War Remnants Museum

I am chastened.

They say that history is written by the victors. Clearly, the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Min City has a “pro-liberation” attitude. Even so, the evidence is pretty much undeniable.

In hindsight, I was probably a bit “holier than thou” with my Killing Fields post. Having seen what we did in Vietnam, I’ve been knocked off of my pedestal.

I didn’t realize the American involvement went back as far as it did. We offered financial and material support to the French until they were defeated. 80% of their budget the last year, I believe 1954, was paid by the U.S. Truman started it, with the infamous “Domino Theory.” Eisenhauer continued. emphasizing our strategic need for the rare minerals and titanium resources in southeast Asia.

The War Remnants Museum has several powerful galleries. There is a collection of photos, by photographers of all nationalities, that died in the war, war crimes committed ( by US and South Vietnamese forces, no mention of North Vietnamese), effects of agent orange, international opposition to the war, and the one that really hit us hard, the imprisonment systems used by the south. The latter showed horrific examples of techniques that were later used by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

From a writeup on the exhibit:

The 1776 the U.S. Declaration of Independence read: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But when the U.S. waged a war of aggression in Vietnam, its armed forces trampled on these principles as well as international laws by systematically capturing, torturing, raping, and killing civilian populations and prisoners of war, and even perpetrating massacres like the killing of 504 civilians in Son My, Quang Ngai, in 1968. They used weapons prohibited by international conventions like steel-pellet bombs, phosphorus bombs and toxic chemicals, especially Agent Orange. In November 1965, Curtis Lemay, Commander of the Strategic Air Command, unequivocally announced the U.S. would “bomb them (the North Vietnamese) back into the Stone Age.”

The war was over but had left three million dead (including two million civilians), roughly two million injured and 300,000 missing besides causing massive destruction of infrastructure in both the North and South.

We left gut-punched, chastened by the corruption, deceit, and hubris of American leaders. We joined a hop-on, hop-off tour of the city, in awe of how the Vietnamese have put the wars behind them and are moving on, aggressively. We found it a little harder to move on.