Pushkin.

After we got married, we got an apartment on Haibachiung near the tending market.

It's not the best part of town, but not the worst either.

Very lively, bustling, noisy area.

That's my Elliot. She lives outside of Los Angeles now, a graceful, elegant, middle-aged woman.

She's talking about her life in Saigon in the early 1960s, the first days of the Vietnam War.

I had an apartment of my own. You know, life couldn't have been better, I thought.

My name is Malcolm Glaubo. Welcome to Religionist History.

Wherever we go back and look at something misunderstood or overlooked.

This week's episode is about a secret Pentagon study that a Vietnamese woman named Mai Elliot and two others became tangled up in.

And what happened when it ended? Because there's a lot we can learn from it today.

The project was run by the Rand Corporation, a think tank based in Santa Monica, California, home to an extraordinary collection of intellectuals and thinkers and policy wanks.

Rand is the kind of place where everyone speaks in complete paragraphs.

And if you close your eyes as you listen, you can almost see the footnotes at the end of each one of those perfect paragraphs.

The Defense Department will lie to them heavily in those years. Still does.

Tell me about how you come to work for Rand.

Dave knew somebody at McVee, who was an officer, a graduate student.

Dave is my husband, an American academic. McVee stands for a military assistance command of Vietnam. Headquarters for the Vietnam War.

So anyway, Dave knew this guy was also a graduate student doing his military stint. And his wife, an American, was working at Rand.

My Elliott is Vietnamese, and she ends up working at Rand in Saigon for a man named Leon Gray, one of Rand's most brilliant academics. He ran a secret study, and he's a big part of this story.

Here's an interview Rand recorded with Gray just before he died in 2007.

And how did you end up getting into Vietnam?

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