Up Country (21 page)

The guide said, “Please to be quiet.”

Everyone shut up, and she began her spiel. I wasn’t too familiar with the Cu Chi tunnels, and I had the feeling I wasn’t going to learn much more from our guide, whose English was somewhat unusual.

I read the brochure, whose English was also a little off.

Anyway, between the guide and the brochure, I learned that the tunnels were begun in 1948 during the Communist fight against the French. They started at the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia, and zigzagged all over the place, including underneath former American base camps. The original tunnels were only wide enough for a small VC to crawl through, and we should be careful of insects, bats, rats, and snakes.

The lady guide informed us that the tunnels could hold up to sixteen thousand freedom fighters, and that people actually got married in the tunnels, and women had babies down there. There were kitchens and full surgical hospitals in the tunnel complex, sleeping rooms, storage rooms once filled with weapons and explosives, drinking wells, ventilation shafts, false tunnels, and booby-trapped passages. The guide smiled and joked, “But no more booby traps for you.”

I said to Susan, “I hope not, for a buck-fifty.”

The lady also informed us that the Americans had dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs on the tunnels, had entered them with flamethrowers, had flooded them, gassed them, and sent in teams of men called tunnel rats with miners’ helmets and dogs to go hand-to-hand with the inhabitants of the tunnels. Over the twenty-seven years of the tunnels’
use, ten thousand of the sixteen thousand men, women, and children who’d occupied the tunnels had died, and many were entombed below.

“So,” said our guide, “we are ready now to go in the tunnels. Yes?”

No one seemed too eager, and about ten people suddenly remembered other appointments. No refunds.

As we walked to the entrance, the guy beside me asked, “You a vet?”

I looked at him and replied, “Yeah.”

He said to me, “You look too big to be a tunnel rat.”

“I hope I look too smart to be a tunnel rat.”

He laughed and said, “I did it for three months. That’s all you can do.” He added, “You got to give it to these bastards. I mean, they had balls.” He noticed Susan and said, “Sorry.”

She said, “It’s okay. I swear, too.”

I said to the guy—who was short, but no longer thin—to make him feel good, “You guys did a hell of a job, too.”

“Yeah . . . I don’t know what the hell I was thinking when I volunteered for that job. I mean, meeting Mr. Charles face-to-face crawling in a small space is not fun.”

We got to the entrance of the tunnel, and the guy said, “I have the worst fucking nightmares about these tunnels . . . you know, I’m crawling in the dark, and I can hear somebody else breathing, and I got bugs crawling under my uniform, biting the shit out of me, bats in my hair, snakes moving over my hands, and the fucking ceiling is about three inches over my ass and dripping water, and I can’t even turn around, and I know Chuck is right in front of me, but I don’t want to turn the miner’s lamp on, and—”

I interrupted and said, “Maybe you shouldn’t go in there.”

“I gotta go. You know? If I go in there, my nightmares will disappear.”

“What genius told you that?”

“Another guy who did it.”

“It worked for him?”

“I guess so. Why else would he tell me to do this?”

“His name isn’t Karl, is it?”

“No . . . Jerry.”

Anyway, the lady guide stopped at the mouth of the tunnel that was covered by a wooden shed. She asked, “Is any person here who has been in this tunnels in the war?”

My buddy raised his hand quickly, and everyone looked at him.

The guide said, “Ah . . . so, you fight in tunnel. Come to talk with me.”

The former tunnel rat moved to the front of the group and stood beside the guide. I thought we were about to get a lecture on American imperialism, but she said, “Please to tell everyone to stay together and to be not frightened. It is very safe.”

The tunnel rat repeated the guide’s instruction and advice, and added a few tips of his own, becoming an unpaid assistant guide. Really bizarre, if you thought about it.

We filed into the tunnel, and the tunnel rat was asked by the guide to bring up the rear.

The entrance to the tunnel was wide, but very low, and everyone had to stoop. The incline started out easy, then got steeper, and the passage got narrower. The tunnel was barely lit by a string of dim light bulbs.

There were about twenty of us, including some young Australian couples, about six middle-aged American couples, some with kids, and the rest young guys, mostly backpackers.

The guide made a little commentary now and then, waited for a Japanese group to move on, then continued deeper into the labyrinth.

