How to Build the Underground: Armed Propaganda and Subterranean Living

“Create your own private world... shut out noise, dangerous intruders, storms, pollen, air pollution... dial ‘Spring’ a ‘sun-drenched’ inviting marble terrace where flowers bloom, a fountain splashes, and tropical fish swim in a pool.” This is the utopic vision with which Jay Swayze, a chemical warfare instructor turned luxury home contractor, sought to persuade consumers in the merits of underground living at the New York World’s Fair in 1964.

Nearly 10,000 miles away, Vietnamese guerillas had been practicing a very different kind of underground living since the late 1940s. During Vietnam’s back-to-back wars against French and then U.S. forces, the Vietminh and Viet Cong guerillas transformed the construction of underground domiciles into military science, and encouraged villagers to build tunnels in such a way that they might function offensively as well as defensively.

In the same period, mythologies of “the underground” captured the imagination of anti-war students and activists who advocated militant, clandestine action as a means of ending the U.S. War in Vietnam. Inspired in part by the North Vietnamese, these activist “guerillas” also produced how-to manuals which included instructions for homemade bombs and weapons, as well as more rudimentary, “everyday” recipes for living and surviving “underground.”

While “the underground” is often conceived as a metaphorical space of clandestine action, this paper examines “the underground” literally, as contested territory. Using American and Vietnamese manuals for subterranean living which proliferated in this period, I will examine how underground space was both domesticated and militarized throughout the U.S. War in Vietnam. These manuals, I argue, evidence what architectural historian Beatriz Colomina refers to as “counterdomesticity,” through which “the underground” became a site for competing national ideals.