by Tom Bissell
I backtracked to room one, the “Historic Truths” exhibit, which was largely concerned with the war's military history. Right off the entrance was a hardcover copy of Robert McNamara's In Retrospect alongside its Vietnamese translation, Nhin Lai Qua Khu (literally, “Look again at the past”). The remainder of the room featured massive hand-painted murals that showed the distribution of U.S. forces around Vietnam, timetables of the war's development, and casualty enumerations. Many of the statistics and assertions here were flatly untrue, and I came across a young American man intent on sharing this fact with anyone who would listen. He was wearing a Chicago Cubs baseball hat, sunglasses, crisp new designer jeans. His T-shirt said DARTMOUTH RUGBY. He was my age, perhaps a little younger, solidly pudgy in a way that suggested recurrent encounters with weight lifting, and around him were his travel partners and several others, including a few Asians. He was patiently and knowledgeably describing the ways in which this museum distorted the truth of the war, how it failed to include the many “documented instances” of Communist atrocities. His face was calm, though his voice was quite loud. He had staked out a corner of room one and walked along the wall and pointed out to his audience the analytical inadequacy of many photos’ captions. Most of the museumgoers were giving the man's little corner of historical veracity a wide berth, but I stood and listened to him. After a while it seemed he was talking directly to me. I then realized he was talking directly to me, because everyone else had left.
Finally, shaking his head, he told me, “It just makes me mad.” A young Asian woman—his girlfriend—came over to fetch him, speaking in Vietnamese. He answered her in same, and they walked off, her hand unsalaciously finding his backside.
The final room I visited—narrower and as a consequence even more crowded than the others—was filled with a sweat-and-sawdust sauna smell. This was the room dedicated to the most derided, lionized, and argued-over army to descend upon Vietnam: its journalists. Near the end of the war, General Creighton Abrams said this of Vietnam's journalists: “They're all a bunch of shits.” In the jingoistic film Hamburger Hill, an American soldier tells a journalist, “At least they [the North Vietnamese] take sides. You just take pictures.” Contempt for journalists comes up repeatedly in the war's combat memoirs as well. “Not everybody fighting is in the newspapers,” one such memoirist is told. “You'll never see a reporter up there. It's too rough for them.” During a 1965 visit to South Vietnam, Senator Barry Goldwater referred to the “pansy press.… No guts, no guts. I wish they'd let me have my way out here. There wouldn't be a gook or a fucking reporter left in six months.… You're nothing but a bunch of yellow bastards.”
The room's first displayed photo was perhaps the most haunting of the entire war: Larry Burrows's Reaching Out, Battle for Hill 484, DMZ, 1966. In it, a head-bandaged black soldier reaches out for his white friend, who is covered in mud and, despite his peacefulness, looks as though he is either dying or already dead. The black soldier is being held back from his lunge; it appears as though he was simply walking by when he noticed his wounded friend sitting in filth. Despite—or because of—its beauty, there is something painterly about Burrows's photo, almost staged. It has been described as a photo about one man attempting to stop another from joining death. It has been described as a photo about friendship. It has been described as a photo about how war can, sometimes, erase all that divides us as human beings, even though, far more commonly, it separates us along identical lines.
