Home!

I added that exclamation point in the title so it seems like I'm excited to be here. (I was excited to vote today. We got in line before the polls opened.)

So we made it. The flight from Tokyo to JFK was long, as expected, but we managed to amuse ourselves with movies. Jordo chose the girliest movies he could find, including, "Made of Honor" and "Sex and the City." I refused to watch either on the grounds they would annoy me so I watched a depressing British film about a woman abusing illegal immigrant workers and a Discovery Channel special on the Great Plains of the Earth. (Odd choices, true, but still better than his movies.)

At the airport in Saigon, Jordo had noticed how a lot of people were spending extra money to have their bags wrapped in tape and plastic. Probably precautions in case someone stuck something illegal in there? We didn't know. We chose not to follow suit and take our chances with Tony Montana. Then, while we were waiting for our baggage at JFK, one of the drug/food sniffing dogs became obsessed with my bag. The handler asked what I had in there and, besides from some foreign peanuts, there was nothing in there to set off the dog's nose. The handler kept pushing: Had I had meat in there at some point? Fruit? No and no. I offered to let him search, but he declined. Since he kept asking about food, we imagined that he could go through my bag, pull out a few kilos of heroin, then put it back, and say, "OK, looks like there isn't any illegal produce in here. You can go."

(The whole incident sent me back to the early 90s, when Jaqui came back from France with cheese and was chased through the airport by security dogs.)

So Saigon flew by. On one of our last days, we went to the War Remnants Museum. (It was apparently once called "The House for Displaying War Crimes of American Imperialism and the Puppet Government (of South Vietnam)" but the name was changed to be more tourist-friendly.) It was a wow. One whole room was devoted to all of the journalists who died covering the war, including Errol Flynn's son. We got to see some of the last photos these journalists had taken before their deaths, as well as some of the shots that then became iconic of the war. Some of those who died did so in combat. A few were on helicopters that crashed. A few just disappeared and are presumed dead. One journalist, who had no wife or kids, left everything he had to a fund to help Vietnamese orphans.

Another room was about war atrocities, and so you can imagine it wasn't too "Go, USA!" It was just plain stressful. They had a lot of pictures and accounts from My Lai, which were chilling. There's a section of former Sen. Bob Kerrey, who in 2001 admitted to his involvement in killing civilians while a SEAL leader in Vietnam. More than one wall was devoted to pictures of people killed or disfigured by Agent Orange or Napalm or other chemicals, be it first hand or because they were the children of soldiers or villagers affected by this chemical warfare. (They included some American children, too, including a boy who was one of the first poster children for the March of Dimes, whose father had been a soldier.) They had deformed fetuses in jars to further show what damage the chemicals had brought to following generations.

They had replicas of tiger cages, where Viet Cong prisoners were held, and a guillotine used by the French. (And yes, weird tourists in front of us posed with their heads leaning towards it like it was Disney World. And I thought it was bad for us to take smiling pictures in the Cu Chi tunnels.)

There was a statue made of metal collected from bombs and ammo that was called "Mother." It purported to show a woman in agony during the war. It was fitting, as so many of the pictures we saw were of women trying to protect their children, women wailing before they were to be shot.

The guestbook was filled with anti-American sentiment, including things like, "Americans are the real war criminals." A tank was parked outside the museum, and "Fuck" had been written in the dust before "USA Army."

Oh, reputation in tatters. Here's hoping all that changes in the years to come.