Understanding Anger

I have no photographs from the war remnants museum in Ho Chi Minh City.

I met Mif in the shade of the foyer, the backs of my knees dripping from 36 degree heat. I had taken a wrong turn out of one of Saigon's many leafy parks and walked the scenic route through blistering concrete to the museum. The enourmous US helicopters and tanks displayed in the courtyard provide a dramatic entrance to a museum which actually largely consists of photographs.
 
Of course, with the former name of the museum being 'The Museum of American War Crimes" you expect that you may have to take the exhibitions with a pinch of salt,  however the museum steers away from propagandaist explanations, preferring instead to use photographic evidence.

In the first gallery that Mif and I enter, the first image I am confronted with shows a ditch full of murdered villagers, mostly women and elderly people, their bodies contorted and bloody. Then an image of two little boys shot dead in a road, the eldest no more than 8 and shielding the younger. Then a large stone well displayed in one corner. The plate reads that a villager's family were discovered hiding in it, shot, and disembowelled. A chilling photograph shows a GI setting fire to the roof of a wooden house. Three GIs grin next to pictures of dead Vietnamese on the floor. Mif has to walk out to catch her breath.

As we slowly shuffle through the galleries, another displaying the evidence of debilitating birth defects as a result of contamination with agent orange, I begin to understand some of the anger held up in this country.

As evidenced by the photographs, and understood by the Vietnamese, the country's landscape was completely burned, contaminated and permanently scarred by the use of illeagal chemical warfare. It seems that the US used the country as a testing ground for a new generation of vile chemical weapons, the liability for which it has not accepted.

A gallery on the second floor entitled 'Requiem' is relieving in that it does not continuously point the finger of blame. Its focus is on photojournalists, non-combatants, who documented the war on both sides. Many of them died in the field. The image that haunts me here is that of Dickey Chapelle (American photojournalist) being given the last rites as she lies dying on the ground. Larry Burrows (who himself later died in a helicopter crash) documents an American GI crying after a tour in the storeroom. . Again there are murdered civilians, terrified civilians. A lady wading through a river carrying a British stamped supply crate reminds me that my own country is not exempt from the conflict.

After a couple of hours we leave the museum emotionally drained, and agree that a stiff drink is required. Seeing this museum makes a lot of Vietnam make sense. The older generation have worked incredibly hard to get their country where it is. The cosmopolitan, friendly and affluent city of Saigon does not seem like a place that has horrific suffering lurking in its living memory. The North seemed unfriendly to me, but if people there are still pissed off at the rest of the world, I totally get it.

Our tourist restaurants (that Vietnamese can't afford to eat in) are irritating. Our insistence on people speaking our language is irritating. Our tourist-only beach resorts and binge drinking are irritating. Tourists it seems, never step lightly on the world; some people in Vietnam would rather that foreigners don't stick their noses into their business.

On the way back to my hostel I am approached by some university students in the park. They say that they are practising English and I indulge them for a while. They are apparently studying tourism. After chatting about Vietnam and England for a while, I say my goodbyes and they present me with a small woven scarf as a gift. It's my final image of Saigon.