# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If you're going through Breaking Bad withdrawal, here's a small way to fill the void. Audible.com has made available a recording of Bryan Cranston, the actor behind Walter White, reading the first chapter from The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien's famous story collection that offers a chilling, boots-on-the-ground portrayal of soldiers' experience during the Vietnam War. A finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, the book has sold over 2 million copies worldwide and is now a staple of college and high school English classes across America. Cranston's reading runs over 47 minutes.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/eprize-content/audible/author/TheThingsTheyCarried_FreeFirstChapter_final.mp3

Cranston actually narrates the entire book, and if you're interested in downloading it, there's a way to do it for free. Just head over to Audible.com and register for a 30-day free trial. You can download any audio book for free, including The Things They Carried. Then, when the trial is over, you can continue your Audible subscription, or cancel it, and still keep the audio book. The choice is yours. And, in full disclosure, let me tell you that we have a nice arrangement with Audible. Whenever someone signs up for their amazing service, it helps support Open Culture. Get more information on Audible's free trial here.

Also don't miss our collection of 550 Free Audio Books. It's a priceless resource.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Free Audio: Bryan Cranston, Breaking Bad Star, Reads First Chapter of The Things They Carried

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If you're going through Breaking Bad withdrawal, here's a small way to fill the void. Audible.com has made available a recording of Bryan Cranston, the actor behind Walter White, reading the first chapter from The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien's famous story collection that offers a chilling, boots-on-the-ground portrayal of soldiers' experience during the Vietnam War.

# data[].attributes.body
A moving -- and controversial -- personal essay protesting the play, Miss Saigon

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Photo by Anna S. Min.
(Italicized words are lyrics taken from the libretto of 'Miss Saigon')

I'm born in Saigon, just inside the Year of the
Tiger. My dad is half Vietnamese, half Chinese. My mom is mostly Vietnamese,
she's pretty sure. Both lovers of poetry, they name me Thien-bao: treasure from
heaven.

Three months later, bombs are falling from the
sky as they shell the airport, trying to kill us. My mom and dad take turns
holding me in the bomb shelter, as the world around us shook and exploded all
night. I don't learn this until years later, and it's an odd thing to hear from
your own family: we were almost killed before you had the ability to form
memory.

***

" the heat is on in Saigon
the girls are hotter 'n' hell one of these slits here will be Miss Saigon God, the tension is high, not to mention the
smell the heat is on in Saigon is there a war going on? don't ask, I ain't gonna tell"
1975, my parents raise six kids and take care
of my paternal grandfather in Phillips, South Minneapolis. Our house is two
blocks from Little Earth housing projects. The neighborhood is densely
populated with American Indians, a people who know about a great many things,
including broken American promises. Many years later, as a teenager, I'll march
with American Indian activists in solidarity as they protest a visiting
football team that, like Miss Saigon, claims to honor the people that
they exploit. I'll also read somewhere that Phillips is the largest, poorest,
and most racially diverse neighborhood in the Twin Cities.

But when I was a little kid, I just knew it was
rough. My earliest experience with multiculturalism is on the school bus: kids
of all hues, from all over the world, call me chink.

***

When I was a baby, I didn't have to do much to
escape death. Growing up in Phillips, I soon realized that a lot of people in
the world wanted to hurt me. Because I was Vietnamese, because I was Asian,
because I was not like them, because I was not a part of their crew, because I
was around and they were bored, because I was not white and therefore
suspicious, because they had been hurt and wanted to hurt someone else, because
I could never be American. I learned to be fast on my feet. Rumor has it, one
of my distant relatives was an activist who fled from China and took up an
assumed surname: Phi, meaning swift, fast running or flying. In Phillips I live
up to my namesake.

***

I'm not more than ten when my dad brings me to
an Oriental - excuse me, Asian - grocery store in Saint Paul. While he shops, I
go to the front of the store to watch a young white boy play a video game.
Other small Asian boys flock there too, quietly watching him play. His older
sister glares at us, and says to her brother, "these gooks are surrounding us."
As if we were the ones who torched her people's hamlets.

***

" the meat is cheap in Saigon
I used to love getting stoned, waking up
with some whore I don't know why I went dead, it's not fun
anymore."
Around the same time, my mom takes me to
Frank's Nursery and Crafts. She loves to garden, and they're having a sale.
When the salesclerk finishes ringing us up, my mom looks at the final price and
says, I think it's too much. The clerk checks and says, no, this is what you
owe. My mom asks her to check it again, so she goes over the receipt. There is
a long line of customers behind us; they start to shuffle uncomfortably. The
cashier says she checked - there's nothing wrong, pay up. My mom hesitates,
then says, "no, you are wrong, it's too much." The people behind us groan, and
the look they give my mom is unmistakable. They don't have to say it. The way
my mom's shoulders get stiff, shows all of us she can feel their glares. The
manager comes over. He checks the receipt, and finds that the cashier hit 22
instead of 2, and tried to overcharge my mom by $40 dollars. The people in line
behind us murmur, embarrassed at their assumption, and chuckle uncomfortably.
But my mom doesn't wait for an apology from any of them - she sets her lips,
holds my hand, and we leave without looking back.

