Good morning. Welcome to the US Institute of Peace event on reconciliation and reckoning in Vietnam. I'm Andrew Wells-Dong with the Asia Center here at USIP. I'm joined in the auditorium live with George Black and Susan Hammond. And we have online Chuck Suetzi and Ngo Suen Hien, who will be our panelists today. The US Institute of Peace is the non-partisan, independent public institution founded by Congress in 1984 with a mission of contributing to prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflicts around the world. And in fact, the founding of USIP is in large part thanks to US veterans from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. And the senators who co-sponsored the resolution to establish USIP, Sparky Matsunaga and Mark Hatfield, both felt that it was necessary to have an institution dedicated to peace building, in part because of their experience during and after the war that they were in. And they knew that every war doesn't end when the guns are silent. It continues for years and years after. There's a tale of the conflict that can take as long as the preparation and actual fighting of the conflict. So to coin a phrase, a long reckoning. And part of that long reckoning is the Vietnam War Legacies and Reconciliation Initiative that we launched here in 2021 with support from Congress, particularly Senator Patrick Leahy, as one aspect of a process of reconciliation among Vietnamese and Americans. When we talk about reconciliation here from a peace building perspective, it's a process of social and political cohesion that is at an individual level, as well as a communal and national level. And all aspects of that, I think, will be touched on in today's discussion. That process involves acknowledging the past and the suffering that took place, restoring relationships among people, and developing a collective concern for the common good to address some of those past sufferings. And in a nutshell, that is the trajectory that George Black's just published book, The Long Reckoning, A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam, follows. This story is one of the most positive examples of peace building in recent decades that we know. It's one that has main characters who are both Vietnamese and Americans, veterans, the Vietnamese diaspora, peace activists, business people, and others. And the people who are with me on stage and online and in the audience are some of the main characters in that story. So it's an honor to be here with you all and to reflect on what we have collectively helped to make possible. George Black's book is published just this week. It's also the 50th anniversary of the withdrawal of the last US troops from Vietnam yesterday. So it's an appropriate time to reflect on the whole story of the war, which is fairly well known, I think, in the US, and the aftermath of the war, which is less well known. And the main characters in The Long Reckoning are US veterans and activists who went back to Vietnam and worked for their own personal healing, as well as for the restored relationships and lives of people in Vietnam. And I think George captures the story in one narrative more completely than anything I've seen before. For me, it's a real reflective and moving experience since I personally know all of these characters from when I arrived in Vietnam in 1997 and in the years after that. George, I met later when he was researching one of the articles that he published in The New York Times magazine a few years ago about Agent Orange in Laos. And he was looking for some obscure research source that I had worked on decades ago that I had long misplaced. But from that, we got to talking about other things. And I'm glad to have him back at USIP now for the second time. So I hope that both the stories about US Vietnam reconciliation and The Long Reckoning book itself will be well known and received. It's based on many great personal stories, some of which we'll hear today. So I will first invite George to give some reflections on what prompted you to choose these stories. What were the biggest surprises for you as you wrote the book and did the research? And what do you hope will come after it? Those are great questions. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you, Jenny. Thank you, Lise, who I don't think is here. But thank you, Lise, for making this possible. This is actually the perfect venue to launch this book. I can't think of a better place or a better time. It struck me, actually, as Andrew was talking about the 50th anniversary of the last troop withdrawals. The first big magazine story I ever did, which had a lot to do with Chuck Suracy, who many of you know, others will meet in a minute remotely, that was time to coincide publication with the 50th anniversary of the landing of the first marines in Da Nang. So it kind of brings a personal little journey, full circle for me as well. The title, as Andrew says, I mean, what's so interesting about this institution is that the people who founded it realized that wars don't end. And I think that was kind of with me, if I can just say one thing on a personal note, kind of with me from childhood. I had a grandfather who had been gassed in World War I in the trenches in Flanders. And he was bedridden. And he was my grandpa growing up. I grew up in the 50s, 60s. There were still ration cards. My parents used to go and buy groceries with ration cards in Scotland, way into the 50s. And when we moved to London in the 60s, the neighborhood we lived in in South London was just full of bonsites, unrepaired bonsites. So yeah, it goes on a long time. I've worked since then in Central America. I was just in El Salvador. There is a story I'm working on that has a very, very long incomplete reckoning. Every war is different. And what is interesting to me about this particular reckoning is a couple of things. If you compare the wars in Germany or in Japan, World War II, it was the victor of the war that dictated the terms of the post-war with the Marshall Plan and the new Japanese Constitution. And the irony of this one, it was largely for many years the losing side in the war that dictated how the post-war process would unfold. And I'll come into some thoughts about the detail of that. So that was the title of the book. And sometimes, I think the title of the book is always the hardest thing. In this case, it was super easy because I chanced upon this quote from Thomas Jefferson, 1808. The evils of war are great in their endurance and have a long reckoning for ages to come. It's the perfect title. The other interesting thing that some of us have been talking about recently is how, when the first reviews of a book come out, what you've got to do, which is hard, you've got to set aside the bad ones. And your agent, your publisher, and everyone says, don't worry about bad reviews. I mean, it's been fortunate so far they've been very good reviews by and large. But what's interesting about reviews is there's a kind of blind man in the elephant thing with book reviewers. What do they think the book is about? And actually, the five or six that have come out so far, including the one on the front page of the Washington Post last week, they're all different. And some of them, a lot of reviews, and I think I would anticipate this happening later, the Vietnam experience, the idea of the war, is so entrenched at this point. Among, I think, the general public who have read books about it, among veterans especially, and especially the grievances, in many ways, the very legitimate grievances of veterans about the war and how they were treated after the war. And the story of Agent Orange, which the Washington Post review, in particular, talked somewhat about, I think all of these things, I would question the ingrained wisdom, the sort of accepted, received wisdom about what the war meant and how it unfolded. And the book is really set why this map is so important. Most of you, many of you, are obviously familiar with the geography. But the book, for reasons I'll walk through, is set almost entirely in this small area that's bounded by the demilitarized zone, the Ho Chi Ninh Trail in Laos, a budding on the famous A Xiao Valley, A Lui Valley, and then cut off at the bottom by the spur of the mountains, the Batma Range, that goes all the way to the sea and cuts off way from Da Nang. So when I started traveling to Vietnam, which is only nine years ago now, the first step was it was actually connected with a small foundation that my wife and I were on the board of. And we were looking for a way to get support to people affected by Agent Orange. And I thought, well, there's got to be a 501C3 where an American veteran is involved or has a pass-through. And we can get in touch with them. So I went to Cong Chi and met Chuck Cersey and very quickly met his colleagues, Huang Nam, who was the young provincial official that he founded Project Renew with in 2001. And then the key members of his staff, Hien, whom you'll meet in a moment on video, Fu, who