War Tour

While I'm not typically an advocate of guided tours while traveling, I can honestly say that I got more out of these few hours in Vietnam than I've gotten out of days, even weeks, in other places. The war became tangible for me on a tour of the Củ Chi Tunnels.

Here's a photo tour; I hope you approach it with skepticism. 

A series of underground tunnels underlies Ho Chi Minh City. This network called the Củ Chi Tunnels is deeply rooted in Vietnamese soil and history. During the war, the tunnels hosted a whole range of activities- from hiding to combat, from transportation of supplies to access to medicine. 

 

The tunnels have since been expanded to accommodate large groups of tourists, and large tourists. 

Here's my foot next to the entrance. Hard to believe it used to be smaller, let alone the fact that people lived down there.

Paintings on the walls at the Cu Chi Tunnels exhibit.

The military cemetery for the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army.

 

The final stop in the tour was a shooting range. Yes, a shooting range. It cost extra, and it was a spectacle, to say the least. I couldn't shoot a gun on these grounds. Couldn't even consider it. 

"Effects Yet To Be Reckoned"

I once read that the United States military troops sprayed at least 20 million gallons of Agent Orange, or toxic herbicides, in Vietnam during the war. I looked it up, and according to the U.S. Department of Veterans affairs, this deadly chemical causes a variety of cancers, heart diseases, Hodgkin’s disease, Leukemia, diabetes, neuropathy and liver dysfunction. The chemical also causes birth defects, such as Spina Bifida, in the children of veterans. The physical mutations of Agent Orange in people in Vietnam were prevalent, to say the least.

I wrote one sentence in my journal the day we visited the War Remnants Museum:

Why does history keep repeating?


In Steve Hawley’s feature “What We Leave Behind” in the Winter 2004 Issue of the Bear Deluxe Magazine, he predicts, “Amid former battlefields [in Iraq], contaminated with depleted uranium, or DU, the true costs of war have yet to be reckoned.”

Hawley’s article reveals the overwhelming amount of toxic DU in Iraq from U.S. bullets. The numbers are staggering- some 260 to 270 millirads of radiation are emitted with a single charred bullet. Hawley points out that the limit of exposure for non-radiation workers is 100 millirads per year.

He also points out research suggesting that damage done by DU often manifests itself in the next generation. Just like Agent Orange, DU is a genotoxin that alters DNA, often in the children of people who have been exposed to it.

I’ll write it one more time:

Why does history keep repeating?

Quite The Show

"Show don't tell."

That's what every teacher and professor has instructed me to do with my words for as long as I can remember. Writing should paint a vivid picture with sensory statements and artfully incorporate detail.  It should establish a sense of place, so much so that the reader feel as if he or she is there.

It's often difficult to show rather than tell travel stories because they represent my individual perceptions. They are not generalizations about these places or these people; they are just my own experiences. In no way am I qualified to speak knowledgably about these cultures. I'm simply documenting the mere hours I was there.

As you read my blogging, specificially about Vietnam, I encourage you to keep in mind that these are my own experiences painted with colorful words. In order to explain the things that I saw and how I felt about them, I must write candidly.

I visited the War Remnants Museum in Saigon and joined a mass of other tourists to mill through it's sobering maze of artifacts, books, testimonials and photography about "The American War in Vietnam." The western world calls it "The Vietnam War." Enough said.

As I scanned war photography, an English woman came alongside of me to ask what information I'd learned about the war in American school, and I was ashamed to respond "not much." Sure "The Vietnam War" had been in my textbooks, but certainly not in the graphic detail I experienced at the museum that day. It was at that photography exhibit that the war became tangible to me, and this is what I wrote...

Images That Will Never Leave Me

A soldier doubled over magazine crates, sobbing. The photographer must have caught him taking a private moment.  

The black and white of an airplane lifting a dead American soldier from underneath. Bold and simple. While dead American soldiers were flown home, dead Vietnamese soldiers were left to die in the ruins.

An American soldier crouching in the grass to hold the bloody remains of a Vietnamese civilian. His face is ragged and torn. I have no words.