A portion of an E-mail written by Patrick Martino…

The Chu Chi Tunnels

I did not learn much about the Vietnam War in school. In high school by the time we got through the colonial area, the American Revolutionary War, The Federalists, Andrew Jackson , The Mexican War, The Abolitionist Movement, The Civil War, Reconstruction, WWI, the Roaring Twenties, The Great Depression, and WWII we had just about run out of time.

What little I did learn about the Vietnam War in the one perhaps two days we covered it in class was that it was a large mistake where lots of American troops died, we napalmed the hell out of everything, and there was a great deal of civil unrest against American involvement back home.

The rest of what I learned came from the movies where young dazed American boys perhaps not knowing what they were fighting for or why were still the heroes fighting for survival against waves of rushing VC in blue pajamas and conical hats.

As to how a third world country with few technological weapons squared off against the most advanced super power in the world and won I had no idea. I caught an insight at the Chu Chi tunnels just West of Saigon.

All of the bombs, night vision goggles, helicopters and troops on the ground could do little against an enemy who hid in the dense foliage of the jungle, made bases in the difficult terrain of the mountains or as is the case in the area around the village of Chu Chi lived underground.

I don't know what it was like during the war. I wasn't there. Visiting the Chu Chi tunnels, however, I now doubt the accuracy of any Vietnam war movie I've ever seen. The enemy wasn't rustling in the bushes or setting off claymores to alert the band of Americans before the big rush. They were unseen, hiding in holes, and behind trees like minutemen picking off red coats on the road from Lexington to Concord.

The Chu Chi tunnels though goes way beyond simple holes. Seeing them was an eye opener. They are an amazing engineering marvel, carved by hand and built over a period of 25 years. During the war they encompassed no less than 170 miles worth of passageways and covered an area of 40 square miles!

The tunnels named after the district of Chu Chi were a VC stronghold and were just 20 miles from the capital , of Saigon! The VC literally ate, and slept underneath the noses of the American military. It took months for the 25ht Infantry division to figure out why they kept getting shot at from inside their perimeter of their fortified base at night. It turns out the 25ht built their base directly on top of an existing tunnel network. The VC only had to pop out of their holes at night lob a few grenades and then disappear to create mass havoc.

Most of the 170 miles of tunnels have been filled in or have collapsed. In the village of Ben Dinh however an hours drive from Saigon you can still visit a small portion of the tunnel network preserved for tourists.

My guide for the day called himself Mr. Bean. He was a thin rail of a man in his late 50's or early 60's. He wore wide oval glasses had thinning light black hair and a moustache. He spoke in halting yet clear English. He had a lazy air, a non-conformist sloth like and easy manner towards his clothes his walk, the way he held his cigarette. Perhaps it was his moustache and tinted sunglasses, the limp cigarette hanging from his lips that I thought him the perfect image of an ageing pimp, a backroom hustler and not a tour guide at all. Here was the man in all of the movies who always knew the location of the POW camp, could get you a hooker, or a missile launcher and who Chuck Norris never entirely trusted.

The air con bus left Saigon at 7:30 to battle a clot of traffic for the short distance of 60 kilometers to the tunnels.

Mr. Bean introduced himself to me and my fellow tourists. "I am Mr. Bean. Everybody knows Mr. Bean," he said with a toothy smile before continuing his litany. "Today I tell you a story. Its a real story. Today you learn about Vietnam. I am very lucky." he added.

His voice was sad and serious. He sagacious con man air dissipated. He now appeared a tired soul who had seen to much, who would reluctantly play out the rest of his life reliving his past for tourists. "I fighter for seven years." he continued "Two brothers dead. Father dead. All the people my age dead. Today I tell you story. Today true story."

He was interesting, more than interesting, fascinating as he gave a brief history of the war. He grew in stature and emotion and let it burst forth when a numb brained young English man had the audacity to ask this survivor what he did during the war. He was excoriating in his reprisal.

"Don't ask me about my life. You don't know me. Your not my friend." he told the befuddled tourist not in a harsh voice but in a middle yet sincere tone. "I don't want to tell you about my life."

But he did anyways letting details leak and seep but never being forthright. "I worked for the Americans. I work for the VC. Americans friends, VC friends. But I'm still alive. I live in New York City, but now I live in Vietnam. This is where I live this is where I stay. This is where I am born. You understand." We stared at him vacantly. The muted Englishman was hushed by the guides reproach. The Englishman acknowledged his understanding with silence.

"Good " Mr Bean stated to break the silence before continuing the history of the war and the tunnels.

