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Book Review: Tunnels of Cu Chi

By Pete Zastrow

Any leftover questions about why the Vietnamese won the war are answered in the book The Tunnels of Cu Chi.

The authors, Britishers Tom Mangold and John Penycate make a detailed case for the strategic importance of the hundreds of miles of tunnels in, around and under the U.S. 25th Division headquarters at Cu Chi. But, despite the elaborate construction and varied uses, the tunnels did not win the war. The dedication, perseverance and flat-out refusal to surrender to the ugliest of surroundings and conditions make it apparent that the Vietnamese would be fighting still today if American troops were in Vietnam and bombs were falling from B-52's.

On one of their travels to Vietnam as journalists, the authors met Captain Nguyen Thanh Linh who commanded the Vietnamese tunnel forces in the area around Cu Chi. From that visit came a series of interviews with a remarkable collection of men and women who made the tunnels their home.

The authors are clearly in awe of the people who march through the pages of this book. Pham Sang was putting on theatrical performances (which he also wrote) in a tunnel beneath Cu Chi on Christmas Day, 1966 for his brother and sister liberation fighters. At the same time above ground, Bob Hope was entertaining U.S. troops making jokes about being so close to the enemy that they charged admission to the VC! Dr Vo Hoang Le not only operated on patients deep in the earth, but when he became senior officer, took over military defense of his underground hospital complex and its troops.

Much of the material coming from the Vietnamese (most of them now connected with the government) sounds, unfortunately, like old propaganda pamphlets though the authors try to break the interviews with narratives about the action on the battlefield. But not all the tunnel troops were so pumped up with patriotic fervor that they followed the rules to the last letter.

Vo Thi Mo, described as "The Girl Guerilla," is almost the storybook version of the patriotic guerilla hating Americans with an all-consuming passion. She joined the fight after her home was burned by Americans. Only then did her father (a Viet Minh guerilla fighter against the French years earlier) tell her that the shelter under their home was connected with other shelters and finally with the tunnels.

Inspired by her hatred of Americans, Vo Thi Mo led a platoon of women who infiltrated the American base at Cu Chi; sniped at GI's who would sneak outside the base to swim (the women could snip from spider holes connected to the tunnels so that one or two shots and they could disappear); attacked ARVN camps (NLF higher-ups prevented women from fighting the Americans whenever possible). "I felt enthusiasm and more hatred. I thought I would like to kill all Americans to see my country peaceful again..."

Vo Thi Mo sounds like the model woman guerilla, the propagandist's dream girl. But in The Tunnels of Cu Chi she gets up off the page and turns human. Despite her view of Americans, when she watches three American GI's through her rifle sights, sees them reading a letter from home, looking at photographs, even crying, she cannot pull the trigger and prevents her RTO (actually, a messenger boy who is her runner) from shooting. At a quick party inquest, party officials dismiss the slip-up as inexplicable, demonstrating that Vietnamese party officials had a good deal more wisdom than American military officials would have had in a similar situation. A seasoned veteran at the time, Vo Thi Mo was 17 years old. The authors give her both a face and a soul as she tells her story.

Mangold and Penycate are clearly fascinated by tunnel dwellers and fighters on both sides of the war. A search for American tunnel rats was not so successful as the search for Vietnamese who lived in the tunnels. There were never all that many U.S. tunnel rats, and many of them did not survive the war. But in a group of veterans who have psychological problems, and where these problems are generally related to the intensity of combat experience, there was probably no experience as excruciating as the pursuit of a guerilla into his or her tunnel home. Foul smelling, dark, almost airless, so small that even the relatively small Vietnamese could just fit through, the tunnels provided all manner of traps for the tunnel rat. Because the tunnels were built with vertical passages there were places where a U.S. tunnel rat had to put just his head through into an unknown and dark cavern. A particularly nasty method of execution was described by one of the liberation fighters: a sharpened bamboo stick would be rammed through the throat of the tunnel rat as he put his head through the opening. Those following him could not go forward because the body blocked the way, and they could not pull out the body backwards.