***

" the Cong is tight'ning the noose
is it a week or a day or an hour that we
got? tonight could be our last shot got to put it
to use."
I'm a teenager, shopping with my mom for
groceries at Cub Foods. In the parking lot, a Vietnam Vet starts shouting at a
Hmong family, two parents and two kids. "I fought for your people, you owe me!"
he screams at them. They don't look at him, they keep walking, their shoulders
turn in towards each other as if they're trying to make themselves as small a
target as possible. I see this and I want to say something, but I don't. I feel
like an unlit match.

***

The first Persian Gulf War, and I have two
brothers in the military overseas. I fancy myself a teenage activist. I go to
all the rallies and say my family has already been torn apart by war once, I
don't want to see it happen again, don't want to see it happen to another
country and culture and people. Even though I am still living in Phillips, I am
only attracted to white women, and I don't think there's anything wrong with
that. In my high school, the Vietnamese students in the Asian club ask me why I
get involved in all of these political causes but never participate in Asian
club. I have no answer for them.

***

" you must
see how it is when you're my wife
having that
child of his brands us for life no
alternative! This child cannot live!
Miss
Saigon is a play about a Vietnamese
prostitute in desperate need of rescue from evil Vietnamese men and the
war-torn Third World. It may be a nice place to visit but it sure doesn't seem
like a good place to raise kids. Shut your mouth - there's a helicopter in it!
On stage! The production values! Well there were helicopters in Vietnam, and
prostitutes, and white soldiers, and bad Vietnamese
men, and mixed race orphans, so the play must be historically accurate and
shit. The Vietnamese woman shoots herself in the stomach so she can sing one
last song while dying in the arms of the white man. When I was much, much
younger, I ask my mom if she wants to go see this play, because it's about
Vietnam. She shakes her head and says, in Vietnamese, "that is not about us."
She says it like she's explaining to me that Santa Claus doesn't really exist.

***

I have no problem with stories about prostitutes, if they are written by
prostitutes wanting to tell their story.

***

A couple of years later, and it's the first Miss
Saigon protest. It's freezing, we stamp our feet on the streets of downtown
Minneapolis. Many white people walk by us in fur coats, but many of them smile
apologetically. Some of them even turn away in solidarity, and decide not to go
see Miss Saigon. An elderly woman, Esther Torii Suzuki, is protesting
with us. Over the years I grow to admire her and see her as my mentor,
treasuring her plucky stories about internment camp and wearing pantsuits.
David Mura is there, with his young daughter. The Ordway creates Community
Cultural Committees, including an Asian American one. When they bring the play
back in 1999, they don't even mention it to the Asian American Cultural
Committee.

***

My mom and I go to Vietnam. It's the first time
she's been back since the war, it's the second time I've been back. I finally
get to meet my uncles, crazy Northerners, hardcore nationalists who stayed
North after Dien Bien Phu while my parents, seeking an education, went South.
Vietnamese people, you know what this means. My mom had not seen her brothers
in over 40 years due to war. They miss their little sister, they joke with her
and they lecture each other, they are kind to me, her youngest son. But
something is underneath. Whether or not they feel my dad fought for the wrong
side. The inter-village beef, the resentment that their little sister can
afford to lend them American dollars - we're poor in America, but what few
dollars we have are gigantic in Vietnam. We can even save those big dollars,
and if we get enough, we have the privilege to buy tickets to Broadway musicals
that insist that they're historically accurate depictions of what happened to
our family, our people.

***

" with these two little diamonds to bait my hooks
I'll book us on a cruise
"boat-people" deluxe don't worry 'bout the sharks out in the
Mekong bay the pirates taking us are more scary any
day."
The play Miss
Saigon is here in Minnesota for the second time. The actress who plays Kim,
the female lead, is in a nearby park for a meet and greet. I stand patiently in
line as men and women walk up to her, shake her hand, and tell her what an
inspiration she is. Her smile is bright but she looks tired. When it's my turn,
I smile, and I tell her I'm one of the principal organizers
of the protests of Miss Saigon here in Minnesota, but that I want to
make sure she knows we're not protesting her or any of the other Asian American
actors in the play. I've never seen a smile disappear so quickly. She tells me
I shouldn't be protesting the play because her character is a strong Asian
woman. She also says the play "tells the truth" about Vietnam.

I tell her I was born in that country during the war.
My mom and dad survived, made sure I and my siblings survived. My mom held me
when the bombs fell. My parents raised six kids in an economically poor
neighborhood in a country that didn't want them. My parent's story tells a
truth about Vietnam too. Why isn't anyone interested in their truth? I ask her.

The woman who plays Kim says nothing - she turns away
from me, reaches for the next hand to shake, and smiles.

***

SPOILER ALERT: the brown person dies,
and the white people, though saddened, live to learn a valuable lesson.

