The Cu Chi Tunnels & the Disneyfication of the Vietnam War
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After almost two weeks in Vietnam, our triptoday to the Cu Chi Tunnels outside Saigon was the first time we visited a site connected to the Vietnam War. In the 1960s, the tunnels were a key defense for Viet Cong fighting the U.S. in South Vietnam. Tthe area was the site of intense battles as the Americans tried to find and destroy the tunnel system, which is now open to tourists. Unfortunately, our visit was the opposite of conducive to serious contemplation of the war and its effects on Vietnam.
We went expecting to be educated about the history of the Viet Cong and the war. But what we found was more like a theme park. Guides show off horrifying spiked “man-traps” as if they were nifty toys and talk about the “hard life” lived by Viet Cong soldiers in the tunnels without offering detail or compassion for their plight. Western tourists laugh as they try to fit themselves into the impossibly narrow chutes that served as entrances to the tunnels. An American tank that was destroyed by a landmine — presumably killing the soldiers inside — is now a photo-op. Animatronic Viet Cong soldiers demonstrate how they disassembled American bombs and used the ordnance to build hand grenades. And worst of all, the “highlight” of the tunnels is a shooting range, where visitors can practice with AK-47s for $2 per bullet. Instead of a history museum, the tunnels have been turned into a historical theme park. It’s Disneyland, Viet Cong style.
The best moments of the two-hour visit were also the worst — namely, our 5-minute foray into one of the actual tunnels. Even though they have been expanded and partially lit-up for tourists, the tunnels are an incredibly claustrophobic experience. Just going the 20 meters from one entrance to another is difficult; it is impossible to imagine living inside them for years at a time. If nothing else, it made it obvious just how dedicated the Viet Cong soldiers were to their cause. But this will not be my dominant impression of the trip. Instead, I’m left wondering — what would happen if we installed a shooting range at Gettysburg?
Disillusioned as I was by the tunnel theme park, I still have high hopes for the War Remnants Museum, which we will visit tomorrow before heading on to Phnom Penh. From everything we have heard, it offers the serious — and moving — consideration of the war that was completely missing from the Cu Chi tunnels.
Written from the road in Saigon, Vietnam. Subscribe to my RSS feed for more stories and come back in February for photos!
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Well, the War Remnants Museum will disappoint you too. You have to keep in mind that almost all visitors to these museums are foreign tourists. Our guide told us that even the woman selling the tickets at Cu Chi had never visited her very own museum. The museums still display a heavy-handed propaganda that turns off most Vietnamese. We were lucky that we had a tour guide who was actually a Vietnamese war veteran who put the war in a more realistic and quite horrifying context. Vietnamese war sights have a great potential for future development but they to bounce between traditional government ideologies and profit-oriented catering to western lack of taste. The shooting range, for example, is made for gun-obsessed Americans. You don’t see Vietnamese firing AK 47s into the landscape.
Dirk — I actually wasn’t disappointed by the War Remnants Museum — yes, the texts of the exhibits are propagandistic, but the artifacts, and especially the photos, speak for themselves.
But you make a really good point about these museums being designed for foreign tourists, and not locals. I wish we had had a more serious tour guide who could have given us a more genuine local perspective on the war. We had serious conversations about it elsewhere, but not at any of the war-related sites that we visited.