Algeria is to France and Vietnam to the U.S. as ? is to ?

I'd decided to let Algeria lie for a while until a pair of passages in Fred Vargas' The Ghost Riders of Ordebec made me realize Algeria must have penetrated the French consciousness and conscience the way Vietnam did in the United States.

The character in question (dead by the time the novel begins and invoked for his abominable conduct in the community and toward his family) is said to have had a bullet lodged in his head from the Algerian War, and to have been

"taken off active service and they put him into interrogations. Torturing people."

Revelations of torture during the war shocked the French public, and the matter still comes up in occasional legal cases. That Vargas could invoke torture and Algeria in a novel published in 2011 (English translation, 2013) suggests at least some in France are still haunted by the subject, and the character in Vargas' book said to have engaged in torture suggests that Vargas regards torture as the materialization of the worst that France has ever done and torturers as the real-life embodiment of the evil spirit always hinted at in her books.

If Algeria is France's conscience and its nightmare, if Vietnam played a similar role for the United States, what are their counterparts for other countries? And have those counterparts appeared in crime fiction?