Vietnam – to Ho Chi Minh City November 27, 2002

In the basement of the Presidential Palace we toured the computer room – full of the equipment that was there at the time of the takeover in 1975. Looks pretty old and outdated now, but it was state of the art then .

This was the desk of the president in the bunker under the palace – Bill decided to try it out for size.

L These are the people at GMT travel, a division of Mai Linh, the mail taxi company in HCMC. We worked with them to get around Vietnam more easily.

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The presidential palace tour was interesting because of the history with the US. It is said that history is written by the victors in any conflict, and Vietnam is a classic case. There is an old US helicopter on the roof and two circles painted where a South Vietnamese pilot dropped two bombs on the south Vietnamese presidential palace. The pilot, who worked for the US and the South Vietnamese, is regarded as a war hero. People talk about the unification of Vietnam as a major achievement, and they view it as finally having purged their land of foreign countries, and see France’s involvement and the US involvement in much the same light – just another struggle toward independence.

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