Interviewer: I know you were a little girl, but what was life like under the Diem regime?
Le Thi Ma: During the Diem regime, I was only a girl of twelve or thirteen and was going to school.
Le Thi Ma: The treatment of the Diem regime was bad.
Le Thi Ma: They forced the inhabitants to do corvée labor, building up Route 15 over here.
Le Thi Ma: Therefore, members of my family also had to do corvée labor.
Le Thi Ma: As a girl going to school, all they taught me was their national anthem which was sung every time we had to salute the flag.
Le Thi Ma: That was all that they taught us.
Interviewer: Did your father work because he had been a member of the Resistance?
Le Thi Ma: He was forced to do corvée labor...I was still a little girl at the time.
Le Thi Ma: My father, during the nine year Resistance, did participate.
Le Thi Ma: But after the war, during the Diem period, I was still a young girl and was going to school then.
Le Thi Ma: After classes I had to hire out my labor, doing any kind of work at all, in order to help my parents out and to help feed my family.
Le Thi Ma: We were very poor at that time.
Le Thi Ma: At that time the general treatment by the Diem regime of the population, my family included, was bad.
Le Thi Ma: They forced the people to do corvée labor, building roads for them.
Le Thi Ma: This was the type of treatment by the Diem regime towards the inhabitants of Cu Chi.
Interviewer: Could you please begin again?
Le Thi Ma: During the Cedar Falls search and destroy operations, the Americans sent in their tanks and armored vehicles to destroy this area.
Le Thi Ma: The technique employed by the inhabitants of Cu Chi was to use unexploded American bombs we unscrewed the detonators first of all, used a saw to cut the bombs in halves, scraped the powder into two large cauldrons bigger than this one here, melted the powder down into a thick liquid, poured the thick substance into a container like this one until it is completely filled, then we made a detonator and inserted it here, and then placed these mines along the routes we knew the tanks were going to take.
Le Thi Ma: When the tanks ran by, they would hit this thing here and cause the mine to explode, causing them to turn over and become demobilized.
Le Thi Ma: So the technique was to use unexploded American bombs and American gunpowder against them.
Le Thi Ma: So, in preparing for the battle, we made use of these mines.
Le Thi Ma: When the Americans poured in their troops, bombs and artillery shells softened the whole area first.
Le Thi Ma: The bombers and the artillery poured down bombs and shells like rain.
Le Thi Ma: Along the Song Be, or the Saigon River, the enemy used boats to bring in their troops.
Le Thi Ma: When the troops swept into the village, they began to destroy, to burn down all the houses, to raze the orchards, and then to herd the population into a certain area.
Le Thi Ma: As for the guerrilla fighters, they went down into the tunnels in order to avoid the bombs and to fight the Americans at the same time.
Le Thi Ma: After that, they relocated the entire population to Thu Dau Mot, which used to be called Binh Duong and which is a part of the present Song be province.
Le Thi Ma: They relocated the people into their strategic hamlets.
Le Thi Ma: Only the guerrilla fighters stuck it out by living in the tunnels.
Le Thi Ma: At that time, when they were herding the population, bombing and shelling the area, and shooting wildly, a number of civilians died.
Le Thi Ma: But I don't know how many died.
Le Thi Ma: There had to be civilians killed because these people were frightened and ran out into the open and the American troops who came ashore from the boats shot and killed a number of them.
Le Thi Ma: Those who remained in the area had to live in the tunnels to cling on to the enemy and fight them with explosive devices like this and with grenades.
Le Thi Ma: These people followed the Americans closely and then threw the explosives and grenades at them.
Le Thi Ma: The guerrilla fighters also used rifles to shoot at the enemy.
Le Thi Ma: We would take pot shots at them.
Le Thi Ma: There were so many ways to fight.
Le Thi Ma: If you could not fight pitched battle then you can fight them in small ways, killing a couple of guys at a time.
Le Thi Ma: During this search and destroy operation, they relocated the entire population and stationed their troops here for twenty days.
Le Thi Ma: This was from January 7 when they first poured in their troops and then occupied this place for twenty days.
Le Thi Ma: After they had removed the population, they used tanks to bulldoze the whole area clean.
Le Thi Ma: This is to say, they plowed everything to the ground.
Le Thi Ma: Everything was razed.
Le Thi Ma: Nothing was left on the ground.
Le Thi Ma: After the operation, the population which had been removed, started to come back to their old land.
Le Thi Ma: This was twenty days after the start of the operation and just about the time the enemy troops were with drawing from the area.
Le Thi Ma: Those of us who remained behind, stayed in the tunnels.
Le Thi Ma: We did not have any food supply then.
Le Thi Ma: We had to dig manioc to eat.
Le Thi Ma: Sometimes we cooked this root, but most of the time we had to eat it raw.
Le Thi Ma: We also had to eat leaves in order to survive during those twenty days.
Le Thi Ma: After the enemy withdrew from the area we still clung on to the area but we lived in the tunnels.
Le Thi Ma: We dug a square shelter which looked that the one over there and placed logs above it and covered it completely.
Le Thi Ma: We placed boards at the bottom of the shelter and lived down there in order to avoid bomb and artillery shells when the enemy troops were not around.
Le Thi Ma: We also dug tunnels leading away from the shelters so that when the enemy troops came we could run out of there.
Le Thi Ma: This was both to evade the enemy and to fight them.
Le Thi Ma: When the enemy poured in their troops we would try to evade them and getting into the tunnels.
Le Thi Ma: But when we knew for sure where they were going to put down their camps, we would then cling to them and attack them.
Le Thi Ma: There were several ways to attack them by mines and by grenades.
Interviewer: Please go ahead and describe it.
Le Thi Ma: The way to make this mine was like this: There were unexploded American bombs.
Le Thi Ma: We took out the detonators by unscrewing them from the bombs round here.
Le Thi Ma: We had a special team which we called the "workshop" section which specialized in doing this.
Le Thi Ma: We then sawed the bomb in halves and used sticks to scrape off the gunpowder into two cauldrons or pots.
Le Thi Ma: We then melted the substance down by stirring it with a stick like this.
Le Thi Ma: When the substance thickened, we poured it into this container here at the base until it get completely filled.
Le Thi Ma: We then closed the container and allowed the substance to congeal and harden.
Le Thi Ma: Each device like this weighed about five kilograms.
Le Thi Ma: After it hardened, we then made charges like this and placed them here.
Le Thi Ma: When the tanks were coming, we would go out there to see where the tanks might be rolling in and place these devices along that route like this, camouflaging them with leaves.
Le Thi Ma: When the tanks rolled over these devices, the weight of the tank would knock out this cone here and cause the device to explode.
Le Thi Ma: The amphibious tanks would then explode along with it.
Interviewer: Was there any battle in which you fought with the Americans personally?
Le Thi Ma: There was a battle which I was personally involved in fighting the Americans.
Le Thi Ma: It was under the tunnel.
Le Thi Ma: At that time there were foxholes constructed down there.
Le Thi Ma: We lay down there in the foxholes.
Le Thi Ma: And when we heard the coming of the Americans, we would place a mine...
Le Thi Ma: For example, the foxhole is here.
Le Thi Ma: We dug a hole so many meters long from the foxhole to the high way.
Le Thi Ma: Then we would attach a wire to the mine, which was several meters away.
Le Thi Ma: In our foxhole in the tunnel there was a hole through which we could see the Americans march by.
Le Thi Ma: When the Americans got to where the mine was, we put the wire to a battery and caused the mine to explode, killing the enemy.
Le Thi Ma: This was how we fought from the foxholes in the tunnels.