HCMC War Museum
Trip Start
Sep 05, 2008
1
53
68
Trip End
Ongoing
Ho Chi Minh City,
Vietnam
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Today we went to Ho Chi Minh City's War Remnants Museum, which as expected focuses on the Vietnamese conflict of the 1960s and 1970s. It's very well thought out, a central courtyard contains American helicopters, planes, heavy arms and bombs. Surrounding this are a series of halls, each with their own theme.
The first was dedicated to War photographers and showed them alongside troops on the battlefields armed only with their cameras. It also contained some of the most memorable and vivid pictures taken during the war, and how some of these led to great political influence. It contained pictures of all the photographers, from both sides, killed in the war. A very rough guess from memory would say there were 50-100 of them.
Another hall reports anti-war marches, foreign opposition to America's involvement, and the American anti-war movement, and disaffected GIs.
The biggest hall contains two large walls covered with photos. It starts grim and gets worse. There are sickening quotes from senior American soldiers "Our policy is flatten all, burn all, kill all", "If it's dead it's Viet Cong", "Anything that moves is considered to be Viet Cong". There are photos of GIs posing with heads of dead Vietnamese soldiers, of a Vietnamese soldier being pushed out of a US helicopter at height, of live Vietnamese soldiers being tied to American army vehicles and dragged to their death, and of entire villages of Vietnamese peasants slaughtered.
Then it gets to the Napalm and Agent Orange exhibits. Photos taken during the war show screaming children trying to run away as they're being burnt by Napalm, and the after effects. The burns caused by Agent Orange are shown, as are photos of hundreds of mutated babies, children and adults born between the mid-1970s and modern day in the areas that were covered by Agent Orange. Most had limbs that were half-length or rudimentary, many were mentally handicapped, and there was an increased incidence of Siamese twins. These children are still being born today. The exhibit even featured several pickled mutated fetuses.
It pulled no punches, this museum. The hall containing the photographers' dedication seemed if anything to be a little pro-American, probably because there were so many more photographers posted with US troops. The overall picture painted by the museum as a whole was predictably anti-American. There's no doubt that atrocities took parts on both sides but the most shocking exhibits related to chemical warfare, which was clearly only used on such a scale by the US side.
