Be careful with the AK-47 sis

Well late Friday night myself and Nathan my cockroach came to a mutual understanding, he would not come into the bedroom and I would not scream every time I went into the bathroom, also that in turn for me not turning him into management I would be left in some privacy when I wanted to shower. Let's see if this mutual understanding continues to work...?

I headed out the visit the Cu Chi tunnels today. I had the same feeling as I had when I was leaving the terra cotta warriors, that I was being fixed up and that it was going to be a cheesy and fake touristy nightmare. I couldn't have been further from the truth.

Our guide Mr. Tung was a war vet, on the Viet Cong side, he had lost his father, sister and brothers in the war, his Mother survived because she fled to Saigon with her only grandchild to the relative safety. It took longer than I expected to get there, about 2 hours through the countryside. The one thing that I did notice was that the closer that you got to Cui chi the more and bigger the graveyards became.

We were ushered off the bus and into a room to watch one of the most blatant propaganda movies I have ever seen, it wouldn't have gone amiss in one of Mr. Minh's re-education camps! We learnt about the peace loving peasants living in a land full of rich harvest and days of sunshine, where the maidens danced at the cross roads, while sturdy youths tended to the rice paddies, and all of this was of course until the vermin Americans came in with their cynical propaganda and burnt their house, shot the men and the boys, the women and children and the chickens and the ducks, and with any left over bullets the imperialists tried to kill Buddha. But still the brave Vietnamese fought on, and great American killer hero became an accolade even the youngest solider sought to obtain. The fact that child soldiers were used or land mines were used are points of pride in this movie.

Then we saw a fox hole ... you see, even if the Vietnamese just kept to the truth without all the crazy use of superlatives they would have most people on their sides and that includes the US tourists. This was a very poor country, a country of peasants, and whether you are here to liberate or to occupy if you are an overseas force and well blood is thicker than water! They didn't have bombs, so they collected the unexploded bombs dropped by the Americans and improvised them, using discarded soda, food and beer cans dropped by the American GIs.

They build over 200km of underground tunnels. which stretched to the Cambodian border and into the outer reaches of Saigon. They had makeshift hospitals, dorms, kitchens and wells all built down there. As our guide said, lucky for Vietnamese they are so small and skinny tall handsome Americans could not fit.

The Viet Cong laid a lot of land mines many of which are still not uncovered and so even today we were warned not to stray off our path. they used child soldiers and they used really awful weapons, we saw some of the boobytrapes, like the bamboo trap, a GI would stand on it and be impaled.

And then we went to the firing range, and i got to shoot an AK-47! Now I texted Bill last night to tell him and I think that he sent me a message he would never have believed he would write, "be careful with the AK-47 sis."

I hadn't shot a gun since I was a child, so I was rusty. Each bullet cost 20, 000 dong, I bought 10. The noise on the range was so loud, I hadn't heard gun shots since that guy was murdered outside my apartment last year. When I got my bullets and headed to the range, all of a sudden I wasn't really looking forward to it anymore, it made me feel kind of sick. But if was fun. one of the attendants loaded the gun and I let loose. I thought that it would hurt my shoulder but it didn't. It was so loud. So loud. The attendant told me that i had a good shot. I really would prefer to be good at something else. But I'm glad I did it.

Afterwards Mr Tung sang us some patriotic Vietnamese songs while we ate a dinner like that enjoyed by the Vietnamese liberation army, i.e. raw potato, sticky rice and tea. Yummy.