"yet we were wrong, terribly wrong...

...and we owe it to future generations to explain why."

--robert mcnamara
former us defense secretary, on confessing to the errors of vietnam in his memoirs.




..

as we walked through the entry gates to the museum, we were greeted by tanks, planes, and helicopters. it was such a strange feeling, almost empowering even, to see our planes and "us army" plastered across the courtyard in another country.




there were probably four planes and a few tanks to the side, along with a helicopter. it was all in perfect condition, and it looked like it could take off again, complete with the machine gun still in place.




these are the tools we, the strongest country in the world, used during the war. but this was a feeling that wouldn't last long.

we knew that the war remnants museum of saigon was going to be our priority in the city and also difficult. i didn't think anything would be able to match tuol sleng. i was right about that, but, as a whole, we were again slightly wrong in how we would be effected.

our american pride was again fueled as soon as we walked in the door. to the left, the words on which our country is based hung on the wall in bright yellow letters against a black background. remebered smiling as i read this, and i missed home. this is what i love about where i'm fromt. it's why we're so powerful-- our devotion to the citizens of our country. and here it hangs, in the middle of communist vietnam.




unfortunately, that's where the pride ended.

..

there were five exhibits in the museum, and it was best to go in order one through five. after the first two, alex and i both had to sit down. maybe it will be best to write out my thoughts in the middle of the visit then explain what we saw. this is what i wrote:

i hope i never again feel the way i do right now. having taken my first trip abroad in 2004, six year s ago, in the middle of my internationally-recognized joke-of-a-president's rule, i didn't care who knew i was american despite the pathetic label we got. i didn't care who thought i was arrogant or unintelligent, i was always proud to say it: "i'm american." who wouldn't be? i've always been proud of my country and couldn't imagine being born elsewhere.

i've never been so ashamed, the way i am right now. i don't want to open my mouth, don't want to talk to alex, or even ask for a bottle of water, in case someone would pick up on my accent and know that i'm from a place that could rule to do these atrocities.

tuol sleng was hard because it was so sad. this, however, is just shaming. i am humiliated that my country's history is part of this. we have never, persay, "lost" a war, so we are never taught anything but victory in school. but even though we're the united states, and i'm reminded all the time here that my country is strong and wonderful, we're not perfect. we ignore the aftermath and atrocities of the innocent victims of war. how many civilians have to die before our government considers it unacceptable? was this invasion really for the betterment of vietnam's society, or did it become for our own sake? i think about how selfish it was, not to mention bewildering to the entire world.

sure, we owe $1.52 million a year to these victims, but there are over five million people effected by it, in addition to all of those who died. you can't apologize for killing someone, and money doens't bring them back. you can't apologize for emotional instability, ruining the genetic makeup of a person so that a mother has twelve miscarriages before giving birth to a child who can't live a life remotely close to normal. it makes me wonder how many people in the war in iraq today don't believe in their cause.

just because we have the economy and resources to enter war this way doesn't mean we should. we don't know the pain vietnam does. i don't know what it's like to watch my village be shot, to starve, to have a sibling that can't function without help, to have my country's beautiful natural resources in ruins and live with the life-thretening effects of other people's mistakes.

and most agent orange children don't even live long enough to understand that they are alive.

..

the first two rooms had been somewhat simple, describing the history of the war. it was quite confusing at first, not nearly as straightforward as i thought. thank you, dr. fogarty, for teaching me about cannibalism my entire spring semester instead of something relevent in world history. we couldn't quite grasp why it was necessary for the us to be involved in the war, and by the end of the day, we realized why we never figured it out. i have a new respect for the vietnam war memorials-- our troops died for another country that didnt really want our help, in a war we didn't belong.

there were tons of stories across the walls, along with a large section devoted to the journalists and photographers who lost their lives trying to report back home.




robert chapa's story was one of the more touching ones, and if you click on the photograph it should enlarge the picture enough for you to read. there was a book, probably three inches thick, with one page dedicated to each photographer or journalist who was killed. their stories ranged from those who watched bombs just yards in front of them, taking pictures moments after it happened, and the roll of film ends as a useless camera lies next to the photographer's body... to those who were brave enough to sacrifice themselves to save soldiers in times of desparation.




it's because of them that we have the photographs of this capacity.

