Shared Weight Podcasts

While in production for Shared Weight: "The Fall of Saigon, 30 Years Later," Producer Steve Elliot took his camera, and his life, in his hands to film a taxi ride through the streets of Hanoi.

Take a journey through Vietnam with a group of eight people who went there to produce these radio documentaries. We find the unpredictable, the complexity of the Vietnamese world. We delve into the world of Buddhism we find is the underpinning of the society, and we find a land caught between the hopes of its past and the dreams of its future.

The stories of poet George Evans, who served as an Air Force medic and who was the first soldier to defeat his court marshal, in a tale that could come straight out of the movie and TV series, MASH. And then we hear the story of Lynda Van Devanter, who was a surgical nurse in 1969 and 70, whose memoir and life story inspired the TV hit series, China Beach.

The story of the Gilchrist brothers, including Republican Congressman Wayne Gilchrist, who’s represented the 1st Congressional District in Maryland for eight terms and his brothers Jeffrey and Alan who served with him in Vietnam, and their brother Richard who served in the Navy, and Clifford, who remained home to teach.

A veteran from the Baltimore ghetto tells how he survived the despair of war and transformed himself.

Artists reveal how their work was born of war. Featured are authors Tim O’Brien ("The Things They Carried"), Bao Ninh (The Sorrow of War), and Wayne Karlin (Crossover, Lost Armies).

Two young soldiers meet on a jungle trail, one lives, one dies. Their fates are connected for 40 years. This is the story of Homer Steedly, and the journal of the young soldier he killed.