Abstract
This article presents the operationalization of violence in dark tourism through repeated visits to a prominent state-operated tourist site in southern Vietnam called the Cu Chi tunnels complex. I argue that this operationalization occurs because dark tourism plays on the violent performances of the extraordinary and everyday. In making this argument, I encourage both a recuperation of the exceptional aspects of the dark tourism experience and a continued appreciation of dark tourism’s routine characteristics. A performative relationship between the remarkable and the familiar brings the operationalization of violence more closely into conversation with dark tourism in Asia, a field and a region more attuned to memorialization and commemoration than with tourist enactments of violence.
Introduction
This article is about the operationalization of violence at a popular state-sponsored tourism site in southern Vietnam called the Cu Chi tunnels complex. This operationalization occurs through performances of extraordinary and conventional violence. Bringing these two facets of dark tourism into conversation with one another is not often reflected in the literature on dark tourism. This article makes dark tourism’s more horrific and proximate dimensions clear through the interplay of the unique and the everyday.
In the narrative undertaken below, I show how the tunnels complex encourages tourists to purchase live ammunition, load it into firearms, and shoot at targets approximately 25 m away. Assurance from tour guides and technical support from assistants at the gun range renders the violence in these unusual experiences palatable. Other tourist practices like trying out rudimentary booby traps that were used on unsuspecting American soldiers reinforce the more humdrum aspects of violence in dark tourism. From the perspective of dark tourism studies, the relationship between shocking and habitual violence underpins the idea that ‘juxtaposing the spectacular nature of tourist sites with the banality of everyday life continues to be a provocative tension’ 1 because it allows research to move beyond dark tourist motivations – which are notoriously difficult to pin down 2 – and to concentrate instead on the multitude of dark tourist experiences that unfold in situ.
The article’s theoretical framework sits at the intersection of the performative dimensions of tourism 3 and recent geographical expositions on violence. 4 I depart from recent work in dark tourism – and particularly ideas emerging from Asian case studies 5 – to bring violence to bear on dark tourism studies by showing that violence need not only be structural, 6 genocidal, 7 cultural, 8 gendered, 9 or racial 10 but also performative. In making this point, I wish to stress – in keeping with arguments about the realities of indirect violence 11 – that ‘performing’ violence in a dark tourism context is no less ‘real’ than other forms of violence. Indeed, in dark tourism as in elsewhere ‘we can find the expression of violence in virtually every facet of our everyday existence’. 12
The article continues in five additional sections. In the next section, I bring together theories of dark tourism and violence to advance the staged performative dimensions of dark tourism. Here, I concentrate on the relationship between dark tourism’s dynamic and routinized features as they play out through tourism experiences. I refer to this relationship as the operationalization of violence, which is the dynamic enactment of typical and uncharacteristic tourism activities, emotions, narratives, and representations that are disposed to violence. After the conceptual framework, the following section describes the Cu Chi tunnels in more detail and contextualizes their place in Vietnam’s tourism industry.
In the subsequent section, I narrate my method at the tunnels. I frame the research around a ‘walking ethnography’ in which I play the part of American dark tourist-geographer. 13 Using a multisensory approach shared by others working in dark tourism sites, 14 I move through the tunnels complex by accounting for the dynamics among site, guides, guests, and researcher. 15 This point catalyzes the main empirical section in which I lead the reader through the tunnels complex. The Cu Chi tunnels represent the performance of exceptional and mundane aspects of violence through tourist and tour guide practices and the narratives grounding them. In light of my arguments, the concluding section discusses one implication for the literature on violence and one implication for the dark tourism field.
Operationalizing dark tourism and violence: between the exceptional and the everyday
Dark tourism research is a sweeping and multifaceted subfield of tourism studies, most recognizable in leisure studies but also prevalent in geography, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and business/marketing studies. In ‘contrast to the sun, surf, and sex that many narrowly associate with the holiday vacation’, 16 the subfield gains traction through an emphasis on experiences and meanings associated with death, tragedy, suffering, and loss. 17 Much of dark tourism’s critical intellectual merit rests on the differentiated ways in which conflict and pain are contested, disputed, and negotiated through the prism of experiences. 18 This does not mean that the selection of dark tourism site is unimportant to the study of the topic but that location is but one ‘voice’ generated through the relationship among host institution, site (and the discourses represented therein), tour guide, and visitor.
Dark tourism experiences therefore move beyond a focus on tourist motivations or an analysis of the political discourses of the host by bringing these two approaches together, in conjunction with the moment-to-moment activities and representations of the site. To be sure, assessing dark tourism experiences ‘has been proposed as more helpful for understanding dark tourism (because) it offers a conceptual means to integrate supply and demand perspectives’, 19 and to this explanation, I would add that tourist and guide practices deliver an additional avenue through which to explore the experiential aspects of dark tourism.