***

I am standing on the sidewalk at the Ordway,
handing out informational leaflets with information about the stereotypes, the
racism and the sexism, of Miss Saigon. I have been instructed to be
polite, not to argue with anyone no matter how rude they are to me, to always
take the high ground in all encounters. An Asian woman drives her car slowly by
me, and her daughter, a mixed race girl no more than ten, glares at me from the
passenger side window. "You're stupid!" she yells while looking directly at me.
"How can you protest love?" You really should be wearing a seat belt, I think
to myself. The Asian woman turns her car around in a slow loop, so that her
daughter can yell insults at me again. "You're stupid," she yells at me, again
and again. Her mother loops the car around about three times, glares at me
wordlessly as she drives by at a crawl each time, a cruel smile on her face, as
her young daughter harangues me from the passenger seat. It's like groundhog's
day for their venom. "How can you protest love?" the little girl yells at me.
You don't even understand your own hate, I want to tell her, how can you
understand what love is?

***

" In a strong G.I.'s embrace/flee this
life/flee this place!"

My dad
was a soldier who fought on the battlefields of his own country for 10 years
for South Vietnam, he lost his brother and sister-in-law to a bomb. Nobody ever
asks about his truth.

***

In 2003, Vietnamese American undercover police
officer Duy Ngo is shot by a fellow police officer. Even though the officer who
shot him opened fire with an MP5, a non-regulation sub machine gun he was not
authorized to use while on duty, nearly killing Ngo, the Minneapolis police
department attempted to blame Ngo for the incident. Duy Ngo committed suicide
in 2010.

Vietnamese men, they can't tell when we're
friend or foe, and pretty soon we can't either.

***

Is the white man's truth always bigger than
ours?
I will not change my mind! you are still mine! not anymore! you're mine until we die! and so is your GI get the hell out!
***

Many
years later, I'm reading a book by Anthony Bourdain, a white man whom I admire. He
compares Vietnam to meeting a woman and immediately falling in love. "You
sense that given the opportunity, this is the woman you want to spend the rest
of your life-"

***

It's now. The United States is on the brink of
bombing Syria. The Ordway is bringing Miss Saigon back to Minnesota for
the third time. This play, that romanticizes war, marches back to us on musical
heels. My parents are still in Phillips, me and my family are not too far away
- literally and figuratively. At daycare, our daughter's surroundings are much
like mine were when I was her age - her cohort are Native American, Black,
Chicano/a, white. No one has made fun of her race or gender. Please, I beg the
world, let that last as long as possible.

I hire a babysitter so that I can go to a
community debate with the Ordway at MPR. I don't even want to go - why waste
money and time when we know the discussion will do no good. They'll claim that
they're using art to provoke discussion. They will find Asians who agree with
them, then reward them. They will magnify the voices of the Asians who take
their side. They will find people who say it's not so bad, or that there are
more important things to protest.

But I go. I am encouraged to see quite a few
Asian American community members there, and also some allies of color,
indigenous allies, female allies, white allies, queer allies, and of course,
some whose identities are intersections of all of these. Some of us in
attendance - Rose, Janet, Ed, myself, and a few others - have been a part of
some or all of the three protests against the Ordway over the last twenty
years. I've spent the two weeks beforehand reading and re-reading materials
about Miss Saigon, reading the text of the shitty songs, staging debates
in my head. I'm like a boxer ready to get in the ring. I want to be ready to
debate anyone, handle any argument they throw my way. I tell myself, over and
over again: don't lose it. Be rational, no matter how stupid they are, no
matter how dismissive.

The President and CEO of the Ordway, a white woman, suggests that we all see
the show so that it can provoke feelings in us. Though several of us have in
fact seen the play, I can't help it. "My entire family was almost wiped out in
that war," I blurt out. "You think I need to go see your play in order to have
my emotions provoked?" There goes my resolve to avoid losing my cool.

I feel raw. Can barely sit still. I want to
vent, to rage, to add my perspective as a Vietnamese person, but I also don't
want to dominate the conversation. I listen to several Asian American women
talk about how men assume they or their mothers are prostitutes, or see them as
submissive sex objects who will do anything for a white man - a behavior that Miss
Saigon reinforces. David Mura is there. His daughter has graduated college.
My daughter, not yet four years old, is at home. Her middle name is the
Japanese name of Esther Suzuki, who died shortly after the second protest of Miss
Saigon at the Ordway.

" my child has no future, like the dust of
life."

Our daughter has a greater chance of someone assuming she is a submissive
sex object without agency or a voice, than the Ordway promising that they won't
bring this colonialist, racist, sexist play back. People will look at her
and assume she has it better in America than whatever country she is from,
though she was born in Saint Paul. The coproducers of the play can't even
manage a simple apology. "We're sorry you're hurt," the CEO says. That's like
punching us in the face three times and instead of apologizing for causing us
violence, they say: sorry that you happened to get hurt by our fist.

