The Vietnam war is over. Even though its veterans are alive. Even though it lives on in the morbid imagination of tourists. It's more than over: it's history. I have proof: an M16, the American assault rifle first used in 1967 in Vietnam.


It isn't a weapon any more. It's a relic, almost a fossil.

Encrusted with shells and deposits. It was fished out of the Perfume River, in Hue, the ancient commercial centre and capital of the Vietnamese empire and, many centuries later, the theatre of the Tet Offensive, one of the most ferocious battles of the “American” war, as they call it here.
The rifle is just another archaeological find, like the amphorae used to prepare nuoc mam, or fish sauce, the rice bowls, stone anchors or fishing net weights. Thousands of these objects belong to Ho Tan Phan, a smiling old gentleman and self-titled erudite, who has been collecting what the sampan fishermen bring to him for almost forty years. At first sight, his home and garden look like the den of a compulsive hoarder. Then you realise that it is a kind of historical warehouse. Amongst baskets filled with fragments of Chinese porcelain, stacks of vases, little amphorae and everyday objects, there are pieces of great beauty and value, including some celadon ceramic bowls.

You wonder who these things belonged to, what human stories lie behind them, how they ended up on the river bed. The rifle prompts even more questions.
It is the poetry of mystery. And it brings to mind a verse by Baudelaire:
“Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance
In a deep and tenebrous unity”
The echo reverberates in the mind: history is never over.

A scene from Full Metal Jacket: The battle of Hue.