War is horror. Its impact on the defeated is, furthermore, long and deep. Nazism and fascism emerged after the defeat of Germany and Italy in World War I. The Soviet Union fell months after the defeat in Afghanistan. And Trumpism cannot be explained without the defeat of the United States in Vietnam. Half a century has passed, yes, but the concatenation seems clear.

She carries her home in her WhatsApp photo. The house, or her childhood. The thing is, she has a selfie where you can see, in the background, the place where she grew up, a suburb of Denver, in Colorado. Today she lives a 15-hour drive from that photograph, in Chicago, where she teaches history at Northwestern University and where she has established herself as one of the great experts on the white power movement. Her book Bring the War Home (Capitán Swing) was in the proofreading phase when a white supremacist rally caused serious incidents in Charlottesville, Virginia. Those racist slogans have returned to occupy the political center, and the book is a good example to understand who these groups are and how they hope to shape the United States.

This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of the United States' withdrawal from Vietnam. It marked the end of a fifteen-year war that resulted in the deaths of three million Vietnamese and fifty-eight thousand Americans. An atrocity we've seen in dozens of films and series. Fiction has served to shape the image of that conflict, in many cases to honor and give meaning to all the lives lost in that pointless conflict. Apple TV+ is now attempting to take a more honest look at it with a six-part documentary series. More than in any other war, television followed American soldiers so closely in the midst of battle that the amount of surviving footage is enormous. And much of that footage has been recovered to track down individuals who are seen and ask them to explain their experience. The stories are devastating, and the narrative approach of alternating archival footage with the current account of the protagonists, sixty or fifty years later, is very striking. "I plunged my machete into his neck, and it was done. Afterward, I felt empowered. I was angry at God and everyone for putting me in that situation. To make me feel good. That's how I realized I'd gone crazy," says one veteran. "I was awarded thirteen kills that day. Everyone told me I was a hero, but I didn't feel like one," says another after liberating the US embassy in Saigon. "The army teaches you how to kill, but it doesn't teach you how to think after you've killed someone. And I felt so sorry for having shot someone," says yet another. It's moving to see the vividness of the trauma despite the passing of decades. Also revisited, in a more secondary light, is the testimony of the Vietnamese people and those outside the army who had to intervene in the conflict under unusual circumstances.