Vietnam: Tunnel Rats for a Day

Most passengers whose ships dock at Phy My plan to visit Ho Chi Minh City. However, Ken had other plans for us--a long bus ride into the countryside to see the Cu Chi Tunnels. During the Vietnam War, his cousin Ricky was a tunnel rat in these tunnels. More than 10,000 people fought in these tunnels during that war and many never made it our of the tunnels because there was no map of the tunnels, which covered 165 to 170 kilometers. Fortunately, Ken's cousin did.

Our tour guide Thanh told us his English name was Mervin while our driver Vu's English name was Traffic Hero. To drive in Vietnam, one needs good nerves, good heart, good brakes and good luck. If one owns one of the 40 million motorbikes of the 90 million residents, he or she also need a good helmet. About 15,000 people die annually in motorcycle accidents. To obtain a driver's license for any type of motor vehicle, a resident goes to school for one day. If that person passes the driver's test, a license is granted for life.

Some interesting facts and insights that Thanh shared with us included: the Vietnam War was a battlefield between Socialism and Capitalism ideologies; 7.8 million soldiers came to Vietnam during the war; Viet Cong stood for Vietnam Communism; four relatives of his died fighting the war; the Vietnam War lasted 17 years, six months and 30 days; the Communists talked a beautiful talk that made the residents ready to die for freedom; and Communism makes people lazy because everyone receives the same thing despite the amount of effort.

Thanh explained that the tunnels were built in Cu Chi for three reasons: (1) hard soil; (2) location between two rivers made it easy to escape; and (3) water hyacinth provides camouflage and is also good to eat. In addition, the biggest U.S. military base in Vietnam was in Cu Chi. The Vietnamese dug the tunnels by hand with hoes and used bamboo baskets to carry the soil to sites where they built mountains of soil with a bomb in the middle. The tunnels were very well organized with many rooms and formed an underground village. The entrances were so well camouflaged that the country is still not sure that all the entrances have been uncovered yet.

The Cu Chi Tunnels today are a well-done tourist attraction. We saw exhibits of the weapons that were used and the different types of booby traps, were offered an opportunity to shoot AK-47 rifles, viewed life-sized dioramas of uniforms worn by the military and life inside and outside of the tunnels, and walked stooped over inside a section of the tunnel that had expanded to accommodate the taller foreign visitors.

Vietnam also engaged in a conflict with China in 1979 and sent troops to Cambodia in 1978, withdrawing in 1988 so for a considerable period of time, the country suffered. In the village in which Thanh was born and grew up, life was hard with low technology equipment for farming, no chemical fertilizers, little land to farm because of landmine, lack of electricity, one television among 3,000 residents, little knowledge of the weather and hunger as a common companion. Now life in South Vietnam is better according to Thanh. Hunger is not a problem, technology for both farming and predicting the weather are available, and the people have television in their homes but there still is no money for healthcare. The government is now a combination of Socialism and Communism but it works.