When I was little (2000s) the consensus seemed to be that Vietnam was a shitshow. It was sort of not talked about because it was considered an embarrassment for the west.
Lately on Boomer TV I’ve been seeing a lot of stories about gusano Vietnamese that “escaped” the “eeeevil communist north Vietnam”.
Shits weird. It’s one thing to paint a country like North Korea as evil because it’s easy to make shit up about an isolated country. But people can watch like a billion travel shows that show communist Vietnam is a normal ass country. The idea that people fled from that becomes less harrowing when you see that it’s a beautiful place that’s just as free as any other country.
If the US lasts another twenty or thirty years, that’s probably how our media will start portraying the Republic of Afghanistan and the occupation there.
The US has never had a shortage of people who want to memory hole any embarrassing facts and rewrite history the way they think it should have happened.