Cu Chi Coup

‘My full name is Pham Van Hai, so my given name is Hai. This driver is Son, very good driver and our mechanic Pung. In Vietnam it is very important to have a mechanic on the bus. Let’s hope today he has nothing to do’. So we met Hai, our guide to the Cu Chi tunnels, the extensive underground complex that enabled the Vietcong to keep a major base within striking distance of Saigon during the American War. Resembling a Vietnamese Ronnie Corbett, Hai had almost perfect comedic timing and a rather dry sense of humour that alleviated any potential tourpidity we might have been feeling.

As we left Ho Chi Minh City he pointed out landmarks on the way. ‘To your right is the zoo. At night-time it is very dark. Is good for flirting. You know flirting? Is not like floating market, is very different. Young people find dark place to be romantic. They do some sentimental talking. Sometimes the hands go somewhere’.

At the tunnels themselves Hai took great glee in slagging off all the mistakes in the Lonely Planet write-up of the site. We sat through a crackly black and white Vietcong propaganda film about the heroes of Cu Chi that described US attacks in the area as by ‘crazy, mad devils’ for their indiscriminate bombing of schools, villages, hospitals and temples. Hai then leapt up and grabbing a wooden pointer longer than he was tall went into lecture mode in front of the large map on the wall and a diorama model cross-section of the tunnels. ‘Lonely Planet say tunnels go all the way to Cambodia’ Hai sighed, ‘here is many paddy fields’ he explained pointing to the area west of the tunnels towards the Cambodian border, ‘if tunnels here would flood very fast!’. On the model he highlighted even narrower ‘pinch points’ in the tunnels that were usually only 70-80cm high and 50cm wide anyway. ‘Vietcong guerrillas not enough rice to eat so very skinny, American and Australian soliders much fatter so get stuck’. The horrors of even attempting to fight in these tiny, claustrophobic passages weren’t worth contemplating. Especially after we'd dragged our fat arses through the dark, narrow, dusty tunnels that had been widened for more generously proportioned westerners.

There were some cheesy Madame Tussauds style dummy arrangements in the jungle above the tunnels depicting scenes of guerrilla life, a woman combing her long hair, one man cleaning a rifle another writing a ‘love letter’ claimed Hai. ’16,000 guerillas in tunnels and only 100 women so sometimes there is flirting and some women is not virgin. You know virgin? It is woman without husband who does not know how big a banana is’. Another scene showed a covert rice wine making operation. Hai picked up a large plastic flask and warned us of the perils involved in a serious session. ‘Very cheap, one bottle and you are drunk the whole day. Some drink wine and forget own name. Some write poem. Some karaoke. Some get too hot, take off clothes and walk around’.

A further installation of brutal man-traps involving vicious metal spikes designed to ensnare unwary GIs included the sardonically nicknamed ‘souvenir trap’. It consisted of a metal cage buried in a pit with inward facing hooks that allow a foot to enter, but not to be removed. So-called as your only option is to dig it up and take it ‘home’ with you.

As we walked through the jungle we could hear the raucous gun-fire from the shooting range. An integral part of the Cu Chi experience is now apparently the opportunity to fire off a few rounds from a menu of high calibre semi-automatic weapons. For the princely sum of $1.30 a bullet you can shoot an M16 into an elevated bank of earth-filled oil drums. There was no shortage of business as eager backpackers queued up to buy their live ammunition for the latest ‘must have’ adrenaline experience on the south east Asian circuit, alongside bungy-jumping and white water rafting. I found it all rather distasteful, feeling the firing of weapons specifically designed to kill people in the context of Cu Chi a little odd. Indeed, the sweaty-faced, wide-eyed expressions on some of the shooters faces were quite disturbing. I asked one guy why he’d been so keen to spend $40 for a few mere seconds of ‘entertainment’. He was somewhat defensive at having to justify his indulgence:

‘I’ve never done it before, its something new, you can’t do it back home, I wanted to see what it was like. Its just boys and their toys isn’t it?’ I fundamentally disagreed. Maybe our personal experiences as Brixton residents familiar with gun crime and the glorification of firearms sways my opinion. But I found the apparent acceptability of middle class backpackers spraying machine guns ‘for a bit of fun’ jarring uncomfortably with the vilification of south London street kids for the similar aspirations. The sheepish responses from those I pressed further reinforced the notion of their actions as very much a ‘guilty pleasure’ and not something to be entirely proud of.

Back in Ho Chi Minh City that night we met Lee at a bar. A dour Scouser working as an English teacher he used to drive buses on one of our Brixton routes; ‘I was stoned on skunk the whole time’ he blithely informed us ‘I had 10 accidents in 3 years and was totally paranoid because I could have been busted at anytime’. He’d previously taught in Cambodia ‘full of paedophiles and child molesters’, and had a distinct air of melancholy about him.

The previous UK census revealed a ‘missing cohort’ of 100,000+ young men and Lee was clearly one of them. In the exciting, exotic context of Ho Chi Minh City on a Saturday night he was off for a curry by himself. I asked him how his Vietnamese was ‘I didn’t bother learning any as I knew I’d only be here 8-9 months or so’ came the reply. “I’m off to South America next, Chile I think’ he said. I wondered whether he’d find what he seemed to be looking for there. I doubted it. He appeared to be searching for something elusive in his own head that no change of scene would provide the answer to. Sometimes the journey is within.

On our final evening in Vietnam we ensconced ourselves in a local Bia Hoi (fresh beer) bar, where plastic jugs of cold beer were dispensed from a huge silver tank that took up half the shop. At 25p for two litres it was refreshingly cheap. Next to us sat the appropriately named Mr Lung who despite his slim stature was sucking back beer by the litre and chain-smoking the local ‘Bastos’ cigarettes (13p a pack). ‘I love foreigners!’ announced Mr Lung loudly, shaking my hand firmly and grinning broadly to reveal an irregular array of blackened, nicotine stained teeth. ‘Vietnam! America! England! Number one!’ added Mr Lung warming to his theme. He was a cyclo rider which explained his wiry frame, kept lean by the effort of propelling plump tourists around town. ‘I love Mr Bush, Tony Blair!’ he continued rather more surprisingly. So Dubya and Tony, if you’re ever in need of some positive reinforcement I know a small bar in Old Saigon that your remaining fan frequents.