Cu Chi Tunnels

What's inside the ground? Oh, it's Will!

Having visited the Cu Chi tunnels outside Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), I have no doubt as to why America was defeated in Vietnam.

The Vietcong built hundreds of kilometers of tunnels. That is what I am popping out of in the video. They were narrow, dark and scary. Most Americans couldn't even fit into one. Many of the tunnel entrances were fakes with booby traps inside of them. It must have been a nightmare to be a soldier there.

We had massive firepower. The Vietnamese had massive ingenuity. They re-manufactured our bombs and other military detritus into dangerous booby traps- pits full of barbed hooks that maimed and slowed our troops. And these traps are really nasty. Imagine walking through a jungle or rice field, your face dripping sweat into your eyes. You are scanning the horizon for enemy soldiers. Of course, they look just like everyone else, so this isn't very effective. All of a sudden, your weapon and pack laiden body just drops through a hole in the ground. A swiveling peice of "ground" has just given way and you now find yourself in a pit with barbed metal spikes sticking into you. That is bad enough, but what is worse is that because they are barbed, you can't pull them out without tearing your flesh and skin further. And on top of all that, there are spikes also facing inward so that if you just pulled your foot out, you would ram it ino even more spikes. You have to be dug out and this takes hours.

We had bomber aircraft. They took our unexploded bombs or ordinances (UXO) and carefully, painstakingly cuth them open with hand tools to rebuild them into anti-tank landmines. They marked these mines and moved them around as the battlefield changed shape.

The biggest asset the Vietcong had was a home field advantage. They blended in with the population- no they were the local population in many cases and they had a lot of support. We bombed and killed and tortured and mutilated and deforested the South of Vietnam, and naturally, the villagers who bore the brunt of this abuse didn't seem to agree with the 'destroy a village to save it' philosphy.

The thing that strikes me most now, was how stupid the conflict was. A cruel dictator, Diem governed the south. We supported him (as had the French before they split and left us holding the bag) as he oppressed his own people and the anti-Diem movement grew. Deim's (and our) repression and exclusion of the communists probably falsly added to their stature as is often the case with insurgents. (There is a strong parallel here with groups such as the Taliban or the Iranianian revolution- while they fought the corrupt power structure they were cheered on bny the people. When they got to power, they ended up being as bad or worse than those they replaced.)

In the rice fields of Vietnam, I feel like it could be 1965 -or 1865 for that matter- and it seems so foolish that these power men in Washinton were scaring us into an idiotic war with this communist threat. I sit in the emerald green rice fields and watch a man in simple clothes and a cone shaped hat tend to his field and think 'is this the Vietnam the American government was so afraid of?'