Surfacing from the literature on experiences, this article follows Clarke, Dutton, and Johnston in presenting dark tourism as ‘a field that takes as its object the texts, discourses, institutions, and performances of travel in sites marked by violence and historical trauma’. 20 This definition supports the performances of dark tourism over any one narrative or sensibility while also noting that ‘tourism at places of death and suffering can overlap with, reinforce, or collide with the use of those places for broader political projects and agendas’. 21 Dark tourism experiences as performances imply ‘a certain narrativization of violence and loss’ 22 that brings together multiple voices, perspectives, and practices. A focus on experiences rejects the dark tourist site as a complete portrait of the events of the past by questioning instead how darkness unfolds in the present.
The above definition for dark tourism sets up my argument about the operationalization of violence in this article, which centers on how tourists are contributors to rather than consumers of dark tourism’s production. 23 At the Cu Chi tunnels, the site is ‘marked’ by violence through the performances of its guests and hosts, indicating a shift away from looking at the site as one that is inflected by violence and toward one produced through violence. The operationalization of violence in dark tourism emphasizes how places become violent through tourism practices and imaginations; sites like the tunnels attraction are characterized as violent through a range of repetitive yet wide-ranging violent performances. In thinking about the operationalization of violence in dark tourism, I seek to complicate a singular ‘dark tourism’ by drawing on Hughes’ argument that ‘in place of the catch-all label of “dark tourism,” more empirically grounded analyses might better explain what is, in practice, an array of tourisms, each entailing different histories, geographies, tourist subjectivities, and specific, embodied performances that continually (re)produce “dark” places and their visions’. 24 In the main section below, the operationalization of violence through its performance gives dark tourism its meanings and values.
Dark tourism performances are made meaningful because they toggle between exceptional and habitual violent experiences. Scholarship has long recognized the presentation of violence in dark tourism attractions 25 but the breadth of violence’s manifestations throughout the tourism industry has only lately gained prominence. Devine and Ojeda’s recent special issue on tourism and violence offer a case in point. For them, ‘everyday tourism practices are intimately related to diverse expressions of violence in various forms’. 26 Their work is principally directed toward identifying the violence of dispossession, (neo)colonialism, and extraction 27 in the name of tourism development. Others, such as Tyner et al., note that the memorialization of violence at dark tourism locations often obfuscates violence’s perpetuation through memorial sites. 28 They write that while ‘remembrance and memorialization of “violent landscapes” has a long history within geography . . . the contested meanings of violence itself (has) only recently been considered vis-à-vis the memorialization of violence’. 29 By assessing the meanings generated through violence rather than violence’s memorialization, these scholars uncover the ‘work’ violence does in underpinning everyday life.
My argument signals the operationalization of violence in dark tourism as an ongoing production implemented in the here and now, unfolding in myriad ways through the lens of tourism experiences. This view resists the presumption that the past – however violent and contested it used to be – is to be remade in ‘touristic’ terms for the present. 30 My contention stands in contrast to the prevailing logics of many dark tourism sites in Asia, where memorialization and commemoration of a violent past are prioritized over participation in violence. For example, Koleth shows how volunteer tourists descending upon modern-day Cambodia believe that the violence inflicted upon Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge is over because visits to Cambodian state dark tourism sites such as the Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum are presented in historicized ways. 31 Throughout Asia, one sees dark tourism sites working analogously: Yoneyama’s research on the Hiroshima Peace Memorial analyzes the ways in which the Japanese state curators minimize the violence wrought by the atomic bomb in favor of the ‘harmony’ that erases it 32 while at Fort Siloso in Singapore – the site of major battles between British and Japanese forces for control of the island during World War II – Muzaini, Teo, and Yeoh explain how historical accuracy has succumbed to ‘dilutions’ 33 that now favor ‘simplicity’. 34 The entirety of this work is built on performances of ‘darkness’ that emphasize commemoration and tread lightly on direct engagement with pain, tragedy, and in particular violence.
