Saigon: Remnants of the War

Saigon Street with no traffic, a miracle

Arriving in Ho Chi Minh city via the airport is like driving into madness. Here you get your first taste of the Vietnamese dependence on/ love of the motorcycle as the streets become engorged with millions of them, and the air becomes 1 part oxygen to 9 parts carbon dioxide. Everywhere they are coming at you,buzzing and honking for right of way, not content to drive on the streets, they drive on the meager footpaths that are already full of parked bikes. The city is like a great shrine to the combustion engine. The first time I stepped out of my hotel into the heart of motorcycle darkness, I had to beat a hasty retreat into a cafe it was so overwhelming. Everywhere people trying to get your attention to take you somewhere, sell you something, and everything is for sale. The streets teemed with noise and chaos and the Vietnamese of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh city (apparently you can call it either) don't seem to be perturbed in the slightest. 

There is no apparent order to the shops, old crumbling lean-tos with dischevelled people selling trinkets right beside  huge shiny glass and chrome car dealerships selling state-of-the-art mercedes cars. In front of the shops are women with traditional Vietnamese wicker baskets on poles across their shoulders with a few vegetables in them, or piles of green mangoes, and people are preparing food to sell from the most modest of cooking utensils, a pot, a kettle, ingredients: it's all compact and it's all mobile. 

My first day I headed over to what is called the War Remnants Museum, which is where they document the details of the American War of Aggression. Outside, huge captured American tanks and bombers take pride of place, their violent memories scored onto the rusting metal of their massive lumbering bodies. B52s, huge tanks, and gigantic transport helicopters with their outsize roters hanging mercifully useless in the hot morning air. Walking by them, I wondered what action they saw during the height of the madness that was the Vietnam/American war. Saigon itself back then was the center of US command and wasn’t liberated by the Vietcong until 1975 when the last Americans evacuated and the war was declared officially over. 

US Army troop transporter outside the War Remnants Museum, Saigon

Captured US aircraft on display outside the War Remnants Museum, Saigon

When I left the US as a child of seven the war was very much still in progress, my family had already moved back to Ireland when the ‘incident’ at Kent State university happened, where the National Guard opened fire on students demonstrating against the war, killing four people and injuring eight. I remember that incident well. It seemed like a turning point, along with the image of Kim Phuc, her seven year old body naked when her clothes were incinerated by Agent Orange as she ran from her village which had been carpet bombed, and just a few years before Nixon resigned for the Watergate scandal. To me, as a teenager, it seemed like the country in which I was born and lived the first seven years of my life and the values on which it was founded was in tatters. Perhaps it was when my own disillusionment set in. Had I been a bit older there is no doubt I would have been out there protesting with the thousands of others.

The museum is an education. Old artillery in glass cases, sections of a sewer children, who were subsequently shot by US forces, hid as the enemy approached, a whole section on photography and how powerful it was in bringing the war to an end, the various photographers from Time and other magazines and papers, many of whom lost their lives while bringing those amazing images to the world. There is a very disturbing section on the effects of Agent Orange and other chemicals that were used profusely on Vietnam (and on Cambodia when the US Army tried to stem the tide of arms coming in through the Ho Chi Minh trail that ran through Cambodia’s eastern flank). These toxic chemicals caused devastation to the landscape, causing cancer and serious birth defects amongst the population for years to come. The tragic and heart-rending images of the people affected by these toxins are to be seen in this section of the museum. I was quite happy when the lights in the museum suddenly flashed and an alarm sounded, which I discovered meant it was lunchtime and the museum was closing for lunch. I’d had enough.

I have been trying to comprehend the psychology of a people that could withstand the full force of the US Army for years, hiding out in an intricate warren of bunkers below the steaming earth as it  bravely withstood everything the US had to throw at it. Pretty much everyone agrees it was due to the leadership of Ho Chi Minh that got them through that time.

The famous image of a group of children, including Kim Phuc who had her clothes burned off in an Agent Orange attack on her village. This photograph galvinized anti-war sentiment across the world.

Time magazine's coverage of the Vietnam war showing Vietcong prisoners loaded onto a boat by US soldiers

When I left the US as a child of seven the war was very much still in progress, my family had already moved back to Ireland when the ‘incident’ at Kent State university happened, where the National Guard opened fire on students demonstrating against the war, killing four people and injuring eight. I remember that incident well. It seemed like a turning point, along with the image of Kim Phuc, her seven year old body naked when her clothes were incinerated by Agent Orange as she ran screaming from her village which was a smoldering cinder, and just a few years before Nixon resigned for the Watergate scandal. To me, as a teenager, it seemed like the country in which I was born and lived the first seven years of my life and the values on which it was founded was in tatters. Perhaps that was when my own disillusionment set in. Had I been a bit older there is no doubt I would have been out there protesting with the thousands of others.