It was a lot cooler in the tunnels, but very damp. I heard a bat chirping somewhere. I said to Susan, “This is a good second date place.”

So, we zigged and we zagged, and the tunnels got narrower and lower, and soon we were crawling over reed mats and sheets of wet, slimy plastic in the dark. I mean, do I need this shit?

We finally came into a space the size of a small room, lit by a single bulb, and everyone stood. The guide turned on a flashlight and pointed it around the underground chamber. She said, “Here is cooking place. You see there place where cooking, and up on ceiling hole where goes smoke. Smoke goes into farmer house, and farmer cooks so American think it is farmer cooking. Yes?”

A lot of flashbulbs started to go off, and Susan said, “Smile” and blinded me with a photo flash.

The guide passed the flashlight beam over the group and said, “Where is American who fight in tunnel? Where?”

We all looked around, but the guy was gone. AWOL. The guide seemed concerned, but considering the limited liability exposure of the Cu Chi Tunnel Corporation, not overly worried.

We moved on for about another half-hour, and I was getting cold, wet, tired, claustrophobic, and filthy. Something bit me on the leg. This had stopped being fun a while ago, and I dubbed this tour “Charlie’s Revenge.”

Eventually, we got into the same tunnel through which we’d entered, and within five minutes, we were out into the sunlight. Everyone looked like crap, but in a few seconds, people started to smile. Was this worth a postcard home or what?

The guide thanked us for our courage and our attention, and everyone gave her a buck, which explained her fondness for what had to be the worst fucking job on the planet.

As we moved off, I saw her washing herself in a basin of water. I said to Susan, “Thank you for suggesting that.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it.” She looked around and asked, “Hey, what happened to the tunnel rat guy?”

“I don’t know. But if that group of Vietnamese behind us doesn’t come out, you have your answer.”

“Be serious. The guy may be lost, or freaked out in there. Shouldn’t we do something?”

“The guide knows she lost someone. She’ll take care of it. He owes her a buck.”

We walked over to an area of vendor stalls. Souvenir shops were selling more war junk like in the Museum of American War Crimes, and a guy tried to sell us a pair of Ho Chi Minh sandals, made of old tires, that he swore were once worn on the Ho Chi Minh Trail by Viet Cong. All the vendors, I noticed, were dressed in black pajamas and sandals, and wore conical straw hats, just like the VC. This was totally surreal at first, then I decided it was idiotic.

Susan asked me, “Are you okay with this?”

“Sure. Cong World.”

We each got a liter of bottled water and used half to wash off and half to drink.

She said, “I can’t imagine how people lived in there for years. And I can’t imagine how you guys must have lived out in the jungle day and night.”

“Neither can I.”

We spotted our tunnel rat friend sitting in a plastic chair with a bottle of beer in his hand. We went over to him, and I said, “We thought you got lost.”

He looked up at me with no recognition.

I asked him, “You with anyone?”

“Bus.”

“Good. Maybe you should get back on the bus.”

He didn’t reply for a few seconds, then said, “I’m going back in.”

Susan suggested, “That might not be a good idea today.”

He looked at her—through her, actually. He stood and said, “I’m going back.” He began walking toward the tunnel entrance where the pavilions were.

Susan said to me, “Maybe you should try to talk him out of it.”

“No. Let him go. He’s got to try it again. He’s come a long way.”

We got back to the motorcycle, and Susan said, “I’ll drive. We need to be in Saigon before dark, and I know the roads.”

We mounted up and drove out of the parking field. Susan continued north on the back road, which was now barely more than a dirt trail. She called out, “This is usually okay as a dirt bike, but you’ve got to hold on.”

We were bumping wildly, and the bike skidded a few times, but she was a very good driver, and I started to feel more confident that we weren’t going to wind up alongside the road kill.

She said, “This road goes to Route 13, which goes through the Michelin rubber plantation. Thirteen will take us back to Saigon, and it’s a very lightly traveled road, so we’ll make good time.”

We traveled north over the worst road in the hemisphere, and I thought my kidneys were going to pop out of my ears.

Finally, we reached a two-lane paved highway, and Susan cut to the right. She said, “This is the rubber plantation. Those are rubber trees.”

