War and peace

"To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries." -- Aldous Huxley

Six of us chose to do a half-day tour that included a visit to the home of former UPI photographer Hoang Van Cuong, 58. He worked for my old news agency from 1968 to 1974 side-by-side with American photographers and reporters, some of whom lost their lives here. After the war, he refused to join the Communist Party, so he had to find a way to support his family, which includes his 97-year-old mother. 

Cuong owns a narrow four-story home; on the ground floor is a convenience store. The upper levels include a dining room, kitchen and bedrooms filled with 18th Century antiques like ceramic vases, wooden furniture, masks and weapons. Hoang says it is a personal collection going back several generations in his family. Here's a YouTube video that claims to tell Cuong's story.

After looking at some of his personal albums and a nice visit, we went to Ho Chi Minh City's War Remnants Museum, or simply, the War Museum. What an emotional experience.

The dove is a peace symbol here too.

"The American War" is what the Vietnamese call the conflict with the United States that raged for almost 20 years before ending in 1975. The museum has thousands of photographs, including those the Western world saw not only on television but in Life magazine and the daily newspapers. The exhibitions tell the story of the bombings, the destruction, the killings and the after-effects of Agent Orange and napalm, the chemical defoliants used by the U.S. military. 

 

To the right is a copy of the Pulitzer Prize-winning picture, taken by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut in 1972. The girl in the center is Phan Thị Kim Phúc at the age of 9 after she was burned by napalm dropped by South Vietnamese planes. She survived and later sought political asylum in Canada. She eventually became a Good Will Ambassador for UNESCO and also runs a foundation.

This plaque from Kentucky acknowledges the

tragedy that rained upon Vietnam for years.

Four stories of exhibits tell the story of the American War. North Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh sent a telegraph to the American people wishing them Happy New Year in 1968 but questioning their military's presence in his country. "As you know, there are no Vietnamese coming to make trouble in the U.S. Yet there  are more than a half-million U.S. GIs coming to South Vietnam," he said. 

Here is how it all started: After years of French domination and Vietnamese rebellion, Viet Minh leader Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam's independence in 1945. France came back to reclaim the area the following year, and war broke out.  The French got nowhere in the next eight years, so they asked for U.S. for assistance in 1954. The fear was that if Vietnam fell to the Communists, so would the rest of Southeast Asia, or the domino theory used by several U.S. administrations during the Cold War to argue for intervention.

President Dwight Eisenhower sent his vice-president, Richard Nixon, to Vietnam, who persuaded the American government to send $385 million dollars to help the French fight in Vietnam. Six years later, President John F. Kennedy sent advisers but decided to pull back, but his assassination would end those plans. His successor Lyndon Johnson accelerated U.S. involvement in 1964, which continued until 1973 when the military packed up and evacuated Saigon in a hasty, dramatic manner. Guerrilla warfare proved effective for the Vietnamese.

The costs for the both sides were high. America lost 58,000 soldiers and a dozen journalists. Another 314,000 servicemen were wounded. It was still mild compared with the Vietnamese, who lost 3 million people including 2 million civilians. Another 2 million people were injured, and 300,000 went missing.

Captured tanks, airplanes and cannons decorate the grounds of the War Museum. 

The second day of our visit to Vietman started with a 90-minute speedboat ride up the Saigon River during which our gregarious young guide, Hui, served us croissants, coffee and exotic fruit.  Traffic on the river has to be mindful of twice-daily tides, and homes in the area are built on stilts. Thirty-year old Hui told me his grandfather fought for the U.S.-allied South where people revered him as a hero. “However, he was considered an 'asshole' by the Communists who took him as a prisoner of war,” Hui said. His grandfather was a tall and handsome man who had five wives and 57 children. I wrote down the number and showed it to him to make sure I did not misunderstand. He said that was the right figure: an average of 11 children per wife.  

Our group of 28 visited the Cu Chi tunnels that stretch 200 kilometres, some of them three stories underground, enabling as many as 30,000 Viet Cong to live underground for months so that they could stage daily attacks on American troops. They survived by eating a plant that grows on trees and tastes like sweet potatoes, and the Saigon River was their water source. The narrow entrance to the tunnels were well hidden under leaves and the exhaust from the cooking vented through ant hills. They used soap to disguise any odors that would give them away. As many as 10,000 died of diseases, scorpion attacks or starvation; their bodies were buried in the third level below the entrance. Viet Cong also found a way to entice Americans into chambers that held sharp spokes or other traps.   

Our final stop before crossing into Cambodia was the Cao Dai temple, built in 1926. Unifying ecumenical faiths, the followers combine Buddhist, Christian and Confucian beliefs, dress in white flowing robes and pray and sing at the temple four times a day. Women kneel, pray and sing on the left, and men stay on the right, while monks and elders lead the way. Some devotees attend four services a day. The ceiling is three-stories high and is painted blue with white stars and the columns are colorfully decorated, giving the temple a cheerful yet serene atmosphere.