The best of the tunnel rats like the best of point men in Vietnam, were those who could somehow sense that the enemy was there. Those were the rats who got out alive, who had the right combination of ferocity and caution. Others still alive got out of the tunnel business early to go back to the relative ease of combat.

Few explicit value judgments appear in the book, but the authors' preferences are often made clear. In and around Cu Chi and the Iron Triangle/Ho Bo Woods were two U.S. Divisions (through most of the war): the 1st and the 25th whose division base was at Cu Chi. The 25th never did get it together to deal with the tunnels. While the 1st Division created special tunnel rat units made up of volunteers and operating under the Division Engineers, the 25th assigned people to tunnel rat duty. Needless to say it didn't work. People would go into the tunnels just far enough, say the couldn't go further, throw in a couple of grenades, and tunnels were "neutralized." For tunnels which withstood massive B-52 attacks, these efforts were less than a mosquito bit.

The ineptitude of the U.S. command was brilliantly demonstrated by its treatment of the tunnels during Operation Cedar Falls, at the time the largest U.S. operation of the war. Despite turning the Iron Triangle into a vast wasteland (so in the words of one U.S. Commander, "A crow flying over will have to carry lunch") U.S. forces found the guerillas were still there, popping from their tunnel homes to fire away at U.S. forces. Craters left by B-52 bombing became open-air theaters for the guerillas to watch patriotic performances; an area "cleared" of guerillas (according to the U.S. command) and which was a free-fire zone still became a vital transit area for Vietnamese troops on their way towards Saigon during Tet of 1968.

The authors of The Tunnels of Cu Chi are not only surprised by the 25th Division's stupidity concerning the tunnels; they seem amazed at the Cu Chi base camp, an amazement which must reflect the feelings of the Vietnamese. The 25th base camp could have been almost any small city in the U.S. with all the comforts of home (since U.S. troops had no vested interest in the war, the military command had to try to provide things from hot meals in the field to air conditioned clubs as a bribe). Once the base was built (and it was built over some of the tunnels) then the base exhausted large amounts of the division resources just to keep it supplied, and the truck convoys to Saigon were always a tempting and fruitful target for the Vietnamese who could use one man to plant a mine or a couple to fire a few rounds and tie up an entire convoy.

In every aspect the war against the tunnels and their inhabitants showed the stupidity of the U.S. effort in Vietnam as a whole. Not understanding the nature of tunnel warfare led to spasmodic (and no doubt expensive) attempts to solve the problems of the tunnels by U.S. technology. A "concept" team would appear from USARV with some new brain child—liquid explosives, for instance, that ended up injuring only the tunnel rats who were ordered to carry out the experiments.

The books begin with a Vietnamese poem, "the Mother — The Native Land." That too in its way shows why the Vietnamese were going to win the war against the Americans just as they had won countless wars against the Chinese, then the Japanese and the French. A sense of continuity flowed from identification with the land that went deep and was not going to be denied.

Read the book. You'll meet some fascinating people from both sides (and a few stuffed shirts, particularly American generals who don't realize how silly they sound). You'll find out more than you ever wanted to know about tunnel warfare. And, finally, you will find out again, from an unusual perspective, why the Vietnamese won the war and the Americans lost.

—Pete Zastrow
VVAW National Office

PS: When I was in Vietnam with the 1st Air Cav, every major hill we were near was supposed to be "honeycombed" (the local term) with tunnels full of VC. Nui Ba Dien (near Tay Ninh), Nui Ba Rha (near Song Be) and Hong Kong Mountain in An Khe all had U.S. bases on top, but all the supplying, etc was done by helicopter. Mangold and Penycate deal only with the Cu Chi area, but from all they say tunnels could have been built anywhere. Maybe there's another book waiting to be written.