My experience in Saigon was legendary! From overly aggressive people trying to sell me "Boom Boom Massages", to motorbikemen soliciting business, it's IN YOUR FACE in Vietnam! Especially in big cities! The big cities can feel unfriendly and can be dangerous for getting bags stolen by criminals on motorcycles. If you know someone to show you around, it's SO MUCH BETTER! A friend of mine gave me a tour of the city, took me for local food, and took me out for drinks. One evening I went to the bar he was DJ'ing at - SO MUCH FUN!!! I also felt somewhat obligated to see the Cu Chi Tunnels and the War Remnants Museum. THAT was an experience...what a day! Beginning from the Cu Chi Tunnels, we were able to crawl into one of the small hiding spots where the Vietcong (Vietnam communists from the North) were hiding and BOY was it small! You CANNOT stand up, rather you must stay hunched over! The section where I went into had actually been widened for the purpose of Westerners fitting into it to gain a feeling for what it was like. The network of underground tunnels comprised something between 1-200 kilometers, and WAS DUG BY HAND WITH SMALL TOOLS, NO MACHINES!!! CAN YoU IMAGINE?! Well, we saw a model of the tunnels, learned how the Vietcong cooked in early morning and early evening to disguise the smoke with the haze, and how they had disguised their airholes with termite and ant hills. To disguise the smell for the dogs, they used pepper mixed with some other ingredients at first, and then switched to covering the area with US Soldiers' uniforms so that the dogs would move along, sniffing nothing unusual. TONS of them could fit into the tunnels, and at points they (the Vietcong) had to lay down and squeeze through the areas, so you could imagine how tight of a fit it would be for a US Soldier. There were also SO many bamboo traps setup all over the jungles, along with in the tunnels themselves! ...so the Americans when they came in, with no sense for where these traps were, often fell into a gruesome situation, and sometimes died. They had to worry about the Vietcong surprise-attacking out of nowhere! Could you imagine how that would have been to be there? We were also shown how people would re-use scrap materials from exploded bombs to reconstruct their own, and where hospitals were hidden to aid the wounded.
Onto the museum now: there was a strong and opinionated Anti-American view of the history of the war. Pictures, actual tanks and planes, propagnada posters, news articles and actual photgraphs taken from the war were some of what was shown. The spraying of Agent Orange (perhaps the world's most known poisonous chemical) to "flush the Vietcong out of the jungles" pretty much destroyed much of the ecosystem and left MANY Vietnamese (and Americans) with SEVERE health problems if not death. The birth defects even spread to the next generation many times, unthinkable! Napalm and bomb victims were depicted as well, along with a picture of Fidel Castro celebrating the final evactuation of US troups from Vietnam. All kinds of weapons were also on display! Innocent men, women and children were inhumanely treated and murdered here (likely on both sides, which generally occurs in war) and the accounts given. Up to a certain point and from what was shown in the museum, only ONE US pilot refused to fly his mission in Vietnam, but surely others follow. Many photographs of places WORLDWIDE showed the support for Vietnam, and the urging of the US to leave! This was a fascinating experience for me, because although I do not directly remember how the Vietnam war was taught in high school, this information DEFINITELy was not revealed. It is always a good idea to look at the coin from both sides, and more than two if the coin has ;)
I am now waiting at a wonderful hotel here in Saigon, and will take my flight to the Philippines tonight late night! I am excited to be back on the beach for 9 nights before I delve into Asia's most modern and developed societies to gain a better understanding of their intricacies.
Onto the museum now: there was a strong and opinionated Anti-American view of the history of the war. Pictures, actual tanks and planes, propagnada posters, news articles and actual photgraphs taken from the war were some of what was shown. The spraying of Agent Orange (perhaps the world's most known poisonous chemical) to "flush the Vietcong out of the jungles" pretty much destroyed much of the ecosystem and left MANY Vietnamese (and Americans) with SEVERE health problems if not death. The birth defects even spread to the next generation many times, unthinkable! Napalm and bomb victims were depicted as well, along with a picture of Fidel Castro celebrating the final evactuation of US troups from Vietnam. All kinds of weapons were also on display! Innocent men, women and children were inhumanely treated and murdered here (likely on both sides, which generally occurs in war) and the accounts given. Up to a certain point and from what was shown in the museum, only ONE US pilot refused to fly his mission in Vietnam, but surely others follow. Many photographs of places WORLDWIDE showed the support for Vietnam, and the urging of the US to leave! This was a fascinating experience for me, because although I do not directly remember how the Vietnam war was taught in high school, this information DEFINITELy was not revealed. It is always a good idea to look at the coin from both sides, and more than two if the coin has ;)
I am now waiting at a wonderful hotel here in Saigon, and will take my flight to the Philippines tonight late night! I am excited to be back on the beach for 9 nights before I delve into Asia's most modern and developed societies to gain a better understanding of their intricacies.
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