The road seemed nearly deserted, and she opened the throttle. We were clipping along at about sixty miles an hour, but it was a good road. The sun, however, was sinking fast, and the shadows of the rubber trees were long and dark.

I remembered that Karl said he’d seen action here with the Eleventh Armored Cavalry, and I knew from other veterans of that unit that there had been a number of running battles within the Michelin plantation, and along Highway 13.

I pictured Karl here, manning a machine gun atop an armored vehicle, puffing away on a cigarette, scanning the spooky forest with field glasses,
and probably pretending he was Field Marshal Guderian leading a panzer army into Russia. I’d have to tell him I was here—if we ever spoke again.

Within twenty minutes, we were out of the spooky rubber forest and into an area of scrub brush. It was dark now, and the only traffic on the road was some scooters and small cars. As we got closer to Saigon, the traffic became heavier, and Susan had to keep slowing down.

Wartime Saigon at night was like a sea of light in a vast ocean of darkness. Within the city, life went on; on the outskirts of the city, barbed wire and roadblocks sprang up and soldiers became alert. Nothing outside the city moved after dark, and if it did move, you killed it. And beyond the barbed wire were the military bases, smaller islands unto themselves, like Bien Hoa and Tan Son Nhat, where soldiers and airmen drank beer and gambled, watched movies from home, wrote letters, cleaned their equipment, cursed the war, stood guard duty, and slept fitfully. And if you were unlucky enough to be assigned to a night patrol, you sometimes met the men and women of the Cu Chi tunnels.

We were approaching the city from the north now, and I saw the lights of Tan Son Nhat Airport. Farther to the east would be my old base at Bien Hoa, which also had runways, but only for military aviation. I asked Susan, “Do you know what happened to the American military base at Bien Hoa?”

“I think it’s a Viet military airfield. Jet fighters. I didn’t know it had been an American base until you told me.”

“I guess I can’t visit my old barracks.”

“Not unless you want to get shot.”

“Not this trip.”

We crossed a muddy canal and got on Khanh Hoi Island from the same bridge we’d left from. The streets of Khanh Hoi were dark, but Susan knew the way. We passed a yellow police jeep, and the guy in the passenger seat looked at us and looked at the motorcycle. He began to follow, and I said to Susan, “We have company.”

“I know.” She shut off her lights and drove into a narrow alley where the cop car couldn’t follow. She seemed to know the alleys and passageways, and within a few minutes, we were pulling up to the parking lot beneath the Nguyen apartment.

We transferred everything from the Ural saddlebags to the Minsk
saddlebags, and switched mounts like a pony express rider. Within a few minutes we were on our way with the small Minsk, which seemed even more uncomfortable than I remembered it.

Susan looked at her watch as she headed toward the center of the city. She said, “Good timing. It’s twenty to eight, and we should be in my office by eight.”

“Where’s your office?”

“On Dien Bien Phu Street. Near the Jade Emperor Pagoda.”

“Is that a restaurant?”

“No, it’s the Jade Emperor Pagoda.”

“Sounds like a restaurant on M Street in Georgetown.”

“I can’t believe I spent a whole day with you.”

“Neither can I.”

“Just kidding. You’re fun. Did you have fun today?”

I replied, “I did. I don’t know which I liked the best—meeting Bill, the heat, your driving, wartime memories of Saigon, the road from hell to the Cu Chi tunnels, or giving that cop back there the slip.”

“Didn’t I buy you a beer, and a pair of sunglasses, and pay for all the tickets?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

We crossed the muddy stream into central Saigon and followed the embankment road along the Saigon River. The city was incredibly crowded for a Sunday night, and I remarked on this.

Susan said, “It’s called Sunday Night Saigon Fever. Sunday night is a bigger night than Saturday for some reason. It’s totally crazy. We’ll go out after dinner and have a few drinks, maybe some dancing, and a karaoke place, if you’re game.”

“I’m really exhausted.”

“You’ll get your second wind.”

We headed up a narrow street that crossed a few heavily traveled boulevards. As we waited at a stoplight, I asked Susan, “Do you ever ride alone? I mean out in the country.”

“Sometimes. Bill is not a big motorcycle buff. Sometimes I go with a girlfriend. Viet or American. Why?”