The Long Reckoning

A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam

By: George Black

Narrated by: Elyse Dinh

The moving story of how a small group of people—including two Vietnam veterans—forced the U.S. government to take responsibility for the ongoing horrors—agent orange and unexploded munitions—inflicted on the Vietnamese.

"Fifty years after the last U.S. service member left Vietnam, the scars of that war remain...This [is the] remarkable story of a group of individuals determined to heal those enduring wounds.”—Elliot Ackerman, author of The Fifth Act and 2034

The American war in Vietnam has left many long-lasting scars that have not yet been sufficiently examined. The worst of them were inflicted in a tiny area bounded by the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail in neighboring Laos. That small region saw the most intense aerial bombing campaign in history, the massive use of toxic chemicals, and the heaviest casualties on both sides.

In The Long Reckoning, George Black recounts the inspirational story of the small cast of characters—veterans, scientists, and Quaker-inspired pacifists, and their Vietnamese partners—who used their moral authority, scientific and political ingenuity, and sheer persistence to attempt to heal the horrors that were left in the wake of the military engagement in Southeast Asia. Their intersecting story is one of reconciliation and personal redemption, embedded in a vivid portrait of Vietnam today, with all its startling collisions between past and present, in which one-time mortal enemies, in the endless shape-shifting of geopolitics, have been transformed into close allies and partners.

The Long Reckoning is being published on the fiftieth anniversary of the day the last American combat soldier left Vietnam.

©2023 George Black (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Black’s immersion in a particular human geography — his attunement to aspects of terrain, climate, flora and fauna, as well as to the people’s intimate relationship to the land — brings home the enormity of the destruction anew. . . . [With] fascinating description of life on the perilous Ho Chi Minh Trail . . . Black resists neat endings. Even as he chronicles the meaningful, if unfinished, progress made over the last half-century, he never palliates the horrors of the war.” —Elizabeth D. Samet, The New York Times

“There’s a world of books about the American war in South Asia, about what we did to its people and to ourselves. The Long Reckoning is different, a vivid, deeply researched account of some extraordinary Americans who have devoted themselves to undoing what they can of all that appalling damage.” —Geoffrey C. Ward, co-author of The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“Fifty years after the last U.S. service member left Vietnam, the scars of that war remain. George Black traces the topography of those scars in this remarkable story of a group of individuals determined to heal those enduring wounds. He also proves that some of the finest literature of the Vietnam War is still being written.” —Elliot Ackerman, author of The Fifth Act

A story that needed to be told

It gave me a new understanding of something I participated in but knew so little about. I don’t feel bad about my reluctance to have participated in such an event at all

A much needed retelling

As someone who grew up learning about the Vietnam war through textbooks ridden with bias and misinformation, this book stands out as one of the integral texts and first person accounts missing from the telling of the war. I read this book as an optional reading for my study abroad trip to Vietnam and I’m so glad I did. Definitely worth the listen

same thing over and over

I could not finish it. Good idea; horrible editing. Same story in different locales. Unrelentingly tedious. The long, boring diary. Needed an editor with a meat ax.