Tunnel Rat

Saigon is another in a line of 'communist' cities that I've visited lately, none of them resembling anything close to communist. Tianjin was certainly a communist city. You could tell by the rundown buildings, the filth, and the poverty. But then, even Tianjin served Budweiser.

Before heading into Saigon for the night, I decided to check out the Cu Chi tunnels. They're leftovers from the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese lived in them, cooked in them, sometimes fought in them. After crawling around in the tunnels myself, I have come to the firm conclusion that war is a dirty business. It's also muggy. When fourteen people are crawling around in a tunnel fifteen feet underground, filling it with carbon dioxide and who knows what else, it can get steamy. And we were only tourists.

The tour started out with the Obligatory Video. It's the one where you sit and listen to the latest propaganda from the company that is selling you the tour. Nine times out of ten, tours have an environmental axe to grind: the Grand Canyon you're visiting will only remain a pristine wilderness if people stop visiting it. Or, Niagara Falls was a much better place before human beings existed. Or, Hawaii's volcanoes knock over houses in a symbolic gesture of taking back the island.

The gist of the Cu Chi video was this: during the war, Americans killed women and children with impunity, and they bombed the greenery because Americans are mean people who don't respect the earth. That's pretty telling. This last part told me that someone in the Cu Chi region has a firm grasp of modern propaganda: nobody gives a damn about women and children (Darfur), but tell them a tree might die and they will freak out (Alaskan pipeline).

The video was black and white. I wasn't sure if it was old, grainy film stock, or if it was just bad videography. In any event, it had a lot of scenes of Vietnamese people blowing away Americans and winning the day. Except there were no Americans on the screen. The shots were always of smiling Vietnamese women holding rifles incorrectly, or a man making a homemade bomb. Then the video would cut to an explosion of dirt flying in the air, and the narrator would say that the Americans had run away.

Whatever. Propaganda videos don't bother me much these days. Virtually every news channel on TV is an anti-American propaganda piece. Anchormen at the CBC have made entire careers out of it. But for the record, I'm pretty sure the Yanks never lost a pitched battle in Vietnam (yes, even the beloved Tet Offensive, where the Americans creamed them), and not many GIs were pot smoking losers that hated their own country. Most of those people were in Canada, trying to get a job at the CBC.

I didn't catch the end of the Cu Chi video. Me and a couple of Americans left the room, not out of protest, but because we needed a smoke.

Our guide took us on a trip through the jungle. He pointed out a couple of hidden trapdoors. One led to a tunnel. Another led to a pit full of spikes. One thing about the Vietnamese, they sure knew how to make a booby trap. There was the 'fish trap,' where your foot would fall through and your calf would be embedded with spikes. There was the 'rolling trap,' where your leg would be mashed like a sausage. There was the 'chest impaler,' where a board of spikes would fall down from a tree and clobber you in the breadbox.

It wasn't all doom and gloom, however. For a dollar a bullet, you can fire off any old weapon you want. They have a collection of them beside the beer counter: machine guns, shotguns, AK-47s. After downing a quick brew, a few people from our tour decided to let fly. I didn't bother to enlist in our little army; I'd fired weapons before.

I wandered down to watch the action. It was interesting to see how many males thought they knew how rifles worked, and it was comical to see them all line up right where the ejected cartridge casing was going to hit them in the face. The Vietnamese guy holding the rifle told them to get out of the way. Then he told a young lady to come up and give it a shot.

The guide was careful. He didn't take his hands off the weapon until the girl had it pointing down the range. Then he stayed very, very, very close to her, making sure she didn't do something stupid like say, "Quick, take a picture," and point the thing at us.

She prepared to fire. She squinted. She tensed. She actually looked pretty cute. I don't know what it is about a woman in hot pants holding an assault rifle, but it isn't the worst thing you'll ever see.

She pulled the trigger.

Click.

The guide was indeed being careful. He'd forgotten to cock the thing for her. He pulled the slide back.

She tensed again. BANG.

A word about firearms. If you've never fired one, they're amazingly loud. The movies don't do them justice. I had a good laugh when I heard Spielberg going on about how real he wanted Saving Private Ryan to sound. If he had tried that, he would have deafened the entire audience within the first five seconds of the film.

Standing near a powerful assault rifle when it goes off is painfully loud. They're an ugly weapon, not built for pretty. When they go off, your ears ring and you wonder what hit you. You also wonder how the hell people fight a war when a hundred of those things are going off all around them.

When the young lady on our tour pulled that trigger, everyone winced and the women jumped a foot in the air. One of them screamed. As I said, weapons are loud. They also stink. One rifle will cover an entire group with the unmistakable stench of cordite.

A few people took a turn each. Bam, bam, bam, firing down the range. The change that came over them was evident: before coming down to the range from the beer counter, they'd been all smiles and laughs. Now they were plugging their ears and frowning. Others walked away without firing a shot. Seeing and hearing deadly things close up is not as fun as people think it is. It doesn't make you a braver, tougher person. It makes you a cautious person.

Thinking of that AK-47 firing a bullet into an American GI was an image that probably came up for a few of them. It isn't a nice image. The guide himself was all chuckles. While the people frowned and plugged their ears, he entertained himself by catching the ejected casings in mid-air as they came out of the rifle.

We made it to the tunnels after sampling some rice wine. I didn't bother to ask why there was a rice wine hut on the tour. At first I thought it was because the VC drank a lot of rice wine before going into battle, much like the Japanese had done during WWII. I was wrong. The reason there was a rice wine hut on the tour was because they were selling rice wine. Five bucks for a great big bottle. It tasted like gasoline, it burned your stomach, and it instantly made me want to shoot somebody. Powerful stuff.

