Visiting the war in Vietnam, and what each site is actually like

Vietnam calls it the American War, and it is told here from the side that won. The Vietnam war sites are spread the length of the country and they are not interchangeable. One is a museum that stops people in the doorway. One is a tunnel system rebuilt for visitors. One is where 90 families lived underground for six years.

Which Vietnam war sites are worth visiting?

Four, and they are very different days. The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City is the one nobody forgets. The Cu Chi tunnels sit 45 km outside it at Ben Dinh and pair with it naturally. The DMZ sites around the 17th parallel are a day trip from Hue. Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi is the short one.

All four belong to the American war. The French one that preceded it has a battlefield of its own at Dien Bien Phu in the far northwest, and almost nobody combines the two, because it is a flight from Hanoi in the opposite direction from everything above.

What is the War Remnants Museum like?

Heavy, and deliberately so. It costs 40,000 dong, opens 7.30am to 5.30pm daily, and takes about two hours. The photography is the core of it, along with rooms on Agent Orange and on the effects that outlived the fighting.

Go in the morning. It is the most confronting building in the country and it is not softened for visitors, and putting it at the end of a sightseeing day is a mistake people make once.

The Reunification Palace, a quarter of an hour away on foot, is the useful counterweight: the same history told as an intact 1970s government building rather than as photographs.

Are the Cu Chi tunnels worth the drive?

Yes if the war is the reason you came, and less so otherwise. Ben Dinh, the nearer of the two visitor sites, is about 45 km from Saigon, entry is 110,000 dong, and it works as a half day or a full one with transport. The Cu Chi page compares it with Ben Duoc, 70 km out and quieter.

Be clear about what it is. The sections you crawl through have been widened, there is a firing range, and the site is busy. It is an interpretation of the tunnel system rather than the thing itself. That does not make it worthless — the scale and the ingenuity come across — but it is not a quiet historical site.

If you have a day and are choosing, the three days in Saigon route sets Cu Chi against a Mekong Delta day.

What is at the DMZ?

The line itself, and what people did to survive it. The Demilitarised Zone straddled the 17th parallel, and the sites sit along Route 9 inland from Dong Ha, usually visited as a long day trip from Hue.

The Vinh Moc tunnels are the reason to go. Entry is 50,000 dong. Unlike Cu Chi, civilians dug these rather than soldiers: around 90 families from the villages above lived in them between 1966 and 1972, and children were born underground. Nobody widened them, and they need no firing range to make the point.

The Hien Luong bridge over the Ben Hai river marked the division and is free to walk up to. Khe Sanh, further west, is an airstrip, a small museum and a lot of open ground, and it is the stop most people find thinner than they expected.

Expect more driving than looking. The DMZ is a day of distances between quiet places, and it rewards a guide who can explain what you are standing in.

How is the war presented?

From the Vietnamese side, without balance. Museum captions use language a visitor from the United States, Australia or Korea will find pointed, and the exhibits are a national account rather than a neutral one.

A national account is the honest thing to expect rather than a complaint, and it is a large part of why the museums are worth the time. Anyone who has only met this history from the other direction is being shown how the country that lives here tells it.

What should you not do?

Treat it as a photo stop. These are places where people died in numbers, several within living memory, and Vietnamese visitors at the same sites are often there for family reasons rather than as tourists.

The other thing worth knowing is that unexploded ordnance remains a real hazard in parts of the central provinces, particularly around the old DMZ. Stay on marked paths and out of fields, which is the same advice the safety guide gives for reasons that have nothing to do with the war.

Much of how this history is presented happens indoors. Museums in Vietnam covers which four are worth an hour, including the two that deal with the war directly.