#VietnamWar a visit to The War Remnants Museum Ho Chi Minh City

I am not even sure if I want to write this blog. Why? The answer I think is it is a grim subject and also because it is hard to understand how the Vietnam war could have degenerated to the appalling atrocity it became. However I am going to carry on. My reasons ? Firstly because having an understanding of what happened here is important to me. Secondly out of respect to all those that suffered and finally to record what I felt and feel now having been to the War Remnants Museum - which is definitely heightened emotion and hopefully more clarity of thought.

First a precis of the history background for context :

The French were in Vietnam since the 19th Century as colonists. Japan invaded during the 2nd World War. After the 2nd World War with Japan defeated France tried to claim back Vietnam.

However the Viet Cong under their leader Ho Chi Minh had other ideas. He declared Vietnam's independence in 1946. He followed a Communist doctrine. A war followed with the French that lasted for 8 years.

In 1954 with France defeated by the Viet Cong something called the Geneva Accord was agreed with Ho Chi Minh. It divided north and south Vietnam into 2 separate administrative areas - a temporary practical measure to deal with the void left by the French. As part of the Accord elections were planned to form a unity government to once again unite Vietnam.

However the Accord was torpedoed before the election could happen because the Americans feared Ho Chi Minh would win an overwhelming majority. As he led a Communist party this was unacceptable to the Americans - they were terrified of the expansion of Communism. The Americans backed Ngo Dinh Diem ( a staunch anti Communist) and he subsequently declared South Vietnam as an independent country. 

In 1960 the Vietcong launch a guerrilla war against the South Vietnamese government with the objective of uniting Vietnam. As the South government was sponsored and supported by America, this started what we refer to as the Vietnamese War and the Vietnamese as the American War. It was to last for 17 years.

Now I am going to cover the actual war itself from the displays and photographs in the Vietnam Remnants Museum. It's focus is to show and explain the wrongs the Vietnamese people suffered by the invading American's.

American justification for the war

 but there are other reasons too 

The Vietnamese motivation is freedom - self determination.

No sane person wants war. However wars happen of course and may even be necessary. In the aftermath of The Second World War, the US representing the capitalist west - believed the expansion of Communism was a threat to our way of life. There was also the question of securing essential natural resources. Were they wrong at the time? I don't know but I can acknowledge the world would have been a different place if communism promoted by Russia and or China (as the Viet Cong )  had became the dominant world force. 

Natural resources are also crucial to create wealth and power of course. We all understand conflicts have occurred to secure vital oil supplies for instance. Easy to say this is wrong from a position of relative western liberal comfort.

The Vietnamese people wanted to be free and self determining. Who could argue with that? We fought 2 world wars for the same reason. Again for balance however - not all Vietnamese wanted to live under Communism. In the 300 days following the Geneva Accord nearly 1 million Vietnamese fled from the north to the south. The Communists persecuted Catholics, landlords and academics as well as many other groups.

So the Vietnam (American) war started in 1960. The nature of the war was a guerrilla war fought by the Viet Cong. Much of Vietnam is dense tropical forest and often mountainous - home to the Vietnamese - alien to the American's and their allies. The Americans wanted to fight a more "conventional modern war" - with heavy guns and bombing and minimal loss of American lives. 

I am not claiming the short account to follow is definitive and I am sure it is simplistic given the war played out over 17 years but this is my understanding of what happened :

• The Viet Cong used guerrilla tactics to ambush and kill the American forces. They used the terrain to hide - they used tunnels - and would appear from nowhere.
• They used hidden jungle supply routes in their push to move south - including through neighboring Cambodia and Laos.
• The Viet Cong peasant fighters were hard to distinguish from ordinary civilian Vietnamese. They used a very successful tactic of integrating with southern Vietnamese villages - often helping the villagers with farming etc. As such the Viet Cong gained support and help from many south Vietnamese people and were able to hide among them in order to pursue their guerrilla war.
• The Viet Cong were well supplied with weapons from Russia and China as in so many ways this was a proxy war being fought out by the world's super powers.
• In the early stages of the war the US expected their superior heavy weapons and particularly aircraft bombing would overwhelm the Vietnamese - fighting from distance not to jeopardize American lives. Increasingly it was realized they could never win without a ground war too and very rapidly the number of American soldiers committed to ground warfare increased.(and so did American casualties.)
• Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive of 1968 was a coordinated series of North Vietnamese attacks on more than 100 cities and outposts in South Vietnam. The offensive was an attempt to ferment rebellion among the South Vietnamese population and encourage the United States to scale back its involvement in the Vietnam War. Though U.S. and South Vietnamese forces managed to hold off the attacks, news coverage of the massive offensive shocked the American public and eroded support for the war effort. Despite heavy casualties, North Vietnam achieved a strategic victory with the Tet Offensive, as the attacks marked a turning point in the Vietnam War and the beginning of the slow, painful American withdrawal from the region.
• Up and until this point my assessment is this was a war like so many other terrible wars that have happened over history. I am not justifying it but I can understand it. But things changed.
• The Americans were in deep. Politically to lose would be unacceptable to their leadership as the dominant world power.The Tet Offensive embarrassed them. Increasingly swathes of the American public and certainly world opinion was turning against the American war in Vietnam. They needed a quick victory but they also needed to prevent loss of American lives.
• What happened subsequently was appalling. The museum rightly refers to war crimes - an offence against humanity. My certain opinion - it was shameful and disgusting - out of control and totally unjustifiable. A blot on common humanity. A blot on the perverted American political and military leadership at that time.Very upsetting to be confronted with.
• Their solution : - 1) bomb the hell out of the Vietcong including their infrastructure, supply routes and their tunnels. The scale was incredible. 2) Go into the villages one by one with troops and air support and flush out the Viet Cong. 3) Defoliate vast jungle areas in order to expose the Viet Cong supply routes and army movements. (I cannot believe this could be sanctioned by any government however desperate - its consequences were truly horrific and a war crime.)

