Yukon Jay - 小祥

Cu Chi Tunnels

Been pretty busy lately... mainly because I'm working 8 straight days and only had 2 days off the last 2 weeks. I dont mind working this much, mainly need the money for school, but because I'm working by myself it gets very stressful when customers all come at once for their orders. After tomorrow I have a few days off and only working 2 more days till I start school.

I made reference to the Vietnam War in the last blog so I thought I jump right ahead to my trip in Vietnam and show pictures of the legacy the Americans have left in Vietnam. The Vietnam War in Vietnam is called The American War... so I'm gonna call it that since the pictures are in the perspective of the Vietnamese.

The tunnel netowrk of Cu Chi became legendary during the 1960s for its role in facilitating Viet Cong (VC) control of a large rural area only 30km to 40km from Ho Chi Minh City.

The network, parts of which were several storeys deep, included innumberable trap doors, specially constructed living areas, storage facilities, weapons factories, field hospitals, command centres and kitchen.

The tunnels made possible communication and coordination between the VC-controlled enclaves, isolated from eachother by South Vietnamese and American land and air operations.

The tunnels were built over a period of 25 years (goes way back during the French occupation), which began some time in the late 1940s. They were the improvised response of a poorly equipped peasant army to its enemy's high-tech ordnance, helicopters, artillery, bombers and chemical weapons (many Vietnamese today still suffer from the effects of Agent Orange).

Unable to win underground with chemicals, the US army began sending men down into the tunnels. These "tunnel rats", who were often involved in underground fire fights, sustained appallingly high casualty rates.

A series of setbacks and defeats suffered by the South Vietnamese forces in the Cu Chi area rendered a complete VC victory by the end of 1965 a distinct possibility. VC strenghth in and around Cu Chi was one of the reasons the Johnson administration decided to involve US troops in the war. The USA's first action was to establish a large camp in Cu Chi district. Unknowingly they built it right on top of an existing tunnel network... took months for the 25th Division to figure out why they kept getting shot at in their tents at night.

The USA declared Cu Chi a free-strike zone: minimal authorisation was needed to shoot at anything in the area, random artillery was fired into the area at night, and pilots were told to drop unused bombs and napalm there before returning to base. Finally, the late 1960s, American B-52s carpet-bombed the whole area, destroying most of the tunnels along with everything else around. Americans resorted to massive firepower, eventually turning Cu Chi into what the authors of The Tunnels of Cu Chi have called 'the most bombed, shelled, gassed, defoliated and generally devastated area in the history of warfare'.

And lastly, there's me blindly staring right at the sun....

Posted by Jay at August 29, 2004 09:04 PM