Miss Saigon, which has been called "the
greatest love story of our time," is an expensive production. It has raked in a
ton of money, and it will continue to do so. Human beings seem to have an
endless appetite for racism, sexism, and colonialism. Most of the people paying
hundreds of dollars to see Miss Saigon would hate to be called racists, I'm
sure, or would deny that they are supporting something that reinforces
Orientalism, sexism, and human trafficking. But they'll open up their wallets
all the same.

At home, our daughter asks me to cut out heart
shapes from paper. She tapes them onto a large round circle from another piece
of paper. "What is this?" I ask her. "It's a Valentine's Day card for everyone
in the whole wide world!" she exclaims, and she means it. Her gesture of love
is inexpensive, but not cheap.

---
I would like to thank the many movement
organizers and friends who helped me edit and fact-check this essay, and
provided me with links and informational resources to strengthen it, especially
Juliana Hu Pegues.. I'd like to give a special thanks to Cara Van Le whose
essay "Part of Memory is Forgetting" strongly influenced the aesthetics and
voice of my essay, and also the members of the Twin Cities Don't Buy Miss
Saigon Organizing Committees, presently and through the years.
To sign a petition boycotting "Miss
Saigon", go here.

To learn more about the "Don't Buy Miss Saigon" campaign, go here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
War Before Memory: A Vietnamese American Protest Organizer's History Against 'Miss Saigon'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Miss Saigon is a musical about Vietnamese women, who are all victims in need of rescue from the Third World. It is a musical about the inherent goodness of flawed white men. Vietnamese men are all abusive, sexist assholes who are so small they can't even expand to fit into two dimensions.

# data[].attributes.body
YAL Novels about WWII

The Young Pilot Series about women pilots in WWII:

Rose Under Fire and Code Name Verity

# data[].attributes.body
http://voiceseducation.org/content/young-adult-fiction-vietnam-war

# data[].attributes.body
Check out this board for photos, links, and videos about the Viet Nam War Era

# data[].attributes.body
Viv Sanders, a history professor, argues that most common assumptions about American involvement in the war are not accurate. At the bottom of the article are links to more information.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Turning Points in the Vietnam War | History Today

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Viv Sanders takes issue with some all too common assumptions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The most remarkable thing about protest music is that it helps people realize they're not alone in feeling a spirit of dissent against certain injustices, whether on a personal or more overarching governmental level. Great protest songs by artists like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie are so infectious, you can't help but sing along. This is hugely effective in creating a sense of community, helping groups organize to affect change.

Protest music has a very deeply rooted history in the United States and reaches back as far as American history reaches. Every major movement in American history has been accompanied by its own collection of protest songs, from slave emancipation to women's suffrage, the labor movement, civil rights, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movement, etc.

A common misconception is that nobody's writing songs that speak out against the current administration, the Iraq War and the War on Terror in general. The truth is that the national music scene is absolutely teeming with these songs, it's just that mainstream radio either hasn't caught on or is so corporatized these days that it bars most protest music from going mainstream.

Absolutely not. Many people feel like protest music is something that came and went with the Vietnam War era and civil rights, but that's just not so. Protest music has accompanied every major (and many minor) period of progress in America, and the current generation is no exception. These days, even major pop stars like Pink and Johh Mayer have recorded protest or politically-charged songs. Meanwhile lesser-known folk, bluegrass, alt.country and artists in other roots-related genres are carrying on the tradition of political song.

Probably one of the greatest protest singers ever was Phil Ochs. His short career was absolutely chock full of topical songs ripping at just about every aspect of society, and all sides of the political spectrum. His song, "Love Me, I'm a Liberal," is one of the few liberal folk songs written to satirize the liberal movement.

Other great classic protest singers include:

Protest music is one of the richest traditions in American folk music. The original folklorists at the turn of the 20th century often disagreed about whether or not to even record the protest and political music they found in their research. Luckily for us, some of them did, and we now have those folk singers' accounts of American history from which to learn and be inspired.

Whether joining in a sing-along of "We Shall Overcome," or sharing a protest song of your own composition at a local song circle or open mic night, protest music is something that can not only affect change around you, but can help us all feel like we're a little less alone in our beliefs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The most remarkable thing about protest music is that it helps people realize they're not alone in feeling a spirit of dissent against certain injustices, whether on a personal or more overarching governmental level. Great protest songs by artists like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie are so infectious, you can't help but sing along.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The girl in the photo - naked, crying, burned, running, with other children, away from the smoke - became emblematic of human suffering during the Vietnam War. Kim Phuc was 9 then, a child who would spend the next 14 months in the hospital and the rest of her life in skin blistered from the napalm that hit her body and burned off her clothes. She ran until she no longer could, and then she fainted.

More than 40 years after her injury, Phuc, now married with two teenagers and living near Toronto, travels the world to talk about the anger she left behind. After years spent in internal pain, she said, she forgave those who disfigured her.

"Through my story, I really give people hope," she said by phone from her home in Canada. "If they [are] seeking hope and forgiveness, it's possible. If that little girl can do it, then everyone can do it."

Phuc, who created a foundation devoted to helping child victims of war, will speak at the Fenn School in Concord on Tuesday as part of the fourth annual Multicultural Educators Forum. (Some seats are available to the public, and can be reserved by e-mailing Jennifer Youk See at jyouksee@fenn.org.)

