The Father of All Things
Page 40
We were taken to a clearing in the middle of Cu Chi's jungle, where a thatch-roofed outdoor patio had been built. It was filled with rows of empty foldout chairs. My father and I sat in the front row—Hien had gone back to the car—while the guide moved to the weathered wooden home entertainment center at the patio's front. I glanced around. From one patio wall a portrait of Ho looked down on us, and above a silent fan turned endlessly. Inside the home entertainment center were a JVC television and a shiny silver Daewoo VCR. The guide hit “Play” and gingerly stepped to the patio's wings. A documentary called Cu Chi Guerrillas began. The film looked water-damaged, and the surf-king electric-guitar soundtrack sounded like the outtakes of a particularly LSD-damaged Brian Wilson recording session. I had to imagine that much of the film's battlefield footage had been staged, for I could not imagine that many NLF guerrillas had been laughing during combat.
The film's statements about the tunnels and the guerrillas who had used them ranged from true (“Bamboo traps used to hunt animals now were used to hunt U.S. enemy”) to arguable (“No architect can design such a system”) to interpretive (“But the merciless American bombs have wanted to kill this peaceful area so far away from America”) to weird (“Like a crazy bunch of devils, the Americans fired into women, children, pots and pans, even Buddha statues”) to demonstrably untrue (“The life of guerrillas in Cu Chi was wonderful”). It fairly unnerved one to watch a film that gloried in how a people “always found ways to kill Americans,” but Cu Chi Guerrillas reached a height of tragically inadvertent comedy when it condemned the killing of Vietnamese women and children seconds before offering up a teenage girl who slaughtered sixteen Americans as an “American killer hero.” Near the end of the film, a few Americans who had voiced grudging respect for the tunnels were greedily quoted. Here, I thought, was the colonial mind-set, served up in a steaming coconut shell: “We hate you! But are you impressed?” Meanwhile, another volley of slamming storm windows filled the air.
“Well,” I said as the film ended, “it's not as if Platoon gives the roundest portrayal of the Vietnam side of things.”
My father waved me off. “We make our movies, they do their thing. Who cares?”
As we stood we heard clapping and looked over at a group of Vietnamese men being led by their own tour guide. Many of these men were wearing military medals, and all were old enough to have been veterans of my father's war. They were clapping hard, clapping like Communists afraid to be the first to stop clapping. They were applauding, no doubt, their victory, their memories, their war. By 1971, only 6,000 of the 16,000 guerrillas operating out of the tunnels had survived. (Vo Van Kiet, Vietnam's prime minister until 1997, was one of them.) Cu Chi, the Iron Land, had done its part, and paid dearly for it. The district had been annihilated. “There were only about four guerrillas left in each village,” one NLF fighter said, in describing to Mangold and Penycate life after the tunnels. “The guerrillas ate leaves to survive and washed their wounds in salted water.” A war memorial not far from these tunnels contained a list of those who had been killed in the six-hundred-square-mile district of Cu Chi. It contained almost as many names as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
My father stood there observing the veterans, as did 1.1 believed the war was wrong. I believed it was badly fought. I even believed that PAVN's soldiers and the NLF's guerrillas were, in the main, more tenacious than the Americans they outfaced. But watching these applauding men caused my tar-pumping heart to crawl up into my throat. My toes dug into my shoes, and my palms tasted fingernail. One of the Vietnamese looked over at us, turned quickly away, and tugged on the shirtsleeve of the man nearest to him. That man also looked at us: two Americans, a father and his son, powerless guests in his land. The second man, too, stopped clapping. Both lowered their heads while all around them the clapping continued. My fists came undone, my ectopic heart slowly sank. My father, without a word, walked away while reaching into his pocket for his Chapstick. I waited for the men to look back at me—I wanted to somehow acknowledge their gesture—but they did not. When their group moved on, they kept their backs to me.
We left the patio and walked deeper into the sparse jungle. Once this had all been triple-canopy forest. Only in the last decade or so had the area's vegetation managed to bounce back from the biochemical caning it had absorbed during the war. Much of the district's water and soil was still considered damaged.