Who knows what Mr. Bean did as a young man during the war. It is plain however he is happy to be alive. Perhaps was what I believe were called Kit Carson's, VC guerillas who switched sides and who would help the Americans locate and destroy the tunnels. Whatever the case Mr. Bean knew his stuff. He had been connected to the tunnels in some way.

The tunnels lay in a reforested eucalyptus grove. A rusting bombed out M-48 tank sats listing in a small clearing. A gigantic kettle, a bomb crater, was nearby. The trees are young and during the war there wouldn't have been a tree in site most of the Cu Chi district being declared a free fire zone making it one of the most heavy bombed and shelled regions in the world in an ! effort to smoke out the VC living underground.

Bombing didn't work. Neither did trying to find the tunnels on the surface. By all appearances on entering the Eucalyptus grove you would never know you were on top of a network of elaborate tunnels. It wasn't until Mr. Bean asked a few of us tourists to move that we realized we were standing on top of a tiny entrance to the network. Covered with leaves it was expertly hidden, virtually invisible. A wooden lid the size of a shoe box fit into a recessed frame in the hard clay soil. It was just large enough to squeeze into if you raised your hands high above your head. Known as a spider hole a VC guerilla could emerge from his hole fire a few shots at the advancing Americans and be gone in a flash.

There were more surprises. Mr. Bean showed us a roped off area. If it had not been for the barricade I would have never believed beneath the surface lay a pit of pongee sticks, sharpened bamboo stakes which could penetrate a soldiers combat boots.

Mr. Bean showed us conference rooms , surgery rooms, a kitchen, and a munitions factory where the guerillas took unexploded American bombs and painstakingly cut them open to defuse them to use the gunpowder to create their own mines and grenades. The guerillas had everything they needed. It was virtual city, underground.

The conference and munitions rooms which comprised the first layer of the tunnel network lay just beneath the surface. The second and third layers of the network were built at 3 to 4 meters beneath the surface and 8 to 10 meters, respectively. The second and third layers were the communication and escape tunnels. The escape tunnels would often lead to another network of conference rooms or after some distance to the Saigon River where wounded comrades could then be taken up the river to relative safety across the Cambodian border.

If Mr. Bean had worked for the Americans he did a good job of showing his distain for them. He couldn't resist calling the Americans fat at every opportunity. "Vietnamese small. Squat when going to the toilet. All their lives the Vietnamese have strong thighs. They can crouch for hours. To relax they can crouch. In the tunnels they can run while crouching. Americans big and fat. They lazy and sit on the toilet. Their thighs are not so strong. They have to crawl through the tunnels. The tunnels zig-zag and they're so fat they get stuck. Have to be pulled out with a rope around their legs."

I don't think Americans are fat so much as we are just larger than Vietnamese. I am far from fat and my thighs are far from weak. I am tall and lanky. I immediately understood though what Mr. Bean was talking about when I entered the communication tunnels.

Far from a wide mine shaft with wood supports and cross beams you picture old prospectors entering into these tunnels were more like worm holes. The tunnels were 1.2 meters high and 80 cm across. Crouching down I was practically in a fetal position. I could barley waddle and could certainly not run. Crouching in such a position my thighs immediately began to burn. I quickly changed from waddling to crawling on my hands and knees.

The soil of the Chu Chi district made for perfect tunnel construction. Made of a rock hard red clay it did not require wooden supports. It was hot and the air oppressing in the tunnels as I crawled staining my hands and knees with the red clay soil.

It was a claustrophobic nightmare with no room to maneuver and certainly no room to turn around. The tunnels were fit and lined with electric lights for the benefit of visitors. During the war however there would have been no lights. A handheld flashlight would have been the only light for an American entering the tunnels, a perfect target for a waiting VC to shoot at in the complete darkness underground. I can't even imagine the horror of an American tunnel rat crawling into the labyrinth of twisting darkness not able to retreat but only to go forward not knowing at the next zig or zag if there might be a guerilla waiting to shoot him, a poisonous snake left to strike, a pit of spikes, or a wired grenade.

To live in such a hole with stale air, bad water, little food and your own excrement must have been near intolerable for the Vietnamese. Yet this is where they fought. I suppose it was because they had no choice. The surface was a free fire zone where anything that moved was shot and bombs and artillery shells fell at will.

To see the ingenuity of this maze is beyond impressive. I crawled a scant 50 meters through the tunnel and emerged dirty exhausted and dripping in sweat. To think there were 170 miles of this!!!! The VC could pop up from their tiny holes fire a shot and be gone, disappear like ghosts, outflank outmaneuver and see all the Americans were doing to the area.

