Let’s start off with a fun fact about Viet Nam shall we?
Vietnamese doesn’t really have compound words, so it’s actually written Viet
Nam, not Vietnam. They acknowledge the fact that English speakers utilize
compound words so they just go with it.
This afternoon I had the opportunity to visit the Cu Chi
Tunnels where 16,000 Viet Cong soldiers lived and fought during the Vietnam
War. One of my goals in visiting Viet Nam was to see the war from the other
side and the Cu Chi Tunnels gave me the opportunity to do just that. Although
the section we visited was a recreation and akin to a theme park, it still
provided an interesting perspective of how the Viet Cong soldiers lived and
fought. We were able to crawl through the tunnels, see the booby traps that
were utilized, and shoot authentic Viet Cong fire arms if we so desired. (I
told my students who had never shot a gun before that shooting a 50 year old Vietnamese
firearms with minimal safety regulations may not be the best place to start.) At
the end of the tour, we sat in a room and watched a video describing the
guerilla warfare tactics of the Viet Cong. There was a great sense of pride in
killing US soldiers, describing the Viet Cong soldiers who had made many kills as
“American killing heroes.” When I first heard that term, I was taken aback. As
an American, it was a strange sensation to be sitting in a room in south Viet Nam
hearing about out our people killed your people. It was almost as if they were
boasting, “You all came here and killed a bunch of our guys but we killed a lot
of your guys too.” It was a stark contrast to any education I’d received on the
war thus far. Also, the fact that Uncle Ho’s portrait was smiling down on us
from his perch above the TV did not go unnoticed.
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