Vietnam war

I'm in Saigon now. Still with the Irish crew. They have almost as many motorbikes here as in Hanoi. You just have to close your eyes and cross the street. So far this year there have been over 15,000 deaths in the country due to traffic accidents. That's almost 50 a day!

Today was a depressing day as I visited some "American War" spots. The first was a town 2 hours north of Saigon where there are many of the origional underground tunnels and living quarters from the war. Imagine hundreds of kilometers of winding tunnels. First of all I didn't think about how dark it would be. Pitch black. And stuffy. And small!! The vietnamese are tiny people and they purposefully made small tunnels so Americans couldn't fit in if they were ever discovered. I was on my hands and knees a lot of the time. Most of the tunnels we went in were short, but there was one that we went in for 10 minutes. I can not believe people lived like that for years. Let alone the fact that they were concerned for their life the whole time. I don't consider myself too prissy but I was so sweaty and dirty and unhappy about the bats by the end of those 10 minutes. Was I really just complaining about haveing wet feet for a few days? What a brat!

Then it was on to the war museum which had the most graphic pictures of the war. GIs hunched waiting to fire in ditches, vietnamese escaping acrossing rivers with their babies over their heads, two little Vietnamese boys walking down the road, and lieing dead in the next picture, GIs holding up the heads of Vietnamese as trophys, babies born with body parts missing. I spent a little while talking with a Vietnamese man just a little older than I am who lost his hands and leg at the age of ten by a landmine. Really friendly, kind man. He was excited when I said I was from the US.

For me the most poinient display in the entire museum was a little quote displayed at the entryway to a building that showed pictures of all the Vietnamese suffering. The quote is from July 4th, 1776.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

If only....