having already seen the lowest level of the palace, I decide to go see the highest. After climbing a few flights of stairs in dingy stairwells, I find myself up on the palace rooftop. As I reach the top level, I’m startled to find myself on a large covered terrace, that was once used for official receptions. A riser to one side of the terrace must have been used for live bands. Perhaps President Thieu and his wife once waltzed across this fine wooden floor, as ministers and honored guests looked on. With more interest in the surrounding scenery, I open the clear glass doors, and step across to the back railing.

On the adjacent rooftop below, I’m surprised to see another Huey helicopter parked there, marked with the flag of South Vietnam. Back in the day, President Thieu used to fly around to the provinces by chopper, meeting politicians, and rallying the troops. With the war on, flying around the country was much safer for him than driving.

Rooftop of the Palace. A Huey chopper once flew President Thieu around South Vietnam. A red circle marks an old bomb strike from 1975.

From this same vantage point, I can see the sight of the second airborne attack on this locale. In the spring of 1975 as the ARVN defenses were crumbling, a South Vietnamese pilot decided to defect to the communists. He took off in his US built F-5 jet, and before heading north, he unleashed two bombs onto the rear section of the palace, where the president’s living quarters were. Out in front of the parked Huey, two large circles have been painted on the repaired rooftop, marking the bomb strikes from the pilot’s asassination attempt. A large piece of rusty bomb shrapnel lies close by. Since the palace had been built strong enough to survive an attack, no one was killed, but it was another propaganda victory for the communists. With an audacious attack on the palace, it was becoming evident that the end was near.

US made F-5 fighter that was flown by defector to bomb the Palace shortly before the war ended

Walking to the opposite rooftop railing, I look down on the front lawn. When the final push came weeks later and the NVA tanks broke through the front gates, the tank crewman scrambled out of their armored vehicles and ran right into the palace. Encountering no resistance, one of the crewman ran all the way up the stairwell to the roof, and stood at the railing where I am now. As TV news cameras rolled, he then waved a Viet Cong flag from the rooftop, for all of the world to see. The communists had taken the palace, and the war was done. Looking around me, I’m amazed to see that there is no plaque up here to mark the event.

For some time after the surrender, the former Independence Palace became a government office building. For a while it was officially named the “Office of the Military Management Committee of Saigon”. A giant portrait of Ho, two stories tall, hung above the front entrance. That portrait has since been removed, perhaps because the current government has become less dogmatic. Still, there is a flag flying from the palace rooftop today, only now it’s the flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. 

View from atop the Palace, from the exact spot where a North Vietnamese soldier waved a Viet Cong flag to signal the end of the war.

 

WHERE CAPITALISM BEAT COMMUNISM

An old Soviet made tank in Saigon. Folks today are more interested in Toyotas.

“The Ho Chi Minh Campaign” is the Vietnamese name for the last offensive that finally ended the war in 1975. Located down the street from the old Presidential Palace, the Ho Chi Minh Campaign Museum is today almost an afterthought. As I walked around this museum, I was the only visitor! Besides old weapons and usual photo displays, the biggest exhibit and centerpiece of this museum is a large model of Saigon and surrounding provinces. The exhibit shows troop movements from the war’s final days, ending with the communist victory. With flashing LED lights, it’s a very impressive display. Or at least it was. After flipping a few switches, I found it doesn’t work anymore.

Outside the museum are more captured American made weapons, plus a lot of Soviet built weapons used in the final offensive. I find that what’s most telling about being here, is not what’s inside the museum, but what surrounds the place.

Near the entrance, an old North Vietnamese Army tank sits out front. Soviet made, it is the very image of communist power. As I stand and look at it, I can’t help but notice that behind and above it, is a big sign from the Toyota dealership next door. Toyotas are much more relevant to Vietnamese today, than this rusting Russian tank.

Also on the museum grounds, a Soviet built surface to air missile points skyward. These missiles were once the terror of the skies, shooting down American made fighter jets and heavy bombers. Towering beyond the missile in the background, is the massive Prudential Insurance building, one of the taller skyscrapers in Saigon. Also across the street from the museum, is a Mercedes Benz dealership. I recall the two Mercedes I recently saw with the Prime Minister’s motorcade, along with other American made vehicles.

A Russian built surface to air missile, points skyward over the Prudential Building.

These days the car dealerships are getting much more attention than this museum, and the power of commerce is evident throughout the city. With the rise of business, and the decline of communist dogma, one thing is clear. The Communists may have won the war, but the capitalists have won the post-war.

