The Tunnels of Cu Chi by Tom Mangold Page B

choice, they always preferred to return as quickly as possible to their primary missions.
    â€œThe tunnels began from a logical strategy,” explained Major Quot. “First they were for individuals, then for families. Each family had responsibility for its piece of tunnel. Then various huts within the hamlet were joined by the tunnels, and soon we began to build tunnels that connected one hamlet with another. In the end there were main communications tunnels, secret tunnels, false tunnels. The more the Americans tried to drive us away from our land, the more we burrowed into it.
    â€œWe even had [street] signs underground so that strangers knew where they were, although guiding strangers [VC and NVA soldiers and cadres] was the responsibility of the local hamlet chief. It was for him to provide guides who would take the people from one district to another before handing them over to another guide.”
    As the intensity of the war in Vietnam escalated, Cu Chi district and the Iron Triangle area increasingly became the focus of attention for the frustrated Americans. Unable to dominate or secure these areas, they were to resort to the one factor in the military equation that was always in their favor—the abilityto bring overwhelming firepower to bear upon the land. With artillery and air strikes, using high explosives, chemical defoliants, and CS gas, the Americans pounded the surface, while below, whole battalions of regional and regular Communist troops waited patiently. The earth cracked, groaned, and in places gave way. The landscape changed from jungle to dusty desert; entire villages disappeared and their inhabitants were moved out. But the physical integrity of the tunnels was to survive long enough for a shadow civilian and military Communist administration to live in the tunnels, conducting its business and defying nearly every attempt to force it up and out. It was an extraordinary triumph of the primitive in a decade that saw man walking on the moon.

   6
   Survival Underground
    Only one year after he married Nguyen Thi Tan in Hanoi, Captain Linh was ordered south to take command of the newly formed 7th VC Battalion in Cu Chi. Linh left behind a son, Nguyen Hoa Vinh; his wife was pregnant with a daughter he would not see until she was ten years old. When Captain Linh came marching home on 6 June 1975, his children refused to let him touch them for three days. “My wife and I treated our reunion like a new marriage. For ten years I had had no relationship with another woman. When we met again my wife only said to me, ‘How thin you are.’ Everyone in the street had come out to welcome me and my wife and I could say nothing in front of the crowd.”
    He is clearly proud of his ten years’ service—five years underground—but too sensitive to have fully buried all the horror he lived through. For example, if the wounded couldn’t be transported to a safe above-ground hospital, they had to be kept in the tunnels to recover. “They used to beg us to kill them,” said Linh. “They used to scream for one look at light and one breath of air, not fresh air, just air. The wounded, their discipline diminished, their minds and bodies hurt, preferred death to lying underground. It was unpleasant to hear them.We offered them nothing: neither death, nor light nor more air.”
    The Vietnamese rarely display emotion. Only very occasionally did the fixed, impassive faces of the villagers break into tears or shouts as they saw their homes or their families destroyed. For a Westerner to ask, “What was it
really
like, living in the tunnels?” is in itself to challenge Vietnamese, and therefore different, concepts of pleasure, pain, endurance, suffering, sharing, and self-discipline. There is common ground, of course—the wounded soldier begging for death as the only relief from hell under earth—but the cultural differences and subtleties