David and Goliath

Of course I had heard about Cu Chi, only 30 kms away from Ho Chi Minh City and knew it was a network of tunnels used by the Viet Cong guerrillas. Today I know better: it is an icon that signifies the grit and tenacity of a people. Armed but with just the primitive of weapons and oodles of native wisdom, the Viet Congs took on the global policeman and brought them to their knees. The improvised response of a poorly equipped peasant army to its enemy's hi-tech ordnance, artillery, helicopters, bombers and chemical weapons, the tunnel today is a place of pilgrimage.

It would look like any forest in the rainforest region - swampy soil, huge trees, thick undergrowth and a carpet of grey leaves covering the earth. Till the guide removes the leaves from about four squarefoot of ground to reveal two small hooks at a distance of about 16". He slips his index fingers through them and heaves it. Off comes an 18" x 12" x 4" block of earth exposing a pit. The volunteer in dungarees explains that this is the entrance - one of the many hundred, in fact - through which the Viet Congs entered and exited the tunnel. As we gape at it incredulously, he slides into it, puts back the 'lid' and with a few leaves strewn on top, you cannot distinguish it from the surrounding vast expanse of decaying leaves.

As we walk ahead, the guide explains that at one time, it covered the entire South Viet Nam. The network in Cu Chi district alone was 250 kms long. There were storage facilities, living areas, hospitals, war rooms and kitchens - all underground. Parts of it were several storeys deep. Some exits were into the river Mekong. There were several trap doors and concealed entries like the one shown earlier. An enemy soldier plucky enough to try to enter the tunnel and lucky enough not to be killed by the guerillas after he somehow got in, would die of hunger, as he would not be able to get out.

Not that getting in was easy. The guide showed us a barricaded lawn - about 10' x 6' in area. He poked it with a bamboo-pole. A block of 8' x 5 ' moved and spun around freely about a central axis a couple of times - like a see-saw installed atop a well would. Any enemy who walked on it would fall into the pit. And on the side-walls of the pit were sharp spears. Your joy that you were lucky to escape them would be momentary, for there were more on the floor to skewer you! The guide explained that the guerrillas were kind to the enemies. In order that they did not suffer too long as they lay impaled by the spears, snake poison used to be applied on the spears.

This was only one type of booby trap. There were several such contraptions - cylindrical ones, those with a thin lid which gave way activating two blades - one two feet below the other - which cut the victim into three pieces. I will not go into more gory details of the horrendous death that awaited the GIs trapped and went for a free fall into the pit.

The 'tunnel rats' deputed by the US commanders under General Westmoreland suffered major casualties while, immune from the land and air operations of the US Army, the Viet Congs moved about freely below their very bases, often mounting surprise attacks wherever the tunnels went and retracting as mysteriously as they had appeared. Flummoxed, but unable to locate the trap doors used by the Viet Congs, they trained German Shepherd dogs, known for their keen olfactory sense, to sniff out the guerrillas. They began washing themselves with American soap which the canines identified as friendly. The uniforms of captured GIs were put out, which confused the dogs further.

Life in the tunnels was not a party, though. They lived in extremely hostile conditions. Light, air, food, everything was in short supply. The only source of light and air was the cavities made in the trunks of trees.If food was found, cooking it was difficult because the smoke emitted would give them away. They devised smoke exhausts with vents located meters away from the kitchen. Americans pumped poisonous gas through these, resulting in casualties in scores of hundreds. In addition to the pressures of living underground for months on end, the guerrillas had to cope with the death of countless civilians among whom were friends and relatives. Only 40% of the 16,000 guerrillas in the tunnels survived the war.

There are mines and shells lying about in the area and it is believed that some of them may be live. The guide warns you against straying from the group, lest you should step on one of them!

PS: I forgot to add that for the benefit of tourists and visitors, one of the entries at the Ben Duoc end of the tunnel has been enlarged so that even the portly and the arthritic can see what it was like to be a Viet Cong in the tunnel. We can step in and 'walk' around through the 'expanded' tunnel. These are about 4' high and 2' across and one has to crawl to proceed. Being unlit, the tunnel was too claustrophobic for me. Exits have been provided at 20 meter gaps so that when you feel you can't take it any more, you can give up your sub-terranean avatar and breathe easy!

Viet Nam Diary ... 1

The first thing I learnt about Viet Nam after coming here is that the country is not called Vietnam; it is Viet Nam – two separate words of one syllable each. Most words in Vietnamese – sorry, Viet Namese (Should it be Viet Nam ese? I must ask somebody.) are monosyllabic. Like Ha Noi, Sai Gon or Ho Chi Minh. In this exercise, they go great lengths, it seems, because Café become Ca phe and Hotel becomes Ho tel in Viet Namese. (I will be lucky if at the end of my two-month stay here, I do not become Raj Ag Oph Al Anh!)

Another is that the spelling may not have much to do with the way the word is pronunced. The name Trang is pronounced Chung (u as in umbrella) and Dung is pronounced Yung (u as in pull). The road we stay in is called Ngu Yen Hong. The first ng is also pronounced as the ng in young.

