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Vietnam War – Agent Orange & The Post-War Experience For Vets – George Black
131 Plays2 years ago
Ep 015 - Nonfiction. An incredible story of Vietnam, Agent Orange, & the post-war experience for veterans. My interview with George Black on his fantastic new book, "The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam."
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello everyone, this is AJ Woodham's host of the War Books podcast where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Today I'm so excited to have George Black on the show talking about his new book, The Long Reckoning, A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam.
00:00:23
Speaker
George is the author of seven previous books on subjects, including India, China, and foreign policy. He is the recipient of the Arnold Gingrich Award in the Kevin Carmody Award for Outstanding Investigative Reporting. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. George, how are you doing today? Good. I'm very happy to be with you. I think on my bio, I may be the only person in the world who's ever written for
00:00:51
Speaker
For the American Lawyer, you said many other publications, the American Lawyer, Fly Fisherman Magazine, and the Journal of Military History. So go figure. Wow. I didn't know about- I'm either a dilettante or I'm a polymath or a know-it-all. I don't know what I
Generational Gaps in Vietnam War Knowledge
00:01:05
Speaker
am. But anyway, Vietnam is the passion of the last 10 years. What did you write about for Fly Fisherman Magazine? Oh, a couple of things. I wrote a couple of books, actually, on fly fishing many years ago. I can't even remember. I wrote one about a
00:01:21
Speaker
a river in England and another one about a river in. Golly, the Shenandoah, I think it was. I can't even remember years ago, but anyway, that's all. Oh, that's great. Very cool. A diverse writing background. You know, I am always so when I read books about Vietnam, I'm always amazed at how little I actually know about the Vietnam War, which is interesting. At the very end of your book, you write there's like 30,000 books that have been published on Vietnam.
00:01:50
Speaker
And I feel like, so maybe it's, I was talking about this with a former guest that I had on, on the show, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg. She wrote a book about Nixon and Kissinger in Vietnam. And I like knew nothing about that, that whole thing. And I don't know, I wonder maybe it's generational.
New Interpretations from Vietnamese Archives
00:02:10
Speaker
I'm 30 years old.
00:02:12
Speaker
And so I think by the time I was born, people just stopped talking about, I mean, you're probably about the same age as my kids and they, you know, they got to read the things they carried by Tim O'Brien in high school, which I think is a, or even in middle school actually, which I think is, it's a great piece of writing, but it also, if it's taught well, it's a good way to give kids an introduction at least. But yeah, I think you're right. I think it's, I mean, it is a long time ago and.
00:02:40
Speaker
You know, 30,000 books, sure, but many, many of those are memoirs, combat memoirs by former soldiers. You know, the big books that probably, you know, a knowledgeable reader about Vietnam would name were really all published in the 19, some of them even in the 1970s and the 1980s.
00:03:07
Speaker
And so there's a lot of academic books since then, but they have a small audience. And I think one challenge of writing this one, particularly the first section, which is on the war itself and the experience of two Marines, sorry, two veterans, one a Marine and one a military intelligence veteran. I drew on a lot of the recent academic scholarship.
Vietnamese Perspectives on the American War
00:03:30
Speaker
which actually gives you a new interpretation of the war because a lot of it is based on access to Vietnamese archives that didn't used to be available. So it gives you a news, really a new slant on how Vietnam itself fought the war, as opposed to most of the earlier books that are about American policy. So I think that was a challenge in getting some of that to a readership that maybe thinks they're familiar with the war, but actually there's a new interpretation here.
00:03:58
Speaker
Yeah, and whenever I read about wars that America has fought from the perspective of the other side, it's also very interesting to me. For example, in your book, this makes so much sense, but I don't know why I never would have thought this. We call the war the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, they call it the American War.
00:04:19
Speaker
which I'm like, oh, of course, you know, that's, yeah. But also too something that I thought was really fascinating in your book is that, and you even, the two vets that you just mentioned, they find this surprising as well, is the Vietnamese are mostly very welcoming towards veterans when they come over. And there's not,
00:04:46
Speaker
I'm sure in some areas there's bad feelings and maybe some hatred, but generally there are warm welcomes to veterans when they come back. I would actually say having talked to many veterans, having traveled Vietnam as a tourist, having led tour groups, I'm not sure I can ever remember one
00:05:08
Speaker
convincing account of hostility. I mean, I think there's a load of reasons for that. And, you know, every time you ask a Vietnamese person about that, you'll get a different answer. I mean, one common answer, obviously, is we're a very young country, demographically. It was a long, long time ago. And you talked at the beginning about, you know, whether a current generation of younger Americans knows much about the war.
Book Development and Focus
00:05:35
Speaker
You know, the younger generation is very pro-American, very cosmopolitan, determined to learn English. So that's one reason, but there are many others. I mean, I think there's a lot of people, especially in the military that I've talked to will say, you know, the Chinese have been oppressing us for 2000 years. The French were here for 100 years. The French war lasted longer than the American war. You know, it started in 1946 and it went on
00:06:06
Speaker
They went on through 54 and then the Americans kind of came in and took over. And they'll say, you know, the Americans were only here for 10 years.
00:06:15
Speaker
So in that sense, it's an interlude in history rather than something that totally defines the history. But I think there's a lot of explanations that go to Vietnamese culture. It's despite the early attempts of the Communist Party to kind of eradicate what they called superstitions, it's a deeply Buddhist, deeply spiritual country. People honor ancestors, their home village, their family,
00:06:44
Speaker
And I think that that inculcates a kind of forgiving nature in society. And the other thing is, you know, between soldiers, the line you will always hear from Vietnamese veterans is, you know, you didn't choose your country's war.
