DMZ, Vinh Moc tunnels and Khe Sanh

Yesterday we took an all day tour to visit the area around the old DMZ that partitioned Vietnam into North and South between 1954 (end of French war and Geneva Accords) and 1975 (reunification). First, we drove north from Hue for an hour and then took the road west into the hills towards the Laos border. The road passes through beautiful, green mountains alongside a rushing river. We stopped to visit an "ethnic minority" village where the wooden houses are built on stilts. The people seem very poor although they have electricity and there is a school house that is not being used at present. We saw lots of dirty and bored looking kids hanging around without adult supervision. Their parents were out working in the fields. I asked the guide why the kids were not in school, and he told me that the school was closed because the kids didn't want to go to school. I would have liked to find out more about these interesting people. Many of the hill tribe people supported the losing side in the war and presumably have suffered repercussions from that.
Next we briefly visited a bridge built by Cuba in the seventies and then visited the former Khe Sanh U.S. combat base set up to intercept arms and soldiers on the nearby Ho Chi Minh trail. Khe Sanh was the site of a bloody siege in 1968 in which thousands of soldiers died. The siege was a diversion tactic by the North Vietnamese leading up to the Tet offensive. The U.S. dropped a tremendous amount of firepower to prevent the VC and NVA from overrunning the base. We saw some helicopters and tanks captured fromthe U.S. forces, looked at the museum and saw the displays of unexploded bombs.

After that, we drove back down to the coast, then north over the Ben Hai River that divided the old DMZ. Continuing along the coast a few more miles, we came to the Vinh Moc tunnel area where we inspected the tunnels learned about the use of the tunnels to help smuggle soldiers, equipment and arms into waiting boats to be transported to South Vietnam to help the war effort. We walked a long way through the tunnels to get a feel for what it must have been like for the people. The tunnels were used by soldiers waiting to get onto the boats and by the local people attempting to escape the bombing. As many as 300 people at a time would be able to get into the tunnels. Many women gave birth there, too. This area was heavily bombed (we saw some bomb craters)and the nearby town completely leveled during the war.