GROSS: You know, one of the things you say about the war and Hollywood is that, like, this is one war where the losers get to write the story.
NGUYEN: Yeah, and that's one of the tremendous ironies, you know, that the United States lost the war, in fact, in 1975. But for the very same reason that the United States was able to wage a war in which it lost 58,000 American soldiers, which is a human tragedy, but was able to create the conditions by which 3 million Vietnamese people died of all sides and 3 million Laotians and Cambodians died during those years and in the years afterwards.
For the very same reasons that the industrial power of the United States is able to produce this vast inequity of death, that's the same reason that the United States, in the years afterward, through its incredibly powerful cultural industry, is able to win the war in memory because wherever you go outside of Vietnam, you have to deal with American memories of the Vietnam War. Inside Vietnam, you have to confront Vietnamese memories. But outside, wherever I've gone and talked about the Vietnam War and memory, one of the first questions that I get is what do you think of "Apocalypse Now?" So...
(LAUGHTER)
NGUYEN: ...That's what we have to confront - right? - that American soft power is tremendously powerful. And it goes hand-in-hand with American hard power.
GROSS: Of course, so many of the movies made about Vietnam are about the divisions in American about whether it was a just war or not and whether American soldiers committed atrocities or not.
NGUYEN: Yeah, and this is one of the things that people have a hard time getting their minds around. I often get questions, people saying, well, if you look at these Vietnam War movies, Americans come off really badly. And my response to that is, yes, that's true, but they're still the movie stars. And given an option between being a virtuous extra who gets to say nothing and being the demonic antihero who occupies center stage, I think everybody would choose being the demonic antihero. And that's what's happening.
The basic reality of the Vietnam War that Americans can't get around is that it was, in many ways, a really bad war. And so Hollywood has at least acknowledged that much. But the way that it has contained the meaning of that war is to make Americans the stars of this drama and relegate the Vietnamese to the margins, even though in reality, the Vietnamese paid the heaviest price. And that is one of the ways by which cultural power, soft power, prepares Americans to do the same things over again, that now as we confront the same parallels and analogous situations in the Middle East, the irony is that, you know, it's mostly people from these other countries that are dying.
But Americans are preoccupied with their own experiences. That's an exact replication of the mindset that got us into Vietnam and that has now allowed Americans to remember the Vietnam War in a certain way that makes it an America war.
GROSS: Do you see your novel "The Sympathizer" in part as an answer to that, as an alternative way of seeing the war, a way of seeing it through Vietnamese eyes as opposed to through American eyes?
NGUYEN: You know, absolutely. It's my revenge on Francis Ford Coppola.
