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If a member of the Cu Chi village guerillas, which included young girls, was to kill a number of American soldiers, they were classed as heroes - "American Killer!". The Cu Chi people were from a peaceful rural area outside Saigon where there were many farms. When the American soldiers came in the Vietnam war and tried to infiltrate the region to capture Saigon they never reckoned they'd have such a difficult job with the Cu Chi people. The Cu Chi defended their homeland by tunnelling underground to hide all the villagers when the American army bombed and came with their tanks. They trapped any incoming battalion by setting traps of landmines and more traditional contraptions previously used to catch large animals. The tunnels they created spanned 250km squared and were on three levels, some more than 9 metres below the surface. They had underground rooms where they cooked (only in the morning because the smoke from the cooking coming out through an air hole, could be masked by the morning fog) and treated their sick, and they had special larger rooms for ladies who were pregnant and the elderly. The height of the tunnels is only 80cm on average and 60cm wide and they are formed purely from the compacted soil (it's very clay like here). It was an ingenious idea because it worked. There are remnants of American tanks and bomb shards all over but they were unsuccessful in their attempts to take the area. If they indeed found an entrance to the tunnel system and tried to get down it they would have found it very difficult to manouevure because of the lack of breathing space and any source of light would make navigating the tight corners almost impossible, not to mention that tight corners means guerillas can be hiding round them. At any one time there were approximately 2000 people 'living' underground in hiding. When we're invited to go down into one of the tunnel systems we're immediately aware of how hot it is underground and the tight space means we have to scamper, crouched through the dark and sometimes jump down into another level, then clamber back up to the next.
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When there's no light up front (there are electric lights every now and then) it goes pitch black and it's impossible to see which way the tunnel is going, because it does twist and turn. A very claustrophobic experience, even for someone like me who doesn't normally suffer from it. And to think that some of the tunnels were less than half the size in diameter, the guerillas had to pull themselves through on their fronts and even that, for a small Vietnamese, must by tiny.
