Sorry for the Group Email

The last time we went to a contemporary history museum in Vietnam I left deeply disappointed. A museum, after all, is supposed to be an objective display of primary evidence, not a propaganda tool for the in situ government.

The War Remnants museum in Saigon begins like any other war museum. I presume there’s some kind of manual for curators.

“Right, so, we’ll have the abandoned jet here, the broken tank over there, and the serious-photography-section can live in that building over there.”

The War Remnants museum has the abandoned jet and broken-down tank, but the serious-photography section occupies the rest of the compound. It would be impossible for it not to.

Vietnam, as any photographer will tell you, was the first war to be reported on in a large-scale, modern manner. Photographers wormed their way into the country, and many of the pictures they took became part of the American and Vietnamese psyches. I don’t need to dredge up the picture of the little girl running, for instance, because you already know what it looks like.

(Perhaps I do need to tell you, though, that the Pulitzer-prize winning photographer who took that picture now works in Hollywood, and one of his most recent shots was of Britney Spears leaving her house on a stretcher.)

The photographers are all-but forgotten, but at the War Remnants Museum, a large hall remembers and publishes their work. The stories of heroism from photographers on both sides are scattered around: photographers who died taking pictures, who in their last moments seized weapons and led suicidal charges towards the enemy, and photographers who earnestly believed that their pictures would inform and change the opinions of those who saw them.

The War Remnants Museum used to be called the War Crimes Museum. Any idiot knows that the Vietnam war was one of colossal cruelty from both sides, but the War Remnants Museum brings home the Vietnamese reality with spectacular force. There is a picture of an old woman with an M16 jammed into the side of her head; another picture of a Vietcong soldier thrown out of a helicopter because he “refused to talk during interrogation.” Another shows a woman and her entire family, their faces pictures of hopeless, paralysed, useless terror. The caption says:

“’Guys were about to shoot these people,’ photographer Ron Haeberle remembers. ‘I yelled, “Hold it,” and shot my picture. As I walked away, I heard M16s open up. From the corner of my eye I saw bodies falling, but I didn’t turn to look.’”

The most striking is of bodies along the side of the road. The bodies are mostly women, but on top of the ghastly pile is the half-naked body of a few-months-old baby.

The images are agony. We were literally horrified: that stomach-deep, slack-jawed feeling that you have when processing what you’ve seen would be as difficult as seeing it in the first place.

So, with light hearts and a spring in our step, we went to visit an actual battlefield.

The Cu Chi tunnels are about an hour north of Saigon, and (it will astonish you to learn) they’re a collection of Viet Cong tunnels, dug during the war to provide the North Vietnamese Army with a place to shelter from falling bombs and American foot patrols. The tunnels themselves are an interesting bunch: you can’t go in any of the unimproved (read: widened for fatties) tunnels any more, but the tunnels you can go in are an experience. The tunnels begin at three meters below ground – low enough to survive artillery shelling but not B-52 bombs. They drop, though, to ten meters deep in places, and while the suitable-for-tourists tunnels that exist today are wider and higher, they certainly go as deep.

Even when you’re in a group with baseball-capped, camera-toting tourists (yes, I was wearing both), there’s still something eerie about the tunnels. In places they are perfectly dark; the people in front and behind you block out the sunlight and weak light from the dim light bulbs on the walls. You know the walls are there because they press on either side of you and if you’re stupid enough to try to shift significantly off your knees your head crunches into the ceiling. I did this twice before accepting the pain in my knees and staying low.

It was, I can’t help but imagine, a thoroughly miserable existence.

Perhaps the only experience to match that of the Vietnamese was that of the American soldiers sent to patrol the jungle. The terror of patrolling ground owned by the North Vietnamese must have been unique.

Cu Chi, you see, has an intriguing selection of replica man traps: perfect facsimiles of those used to booby-trap the jungle. The first we came to was a pit about eight feet deep, at the bottom of which were a series of sharpened bamboo poles. Over the top was a disguised slab, much like a large, wide table top. It pivoted freely about the middle, so if you were luckless enough to step on it anywhere but dead centre, it would swing around, depositing you into the poles. But, because the disguised slab moved freely, it would pivot around until what was the underside now faced upwards. The impression to patrol-members would have been that a soldier had simply vanished, leaving nothing but screams. We saw other traps: some which swung open when stepped on, revealing rollers with spikes on them designed to impale the torso. Others swung shut, violently impaling the legs. One was designed to be fitted to a doorway, and was a series of spikes, articulated in the middle. When someone walked through the doorway, the spikes would shoot down, aiming directly for the face and chest. If, by some miracle, the spikes were caught, the articulated section would swing up, catching the soldier squarely in the legs and groin.

“And then,” joked our guide, “you have no more babies.”

A titter ran through our crowd of tourists. It’s not appropriate to laugh, of course, but what else are you supposed to do? If you actually tried to comprehend the series of torture devices; the flesh and organs they were designed to tear through, you’d go mad. If nothing else, you’d have a horrible time and you’d never recommend visiting the Cu Chi tunnels.

But, for us, the tunnels put the War Remnants Museum into perspective. The acts and crimes captured by the war photographers are dreadful. They are terrible to look at and you have to choose to comprehend them. To spend any amount of time in front of them is to commit yourself to a few hours of miserable contemplation. But the traps on display at Cu Chi hint at the depths of the terror that the American soldiers must have felt. Violence, as they say, begets violence (begets violence, begets violence, ad nauseum).

Dave found this hard to write. Normal service will resume shortly.