There is a mythology the U.S. built around the American War in Vietnam. It goes like this: Young idealistic soldiers were sent into an unwinnable situation by confused politicians. They came home broken and unappreciated. It was a tragedy. A mistake. A lesson learned. Notice what that story does. It centers Americans. Their trauma. Their confusion. Their homecoming. Their feelings. In this story, the Vietnamese people are a backdrop. A jungle. An obstacle. An abstraction. Three million dead Vietnamese people are the scenery for a story about American self-discovery. They made hundreds of movies about Vietnam. The Deer Hunter. Apocalypse Now. Platoon. Full Metal Jacket. Born on the Fourth of July. Hamburger Hill. Count how many of them center a Vietnamese character with a full human life, a family, a name you remember after the credits roll. They turned our genocide into their coming-of-age story. They lost the war and still managed to make themselves the main character. And then, with extraordinary arrogance, they put their soldiers' names on a wall in Washington and call it a memorial, as if the dead to be mourned were the people who flew 10,000 miles to do the killing. Where is the wall for our three million? There isn't one. Because in their telling, we were never quite real enough to mourn.