Today, we had a full and exciting day, absolutely packed with sightseeing interest and historical detail. It was important, therefore, that we fuel ourselves well for the vast amount of walking and exploration that lay ahead for us. We loved our hotel and its immense breakfast buffet that offered Asian, Continental and typically Vietnamese fare. I decided to play it safe today and have a Western breakfast. I ordered a Ham, cheese and mushroom omelette and helped myself to sausage and bacon before requesting a Vietnamese coffee made with condensed milk. With fruit to follow, it made a really hearty breakfast for which I was very grateful as the day progressed.
A Conducted Tour of Saigon City:On schedule, we were waiting in the lobby of our hotel for our pick-up. We had signed up for a conducted tour of the city in the morning followed by lunch and a trip, 2 hours away to the area called Buen Duoc to enter the infamous Chu Chi Tunnels (about which more later). As pick-up was at 7.45 am, we had set our alarms for 6.30 am to leave us enough time for breakfast before joining the tour
Our tour guide arrived just a few minutes late—her name was Thuyen and she turned out to be the most coherent of the guides we’ve had so far. Not only was her English fluent but her pronunciation was perfect and her accent not too strong. This was highly fortunate as there was a great earl of information she imparted as the day went by. Far from switching off mentally (as I had done in the past few days because it is too much of an effort to concentrate on what the guides are saying), I found myself hanging on to her every word. We had a few people in the large van already (including Lynda and Jeremy from Lyon, France, with whom I could practice my French and with whom we became friends by the end of the trip) when we entered and we stopped at one more hotel to pick up a foursome of Filipinos who were extremely friendly. We all became friends by the end of the day as the experiences we had drew us together in amazing ways. Once our van was full, Thuyen introduced herself and our route and took us first to what she termed “Little France” or La Petite France. This was the square we had ended our individual walking tour in last night—the one with Notre Dame Cathedral in one corner of it and the Central Post Office in the other.
The Post Office building dates from 1865 and was built soon after the French took over Vietnam, named Cochin-Chine (don’t ask) and later Indo-Chine, and colonized it. It is a beautiful building in typically French architectural style, characterized by arches and sculptural detail outside and filled inside with large-scale period maps on the wall that depict the region especially the course of the Mekong River as well as France’s territorial holdings in Southeast Asia. There is also a huge portrait of Ho Chi Minh in the center as he looks down benevolently on all visitors. The building is still a working post office and this is efficiently run, clean, organized and professional. We picked up magnets of Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh City from here but realized quickly that the place is known everywhere as Saigon. Hence, we picked up a magnet of Saigon too. With our souvenirs in the bag, we were able to return to our guide who put us back into the bus—but not before pointing out some details about the Cathedral in front of us. It is, of course, a landmark of the city and one of the few Catholic places of worship. Had we time, we could have gone inside, but it was enough to notice that it is modeled quite similarly on Notre Dame in Paris.
Visiting the Exceedingly Difficult-to-Handle War Remnants Museum:Back in the bus, we headed first for the War Remnants Museum—easily one of the most difficult museums in the world to visit. Llew and I have visited Holocaust Museums around the world but this one was decidedly different because, unlike all the other ones we’ve seen (in Berlin, Washington DC, Jerusalem, Poland), this one portrayed Americans as the Bad Guys. It documented (through photographs, newspaper clippings, quotes from a number of contemporary politicians) the origins of the Vietnam War (which is known as the American War in Vietnam). It explains why America got drawn into the war. So here’s a bit of background:
, after liberation from the French, Vietnam (which had included modern-day bits of Cambodia and Thailand) was divided into North and South Vietnams with an actual DMZ (Demilitarized Zone or No Man’sLand) existing between. them. In fact, in the early 1950s, Vietnam was actually two separate countries: North Vietnam with his capital in Hanoi and South Vietnam with its capital in Saigon. HCM’s Communist sympathies worried the US in its race for superpower supremacy against Russia during the Cold War. When it appeared as if Northern Vietnam would come under Communist sway, the then US President Lyndon Johnson gave the order for American troops to enter South Vietnam to keep the Northern communist activists (organized under the banner of the Viet Cong) at bay. US troops arrived in Vietnam in 1963 and made their headquarters in Saigon. From there, the US masterminded bombing missions over North Vietnam which was being defended by the vast number of locals (militiamen) who joined a communist militia called the Viet Cong based in Hanoi (but with spreading tentacles all over the rural north).
did the US realize that the militia known as the Viet Cong in the North would put up a brave fight. The war continued unabated for 17 years (whereas the US thought they would be victorious in 17 days). When the US realized that they were fighting against guerillas whose tactics were foreign to them, the atrocities on their part began. As the US was unclear which Vietnamese were part of the militia, supportive of or helping the Viet Cong, they turned their military efforts upon civilians in ways that are truly unspeakable.
