Surreal Atrocities Sandwich

In the Ben Thanh Market I saw a t-shirt that read “Vietnam is a country, not a war.” Growing up in North America I mainly heard of Vietnam in the context of the war the Vietnamese refer to as “the American War.” 

If you’re just hanging out in Saigon having some bahn mi and beers, or here on business surrounded by cheerful Vietnamese people, it’s probably easy to forget the history. It’s hard to reconcile the good natured people of this place with the horrific things that have happened here. Even the sales language of the Cu Chi Tunnels make them sound like fun for the family. Come crawl through some Viet Cong tunnels from the war and have your photo taken, then we’re off to the Mekong Delta!

We signed up for that tour and headed out of town in a van with a guide and a small group of tourists. Once we had our water and crackers, our guide, Phong, told us how the defoliant used by the US soldiers during the war, Agent Orange, continues to cause birth defects in the population even in the 3rd and 4th generations. He showed us a video of children with heartbreakingly severe defects who live in hospital and let us know we would soon be arriving at a workshop where adults with Agent Orange related birth defects are trained to do lacquer work to sell. We got to see some of the artists at work and buy some of their art. I admit I was both relieved, and embarrassed to be relieved, that the people I met there had differences that were more on the minor end of the scale. I wasn’t ready to be confronted by the brutal effects of war on the innocent first thing on this outing.

The tunnels we were on our way to see were just outside Ho Chi Minh City and started during one of the wars with the French in the 1940s to hide and store supplies and were connected up and expanded in the 1960s by the North Vietnamese during the war between them and South Vietnam, the Americans and other allies. The tunnels system eventually was over 200km long and included space for hospitals, barracks, supplies, command centres, kitchens and training spaces. There were tiny hiding hatches to seemingly disappear in thin air. These were so tiny that only the slimmest foreigners could even try to get in them for a photo op and arms would have to go straight up to fit shoulders through. Then there were all the tunnels. They were at different levels and were incredibly complex. They had underground wells and ventilation shafts running up through fake termite mounds created with American GI toiletry products mixed in so the allies’ German Shepherds couldn’t detect their scent. Tunnels were rigged with booby traps, including grenades and boxes of venomous scorpions or snakes that would drop on the enemies heads. 

There were some tunnels that were enlarged for foreign tourists, but our guide didn’t want to wait for those popular tunnels, so we used smaller ones. A couple of us climbed down to the opening of our tunnel, looked and came back up. K noped out, as did another person from the group. I sucked it up and got in. Once in, there was no turning back, which was a touch nerve wracking. Because I’m as tall as a 1960s Vietnamese man, I could squat walk with my butt just above the ground. The rest of the group had to crawl on hands and knees. One part got so low and tight that I had to do that on hands and knees as well, but then managed to get back on my feet. One woman three people ahead of me had a panic attack and we had to talk her into keeping going so we could all get out. Coming back up into the air was pretty exciting.

The whole time we were in the tunnels, there were people paying to shoot guns in the shooting range, so we were hearing loud gunfire non-stop. It was quite evocative. We saw the craters of B-52 bomb drops (am I the only one who didn’t know the B was for Boeing and 52 was the first year of manufacture? Ok, just me then.) By far, the most distressing elements were the booby traps.

There were two sites to visit the tunnels and they both have recreations of some things: the kitchens where they served us cassava with crushed peanuts, the sandal workshop where they turned old tires into sandals that would leave misleading footprints in the jungle mud, how they dug tunnels in groups of 4 with gardening hoes, the weapon making workshop where they dismantled bombs to make very sharp hooks from the casing for booby traps. Then there were the demonstrations of the non-grenade, non-venomous creature type booby traps. 

