Almost everyone’s heard of the Vietnam War. It’s taught in schools, dramatized in films, and many veterans are still alive today. But most people, including myself, don’t actually know much about it beyond a handful of images and slogans.
Before visiting Vietnam, I’d only just started learning about the devastating legacy of UXOs in Laos. So I knew I couldn’t miss the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. What else didn’t I know about the Vietnam War?
The War Remnants Museum doesn’t hold back.
Some exhibits are hard to look at. They don’t just show the destruction left behind in Vietnam; they lay bare the raw impact of the war on everyone it touched. The Vietnamese, the Americans, and neighbouring countries. Soldiers and civilians, including children. It’s not one-sided, but it is brutally honest.
One thing I noticed was the language. The U.S. military are often described as invaders or occupiers. Which is accurate. But it struck me that we never used those words when I studied the war in school. I’m not sure I’d call it sugarcoating, but we never said those words out loud. We never wrote them in our essays.
Of course, the museum details the horrific effects of the war on the Vietnamese population. The “justification” for the war. The napalm that turned jungle to ash. The Agent Orange that poisoned the land and the people. The civilian casualties. The decimation of rural communities. I thought I knew some of this already, but there were still moments that shocked me.
One section honours the journalists who died reporting the war, both foreign and domestic, North and South. At least 63 reporters were killed across the 20-year conflict.1 Their deaths are a reminder that war doesn’t just kill soldiers. It kills the truth-tellers too.
What hit me hardest, though, were the long-term effects of Agent Orange. I knew it was a defoliant meant to strip the enemy of jungle cover and food. But I hadn’t realised how toxic it was to people. It causes cancer, stillbirths and birth defects. Genetic mutations caused by Agent Orange would last for generations. It didn’t just poison the Vietnamese: U.S. soldiers exposed to it suffered too. And they brought the consequences home with them.
The final exhibit focuses on the Tet Offensive, a turning point that helped the Viet Cong reclaim ground in the South. It shattered the illusion that the war was winnable. As protests exploded across the U.S.A., public opinion turned. The U.S.A. withdrew. The war ended.
But, of course, this is only a glimpse of what I saw, and an even smaller fragment of the full story. I’ve learned more about this war in the past few weeks than I did in years of school. And the more I learn, the more I feel we all need to learn.
Because once you understand how these wars begin, how they escalate, and how they end you start to see the same patterns repeating in today’s world. The same rhetoric. The same outcomes.
No one wins. Except the powerful few who send children to kill and die in their name.
War is good for nothing. Maybe the only way to end war is to truly understand that.
- For reference, over 200 journalists have been killed by the IDF during the last 2/3 years of the Gaza Genocide. ↩︎
