Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam - Day 2, Part 2

The next place that we went to was the War Museum.  When you first walk onto the grounds, all around you are US Air Force jets.  Then you walk into the museum, and the first things that you see are how the children handled the war.  They were taught how to dig trenches and clean weapons.  The classes were interrupted every ten minutes so that students could get into position to avoid the US air raids.  They often had to have their classes in trenches ten feet under the ground.  This floor also had a huge section on propaganda and protests against US involvement.  Every world in the country opposed what America was doing in Vietnam.  Even people in America protested it.  We basically did it though to protect our alliance with France.

The next floor talked about all of the war crimes that America had committed.  They showed many pictures of soldiers torturing women and children.  There was a story about a boy who was screaming because the US Soldiers had just protended to kill his father to get information about the Vietcong from the boy.  There was a picture of bodies completely blown apart from the bombings.  They showed how much of the cities and villages had been destroyed.  Nothing was left. 

The next area was most definitely the hardest; it was about Agent Orange.  A picture that will stay with me is of an American soldier standing by a container of Agent Orange.  On the container, someone had written “Purple People Eater.”  It was disgusting.  Many of the other pictures just showed the birth defects that people faced after contamination.  They had deformed bodies or heads.  The last part of this was a letter written from a Vietnamese woman in 2009 to President Obama, asking him to finally give the victims of the aftermath the monetary support that they need to live successful lives.  The girl had no legs only one hand.  She wanted to be a doctor, but people told her she could not do it without her limbs.  They also said she could never have children, because they would most likely have mutations as well.  The most touching part of her letter included a section where she quoted Obama for saying that he wanted his daughters to have all of the opportunities in the world; this Vietnamese woman never would.

The last floor mostly focused on the rebuilding of Vietnam after everything happened.  This museum was clearly biased, but it is also good to see something from a different side.  Even though they paint Americans so horribly in this museum, they really don’t have harsh feelings towards us.  They welcome us into their country and tell us that they love us.  When you ask about the Chinese though, it’s a different story.