Followed by a pregnant dog with engorged black nipples hanging from her belly, we walked through the forest and attached ourselves to a larger tour group gathered around some of the scars of Cu Chi's destruction. These were B-52 craters, in which little grew but some crawling vegetation and a few twisty, double-trunked cashew trees. Most of the craters were twenty feet deep and a hundred feet in diameter and filled with muddy water. Some were big enough to hold a camper or a small house. The dog, I noticed, stayed away from them.
My father stared into one of the bigger holes, then let a whistle push through the greased blowhole formed by his pressed-together, freshly Chapsticked lips. “And that's what they do.”
I looked at him. “Jesus, Dad. ‘That's what they do’?”
He shrugged. “That's what they do.”
I shook my head. “Sorry. Not good enough.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“How about nothing.”
As our group walked on, we passed air vents disguised as termite mounds, the ingeniousness of which was lavishly remarked upon. The talk was extinguished when we came to a mine-wrecked tank. Its cannon was sadly tilted toward the ground, its treads were gone, and its body was crumbling from rust. This tank's inhabitants, we learned, had all been killed. Vietnam's guerrillas were horrified by tanks and armored personnel carriers, and it was easy to understand why today the Vietnamese displayed the slain iron behemoths as trophies. (In 1966, the NLF actually managed to capture an American tank from the ARVN. They buried it near Cu Chi and used it as a command center. When the tank was discovered three years later, its batteries and radios were still working.) Thirty years on, however, it seemed slightly ghoulish.
We moved on down the path, wet composty leaves squishing beneath our feet. At one bend in the jungle a vortex of tiny birds swirled up from some bushes, strafing the path below with startled bombs of watery guano. After whistling for our attention, one of the Vietnamese guides removed his pith helmet and handed it to the other guide. With our curious eyes fastened upon him, the guide crouched, lifted from the jungle floor a tiny and completely hidden trapdoor, hopped inside, and after him slid shut the wooden slat, over which the other guide quickly scattered a few leaves with his foot. The whole demonstration lasted four or five seconds, and during it several in our group actually gasped. I pushed through the crowd and held over the trapdoor the spiral notebook in which I had been scribbling impressions. My notebook was slightly larger than the trapdoor. I stepped back as the tiny Vietnamese Morlock popped back out, smiling at the applause he had earned.
The guides quickly led us to tunnels we could enter for ourselves, all of which had been enlarged for plus-sized Westerners. Did I want to enter a tunnel? I did not. My father gamely ducked into one while I pondered what living in darkness, beneath the hard rain of ordnance, not only for days or weeks but years, must have been like. “The tunnels,” William Broyles, Jr., remembered, “were a part of the special terror of Vietnam. In our minds the enemy wasn't another soldier, a man like us. He was mysterious and elusive—a vision from the unknown, a bogeyman with terrible powers rising up out of the earth. Vietnam was a nightmare war, the deepest childhood fears come true.” But was the enemy in this nightmare war truly “everywhere all at once like spider cancer,” in Michael Herr's typically lysergic words? “Phantoms, I thought,” Philip Caputo wrote, “we're fighting phantoms.” George Ball told President Johnson in 1965 that “I have grave doubts that any Western army can successfully fight Orientals in an Asian jungle,” and during the war one Marine Corps colonel said, “The e
nemy always has the advantage of operating in the jungle.”
This is actually extremely debatable. The Vietnamese were regarded by their American foes as being simultaneously sub- and superhuman; what they were not was equally human. But the Vietnamese as a people were hardly bioengineered for jungle war. Many NLF guerrillas were city kids as lost in the jungle as an American teenager from the Bronx. The guiding principle of the NLF was “Walk without a trace, talk without noise, cook without smoke,” but these men and women were not ghosts. Many carried booklets that described which berries could be eaten, which leaves could be ground into medicine. The skin-burrowing chig-gers in the tunnels alone were enough to drive many NLF guerrillas insane. When NLF guerrillas were captured, it was determined that fully 100 percent of them had some form of intestinal parasite. To become an NLF cadre, one had to take virtual oaths of poverty and chastity and promise to fight until one died. Yet despite this fanaticism they took boyishly mugging photos of one another and themselves, keepsakes that were often found on their bodies. They wrote poetry. Whenever they could they slept in villages, where they were most vulnerable, for the simple reason that villages were more comfortable. They sometimes held preemptive funerals for one another before going on dangerous missions.
