TIME Asia | The B-52s

HEAVY MACHINERY: Hanoi's new B-52 museum carries much psychological weight	ASIA	February 2, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 4
The B-52s Even as its U.S. ties improve, Hanoi opens a museum about America's dreaded warplanes By TIM LARIMER Hanoi he rusted and twisted pieces of steel, stacked 5 m high, aren't much as a piece of sculpture. But beauty isn't the point at Hanoi's B-52 Victory Museum, which opened to the public in January. The scrap heap, with giant tires, engine parts and pieces of wing poking out, is meant to remind visitors of the powerful weaponry used against Vietnam by the U.S. military. Eventually, says the museum's director, Nguyen Minh Tam, the parts will be welded together to make a model of a B-52. "We want to show people how big these planes are," he says. Its 56-m wing span, he thinks, will amaze visitors. Yet the metal pile conveys another impression: what Vietnam's David did to America's Goliath. "We don't intend to humiliate the Americans," insists Tam, 46, an Army senior lieutenant colonel. "We want to remind people, especially our young people, of what we had to overcome." Simple and well organized, the small museum displays the usual revolutionary slogans, as well as Ho Chi Minh's typewriter and soldiers' simple tools. The museum, which took 10 years and $1.4 million to complete and required moving 60 households, nonetheless sends a curious message to its former enemy. "The Vietnamese keep saying they want to get over the past, but now they open a museum that does the exact opposite," says a U.S. military officer working in Hanoi. The museum displays a Soviet-made MiG fighter, two surface-to-air missiles like the ones used to shoot down B-52s and a room devoted to prisoners-of-war (pictured as jolly inmates playing volleyball). The specter of the B-52, however, hangs over everything. The giant plane was always controversial. On the first deployment of B-52s, in 1965 against a Vietcong sanctuary in South Vietnam, two of the bombers collided. For the next eight years, they flew thousands of missions over North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, dropping more explosives than fell on Europe in World War II. The U.S. estimates that North Vietnam shot down 18 of the bombers. The U.S. military team searching for remains of downed servicemen excavated the last of those crash sites just last year. "It is true we used the technology of the Soviet Union to shoot them down," says Nguyen Van Trung, 48, who led his factory's anti-aircraft unit during the war. "What is more important, though, is the creativity of the people using the technology." Propaganda posters and photographs on display at the museum depict young women gunning down war planes. That imagery meshes well with Vietnam's historical self-image as underdog, continually forced to repel stronger enemies. There is the 10th century warrior Ngo Quyen, who tricked Chinese invaders by planting bamboo spikes in a harbor so that they were invisible during high tide. There was the surprise attack on Chinese forces during the 1789 lunar new year holiday--presaging the daring 1968 Tet Offensive against South Vietnam--and the pivotal 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu, in which soldiers on bicycles attacked a key French fortress. A patriotic song about the B-52 includes these lyrics: "Our will and wisdom are a thousand times stronger than the bombs and weapons of the enemy." There were moments, during 12 days of intensive bombing in December 1972, when the residents of Hanoi's Kham Tien Street didn't feel so resilient. Bombs destroyed most of the houses there and killed nearly 300 people. "Everything was on fire," recalls Nguyen Thi Ky, now 58. "When the fire stopped, it seemed like nothing was left." Her husband and two of her children were killed. The bombings, late in the war, struck victims like Ky as particularly cruel. U.S. President Richard Nixon insisted the air blitz nudged Hanoi back to stalled peace talks, and a treaty was signed a month later in Paris. The Vietnamese version is that losses suffered by the U.S. in the attack forced Nixon to end the war. Vietnam's Communist leadership, struggling to remain relevant as society evolves, likes to promote the country's battlefield victories. But that doesn't help ties with the U.S. The two countries are negotiating again--this time over trade--and slowly building a normal diplomatic relationship. The U.S. envoy in Hanoi, Pete Peterson, himself a pow for more than six years, declined to comment on the new museum. "His policy is not to talk about things to do with the past, with the war or about things that memorialize the war," says a spokesman. A photograph that appears to be of Peterson as a pow hangs in the museum. "It is not that we live for the past," says painter Le Thanh, 55, who resides near the museum. "But how can any nation forget the ancestors who formed the nation?" That is why, he says, he keeps in his garden, tucked behind banana palm trees, his own relic of the war: an engine from a B-52 that fell onto his house in 1972. He has declined to sell it for scrap metal, which he could have done for a handsome sum. "And," he says, "it is too heavy too move."
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Even as its U.S. ties improve, Hanoi opens a museum about America's dreaded warplanes

