Life as a VC Guerrilla

Forty years ago, our new pal wouldn't have been posing for photos…

International Living Postcards-- your daily escape

Friday, March 2, 2007
Cu Chi, Vietnam

We’re half expecting something to happen--but when it does, it still makes us jump. Up pops a skinny Vietcong guerrilla soldier from a leaf-camouflaged fox hole. Its entrance looks about half the size of a drain pipe.

Jack-in-the-box stuff today, but it’s chilling to think such scenes really happened 40 years ago. Back then, our olive-helmeted pal wouldn’t have been posing for photos and grinning like a pantomime villain. No, he’d have been blasting us to kingdom come with a machine gun.

I’m at the "revolutionary historic site" of Vietnam’s Cu Chi Tunnel Network. As the giveaway brochure puts it, here "versatile tactics were used in the resistance and unification of the country."

Around 40 miles from Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), the Cu Chi Tunnels spider out in a 125-mile web of subterranean passageways and ambush points. The tunnels weren’t built on one level alone; it was like a three- and four-story underground city. Below ground were field hospitals and canteens, storerooms and sandal-making workshops, command centers and weapons factories. Working by torchlight, VC munitions experts defused and recycled American bombs.

Although there’s something of a doctrinaire feel to the experience, the tunnels deserve their billing as a prime tourist attraction. Apart from those who fought here, many of us know the Vietnam conflict only through Hollywood’s perspective. Cu Chi is part of the other side of the story--the VC story and what is known in Vietnam as "the American War."

Two Americans were on our tour; both male, but neither anywhere near old enough to have served in Vietnam. Even so, they looked uncomfortable at the old black-and-white propaganda documentary you initially have to watch. And they didn’t want their photos taken beside the captured American M41 tank.

What’s the difference between a five-star tunnel and a one-star tunnel? The five-star tunnel has been widened especially for foreigners to shoehorn their bodies into. (Presumably cleared of fire ants and scorpions, too.) Before reaching the tunnel, you’re shown booby traps in the form of bamboo-spiked doors and pits…and also how they worked. The spikes were often tipped with poison. Primitive but effective, and very unpleasant to contemplate.

Enter the pitch-dark tunnel and there’s an escape ladder out after 30 meters along. I’d expected doing the full stretch would be easy, but I was wrong. Never before have I been anywhere so humid and claustrophobic. Hunched over double, praying I’d remain unwedged, the 30 swelteringly meters seemed to last forever. Having been warned the tunnels got even lower and narrower further along, I wimped out and took the ladder. Life as a VC guerrilla wouldn’t have suited me one bit.

I wasn’t expecting Cu Chi to have a firing range. Those who missed out on the ’Nam experience can purchase five bullets for $6 and blast at targets with weapons such as AK47s and M16s. Real guns, real ammo, and the noise from the boys and their toys is apocalyptic.

To me, treating war as a fairground attraction is more than insensitive; it’s obscene. Particularly so in a place where so many on both sides of the conflict lost their lives.

From Ho Chi Minh City, Sinh Café Tours runs a half-day coach trip to Cu-Chi for $4. Entrance to the site is an additional $5.

Steenie Harvey
Roving Travel Writer, International Living