..

there was an unmarked exhibit between rooms two and three. alex and i walked in to large photographs of children, each with captions. we read three or four before looking at each other wondering what they all had in common, or why disabled youth was plastered all over this room, and it hit us at the same time. agent orange.

agent orange is a chemical compound called dioxin, a herbicide to be exact. it was literally created to destroy forestry, shrubery, or any natural plantlife in which an enemy could hide. tdcc, a chemical found in the herbicide, is extremely harmful to man. it's known to be fatal, cause cancers, and cause major birth defects. the following are two of the photographs and captions from the exhibit.




nguyen thi men is twenty-one years old and lvies in vu thu district, thai binh province. all day long, men attempts to chew and swallow anything within her grasp. suddenly, as she recognizes her father, she extends her hand through her enclosure, reaching for him. her father, nguyen van hang, spent time fighting in the truong son mountains. he was contaminated by agent orange.




this is the radiant face of thuy linh, whose miraculous legs have helped her overcome being born without arms. her determination is another miracle that has enabled her to become a gifted painter and to have a future filled with hope and promise. linh's grandfather, a helicopter mechanic who handled agent orange from 1962-1970, passed away from lukemia in 1972. now tu du hospital in hoa binh village is caring for linh.

this was when we took our much-needed break.

..

we continued on to the next room that was filled with more of our unjust atrocities of the war. on the wall, a sign stated:

in march 1965, the us government sent its troops to vietnam. all us soldiers received a booklet called "a new war style," stating "we come here to help the people of southeast asia from communist aggression and oppression. by that action, we can boost the security for the united states." but what the us soldiers had done was arrest and kill normal people, including children, women, and the elderly, destroying houses, schools, hospitals, spraying defoliants to devestate forests and crops..."

photographs of inhumane actions carried by our soldiers, such as this one, filled the room. another point in which i hated who i was. maybe this is why i could never be part of something so intense, maybe my liberalism, my compassion, but i feel that even an enemy has rights and should be kept dignified, dead or alive. both sides of a war fight passionately, but no one person in the war itself is the war itself, and this man is no exception. it's enough to kill, but that's what happens in war, and for that i'll understand. but to humiliate the dead is unquestionably unacceptable, and i am repulsed.




no one was spared. women, children, the elderly, men, villagers, troops. there were about three million people killed in the war. two million of them were civilians.




the caption to this photograph read, "tell the whole world what they did to my daughter," as this father stands next to his battered child. she can't be more than five or seven years old. later in the museum, color photographs were displayed, focusing on the massacres that occured later in the war.




the photographer of this picture stated, "most were women and babies. it looked as if they tried to get away."

..

the only amount of hope i even had stood in the photographs of us protests during the war. it was warming that citizens of our country were just as troubled by the war as i was in the museum. in fact, there were protest pictures from all over the world- literally. i looked at photographs from laos, malaysia... australia... new zealand... finland... denmark, sweeden, the netherlands, france, switzerland, belgium, italy, austria, norway, romania, chez republic, albania, russia, hungary, bulgaria, congo, egypt, guinea, chile, mexico, palestine, venezuela, india... it literally seemed that the world was against us. rightfully so.

the vietnamese were largely appreciative of these countries.




after all, if it's communism that the people of this country want, and they're treated fairly by their government, who are we to stop them?