Why didn't the Americans destroy the tunnels you may ask? They tried. Throwing a grenade down a tunnel entrance however would do little but make allot of noise. The stiff red clay absorbed the shock. That's even if the GIs could find the tunnel entrances. Blowing smoke into the tunnels didn't work nor did trying to flood them. The VC built trap doors at narrow points to hold back the water or gas. They would flee to another section of the network until the water drained or the smoke dissipated. Plus it was not easy for the Americans to lug a generator or water pump into the jungle in the first place.

Nothing short of a direct bomb blast on a tunnel, remember that is only 80 cm across would work, or sending a tunnel rat into the labyrinth to duel with pistols with the hidden occupants and then laying c4 the entire length of the tunnel would do the trick. Even if a tunnel was destroyed it would not take the VC long to dig another one or to repair it.

The Chu Chi tunnels are just one small part of the Vietnam conflict. Seeing them however I know understand a little bit better how the Vietnamese won. They wanted to win more.They had more resolve than the American public. They were willing to go as far to live underground and fight against tanks and heavily armed men with pits full of sharpened bamboo stakes.

The War Remnants Museum

Growing up in America my family flew the American flag on the 4th of July, In school I said the pledge of allegiance everyday and with my peers recited my nation was "One nation, under god with liberty and justice for all." I learned my nation's flag was the flag of heroes carried by minutemen who fought the British for independence and marines at Omaha beach who saved the world from Nazi tyranny. Americans in my youth were always winners, the gold medal winners in the Olympics, the victor in the movies, the good guys, the cowboys riding off into the sunset or the Calvary coming to save the day

It is unsettling to visit the War remnants museum in Saigon. It is a museum where Americans are not heroes or winners but instead are called enemies, murders, and war criminals.

The museum is far from Smithsonian standards with huge galleries laden with exhibits behind glass complete with an Imax theater. It is still by Asian standards well maintained. The War Remnants museum is a horseshoe of one-story buildings surrounded by an open courtyard filled with just as the name would imply war remnants. It is a virtual stockpile of US weaponry. There is an M48 tank, a bulldozer, a Huey Hog and in the surrounding buildings an arsenal of small arms. There were M'16's, 50 caliber machine guns, bomb casings, and machine guns. Each gun each weapon was mounted and displayed with a tag line in Vietnamese paramount and the English below.

The weapons were not what was disturbing about the museum. It was the pictures and the captions beneath them.

In a building labeled war crimes photos from the My Lai massacre hung on the wall. The portraits of children born with birth defects, the results of the defoliant agent orange hung in a far corner. There were glass jars filled with the fetuses of unborn babies grossly deformed by chemical agents. There were grainy enlarged snap shots of VC prisoners, and civilians burned by the firestorms of napalm.

If the pictures were not enough to send a message of the horrors of war to shock an innocent American the first words in the exhibit were doubly powerful. They were written boldly in Vietnamese and in smaller type the English. "All men are created free and equal." United States Declaration of Independence July 4th 1776. It begs the question why Vietnam needed to fight a war with a nation founded on the principals of freedom when all it was trying to do was be free too. Of course the politics are infinitely more complex than this simple logic but it was shocking to behold in of all places a communist country.

The museum was heavily one sided. It presented one view, one side. It neglected to show American POWs being tortured, minority villagers threatened or killed to give aid to the North, the reeducation camps which were set up after the south fell, the thousands of boat people who fled the country after the repressive communists took control. The museum however was never the less a haunting reminder of the horrors of war. The museum was also an interesting if not disturbing alternative point of view. My youthful and patriotic naivety will be forever shattered after visiting places like Laos and Vietnam. Americans are not all heroes. We have made mistakes. We have hurt and we have killed. I can now understand why some people don't like us.

Perhaps the Vietnam War was one of America's biggest! mistakes. To quote Robert McNamara "we were wrong, terribly wrong." Maybe time will allow for forgiveness and for the wounds to heal. Perhaps too, history will remember the United States not for its mistakes but for the greater good it has done.

(I would highly recommend the following link below for those interested in a brief overview of the cause and effects of the Vietnam War, the mistakes, and the lessons learned. Some of the remarks are quite shocking given the current situation the US is involved in in Iraq. It is a transcript from 1995 of a public debate given by Robert McNamara at Harvard University shortly after the release of his memoirs about being the secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. For those who don't have time to read his big thick book it is extremely illuminating and gut wrenching. Highly recommended it takes about 45 minutes to read. http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/ifactory/ksgpress/www/ksg_news/transcripts/mcnamara.! htm

Index of Patrick’s Stories