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Ho Chi Minh City: A hidden legacy of war

For those of us who are old enough to remember when Ho Chi Minh City was called Saigon the name will forever be linked to the Vietnam war or, as the Vietnamese call it, the American war.
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Burned Out US tank, Cu Chi.

For those of us who are old enough to remember when Ho Chi Minh City was called Saigon the name will forever be linked to the Vietnam war or, as the Vietnamese call it, the American war. It’s been 43 years since the first GIs landed in Da Nang on March 8, 1965 and 33 years since the last U.S. helicopter took off from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon and fled to the safety of an American warship. During that 33 years Vietnam, a divided and war-ravaged country, has rebuilt its shattered infrastructure, resolved its political differences, and emerged as one of Southeast Asia’s most successful economic powers. Except for a scattering of war memorials and museums the legacy of the American war has been largely eclipsed by Vietnam’s surging market economy.

On our 2,800 km journey from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City we saw only a few relics of the American War, always from the Vietnamese perspective. A plaque beside the wreckage of a B52 bomber in an upscale Hanoi neighbourhood pays tribute to the skill of the gunners who brought it down. The burned out shell of an American tank commemorates the Vietnamese patriot who gave his life to destroy it, and the occasional memorial to Uncle Ho celebrates the ultimate victory of his communist resistance fighters over “foreign aggressive forces.”

As a tourist it would be possible to travel through modern Vietnam without seeing any evidence of that devastating conflict. But the scars are there, just out of sight, and ignoring them is to ignore some of modern history’s most compelling lessons about the futility of war. Any political leader who even contemplates resorting to military intervention in another country should first be required to visit the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. Behind the usual array of tanks, fighter aircraft, and ordnance the museum’s eight thematic exhibits focus on the human side of the war as seen by the Vietnamese.

Using photographs, text, and videos the displays document in horrific detail the brutality of the French colonial occupation, the struggle for independence, and the tragic intervention of the U.S. with its state-of-the-art weaponry. The statistics are mind-boggling — three million Vietnamese (mostly civilians) killed and two million wounded. The U.S. used 14 million tons of munitions in Vietnam, seven times the amount used in WW2. Seventy million litres of toxic chemicals, including agent orange, were dumped onto the ground, destroying over 20,000 sq km of forest and agricultural land. Napalm and huge BLU-82 seismic bombs were deployed against both military targets and the environment in an effort to defoliate the jungle and expose the enemy.

Vietnam’s struggle for independence from French and later American occupation pitted their ill equipped peasant army against the high-tech airborne ordnance of a military superpower. Their response was to move underground. The Cu Chi tunnels were started by the Viet Minh in the 1940s, during their war against the French and extended by the Viet Cong during the 1960s. The underground system in Cu Chi district alone once contained more than 250 km of hand-dug tunnels and a branch line extended all the way to the Cambodian border.

We joined local guide Amey for a tour through part of the old tunnel system that is preserved near the village of Ben Dinh, 60 km northwest of Ho Chi Minh City. The trail leading to the tunnel entrance winds past huge bomb craters where newly planted eucalyptus trees struggle to survive in the toxic, herbicide-laced earth. We stop at a reception area where Amey displays a map of the tunnel system, which once extended several levels below the surface and contained weapons factories, command centres, field hospitals and living quarters. She takes us to several life-sized displays that pay tribute to the patriots who lived and died here — a woman sharpening bamboo sticks for booby traps, two men sawing through a dud U.S. bomb to recover its explosive. I’ve been in a lot of caves and I’m not subject to claustrophobia but on my crawl through the Cu Chi tunnels I made a wrong turn and ended up in a dark dead end too narrow to turn around in. For a few moments, as I was backing out I experienced the feeling of being trapped, and I thought of the people who were forced to either live in these holes or face death on the surface.

The Cu Chi tunnel system played a key strategic role in the Vietnamese war. It provided both a supply and communication network and its multitude of cleverly camouflaged trap doors allowed the Viet Cong to launch surprise attacks and then disappear. After American attempts to root them out resulted in staggering losses to their GI tunnel rats they gave up and resorted to indiscriminate bombing and defoliation of the entire Cu Chi region. In their book “The tunnels of Cu Chi” Tom Mangold and John Penycate call it “the most bombed, shelled, gassed, defoliated and generally devastated area in the history of warfare.” But despite the aerial onslaught the 1968 Tet Offensive, which marked the turning point of the war, was planned and launched from Cu Chi.

In the end it was neither the tunnels nor the bombs that brought the war to an end. The daily images of chaos and killing on American TV didn’t level with the military hype and with no end in sight public support for the war dried up. The cost of continuing was simply too high to bear. America was rocked by antiwar demonstrations and in 1973 all U.S. military personnel were pulled out of Vietnam. Two years later North Vietnamese forces charged into Saigon, immediately changed its name to Ho Chi Minh City, and Vietnam began the task of rebuilding itself as a unified communist country.

Since the end of the war 33 years ago many of the wounded have died, most of the bombed out buildings have been repaired or replaced and the rubble of others is hidden under a mat of scrub foliage. But the damage to the environment will take generations to heal. The dioxins used in agent orange and the other herbicides are still active in the soil and groundwater 45 years after they were dropped, and no one knows how many future generations of Vietnamese children may suffer genetic damage from these chemicals.

We visited one of the many orphanages where the children affected by agent orange are cared for. It’s estimated that between two and five million people were exposed to agent orange during the war and many of them suffered severe genetic damage. Now, two and three generations later the twisted bodies and vacant eyes of their children and grandchildren are a testament to the horrible aftermath of that war. When we arrived at the orphanage and saw the children, severely disabled both physically and mentally, we immediately realized that our gifts of school supplies and toys were of little value. One of the caregivers, a German woman who has volunteered at the orphanage for 15 years, invited me to photograph her ward. “Some of the children,” she told me, “have one or even both parents but these kids require continuous one-on-one care and the parents have to work.” I couldn’t bring myself to take a picture but I’m still haunted by the mental image of that ward.

Back in Ho Chi Minh City I took a motorbike taxi back to my hotel. Its driver, like most of the others on HCMC’s teeming streets, is much too young to even remember the war. As we wound our way past the thriving shops in Vietnam’s biggest and busiest city I tried to think of something positive that could possibly justify the cost of the American war — three million Vietnamese lives, almost 60,000 American lives, US$165 billion, 8,500 downed aircraft, the list goes on. Preventing the spread of communism, the so-called “domino effect”, which was used to justify U.S. military intervention, seems totally irrelevant today. Perhaps avoiding future wars by recognizing the futility and waste of the war in Vietnam could be a positive outcome. But if nobody remembers even that will be lost and history is doomed to repeat itself.