Outside of Ho Chi Minh City is the Cu Chi region, whose people fiercely defended their homeland during the Vietnam War (or American invasion as it’s often referred to here). As the old, black and white propaganda film explains, they responded to the “American demon’s” bombs and tanks by digging a complex network of tunnels to live, work, and fight from.
The region is dense jungle, crawling with centipedes and snails and quite loud once the other biomass starts talking. It’s tough to imagine finding or fighting anyone here, even without the tunnels. With tunnels, traps, and bombs everywhere, victory seems impossibile.
A tunnel entrance, invisible under a covering of leaves, is a tiny 18 x 10 inches - just enough to admit a skinny person’s torso with their arms held up. A few of us dropped in with headlamps and began a doubled-over duck walk through tunnels no more than 3 feet high and 2 feet wide. After the first bend, all outside light and air disappears and the heat and claustrophobia hit me quickly. Then it feels like a urgent scramble to get out, and looking at the surface distance our crawl through the tunnel seems much longer.
The remainder of the tour shows - above ground - how the villagers prepared weapons and nasty spiked traps, made sandals from tires (which lasted for 5 years), and fed themselves with rice paper and rice wine. Craters from the many B-52 delivered bombs dot the landscape, and it one a formidable bundle of bamboo has grown dead center. The most striking part of the experience was crawling through the tunnels, though - it took some very tough people to live and fight in them for weeks at a time.
