Clogged Up In Cu Chi

Saturday March 22, 2008, Clogged up in Cu Chi

yasmin@thestar.com.my

Until you’ve been trapped several feet underground with a fat behind stifling the air supply right in your face, you can’t possibly know hell.

A city’s a city, right? Lots of people, lots of noise, a bit more crime than you’d find in your average hill tribe village?

Wrong.

Ho Chi Minh was not just another city. It was an uber city, a metropolis, a massive seething ant farm of humanity with a good dose of inhumanity thrown in to boot. Lots of people? Try four million of them, all squashed at an average of 22,000 per sq km. Lots of noise?

“What? I screamed above the cacophony of the traffic to the motorbike driver for the eighth time. “I said you want marijuana? Very good, very sticky!” And that took care of a bit more crime.

District 1, the main tourist drag in downtown Saigon, was deranged with mayhem, and it wasn’t even nine in the morning yet. The streets were crammed to bursting with people of every persuasion: from touts selling everything from ivory opium pipes to hammocks, to little boys selling packets of Wrigleys Spearmint that had surely been in storage since the Vietnam War.

Into a labyrinth: Tourists walk down one of the Cu Chi tunnels.

Clinging to my daypack, I pushed my way tentatively past tailors and cramped art reproduction sweatshops in which dozens of young men painstakingly copied famous work. “So, what's next?” asked my travel buddy, Dini. I was just about to open my mouth and suggest anchoring ourselves with some Vietnamese coffee, when I spotted a sign that read “Tunnel Tours”. Given our aversion to group anything, Dini and I were doubtful. As far as we were concerned, a group excursion turned otherwise normal individuals into a collectively retarded clot of helpless fumbles who, for the duration of their junket, hand over their free will to hyper jerks with an overworked script.

But then again, I thought, maybe a day of acting like a docile infant instead of a trouble-seeking missile of an idiot would do no harm. Besides, we might actually see something neat.

“What’s the tour about?” I asked the lady at the information desk.

“Ah!” she shot back. “We go to the Cu Chi tunnels. It’s a 200km stretch of underground passageway built by Viet Cong guerillas during the war. You can crawl through a tunnel yourself.”

“Dini?”

She shrugged. “Why not?”

Why not, indeed. Even if the sights turned out to bad, we would get to spend a few hours drowning in an air-conditioned bus with seats so plush they swallowed us. After three weeks of torturing our tailbones on wooden planks and seats so small, our bottoms felt as if they had been sharpened to point, this way was our little way of saying “Thank you” to our butts.

“Welcome to the Tunnel Tours. My name is ?” he made some kind of tuneful gulping noise, “but you can call me Billy,” said the guide.

Some Vietnam war veterans on the bus had been to the tunnels long before they became a sort of macabre tourist attraction, but they were paying in dong this time, not lives, and I’d be damned if they weren’t going in and facing their past like men.

The roadside jungle grew thicker and white stumps reading “Cu Chi’’ counted off kilometres to our destination. By the time we got to the tunnel complex and were seated in a room, our curiosities were aflame.

Underground city: Foreign tourists listen to a guide next to one of the gates leading to the tunnels at the site of Cu Chi tunnels

The surrounds looked innocent enough, just another scrubby jungle landscape dotted with fading signs in Vietnamese.

“Before you go to the tunnels, we have a movie for you to watch, which explains what happened here during the war,” Billy announced.

The television flickered and instantly the sounds of combat filled the room. On a screen tinged with a grey gloom of age, grainy jets pelted dense forest with bombs, as peasants went berserk, scrambling madly for cover and Viet Congs in their black pj's assembled dodgy-looking rifles.

“The tunnels at Cu Chi” a heavily accented narrator began. “The true story.”

As the soundtrack of gunfire and high-pitched shrieks gave way to something akin to the theme from Bambi, images of idyllic village life filled the screen. “Cu Chi, the land of many gardens,” said the narrator. “Peaceful all year round under shady trees. But then,” intoned the narrator, “everything changed. Mercilessly the American bombers decided to kill this gentle piece of countryside.”

Dini and I glanced at each other. I wondered if the Americans could see humour in it. Obviously not.

“Gentle?” cried a stocky American in fatigues, “Gentle my ass! What is this sh*t?” Immune to the heckling, the narrator droned on. “Like a crazy bunch of devils they fired into women and children...insane Yankee devils...”

“My buddy died down there you a**hole!” yelled someone from the back.

“We hoped you liked the movie. Maybe later, some of you would like to try shoot a real AK47 at our firing range,” said Billy, oblivious to the uproar. Now that’s bad timing.

Billy led us into a hut, evidently some kind of torture museum, boasting a galaxy of horror that made Psycho look like an episode of Little House On The Prairie.