Phuc will address how schools can develop the qualities of empathy, respect and forgiveness. She was asked to take part in the forum after the independent school's director of diversity and some faculty members heard her speak at a conference last year.

Phuc lived in Trang Bang, north of Saigon, when the war started. On June 8, 1972, Phuc, her family, other villagers and South Vietnamese soldiers had been hiding in a temple for three days. The day of the attack, they heard planes flying overhead. One of the soldiers told the civilians to run away, that the plane was going to bomb the temple.

Phuc went outside and saw the plane getting closer, and then heard the sound of four bombs hitting the ground. She couldn't run. She didn't know until later, but the bombs carried napalm, a gel-like incendiary that clings to its victims as it burns.

"Suddenly I saw the fire everywhere around me," she remembers. "At that moment, I didn't see anyone, just the fire. Suddenly, I saw my left arm burning. I used my right hand to try to take it off."

Her left hand was damaged, too. Her clothes burned off. Later, she would be thankful that her feet weren't damaged because she could run away, run until she was outside the fire. She saw her brothers, her cousins, and some soldiers running, too. She ran until she couldn't run any more.

"I called out, 'Too hot, too hot,' " she remembers. "Then one of the soldiers, he tried to help me. He poured water over my body. At that moment, I passed out."

She learned afterward that the photographer, Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut, took her to the hospital. Two of her cousins, ages 9 months and 3 years, died in the bombing. Phuc had burns over two-thirds of her body and was not expected to live.

She spent 14 months at the hospital, undergoing many skin grafts and surgeries. But after she recovered, she was used by the Vietnamese government for propaganda: She was a "living symbol of the war."

Phuc converted to Christianity 10 years after the attack, when she was living with her sister in Saigon. Phuc was reading about religion in the library, searching for meaning in her suffering, and was moved by the New Testament.

Her conversion displeased her family, she said, who practiced Cao Dai, a Vietnamese religion. She also grew tired of the government's control over her life. In 1986, she went to study in Cuba, where she met her husband.

'"If they [are] seeking hope and forgiveness, it's possible. If that little girl can do it, then everyone can do it.'

They traveled to Moscow for their honeymoon in 1992, and defected to Canada when their plane stopped in Newfoundland for fuel. Now they live with their two sons, Thomas, 18, and Stephen, 15, near Toronto. Phuc had feared that her injuries would keep her from experiencing both marriage and motherhood.

"After I left the hospital, every time I endured the pain and I look at my scars, I never thought in the future no boy [would] love me and marry me, so that I never have the normal life like everyone else," she said.

Phuc's scars on her back and arms still hurt, especially when the weather changes. She eats healthy foods, exercises, and tries to distract herself from the pain.

Now 49, Phuc serves as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, and gives 20 or 25 speeches around the world each year.

"People helped me through - the doctor, nurses," Phuc said. "People find the way to help me and they give me the future. And so now I really want to give back."

The iconic photo earned Ut, who was working for the Associated Press, the Pulitzer Prize. Phuc keeps a copy in her house, hidden in a bookcase among magazines. She only looks at it when she is alone.

"It's horrible, it's ugly. I can feel the burning, the smell, at that moment," she said. "I avoid that. It's my choice. I avoid living that past."

Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
scientific and cultural organization united nations educational

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Kim Phuc, the girl in the famous Vietnam photo, talks about forgiveness - The Boston Globe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kim Phuc became emblematic of human suffering in the Vietnam War in a photo taken of her at age 9 - naked, burned by napalm, and running away with other children - after South Vietnamese planes mistakenly dropped bombs on a temple.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Note: This timeline is an abbreviated version of the more detailed timeline posted on the Public Broadcasting System's "Vietnam Online" section of The American Experience .]

# data[].attributes.body
Vanity Fair on Agent Orange

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
To be writing these words is, for me, to undergo the severest test of my core belief-that sentences can be more powerful than pictures. A writer can hope to do what a photographer cannot: convey how things smelled and sounded as well as how things looked. I seriously doubt my ability to perform this task on this occasion. Unless you see the landscape of ecocide, or meet the eyes of its victims, you will quite simply have no idea. I am content, just for once-and especially since it is the work of the brave and tough and undeterrable James Nachtwey-to be occupying the space between pictures.

The very title of our joint subject is, I must tell you, a sick joke to begin with. Perhaps you remember the jaunty names of the callous brutes in Reservoir Dogs: "Mr. Pink," "Mr. Blue," and so on? Well, the tradition of giving pretty names to ugly things is as old as warfare. In Vietnam, between 1961 and 1971, the high command of the United States decided that, since a guerrilla struggle was apparently being protected by tree cover, a useful first step might be to "defoliate" those same trees. Famous corporations such as Dow and Monsanto were given the task of attacking and withering the natural order of a country. The resulting chemical weaponry was euphemistically graded by color: Agent Pink, Agent Green (yes, it's true), Agent Purple, Agent Blue, Agent White, and-spoken often in whispers-Agent Orange. This shady gang, or gang of shades, all deferred to its ruthless chief, who proudly bore the color of hectic madness. The key constituent of Agent Orange is dioxin: a horrifying chemical that makes total war not just on vegetation but also on the roots and essences of life itself. The orange, in other words, was clockwork from the start. If you wonder what the dioxin effect can look like, recall the ravaged features of Viktor Yushchenko-ironically, the leader of the Orange Revolution.