THE WAR KILLED MY LIFE

Duc served with Americans on a PBR like this one. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

I’ve heard refugees and veterans speak of war’s awful consequences before, but I’d never heard it put into these five simple words.

“The war killed my life.”

I heard these words from Duc (pronounced 'Duke'), a veteran who had fought for the losing side of the war in South Vietnam. Despite him losing so much from the conflict and its aftermath, Duc had managed to survive. Duc was my tour guide in Cu Chi, and compared to the usually reserved Vietnamese, he’s a very vocal and excitable fellow.

“I’m not very handsome like before,” Duc joked, and the tour group I’m in lets out a collective chuckle. At 59 years old, he’s slight in stature, with a touch of an Asian moustache. A tour guide for more than 10 years, he knows how to keep foreigners interested. Wearing a ball cap and 80’s style mirrored sunglasses, he has the air of a military veteran. Through Duc’s speeches to the tour group, and later conversation I shared with him, he had a remarkable story to tell. In between his puffs on cigarettes, his story unfolded.

Duc had begun life with so much. He was born to a Vietnamese mother from an upper class Saigon family. She was a professor at a local university. His father was a diplomat from the Philippines. From such a family, Duc was able to attend excellent schools. As he grew up in the southern capital, his family’s status kept him relatively insulated from the war.

Duc's unit patrolled dangerous waterways, such as here in the Mekong Delta

“For 125 years Vietnam people fight. They never stop,” Duc told us. It was a long road of conflict. There were so many years of war fighting the French, the Japanese, the Americans, and each other. His family’s life had been struck by the tragedy of war before. His grandmother was killed in 1944, when a Japanese bomb struck their house during their World War II occupation.

During the 1960’s, Duc was a university student in Saigon, studying to be a doctor. At that time the city was reasonably peaceful, and for him, the war was something far away. Then the Tet Offensive happened in 1968. With so much fighting around the city, Duc was shocked to see bodies lying in the streets. He was also shocked to learn that one of his female classmates was a Viet Cong, killed in the fighting. With his country in crisis, Duc decided to join the fight to defend it.

Unlike so many who ended up in the army, Duke was put in a naval unit. His service included assignment at bases in America. He served at bases in Philadelphia and San Diego, teaching new  coast guard and naval recruits how to drive the PBR boats (patrol boats) used in the Vietnam's waterways. Although many Vietnamese dream of living in America, Duc missed his country, his family, and Vietnamese food. “I don’t like American food. It’s horrible,” Duc said bluntly. He looked forward to going home.

In 1969, he was sent back to Vietnam. He had reached the rank of warrant officer, and was attached to an American Naval unit patrolling the rivers of South Vietnam. His unit even had a young naval lieutenant by the name of John Kerry. This was the same John Kerry who would later become a senator, and presidential candidate.(Note: since I 1st posted this story, Kerry has become Secretary of State.)

Duc fought in John Kerry's unit (State photo)

One of his unit’s duties were missions to retrieve servicemen who were missing in action.(MIA’s) Some of Duc’s most dangerous missions were to recover live American pilots, or bodies of American servicemen killed in action in enemy areas. Duc was shot during one of these missions, recovered, and returned to duty. Luckily for him, his small stature made him a smaller target for communist gunners.

When the US signed the peace agreement and left in 1973, the American officers in his unit offered to take Duc with them. He refused. “Vietnam is my country,” he said, “I love my country.” He didn’t want to abandon it. Additionally, his mother had gotten divorced, and he didn’t want to leave her either. Patriotism and duty to family meant more to him than escape. And besides, he’d been to America already, and he still hated the food.

Two years later, the North Vietnamese Army advanced on Saigon. The end was imminent. Duc’s mother begged him to leave the country. He wouldn’t do it. With the end near, Duc took his service revolver, and went outside to commit suicide. With tears in his eyes, he raised the pistol to his head… and he couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t pull the trigger. Somehow, Duc would survive.

After the communists took over, thousands of those like Duc who had fought alongside the Americans were captured and imprisoned. Duc was sent away to a ‘re-education’ camp. For three years, Duc had to sit through daily sessions of political cadres spouting communist propaganda. Conditions were difficult. Duc got malaria in prison, and his captors refused to give him any medicine. Some other prisoners died from the malaria. Duc shivered and suffered from fever. Eventually he recovered. When he was finally released, he returned to Saigon, only to find that his mother had died during his imprisonment. He had never even been informed. Duc found that his brothers and sisters had also fled the country. He couldn’t move back into his family’s house either. It was now occupied by another family with connections to the new government.