is the wonderful friend now who is in charge of education programs, particularly for kids, to warn them of the dangers. And then Cheung, the executive director, or I can't remember what his title is exactly, but, and then Du Ling, who's the head of the operations and runs the women's team, which is an extraordinary thing. Toan, who runs the victim assistance program. And it started off as a story about UXO. And I've got to learn how to use this clicker here, bear with me. So there's Chuck in Saigon during the Tet offensive in January 68. And the work of Project Renew, which is where this story got kicked off, Quang Tri, above any other province, is saturated with unexploded ordinance. And the program that has been developed there, not just by Project Renew by Norwegian people's aid by other institutions, Peace Trees, which was actually the first to go in, it really is not just a model for Vietnam. I remember being at a panel here a couple of years ago where officials, government officials from both sides were saying, you know, this is not just a model for Vietnam, this is the model for the world. So this is a cache of munitions that were found at the base of the rock pile, the famous rock pile that was a marine helicopter base with an artillery position. And this is Foo on, I think this was the first or second trip I made, 2014, 2015, visiting one of the scrapyards. There used to be a lot more than there are now, but for decades after the war, certainly many years. The local economy of Quang Tri that was so devastated was essentially kept alive by infusions of cash from scavenging unexploded metal, unexploded bombs and other war detritus. And Foo grew up in a small village on the famous McNamara line, and his dad and he as a kid would go out and scavenge RPGs and grenades and rifles and all sorts of stuff until his father warned him how dangerous it was. This is the state of Dong Ha immediately after the war, which actually leads into, if you like the overarching political thesis, I try to develop about the war, which is the first of the three parts of the book. And that is, again, I think one of the great entrenched stories that people think they know about the war as a result of decades of books and films is that it was Ho Chi Minh and General Zapp who ran the war. And Zapp was the great mastermind of the victory and Ho Chi Minh was the inspirational leader throughout the war. And it's largely not a true story. I mean, obviously Zapp was a military genius. He was the commander of forces at Dien Bien Phu in 54 that got rid of the French. And Ho Chi Minh was the inspirational leader. But by fairly early on in the war years, meaning 63, the country, the party, the policy was largely being dictated by this man who's in the center next to Ho Chi Minh, Lézuan, who was a Stalinist, an extremely dogmatic Marxist. And more than anyone dictated the political and military strategy of the war. And General Zapp, meanwhile, that was Lézuan and Ho Chi Minh on a visit to Moscow for the Soviet Party Congress sometime in the 50s. General Zapp, who's on the left here, in fact, was really displaced from military, primary military influence by General Ninh Tinh, who's next to him. And he was the only other five-star general in the People's Army of Vietnam. And he was the closest associate on the military front of Lézuan. And this is a photograph which I think was taken and distributed by the government in Hanoi to try and emphasize the unity of purpose. In fact, this is right on the eve of the development of the final plan for the Tet Offensive. It's actually taken about three days before General Tan died of a heart attack. Zapp and Ho Chi Minh both expressed very deep reservations about the plan for the Tet Offensive. They thought it was impetuous, ill-considered, premature. Lézuan wanted to trigger a mass insurrection. Nguyen Chi Thanh was his great ally and that's essentially the plan that went forward with some compromises, but really not that many. So on the second trip, I think it was to country, I also spent some time in Hue and Danang and the back country of Quatien province, Aloe Valley. Manus Campbell is the second main veteran character. I think Chuck's story as a military intelligence analyst in Saigon and Manus's story as a Marine grunt in the worst battlefields of Quang Tri, Hue, the Aloe Valley at the worst time of the war. Their stories really bookend each other. They're two sides of the coin of the war at that period. Manus is leaning forward center right in that photograph. This is taken at Quang Tien, where he spent about six months. He was also in the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This one is kind of out of order and I should come, well, maybe I'll say about it now. The third thing is once you realized in Quang Tri, particularly the sort of symbiosis between unexploded ordnance and Agent Orange destruction and the number of victims, a lot of that is to do with the way the operations were conducted. Before the flights came into spray, the fighter bombers would come in and lay down cluster munitions, rockets, napalm. So I began to meet families who had been affected by Agent Orange, which really, I mean, the richest experiences in the book and in the nine years I've been going there are these encounters with families. I'm not seeing them as victims, but seeing them in many, many cases and this has been the experience of veterans going back for many years since the first one started returning 30 odd years ago. The grace, I mean, I don't want to be sentimental about it, but the grace, the forgiveness, and there are many, many explanations for this. The Chinese have been oppressing us for 2,000 years. The Americans were here for 10. The French were here for 100. Or it's a Buddhist explanation either that war is punishment for past sins or it's controlled by forces that are not rationally explicable. There are just, the more Vietnamese you talk to about this, some is it's a young country, we want to be friends, we want to move forward and develop the economy. We love American commercial and market, values, there's all sorts of reasons. But I began, this was about the point where I met Charles Bailey, who is the head of the Ford Foundation office in Hanoi from 97 for the next decade. And Charles's philosophy has always been the cleaning up of the hotspots of diox in the old air base is a wonderful, necessary thing. It's expensive, it's very doable, it involves a lot of technological ingenuity, it was relatively speaking, and I mean relatively in relation to the disabled question, relatively easy to finally get official approval from various parts of the US government, including eventually the Pentagon. But Charles's insistence, and I think Susan would agree with this and anyone who's worked on Agent Orange would agree with this, is that the small amounts of aid can accomplish remarkable results to transform victims into something more than victims, into protagonists and to people who can lead independent and creative and productive lives. And this is a painter who was, grew up in a village just north of Benoit in the famous war zone D, very, very heavily sprayed. He'd born with terrible, terrible, four limb disabilities. He's now a very successful painter, he's a mouth painter, and he's sort of emblematic of this idea that the aid that can go to quote unquote victims of Agent Orange, in the rural areas, a gift of a thousand dollars, the kind of thing that Tuan at Project Renew or Susan in her programs, a thousand dollars can be transformative to the life of a family. And it's not a lot of money, it really, Charles Bailey refers to it as decimal dust. I mean, Tim knows a lot about even the difficulty of getting decimal dust through Congress, but this is not a vast investment and it should not be, and this is the other great lesson I think that I took and you asked me about surprises. I had sort of initially got to know veterans who were, had been in one way or another, traumatized by the war turned left in their politics or they'd been part of the anti-war movement, but the more time I spent, I'd meet more and more veterans who came from all parts of the political spectrum and there's one story, somebody that some of you will probably know, there's a Marine in Da Nang, which is the biggest cluster of resident Marines called David Clark. David is a very militant, outspoken anti-war activist, married to a Vietnamese woman and he works every year with a die-hard MAGA Trump supporter, former airborne warlord as the unit was called and every year through David's wife, Ushi, they buy bicycles at cost price through her connections and the two of them take these bicycles to the Asher Valley so that ethnic minority kids can get to school and the politics are entirely immaterial. There are other groups like that for example, conservative evangelicals, this should not, unfortunately it often is, it shouldn't be a bipartisan matter, there's obviously no reason, this is just simple humanitarian need being met