Yellow Rain

A reinvestigation of chemical biological weapons dropped on the Hmong people in the fallout of the Vietnam War In this staggering work of documentary, poetry, and collage, Mai Der Vang reopens a wrongdoing that deserves a new reckoning. As the United States abandoned them at the end of the Vietnam War, many Hmong refugees recounted stories of a mysterious substance that fell from planes during their escape from Laos starting in the mid-1970s. This substance, known as “yellow rain,” caused severe illnesses and thousands of deaths. These reports prompted an investigation into allegations that a chemical biological weapon had been used against the Hmong in breach of international treaties. A Cold War scandal erupted, wrapped in partisan debate around chemical arms development versus control. And then, to the world’s astonishment, American scientists argued that yellow rain was the feces of honeybees defecating en masse—still held as the widely accepted explanation. The truth of what happened to the Hmong, to those who experienced and suffered yellow rain, has been ignored and discredited. Integrating archival research and declassified documents, Yellow Rain calls out the erasure of a history, the silencing of a people who at the time lacked the capacity and resources to defend and represent themselves. In poems that sing and lament, that contend and question, Vang restores a vital narrative in danger of being lost, and brilliantly explores what it means to have access to the truth and how marginalized groups are often forbidden that access.

The use of poison gas - chlorine, phosgene, mustard - during World War I forever changed the face of modern warfare. Yet poison gas, and its far deadlier successors, nerve agents like sarin and soman, remained oddly absent from the world stage during World War II. The possibility that poison or nerve gas could be used spurred the development of more and deadlier toxins as insurance against other countries taking the same action - the production of which poisons continued unabated even after the war ended, providing the threat beneath the uneasy stalemate of the Cold War. The United States was left with stockpiles of earlier iterations of gases held in arsenals around the world and nothing to use them for, especially with such weapons banned by international law. But while the world on the surface seemed content to keep their deadly super-poisons locked away, whispers from around the globe in the latter half of the twentieth century suggested that this was not the case at all. Since 1979, rumours of a poison hundreds of times deadlier than nerve gas leaked out of the war-zones of Laos, Cambodia, and Afghanistan, born on the lips and bodies of survivors who watched their friends and families die in excruciating pain. The gas was known as 'yellow rain' and, like all chemical weapons, it is banned by every international and moral law. For years the connections between the sites of distribution were not made - too far apart geographically and in time, with no single known chemical capable of causing the symptoms, each instance was written off as a tragedy without any real answers. Sterling Seagrave's investigation into yellow rain takes him across the world as, over the course of several years, he pieces together fragments of information to finally reveal the origin of the super-toxin for the first time. Seagrave expands his analysis of T2, one of the most lethal poisons ever invented, and created from a virulent spore found on grain, into a terrifyingly readable survey of the silent but steady growth of chemical arsenals worldwide. Praise for Yellow Rain 'His story is a terrifying one...he does not confine his investigation to the Russians alone. He is equally critical of American deceits over chemical and biological weapons.' - The Times Praise for Sterling Seagrave 'compulsively readable' - International Herald Tribune 'Fast-paced and jammed with racy details' - New York Times Book Review Sterling Seagrave is an American historian and investigative journalist whose work has appeared in many major newspapers and magazines, including The Washington Post, Time, and Smithsonian. He grew up in Asia and the United States. He is also the author of The Soong Dynasty, The Marcos Dynasty, and Gold Warriors.

Ainielle is a village high in the Spanish Pyrenees. Its houses now stand deserted - most of them in ruins. Its last surviving inhabitant, an old man at death's door, lingers on and as the yellow rain of autumn leaves fall around him, he recalls the life he lived.

A mysterious—and lethal—chemical weapon goes missing in this Cold War thriller of nonstop intrigue and suspense. When an Afghan village becomes paralyzed by the Soviets’ new warfare, and a thick nerve gas suffocates innocent people, rumors of a deadly weapon find their way to the Pentagon—and into the hands of Lieutenant Colonel Mark Schad. Along with his three-man team, Lieutenant Colonel Schad will lead one of the riskiest covert operations known to the US Department of Defense in order to find one unexploded cylinder of Yellow Rain. But are these men up against something much greater than American intelligence is prepared to face?

Trained sociologist and photographer Marrigje de Maar (born 1944) seeks out those magical households in which families have come together for generations--where life has "worn itself into" a house. Over the course of five trips to China, she photographed housing in Chinese communes that had been scheduled for demolition, finding within them a surprising diversity of types and uses of classical living spaces.

Hailed on first publication and continuously reprinted in Spain, "The Yellow Rain "is a haunting ode to the power of memory, an elegy for a landscape and a way of life.

This volume provides information from the author's twenty-five year study of the humble desert Papago Indians