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Tuesday,Oct 13 2009, 04:40:18 AMCu Chi tunnels one of Vietnam's most popular tou..
War's reality closes in when you take plunge into underground passageways - Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam
HO
CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam -- The sound of gunshots pierce the thick jungle
air. I'm on my hands and knees, crawling through the subterranean
darkness, sweating in places I didn't know I had sweat glands.
"Keep on coming! Keep on coming!" urges a wiry Vietnamese man in fatigues, waving me forward.
Cu Chi Tunnels, Vietnam
A Cu Chi tunnel worker demonstrates how villagers and Viet Cong would enter the hidden tunnels during the war. The openings were incredibly small and hidden by leaves. When tourists visit the tunnels today, they go through segments that have been widened to accommodate Westerners' bodies.
If you goCU CHI TUNNELS: Open from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day. Admission costs about $5.
We're
in the infamous Cu Chi tunnels, the Viet Cong's network of secret
underground passageways that proved to be one ginormous thorn in the
side of the American military during the Vietnam War.
The
claustrophobic tunnel system -- dug by hand -- at one time measured
more than 120 miles, stretching from the Cambodian border to the
outskirts of what was then Saigon. A virtual city, the web of tunnels
was home to local villagers seeking shelter from bomb raids, plus
thousands of Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese Army-backed guerrillas who
battled South Vietnamese and U.S. forces. Here, right under the boots
of American GIs, is where the Viet Cong ate, slept, hid and launched
deadly surprise attacks.
It's also where a select group of
American soldiers -- a k a tunnel rats -- engaged in what has to be the
world's scariest game of hide and seek. These tunnel rats inched their
way through the cramped, dark passageways, trying to find the enemy
before the enemy found them. Something to think about this Memorial Day.
For
obvious reasons, not a lot of soldiers wanted to set foot in these
booby-trap-filled hell holes. But these days, the Cu Chi tunnels are
one of Vietnam's most popular tourist attractions. Some 1,000 visitors
flock daily to the site, located about 45 miles from downtown Ho Chi
Minh City (formerly Saigon).
Only a few short sections of the
tunnels are accessible today. They've been expanded a bit to
accommodate Westerners' super-sized bodies, but that didn't keep me
from struggling to hunch low enough so my back wouldn't scrape against
the dirt ceiling.
"Are there snakes in here?" I ask my Vietnamese guide, who seems almost comfortable in these ridiculously confined quarters.
"Not anymore," he answers with a big grin, followed by a few more rounds of "Keep on coming!"
Tourists
can make their way through three sections of tunnels ranging from 150
to 650 feet in length. If you're claustrophobic or have a bad back or
knees, you're probably better off staying above ground -- at least when
it comes to the longer tunnels.
And don't worry: There's
plenty to see above ground. A display of horrific spiked contraptions
once hidden under trap doors in the jungle floor, craters left by bombs
dropped from B-52s, abandoned U.S. tanks you can climb in, mannequins
of North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerrillas -- it's like the
Disneyland of Death and Destruction.
The whole experience gave
me a better sense of what American soldiers went through. It's one
thing to stand in front of a war memorial or monument; it's another to
get down and dirty in the proverbial trenches, especially with the
eerie sound of assault rifles blasting in the distance.
"If you
want to shoot gun -- AK-47 or M16 -- you can do it ... $13 or $14 buys
10 bullets," says Nguyen Cao Van, my above-ground tour guide at Cu Chi.
"If you don't want to shoot gun," he adds, "you can buy ice cream next
door."
Just like Disneyland.
Nguyen's uncle was a
colonel for the South Vietnamese army. After the war ended in 1975, his
uncle spent seven years in a re-education camp.
"And he was a quick learner," Nguyen says.
Nguyen's
wife is from North Vietnam. They tied the knot in 2005. Marriages
between people from the North and South have become more common in the
last few years, Nguyen says, now that animosity between both halves of
the country has finally started to die down.
Before I arrived in
Vietnam, I was a little worried that I might face lingering animosity
over the American War, as they call it. When you carpet bomb a country
and spray its landscape with Agent Orange, people might hold a grudge.
But
the only accosting this Yank got was from overeager Vietnamese street
vendors desperate to sell their bamboo bowls and other tchotchkes.
"What
happened has happened," Nguyen says, adding that most people in Vietnam
are too young to even remember the war. Some 55 million of the
country's 87 million residents were born after Saigon's fall in 1975.
"We don't look to the past," he says. "We look to the future."
Source: suntimes.com/lifestyles/travel/asia/
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