My research at the tunnels suggests that there is still something exceptional – unsafe, uncomfortable, and morally problematic – about the matter of violence in dark tourism experiences. To confine dark tourism to the impulses of predictability and memorialization is to limit our understandings of the ways in which the concept of dark tourism is unique among tourism subfields. Moreover, to underscore dark tourism’s banalities without concomitantly addressing its exceptionalities is to mask the ways in which life is enlivened through dark tourism. Using the word ‘enlivened’ here does not mean that dark tourism necessarily peddles in affirmation or ‘good vibes’; it is instead to recognize how darkness can be biting, disorienting, demoralizing, and scarring. Gibson urges scholarship to address the ‘unexpected surprises’ of the tourism encounter, remarking that the ‘world would be dull’ without tourism. 35 Engaging with suffering, death, or atrocity through participation in violence at a dark tourism attraction is a powerful invitation to encounter tragedy of a significant depth and magnitude. Even in an age when the dark tourism experience is replete with ‘unreflexive, habitual and practical enactions which reflect common sense understandings of how to be a tourist’, 36 this article demonstrates through the Cu Chi tunnels that tourism still fulfills ‘the conventional viewing (of tourism) as an exceptional activity separate from our mundane and ordinary lives’. 37
Going hand in hand with the momentousness of dark tourism is the argument that tourism’s ordinariness is also sustained through the tunnel experiences. The everydayness of the journey contributes to the site’s impact, and dark tourism is an attractive pursuit in part because it is set up to breed familiarity by mitigating ‘disorderly experience . . . through a battery of architectural, design, and managerial techniques’. 38 Clear English recordings and signage, chatty guides, time allowed to take photos, and invitations for tourists to participate in the vagaries of Vietnamese peoples’ lives during the war are all markers of how normal occurrences transform the dark tourism experience with a set of paced expectations recognizable in other dark tourist sites around the world. This conceptual intersection is where the operationalization of dark tourism’s currency lies; the power of its performance rests on a certainty that the dark tourism experience includes habitual encounters typical of other dark tourism endeavors and ones concurrently jarring enough to be profound, even distressing. The article’s core argument consequently stems from the degree to which we understand the dark tourism stage to operationalize the quotidian and unusual performances of violence. In this study, the Cu Chi tunnels complex does not represent violence but pivots on it by relying on violence’s multifaceted operationalizations. Simply put, at Cu Chi more importance is placed on the visitor performances of violence than in historicizing the Vietnamese side of the war for consumers. 39
Thinking through the operationalization of dark tourism as an ongoing conversation between the outrageous and the banal contributes to an understanding about why catastrophe endures as a prominent if disputed tourism attraction. Before getting to this article’s source material, the next section introduces the tunnels complex in more detail.
Touring the Cu Chi tunnels complex: a review of the site
A visit by tourists to the Cu Chi tunnels site is the start of an immersion into an account of the ‘American’ war that includes other well-known tourist sites in the Ho Chi Minh City region including the War Remnant’s Museum and the Reunification Palace. 40 At the site, tourists are informed that the tunnels begin with the bombs: the American military initiated dropping explosives on the area in the mid-1960s to kill Viet Cong guerillas and their civilian accomplices hiding out in the Cu Chi district villages. 41 The construction of the Tunnel Complex is therefore a metaphor for the dramatic escalation of the war – when Vietnamese citizens were forced to confront large numbers of well-armed ground troops and extraordinary airpower 42 – and for the eventual (re)unification of North and South Vietnam in 1975. The site’s popularity for international visitors is indicated by the frequent international media stories about it (among others Cable News Network, British Broadcasting Corporation, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Channel News Asia have reported on it recently), the high profile it occupies in the Ho Chi Minh City tourism industry, and the number of ‘word-of-mouth’ recollections that pepper the immense international tourist blog and social media landscape. For example, Trip Advisor (a popular English travel website) rates the tunnels the top destination in the Ho Chi Minh City region. 43 It has long been a featured destination in Lonely Planet and Frommers, two of the most popular English travel guide publications. 44
The tunnels location sits on the Saigon River north approximately 50 km from the center of Ho Chi Minh City. It was designated as a national historic relic on 29 April 1979 and is open everyday of the year from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tours last between 2 and 4 hours and admission price for foreigners is 110,000 Vietnamese dong per person (around US$5) and 20,000 Vietnamese dong per person (around US$1) for Vietnamese guests. The heavily wooded site is laid out in a circular walking pattern for the guest. The path tourists follow includes a welcome video and continues with stops at replica ‘fighting bunkers’, ‘meeting rooms’, ‘kitchens’, ‘medical bunkers’, ‘groups of guerillas’, ‘homemade weapons galleries’, ‘military workshops’, and a shooting range (Figure 1). These are clearly marked and mostly exist underground, with visitors able to access them by short descending staircases. Visitors also have the opportunity to crawl through a few pieces of the tunnels in the system, and it is commonly understood that the site’s purveyors periodically enlarge the tunnels to accommodate ‘larger (Western-European) bodies’. 45 There are a number of craters pockmarking the complex that are described by guides as remains from the bombings. Captured American tanks and other confiscated US weaponry are scattered throughout the walking path. These spots on the tourist path will be examined in more detail in an ensuing narrative section.
A map of the Cu Chi tunnels complex outside the entrance.
The exhibits at the site are marked with descriptions in English and Vietnamese. The four different complimentary promotional brochures (in English, French, Chinese, and Vietnamese languages) offered to tourists before entering the complex all feature the same aspects of the site. There is a large map of the site, the tunnels are highlighted, the revolutionary nature of the Vietnamese ‘resistance’ fighters is noted, and the site promotes the ‘National Defense Sport Shooting Ground’ (English)/‘Exercice De Tir’ (‘Shooting practice’ in French)/‘开枪’ (‘Starting the gun’ in Chinese)/‘Bắn Súng Thể Thao Quốc Phòng’ (‘recreational national defense shooting’ in Vietnamese) activity that ends the tour. This shooting range area is separated from the main walking path by a gift shop and appears at the end of the tour. There are approximately 12 individual spaces for shooters on a firing line. Visitors are invited by guides to use various types of weapons of their choice that were used in battle during the war. Targets are set up and live ammunition is available at the gift shop for around 20,000–45,000 Vietnamese dong per round (~US$1.30–US$3). There are range masters who help load the guns, instruct visitors on how to shoot them, clamp down each weapon for safety reasons, and secure ear protection for guests. A quick Google search of the Cu Chi tunnels reveals that the most popular images are of visitors shooting at targets.
