The Tunnels of Cu Chi: A Harrowing Account of America's Tunnel Rats in the Underground Battlefields of Vietnam
By: Tom Mangold, John Penycate / Narrated By: Jeff Harding
Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins
Where are the Tunnel Rats? Oh that’s right… this is 11 1/2-hours of them getting slaughtered by heroic VC…
I get it; really I do. From the get-go, as an itty bitty kid, what was going on in Vietnam was an atrocity. We were anti-war but verrrry pro-young men, the boys coming home in body bags, or those coming home to indifference at best, outrage and hostility at worst, or those who came home years later after being POWs. And those whose bodies came back but whose minds never left that country.
So I’ve wanted to Be There for My Guys, and prior to this age, that entailed learning all I could about their experiences. I’d heard about Tunnel Rats, but it wasn’t until I came upon a PTSD at End of Life teaching video where a man with cognitive decline, a man who’d forever told his wife he was an Engineer in Vietnam, starts Going Back, describing what it was like in the dark, helpless, in terror, terrorized, that it clicked for me: Tunnel Rat, oh my God, he was a Tunnel Rat.
Imagine my astonishment to come upon this audiobook, The Tunnels of Cu Chi, released in 2021. I got it, and the secondary title had me thinking I’d get to learn about them, what they experienced, how they survived, what they accomplished.
But almost immediately I noted an… off… tone to the book. Sure, I get it: We shouldn’t have been over there in the first place, so of COURSE this’ll have a LOT of presidential blunders. And a LOT of what happened over there was atrocious, so of COURSE this’ll have pretty much every horror a civilian and a country could go through. Yes, they call it “The American War” over there, and their museums are horror shows of what they went through… and isn’t it amazing how little David with his slingshot, and his bicycle, and his tunnels beneath the countryside and primarily under Cu Chi, beat the beJESus outta the technological giant, the U.S.?
So I had to pause and look up the book release date, cuz this was feeling really… off… and I put together that the author’s access was only a few years after the final end of the War. Sooo, hmm, maybe things were still all fraught, still all anti-war? Okay. Maybe Vietnam’s leaders that granted access were all aglow about their unlikely victory and were rightly proud of their cleverness, their fortitude? Okay. And who knows? Maybe author Tom Mangold had an Outsider’s Perspective, devoid of Huzzah-America, as a British journalist? Okay. And why am I feeling so twitchy when pretty much everybody on Goodreads raved about the “evenhanded writing”, the “finally!”-we-get-the-other-side’s Point of View?
You want to hear about how every single Vietnamese soldier was a Hero? Here you go. How every single Vietnamese civilian who worked for Americans by day but ran intel by night, was a Hero? Here you go. How every single person who thought of creative ways to instill terror into Goliath, with tales (From the VC Perspective) of how poisonous snakes were used, one step two steps you’re dead, of how spiders and centipedes that crawled all over the Tunnel Rats or up their clothes kept them in states of heightened fear? Here you go. And oh? Just in case you missed it, the text makes sure to let you know how the careers of each of the VC, from foot soldier to general to tunnel expert to entertainer down below, went after the war: How many medals and citations they received, how photos of each were proudly displayed beside photos of Ho Chi Minh, huzzah huzzah aren’t they clever and glorious huzzah.
I did NOT go into this audiobook thinking US Good/Vietnam Bad. Rather, I thought I’d hear of Vietnamese cleverness/US courage. But jeez, I also did NOT go into this thinking that here was almost 12-hours of stories which left me thinking, and I’m serious, and I’m not proud of this: This is WHY stuff like the My Lai Massacre happened. This book specifically roundly enthuses how all the villagers were in on it; how they traveled the Tunnels to work for the VC, how they traveled the Tunnels to partake of nationalist pride. I understand, this was the country they loved that was being invaded, and of course they fought to preserve their homeland. But it also shows why no American grunt could trust the villagers by day, knowing they’d be passing info and god knows what else by night. Further, the book gets pretty godawfully specific about just how horrific their methods were with the pits with bamboo stakes, with how VC soldiers inflicted torture on Americans for what they saw being done to their country, with the glee in which they thought of nifty and novel ways of providing terror and death. And Mangold, it would appear, shares that glee.
I dunno.
I had to take a break, had to start writing this review over again, several times. Because I know many a Vietnam Veteran, and I can guarantee you they’ve struggles and courage and fortitude like you would not believe. They didn’t ask for their scars, and they don’t ask for anything, really. They’re a proud and dignified bunch, and they didn’t deserve what their own country did to them, and they sure as HELL didn’t deserve the special horrors that the VC did to them (And I should mention that my use of VC is my own and not Mangold’s… no, he has mighty cheers for each force that fought Americans).
Here’s where I am, finally at the end of this review, feeling raw, feeling sorrow, feeling no great fondness for Mangold as a Cheerleader, feeling a true sense of unease that, really? THIS? This is what’s out there on Tunnel Rats? They deserve more than this.
And Jeff Harding? Gosh, could you blow your cadence any more? Could you make a terrified Tunnel Rat sound any more like a cartoon character, eyes bulging, shrieks of terror made oh so comical?
Just Boo! all around for this unworthy tribute to one, but not each, side of a horrific time.
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