I'm John Bacheler with George Black. His new book is The Long Reckoning, a story of

war, peace and redemption in Vietnam. What I learned importantly is that the story is

not closed. It remains a challenge, a work in progress. But a meeting in 2019 in Vietnam,

I have the US ambassador, Kristen Bach, the Charles Bailey of the Ford Foundation, Tim

Reaser, who George just mentioned, Pat Leahy was there, Chuck Serci was there, others gathering

in an airfield to begin a project 2019 that the then Secretary of Defense, Mr. Mattis

said, would begin to deal with the ghosts of the past. Question is, is it adequate, George,

today? Because I want to go to the story you tell of a young woman named Yen, I believe

her name is, who goes home to her family. She's disabled in some fashion and she's never

flown in a plane, but she makes her way in the world in the big cities. And she goes home

to her family to visit for the first time. I take it in several years. And there's

a sense of superstition and rejection and a plane horror that comes to these families

because they're not entirely certain that it was the Americans that did it. What do they

think? That it was bad ghosts or something like that, George?

Well, Yen is from one of the indigenous peoples I mentioned earlier whose story I think

needs to be told in full. She's from the Taoi people. And their belief system is that

the world is ruled by spirit forces who are present in every landscape and trees, in

rivers, in animals. And birth defects are held to be the work of angry spirits. And Yen's

mother, whom I met when we went back to her village, Yen's mother wanted her to be killed

at birth. She only survived because of the intercession of her grandparents. She was

very, very badly deformed by a disease called Arthur Gryposis, which is a distortion of

the lower limbs or all four limbs in her case. And she's just a person of immense spirit

...