Tours can be booked ahead of time and guides at Cu Chi are also available ‘on demand’ as tourists arrive. Guides are available to lead in Vietnamese, English, French, and Chinese languages. Guides’ style of dress fits the ‘part’ of National Liberation Front (NLF) guerilla fighter (pejoratively known as ‘Viet Cong’) whereby male and female guides are clad in green and black military uniforms, respectively. Each guide has a nametag and leads tours individually.
Pedestrian crossing – a note on walking and positionality at the tunnels
The tunnels complex caters primarily to Western, English-speaking tourists because it features English signage and predominantly employs English-speaking tour guides; it reconstructs its tunnels for bigger bodies to wriggle through, and (as noted above) its notoriety is well-known among Western tourists who visit Vietnam. In conversation with tourism industry leaders in Ho Chi Minh City and in visits to the site by myself and with tour groups, friends, and family members, I have discovered that the majority of the guests are backpacker and package tourists who visit the site in large tour groups on 1-day tours with lunch provided at nearby restaurants. A secondary market is Vietnamese school groups from Ho Chi Minh City and surrounding areas who also visit on 1-day or half-day trips. 46 Other guests include foreign businesspeople, who incorporate a trip to the tunnels as part of their visits to the region’s numerous export-oriented factories, veteran groups from Vietnam and the West, and private tours. These observations have been confirmed through discussions with members of the Ho Chi Minh City tourism industry.
I have been visiting the tunnels since 2002 and have participated in approximately 20 group package tour visits and six private tour visits. I have gone along with a range of different types of tourist groups, including backpacker groups, high-end tour groups, and educational tour groups. I am an American citizen and the majority of the tourists involved in each of these group tours are also American citizens. The six private tours, of which four have come in the past 2 years, have been on my own without a tour guide accompanying me. With the exception of a new ticket taking area at the tunnel entrance built in the early 2010s, the site has remained untouched, tours follow the same path, and guides rehearse similar themes to tour groups since the first time I toured the site.
My method for assessing the site is participating in the tours by walking them. Walking is an embodied mobile method put to increasing use in geography and tourism studies. 47 For the purposes of this article, the method is appealing because ‘walking ethnography’ 48 has roots in tourist and researcher behavior. For example, just as the tourist may walk through a tourist site to make use of all of the senses during the experience, so too does the researcher choose walking as a method to bring each sensory moment into conversation with one another while analyzing the site. Tourist and researcher feel the tunnels squeezing them, they both listen to the sound of guns popping in the distance, they smell the gunpowder as they get closer to the firing range, and they read texts about the war unfolding before them on their walks. What distinguishes walking ethnography as a practice and a method is its ability to concurrently be a ‘performative act’ and a way to ‘know the world . . . at multiple levels of engagement’. 49 The multisensory triggers experienced through the tour are the connective tissue between enactment and a broader epistemological framing. In outlining the performance shift in tourism studies, Larsen and Urry have written that ‘the doings of tourism are physical or corporeal and not merely visual, and it is necessary to regard “performing” rather than “gazing” as the dominant tourism research paradigm’. 50 Walking catalyzes these performances by drawing sensory subjectivities into the activities of the site, and it is at this intersection where tourists and researchers create stories from their activities. Walking ethnography also means one can create a sense of openness in the encounter by lingering, reflecting, pursuing answers to unanticipated questions, rehashing, and even stopping to rest for a moment.
Walking as method, however, includes a ‘particular intellectual agenda’ 51 and mine is shaped out of an exploration at the confluence of my ‘Americanness’, tourist identity, and profession as a geographer. 52 For analytic purposes, I keep these aspects of my relationship to the Cu Chi tunnels separate because I feel that all three of them contribute to the stories I describe below. As an American, it is important to be in conversation with the tunnels 53 because the site is speaking to me in a voice I am not typically exposed to at home. When Americans are described at the tunnels, I see something of myself but the prevailing narrative of an ‘American soldier’ is not a profile easily recognized from stories about the war told at home. In the United States, Vietnam is often treated as a war and not a country, or it is a remote location filled with a mysterious group of people who do not like Americans, or it is a collective ideology that the US government stands in contrast to, or it is an enduring and damaging symbol of American weakness. At the Cu Chi tunnels, these myths are rearranged to cast a shadow on the American people and its government. The mystery, animosity, hegemony, and violence are all depicted to be quintessentially American qualities and despite the heavy handedness and murderousness of the American military, and the basic resources available to the Vietnamese people during wartime, Vietnam nevertheless convincingly triumphed over the United States.
