Remember how I said that, when I was inside the Hoa Lo Prison and was surrounded by what may be one of the darkest periods in the history of Vietnam (the French occupation, to be more specific), I felt this certain heaviness that kinda made it difficult to breathe? Well, that still did not prepare me for my visit to the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh. The pain is real, and I wasn’t even part of that period of history. (This post is rated PG. Parental Guidance is strongly advised… due to some violent and graphic images and descriptions.)
We left our hotel relatively early, getting directions from the guy at the front desk on how to get around. To make things easier, he even provided us with a hand-drawn map and added some illustrations on how to get to the key places we wanted to visit on our last full day in Ho Chi Minh.
First on our list was the War Remnants Museum.
Now let me make one thing clear first: this post is made from the point of view of an “observer”, since I belong to neither parties or nationalities directly involved during the wars covered or featured in this museum. I just would like to somehow share my thoughts and feelings, as someone on the outside looking in.
Personally, my knowledge about the Vietnam War is limited on the few movies I’ve seen and the books I’ve read, so the story can differ depending on the point of view of the author or filmmaker. No judgments intended on my part.
Now that the disclaimer is over, let’s move on.
We had quite some trouble locating the War Remnants Museum mainly because of the endless maze of streets that we walked around in, with each turn looking seemingly similar to the previous one.
The War Remnants Museum opened to the public in 1975, and its original name was the Museum of American War Crimes. I suppose that name is not good for any efforts to heal the wounds from the past, which is why they changed the name.
Several of the descriptions I’ve read of the War Remnants Museum described it to offer a “shocking reminder of the long and brutal Vietnam War, which lasted from 1945 to 1975”.
Basically, this museum contains many American military weapons and equipment, as well as a massive display of a plethora of graphic photographs regarding the War.
And boy, they weren’t kidding when they used the word “graphic” to describe it. To this day, I still get chills remembering the photographs I saw.
Enter… and Proceed with Caution
To say that a visit to the War Remnants Museum is “not for the faint of heart” is a gross understatement, I tell you, it is very disturbing, and this is coming from someone who is from a “disinterested” citizen. I can only imagine what goes on in the minds of the Americans who visit this place.
Admission to the Museum is 15,000 VND (USD 0.65 or PHP 35.00). It’s open daily from 7:30 AM to 11:30 AM, and then reopens at 1:20 PM to 4:30 PM. I’m not sure why, maybe they have a long lunch break or something?
Instead of a ticket, you’d be given a sticker that you’d have to stick anywhere that is visible, so you can easily go around the Museum freely.
The compound consists of the main museum building and another outdoor installation on the side. In front are some aircrafts that were supposedly used during the war.
People who love machines – or war machines, to be exact – will definitely have quite a grand time checking out the crafts on display. They were well-maintained, purposely for show and display. I was thinking, however, that these were the machines that farmers-turned-fighters had to contend with.
The first thing you’d spot when you walk through the gates (you can actually catch a glimpse of it from outside, on the street) is this U.17 PLANE, a reconnaissance and observation plane, manufactured by the Cessna Aircraft Company. Its armament includes a rocket launcher system, 10 flares, 2 flare guns and an Anti-SA.7 Rocket System, whatever that is.
With an effective time action of 4 hours and a maximum range of action of 1,111 km, it’s easy to see why the pilot would feel mighty invincible when seated on the cockpit of this baby.
A lot of the male visitors were particularly flocking around this tank, it was hard to get in and take a look at the label. This is an M.48 A3 TANK, It’s basically a main battle tank that weighs 47.2 tons and a 48 km/h speed. It’s got a 90mm gun with coaxial 7.62 machine gun, a mounted 50-cal. machine gun and an infrared fire-control equipment and xenon searchlight.
Trivia: the US Army had around 370 of these tanks deployed all over Vietnam as of July 1969. You might have seen one of the remains of these tanks from our visit to the Cu Ci Tunnels.
This is like a staple in most war movies: a CH-47 CHINOOK, which is essentially a twin-engine, tandem rotor heavy-lift helicopter. It’s used mainly for “troop movement, artillery emplacement and battlefield resupply.”
