I went to the Vietnam War Exhibit at the United States Marine Corps Museum near Quantico. This section of the museum is about the Vietnam War, titled the Vietnam War. There are multiple exhibits in each section. The curators are Owen Conner, Jon Bernstein, and Bruce Alan. In the USMC Museum, the museum is broken up into multiple exhibitions with around 10-20 exhibits in each. Each exhibition goes over a time period from Marine Corps history. I will be writing about sections of the Vietnam War exhibition.

There are several artifacts within each exhibition. In the Vietnam War exhibition what stands out to me is the tank and plane artifacts. But I think one of the most interesting parts of the exhibition is the Pungi trap. Bruce Alan helped put the interactive display together. When you step on the plexiglass, a red light turns on showing what you stepped on.

The USMC Museum is a museum centered on the glories of the American military. Naturally, this creates a bias and hides any black marks in the Marine Corps’ History. The historical interpretation of this particular exhibition is that the U.S. Marine Corps was saving Vietnam from the “corruption” of Communism. The tone very much portrays the Viet Minh and their allies as villains. The exhibit’s purpose is to reveal the American interpretation of the Vietnam War.

Several parts of the exhibit play captioned videos and the written captions on the exhibits have an audio play feature. There are also archived media to show the news at the time. I forgot to grab a picture of those. The target of the exhibition are Marines and their families. The exhibits across the museum do their best to explore what the time period in each section was like.

So, I know some behind-the-scenes information. When putting the exhibit together the builders of the museum made some of the walls uneven and this caused some of the exhibits to be shortened and or removed. The curators had to cut some information that they wanted to cover out of the exhibit. There is another factor that is out of the curators’ hands; some Vietnam vets have experienced flashbacks and suffered from anxiety attacks while going through a specific part of the exhibit. This is not the only exhibit that has this effect in one of the unopened exhibits someone who is a modern former marine experienced severe mental distress. The museum has built a de-escalation/calming room for when this occurs.
I like the museum overall because I know the people behind the exhibits worked hard and they love history, they set out to educate the public on the sacrifices of the Marine Corps. However, the exhibition is biased, the exhibit does not go into the history of Vietnam as much as it could nor does it explain the motivations of the Viet Minh neither does it justify why there was military action in Vietnam.