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.
It’s pretty much the same as it always was. Cobra Kai is a recent series and it had “Vietnamese POW camps were brutal prisons where they made people fight to the death!” A similar plot was in The Deer Hunter. Then there’s that Mel Gibson movie about American troops being hit by human waves of Vietnamese.
Even “”“anti-war”“” films like Born on the 4th. of July have brain worms. They casually drop a line about “having to kill babies” and it’s said like that’s not one of the most disgusting things a person could do. If a foreign army killed white, American babies, we’d never hear the end of it. That shit would be unforgivable for Americans. But when Americans admit to doing the same thing? It’s “Aw shucks, golly-gee whiz! Look how bad it made our soldiers feel, who are obviously the true victims!”