I will take each of these 3 "solutions" one at a time.

1) bomb the hell out of the Vietcong :

Shows the scale of the American and allies involvement. Peaked at over 550000 US personnel.

Tonnage of bombs dropped. To this day unexploded bombs from the war is a big killer in Vietnam.

This is truly shocking. 5 million tons of bombs and shells used in total in the 2nd World War. 14.3 million tons were used in the Vietnam war mainly through American bombing. Unbelievable figures.

2) Go into the villages and deal with the Viet Cong. They were not fighting a conventional army. The Viet Cong often looked like village peasants. The Americans were often indiscriminate. There are proven cases of mass slaughter of civilians and random and brutal torture. One of the worst and most documented was what became known world wide as the My Lai Massacre. (see below).

3) Defoliate by spraying vast areas of jungle from aircraft using chemicals the most horrific of which was Agent Orange. The justification was to flush out the Viet Cong who were fighting a very destructive guerrilla war. The Americans were taking casualties because they couldn't easily see or even find their enemy. They resorted to chemical spray to defoliate the trees. The legacy was truly horrific and shameful. It is hard to believe the American government who sanctioned its use actually understood the consequences of such a vile means.    

I have not included any photographs from the exhibition showing the effects on human life of defoliants such as Agent Orange. They were just too terrible - frankly I could not take them. You might remember the damage done by the pregnancy drug Thalidomide. The dioxins used by the Americans deformed and distorted embryos in the same terrible way. Shocking consequences. And because it was used in such incredible volumes over such a massive area it has left Vietnam with not just an unexploded bomb problem but the Americans poisoned the land on a diabolical scale with terrible implications for the people living there for generations. It was and is truly unimaginable and undoubtedly constitutes a war crime.

A terrible legacy of war

After many years the Americans and international help has tried to help Vietnam clean up the environmental damage leveled on their land.

The scale of human cost AFTER the war.

Dioxins caused unimaginable human suffering long after the war ended.

My conclusion is the Americans lost the plot. They couldn't handle they were unable to fight on their own terms. Subsequent political and public opinion pressures forced the US leadership to seek a quick win and withdraw. They resorted to appalling tactics. On top of that the American soldiers - the GI's - were there to fight a war that increasingly they didn't believe in but required them to go out into terrain that was alien to them to do an impossible job. The Viet Cong were there for the long haul and picked them off. The Americans did terrible things in retaliation.

I knew about the Vietnam war before I went to the museum of course. I grew up through it. But being in Vietnam - having just come down to Ho Chi Minh City from the north - having spent time with our wonderful mountain guides on Fansipan and being confronted with the realities summed up in the Museum presentation - I was and remain genuinely stunned and ashamed that it happened. Rob and I were silent - we were really upset.

But I want to share something personal with you. Something more positive and I am sure will remain a treasured memory for me. It occurred shortly after we had come away from the museum.

It was hot and quite humid - it was lunchtime. Rob wanted some western food and we were both thirsty.

We sit in the forecourt garden area of a small supermarket on a main street in Saigon. We get some cold beer and sit in the shade. As almost everywhere in Vietnam there is high speed free wi fi available. There is music playing. We drink some beer - still thinking about the atrocities - the innocent harm - the innocent young -  a shameful senseless out of control war. The people are so friendly here. It is almost too much.

I read my WhatsApp messages from home. One from my daughter. My eldest granddaughter has won a prize in a national schools poetry competition. Her poem will be kept in the British Library archive forever. I read it. It is called "Me!". I well up again - can hardly hold the tears back. The contrast. And then incredibly - loud and clear and in Saigon - the radio plays Morning has Broken by Cat Stevens. This was piling it on. (I had seen Cat Stevens perform live just a few months earlier on the Glastonbury Pyramid stage. I wasn't that bothered about seeing him - I had gone down near the front to meet my mate R and some of his Jeordie friends. Cat came on. Just sat there with his guitar. The sun came out and he just sang and chatted. It was mesmerizing and beautiful. As it turned out probably the Glasto highlight this year for me and emotional for reasons I do not need to go into here.). I read and read Me. I am stunned my beautiful little granddaughter can write such a thing. I am so proud of her. I think about her future and I think about what the human race is capable of and the beauty of  Morning has Broken envelopes it all. I sit there and cry. Optimism wins over pessimism. We must learn from the past. OMG. What are we doing? What a morning - a morning to remember for the rest of my life. xxxx