The fact is that their supposedly superhuman powers were the product of endurance, intelligence, and adaptability. In many cases they were able to avoid being wiped out by aerial bombing due to the robotic sameness of U.S. operating procedure. NLF guerrillas calculated the number of minutes that typically passed between the overhead passage of an observation plane and the napalm-spilling monsters that followed it, and would hide underground while the jungle burned above them. They sent top secret messages north via bicycle-riding children. They entered contested areas in coffins during fake funerals or climbed into a coffin and rode with the corpse if the funeral was real. They shouted code to one another in cities by posing as singing drunks in the street. NLF village sentries—often little girls—wore one of three shirts while working in the field. If the shirt was brown, all was clear; white, U.S. or ARVN soldiers were about; black, clear out of the area. But they also made the same mistakes in combat as their putatively bungling American enemies: Johnnie Clark's combat memoir Guns Up! contains a mind-bending moment in which Clark realizes his squad is marching directly behind an enemy squad on night patrol, both having mistaken the other as friendlies. The NLF ran. They retreated. After its first encounter with a missile-spraying helicopter, an entire NLF company deserted. They were often commanded in such a rigid way that desertion was common. They accidentally shot one another. They ran out of rice. They were reduced to hunting apes for food or using ash as seasoning. They died of beriberi. They starved in jungles. An internal NLF memorandum captured by the CIA in 1967 listed seven reasons why the NLF was losing its footing. Reason one was that they were tired of the war. Yet so many of them kept on fighting.
When my father and his fellow tunnel rats resurfaced sweating and dirty and laughing (except for a woman who while underground had been hit in the face by a bat: she was crying, actually), we walked to something called the “Home-made Weapons Gallery.” Set out on tables or crudely mounted, these awful, monstrous devices—made of wood and nail and vine and hook—seemed to beg one to believe they were not real. This was relatively easy, in that they looked like the fanciful props of some satanic dentist's office, a torture-chamber phantasmagoria. As weapons they ranged from crossbow traps (triggered by a tree-root tripwire; the arrows were often poisoned) to punji-stick-filled pit traps (feces were often smeared along the points to promote infection) to swinging traps (giant spiky balls that went sailing across a jungle path) to bamboo whips (taut-wire traps that snapped a huge fishhook across one's face) to balance traps (a boot-sized trapdoor above a bed of metal spikes) to crocodile-bite traps (the angled teeth of which were often poisoned) to door traps (a double trap that slapped two nail-covered wooden boards upon one's chest and thigh; you could stop one but not the other). A nearby hand-painted mural showed hapless U.S. soldiers falling into pits, being impaled on punji sticks, tripping grenade traps. I picked up a conical, three-pronged Bouncing Betty, perhaps the most feared of all NLF booby traps. It was usually set in the ground. Once it was tripped, a tiny explosion sent it no more than three feet into the air, whereupon the second, more terrible explosion occurred.
My father was standing next to me, looking at the Bouncing Betty as I turned it over in my troubled hands. “Were these things,” I asked, “really as terrifying as—”
“Oh Jesus God yes,” he said quickly. “I still sometimes have nightmares.”
“Still?”
“Not often. But sometimes. I think booby traps were the most effective thing they used against us. Psychologically speaking, I mean.” In World War II, 4 percent of U.S. casualties were caused by booby traps. In Vietnam that number was 28 percent. “But keep in mind,” my father went on, “we used them against the VC too. We had a deadly little mine shaped like a leaf, as I recall. Our antipersonnel weapons were used very, very successfully sometimes.”
“Antipersonnel.’ All the terror is scrubbed right out, isn't it?”
