Posts tagged 'Cu Chi Tunnels'

Day 3 - Cu Chi Tunnels
May 22nd 2013, 2:44:00 pm

On day 2 I headed to the Cu Chi tunnels on a tour booked through my hostel. Our guide was a very interesting half-Filipino, half Vietnamese man who fought in the war on the USA side. It sounded like he'd had a pretty horrific life, with both his wife and mother killed in the war, and his siblings fleeing the country. It was nice to have someone who was actually involved and from Vietnam tell us that most of what the Vietnamese museums state as truth is horribly biased propaganda, but that the USA is just as full of shit with their telling of events. Both sides did messed up things and there was no real winner.

When we arrived at the tunnels we sat and watched a video that was so nationalistic/anti-American it was painful to watch; how the evil Americans were out to prevent Vietnam re-unifying (completely ignoring that, as I understand it, the south wasn't actually supportive of that, hence why the war didn't end when America and Co pulled out), and how this guy, that guy and another guy was awarded the killing Americans bravery awards for killing Americans, killing American this, killing Americans that. At one point I'm sure that every sentence spoken for a few minutes had "killing Americans" in it at least twice.

The after the propaganda film we moved onto the actual site, were shown huge B-52 bomb craters which were all over the place. We were shown one of the "manhole" entrances to the tunnels. People were allowed to hop in for a photo but the hole looked crazy small and I didnt think my shoulders would fit through so I didn't give it a go. Next we saw a variety of different booby traps they used with the intention of perforating the Viet Cong's enemy soldiers and dogs; they were pretty vicious looking contraptions.