The War Remnants Museum in HCMC, according to a former ARVN officer who was also my tour guide to the Cu Chi tunnels, is “full of bullshit.” I found the visit worthwhile nonetheless.

Originally named the ‘Exhibition House for US and Puppet Crimes,’ the exhibits show exactly that: the legacy of Agent Orange; the My Lai massacre and similar atrocities; the torture methods used against some political prisoners in South Vietnam’s jails; the bodies of napalm victims; the refusal of some American soldiers to fight, either by defection, desertion, or simply getting thrown into basecamp prisons after deployment; the brutal killing of peaceful anti-war protestors at Kent State, etc. None of it is bullshit, it’s all absolutely true and real and horrific and shameful.

The bullshit Tuan refers to is the total lack of balance: there’s simply nothing about the crimes perpetrated by the Viet Minh; the generations of staunchly anti-communist Northern Vietnamese robbed of their assets and driven from their homes to fight for their lives in the South; the violent post-unification reprisals against known or accused collaborators or capitalists; the decades of refugees fleeing the economic and social isolation of unified Vietnam; the strife between Catholics and Buddhists, the dirty involvement of both sides in the black market drug trade, the fights for and against the Khmer Rouge, the manipulation of ethnic minorities by both sides, the pursuant war with China and mass deportation of ethnic Chinese, the concentration camps where ARVN vets were forced to labor as slaves for up to 30 years, etc. The Indochina Wars are not exactly misrepresented in the museum, it’s just a zoomed in closeup of a panoramic photo.

For the record, I do think the Vietnam War was a crime, and I’m surprised daily at just how hospitable most Vietnamese are to me, an American. Yet I also sympathize with Tuan. He grew up poor in the wartorn Mekong Delta because his family was forced to flee Haiphong as political refugees. He was pushed into the army at 17 and spent 7 years, the prime of his youth, fighting a losing battle. After it was all over, he couldn’t leave his family to go to America, but as a former ARVN officer found it very difficult to get enough work to feed them. Even now, he has to bribe a government official with $400/year for his tour guide license, because former ARVN officers are not legally permitted to work in any educational capacity. I understand his wanting people to know that it was not just a war against foreign oppression, but an ideology based civil war, whose losers weren’t any more evil or wrong than its winners, and for whom the need to fight never really disappeared.

Prior to 1975, the modernist museum building was the Saigon USIA headquarters. Formed in 1953 and abolished in 1999, the USIA (United States Information Agency) was the formal propaganda wing of the US government, at its height employing more people than the top 20 US public relations firms combined. I graduated high school in 2001, and it always surprises people when I say I didn’t learn much, if anything, about the Vietnam War in school. Despite many fathers, uncles, and family friends of people my age being vets, my generation didn’t hear much about it at home either. The thinking then was really shellshocked guys needed talk therapy, and just your average vet could hash things out over drinks once a week at the VFW Post, but it was not a topic for civilians, and certainly not families or kids.

Consequently, I’ve visited every Ho Chi Minh museum, watched every documentary, and read several autobiographical accounts of the war. The most interesting media, in my opinion, are primary sources like contemporary news reels and articles. It’s striking to me how well attested the war was, and how hard the North Vietnamese worked at releasing lots of their own foreign language, especially English language, propaganda. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the lifetime of the USIA spanned roughly from the beginning of America’s involvement in what was then a French war to the lifting of American economic sanctions on and resumption of diplomatic relations with unified, purportedly communist Vietnam. I say purportedly because the reality is that while the United States and Vietnam superficially espouse the diametrically opposed economic models of capitalism and communism respectively, the reality in both countries is socialism and too-big-to-fail style safety nets for a political and economic oligarchy, paid for by the harsh, do or die market capitalism endured by the rest of us. But that’s a topic for another day.

Did the US government bow out of the propaganda game because it’s distasteful, immoral, and unconstitutional, or because it’s a game they couldn’t win? In a country where a government practices “public diplomacy” that can be fact checked, critiqued and debated by a free press, truth is valued, disputed, and exposed. In a country where government workings are increasingly opaque, specifically military action, the free press can only compete with their guesses at the truth or interpretations of it. Running the best researched, hardest hitting, exposés becomes less profitable than running the most superficial, pandering soundbites, the most engaging gossip, or the most controversial, extreme opinions. Limited, poorly presented or even misleading information is proffered by the government rather than checked by it, profited from by the same elite profiting from arms sales. We pay for those weapons and demand no true accountability, decade after decade. It’s ironic, darkly humorous even, that the erstwhile epicenter of American propaganda about Vietnam has become the temple of Vietnamese propaganda about America, and yet the two are now the best of friends.

The Vietnam War is a matter of history, but its legacy, in both the US and Vietnam, is one of lies by omission as government policy, and it’s incredibly dangerous. I see it in America, in the habituation of the taxpaying public to decades-long foreign wars, sometimes several running at once. The average American expects and accepts tens of thousands of ruined lives to be reduced to a forgettable nightly news clip, on every forgettable night, as if that’s the most natural thing in the world. Though the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been exposed as colonialist cash grabs not dissimilar to Vietnam, there is no discourse among lawmakers on how policy can be changed today to prevent the next 20 year-long, taxpayer-funded, corrupt governmental overreach. I see China mimicking the United States’ destructive colonial path, and drumming up vitriol with their aggression towards Taiwan and in the South China Sea. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown us the dangers of indulging the territorialist aspirations of those who profit from the military-industrial complex by allowing them to buy and sell our political leaders. Are we already as powerless as citizens of China and Russia?

To quote the September 12th 1969 front page article of Shakedown, the antiwar newspaper written semi-anonymously by Fort Dix GIs:

Peace will come when we want it. Most American people would rather sit around watching TV than do something about all this slaughter. How many more people have to die before something will change in our “liberal” government system? It’s up to all of us. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC POWER MUST BE CONTROLLED BY THE PEOPLE — not the rich, fascist elite of Washington and Wall St. IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF ALL PEOPLE TO SEIZE THAT POWER. BRING THE WAR ON HOME!

That was 52 years ago. 52! I’d be very lucky to be alive in another 52 years. When will America change?