Turning away from Reaching Out, Battle for Hill 484, DMZ, 1966, I found a display commemorating all the journalists who were killed in 1970 alone, when the ground war spread into Cambodia: Gilles Caron, Roger Coine, Sean Flynn (Errol's son), Dana Stone, Tomoharu Ishii. This theme, sadly, held strong throughout much of the room. Many of the featured photographers, like Larry Burrows, were dead. Here was Robert J. Ellison's astounding photo of Khe Sanh's shell-struck ammunition dump exploding the moment he snapped his shutter. Ellison would die at Khe Sanh. Here was a display of Bernard Fall, killed on Highway One, and here was Sam Castan, a Brooklyn-born journalist who crossed the line from documentarian to participant when he helped five Army troops fight their way out of a PAVN ambush. Castan killed several enemy soldiers, his caption read, before being felled by a bullet to his brain. Charlie Chellapah's last photo was of one soldier holding another after the latter stepped on a claymore. The photo is close-focus, dark and silty. The caregiving soldier looks calm, as though he is confident he can save his friend's life. Right after Chellapah took the photo, all three were killed by another claymore. I stepped away from this image, a fan blowing sour air over me, to find the last photo of Dickey Chapelle (nee Georgette Louise Meyer), a gender-bending correspondent from Shorewood, Wisconsin. She survived Iwo Jima but not Vietnam. Her “last photo” differed in that it was taken of her, not by her. She lies facedown in the mud while a priest performs her last rites. There is blood coming out of her ear. The man who took this photo, Chapelle's friend Henri Huet, who was born in Da Lat, was later killed covering combat. Here was Robert Capa's last photo. Capa, the most famous war correspondent in America, who survived D-Day and the Spanish Civil War, snapped his final photo of some Saigon regime soldiers trudging along a dike. Capa climbed the dike he had just photographed, perhaps to get a better shot. The land mine buried in the dike killed him. It was 1954. He was the first U.S. journalist to die chronicling the war.
The room's most moving and impressive display was the final list of every journalist—Vietnamese, French, Japanese, American, Australian— who had been killed in Vietnam. An angled, waist-high ledge provided a photo and short description of every slain reporter. Above the display was a large blow-up photo of Taizo Ichinose's camera, which had been ripped open by a bullet, though Ichinose himself survived the war. I read through each journalist's description, then stared at their photos.
So many of them twenty-five and thirty years old, so many of them smiling, so many of them good-looking. Or perhaps, since so many of them were photographers themselves, they knew how to be photographed. My heart grew small as the accumulated waste of it all bore upon its chambers. Though these men and women may have been admirable, they were not romantic. “Why, Monsieur Sully,” U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Frederick Nolting once asked the French journalist Francois Sully, “do you always see the hole in the doughnut?” Sully answered, “Because, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, there is a hole in the doughnut.” Sully, whom Ngo Dinh Diem once banned from South Vietnam, died covering the botched ARVN invasion of Laos for Newsweek. Was proving there was a hole in the doughnut worth dying for? The smiling faces of men or women long dead were not easily read, particularly if they died doing something for which they believed their lives were worth risking.
A journalist's death is not a soldier's; their ends are differently charged. A soldier dies for causes, for ideologies, for ground, and for other soldiers. A journalist dies for a story, for an image, and for the conviction that politics could shape but had difficulty truly controlling. The soldier dies for ideas, but the journalist dies for one idea. The faces of the dead seemed to me far stranger, then: smiling up from their underworld at this country few of them could have imagined, this country they neither loved nor hated nor killed for, this country that refused to spare them.
The next afternoon, one final excursion with Truong and Hien took us by car on a forty-five-minute journey outside Saigon to the village of Ben Duoc, part of the battleground known as Cu Chi. I slept most of the way, awakening only near the end to see miles of rubber trees planted in paranormally straight rows—the sort of forest in which a sorcerer or some flute-playing, goat-legged little demigod might live. As Truong slowed to turn onto a gravel road, gangly bare-chested Vietnamese boys ran alongside us, then waved as we drew away. My father was quiet; in eight hours he would be on a plane heading home. This morning, over breakfast, he had gently tried to talk Hien out of taking us here, preferring instead an excursion to one of Saigon's Buddhist temples or perhaps its zoo. H
ien had been adamant that Cu Chi was worth seeing, and when I betrayed a desire to visit it as well, my father relented. “If it's more goddamned glorification of the revolution,” he had nevertheless whispered as we got moving, “I'm going home to reenlist.”
In a dusty, empty parking lot we exited the car to hear a number of loud, distant, sudden sounds not unlike a procession of slammed-shut storm windows. A few moments later, another procession. Hien went to procure tickets while my father and Truong enjoyed a cigarette and talked things over in their improvised but apparently mutually comprehensible imaginary language. Within sight of the parking lot was a post office, a tiny hotel, tennis courts (tennis was once a hated colonialist pastime), and a merry-go-round with paint-chipped green and yellow and white horses. The forest all around us had a thin, struggling look to it, which was one consequence of the area's long history of resistance. For much of the previous century the surrounding countryside had been a series of rubber plantations, including one run by Michelin, a French company famous for the savagery with which it treated its Vietnamese workers. (According to Larry Heinemann, the U.S. Army had to pay Michelin $1,000 for every rubber tree it destroyed in the area.) This legacy no doubt explained some of the Cu Chi district's revolutionary fervor.
