Vietnam 5/26

On our way out of Vietnam back to Phnom Penh we visited the Cu Chi tunnels, an incredibly intricate underground system northwest of Saigon that the Viet Cong used to elude American bombs, survive attacks, live in safety, get and hide supplies, and gain intelligence from a key U.S. base.

At several points in the tunnels the system descended three levels, so if bombs destroyed the top one, often the next two down would still survive. A-shaped bunkers were built to withstand explosions. Many of the tunnels narrowed to as little as 20 centimeters, so the smaller Vietnamese could escape the larger American soldiers.

One interesting element was how Viet Cong cooked underground. They could not allow smoke to waft from their fires, lest they be detected, so they created a five-chamber system underground, in which the smoke would filter from one space to the next to the next, until it dissipated. Like I’ve said in earlier posts, God created these Asians to be an orderly, efficient and savvy people, and it worked to great effect against us in the Vietnam War.

Today the historical site stands as an anti-American propaganda vehicle and an ode to the communists. A video that introduces visitors to the site made statements like “The United States wanted to bomb a quiet and peaceful land thousands of miles from America.” It also emphasized that the U.S. fired on livestock, schools, and Buddhist temples. A tour guide to the tunnels, showing the site of where a B-52 dropped its load, said, “In the wartime we got many bomb craters because of the Americans.” Nowhere is there any mention of the resistance by the Vietnamese themselves.

The whole experience was so nauseatingly pro-Communist it led one in our group, a war vet, to say, “I don’t know what’s worse: this or CNN.” On that point, if you think the network is bad in the U.S., you ought to see how anti-American it is in the rest of the world.

Here are a few demonstrations by our dispassionate tour guide. The enemy made heavy used of bamboo spikes:

You may have noticed a large painting behind the tour guide in the above video. It depicted American soldiers falling into various traps:

Our tour guide continues:


A hollowed-out, rusted M-41 tank:

The tour guide explains the Viet Cong’s mini-bunkers:

And he also describes the “down-time” of the Russian- and Chinese-supported North Vietnamese: