Day 68
I'm struggling to keep up with my feelings. This trip has really opened me up. I feel more like myself than I have in years. Actually, I feel like more than myself. My friends on the ship and my experiences in each country have inspired me to really live life more fully.
That may have seemed impossible to me three months ago, but now I've surpassed my previous connectedness to life. I sing more; I dance more; I laugh more. (Not in public places, though; I'm still just as proper and embarrassed.)
At the same time, I'm so torn between my elevated happiness and the heinous unfairness of the world. Or maybe realizing my privilege has made me not take it for granted. I expect that I will seem significantly different to everyone when I get home. I'll probably be annoyingly optimistic and remind everyone of how lucky we all are. But it's true, and we should be reminded of it frequently.
Okay, so what brought this all up (well, it's been surfacing for a while. I just decided I should express it this time.) was my visit
to the Cu Chi Tunnels and war remnants museum today.
I had been wanting to go see the tunnels, but thought I wouldn't get a chance because I wasn't already on the trip, and I figured Kelly would want to do someth
ing else. But in a twist of events, Kelly got sick and missed her Cu Chi Tunnels trip. She was going to try to get on the trip this morning, which made me really excited, but regretfully still felt too bad to go. I got up and went anyway. There was no reason for me to sit on the boat or make other, less-enjoyable plans for my last morning in Vietnam.
The tunnels were amazing, a feat of architecture in my opinion. First thing, we watched a short video about the role of the tunnels and Cu Chi during the war. It didn't seem to favor the Americans in any way. The makers were slightly biased. Then we got to see how the tunnel entrances and traps were camouflaged. Some of the holes are so tiny! They also showed us several of the different types of traps the Viet Cong used. They all looked painful, to say the leas
t. But at the same time they were pretty ingenious.
One type was the bamboo trap. To make it, they dug a hole and stuck sharpened bamboo spikes into the ground. To cover it up they built a rotating floor that had grass on both sides, so someone would step on it, fall in, and it would flip over and look like grass again. So tricky. In another one, if you stepped on it, it would sink down and cause spikes to be driven from all sides into your leg. One worked like a trap door split in the middle: if you stepped on it, you would fall in and spikes would get you in the armpit. I know I'm not explaining this very well. It would be much easier with hand gestures or diagrams. Ask me about them later.
Next they showed us how the VC took apart US unexploded bombs and refashioned them. We walked past a US tank that had been destroyed by a grenade. Then we headed to what was probably the most disturbing part of the tour–the shooting range. Here you could pay to shoot different military guns. Although my conscience was against it, nurse Jane convinced me to shoot an AK-47. “When else will you have this opportunity?” she asked. True, true. And what would I tell Max if I didn't?
So I did. I shot two rounds on an AK-47. At least it wasn't an M-16 or the handgun. It was
not thrilling. Nothing like shark diving. Only really scary and loud. And wrong. Maybe I'm the only one who sees any moral degradation in Americans coming to Vietnam after the war and paying to shoot a gun there. At least they're capitalizing on it, I guess.
I couldn't get over the noise of the gunshots. Before we arrived at the range they really added to the war ambience. But the noise really shook me up for the rest of the tour. I am not surprised that people were so messed up coming back from the war. There is no way I would be able to have any sense of safety, let alone peace, with the constant noise of guns. I would have had PTSD after 24 hours.
At least we got away from the noise in the next part of our tour. We went under ground. I got to actually go through the Cu Chi Tunnels. They were bigger than I had expected. I thought we would have to go through on our stomachs, but you could easily crawl or just hunch down even. Even so, I have no clue how the VC moved through them so fast. I had to stop and rest every few yards. It was so hot down there, too. Not my ideal living space. At least they lit up the tunnels, or else it would have made everyone claustrophobic.