This Museum documents the barbarity of the Americans—seen, of course, from the perspective of the Vietnamese. The torture, the killings of civilians in cold blood, the methods of interrogation used to extract information from men, women and their treatment of children makes this visit harrowing and unforgettable. Towards the end of the war, the Americans began chemical warfare as they used Agent Orange (the chemical dioxine) which they sprayed all over the fields, villages, etc. in a sort of ‘scorches earth’ policy. The poisonous chemical killed all vegetation and wrought terrible effects upon those who survived—even into the next generation.
As it turned out, American press photographers and reporters were actually present in Vietnam throughout the war. They kept sending back the most horrific photographs of the atrocities meted upon the Vietnamese. So many of these photographers died in the war but their telling photographs are a lasting legacy of the impact of American imperialism in Southeast Asia.
Eventually, as the Museum showed, it was public opinion in America that turned against the war as three million Americans had died after being forcibly drafted into the army. Singers like Joan Baez and actors like Jane Fonda, who had traveled personally to Vietnam and saw, with their own eyes, the rampant destruction wrought by the war, used their talents to inform and educate Americans about the country’s military actions in Vietnam. As the years passed, when American soldiers themselves, as conscientious objectors, refused to enter the war, the time came for the US to withdraw. The war came to an end in 1979 and a whole generation of Americans, who were fortunate enough to return alive, suffered from PTSD and used alcohol and drugs to dull the pain, guilt and remorse of their cold-blooded killings in Vietnam.
It was not easy seeing the graphic images of ruined Vietnam and mutilated Vietnamese in this Museum. But as if to balance the equation, the museum also documented South Vietnamese brutality against their own Northern people by showing us the infamous ‘Tiger Cages’ win which they held their prisoners of war and the ruthless tactics they used to extract information, including (if you can even believe it—I could not!) the guillotine! Northern Vietnamese were beheaded by their own Southern brethren through the use of the guillotine, the very instrument that the French had used in the 18th century during their Revolution to oust their own monarchy!
The front courtyard of the Museum is filled with dynamite shells, bomb casings, etc. as well as tanks, war planes, helicopters and the like. When we returned to our meeting place after one hour, most of us were devastated and rendered speechless with their horrors of the experience
Viewing the Independence Palace from the Outside:Thuyen then took us to Independence Palace but explained that yesterday and today it is closed to visitors as there is a private function going on there. This place was built after the liberation of Vietnam from the French (post-1954). Construction began during the tenure of HCM himself, but as he died in 1963, he did not have the privilege of occupying it. Instead, the first four Presidents of Vietnam after Independence did.
After the fourth one, it ceased to be used as their official residence and became a show piece, restricted to tourist interest alone. As we could not go inside, we merely took pictures of the exterior, but Thuyen informed me that a visit inside would show us the living quarters of the past Presidents and the formal rooms they used to receive and entertain diplomats and visiting heads of state. Clearly, Vietnam, in the first decade after Independence, was a proud republic. A Visit to the Ho Chi Minh Museum:We moved on from Independence Palace to the next port of call—this was added to our tour as a substitute venue as we could not enter the scheduled site. This was a visit to the Ho Chi Minh (HCM) Museum on the banks of the Saigon River. It is a lovely site as it overlooks the modern harbor and offers the visitor a cogent idea of the massive economic gains the country has made and the strides it has taken towards staking its place in the modern world. The Harbor here is surrounded by beautiful skyscrapers, each sporting a Futuristic modernist design—such as in Shanghai or Dubai.
