experience, you know? But I want it to be on the mark, get it right. Talk about the war America and its allies lost, how Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon, how all of them screwed up … how it was the most unpopular war the west ever fought, even more than Iraq. What I need is the perspective of the American soldier — ”
“No.”
“Look, mate, I wouldn’t take up a lot of your time, I really only need you to — ”
“I really only need you to shut the hell up … mate.” When the old man said that, the Australian guy took a couple of quick steps backward. He was nervous — maybe even scared. Scared of someone in his sixties.
The weird thing is, if I’d been him, I’d have been scared of the old man too. There was something about the way he was looking at the Aussie writer that was kind of crazy — off base, like he wasn’t totally with the program. Guys like that are scary and right at that moment the old man was a scary guy.
The writer dude from Australia shut the hell up. And got out of there, dragging the family with him. They were moving quite rapidly
I thought about trying to say something funny. Like well, I guess I won’t be taking her to the prom. But I changed my mind. Maybe not the time for Huffman humour.
We moved away from the bus and followed the crowd that all seemed to be heading the same way. Cu Chi was a town. But we weren’t there to see the town. Nobody was. It turned out everyone on the bus, and all the people from all the other buses, were there to see the tunnels. The Cu Chi Tunnels.
I figured this would be more boring than the Saigon zoo with its No Animals policy. Now we’d be poking around a couple of little tunnels with those things hanging down — stalactites. Total yawner.
I was way wrong.
The old man led me over to where you pay for the tour. He went up to this sort of cage and paid. He came back and handed me a piece of paper.
“Where’s yours?”
“I’m not going.”
“Why not? I don’t want to go by myself.”
“I’ve been in tunnels. Not these tunnels but others like them. Charlie was very good at digging.”
“Who’s Charlie?”
“It’s what we called them … the enemy. We called them other names too. But a lot of the time it was Charlie.”
“So why are we here if you’re not even going in there?”
“I don’t need to go down there.”
I shook my head. “Well, I don’t need to go down there either. I thought this was about you. You’re the one who was in the war.”
“This is about us. I’ve been in tunnels, you haven’t. You better get going. Your tour guide is leaving.”
I wanted to tell him this was crap, but there were a lot of people around, and I didn’t want to look like the pain-in-the-ass teenager. I shook my head again and turned to follow the tour guide and about ten people who were in our group.
The guide didn’t say much at first, just walked off and signalled for us to follow her. She looked like she was having a bad day.
There were maybe twelve of us. We hadn’t gone far when suddenly this guy popped out of the ground right in front of us. He was wearing a black army shirt that looked like it came from Value Village and a floppy green bush hat. He was holding the hatch over his head like one of those sewer covers and grinning like crazy at us. He made his fingers in the shape of a gun.
“Bang, bang, you all dead now,” he said, still grinning.
I could see what he was saying. A bunch of soldiers walking along and suddenly, this guy is there with a machine gun or a grenade or something and yeah, everybody’s dead.
Everyone snapped pictures like crazy for a couple of minutes. Everyone but me. I wasn’t going to waste film on a guy doing an impersonation of a jack-in-the-box and wearing cheap black pajamas. We walked on and eventually came to an exhibit. I’ve been to a few museums on field trips and stuff, but I’d never seen an exhibit like this one.
The whole exhibit was booby traps that the Viet Cong used to kill guys. The worst one for me was this pit that was covered over just like the hole the guy had come out of. When the thatch cover was pulled away from over top of the pit, there were all these sharp bamboo stakes at the bottom, pointing up.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to be walking along and falling into one of those pits. I had this picture in my mind of these soldiers looking down into the pit where one of their buddies was spread out with those stakes all through him. Trying to think of a way to help him. To get him out.
Something I’d noticed: whenever you saw anything about American war crimes, it was all those rotten bastards. But anybody who ran into one of the booby traps I saw displayed there was going to die a pretty horrible death. Cruel. But this exhibit was like a celebration. Like somebody had won the Stanley Cup. We showed ’em. I guess they did.
I was glad we didn’t spend a lot of time at that exhibit. Next we got to go down into one section of the tunnels ourselves. The guide told us there were 125 miles of these tunnels. Three tiers of them that had kitchens, first aid stations, weapons caches — it was unreal. And the Viet Cong, who were the communists in South Vietnam — Charlie — they did a lot of their war preparations from down there. And launched attacks from inside the tunnels.
The guide said there were guys on the American side called tunnel rats. Their job was to go down into these tunnels and try to find and destroy the enemy. I tried to imagine what that job would have been like. The guide said guys volunteered for that job. He sounded like he actually admired people who would do that. I knew one thing — there was no freaking way I’d have volunteered to go down there and look for the enemy.
I got tired of listening to the guide, so after we’d been down there awhile, I wandered off by myself. This part of the tunnel had been a command post. I moved slowly through it and came out into what had been a dormitory — probably big enough for about twenty people to sleep in. Some of the bunks were still there.
“Hi.”
I turned and there was the Australian chick, Jennifer, standing there. “Hi.”
I looked around. There were other people in the room, another tour group, but I didn’t see Jennifer’s parents.
“Where’re your mom and dad?”
She shrugged. “We’re not interested in the same things.”
I nodded. Tried to think of something to say. “Uh … what did you think of that bamboo pit deal?”
She made a face. “Gross. Scary.”
“Yeah, no kidding.”
“So your dad — did he fight in the war here?”
“Yeah. I guess so. He doesn’t say much.”
“But when he does … ” She had a little smile on her face.
“Yeah,