00:07:06
Speaker
And the experience of veterans, they were all terrified by what they went through and it was kind of a bonding experience in a way. You know, once you get over the past bitterness, you realize that, you know, 19 year old kids on both sides.
00:07:20
Speaker
went through their own forms of terror and fear and battlefield trauma. And yeah, they have shared experience to draw on. And in the end, you know, they, in many or most cases, they didn't really have much choice about fighting either.
Agent Orange: Impact and Discovery
00:07:36
Speaker
They were conscriptive. Yeah. Well, what made you want to write this book in particular?
00:07:45
Speaker
I don't think books, at least in my experience, books don't come to you fully formed. They take shape, or this one took shape in stages. It started probably about nine years ago when I met these two veterans. I met Chuck Searcy, the military intelligence veteran in 2014.
00:08:12
Speaker
Then I met Manus Campbell, the Marine, in 2015. So from the initial sort of central to characters, I thought these people are really interesting to write about. If I can find the right way to do so. Then I think the second stage was
00:08:33
Speaker
place and setting for a narrative because Manus fought in a particularly deadly part of Vietnam, which was this area that's really a tiny area, the size of the state of Connecticut, that is formed by two provinces immediately below the old demilitarized zone. So there was constant pressure from the north to break through the demilitarized zone
00:09:01
Speaker
And then there was the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the famous Ho Chi Minh Trail, where the troops from the north came down inside Laos and then found all these crossing points through the mountains, through the jungles, into these two provinces. So it became kind of the strategic center in many ways of the war. And for that reason, it was a particularly intense and traumatic battlefield.
00:09:26
Speaker
and, you know, older listeners to your podcast who went through that generation, even if they didn't fight there, you know, the names would stick in their memory. You know, Kisan, Hui, the Ashaw Valley, Kontien, you know, these were some of the hairiest of all the battlefields. So there was my characters initially, my setting, and then from the setting,
00:09:51
Speaker
you sort of get into the underpinnings, not just of the geography, but why strategically that was such an important area. That leads you to this new interpretation of the war itself that I'm offering.
Character Connections and Cultural Narrative
00:10:03
Speaker
And then once you have the central characters, I describe this collective group of characters in the book as a kind of Venn diagram. And Chuck Searcy, one of the veterans, is really at the heart of it. He's been resident now in Vietnam for close to 30 years.
00:10:21
Speaker
Another central character is a woman named Lady Borton, not an English aristocrat. She's short for Adelaide, who's a very, very compelling character. She was there during the war in a neighboring area very close to this, working as a humanitarian aid worker in a prosthetics clinic.
00:10:42
Speaker
where a lot of the patients were kids, you know, having their lower limbs blown off by unexploded cluster bombs and hand grenades and all sorts of munitions. So Lady comes out of that faith-based tradition. She came from a Quaker family. She worked for a Quaker organization, the American Friends Service Committee. Then you add
00:11:07
Speaker
You know, you've now got battlefield trauma, physical destruction, unexploded bombs, PTSD among veterans. Then you get to the big one, which is Agent Orange. And that was really the last piece of the puzzle, the intersection of that Venn diagram with scientists and scientists who came in to unravel this great
00:11:32
Speaker
political problem, which the United States for many, many years after the war just would not deal with, which were the consequences of Agent Orange. Those are the steps, characters, place, political theory, Venn diagram, Agent Orange. Yeah. Well, let's talk about Agent Orange because
00:11:54
Speaker
So you open your book with a story about a Vietnamese woman and her husband, and they lived through the war, and then they have their first child, and their first child has birth defects, and then their second child also has birth defects.
00:12:14
Speaker
Talk about just talk about agent orange first. What was agent orange and You know, what what was its purpose and then what were its its after effects that you explore in your book sure Agent orange was one of a set of what they called the rainbow chemicals they were called that because they were stored in barrels that had
00:12:38
Speaker
Excuse me, that had a colored stripe painted around the barrel. Yeah, there was like agent blue. Yeah, there was blue, there was white, there was purple, there were small quantities early on of green and pink. And they were different chemical compositions, but essentially pink and green that were used early on, then purple, then orange were
00:13:04
Speaker
a combination of two chemicals in a 50-50 mix basically. And one of them, the manufacturers knew very early on that it had a very, very microscopic trace element of a compound called dioxin. And they were not greatly concerned because of the concentrations. I mean, they were really minuscule concentrations early on. And
00:13:33
Speaker
It was pretty clear to chemists very early on, this is possibly the deadliest of all manufactured chemicals in existence. It was used commonly, the two component chemicals were used in America very widely to keep vegetation down and keep golf courses and lawns green, clear brush from railway tracks. In their various different ways, these chemical compounds caused
00:14:02
Speaker
vegetation to die. The effect of Agent Orange essentially is that it messed with the hormones of a plant and to put it metaphorically, it caused the plant to grow itself to death very quickly. So it was used for two purposes.
00:14:22
Speaker
The first was to remove forest cover from areas that the North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong resistance in the south were using for cover. It's where they had base camps. It's where they had secret trails. So the idea was to expose them to attack, to aerial bombing. The second purpose, which was much, much more controversial and was discussed when
U.S. Recognition of Agent Orange Effects
00:14:48
Speaker
the program began in 1961 under John F. Kennedy.