at fairly low cost. Susan's work was really the last piece of the puzzle and the last character who came into the book in a major way and that was because we encountered each other through the work she was doing with Jackie Chanion on the left in this picture in the Laos border area and that was really, it was the final piece of the characters. I'm sort of out of sequence and I'm gonna go to one other in just a second because it relates to the same area and the same theme. It reinforced not only what I think of as this Venn diagram of characters where you have veterans, you have scientists, you have humanitarian workers often coming out of the Quaker tradition and you have the funder who came in and made a lot of the Agent Orange work possible, Charles Bailey of the Ford Foundation and they all intersect and at the center of that Venn diagram, I think Chuck Suricy and another character who is very central to the book who again, some of you know and some of you may have spent years trying to track down because she's famously elusive and Susan finally introduced me to the legendary Lady of Borton who probably knows Vietnam, I think, more deeply than any other American. It was the earliest American to settle there after the war. So anyway, the unifying factor here is this Venn diagram of characters and the geography and the Ho Chi Minh trail back in that original map, particularly that section that are butts, quang chi, chu ti, and the DMZ. That completes the core geography that I'm looking at and everything, really, every issue starting with Ann Mills Griffith's issue of those missing in action. This was where most of them went down because they were pilots. They were either flying into this area like Ann's brother and were shot down elsewhere or they crashed on the Ho Chi Minh trail in the mountains around the DMZ in the Ashile Valley, particularly the helicopter crews who went down there by the hundreds. That's where the whole story, in a sense, starts of how from the beginning the difficulty was that if I can quote you, Ann, because we've talked about this, the search for American MIAs was basically, again, a nonpartisan humanitarian obligation. You send young men to die. You have an obligation to find them. It became very embroiled in the politics of the post-war years. Developing this segment or fringe, or whatever you want to call it, of the movement that insisted that there were living prisoners being held in captivity and these secret jails on the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos. Whereas the backtrack, the last part of the puzzle is the work that was done in the Ashile Valley to develop really the paradigm that has driven the whole cleanup effort, which was to break through the fog of war that, you know, Agent Orange is everywhere. You can never deal with it. It's so pervasive. This is Tom Boivin, who was one of the team of Canadian scientists who came in to do a complete soup-to-nuts study from the tanks on the C-123 aircraft through to the disabled people in the villages of the Arloy Valley to show exactly how dioxin worked. And once that was done, it broke through, by this time there was collaboration between the two governments on the MIA issue there was the first humanitarian aid going in from the United States, initially through private channels, then through government channels. And then finally it became undeniable the American veterans had already achieved recognition through the Agent Orange Act. The double standards were egregious and the work that was done in the Arloy Valley by this Canadian-Vietnamese team, these are villagers collecting cattu ethnic villagers whose kids are now probably getting bicycles from David Clark's project, collecting grass carp for sampling, a cattu woman very reluctantly giving blood because to them this was giving up part of their spirit. And they had been very militant supporters of the PAVN, the North Vietnamese Army, during the war more than any other ethnic group in the country. And this photograph I like particularly because it really is a photograph of the Venn diagram. It has on the far left of the photograph Grant Bruce, who is another member of the Hatfield team, and Lady Borton in the center, and Chuck Cersei second from the right in the blue shirt. But what's really crucial about this photograph and I think is the unifying theme of the whole book. I think the most important sentence in the book is actually in the prologue. And it's a portrait of a Vietnamese woman growing up in Cong Chi with disabled children. And it traces very sketchily her wartime experience of post-war experience. And then this moment, 20 years after the war, when a small group of great-haired American veterans come to the village and hear the stories. And the leader of the group says, what do you need and what can we do to help? And that is actually the message of this whole book. Every single one of these people, Americans, Canadians, was driven primarily by their Vietnamese partners by asking that question. The Hatfield study was not the Hatfield study, it was the Hatfield 1080 committee study. It was a Vietnamese project for Vietnamese. Susan's work has been driven by those same impulses, and she'll talk about them, of going into villages. What do you need? What can we do to help? And I think that's the most important theme. In the middle of, in the center of this photograph with Lady is her originally assigned from the government to be her companion, mind or whatever you want to call it, way back in the 70s and became a dear friend, Phuong. And they've remained very close. I just sent a copy of the book to Phuong with Lady last week. Two days ago, she went to Hanoi. So that's really the message, you know, the lead is given by the Vietnamese partners. The early science, I won't go through the details of who these people are, the early science on Agent Orange and dioxin was done by Vietnamese scientists. They were derided by the American government as propagandists. They were serious people. This Dr. Phuong was a world-renowned liver surgeon and liver cancers were the first real epidemic that the Vietnamese doctors began to notice in the war. And Phuong was publishing articles in the Lancet, you know, one of the two great medical journals in the world during the early years of the war. These are some of his followers and acolytes and Phuong on the right was a young OBGYN in Hanoi who did work with Dr. Phuong. Her husband actually was a general who commanded forces at Ke San, that's him. Phuong Cao was then the head of Committee 1080 that worked with the Hatfield teams for several years. And Lê Cao's eye on the left here with his wife who was an artist. He was really the key figure who interacted with Chuck Cersey with Lady Borton and other Western researchers. And then the book culminates with I think one of my favorite images in the photo sections, which is the culmination of this whole process. This is Ambassador Dan Critt and Brink who was Ambassador there until two years ago and many of you know. And this is lighting incense at the great Ho Chi Minh Trail, Cong Tri, Chong Son, Martyr's Cemetery, 33,000 people who died on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And in the center with him is Huong Nam who is now the vice chair of the People's Committee in Cong Tri and the founder with Chuck Cersey of Project Renew. So this photograph to me kind of brings the story to a, not a conclusion, I would never say that. There is no conclusion to this. Dangled at the end of the book is a chapter called Unfinished Business. And that touches very briefly on some of the things that have to come next. One of which is this extraordinary initiative by USIP, partner organizations in Vietnam, the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School, finally to assist and bring full circle the story that Ann started. Bring full circle, the search now for the Vietnamese war dead missing of whom there are of course many more than there were Americans. That's one thread at the end. The next one, which I think is, by common agreement and has been discussed on past events here is bringing the Vietnamese American community and the returning Vietnamese into the picture more. And part of that would be honoring the Southern war dead. It's a long, long process. There's a lot of resistance politically still to that. But there are many, many chapters still to be written about this book. If there's a paperback edition which there will be next year, I would very much like actually to add a chapter about this search for and identification of Vietnamese missing. It was a big part of a story I did recently in the New Republic magazine, which is essentially a kind of homage to Senator Leahy and to Tim for the work they've done. But it's centered a lot on this question of finally accounting for the Vietnamese war dead. And I'm overrunning on time and I will stop there. Thanks. Thanks very much, George, for a summary of the long story through some compelling pictures and personal