A day in Saigon

Three museums offer exhibits on the American war. They are pretty much in the same section of the city, so yesterday morning we set off on foot before the day heated up. After half an hour a cyclo driver spotted us consulting a map. Ken-like, he assured us that we still had a long way to go to the Museum of the City of Ho Chi Minh City. Then one of his confederates appeared, and we climbed aboard the two bike-rickshaws. We were suspicious, but we were already sweating through our T-shirts. The museum, yes, was only a hundred meters farther, and we had been mildly scammed. But you do want to help the cyclo drivers. Many were teachers and other professionals under the old regime and were denied employment under the communists. They barely survive. Joe's driver, though, cheerfully remarked midway in the short ride that he had been Viet Cong. Joe could think of not a single appropriate response.

The City museum is in a former French palace set among lovely gardens and less attractive artillery pieces. It depicts, mostly through photographs, the history of the communist struggle in Vietnam, dating back to the 1930s, then the French resistance and the American. There are tableaus of smirking workers and heroic portraits of Ho Chi Minh and other notables. The texts are full of the lingo of the era, lots of French colonialists, American imperialists and their puppets and lackeys. It feels loony, not just because few people on earth employ these terms anymore without irony or embarrassment, but because the museum is in a neighborhood that in significant ways now resembles downtown Fort Lauderdale. Look out one of the museum's big windows and you see the HSBC Bank tower. (In Luang Prabang, I saw a farang tourist wearing a red T-shirt with a gold hammer and sickle on the front. Sondheim: "First you're just a sloe-eyed vamp/ Then somebody's mother/ Then you're camp.")

The Reunification Palace is the former presidential palace of President Thieu. Built in 1963, not a great year anywhere for architecture, it's Texas A&M Student Union-modern on the outside, Scranton Sheraton on the inside. Down in the basement you can visit Thieu's bunker---it is spare---and then hike up to the roof to view the helipad from which the last American puppet flew into oblivion in April, 1975. It's a singularly unattractive place, but it's a perfect historical artifact. It instantly conjures up images of American diplomats in crewcuts and skinny neckties grinning and urging a corrupt regime to hang in there, guys, there's light at the end of the tunnel.

The War Remnants Museum is hard to take. Again, it's mostly photographs. It's got all the famous ones---you know what they are---plus many, many more that are far more graphic. These are the pictures of atrocities and grotesque bombing wounds and injuries that Americans are kept from seeing for reasons of "taste." To its credit, the museum also shows the grief and suffering of American soldiers. The awful tiger cages of Con Son Island, where the Thieu regime kept political prisoners, have been recreated here with convincing detail. The most depressing thing at the museum is a documentary film about the effects on civilians of Agent Orange and other toxic defoliants the U.S. dropped by the B-52-load on many areas of Vietnam. The filmmakers assert plausibly that a million Vietnamese were killed, sickened or deformed by what amounted to chemical warfare. In some regions many of the families had painfully deformed children. We've seen some of the survivors on the streets of Saigon, where they sell lottery tickets.