Randa Abdel-Fattah

Among them, four-year-old Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Movies like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, The Deer Hunter.

All American films that tell the story from an American perspective.

American tragedies, American trauma, but exported and consumed around the world.

For Viet, the political experience of the war was very personal, and his personal experience was always political.

My parents are Palestinian refugees and we had like a tense relationship with memory.

On the one hand, it was like obsessively remembering so that we don't forget kind of like where we came from and things like that and what happened.

On the other hand, there were like black holes in the discussions we had about their actual personal experiences.

And I wonder, you know, as the child of refugees yourself, was that something that you also experienced?

I think in talking to my own parents, I know that they did see horrific things also, but it was something that they didn't talk about for decades.

And it makes me wonder if there's something to the fact that you almost need the distance, you need the physical and the temporal distance from something in order to begin to process it on an individual level and maybe on a collective societal level.

The narrative wasn't complete.

The way nations remember their wars also affects how their veterans are treated.

In the U.S., World War II veterans were seen as heroes in our collective memory, those who fought and won the good war.

But on the other hand, Vietnam veterans were seen as damaged goods.

And that loss and war not only followed them around, but was also seared into our collective psyche.

Viet's personal narrative also wasn't complete because he had never been back to Vietnam.

To do this, he realized he had to go back again to try to figure out what was real and what wasn't, how the war stories were being told in Vietnam, and what that might mean for how people in both countries move forward.

When we come back, Viet returns to Vietnam, this time not as a tourist, but as a writer.

Part 2.