Vietnamese wartime tunnels visited
(Cu chi, Vietnam) — As Li. Col. George Eyster lay
dying from Viet Cong sniper bullet wounds on a jungle
trail, he said to me, “before I go I’d like to talk to the guy
who controls those incredible men in the tunnels.”
Eleven years later I met that man and he showed
me the inside of the fantastic tunnel octopus that took 30
years to dig and stretched 150 miles, with tentacles
sometimes winding right under the chairs of U.S. com
manders as they sat in their headquarters.
Eyster, a tall West Pointer from Cocoa Beach, Fla.,
died in a field hospital while his battalion, the Second of
the 28th Regiment, First Infantry Division, was trying to
fight its way out of the vast underground complex 20
miles northwest of Saigon.
The now peaceful tunnels were on the itinerary of a
German tourist group I traveled with on a rare two-week
trip to Vietnam.
One of the briefing officers at district headquarters
was Capt. Nguyen Thanh Unh. Dressed in an olive drab
North Vietnamese uniform and Ho Chi Minh rubber tire
sandals, he said in answer to a question that he had
commanded the Cu Chi Liberation Battalion during
1966.
That was the unit the American colonel's "Black
Lion” battalion had opposed. The slightly-built,
45-year-old Capt. Unh looked quizzically as I pursued
my questioning. Yes, he said, intelligence reports had
informed him at the time that the opposing American
battalion commander had been killed.
As he recalled those days for our tourist group, the
horror of a war I had witnessed from only one side
became vividly real.
Capt. Unh spoke in French with grudging respect
and almost without hatred about his former enemies, the
Americans. The death of Eyster and many other Ameri
cans in those early war years shocked the American
public, but as the captain talked it was evident the bat
tles had not been one-sided.
Of the 600 men in the Cu Chi battalion that fought
Eyster's Black Lions in January 1966, only four survived
the war, two officers and two non-commissioned offic
ers, said Unh.
The battalion itself “was wiped out several times,”
he said. “Each time we reconstructed it. In the whole
sector we lost 12,000 men in the course of the war.”
The former battlefields looked lush and sleepy as
our group drove from Saigon northwest along the river
bearing the city’s name. Some deep B52 bomb craters
were still visible, retained as fish ponds or wallowing
holes for animals.
Youth labor gangs were widening a road, and oc
casionally a reminder of the war would appear. A rusting
armored personnel carrier with First Infantry Division
markings and “Little Rose’’ painted on its side loomed
out of a bamboo thicket. The wreck of a U.S. helicopter
was overgrown with elephant grass.
The battleground we were being taken to lay be
neath our feet, at one, two and three levels undergound.
It was a twisting octopus of tunnels and caverns stretch
ing from Cu Chi towards Saigon and the surrounding
provincial capitals.
The tunnels were marked in black lines on a 12 by
12-foot map hanging from a briefing room wall, and my
first reaction was that it looked like a map of the New
York or London subway system, with dots not for sta
tions but for fighting positions and secret entrances and
exits.
The slippery, humid corridors, about two feet wide
and two feet high, blocked with wooden trapdoors at
undergound intersections, spanned the history of the
whole Vietnam war, starting from the days when Com
munist agents hid from the French police. But it was
during the American phase of the war, Linh said, that the
system was truly tested.
"As more and mere American soldiers arrived to
occupy the surface above, the more we extended our
system below,’’ said a senior officer at the briefing, Col.
Duong Long Sang.
“At the end we had a three-tier tunnel system and
everything was underground — the toilets, the hospi
tals, all our soldiers, many civilians and even water
buffalo.’’
The colonel continued: “We literally dug for 30
years, usually in the dark, squatting down. We carved
out about a meter every eight hours, and women distri
buted the earth on the surface, hiding it under fallen
leaves. ”
The tunnels crept under some U.S. positions
"Several times we knew that American field comman
ders would sit like this on their metal chairs directly
above us,” said Linh with a grin.
The Vietnamese took our group for a visit, and as
noisy swarms erf mosquitoes buzzed around our heads
we pushed ourselves tnrougn me narrow cornoors, oo
viously built by and for slender Vietnamese.
"We always moved in the dark, saving our candles
and torches for emergencies," said Linh. "Our am
putees lay in the dark, sometimes for months.”
But eventually the Americans figured out the coun
terattack.
First they used hunting dogs "and we battled them
underground with rifle butts, mines and knives," said
Linh. Then somebody had the idea to use American
toilet soap and the Vietnamese started smelling the
same as the GIS. "That stopped the dogs," Linh said.
Next came the "tunnel rats — small, tough Ameri
cans, like us,” Linh said. "They crawled into the tunnels
with explosives and gas to blast us out. We installed
more escspe routes, more tiers, but sometimes we were
cornered and we tried to kill them with bayonets so as
not to give our positions away.
“Many Americans died in the tunnels. They wasted
much time pulling their dead back. That gave us time to
regroup. The more we killed, the fewer problems we
had," said Linh.
The Americans tried flooding the tunnels "and we
lost many men until we constructed upper tier escape
levels," Col. Sang said.
Finally, Linh said, came the "scorched earth" policy
that from 1968 on saw regular B52 bombing of the
tunnel complexes. Only direct hits killed, Linh claimed,
but he described the awesome experience of a near
miss: "Fire would be everywhere, the body would be
thrown back and forth in the tunnel, shirt and pants
would be ripped apart by the suction of the air blast."
