Hello, by picture listeners. For the next few weeks, Sean and I are handing the feed over to a narrative podcast about Vietnam movies.

It's called Do We Get To Win This Time, and it's hosted by longtime ranger contributor Brian Raftry, who you might remember from our other narrative podcast, Gene and Roger.

I think you'll like it. Sean and I will see you in a few weeks.

What's the first image that comes to mind when you think about the Vietnam War?

If you were old enough to watch the nightly news in the late 60s and early 70s, as more and more US troops were being pulled into the conflict between North and South Vietnam, your first image is maybe of the chaos playing out on TV, like this haunting battlefield scene from 1970.

I looked up and spotted just an MVA had a green uniform at an AK and it was like a quick draw thing. I opened up in him, he opened up in me. He's lying up there in the trail.

The Vietnam War claimed the lives of more than 58,000 Americans and led to the deaths of millions in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia combined. It was cruel and complicated.

A war that engulfed multiple countries and stymied five US presidents before ending on April 30, 1975.

That's the day communist forces rolled into Saigon and Americans raced out. That infamous moment was captured in this CBS report and repeated in documentaries for decades to come.

Inside the building, the evacuee is rewrote into group society and then it was a mad dash out the door into the parking lot for the waiting helicopter.

And then it was farewell to Vietnam.

But if you were born after the war ended, as I was, and if you grew up watching way too many movies, as I did, your most vivid images of Vietnam come straight from Hollywood.

Images like Robert Duval, beaming with pride as he storms the beach in apocalypse now.

I love the smell of light coming in the morning.

Or Arlie Ermi, viciously chewing at Marines in full metal jacket.

You are the lowest form of life on earth. You are not even human fucking beings. You are nothing but unorganized, grabastic pieces of amphibian shit.

Or Sylvester Stallone, returning to finish a war that traumatized his country in Rambo, first blood part two.

Sir, do we get to win this time?

No modern event has captured the hearts and minds of movie makers and movie goers like Vietnam.

It began as a television war, the first of its kind to play out in real time, with network TV bringing the fighting to living rooms across the country.

But Vietnam would loom larger and longer on the big screen, inspiring countless Hollywood films about the war and about the people who fought in it.

For the most part, these were movies written and directed by white American men, often with a distinctly western perspective on the war.

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