WHILE THE US ALLEGES CURRENT WAR CRIMES IN EURASIA, REMEMBERING VIETNAM: 8/8: The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam –by George Black (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2024
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
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.
1973 AMBASSADOR ELLSWORT BUNKER
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John John Bachelor with George Black. His new book is the long reckoning, a story of |
| 0:09.4 | war, peace and redemption in Vietnam. What I learned importantly is that the story is not closed. |
| 0:16.4 | It remains a challenge, a work in progress, but a meeting in 2019 in Vietnam I I have the US ambassador Kristen Bach, the |
| 0:26.8 | Charles Bailey of the Ford Foundation, Tim Reiser who George just mentioned |
| 0:31.7 | Pat Leahy was there, Chuck Searcy was there. |
| 0:34.0 | Others gathering at an airfield to begin a project 2019 that the then Secretary of Defense |
| 0:41.6 | Mr. Mattis said would begin to deal with the |
| 0:44.5 | ghosts of the past. The question is, is it adequate, George today? |
| 0:49.8 | But because I want to go to the story you tell of a young woman named |
| 0:55.0 | Yeah, and I believe her name is yeah who goes home to her family. She's disabled in some fashion and she's never flown on 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 plain horror that comes to these families because they're not entirely certain |
| 1:25.2 | that it was the Americans that did it. What do they think that it was bad ghosts or something like that, George? |
| 1:30.5 | Well, Yen is from one of the indigenous peoples I mentioned earlier whose story I think needs to be told in full. |
| 1:37.0 | She's from the Taoy people. |
| 1:39.0 | And their belief system is that the world is ruled by spirit forces who are present in every landscape in trees, in rivers, in animals, and birth defects are held to be the work of angry spirits and |
| 1:54.6 | Jens mother whom I met when we went back to her village |
| 1:59.0 | um, Jan's mother wanted her to be killed at birth. |
| 2:01.8 | She only survived because of the |
| 2:03.8 | intersection of her grandparents. She was very, very badly deformed by a disease |
| 2:08.2 | 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 and determination extraordinary young woman and she exemplifies what Charles Bailey has long argued which is it |
| 2:27.8 | doesn't take many material resources to radically improve the lives of these people and a lot more resources are |
| 2:35.8 | needed and it shouldn't be a partisan matter. This meeting at the Bienwa Air Base |
| 2:39.9 | Patrick Leahy was leading a Senate delegation. |
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