The tunnels were our last stop. During the Vietnam War, there were miles and miles of them, some of them going more than thirty feet into the ground. Throughout the maze, there were living spaces, storage areas, hospitals, you name it. Americans who went into them would be greeted by booby traps, spiders, rats, and enemy soldiers waiting to stab you to death in the dark. I read once that some of the tunnel rats, as the American interloper was known, would go nuts from the stress of going down those holes.

I don't know if I could have done it. Who can know that, except for a diagnosed claustrophobic? All is know is, tunnels are very tiring to crawl through, they're hot, and they stink.

Our tourist tunnel had been smoothed out since the war. The guide told us they were quite safe. We were only going to go fifteen feet underground. The tunnel was about three feet high. It would be shoulder-width. There were no rats or snakes, but there might be spiders. That raised eyebrows.

Two people bailed out immediately. As we descended a set of dirt steps into the ground, two young ladies came walking back past me. One said, "No way." The other said, "Fuck that."

When I got the bottom of the steps, I was greeted by a trapdoor, minus the door. I dropped down into darkness. A small red light was set into the wall, but it didn't do anything for my vision. There was an immediate left turn in front of me. The guide had told us to expect a sharp turn after every trapdoor. They'd been built to muffle a grenade being dropped down the hole.

I was on my hands and knees, the ceiling of the tunnel brushing my back. The tunnel smelled of dirt and sweat. I felt my way along the wall and made the turn. I could hear my group up ahead, but I couldn't see them. Once in a while there was a flash of light as the guide turned his flashlight back towards us, and I could make out the silhouette of someone's butt up ahead of me.

The air got muggy. We went down at an angle. Someone in our group had the worst B.O. of all time, and it threatened to gag me once or twice. I could not imagine making this crawl knowing that there might be an enemy soldier up ahead with a bamboo spike in his hand, dying to drive it home.

Turn, turn, turn. And quite a few of them, too. Whoever had constructed these tunnels was not a fool. For a tourist like me, they were a simple pain in the ass. For an invader, every turn would be considered a deathtrap. There would be no way to know what was around every corner.

I bonked my head against the wall. I hadn't seen it coming. I felt around with my hands. No way out. Trapped. I reached up, and discovered there was a hole in the ceiling. I stood up, and bonked my head against the ceiling of the next level. Between AK-47s and tunnels, the tour should come with a free bottle of Excedrin.

I crawled through the hole. I could hear people up ahead. I heard the guide say, "It's okay." I knew he was at least ten people and two corners ahead of me, but he sounded five feet away. Noise in the tunnel carried far, and I suddenly regretted saying, "That guy stinks," a little while ago.

It brought up another thought of the American invader. There's no way they snuck up on their enemy in the tunnels. It must have been primal warfare. Wits, and knives, and fists, and the gun as a last resort, deafening you and alerting the entire tunnel system to your presence. And once you did that, how to escape? How do you run when you can't even walk?

We reached a bottle neck. My friend Matt was jammed up. His voice was shaking a bit in the dark. He said he was stuck, that he had to take his knapsack off his chest. Claustrophobia was closing in on him. Only later did he tell me that he'd done the tour to face his fear of tight places. Tight, dark places were another matter.

"You're all right," I said. "You've got plenty of room," I lied.

He pushed his way through. I crawled forward and heard him disappear around another corner. Then I felt what he'd been afraid of. I say felt, because I hadn't seen it. It was a good bottleneck, and it had me by the shoulders. My knees were hurting more, and my shirt was soaked through. Sweat was dripping off my face like a salt shower.

I pushed forward and slipped through. I shuddered to think of a fat person getting jammed in there, yelling for help, and not being able to see help coming.

Light.

I'd reached an exit, steep steps leading ten feet up to the surface. I saw two people climbing the steps, breathing hard, congratulating themselves. I yelled ahead into the darkness. I got a yell in response. So push on. If you're going to crawl through an old war tunnel, you might as well crawl through the whole thing.

More dirt, more heavy breathing, more sweat. The tunnel past the first exit was narrower. That first exit must have been for the people who felt the rest of the tunnel getting a bit too tight. These tunnels had been made to fight American soliders and scare the crap out of American tourists.

And the Vietnamese lived like this for years. Crawling around in the dark, dragging rifles and ammunition, food and water, perhaps wounded Marines. It was Iwo Jima flattened to pancake proportions, the tunnels spreading out around the country. They would lie in wait. And wait. And wait. And when the time came, up they'd come, out of the ground, looking to kill somebody in a green uniform.

They may never have won a pitched battle, but they certainly inflicted enough pain and misery upon their invaders. The Americans got their digs in too, but leaving Vietnam was probably a wise decision no matter how you felt about communism. People who dig tunnels underground and fight a smash-and-grab guerilla war are not going to surrender, it's just that simple. I only had to crawl through the tunnels; the willpower to dig them and make house must have been extraordinary.

The answer to the tunnels, of course, would have been to cut off their head. We can't go into all the reasons the Americans didn't nail North Vietnam to the wall, but the fact is, they didn't. Hence the tunnels lived on throughout the war and lasted to be the pain in the ass they were for the Americans.

And for me. I finally got out the other end after twenty-five more meters of darkness. A shaft of daylight looks blue when it's coming down into the tunnels. It is deceiving, too, because it looks closer than it is.

Finally up and out, fresh air tasting as good as a dry martini. I looked down into that black mouth, then looked at the faces of my group. They were all sweating, laughing, and taking pictures. They couldn't wait to get out of that hole. We drank Tiger beer and said that it had been interesting, hot, and stank like hell, and we were better off outside than inside.

That the Vietnamese couldn't wait to get back into that hole during the war speaks volumes. To them, that hole was home.