SwiftVets.com

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email from greasy:

Subject: save your buck


> Well, here I am with time to kill in Saigon, so I thought what the hell,
> I know it won't be fun exactly, but may as well go see the War Museum.
> (Formerly known as the Museum of American Atrocities, but renamed a few
> years back to be a bit more attractive to the tourists.)
>
> It has several sections placed around a large courtyard, and with lots of
> big equipment in the courtyard. (A Huey, two fighter jets, spotter
> plane, two tanks, another armored vehicle, a 175mm cannon, some other
> artillery, a bunch of bomb casings, etc.) The first hall is the Hall of
> Historical Truth, and has a lot of pictures from the earliest US
> involvement in Viet Nam, a lot of charts of how many planes and tanks and
> rifles and damn near every military supply item you can think of were
> used in the war or given to the ARVN. It has one wall with all the
> insignia of major US units serving in country. (Took a snapshot of
> that.) Then there's a long hallway with a couple hundred pictures from
> the war, some blown up very large. I looked at the first one and
> recognized a Larry Burroughs shot that won a prize, and then as I glanced
> around I recognized more and more of the images. They were all from the
> major display of war pictures that has been touring the US for the last
> several years, in fact I helped put them up at the library of the
> university in downtown Raleigh two years ago. By the end of the display
> I came across the plaque from some group in Kansas that had contributed
> the whole display to the museum.
>
> They had a whole wall display of the names of all the commercial
> photojournalists who died in SE Asia, and I stopped to tell the guide at
> the desk that it's an incomplete display, since it doesn't list any of
> the military photographers and correspondents who died there too. She,
> of course, could have cared less. But I was wearing my old OD Marine
> cover, and one of the other guides, an older guy with white hair, came up
> and asked if I was a Marine in the war. He was an interpreter for a US
> unit in Chu Lai, and ended up at the battle of Hue. Like all the former
> Southern soldiers, he went off to the camps, but being only an E-6, only
> had to spend 3 months there. But he couldn't get a job for years
> afterwards, because of the official discrimination, until finally they
> wanted people who could speak good English and also French for the
> museum, and he has worked there since. (And very, very happy to have a
> regular job after all the years of being very poor.)
>
> I went on to the other halls, where the pictures and stories started
> going directly to three main themes. These are:
> terrible effects of napalm and white phosphorous on people, with a bit on
> flechette wounds and grenade wounds thrown in for good measure;
> how the bombing of the North damaged residential areas and schools and
> hospitals (strongly implied to be totally deliberate);
> and of course,
> how Agent Orange is responsible for every birth defect, cancer, and skin
> disease in all of Viet Nam from then right until now.
>
> And not to be forgotten is the big picture of the naked little girl
> running down the road burned by napalm, but at least it doesn't say it
> was a US plane or pilot (it was all ARVN, and the bomb hit a bunch of
> their own troops as well, and there was no US advisor even on scene). I
> couldn't help myself, opened my big mouth and told the horrified
> Australian tourists staring at the picture that she now lives in Canada
> as a refugee. That got me very strange looks, so I shut up and went
> away. I figured there was no point in mentioning that napalm was used by
> the NVA to barbecue a whole Montagnard village, and that collateral
> damage to civilians is a tragic but totally normal part of warfare.
>
> Nor, of course, would pointing out that the 40,000 tons of bombs dropped
> on Hanoi and Haiphong killed fewer than 1500 people, and less than 2% of
> the bomb strikes were off target and hit civilian areas, do any good.
> It's their dance hall and they get to pick the music that's played.
>
> They really outdid themselves on the Agent Orange thing, the displays
> went on for yards and yards of wall space, lots of jars of deformed
> fetuses, lots of pictures of kids with birth defects, adults with
> cancers, etc. No statistics at all, which is the only way you can
> demonstrate that anything is different from the normal run of birth