Duc boarded cargo boats much like this one, as they searched for smuggled Viet Cong weapons

Duc would learn that despite his communist ‘re-education’, it was very difficult for him to find work. The government was refusing all professional jobs to anyone from the former South Vietnamese military.

Eventually, Duc found himself a good Vietnamese woman, and married. “My wife so ugly,” he joked in his crass style, “but I love her so much. She very good cook.” He settled into a family life, and had two sons. As the Vietnamese economy liberalized, his English speaking skills helped him get a job as a tour guide, where he still works today. He also managed to locate his siblings. His brother and sister returned this year from Australia for a family reunion during the Tet holidays.

Duc has regained a somewhat normal life, but he decided that he won’t work for much longer. His oldest son will soon finish medical school, and when he does he’ll be able to support Duc. He’ll be 60 years old then, and will retire from being a tour guide. Having worked six to seven days a week for years, he’s looking forward to the rest.

I'd like to show you a photo of Duc, but having him identified publicly, may get him trouble again with Vietnam's communist government. I'd better keep the photos I have of him private. Duc has suffered enough.

A DEADLY TRAP

A Vietnamese punji trap, designed to trap US foot soldiers

Our group is exploring outside the war tunnels of Cu Chi, when our guide Duc announces, “If you don’t like your wife, let me know, and we can leave her in the tunnel!” A former soldier for South Vietnam during the war, Duc may have had a hard life, but he hasn’t lost his sense of humor.

As I look around, I see another tunnel entrance. This one isn’t for visitors, so I grab a light, and crawl down for a quick look alone. Descending the cramped steps, I get six feet underground, where the tunnel branches out. This tunnel is REALLY cramped; obviously not made for a tall guy like me. It’s only knee high. Squeezing down into the tight space for a better look, my light illuminates the walls of red clay. It gets even tighter further ahead, so I have to stop. If I tried to continue, I would have to shimmy along like a snake, and would probably end up stuck. I don’t really feel like screaming for help, and then being dragged out by my feet.

The war tunnels had many levels, like an underground village

Most of these old war tunnels aren’t safe anymore, and many sections have collapsed from erosion. Although there are no longer Vietnam Cong rebels down here, I recall that certain slithering reptiles still make their homes in these tunnels. With that in mind, I crawl backwards to the entrance and climb out of the tunnel.

Walking on, our group reaches a small clearing in the woods. There are no hiding places here, or so we think. The ground is covered with fallen leaves of the surrounding jungle foliage, and a Vietnamese soldier joins us. He steps towards the center, and reaches down into the leaves. I’m taken aback when he lifts a perfectly camouflaged wooden cover, the size of a shoe box, revealing a dark cavity in the earth beneath. He puts his feet in, drops into the small hole, and pulls the cover closed again, all in less than 10 seconds. His hiding place is virtually undetectable.

This tiny hideout is what was known as a spider hole. Viet Cong would emerge from these holes frequently to fire on patrolling American soldiers. When charging GI’s advanced on the VC’s position, the VC would quickly disappear in seconds back into the spider hole. This left the puzzled, frustrated American soldiers wondering how the lone VC had disappeared.

Feeling brave, I hop into the hole to check it out, but like the tunnels, these small holes were tailor made for the smaller, thinner VC. It takes me longer than the small soldier, but I manage to squeeze in. The lid comes on, and it’s pitch black, tight, but a very effective hiding place. Someone could step on the door itself, and never know I’m down here.

A soldier's hiding place, for thin people only

I climb out, and Duc says that a few days previously, a large Canadian woman got stuck in this very same spider hole. It was a struggle to get her back out. “It took us twenty minutes,” he says. “We needed five people to pull her out.” Duc smirked, added a few vulgarities, and said, “She lost her trousers, her panties, everything.”

As we make our way around the old battlefield, we pass many depressions in the surrounding jungle. These are old bomb craters, of many different sizes. Since the VC tunnel system was never destroyed, this whole region was continuously bombed by aircraft and artillery for years. Duc witnessed a bombing himself. One day he left nearby Dong Du base in a helicopter. “I was riding in Huey,” he said. “We look down, we see smoke come out of ground.”

Their chopper was over tunnel territory, and the smoke they saw was from a hidden chimney. Someone was cooking in an underground Viet Cong kitchen. The co-pilot called in the coordinates, and soon an artillery strike rained down on the surrounding landscape. When the dust cleared, the smoke had stopped.

