Randa Abdel-Fattah

And I found it very striking.

And I wonder if you can explain sort of what you were thinking in that moment and since that moment.

The extraordinary success of this mission

was due to the incredible skill, bravery, and selfless courage of the United States military and our diplomats and intelligence professionals.

Refugee stories are war stories as much as soldier stories are.

Not either or, but both and.

I think it's something that a lot of people would nod along and be like, yeah, absolutely, right?

It's like on a theoretical level, and some people would be like, honestly, some people would roll their eyes at that, right?

So I guess my question is, how do we actually make it so that this is just the way we talk about history?

It's not like something where we're like, here's the appendix with all the extra stories that you need to fill in the gaps, but it actually becomes part of the way we actually think of ourselves and think about our history.

So they forgot her, like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep.

Occasionally, however, the rustle of a skirt hushes when they wake, and the knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep seem to belong to the sleeper.

Sometimes the photograph of a close friend or relative looked at two long shifts, and something more familiar than the dear face itself moves there.

They can touch it if they like, but don't, because they know things will never be the same if they do.

This is not a story to pass on.

That was also a goal of Viet's book, Nothing Ever Dies, to search for what that future might look like.

And he found it.

This is the battlefield in Laos.

These are government troops supported and financed by the United States, fighting and losing ground.

dropped more explosives on Laos than it did on Germany and Japan combined in World War II.