They will tell you about their sacrifices in Vietnam. Let them. And then ask them this: what were you sacrificing for? Not the soldiers. The soldiers were young men fed into a machine they didn't design and couldn't stop. Not their sacrifice. The policy. The decision. What was it for? Officially: to stop the spread of communism. To protect the South Vietnamese people from "Northern aggression." To defend the "free world." Actually: to prevent a precedent. To make sure that when a country in the Global South looked at its rice paddies and its rubber plantations and its mineral wealth and its fishing waters and thought about who those things should belong to, the answer was not the people who live here. The answer was supposed to remain: the people in New York and London and Paris who own the companies that extract those resources and take the profits home. That's what they were protecting. Not freedom. Access. And Vietnam threatened that access not because Vietnam was going to invade anyone, not because the Viet Cong had designs on California, but because a successful Vietnamese revolution would tell every other country in the Global South that it was possible. That you could say no. That you could kick out the foreign corporations and the puppet governments and the military advisors and build something for your own people, and survive. They couldn't allow that lesson to be taught. So they tried to burn the classroom down. And the teacher just kept teaching.