The museum is an education. Old artillery in glass cases, sections of a sewer children, who were subsequently shot by US forces, hid as the enemy approached, a whole section on photography and how powerful it was in bringing the war to an end, the various photographers from Time and other magazines and papers, many of whom lost their lives while bringing those amazing images to the world. There is a very disturbing section on the effects of Agent Orange and other chemicals that were used profusely on Vietnam (and on Cambodia when the US Army tried to stem the tide of arms coming in through the Ho Chi Minh trail that ran through Cambodia’s eastern flank). These toxic chemicals caused devastation to the landscape, causing cancer and serious birth defects amongst the population for years to come. The tragic and heart-rending images of the people affected by these toxins are to be seen in this section of the museum. I was quite happy when the lights in the museum suddenly flashed and an alarm sounded, which I discovered meant it was lunchtime and the museum was closing for an hour and a half. I’d had enough.

Although written twenty years ago, this piece from a book I've found invaluable throughout my journey is still appropriate:

On entering Saigon I realized that I was not prepared for the shock. I had thought about all the practicalities, but not about what the return would mean for me. The Saigon that came to meet me was a bedlam of humanity. I felt lost and almost frightened. On the morning of the 30^th April 1975 I had wept with joy to see the tanks of the Liberation Army rolling into Saigon: the war was over, and the Vietnamese would now be masters of their own country. When I returned ten years later I had wept with despair when I saw how the Communists had wasted their chance to make Vietnam a truly free country. Now I was even more heartsick. The failure was everywhere, in the life of every one of those who had won the war.

From ‘A Fortune Teller Told Me’ by Tiziano Terzani

I felt exactly the same as I first entered Saigon twenty years after this had been written. I stayed in a hotel in the center, District 1 called ‘Tan My Dinh’, which became my private joke as I would say it to myself in an old-time prospector’s voice whenever something in the environment threatened to overwhelm me, which was fairly often, as in, ‘Well, tan my dinh…’ It’s amazing what amuses you in such times. I booked a day trip to the Mekong and immediately regretted it. And this is because I have come to realize over the course of this amazing trip I’m on that I am not a tourist. Let me explain...

In fact, there is nothing that fills me with dread more than a trip with a group of strangers that involves a ‘guide’ and a tour bus. And, as I was to discover in Vietnam, all tours have a pronounced mercenary character, aimed as they are at showing you as little as possible of what you actually want to see (the floating market or life on the Mekong…) and instead spending the bulk of the time parading you through the local alligator farm, snake pit or iguana wrestling tent, where they just happen to sell the particular animal’s hide done up into a nice wallet or purse. You can try on the python like movable art, wrap the magnificent creature around you like a stole and then be shown how lovely its skin looks in a laptop case. There is something obscene about this way of thinking at which the Vietnamese are so alarmingly proficient, where everything is there to consume, literally or figuratively. It turned my stomach in the Mekong. Glad to hear others weren’t impressed, a New Yorker complained that pretty much everything they were selling in the market was from China. It’s also isn’t lost on me where this voracious consumerism comes from, imported wholesale as it was from the west, traded outright for all the real vestiges of local custom. I had higher hopes for Asia, hoping some of the ancient charm would remain (more twinkling lights, tinkling bells, oddly discordant music filled with chimes and gongs and insanely high-pitched female voices, a people as mysterious as we in the West are mundane). If ever it was there, it is now (if southern Vietnam is anything to go by), sadly, almost completely obliterated. Another thing that is insupportable about being a tourist is how quiescent tourists generally are with the level of utter crap that are confronted with, without a murmur on their part. This is another thing that has brought me to the cconclusion that I am not a tourist. I tend to murmur quite a lot....

Take lighting, for example. Everywhere are fluorescent strips flooding everything with flat vacuum tube light. No hint of mystery left, everything blasted in brilliant floodlight.

We took a three hour cruise up the Mekong, a wide, languorous muddy river with great tufts of green branch-like islands, and a lot of plastic debris, floating around. People were out on ancient river barges selling whatever they could. Not at all like the floating market outside Bangkok, this was a quiet, nonchalant affair. The shanties of the people lined the water, on wooden posts. After the confines of Ho Chi Minh the wide open sky and great vast river was refreshing.

Later, I wandered around Saigon looking at historical landmarks, the Continental Hotel, the Opera house.  Everywhere a million honking motor bikes vying for space. Everywhere a hundred people urging you to buy something, to let them take you somewhere, every encounter behind the smile and the friendly, Where you from? an eyeball rolling up into dollar signs. I wanted to get away as soon as possible. I booked a ‘sleeping bus’ to Nha Trang, a seaside resort two hundred miles north of Ho Chi Minh, and more importantly, on the Pacific ocean.

Iconic picture of young Vietnamese girl standing in front of her burning village

Saigon street vendor