THE FOG OF WAR

A TV adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer challenges long-held beliefs about the Vietnam War

- ANDREW R. CHOW

WHEN THE AUTHOR VIET THANH NGUYEN was growing up in California as a refugee from the Vietnam War, depictions of that conflict were omnipresent in American culture. Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, and many other films portrayed American heroes fighting their way through a dystopian backwater and then dealing with the psychic toll of defeat back home. Very few of those films gave much thought to the experiences of the Vietnamese-who themselves refer to the conflict as the American War.

It's been 51 years since the last American combat troops departed Vietnam. Nguyen now teaches a class on the war at the University of Southern California, and finds that most of his students-who were born after 2000-haven't seen those movies. But their perspective and themes linger in the air, irrevocably molding the collective memory. "Hollywood has so radically shaped the global understanding of this war and its aftermath," Nguyen says.

Nguyen offered a counternarrative with The Sympathizer, his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2015 novel that follows a North Vietnamese spy during and after the war. Now, that book is getting the Hollywood treatment, a miniseries adaptation premiering on HBO on April 14. The A24 production features a mix of big stars, including Robert Downey Jr., Sandra Oh, and John Cho, and ethnically Vietnamese newcomers, most notably Hoa Xuande in the lead role. Nguyen, who is an executive producer, and the creative team hope the series will force viewers to center the Vietnamese perspective of the conflict while rethinking fundamental American myths, including about how the country still wields its geopolitical power in a fractured world today. "Everything that the United States was doing in 1975 are things that are still happening now," Nguyen says.