Military History Museum

Saturday, on a sudden urge to be a tourist, I went to the Military History Museum. It is a couple blocks from the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, and across the street from a big statue of Lenin, with flowers and people playing badminton and people doing tai chi and ladies selling bananas and teenagers making out while perched on their motorbikes. Just like everywhere else in Hanoi.

The museum display started with the Battle of Bạch Đằng, which is where, in 938, the Vietnamese put sharpened iron-tipped stakes in the river bottom. At high tide they snuck out beside the Chinese navy and said “nanny nanny boo boo, bet you can’t catch us,” and took off up the river drawing ‘hot pursuit’ – which is allowed under international law, they checked that first. Then the tide went down, and the Chinese boats were stuck, looking uncannily like hydrofoils perched precariously in the wrong millennium, and feeling a ‘there’s a stone in my shoe’ kind of feeling, only slightly more ominous than that. In any case, in the short and sweet version of Vietnamese history, that is the beginning of independence from Chinese domination.

There was one display on a musician who, I suppose, wrote patriotic and revolutionary music. Nice sculpture, I can’t really speak for the music, I didn’t hear it.

I think it’s fair to say that the most popular part of the place was all the equipment they
had outside, old French stuff from before they were defeated in 1954 at Điện Biên Phủ (the museum is on Điện Biên Phủ Street, after all), and of course lots of stuff from the American War, as it’s known here. Scattered around the ‘flag tower,’ built in 1812 as part of Hanoi Citadel, are cannons and airplanes and bombs, a huge pile of wreckage from an American plane that was shot down, and tourists having their pictures taken next to big, old, deadly stuff.

The war, in a direct way at least, seems to have very little to do with my life here. I guess in some way my interest in Vietnam right from the beginning was motivated by kind of a reaction against my impression, of the war and the ‘Vietnam Era’ and it’s impact on the American psyche, of all of that completely overtaking the ability to see Vietnam the country, today, with beauty and pain just like everywhere else. I guess that is pretty direct – directly contradicting what I said before...

Of course the leftover bombs are not all sitting in the museum. Just last week somebody found a 500 kg bomb at the My Son World Heritage Site – that is in central Vietnam, some six or eight hundred year old remains from the Cham culture, which are fascinating. But less fascinating if there are 35 year old bombs lying about rusting away… I was at My Son twice on my first trip to Vietnam, don’t remember seeing that bomb. Unexploded ordnance are still found regularly in some areas here. Sometimes safely, sometimes not safely.

From the top of the flag tower, you have a nice view across central Hanoi, high-rises going up. At the bottom of the tower, next to the ATM and the row of motorbikes, generously providing recovery services from strenuous ‘posing next to deadly machinery’ exercises, is a Highlands Coffee Shop. Under a canopy of trees, with a funny musical mix of a traditional Vietnamese song, something else reminding me of the beach, and always one 4th generation version of something that used to be reggae, the java and hoa quả was all good and very peaceful.