This is John Bachelor. In conversation with the author, George Black, is new book The Long Reckoning,

a story of war, peace, and redemption in Vietnam. We've focused on the damage done by the herbicide

sprayed by the U.S. in an effort to defeat the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese by removing the

tree canopy of the deep jungles on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The results were a catastrophe for the

people of Laos and Viet Nam. All these decades later, George Black speaks of the true damage

what happened to the dioxin in the soil, in the water, in the fish. Here's George Black.

It had terrible levels of birth defects and there were no other conceivable sources. So if you

found dioxin, you knew it was from Agent Orange. And that gave rise to the idea of the hot spot,

that the concentration. People were partly deterred by the idea that the whole country had been

sprayed. So how did you begin to get a handle on the problem? A lot of people say, well,

like is every inch of farmland and forest land still contaminated, and Hatfield set out to map

the journey of dioxin from the airplanes into the soil, into the water, into the body.

And they found that basically most of the agricultural and forest land was pretty clean.

dioxin had degraded through natural processes, but where it concentrated was in food,

particularly the fatty tissue of fish, ducks, and other creatures that absorbed the dioxin into

their fat, pasted onto humans. And then really the worst tragedy of the whole dioxin story to me

is that breast milk has an extremely heavy fat content. What makes it so nutritious is the most

nutritious thing in the world, and women were expelling dioxin through their breast milk into their

babies. This is John Bachelors.