recollections. We'll have time to discuss with George and our other panelists. But before we do that, I would like to introduce Chuck Cersei who is joining us from Atlanta. Good morning, Chuck. Can you hear us all right? Good morning, yes I can. Can you hear me? Very well, thank you. Yeah, it's great to see you. As I was saying, Chuck is one of the first Americans I met in Hanoi in the late 90s. You'd already been there a few years by that time as the representative for the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and then later the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, Veterans for Peace and along the way Project Renew as a joint effort between Quang Chi Province and American supporters to clean up UXO and landmines, support livelihoods and in recent years also engage with Agent Orange victims. Chuck, I know George's book tells a lot about your whole trajectory from your service in the war up to now. I'm interested in the point at which you decided to move back to Vietnam in the 90s. What led you to choose that and how has that changed your life since? Well, it has had a huge impact on my life and it's really shaped my life for the last 25 years or longer. I did not have any intention of coming back to Vietnam and staying and working for a long period of time. I almost accidentally came back to Vietnam in 1992 because an old fellow veteran in the Army with me came to Atlanta for a convention and we had dinner together. We hadn't seen each other for some years and it turns out he had also been thinking he would like to come to Vietnam just to see the country in a time of peace and by the end of that dinner we had decided to come back together as tourists and without thinking much more about it we did that in fall of 1992 and then as we approached Saigon and the plane was landing at Tonsunut Airport I think both of us had a panic attack because suddenly it occurred to us that the Vietnamese are likely going to hate us to GIs, to former American soldiers coming back to Vietnam on a vacation. It just seemed unreal and suddenly we sort of panicked and then the plane landed and we found ourselves in Ho Chi Minh City downtown district one, the port of Saigon and we're astonished at the welcome that we had from the local Vietnamese who were interested in talking to us curious about why we had come back wanted to know what we did during the war and there was absolutely no hostility no anger, no bitterness from anybody and my friend and I traveled the whole country for 30 days from Saigon to Hanoi and back again and we encountered the same reaction from everybody this warmth and this embracing welcome and I was astonished and on that trip I began to realize that the Vietnamese were looking to the future and rebuilding and recovering from the war which had been devastating for them and during that trip I began to think perhaps it would be possible for me to come back and contribute in some way to that recovery and the opportunity came in 1995 with Veterans Organization as Andrew mentioned Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and I came here for a three-year project a three-year commitment helping to improve and expand an orthopedic workshop at the Children's Hospital in Hanoi and later at Bach Mai Hospital and that three-year commitment turned into five years and five years turned into 10 years and 10 years has turned into more than two decades now but it has been a fascinating experience, a learning experience for me I've learned much from the Vietnamese and in a small way I think that I and other American veterans and American citizens have demonstrated to the Vietnamese that we also share in their hopes for a better future for themselves and for their children. Chuck, what has changed in recent years and how do you see the story's continuation at this point that you've been part of? I think one of the most significant changes that I have witnessed in my time in Vietnam is the shift in attitude of American officials to a lesser extent American citizens and veterans that shift had already occurred but when I first came here the view of the US government was that we didn't really owe the Vietnamese anything that was very hostile territory if we started talking about the problem of bombs of mines and the Agent Orange and the legacies of the war that opened us up to legal liability and we didn't want that. There was a very complicated issue and the US was very standoffish and would actually end meetings if the subject of Agent Orange was brought up. So there was an attitude of hostility during those early years and complete absence of any cooperation. That has gradually changed thanks to the efforts of people like Charles Bailey and Lady Borton and Senator Patrick Leahy and Tim Reiser and others that George mentioned but the shift has occurred gradually but steadily to the point where today the situation is completely different. Not only is there an absence of any hostility between the two sides, there's now complete cooperation at so many levels that it's almost staggering. I never thought I would see the day for example when the US government not only is funding most of the cleanup effort in ridding of country of bombs and mines but also is contributing funds and expertise for the dioxin cleanup as George mentioned but that's now extended to assistance to the families of a presumed victims of Agent Orange. The wording and the characterizations may be slightly different but everybody knows that that's what the intent is to help families who've suffered from consequences of the war. That is now an open engagement and in fact the US Embassy and the American personnel here are looking for additional ways to engage. One example is the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City which has changed names several times. When I first came here it was called the American War Crimes Museum. It's changed now to the War Remnants Museum but the staff there and the director of the leadership is planning to refurbish that and to improve it and they are now receiving direct assistance through USAID from American institutions such as the Smithsonian Museum. Who could have imagined that that kind of cooperation would exist today after years ago, American Personality Embassy were basically, if not prohibited, they were discouraged from going to any sites such as this. Now it's a completely different picture. The US is cooperating with the Vietnamese officials and the Tien Huy and the Veterans Association to open up and to clear of bombs and mines safely a site which resonates in the history books for Americans called Hamburger Hill. That is being turned into a peace park for tourists and for veterans and others, students. And the US is cooperating. The US paid for the bomb and mine cleanup and it's cooperating in other ways. So those are examples of the sea change that has occurred over the last couple of decades in the attitudes between the two governments and people and our levels of cooperation. Yeah, thanks. At USIP we're excited to be part of some of those efforts that Chuck has mentioned together with Vietnamese and US government partners. And that is a significant change from 20 years ago or more when we were first coming to Hanoi. It's dark days as we call them. Of the relationship. Do we have Ngo Suen Hien on this online? Hi. Hello, good evening from Vietnam. Hi Hien, how are you? I'm great, thank you. I just finished 10 kilometers run. There you are, on picture, great. I've been full of snow to refresh myself. Thanks so much for joining us. It's my honor. So Hien is the development and community manager at Project Renew in Quang Chi and has been active in this work to clean up the consequences of war for most of your life, right? And you are also one of the main characters in the long reckoning of the people that George met and identified as the core team working in central Vietnam. And you have a moving and impressive life story yourself. How did it come about that you started working with US veterans like Chuck Cersei? And what is that meant to you in your career in light of your life story? Thank you very much, Antu, for your question. This year marks my 15th year of my joining Project Renew. And taking part in this publication, talking about the book of my friend George Black, it's our honor because we feel very honored to be a small part of the book. I've been working with Project Renew in 2008. I am now 40, eight years old and a father of three. And before joining Renew, I worked as a teacher of English in a high school in Kassam where the former combat base of the US Marines. And for two years and in 2000, I was transferred to work for a Swedish funded project on public administration reform at the provincial department of home affairs. And one day in May, 2008, I saw an announcement, a group of men at Project Renew. So I applied, I sent my application and I was offered for interview. And I met Chuck Cersei and Huang Nam, the two co-founders of Project Renew interview