Ho Chi Minh & The American War Museum

Jamie DeFauw
Mar 21, 2017
5 min read

Bike Tour around Ho Chi Minh

We only had a day in Ho Chi Minh before we flew back to the home base in Singapore. With such a short amount of time we decided to pay these guys to scooter us around the city to a handful of places! Ho Chi Minh is made of two parts: Saigon is the old side from before the war and Ho Chi Minh is the newer side form after the American War. The whole city was renamed after Ho Chi Minh, who was a war hero to them!

The pink building you see below is Tan Dinh Church! It was built during the French Colonial period, when it was still part of French IndoChina! It's super pretty and worth a quick stop to see the Barbie-like building! We also went to many statues, including a famous statue of Ho Chi Minh himself. One of the buddhist temples we stopped at also had the plethora of turtles you can see floating around in the pictures below! At the end of the scooter tour the guys even had us write them a note in their travel notebooks for a keepsake!

Ben Thanh Market and other our other random explorations

The market in Ho Chi Minh, Ben Thanh, was absolutely giant! It was also insanely hot and stuffy so we only spent around 30 mins there! You can find anything your heart desires in this square though for super cheap prices! It was so hot in Ho Chi Minh that we even spent another 30 minutes on the top floor of an electronic store sitting in front of a bunch of fans...

Later in the day we stumbled upon a festival by our hostel! It had games, live music, and tons of food!! It was a really fun surprise to end our day!

War Museum

The war museum in Ho Chi Minh honestly brought me to tears. Seeing the destruction in Vietnam and the suffering from such a violent war is gut-wrenching. Never before had I learned about a war from the opposite point of view, where my home country is seen as the brutal enemy. Pictures and evidence of our country's infliction of their suffering laid across the walls and in cases right in front of me. During the war the US partnered with the South of Vietnam against the North. The US joined in the war in efforts to try and stop the spread of communism, but in the end the North took over Vietnam as a communist country. The North and South were brutal to each other. You can see a picture of a prisoner that was held captive below. They hardly had anything left on their bodies but skin and bones. The barbed wire cages below were referred to as tiger cages. They were so small and hung so low that it made it impossible for a prisoner to ever sit up straight. It left them with permanent spinal damage after days in these cages, in addition to the deep cuts covering their bodies from the wire stabbing them in every direction.

The hardest part to swallow was my own countries impact on Vietnam. Many people are not very educated on America's specific involvement in the war. While the motives behind their efforts were in the right place, the tactics they used truly make me nauseous. In the war, America used large-scale bombing tactics to try to bring the North to the bargaining table, but they were ignorant of the culture of their opposition. Ho Chi Minh himself once said, "You can kill 10 of my men for every 1 I kill of yours, but even at these odds you will still lose and I will win." Despite this, we continued to relentlessly bomb cities and countrysides of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. We killed countless numbers of innocent people, and demolished thousands of people's homes.

The most horrifying part of the war is when the US used toxic chemical defoliants between 1961 and 1971. They were used to defoliate large parts of the countryside to prevent the Viet Cong from being able to hide their weapons and encampments under the foliage. These chemicals destroyed the environment in these areas! Even today it continues to change the landscape, cause diseases and birth defects, and poison the food chain. In the last few photos, you can see the birth defects that took place after we dropped the 80 million liters of toxic chemicals known as "agent orange." Seeing the photos of hundreds of innocent children suffering put tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. I had to leave the exhibit at this point to go get air outside.

In America, we fear other parts of the world for their differences. We compartmentalize the world as "us" versus "them," rather than humanity as a whole. The news portrays the world as a scary place, ridden with terrorism, but the world is an amazing place full of unique and loving cultures. The States is just as dangerous as anywhere else in the world. We are raised to view certain people as "enemies," rather than realizing they are just people, the same as us, who are raised to believe different views and values. The destruction that was done to Southeast Asia hurts my heart. Killing thousands of innocent people and poisoning generations to follow did nothing but strike fear into Asian people towards the US for the rest of their lives. War only accomplishes hate and fear from each side and leaves the world watching in devastation as the casualties quickly add up.

There was an estimated 3.8 million deaths during the span of the Vietnam war from 1955 to 2002. I empathise for every country and every family that suffered from this war, and I hope someday our world will be able to work towards a better future without relying on war and death to do the talking. Patriotism is a wonderful thing, but it can blind us from putting our compassion towards those who are different then us as well. I hope after reading this you take some time to reflect on your own attitudes towards other cultures, such as Muslims, Hispanics, etc, and think about how you truly construe them. Admit your prejudices to yourself and think about why they're there. Have you ever truly had the chance to interact with these people, or do your beliefs about them come from the news and other outlets, such as your upbringing, that paint them in a certain light. Extremists everywhere are cast across the news that portray entire sections of people in a bad light. Just as videos of extremely right winged republican's creates an inaccurate stigma towards republicans, videos of muslim extremist's create a completely inaccurate stigma towards muslims. Construing all muslims as American-hating terrorists is no different then construing all republicans as rich, old white men that are homophobes. It's ridiculous levels of stereotyping, and it stems from the fear of what's different and the internal refusal to consciously listen and sympathize for another's point of view.