In the Tunnels

by Jared Kent (Australia)

I didn't expect to find Vietnam

In the Tunnels The air was hot and stale. As I wiggled through the dark rock tunnel on my knees and elbows, I felt an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia, like the enveloping earth was slowly closing in on me. I drew short, heavy breaths as the panic began to set in. I wriggled even quicker through the tunnel, until at last I came to an opening where the glimmering daylight welcomed me from the surface. I pulled myself up from the abyss and greedily sucked in deep breaths of the humid rain forest air. Here, by the tunnels just outside of Saigon, painful reminders of the war lay strewn about everywhere. A melted, dilapidated tank sat a few yards away; a preserved booby trap with giant wooden mandibles lay menacingly before me. As I escaped from the hellish tunnels, part of a guided tour, I couldn’t help but ponder the people who built them, the people who spent months at a time living beneath the Earth, enduring the hot, stale dark while the sounds of battle boomed above them. I also couldn’t help but wonder about the people that chased them down those tunnels. The Americans. Those were my countrymen. Although the war started and finished long before I was born, a guilty conscience weighed heavily on my shoulders. Earlier that day, in the museum, I read in shameful horror the stories of the atrocities carried out by American soldiers. Tears welled up in my eyes as I gazed upon a photo of a young marine smiling as he held up the tattered remains of what was a little girl. On his shoulder, he wore a patch bearing the same flag that I so many times have pledged my undying allegiance to. In school, the war was rarely discussed. I remember my history teacher briefly glossing over it, casting it simply as an unfortunate, but necessary strand in the massive and byzantine geopolitical web that was the cold war. Perhaps there was some truth to that. War is messy and complicated, and one day of touring war remnants does not make one a savant on the complex issues of history. But in that moment, breathing in the jungle air while a vast network of tunnels slithered through the ground beneath me, I felt betrayed. My whole life, in all my schooling, I had been led to believe that my country stood as a paragon of moral virtue, that we did what was right, and what was necessary. I was told that we were righteous vanguards of a just world order. But here, under the dense canopy of the forest, I realized that a dark chapter of our history had been whitewashed. I realized that an entire generation of young people like me had been deliberately left ignorant. Before that day, I had never heard of these tunnels. I had never heard of agent orange, the chemical that ravaged and deformed millions. But when my guide told me of his grandmother with three legs, I shuddered indignantly and shamefully at my own ignorance. As we continued to hike through the forest, I thought how easily it might have been me chasing people down those tunnels. At 20 years old, I was the same age as many of the young men who fought, killed, and died on the soil I now walked on. What if my number had been called? What would I have done? Would I have fled to Canada or would I have been a loyal believer of the cause? Would I have ended up in a photo at the museum; would I have spilled innocent blood onto this forest floor? How easily could I have been swept up in the waves of exceptionalism and blind patriotism? In the abstract, it was impossible to know. The unknowing haunted me. After what felt like an eternity, we finished the hike, and I took one last painful glance at the mouth of the tunnel before climbing into the back of the van. As the engine roared and we headed back towards the city, I gazed into the window and saw my reflection, but it was a different face looking back at me.