Graphic murals on the walls showed cartoon American soldiers keeling over in pools of red paint. The exhibits consisted of dozens of nifty gizmos employed by the Viet Cong spelunkers to make the enemy's lives, or what remained of them complete – hell-spiked ankle trap, homemade spears and bombs. And more.

“Come now,” Billy called out to our increasingly nauseated group. “Time for the tunnels.”

I was the most claustrophobic person I knew, but burying myself in a tiny underground tunnel had to be better than this archive of agony. Along the walk, Billy expanded on what we had learned about their history. By his account, the tunnels were first constructed as a place for the impoverish peasant, the Viet Minh, to hide from and fight the French. But it wasn’t until 1960, with the uprising of the communist Viet Cong against the South Vietnamese government and later, the Yanks, that the tunnels reached their highest point, or to be literal – the lowest.

The tunnel system ran from Saigon to the Cambodian border, which would have made for a bloody long crawl.

Apart from using the sprawling network as a clever base from which to attack and to hide miniscule hospitals, kitchen and weapon factories, the guerillas actually lived down here for months at a time. When the US troops sent dogs to sniff out the tunnels, the Viet Cong used American-made soap to throw them off the scent. Billy steered us into a forest clearing.

“Does anyone see a good place to hide?” he quizzed. I looked around. Trees? Too obvious. Behind a nearby rock? Sure, if you’re three inches, tall but as far as I could tell the guerillas weren’t Smurfs. Booting me out of the way, Billy cleared a pile of compost that concealed a lid and swept his hand - voila! -a secret hiding hole.

As far as I could see, the narrow pit went straight down about two feet, leaving no room for a sniper to crouch once inside. Maybe they really were Smurfs. In one liquid motion, Billy slid in and all but disappeared except for his grinning face and arms, which stuck out like a jack-in-the-box.

“Now see how they hid!” he said, folding himself down into the pit, while dragging the covering lid over his head. Everyone dutifully oooh-ed and aah-ed, genuinely impressed. I shuddered at the thought of the American patrols in the jungles and the nasty surprise that awaited them.

Two seconds later, I got a pretty good idea. “Yaaaaah!” Billy shouted, leaping back out of the hole, sending the lid and not to mention me flying. “Bloody hell!” I screamed.

“Sorry,” I muttered sheepishly. “I got a bit carried way. This was precisely why I’d never played Dungeons & Dragons.

“The tunnels we will enter have been widened so that Western tourists can crawl through them,” Billy explained. “Now, go in and see what it’s like to be a real Cu Chi guerilla. But let me warn you, there is no light here and it is very narrow. Anyone who is pregnant or scared of the dark should not go in.”

I looked at Dini with trepidation, and she offered a half smile in return.

“If you get scared or feel panic, you can come out at any of the exits we have made every 50 feet along. Or for the brave,” he chuckled “ you can go the entire way.”

By the time I found myself on all fours, enveloped in dust, a large woman’s bottom had blocked what-ever visibility I may have otherwise had. “Fish,” I grumbled back to Dini. “I'll bet the Viet Cong never had to put up with this.”

I took stock of my surrounds. Fixating on the arse of a 50-year-old woman had been eerie enough, but crouched in the dark tunnel, I felt like I was being swallowed in a constricting oesophagus.

Dirt was getting into my lungs, nose, and mouth. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I realised there was nothing else to see – just dirt and darkness.

“Uh... Dini,” I said, trying in vain to turn my head around.

“I feel sort of sick.” What I actually felt was my gorge rising, along with a wave of anxiety and revulsion. I wanted to scream at the top of my clogged-up lungs, but that would only open the floodgates of panic.

Buoyed by the idea of busting out into the afternoon sunlight, I crawled forward at top speed, which wasn't very fast at all. “Ow!” the clogger cried, as I slammed straight into her bum. “Watch it!” “Whoops,” I mumbled, trying to dislodge my head.

“Is this line moving or what?”

“Someone’s having a panic attack,” she grunted back. “I think it's one of the old guys. He’s refusing to move.”

The air was getting damp from communal exhaling. Apart from an imminent panic attack, I was possessed with admiration for the determined guerillas who lived and died down here.

“We’re moving!” came a voice from somewhere in the distant dim. “Go lady, move it!”

I stifled at the urge to slap her on the buttocks and waited for an intolerable five seconds until we actually began worming our way forward again.

And it wasn’t until I clambered out of that heat tunnel, squinting in the late afternoon sunlight with forest air filling my lungs that I truly knew joy. Chocolate has nothing on oxygen, I tell you. I looked down at the dirt that had taken up permanent residence on my clothes. I’ve kept it that way, as a reminder of man’s brutality to their fellow man.