frisco-kid
Senior Member
Registered: August 2001 Posts: 2,574
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The only disturbing place for me on the whole trip was the War Museum in Saigon. I went there after stopping at the Buddhist temple, "U.S. PARATROOPER" hat and all. You pay less than a buck to get in. You then enter a gallery depicting the war in pictures. One of the first displays is of unit patches of all of the American units involved in the war. You then meander through a hall lined with blown-up pictures of U.S. forces in kinda chronological order. The first thing I noticed about them was that they were all taken from Life Magazine, newswire agencys, etc., many of them famous pictures. They were given usually slanted captions. Their museum; I guess they can say whatever they want. Some of them were wrong, also. They had several of the 101st dated when I was with them and the location stated wasn't accurate. They did have one cool picture of us making the jump at Kontum, taken from inside the plane as we exited the door. I don't think I was in it, though. I don't recall a photographer on my plane.
As you exit the building, you go through an outside exhibit of U.S. military equipment. These are the one's I have pictured.
When you cross the exhibit, you enter another building. This is the one I really had a problem with. The whole theme of the exhibit inside is depicting us a s barbarians and war criminals. It starts out with an exhibit explaining Agent Orange; pictures of planes spraying it; topped off with a couple deformed fetuses in jars claiming to be caused by the effects of AO. It then flows into pictures of napalm drops on villes and countryside; pictures of burnt victims; and the centerpiece,.....the little naked girl running down the road away from a napalm strike. The caption conveniently doesn't mention that this was an ARVN Air Force drop. I set the record straight with several Europeans that were near me. It then, of course, went into pictures of My Lai. As I moved through the pictures, I noticed one of the uniformed security guards was watching me. I stopped and locked eyes with him until he looked away. Phuck him. Did the same thing with a couple Europeans that I caught giving me side glances. It then went through a group of pictures of us handling prisoners and dead bodies. One of them was a picture of an APC dragging three bodies down a road. The caption said that the three was dragged to death but, upon a closer look, you could see that one had an obvious GSW to the head. There were others with prisoners being led by ropes around their necks with the caption reading that we treated prisoners worse than we would animals. On the way out of the building there was another room with a sign above it saying something like "Children Remember The War Through Drawings And Writings," or something like that. I could only imagine what half-truths and lies were being presented in there. I was too pissed to go in. I walked out and told my driver lets get the phuck out of here. It might be their museum, but I don't have to like it. I'm sure my body language told them so, too.
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