SURVIVAL IN NORTH VIETNAM'S WAR TUNNELS

Old Vietnamese soldier sits outside tunnel entrance

Deep in the dark war tunnels, below the village

I’m down in a dark tunnel. I've already been down in the Cu Chi tunnels, where Viet Cong guerillas had fought tough American 'tunnel rats' back during the war. But this place is different. I'm now in what used to be North Vietnam.

It’s very damp down here, and the air is humid. As I descend deeper inside, darkness envelops me. I round a corner, where a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling helps illuminate the way. In the dim light, I can make out cave walls that are a mixture of brownish soil and whitish chalk.

Fortunately, I don’t have to crawl around on my hands and knees this time, this passageway is reasonably spacious. But I'm forced to walk along bent over like a hunchback. This tunnel wasn’t made for tall Americans like me, but for shorter Vietnamese.

I’m beneath the village of Vinh Moc, and until the country became divided by the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), this was just a quiet fishing and farming village in central Vietnam. When the country was split in two, that left Vinh Moc located just to the north of the DMZ in North Vietnam. For Vinh Moc’s villagers, the quiet coastal life that they had known was over. Overnight, they found themselves on the front line of Vietnam’s most devastating war.

Frieze depicts wartime Vinh Moc, both above and below ground

Much as the Gio Linh Firebase I had seen on the opposite side of the DMZ was a target of communist artillery, this village on the northern side was bombed even more intensely by US firepower. Since Vinh Moc was a coastal community held by the North Vietnamese Army, the NVA set up their heavy guns here, making the town a target of  US bombing from artillery, from the air, and even from the sea by heavy guns of the U.S. Navy. With this trio of destruction, the villagers of Vinh Moc soon found themselves living in one of the most heavily bombed villages in the war. Just about every building in the community was destroyed, including the village church.

As casualties mounted, many villagers fled to escape the shelling of the 1960’s, but some families stayed. With so many bombing attacks hitting the village so frequently, there was only one place where the villagers could find safety, and that was deep underground. Work quickly began on tunnels for shelter, and on trenches connecting houses to tunnel entrances.

Huge bomb crater from the war in Vinh Moc

As I walk stooped over through the dimly lit tunnels, my head bumps a crossbeam. Some stretches have wooden beams and supports lining the walls and ceiling, giving the appearance of an old gold mine. It’s an impressive network. These tunnels are solid, and far more spacious than those that I crawled through before in Cu Chi outside of Saigon. Those tunnels in the south were very narrow, built tight to discourage the taller and fatter Americans from entering. Since Vinh Moc lies within North Vietnam, they didn’t have to worry about American tunnel rats pursuing them down in these caves. These tunnels were built much taller and wider, to accommodate all of the village families.

Above ground many old bomb craters are still scattered around the tunnel entrances, but these tunnels were deep enough to protect them from incoming artillery. Multiple entrances allowed multiple means of escape. That way if a direct hit caused an entrance to cave in, the villagers were not left trapped inside.

 

The maternity room; 17 babies were born in the tunnels

There were three layers of tunnels, with the deepest going down to a very safe 23 meters. I’d like to see the lowest levels, but they have been closed off. Perhaps they are no longer maintained.

As I walk along, I encounter side rooms dug into tunnel walls. There are still beds inside, made of bamboo. These spaces were made to shelter individual families, who could sleep down here in safety. During long attacks, the villagers stayed down here for days at a time. For some villagers, there lives began down here.

“My father born in tunnel,” said Le, a local teenager who sells drinks outside. As the war dragged on, 17 of Vin Moc’s babies were born underground as the bombs fell above them on the surface. There was a makeshift hospital in one room, but conditions were far from sterile. Other infants born in these difficult and stressful circumstances didn’t survive.

There were rooms down here for cooking, for meetings, and storage for NVA supplies and ammunition. What they didn’t have room for, was an underground school.

Some entrances nearly reach the South China Sea coast

“No school (back then,)” Le told me. After the schoolhouse was destroyed, Le’s father grew up without an education. “Many men no have job now,” Le explained. The lack of schooling in their youth, made it difficult for Vinh Moc’s men to find a job in Vietnam’s economy of today. Le told me her father has to get by now with occasional work as a fisherman. 

I see daylight ahead, and follow it to a tunnel exit. As I walk out the opening, I have to duck under overhanging weeds. This entrance is surrounded by ferns and other overgrowth. After walking a few steps down the path, the brush opens up, and reveals a beach. I had no idea that the tunnels were located so close to the coast; the surf of the South China Sea is only steps in front of me. Then I turn around, and look back at the tunnel entrance. I can’t even see it! This entrance was well placed. Even with no war going on today, the entrance is still perfectly camouflaged by nature itself.

As I finish exploring, I leave the tunnel network, and find myself back in the village center.  I rub my back, pleased to be able to stand fully erect again.

Steps away from the tunnel entrance, it's nearly invisible

 Before I depart, I encounter a sight common in Vinh Moc during the war years. I happen upon a group of people wearing the military uniforms of the North Vietnamese Army. They are all older Vietnamese women, and most are wearing medals on their plain khaki clothing. I quickly realize that these ladies are all war veterans.

A sign on their bus translates as, “Association of Pioneer Youth Visiting The Old Battlefields.” These veteran women had a hazardous job. In their younger days as teenagers, these ‘volunteers’ had the difficult job of manually building and maintaining the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

As I look on, some foreign tourists approach to pose with the women for photos. The lady vets are all smiles. Many of them are grandmothers now, and they’re surprised at this kind of attention from foreigners. The contrast in size is obvious. Posing next to the taller Europeans, many of the Vietnamese ladies are not even five feet tall. It’s hard to imagine that this group of short, smiling older women are war vets. But they were there. They dug trenches, repaired the roads, and ran for cover from air raids. When jets destroyed the Ho Chi Minh Trail, they went right back out to work, to fix the roads all over again.

Lady war veterans from North Vietnam; they worked to build the Ho Chi Minh Trail

I remember the Godmother that I meet back in Saigon, who in her younger years wasn’t even 18 when as a young Viet Cong, she took on the US Army. She barely survived. I wonder how many of these ‘Pioneer Youth’ were killed or wounded as they carried out their dangerous duty.

Back in the 1960’s, American women were marching in the streets to protest for women’s rights. At the same time, many Vietnamese women here were marching off to war. Communists aren’t known for personal freedoms or liberty, but they did give their women a right that American women were mostly denied: the right to die in a war. The communists had female soldiers out in the line of fire, decades before the US military did.

Back in World War II, America had 'Rosie the Riveter', who donned coveralls, and went off to work to build planes, ships and tanks.

In Vietnam they had 'Diu the Digger', who put her hair up in a bun, marched off into the jungle, and helped build the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

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.