The HCM Museum itself is a double-storied colonial structure in rose-pink that traces the interesting life of the man that the country considers the Father of the Nation. He was born to humble parentage and spent the earliest decades of his life doing odd jobs in Saigon under colonial rule. In his early 20s, he hopped aboard a steamer as a ship deck hand and found the world open for his perusal. Thus began his long tutelage and exposure to Leninism and Soviet Communism which filled him with determined zeal to get the colonists out of his country. He returned to Vietnam determined to lead a political movement that would oust the French and, as a man passionate about his cause, fired up his supporters and rushed ahead.
I found it particularly interesting that so many of the anti-colonials who led their countries to freedom from colonialism (Gandhi and Nehru in India, Jinnah in Pakistan, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia, Toussaint de l’Ouverture in Haiti) had to leave their own countries behind, absorb the political teachings of those in countries other than their own, before returning to apply principles of Western liberalism to their own struggles for freedom). HCM’s efforts were highly successful, of course, and the French departed in 1954—although they did return briefly in the early 1960s but were ousted again. As Vietnam attempted to find its voice and identity in an independent world, HCM led the country by adopting, as so many contemporary leaders of the time did (Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, etc.) the principles of austerity. He wore sandals made of rubber tyre scrap that the peasants, slaving in the rice paddies, had done and with his staff and his sola topi, he became an international symbol of nationalism and a hero to his own people. Of course, his ideology was Communist (which was what sent shivers down the spine of the Americans). HCM’s natural gravitation towards the Russians left America uneasy in the decade of the Cold War and resulted in the US keeping a close eye on political developments in the Southeast Asian region.
All this history and more is depicted in the HCM Museum which contains loads of photographs (including those of him with Prime Minister Nehru of India and Dr. Rajendra Prasad, India’s first President) and on his conducting a Vietnamese symphony orchestra in their rendition of the national anthem. There is plenty of memorabilia (his hat, his typewriter, his sandals, eye glasses, etc,) for the historian of the region and I was glad I had the chance to become introduced to this shadowy figure (at least to me) for whom the city was renamed but whom I remembered well from contemporary reports in the Times of India when I was but a child.
With this last stop on our city tour, Thuyen took us to a restaurant where we were seated as she dropped off the two Indian participants who were not joining us on the Tunnels excursion. She had provided us with a menu at the start of our trip and we had chosen Shrimp and Pork with Rice and Rice Glass Noodles (Vermicelli) with Crab as our choices (Llew and I would share them). This came with a clear soup for starters and as we sat and ate at a large community table, we got to know the rest of the tour group. The hour long stop for lunch allowed us to use rest rooms and get a break before we launched on the next, deeply harrowing part of our tour.
A Tour of the Chu Chi Tunnels:
In order to under the significance of the Chu Chi Tunnels, about two hours outside the city of Saigon, you need to know a little it about the history of Vietnam in the decade after its Independence from French colonialism.
As in the case of so many military powers (we see it with Russia and Ukraine today, for instance), the US believed that its intervention in Vietnam (motivated by its determination to stop Communism from spreading in Asia during the Cold War) would last a few weeks—a couple of months at most. Their superior military prowess, arms and armaments led them to believe that they would vanquish their ‘enemy’ in no time at all. Little did they bargain for the determination and courage of the Viet Cong and its thousands of supporters who, realizing that they could not beat the Americans at their own game, devised all sorts of approaches and tactics that have come to be termed generally as ‘guerilla warfare” from the French ‘la Guerre”—war.
The Viet Cong were aware that a network of tunnels existed in North Vietnam and had been used as a base during the struggle for Independence from the French in the 1950s. They decided to employ the very same tunnels in their battle against the Americans. Hence, they immediately began expanding the network of tunnels in Northern Vietnam that were known generally as the Chu Chi Tunnels. Although tunnels formed the entry into this subterranean world, it developed into a full-scale underground township, complete with bunkers, kitchens, hospitals, etc. Think of the Taliban in Afghanistan who used the same network of tunnels in Tora Bora to vanquish the Americans not even 10 years ago. Being unfamiliar with the mountainous terrain and the fact that their satellites could not pick up images of the activity below-ground, the Americans were kept guessing as to the site and nature of the Taliban’s attacks. Ditto the Viet Cong’s attacks from 1963 until 1979. This tunnel-warfare resulted in the death of millions of Americans in a war that stretched on, seemingly unendingly, for years on end.