The tone of the site amplifies the ‘outsider’ status I feel as a foreign visitor. When describing myself as an ‘outsider’, I do not mean that I feel subjugated or victimized by the site, although Schwenkel has recorded feelings of persecution among Americans visitors at a similarly themed tourism location in Vietnam. 54 ‘Outsider’ in this case means that the site plunges the tourist part of my identity into perspectives unfamiliar to me. The site seems to want to take responsibility for my naiveté by thrusting the day-to-day activities of the conflict into my hands, forcing me to participate and therefore better understand the circumstances of the plight of Vietnamese people during the war. In other dark tourism places, international conflicts are humanized through personal interest stories of healing and redemption or they nod to the diplomatic elements of visits to dark tourism sites, such as public displays of reconciliation among former enemies. These are framed as educational parts of the dark tourism experience but when tourists recreate the most intimately harmful parts of the war, performances can turn from educational to disquieting and even surreal. The tunnels complex is a monument to the ignominy of foreign invasion and inspires humility and isolation for a guest like me. It is arguable that the dark tourism experience at the tunnels is not so much a site-specific lecture about a historically important event as it is a means to generate participatory lessons about imperialism and injustice to those who are in the dark about them.
As a researcher, Cu Chi does not lend itself to dry assessment, writing up, and releasing to the pages of scholarship. However, a geographer such as me at the tunnels has the tools to critically consider the moments where the political and the personal intersect, and how the methodical bodily movement of walking aids in bringing these into closer dialogue. Scalar relations between embodied practices and broader global processes are revealed through walking ethnography. For example, appearing at the site are repetitive stories conveying what Vietnamese national identity is by describing what kind of people the Vietnamese are, where their cultural home is (within Vietnam’s territorial borders), and how they respond to foreign aggression. Conducting a walking ethnography at the tunnels rescues dark tourist performances from the recesses of observation and casts them in the middle of the messy and uneven participatory space lying between astonishment and inconspicuousness. The method establishes the darkness in dark tourism by prioritizing its ground-up operationalization. In the following empirical section, I guide the reader through the tunnels site by showcasing tourism’s violent performances in both their outstanding and unexceptional permutations.
A light at the end of the tunnel? Operationalizing tourism underground
The narrative tone of the tunnels is established early on by the first stop of the tour, the gift shop. It attempts to strike a balance between the horror of war and the commodified comfort underpinning any international visitor center. English books about the war adorn the shelves, which match the ones sold on sidewalks throughout the backpacker areas in Ho Chi Minh City. A brief glance at the titles signifies the opinions of Western writers on the caprice and tragedy of the American war in Vietnam. War-related trinkets such as miniature tanks, planes, and grenades, Zippo lighters, and snacks are also for sale.
There are a number of war-related items placed throughout the gift shop that are not for sale, though they foreshadow some of the experiences visitors will engage in when they enter the site itself. For example, there are dozens of bombs dropped by the Americans, captured by the Vietnamese, and put on display on the gift shop grounds. The deactivated bombs have signs explaining their name and weight in Vietnamese and English (Figure 2). Moreover, there are perhaps 15 gun racks of captured American weaponry from the war. Above these racks dozens of framed black and white photographs of military engagements in the area are displayed. Scenes depicted include injured Vietnamese, destroyed homes, large areas on fire, and other reminders of violent conflict. Some visitors take photos in front of the weapons while others take the time to touch them and read their descriptions. Miniature toy guns are mockingly fired, small replica bombs are inquisitively picked up and examined, and a few guides show souvenirs to visitors with the hope that they may purchase them. The gift shop offers a familiar introduction for tourists and the weapons – authoritatively labeled ‘United States Army’ – authenticate the site and send a cue about what lies ahead.
Examples of captured and deactivated American bombs.
Time at the gift shop gives way to a tunnel employee dressed in green military attire requesting for groups to come forward to move into a grass-roofed hut where two columns of 10 flat benches and a small black and white television await (Figure 3). Guests are asked to sit through a 10-minute video on the travails and potency of the Cu Chi people during war in an underground location that is described as a typical regional dwelling of that era. This recreation of living space is a familiar performance for many dark tourism sites in Asia; places such as the Changi Chapel and Museum in Singapore, the ‘Hanoi Hilton’ in Vietnam, and the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall in China, all include exhibits depicting living arrangements from their respective time periods. The film shows interviews with and activities of local residents from the war years and guerilla fighters who fought in Cu Chi. The film conveys the pain and suffering incurred by the Vietnamese citizenry during their bombardment by American forces. For example, the conditions and motivations of the Cu Chi residents during wartime are shown through an example of a schoolgirl who is portrayed in the video as ‘cute of the fields’, who ‘was loved by her family’, and who used ‘simple peasant weapons’ to ‘become strong . . . she traveled down the enemy’s path’ and killed ‘many Americans’. Although she and her family ‘lived in poverty’, ‘they would not give up their land, a rifle in one hand and a plow in the other’. The ‘simple weapons’ as they are described in the video are ‘weapons for hunting animals . . . but are now used to hunt Americans’. This schoolgirl was also lauded as an ‘American killer hero’. 55
The welcome area. Note the small television in the back center of the photo.
