Củ Chi tunnels
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The Viet Cong dug 250 kilometres of tunnels outside Saigon, used to move weapons and ammunition, at depths of three, six and twenty metres. Kiriakou visited during his 2026 trip and reports failing the entrance test at a hole that had been widened for tourists: "I'm not a fat guy, but my chest was too big. I literally could not get into the hole... And then these guys had to pull me out because I was stuck."

He draws the causal chain the other way round from the usual telling. The tunnels worked because the people who dug them were small, and they were small because they were hungry: the Vietnamese "had been malnourished for so many years" and were "as a result much much smaller than the average American soldier. So they took advantage of that by digging these tunnels."

The engineering he singles out is the ventilation: "the ventilation systems are incredibly sophisticated. You don't even know that these are ventilation pipes because they're disguised as termite mounds or disguised as bamboo groves."

See also

- Kiriakou's visit to Vietnam (2026)
- Vietnam War