me. And I was accepted to work at Project Renew. And 15 years have passed. And I think that together with other colleagues at Project Renew, we think that Project Renew is on the right track. Project Renew has proven that using the existing institution and with the local staff members, we can deal with the war legacies in particular. So for US veterans, I feel I'm privileged to work closely with Chuck Cersei since 2008. And I am the only one among nearly 300 staff members of Project Renew who had the opportunity to travel with Chuck Cersei to the States for three times. And for those 15 years, I have met and befriended with many American veterans. Most of them are the same, I saw at my late mother. You know, my mother, she was a bit, she was a bit calm. She forced in 67, 59, the period that saw the field fighting between the NVA and the US Marines with Arvind in Guangxi province. And she was three times weak. And when I told her about my intention to work for Project Renew, she was totally supportive. And it was in 2009, and I was contemplating introducing my mother to Chuck Cersei. But then she passed away in September 2009, just one year after I joined Project Renew. But I think that she's, you know, she's always looking down on her son. She knows that together with our colleagues, we are doing the important work, life-saving work to help reduce the number of desk injuries from 150 per year, from 95 to 2015, down to almost Euro. In 2018, it was first year that we had that record. And we will manage to sustain that record for four years, and that's when it happened again. It's a great reminder that the legal impact of U.S. bonds in mind, it remind us of the need that we need to double our work and interventions to help local communities to take it. And for those years, I have seen the positive changes in the mutual relationship of our two countries. And yeah, I always tell my colleagues about that. It's my dream, or my wish that the U.S. and Vietnam we should work together for a brighter future. We put aside the past, but we look forward to a brighter and better future for the younger generation. I have three children and three of them speak English and I hope one day they would be traveling to the States for higher education. So it's like one of the things that is their mutual, not only the government, but also people-to-people relationship. So I think that is of the individual. If we think that we can have the same way of thinking and striving to do the best, I think that we can make it happen. So 15 years working with U.S. residents means a lot to me. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Hien, for what you've done to bring our countries closer together and acknowledge the past and build that better future. I want to turn now to our final panelist, Susan Hammond, who is the executive director of the War Legacies Project, working to support people affected by Agent Orange in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Susan, in addition to being a specialist on Agent Orange, you're also the daughter of a U.S. veteran and I wonder how you reflect on your own background and experiences and how your father's experiences have informed the work you're doing now. Yes, thank you, Andrew, and thank you for writing this amazing book, George. And also, before I begin to answer that question, I want to give special thanks to the Chino-Syanigan Foundation, a small family foundation out in California that has supported my work ever since I started working on this issue of Agent Orange in Vietnam. And it's because of that small family foundation I've been able to do what I do today very few foundations, particularly after the Ford Foundation left Vietnam and ended this work, even begin to work on this issue. I'm just showing a few pictures, I'm not going to talk to them, just to give you a sort of a sense of the area and the people we're talking about. And then the other sort of link of all of this is the year 1968, because that was the year my father was in Vietnam and Chuck was there and Manus was there, Sally and Steve were there. Roger, I mean Jackie Shenyang, who I work with, was in there in 1968 as well. It's kind of the year that all links our work. But my identity as a daughter of Vietnam veteran really informs my work in so many ways. Not only do I focus on the impacts of Agent Orange in Cambodia, Laos in Vietnam, but also the impacts on veterans and their children. Another part of the story that isn't told very much in the US is the impact of Agent Orange, a potential impact of Agent Orange on the health of the children of veterans who came back, just like we don't know a whole lot about the impacts on the Vietnamese Americans. And it was my father's experience in Vietnam which brought me there for the first time when I was in the region in 1991 traveling and it had just opened up to foreign tourists. And even though my passport said if I went to Vietnam I would be trading with the enemy, I went. And that experience where I just saw the scars of the war in the poverty in part caused by our 20 year plus embargo on the country really made me feel like I had to do something, I had to learn more. And I was also trying to understand why my father was gone for almost three years of my life as a child, why Vietnam, what was so important about Vietnam. And honestly, I haven't answered that question yet. And I'm now in my late fifties. But that trip brought me to what I would steal from Senator Leahy, the title of his autobiography to the Road Taken, that trip changed the whole trajectory of my life and I knew I wanted to do more in Vietnam. And luckily when I was in grad school in New York I met John McAuliffe who was the director of the US, what was called then the US Indochina Reconciliation Project and now the Fund for Reconciliation and Development. And that's where I began to meet many of the enemies through the various conferences and events and people-to-people exchanges that FRD coordinated. That's where I met people like Lake Howe Die and Dr. Fanti Fifi. I met Lady Borton, I met Chuck Searcy, I met all of the characters who were part of the loss reckoning. And they guided me in this next step of once normalization of relations between the US, Cambodia and Laos occurred, the war legacy issues were there. They needed, something needed to be done. And thanks again to the work of Ann Mills Griffiths that launched us into this ability to work on the hard issues together with Vietnam and then less so with Laos and Cambodia, but we're getting there. About the same time my father developed Parkinson's disease because of his exposure to Agent Orange during his, probably during his time in Da Nang, not as opposed to his time in Ho Chi Minh City. And that, so then I had a more, so a personal reason to do something about this issue. And with John, I met one of the first people who was impacted by Agent Orange in Hanoi when we went to the family of General Tu, I think it was. And I met his daughter who was born after the war and she was severely disabled and in such sharp contrast to her older sister who was born before the war who had no disabilities at all. In effect, she was, I believe at Columbia University at the time of studying. So that contrast between those who, like in my family, I'm one of eight kids and seven of us were born or conceived before the war. And my younger brother luckily did not have problems, but that could have been my story of my family. My father could have come back and we could have had, my mother could have had children with disabilities like many other veterans had. But that really got me moving in the direction of addressing more legacy issues. And I began to work a lot of times behind the scenes with many of the people in the long reckoning with Charles Bailey in particular, I worked closely with him. And I wanted to work to get past the political impasse that was those dark days in Vietnam where the two governments could barely talk about this issue together. Well, the Vietnamese were more than willing to talk about it, but the US was not so willing. And so working with Charles, we really wanted to get to the point to show that Agent Orange was a humanitarian issue that we could do something about. I mean, as a child of a veteran, not just a veteran, my dad was a career military officer. He was a lieutenant colonel when he retired. You just get the facts and you find the answer to solve a problem, no BS, you just do the work that has to be done. And that was my attitude, just get it done. And thankfully this team that was developed with Chuck and with Lady and the Hatfield Group, we were able to work together in a lot of ways to get past this problem of debating the science over who is and who isn't an Agent Orange victim and just do the right thing and do the humanitarian thing. And without Senator Leahy, thank God I'm from the wonderful state of Vermont with great Senator and with Tim Rieser. We just would not be where we are today and we would not be celebrating this