The movie can be read as a performance of confrontation and resistance between enemies, but it can also be interpreted through the operationalization of the exceptional–unexceptional binary evoked in my article’s argument. The simplicity and kinship ties of Vietnamese society reflect a ‘typical’ performance of everyday life for foreign visitors who may believe Vietnam’s population is made up of rural peasants. The movie alludes to a familiar kind of peaceful and humble Vietnamese society mythologized in many parts of the world and perpetuated at the tunnels complex. Alongside this tranquility, however, there is also an air of explosiveness undergirding the narrative. The Cu Chi people are pitched as traditional and versatile to differentiate themselves from the United States and to prove that representations of the ‘primitive’ Vietnamese peasant should not be interpreted as powerlessness against a supposedly ‘greater’ power. In demonstrating the ability of the United States military to enact powerful forms of violence against Vietnamese people, and to be met with alternative yet extreme forms of violence by the Cu Chi peasantry, the tunnels are depicted in sensationalistic ways not typically found in dark tourism memorials in other parts of Asia. The operationalization of violence at the tunnels is arguably initiated with this binary representation of aggressor-aggrieved and underwritten by a single-minded storyline of violence lacking in the usual accounts outlining the general reasons for international conflict like motivation, lead-up, alliances and diplomatic efforts, or support for or protests against the war. 56
After finishing the movie, the guest exits the welcome area and proceeds along a wide path through canopied forest. From time to time, small groups of tourists are seen standing off to the side of the path staring down at what seems to be unimportant area of brush on the ground. These are the ‘hidden’ entrances to the tunnel complex, usually covered by leaves and undiscoverable without prior knowledge of their location. At a clearing in the forest, and as tourists excitedly steady their cameras, a tour guide asks a group if they can successfully locate a ‘secret’ hideaway. After the mild build-up runs its course, the guide clears the area in question to reveal a small wooden square entrance. In what is a now famous international representation of the tunnel experience, the guide then lowers himself/herself down into the tunnel entrance, grabs the cover, and disappears from sight. A few seconds later, and to the delight and quick shuttering of guests and their cameras, he or she surfaces again. Tourists are then invited to participate in this ‘trick’ by lowering themselves into the entrance, and one after another obliges. Family and friends take photos as visitors pose (Figure 4).
Tourists revealing a secret subterranean space.
A Guardian writer describes the experience of popping in and out of this hiding place as ‘a tight spot . . . claustrophobic . . . but (it) wasn’t designed to hold a lump of a foreigner like me’, 57 indicating feelings of ‘foreignness’ in a particularly ‘Vietnamese’ terrain. It is likely that the writer feels more than physically uncomfortable because her venture into the tunnels is the first moment the tourist body receives a multisensory introduction into the kind of subterranean life that existed among Vietnamese living in Cu Chi during the war. The comportment of the tourist body in this space thus becomes a metaphor for the operationalization of the dark tourism experience at the tunnels. The upper half of the visitor’s body remains above ground, posing, waving, and performing for onlookers in the same way a million other tourist performances unfold everyday in all corners of the world. This is the unremarkable side of dark tourism at the tunnels, one befitting the instant recognizability of the dark tourist performance no matter where on the Earth it occurs. This part of the performance is also characteristic of dark tourism’s propensity for reenactment, where groups ‘engage in mimetic play as they imaginatively and theatrically try to recreate elements from the mise en scene of the original battle’. 58 In other words, the upper half embodies the recognizable customs of sightseeing and engagement with other tourists. On the other hand, the lower part of the body is shielded, stuck in an obscured zone of darkness, and therefore incapable of performing anything but absence. Although it does not seem to be in danger, the lower half of the tourist body represents the unfamiliarity of the event. The lower half of the body is where the possibility of the extreme lies because the lack of a visible lower body symbolizes the uncertainty and loss that came with living underground during the war.
After everyone who wishes to step into the hole has had the opportunity to do so, tourists and the rest of the group are invited to walk ahead to crawl through an extension of the tunnel network itself. The short crawl is the top draw of the complex, designated as the most authentic aspect of the visit and a unique opportunity to be submerged ‘underground’ for a few minutes. The experience is intensively physical; even the smallest bodies begin the journey by crouching low to enter. Before long, the guest is crawling through a dark and tight space and squinting, breathing laboriously, and likely perspiring. The mild amusement felt during early moments of the crawl give way to abrupt feelings of disorientation, isolation, and fear. About her experience crawling through the tunnels on a tour at Cu Chi, one New York Times commentator writes,
Still (the tunnels) are a tight fit. Everyone crawled forward on all fours in a human chain. At first there was banter, but then the heat smothered it. I wanted to yell to be let up, but I was at least eight bodies from the entrance, so I stayed silent. Then we stopped moving. Anyone who has been on a roller coaster when it grinds to a halt midflight knows this terror.
