UC Berkeley Journalism - Faculty - Tunnels That Run Deep, In Earth and Memory

"Tunnels That Run Deep, In Earth and Memory"
By Orville Schell

The New York Times
April 20, 1997

Orville Schell is dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.

When I first visited Cu Chi, in 1962, I was a young journalist who had driven the 21 miles from Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) with a South Vietnamese Government official to "inspect" the area's strategic hamlets, newly built fortified villages into which peasants had been forcibly moved. The idea was both to protect them from the National Liberation Front and prevent them from helping guerrillas topple Ngo Dinh Diem and reunify South Vietnam with the Communist North.

The war had not yet heated up and Cu Chi still presented a beautiful landscape of thatch-roof houses, rice paddies and swaying palms. There were rumors that the guerrillas had built an elaborate tunnel network throughout the area that allowed them access to the strategic hamlets even after their gates were locked each evening. But none of this was evident to me at the time.

Within a year or so, the strategic-hamlet program had failed, Americans had arrived in force in Vietnam and, because of stiff guerrilla resistance, the area around Cu Chi had been dubbed the Iron Triangle. Declared a free-fire zone, it was the site of massive United States military operations, effectively exterminating any sign of life within its boundaries. These were the days when the Vietcong body count, that index by which our strange military progress was measured, was read by Pentagon grand viziers like sports scores. Around Cu Chi, all human life had taken cover in an increasingly elaborate tunnel system deep in the hard red earth. Trained dogs and human "tunnel rats" tried to rout the Vietcong from these underground redoubts in grisly hand-to-hand combat. They never succeeded.

By the late 1960's the Iron Triangle's jungles and fields had been sprayed with defoliants and plowed under with massive Rome plows in an effort to deny the enemy crops and hiding places. Artillery units had pounded the area. Bombers had conducted relentless air strikes, killing anything that moved. B-52's had carpet-bombed the area repeatedly. Like Ben Tre, the famous village that had to be destroyed in order to be saved, according to an American officer, Cu Chi's surroundings looked as desolate as the cratered face of the moon. It was a curious way to win the hearts and minds of the people, to use the parlance of the day. Unmoved, the Vietcong clung to a tenuous existence underground.

I arrived back in Cu Chi in late spring last year in an air-conditioned bus with a load of passengers from the Seabourn Pride, a luxury cruise ship on which I was a lecturer. The Cu Chi tunnels, which once veined the earth with some 120 miles of passageways, have become one of Ho Chi Minh City's premier tourist destinations, drawing crowds of local and foreign visitors. For local people, the tunnels are almost like a holy land in their struggle against foreign domination. We Americans, however, came face to face with the ambiguity of our war effort and the painful recognition that the very people who now squire us so cheerfully through the tunnel complex were once our implacable enemies. Some Americans became uneasy upon reading a guidebook that noted that Cu Chi was "where the Vietcong outwitted the Americans with a miracle of primitive technology."

Others became indignant when forced to watch the propaganda video introduction to the tunnels that is part of every tour, especially when the announcer breathlessly extolled the Vietcong practice of giving awards to "killer heroes" for their success in hunting down Americans and turning them into a body count of their own.

As we descended into the darkness of this claustrophobic underground world where thousands of Vietnamese ate, lived, slept and tended their wounded for years, the Americans attempted jokes to relieve the tension. "I don't do tunnels," exclaimed a bearded retiree slung with too many expensive cameras. "Seen one tunnel, seen 'em all," said another as he emerged from one particularly suffocating stretch where the only way to move forward was to waddle in a painful crouched postion. "I'm just glad I didn't get stuck," said a portly businessman sweating profusely and chuckling as he crawled out from an underground command center that offered a photo op -- a hammer-and-sickle flag behind a former commandant's desk.

Since everyone from the Ho Chi Minh Municipal Party Committee to the Vietnamese military is now rushing into business, not even national war shrines such as this can avoid being sucked into the commercial wave that is sweeping even titular Communist countries. At souvenir stands in the Cu Chi parking lot, toy F-16's and helicopter gunships fashioned out of various caliber bullet shells were being hawked. There were knock-off Vietcong black-pajama uniforms and even engraved Zippo lighters made famous by G.I.'s seen torching "hooches," village huts, on television news, and old Rolex watches from heaven knows where. For a fee, a visitor can dress up as a Vietcong guerrilla -- complete with rifle and pith helmet -- to have a picture taken. ("Please Try to Be a Cu Chi Guerrilla. Wear These and Uniform Equipment Before Entering Tunnel" a sign in English says.)

But the piece de resistance of this battlefield-become-theme-park is Cu Chi's National Defense Sports Shooting Range, where for a buck a bullet visitors can blaze away at targets with M-16's and AK-47's just as in days of old. For anyone who knew Vietnam when the war still raged, it is unsettling to emerge back above ground after crawling through this labyrinth where so many died, and once again hear the staccato chatter of automatic weapons coming from within the newly grown jungle foliage.

As we drove back toward the dock and the refuge of our ship, my shipmates were silent. They seemed relieved to be done with Cu Chi and the disturbing way it momentarily made this former war of ours more than just a chapter from a history book. When we reached the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City and advertisements from United States multinationals began appearing on roadside billboards, they became more garrulous, perhaps reassured by these familiar commercial icons that America was now playing a more benign and less controversial role in the world. A neon sign for the new Omni Hotel's L.A. Club provoked a murmur of satisfied recognition. Eye-catching logos for Pepsi, Snickers, Mobil, Coke, Compaq and Marlboro -- the standards of America's new and now triumphant commercial legion in Asia -- seemed to soothe everyone.

As our ship cast off and steamed back down the muddy Saigon River toward the South China Sea, I sat alone in an air-conditioned lounge sipping coffee. The unperturbed way that delicate Vietnamese women rode by the docks on motor scooters, the silky swallowtails of their ao dais trailing out behind, made the war seem almost unreal. But even in the serene and detached environment of our ship, I could no longer suppress a flood of long-suppressed memories. The last time I had been on this river, 30 years ago, still seemed as vivid as our tour of the Cu Chi tunnels. I had come back to Saigon on a Navy PT boat bristling with machine guns after covering an operation in the Mekong Delta. The troops on board, too, had just added to the body count. We never knew who or exactly how many had been killed. They were just people along the banks who happened to be in an "unfriendly" zone. No sense taking chances.

Such memories are strange stuff on which to build a luxury cruise.

Originally published in the New York Times
Reposted here with permission.

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