TABLE
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War Tours?
By: Danica Taylor
I found
being in Vietnam
at such a time of change
and development was a true learning experience. From history, we know
that
developing countries are good for the people benefiting from the
developments
and bad for those left behind. Although Vietnam is at the early
stages of
development, the separation between those fortunate and those not was
extremely
apparent.
In and around Ho Chi Minh City the
transnational element was quite evident. New skyscrapers being built in
what my
tour guide described as “new town”. A place where international
companies were
opening stores and the government was investing money in developing and
maintaining westernized landscapes, roads and complexes.
There was no evidence that this country was
once a battlefield, a place where almost all vernacular architecture
was
destroyed by air raids and grenades. The Vietnamese however have
restored their
old way of life. Many still reside in the delta, villagers who came out
of the
Cu Chi tunnels to rebuild their thatched roof homes and digressed back
to
the
life they lived prior to invasion. I was so
intrigued to see how contently they
were living their life, even after having to completely reconstruct
their
villages that were destroyed during the American War.
After the war, foreigners,
especially Americans were
scared
and uninterested in visiting the land that so many soldiers sacrificed
their
lives on. But more recently, as
Christina Schwenkel points out in her article titled “Recombinant
History: Transnational Practices of
Memory and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Vietnam,”
“Vietnam has adopted tourism as a prime
development
strategy to produce economic growth” (p. 4), and as a result
the locals
have had to adapt to the large increase in tourism; caucasians with
blonde
hair and blue eyes, technology unimaginable being used to snap pictures
of
their villages, of their homes and of their families.
Vietnam
is
developing, the cities are alowly transforming into a more westernized
land, transnational
elements are beginning to bombard and replace the vernacular ways of
life and attract
tourists
with modern, desirable amenities and accommodations. Schwenkel points
out that Vietnam is also capitalizing on the
remnants of the war,
“Vietnam is not only about romantic encounters with 'natives'…the
battlefield
tourist is driven by the desire to see, experience, and understand mass
destruction and violence in the modern era” (Schwenkel, 4). The war has
now
become a transnational source of income for the Vietnamese. Everything
from the
Zippo lighters that the US GI’s carried, to pieces of shrapnel found in
the
delta is being sold to tourists. The Vietnamese have begun to use
“expressions,
artifacts, knowledge, and spaces primarily linked to wartime
experiences of US
forces that have little meaning to the average Vietnamese person”
(Schwenkel,
7).
We visited the Cu
Chi tunnels
where
a local Vietnamese man guided us though the various traps and tunnels. The
locals are making their living from telling personal stories from the
war, and
are even being educated in “the conflict as it has been represented in
the
United States history and pop culture” (Schwenkel, 7). The guide was in
no way
telling us actual stories he had of the war, it was a fabricated speech
given
to the tourists to be informative and supportive of the VC and still
not offend
American tourists. To top off the whole tourist experience, at the end
of the
tour there’s the opportunity to shoot “authentic” war guns. At the
small price
of around $5-$10.
Overall, Vietnam
was very interesting, as I
mentioned earlier it really offered many learning experiences, being
able to
witness and
experience a culture that is trying so desperately to become
industrialized and
enter the world market with economic prosperity. It was also
fascinating to see
not only the US citizens interest in the war, but people from around
the globe
who were making their rounds to all the battle fields, museums, and
consuming
artifacts…its strange to think the tragedy that once threatened the
Vietnamese existence is what the economy is
now profiting
from. I doubt any of the locals thought that in the long run the war
would be
the source of their daily profits, and that the majority of the sales
would be
from United States
citizens.
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