story of so much that has been accomplished. But much of my direct support of the work I do in Vietnam actually comes from a Vietnam veteran in his family. Bob Feldman died of cancer from his exposure to Agent Orange when he was in Ben Hoa. And just before he died in 2006, I got a call out of the blue from Nancy saying they wanted some of the VA benefits he was receiving for his cancer to get to Vietnam to help other people impacted by Agent Orange because at the time the US government was not doing anything to help Agent Orange victims. And so over the years I've worked with the Feldman Fund in Vietnam to provide direct support to families who have seriously disabled children. Those who medical care and some of the US projects that are now being funded just, it's too little too late sadly for so many of these families that you're seeing some in these photos. We go work directly with the Quang Nam Red Cross. We don't have a staff in Vietnam. We work, our philosophy there is just go directly to the Vietnamese partners and ask that question that George raised, what is it that we can do to help? And sometimes it's hard for families to put into words what they need. I remember one family when we went to and the father said, all I need is a red stool. And I'm like, red stool? What, how is that gonna help your family? And he told me, well, I'm getting old, I'm a bike repairman and I can't squat on the ground anymore. But if I had a red stool, which costs like $2, I could help my family. But he was spending all of his resources to help his two disabled daughters. His wife had died that he wanted a red stool to continue his work. And so we bought that red stool, of course, but also bike repair materials and pumps so that he could then work on motorbikes, not just bicycles. We really try to do what we can to find the family's needs because these programs that the US funds is a lot of rehabilitation and changing the system in Vietnam to help the Vietnamese provide services to people with disabilities. But what I find in so many families is families, they're struggling day to day to care for their children because they're stuck in this cycle of poverty because if you're caring for a severely disabled child, you lose a caregiver.  It takes hours of a day, of a person's day to feed their child, to clean their child, to prepare the food. They can't leave them alone. They're afraid to leave them alone in their home to go to the fields to work because someone could come in and hurt their child. They're especially fearful for their daughters. And so if they don't have a family member who can take care of them, they're stuck. So we do what we can to bring programs where the family can earn an income at home or we have thousands now after 15, almost 17 years of Feldman cows roaming around the hills of Quang Nam because a cow will then have a calf and that calf will have a calf and soon you have a cow bank, a literal cow bank in your front yard. I also used to work, I worked with Phung Tu Voi in A Lui when he was putting up a green fence around the contaminated spot there and I would look across the valley to the hills of Lao and I kept thinking, I've got to do something about Lao. That's the next project. I did a little bit of work in the early 2000s with Roger Rump, but then sadly he got very sick and passed away and I then continued to work after with his wife, Jackie Shenyang, who wanted to continue Roger's work and that's the story that, well it's partly in this book, it's in this book, but also it's in the article that George wrote in the New York Times about how we didn't know the impacts of Agent Orange and Lao really because that was a secret war. A lot of that document information is still classified. The US finally released the records in the early 2000s, which is how Roger was able to get some of his work started and Hatfield also went in and tried to get a little bit of testing done at that time, but we didn't know how many people were impacted by Agent Orange and it wasn't until 2018 that we really were able to get our work started there and we have found the same number of, same types of disabilities that you see across the border in Vietnam and if they could, if they were born just 15 kilometers away they would be getting some of this support from the US government. It's taken a long time to get that information and we still need to do some further surveys, but thanks again to George's article in the Times and the work of Leahy and Tim, the US has now finally been able to allocate in two different appropriations, $3 million to Lao to help people along the Ho Chi Minh Trail that were sprayed with Agent Orange. That project hasn't yet begun. The embassy in Hanoi and Vien Chien tells me they're in negotiations, but I also know we have to make sure that the funding gets to those who we believe are impacted by Agent Orange and not just spread out widely to people who may have disabilities regardless of cause. And finally, in Laos, what we don't really know is are there any dios and hotspots? We know there won't be a Ben Hoa or a Da Nang, but we have heard from Air America pilots that there was a small spray program in again in 68 or 69 out of Long Chien where they loaded planes with herbicides and they sprayed the areas around Long Chien. I suspect there is dioxin in that soil and the appropriation allows for some funding to do that research, but we're hitting a wall with the US embassy almost like we did back in the night, early 2000s, that they don't believe that there's dioxin there. It's not probably no dioxin hotspots. And I just say it's an easy thing to find out. You just test soil. If it's there, we deal with it like we've done in Vietnam. So there's a lot more to do in Laos thanks to a lot of the characters in the Lost Reckoning. We've gotten this far in Vietnam, but we need more to our team. We need more to keep this work going. We need more people, we need more money. We need to put an end to this story eventually. Thank you, Susan. Please join in thanking all of our speakers. And before you leave, do you have any question or comments? I wanted to call on you. I know you have to go. Jetty has a mic behind you. Yes, in fact, you know how fascinated I am with all the good work you've been doing and I appreciate you all mentioning that is because of the long work that we did that we were able to finally get to the situation where we could provide the kind of humanitarian assistance we needed. They're all project I believe in. It's not, doesn't necessarily I agree with every bit of the language that you sometimes to make us feel more guilty than some of us really deserve, but it does mean that what you're doing is in fact reconciling and addressing the damages that inflict people that are hurt so badly by warfare, which none of us support. So it's a pleasure to get to see you again. I hope, I'm sorry I have to leave so soon. I'm here a short time because I now live in gorgeous San Diego area in California and Jay Vithe who was here earlier will be the incoming executive director of the league once we can get things sorted out and he's very experienced too. So thank you all for what you do. Keep up the good humanitarian work. We'll do the same and if it wasn't, she's right. If it wasn't for what we started earlier, I remember many times when the Lauer, the Vietnamese would refuse to have English language training or humanitarian assistance or anything to do with the war because they didn't want all those dangerous Americans running around and so many funny stories, but what you're doing is invaluable and thank you so much for it and thanks for including me in this. Sorry, I can't stay longer, I would. Thanks so much for being here and thanks to you. We have a mic going around the room so welcome your questions to George, our other panelists, comments and reflections and also for everyone who is watching online, please enter your questions and comments directly there on the website and we'll be able to share some of those questions soon. Brent. Good morning, thank you. Brent Glass, Director of Emeritus at the National Museum of American History at Smithsonian and George, congratulations on a wonderful book and I've been doing some work with the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City and your book came along at a perfect moment to kind of untangle a very complicated story and tell it in a way that's so coherent and I hope many people read this book, not just about the post-war period but in setting some of the myths to rest about the war itself. But one question I have and actually Andrew has written about this, so it's really for anyone, is what has come across to me is the growth of civil society in Vietnam around some of these issues. Project Renew is a good example of collaboration but there are many, it seems to me, independent organizations that have grown up around disabilities, supporting people with disabilities and that seems to be a really remarkable achievement in the last 10 or 15 years. Can