Sang stated: "The Americans used to say that as
long as there were soldiers of the Liberation Front in the
Cu Chi tunnels, Saigon would be in danger. They were
right.
We planned the 1968 Tet attack against the U S
Embassy in Saigon from here And it was also from here
that details for the final, successful liberation of Saigon
on April 30. 1975, were drawn up.
"The greatest pleasure in those days was to stick
one's head out to the surface and just breathe air," said
Linh as we dim bed into our vehicles for the ride back to
Saigon. I watched him take a gulp of the heavy, humid
and undisturbed air that hangs over peaceful Cu Chi
today.
Weaver calls gas deregulation robbery
By JOHN RIMEL
Of the Emerald
U.S. Representative Jim
Weaver, D-Ore., said Monday in a
news conference the deregulation
of natural gas prices would drasti
cally increase both unemploy
ment and inflation.
“Deregulation would be a mas
sive robbery of consumers, as
much as $10 billion to $20 billion a
year,” he said.
The Fourth District Congress
man said if gas prices are allowed
to rise, all other energy prices will
go up and unemployment also
would increase because the
American public’s purchasing
power would be diminished.
Dave Fidanque, spokesman for
Weaver's Eugene office, said that
since 70 per cent of Eugene’s
natural gas comes from Canada,
the impact on the Eugene area
would be only indirect. Industry
would pass the increase in gas
costs to consumers, and prices of
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Regular Special
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Kneissl Loipe S Skis $90.00 $60.00
Trucker BCP Skis $180.00 $130.00
Trucker Mountain Edge Skis $110.00 $99.50
Other assorted racing and touring skis 30% and more OFF
Cross Country Ski Boots 50% OFF
(Small assortment)
SPECIAL PACKAGE — When you buy skis,
boots, poles and bindings, you get AN EXTRA
15% OFF
(Even items already on sale!)
Chuck Cross, Kneissel Cross Country Factory ^
Representative, will talk with you in our Downtown
Mall shop from 2 to 5 PM Thursday. ~
This sale and demonstration in our Downtown Mall
Shop Only - 57 West Broadway
<S»
Sale ends Sunday, October 16th
4W
Page 4 Section A
gasoline and other petroleum
products would rise because of
their increased competitiveness
with natural gas.
Natural gas pricing is one of
President Carter’s major energy
proposals. Carter proposed end
ing the dual market under which
gas in interstate pipelines is regu
lated at $1.46 per thousand cubic
feet, while gas used in the states
where it is produced is free from
controls. Carter has instead re
commended a new uniform ceiling
on all newly discovered gas start
ing at $1.75 pef thousand cubic
feet and rising to about $3.36 by
1965.
The House approved this prop
osal in August, along with much of
the rest of the President s energy
program. However, the Senate
adopted the opposite approach
and approved the Pearson
Bentsen substitute, an amend
ment that would lift all federal price
controls on new natural gas.
According to Weaver, The only
argument the industry gives for
deregulation is the incentive to
produce more gas, and this is pa
tently false He added that "at
$1.40 per thousand cubic feet,
there is a proven strong profit in
centive. The price set in the House
bill is $1.75 per thousand cubic
feet, easify more than the industry
needs."
A House-Senate conference
commrttee will try to reconcile the
differences and put together a
compromise bill. Carter has said
he wiU veto the legislation if it con
tains deregulation like that voted
by the Senate
i Ballot Measure #2 gets nods
Two new statements of support
for Ballot Measure No. 2, the re
ferendum for development of
non-nuclear energy sources to be
voted on Nov. 8, have been issued
by major Oregon environmental
groups.
The Oregon Environmental
Council (OEC), a citizen organiza
tion, and the Many Rivers Group
of the Sierra Club both declared
support this week for the meas
ure. The proposal will make avail
able low-interest money, backed
by state bonds, for new energy
sources within the state.
f
The OEC gave its support, it
said, because the measure "pro
vides a needed mechanism for
stimulating development of en
vironmentally sound, decen
tralized non-nuclear energy re
sources in our state.’’
The decision came after long
discussion between board mem
bers over what they perceived as
ambiguities in the language of the
measure.
“Many board members expres
sed concern that major utilities, oil
and gas companies could easily
gain control of most of the funds,
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difficulty meeting people and making friends with those you do
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effectively frustrating the kinds of
small scale, decentralized energy
development projects the meas
ure purports to encourage," OEC
President Vem Rifer said.
However, he said, the OEC
board decided to support the
measure "because it represents a
step forward in energy policy, and
a move toward development of
more environmentally sound
energy sources."
The Sierra Club’s Many Rivers
Group, with members in Coos,
Crook, Deschutes, Douglas and
Lane Counties, issued unqual
ified support for the measure. The
group is encouraging a “yes
vote, saying, "We must now shift
our energy base from nuclear and
fossil fuels to renewable energy
resources such as solar heating
and cooling, wind generation and
recycling waste heat."
The measure would enable
Oregon to allow "smaller utilities
to generate electricity near con
sumers, which reduces waste and
provides economic stimulation in
the ratepayers’ communities,’’
said the Sierra Club group.
Thursday, October 13, 1977