Today, a tour of these tunnels near Cu Chi is an interesting day trip from Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). The first stop on the tour is in a thatched-roof briefing shed, where a 1960's propaganda movie and a map of the 125 miles of multi-leveled tunnels under the area near Cu Chi are shown. The hard clay soil near Cu Chi is very conducive to tunnel building, and all the tunnels were dug by hand, many of them in the 1940's during the struggle for freedom from the French. In addition to being an underground pedestrian highway, 6,000 Vietnamese lived, worked, and fought the Americans from the Cu Chi Tunnels during the mid-1960's to 1975.
The tour includes mannequins of Viet Cong fighters and many different types of Viet Cong booby traps with punji stakes and other horrendous killing techniques.
A section of the tunnels (about 165 feet) is open to visitors who want to walk through the dark passages.
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