It’s the elephant in the room, of course. For a certain age and mindset, the words ‘Vietnam’ and ‘war’ just go together like a horse & carriage. But not, it would appear, to the Vietnamese.
Visiting the Ho Chi Minh City Museum – in effect the national museum – we found it contained almost nothing but young Vietnamese taking photographs of each other.
No-one was paying the slightest attention to the few forlorn exhibits: a wristwatch, once the property of General somebody or other, a few old transistor radios, a crude, brakeless Ho Chi Minh trail bicycle, pots and pans, trenching tools, pocket knives….the very meagreness on display really bringing home what a staggering testament to the indomitable human spirit it all was. Banal as it sounds, peasants with AK47s and canvas hammocks really did go up against napalm, B52s and the most destructive technology the most powerful nation on earth could throw at them, and won.
And all so that, among dusty, ill-lit rooms punctuated by blurred photographs of onetime heroes – people who fought, and struggled, facing hardships we can’t even imagine – fifty years later their descendants could take selfies on a crumbling balcony.
We ain’t in Kansas anymore
Earlier in the trip we’d taken a 10k walk through national forest to The 1000 Year Old Tree. It was all pretty tame – paved in any challenging sections, perfectly doable by a couple of half-fit geriatrics. But a jungle remains a jungle, and even in that neutered form you did get at least an inkling of just how terrifying it must all have been for a 19 year old farm boy whose previous Big Adventure was a trip to Dullsville, Nebraska.
Towards the end of our time in Vietnam we visited a onetime POW camp just down the road from our mega tourist complex – a dozen or so huts, maintained in, presumably, more or less their original state. Seriously grim. Featuring crudely-worked but wince-inducing portrayals of guards torturing inmates. Sombre groups of Vietnamese accompanied by guides; no-one taking selfies here…
At the prison where Vietnamese/Phu Quo Communist prisoners are kept, the enemy applied more than 45 tortures of prisoners from the middle ages to the modern ages. The purpose is to discover the organiza-tion, the leader, the guideline of escape and force the prisoners to Tan prison for their activities.
Consequently, more than 4,000 prisoners were killed for the period of 5 years, the existing duration of the prison (from July 1967 to March 1973). The evidence was the holes for burying collective of thousands of persons and the nails of from 8 to 10 cm still pinned the head bone, shin bone, foot bone, kneel, leg, etc. of the found prisoners’ remains.
(Sign at the prison)
Within my lifetime, according to official Vietnamese government figures released in 1995, more than three million Vietnamese, including over 2 million civilians, died in a war the Vietnamese neither started nor wanted. And yet…