The average speed of life in Ho Chi Minh City seemed to have calmed somewhat as we ventured out again today. Or maybe I am simply less jet lagged. Either way, everything feels a bit less like wading through treacle and a bit more discernible as a flow I can go with. I have found my meandering trickle of pond water to sail on, alongside M's calm lakes - and it's all just, well, easier. I will be a seasoned traveller in no time. Perhaps by tommorrow. I will basically be Columbus. Minus, (hopefully) the colonial tendencies. And that time scale is perfectly reasonable. I guarantee it.
Today's main events were the War Remnants Museum, dedicated to the 17 year Vietnam/American War (more on the aptness or otherwise of its title later) and the Water Puppet Show.
The latter takes place in a garishly beautiful theatre, featuring a pool of water out of which wooden puppets rise, swim and generally carry out their business, accompanied by a small band of musicians playing and singing traditional Vietnamese music. The show is a compilation of small vignettes, depicting such things as peaceful life in the countryside (a child rides a water buffolo, playing a flute), magical creatures doing what comes naturally (the pheonix falls in love with another pheonix, lays an egg and dances with its newly hatched young, the dragons play with a ball, squirt water and breathe fire. All in a day's work really). It's harmonious, innocent and pure - and feels rather like watching children play, except without the suspicious connotations. It's unlikely that working the puppets is child's play, though. They rise out of the water and the operatives, when they come out to take their bows, are wet. Whether with sweat or water I am not sure - I deliberately didn't try too hard to penetrate the illusion. Coming straight after the crushing lack of humanity searingly demonstrated through the sizable War Remnants Museum, it's like breathing fresh air after long confinement - no, better, it's like eating a stick of rock at the seaside, whilst breathing fresh air after long confinement.
One of the stories illustrated by the Water Puppets is a legend in Vietnamese history, of a warring king, who, whilst striding/sailing about, presumably brandishing his weaponry and attempting to conquer neighboring nations he liked the look of (or didn't), encounters a magical giant tortoise, who swims up to him calmly, looks him in the eye and then takes his sword in its mouth, out of his hands, and swims away with it. The King interprets the tortoise' message as a warning to stop fighting to win other nations and concentrate on ensuring the nation he already rules is healthy and prosperous. He lives on to be a great King.
The Vietnam War, as named by Americans, and the American War, as named by the Vietnamese, are one and the same, horrifying thing. Of course history is not necessarily only written by the victors, but by everyone according to their personal viewpoint. I am one of the most historically ignorant people you could meet and my understanding of the Vietnam war as told by American and English novels and films centered largely on wading through mud fighting an enemy much more used to the territory, and the shockingly cruel treatment of soldiers caught by the Vietnamese in prisoner of war camps. The American War, it turns out, was a systematic burning and destroying of Vietnam as an ecology, troops of rampaging GIs burning down villages and killing and disembowelling innocent women and children. Oh, and apparently the prisoner of war camps involved starvation and torture. Odd. I've heard something similar to that somewhere before.
The museum focuses on the effects of Agent Orange which has wiped out or severely deformed second and third generations after the war was over and the general acts of aggression perpetrated by American soldiers. These are more or less undeniable (though obviously this is not to generalise across all American soldiers).
What the museum leaves me entirely uncertain about is what on earth was the point of all this in the first place. Nowhere could I find a clear explanation of what had happened, and in fact, far from immediately consuming our figurative stick of rock, M and I repair to a coffee house and try to get it straight in our minds.
As far as my limited understanding goes, the story goes like this:
Communism uprisings were happening here and there in various countries in South East Asia and the west, America in particular, were concerned. Then a guerilla force, called the Viet Cong, established themselves in the South of Vietnam, funded by and affiliated with the communist regime in North Vietnam and began attacking the people of southern Vietnam. At this point, I think, the 'war' was between south Vietnam and the Viet Cong. America then stepped in to help the afflicted people and farmers in South Vietnam. Somehow, after that, everything became rather more murky, and American soldiers began to attack Southern Vietnam, and, allegedly, to kill even the farmers, women and children they had been recruited to protect. I imagine this was less unrestrainedly evil than it sounds - these were frightened soldiers who had already been fighting for some time and for whom the enemy, being guerrilla soldiers, were unidentifiable from the common people. A culture of suspecting everybody is not wholly unpredictable. Also, given the American tactics for protection of the Southern people, which may have been a little heavy handed, the people of South Vietnam may have come to regard them as an enemy oppressor long before things got to the stage where GIs were murdering housewives. Of course the escalation of war led to the use of pesticides and chemical weaponary and the rest, unfortunately (or fortunately) is history. Accordingly to the tone of the museum, by the end of the war, the American's themselves had become the enemy and, probably because of their access to the more sophisticated weapons, this is because they had become the largest threat.
The whole thing is deeply depressing. What begins as an act of heroism ends terribly, hundreds and thousands of people suffer and die in awful ways, and the human capacity for cruelty is astounding. It isn't helped by the knowledge that, by the time the American soldiers finally pulled out of the conflict, and returned home, the majority of the world had been protesting to demand the end of the fighting,the American people included. Instead of a parade, they returned, tired, hungry, deeply disturbed by the events they had seen and often gravely injured to find approbation among the public, and little of no support and care.
It seems like a catalogue of hilarious misunderstandings, only without the hilarity. Why do we do this? How do nations gets themselves into this entanglement? How did this go on for 17 years? How after such a long time of onslaught with such generationally and ecologically wounding methods, is the country of Vietnam even here at all?
So you see, I am quite pleased, actually, to see swarms of motorbikes. Ho Chi Minh City's vitality has never seemed quite so welcome.
But I still can't help thinking, in those 17 years, where oh where were all the tortoises?
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