00:14:52
Speaker
there was a tremendous resistance, including from Kennedy himself, to using chemicals to destroy food crops. It had been discussed during World War II, used chemicals to destroy the Japanese rice crop. And senior officials around Kennedy basically said, no way. One said it would violate every Christian ethic of which I'm aware. So there was a lot of debate. And then finally,
00:15:20
Speaker
The insistence was that the roots of infiltration from the Ho Chi Minh Trail into Vietnam were so threatening that the debate was won. They started destroying food crops that were supposed to feed the enemy. And of course, in many cases, what that did was to wipe out the food crops for local people, which was incredibly counterproductive politically. There is also a huge amount of evidence
00:15:49
Speaker
including evaluations by many generals who fought, who led troops. But Agent Orange was actually, apart from clearing dangerous areas for troops, like along the Mekong Delta, for example, which is this labyrinth of rivers and waterways, canals, heavily lined by mangroves or by brush and forest, that actually removed a very real danger of ambush.
00:16:18
Speaker
But other than that, from a military point of view, it was pretty ineffective because Agent Orange doesn't work immediately. It takes days before the leaves drop. So the Vietnamese very quickly figured out that these plains would come over, they'd spray the forest, and they basically had several days to get out of the area.
00:16:40
Speaker
So from that point of view, tropical forest takes a lot to defoliate. And some of these areas I write about, the plains would go over six, eight, 10, a dozen times to get rid of the forest cover. Yeah. And you write too at the beginning, so you mentioned that chemists knew that this was a harmful chemical compound, but the soldiers who were made to disperse the Asian orange
00:17:11
Speaker
They weren't, they didn't know that. In fact, they thought it was completely harmless. And you're right, they would even drink Agent Orange in front of people to prove to them that it was completely harmless. And I was, I was shocked by that. Yeah. Well, it is with hindsight, 2020 hindsight, it is shocking. Yeah. You know, South Vietnamese soldiers allied with the Americans would go into villages and smear it all over their bodies to prove it was harmless.
00:17:39
Speaker
So the health effects, they were always inherent in being exposed, particularly if you were sprayed with large volumes. And even from the start, the concentrations were probably about 10 times as high as they were in the versions that were being used on American croplands and lawns and so forth. But as the war grew in intensity after 1965,
00:18:05
Speaker
particularly after 1966, you had these production pressures from the Pentagon. They wanted more and more and more of this stuff. So they would start, you know, the first full year, they sprayed about a half million gallons. And then the next year it was a million gallons. And by 67, it was four, four and a half million gallons a year. It added up in the end to 20 million gallons. And under those production processes, under that accelerated need,
00:18:35
Speaker
the manufacturing process, the chemical reaction just went haywire because it depended on very strict heat controls. And once the heat controls were lost, the amount of dioxin just exploded exponentially. So the later concentrations were much, much heavier. The interesting thing is that the first American scientists who were concerned about this
00:19:05
Speaker
They were primarily concerned with the environmental destruction because it was just removing vast areas of healthy forest. And they were actually more concerned from a health point of view with another compound called Agent Blue, which was the main one used for crop destruction. And that was an arsenic-based compound. So the first health concern was here's all this arsenic going into the ground.
00:19:30
Speaker
and going into food crops. And when arsenic, there are two forms of arsenic, I won't get too technical, but initially the form in which it was sprayed was not toxic, but in the ground and in the soil, it mutates into another form, which is carcinogenic. But Vietnamese scientists were aware of the health impacts very, very early on because they began to see
00:19:58
Speaker
There were a group of doctors who have never, I mean, I think this book is really an attempt to, one chapter in particular, an attempt to say the pioneering work on this was done by the Vietnamese. And they were written off as communist propagandists who wanted to extort reparations from the United States and, you know, concerns about corporate liability for the producers.
American Society and the Vietnam War's Aftermath
00:20:22
Speaker
These were highly distinguished, internationally renowned physicians.
00:20:27
Speaker
The main one of them, he was publishing as early as 1963 in The Lancet, the great British medical journal. It's kind of the equivalent of the New England Journal of Medicine. He was publishing on liver disease, liver surgery. He was a liver specialist. So he began to see all these cancers appearing, especially liver cancers, as well as birth defects in the children of veterans returning to the North who had been fighting in the South.
00:20:57
Speaker
He had a pupil protege who ran a clandestine field hospital on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And he was seeing all these 20-somethings, young soldiers, healthy young soldiers, coming in with liver cancer. And he himself came under the spray. He eventually died of what we now recognize to be Agent Orange-related disease. So they were the ones who pioneered the early research. And the Americans just didn't want to know about it for years, for decades.
00:21:28
Speaker
Yeah. And I mean, really that's kind of the title of your book is The Long Reckoning. And it really has taken so long, which we'll get into when we talk about Chuck and Manus. How long was it though before the American public was alerted or before it became public or maybe even popular among the public that Agent Orange was so harmful?
00:21:57
Speaker
Yeah, it became evident really in stages in the late 1980s, a lot of veterans knew right away that they were coming back from Vietnam and having deformed kids or their wives were miscarrying, giving birth to stillborn kids with birth defects. So they were aware of that and a lot of them began to get sick and there was no real medical explanation.