The full inventory of this historic atrocity is still being compiled: it's no exaggeration to say that about 12 million gallons of lethal toxin, in Orange form alone, were sprayed on Vietnam, on the Vietnamese, and on the American forces who were fighting in the same jungles. A prime use of the chemical was in the delta of the Mekong River, where the Swift Boats were vulnerable to attack from the luxuriant undergrowth at the water's edge. Very well, said Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Jr., we shall kill off this ambush-enabling greenery by poisoning it from the skies. Zumwalt believes his own son Elmo III, who was also serving in the delta, died from the effects of Agent Orange, leaving behind him a son with grave learning disabilities. The resulting three-generation memoir of the Zumwalt family- My Father, My Son (1986), written by the first and second Elmos about themselves and about the grandchild-is one of the most stoic and affecting family portraits in American history.

You have to go to Vietnam, though, to see such fallout at first hand. I had naïvely assumed that it would be relatively easy to speak to knowledgeable physicians and scientists, if only because a state that is still Communist (if only in name) would be eager to justify itself by the crimes of American imperialism. The contrary proved to be the case, and for two main reasons. The government is too poor to pay much compensation to victims, and prefers anyway to stress the heroic rather than the humiliating aspects of the war. And traditional Vietnamese culture has a tendency to frown on malformed children, whose existence is often attributed to the sins of a past life. Furthermore, Vietnamese in general set some store by pride and self-reliance, and do not like soliciting pity.

I am quite proud of what I did when I came to appreciate, in every sense of the word, these obstacles. The first time I ever gave blood was to a "Medical Aid for Vietnam" clinic, in 1967. That was also the moment when I discovered that I have a very rare blood type. So, decades later, seeing a small ad in a paper in Ho Chi Minh City (invariably still called Saigon in local conversation) that asked for blood donations for Agent Orange victims, I reported to the relevant address. I don't think they get many wheezing and perspiring Anglos at this joint, let alone wheezing and perspiring Anglos with such exclusive corpuscles; at any rate I was fussed over a good deal while two units were drawn off, was given a sustaining bowl of beef noodles and some sweet tea, and was then offered a tour of the facilities.

This privilege, after a while, I came almost to regret. In an earlier age the compassionate term for irredeemably deformed people was lusus naturae: "a sport of nature," or, if you prefer a more callous translation, a joke. It was bad enough, in that spare hospital, to meet the successful half of a Siamese-twin separation. This was a more or less functional human child, with some cognition and about half the usual complement of limbs and organs. But upstairs was the surplus half, which, I defy you not to have thought if you had been there, would have been more mercifully thrown away. It wasn't sufficient that this unsuccessful remnant had no real brain and was a thing of stumps and sutures. ("No ass!," murmured my stunned translator in that good-bad English that stays in your mind.) Extra torments had been thrown in. The little creature was not lying torpid and still. It was jerking and writhing in blinded, crippled, permanent epilepsy, tethered by one stump to the bedpost and given no release from endless, pointless, twitching misery. What nature indulges in such sport? What creator designs it?

But all evil thoughts about euthanasia dissolve as soon as you meet, first, the other children and, second, those who care for them. In the office of Dr. Nguyen Thi Phuong Tan, a wonderful lady who is in charge of the equally impossible idea of "rehabilitation," I was taking notes when a lively, pretty, but armless 10-year-old girl ran in and sprang with great agility onto the table. Pham Thi Thuy Linh's grandfather had been in the South Vietnamese Air Force, had helped to vent Agent Orange on his Communist foes, and had suddenly succumbed to leukemia at the age of 42. His curse has been transmitted down the generations, whether via the food chain or the chromosomes is unclear. While Pham Thi Thuy Linh deftly signed her name with her right foot-with which she also handled a biscuit from the fond nurses-I learned that she had been listed for some artificial arms, perhaps with modern synthetic flesh, from an organization in Japan. All this will take is a wait until she's fully grown, and some $300,000. Money well spent, I'd say. But there will be no "making whole" for these children-eerily combining complete innocence with the most sinister and frightening appearance, ridden and riddled with cleft palate and spina bifida. One should not run out of vocabulary to the point where one calls a child a monster, but the temptation is there. One sees, with an awful pang, why their terrified and shamed parents abandon them to this overworked clinic. One also realizes that it isn't nature, or a creator, that is to blame. If only. This was not a dreadful accident, or a tragedy. It was inflicted, on purpose, by sophisticated human beings.