After the tunnels, we saw the kitchen and dining halls. These places were all just sunken rooms that would have had flat roofs blending in with the ground. The smoke from the cooking fire came out through a chimney far away from the kitchen itself. They served us tea and tapioca before we looked at the health center. Even wounded soldiers were transported on stretchers through the tunnels. We passed a crater from a B-52 bomb and piles of artillery that had been collected. There were tons. I can't believe how wasteful and harmful the unexploded bombs were.
I made plans to go see the war remnants museum with Christina after our lunch back on the boat. We took the shuttle into the city and walked a few blocks to the museum. It was pretty busy. It was set up so that you wo
uld go through a series of small rooms with a courtyard in the center. In the courtyard were tanks, a helicopter, howitzers, a jet and smaller airplanes. I think they were all US.
The exhibits were hard to look at. First they showed the different political figures involved and talked about the background of the war. In the second room, there were pictures taken by photographers who wanted the world to know what was going on. Many of them died in the attempt. The pictures were contemporaneously great and terrible. They made me realize how little I know about the Vietnam War.
Most of the pictures in this room depicted scenes that were horrible, yet you knew they were just part of war. There were prisoners of war being loaded up, wounded and tired men in trenches or combat, civilians trying to escape, even men being shot, blown up or already dead. There was a series of pictures of a wounded medic, his eye bandaged so that he could barely see out of one, still caring for another soldier. He spoon fed him as the soldier's head rested on his knee. They were the type of things most people know about and expect from war.
But in the next room, I saw things I had never heard about. There were pictures of villages being burned or bulldozed and their inhabitants being rounded up. The photographers took pictures of the villagers, mostly women and children, just before they were killed. Usually a quote accompanied a picture in its description. There was one that said something like, “I took this picture of them standing huddled together. They were all shaking and crying. As I turned and walked away I heard about 16 shots fired.” Every caption said something similar.
Another picture showed a man screaming in pain as he is being tortured. Another showed a soldier in the act of hitting a suspected Viet Cong with the butt of his rifle. One was of a man falling from a helicopter just after being pushed out. Several were pictures of Americans holding the heads of VC that they had decapitated.
I can't believe that such horrifying actions could be performed by the hands of people who express such high moral standards. They went to Vietnam to bring freedom from suppression to the people. They promote the ideals of the right to life, love and the pursuit of happiness. How could the people whom I live among do such terrible things? When did we become so hypocritical? It's no wonder we can turn our backs on Sudan and Darfur.
I never expected that my heart could be broken so many different ways for so many different reasons. Poverty is something that is hard to fix. It happens everywhere, and I can deal with that. But this torture should never ever happen. I certainly never expected it from us.
The next room wasn't any better, but it dealt with things I knew a little bit about at least. This room was dedicated to the victims
of Agent Orange, Napalm and B-52 bombings. There were several pictures of children with problems that resembled the ones plaguing the children in the orphanage. The famous picture of the girl running down the street after a napalm attack was in this room. Our guide told us the picture was taken in Cu Chi. The next room broke my heart again, but in a good way. It had pictures drawn by school children of world peace and friendship. I don't know how anyone could forgive us for all the terrible things we did in Vietnam (most of which I know nothing about), but these children did. Maybe I'll write about them for my communications paper.
After that room came the “reeducation room,” which were basically jails where the communist north tortured people who had fought against them during the war. I was surprised they would put this in the museum, since the same regime was still in power. There were pictures of the south Vietnamese after they were released from the jail. Most were paralyzed from beatings; several had gotten their limbs amputated. The jail cells looked really cozy with one bed and some buckets of water in them. Signs said that in the summer, the cells would be packed with 5-12 people, and in winter they would put just one person in, cuffed to the bed by his ankles. Guards would walk along above the cells, spitting down into them or dumping lime in. The last thing in that room was the execution chamber with a guillotine.
I didn't get to go into the last room because we had to leave. It was threatening to rain. We still had to go to the post office. We passed the reunification hall on our way. I would have liked to walk around in there for a while too. The post office was a beautiful building. It was right next to Notre Dame church, also beautiful. I got some stamps, sent some postcards, and we set off to catch the shuttle back to the ship.
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