Before we were allowed to roam free in Ho Chi Min City, we were given some good advice from our tour guide.
Beware of taxi's in Ho Chi Min, they will rip you off! Before getting into a taxi, always take a picture of the front and side of the taxi, and make sure the driver sees you do it. If they know you are vigilant, they won't try to rip you off, and if you forget anything in the taxi, it can be tracked down for you.
Be careful crossing the street! There are over 10 million people in Ho Chi Min City, and over 6 million motorbikes. You have to be careful crossing the street. Never run across a street, if you do, the motorbikes can't predict your actions and they will hit you. Look for a small break in the traffic, then walk slow and steady. The motorbikes and cars will drive around you. In reality, we think drive is too calm of a word. We think that they swerved around us! It is crazy but does work!
Never drink the tap water in Vietnam! This was true in Cambodia too. If you have to drink it, boil it first. There is a boiler provided in every hotel room.
Watch out for bag snatchers! If your bag has a strap, always use it and keep your bag close to your body.
Our tour guide reminded us that this is a very safe city, but like all large cities, there is poverty, and where there's poverty, there are crimes of opportunity. So don't give them an opportunity! We now refer to our guide as Papa Khanh. He's got our backs!
Today we signed up for a half day tour to the Cu Chi Tunnels. They are part of an underground tunnel network built by the Viet Cong to control a large rural area near Saigon. The Cu Chi tunnel network includes 125 miles of tunnels with many branches connecting to underground hideouts, weapon factories, hospitals, shelters and other tunnels.
We started out at 7:30 am for a 45 minute bus ride from central Ho Chi Min to the district of Cu Chi where the restored tunnels are located. On our way, Khanh gave us a lot of history and helpful information.
In Vietnam, they call the Vietnam war the American war because Americans were one of the main participants. North Vietnam was a communist country and South Vietnam was a republic. A lot of communists lived in South Vietnam, but kept their political affiliation a secret for a long time.
In 1948 Vietnam was still a French colony. Many people built underground bunkers to hide from the French. They were communists who were rebelling against the French rule. They would only move around above ground after dark, so the French rulers didn't know they existed. The French knew nothing about the communist underground.
Eventually, they began to connect their bunkers with tunnels so that they could move around underground. Many Communist children were born and raised in the tunnels and bunkers, even going to school underground.
The invasion of South Vietnam started in 1956, and for many years the U.S. sent advisors to South Vietnam. From 1956 - 1959 there was conflict between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, but they were alone in their fight. In the 1960's the North Vietnamese Army started descending upon South Vietnam using the Ho Chi Min Trail and at that point the allied countries joined the war.
At the time of the Vietnam war, there were three distinct groups, the Viet Cong (who were the communist rebels living in south Vietnam), the North Vietnamese Army and the South Vietnamese Army and their allies. The allies of South Vietnam were Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, Thailand, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States.
The allies and South Vietnamese Armies started building military bases all around Siagon.
In 1956 when the Vietnam war started, no one knew about the underground bunkers and tunnels. The people who lived in them, the Viet Cong (VC), started making the network bigger to accommodate more people and started working with the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) to take over South Vietnam. In 1968 they stopped expanding the tunnels and changed them from a hiding place to a fighting place. The NVA set up military bases in the tunnels.
The American 25th infantry, not knowing that the VC had tunnels below ground, built their base right on the edge tunnel system. They started trying to clear out the VC, but they met huge resistance and many were killed. They finally figured out that the VC were hiding underground, so they sent soldiers down into the tunnels to fight the VC there. They chose the smallest of their soldiers for this job since they were the only ones who could fit in the tunnels. They were called Tunnel Rats.In general the Tunnel Rats failed because they didn't know the tunnel systems, and the VC knew the tunnels well, and would set booby traps for the American soldiers. The South Vietnamese Army and their allies had to change strategies.
From 1961 to 1968 they turned the Cu Chi district of Siagon into a free fire zone. They marked an area on the map and asked all of the South Vietnamese people to leave that area and move somewhere that they would be safe. Those who were asked to move were provided with assistance but many chose to stay. Then they continuously bombed and shelled that area from 1968 to 1973. This destroyed parts of the tunnel system, but large parts still remained intact. The VC would then rebuild below or around the bombed area. Many VC and allied soldiers were buried underground during the bombings.
For the 20 years from 1948 to 1968 more than 130 miles of tunnels were built by the communists. They were 3 stories tall and about 60,000 - 70,000 acres. They connected houses to houses, villages to villages. During the war, more than 10,000 NVA and VC were fighting from the tunnels at one time.
Once the war was over, the communist soldiers came out from underground and began farming on top of their own tunnels. Most of the tunnels have now been abandoned and have collapsed. The section in Cu Chi have been maintained by the military.
Originally the tunnels were 2 feet wide and 2 1/2 feet high. They have now been expanded for tourism. They are now about 3 feet wide and less then 4 feet high. There is no support inside the tunnels. They still want it to be a realistic experience as people explore the tunnels. During the war, they lit the tunnels and bunkers with oil, candles and kerosene lamps. We will use flash lights. The tunnels are a little cooler than outside, but much more humid so they seem very hot.
Sometimes the South Vietnamese people were mistaken for VC and were accidentally killed by the allied forces. So after the war, there was a lot of resentment toward Americans.
We spent the day fighting back tears as we listened to how this war impacted the South Vietnamese people and the allied soldiers. Steve and I talked a lot about the atrocities that happened in this area over so many years. There were so many innocent people caught up in this war, and so much confusion for so many years both in Vietnam and in America.
