December 2019 – COHN17

Prang Sam Yod

Prang Sam Yod is a Khmer-era temple. It was built approximately 800 years ago by King Jayavarman VII, who built many of the structures at Angkor Wat.

Today, the temple sits in the middle of a traffic circle, and it is best known for the monkeys. Don’t trip over them on your way to the site.

Wat Muang – a big Buddha and another Hell garden

In August, I went with a friend to Ang Thong, a province about 100 km north of Bangkok. The province is known for its temples.

Most notable is Wat Muang, site of the largest sitting Buddha figure in Thailand—84 meters tall, sitting atop an eight-meter high pedestal.

We approached the temple from the rice paddies.

To give another sense of perspective: the statue is enormous.

There is a mirrored sanctuary hall with wax figures of the deceased chief monk and his acolytes.

Note the tattoos on the figure and in the photograph.

Wat Muang also has a Hell garden—a warning to immoral visitors of what will happen to them in the afterlife.

The animal-headed representations of sins.

The kids don’t seem too worried; they must be very good children.

Also—you can see some cheerful recreations of earthly and heavenly battles.

Next: monkeys.

A bike tour in Vietnam – day 7

Our last day, we had a short ride to a ferry which took us to Hoi An, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and former trading city.

I’ll post a video of the trip soon. In the meantime, on to the next topic.

A bike tour in Vietnam – day 6

After the visit to the My Lai Massacre Museum, the visit to the Heroic Mother Statue was a more uplifting exposure to the Vietnamese experience of the war. The statue and accompanying museum opened in 2015 to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of the war. It honors Nguyen Thi Thu, whose 11 children and grandchildren all died fighting against the U.S., as well as the other “heroic mothers” of the war who fought in the war or otherwise contributed to the Vietnamese effort.

Reconciliation between mothers of soldiers who died during the war

A bike tour in Vietnam – a sad day 5

When news of the massacre, investigation, and cover-up broke, it was a major turning point in galvanizing opposition to the war.

Note: Some of the photographs below are disturbing.
Leaving Tam Quan, we biked a few miles to what was in some respects the most significant stop on our tour: Son My, the district that was the site of the My Lai massacre. (Click on this link for a detailed Wikipedia history.) On March 16, 1968, soldiers from two U.S. Army battalions attacked a number of hamlets in pursuit of Viet Cong (VC) guerrillas with orders. Colonel Oran Henderson of the 11th Brigade told his officers to “go in there aggressively, close with the enemy and wipe them out for good.” The orders, as transmitted downward, resulted in the command to consider anyone in the villages as VC members or sympathizers. Over the course of the next few hours, soldiers destroyed everything in the villages—homes, livestock, food supplies; killed somewhere between 347 and 504 civilians, including women, children and the elderly; and conducted an unknown number of sexual assaults.

The following are photographs from the memorial museum and the surrounding area.

The museum’s heroes:


Ronald Ridenhour, who reported the incident to Congressional members; Lawrence Colburn and Hugh Thompson, Jr. who rescued civilians by helicopter; Herbert Carter, who shot himself in the foot, allegedly to avoid taking part in the attack.

The museum’s villains:


Colonel Oran Henderson, Captain Ernest Medina, Lt. Colonel Frank Barker and Lieutenant William Calley, the chain of command for the attacks; to the right is Sergeant Ronald Haeberle, who took the photographs of the attacks. Also the American and South Vietnamese politicians responsible for the war, and South Korean “mercenaries.”