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In Vietnam, War can be found - if you look hard

By Christina Verderosa

There are not many obvious reminders of the Vietnam War. Saigon is now officially called Ho Chi Minh City, but the two names are used interchangeably. Vietnam is now a communist country, but one is a lot more likely to see billboards exhorting one to drink Tiger Beer than to work for the greater glory of the Fatherland. Visiting Americans are greeted with smiles and welcomes rather than bullets and grenades.

But every once in awhile we saw a reminder of the painful past America and Vietnam have shared. And nowhere was that more obvious than at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City and the Cu Chi Tunnels.

The yard outside the War Remnants Museum is filled with American tanks, bombs, armored vehicles, and weapons and western tourists examining the displays. At first it all seems like any other museum. We snapped pictures of the exhibits, until a smiling young woman who was obviously not old enough to remember the war introduced herself as our tour guide and we went into the first building, titled, “Historic Truths”.

The first thing we spotted after walking in the door was a copy of Robert McNamara’s controversial book, “In Retrospect” in which he said that America’s involvement in Vietnam had been a mistake. Our guide pointed out the grim statistics, 7,850,000 tons of bombs dropped, 75,000,000 liters of defoliants sprayed on crops, farms, forests, and villages. Over 58,000 Americans were killed and nearly 3,000,000 Vietnamese died. There were of course, the requisite digs at the “imperialist aggressors”, but most of the information sounded a lot like what I had read in Stanley Karnow’s “Vietnam: A History.”

But then we went into the second building. The walls were covered with large black and white photos, documenting American “atrocities” against the Vietnamese people. Our tour guide solemnly pointed out pictures of peasants thrown from helicopters, beheaded, dragged behind tanks. We saw bodies burned beyond recognition and torn to shreds by bombs or mines. Some were so grainy that we couldn’t be sure what was in the picture, others were sickeningly clear. Jean Hershey, who had served as a nurse in Vietnam from 1971 to 1975 said that she remembered taking care of patients who had been injured by fragmentation bombs. Of course the famous picture of a South Vietnamese Army officer shooting a prisoner at point blank range and the My Lai massacre were prominently displayed.

There were no corresponding pictures of any North Vietnamese actions, such as their mass execution in Hue of “reactionary elements”, which Karnow said included civil servants, army officers, intellectuals, clergymen, uncooperative merchants, and anyone linked to the South Vietnamese. Even those of us who remembered opposing the war were feeling very uncomfortable. It was a graphic reminder the winners do indeed write history. “There are two sides to every story,” Peggy reminded me, “and the truth is usually in the middle.”

We went through rooms illustrating the anti-war movement from all over the world, saw a model of the infamous “Tiger Cages” on Con Dao island where the South Vietnamese government crammed prisoners into these dark, tiny cells, and of the guillotine which was used for executions until 1960. Jean said that she had heard people talking about the tiger cages during her time in Vietnam.

There was, however, one exhibit that presented a moving documentation of the horrors of war from all viewpoints. “Requiem” is an exhibit actually sponsored by a number of American organizations and featured the work of photographers, who were killed in Vietnam. The photographers ran the gamut from Pulitzer Prize winners to unknowns, the subjects wounded soldiers, refugees, fierce battles, suffering families from all sides. We went through the exhibit in silence.

We emerged from these grim exhibits into a courtyard full of souvenir shops selling cigarette lighters and other paraphernalia decorated with the insignia of American units that had served in Vietnam. But we were not in the mood for shopping.

Later in our trip we visited the Cu Chi Tunnels. Cu Chi was a village just northeast of Saigon. In their book, “The Tunnels of Cu Chi”, Tom Mangold and John Penycate said that Cu Chi became, Ôthe most bombed, shelled, gassed, defoliated, and generally devastated area in the history of warfare.” The tunnels began during the war against the French and expanded under American bombardment to include a system covering hundreds of kilometers, “stretched from the gates of Saigon to the border with Cambodia.” The tunnel complex included living quarters, storage areas, ordnance depots, hospitals, even schools.

Peggy Bullock, who had visited Cu Chi before, warned me that our visit would begin with a propaganda film. And sure enough, the first thing we saw was a grainy black and white film extolling the valiant efforts of the brave peasants of Cu Chi who fought off the vicious American invaders. The rhetoric was certainly overblown, but the facts were not that far off.

Then we went outside and met our tour guides, this time young men, once again who were all too young to remember the war, dressed in pseudo-army uniforms. We followed the path into the woods past a bomb crater and to a pile of leaves where we were asked to find the secret, emergency entrance to the tunnels. When we found it, just a tiny opening, with a wooden cover, Nguyen Duong Dinh Thai demonstrated how to go down. He got in, raised his arms, and slithered down out of sight. Jean, the smallest of the Americans tried it next and made it. Then John Benjamin, who’s a lot bigger, tried, and despite all our protests that he’d get stuck, managed to get down and back. As we left the entrance, I heard a loud bang. The tour guide told me that I had tripped a land mine.

We stopped at an American tank that had been damaged by a land mine. We don’t know what happened to the Americans who were in this tank, whether they were killed or captured or got away. But now it’s a tourist attraction and we all piled on the tank for a group picture, which our tour guides offered to take. We went to a shooting range, where for $1, we could try our hand at firing some of the weapons of the Vietnam War. I chose an M-16 and Apropos an AK-47. I missed.

Then we went down into the tunnels. The tunnels we went into had been widened a bit for the tourists, but that didn’t make them less claustrophobic for me. John managed to get through just by bending down, but Apropos and I got down on our hands and knees. Although lighting had been installed, the tunnels were dark and hot. I tried to imagine what it would have been like during the war, crawling through those tunnels, pursued by enemies, in danger of falling into a variety of ingenious and deadly traps. I couldn’t even make it through the entire 100 meters, and I crawled to the surface after the second exit, thinking what a lousy guerilla fighter I would make.

Our guides showed us how the tunnels were built so that the construction could not be detected, how the smoke of cooking fires was routed far from the source, how tiny air holes were disguised. They demonstrated “tiger traps” and other simple but deadly weapons that could easily maim and kill any GI unfortunate enough to become ensnared in them. We were filled with horror but also admiration for the people who had devised this ingenious system.

We left the exhibits, sat down at a picnic table for a snack, and headed for the souvenir stands. We were back in the Vietnam of 2002. We were all friends again.

The brochure from the War Remnants Museum lists the facts and figures of the war, over 58,000 American dead, nearly 3 million Vietnamese killed and over 4 million injured. Perhaps its concluding statement is just another piece of propaganda, but we should all hope it’s right, “human beings will not tolerate such a disaster happening again, neither in Vietnam nor anywhere else on our planet.”

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Originally Published in the DeWitt Era-Enterprise (DeWitt, Arkansas), February 14, 2002

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