I visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) in Vietnam today. It’s easily one of the most visited tourist attractions in the country.
The museum has tons of photos and military hardware from the Vietnam War (or the “American War” as the Vietnamese government calls it). The museum is definitely anti-American, and if even half the exhibits are true (I think they all are), then their point of view is understandable. The place is meant to offend. It does, it should.
I’ve read a bunch of books on the war, but I didn’t realize the extent to which US soldiers tortured Vietnamese – like dropping them out of helicopters if they wouldn’t talk, dragging them tied up to tanks until they died, and water-torturing people until they suffocated to death.
It’s like the American media’s whitewash of Hurricane Katrina. It wasn’t until I got overseas on this trip that I saw some of the actual dead bodies in New Orleans, shown by the local television channels in India, Thailand, Australia, etc. But maybe they’re showing them there in the U.S. now.
One of the more gruesome exhibits at the War Remnants Museum includes the bottles of deformed fetuses damaged by Agent Orange dropped on villages. As I stood in front of these bottles, I was horrified not just at the fact that there’s a government capable of authorizing this, but that there’s also one willing to set this tragedy up as a museum exhibit.
There are other grisly photos, like the one of a grinning American soldier holding up part of the trunk of a Vietcong corpse, and another posing with decapitated heads.
I was also struck by the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a mother and children struggling to cross a river to escape the bombing of their village. The description at the museum said they made it safely.
The museum also displays the War’s most famous photo, taken by Vietnamese photographer Huynh Cong Ut, of a naked young girl running down the road after a napalm strike in her village.
Again, a happy ending here, because the 9-year old girl, Kim Phuc, survived and emigrated to Canada where she married and had a child. She’s now a Goodwill Ambassador with the U.N.