Vietnam Military History Museum

Ever since we said we were coming to Vietnam, people have wondered -- heck, we've wondered -- how we would be perceived, especially in light of what happened during the Vietnam War.  Our country continues to struggle with that conflict, even forty years later.  Why were we there?  What did we accomplish?  Was it worth it?  The Vietnam War is a complicated question in America, and I'm not eager to re-hash it here.

What we had read and heard before we left is that the Vietnamese are not preoccupied with the war, that there are few (if any) hard feelings about what happened, and that there is a very high approval rating for America in Vietnam.  And now that we've been here a month, we can say that the Vietnamese have been incredibly friendly and supportive (and I'm typing this in a crowded Starbucks, where there is lots of talking and laughter).

To really understand why the feelings toward America are not as ugly as they could be, it is important to consider Vietnamese history.  Vietnam has a history that goes back at least a couple thousand years, It has been invaded and occupied many times, mainly by the Chinese.  France considered Vietnam a colony of theirs for 100 years, until the Vietnamese were finally able to expel them after an eight year war that ended in 1954.  After Vietnam was divided in two partitions by the Geneva Accords of 1954, a civil war started the next year and lasted twenty years.  America was involved in that war for about eight years, helping and fighting for the South Vietnamese government that eventually lost.

So all of this is a backdrop to the visit Libby and I had to the Vietnam Military History Museum in Hanoi.  I was curious to see how the American involvement would be portrayed.  While there were some dramatic artifacts from the Vietnam War (called the "American War" here), there was not as much information inside the museum about the United States as I would have expected.

Here are some of things in the outdoor exhibit, including a couple of American tanks, a helicopter, and a shot-down bomber.  Some of this stuff was captured and used by the Vietnamese in this and other conflicts.

There was a lot of information about the French occupation of Vietnam, I suspect because Ho Chi Minh declared independence for Vietnam on September 2, 1945, then had to fight the French for 8 years to actually gain that independence, much like the Americans did against the British, 1775 - 1783, with our Declaration of Independece coming in 1776.  In fact, Ho Chi Minh referenced the American Declaration of Independence in his declaration for Vietnam in 1945:

Pictures of French soldiers surrendering in 1954 in Dien Bien Phu.  There were many rooms dedicated to the Indochina War (1945-1954):

 Some of the first Vietnamese flags:

 Vietnamese fought for 30 years (1945 - 1975) to gain independence and then reunify the country.  America's involvement in that played a part, but our involvement was about 8 years of that.  There were even pictures of Ho Chi Minh being trained by Americans near the end of World War II to combat the Japanese:

But in the military history museum, there was not a lot about the United States.  Here is a picture of President Johnson planning military strategy, except the caption spelled Johnson "Gionxion" which is how it sounds in Vietnamese:

Most of the information about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam can be found in these two corners:

There was also lots about various other times in Vietnam's history that they were invaded and occupied, namely by the Chinese and Japanese.  Vietnam has thousands of years of history, and for many Vietnamese, the American conflict was just a blip.

Adjacent is the hexagonal flag tower.

Walking away from the museum and thinking about the visit, I saw the understandable national pride that is on display in every room as various accounts detail the defeat of the invaders.  I know there are some very dark parts of this history on all sides, and I do not mean to sugarcoat what happened, but the museum did highlight where the American involvement fits in to the larger picture of Vietnamese history.