Cu Chi Cu Chi Cu...

1 September 2009

(From David)

The American education system has a lot to answer for. Only a month ago, I had never heard of the Cu Chi Tunnels. Since then (and only because I wanted to know more about them prior to this visit) I've read a great book by a couple of BBC reporters detailing Cu Chi and it's importance. But if not for that, my knowledge of the Vietnam war would come entirely from Hollywood (Rambo!) and the just slightly one-sided perspective of the various Vietnamese museums and historical sites we've been to in the last 11 days. Every American history course I've ever taken, from elementary right through high school, has always managed to get through WWII and touch on the beginnings of the Cold War, before promptly wrapping up for the year.

You would have thought at least one of them would have covered the Vietnam War, but nope, not one ever did. Not sure of the reasons for this, but definitely a failure of the education system in my mind--resulting in a small, but significant gap in my knowledge of American history. I've lived through everything post-Vietnam, and everything pre-Vietnam I've had covered in the classroom at some point or another (including the Korean War thanks to a math teacher/Korean War medic who liked to have non-math Fridays).In any case, I'm making up for this by getting a graphic education on the Vietnam war during my two weeks here In-Country.

The Cu Chi tunnels is just the latest example. I won't go into much detail on the tunnels except to say that during the war there were over 200km of tunnels (some right under the major US base camp at Cu Chi) that the Viet Cong and NVA used to fight and hide from their adversaries. One of the reasons the tunnels were so effective is that your average American soldier doesn't fit very easily into the tunnels. This is best illustrated by the images below...for more details, try to find 'The Tunnels of Cu Chi,' by Tom Mangold & John Penycate. Preferably not the Vietnamese copy we have, which is photocopied and has a somewhat random page order.