This is a communist country. If you don’t believe it these women will shoot your ass off.

Ho and the Marx brothers watch over everything here, including traffic intersections.

I was always amazed to be in the back back country in China where they had not seen a foreigner for decades and go into a conference room and encounter big pictures of Marx and Engels. Two old Europeans watching over the proceedings. Their extrapolation of the future based on a foggy analysis of industrialization in the 1800’s was silly before the ink was dry, but it sure gave a good theological underpinning for dictators.

As to Ho Chi Minh, we can hate him or whatever, but he was a giant of a man.

The War Museum

I really did not want to go to the war museum. But being here I kinda had to. It was worse than I imagined. No matter how Hollywood spins it we lost a war here, and the victors always get to tell the story. The museum as I expected was propagandized but it was still shocking to see the terrible photos and our country and our soldiers portrayed as war criminals and heartless, savage killers.

There were two people I went to university with who I know came here and returned in a box. After five years of engineering school. An example of why at the time we called our casualties:  wasted. But it is so long ago I cannot recall their faces. And I am older now and understand loss.

I was living in London through the hottest of the war and the wrap up, and missed the demonstrations and most of the news and the uproar. To me the war was just a sad thing, but we were all in a global struggle with communism then, each of us fighting in our own way. I believe to this day that communism enslaves their population, but maybe not in the domino theory, as we did then. This was a grim, deadly serious struggle. We lived under the risk of a preemptive nuclear attack every day.

The museum did surprise me in that although it was primarily about the conflict with the USA, it was presented as a fight against foreign aggression. They, for example, displayed captured US ordinance: planes, tanks, etc. (they look so primitive now) beside a reproduction of an infamous French prison.

Here is one thing I guess I did not appreciate and will give them. Napoleon III sent the French army to invade their country and the French ran things here for 6 decades. It is hard to deny that they enslaved the country for the collection of natural resources for export and French profit. By any measure: life expectancy, education, literacy, home ownership, the people were worse off after the 60 years than before.

Another thing I did not appreciate was that the USA had a military contingent here from 1950. Supporting the French. And when the French were thrown out and the country partitioned (North and South, like Korea still today), we took over the cause of supporting the South. Which led us into a land war in Asia against a people struggling to throw out the foreigners. What were our politicians and generals thinking?

I am sure that all sides in a war do bad things. We did bad things.

We bombed and bombed and bombed.  Targeted bombing. Carpet bombing. Air Force Chief of Staff Curtus LeMay was quoted in the museum with his resolve to “bomb them back into the stone age”. I remember that quote because LeMay graduated from my University and Engineering school and I was proud of him until that moment.

All significant buildings in North Vietnam were destroyed. All factories, train facilities, bridges, roads, ports. And (I myself believe by accident) some churches, schools and hospitals.

According to a study done by Columbia University we rained maybe 100 million liters of poisonous chemicals on the country. Napalm, phosphorus bombs, combat gasses, defoliants, dioxin.

I got to see examples of the horrible little “anti-personnel mines” that we would sow over areas. They would last for years waiting patiently to indiscriminately kill or maim.

And I was convinced that as the war rage got higher and higher we went over the line with the torture and execution of prisoners.

I cannot look back through any lens of time and understand how our leaders could believe an end so important as to unleash these means. But they did.

And I cannot buy the premise of the museum: that we abandoned our principles and aggressively abused a people yearning to be free.

The facts are that we wasted 60 thousand American dead and wounded 300 thousand. The Vietnamese losses are staggering: 3 million killed of which 2 million were civilians. 2 million injured. Hundreds of thousands missing and presumed dead. What a tragedy.

There are not many pictures in this blog. I could have put up some of the shocking and horrific ones from the museum, but why? Perhaps this terrible affair should just recede into the history books alongside the long list of other tragic war histories.

I just hope we are learning something from all this.

Anyway, at high tide the coconut barges are coming downriver.   The rainy season will start any day. It is time to move on.