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17 APR 2001 VINH MOC, VIETNAM
Bowermaster
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I took a half-dozen steps down into the pitch-black tunnel and nearly turned and ran back. The cheap aluminum flashlight I'd been handed before entering was barely sufficient to light up the musky hole that dropped as deep as 60 feet below the red clay surface. Though I could still make out the sound of the pounding surf of the South China Sea it was no great comfort. As the height of the ceiling dropped to five feet and the tunnel narrowed, I kept walking.
Though we have been attempting to veer our days and our experience away from the subject of war, it is especially difficult to avoid here in the DMZ, the demilitarized zone that literally split the country in two thanks to the Geneva Accord of 1954. We are just a few kilometers north of the dividing line, the 17th Parallel, and reminders of war are everywhere: The simple fishing village we kayaked into today - Vinh Quang - was the site of one of the worst days of the war, with 345 locals killed by bombs and napalm on a single day in June 1967.
Two hundred fifty of the nearby villagers had put their heads and hands together to dig this, the most elaborate series of tunnels in all of Vietnam, by hand. There was no grand architect; a half-dozen families started digging from different directions through the sticky laetrite. Offered the option of fleeing further to the north, they had refused, preferring to stay put, close to home and living mostly underground from 1967 to 1972. The digging took 18 months. In the end, there were 13 exits, including a half-dozen that emptied through heavy jungle and onto the sea. A maternity room, where 17 children were born during the two years when the town was bombed nearly daily by American planes. A school occupied one thin sliver dug into the wall, as did a half-dozen freshwater wells. Cooking vents were dug deep into the soil to avoid tell-tale smoke from escaping and alerting overhead planes. A meeting hall, where they performed song and dance and theater to keep themselves from going completely nuts while living underground for weeks on end. An emergency ward, long and dank, where they patched up Vietcong soldiers who knew to escape here as well as the rice farmers and fishermen who lived in the nearby village. Each family -- at its biggest, 380 men, women and children lived simultaneously below the ground here - was given a living space as big as a single mattress. Many died from disease due to the humid, dank conditions, especially children who feared leaving the safety of the tunnels for even an afternoon. Between 1967 and 1969 most of the village had lived in these conditions; many stayed until 1972.
The most intimidating sight I saw, once my eyes adjusted to the dark, may have been the very first room we passed: A narrow slot dug into the mud called the Guard's Room. An armed soldier had sat there 24 hours a day, on lookout for the enemy sneaking down inside carrying grenades. What made it spooky was that I knew that American and South Vietnamese soldiers had tried to sneak down inside this most intimate of hideouts… sneaking down into this tunnel, and others like it, armed and dangerous. What a lousy assignment.
Emerging onto the sea through a narrow slit in the overgrowth was a relief, physically and spiritually. Walking over the top of the tunnel system it was hard to imagine the sophistication of what lay beneath; similarly, it was hard to imagine that the craters that dot the ground's surface didn't collapse the whole system.
Just beyond the border of the tunnel we are introduced to a couple in their 70s who helped dig the tunnel and lived in it for most of six years. Their 33-year-old son - a handsome man, wearing a flowered shirt - was born in its maternity ward.
They've just walked into the yard of their simple, wooden, neatly hedged home. He carries a small basket of fish, she a rusted metal scale. Today their life has a simple routine, fishing and selling the modest day's catch in the local market. After an hour's conversation - during which he does most of the talking, animatedly, using sea-roughened hands to accent his descriptions - I ask if they hold any animosity against the "enemy" that forced them to live below ground for most of six years.
"I only remember the days of peace that came after," he says, a kind of response we're getting used to from Vietnamese on both sides of the man-made border. It seems here, even in the places hardest hit by war, people have moved long past war and onto the future, whatever it holds.
I have one very base question for them, most curious how they ate during those long days in the dark. Obviously they couldn't grow rice given the almost daily bombings and since he's said he's a been a fisherman all his life I wonder if he was able to somehow get out and fish between bombings. "We didn't have to," he admits. "Every day they would drop a bomb in the sea and the shore would fill with freshly-killed fish." He and his friends would slip out at night and collect baskets-full for all of the tunnel-dwellers.
For audio reports from the field go to the National Geographic Society coverage of this expedition.
— Jon Bowermaster, MountainZone.com Correspondent
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