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Location: Cu Chi Tunnels are
located approximately 70km northwest of Ho Chi Minh City
centre in Cu Chi Rural District.
Characteristic: Cu Chi Tunnels consist of more than
200km of underground tunnels. This main axis system has
many branches connecting to underground hideouts,
shelters, and entrances to other tunnels.
Cu Chi District is known nationwide as the base where
the Vietnamese mounted their operations of the Tet
Offensive in 1968.The tunnels are between 0.5 to 1m
wide, just enough space for a person to walk along by
bending or dragging. However, parts of the tunnels have
been modified to accommodate visitors. The upper soil
layer is between 3 to 4m thick and can support the
weight of a 50-ton tank and the damage of light cannons
and bombs. The underground network provided sleeping
quarters, meeting rooms, hospitals, and other social
rooms. Visiting the Cu Chi Tunnels provides a better
understanding of the prolonged resistance war of the
Vietnamese people and also of the persistent and clever
character of the Vietnamese nation.
For a place that’s physically invisible, the Cu Chi
Tunnels have sure carved themselves a celebrated niche
in the history of guerilla warfare. Its celebrated and
unseen geography straddles – all of it underground –
something which the Americans eventually found as much
to their embarrassment as to their detriment. They were
dug, before the American War, in the late 1940s, as a
peasant-army response to a more mobile and ruthless
French occupation. The plan was simple: take the
resistance briefly to the enemy and then, literally,
vanish.
First the French, then the Americans were baffled as to
where they melted to, presuming, that it was somewhere
under cover of the night in the Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta.
But the answer lay in the sprawling city under their
feet – miles and miles of tunnels. In the gap between
French occupation and the arrival of the Americans the
tunnels fell largely into disrepair, but the area’s
thick natural earth kept them intact and maintained by
nature. In turn it became not just a place of hasty
retreat or of refuge, but, in the words of one military
historian, "an underground land of steel, home to the
depth of hatred and the incommutability of the people."
It became, against the Americans and under their noses,
a resistance base and the headquarters of the southern
Vietnam Liberation Forces. The linked threat from the
Viet Cong - the armed forces of the National Liberation
Front of South Vietnam - against the southern city
forced the unwitting Americans to select Cu Chi as the
best site for a massive supply base – smack on top of
the then 25-year old tunnel network. Even sporadic and
American’s grudgingly had to later admit, daring attacks
on the new base, failed for months to indicate where the
attackers were coming from – and, importantly, where
they were retreating to. It was only when captives and
defectors talked that it became slightly more clear. But
still the entries, exits, and even the sheer scale of
the tunnels weren’t even guessed at. Chemicals,
smoke-outs, razing by fire, and bulldozing of whole
areas, pinpointed only a few of the well-hidden tunnels
and their entrances. The emergence of the Tunnel Rats, a
detachment of southern Vietnamese working with Americans
small enough to fit in the tunnels, could only guess at
the sheer scale of Cu Chi. By the time peace had come,
little of the complex, and its infrastructure of
schools, dormitories, hospitals, and miles of tunnels,
had been uncovered. Now, in peace, only some of it is
uncovered – as a much-visited part of the southern
tourist trail. Many of the tunnels are expanded
replicas, to avoid any claustrophobia they would induce
in tourists. The wells that provided the vital drinking
water are still active, producing clear and clean water
to the three-tiered system of tunnels that sustained
life. A detailed map is almost impossible, for security
reasons if nothing else: an innate sense of direction
guided the tunnellers and those who lived in them.
Some routes linked to local rivers, including the Saigon
River, their top soil firm enough to take construction
and the movement of heavy machinery by American tanks,
the middle tier from mortar attacks, and the lower,
8-10m down was impregnable. A series of hidden, and
sometimes booby-trapped, doors connected the routes,
down through a system of narrow, often unlit and
invented tunnels. At one point American troops brought
in a well-trained squad of 3000 sniffer dogs, but the
German Shepherds were too bulky to navigate the courses.
One legend has it that the dogs were deterred by
Vietnamese using American soap to throw them off their
scent, but more usually pepper and chilly spray was laid
at entrances, often hidden in mounds disguised as
molehills, to throw them off. But the Americans were
never passive about the tunnels, despite being unaware
of their sheer complexity. Large-scale raiding
operations used tanks, artillery and air raids, water
was pumped through known tunnels, and engineers laid
toxic gas. But one American commander’s report at the
time said: "It’s impossible to destroy the tunnels
because they are too deep and extremely tortuous."
Today the halls that showed propagandas films, housed
educational meetings and schooled Vietnamese in warfare
are largely intact. So too are the kitchens where
visitors can dine on steamed manioc, pressed rice with
sesame and salt, a popular meal during the war, as they
are assailed with true stories of how life went on as
near-normal, much of the time. Ancestors were worshipped
there, teaching was well-timetabled, poultry was raised
– and even couples trusted, fell in love, were wed, and
honeymooned there. But visitors have it easier: those
re-constructed tunnels give the flavour of the tunnels
but not the claustrophobia and the sacrifice of the
estimated 18,000 who served their silent and unseen war
there with only around one-third surviving, the rest
casualties of American assaults, snakes, rats and
insects.
Now the unseen and undeclared No Man’s Land is
undergoing a revival, saluted as a Relic of National
History and Culture with its Halls of Tradition
displaying pictures and exhibits. The nearby Ben Duoc-Cu
Chi War Memorial, where the reproduced tunnels have been
built, stands as an-above ground salute to a hidden war.
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Source: Vietnam Nation Administration of Tourism
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