Read The Tunnels of Cu Chi for Free Online

antigovernment groups, was formed to supervise the resumption of guerrilla war in the South. Coordinated armed attacks began on army and police posts, and for the first time the essential weakness of the Diem regime was exposed. Army posts were either easily overrun or sufficiently intimidated by demonstrators or persuaded by the threats and blandishments of villagers so that all the weapons were surrendered. To the exasperation of their American advisers, the ARVN units deliberately avoided enemy contact and the consequent casualties. One by one the villages of Cu Chi and adjoining districts disarmed local ARVN detachments and effectively cut themselves off from government control. The arms acquired by this means were the first and only weapons many nascent Viet Cong units had; enterprising villagers set about making copies, founding the huge cottage ordnance industry in the tunnels that would last until the late sixties, when newer guns came south from Hanoi.
    With the resumption of guerrilla warfare the old redoubts of the Viet Minh had to be reactivated. The French had used aircraft to spot and bomb the Vietnamese fighters; Diem’s army was increasingly transported by American helicopters. In villages all over Cu Chi, Tay Ninh, the Iron Triangle, and wherever possible, old tunnel networks were repaired, and a great program of tunnel-digging began. “When we got orders to set up a secure base here,” related one Cu Chi survivor of that period, ex-guerrilla Ba Huyet, “the first thing we did was to start digging thirty kilometers of underground tunnels. It was in 1960. Not only was this one of our closest outposts to Saigon, but it was our advanced command post throughout the war. The Americans were sure something was going on here, but they were not sure what.” Tunnel veteran Major Nguyen Quot estimated that forty-eight kilometers of tunnel excavated during the war against the French had grown to two hundred kilometers by the time the American army arrived in 1965. After 1961, hitherto piecemeal local digging was connected up to form anintegrated network. The Americans would nickname it the little IRT, after part of the New York City subway system.
    Diem’s reaction to the guerrilla offensive was to seek the best available advice on rural pacification. He hired as an adviser Sir Robert Thompson, architect of Britain’s successful “strategic hamlet” policy to overcome the Chinese Communist-led insurgency in Malaya (as it then was). Acting on his advice, the ARVN began concentrating the rural population into special encampments fortified by government troops. Ngo Dinh Nhu himself supervised the inauguration of the first strategic hamlet in Cu Chi district in 1961. Most of the population was rehoused in this compulsory fashion, to separate them from the guerrillas; the exceptions were the villages in the Ho Bo woods, which remained “liberated” and under Viet Cong control. On 3 February 1963, the ARVN launched Operation Sunrise into the adjoining district of Ben Cat. The Viet Cong avoided contact, and the peasants were herded into a new showpiece strategic hamlet at Ben Thuong. In fact, the Viet Cong usually remained in the countryside, hidden in the tunnel system, when their families were displaced into “agrovilles.” Supplying the guerrillas with the strictly rationed rice and other food became an elaborate operation of smuggling and concealment, ruthlessly punished when detected. Meanwhile, propaganda was created to distance the villagers from the guerrillas. The disparaging name Viet Cong (Vietnamese Communist) was coined to describe all those South Vietnamese groups that opposed President Diem and to give them an image of ruthless and fanatical cruelty. (The names Viet Cong, VC, and Charlie—short for Victor Charlie—have survived the war and are now used without any pejorative overtone.) The Viet Cong could be murderous, in that they saw themselves as at