Why Were the Soil Tunnels of Cu Chi and Iron Triangle in Vietnam So Resilient? (i)

from Kenneth R. Olson and Lois Wright Morton at the Open Journal of Soil Science

Resilient?

Resilient?

Kenneth R. Olson is Professor Emeritus in the Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences research unit in the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He defended his doctoral thesis at Cornell in 1983, not much slowed down by his uniformed service at the time of the United States’ occupation of the Republic of Viet Nam.

He wrote on “Soils and Climate Effects on Yields for Assessment Evaluations.” Kenneth is a soil scientist in professional formation as well as current work.

Soil scientists investigate resilience in the sense of any homeostasis soils may show. They wonder how a soil may return to an initial state after some de-stabilizing intervention.

Resilient?

Lois Wright Morton is Professor Emerita of Sociology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Iowa State University. She earned her doctorate in Development Sociology at Cornell University in 1998.

Her thesis title, “Markets and civil society: Facing false necessity in health care restructuring” suggests an interest in the resilience of institutions. How do societies remain human in change?

Cornell University has been awesome and wonderful in big thoughts and practical research, both an ag school in farm country and a world university in the humanities, natural, physical, and social sciences. It fits that Kenneth and Lois maybe met there after the war and certainly came to research together the social construction of Vietnamese dirt.

Resilient?

The abstract at least of their work together however does not address resilience in terms of sociology or soil science. “Why were the soil tunnels of Cu Chi and the Iron Triangle so resilient?”

Kenneth does not address the return of tunneled soils to their previous state, rather the opposite. Lois does not address the resilience of those who dug the tunnels against those who buried them alive with high explosive.

Their article concerns rather how built structures stood under those bombs, in the resilience studied by construction, engineering, and materials science. The tunnels of Cu Chi demonstrated negative resilience in the soils science sense, by showing positive resilience in the engineering sense.

Resilient. The tunnels did not turn back to dirt.

What about social resilience? Did the positive resilience of the soil tunnels in the engineering sense help the people and their institutions cope with change, showing resilience to a student of society such as myself?

They helped some individuals die, and some survive. A colleague has reported a friend who survived in hers just behind her husband when our side shot his head off.

As to institutions, neither the Viet Minh who dug tunnels in the 1940s and then the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Viet Nam survived victory over Saigon in 1975. After that the more general solidarity of the society has collapsed first in poverty for all then prosperity for few under the weight of the victorious Communist Party.

Soil tunnels still stand, though. If you are a jackass nimrod you can go play revolutionary there in one they have dug out for the thick.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.