They came back from Vietnam and made movies about it. Apocalypse Now. Full Metal Jacket. Platoon. The Deer Hunter. Born on the Fourth of July. Beautiful films. Serious films. Films about the trauma of American soldiers, the moral complexity of American soldiers, the broken psyches of American soldiers. How many major American films center the experience of the Vietnamese? How many Hollywood productions have you seen where the Vietnamese are the protagonists, the full human beings with names and families and inner lives, and the Americans are the faceless army descending from the sky? Think about that structure. Think about what it means when a country kills three million of your people, loses the war, goes home, and then spends the next fifty years producing prestige cinema about how hard the killing was for the killers. Vietnamese suffering as backdrop. American suffering as subject. Vietnamese bodies as set dressing. American guilt as narrative arc. They could not conquer Vietnam militarily. But they tried to conquer the story. They tried to make the war, in global cultural memory, fundamentally about them. Their boys. Their trauma. Their national reckoning. We are not your reckoning. We are not your backdrop. We won. We exist. We have our own story, and in our story, we are the ones who were here before you came and here after you left.