HANOI, Vietnam -- On the third floor of the Ho Chi Minh Museum here stands an exhibit that looks as if it belongs in a 1950s-theme restaurant. A Ford Edsel hurtles through a wall of glass, symbolizing the flawed thinking that led to the U.S. defeat in Vietnam.

Across from Ford's folly is a photo of an American soldier covered in mud. And there is a picture of Dizzy Gillespie, though exactly what it represents -- American decadence embodied in jazz? -- isn't entirely clear.

The Ho Chi Minh Museum is like that: sometimes blunt, sometimes oblique and often surreal. While other regimes have chosen more traditional ways to commemorate the birth of their nations, the leaders of Vietnam have selected displays that recall the work of Andy Warhol.

Judging by the crowds and the reactions, though, Vietnamese seem to like it.

"Many of them delight in trying to guess what a particular exhibit is supposed to convey," says Hue-Tam Ho Tai, a professor of Sino-Vietnamese history at Harvard University.

The Ho Chi Minh Museum is one of several historic sites with starkly different approaches to the country's colonial past. Whereas the museum tends toward the abstract, the nearby Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum is a classically Stalinesque structure displaying the remains of the nation's founding father.

Nearly 1,100 miles to the south in Ho Chi Minh City -- formerly Saigon -- stands the War Remnants Museum, a polemical house of horrors documenting the brutality of U.S. soldiers.

Together, the sites offer a multifaceted, official perspective on a period in which a poor Southeast Asian country bested two major Western powers, defeating the French in 1954 and ousting the Americans in 1975.

The Ho Chi Minh Museum is a white concrete building in north-central Hanoi celebrating the life of the man whose leadership helped win those wars. A few blocks away, lined with palm trees, is Lenin Park -- home to what must be one of the few statues of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin left standing.

On the museum's second floor sits a musty exhibition titled "President Ho Chi Minh and the building of a state of the people, by the people and for the people." Largely consisting of black-and-white photos with typewritten captions in Vietnamese, French and English, the display follows the life of Ho from the thatched jungle hut where his revolutionary Vietminh Front was founded in 1941 to his death in 1969.

The museum switches gears on the third floor, rising above the conventions of national history exhibits and into the realm of the fanciful. Designed by Czech artists, the section opened in 1990 and uses what looks like pop art to chronicle world events during Ho's lifetime.

A reproduction of Pablo Picasso's 1937 masterpiece "Guernica" signifies the struggle against fascism. Nearby stands a giant sculptural still life of fruit, not far from a diorama filled with pieces of plane fuselage, a tank turret and sandbags.

The display featuring the Edsel is supposed to illustrate the conflict between socialism and capitalism, which is increasingly harder to discern in this nation, where most people have abandoned the former in favor of the latter. A volcano made of red bricks "symbolizes the great power of national liberation movements around the world," according to one sign.

A short walk from the museum stands Ho's final resting place, a hulking, gray stone building with rectangular columns that resembles Lenin's tomb in Red Square and Mao Tse-tung's in Tiananmen.

While images of Vietnam's revolutionary leader may spark demonstrations outside a California video store -- as they did last month -- "Uncle Ho," as he is known here, still inspires reverence in Hanoi. The changing of the guard outside the mausoleum involves three soldiers in olive uniforms and white gloves goose-stepping in slow motion.

On a sunny Sunday morning, men in baseball caps and women in yellow and green scarves wait in a line that wraps around the block for a glimpse of a man who has been dead for three decades. Once inside, visitors walk single file on red rubber mats through the air-conditioned bowels of the building.

Hats come off. Soldiers order guests to remove their hands from their pockets. No one speaks.

Soft yellow lights cast a warm glow on Ho, who lies in a glass sarcophagus and appears to be sleeping. His thin gray hair is perfectly combed against his temples and his wispy beard appears glued into a position that defies gravity.

"I went there and cried," recalls a 29-year-old Vietnamese man who has visited the mausoleum twice. "He spent all his life for the people and the country."

Just as the mausoleum deifies Ho, the War Remnants Museum demonizes the U.S. troops who tried to defeat him. The curators spare nothing to detail the horrors of war.

A jar containing the bodies of horribly deformed Siamese twins sits on a table, the disfigurement attributed to the U.S. defoliant Agent Orange. A glass case displays anti-personnel weapons, including fragmentation bombs and an explosive filled with tiny, metal darts. One particularly graphic photo shows American troops posing with the severed heads of Viet Cong, Vietnamese communist guerrillas.

The presentation is nationalistic and almost entirely from the Vietnamese perspective. Captured U.S. military hardware, including a 175 mm howitzer and a Huey helicopter with a 7.62 mm machine gun, fills the courtyard outside. There is no attempt at historical balance or mention of the thousands of Vietnamese civilians tortured and killed by the Viet Cong.

The most thought-provoking picture in the museum, however, is not one of the many depicting the grotesqueries of war, but a black-and-white shot that seems to suggest a historical path not taken.

The 1945 photo shows Ho sitting with members of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services -- the forerunner of the CIA. The OSS trained Ho's soldiers during World War II to help stop Japanese expansion in Asia.

In Ho's later war to rid Vietnam of its colonial master, the United States sided with the French. Back in 1945, though, relations were good.

"When the U.S. troops land at a place, we must encourage people to support them," reads a resolution from the Vietnamese military conference in April of that year.

Pub Date: 3/10/99