scrawny arms, and tired eyes behind thick-lensed glasses. In 1962 he was working with the Viet Cong in the countryside.He was fitter then, he comments, smiling. Today, at fifty-five, he is painfully thin. âDigging tunnels was our daily task; besides the tunnel where I lived, I had to have two or three spare tunnels, because if the enemy came to one, or bombings destroyed the other, I still needed one to go to. So we had to dig daily. The soil of Cu Chi is a mixture of sand and earth. During the rainy season it is soft like sugar, during the dry season as hard as rock. If I managed to dig down thirty centimeters a day in six hours it was a big achievement. It was easier to dig during the rainy season. I had a hoe as small as a saucer, and I had to kneel or sit down on the ground. I had to find hard soil at the root of a bamboo tree or where there was a termite nest. Such soil could stand the weight of a tank. We dug in teams of three: one dug the earth, the second pulled the soil out, and the third pulled it up.â
And how were the thousands and thousands of tons of earth removed from the tunnels to be disposed of, hidden so that the Americans would not find the telltale evidence? The Communists knew full well that the Americans had spotter planes, and sophisticated new aerial-surveillance techniques that could easily âseeâ great mounds of freshly dug earth. High-resolution photography combined with infrared sensing techniques were sufficiently refined in the early sixties to pose a serious threat. The tunnels manual did not make a great fuss about earth disposal. It simply said, Get rid of that stuff, using your common sense:
Notice:
The earth removed from the underground tunnel should be made into basements for houses, furrows for potato growing, or banks for communications and combat trenches. It may also be poured into streams but must never be left heaped in mounds. In short, the utmost care must be taken to conceal the underground tunnel from the enemyâs discovery.
And it was.
Tunnelers refined earth disposal to a new science. When the American B-52 bombing raids first began, the VC simply shoveled earth into the new craters. When U.S. ground patrols or the ARVN troops made disposal awkward, they used trained water buffalo to carry dirt away from tunnel sites. MacDonaldValentine, who spent nineteen months attached to South Vietnamese Ranger battalions and was stationed at Cu Chi, was told by his Vietnamese scout, Phuc Long, that if enemy pressure left them no other option, they would smuggle earth out under the noses of U.S. patrols inside the common Vietnamese crock that usually contained fish sauce. The crock was the size of a coffee jug, and beneath a layer of fish sauce, the women would hide a bladder full of earth. It was as near as one could get to emptying a lake with a tablespoon.
Every twenty or thirty meters the tunnelers dug a water drainage hole to prevent flooding. It was 20 cm wide, 15 cm deep. But even more importantly, every hundred meters or so, in strategic locations within the tunnels, the special water traps were dug. These stagnant stinking pits, first uncovered during Operation Crimp, served to block the corrosive and often deadly fumes from the smoke bombs and CS riot-gas grenades that the Americans hurled into tunnels in an attempt to contaminate them. In effect, some of the most modern and noxious devices produced by Western chemical-warfare laboratories were often frustrated by the equivalent of a lavatory U-bend in the tunnels. The ordinary trapdoors linking the separate levels were also very effective blockers of gas fumes.
One of the most important secrets kept from the Americans during the entire war, according to Major Quot, was that the construction of the tunnels was such that each section could be sealed off. âThe Americans thought that our armed forces were confined to one tunnel and that they were able to kill everyone down there by blowing down gas or
And how were the thousands and thousands of tons of earth removed from the tunnels to be disposed of, hidden so that the Americans would not find the telltale evidence? The Communists knew full well that the Americans had spotter planes, and sophisticated new aerial-surveillance techniques that could easily âseeâ great mounds of freshly dug earth. High-resolution photography combined with infrared sensing techniques were sufficiently refined in the early sixties to pose a serious threat. The tunnels manual did not make a great fuss about earth disposal. It simply said, Get rid of that stuff, using your common sense:
Notice:
The earth removed from the underground tunnel should be made into basements for houses, furrows for potato growing, or banks for communications and combat trenches. It may also be poured into streams but must never be left heaped in mounds. In short, the utmost care must be taken to conceal the underground tunnel from the enemyâs discovery.
And it was.
Tunnelers refined earth disposal to a new science. When the American B-52 bombing raids first began, the VC simply shoveled earth into the new craters. When U.S. ground patrols or the ARVN troops made disposal awkward, they used trained water buffalo to carry dirt away from tunnel sites. MacDonaldValentine, who spent nineteen months attached to South Vietnamese Ranger battalions and was stationed at Cu Chi, was told by his Vietnamese scout, Phuc Long, that if enemy pressure left them no other option, they would smuggle earth out under the noses of U.S. patrols inside the common Vietnamese crock that usually contained fish sauce. The crock was the size of a coffee jug, and beneath a layer of fish sauce, the women would hide a bladder full of earth. It was as near as one could get to emptying a lake with a tablespoon.
Every twenty or thirty meters the tunnelers dug a water drainage hole to prevent flooding. It was 20 cm wide, 15 cm deep. But even more importantly, every hundred meters or so, in strategic locations within the tunnels, the special water traps were dug. These stagnant stinking pits, first uncovered during Operation Crimp, served to block the corrosive and often deadly fumes from the smoke bombs and CS riot-gas grenades that the Americans hurled into tunnels in an attempt to contaminate them. In effect, some of the most modern and noxious devices produced by Western chemical-warfare laboratories were often frustrated by the equivalent of a lavatory U-bend in the tunnels. The ordinary trapdoors linking the separate levels were also very effective blockers of gas fumes.
One of the most important secrets kept from the Americans during the entire war, according to Major Quot, was that the construction of the tunnels was such that each section could be sealed off. âThe Americans thought that our armed forces were confined to one tunnel and that they were able to kill everyone down there by blowing down gas or
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