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

Communist defense force of at most some 1,000 men. Its mission was the defense of the all-important Phu My Hung tunnel complex, one of the largest in the entire Cu Chi district. Linh’s soldiers were scarcely battle-hardened veterans. Most were teenagers or younger. Linh had, paradoxically, argued against being given command of too many men to defend the tunnels. “The more men I had, the more casualties I would receive,” he explained. “Fighting from the tunnels was an advantage if I did not have too many men. Often one or two riflemen would be enough, five or six rifles would be sufficient. In this kind of war one should attack numerous enemy troops with only a few men.”
    Linh’s major problem was to stimulate his youngsters into facing and fighting the Americans. Small unit attacks on theSouth Vietnamese soldiers, random guerrilla assaults, all this was one thing. But facing a superpower that had put rockets in space and had the capacity to destroy the world was another. Besides, Americans were very tall, some were tall
and
black. They even had hair on their arms.
    In his role as cadre, Linh fielded some awkward questions from his boy soldiers. Would a bullet fired from an old carbine kill a big American? Would it kill a black the same as a white? “I reassured them their bullets would kill if they struck the right spot, and I warned them that American bullets would kill them just as easily. Four days later, the Americans came. We watched with heavy hearts the helicopters endlessly landing men.”
    As the 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry, settled down on the landing zone, the men could see that their colleagues from the 1st Battalion, 16th Infantry, were already in trouble and taking fire from the north corner edge of the landing zone. Battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Robert Haldane could see his men were growing increasingly apprehensive, particularly when they saw their comrades from the lead battalion being hit by enemy bullets and grenades. Captain Terry Christy, in command of B Company, knew he had to move his men off that landing zone and into the tree line quickly. He yelled at his platoon leaders and NCOs and moved all his men within minutes. But the enemy had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. A few meters inside the tree line at the edge of a rubber plantation, Christy’s men stumbled across a large trench. It was the first sign of a most elaborate underground fortification. Haldane did not have time to check the complex. He remained puzzled. How could the Viet Cong, who had been firing on the 1st Battalion, have fled undetected through the relatively open rubber trees? Haldane knew his unit was to operate here for several weeks, before handing the area over to the newly arrived U.S. 25th Infantry Division, and he did not want an enemy that simply melted away every time he advanced.
    As the battalion moved forward with three companies, cache after cache of rice, salt, and other foodstuffs was turned up, perhaps enough to feed an enemy regiment. A large minefield was found across the wooded north end of the area, indicating the enemy had planned the area to be a permanent military complex. During the next two days of Crimp as the huge sweepscontinued, soldiers began reporting foxholes, trenches, mines, caves, right across the 1st Battalion’s 1,500-meter front. The men were slowly approaching the Saigon River; there was ample evidence of VC base activity, but something was still wrong. Battle was simply not being joined. There were no running fights, no shouts, nobody was surrendering—yet GI after GI was being hit by Viet Cong sniper fire. Haldane watched anxiously as his men’s morale began to ebb; he prayed they would soon pin the enemy against the river and extract their revenge for their own mounting losses. But when, on Monday 10 January, his battalion finally reached the wide expanse of rice paddies that linked the dry ground to the wide, sluggish Saigon