Vietnam – emerging from the dark tunnels of tragedy

In 1945 Ho Chi Minh declared full independence for a united Vietnam, after long history of occupation from China and more recently France. 

It took 10 years for the French to completely leave the south, only to be gradually replaced by the Americans, who wanted to stop and reverse the spread of communism down from China and Russia.

Today, we visited the famous Cu Chi tunnels outside Saigon – a complex warren of underground arteries, just wide enough for the Viet Cong guerrillas to hide in the day and to emerge to kill the American soldiers at night. 

The tunnels are too small in diameter for the majority of the  larger American GIs to squeeze into. That’s if they survived the hidden death traps and snake pits strategically placed in the jungle. We saw a selection of these traps – all of which resulted in soldiers being impaled on spikes to bleed to death. 

My wife ventured into one of the tunnels, I didn’t dare. I’m not good with small spaces.

By 1975, twenty years later, 58,000 Americans had died and 300,000 been injured – with absolutely no progress made against the communist incursions.

I remember the clamour across the world for America to pull out of Vietnam and to bring the remaining troops home.

Finally America withdrew, licking its awful bloody wounds, and inevitably Saigon fell to the Viet Cong. Vietnam was reunited as a communist state, liberated from Western occupation.

Those are the facts and the terrible and tragic American story.

Today we visited the War Remnants Museum in Saigon. Here we saw the same tragic story from the Vietnamese side. We literally saw it – with our eyes – in a room full of graphic photographs and video film. Awful pictures of GIs injured and dying in dirt and mud. Fortunately for us, mainly in black and white to spare us the more shocking impact. 

One could only begin to imagine the pain and despair of those poor young men and then their families when they received news of their deaths. All 68,000 of them – plus those vets who returned home with horrible injuries. We had been to the Somme battlefields earlier in the year – here was the same horror 50 years later. 

What we hadn’t heard about was the outrageous genocide (and that was the official verdict) of innocent civilians – men, women and children – by American troops. Peasant farmers and their family members shot, beheaded, disemboweled. Others tortured and imprisoned in shockingly tiny tiger cages. We saw some of those and held our breath.

We also saw and touched a large concrete drain in which three young children hid in terror whilst their parents were shot, only to be discovered and executed themselves in a horrible way. I had to leave at this point, my stomach sickened and my eyes filling with tears. 

We run out of adjectives – outrageous, tragic, sickening , awful. We run out of nouns – despair, pain, futility, horror. None of these words feel adequate for what we read and saw. And we were only seeing it on photos 50 years later, from a safe distance. The reality was a million times worse.

Today, as we have witnessed on our tour of north and south, half a century on, Vietnam is a united, peaceful and prosperous country

The price of that was indescribably horrific and laced with heart-rendering individual human tragedies.

And yet, there is some compensation in seeing a country which survived and ultimately prospered. People who smile and are friendly. Their togetherness and deep family connections rooted in shared memories.

Emerging out of the dark tunnels of inhumanity and imprisonment, into the light of freedom and peace.