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An invitation to slink through the tunnels is an invitation to feel intimidated, compounding the performance of violence by heightening feelings of distress in the experience. Although tourists accompany other guests into the tunnel, the darkness and narrowness of the tunnel make it difficult if not impossible to see, hear, or touch them. There are no sensorial cues such as lights, sound effects, or signs, which makes the trip feel longer than its approximately 30 m. As noted in the passage above, tourists breathlessly inch through the tunnel and exit it looking perplexed, relieved, surprised, and ‘gulping a blue sky’. 60 Comments from guides to tourists prior to their underground venture contribute to the sense that tourists are agreeing to participate in a traumatizing and threatening experience. For example, guides tell visitors not to deviate from the prescribed tunnel path because doing so is dangerous, risky, and should be avoided. They are also told that other parts of the tunnel system are too narrow for visitors to enter, or too unstable to traverse, or lack easily identifiable exit routes. These comments become even more vague and confusing once the visitor enters the space because the purported ‘main’ tunnel path is not marked and feels quite narrow itself. 61 If an excursion through the tunnels is the most commonplace part of a visit to the Cu Chi tunnels complex and replicates a ‘normal’ experience for Vietnamese living in the area during wartime, the performance also pushes the limits of what constitutes tourism ‘normalcy’ by evoking the kind of everyday terror that was felt by Vietnamese who made homes and avoided death in these tunnels during the war. And while the site itself may be popularized by the global tourism industry (thereby authenticating its status as a customary ‘must-see’ dark tourism location in Asia), the multisensory, personalized, and ‘in your face’ engagement with the tunnels also highlights the extent to which extraordinariness features in the trip.
The operationalization of violence continues in an additional clearing materializing later in the journey. Guests enter a small building housing various devices used by the Vietnamese people during the war. These are described as 10 basic (or ‘simple’ in the words of one tour guide) traps that were a major part of the Cu Chi peoples’ arsenal against the Americans (Figure 5). These include ‘sticking trap’, ‘clipping armpit trap’, ‘rolling trap’, ‘window trap’, ‘folding chair trap’, ‘see saw trap’, and ‘door trap’. A few of these devices are demonstrated to the audience and guides ask tourists if they would like to try them out. In one visit I took in March 2015, the young tour guide showed the tour group how the ‘sticking trap’ works to maim the enemy. Pulling a piece of fake grass away to reveal a 2 m pit, the ‘sticking trap’ masks a hole with approximately 10 metal barbs protruding from its walls. Very often, the guide notes, the barbs are laced with pig or water buffalo feces to inflict maximum damage on the soldier. For anyone unlucky enough to fall into the trap, the guide continues, skin is shredded, deep wounds affect the feet and legs, and the body’s exposure to feces can quickly cause further, perhaps even more serious illness. Once again the explanation centers on the use of ‘simple’ instruments at ‘every Vietnamese farmer’s’ disposal. Further along, another guide stands by a ‘door trap’ and shows the group how, when a foe unknowingly opens an equipped door, a barbed wooden post swings down and pierces the chest and groin in multiple places. Like the others, this trap can be fatal or it can incapacitate an enemy. Recognizing both the threat and facetious nature of the guide invitation, I have never seen a tourist take up an offer to partake in any of the equipment.
Examples of traps set by Cu Chi residents and National Liberation Front fighters.
In this section of the site, the responsibility for performing violence falls on the tour guide who takes the narrative lead in exhibiting how local, inexpensive forest and farm products were transformed into tools used to destroy the enemy. What begins as an ordinary component of a tourist expedition – stories about land use and farm products among local people – is then warped into a narration about how local communities weaponize themselves against foreign aggression. The balance between the routines and the exceptionalities of violence are demonstrated through the ‘ho-hum’ ways in which violence’s brutality can destroy, intimidate, and overpower people.
The visit comes to a finish at the shooting range. Throughout the tunnels complex, the tourist’s senses are sharpened through the heavy forest canopy, the hot and humid conditions, and the harrowing underground adventure, but they are about to be challenged once more by the muffled sounds of pops and bangs echoing before them and growing louder as they inch forward. Above the shooting range’s welcome desk (which sits in front of the shooting range), a sign proclaims that ‘all kinds of bullets are available’ and there are numerous types of semi-automatic firearms for tourists to choose from. In my experience, approximately 30–40 percent of all guests take up arms and shoot, and these are primarily male tourists. In earlier eras, guests were allowed to walk into the shooting range itself without purchasing bullets, but this practice has been outlawed and only visitors who purchase bullets are invited to enter the shooting range itself. When tourists select their weapon, they are led to a clearing where their firearms are bolted down for security reasons (Figure 6). An assistant adjusts the tourist’s ear protection, quickly shows how to pull the trigger, and the visitor begins firing at targets and the dirt built up around and behind them. The scene is chaotic, with people walking in and out of the area carrying unloaded weapons. The noise surrounding the spot is deafening. People who are not shooting at the targets sit and wait for their tour group mates and some eat ice cream or ears of corn that are sold at the counter.