00:22:25
Speaker
Then in 1988, there was a lawsuit brought by a Vietnam veteran who was dying of cancer against the corporations. That went to court. There was an out-of-court settlement. There was a film made at about the same time called Vietnam's Deadly Fog, I think was the title. Then when the first tourists began, when Vietnam opened up, there was kind of a process
00:22:55
Speaker
the late 80s early 90s that was a bit like what happened when the Soviet Union fell apart there was an economic reform process there was an opening up to the world the first tourists began to go the first veterans began to return and they became aware that in Vietnam there were all these deformed kids and so you know it was a gradual process but it took until 1991
00:23:19
Speaker
before American veterans got any official recognition that there was a connection.
Cultural Misunderstandings in War
00:23:24
Speaker
And it was more based on politics and really on guilt than it was on science. You know, the veterans were very, very badly treated when they came back because America doesn't lose wars. And, you know, World War I, everyone came home to a hero's welcome. And World War II, no one knew how to deal with the veterans.
00:23:45
Speaker
and they didn't know how to deal with their own experience, and they didn't talk about it. And most veterans to this day, I gave a book talk in St. Louis the other night, and there were quite a lot of veterans in the audience, and one of them came up with his daughter. He had actually served in this same province where the book is largely set, and his daughter took me aside. He had Parkinson's disease and a spinal degenerative disease,
00:24:10
Speaker
He is receiving full benefits from the Veterans Administration because of Agent Orange-related illnesses. And his daughter came up to me after and said, you know, he never talks about it. This is the first time I've seen him talk about it. And this is, you know, 50-odd years after the fact.
00:24:27
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think I grew up in Northwest Indiana in a very working class rural town. And also just growing up, it wasn't the war wasn't I didn't it wasn't taught in school. All our history books ended right before you get to Vietnam. Yeah.
00:24:45
Speaker
And what I really remember from my community is, one, the draft, which people talked a lot about how frightening that was. And then, two, people in the town who had died in Vietnam. And there's just memorials outside of houses. Such and such died here on this day. Or somebody died.
00:25:09
Speaker
And that's really, I never was taught what the causes of Vietnam were, really what the history of the war was. It just wasn't talked about. And I think like you said, America doesn't lose wars.
00:25:25
Speaker
I think even going back to when I was a kid, I think I remember seeing some school presentation that made it very clear that America has won every war that it's ever fought. And I think about that sometimes. And yeah, you're right.
00:25:43
Speaker
And you know, policymakers, there's a conversation in the book between Lyndon Johnson's National Security Advisor and the most famous of the veterans, Bobby Mueller, where McGeorge Bundy says to him, you know, there's so much guilt, embarrassment, shame, anger, bitterness, that people are just not going to deal with you.
00:26:10
Speaker
policymakers are just not gonna deal with you. They just want it out of sight and out of mind, forgotten. And then you can argue, a lot of people do, that there is a particularly, I don't think it's only American, but there's a particular strain in this country of not wanting to learn lessons from history, not wanting to think much about history at all, particularly when it reflects badly on this kind of,
00:26:35
Speaker
you know, the national identity that Americans have, you know, as virtuous and as, you know, a model for the world of democracy. It's eroded a lot in the last 30 years. You know, the last time America won a war, it was expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991. It's a long time ago. And since then we've gone through Iraq, we've gone through Afghanistan,
00:27:06
Speaker
And in both those cases, to me, the common feature between those in Vietnam is that the policymakers who made the decisions never began to understand the culture they were dealing with in the countries they were fighting these wars. And the result of that, every war has this long reckoning. And a lot of the time, that is to do with
00:27:34
Speaker
the illusions that drive the war in the first place, and then the unintended consequences. If you look at Iraq, the long-term consequence of the war in Iraq, other than 300,000 dead Iraqis, is that Iran essentially now controls the country, which was exactly the opposite of the intended effect.
00:27:59
Speaker
I found myself in your discussion of Vietnam drawing a lot of parallels with Iraq. Afghanistan, I think the war there is a different case in that it began, in my view, out of entirely legitimate concerns. It was about capturing Osama bin Laden after 9-11.
00:28:25
Speaker
And it morphed into something else that was very different. And a lot of that, you know, a lot of veterans, if you recall, or saw a lot of your listeners, I'm sure will, the Ken Burns series on the war in Vietnam, six or seven years ago, a lot of veterans just
00:28:42
Speaker
turned it off after the first 10 minutes of the first episode because he said it was a war born of good intentions that went wrong. A lot of veterans really question that. I think it's a debatable point and I think Afghanistan
00:28:56
Speaker
you know, once the hunt for Osama bin Laden had failed, there were a lot of genuinely good intentions. I mean, people said, excuse me, people said, you know, here's a country where girls are not allowed to go to school. That's terrible. Of course it was terrible. And it was a very honorable, noble intention to change that, to open society, to have, you know, democratic freedoms, send girls to school.
00:29:24
Speaker
And the problem was that was entirely incompatible with, you know, deep rooted centuries long culture, which rightly or wrongly, and to most of us wrongly suppressed and silenced girls and women and still does. So, you know, good intentions can go wrong. And the result of Afghanistan is countless Afghans dead, a completely rotten political system that fell apart. The Taliban come back to power and girls can't go to school again.
00:29:55
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in, in one of the things for, for my show here that, uh, I feel really kind of privileged that I get to talk to, you know, people like you and, and read all these different books about war is you start to see a lot of commonalities with a lot of these wars, a lot of the same threads, even with, with Ukraine and Russia right now, you know, it's, it's, you know, history is, is repeating itself, you know, in, in a lot of ways.