This 4-crew aircraft pretty much does the heavy legwork out in the warzone, with a speed of 298 km/h, 2 M135 machine guns 7.62mm and one M60 machine gun, and infrared ray camera and a high rate radar.
This A-37 FIGHTER-BOMBER is a light-attack aircraft used for bombing targets on the ground, the sea and escorting aircraft carriers or supplying truck convoys. Its armament is comprised of one 7.62mm gun (with 1,500 bullets) and 4 bomb ejector racks.
Check out this CBU-55 BOMB. It is 2.3 meters long, has a diameter of 0.36 meters and weighs 235 kg. This mother bomb actually contains 3 son bombs, with each bomb containing 45 kg of chemical). It is lethal within a 500 meter radius.
Beyond the Wall…
Before entering the building, we saw one walled area of the compound. Out of curiosity, we went in. The sign above the doorway was already ominous. “Tiger Cages?” I thought. I wondered what they were, but I knew for sure that they can’t be anything good.
This walled area is a recreation of part of the Con Dao Jail and the entire walled area is dedicated to showing the Prison Regime in the aggression war against VIetnam.
The Con Dao archipelago is a group of islands in southern Vietnam, and its largest island is Con Som. It is in this island where the Con Dao Jail or Con Dao Prison was established. Today, it is one of island getaways for anyone looking for a tropical island vacation in Vietnam.
But behind the tropical paradise was a dark history that took place in the Con Dao Prison complex. The local language has it as “Cay Dua Prison Camp”, which literally translates to “Coconut Tree Prison Camp”. The prison itself was built in 1861 and became the place where the high-ranking Vietnamese officials at the time were detained and imprisoned by the French colonists.
That prison was recreated in this portion of the War Remnants Museum complex. Which means that the place holds not just reminders of the Vietnam War and the American’s involvement, but also of an earlier but nonetheless tragic war, around a century earlier.
My visit to the Hoa Lo Prison was already an indication that the French occupation of Vietnam was not exactly a happy time. This sneak peek kinda drove that information home further.
But if you thought that the agony and torture of imprisonment behind the walls of the Con Dao Prison ended when the French colonists left, you’d be wrong.
In 1954, the prison was turned over to the South Vietnamese government, and it continued to operate as a prison, same as it always has. This time, it served as a place where more than 40,000 patriotic soldiers were imprisoned.
The actual prison in the island had an area of 5,745 square meters, with a total of 120 cells for the prisoners. The whole area was surrounded by 5 layers of barbed wires.
What it is most famous for, however, are the tiger cages, which we’ll get into later.
Interestingly enough, the jailers that suppressed and tortured the prisoners have been regularly trained by U.S advisors in “physical and psychological torture techniques against the prisoners.”
The Con Dao Prison is just one of over 1000 prisons all over Vietnam. For the period 1954-1960, more than 90,000 patriots have been killed in South Vietnam, and 800,000 others have been detained and tortured while imprisoned.
Behind these walls….
There are more ways than one to skin a cat, they say. If you, like me, have seen a good number of action and wartime flicks portraying various forms of torture to interrogate a prisoner or simply to break them down, you’d be surprised to find that in reality, there are a multitude forms and modes of torture that have been applied, and most of them took place within the walls of the prison.
Some of the forms of torture listed on the wall hangings include beating the prisoner with a pestle or with a cane, knocking them down with an oil drum, breaking off prisoners’ teeth using a pestle, removing their fingernails or toenails, and rendering the prisoners blind by shining radiation light directly into their eyes.
Click on the thumbnails below to see what other modes of torture were used. And, yes, you have to have a pretty strong stomach for it.
This recovered IRON GRILL is usually seen in my province on footbridges and hanging bridges. But at the prison, it was a tool for torture.
How it works is that the prisoners are made to take off their clothes and proceed to roll over and over on top of the iron grill, with its many holes. The hooks on the grill will snatch and snag at the prisoners’ hair and bare skin until they bleed. Even their scalp won’t be spared.
Images and narratives were spread out, so if you have lots of time, try to read through all of them or, at least like me, just a few of them.
In the pic below, the one on the left is a guy whose “knee bones were chiseled and whose calf legs were incandescenced and stabbed through by an iron bar.” Other prisoners that attempted to escape were also punished by having their legs sawed off.