During the American War, the majority of this area was designated a free-fire zone, which meant that anyone in it was considered an enemy combatant. (The “enemy” part of that pitiless designation may not have been far from the truth. A few months before the Marines first arrived in Vietnam, the NLF was brazenly holding parades in the middle of Cu Chi City.) Thus Cu Chi district was napalmed, gassed, Agent Oranged and Whited, B-52'd, bulldozed, and otherwise completely razed. In their history of the Cu Chi battleground, Tom Mangold and lohn Peny-cate write that on “military maps, over what had been villages and plantations, [the Americans] printed—repeatedly and brutally—the word ‘destroyed.’ “But Cu Chi's resistance remained stubborn and, it sometimes seemed, mystically immortal.
A few miles away, near the village of Dong Du, the U.S. 25th Infantry Division had built its base camp in 1966. (When the 25th arrived, Cu Chi was being clobbered with 180,000 shells a month.) The base was visited by Robert McNamara, who also stopped in at Cu Chi City, then a “showcase village” for the results of pacification. The Dong Du base, which housed 4,500 American soldiers and staff, ranked among Vietnam's more luxurious. Within its wire were a radio station, a football field, a mini-golf course, several lifeguard-staffed swimming pools, officers’ and enlisted men's clubs. The men of the 25th Infantry were also privy to an extensive basewide prostitution ring that naturally doubled as an NLF information-gathering service. Every Vietnamese barber employed by the 25th was also an NLF spy.
After the 25th had completed its base, no one could figure out why it kept suffering attack, especially given the Army's apparent success at pacifying the surrounding area. For months the 25th's helicopters were blown up, its food stolen, its men garroted in bed, yet there never seemed to be a traceable perimeter breach. (One horrific raid resulted in the destruction of fourteen CH-47 Chinooks and the deaths of thirty-eight U.S. soldiers—and the escape of every one of the thirteen attacking guerrillas.) Tobias Wolff, addressing the terror with which many U.S. soldiers regarded Vietnam's insurgents, writes of the legends that accumulated upon them, such as how “before battle they got stoned on some kind of special communist reefer that made them suicidally brave; that their tunnels were like cities and ran right under our bases; that they had tanks and helicopters; that American deserters were fighting on their side.” Most of these legends were not true, or at least not often true. The insurgents did, however, use tunnels, and the 25th Infantry Division happened to have built its base right on top of one of the most extensive tunnel systems in Vietnam.
The laterite clay soil around the Cu Chi area made it perfect for tunnels, the digging of which was done by hand or with little basket scoops and spades. The soil was easy to grub into, eventually solidified into a surface as durable as concrete, yet still allowed for oxygen penetration. In addition, most of Cu Chi district was twenty meters above sea level, and the water table was far below what one normally encountered in soggy Vietnam. (This was part of what had made Dong Du so attractive to U.S. Army engineers.) The 25th, which came to jokingly call itself the Cu Chi National Guard, was among the only Army units to have been appropriately trained in guerrilla warfare tactics at the Special Asian Warfare Training and Oriental Center in Oahu, Hawaii, and their training covered nearly every NLF tactic—except tunnels. This was in spite of the fact that the Viet Minh had used tunnel warfare during Dien Bien Phu and that the ARVN, which had developed an efficient counter-tunnel strategy of pretending they did not exist, had warned the United States of the tunnels as early as 1963.
The first tunnel was discovered accidentally, when an American soldier sat upon a trapdoor's extruding nail. Believing the tunnel was merely a weapons cache or hidey-hole, the soldiers heaved into it a few red smoke grenades. Red smoke was shortly pouring out of every airhole and trapdoor for dozens of yards in every direction. The tunnels quickly became a plague upon U.S. forces. “We were just sittin’ there,” one soldier told Mangold and Penycate, “almost on top of [a trapdoor], when the friggin’ thing pops open, out comes Charlie, throws two grenades, reaches down, grabs a carbine, sprays us, and before we can pick up our weapons, he's back in the ground and that goddamn trapdoor shuts over him.” The trapdoors inside the 25th Infantry Division's base were eventually found and, at great pain, sealed off, and ultimately used as a training center for antitunnel tactics. The interconnected tunnels all over the base's perimeter, called by the NLF the “belt,” continued to create havoc.
