Like Nguyen, I never lived through the war. But none of my close relatives fought in Vietnam. My AP U.S. History textbook contained only four pages about the conflict, and my class ran out of time to cover the 1970s in detail. So I got my information from books like Fire in the Lake and films like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now.

And unlike me, my Vietnamese contemporaries grew up in the communist country that the war created. That country has changed dramatically over the course of their lives. When Nguyen and Hien were children, Vietnam had just begun to integrate into the global economy following a postwar decade of scarcity and stagnation. Since then, Vietnam has become one of East Asia’s fastest-growing economies, and the government's staunch communism has given way to a new pragmatism as it privatizes state-owned companies and seeks foreign investment. A recent Pew survey found that 95 percent of the Vietnamese people support free-market capitalism—a higher percentage than in any other country surveyed, including the United States. As a Hanoi secretary in her 30s told me: “The war is the past already. ... We care only about money. We don’t care about politics or history.”

* * *

Students in Hanoi learn about the American War for the first time in elementary school, taking class trips to the capital’s Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum—which houses the embalmed remains of the communist leader who led the war for independence against the French—and Military History Museum. In the following years, they study the conflict in the context of the country’s history of fighting colonial powers, from its 10th-century rebellion against China to its war against France beginning in the 1940s. “Each year, we learn the same thing in more detail. America started the war to help France get Vietnam back,” university student Luong Tuan Bach, 19, told me from a bench beside Hanoi’s Hoan Kiem Lake, where he sells Coca-Cola and iced tea to passing tourists to earn spending money.

Luong said he felt these lessons were important, and cited a well-known Ho Chi Minh poem: “Our people have to know our history.” But other young people I spoke with complained that history classes are too dry and tedious to make a lasting impression. “We started learning about the war in sixth grade, but I don't remember much. History is too boring, just texts after texts,” Nguyen Thi Huong, the university student, said.

Those texts, which, as Hien recalled, depict a “hard but glorious” struggle to defeat the American invaders, present the official Vietnamese view. “We learned that even though the U.S. army was really mighty and their weapons were really modern, the Vietnamese country united and stood up for our freedom,” Thuy, a university student in Hanoi, told me.

One 12th-grade history book I read meticulously detailed the number of South Vietnamese and U.S. planes, tanks, and helicopters that were shot down in each major battle as well as the number of enemy soldiers who were captured and killed. It made no mention of the estimated 1.1 million North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerrillas who died—a common omission, according to locals I spoke to. “It's war, so Americans have propaganda and we have it too. It’s inevitable,” retired high-school teacher Le Van Bon, 81, told me.