Down the rabbit holes in Cu Chi
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- November
- 16
We went to Cu Chi again today, this time with the rest of our group of Rockland County Vietnam veterans, Rotary Club members and friends. We ended up at a different tunnel tour – no shooting range at this one, but we got an excellent demonstration of how the Viet Cong guerrillas disappeared down these tiny tunnel holes.
You have to see it to believe it. Click on the video link below.
When you crawl through just a small segment – enlarged for American tourist benefit, but still extremely cramped, dark and damp – of these handmade tunnels (including underground hospitals, kitchens, you name it), you get a shocking sense of “the enemy’s” will in the Vietnam War. How do you fight people who are willing to literally live underground, indefinitely? It’s almost as bad as fighting suicide bombers. The Vietnam veterans in our group just shook their heads, and we moved on…
I think you misunderstand the “Cu Chi Tunnels.” They could NOT sustain “thousands of people willing to live underground, indefinitely.” Tunnel complexes, in scattered locations throughout this region and others in the former South Vietnam, could conceal dozens of guerrillas underground for relatively short periods of time. The tunnel complexes, some with two or three progressively deeper levels, lacked capacity to bring in fresh air or dispose of human waste. While water and rations could be brought in, storage space was limited and sustaining life underground required regular resupply from the surface. Virtually all of the underground “rooms” are actually bunkers whose ceilings, while they may be cleverly camouflaged, are on the surface. The Cu Chi Tunnel complex visitors see is what GI’s commonly refer to as a “bunker complex” characterized by numerous rooms whose reinforced ceilings were at the surface and connected by trench lines or, as in this case, crawl-space tunnels. At the perimeter of such a complex the bunkers would be fighting positions. In the interior, the bunkers could serve a variety of functions including command & control, medical, storage, cooking, etc. The bunkers were most susceptible to discovery and destruction, leaving only the connecting tunnels for refuge. These tunnels could be cleverly “booby-trapped” and otherwise engineered to make exploration by US forces difficult. However, they still lacked the capacity in space and logistics (water, rations, waste disposal) to sustain even a small force for any period of time. The tunnels, now a major tourist attraction, is somewhat of a myth that perpetuates the idea that guerrillas were largely responsible for the eventual communist victory, when in reality the role of the guerrilla was diminished (as were the number of guerrillas) as the war progressed and the communist fighting force was increasingly made up of North Vietnamese Army regulars. In fact, most of the communist military activity from 1972 to 1975 was characterized by the use of conventional infantry supported by armor (tanks).
Good points.
I meant that the Viet Cong guerrillas were willing to live that way indefinitely to defeat the Americans and South Vietnamese military forces, not that they actually could or did. Psychologically, when you crawl through just a small example of the tunnels, it’s a striking thought. And as for “thousands,” I meant people who felt that it was a worthwhile way to live indefinitely, not that did so at any given time.