Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and the War Remnants Museum

"We were wrong, terribly wrong.   We owe it to future generations to explain why."

-Robert McNamara, former US Defense Secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations

I knew it  wasn't going to be easy to witness or communicate what Erik and I would see here...

"Guys were about to shoot these people", photographer Ron Haeberle remembered.  "I yelled, 'hold it' and shot my picture.  

As I walked away, I heard M16s open up.  From the corner of my eyes I saw bodies falling, but I didn't turn to look"

Photo taken at Vietnamese village at

Son My, My Lai.  

We had - and have - a moral obligation to have learned something from this, but have we?

The War Remnants Museum tells the story of the "American" (Vietnamese) War from the other side.  

One learns briefly of Vietnam's longstanding struggle for freedom from multiple, historic invaders, but here the story begins with the demise of the French and the arrival of the American imperialists.  

Especially well documented are the horrors and long-term effects of our spraying of agent orange, and of the insidious and long-term effects of its chemical component, dioxin.

Included in the exhibit is a poignant letter sent to President Obama from a young Vietnamese girl, Tran Thi Hoan, born without legs or her left hand and a 2nd generation victim of the effects of dioxin. 

In it, she seeks his (and our) assistance in reparations for this now multi-generational scourge, effecting both Vietnamese and American families.  

A special exhibit features American and other journalists, and the critical role they played, especially in this war, in informing the public of the realities of our undertaking.  

Here, no one's work and words touched us as much as  those of photo journalist Larry Burrows, pictured below in a photo taken three days before he was killed in a helicopter in Laos. 

He'd said: "I will do what is required to show what is happening" and, hauntingly, "I have a sense of the ultimate-death and sometimes I must say "to hell with that."

After leaving the exhibit, and reflecting upon our leadership that had led us into this war, words that I'd learned as a  Catholic child came to mind: "forgive them, for they know not what they do." 

There were far too many other stories to tell and quotes to share, but let's conclude with this one from a "just" war:  

"To initiate a war of aggression is not only a crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evils of the whole." 

-The judgment of the Nuremberg        International Military Tribunal, September 30, 1945.