Vietnamese President Nguyen Xuan Phuc’s three-day state visit to South Korea earlier this month began with a 21-gun salute and ended on a sunny note. Phuc and his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yeol, decided to elevate bilateral ties to “a comprehensive and strategic partnership”—the pinnacle of Vietnam’s diplomatic hierarchy. Before South Korea, Vietnam had forged this level of partnership with only three countries: China, India, and Russia.
Such pomp and circumstance, however, obscures how the two countries have dealt with a fraught part of their history: South Korea’s involvement in the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975. Although civilian killings by South Korean soldiers during the war are well documented, Seoul has been adamant that there is no evidence of such atrocities. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese government has never publicly pushed for an official mea culpa, much less reparations, from South Korea. A recent reminder of this reality—and how neither country has addressed this wartime baggage—came from a South Korean drama series that sparked controversy in Vietnam.
In October, Vietnamese authorities demanded that U.S. streaming giant Netflix remove Little Women, a K-drama about three sisters living in modern-day Seoul, from its lineup in Vietnam. Their rationale could be boiled down to several lines in episode eight of the 12-part series, which featured a war veteran bragging about South Korean troops’ kills. “In our best battles, the kill-to-death ratio for Korean troops was 20:1. That’s 20 Viet Cong killed for one Korean soldier dead,” the character said, referring to the communist-led army and guerrilla force supported largely by North Vietnam during the war. He added that the ratio was even higher among his country’s most skilled soldiers.
