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HBO\u2019s The Sympathizer, <\/em>from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, opens with a quote: \u201cAll wars are fought twice, once on the battlefield and the second time in memory.\u201d It\u2019s not simply memory that the book and the series are concerned with though, its \u201crepresentation,\u201d that is social memory refracted through a hostile media, which often exists to \u201ccorrect\u201d the sins and failures of bloody imperial overreach.<\/p>\n \u201cOn the battlefield,\u201d Vietnam was lost by the U.S. and its tiny number of collaborators, although the cost was high, with over 1 million Vietnamese killed for the crime of wanting to free their country from first French and then American domination.<\/p>\n \u201cIn memory\u201d though, on American movie screens particularly, the Americans won the war, with Rambo\u2019s \u201cbrave\u201d rescuing of prisoners just one in a cacophony of works with \u201coutnumbered\u201d soldiers prevailing against all odds. The films always forget to remind us that the soldiers were \u201coutnumbered\u201d because the majority of the people in the country opposed its land, resources and strategic position in Southeast Asia being appropriated by foreign conquerors.<\/p>\n High-end films (Platoon, Apocalypse Now<\/em>) generally elided the Vietnamese having them fade into a faceless background where they were often machine-gun fodder. The Sympathizer <\/em>goes some way toward addressing this grievance, but in the end not far enough, ultimately retreating into generic considerations which quash what could have been a more far-reaching understanding of the war.<\/p>\n