> defects, skin diseases, and cancers that occur in any population. They
> list birth defects in the north, hundreds of miles from any spray, as AO
> related.
>
> [Comment- would I say that there are no AO effects on anyone, anywhere?
> No, certainly not. The final studies indicate a strong possibility of an
> increase in early diabetes and just maybe prostate cancer, but the
> contrast between the exposed and unexposed groups is not like between
> smokers and nonsmokers. Whatever the effects of AO or any other factor
> in the war, they are not remotely related to what the boys in Hanoi like
> to claim. It's a basic sucker game to guilt people, the US most of all,
> into sending more millions to subsidize the fairly lousy state health
> system they have in Viet Nam. And the assorted tourists buy into it
> hook, line, and sinker, and it really ticks me off!]
>
> Next came... you guessed it, My Lai. Lots of pictures of that, and a
> couple of other claimed massacres too, with a big portrait of Bob Kerrey
> and a list of a bunch of civilians claimed to have been killed by him and
> his SEAL team in their night raid. I hate the fact that some of these
> things happened, there is no defending at least a few of the claims of
> very bad behavior by our guys. The fact that there were comparatively
> few such crimes and that the policy of the communists was to commit many
> thousands of assassinations in the villages, not to mention the very
> organized Hue massacre of several thousand civilians, is never going to
> register with the assorted Australians, Germans, Italians, French, and
> others who wander past those displays with staring eyes and shock on
> their faces.
>
> Thrown in were also some pictures of nasty interrogations, mostly with
> Vietnamese doing the bad stuff with US guys in the background, but a
> couple with Americans working on someone. All in all, the 50 yard stroll
> around that part of the big hall would convince anyone that the Nazis
> were amateurs compared to the US when it came to being bad guys and
> hurting innocent people.
>
> There were a bunch of display cases of weapons used in the war, every
> variety of M-16 you ever heard of, shotguns, a couple of types of
> bloopers (I only ever saw the original), old French rifles, an M-1, a
> BAR, a greasegun, etc. Didn't happen to see any pistols.
>
> The second-last building was the "tiger cage" replication, with lots of
> shots of abused people and sketches of assorted tortures, but if you read
> closely most of it related to the French and later the South Vietnamese
> and their interrogation and prison techniques. One mention of an island
> prison (I never heard of it before) run by the US, where supposedly a lot
> of the prisoners were badly treated and many died.
>
> And the final building was dedicated to all the support given to Hanoi by
> antiwar and/or communist groups across the world. Americans featured
> prominently, but German, French, and every client nation of the old
> Soviet Bloc (Hungary, Poland, etc, and Cuba too). The picture of John
> Kerry is no longer on display, last I heard it was taken down somewhere
> after the beginning of his presidential campaign.
>
> Oh, and one other thing- from this display you would have almost no idea
> that any such thing as a South Vietnamese military existed, that they
> ever fought any battles or had any part of the war. The period of time
> from late '71 to the fall of Saigon, over three years and hundreds of
> thousands of casualties on both sides, is invisible. They may have
> changed the name, but this is still essentially the Museum of American
> Atrocities.
>
> That about did me in, I was very glad to get the hell back out on the
> street and find my motorbike guy waiting for me.
>
> I guess the killer is that I know a majority of the visitors to that
> museum will go away accepting that what they have seen is all good stuff,
> rignt on the money, and the legend of the stupid, brutal American
> behavior in the war will just go on and on. And of course that means
> they'll be all the more ready to accept whatever the media say about us
> in Iraq and Afghanistan. The demonization of the US soldiers will
> continue to be a normal part of the world's view of us. Not for
> everyone, no, but for far too many. I wish I had a better answer for
> this.
>
> Anyhow, that's what's there, so if you go to Saigon, save your $1 entry
> fee, so see a nice temple or something!
>
> Del
>

[1991932]

Are you kidding me???

I'd pay a buck to see all that.

Gotta keep the interpreter in a job
_________________
Former "War Criminal"