At the end, in 1979, 17 years after it had begun with 3 million casualties on the American side and 58,000 Vietnamese deaths, the terrible Vietnam War came to a close. Apart from celebrities like Joan Baez and Jane Fonda, two hundred university professors drafted an anti-war letter to Richard Nixon (whose Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was a supporter of prolonging the war) and were joined by American university students all over the country, starting with those at the University of California at Berkeley, who protested the war in marches attended by thousands of civilians and students in America. Press photographers and photo-journalists had also been sending graphic images of the destruction being caused to civilian populations in Northern Vietnam (not to mention that endless plane loads of dead and maimed Americans that returned to the US after suffering PTSD in a war they did to support and in which they had been drafted).
photograph, eventually, of what came to be called “Napalm Girl”, a little 9-year old naked girl, desperately burned by Agent Orange (dioxin), the chemical used by the Americans to subdue the Vietnamese, caused a public outcry in America as the nation’s brutality was mercilessly exposed. It was no longer possible to continue to draft young men into a never-ending war which was finally ended in 1979 with the evacuation of the last GIs from Saigon.
So why did the Viet Cong win the war and why did America suffer so much destruction to life and limb? It had to do with the Chu Chi Tunnels from where they operated under cover of darkness. The Viet Cong fought with low-tech weaponry such as sharpened sticks, batons, axes, hoes, etc. They created land mines that exploded when and in areas that the Americans least expected. When the Americans realized that they were underground, they sent out sniffer dogs to find the openings to the tunnels. The Viet Cong then booby-trapped the areas and placed pointed spikes in the ground—when the Americans stepped on the traps, they fell into deep pits, impaled on spikes that were coated with snake venom to cause death.
Whie based underground, the Viet Cong began to gather up all war-scrap the Americans left behind (war heads, bomb casings, etc.) and used them in creative ways to fashion their own low-tech weapons. Throughout the 17 years, as the war progressed, the Viet Cong continued to expand the underground network, eventually creating 200 kms of tunnels that stretched as far as Cambodia and the Mekong Delta. They stayed alive by growing cassava (tapioca) in the jungles above them, boiling and eating it and drinking cassava tea. We were given a little taste of both at the very end of the tour
Apart from gaining all this knowledge, he highlight of this tour for visitors is that they actually get to descend into the tunnels which have been retained as sites of tourist and historic interest. You can walk or crouch or crawl inside the tunnels (depending on how tall you are and how low the tunnel ceiling). It is pitch black inside and really really hot. Of course, there were air holes to provide fresh air but it was still so hot that, to me, it felt like a sauna and I was perspiring profusely when I emerged from the twenty meters through which I had crouched while underground. Actually crouching as I walked through the tunnels myself made me realize how courageous, determined and resourceful the Viet Cong were and why the Americans had no chance of winning the war. You emerge from this whole experience deeply enlightened about the principles of guerilla warfare and the reasons why the war went on for so long. It can be profoundly sobering to be an American visiting this Museum—because for the first time, I had the opportunity to see what the US did in the name of saving the world from the scourge of Communism.
Back On the Coach to Saigon ad Banh Mi for Dinner:It was another two hour long coach ride back from Ben Duoc to Saigon and Llew and I were both tired and hungry when we arrived at our hotel. We decided to go out in search of dinner but were too tired to sit in a restaurant. Instead, we decided to pick up Banh Mi, the famous Vietnamese sandwiches made in a crusty baguette, and bring them back to the hotel to be enjoyed with cold beer.
We were very fortunate that someone on the street directed us to a perfect place not too far from our hotel for the best banh mi in the city. It is a placed called Bank Mi Huynh Hoa and it was just awesome. The baguettes are huge, they are overfilled with delicious pate and a variety of deli meats—pork, chicken, beef. Salad greens, onions, cucumbers and fresh herbs come in a separate plastic packet so that you can add them to the sandwich when you are ready to eat them. Gosh! They were simply excellent (although poor Llew bit right into a deceptively green chili that he thought was a scallion). He went through agony as he tried to bring relief to his burning mouth! I was super careful after that and thoroughly enjoyed my sandwich. Highly recommended if you are in Saigon!
that was left was for us to get showers done and wind down for the night after what had been a truly enlightening but really harrowing day.
Until tomorrow…
No comments:
Post a Comment