Veterans' Journeys: Chuck Searcy and Manus Campbell
00:30:25
Speaker
Well, let's talk about Chuck and Manus who were two of the characters that make up a large part of your book. Let's start with Chuck Cersei. So who is Chuck Cersei? What role does he have in the book that you write?
00:30:48
Speaker
He's really, in a way, the central character, not just in the amount of text he takes up, but I think he's kind of the moral center of the book. He was a straight arrow boy from born in Alabama, grew up in a small town in Georgia, in segregated Georgia, came from a very conservative family. All the kids went into the military.
00:31:17
Speaker
going back generations. His father was a World War II POW in Germany. And so, you know, he grew up in the high school marching band, joining junior ROTC in high school, accepted that he was going to have to go and serve, signed up, went into army intelligence, and, you know, describes the classic process that every
00:31:47
Speaker
every enlistee, every draftee went through in boot camp. And the first thing that boot camp has to do is to dehumanize the people you're gonna fight against. Because the fact of the matter is, most teenage kids, and the average age of those who went to Vietnam was 19. World War II was 26. A lot of those in World War II, you know, were married men with kids. These were 19-year-olds and a lot of 18-year-olds.
00:32:18
Speaker
and they wanted to prove themselves as heroes. They, Manus in particular, you know, had a problematic father who nothing was ever good enough for his father and Manus wanted to be a hero in his father's eyes. But, you know, boot camp, most kids of that age don't want to go out and kill people.
00:32:38
Speaker
I'm sorry. Are you talking about Chuck? Are you talking about every, every and every drafty, they go in to basic training with no particular desire to kill another human being, but that's their job. And so the other, the other side, the enemy has to be dehumanized. And that means giving them horrible racist nicknames, which happens in every war happened in World War II. And then
00:33:09
Speaker
You know, if they don't, this particularly applies to the Marines who have a unique culture within the military. You know, every man depends on every other man. So every man has to be rock solid. And if you can't handle the abuse and the horrible torture you put through in bootcamp, you won't be able to survive or deal with encounter with the enemy in Vietnam, which is 10 times scarier.
00:33:38
Speaker
So you have to be turned into the cogs in a machine and you don't have to understand the purpose of that machine. It's just to kill the enemy. So Chuck went to Vietnam. He was a couple of years older than Manus and he was assigned to military intelligence in Saigon. So 80% of this is something I think most people don't understand about 80% of all those who went to Vietnam never fired a shot in anger. You know, there was a huge,
00:34:07
Speaker
bureaucracy, infrastructure that sustained the combat troops. And Chuck sat there analyzing the war that Manus Campbell was fighting. He had to evaluate North Vietnamese and Vietcong troop movements, order of battle where the enemy units were, and all sorts of other things too, like rice production and how the economy was doing and how many people were living in
00:34:36
Speaker
in pro-government villages, which often meant they were herded into them because their homes were being burned out and turned into free fire zones. So that was Chuck's wartime experience. And then he experienced in the middle of his tour the Tet Offensive, which was the biggest episode and really the turning point of the war, when a lot of Americans began to realize that this was not a war they were ever going to win.
00:35:04
Speaker
The Tet Offensive was the first time the war came to Saigon. There was a mass attack on dozens of cities and military bases. And Chuck was roused in the middle of the night because helicopters were flying in to relieve the US embassy, which had just been attacked by the Viet Cong. And then he talks a lot about the aftermath. He lived in this peaceful little neighborhood near the airport.
00:35:34
Speaker
All hell broke loose as the Americans really took their vengeance out on the Viet Cong and his whole neighborhood was raised to the ground. And it had been this quiet little neighborhood where you had, you know, old men sitting out in the streets with their wispy little Ho Chi Minh beards and smoking pipes. And, you know, it was just devastated. So that was a turning point for him personally as well. That was his wartime experience.
00:36:03
Speaker
Yeah. Well, talk a little bit before we get to his his post-war experience, talk a little bit about Manus Campbell and maybe contrast the two a bit. Yeah. I mean, they were fighting the two halves of the same war. Manus was fighting it. Chuck was analyzing it. Manus is misfortune. And what binds them together, apart from their present day friendship, is that
00:36:28
Speaker
They served at exactly the same time. They arrived in Vietnam in June of 1967 within days of each other. Marines served for 13 months instead of 12, which the regular army did. Never understood the reasons for that. So Manus had an extra month. But he had this particular misfortune. He was assigned to all of the worst places at all of the worst times.
00:36:54
Speaker
So he went through, he spent about six months right on the DMZ in a base called Kon Tien. And Kon Tien was just a killing zone. The whole area was a three fire zone. And it was a base on a hilltop that was designed to look across the DMZ into North Vietnam.
00:37:18
Speaker
And the trouble was with that, it was totally exposed. So it was just totally, permanently under shell fire, mortar fire, attempts to breach the perimeter fence.
