This morning we travel to the Cu Chi tunnels. The tunnels are located in an area NW of Saigon and along a major highway that connects Saigon to Cambodia (see red area on map). During the French uprising in the 1930s +, the Vietnamese constructed a tunnel network which was used in the war against the French. When the American Vietnamese war started in the early 1960s, the tunnel network was reactivated and expanded to be a network the exceeded over 200 miles of interconnected tunnels. The tools that I am holding, a small short-handled shovel and basket, were used for digging and soil removal. These tools were used to dig the entire the tunnel...all by hand! A picture shows a women making rice paper vegetable wrapper for supplying food to the VC...cooked tapioca root dipped in a mixture of peanut, sugar and salt was a main food staple...carbs and protein.
The network included small spider holes which are 2' long and 1 1/2'' wide ..... a size that can accommodate the small stature of a VC soldier. The tunnel system was multi-tiered with the 1st tier being 6 ft down, 2nd tier - 12 ft down and the 3rd tier deeper. The network included kitchens, hospitals, living quarters and armament preparation...all underground. Expended US ordinance was used to create ingenious disabling devices that could seriously injure or kill a US or South Vietnamese soldier (see picture of trap door device with hidden budgie sticks). Tires were used to make flip-flop shoes that one could put on front wards or backwards..if you put the flip-flop on properly, your foot tracks would indicate the correct direction you were walking..if put on the other way, your foot track would mislead the person into thinking you were going in the opposite direction.... the VC had a whole host of tricks that had been developed over decades. Cooking was done only in the morning...the smoke was carried off through a chimney over a half mile away from the kitchen and exhausted into dense underbrush..it looked like morning ground fog. Lastly, look-a-like termite mounds were created to cover the bamboo vent shafts that were needed to provide air to the underground tunnel network.
We crawled through about 45ft of an underground tunnel and I will tell you it was like a sauna. A number of propaganda photos and videos were presented but all-in-all you gained an understanding of what our troops faced in fighting in this area. I have included one photo to show what the natural terrain looked and how the VC were able to blend in their traps and hide the tunnels.
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