The Tunnels of Cu Chi by Tom Mangold Read Free Book Online

operations to secure the areas.
    Large military operations had to await the dry season. In January 1966, Operation Crimp was the first sweep by American and allied troops into the Viet Cong strongholds of the Ho Bo woods and other parts of Cu Chi district. This was to “clear and secure” the area adjoining the planned new base camp. Before the operation began, artillery fire was rained on the area, and there were softening-up raids by B-52 bombers. B-52s had been built for strategic, or nuclear, attack, but from 1965 on, over a hundred were adapted to carry dozens of 750-pound conventional bombs. They flew from bases on the island of Guam and in northern Thailand. B-52 raids were called up at twenty-four hours’ notice, and targeted by controllers on the ground in Vietnam. The planes were almost inaudible to their targets because they flew so high. The thirty-ton load of high explosive would leave a mile-long swath of destruction and deep craters.
    After the bombing came the GIs and their allies. On 7 January 1966 over 8,000 soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and the Royal Australian Regiment were airlifted from Phu Loi to Cu Chi district, and straight into trouble.

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   Operation Crimp
    As the sun rose on another cloudless day that promised only the inevitable invasion of heat by breakfast time, the U.S. Air Force C-130 transport aircraft coughed noisily into life and lumbered awkwardly down the runway at Phuoc Vinh. It was Friday, 7 January 1966, and the 1st Battalion of the 28th Infantry, part of the 3rd Brigade of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One, was being airlifted to Phu Loi in preparation for the start of the largest American operation yet in Vietnam—Operation Crimp.
    The Christmas pause in the bombing raids against North Vietnam ordered by President Johnson was two weeks old—his public gesture to lure the Communists to the negotiating table would end in failure three weeks later. In the South, General Westmoreland’s Operation Crimp was intended to teach the Communists a lesson they would never forget. With full armed might—helicopters, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and no fewer than 8,000 fighting men—he was going to solve the problem of Cu Chi.
    A recently declassified U.S. Army report reveals that Crimp was to be “a massive attack … to strike at the very heart of the Viet Cong machine in South Vietnam at the notorious HoBo woods just west of the fabled Iron Triangle itself.” This no-nonsense offensive was planned to destroy the long-time Communist redoubt by finding and eliminating the politico-military headquarters of the entire Viet Cong Military Region IV.
    No World War II scenario could have been more apt. After playing cat-and-mouse with the ARVN troops for several years, the Viet Cong had it coming to them. Now the dogs of war were about to be unleashed.
    From Phu Loi, the GIs of the 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry, were to be flown by helicopter directly to Landing Zone Jack, following on the heels of the 1st Battalion of the 16th Infantry. The location was almost on top of the Ho Bo woods. Long before the sun had flattened the dawn blue of the sky into an opaque glare, Operation Crimp had begun.
    At Phu My Hung, on the banks of the Saigon River and within the Ho Bo woods area, Lieutenant, later Captain, Nguyen Thanh Linh of the Viet Cong’s 7th Cu Chi Battalion sat deep inside the tunnels reading and rereading the long handwritten reports he had already drafted to his regional commander about the forthcoming American operation. Linh had command of a VC battalion of under 300 men. “We knew they were coming,” he said. “It followed basic military principles. They’d bombed, shelled, taken reconnaissance photographs. All this was unusual enough to make it clear there would be a big operation.”
    Linh’s battalion was one small unit within the local