War Remnants Museum

These school boys cheerfully pointed the way to the War Remnants Museum, aka the War Crimes Museum.  I felt like a Nazi asking for directions to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Peace posters lined the fence.

Thien had described the museum as deeply emotional.   Wrenching is more like it.  A photograph at the entrance depicted the young victim of a napalm attack.

A map inside indicated where American helicopters sprayed Agent Orange. They hit the pink areas the hardest. The defoliant, which remained in local jungles and soil long after the Americans left,  has deformed several generations of Vietnamese children.

Children's depictions of the war's impact filled an entire gallery.

The wing of a B52 bomber.

An American soldier setting a village on fire.  Not my country's finest moment, that's for sure, but it lacked the context that made Ken Burns's doc so compelling.  The Viet Cong were no angels, as their treatment of the South Vietnamese proved after the war.