War and All His Friends

Remnants of War Museum

I knew it would be too much but I went anyway. How dare I be an American in Vietnam and not acknowledge our acrimonious history?

Still. Stepping into the Remnants of War Museum felt foreboding.

The bottom floor, open-aired with only two full walls encompassing the place, is mostly news-clipping style photographs, the occasional poster. Australia’s presence in the war- the Australian people demanding they not be involved.

A soft opening. A whisper before shouting, before the throat stripped raw to silence.

On the upper floors the brutality of war is unleashed; never mind the perspective.

History is written by the winners...or, when there are no winners, by whoever tells the story. And this story is very much Vietnam’s. No matter, there is no gentle way to spin a story about a country divided and its allies/enemies, and the horror unleashed when soldiers are required to strip the humanity of the “enemy” in order to do their governments’ bidding.

I am the child of a Vietnam Veteran. In the shadow of the hell unleashed here, where I lay my head for the next few weeks, I weep for my father and the men and women like him. I weep for the men and women he and they fought against.

The pictures lay naked the truth American schools don’t tell. Not just the damage of the guns to flesh, or even the chemicals to a verdant landscape burned bare, but the legacy of those things. Pictures of children born decades later and still they suffer the calamities of their birthplace. The calamities America spearheaded.

Before and after agent Orange

The weapons of war litter the grounds of the museum. Tanks and planes and over-sized guns. I watched a young man pose for a picture next to a weapons larger than him- he mockingly put two fingers to his temple – the pantomime of a gun- and grinned as his friend captured the moment. I stared in horror. Someone operated that weapon. Someone died, a casualty of that weapon.

"Mother' a statue made of leftover mortar

A few decades behind us and somehow this weapons of destruction is seen only as a prop in an online profile.

As I ponder when humans will stop wreaking devastation wherever we go, I think of that young man. I think of our ability to be blind to the suffering of millions, the loss, the pain.

If we do not remember, if the bloody and mangled bodies immortalized in pictures do not prick our sense of empathy and dread, then I fear we are always headed for the next atrocity at our own hands. And it won’t matter which side tells the story, the death will be the same.