Quite often, the last letter is not pronounced. Thus, though Buon Me Thuot, the town we are in, is spelt varyingly (including Ban Ma Thot), it is pronounced Bo Ma Tho. (We’ll call it BMT, though, for convenience.) This is true not just of Viet Namese words, but of other languages. Like ‘peanut’ is ‘peanah’. And passport is 'pah po'. The language has no script. They use the English alphabet in conjunction with several signs like ^ ~ . ` - ? and '. Some of these accents placed above, some below and a few across them (sometimes in conjuntion) to indicate the intonation.

BMT, located 450 metres above sea level, is the capital of Dak Lak Province in the Central Highlands. With a population of 400,000, it is the fifth largest town in Viet Nam. There are hardly any old buildings because the Americans had razed the entire city to ground before they left in 1975. It looks like a planned city. Though most of the buildings are new, there are no condominiums.

The roads are really broad. At each intersection, there are road signs. They indicate not just the names of the roads, but the widths of the road, the footpath on either side and the median if the road has one. There is strict hierarchy in the placement of the signs at crossings: the one indicating the name of the broader, more important path is always on top.

Hardly anyone speaks English, but they are very friendly towards foreigners. With our arrival, the population of foreigners in BMT has doubled. (Foreigners, mind you, not Indians.) All of a sudden, we have become head-turners and traffic-stoppers!

Dac Lac is coffee country – and it shows! Each lane can boast of a café (Ooops! I should have said Ca phe) if not more. Main roads have several of them, at times two of them sharing a wall. Hari says (He works for a coffee company and should know) that before 8 am every day, 60,000 cups of coffee are sold through these outlets. Radhika says the drawing rooms of several houses have been converted by enterprising housewives into eateries.

Viet Nam being on the eastern cost, day breaks very early. By quarter past five, fitness freaks are out on the roads heading for parks, playgrounds and gyms. There are several parks and joggers’ tracks all over the city. Plus well-appointed badminton courts, football grounds and indoor stadia maintained by the government. These can be used by the general public practically free of payment. What strikes one is the care with which the public uses these facilities.

The indoor stadium closest to where Hari lives has seven shuttlecock courts and doubles as a football ground after eight in the night. The shuttlecock players start leaving by quarter to eight. They do not linger on and delay the football. Five minutes to eight, and one caretaker removes the nets, rolls the poles from the centre to the sides while another pushes the goal posts from the sides to the extreme ends and by eight, the ground is ready for football!

In the city square, we saw a gleaming steel structure surrounded by a few huge bonsai trees. (You read it right, huge bonsai trees.) It had two doors and looked like a telephone booth. Something was written in the local language on its wall. It intrigued us, but we could not ask anyone. It took us three days to discover that it was a free public toilet! A far cry from the toilets we can smell from a hundred metres.

Perhaps because most people own two-wheelers and use them for local travel, city buses are hard to come by. Though the roads are wide and in excellent condition, they drive at moderate speed and with great consideration for the pedestrian.

. . . . . .

I realise have not said anything about the people yet. Watch this space.

Open Sesame, Viet Nam

In our bid to cut costs, we had booked ourselves by Tiger Airways from Singapore to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). We had been warned about the inconveniences that we would have to put up with in this sector. Right from having to report at a lousy terminal to limited baggage allowance to hefty penalty if the limit is exceeded to having to pay even for the water served on board.

We were, however, in for a very big surprise. The ‘Budget Terminal’ was better than most terminals in India. Tiger had certainly cut corners where possible (like the boarding passes which were on continuous stationery unlike the thick cards you get in the ‘full-service’ airlines, but it hardly mattered).

The seats were as comfortable as any Airbus 320 aircraft. In fact, compared to the cramped seats in the ‘full-service’ provided by Jet from Chennai to Singapore, these were really good.

We were surprised to see that all flight crew and the ground duty staff – barring a few doing low-end jobs and pilots – were women. They were smartly attired and went about their duties with clinical efficiency.

It was a different story in HCMC though the aircraft touched down a few minutes before schedule. We were to be given the visa on landing. On handing over the relevant documents, the cop on duty motioned us to a row of chairs.

As we waited, a woman of a different nationality who had obviously been waiting for long and had lost her patience, got up from her seat, walked up to the counter and enquired about the status of her visa. The cop spoke no word, gave her a dirty look and rudely gestured her back to her seat. As I did not want such ignominy to be heaped on me, I waited patiently. The formality, which, according to me, should not have taken more than five minutes, took a good one hour.

The next port of call was the immigration counter. When we reached the spot, there was a long queue because ‘the system was down’. What surprised me was not that nobody seemed to be doing anything about it (We are so used to that in India), but that people seemed to be resigned to the fact and waited … and waited. The personnel manning the counters just sat there doing nothing, waiting for the system to come alive. It took over an hour for the snag to be resolved.

Passengers waiting for the computer system at Tan Son Nhat air terminal,

HCMC to come alive to complete the immigration formalities,

There was no way we could pass on the message that we were held up to Hari and Radhika who were waiting for us in the terminal. (Later we realised that there was no need for that: such delays were usual.)

By the time we were cleared by the immigration, the registered baggage, after a few free rides on the carousel, had been removed by the security personnel and given to the ‘Lost and Found’ section. We collected it and joined Hari and Radhika who had been waiting for us for two hours.