Saigon

Trip Start May 03, 2008
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12
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Trip End May 02, 2009


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Wednesday, June 4, 2008

For our first full day in Saigon, aka Ho Chi Minh City, we did a bit of a walking tour. We started off and had a look at the market and the old buildings and then went for ice-cream. This seemed to take an awful long time and most of the day was gone! We saw the Reunification Palace but it was closed so we couldn't go in. It didn't look anything special though. We kept walking past the Ho Chi Minh Museum which had old fighter jets and tanks on display. We didn't go in there either because we wanted to get to the War Remnants Museum before it too closed. This museum had the jets, tanks, unexploded bombs etc. with descriptions of how much ammunition they can carry and the type of destruction they can carry out. It's important to mention that this museum is also known as the American War Crimes Museum so it does have a particular slant to it, ie. describes the American war casualties.
That said, it is the moving place I've seen in a very long time War Museum Saigon
War Museum Saigon
 . There are a lot of photographs taken by mostly Western photojournalists which document much of the events that occured during the war. It starts off easy enough with photographs of B-52 Bombers flying through the sky dropping bombs on the people below. Then there are photo's of soldiers from both sides in varying stances. Some are smiling, some looking vacant, some under fire, some dying or dead. There are some awful photographs of Vietnamese soldiers tied to the back of a tank and being dragged to their death. Again, this is a one sided museum and we'll get to the other side of the story later.
For me, some the saddest photo's were those of the victims of the napalm bombs and agent orange. There were pictures of the deformaties these people have had to endure and you can really se the sadness and hoplessness in their eyes. The saddest story goes with a picture of an outside drain. Simple picture but I cried when I read the story about the family that hid in there when American soldiers broke into their house and tortured and killed their family members. Those that managed to escape hid in this drain but the soldiers followed them and killed all but one little girl, who was injured but not killed. She saw three generations of her family killed infront of her eyes. This is one side to a two side story but it really is an insight into modern Vietnamese and their attutidues towards what they call the American war.
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