..

in the last room, the conclusions were drawn. another plaque stated, "the war ended, but many people still do not enjoy happiness. in vietnam, 35 years have passed since the war stopped, but countless people have been suffering from agent orange, physical and mental wounds, missing people, orphans, and more."




photographs of more agent orange victims were scattered about the room. there was even a fetus that hadn't survived, preserved in a large tank. by agreement through the un, the us is to pay 1.52 million dollars a year to these people. the us was found guilty of ecocide, and even worse, according to the bertrand russel tribunal-stockholm session, the us government "is guilty of genocide vis-a-vis the vietnamese people."




who wants to be from a country that is accused of genocide?

..

i'd still never change my home for the world. i'm still proud to be american, to tell the people of vietnam that that's my country. i love my country. but to feel stripped of the pride i've always held for my home country, for which i've always had so much respect, that day was an awful feeling... and to see the unglorified parts of our history hurt. but i can't wait to come home and be on american soil again.

..





Y rae. racho. d.

choueng ek

no worries, i can't really say it either. they're just referred to as the killing fields.

..

even after my twenty-eight page senior seminar paper for doctor galloway on the inaccuracy and inability of language to describe life, i'm frustrated with the following attempt to get you all to truly understand what alex and i have experienced in cambodia. and i know that's how language works, that it doesn't. trust me, after jen payne and i scrambled for a solid forty-eight hours to compile our quality papers, we tried to learn a few things. maybe if i could speak five languages and you could understand those five i'd be able to throw together some mix, but english just isn't going to cut it. you'll have to think about these.

..

it has been about four days since we were actually on these fields, and i have about the same amount of words to say now as i did before. i thought maybe i'd be able to process a few things, formulate something with which i could explain, but i really can't. looking at these pictures for the first time since they were taken-- i never even looked at the back of the camera as they were shot-- the same wave of pity came back over me and i still can't quite understand.

tuol sleng itself was quite difficult, but there, things were untouched. counting systems for the cells was still in plain sight, the beds that victims slept in were still in the same rooms, and there was question as to what we saw on the walls and floors was still dried blood. but the killing fields have been manipulated, excavated. the grass has to be mowed, landscaping has been done, most of the buildings were torn down, and the ground is now large holes. it was hard to grasp what happened here rather than just look around and see mounds of dirt, but to wrap my mind around everything the place represented was asking a lot.

..

after a forty-five minute moto ride in which alex and i, again, thought we'd lose our lives, our crazy driver stopped at the front gate. much of the ride there, he tried to teach us khmer, then he wouldn't stop talking about the duck soup he would eat while he waited for us. he must make this drive fairly often, and it caught me off-guard that he actually looked forward to it, even for the simplest reason.

we weren't sure what we'd see today, but we had an idea. we walked in and got our tickets.




this beautiful building was the first thing we saw past the ticket counter. it has a typical asian / buddhist silhouette, with gorgeous landscaping out front. assuming it was commemorative, a monument, i took a few photographs from the outside.




this sign was out front, along with the numerous signs that asked us to keep our noise level as low as possible while we walked through the fields.




it was a tribute to all of the victims, with the count being somewhere between 1.4 and 2 million people. since there were no records kept, this is as accurate as it gets. this particular field has a definite count of 14,000 dead, but with those unaccounted for and the facts from the excavation included, they feel that 20,000 is more accurate.

how do you lose sight of six thousand people?

..

i walked closer to the building, and as i did, i was able to start making out that it wasn't just a building, but it encased something. i kept stepping closer, but stopped about fifty feet back. i've done the research by now, and i've seen the pictures, video on the fields, and heard stories about what is there. i should have known.




the building is home to thousands of skulls that were brought up from the fields. i stepped inside, and though glass covered those higher in the building, i was face to face with the skull in front of me. holes had been cut out of the glass at eye-level so tourists could take photographs of what was in front of them.

amongst the skulls sat a sign that simply read "15-20 yrs women."

can you call a 15-year old a woman? or is child a better word?




many of them bared testimony to the tragic deaths they suffered with holes and large cracks facing towards us, on display as if to say "it's true, here's the proof". we had seen this back at tuol sleng, but knowing that it had been dug up only a few hundred yards away was one of the few things i could wrap my mind around. these aren't the plastic skulls you find at halloween. and these weren't donated to science like the skeleton that hangs in nininger.




these people had no choice, they died simply for existing.

