Day 5- Vietnam-3/26/09

The last day in Vietnam I had an SAS trip which was with a former war photographer and then went to the War Remnants Museum.  We left the pier and headed for the photographers home.  He bought several homes all around each other and created a makeshift museum out of them.  He was a photographer for UPI which is a division of the Associated Press for South Vietnam.  Its hard to imagine the experiences he went through as his pictures showed things no person should ever have to go through or see in their life.   When the Americans withdrew from Vietnam, he stayed and the new communist government assumed he was a spy for the Americans and put him in jail for several years.  After he got out of jail, instead of fleeing the country like the rest of his family he continued to live in Vietnam as he considers it his home.  When Bill Clinton was President he came to Vietnam and came to the photographers home and he was very proud of the picture of him and the Clinton family.  He had a whole room full of his pictures hanging on the wall and outside he had an old U.S. Army jeep which he uses as his car to this day.  After he got done speaking he let us go through the pictures he has and allowed us to purchase copies of them if we so desired.  It was then time to leave his house and head to the War Remnants Museum.  The museum was very interesting but hard to describe.  Once again it was from the point of view of the Vietnamese and tended to be slightly biased.  The museum featured many of the photographs taken by the mans who's home we had just visited which was pretty neat as we had just met the photographer.  Most of the pictures were very gruesome and displayed severed body parts and the effects of Agent Orange.  The museum made sure it shed negative light on the Americans and it did a pretty good job of that.  After the museum we headed to KFC to get some lunch before heading back to the ship.  It was then time to go back down the Saigon River and head to China.