any one of you talk about that? Yeah, that's certainly true and in fact the U.S. funding that's going to address the disabilities in age and orange issue in Vietnam is primarily going to Vietnamese entities. I think there's a handful who are providing training and expertise in various aspects of disability work but it's the Vietnamese who have done the most on this issue actually. I mean, what I do is just drop in the water or one part per trillion of dioxin in this issue. So yeah, that's very, very true. Not so much in Laos but in Cambodia also has a very, very active nonprofit sector that's working on various issues in human rights as well as development in war legacy issues. I mean, if I could add on both the U.S. and the Vietnamese sides, this is cooperation between governments and non-government organizations who share common objectives and that creates space for people to do more humanitarian work. So it's different from the idea of civil society as being separate from government. It's actually very much working hand in hand in support of nationally identified priorities that has enabled this movement to grow. Chuck or Hien, did you wanna add anything about? Brent's question? Let's go on and we'll come back to you. I think Chuck was going to say. Chuck, yeah, he's muted. You're muted. I was just gonna say to Hien, Hien, you can answer this better than I can. So Chuck, do you want me to provide some further information about this slide? Well, I think just to reinforce what Susan said and the context of the question, that Renew is one example, but there are many others of collaboration between American organizations, Vietnamese, local institutions and organizations and agencies and my view is that in Vietnam to succeed with any sort of humanitarian project, you need to engage a broad swath of the local population and that's what we've managed to do, I think with some success with Project Renew, engaging. For example, the Women's Union or the Youth Union or the Farmers Union and others and other more independent organizations such as a self-sustaining disability group in Quang Tri Province. So the broader the cooperation, the greater the success in my opinion and it's becoming easier for so-called civil society organizations to operate in Vietnam without much suspicion from the government, which was the case two decades ago. So I think that will continue to improve. I would like to add a little bit information about what Chuck and Susan have said about the cooperation between all of the stakeholders in Brazil, India. I think to me, the last legacy of the war that is acknowledged by Okshens because the past two decades have seen impressive results and achievement made in mitigating the impact of unexploded ordinance I mean in Quang Tri Province. But according to what George Black put in his book without the legacy of Agent Orange, the looms last, but with our experience, like Chuck says that we need to engage all the every single actor, the government and civil society in addressing this because we have to rely on those existing institutions that happen to reach out to every single family who have deal with the severe, severe disabilities related to Agent Orange. And what we can do, we are very happy in starting in 2021 we were able to receive the funding from USAID under consortium of five local NGOs working in Quang Tri. So it's the, what we think that we can have to make the line with these disabilities more bearable because in Quang Tri Province, for example, the family now they have to take care of the disabled children who are now in the late in the early 20s or early 30s, we cannot cure their disabilities, but we can make, we can have their parents, their caregivers to lessen the burden on taking care of the disabled children. So that is what the objective of Project New and Others organization is looking forward to implementing. Thanks very much. Question from Erin. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hi, I'm Erin Steinhauer. I am the co-founder of Vietnam Society. I'm just so glad. First, thank you so much for all of your amazing work. It's really heart warming for a Vietnamese American to see how much you've done for my country. Thank you. Second, I'm so glad, George, that you brought in sort of at the, almost your last sentence, let's bring Vietnamese Americans into the conversation. Reconciliation in my mind is about rebuilding bridges between people and not just countries. And people such as Vietnamese Americans, which now there are 2.5 million of us in this country, have endured and have gone through just as much suffering. But we came to this country and we now, many of us are American citizens, we're doctors, lawyers, business executives. We have made it very well here, but we also like a seat at the table when we talk about reconciliation and rebuilding for the future. In particular, as we talk about issues like displacement, forging peace in the future, really reconnecting generations that have been born here to back to their countries as well, et cetera. And making, when you talk about war legacy, that is war legacy as well. And so I hope, George, that in your new book and the new chapters of your research that you reach out to people like us and for us to share many of those stories and our hopes and dreams for the future and to Andrew with USIP, this is part of the American fabric. This is now a very beautiful, unique story, actually, that can be captured even in the American, Smithsonian American History Museum because we are part of that too. And so I'm just encouraged by this conversation that at the very end, we're talking about the future and how we can get Vietnamese Americans involved. Thank you. Can I just respond to that, Erin? I would love to talk to you separately about this, even at this very immediate stage now of how to get the book and the message of the book out. We're in the early stages of doing the famous book tour and one thing I particularly wanna do, the two audiences, if you like, the more specialized audiences that I want to reach in trying to push the book out is, first of all, the veterans community of both the Vietnam generation and the younger generation. I know some very, very interesting young veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who have this same sense of obligation to build back what was destroyed in those countries and at the same time to heal their own wounds because in many cases, those are even, if it's possible, worse than the wounds that American veterans brought back from Vietnam because many, many more people because of the advances in medical technology and evacuation survive with absolutely catastrophic injuries and they have their own battles, which are very serious. And I want to bridge that generational veterans gap but above all, the Vietnamese American community and I would love to get your advice and other Vietnamese American leaders on how to approach, identify, arrange events that would appeal. I've been talking to people in Seattle, for example, which seems to be very connected to the Vietnamese American community, some other cities, but if we could talk, I would really like to do that. Jenny, what, may I have a comment? Of course. Can I comment on what Aaron and George just said? I totally agree, you know, for a couple of decades of veterans and other people like Susan and the Chino C. and the Foundation and many other supporters have been a bridge to bring about the progress that has occurred that we've talked about today but in the future, you know, a lot of us are getting older and we're not gonna be around so long and it's really essential, I think, to reach out to the Vietnamese American community, a new generation of bright, engaged, very sensitive young people, younger than we are for sure and they may want to forge stronger links with Vietnam. It's a different situation today than it was 20 or 30 years ago. And that's the future. Those are the people that the Vietnamese who are still in need, who are still facing these terrible consequences of the war, need to help them. And so it's really up to that younger generation and I hope we can do a better job of engaging them and working together to build for the future and to create longer and newer bridges to the future because that's what's gonna be essential to dealing with these problems of age and orange and UXO and they're not gonna go away. They're not gonna be solved overnight. They really are becoming, it's clear to us that they are really a management, long-term management problem to deal with making people's lives better who are suffering these consequences of the war. And the Vietnamese Americans, the younger generation really are the key to that success. Let's hear several questions from the online audience and then John have the last comment. All right, we have one online question from Hoang. Do you think American political support for resolving Vietnam War legacies and reconciliation with Vietnam will be positively or negatively