The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam – The Brutal Sculpture

There’s nothing funny about war. Absolutely nothing. I’ve seen the consequences first hand when I went to Kosovo for work in the early 2000s and saw how a conflict could completely screw up the lives of all of those affected.

There are no winners in a war. No one. And this is pretty evident if you visit the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam which documents their version of what happened in what foreigners know as ‘The Vietnam War’, but what the Vietnamese know as ‘The American War’.

And visiting will show you that there are always two sides to every story.

The name sounds a bit odd, but the War Remnants Museum has been shortened from it’s original moniker, the ‘Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes’ which is pretty obvious what the museum is all about.

What is there to see at the War Remnants Museum?

When you first turn up, you’ll be greeted with many U.S. military displays from planes, tanks and other armoury.

It’s a popular place to visit in Ho Chi Minh City, but be warned – it’s confronting, and you cannot unsee the often gut wrenching images and displays.

The irony of this is that many images that show the atrocities of the Vietnam War or American War are from United States sources. And I’m not going to show them here because they’re terrible and you should set foot inside the museum to see them for yourself. I’m talking about corpses, formaldehyde jars full of deformed foetus’, and real life napalm victims who are now working in the museum.

Let me warn you now – you will feel sick in the guts if you go. But these memorials need to be there because if everyone forgets the past, you will be condemned to repeat it.

Since Vietnam has had the literal crap bombed out of it from all sorts of conflicts, I’m extremely impressed how far the country has come considering where it came from.

The below image needs no explanation.

That’s just for starters. When walking around the museum floors, you’ll come across the weapons of choice, such as land mines:

I didn’t know that there were so many varieties..

and other destructive objects like nail bombs.

And I had no idea how much of the country had been napalmed – the defoliant sprayed to remove leaves from the thick, impenetrable jungle (see purple areas below).

But there is one display that really makes a statement about the Vietnam War. Over 7 million tonnes of bombs were dropped on Vietnam – compared to over 2 million in World War 2.

When you walk around, you’ll come across this sculpture.

Here is another image which shows the whole thing.

Guess what it’s made of? Shrapnel! Yes, there’s so much of it around that a clever artist made this entirely from the material that caused Vietnam so much grief.

It even contains old explosives.

If something like this doesn’t make you think, then nothing will.