I am not an epidemiologist. And there are professionals who will still tell you that there is no absolutely proven connection between the spraying of this poison and the incidence of terrifying illnesses in one generation, or the persistence of appalling birth defects in the next one or the next one. Let us submit this to the arbitration of evidence and reason: what else can possibly explain the systematic convergence? I left Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon and went down the road and along the river, by boat, to the delta town of Ben Tre. This is the very place where Peter Arnett heard the American soldier say in 1968 that "we had to destroy the town to save it." My ferry churned the big muddy waters that had once been cruised by the Swift Boats, and I stood out in the pre-monsoon rain to get a clear look at the riverbanks with vegetation that took so long to grow back. Ben Tre Province, then called Kien Hoa, was a kind of "ground zero" for this experiment on human beings and animals and trees.

Jungles can ostensibly rise again, but dioxin works its way down through the roots and into the soil and the water, where it can enter the food chain. The unforgivable truth is that nobody knew at the time they were spraying it how long it takes dioxin to leach out of the natural system. The muttered prayer of many Vietnamese villagers is that this generation will be the last to feel their grandparents' war in their bones and their blood and their epidermis, but the fact is that the town of Ben Tre is home to about 140,000 people, of whom, the Red Cross says, 58,000 are victims of Agent Orange. (I don't trust Vietnamese statistics, but these were supplied to me by a woman expert who is not uncritical of the Communist regime, and whose family had been subjected to forced "re-education" after the fall of Saigon.)

Once again, after a tour of some thatched hamlets and some local schools for the special cases, I experienced an urgent need to be elsewhere or alone. How many times can one pretend to "interview" the parents of a child born with bright-yellow skin? The cleft palates, the deafness, the muteness, the pretzel limbs and lolling heads ... and the terrible expressions on the faces of the parents, who believe that this horror can sometimes skip a generation. There is just enough knowledge for agony and remorse, in other words, but not enough for any "healing process." No answer, above all, to the inescapable question: When will it stop? A rain from hell began falling about 40 years ago. Unto how many unborn generations? At a school full of children who made sign language to one another or who couldn't sit still (or who couldn't move much at all), or who couldn't see or couldn't hear, I took the tour of the workshops where trades such as fishnet weaving or car repair are taught, and was then asked if I would like to say a few words, through an interpreter, to the assembly. I quite like a captive audience, but I didn't trust myself to say a fucking thing. Several of the children in the front row were so wizened and shrunken that they looked as if they could be my seniors. I swear to you that Jim Nachtwey has taken photographs, as one of his few rivals, Philip Jones Griffiths, also took photographs, that simply cannot be printed in this magazine, because they would poison your sleep, as they have poisoned mine.

"After such knowledge," as T. S. Eliot asked in "Gerontion," "what forgiveness?" That's easy. The question of forgiveness just doesn't come up. The world had barely assimilated the new term "genocide," which was coined only in the 1940s, before the United States government added the fresh hell of "ecocide," or mass destruction of the web of nature that connects human and animal and herbal life. I think we may owe the word's distinction to my friend Orville Schell, who wrote a near-faultless essay of coolheaded and warmhearted prose in the old Look magazine in March 1971. At that time, even in a picture magazine, there weren't enough photographs of the crime, so his terse, mordant words had to suffice, which makes me faintly proud to be in the same profession. And at some points, being naturally scrupulous about the evidence, he could only speculate: "There are even reports of women giving birth to monsters, though most occurrences are not reported because of nonexistent procedures for compiling statistics."

Well, we know now, or at least we know better. Out of a population of perhaps 84 million Vietnamese, itself reduced by several million during the war, there are as many as one million cases of Agent Orange affliction still on the books. Of these, the hardest to look at are the monstrous births. But we agree to forgive ourselves for this, and to watch real monsters such as Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger, who calmly gave the orders and the instructions, as they posture on chat shows and cash in with their "memoirs." But, hey, forget it. Forget it if you can.

No more Latin after this, I promise, but there is an old tag from the poet Horace that says, Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur. "Change only the name and this story is also about you." The Vietnam War came home, and so did many men who had been exposed to Agent Orange, either from handling it and loading it or from being underneath it. If you desire even a faint idea of the distance between justice and a Vietnamese peasant family, take a look at how long it took for the American victims of this evil substance to get a hearing. The chemical assault on Vietnam began in 1961, in the early days of the Kennedy administration, and it kept on in spite of many protests for another 10 years. The first effective legal proceeding brought in any American court was in 1984, in New York. This class action, settled out of court, was so broadly defined, in point of American victims and their stricken children, that almost nobody got more than $5,000 out of it, and there was a sharp (or do I mean blunt?) cutoff point beyond which no claim could be asserted. Six million acres of Vietnam had been exposed to the deadly stuff, and, as is the way with protracted litigation, the statistics began to improve and harden. It was established that there was a "match" between those who had been exposed and those who were subject, or whose offspring were subject, to alarming disorders. Admiral Zumwalt, who had first used the phrase "wrong war, wrong place, wrong time" in connection with Vietnam, took a hand in forwarding the legal cause and might have added that his grandson should not be (or do I mean should be?) the last one to suffer for a mistake. More than a mistake. A crime.

