The Vietcong were ghosts, shadows. When they ran away they disappeared into thin air. Suddenly. When they attacked they suddenly appeared. Out of nowhere, materializing without the Americans understanding how they did it. Technique bite and flee. The Americans knew that their shelters were underground, but they never imagined that the tunnels would extend for hundreds of kilometers. Real underground cities, with hospitals, canteens, kitchens, tailors, mechanical workshops, air vents, water wells, armories, often dug just under the enemy barracks, at eight ten meters of depth. Near Saigon, in Cu Chi, the Vietcong had dug 280 kilometers of tunnels but the Americans could not find the entrances and, when they found them, they were trapped in terrible and cruel pitfalls. They started using dogs. But the Vietcong scattered pieces of American soldiers' uniforms, and the dogs got disoriented and went back to look for their masters. The Vietcong engineers were really ingenious and clever. The chimneys to let out the kitchen smoke were long enough to dissipate it and make it look like fog. The vents were hidden in old termite mounds. The network of the tunnels was immense, the Vietcong themselves needed guides to move and not get lost, crawling along stairs and underground paths without missing a fork.
In Cu Chi we were there and we saw and even visited the galleries, with some difficulty due to the fact that they were adapted to the measurements of the Vietnamese. Cu Chi is a kind of open-air museum. Traps, hiding places, galleries, weapons, cannons, enemy tanks are available. Tourists are invited to do Viet Cong, to descend into the wells, to crawl into the tunnels, and, in the end, also to shoot with the rifles of the time in a polygon where the targets, fortunately, are not human silhouettes but of animals. There is also a souvenir photo, posing among statues of Vietcong on a human scale, as if taking part in a council of war. Of course, there is also a restaurant, a bar and a shopping center where you can buy small carrarmatini turned into snow balls like the tower of Pisa and even real bullets turned into a key chain. This is of course interesting from the point of view of documentation. But a little bit of dubious taste if we think we’re remembering a war that has killed millions. And how six visitors of Dachau were invited to simulate the gas chambers or to lie down in the bunk beds of the poor inmates. Or in Dresden they made a show of sounds and lights simulating a bombing. Cu Chi is practically Disneywar.
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