-^-for posterity-^-

"are there war museasums in ho chi minh city? i am not interested in seeing the mall..but the war related stuff...i will look on the internet and look into what there is to see related to the war...." dad emailed me this after my last post. i thought the mall was fascinating but i decided to see one of the war museums here in saigon. here ya go dad. you asked for war.

i walked down past the park that i talked about earlier. the one with the numbered trees. it's right next to the "reunification palace" where the north vietnamese tanks broke down the gates to reunify the country. after the breech of the palace, the southern president duong van minh supposedly greeted the northern general bui tin with, "i have been waiting since early this morning to transfer power to you" to which the northern general replied, "your power has crumbled. you cannot give up what you do not have". the tanks still stand inside the gates.

i made my own reunification trip from hanoi to saigon. didn't do much damage along the way though.

today i visited the war remnants in vietnam museum (formally called the war crimes museum). i didn't know exactly what to expect but knew the museum dealt with american involvement in vietnam. the day was very hot and the sky was blue. i entered the nondescript building and paid my 10,000 dong fee (75 cents).

in the first room my relatively happy day turned sour. pictures upon pictures of war tragedies. old ladies with guns held to their heads. you could see their skin was leathered and their face contorted. what must have been going through their minds. rows and rows of suspected vietcong bound hand and foot. children dead on pathways. old men crying. american troops wounded in ditches. another row of pictures displayed the victims of differing air attacks. victims of "frag bombs". laying on their sides and their backs were riddled with small pieces of debris. sitting up crying. victims of napalm attacks. their skin was charred black like an old campfire log. dead babies lying on tables. they looked like a charred mannequin. a picture of a person being thrown from a helicopter. what must they have been thinking as the wind rushed all around them and they struggled fruitlessly. a picture of a dead man dragged behind a tank. was he alive when they started dragging him? was he just a body they were taking home? did no one have a conscience?

this war was not my war. i remember it through pictures and videos. nice, well narrated documentaries about american involvement. i never saw the news. i never saw the body counts or was given a draft card. my generation has lived through television wars. clean wars. viedo game wars.

another room listed international calls for peace. there was every country you could imagine and a picture of a protest that took place there. everything from the congo, malaysia, uganda, chilie, norway, germany, italy and the us. there were the stories of the three americans that lit themselves on fire. there was the story of the american piolot that refused to fly more missions over north vietnam. by this point i was feeling exhausted.

there was another large open area that displayed american arms. there were fragments of all sorts of bombs. they had sunk into soft rice paddies and had not exploded. there were helicopters, jets and tanks. artillery, machiene guns and personel carriers. two statues cased in plexiglas caught my attention. they were replications of american soilders. one looked just like me. he was tall and had a pale face. he had dark eyebrows and a concerned look on his face. it wasn't angry. he looked right into my eyes. he held a gun out towards me. he could have been me 35 years ago. i walked around the munitions for a long time imagining them roaring through jungles and paddies. the sky darkened and started to sob. it didn't rain, it just sobbed slowly and quietly.

i walked into the final room. the first part was full of pictures of deformed babies and fetuses. there were over 75,000,000 liters of defoliants sprayed all over the countryside. 75,000,000 is a big number. babies born with part of a leg deformed the foot twisted inside as if cowering out of fear. children with faces that seem to be made of melted wax partially dripping to one side. children born with all form of brain defect. cancer. a documentary was being shown in english. the majority of peole there were korean or japanese tourists. i guess it was in english for a reason. i listened.

it interviewed person after person whose families lives were destroyed by chemicals sprayed on the countryside. the rain picked up. the roof was tin and seemed to roar. i watched for 10 minutes and saw hundreds of people. i wanted to cry. i walked into the last wing of the building. it held picture after picture of soldiers on all sides and their stories. story after story of suffering. american suffering, vietnamese suffering, laotian suffering, cambodian suffering. the rain caused the tin roof to scream. i waded through the pictures reading them all. photographers who stepped on land mines. villagers who watched their father shot. children who died while running away. children. there were american's in ditches covered in mud bleeding. mothers dragging their children across swollen streams. the tin roof moaned. i walked to the end and stood in the doorway. the little water bombs dropped on the metal tanks and exploded sending water shrapnel in all directions. people ran from building to building as if bomb shelter to bomb shelter. the rain's assault was relentless. so many people were wet.

i stood there and watched. i was sad. i felt helpless. i was ashamed that war still exists.

it didn't seem important whether i was wet or dry at this point. i had to escape the moaning and screaming of the tin roof. it was haunting me. i walked into the downpour.

i held my head low on the walk home. i was hiding from the rain's force. this museum had brought on a flurry of thoughts and emotions. the pamphlet i was given says that "nearly 3 million vietnamese were killed, and 4 million others injured..." and, "over 58,000 american army men died in the war... in retrospect, it (the museum) is not for inciting hatred, but just for learning lessons from history: human beings will not tolerate such a disaster happening again, neither in vietnam or anywhere on our planet."

this war, as i said, was not mine. the war in iraq will be mine. it will be my generation's. i don't want to visit baghdad in 35 years and see a museum dedicated to depleted uranium bombs causing cancer and deformities and daisy cutters destroying whole villages in a single swoop. i've had just about enough of our state run military machine.

i returned to my apartment, soaked to the core. i walked to the roof to think about what i had seen. the storm was passing. there were blue skys on the horizon and the sun was about to shine again.

i can only hope.