At the close of the twentieth century, Vietnamese-American novelist Monique T.D. Truong claimed that “For the majority of Americans, Vietnam as a self-defined country never existed,” that its existence in the U.S. national consciousness emerged only when it became “defined by military conflict”—as the site of American warfare (1997: 220). Through the opening decades of the twenty-first century, little has changed to challenge this assertion. Twenty years after Truong made this statement, another Vietnamese-American writer, Pulitzer-Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times where he asserted, “For most Americans and the world, ‘Vietnam’ means the ‘Vietnam War,’ and the Vietnam War means the American war” (NYT, 5/2/2017). This fact is also highlighted by the editors of a 2016 book on the war when they claim that “‘Vietnam’ is used as shorthand in the United States for the war, not the country” (Boyle and Lim, 2016: xv). And as if to illustrate this point, Karl Marlantes, the author of Matterhorn and a veteran of the American-Vietnamese War, titled an article in such a way as to make this equivalence of Vietnam-as-war explicit: “Vietnam: The War That Killed Trust” (NYT, 1/8/2017).