Long after both senior male Zumwalts had died-or in 2003, to be precise-the Supreme Court ruled that the issue had not been completely put to rest by the 1984 settlement. The way now lies open for a full accounting of this nightmarish affair. A report, written by Professor Jeanne Stellman, of Columbia University, as part of a U.S. government study, has concluded that nearly two million more gallons of herbicide were disseminated than has yet been admitted, and that the dioxin content of each gallon was much higher than had been officially confessed. (It has been calculated from tests on some Vietnamese that their dioxin levels are 200 times higher than "normal.") The implications are extraordinary, because it is now possible that thousands of Americans may join a million of their former, Vietnamese adversaries in having a standing to sue.

"Doesn't it ever end? When will Agent Orange become history?" These were the words of Kenneth Feinberg, who figured as the court's "special master" in the 1984 suit, and who has more recently run the Victim Compensation Fund for the families of those who died in the attacks of September 11, 2001. One should not leave him to answer his own question all by himself. Agent Orange will "become history" in a different way from the trauma of September 11. Of that event, it's fairly safe to say, there will be no lapse of memory at least until everybody who lived through it has died. Of this Vietnam syndrome, some of us have sworn, there will likewise be no forgetting, let alone forgiving, while we can still draw breath. But some of the victims of Agent Orange haven't even been born yet, and if that reflection doesn't shake you, then my words have been feeble and not even the photographs will do.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Christopher Hitchens on Agent Orange and Its Continued Destruction in Vietnam

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
To be writing these words is, for me, to undergo the severest test of my core belief-that sentences can be more powerful than pictures. A writer can hope to do what a photographer cannot: convey how things smelled and sounded as well as how things looked.

# data[].attributes.body
A PBS series

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Vietnam War pitted communist North Vietnam and the Viet Cong against South Vietnam and the United States. The war ended when U.S. forces withdrew in 1973 and Vietnam unified under Communist control two years later.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Data visualization showing service members from Florida that have been killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
One of the things about humans is that they die sometimes, and one of the things humans pay a lot of attention to is other people dying. We do a pretty good job of distracting ourselves from the whole "I'm gonna die one day" thing, but the fixation is there, underneath the surface, and one way it shows through is how riveted we are by other people's deaths.

The news is an obvious example-just open up CNN.com and typically, at least half of the headlines are about people dying. Entertainment is another-nothing locks eyes on a screen like the death of a character.

History is a less obvious example, but it's the parts of history that involve a lot of people dying that usually compel us the most. That's why there are so many war movies and so few movies about critical legislation being passed.

But for a crowd so interested in death, humans know surprisingly little about the actual numbers of people that died in key moments throughout history. Most of us know that 3,000 people died on 9/11, but how many Americans know how many Katrina victims there were, or how many people died in the American Revolution. Did the Christian Crusades kill 100 times as many people as the Vietnam War? Or were they identical in their death tolls? Given how much we talk about historical human tragedies, it seems like something we should have a better handle on. So let's take a look.

Some quick notes:

The area of each circle in the graphic is exactly proportional to the number it's representing and to the other circles in the graphic. Note the scale, and how it changes as the numbers grow. I chose circles and area because a one-dimensional scale like a bar graph doesn't work when numbers are growing 1,000-fold over each other-you need two dimensions to be able to handle such a wide range. But keep in mind that with the way area works, a circle with double the diameter of another circle represents four times the deaths, not two.

I focused on human tragedies of various kinds, but sprinkled normal death statistics (the gray circles) throughout as comparison points to help put things in perspective.

I tried to maintain integrity in my research. There are many "sources" citing various death tolls online-so I made sure there was a reasonable consensus for all the numbers below. When there were too many differing opinions (like Howard Zinn saying European Colonialism killed 100 million people, with other sources saying it was 2 million), I left it out. Sometimes, there is genuine uncertainty to the exact death toll in an event, but a consensus about the lower and upper bound that the death toll might be. In those cases, I made the upper bound a big, faded circle, and the lower bound a smaller, brighter circle inside. For example, the total number of lucky people who had their hearts cut out and sacrificed by the Aztecs is unknown. But historians are pretty sure that the number is somewhere between 300,000 and 1,500,000. So I represented that like this, with two circles:

Alright, on with it. The Death Toll Comparison Breakdown:
______ ______
If you're into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we'll send you the new posts right when they come out.
From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq's Full Story The American Presidents-Washington to Lincoln
If you'd like to support Wait But Why, here's our Patreon.

More Wait But Why history brush-ups:

And another one in infographic form: Putting Time in Perspective

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Death Toll Comparison Breakdown - Wait But Why

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One of the things about humans is that they die sometimes, and one of the things humans pay a lot of attention to is other people dying. We do a pretty good job of distracting ourselves from the whole "I'm gonna die one day" thing, but the fixation is there, underneath the surface, and one way it shows through is how riveted we are by other people's deaths.

# data[].attributes.body
A photo that speaks volumes about war