Ask anyone in Ho Chi Minh City what you must see. You will not finish the sentence before someone says Cu Chi tunnels. I heard about the Cu Chi tunnels Vietnam before I even landed. It has that kind of reputation.

And it earns it.

If you want to see death, destruction, and human resilience in one place, Vietnam is a good address. The Cu Chi tunnels carry all three. Quietly. Without making a fuss about it.

First, Some History

It started in the late 1940s. Vietnam was fighting to end French colonial rule. Small holes were dug into the red soil around Cu Chi, a rural district about seventy kilometres northwest of what was then Saigon. Nothing grand. Just enough to vanish into when you needed to.

Then the Americans arrived.

By the early 1960s, the United States had committed troops to South Vietnam, supporting its government against the communist North and the Viet Cong guerrillas fighting in the South. Cu Chi sat squarely in contested territory. The Americans eventually built one of their largest bases in Vietnam right on top of the tunnel network. They did not know it was there.

The farmers dug deeper. If you want the full picture of the war, Ken Burns’ documentary is the place to start.

The Tunnels

Two hundred and fifty kilometres of tunnels. Dug by hand. Mostly at night. By farmers who had never lived underground and had no intention of starting.

That number takes a moment to land.

Stretch those tunnels out and they run from Mumbai to Pune and back. Think New York to Philadelphia, Or Sydney to Canberra. Pick your geography. The number does not get smaller.

All of it beneath an ordinary-looking forest. All of it invisible from above.

The soil here is red and firm. Good for digging. Better for hiding. Simple shelters became something else entirely. Kitchens with chimneys angled sideways so the smoke rose thin and invisible through the trees. Field hospitals. Weapons stores. Command rooms lit by oil lamps. People were born down there. Some died there. The tunnel did not ask anyone if they were ready. It just asked them to keep going.

My Turn

I tried getting into the tunnels. There is a section open to tourists, widened slightly from the original, lit at intervals. Helpful, in theory.

Within two metres I was bent double. Shoulders on both walls. Knees filing urgent complaints. For someone of my particular level of fitness, this was not exploration. This was negotiation. I shuffled forward, gasping quietly, looking desperately for where it ended. It did not seem to end.

I emerged. Wincing. Suddenly very aware of muscles I had not thought about since the last time I climbed stairs too quickly.

Around me, other tourists were doing the same. Appearing from holes in the ground like bemused meerkats. Some triumphant. Some clutching their knees. One man stood very still with the expression of someone reconsidering several life choices.

To think that for decades, an entire generation lived and worked from down there. Slept there. Ate there. Planned there. Climbed out to fight. Climbed back in.

The Tank

Then there is the tank.

An American M48 Patton. Built for open ground, clear sightlines, and a visible enemy. It found none of those things here. It stands alone in the heat, rust-stained and enormous, with the quiet dignity of something that was once very powerful and is now very still.

It is an accidental monument to a simple idea. Alter the ground of combat and the strength built for another ground becomes useless. The tunnels did not match American firepower. They made it irrelevant. The war moved beneath the reach of the tank, beneath the bombs, beneath everything that should have ended it quickly.

Watch your ground, the tank seems to say. I did not.

Places that carry this kind of weight stay with you. Kamuthi Fort, a forgotten fortress in Tamil Nadu, did something similar to me. Different continent, same silence.

Walking Back

The path back to the entrance takes you past the firing range. You hear it before you see it. A crack, then another, then a continuous percussion that fills the trees. Tourists queue to fire AK-47s and other guns. The sound is enormous. It bounces off everything and asks no permission.

The irony is thicker than a bulletproof vest. The guns were supposed to have fallen silent when the tunnels emptied out. Decades later, the bullets are still flying. Just with better queuing and a gift receipt.

When you get older, you develop an aversion to loud sound. My father used to say that. The thought arrived just as I turned away and noticed a small polite sign on the path ahead. B-52 bomb crater. Not an ordinary crater. One left by a bomber that flew so high you never saw it coming. Marked now like a feature on a nature trail. The ground around it still looks unsettled. Like it remembers and has not quite forgiven it.

You look ahead and keep walking. The gunfire slowly recedes behind you.

What They Left Behind

Inside a low covered shelter, the weapons are on display. Mines, grenades, and small explosive devices laid out on wooden slats. Yellow casings. Black fittings. Organised like a market stall. Each one made largely from scrap, from whatever the war left behind. Spent shell casings were cut and reformed. Unexploded American bombs were carefully taken apart and rebuilt into something else. Nothing was wasted. Everything had another use. So says the tall guide with authority and a badge.

He explains the use cases of each of the bombs without drama. This for the legs. This one slower. The calm voice makes it worse for me.

In the exhibition room, artillery shells are stacked in a broad pyramid. Hundreds of them, arranged by size, smallest at the base, largest reaching upward. A gift shop is visible just behind. People browse both with roughly the same expression.

The labels tell you what each one is. 105mm artillery shell. 150mm shell. Cluster bomb. The numbers are precise. The effect is not clinical. You stand there and do the arithmetic quietly, and then you stop doing it.

The Ground Remembers

You walk among quiet tourists towards the exit. Most are solemn. Turning something over. The forest thins. The entrance comes into view.

By the time you reach it, the firing range is distinct yet distant.

Though I suspect some of the silence around me had less to do with reflection and more to do with the sudden discovery, deep in a Vietnamese forest, that knees and thigh muscles exist. And have opinions.

Two hundred and fifty kilometres. Dug by hand. By farmers. Against the world’s most powerful army.

The ground remembers. Even if the rest of us needed reminding.

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If travel and human behaviour interest you, this queue on Wall Street taught me something entirely different about optimism.