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When America first saw the design for the Vietnam Wall, critics called it a black gash of shame. No federal money built it. 275,000 Americans did. Sound: Benboncan (CC BY 4.0)

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Stitched inside the vest was a promise: this vest may save your life. It was built for shrapnel. When the Army tested it in Korea, bullets went through it three times in four. Sound: juskiddink, Benboncan (CC BY 4.0)

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The picture is from the next day, 5 October 1918, by Underwood and Underwood (National Archives 165-WW-158A-57), captioned "Group of the homeless." The acreage and this year's digging: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers notices, 2026. The toll is from a 1918 caption in the same file.

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108 years ago today a shell plant in Morgan, New Jersey began to explode. It went on for three days and killed about 100. The Army Corps of Engineers (its own 2026 notice) is still searching 3,156 acres of homes and schools for the munitions it threw. youtube.com/@paverundo #history

A War Department file card from 1918 with a sepia photograph mounted on
it. In the photograph about forty women and children stand and sit
together on bare ground at the edge of a scrubby field, most looking at
the camera. Women in headscarves hold babies wrapped in white, boys wear
flat caps and jackets, and small children sit cross-legged in front. The
typed caption on the card reads "Terrific explosion at T.A. Gillespie Co.
plant, Morgan's Landing, New Jersey. Group of the homeless." The card is
stamped 165-WW 158A57, Underwood and Underwood, taken 10/5/18.

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Vietnam killed more Screaming Eagles than Nazi Germany did. The 101st Airborne lost about 1,700 men in the whole of the Second World War. In Vietnam it lost 4,011, without a single combat parachute jump.

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The picture is Kintpuash in 1873, by Louis Heller (National Archives 165-MH-404). Trial and hanging: Oregon History Project, Oregon Historical Society. The skull, its catalog number and its return in 1984: Seattle Times, 24 March 1996.

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153 years ago today the Army hanged the Modoc leader Captain Jack after a trial with no defense lawyer (source: Oregon Historical Society). Then it cut off his head and sent it east. His skull sat in a Smithsonian drawer until a relative collected it in 1984. youtube.com/@paverundo #history

Black and white studio portrait from 1873 of Kintpuash, the Modoc leader
known as Captain Jack, shown from the chest up and facing the camera. He
has dark hair parted in the middle and cut straight at the jaw, a steady,
unsmiling expression, and a striped collarless shirt buttoned at the
neck. The edges fade to white, and the number 404 is stamped in the top
right corner of the card.

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Two years after Reagan gave him the Medal of Honor, the government decided this Green Beret could go back to work, and moved to stop his disability checks. He still had shrapnel in his heart.

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Nearly five million Americans swore they would not take off a stranger's bracelet until he came home. Thousands of those men never did.

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The picture is the Queen Mary arriving in New York with returning troops, 20 June 1945 (US Navy 80-GK-5645, National Archives 521011). Curacoa toll: naval casualty file released by the UK National Archives, June 2013.

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84 years ago today the Queen Mary, carrying thousands of GIs to Britain, cut her own escort HMS Curacoa in two off Ireland. Under orders never to stop, she kept going. 337 sailors died (source: UK National Archives), and the public was not told until after the war. youtube.com/@paverundo #history

Black and white aerial photograph of the liner Queen Mary in grey war
paint steaming up a harbour, her three funnels trailing white smoke and
her decks crowded with thousands of soldiers. Two tugboats run alongside.
Behind her is the Manhattan skyline with the Empire State Building under
a sky of heavy clouds.

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Paverundo @paverundo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

At My Lai, one American pilot landed his helicopter between the soldiers and the villagers. The only man a powerful congressman wanted court-martialed for that day was him.

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After Saigon fell in 1975, the women who had worked in the American bars were rounded up and sent away to have their dignity restored. Two of them later said it meant a prison island, then three years of hard labor. #history

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Paverundo @paverundo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The picture is men of the 24th Infantry moving up to the firing line in Korea, 18 July 1950 (US Army Signal Corps, National Archives 111-SC-343967). Regiment inactivated 1 October 1951: Mahon and Danysh, Infantry Part I, CMH 1972. Order: EO 9981, 26 July 1948.

