In 1977 I was amongst a company of infantry soldiers who travelled to complete an exchange with a company from the 101st Airbourne Division. Their badge was the Screaming Eagle and one was looking down on me from the Huey and Chinook helicopters standing in the entrance yard. My time in the States was a mere two years after the Americans finally pulled out of Saigon. I was 17 in 1975 and watched the last hours unfurl via the news - it was strange to be in the actual city that fell in the end to the North Vietnamese.
The next exhibit was a mock up of the jails that the Americans and South Vietnamese held their prisoners from the north captive. It was grim stuff with affidavits from prisoners, some who went on to become members of the government. Others were not so fortunate.
Of course a lot of what was on display could have been propaganda. We know of situations on the reverse side of the coin that made the North look just as bad. However, nothing could have prepared us for the gallery containing photographs of the victims of Agent Orange, the US's attempt to defoliate the jungle but just left a generation of children deformed with chronic and heartbreaking genetic defects.
Most people walked through that gallery in silence while a few morons decided to take selfies with the unfortunates being their back drop. In another gallery there was a fitting tribute to the war correspondents and cameramen/women that died from both sides, this war certainly tugs at the heartstrings forty years later. (The final evacuation of Saigon was on 23rd April 1975).
On our way out we were stopped by a man with both arms missing up to the elbow, a leg up to the knee and one eye blinded. He was selling books about the war, he'd stepped on a land mine as a youth - we bought something from him!
After that emotional visit we decided to walk to a restaurant we'd been recommended to try out. I plotted the journey in Google Maps and off we went. En-route we passed the Independance Palace, once the Presidential Palace. That was before April 75 when a Russian built T54 tank crashed through the palace gates, an image that flashed round the world through the news media of the day.
It hadn't been on the agenda but we paid a small amount to get in and what an eye opener it turned out to be.
To begin with we got photos of that tank I mentioned and secondly the 4th annual ASEAN Chief Justice Ministers Conference was due to take place the next day. Ho Chi Min beamed down from a giant poster unfurled from the palace roof, you'd think he was still alive! A massive security and gardening job was going on but we still got in.
The place was steeped in history, well it would be in a country that was at war for many years. Nixon, Kissinger and Ford had all been here to parle with the S Vietnamese president and the whole building was dripping in artefacts, grand carpets and stunning rooms. We had access from the very top where there was a helicopter positioned on the roof to the cellar which had been the wartime bunker and control centre.
We eventually did make it to the restaurant - it was closed until the evening. A taxi was hailed and we went back to clean up. After a quick one in the Champion Bar we went back to the restaurant, the Huong Lai on Ly Ty Trong, still in District 1. It had in fact been recommended by my sister and brother in law who'd been in Saigon the week before us, it had a unique selling point.
Service staff and some in the kitchens are either former street children, orphans or from poor families; the restaurant with its ongoing hospitality training provides them an opportunity to better their lives. The restaurant itself offered pure Vietnamese home cooking cuisine, it was sublime and the service would have embarrassed that at a top city restaurant anywhere. Indeed, one of the male waiting staff has now been headhunted by a top hotel in downtown Saigon. Mission (in my book) accomplished.
After a few drinks back on the street we had an early night before another early rise for the plane back to Bangkok.
We were leaving behind a fast growing re-emerged country which has lived through the horrors of war, reunified as one country and is looking forward as far as I can see to a burgeoning tourist and hospitality industry. The past it seems has almost been forgiven ( against the French and Americans) but never forgotten. However, there is a new gallery in the war museum entitled DOVE, a children's education centre, surely the place to begin teaching modern day values to the future custodians of what we have found to be a facinating and friendly country.
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