With so much artillery and aerial bombing, by 1972 Cu Chi’s not all of them exploded. The VC found some of them, and carefully brought them down to the tunnels. Duc brings us to a workshop area of the tunnel network, where a dud 250 pound airborne bomb was left partially opened.

“Here they cut open the bomb, take out explosive,” Duc says. Fighting an enemy that was much better armed then they were, the VC scrounged for weapons and explosives wherever they could. Using simple tools, VC tried to carefully removed the explosives, a very dangerous process. Think of The Hurt Locker, with no body armor. Sometimes as they worked, the bomb went off, killing all the VC near it. When the explosive was successfully removed, it was remanufactured into primitive hand grenades and landmines.

Cu Chi was once well known for fruit trees, but those are long gone now, since it wasn’t just bombs that were dropped on the surrounding woods. “All the tree die, everything dead,” Duc says. “They drop Agent Orange.”

In the early years of the war, Agent Orange was sprayed over rural areas where the enemy was thought to hide. Used as an herbicide to remove brush and trees, nobody knew how toxic the chemical really was in the early years. When the military eventually learned that exposure to Agent Orange was causing health problems, they stopped using it, but by that time it was too late. Millions had already been exposed to the dangerous chemical including soldiers from both sides, and numerous civilians. Many developed health problems later from their exposure, including many types of cancer, Parkinson’s disease, miscarriages, and birth defects in their children.

Decades later trees are growing back now, but few edible crops are grown here, due to the fear of chemicals still present. Much of the land has been switched over to government rubber tree farms.

Arriving at another section of the old battlefield, we reach another clearing, or so it seems. Duc steps into the center and kicks at the grass on the ground. The grassy floor swoops downward like a swinging door, revealing a four foot fall down onto sharpened steel spikes in a pit beneath. This is a punji trap, the kind the VC dug out in the jungle earth, hoping to kill or wound unsuspecting American troops patrolling on foot.

Duc shows us a few more traps here. There are the deep tiger pit-like traps, spiked balls that swung down from trees, and wooden boards that swung down laden with spikes. The most common punji traps were smaller, shallow holes dug out along footpaths. If a GI stepped into one, the bamboo or steel spikes were sharp enough to penetrate through his boot into his foot. The VC sometimes urinated on the spikes before they hid them, to increase the likelihood of infection.

The skeleton of an American M-41 tank, stripped after it was abandoned

We reach another clearing, and come across an old American M-41 tank. It ran over a mine here in 1970, and has been here ever since. Duc says, “One American died here. After tank hit mine, the tank cannot move. He got out, and got shot.”

Some bullet marks are still visible on the outside of the tank. Just steps away, old trenches and a tunnel entrance show where the VC could have taken cover.

Looking at the tank now, it has been stripped of most of its parts. The treads are gone, and the engine’s gone. I remember when I worked in Afghanistan, where I saw old tank engines converted into small village generators. Here, the rest was probably sold for scrap metal by locals. Now it’s just an old shell, for the curious to climb on.

I remember well a tank story from Don, a Vietnam war veteran from my hometown in America. He was an army mechanic based here in Cu Chi. The story went that they had an M-41 tank like this one on their base, and as sometimes happens in any military bureaucracy, all the paperwork for it had been lost. One of the oddities about the US Army, was that it was an extremely difficult, nearly impossible task to re-register a tank without any paperwork. Re-doing the paperwork was such a difficult, time consuming process, that it would have been much easier for them to just take the tank, put it into a hole, and bury it. And that’s exactly what they did.

They found an out of the way corner of the base, and used earth movers to excavate a deep hole. After removing the engine for spare parts, they pushed the tank right into the giant hole, and buried it. That wasn’t quite the end of it. A couple days later, the tank’s radio antenna popped up out of the loose dirt. This worried Don and his buddies. If their base commander found out that they had buried a tank, they would have been in a great deal of trouble. So Don’s Sargeant told him and another GI to grab a couple shovels, go out to the offending antenna, dig down a couple feet, chop it off, and rebury the hole. And that’s exactly what they did.

It almost seems like I should ask Don exactly where that old tank was buried. After all, it could be dug up and all that steel could be recycled. But if that tank was found, it may be more valuable to the Vietnamese government for propaganda purposes. They just might dig it up, repaint it like new, and stick it up on a monument somewhere with a plaque saying how it was captured in battle. The war may be over, but there is still propaganda. 

It would be great for me to get into the old Dong Du base for a look around at Don's old haunts, but I learn that going inside is out of the question. It’s still a military base today, only now it’s occupied by a few thousand troops of the Vietnamese Army. They’re not about to let an American back in.