The skull on the upper right hand corner is that of a prisoner who died after a nail has been hammered into his head. You can probably spot the nail hammered in, cant you?
This seems to be something that the French soldiers at the time used heavily or frequently: the guillotine. Since my first up close encounter with a guillotine (back at the Hoa Loa Prison), I don’t think I’ll ever look at a large basket-slash-box like the one below the same again.
But use of this was not limited during the French occupation, because during the US war against Vietnam, this was transported to all the provinces in South Vietnam and was used to decapitate Vietnam patriots, at least until 1960, when the last patriot was decapitated.
Behold the Tiger Cages
We come to this prison’s claim to fame: the “tiger cages”.
These are basically cages of varying sizes that are surrounded by barbed wire. If you look at it closely, the barbed wires are actually woven and interwoven.
They came in different sizes, with some cages able to hold 2 to 3 people and others for 5 to 7 people. Of course, the more constricted and narrower the interior of the cage is, the more tortuous it would be for the prisoner inside.
Most of the time, they’d end up just lying down, since they can’t even sit up properly. And the cage is left out in the open, under the searing heat of the sun, or the lashing cold of the rain. What makes it worse is that the cages are left out in the sand, compounding the heat or the dampness to higher levels of discomfort and suffering.
I mentioned that the Cao Dai prison had 120 cells, right? They were also recreated in this section of the War Remnants Museum.
The words “tiger cages” apply to pretty much the entire prison complex, not just the actual barbed wire cages. These detention cells, for example, also fall under the Tiger Cages. To get a closer look at how these tiger cages look like, you can go up these stairs….
…and find these.
These grilled areas of the floor are actually the ceilings of the detention cells. These tiger cages are special cells used to detain political prisoners that the Saigon authorities at that time deemed to be “stubborn”.
This is how it looks like from above. I was honestly a bit creeped out when I saw the models or mannequins of emaciated half-naked prisoners.
Each of the 120 detention cells had a measurement of 2.70m x 1.50m x 3m. During the hot season, apparently, 5 to 14 prisoners were kept in one cell, so it gets cramped and mighty hot. During the cold winter months, only one or two prisoners are kept inside a cell, with their feet shackled to a long iron bar.
Each prisoner was given only half a tin can of drinking water for a day, so no room for hygiene in here. This was especially inflicted as a punishment to women prisoners, especially during that time o the month. Ugh.
And seeing as they’re caged, they are pretty much fair game to the abusive jailers and their mood swings, especially when they become free with the use of their clubs, sticks and even shovels.
Warning: if you’re easily scared of human statues or figures, peeking into the cells might give you nightmares for a very long time. We did that, peeking into some of the holes on the iron doors of the detention cells, and look what greeted me.
When the prisoner complex was turned over to the South Vietnam government, they actually added more of the detention cells. They even created an oxen stable. Yes, an oxen stable where the prisoners were kept, immersed in oxen dung day and night. Now that is another form of torture in itself.
Torture was a natural way of things in these tiger cages. I shuddered just looking at some of the images and illustrations displayed, like how the jailers let snakes out into the trousers of the prisoners, women prisoners especially.
To be honest, these clubs and sticks used by the jailers paled in comparison with the images of the various forms of torture used, like filling a prisoner’s stomach with water through his nose, using a rubber pipe. *wince* It gets even worse when the jailers use soapy water or limed water. *double wince* Once his belly has become inflated with all that water, the next part involves trampling and kicking him right on that spot. Well, you can picture what happens next.
For all intents and purposes, the Con Dao prison complex was a concentration camp, where over a thousand prisoners fell dead annually.
While walking around, I kept wondering how some human beings can even contemplate doing such ruthless things to other human beings, especially their own countrymen. I guess that’s what bothered me the most: the torture was mostly inflicted by Vietnamese to other Vietnamese… after they have obtained trainings in torture from the French and American soldiers.
But then again, I suppose there shouldn’t be great surprise in that, since it’s not something that is unique to this place. Even my country’s history is partly filled with sections where countrymen turned against each other. I guess that’s what makes the realities of war even more disheartening and tragic.
Does it get smoother and easier from here? I’d like to say it does, but I’d be lying. We still have that main museum building waiting to be explored. I’ll see you then.
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