Cu-Chi tunnels...
Mac
Visit the Vietcong's World: Americans Welcome
By Seth Mydans, , July 7, 1999
URL is: << http://www.mishalov.com/Vietnam_Cu-Chi.html >>
CU CHI, Vietnam -- The rattle and pop of automatic weapons greet a
visitor. Young women in the black pajamas of the Vietcong flit through
the woods. A man in green fatigues picks his way down a narrow trail,
leading a small platoon of foreign tourists.
This is the site of the Cu Chi tunnels, one of the most famous
battlegrounds of the Vietnam War. Today it is one of the country's
prime tourist attractions, part of a new industry of war tourism.
Sometimes, these spots seem to be memorials to wartime propaganda as
much to the war itself.
Following the man in green fatigues, the tourists arrive at an
open-sided hut, where the women in black show them to their seats.
There, on a big-screen television set, the Vietnam War plays on:
B-52's drop strings of bombs, villagers run for cover, communist
guerrillas fight back.
For those who still don't get the message, a narrator says:
"Cu Chi, the land of many gardens, peaceful all year round under shady
trees ... Then mercilessly American bombers have ruthlessly decided to
kill this gentle piece of countryside ... Like a crazy bunch of devils
they fired into women and children ... The Americans wanted to turn
Chu Chi into a dead land, but Cu Chi will never die."
Knitting past and present jarringly together, the gunfire in the film
mingles with that of the nearby firing range, where visitors can pay
$1 a bullet to shoot an AK-47 rifle.
Since the war ended in 1975 with a communist victory, Vietnam has
rebuilt and moved on. It is almost impossible to find anyone who still
talks like the soundtrack of the Cu Chi film. Even the young women in
black, who work as guides and ground keepers, dismiss the hard
language, repeating instead today's government line: We're all
friends.
But in their new struggle for foreign currency, the Vietnamese are
exploiting their harsh history, offering visits to long-forgotten
places that were once considered vital to America's national
interests. Most of the visitors here are foreigners; the Vietnamese
who come are mostly schoolchildren with their teachers.
The Cu Chi tunnels, a 75-mile-long underground maze where thousands of
fighters and villagers could hide, are at the top of the list of
tourist spots for Ho Chi Minh City, 45 miles to the southeast. Another
is the city's Museum of War Remnants, with its displays of captured
weapons and its catalog of horrors, which only recently amended its
name, with changing times, from the Museum of American War Crimes.
Hue, the ancient capital, familiar to many Americans as the scene of
heavy fighting in the Tet offensive in 1968, is the hub of a network
of war tours. Streetside kiosks offer lists of attractions: "Khe Sanh,
Dong Ha, Marble Mountain, China Beach, bombed-out church, DMZ with
statue of Ho Chi Minh."
Even the site of the American massacre at My Lai has been turned into
something of a theme park, with a cemetery, museum, professional
storytellers and a memorial reading, "Forever hate the American
invaders."
There are plans to develop the DMZ -- the wartime demilitarized zone
separating the north and the south -- as well as parts of the Ho Chi
Minh Trail, neither of which now offer much for tourists to see.
Many of the visitors to these sites, like most of their guides, are
too young to remember the war. Relatively few tourists come from the
United States. For most people who come here, the war is a distant
curiosity.
But for the last few years, since travel to Vietnam became more open,
groups of American veterans have come in search of remembered
battlefields. A small number of American tour companies specialize in
guiding them and gaining permission to visit remote areas.
"They get a feeling of closure; that's the big benefit of going back
as a veteran," said Richard Schonberger, director of veterans programs
at a travel agency in Washington called Global Spectrum.
"We left suddenly," he said. "Now you know how the story ended. All
the Vietnamese are very friendly. It's a different country now."
That can be disorienting, said Chuck Searcy, the Hanoi representative
of Vietnam Veterans of America, which now runs prosthetics and
rehabilitation programs.
"Everything has changed," Searcy said. "Almost every time, the vets
are disappointed. They can't figure out where anything was: Was it
here or was it that hill over there? That piece of rusted metal was
the gate to a big army base. You go to Long Binh: It's an
export-processing zone now."
One American tour company uses a global positioning satellite to
pinpoint battle locations for its clients, said Paulette Curtis, a
graduate student in social anthropology at Harvard who is studying
returning veterans.
"I've been to Hill 10, Hill 37, Hill 55 and Hill 65," she said, naming
old battlegrounds. There isn't much to see. "You go to Khe Sanh and
it's just coffee plantations and black pepper trees. The world of the
vets' tour is completely different from the rest of Vietnam."
The sites that have been restored for tourists, with their soft drink
stands, hawkers and eager guides, are almost as unrecognizable.
At Cu Chi, the visitor is greeted by a sign reading: "Please try to be
a Cu Chi guerrilla. Wear these uniforms before entering tunnel." Black
pajamas, pith helmets, rubber sandals and old rifles are available.
Here and there, swimming pool-sized holes in the ground are neatly
labeled: "B-52 crater."
The woods are dotted with souvenir kiosks selling these items: a
lighter made from a bullet, a pen made from bullets, a bullet on a
chain, rubber sandals, an "I've Been to the Cu Chi Tunnel" T-shirt.
Also abundantly available, as they are wherever tourists are awaited
in southern Vietnam, are Zippo lighters engraved with reproductions of
the swashbuckling mottos that were popular among American G.I.'s:
"Death is my business and business has been good."
"I know I'm going to heaven because I've already been to hell:
Vietnam."
"I am not scared just lonesome. Vietnam 68-69."
The tunnels themselves are undeniably impressive. Throughout the war,
the South Vietnamese Communists, or Vietcong, continually expanded the
three-level network, which included mess halls, meeting rooms, an
operating theater and even a tiny cinema.
When the war was over, the people of Cu Chi went to work on the
tunnels once again, widening parts of them and adding steps and
lighting so that foreign tourists could wriggle in for a look.
"I got claustrophobia big time," said Lawrence W. Goichman, a recent
visitor from Stamford, Conn. "I crawled about 30 yards and then I took
the first emergency exit."
But he added: "It's very clean down there. The guide said they have
someone dusting every day. They actually let you eat the food that the
people that fought were eating."
He said he enjoyed his visit to Cu Chi. But he said the Vietnamese
still have some work to do in developing their tourist sites. "Let's
put it this way," Goichman said. "It wasn't as good as Disneyland."