By TIM LARIMER Hanoi

he rusted and twisted pieces of steel, stacked 5 m high, aren't much as a piece of sculpture. But beauty isn't the point at Hanoi's B-52 Victory Museum, which opened to the public in January. The scrap heap, with giant tires, engine parts and pieces of wing poking out, is meant to remind visitors of the powerful weaponry used against Vietnam by the U.S. military. Eventually, says the museum's director, Nguyen Minh Tam, the parts will be welded together to make a model of a B-52. "We want to show people how big these planes are," he says. Its 56-m wing span, he thinks, will amaze visitors. Yet the metal pile conveys another impression: what Vietnam's David did to America's Goliath.

"We don't intend to humiliate the Americans," insists Tam, 46, an Army senior lieutenant colonel. "We want to remind people, especially our young people, of what we had to overcome." Simple and well organized, the small museum displays the usual revolutionary slogans, as well as Ho Chi Minh's typewriter and soldiers' simple tools. The museum, which took 10 years and $1.4 million to complete and required moving 60 households, nonetheless sends a curious message to its former enemy. "The Vietnamese keep saying they want to get over the past, but now they open a museum that does the exact opposite," says a U.S. military officer working in Hanoi. The museum displays a Soviet-made MiG fighter, two surface-to-air missiles like the ones used to shoot down B-52s and a room devoted to prisoners-of-war (pictured as jolly inmates playing volleyball). The specter of the B-52, however, hangs over everything.

The giant plane was always controversial. On the first deployment of B-52s, in 1965 against a Vietcong sanctuary in South Vietnam, two of the bombers collided. For the next eight years, they flew thousands of missions over North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, dropping more explosives than fell on Europe in World War II. The U.S. estimates that North Vietnam shot down 18 of the bombers. The U.S. military team searching for remains of downed servicemen excavated the last of those crash sites just last year. "It is true we used the technology of the Soviet Union to shoot them down," says Nguyen Van Trung, 48, who led his factory's anti-aircraft unit during the war. "What is more important, though, is the creativity of the people using the technology." Propaganda posters and photographs on display at the museum depict young women gunning down war planes.

That imagery meshes well with Vietnam's historical self-image as underdog, continually forced to repel stronger enemies. There is the 10th century warrior Ngo Quyen, who tricked Chinese invaders by planting bamboo spikes in a harbor so that they were invisible during high tide. There was the surprise attack on Chinese forces during the 1789 lunar new year holiday--presaging the daring 1968 Tet Offensive against South Vietnam--and the pivotal 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu, in which soldiers on bicycles attacked a key French fortress. A patriotic song about the B-52 includes these lyrics: "Our will and wisdom are a thousand times stronger than the bombs and weapons of the enemy."

There were moments, during 12 days of intensive bombing in December 1972, when the residents of Hanoi's Kham Tien Street didn't feel so resilient. Bombs destroyed most of the houses there and killed nearly 300 people. "Everything was on fire," recalls Nguyen Thi Ky, now 58. "When the fire stopped, it seemed like nothing was left." Her husband and two of her children were killed. The bombings, late in the war, struck victims like Ky as particularly cruel. U.S. President Richard Nixon insisted the air blitz nudged Hanoi back to stalled peace talks, and a treaty was signed a month later in Paris. The Vietnamese version is that losses suffered by the U.S. in the attack forced Nixon to end the war.

Vietnam's Communist leadership, struggling to remain relevant as society evolves, likes to promote the country's battlefield victories. But that doesn't help ties with the U.S. The two countries are negotiating again--this time over trade--and slowly building a normal diplomatic relationship. The U.S. envoy in Hanoi, Pete Peterson, himself a pow for more than six years, declined to comment on the new museum. "His policy is not to talk about things to do with the past, with the war or about things that memorialize the war," says a spokesman. A photograph that appears to be of Peterson as a pow hangs in the museum.

"It is not that we live for the past," says painter Le Thanh, 55, who resides near the museum. "But how can any nation forget the ancestors who formed the nation?" That is why, he says, he keeps in his garden, tucked behind banana palm trees, his own relic of the war: an engine from a B-52 that fell onto his house in 1972. He has declined to sell it for scrap metal, which he could have done for a handsome sum. "And," he says, "it is too heavy too move."