..

signs like this one were placed around the entrance area, marking the placement of certain buildings and stops along the way. this particular one shows where the building in which they kept hammers and other tools for bludgeoning, but it was destroyed right after the vietnamese drove the khmer rouge out of phnom penh. in fact, every relevent building was destroyed, most likely out of hate for their actions.




though i understand this and don't mind at all, it's partially what made understanding where we were so difficult. besides the skulls, there was nothing to visually mark the tragedy of the history here. sure, there were signs and words and holes in the ground, but we had to stand and look and think until our heads couldn't do it anymore.

there were a couple of these fenced in areas. this one in particular was right as we walked in the fields themselves, which were located behind the building. i just can't understand four-hundred and fifty people.




the area itself was so small, and couldn't have been longer than fifteen feet wide.




i try to figure-- were they all killed at the same time? in groups? over one day? three days? did they just dig a large hole and fill it in by the day until it was the same height as the ground? and i usually stop there. it's something i can't even let my mind wander off to now while i type.




this sign marked the grave of 166 more people, and i'm not sure how they were able to figure this out.

these bodies had no skulls to help in the victim count. they had been beheaded.

..

we contined on, and the property of the killing fields included a short walk around this lake. i wondered why, because there wasn't really anything behind it. maybe the government understood that people would need to spend a great deal of time here, and wanted to give them somewhere to which they could wander. but it just didn't seem right to see something so tranquil in the middle of a place that had been filled with sounds of death and pain only thirty years ago.




after we finished our walk around the pond, we came out on the other end of the fields. in the middle of them was a large tree. this sign states that it was the "magic tree, used as a tool to hang a loudspeaker," which made sounds louder than the screams of the victims. this was so anyone who lived in the surrounding communities couldn't hear what was going on as people were being executed.




we stood for a bit, and alex decided this was the point in which she was done. there were only a few more things to see, so i thought i'd walk on. it was difficult to get photographs that could illustrate the number of graves in the area, and this was one of the few where you don't have to search for them.

in some places, there were even signs and ropes that held people back from unknowingly stepping on the sites.




i stumbled upon one more mass grave site, and though i don't remember how many were killed here, it was all women and children who had been stripped naked. it wasn't until i walked around the perimeter that i noticed this sign. the bones next to it had been dug up here, and their broken edges illustrate the beatings.




i walked back towards the entrance, slowly now, trying to understand and absorb my surroundings, but i had still couldn't quite do it.

though i walked out the same way i walked in, i noticed something i hadn't before. alex and i had to walk around a large roped-off area on the main pathway right as we had entered the fields. we didn't really pay attention to what was there, but as i walked by, this particular image caught me by surprise. i crouched down and realized that it was a bone, burried in the dirt.




in fact, all of these white specks in this picture are pieces of bone. it seems that they had recently discovered this grave and hadn't yet gotten the chance to excavate it. it was surreal-- bodies that had yet to be accounted for and given a proper burial after thirty years. this was as true-to-history as the killing fields got, and i couldn't have asked for a more straight-forward visualization to help me comprehend.




the mass graves in general seemed so small, this one in particular, and i can't understand how so many people could stand, kneel, shoulder to shoulder.

i sat down at the end of my walk and felt both frustration and unsettlement at my lack of reaction to where i was. the air was quiet, and the few people who talked were barely above a whisper. this was the first day there had been a slight breeze, but the air was so dry, and everything seemed to stand still, or move in slow motion.

as we walked out, our moto driver stood ready for us. he asked what we thought, but neither of us knew what to say. he was around forty-five years old, meaning he had lived through everything. he said to us,

"i don't understand. why khmer kill khmer?"

but we obviously weren't the ones to ask.

..






Y rae. racho. d.