Vietnam has a pretty big population of 85 million. The country has gone through many wars especially during the 20th century (with the French, Japan, civil war, US, China and Cambodia) and is governed by the communist government. In 1986, the country introduced market reform called Doi Moi (Renovation) which resulted in a socialist oriented market economy similar to China. The country has been growing at 7-8% rate for the past 20 years after the reform and is one of the fastest growing countries in the world. The country joined WTO in 2007 and things are looking to change for the better
Vietnam has some Chinese influences and was a vassal state under the Chinese rule for a thousand years until 938 Ad. Even the Vietnamese language incorporated some Chinese words.
Ho Chi Minh city is full of motorcycles.
Walked to a market nearby and had this (20,000 Doong~USD$1)
for breakfast. Lettuce and fish sauce are very popular among Vietnamese dish.
Rent a motorbike for the day USD$6.
Benh Thanh Market
Food section
City Museum
Notre Dame Cathedral
Central Post Office
Inside the post office
Reunification Palace/Independence Palace (15,000 Dong~USD$0.80).
This was the former South Vietnamese presidential palace and was preserved from the day Saigon fell to the North. The infamous picture of a Nothern Vietnamese tank crashing through the gate of the palace was took here symbolizing the defeat of the Americans and the South Vietnamese government.
The president’s office
First lady meeting room
Corridor
War Remnants Museum (15,000 Dong~USD$0.8) which is one of the best museum visited in Vietnam so far. It showed the other perspective of the war from the Northern Vietnamese view. It was formerly known as the exhibition of American war crimes and showed some of the cruelty that American soldiers did in the war. It might be a little bias because it didn’t mention about things that the North Vietnamese did but still an eye opening experience.
Tanks and weapons used
Aircrafts
Bullets of different sizes
American soldiers with a Vietnamese soldier skull
A sewer which was used by Vietnamese kids to hid inside but American soldiers found them and stabbed them to death.
Americans used a lot of Chemical weapons in the war
which destroyed the environment
as well as causing a lot of birth defects among the Vietnamese population even until today. Those batches of Agent Orange contained Dioxins and will cause long term cancer effects and genetic defects which leads to birth deformities.
In 1961 and 62 the Kennedy administration authorized the use of chemicals to destroy vegetation and food crops in South Vietnam. Between 1961 and 1967 the US Air Force sprayed 12 million US gallons of concentrated herbicides, mainly Agent Orange (containing dioxin as an impurity in the manufacturing process) over 6 million acres (24,000 km²) of foliage and trees, affecting an estimated 13% of South Vietnam’s land. In 1997, an article published by the Wall Street Journal reported that up to half a million children were born with dioxin related deformities. There were many pictures showing birth defects but I didn’t take those.
During the war, Americans dropped almost 7 million tons of bomb in Vietnam.
A sense of remorse from Senator McNamara
John Kerry’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, APRIL 22, 1971
An excerpt from the interview
“We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.
We found most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Vietcong, North Vietnamese, or American.
We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how money from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Vietcong.
We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.”
Pagoda
Just motorcycles on the road
Pho again for dinner (30,000 Dong~USD$1.50)