In these demonstrations, a nice man smiles at you with a sense of innovative patriotic pride as he shows you all these different ways they created that a human can fall through a hole in the ground or a tunnel and be pierced and not be able to get out without being shredded, or at all. They barbed all the points and coated everything in piss and shit and let it rust so it would tear on removal and cause infection. Perhaps my imagination is too strong, but I felt sick. They showed us a door swinging trap that would pierce the torso of anyone opening a door and, if the soldier happened to put up his rifle in time to stop it, a lower piece would swing forward and “make sure he didn’t have any babies. Haha!” I couldn’t find that funny. I understand the Viet Cong were in a righteous war against major powers to keep their land in their own hands, but some of those invaders were teenaged boys who never wanted to be there and got drafted and shipped to fight for reasons that weren’t theirs. It was tragic all around.

Then it was time for lunch. 

The Irish woman with our group grabbed almost all the tofu dishes and spring rolls put aside for all 3 of us vegetarians and I momentarily reconsidered my anti-war stance. She’s lucky I wasn’t that hungry. 

Those grim reminders were followed by an afternoon spent in the Mekong River delta. We drove past rubber plantations and scores of graveyards with little grave houses. We took a boat down the river to visit a bee farm where we got to try all sorts of delicious treats and I got to stick my finger directly into a honeycomb covered with bees to sample their honey. Bees gave no fucks, which is good because I had no EpiPen with me. 

Then we were golf carted to a place where people were making coconut candy. So delicious! They flavoured it with coffee, or pandan or peanuts. All were tasty. Phong heard that another lady & I love snakes, although her declaration was sarcastic, so he found us a fella just down the road with pythons to cuddle. I was on that snake like white on rice. I wrapped it around me and petted its sweet head while K snapped shots. A few of the other ladies tried it but the fellas were oddly reluctant. 

Next we were marched off to some other place where I somehow ended up doing shots of some jungle banana liquor with the young men of the group. I don’t know; Phong had decided I was the good sport of the group so I was the one selected to stick a finger in the beehive, wear the python and shoot multiple shots of backwater homemade hootch. Maybe the rest of the group seemed sane or he thought I had nothing to lose. I drew the line at the many bottles of liquor full of massive cobras and scorpions.  

Fruit and music were the next courses. We ate fruit and drank pandan tea while traditional musicians sang songs at us from the courts of the ancient kings, namely If You’re Happy and You Know It (Clap Your Hands). I never knew that was a Vietnamese royal court standard.

Do you get yet that this was a really weird day? 

Then they split us up and popped us into a series of canoes to being paddled down a scenic canal by locals. They dropped us off where the canal met the river and we were back on our boat to our van and back to Ho Chi Minh City, where we asked, what just happened? 

You would think that was enough weird tourism to hold us for a few days but the very next day, after watching guys playing foot badminton, joining in a spontaneous duet of Defying Gravity with a flamboyantly charming young man, and visiting Independence Palace, we decided to check out the War Remnants Museum. War Remnants. What does that even mean? As we approached and I saw tanks and planes in the courtyard I felt sure it was something like Ottawa’s War Museum.  

There was an exhibit entered from the side of the front yard called “Tiger Cages” referencing  prisons for the Viet Cong. In the first room was the guillotine that the South Vietnamese drove around in a truck from village to village decapitating anyone who they heard might be Viet Cong (North Vietnamese Communists), or alternately, enough people to deter anyone from joining them. There were pictures lining the walls of heads being hoisted aloft and the alarmingly high numbers of people who experienced it. 

The next room was… torture methods, more and more and more rooms of actual torture devices with realistic models, or pictures with descriptions or actual photos. Ahhhhh…. I almost tore a me sized hole through the wall getting out of there. 

I went into the main museum building where I was mollified by rooms of international responses to the war. Okay, cerebral and expressing support of national autonomy. I can get behind that. Then I went upstairs and found myself standing between “War Crimes” and “Effects of Agent Orange” rooms of photo exhibits. Wtf was I doing here? I eventually found an exhibit of anti-war badges from the US that soothed me somewhat and then got out of there.

How do these past enemies live alongside one another after all the atrocities? How do they all sit together on the side of the street sipping coffee, gossiping and laughing? When you know your old barber was on the side that did these tortures to your granddad, how do you navigate that? There’s a lot to the Vietnamese people I just don’t understand.