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Paverundo @paverundo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

When the Americans left Vietnam, they left thousands of their own children behind. The Vietnamese called them bui doi: the dust of life. It took one photograph of a crippled boy to bring them to America. Congress has still never made them citizens. #history

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The attack that started the Vietnam War never happened. One Navy pilot flew over it, and saw nothing. Two days later the Senate voted 88 to 2. Photo: rhjpage (CC BY 2.0). Sound: juskiddink (CC BY 4.0)

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The picture is Paul Blobel, commander of Sonderkommando 4a, sentenced at the Einsatzgruppen trial on 10 April 1948 (US Army Signal Corps, National Archives 111-SC-299809). The trial opened on 29 September 1947. Figures: USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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85 years ago today the killing at Babi Yar ended. The figure quoted, 33,771 Jews in two days, is the SS unit's own count, sent to Berlin. At Nuremberg the prosecutor called no witnesses and used their reports. Here the unit's commander is sentenced to death (USHMM). youtube.com/@paverundo #history

Black and white photograph of a courtroom dock. A bald man with a full
white beard, in a plain jacket and translation headphones, stands between
two American military policemen in white-lettered helmets and uniforms.
Behind them are tall carved wooden doors, one standing open, and a large
square wall clock at top right. Wooden benches cross the foreground.

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In 1969 a lottery decided who went to Vietnam, and it was stacked against anyone born in December. By accident. 26 of December's 31 birthdays were called. In March, only 10. #history

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Paverundo @paverundo.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The National Guard shot an Army ROTC cadet in the back. His name was Bill Schroeder. He wasn't protesting. Kent State, 4 May 1970. 67 shots in 13 seconds. Four students died. No one was ever convicted. #history

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The picture is the US Army Map Service sheet NN 41-1 Chelyabinsk, compiled in 1954 from Soviet maps of 1936 to 1941. The plant was begun in 1947 on the lake east of Kyshtym, so it is not on it. Figures: NRPA Bulletin 8-07, 2007.

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Paverundo @paverundo.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Before Chernobyl, this. 69 years ago today a waste tank blew up at a secret Soviet plutonium plant. Its city had only a code name, so the disaster is named for the nearest town on the map, Kyshtym. 23 villages were emptied (Norwegian Radiation Protection Agency). youtube.com/@paverundo #history

Detail of a 1950s US Army topographic map of the southern Urals. The town
of Kyshtym is marked in yellow at the left edge. To its east lie two large
blue lakes, Ozero Irtyash and Ozero Kyzyltash, and beyond them a scatter
of small villages joined by dashed tracks, among them Satlykova, Berdenish,
Metlino and Techa-Brod. The ground around Lake Kyzyltash is blank apart
from tracks and a forest rangers cabin to its southwest.

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Paverundo @paverundo.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

January 1967: Robin Olds disguised his Phantoms as bombers. The MiGs came up to ambush them, and flew into a trap. Models: andertan (CC BY 4.0), htqclassic (CC BY-SA 4.0). Sound: DudeAwesome (CC BY 4.0), mensageirocs (CC BY 3.0)

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The Army drugged its own soldiers, then filmed them. For twenty years Edgewood Arsenal tested 254 chemicals on volunteers, most told they were testing clothing. One sergeant learned he'd been given LSD 17 years later. #history

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The picture is Nathaniel Currier's lithograph of the sinking, printed in New York in 1854, Library of Congress. The study: Elinder and Erixson, "Gender, social norms, and survival in maritime disasters", PNAS 2012.

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Yesterday's answer: none. Not one woman or child on the SS Arctic survived. The boats went to the crew and the fittest men. A 2012 study of 18 shipwrecks found women had better odds than men in just two, the Titanic and the Birkenhead (Elinder and Erixson, PNAS). youtube.com/@paverundo #history

A black and white lithograph from 1854 of a large paddle steamer sinking
stern first in a calm sea, her two masts still flying flags and a crowd of
people on her tilted deck. In the foreground a lifeboat packed with men in
top hats and caps is pulling away from the ship. To the left people cling
to a raft of spars, to the right men sit astride floating barrels, and
others swim among the wreckage.

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President Johnson called it treason, then said nothing. October 1968: an FBI wiretap caught Nixon's go-between telling Saigon to hold on, they were going to win. Days later Saigon boycotted the peace talks. #history

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President Nixon tried to gag the New York Times. Its crime: printing the Pentagon's secret history of Vietnam. The Supreme Court ruled against him, 6 to 3. So his men burgled the leaker's psychiatrist instead. #history

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A clue: a 2012 study of passenger shipwrecks from 1852 to 2011 found one group on board survived more often than anyone else, and it was not the passengers. The answer tomorrow.

