Since 1981, American veterans have returned to Viet Nam on journeys of reconciliation and atonement. The Vietnamese government responded to these journeys by welcoming veterans back, offering friendship and solidarity through a ‘national policy’ of forgiveness. Veterans widely reported feeling healed by these experiences, and international media coverage of returning veterans fixated on their trauma, atonement, and healing in Vietnam. A narrative of healing-through-reconciliation became embedded in US-Vietnam relations. Drawing on oral histories with returning veterans and on media discourses in America and Vietnam, this paper will explore how the narrative of healing-through-reconciliation gradually reframed the space of Vietnam as the ‘scene of the crime’ in the Western imagination; as a therapeutic space first and a country second. This paper will show how the healing of American veterans reduced the Vietnamese to the ‘forgivers’, erasing their experiences and pain. Some veterans expected unconditional acceptance from Vietnamese survivors, while others challenged the forgiveness extended to them. Finally, this paper will show how the healing-through-reconciliation narrative became an effective method of silencing Vietnamese dissent and critique of US-Vietnam relations.