Cu Chi
Without lifting my elbows away from my chest, I can press my hands flat against the side walls. The clay feels warm and hard. I am squatting as low as I can, but I still have to lower my head to avoid the roof. The air down here is thick and heavy, and breathing is as hard as crawling. A few feet in front of us, a tiny lamp flickers in a niche. Summer passes between me and the light and suddenly I can see nothing: total darkness. Fifty feet from the tunnel entrance, we are all but buried alive. Oh no, I think. Not again.
Three months ago, Summer and I were in Turkey for a friend’s wedding. After a few days in Istanbul we flew east to Cappadocia, an ancient volcanic wonderland famous for its fairy chimneys and cave churches. A lunar smurf village, as Summer put it. Apart from a few miraculously verdant valleys, the land is barren. But the rock is of a rare consistency, soft enough to work by hand, hard enough that caves and tunnels don’t need reinforcing. For six thousand years people have carved structures out of the mountain rock: homes, storehouses, bakeries, wineries, and, in the Christian era, churches and monasteries. It was probably easier to dig caves than to quarry the rock for free-standing buildings, but more importantly it was safer. Turkey was swept by one wave of marauding invaders after another: Hittites, Mongols, Arabs, Crusaders, and of course the Turks (who stayed). With a ravening horde abroad, would you rather bolt the door of your house or pull up the ladder and roll a boulder in front of your cave entrance, which is, by the way, halfway up a cliff? Many an ox-cart back then bore the bumper sticker ‘I may be a troglodyte, but I’m a live troglodyte.’
Near a town now called Kayseri, the locals compromised. They spent most of the year in more stone or wooden houses, but also built an underground shelter, a bunker. An underground city. Big enough to hold say, four thousand people. For six months. Six storeys deep. Complete with ovens, granaries, wineries, meeting halls, 200 foot-high ventilation shafts, and multiple lines of defense. All hacked out of the rock with hammers and chisels.
The oldest part of the Kayseri city dates back four thousand years; it was abandoned at least a thousand years ago, and forgotten until some kids stumbled across an entrance in the 1960s. Now it’s a major tourist attraction, and we were able to spend forty minutes or so underground exploring the first three levels, wondering who these people were, how they could have accomplished this, and what were they so afraid of. Although it’s easy to stand up in most of the tunnels and chambers, and the ancient ventilation shafts somehow deliver fresh air throughout the system, claustrophobia mounts.
Until Bin Laden’s complex at Tora-Tora in Afghanistan is open to tourists, there’s only one place on Earth that is comparable to Kayseri, and it’s Cu Chi in Vietnam, about an hour’s drive from Saigon.
Like Kayseri, Cu Chi began as a place of refuge. Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh guerillas dug the first tunnels in the 1940s to hide from their enemies. But as the tunnel network expanded, its role quickly shifted to offense. From their underground base just 30 miles from Saigon, the entrances concealed in dense jungle or even underwater, the Viet Minh could strike against the French and their South Vietnamese allies and then vanish. By 1965 the French were gone and what were now called the Viet Cong were on the point of defeating the anti-communist South. Then the Americans came, and the killing began in earnest.
But the Americans couldn’t find the tunnels either. The 25th Infantry Division unwittingly built their base directly over part of the network, and wondered how the VC were able to shoot at them from inside the perimeter.
In countless Vietnam war movies the inscrutable Viet Cong, the undifferentiated Charlie, are portrayed like ghosts, evil spirits who melt into the cursed Asian jungle. That may be how it looked to the poor misbegotten GIs who fought against them, but there was no magic, just an extraordinary feat of engineering. Over 100 miles of tunnels, three storeys deep. Underground field hospitals, meetings halls, kitchens, and weapons factories. Ventilation shafts hidden under fake termite mounds. Cooking smoke piped out and diffused over large areas so that it looked like mist. And everywhere booby traps: mines recycled from unexploded U.S. bombs, pits lined with metal spikes, spinning wheels edged with swords, mediaeval in their simplicity and viciousness.
Unlike Kayseri, Cu Chi was never intended to be a long-term shelter for families. The men and women based here crawled into action on their hands and knees, and slipped in and out through holes no larger than the widest part of their bodies - see the photo above. The stretch that Summer and I went through is only 120 feet long, and has been enlarged for tourists, but we couldn’t wait to get out.
When U.S. forces finally did penetrate the tunnels of Cu Chi, they sent soldiers in to fight hand to hand. They called them sewer rats. As I haul myself to the surface, I wonder what it must have been like, down there in the blackness, to fight a man with bayonets.