“Yeah. Until one of them takes off your leg, your feet, your genitals. That's what so many guys worried about. Losing their nuts. That weapon you're holding right there was designed for that. It was designed to emasculate. And they filled them with whatever we dropped. Screws, scrap metal. Our own garbage was used against us. Coke-can grenades. The spoon in your mess kit could become a detonator.”
“And parachute silk was used as hammocks or to store rice.”
“Exactly. After a while—after way too long, I think—the order finally came down: Stop leaving your garbage around. Pick up after yourself. If someone lost a lighter, we'd spend half the morning crawling around looking for it.”
That was not all. For the NLF, every U.S. bomb that was dropped but did not explode—a number thought to be between 1 and 5 percent— became a weapon. (U.S. ordnance also found other uses: in rural Vietnam one will often find that the village bell is an old hollowed-out artillery shell.) Howitzer shells were sometimes turned into pressure-activated traps and buried, or their explosives were salvaged for coconut-shell grenades and homemade mines. One NLF mine, the DH-5, detonated with the equivalent force of seventy twelve-gauge shotguns going off at once. The NLF also used more local materials. For instance, hornets. Actual hornets were trained to attack U.S. soldiers. In the tunnels, boxes of scorpions were rigged to pop open when the invader tripped a wire. Bamboo vipers were hung from tunnel ceilings or placed in shallow pits. In 1961, the counterinsurgency expert Colonel Edward Lansdale, fresh from a trip to Vietnam, stopped to see Robert McNa-mara in his office. After Lansdale dumped out onto McNamara's desk a collection of homemade NLF mines, booby-trap remnants, and captured insurgent clothing, McNamara asked what was the big idea. “Mister Secretary,” Lansdale said, “I thought you ought to see how the enemies we're fighting in South Vietnam are armed…. They have old French weapons they've captured from our side; they make their own mortars and grenades and mines in the jungle. They wear black pajamas like these, and they make these rubber sandals they wear from truck tires. They're beating the shit out of us.”
I put the Bouncing Betty down, filled with a vague impulse to wash my hands. “I read somewhere,” I told my father, “that the NLF was so effective using booby traps because they knew which trails you'd take. They knew American soldiers would always take the easiest, driest-looking path.”
“I am sorry to say,” my father admitted, “that what you read is probably true.”
“Well. That's kind of a problem, wouldn't you say?”
“I'm not arguing. But war is long and hard. At a certain point you begin to do the math. You divide how tired you are by your chances of hitting a booby trap, and you say, ‘Fuck it,’ and hump up a dangerous trail.”
“But it seems to me the VC didn't do the same math. They seemed far more able to avoid your weapons tha
n you did theirs.”
My father fixed upon me a grinding-bicuspids stare. “Do you have any idea how many VC were killed? They lost half a million men in the war's first three years. You saw those craters back there. Every one of those holes is a mass grave.”
For a moment I was quiet. Then: “I'm sorry about that, by the way.”
“Sorry about what?”
“For being rude. At the crater.”
“Squirt,” he said. “I survived Vietnam. I think I can handle you.”
For some reason, the Cu Chi Tunnels had a small zoo. While glumly looking at two caged and sore-covered mandrill baboons and thinking about how I could liberate them, I once again heard the curious slamming storm windows. It was far louder this time, the echoes were more saturated, and I collared my father and dragged him to the sounds’ source. This was the “National Defense Sports Shooting Range”— located, somewhat ominously, directly across from the “Rice-Paper and Rice Wine House.” Most of our heavily European group bypassed the shooting range, though many of the Asian tourists made a beeline for it. I followed them. Once I was inside the shooting range's perimeter, a scowling Vietnamese woman approached me. “What kind of gun you like?” she asked brusquely. It appeared that the National Defense Sports Shooting Range allowed its visitors to unload at several targets that, until recently, had been shaped like American-soldier silhouettes. “What kind of gun?” she asked again. Her complexion was nacreous, her nostrils flared.
“Tommy,” my father said, coming up from behind me. “Let's go.”
“No. I want to shoot.”
“Tommy,” my father said. “Come on. You're frankly the last person I want to be firing an automatic weapon if I'm anywhere within five miles of the target.”