00:37:29
Speaker
So he went through that. He was also on the trails to the famous or to soldiers infamous Ashaw Valley. And I spent a lot of the book talking about the Ashaw Valley as really the most crucial place in the whole war. It was where it was the first place the North Vietnamese established a secure
00:37:53
Speaker
protected area within the South. And it became the launching point for major operations. Throughout the war, they controlled it. The Americans never took it back. It is also coincidentally where the pioneering research was done on Agent Orange because it was massively sprayed. So, you know, Manis' first big firefight, which I describe in detail in the book,
00:38:19
Speaker
was on one of these many, many anonymous hills called Hill 674. And his battalion was sent into combat with what was in fact the military command center of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in this area of these two provinces that the book is centered on. And it was a horrific thing, a daily event. I mean, it's the kind of thing that
00:38:47
Speaker
happened all the time and you get a couple of paragraphs in the hometown papers about all those who had died. But it wasn't counted as a major battle, although if you were a Marine, you certainly saw it as such. Its platoon walked into an ambush. One of the things that I was struck by actually in your book when you talk about these types of battles
00:39:09
Speaker
is in modern warfare, we spend a lot of time training for, you talk about how soldiers will spend a lot of time training to be the best soldier they can be and obviously learning the best tactics and maybe spending a lot of time getting very strong and buff, but in modern warfare,
00:39:29
Speaker
Chance is really what things come down to. You can be the biggest guy on the planet, super strong, just be a military genius and then get hit with a bullet. And Chance in this war factor is much more you write about than in previous wars. 80% of combat in Vietnam was initiated
00:39:59
Speaker
by the enemy in ambushes and night attacks. And on at least a couple of occasions, there was one where Manus' company was ordered to reconnoiter a hill, another hill. They came under automatic weapons fire. They dived for cover and Manus threw himself to the ground
00:40:26
Speaker
Another guy threw himself to the ground with his foot right up against Manus' head, took a bullet through the foot. It's two inches, it's Manus' head and he's dead. There was another where his company was overrun in the night by a very formidable force of North Vietnamese regulars, you know, the best troops North Vietnam had. And they stormed the perimeter fence of another hilltop and Manus' company was overrun
00:40:55
Speaker
He dived a cover in a fighting hole, which they dug with their entrenching tools. His lieutenant came running up to him and said, I'll take this fighting hole, you take the next one, which was a couple of yards away. Bang, he jumps into the hole and a shell hits it and he's dead. So it was a great lesson and it leads to what really is the defining experience of people with PTSD, which was survivor guilt. You didn't know how to handle that experience.
00:41:24
Speaker
19 years old. I mean, I'll tell you a personal anecdote which is relevant to this. We were talking about Afghanistan and Iraq and Ukraine. My son is in Ukraine right now. He organized a group to take relief supplies into frontline areas and evacuate refugees. Two months ago, he's been working for several months on the back front, the main battle front now.
00:41:55
Speaker
And two months ago, he and a very close colleague, a Marine veteran, loaded up an ambulance with supplies to take to the Buckwood area. And by chance, David's own vehicle was in the shop that day. So he said, yeah, go, go with, you know, a couple of other colleagues of ours and I'll have to stay and get my vehicle repaired.
00:42:19
Speaker
Pete, his friend, was hit by a Russian missile attack and killed. Gosh. So, you know, it is the great story of war is chance. Yeah. Well, first, I mean, that's incredible. And, you know, I hope your son stays safe. But, you know, I really, you know, I really felt for Manus, but also
00:42:44
Speaker
all of the other soldiers who you write about in your book, who are almost just a little bit helpless maybe, because they could just be at the wrong place at the wrong time, just kind of like what Eva just described. Talk a little bit about the post-war experience for Chuck and Manus. Well, Manus went through
00:43:13
Speaker
an experience that was common to countless tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of veterans, alcoholism, drug abuse, broken relationships, failed marriages, reckless behavior. One thing that happened as a combat Marine, you became addicted to adrenaline. And he became a state trooper in New Jersey.
00:43:43
Speaker
and struggled for many, many years with all of those PTSD related problems. He also had a girlfriend at one point who aborted a fetus with no arms and legs. And it's a story. In fact, he didn't tell me until after the book was done. It's not even in the book. It's too hard, but he decided after that, I'm not going to have children.
00:44:13
Speaker
So he then went on really a long spiritual journey to try and make sense of his life. And it took him along various paths, you know, transcendental meditation, Hinduism, he traveled widely in India, he went on retreats in India, and eventually it led him to Buddhism. And he became a follower of the great Buddhist teacher in the city of Hue.
00:44:41
Speaker
where he initially went back and resettled Thich Nhat Hanh, who's probably the best known Buddhist scholar and inspirational leader to Americans who, you know, who are not only practicing Buddhists, but are really, you know, have espoused the whole idea of spiritual wellness. So Manus took that religious journey, and it was only when he had come through that that he decided it was time to return. Chuck returned much earlier.
00:45:12
Speaker
Chuck had not been in combat. He'd witnessed the destruction of the Tet Offensive, but he came back disillusioned and bitter, joined the anti-war movement, but really not as a radical. I mean, he still had this belief that the checks and balances of the American system would sort of come to terms with what happened.
00:45:35
Speaker
He was a speaker though. I think you've actually got a photo in your book of him speaking at an anti-war demonstration. The biggest demonstration of the whole war was after the US sponsored an invasion of Laos by the South Vietnamese. This was during the period called Vietnamization when the American troops were coming out and it was a fiasco and tens of thousands of soldiers died.
