11 January,2017 10:19 AM IST | | The Guide Team
Malcolm Gladwell, the English-born Canadian journalist, gathered his interviews and sound bytes to plan a podcast, centering around the Vietnam War
An archival image of a US trap in Vietnam. Pic/AFP
Malcolm Gladwell, the English-born Canadian journalist, gathered his interviews and sound bytes to plan a podcast, centering around the Vietnam War.
The author involves people - a young Vietnamese woman, a refugee from Nazi Germany, a Russian expatriate - and the then unpopular Vietnam government to help understand the futility of the intelligence-gathering mission that the US had signed up for.
All their lives intersected in the battle; if one ducked bullets, the other took shelter to be safe. "The house we lived in Saigon was directly in the trajectory of rockets. We had the experience of ducking while dining on the table," said one of them.
The 44-minute episode is a flashback to the time when the US was on the mission, run by the Rand Corporation, known as Viet Cong Motivation. The message the episode delivers is that knowing everything about the enemy will not solve any problem; war politics and the reason behind the battle are far from it. "The US kept bombing till Vietnam gave up," he sums up.
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