Foreign memorials in Vietnam - who was Roy Thompson?

While Vietnam has its fair share of war memorials, for a country so shattered by twentieth century battles, memorialising here seems to me to be pretty restrained.

There are other reminders of the country's great suffering in media, but large scale monuments to the war dead are rare. They're mainly confined to the all too common war cemeteries that line the nation's roads. And these cemeteries don't count South Vietnamese military or civilian casualties.



I only need to think of Australia and its ubiquitous obelisks and other war memorials to appreciate how understated Vietnamese commemoration is. The fact that war is so deeply etched in Vietnam's past may diminish the need for physical memorials. Perhaps Vietnamese don't need grand reminders of the frequency of war and hardship in their history.

Just as surprising as Vietnam's commemorative restraint in respect of grand war memorials, is the presence on Vietnamese soil, of a handful of monuments that allow remembrance of foreign forces - former enemies.



At Dien Bien Phu in the remote northwest, a small obelisk erected in the 1990s remembers French soldiers that served in the fateful 1954 battle that author Bernard Fall described as "hell in a very small place".

The battle at Dien Bien Phu signalled the end of French colonialism in Vietnam and was the first modern era military repudiation of a colonial force.

Outside of Vung Tau in Vietnam's south, a replica white cross in the middle of a rubber plantation remembers 18 Australian servicemen killed in the Battle of Long Tan twelve years after Dien Bien Phu in 1966. More than 200 Vietnamese died in the battle.





Vietnamese officials have graciously permitted simple memorials to their vanquished former foes to stand on these old battlegrounds.

Commemoration of the much larger and more devastating US presence is unsurprisingly harder to come by. I've found only two traces in all my travels.

The current US Consulate in Saigon, has a replica memorial in its grounds to the men who died defending the complex against Viet Cong attack during the Tet Offensive in January 1968. I understand the original memorial was lost in the chaos of the looting of the Embassy after the evacuation in April 1975.


The current US Consulate stands where the former US Embassy stood until it was abandoned in April 1975. The original imposing Embassy building was demolished in 1998 to make way for warming US Vietnam relations and the opening of a new Consulate after a long and devastating trade and diplomatic embargo.

The Tet 1968 attack on the US Embassy in Saigon was a terrible blow to US morale and in some minds was a turning point in US public support for the war.

Less than twenty metres away on the other side of the Consulate walls is a memorial commemorating the 16 Viet Cong lives lost while attacking the Embassy compound. It's at the corner of Le Duan St and Mac Dinh Chi St and marks the spot where Viet Cong sappers blew a hole in the Embassy wall to gain access.



This must be one of the only monuments anywhere that remembers an attack on a diplomatic post - right outside an operating diplomatic post of the attacked nation. It could be a monument to the fraught complexities of diplomacy itself.
 

During a visit to Quy Nhon on Vietnam's central coast last year, I stumbled across what may well be the only memorial to a US soldier on Vietnamese soil - excepting the US diplomatic compound mentioned above.

I haven't been able to find out much about it and really only noticed it in passing.

A few kilometres south of Quy Nhon is the Quy Hoa leper colony dating back to French colonial times. It's on a beautiful stretch of beach and was administered by Franciscan nuns during the war.



These days it's open for tourists to visit. It sounds like a macabre attraction but it's actually a very quaint village in a lovely setting. Vietnam's leprosy problem has been largely contained and families here lead dignified simple lives.

Part of the area has been allocated to a "humanity" park celebrating the great names of international and Vietnamese science.

Quy Hoa is also the resting place for one of Vietnam's most celebrated poets, Han Mac Tu, himself a leper who died here in 1940 aged 28.



During my visit to Quy Hoa, local workers were dismantling an old US military barge on the beach for scrap metal. It was near there that I spotted an abandoned shack with a small sign above it reading "In memory of PFCT Roy Thompson from the members of the 71st Transportation CoTS."



I've searched for more information about Roy Thompson but haven't come up with anything. I'm guessing he provided some kind of assistance to the leper community. But I'm not even sure of that.

There was a big US military presence in Quy Nhon throughout the war and there seems to have been quite a lot of support provided to the leper colony by international organisations as well as US troops and US aid organisations.



The collection of buildings that included Roy Thompson's memorial looked ripe for demolition and I was left wondering how long what may be the only monument to a US serviceman on Vietnamese soil, might survive? And who was Roy Thompson?