The entrance to the shooting range.
The scene is dissonant 62 because it normalizes perhaps the most instantaneous form of violence on Earth by embedding the firing of guns in a touristic setting and pitching it in ‘fun’ terms. For example, the shooting range is designed to accommodate large numbers of visitors, there are numerous slots available for shooters, there is a rest area with plenty of tables and chairs, and there is a well-stocked food and drink stall. Shooters can fire at a target a few times and then exit to take photos with their weapon or of their guide with the gun. Weapons discharge bullets while steps away visitors eat snacks, drink soft drinks, fan themselves, and sit.
There are plenty of tourists who choose not to participate in the shooting activity, however. Indeed, what is remarkable about this space is not the volume of tourists firing live rounds at targets but the number of tourists who unexcitedly sit through the assault and wait for their friends, family members, or fellow group visitors to finish their activities while they snap photographs, chat a little bit, or casually play with their mobile devices. Perhaps moved to banality by the multisensory onslaught figuring throughout their time at the tunnels, or too tired and overheated to render any concern about surrounding events, or simply uninterested in the extremities of gunplay, at the shooting range, a large contingent of tourist rehearses activities that match the rest areas, gift shops, and waiting areas in other international dark tourism sites. When Devine and Ojeda argue that ‘the socio-spatial arrangements that (dark) tourism requires are not ready made, but need to be materialized and actualized’, 63 they are describing the performances at the shooting range. The performance of the Cu Chi tunnels is not dependent on tourists to be consumers of the violence offered at the site. Rather, it is tourists who give violence life at the site through their multifaceted violent practices, including by exhibiting everyday tourism behaviors toward the violence happening among them.
Conclusion
This article reviews a walking tour at the Cu Chi tunnels, a popular, well-known dark tourism location outside of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Through a range of interactions at the complex, I explore the operationalization of violence. This operationalization is produced through a mixture of exceptional and everyday performances of violence. I have three reasons for presenting the tunnels in this way. In the first place, I wish to show how violence is given life through the interplay of extraordinary and mundane tourism practices. The second reason relates to the first in that this article urges the field of dark tourism to come face to face with the unusual aspects of violence in the experience. I make this argument by largely ignoring the memorialized and commemorated dimensions of dark tourism and favoring the production of violence as it unfolds in the ‘here and now’ by various actors at a site such as the Cu Chi tunnels. In contrast to some of the undercurrents in the contemporary literature on dark tourism that reflect on its parallels to and imbrication in ordinary life, 64 dark tourism must also continue to be seen as ‘out of the ordinary’ to fully appreciate its power. Finally, the site reinforces everyday violence’s relevance to dark tourism, including how violence occurs while participating in ‘normal’ tourism activities such as gift shop visits, tunnel crawls, and playing the ‘waiting game’ while tour mates do something else. Experiences like these parallel dark tourism’s links to the potentially unexciting yet predictive aspects of sightseeing practices. 65 Far from prioritizing either the shocking or the ordinary, the Cu Chi tunnels complex is a powerful example of how the tension between both kinds of violence imbues dark tourism with meaning.
There are two implications arising from these arguments, one for violence and one for dark tourism. With respect to violence, research in the geographies of violence is an emergent multidisciplinary sphere that has fruitfully engaged with themes such as governance, gender, trauma, (in)justice, ethics, and history. Dark tourism has not traditionally been brought into conversation with these topics. I would, however, like to use the ideas outlined in the operationalization of performative violence as a way to draw dark tourism squarely within the debates about the geographies of violence. In doing so, I think violence’s memorialization and commemoration in dark tourist locations should take a backseat to investigate how violence’s practices, feelings, and embodiments generate dark tourism.
Second, the article builds on the literature outlining the heterogeneity of dark tourism sites 66 by offering a heterogeneous set of dark tourism practices. In stating that the performance of violence is integral to the dark tourism experience, I encourage dark tourism research to implicate violence more fully into its canon, 67 to explicitly tie dark tourism experiences to domination and subordination, power and resistance, and sedimentation and provisionality. Only by implicating dark tourism into these fields of thought will the real consequences for performing violence at dark tourism sites come more closely into view.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Close readings by the three reviewers and Dydia DeLyser reshaped the paper and made it much better. Thank you to those who have discussed this paper with me at the Engaging with Vietnam conference in Hanoi in July 2015, in the Department of Geography at the University of Hawaii-Manoa in October 2016, and with colleagues in the Politics, Economy, and Space group in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. Thanks to Nguyen Thi Van for her companionship to Cu Chi.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: National University of Singapore Start-Up Grant, WBS R-109-000-128-133.