A Ho Chi Minh City-based museum has been organizing apologetic trips for South Korean veterans of the American war in Vietnam to return to the country for reconciliation and repentance over the last two decades.

The success of the program was presented to attendees at a museum development conference in Hanoi on Monday by Huynh Ngoc Van, former director of the War Remnants Museum.

The War Remnants Museum, located in District 3, Ho Chi Minh City, is where South Korean veterans visited to end haunting ghosts from the war in repentance trips that have been consistently maintained by the Vietnamese museum and a South Korean partner, the Seoul-based Korean Peace Museum.

The trips were first organized in around 2000, when the Korean Peace Museum visited its Vietnamese counterpart and suggested both sides jointly hold those tours.

Initially one such trip was arranged yearly but the number has since stood at two or three, and could be higher in the near future, Van told the conference.

Participants in the journeys included South Korea’s war veterans and students who wanted to know more about the war in Vietnam, she said.

The one-time soldiers, most of whom took the trips many times, usually toured the War Remnants Museum in daytime and at night, conversed with Vietnamese war survivors and expressed their apologies for the sufferings they caused in wartime.

They cried and even knelt down in atonement before the victims.

The veterans also watched musical performances by Vietnamese people disabled by defoliant Agent Orange, and they failed to hold back tears, Van said.

In 1968, South Korean troops slaughtered 135 civilians in a village of the central Vietnamese province of Quang Nam.

The massacre did not come to light in the East Asian country until 2000, when Seoul-based newspaper The Hankyoreh 21 published stunning revelations about the atrocities.

The paper then launched an apology campaign in February 1999 that lasted until February 2003.

The campaign – which was a call for apologies and financial contributions to support Vietnamese victims and build a peace park in Vietnam, among other activities – was enthusiastically embraced.

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