Today one surviving portion of the tunnel complex was home to a museum, and we entered one of its small schoolhouselike buildings to find a diorama that, in cutaway, illustrated an idealized tunnel system. Above ground, the dioramist had crafted crashed helicopters, burning tanks, scorched earth, and dying U.S. soldiers. Safely below ground, however, in an ant-farm gallery of winding tunnels and rooms, tiny plastic Vietnamese sat at desks, slept contentedly in hammocks, and crawled indefatigably through laterite clay passageways. The school-house also contained a large situation map, said to be a replica of a U.S. military situation map. With differently colored blinking lights the map illustrated the tunnel system's astonishing breadth. In total the tunnels covered 150 miles. The tunnels could take one from the suburbs of Saigon to the border of Cambodia and back again, all without a glimpse of the sun.
“Holy shit,” my father said, looking at the situation map with a drawn expression.
Hien's arms went proudly akimbo. He nodded. “Yes. It is very impressive.”
“Holy shit,” my father said again.
“You didn't know about the tunnels?” I asked him.
“No, I did. It's just that… holy shit.”
I dragged a finger along one of the blinking-light rows. “I have to admit: it's sobering to me, and I didn't even fight here.”
“It just goes to show you,” my father said, as we walked outside.
“What's that?”
“The first law of war. If you can figure out a way to kill someone, they will figure out a way to avoid being killed. And they will probably do it quickly, in ways you cannot imagine.”
We followed Hien along a packed-sand pathway to the jungle's entrance. Beside a tree-trunk-shaped garbage can, a smiling young Vietnamese man dressed in an NLF pith helmet and pocketed green fatigues waited for us. (The pith helmet—the revolutionary symbol of both the Viet Minh and the NLF—had originally been introduced to Vietnam by the French, and one could buy one here for a little over a dollar.) Coming toward us up the trail, a young Vietnamese woman led out of the jungle a small contingent of tourists. She too was wearing a pith helmet but black pajamas and a black-checked white scarf (the NLF's accouter-ment of choice). I looked back at my father to discern whether his emotional shock-support system could withstand being led aroun
d a former battleground by fit, attractive young Vietnamese dressed like the guerrillas who had once tried to kill him. Of course, he was smiling and saying “Hello! Hot day!” to the young woman and the tourists she led.
As we plunged into the forest, our young guerrilla guide described to us how the tunnels had been begun in French times. They were not a product of Communist Party directive but rather the result of a long process of trial and error. Their original inspiration was the Chinese, who had used them in the resistance against the Japanese during World War II. The extensive nature of Vietnam's tunnels, however, was unique. The first tunnels were mostly family bomb shelters that, little by little, were connected. Later, ingenious additions to tunnel methodology included digging at zigzag angles to frustrate clear firing lines for any intruders and sublevel trapdoors, sealed with wax or white rubber-tree sap, that allowed for quick escape to other hidden tunnels and that also largely foiled attempts to flood or gas the system. The tunnels contained kitchens, primitive bathrooms, wells, surgical wards, schools, storage rooms, map rooms, operations rooms, even factories for producing homemade ordnance. Insurgents peddling rigged-up stationary bicycles provided the tunnels with power, and thanks to a bamboo-pipe system some had access to running water. Only a few Revolutionary Force members knew the whole layout, and when visitors from the North came to inspect the tunnels, they were flabbergasted. Finally our guide described how the tunnels had been the staging area of the Tet Offensive—NLF guerrillas had even built a mock-up of the U.S. Embassy's outer compound in Cu Chi's forest to prepare them for its assault—the success of which drove “the enemy” (not, I noticed, the Americans) out of Vietnam. My father's response to all this was to loose a long, quiet fart as he listened.