00:46:04
Speaker
hundreds of Americans died providing air support. And so there was this big protest in Washington where thousands of veterans camped out on the National Mall for days and disobeyed orders from the police and the Nixon administration to evacuate. And it culminated in this famous medal throwing where they marched up one by one to the podium
00:46:32
Speaker
said what their service was, who they were, and then threw their medals over the fence onto the Capitol steps. So there is a still from an amateur documentary that was made at the time that I managed to track down of Chuck throwing in that ceremony. And after that, I mean, he remained, he had a parting of the ways, a very bitter parting with his family. Like many veterans who joined the anti-war movement,
00:47:01
Speaker
You know, his parents were very conservative. They were living in South Carolina by that time and they didn't want any contact with him. They cut off all contact for more than a year and said the war had turned him into a communist. He'd been brainwashed. And then there was a reconciliation where his father called him one day and said, your mother and I had been talking about this thing and this is a terrible war and it's got to end and you were right.
00:47:27
Speaker
So he had that experience of reconciliation with his family, which a lot of veterans didn't. And then he had a very interesting career. Mainly, he started off as a newspaperman. I was actually in Athens, Georgia, where he went to school at UGA last week.
00:47:45
Speaker
and met this friend of his with whom he started a newspaper, which existed for many years, the Athens Observer.
Humanitarian Efforts and Personal Redemption
00:47:52
Speaker
He then went into a career largely in politics in the Democratic Party. He ran a Senate campaign for an underdog Democrat called Weisch Fowler, who won. It was a big shock of the year in which he was elected in 1986.
00:48:11
Speaker
He spent several years as the executive director then for the Georgia Trial Lawyers Association. So he had a political career that was sort of a democratic party insider.
00:48:24
Speaker
Both of these men, they do end up in terms of reckoning with what happened in Vietnam. They do both end up involved in influencing American policy and trying to bring understanding to what the Americans did in Vietnam. Talk a little bit about how they reckoned with what happened in Vietnam and some of their public work.
00:48:50
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, Chuck went back in 1994, which is a long story in itself. He was actually nominated to be the top person at the Pentagon on missing in action prisoners of war, MIA POW issues. And it caused a firestorm. There was a tremendously strong movement to recover American POWs, which didn't exist at that point by the early 90s.
00:49:20
Speaker
and, you know, the two and a half thousand who were missing in action. And it became very politicized and there was a firestorm about his nomination. And meanwhile, he had a second offer from the veteran I mentioned before, Bobby Muller, who was confined to a wheelchair. He was actually shot in the back very close to where Manus Campbell spent six months on the DMZ. And
00:49:46
Speaker
that author was to go to Vietnam and start a prosthetics program. And once he started on that, and the atmosphere between the two countries began to warm, it was a sort of logical step to say, well, why so many people walking around with no legs? It was because they were stepping on unexploded munitions. And Quang Tri province, it's this tiny province, it's the size of Delaware.
00:50:15
Speaker
more bombs dropped on that province than on the whole of Germany in World War II, which is kind of hard to get your head around because Germany is 75 times bigger. So, you know, the province was just like one big minefield and thousands of people were killed there. And Chuck sort of made the transition then working with a Vietnamese colleague, young politician in that province.
00:50:43
Speaker
And they set up an organization, which has now really become a model for the world of clearance of unexploded munitions to the point where very, very few explosions now happen. It's called Project Renew. And I write a lot about it in the book. The key thing about Project Renew and also about Agent Orange is that the people who led the fight against those two problems took their lead from the Vietnamese.
00:51:14
Speaker
They didn't come swanning in and say, we're Americans. Here are the answers to your problems. You know, the Vietnamese were kind of sick of hearing that. They came in and basically they said, what do you need and what can we do to help? So this was a Vietnamese led initiative and it's grown from, you know, a nucleus of Chuck.
00:51:34
Speaker
his friend, Hwang Nam and three other people to an all Vietnamese staff of 300. And most of them are local from country province and it's become this global model. Manus' experience was really different. And you know, Chuck, it's a lot of long story that I tell in the book. He became really a key figure in pressing these concerns with a lot of political skill that he'd learned in Washington and Georgia.
00:52:01
Speaker
pressing American officials to take responsibility for the consequences of the war and had a lot of impact. People came to joke about him as being, you know, the other American ambassador. Manus was one of many who went back to do small-scale humanitarian work. His practicing Buddhism took him back, as I said, to the city of Hue, which was largely destroyed during the Tet Offensive. It was the biggest single battle of the war.
00:52:32
Speaker
in February, mainly, of 1968. And he discovered a Buddhist-run school that was run by a nun who was a devotee of Thich Nhat Hanh. And it just involved working with disabled children, providing financial aid for them. Many of them were presumed victims of Agent Orange. Others were simply kids with Down syndrome or with other disabilities. And he would take them
00:53:02
Speaker
swimming. He would play football with them. He would just take care of them out of the goodness of his heart. And why do you think it is that the veterans like Chuck and Manus have been drawn back to Vietnam to help in these types of ways? Well, I think initially it was a humanitarian impulse. It had a lot to do with personal redemption, personal explanation of what had happened to them, you know, what they had done in Vietnam, what Vietnam had done to them.
00:53:31
Speaker
And then it sort of blossomed into something larger when they saw that the Vietnamese were not hostile to them. And Chuck at one point in the book says, you know, I think the Vietnamese see us as, you know, they give us something to live up to, which is to be the best we can as Americans.
00:53:56
Speaker
and to sort of espouse what we see as the best in the American tradition, which is a tradition of generosity and humanitarianism that was contradicted by the war. And I think the reception they got from the Vietnamese was critical really in why they stayed.
