Make Pho Not War

Today, after our last classes at UEF, we explored a few of memorials of the Vietnam War in HCMC. We walked from the Xa Loi Buddhist Pagoda to the Thich Quang Duc Memorial. Thich Quang Duc was the Buddhist monk who took this same path before he famously doused himself in gasoline and lit himself on fire in protest of President Ngo Dinh Diem's oppression of Buddhism. At the time, President Diem was part of a catholic elite ruling over a dominantly Buddhist South Vietnam. This "democratic" government that imprisoned and tortured Buddhists for their religion was backed by the U.S. simply because it wasn't communist.

After seeing the memorial to Thich Quang Duc, we traveled to the War Remnants Museum, which focused on the extreme violence used by Americans in supporting South Vietnam's government in the Vietnam War. Captured weaponry, hundreds of graphic images, and excerpts of news articles portrayed the horror of the war quite powerfully. While I knew going into the museum that the Vietnam War was brutally violent, I was still shocked by many of the exhibits. The most jarring was the exhibit on Agent Orange, an herbicide used by Americans to kill crops, trees, and people. I knew that Agent Orange was still causing health problems in many parts of Vietnam today, but I wasn't really familiar with what those problems were. The exhibit consisted of many images of horrific birth defects caused by Agent Orange. While walking through the exhibit, I could not believe that my government had endorsed the use of such barbaric weaponry to not only harm innocent civilians, but to harm their unborn children. Throughout this and other displays of what my country had done, I wanted to blame the bias of the museum. Surely, this is all exaggerated and skewed. While I was able to tell that the museum was biased against America, the parts that were disturbing were images. While it is certainly possible to lie with a picture, it's still hard to deny the horror in a picture of an American soldier standing over two freshly decapitated Vietnamese heads or a picture of a stack of bodies burned by napalm. At the same time, I had to consider the violence committed by the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong. I thought back to the Cu Chi tunnels, where the tour guide prodded a patch of grass with a stick to activate a gruesome trap involving bamboo spikes dipped in human excrement. Still, even if the brutality was requited, America's extremely violent acts were not justified by any means.

The most confusing part about visiting the War Remnants Museum was realizing that America came to Vietnam to participate in a war that left 3 million Vietnamese dead through horrific methods and yet today, 40 years after the end of the war, Vietnam is one of the most pro-American countries in the world. While it is important to consider that I am in Saigon and not Hanoi, I am still blown away that strangers come up and take pictures with me simply because I'm American. I would expect at least a hint of caution or resentment when interacting with Americans as opposed to the tremendous hospitality I've received on this trip.