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  Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Friday, September 19, 2008

Thirty thousand feet above the ground, I cannot wait to land and begin my two weeks in Vietnam. The countryside below resembles a quilt made in the dark with jagged and uneven rows of rice fields haphazardly cutting this way and that. Unlike the United States, there are no suburbs, no cookie-cutter houses, no pools, no golf courses, no baseball fields, and certainly no shopping malls. There are roads (some of them dirt), farm plots, and foliage - lots of foliage. The jungle mesmerizes me as I stare into it. I can't help but see the remnants of war: Victor Charles and GI Joes, AK 47s and M-16s, pundit stakes and tunnel rats, bouncing betties and claymores, MiG 17 Frescos and F4 Phantoms, and of course Forrest Gump with Lieutenant Dan. As we land, I have to remind myself I am not only visiting the Vietnam War; I am visiting the country of Vietnam.  

While we did many things in Saigon, I'm going to write about the two highlights: the Cu Chi tunnels and the War Remnants Museum. I feel bad skipping other mentionables like the Reunification Palace (location of the famous picture of tanks breaking down gates during the fall of Saigon), exploring Cholon (the not-so-Chinese Chinese quarter) and a river trip on the Mekong Delta (it rained all day but we got to see how "locals" live off the land). But seeing how I'm already a week behind on blogging, I haven't much choice. So in the interest of pith, here's Ho Chi Minh abridged.

The first morning in Saigon we hailed a taxi and headed for the town of Cu Chi. Due to its extensive Viet Cong tunnel network, Cu Chi witnessed intense fighting and some of the heaviest bombardment during the war. Now, tourists can go see how the VC lived and even crawl through the tunnels. The tour began with a history (read propaganda) video about the war and featured several VC heroes who earned the "American Killer Hero Medal.' I swear the ominous painting of Ho Chi Minh above the television smiled as the video boasted how a single VC killed a dozen "American aggressors" with only one pistol, a grenade, and the courageous determination of the Communist cause.

After the video, we visited several reconstructed tunnel facilities reproduced above ground for show: hidden rabbit hole trap doors, ghastly booby trap death and mutilation factories, ingenious smokeless kitchen stoves, and cramped medical quarters. Without a doubt, the most spooky site was the animatronic mine production plant, an odd perversion of Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean" complete with smiling Communist puppets merrily filling shrapnel and gunpowder into metal containers.

After the mine bunker, we came to a firing range. Throughout the tour, we heard the percussive cracks of gunfire, but we had shrugged them off as recordings. Realizing the gunfire was in fact real, the entire tour took on a more sinister and foreboding tone. For an extra fee, we were invited to shoot a diverse arsenal of weaponry. In the United States, I have always felt ambivalent about guns, the 2nd amendment, and gun control laws. When I think about guns, I imagine gang bangers, deer hunters, and Waco, Texas. But in Vietnam, they look at guns an entirely different way. For them, the AK-47 is a symbol of their national struggle for independence, a deadlier version of our bald eagle. With that rationalization in tow, I did not hesitate to get my hands on an AK. Locked and loaded, I squeezed the trigger. It was loud, scary, and a hell of a lot of fun. As my bloodlust surged, I looked to my left to see a 10 year-old kid gleefully firing a machine gun twice his size. Just like that, I was done with the guns.

My ears still ringing, we headed to the main attraction of the tour. For 100 long, dark, and treacherous meters, we troglodyte neophytes crawled through the Cu Chi tunnels. Supposedly widened for Western tourists, the passageways were barely large enough for me to crouch through. Adam opted instead to crawl on his stomach. The heat was devastating and the darkness even more so. And all the while, the irrational fear of a cave-in or, even worse, taking a wrong turn rose from deep in my gut and made me dizzy. The Viet Cong slept, ate, and fought from these tunnels for weeks at a time. I could barely last five minutes.  

While I have read about our tunnel rats in books, those five minutes finally let met glimpse into the nightmare of their job. I cannot imagine the full terror of an American GI ordered to clear a VC tunnel. With a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other, they would crawl through the tunnels utterly vulnerable to booby traps and lurking VC ambushes beyond every corner. But I also gained a newfound appreciation for the dedication of the VC. To overthrow the South Vietnamese government, they endured hunger, malaria, American assaults, and bombs - tons of bombs. Massive bomb craters thirty feet wide and 20 feet deep pockmark all of Cu Chi, all of which likely originated from a 750-pound bomb from a B-52. In total, we dropped 30,000,000,000 pounds of explosives on Vietnam, more than any previous war. How we found enough room to drop it all, I'm not sure.

Obviously those 30 billion pounds of explosives, not to mention the innumerable artillery shells, Agent Orange eradications, and napalm infernos, could not turn the tide of the war. But American firepower did earn us a featured spot at the Vietnam War Remnants Museum. Originally called the "American and Chinese War Atrocities Museum," the site has toned down its rhetoric - but not its message - in recent years. Captured American tanks, warplanes, and artillery pieces guard the entrance to the main gallery, a comprehensive catalog of all the suffering and death the American military inflicted on the Vietnamese people. The mutation-causing defoliant Agent Orange and the My Lai massacre take center stage. The museum also features replica South Vietnamese torture chambers and a towering guillotine used against captured VC. All of it was rather gruesome.

The majority of the visitors were white, including many Americans. Just as I did, they all walked sullenly and introspectively from photo to display to exhibit, consciously looking for overt lies and propaganda but finding none. As far as we could tell, the exhibits did not create or exaggerate the truth. Unlike the Cu Chi tunnels, this museum relied on a more subtle kind of propaganda - lying by omission. The museum does not offer broader context for American actions, nor does it ever consider any mitigating factors. But more insidiously, the museum does not mention a single atrocity committed by the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese. And as we know, there were plenty: the massacres of Hue, the summary executions of government collaborators, the reeducation camps, the torture and murder of POWs. There is a reason why millions of Vietnamese preferred the threat of pirates, starvation, dehydration, and a lifetime of refugee status instead of the newly unified Communist Vietnam. This museum never touched on that reason of course. Instead, it wove a compelling, damning, and conspicuously one-sided case against the American military with deadly meticulous aim.

It might then appear paradoxical that the Vietnamese love Americans. I have only been treated with the utmost hospitality and friendliness. Even American soldiers who return to visit the country are greeted with the greatest of respect. Beyond the forgiving and easy-going nature of the Vietnamese, the final exhibit at the War Remnants Museum gives a clue as to how they can look beyond the Vietnam War and seek the friendship of Americans. The museum dedicates an entire building to the global peace movement that sought the end of the war, placing special emphasis on the American peace movement. In this way, the Vietnamese differentiate between American policy and the American people. We are forgiven, even if the Pentagon and the White House may not.

Anecdotally, most anti-Americanism today across the world allows for the same dichotomy between government and people. Perhaps this differentiation is unwarranted since we ostensibly have a government of, by, and for the people. More than most countries, our government is the people. Nonetheless, we are blessed by this silver lining that people who hate America still like Americans. They trust that, in the end, Americans will do the right thing. I hope we do not squander that trust.

Feeling moved by the museum, we ended our stay in Saigon at a special military surplus market. Combing through countless "authentic" dog tags, Adam and I found what we think might be the real thing. Unlike all the others, it reads with no spelling errors, provides all the necessary biographical data, and possesses what we imagine to be the just-right amount of rust. When we go home, Adam will take it to the Wall and look for the name. If it checks out, Adam knows an organization that returns the tags to any surviving family. With that done, we ourselves checked out and boarded a bus for the beach resort of Nha Trang.

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