American Culture and Vietnam War's Legacy
00:54:16
Speaker
Chuck's been there now for 29 years. Manus has been there for coming up on 16.
00:54:22
Speaker
And there's not a lot of veterans who resettle permanently, but there are a lot who come and go and aid in projects, particularly in this area. And there are all sorts of political stripes. They're not just anti-war liberals by any means. I know several who are associated with evangelical Christian groups, conservative evangelical Christian groups, Trump supporters.
00:54:51
Speaker
But they have the same sense of moral obligation and they provide humanitarian aid to kids in the same areas for the same reasons. I wonder what it says about our culture that it's taken so long
00:55:08
Speaker
So, you know, obviously Chuck and Manus have returned to do these good humanitarian works, but it's still, Vietnam's still just not talked about so much. And, you know, again, the long reckoning. I wonder what it says about our culture that it's taken so long to reckon with some of these human rights abuses that happened. You know, you could write a whole other book and people have.
00:55:37
Speaker
about that. I think there is a deep-seated belief after World War II, especially in the Good War. The person who gave my book a very generous review last week in the New York Times book review teaches at West Point, and she wrote a book called Looking for the Good War.
00:56:04
Speaker
which is about the post-World War II era, and this search for another war that would prove the best about America, and they've been very hard to come by. And I think, as you said, you weren't taught, kids of your generation were not taught much about Vietnam, if anything.
00:56:25
Speaker
And it's a war that still really has no happy memories. I mean, there's no way to retrieve a good news story out of Vietnam.
Book's Reach and War's Long-Term Impacts
00:56:34
Speaker
And even those who supported the war at the time, I mean, you will still get some diehard, extreme conservatives who refuse to give up on the idea that the troops were stabbed in the back. There's actually quite an interesting current of opinion
00:56:52
Speaker
that runs all the way into the Trump movement and the far right in American politics today. It was interesting on January 6th, there were images on the flags of Trump as Rambo, who was kind of the emblematic figure of vengeance against the communists after the war. There was South Vietnamese flags flying at January 6th, which was extraordinary.
00:57:16
Speaker
Wow. I didn't know that. A tiny number of people at this point, most people just don't want to think about it. It was too horrible. Yeah. I mean, just me trying to think now, I don't think I've ever talked to somebody who remains to this day a supporter of the Vietnam War. Like you said, I'm sure they're out there, but it's very uncommon.
00:57:41
Speaker
Well, you know, I wonder, you know, what do you, what are you hoping that people take away from your book? I'm hoping, and I'm encouraged by the early signs that if we can get it out to the right audiences, and I'm lucky to have a great publisher, Knopf is a fabulous publisher, uh, with some of the best, I mean, I've never experienced such high quality editing or such.
00:58:10
Speaker
expert publicity and marketing, we're trying to reach, you know, obviously the general reader, those who have read books about Vietnam before, and the veterans community, I'm particularly interested in reaching the Vietnamese American community, all these specialized readerships, as well as the general ones, because, you know, one review I particularly was happy with was from
00:58:38
Speaker
a guy who's written one of the very best books I've ever read on the war, a guy called Christian Api, who wrote a book called Patriots, the Vietnam War from all sides. And he said, you know,
00:58:51
Speaker
in this vast literature on the war, there's nothing like this book, which was a great thing to hear from him. And I don't think there is, I don't say this vainly really, I don't mean to praise my work, but I think objectively there is nothing like this out there because it does trace the whole story from the 50s all the way through to the present day.
00:59:14
Speaker
and show this question of what the long-term impacts of the war were. And I think, you know, by implication, the impacts of all wars, you know, the title of the book is actually taken from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote about wars in Europe in 1808, warning Americans against getting involved in wars. And he said the evils of war
00:59:43
Speaker
have a long, have a great, I wish I could remember my own quote, I wanted this quote. The evils of war are great in their endurance and have a long reckoning for ages to come. And I sort of grew up with that. You know, my grandfather was bedridden because he'd been gassed in World War I in the trenches.
01:00:03
Speaker
My uncle suffered from horrendous PTSD because he'd fought against the Japanese in the jungles in Burma.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
01:00:11
Speaker
My neighborhood in South London through the 60s had all these unrepaired bomb sites, old blocks that were just rubble. My parents still had ration cards through the 50s. So that was like an early education. My son is in Afghanistan now. They're just beginning to deal with the fact that farmers are being blown up in the fields by
01:00:32
Speaker
land mines and unexploded cluster bombs exactly as in Vietnam. And that's gonna take decades to recover from. So it is a universal message and I hope people take that away from it as well. This isn't just a book about Vietnam.
01:00:47
Speaker
Wonderful. Well, um, George, this has been a terrific interview and thank you so much for, uh, for joining me. Thank you. Yeah. If, if folks want to find you or follow you, are you on social media? How can, how can people follow you? Oh, my website is George hyphen black.net. My wife and my daughter castigate me all the time for not being a Twitter user.
01:01:13
Speaker
And my publicist at Knopf said, don't worry about it. If you want to publicize a book, the best way is to do podcasts. OK. All right. I'm doing a podcast. I'm thrilled to do it. And I hope you can be a big audience.
01:01:27
Speaker
Great. Well, yeah, thanks again, George, everybody. George Black, The Long Reckoning, A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam. Go pick up a copy. Go check it out from your library. It's a story worth reading and sharing. And George, thanks again. Thank you, AJ. Take care. Bye.