SHOWTIME IN THE TUNNELPLEX

By GARRY TRUDEAU

Like most Americans, I tend to deplore the postmodern moviegoing experience--from the claustrophobic confines of the cineplex to the rowdiness of interactive audiences to the sinister "golden topping" that saturates the reheated popcorn.

I found myself thinking about this recently as I sat in the Saigon office of Le Hong Thanh, a former Viet Cong colonel and now director of a Vietnamese film-distribution company. As always, I was in town on a fault-finding mission, but here in the land of our former enemy, I kept getting derailed by the extravagant civility of my hosts. Thanh, having already provided the twin amenities of green tea and air conditioning, was just then regaling me with a prolonged description of what might best be described as extreme screening.

During the war, Colonel Thanh commanded four film-projection squads charged with showing movies to guerrillas living in the underground tunnels that crisscrossed the Cu Chi district of Vietnam. The motion-picture units were considered indispensable to the liberation effort, apparently because all war and no play made Charlie a very crabby combatant. Indeed, troops would sometimes demand to see a movie before they would consent to fight. Had the U.S. command known this, of course, it could have significantly altered the course of the war by buying up all the projectors carried by Saigon electronics stores, which was where the V.C. shopped for their Bell & Howells.

Showtime in the Cu Chi tunnelplex was usually around 7 p.m. Thanh's projection crew would wrap up their daytime activities (foraging, digging, shooting at helicopters, etc.), descend underground and prepare for the evening's unspooling. Shortly thereafter, the audience, bubbling with anticipation, would arrive through the various connecting tunnels. On movie night, the entire population of a small hamlet would simply vanish underground. Up to 100 guerrillas and their families would cram into the dank screening chamber, taking pains not to sit on any poisonous vipers. (The moviegoers would try to ignore the rats, which were tolerated as an important V.C. food group.)

Meanwhile, on nearby American fire bases, the night shift was usually cranking up for another round of mayhem. Since Cu Chi was a "free strike" zone, local U.S. commanders didn't really feel they were doing their job if they weren't chewing up the countryside more or less nonstop. Consequently, as the sun dipped below the horizon, artillery shells would whistle down through the jungle canopy and throw up enormous red sprays of laterite-clay clods.

Down in the tunnels, seasoned filmgoers, who had a high tolerance of low-end ordnance, would take little note. Artillery was ineffective for collapsing tunnels, so the movie would proceed on schedule even if the complex was receiving direct fire. The generator crew would be given the signal, and the first of two 20-minute documentaries would flicker to life on the screen. One of them would invariably feature the latest U.S. antiwar demonstrations, which, unreconstructed hawks will be glad to learn, actually did bolster the spirits of the Viet Cong. These were followed by two back-to-back feature films, usually war movies depicting the Big Red's greatest hits--from the October Revolution to Dien Bien Phu. The films were considered family fare (the children would soon be warriors themselves), and the guerrillas were said to have drawn great inspiration from what they saw. This is particularly impressive when you learn that the Russian and Chinese films had no subtitles, so audiences were dependent on Colonel Thanh's dramatic transcript readings (shouted into a mike over the din of incoming artillery) to understand what was going on.

There were only two things that could undercut the proceedings. One was the generator quitting, which it did whenever it ran out of air, which was often. In such an event, the audience would sit patiently until fresh air could be hand-pumped into the shaft and the generator restarted.

The other showstopper was word of an imminent B-52 carpet bombing. The B-52s dropped 750-lb. bombs, which were deep penetrators, so the audience would scramble to disperse lest a direct hit wipe out the entire village. However, even an off-target 750-lb. bomb radiates a tremendous concussion, so many attacks left moviegoers bleeding from the nose and ears. If the shock was close enough, it could even rip one's clothes off. The worst-case scenario, of course, was death, but such was the apparent draw of old Chinese war movies that the V.C. would tend to their casualties--and then resume watching the film. Thanh recalls the screening of one 90-minute film that took 12 hours to complete.

Didn't the audiences ever get fed up? I wondered. "Never," said Thanh. "The troops were extremely uplifted when watching the movies."