Cu Chi

Up at 7:30 and off on our tour. First it was to the Cao Dai HQ. Cao Dai is pretty much a Vietnamese only religion, don’t think it’s made it out of there really. Though there are a few million of them practicing it. Basically it’s a fusion of Catholosism, Buddhism and Taoism.

It is also, as you can see, a very colourful religion. The followes wear different colours depending on how far they have progressed in the religion. At least that’s what my book says. Red is for catholocism, Yellow Buddhism and Blue for Taoism.

Our excellent tour guide (nicknamed Jacky by the Americans – who he worked for as translator – and served 3 years in prison for as he was a second leutenant), was a mine (bo boom) of information about the tunnels that the VC used (Viet Cong by the way is a play on Vietnamese Communist)

They had 250km (staggering) of tunnels around this place – 80km or so outside of Saigon. It was the staging area for many georilla attacks. 250km, unbelieveable.

I’ve left that map quite large if you click on it – the dark lines are the tunnels. The red area was an American free fire zone. Basically they bombed the area relentlessly, as often as they wanted, anytime of the day or night. The pink areas show the areas that supported the VC (gave them food etc), as obviously, what was once a lush productive area was reduced to worse than ashes. Worse.. so much agent orange and napalm, the injuries were horrific, utterly, and the birth defects afterwards – just awful. One really hopes that when they were doing this they had no idea that babies would be born in the way they were. Hardly bares thinking of (but we should, I think)

There are so many awful things we learned, it’s a must see if you come here, I’ve heard there are better tunnel systems up in the DMZ (Demilitarised Zone) up by Hue, that we will probably check out up there, but it was an interesting tour – Jacky was excellent.

Mhairi was small enough that she was allowed into the tunnels (which you could not see when it was closed – perfectly fitted entrances – never flooded!)

We saw many of the really nasty traps that were made.. trapdoors with spikes of bamboo to impail yourself on, holes to fall into and have spikes chop your legs of.. traps so that when you open a door a plank of nails (cleverly hinged so that it swings into you if you try to block it) falls down heavily and probably disembowels you..

These guys really knew how to fight. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not glorifying war in any way shape or form – but it’d be close to suicide to have entered their tunnels.. they did ingenious things with very basic materials.

Jacky was saying that they faught – suicide even – because they believed totally in what they were fighting for. Iraq must be the same – I would agree with our guide – that it is impossible to beat an enemy like that – on their own soil with popular support. If there is popular support that is. Looks like the latest constitution vote came through well.. I hope they can know peace and begin to put things back together.. but you can certainly see similarities..