"Good Morning, Vietnam!" The discursive construction of nationhood in the War Remnant Museum wall-texts

When the tourism industry is operatively organized by governmental institutions, it seems that the destination is commodified in ways that are ideologically constructed so as to 'educate' tourists to perceive them as having a historically different identity. This seems to be what happens when visiting the War Remnant Museum (WRM) in Vietnam. The WRM is a war museum, in Ho Chi Min City, containing exhibits related to the Vietnam and Indochina wars in a series of themed rooms; they include graphic photography accompanied by wall-texts, in English, Vietnamese and Japanese, covering the effects of such chemicals as Agent Orange andother defoliant sprays, the use of napalm and phosphorus bombs and other war atrocities. Since, in some guidebookswritten for an international Western audience,we readthat the Cold War is dealt with by looking at the US with a benevolent eye, there seems to be some dissonance between what the Cold War is, how it is described in guidebooks and what is told about the WRM.