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You're hearing America's real ghost tape from Vietnam. Ghost Tape Number Ten: funeral music, weeping children, and a dead soldier's voice begging his comrades to go home, played into the jungle at night. #history

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Paverundo @paverundo.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Agent Green was sprayed over South Vietnam from 1962 to 1964, before any combat troops arrived. The Air Force's study of its own spray crews rated its dioxin 33 times Agent Orange's. The Americans underneath were advisers and airmen. #history

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One in three sailors on the Navy's river patrol boats was wounded. The fiberglass PBR had no armor. Speed was its protection, until the Navy sent it into canals too narrow to turn around in. Model based on neysha (Sketchfab); sound: SkyernAklea (freesound). Both CC BY 4.0

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Paverundo @paverundo.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The Navy built Top Gun to beat this jet. The MiG-17 was slower than sound, but it turned tighter and had three big guns. US missiles often missed. Sound: soundscalpel.com, OGsoundFX, SkyernAklea, datasoundsample, TimoSchmied, YannSauvin (freesound, CC BY)

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Paverundo @paverundo.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Every US Navy sailor is trained to fight fire. July 1967: a rocket fired by accident across USS Forrestal's deck. 94 seconds in, a bomb killed almost her whole fire team. 134 men died. Sound: iainmccurdy, datasoundsample, TimoSchmied, YannSauvin, CGEffex (freesound, CC BY 4.0)

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A Nobel Peace Prize winner refused his medal. Le Duc Tho shared the 1973 prize with Kissinger for the deal that took America out of Vietnam. He said the ceasefire was already violated. Would you have accepted it? Le Duc Tho portrait: Phuongcacanh, CC BY 4.0

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The picture is from the archive of the Batignolles company, which built the line, 1924 to 1925. Article 5 of the 1926 convention: forced labour "may only be exacted for public purposes". Sources: ohchr.org, Archives nationales du monde du travail

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The treaty meant to end slavery was signed 100 years ago today. Its Article 5 still allowed forced labour "for public purposes". These men were building France's Congo-Ocean railway around 1925, with labour the colony took by force (French national labour archives). youtube.com/@paverundo #history

A sepia photograph of eleven young African men standing in a line on bare
earth in a cleared forest, in French Equatorial Africa around 1925. They
are barefoot and very thin, most wearing only a cloth wrapped at the waist,
and each rests his hands on a long handled shovel planted in the ground in
front of him. One boy in the middle, smaller than the rest, stands with his
hands on his hips. Behind them rise the pale stumps of huge felled trees,
with cut branches and leaves piled on the slope.

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Five dolphins guarded an American ammunition pier in Vietnam. In 1970 the Navy sent them to Cam Ranh Bay to find enemy swimmers by sonar. In 1976 a former Navy trainer said they were killers. The Navy says they never killed anyone. Do you believe the Navy? #history

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One Chinook gunship shot itself down over Vietnam. In 1966 the Army bolted cannons and rockets onto four Chinooks. A retaining pin worked loose, and its 20 mm cannon fired straight through the forward rotor. Did a Chinook ever resupply your firebase? #history

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American guns shelled buckets of urine in the jungle. The Viet Cong hung them there on purpose, because the Army's people sniffer smelled ammonia, and one bucket read like a whole company of men. The machine could not tell the difference. Neither could the guns. #history

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The picture is a US Department of Energy photograph of Garigliano from across the river, around 1967. Italy ran four reactors; a 1987 referendum ended the programme and the last two shut in 1990. The Senate vote was 81 to 51. Sources: world-nuclear.org, AP

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Yesterday Italy's Senate voted to let the country build reactors again. This is Garigliano, which General Electric built near Naples. Italy voted nuclear out after Chernobyl, yet about 5% of its power is still nuclear, all imported (World Nuclear Association). youtube.com/@paverundo #history

A black and white photograph of the Garigliano nuclear power station near
Naples, about 1967, seen from across a slow river with reeds and a sandy
bank in the foreground. At left stands a huge steel sphere, the reactor's
containment, with a crane beside it and a tall chimney painted in black and
white bands behind it. In the middle is a long flat turbine hall with a
row of vertical fins along its roof, and at right a tall water tower, also
painted in black and white bands. The sky is pale and empty.

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