Day 300: Cu Chi Tunnels & Saigon

Super weird and complicated emotional day in Ho Chi Min/Saigon. As mentioned before, a goal for our trip in Vietnam was to see the war through the lens of the people and museums. Our feelings are conflicted so going to try to express the emotions felt today as objective as possible. Our two activities included visiting the Cu Chi Tunnels created by the North Vietnamese Viet Cong and the War Remnants Museum.

Quick (hopefully unbiased) historical context of the war: Vietnam was under French colonialism until Japanese occupation in 1940-1945 and French colonialism again until 1954 fighting for their independence. With help from the Soviet Union and China, a Vietnamese communist party was formed in the North with the goal to achieve Vietnamese independence as a communist state. The US did support Vietnam financially to escape Japanese occupation but also provided funding to the French during this time to fight against the Vietnamese communists. At the 1954 Geneva Conference Vietnam achieved independence, but was split in half. US assumed the Southern half to support it financially.

Similar to North Korea and South Korea, Soviet Union and US set up their respective governments which would eventually oppose each other; with Soviet and Chinese backing, the North initiated war against the south to start its path towards communism under one government. Through this proxy war, atrocities were committed by both sides with entire villages being wiped out, massacres against civilians, and conflict spreading to Laos and Cambodia. And while both sides committed major war crimes, US was especially complicit with mass bombing campaigns using B-52s and napalm, which has horrible side effects for at least 4 generations. With the war lasting 22 years and waning American support due to falsehoods surrounding the Golf of Tonkin incident and the military harming civilians, US and Allied troops pulled out and south Vietnam fell to Northern Communist rule. Massacres continued as the North captured the city and it was eventually renamed Ho Chi Min city.

While communist rule was oppressive following the fall of Saigon, Vietnamese leadership eventually realized that more democracy and a bit of free market capitalism is necessary to flourish. The country eased up on oppressing its people and normalized relations with the US and allies in 1995. Vietnam is a success story in overcoming some of the totalitarian communist tendencies that plagued China, North Korea, and Russia, but it’s still oppressive in jailing political protestors and maintaining a one party system.

That being said, the North still won the war which means the North also wrote the history books and museums….so onto our weird day.

Visiting the Cu Chi tunnels, we expected to learn a lot about the Viet Cong’s experience using guerrilla warfare and dealing with US troops. The soldiers built extensive tunneling systems, air ventilation systems, and whole underground communities only using bamboo shoots and shovels. Whole families lived in these tunnels and groups would manufacture weapons, food, shoes, and even wine. When fighting erupted, of course the Viet Cong would hide and ambush troops, run, and ambush again. Attendees were encouraged to crawl through these tunnels and climb into the holes to see how they fought. We also saw the creative traps set by the Viet Cong soldiers and bomb craters. While trees surrounded us today, there were no trees initially after the war because the US carpet bombed the hell out of it.

What we weren’t prepared for was the on site shooting range where attendees had the opportunity to fire American guns like the M16 and Carbine. We were the only Americans in our group of Europeans so we opted out of the shooting range. And after touring all the tunnels, here we are sitting at a souvenir shop with bullets, hats, and patches while gunfire is shooting off loudly and constantly.

It finally hit us that the Cu Chi tunnel tour is a celebration of the North’s success in the war and the ingenuity to defeat south Vietnamese, US, and Korean troops. The shooting range is a way for locals and tourists to shoot the guns for fun and join in on the celebration. We felt extremely guilty about the war crimes the US committed in Vietnam, but also there is blatant absent representation of the South Vietnamese people and soldiers who where killed and fighting for their own independence against the North communists.

This same theme persisted into the War Remnants Museum. Before the US and Vietnam normalized relations, the museum was called the “Exhibition House for US and Puppet Crimes,” then the “Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes”, and then the “Exhibition House for Crimes of War and Aggression.” It was renamed to its final form War Remnants Museum that we visited today, and to be honest, we left it very conflicted. Found an article that encapsulated our feelings called “Remembrance and Propaganda in Vietnam.”

So the museum included one exhibit on the war in general while the remaining exhibits focused on the American and allied war crimes. There was a section that featured the famous LIFE magazine photographs from soldiers in Vietnam as well as sections on napalm effects, different massacres, and then world support for Vietnam. The imagery and statistics were especially gruesome and the maps showing US bombing campaigns were upsetting. It was completely unnecessary, desperate, and inhumane the way the US fought the war and we appreciated how front and center this museum focused on those atrocities.

However, the museum is very very VERY heavy on Soviet and Pro-North propaganda and once again does not represent the South Vietnamese people’s experience and that was extremely hard to look past. So please bare with us for a few complaints:

1. The museum painted the North’s war initiation and communist oppression as the riotous
intentioned goal to unify Vietnam. The South was painted as a fake puppet government and the North was freeing its people.

2. The museum referred the event as the American War or the War of American & Allied Aggression, and is not treated as a Vietnam civil war between north and south. There is also no mention of how the Soviet Union and China supported the North in its war with weapons; the war is purely painted as a nation’s survival to independence and unification under one government.

3. There is zero mention of the countless war crimes, massacres, and torture committed by the North and Viet Cong against South Vietnamese. It’s just missing from the narrative overall.

To summarize, there were several moments for us to emotionally reflect on US involvement and US committed atrocities today yet those moments were interrupted by propaganda that so blatantly deleted and covered up the Southern Vietnamese experience, that it couldn’t be ignored.

We know from our own US experience that a country will tend to minimize or only briefly cover its crimes, just as we have with Native Americans, Hiroshima, South America, and slavery; we shouldn’t be upset or perturbed by the Vietnamese government behaving the same way. However, it was tough and emotionally complicated today. We are upset for the Vietnamese people as a whole, but are also especially sorry to the Southern Vietnamese who are not represented in their own museums and country.

FYI this is the article we found that helped put our feelings into words: https://separatepoints.com/2018/10/28/remembran…Read more