The Củ Chi tunnels

You're in a bright forest, a few dozen kilometers northwest of Sài Gòn (the former Saigon, now Hồ Chí Minh City). The guide stops, sweeps aside a few dead leaves with the tip of his foot, and lifts, with a sharp motion, a small wooden trapdoor about the size of a serving tray. Beneath it, a black hole, barely wider than a man's shoulders, plunges into the earth. He slips into it, disappears entirely, then closes the hatch: the ground becomes forest again, without the slightest trace. This is how, for years, fighters lived — under the very feet of their adversaries — in the astonishing maze of the Củ Chi tunnels (pronounced "koo chee"). This is no mere tourist curiosity: it's one of the most staggering places for understanding the Vietnam War and the desperate ingenuity of those who fought it underground.

A city beneath the earth

Củ Chi is a rural district near the great city of the south. Its subsoil is made of firm, clayey earth that holds well when dug. It's this geological detail that made possible one of the most extensive underground networks in military history.

During the war — first against the French, then, on a far larger scale, during the Vietnam War against American and South Vietnamese forces — guerrilla fighters dug, by hand, with pick and basket, an immense labyrinth of galleries. Added together, these galleries are estimated to have stretched for hundreds of kilometers, across several levels of depth.

These were not simple shelters. It was a genuine underground city, with its vital functions:

• dormitories for sleeping safe from the bombing,
• kitchens for preparing meals,
• makeshift hospitals where surgery was done by lamplight,
• meeting rooms, workshops, water wells, stores of weapons and rice,
• and an entire ventilation system, with cleverly hidden air shafts.

Underground, whole families sometimes lived for months; children were born there. People led a complete existence, in darkness, damp, and cramped space, only a few meters below enemy patrols.

The art of vanishing

The genius of Củ Chi is invisibility. The entrances (the famous trapdoors) were tiny, hidden under leaves, sized to the build of the Vietnamese fighters — often too narrow for an equipped American soldier. Once closed, they blended perfectly into the ground.

Everything was designed to deceive the enemy and to survive:

• The kitchens' smoke flues were connected to long ducts that carried the smoke far away and released it in thin wisps, often at dawn when the mist made it undetectable. These kitchens are called Hoàng Cầm stoves (bếp Hoàng Cầm), after the man credited with the trick: a hearth whose smoke is cooled and dispersed through channels before escaping, almost invisibly.
• The air ducts were disguised in fake termite mounds or angled away.
• Some galleries ran beneath rivers; others could be flooded to trap pursuers.

Living there was a constant ordeal. The air was thin and heavy, the heat stifling, the darkness total. One had to cope with scorpions, ants, snakes, rats, the fear of gas and of flooding. Many suffered from illnesses tied to the lack of air and light. It's an understatement to say that underground survival came at a heavy price.

The traps and the guerrilla war

Around and inside the network, the fighters had set fearsome traps (bẫy). Many were made with rudimentary means — above all sharpened bamboo (tre) — yet were terribly effective: tilting trapdoors lined with spikes, hidden plates that gave way under weight, devices triggered by a taut wire. These traps, now shown (disarmed) to visitors, speak to the relentless harshness of this war.

This is the whole logic of guerrilla warfare: fighters without material superiority, facing a far better-equipped army, compensating through knowledge of the terrain, cunning, mobility, and endurance. Strike fast, vanish underground, resurface elsewhere. The tunnels made it possible to attack and then melt away, leaving the adversary almost powerless to find an enemy who seemed to rise out of the ground itself.

American forces tried everything to overcome Củ Chi: sending in specialized soldiers — nicknamed the tunnel rats, who crawled through the dark at the risk of their lives — flooding, gassing, and massively bombing the region. Despite the ferocity of these efforts, the network was never fully destroyed. Củ Chi became the symbol of a stubborn, almost ungraspable resistance.

Digging by hand, living in the shadows

It's worth pausing on the scale of the task. This colossal network was not dug by machines but by hand, with rudimentary tools: short hoes, picks, baskets to haul out the earth. Every handful of clay torn loose then had to be hidden — scattered across the fields, thrown into streams, concealed in bomb craters — so as not to betray the galleries' existence from the sky. Painstaking, ant-like work, carried out at night, over years.

Daily life, meanwhile, was organized around survival tricks. Rice was cooked before dawn so the smoke would dissolve into the mist. Water came from wells dug straight into the rock. Sandals were made from old tires; the metal of enemy shells was recycled into weapons or tools. Fighters rotated through tasks: digging, standing guard, tending the sick, farming a plot on the surface, carrying supplies along invisible paths. This constant resourcefulness, made from so little, is perhaps the site's most striking lesson: how near-total deprivation was turned into a system of formidable effectiveness.

Remembering, underground

The Vietnam War ended in the mid-1970s with the reunification of the country. Today the Củ Chi tunnels have become a place of memory (di tích, a "historical site") and one of the most visited sites near Hồ Chí Minh City.

People come to understand, to feel. Some galleries have been widened so that visitors — often larger than the fighters of that time — can crawl through a few dozen meters of them. The experience, even brief, is striking: the moment you push, hunched over, into the warm black passage, your throat tightens. You begin to imagine — barely — what an entire life spent down there must have been, under the bombs.

The site also displays the Hoàng Cầm stoves, the camouflaged entrances, the traps, and reconstructed scenes of daily life. For many Vietnamese visitors, it's a place of pride and contemplation; for foreign visitors, a dizzying history lesson about what human beings can endure and invent in order to survive.

Two sites, one memory

The Củ Chi network is visited today at two main locations, a few kilometers apart: Bến Đình and Bến Dược. The first is the busier, closer to the city, with its widened galleries and demonstrations. The second, a little quieter, houses a large memorial temple (đền tưởng niệm) dedicated to the war dead, its walls bearing countless engraved names. There, people come to light a stick of incense, to bow, to fall silent.

This double dimension — curiosity, almost the vertigo of the feat, on one side; contemplation and mourning on the other — is what makes Củ Chi so singular. You don't visit it as a theme park, even if the site sometimes looks like one: every trapdoor, every trap, every smoky kitchen points back to real lives, to an endurance beyond imagination, and to a tragedy that forever marked generations, in Vietnam and beyond.

What Củ Chi teaches us

Beyond the figures and feats of arms, Củ Chi tells us something universal about war: a people's capacity to turn their own land into refuge, into weapon, into a parallel world. We should be careful not to reduce it all to a technical exploit: beneath these galleries lie broken lives, immense suffering on both sides, and the terrible price of a conflict.

But it remains, etched into the clay of Củ Chi, this arresting testimony: when everything above ground was superior to them, women and men chose to go beneath the soil, to build a whole world there, and to hold on. Stepping back into the light, you blink, you fill your lungs with forest air — and you never quite look at the ground the same way again.

Vietnamese to remember

• Củ Chi (koo chee) — the district and its tunnel network
• địa đạo (dee-a dao) — the underground tunnel, the gallery
• địa đạo Củ Chi (dee-a dao koo chee) — "the Củ Chi tunnels"
• đường hầm (deuong hum) — the tunnel, the underground passage
• bẫy (buy) — the trap
• tre (treh) — bamboo
• bếp Hoàng Cầm (bep hoang kum) — the stove with concealed smoke
• chiến tranh (chien trang) — war
• du kích (zoo kik) — guerrilla warfare, the guerrilla fighters
• Sài Gòn (sigh gon) — Saigon, now Hồ Chí Minh City
• di tích (zee tik) — a historical site, a place of memory
• hòa bình (hoa bin) — peace