The Cu Chi district, northwest of Siagon, where the tunnels still remain was completely wiped out by agent orange during the war. All of the trees in this area were replanted 40 years ago. Cu Chi was the largest tunnel system and that is why it was preserved.
As the Viet Cong built the tunnels, they needed air holes, so they disguised them as termite nests. U. S. soldiers would use dogs to sniff out the air holes, but the Vietcong started using chili to confuse the dogs sense of smell. Later they would us the clothing of U.S. soldiers that had been captured to disguise the scent of the air holes.
We walked through dense jungle to get to the tunnels, but it wasn't nearly as dense as it was during the war because there is only 40 years of regrowth in the jungle now.
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| Left over ammunition from the war |
A real termite nest.
Red is VC territory.
Green are the tunnel areas.
Blue are bases of the South Vietnam Army and their allies.
Yellow is the new residential areas when the Cu Chi district became a free fire zone.
The model below shows the different levels and entrances of the VC bunkers and tunnels.
Tools for digging the tunnels were very crude. Five men could dig 1 meter per hour. They used wood to support the roofs of the bunkers and then covered them with dirt and plants. The bunkers were used for fighting, storage, health clinics, kitchens, meeting and dining rooms.
Bamboo sticks were used for air holes. Tunnels were as deep as 30 to 35 feet. The VC would use planks to avoid land mines that they placed in the tunnels but then would remove them so the Tunnel Rats would hit the mines. They used their small size to their advantage in the tunnels. Americans are much bigger and couldn't fit in many areas of the tunnels.
Some of the entrances to the tunnels were in rivers. The VC would swim down to the entrance and come up in the tunnel. Only battery flashlights could be used for light in the lower two levels of the tunnels because there wasn't enough oxygen for fire to burn.
This was our guide through the Cu Chi Tunnels. He did a great job of showing us all of the interesting stuff.
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| Sorry, not very flattering, but it shows how tight the tunnels are, and these tunnels are almost twice the size of the original tunnels! |
Our guide is a lot smaller than I am. He is about the size that a VC soldier would have been.
We would climb through a series of tunnels, the come back up in a new location in the jungle, and then back down into more tunnels again.
The next section of our tour showed us how the VC was so successful at keeping their tunnels disguised.
The fighting bunkers would have four air holes each. The air holes were long narrow slits near the top of the bunker. They were large enough for the Viet Cong to see out, put the end of their gun out, and of course, get fresh air into the bunker.
The entrance to the fighting bunker was about 10 feet away from the bunker. It was a hole in the ground about 18” by 18" max, and had an ironwood or concrete lid. When the Vietcong went into entrance, they would lift the lid, recover it with leaves, hold it above their head and lower themselves into the whole with their arms above their head, replacing the concrete as they lowered themselves into the tunnel. When the lid was back on, the entrance was completely hidden. They then had tunnels between the entrances and the bunkers.
This short video shows us using one of the tunnel entrances.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRxsJRc1kJI
Our guide showed us how they worked by disappearing into one of them.
Then he reappeared about 40 feet away at another entrance.
When he was done showing us, we had a chance to try it ourselves, so here goes nothing.
The lid was really heavy.
This is as far as I can make it. My knees were hitting in the hole, so I couldn't get any lower.
After I went, Chris and Sarah followed. After a few tries, Chris got clear in, but couldn't get the lid on. Sarah pretty much made it all the way. They are rock stars!
Pits in the ground, originally used for trapping animals became tools of war for the Viet Cong. They placed 12” long spikes in the bottom of the pits and covered them to disguise them so the allied soldiers would fall into them, onto the spikes.
As we came out of the health care bunker, there was a dish of kasava on the table. It was peeled tapioca root for us to try. It has the texture of a waxy baked potato and kind of dries out your mouth. It really doesn’t have any flavor. Khanh told us that during the war they ate a lot of kasava because it grows naturally in the jungles of Vietnam. It didn’t taste very good, but it filled them up.
This is a tapioca plant growing wild in the jungle.
When the VC would hold their underground meetings they would wear their uniforms, but they would also wear scarves over their faces so that if they were discovered by an intruder they could not be recognized. It would be likely that the intruder would be one of their farming neighbors who didn’t know they were Viet Cong.
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| Again, not flattering, but you know the story! |
The kitchen bunker had a smoke vent, but it didn’t vent out near the kitchen. It ran to the surface diagonally and surfaced about 300 yards away from the kitchen. That was done to keep the smoke from coming back into the kitchen, but just as importantly to attract the bombers and soldiers to the smoke instead of to the kitchen bunker.
As you can see from the picture below, there were bats living in all these bunkers as well. I'm not sure how I got lucky enough to catch this one in a picture, but there were a lot of them.
Underground bunkers were used for making clothes, shoes and even weapons.
The Viet Cong would collect the shrapnel from the allied bombs. Part of it they would melt down to make spikes for their traps, others were used to make land mines. All of this work was carried out in underground bunkers.
Once the war was over, this area of bunkers and tunnels was used to teach the Vietnamese children about the history of the war. It has now been opened for tourism and many of the tunnels have been expanded to allow our larger frames to fit into them. The tunnels are very hot, sweaty and dirty and the jungle is full of mosquitoes.
Our tour of the Cu Chi tunnels was eye-opening to say the least, and really gave us insight as to what many of our soldiers encountered during that war. It was truly a war of the super powers of the world, not just a war between North and South Vietnam. Whether you supported the war, or hated it, coming back to Vietnam is something that everyone should experience in their lives. There is so much here that a textbook can never teach!
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