The bus ride to the Cu Chi Viet Cong tunnels takes about an hour and a half. Our guide, who is about sixty, takes the opportunity to give tell us some of his memories of the war over the distortingly loud bus PA.
He starts getting very animated and even emotional, which seems strange considering he must do this tour nearly every day. He starts asking us questions like a test. When he asks us when we think the Vietnam War ended, the answer he gets from me and few others is 1975. ‘Wrong!’ he says, ‘you know nothing about the war’. He goes on to explain that the Chinese did not leave Vietnam until 1980, so this point represents the end of the war. He also says that since Vietnam had been invaded, occupied and at war with various countries since 1840, the Vietnam War was in fact 140 years long.
Nearing retirement, he explains that he is not afraid to tell the truth. With a very Asiatic name too difficult for the western tongue to quickly master, he tells us to refer to him as Mr. Bean.
He is damning of the American presence in Vietnam, and of the CIA in particular, hinting that he suspects them of having assassinated President Kennedy and being involved in the killing in 1986 of Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister who had closed the US embassy in Sweden in response to the war.
This makes it all the more surprising when he reveals that his father was an American, and that Mr. Bean himself was in fact a US Army war veteran having worked for the Americans during the war. This meant that when the war ended, the communists put him in prison for four and a half years, when he says he ‘learned about the communists’. It becomes apparent that, for reasons of impunity, what he says about the Americans and the communists should not be taken wholly on face value as representing his beliefs. It seems clear though that he is no friend of the communists either. It also emerges that his fiancé had been killed in the war, although he doesn’t say by whom. No wonder he is still quite emotional when telling these stories.
Having said that, he is quite an entertainer, warning us that Americans have a tendency to get stuck in the tunnels because ‘they have fat asses’.
Being an ally of nobody, his response to a question from a Swedish lady in our group is unsurprising. The Swedish lady claims that she comes from the most socialistic country in Europe, and she asks Mr Bean plaintively ‘where is the socialism in Vietnam?’ His reply, perhaps not wholly comprehending her viewpoint, is that ‘no, no, we have capitalism now, it is much better’, which I would have thought would be obvious to anyone making a comparison between Communist Vietnam and now, although of course it is still a one party state.
Arriving at the tunnels, we are escorted to a hut where we are shown a video straight from 1967. The South Vietnamese Army are referred to as traitors, and the Viet Cong fighters are awarded the accolade of ‘Hero American Killer’. Later on in the tour, we are shown booby traps employed by the VC, which are backed up by gruesome portraits showing how US soldiers got impaled on them.
Finally, in the tunnels, which are famously narrow and low, I get short of breath and have to get out after two sections, each of which are about 15m long. I get back in for the final section, which is so narrow and low that I have to crawl on my hands and knees, scraping my back against the ceiling.
The tunnels are built in zig zags and there are three levels to make entrance by enemy soldiers more treacherous. Mr. Bean says that the US practice of pouring gasoline down the tunnels and then lighting it only served to harden the clay, making it more resistant to bombing, while the VC hid down in the third tier.
After crawling through the tunnels, there is an option for target shooting using anything from an AK47 to a Browning machine gun. These are now bolted down to shoot toward the targets after the suicide a few years previously of a Korean tourist. I decline the opportunity as the guns are disturbingly loud and the bullets are a minimum of £1 each (minimum of ten for a rifle, the machine guns are more). Also it seems to make this war tourism into a bit of a game.
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| fresh rice pancakes sold at Cu Chi tunnels |
Before entering the coach to return to Saigon, I talk to Mr. Bean privately. He says, ‘although I joke, when I talk about the war I am very serious. The war ruined my life.’ With an American father, his family had been very wealthy by Vietnamese standards. When the war ended, all their property was confiscated, and his brothers and sisters became boat people, seeking refuge in Thailand. He had wanted to be a doctor, but having been imprisoned by the communists, he wasn’t allowed to study and work as he wished, which is why he is now a tour guide, ‘a low occupation’ for him.
He says he is embarrassed about using the microphone on the coach because he is ‘not a movie star’. I tell him he is a very good story teller, which on reflection was a slightly inappropriate thing to say, as if the stories he told were fiction. On the journey back he gives us additional commentary without the mic.
Before getting back to Saigon, the coach stops at an arts factory where disabled & deformed people work, notionally all victims of Agent Orange though I suspect this is partly propaganda. They make traditional furniture and ornaments, like a football made from eggshells. It is quite impressive, but the items are priced very much for better off westerners.
Back on the coach, Mr. Bean tells us he has written a book, which my memory tells me was called ‘Three Moon War’. I can’t find anything about it on the internet, but might help if I had written down his real name, as opposed to ‘Mr Bean’. I had meant to ask him, but found myself hurrying off the coach when it stops outside the War Remnants Museum (formerly the ‘War Crimes Museum’), as I wanted to see inside.
As ‘Bean’ had told us on the coach, the museum is very much a victor’s history, but the displays which, besides the armaments and vehicles outside, consist mostly of photos with brief commentaries, are no less horrific for that fact. To give just one example, one of the photos shows a US soldier picking the torn apart remnants of a VC killed by a grenade launcher. Perhaps a majority of the photos were taken by photographers that were killed in the war. There is a specific section of the museum dedicated to the mostly western photo-journalists who were killed, and there were a remarkably high number of these, perhaps seventy or eighty listed here.
In the evening, I meet Gary, Laurie’s boyfriend who has now joined the group until we get to Singapore. Gary is somewhat the jealous type and I am somewhat nervous about meeting this rather large man whose girlfriend I have spent most of the last two and a half months with. We three go for some food at another local kitchen restaurant and, in the event, Gary and I get along well, although he does get a bit intense after a few beers.
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