Continuing about Vietnam…
Our next few days were intended for soaking up the sun on the beaches. However, Vietnam’s rainy season chose to continue into December this year, so instead we enjoyed Netflix a little more than anticipated as the ocean waves looked rather treacherous. Thankfully, the rain cleared every once in awhile, and we were able to check out a mountain of marble as well as meet Ngan, one of Liban’s friends from MSU a couple times. We ate delicious seafood and explored a little bit of Danang’s coast and sights with her and another friend.
We’d enjoyed our travels thus far, but the absolute best part was getting to see Courtney & Caleb. Courtney was one of my OT classmates and is now living in Cambodia, and it was SO GOOD to get to spend time with them and learn about their new lives and adventures. I am sure she and I are probably the only two weirdoes who have graduated Mizzou’s OT program dreaming of the day we would use our fancy schmancy OT degrees to live in Asia and make no money, and this trip just made me realize how thankful I am that God put us in the same class. Hearing about their experiences, struggles, and victories was a much-needed encouragement to us, and it came at a perfect time.
One place we were all able to go together was My Son, which is a stretch of ancient Hindu temple ruins built in/around 700 A.D. It was pretty cool and especially interesting to see the similarities to the temples in India, and it struck me as the type of temple and setting in The Jungle Book, just much, much smaller.
Even at these beautiful, old temples, there is the tangible presence of the Vietnam War; this is true for the majority of what we saw throughout the country. Feet away from each of these temples is a 10-20 feet wide crater from the bombings, and the ruins reportedly went from 70 temples to about 20 remaining standing.
We saw the same remnants of bombing at Vinh Moc, a small town about 20-30 minutes north of the border when the North and South were divided. The entire town of Vinh Moc literally went underground for years during the war. Children and elderly were often sent to safety further north, but the rest of the citizens used shovels and their hands to dig a network of tunnels that they lived in. They did so with good reason, as the grass and dirt on top are peppered with craters about every 20 feet from the B-52 air raids.
Trenches that connected with the tunnels
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Filling up a family room in the tunnels
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The network of tunnels is a total of 35-ish miles long and is down to three levels deep in places. The tunnels were tall enough for us to walk in with hunched backs and necks, and I’m grateful the people preserving the tunnels have added electricity because walking around with only one flash light would have been a little scary. (Coming around the corner to find a statue replicating daily life was at times terrifying on its own!)
When I read online about the tunnels, I think I was expecting each “family room” (aka totally open room on side of tunnel with zero privacy) to be about the size of a queen size bed. Instead, it was about the length and width of a loveseat. Yes, the Vietnamese are a shorter people, but there is no way that 3-4 people inside one of those “rooms” was comfortable. Liban and I just squatting in one of these rooms was a bit squished. Realizing that people lived underground like this, children grew up like this, for literally years at a time gave me a new perspective on America’s history.
The Vinh Moc tunnels’ 12 entrances have been rebuilt to accommodate tourists’ statures and withstand weather, but they are spread out all over the area. Some exit on a hill by the beach, where the townspeople smuggled weapons and resources out to Viet Cong boats, others exit by what was probably once rice fields. All of these areas are covered in bomb craters.
I cannot think of a single class in my education where the Vietnam War was discussed for more than a few minutes, and even that mainly focused on the protests. The rest of it was swept under the rug with a discussion of communism and Karl Marx’s theory vs. reality. (Sadly, I probably learned more about America’s involvement from watching Forrest Gump!) But it’s interesting--there has to be a better word than that, but it’s all I have now--to go through not one but several museums and read about American Imperialism, read about how the Americans shouldn’t have been involved, see the torture devices and "tiger cages" Americans used for Viet Cong prisoners, see the palace where the American-supported president of South Vietnam surrendered to the North, and walk past “victorious” photos of American pilots being captured and taken to prison. The amount of propaganda present was also a little eerie and something that cannot be objectively ignored (and made me wonder how much more must be present in North Korea); regardless, I appreciate being able to see another perspective not shown in my high school history books and learning general information. Unfortunately, I feel just as confused about it all as I did when we arrived in Saigon.
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| The orchestra/actresses on the left, with the fire breathing dragon puppets in the water :) |
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