The Cu Chi Tunnels

Today  was hands down my favorite day as we got to visit the cu chi tunnels and enter them. This was a completely new experience for most of us and I couldn't believe my eyes when I got inside one. It was  pitch dark with barely any space to move and the only way you could move around in them is by kneeing down or by crawling and the tunnels were kilometers long! We also got to see some of the traps they used to fight the Americans and they were brutal, you could feel the pain just by looking at the demos our tour guide showed us. We also had an amazing opportunity of firing guns, which was a new experience for most of us. Such ranged from M1s  to massive M60s machine guns, which, when we were not at the range, had a huge contribution in making the atmosphere as realistic as possible, as that's what the soldiers would have experienced during the war. I was surprised at how complicated the tunnels were which means that it would have been impossible to memorize the whole system. But the best part about this was that it was told from the Vietnamese perspective unlike most other sources such as books or movies which only took into consideration the American perspective of the war. We spent the whole morning there, and the one and a half hour bus ride was definitely worth it, especially if you find war history fascinating like I do. -Marco Triglia