Letters from Vietnam 14

12th July 2006 – 19:37 – Home

We were on the bus again, this time moving towards Cu Chi Tunnels. It took around one hour to arrive there. It was raining again, slowly and desperately. We paid 70,000 VND per head for the tickets. Our guide bought the tickets for us. The first thing we did was to watch a documentary movie about the tunnels. A young Vietnamese girl’s voice was filling the entire space in the room. As usual, she was speaking about how brave the Vietnamese people were during the war and how much they sacrificed for their country. As the black-white movie strips move in front of my eyes, my mind went to the old documentaries about First World War. Turkish state channels used to broadcast them very frequently to increase the so-called ‘national unity’.

After the documentary, I took some photos of the pictures on the walls. They were real war pictures. After leaving the room, we went into the woods. It was still raining and nobody in the group seemed to worry about it. While walking, my mind took me away one more time. Perhaps, the things we were going to see in a minute were one of the finest –or embarrassing in terms of war- human made structures. How did these people dig the earth to build a network of tunnels which reaches the length of more than 200 km? What kind of circumstances might have caused this? Can a person –as a human- be proud of this work? Naturally, Vietnamese people are proud of these tunnels because they show how patriot they were during the war. I can understand and accept this very easily. What I can’t understand is something very different from nationalist perspective. Isn’t it embarrassing enough to understand the reasons behind these tunnels? We are humans and easily subject to violent behavior. We beat our rivals, torture our enemies and at the end kill each other for almost nothing.

I always wonder about the two people who pull the triggers against each other. Let’s isolate them from the time and location in which they have met and put them in somewhere else, in another time. Isn’t it more likely that these two people will be good friends? Can’t a Palestinian and an Israeli be good friends if they don’t know each other’s nationality? I am sure they can. Instead of killing each other, they can enjoy life. War is one of the worst parts of our history and unfortunately it seems unavoidable for some people who usually like to have easy solutions for their long-term problems. These tunnels show us how cruel we can be as we push our own kind to the under-earth to survive. What we can conclude is there was no safe place to stay on the earth and these people had to dig down to create a new world. They show us how we were –and are- determined to kill each other. It speaks in its own language; saying that I am the witness of bloody war and I am the witness of human’s limits toward unbearable ends. Of course, these tunnels were not built to live in. They were for fighting, for killing, for escaping, for trapping and for communicating. They built the tunnels to fight against the people who came to invade their country. Those invaders lost the war and went home. Did they learn their lesson? As history repeats itself, war is not something related with politics or nationalism. War is much beyond that! Desire for power and desire for showing this power are two main things behind wars.

Then we arrived at a hole. There were stairs going down and our guide asked us who wanted to go first. He also said, he will wait at the other end of the tunnel for us. We went down, J was in front of me, bent our body more than 90 degree to fit into the hole. It was too small for me and I really wanted to leave the place as soon as possible. It was dark and the bag on my back was causing trouble in this tiny hole. This somehow reminded me my own short story which I had named ‘The well’ fairly. The tunnel had a very heavy smell which I suspected methane. This heavy gas might be the reason for the “no smoking” signs around the woods. Whenever I saw the first exit, I felt happy as if I missed the sunlight in a less than 1 minute long journey. I thought Vietnamese people might be smaller and thinner to maneuver easily in the tunnels but living without sunlight for days and nights must be beyond perfection. How can a person live without light for many days? Many of the group members left the tunnel just after me, a few of them continued until the next exit. Those continued were ready with torches in their hands and no bags on their backs. I walked towards the next exit to meet the guide. He showed us the traps which have been used by Vietnamese soldiers during the war. Some were amazingly torturing but clever, some were simply deadly. The iron jaws of the mechanism were built to stab a man’s chest or genitals. I took the photos but did not look at them for long time. Later on, we have been invited to a little meal which consisted of what Vietnamese soldiers ate during the war. Boiled or steamed roots of the trees in the woods were waiting for us. We were offered to dip these potato-like roots into a salty-spicy sauce to eat comfortably. Our guide did not forget to mention that soldiers of war times did not have the luxury of the sauce. This was the end of the journey. We walked back to the exit of the museum –I just realized it was a museum- and waited for the bus driver once again. Before the exit gate, I saw snake and scorpion whiskies I have mentioned days ago. A snake in a bottle, dumped into some kind of alcohol and water mixture. Do they think it is a good idea to drink these bloody whiskies after seeing all these war pictures and memoirs?