affected by a changing of the guards over the next four to eight years? Just to clarify, is that question the changing of the guard in American politics are we talking about? Is that? I believe so. Well, potentially profoundly, during the Trump years, well, I mean, every administration has had its own story with Vietnam. I think that if I can switch the subject very quickly to Ukraine, where my son is actually now doing frontline humanitarian relief work and I'm very proud of him, he's working on the Backmute Evacuation Front. There is a very disturbing trend now within the Republican Party to reduce commitments to foreign aid in general. As we were saying earlier, there's nothing inherently that should be bipartisan about relief for Vietnamese war legacies. But yeah, I am quite anxious. I think the generational focus is also an important thing to keep hold of because there are new generations of wars in which we've been involved and they pose their own demands and financial requirements. I think there's a lot of anxiety which most of us in this room have been talking about for a while now how you continue the congressional impetus with Senator Leahy no longer being there and all of us praying that Tim will stay on until he's 80 which probably won't happen but that's a huge challenge I think too. I mean, it's interesting to me that the congressional delegation that's about to go is only composed of Democrats. It bothered me last fall when Senator Leahy was supposed to be going and then suffered a period of ill health that it was very, very difficult to get any Republican senators to join that delegation. So yeah, I'm concerned about whether it's four years, eight years, how the momentum gets sustained. And I'll just add one other thing. Andrew asked me at the very beginning what the biggest surprises were to me in researching and writing this book and I would add one more which is without getting sentimental about it, the ability of ordinary American citizens to push the government and achieve the breakthroughs they did and the Canadians who worked on the science. I mean, this was a stone wall opposition from the most powerful government in the world and this handful of people. There are many more obviously than the half dozen I focus on in the book but the power of those people to achieve change at a policy level just by their moral authority as veterans or as humanitarian aid workers or as scientists and their doggedness and their persistence. There's a lot of lessons there about how a small number of people who understand the local needs profoundly can actually change policy. So that makes me optimistic. And I just wanna add to that. I kind of hope that those who are resistant to international aid, particularly dealing with war legacy issues, look at this history of working on Agent Orange because it has led to deeper relationships within the region between the US and Vietnam. It's important for our geopolitical position there and security and it is a lot of the reason that we are with this relationship now, particularly with Vietnam is because of the two governments being able to work together to address this really, really challenging, complex, politically sensitive on many levels issue. And it has been a bipartisan group of US senators, mainly who have normalized and developed their relationship with Vietnam over the last almost 30 years, so especially John McCain and John Kerry, among others who were veterans serving in Congress at that time. And Senator Leahy on the appropriations who helped get that funding. John. Good morning. This has been very impressive. I think what you have done is captured the what I'd call the second stage, which is the post normalization, engagement and friendship and responsibility stage, which is very important. Susan and Anne both referred to the earlier stage, the prequel if you were and can be your next book, which is how we got from 75 to 95. If people are interested in that, I'll send Andrew the link for the two section webinar we did with American organizations that were involved in that work and Vietnamese organizations that were working with them when distrust was the real underlying theme. I have one footnote to correct. Our dear friend Lady Borton was not the first American. Nina McCoy was the first American. Nina, who went in the late 70s with, as an English teacher with the Swedish By Bang Project and then returned and represented the Social Science Research Council for many years in Hanoi. She gets the title and she shocked Bobby Muller and that first veteran's delegation when they discovered there was an American already living and working in Hanoi. The question. For that correction. That's one of the virtues of having done this so long is that you have these pieces. One larger question I wanna ask is the elephant in the room. Seems to me that one can't understand what's gone on, why it took only 20 years to get to normalization and what's happened since normalization without thinking about the strategic issues and the role of the common interest of the US and Vietnam vis-a-vis China. The tragic irony of it is that it was our fear of China which drove us into this horrible, disastrous, unnecessary, humanly destructive war but it's now our common fear of China that has, I don't know how much you evaluate, how you and Susan and Chuck evaluate that as the underlying factor that has pushed ahead this process which I think you've admirably described what the human dimension of that is, what the moral dimension is, what the linkage's question is but I must say that I really feel that all that we have done would have not moved as far as it has without this underlying question. I do talk about that in the book to some degree. I said to a friend I was staying with last night, the hardest presentation to make, I find talking about these things is 20 minutes. Five minutes is easy, an hour is easy and there are a lot of things I didn't get to and that's one of them. No, I do discuss it in the book and I think there are obviously those huge historical ironies of why the war was fought in the first place and what the reconciliation in part is driven by now. I tell it mainly through the Danang to Benhua cleanup operations where Benhua is by far the biggest of the hotspots and what brought the Pentagon in was not just, I mean a lot of this is due to Ambassador Tedosius because Ted pushed very hard because of the enormous cost that it couldn't be born, it would have wrecked the USAID budget to bear the whole initial cost that was agreed of 300 million. But what swung it strategically was that Mattis and others saw the strategic importance. It had been building for several years starting really with the Danang cleanup and the first Coast Guard cutter going in which ironically was a cutter that had been used in the war to sponsor Navy SEALs and special operations insertions which is also kind of ironic. But the interesting thing about Benhua which I discuss in the book is it's a major strategic fighter base. It's the major base in South Vietnam, the old South Vietnam for the People's Air Force and it has a squadron of fighter bombers whose job is basically protecting interests in the South China Sea. So yeah, you're absolutely right. Thank you everyone for coming and for your questions and reflections. Thanks again to George and our other panelists, Ian, Chuck and Susan for sharing with us and for everyone for being here.


I think that for 6,000 years humans have, when we wanted to engage in consensual exchange, we've relied on third parties, these central institutions we set up so strangers we can't trust each other so we just trust that central institution. Well, a lot of times those central institutions start getting pretty big for their bridges and what's happening with blockchain is it's possible for us to have systems where we can have consensual exchange and there does not need to be a third party that we trust. So it's really disruptive, frankly, to a bunch of institutions which have accumulated what civilization is, it's a bunch of these kinds of institutions that establish trust. Now we can achieve trust in this cryptographic way. Those institutions, what happens when you disintermediate and disrupt, not publishing like the internet does, but some real fundamental institutions to society. It's going to make society more honest because, you know, it's like in 1971, the U.S. everything, all currencies were stapled to the U.S. dollar until then and we were connected to gold and in 1971 we cut our tie to gold. That was the first time in history, everything just became free spinning, free spinning and untied to anything real. Well, this is going to let civilization find a bedrock again, a bedrock truth that is not subject to political control and that's what the blockchain can be. And as we start rebuilding institutions from the blockchain, we will be building a society which is more immune to corruption and more transparent, more immune to corruption. It will be a very odd world.