War Remnants Museum

I was a junior in high school the first time I visited the United States National Holocaust Memorial Museum. Since then, I’ve visited the museum many times; as it is currently part of the Washington, D.C. trip I take with my 8^th graders. Each time I visit, I am shocked by the reality of what the Nazis did, and how many different people stood by and let it happen. The message, however, is what “they” did to “them,” allowing me to feel deeply, but, at the same time, not personally implicated.

The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City is similar to the Holocaust Museum. The exhibits would have been powerful enough to leave me speechless, even if the “aggressor” had not been the United States. The additional impact of seeing images of American soldiers performing incredibly savage acts of brutality, however, was almost more than my physical body could withstand, and I almost had to run to the bathroom. One exhibit was filled with images of tortured Vietnamese people, including woman and children. Another exhibit focused on the impact, long and short term, of Agent Orange, which continues to negatively impact the lives of more than three million Vietnamese people in the form of birth defects, cancers and other disorders.

The reality of any single person being forced to withstanding the type of physical pain and psychological trauma I saw demonstrated in many pictures in the museum instantly made me hate war with even more intensity than I knew I had inside. It also made me scream inside, knowing that, in the eyes of the Vietnamese, we did this to them. And, as an American, I was part of the we. The museum also reaffirmed my belief that the American government should do more to admit responsibility for the problems caused by the dioxin in Agent Orange, which also continues to harm the lives of U.S. Veterans. We cannot change the past; the fact that our government dropped a horrible chemical onto the forests and fields with the goal of destroying foliage, but resulting in deplorable effects. We can, however, change how we respond to the continued impacts of this decision in the future…and I do not think that is too much to ask of my country.