Taro's Travels

History is fungible

Every War Museum I've been to has presented its own version of events; I suppose that the history presented by the Australian War Memorial is similarly individual, but since it presents a history aligned with what we learned at school it may be hard to see.

War names can vary: "The Vietnam War", "The Vietnam Conflict", "The American War", "The Second Indochina War", "The Indochina War"... and when did World War I finish, anyway: 1918, or 1919?

The War Museum museum in Kota Bharu, Malaysia stated that Thailand allowed Japanese troops access to Malaysia because it would have received control over northern Malaysia as a quid pro quo. The Thai JEATH museum, indicates that the Thais resisting Japanese invasion stood down at the order of the government, but provides no more detail.

The War Remnants museum in Ho Chi Minh City presents the Tet Offensive as an unqualified victory; the Western consensus is either nuanced or excusatory - that Tet was a military disaster for the North Vietnamese but a long term political victory. From an Australian perspective, some of the captions appear to be rather propagandist; from a Vietnamese perspective possibly less so.

"War Remnants" is not the original title of Saigon's Museum, though what the original title was is a matter of little consensus: was it "The Museum of American War Crimes", or was it the "The Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes", or perhaps just "The War Crimes Museum"? The Internet is absolutely no help.

The main multi-storey building of the War Remnants Museum is an ugly modernist one, but its ground floor contents and those of the museum's peripheral outbuildings are uglier. Unlike the current name, the contents are fairly uncensored.

In the main building, only the ground floor is used. Here, captioned photographs present mainly civilian victims of conventional weaponry, of mines, of napalm and white phosphorus, and of Agent Orange - both those directly exposed, and their malformed progeny. Two jars suspend grossly deformed babies in formaldahyde - discomforting as much for their resemblance to jars of a similar nature appearing in sideshows as their grim contents.

A small replica prison presents conditions and tortures allegedly used by the Diem regime, including two "tiger cages" - cells with bar-shackles. The photographs in the remaining outbuildings are generally less gruesome, detailing historical aspects of the war(s). The human aspect of the exhibition contrasts a little jarringly with displays of weapons and vehicles.

An hour from the museum are the Cu Chi tunnels - an altogether more cheerful and triumphant location, with a display of booby traps, mannequined dioramas showing life as a Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Regular Army member, fortifications, and tunnels concealed and unconcealed. There's one stretch of tunnels - specially widened for comfort and accessibility - through which a continuous stream of tourist passes. It's still not particularly large: Some of us got through by waddling or shuffling on knees; others did it standing but bent right over. That VC members managed to traverse even smaller tunnels for years is amazing. At the end of our tour we saw a documentary whose commentary is rather similar in style and tone to newsreels from World War II.

Tuol Sleng was a high school that was converted into a prison by the Khmer Rouge. There were a few pictures of tortured victims, but by and large what was on display was far less explicit but no less horrible than the War Remnants museum: rows after row after row of official prison photographs of prisoners - adult and child - almost all of whom died there, crumbling brick cells, stained lino, barbed wire, and a few dozen stories and vignettes from relatives of the disappeared, and former prison staff.

The original structures at the Killing Fields are gone now, with only signs to identify where buildings once were. A pavilion displays some background information. A glass-sided tower displays skulls. An excavation sits under an open hut, while other excavations resembling bomb-craters sit exposed to the rain. Apparently it's now a private site, owned by a foreign corporation.

The War Cemetery is immaculate. New brass-plated concrete gravestones are separated by flowering plants. I walked up the grass of the first row, (feeling rather uncomfortable) down the second, and exited. The bridge - the rebuilt iron one - was overcrowded with visitors walking over and back. What's left of the original bridge is at the JEATH (Japan, England, Australia, Thailand, Holland) War Museum.

The Cu Chi tunnels has a firing range, where visitors may buy bullets to use in a range of weapons; the Penang War Museum has paintball; while the highlights of daytrips to the River Kwae are the train ride along the Death Railway, the elephant rides, and the rafting. Five local boys played roughly on the earthen dike at the Killing Fields - one pushed another down the slope, where he lay screaming abuse. And everywhere hawkers try to sell their wares.