7/8: LOST TRAGEDY LOST: The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam Hardcover –by George Black (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 4 July 2023
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
@Batchelorshow
1926
7/8: LOST TRAGEDY LOST: The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam Hardcover –by George Black (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Long-Reckoning-Story-Redemption-Vietnam/dp/0593534107
The American war in Vietnam has left many long-lasting scars that have not yet been sufficiently examined. The worst of them were inflicted in a tiny area bounded by the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail in neighboring Laos. That small region saw the most intense aerial bombing campaign in history, the massive use of toxic chemicals, and the heaviest casualties on both sides.
In The Long Reckoning, George Black recounts the inspirational story of the small cast of characters—veterans, scientists, and Quaker-inspired pacifists, and their Vietnamese partners—who used their moral authority, scientific and political ingenuity, and sheer persistence to attempt to heal the horrors that were left in the wake of the military engagement in Southeast Asia. Their intersecting story is one of reconciliation and personal redemption, embedded in a vivid portrait of Vietnam today, with all its startling collisions between past and present, in which one-time mortal enemies, in the endless shape-shifting of geopolitics, have been transformed into close allies and partners.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchewa, George Black, his new book The Long Reckoning, A Story of War, Peace |
| 0:09.5 | and Redemption in Vietnam. |
| 0:12.0 | It is now the 1990s and the early 2000s. |
| 0:15.1 | This period between the talk of recognition, diplomatic recognition between the U.S. and |
| 0:22.0 | between Washington and Hanoi, started in 1994, was Captain 95 with the Clinton administration. |
| 0:28.2 | But between there and 2006, as my note, there was a frozen period where everybody had |
| 0:35.8 | issues, personal issues, political issues, financial issues, to hang back from the full understanding |
| 0:44.0 | of what Agent Orange, Agent Purple, Agent White, the herbicides not only had done to the |
| 0:49.7 | landscape and the people, but were doing to the next generation. |
| 0:53.0 | And perhaps more than that, George Beg pardon for interfering in your explanation. |
| 0:59.8 | It was the Vietnamese research that fixed the dioxin as the poison, as the poison we |
| 1:09.0 | know, TCDD. |
| 1:11.5 | But the Hatfield organization is also coming in, a Canadian, to give us information that |
| 1:17.8 | points to TCDD as well. |
| 1:20.4 | But there still was reluctance in you explaining why, please continue, George. |
| 1:25.0 | Yeah, I've found out the connection to liver disease, the first patterns of disease that |
| 1:31.6 | struck the doctors and scientists in the North were returning veterans and even veterans |
| 1:39.4 | in the field on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where one of these doctors operated a field hospital. |
| 1:43.8 | They're seeing all these cases of liver cancer in young men in their 20s and they can't |
| 1:48.4 | understand it. |
| 1:49.4 | And they're coming back to Hanoi or to the North after the war and they're giving their |
| 1:54.4 | wives are giving birth to these grossly deformed babies, kids with terrible birth defects. |
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