24.06.2004

Talk about the war

The sun spent today beating down on us wandering the streets of HCMC taking in the various war museums and the re-unification palace. This ornate building housed the South-Vietnamese Government and President Diem's family sometime before Viet Cong tanks crashed through the wrought-iron gates out the front.

The building was left pretty much in the same state as when the Viet Cong took over. You can tour through most of the four levels: President Diem's living quarters, library, cinema, and strategy rooms (complete with original military maps hanging from the wall). The east-west-sixties-fashion-fusion is very...unusual.

The most interesting section of the building is found underground. A rabbit-warren of tunnels connecting intelligence rooms (with original morse-code machines), other comms rooms, strategy rooms, and the President's main war room are all on display.

Over at the War museum there are walls and walls of award-winning photography during the Vietnam war containing bios of all the photojournalists who lost their lives covering it.

Along with these are many tragic photos of the massacres at My Lai, casualties throughout the war, and disturbing pictures of the effects of Agent Orange. What had me was that even in Vietnam at a war museum it is still referred to as a 'herbicide'. I guess that means it is really an ex, and not a de-foliant. The two pickled and disfigured fetuses on display silently proclaimed that Agent Orange was indeed a chemical weapon; a weapon of mass destruction that just achieves the same results in a slower and more painful way.

One room contains protest paraphenalia from around the world. The Australian posters seemed eerily similar to more recent protests on wars abroad.