FEAR AND UNDERGROUND WAR IN CU CHI

The dark, forboding war tunnels of Cu Chi

I’m in another spooky tunnel, and this time it’s dark. Extremely dark, with no lighting. Yes, it’s so dark, I cannot even see my hand in front of my face.

This time there’s no tile floors, or concrete walls. I’m surrounded by clayish-dirt. I’m in a very tight earthen cave, and there’s very little space around me. It is so cramped down here, that I’m forced to crawl on my hands and knees. With my vision useless, I can rely only on my sense of touch. As I crawl ahead slowly, each of my hands reaches forward in the blackness, feeling only damp dirt beneath. The walls and ceiling are so tight, it’s impossible for me to turn around. So this is what claustrophobia feels like.

I’m in the Cu Chi war tunnels, just north of the former city of Saigon. This was an enormous tunnel network built by Vietnamese rebels for use first against the French, and later used against the Americans. It is enormous in length only. The height and width of most of the tunnels were kept to a minimum. This meant that a short Viet Cong soldier could crawl through without much difficulty, while the taller, bulkier American soldiers couldn’t get through at all. That was the idea behind their narrow construction. American soldiers weren’t likely to follow the Viet Cong into small spaces where they couldn’t fit.

“It’s going down,” I hear from a nervous voice up ahead, another visitor in this world of darkness. I’m aware that this section of the tunnel has been widened, so someone as tall as I can still crawl through. But as if the dark and tight conditions weren’t enough already, now the tunnel is starting to slope downward. I’m going deeper underground. Crawling forward on a downward angle in the darkness is even more nerve wracking.

I’m inching through the tunnels with a group of visiting tourists, but most of the tour group hasn’t made it this far. Our larger group first entered the tunnels about 200 meters behind us. Back there, closer to the entrance, there was some lighting. But as we crawled ahead in the cramped conditions, the lights eventually ran out. Rounding a turn, the blackness surrounded us. Most of the other tourists couldn’t handle either the darkness, or the claustrophobic conditions. Since the war’s end, the only residents of these tunnels have been snakes, spiders and scorpions. The others escaped their fears by climbing out through side exits.

Now, there are only a few us left, feeling our way forward across the clayish soil of the tunnel floor, in total darkness. I’ve never even imagined conditions like this before. Try crawling for 400 meters sometime. Then try it totally blind. Next, try it in a tunnel so tight, that your shoulders bump the walls on both sides, and your head scrapes along the dirt ceiling. During the war the Viet Cong crawled around down here every day, and they crawled for far longer distances.

This vast tunnel network was more than 200 km long! The clayish soil of Cu Chi made for perfect tunneling conditions. The network stretched from the outskirts of Saigon, all the way to the Cambodian border. Some tunnels even reached under the American military bases. This underground network had just about everything the Viet Cong needed. These narrow tunnels widened out to become rooms for various uses. There were bunkers for fighting, and bunk rooms for sleeping. There were kitchens, storage rooms, meeting rooms, and even underground hospitals. In some places there were as many as three levels, descending deep beneath the earth.

The Americans eventually put together a unit of soldiers to pursue and fight the VC down in the tunnels. Shorter and smaller in stature than average American men, they became known as the Tunnel Rats. It’s hard to imagine how difficult it was down here then, crawling and fighting for their lives, armed with only a pistol and a flashlight. It's spooky enough down here as it is now. I can't imagine how terrifying it must have been down here then, when the Tunnel Rats and Viet Cong guerrillas fought to the death in the darkness.

While the tunnel rats fought undergound, American military might tried to destroy the tunnels any way they could. Aerial attacks, artillery, bulldozers, explosives, gas, and defoliants, none were enough drive the Viet Cong out of Cu Chi’s underground world.  By the end of the war, Cu Chi became one of the most bombed out places in Vietnam. Between the craters and lack of vegetation from Agent Orange, the place resembled a moonscape, and the environment was destroyed.

Unexploded US bombs found in Cu Chi. They are still being found today.

Despite their vast firepower and technology, the American military never managed to destroy the tunnel network. The network was just too long, and the VC kept right on digging more tunnels.

On the opposite end, despite many attacks, the Viet Cong never managed to capture any of the vast US bases around Cu Chi while the Americans were still here. The conflict here was more or less a stalemate. But the VC did manage to maintain a presence, and continued to harass the American bases. In that sense, the Cu Chi war tunnels aren’t really a monument to victory. They’re more of a monument to Vietnamese tenacity.