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CU CHI, Vietnam: If war is like hell, the fighters of Vietnam’s Cu
Chi tunnels were several meters (feet) closer to it than most.
For years, Viet Cong guerrillas lived in a
network of tunnels three-stories deep, a labyrinth that spanned over
300 kilometers (186 miles), connecting villages in virtual
underground cities in this district north of Saigon.
While US air attacks, artillery, napalm and
Agent Orange defoliants turned the land above into a moonscape,
guerrillas launched hit-and-run attacks and even readied the January
31, 1968 Tet Offensive from the tunnel system.
Dubbed the “Land of Fire” in Vietnamese
during the war, Cu Chi became “the most bombed, shelled, gassed,
defoliated and generally devastated area in the history of
warfare,” wrote authors Tom Mangold and John Penycate.
Communist forces in the 1960s expanded tunnels
that anticolonial rebels first built in the late 1940s, creating a
vast complex with sleeping quarters, arms caches, kitchens,
hospitals and even propaganda theaters.
Entrances were concealed and booby-trapped to
stop the “tunnel rats,” US and Australian soldiers of narrow
build, who crawled into the deadly holes with only a torch and a
handgun to ferret out the black pyjama-clad enemies.
The elusive underground guerrillas, once dubbed
“human moles” by US commander General William Westmoreland,
terrified US and South Vietnamese forces like no other communist
soldiers in the conflict.
Viet Cong veteran Nguyen Thi Nghia, who joined
the revolution when she was 13, recalled how her village “went
underground” and how she once spent five days in a hot and
claustrophobic tunnel during a heavy bombing raid.
“The earth was swaying like a hammock,” said
Nghia, 61. “We were crouching in the tunnels with only one candle.
We tried not to speak to save oxygen and limit carbon monoxide. We
tried not to move. We were soaked in sweat.”
Today, Americans are back, firing M-16s at Cu
Chi, but this time they are among the tourist crowds blasting away
for $1.30 a bullet at a shooting range set up at what is now the Cu
Chi tunnels tourist park.
A souvenir shop sells war kitsch, including mock
hand grenade cigarette lighters, key rings made from assault rifle
rounds, fake GI Zippos engraved with gung-ho war slogans, and
plastic figurines of VC guerrillas.
Tourists now photograph each other atop the
rusty carcass of an M41 tank claimed by a landmine in 1971 and crawl
through a section of tunnel that has been widened to accommodate the
larger bulk of many Westerners.
A group of VC mannequins in olive uniforms and
gray VC neck scarves take a rest in a jungle shelter, listening to
revolutionary news on a field radio and drinking, the guide says,
rice whiskey to ward off malarial chills.
The guide points out the swimming-pool sized
crater of a B-52 bomb that once served as a fish pond for the
peasant fighters, and a ventilation shaft hidden inside a termite
mound to keep away the enemy’s sniffer dogs.
The tour is full of gallows humor, but to most
Vietnamese, Cu Chi still epitomizes the horror and heroism of war.
When B-52s carpet-bombed Cu Chi in 1968, most
tunnels collapsed and became the graves of those inside.
-- AFP
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