Day 10 - Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City

Secret entrance/exit to the tunnels below.
This was a live demonstration!

After about a 1 hour flight from Hoi An City to Ho Chi Minh City, the first thing we wanted was lunch. We stopped to have traditional Vietnamese Pho noodle soup, which was actually very good, before heading immediately for the Cu Chi tunnels, about 2 hours from the airport. The Viet Cong dug these tunnels to protect themselves initially from the French air and ground sweeps, then from the Americans during the Vietnam war.

 It's interesting how history is shaped by each persons perspective. Many Vietnamese refer to the war as "the American war" and refer to the land as "occupied by the Americans" because of Vietnam's history of colonization and their fight for independence.

Me coming through one of the tunnels
into an underground room. You can
get an idea how small these tunnels were.
Small enough for Vietnamese; too small
for Americans

A former VC was one of our tour guide at the tunnels. He lost his right arm during the war.He told us 2000-3000 VC (men, women, and children) lived in the tunnels at any one time during the war. They were farmers during the day and at night they worked at digging the tunnels and setting up land mines and traps for the American soldiers. He said 90% of the people in Cu Chi were VC who lived in the tunnels. He lived in the tunnels for 12 years. We saw the weapons the VC used against the U.S. and the ways they out-smarted and trapped their enemy. I got to crawl through the very small tunnels underground to see how they lived and survived.

Recovered, unexploded cluster
bombs. Notice how the bombs
inside the tubes glow under
the flash of the camera!

 It was a very somber experience that stirred up a lot of emotion in all of us. It helped me understand much more clearly the emotion behind the anti-war protests of the Vietnam War era. Neither the north nor the south wanted the Americans in Vietnam. I also wrestled with the realization that my step-mom and her family were from Cu Chi and that my father was a civilian working in Vietnam during that time with a private construction company under contract with the U.S. government. I try to imagine what it was like.

IN HONOR OF ALL OUR VETERANS, HAPPY VETERANS DAY!

The VC even had an emergency
medical room set up underground