Saigon is super modern with lots and lots of scooters and lots of heat. It is so hot you pretty much always need to be in a pool or eating ice cream or in air conditioning. On our rooftop you could see lights in every direction.
Our first day, we went to visit tunnels from the war. On our way to the Cu Chi tunnels, a couple hours away from Ho Chi Minh City, we learned new information about the Vietnam American war. The northern troops, called Viet Cong, were trying to create independence for their country. While the American troops were trying to fight communism. The Vietnamese built tunnels, so they could survive because they needed to be protected from the Americans dropping bombs.
We got to visit the tunnels and learn about how they lived, worked, and fought there. In the tunnels, there were three levels, and the lowest one was about 10 m deep, but you weren’t allowed to live in that one because there’s not enough air so you couldn’t breathe that low. The lowest level was used for escaping underground into the river if the tunnel was captured by the enemies or bombed. The second level (a bit higher up) was for storage to keep their food and guns and everything else that they needed. And then the first level was for the bunkers, which included the kitchen, meeting rooms, medical room, and places to sleep.
Bamboo was used to bring air down into the tunnels. They covered the top where it came out to make it look like a termite hill. The enemies used dogs to smell and find the tunnels. The Vietnamese put chili powder at the bamboo air hole so dogs would sneeze and even used clothing from dead American soldiers near the bamboo so the dogs would smell their owners and move on.
The Americans poisoned the water with Agent Orange (which killed all the trees so they could find the Viet Cong), so the Vietnamese had to dig their own well to have water in the tunnels. The Vietnamese didn't want their cooking to attract attention from the enemy, so they built these complicated spaces for smoke to be held underground. It would be released very slowly in the early morning so it would blend in with the mist.
And how to get into the tunnels is that once in a while there would be a secret door that’s covered with leaves underneath so you can’t see it. You’d have to find a signal or something on a tree or certain landmark, and then you’d start knocking all over the ground until you find the wooden door and then once you find that you lifted up and get in to it. Then you have to take the door, cover it with leaves and then put it back on when you’re done.
We got to go into some of the tunnels. Inside there is a very narrow and steep staircase and then you walk squatting into the tunnel which was very dark. The rooms they lived in weren't very big, so it was probably hard to live in and they had to do it for 10 years. The tunnels underground go about 250 km all around and how you build them is they would dig them by hand using tools that they built from the enemy bomb that didn't explode. How they got the bomb material is they found the non-exploding bombs that the American people dropped and they brought them back and put them in water so that it wouldn’t explode and then they brought it back and use the saw to break them up and then they could start to melt them to shape them.
The Vietcong were very smart in the ways that they tried to fight. One example they built their own shoes from leftover tires that they use and they made them so that you put them on the opposite direction so when you walk forward the prints in the ground looks like you’re walking the other direction so that the American people wouldn’t know which way you’re going. they also built really creative ways of trapping people in the ground. The traps would have be covered so that people wouldn’t know that they were there, and when they stepped on them, they would fall into a deep hole that had spikes often from sharpened bamboo sticks with poison on the tips from the snakes and scorpion. The Vietnamese won the war, and then they changed the name of Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City because of the president’s name was Ho Chi Minh.
It was really interesting to be Americans on this tour with a Vietnamese person telling us their perspective. Of course, he explained the people were very angry with the Americans back then around the time of war but during this time he made it sound like he really believed that people had moved on and were no longer mad at Americans and that, in fact, they are interested in American culture and music. The adults in our group didn’t remember learning very much detail about the Vietnam war when we were kids and so we were all learning about the war for the first time together from the perspective of the Vietnamese. We learned so much about how people are impacted by the war. And we feel so sad about the pain that it caused for everyone.
Our last night in Saigon, we went to the A O show at the Saigon Opera House. It was amazing. It was a Vietnamese circus. People used bamboo to hop and flip and spin. They threw baskets to one another in a complicated pattern. They danced martial arts. They even beat boxed and break danced. There was one scene where they played ping pong in slow motion, and Grayson almost fell out of his chair from laughing so hard. The musicians played old music and new music on instruments we had never seen before. They used a lot of local Vietnamese objects and sets in their performance. We were so impressed. - Poppy and B
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