WHEN I first visited Cu Chi, in 1962, I was a young journalist who had driven the 21 miles from Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) with a South Vietnamese Government official to ”inspect” the area’s strategic hamlets, newly built fortified villages into which peasants had been forcibly moved. The idea was both to protect them from the National Liberation Front and prevent them from helping guerrillas topple Ngo Dinh Diem and reunify South Vietnam with the Communist North.