Cu Chi Tunnels

The Cu Chi Tunnels are about an hour northwest of Saigon and are famous for being an underground stronghold of the Viet Cong after the U.S. bombed the hell out of Cu Chi town and forced the villagers underground. The area surrounding the town was important for its rubber plantations. All those trees were completely wiped out by American bombs, but new rubber trees had been planted after the war finished, so rubber was bvack to being an important crop for the region.

The Tunnels themselves were very touristy, mostly with adverse effects. When we arrived at the Tunnels, we were sat down in an audiovisual room and shown this 10-minute propaganda film about the heroic resistance of the villagers, who fled from the town and constructed the Cu Chi tunnels, where they lived during the rest of the war and carried out guerilla combat operations against American soldiers trying to secure the region. The film was intriguing because it was composed of footage filmed during that actual period of the 1960s, but everything seemed staged, with smiling soldiers firing weapons and ranging around through the underground tunnels. It's difficult to imagine any soldier from either side of that war smiling while taking on the enemy.

After the film, we were led by our tour guide on a long loop past some of the tunnel entrances and also some exhibits of the kind of traps that Viet Cong soldiers set to injure and possibly kill enemy soldiers. For me and another American I met on the tour on the tour, there was entirely too much laughter as the tour guides were demonstrating how some of these traps worked. It seemed like people weren't considering that these traps were constructed to and were quite successful in killing people. To make matters worse, there was an actual firing range where tourists could fire makes of weapons similar to those that soldiers used during the American-Vietnam war. I tried to play devil's advocate with my friend by saying that the War Remnants Museum contained so much horrifying material that maybe the Vietnamese felt some levity was also possible with vestiges of the war so that remembering what happened didn't have to be completely depressing. But I don't really believe any of that carnival element was appropriate.

The best part of the tour was actually spending a few minutes crawling around these tunnels that soldiers lived in and fought from during the war. Marriage ceremonies and births happened in the tunnels during the war. People spent all their time living down there in these small passages that I couldn't stand up straight in even though the tunnels had been enlarged for tourists. I began to get claustrophobic after about a couple of minutes being stooped over and not being able to stand up straight, so I marvel at how people spent whole years of their lives in these cool passages that were only faintly lit. That's why the earlier carnival atmosphere that I experienced above the ground left me with such a bad taste in my mouth; it seemed to be making light of the sacrifices that various people on both sides made during the war, even if no one was completely sure why they were fighting each other.