All Along the Watchtower

My first few days in Vietnam were spent in Ho Chi Minh City, aka Saigon, indulging in the food (oh. my. god. SO good.) and learning how to cross the street. Nothing in India or China prepared me for dodging motorcycles, frogger-style, several times a day. Mental preparedness and a good strong pep talk were required, as well as reciting audibly the mantra of "<deep breath> OK, here we go s***s***s***s***s***s***, ack! Taxi! f***f***f***f***f***f*** Van! Right...made it"

(I have video if you don't believe me, and I hear Hanoi is even worse)

That aside, most of the tourist attractions in the city have to do with the war and two days will allow you to see the big 3 - Cu Chi Tunnels, Reunification Palace and War Remnants museum. I met a Swiss girl, Linda, and we set off Monday afternoon for the Reunification Palace - the old HQ of the South Vietnam government that fell in 1975 with a tank rolling through the gates and a bomb drop on the helicopter pad. Since then, besides the bomb damage and gates being repaired, it's been bizarrely frozen in time, and looks like what Mike Brady would design were he to have a crack at the White House. Wandering through with a lovely, sunny Vietnamese tour guide was a touch eerie, especially when we got to the basement war rooms with maps and radios and tunnels. The tour guide matter-of-factly talked about the use for all the rooms, with a surprising lack of Communist-style spin (impossible to imagine a similarly relatively impassionate, factual account if a similar thing existed in China for the Kuomintang) in referring to when the Americans replaced the French as occupiers of the country.

The next day Linda & I had booked on a tour of the Cu Chi tunnels, about an hour (or 3) out of HCMC. On a bus of 40 or so people, driving through the countryside of rice paddies we're informed that, in fact, they are not rice paddies. Agent Orange basically leveled the joint 40 years ago and still nothing grows in these fields.

<close eyes, bring hands to head, ...sigh...>

At the Cu Chi tunnels our tour guide 'John Wayne' ('but people say I look like Jackie Chan' <big grin> 'but I am more handsome!') proudly shows the ingenuity of the Viet Cong fighters between the tunnel network and the 'booby' traps set for American soldiers. Walking through the drizzling rain in the jungle to the different exhibits, I reflected on 18 to 22 year old kids being sent into this place, not knowing if the next step they took would end up trapping - but not killing - them, piercing their legs.

Or arms.

Or abdomen.

The 200 km tunnel network was amazing, and had been widened in this part for Westerners to see. The original size of the tunnels were something only large enough for a very tiny Vietnamese person to crawl through like a snake. My claustrophobia took hold and the closest I got to being actually inside the tunnels was to lower myself into a sniper position (yeah, I got stuck on the way back out). John Wayne described the traps set for American soldiers such as rigging grenades to explode if they managed to find a tunnel entrance.

The last part of the Cu Chi exhibit was a documentary film, which admittedly had a bit more of the noble peasant communist propaganda flair to it that I had come to expect from my single-party governments. It celebrated examples of war heroes awarded '9 Medals for Killing Americans' and the guerrilla nature of the Cu Chi area fighting.

On the way back we were taken to a lacquer factory, being the Turkish carpet tourist trap of Vietnam. Walking through being shown how lacquerware is made, I took a few photos.

...And then realised that the factory was actually for people handicapped by the war and were missing limbs or were severely disfigured thanks to Agent Orange.

Dear God.

The last stop for the day was the War Remnants museum, which used to be known as the War Crimes museum. With a name like that you'd expect a fairly one-sided view of things and of course it was. But, frankly, I'm not sure how you could see another point of view being faced with photo after photo of severely retarded and/or disfigured people still being born today thanks to Agent Orange. There was another exhibit of donations by the families of war correspondents and photographers that died in the war trying to tell the real story, and another with coverage of protests (the Kent State killings, etc) and international support for Vietnam during the war. I spent 2 hours going through photo after photo and trying to make sense of the senseless...of what on earth were we doing there.

Walking through HCMC there is any Asian city's share of the poor and destitute. I've become a bit desensitised to begging and poverty in the last 6 months, as one has to to travel in these countries. But Vietnam has grabbed me more than any other, because every time I am approached by a disfigured person or amputee I think "my country did that". At the very, very least the US owes this country a proper clean up of the toxins inflicted on the water supply, soil and vegetation of Vietnam. It makes me so very sad and not a little bit ill, and of course the parallels with the wars in the Middle East are not lost on me either.

At the start of the Cu Chi tunnels tour, John Wayne brought up the whole American question upfront...

People often ask me, what if there are Americans on the tour, what do you think of Americans given what's happened here. I say that Vietnam people welcome American people. When American people visit Vietnam, they bring dollars and stay in hotels and eat in restaurants, which give taxes to Vietnam government to build roads and schools. We know that American people different from American government, and that many protested the American War.

An attitude I have seen in the welcoming smile of the Vietnamese wherever I have been thus far, which is simply...amazing. That a country and a people can pick themselves up like that and move on with so little ill will towards a nation that caused such destruction is nothing short of inspiring

Imagine if 40 years from now the Iraqis and Afghanis can have the same approach.