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This is a pivotal episode of Hope is Kindled, and one of the most poignant we’ve ever recorded.

Thanks to Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, Last Men Out takes us to back in time to bear witness of the final hours of the Vietnam War, at the moment when the helicopters lifted, the embassy gates closed, and history moved on without resolution. This is not a story about victory. It is a story about duty when victory is no longer possible, and about what remains when a nation withdraws.

Through historical, biographical, and psychological analysis, this episode examines the human cost of the withdrawal from Vietnam: the Marines who stayed to the very end, the allies left behind, the veterans who returned home to silence and misunderstanding, and a society struggling to process moral failure, loss, and abandonment.

We also explore what comes after disaster, looking at figures like Frederick Downs Jr. (The Killing Zone) as examples of long-term moral response: lives shaped not by closure, but by responsibility carried forward over decades.  Here, hope is not triumph. It is presence. It is integrity. It is the refusal to forget.

This episode speaks directly to our obligation to remember, to care for our veterans, and to confront the consequences of war honestly—without romanticism and without evasion.

Last Men Out reminds us that hope does not always arrive as rescue. Sometimes it arrives as restraint. Sometimes it arrives as witness. And sometimes, it arrives simply in the choice to stay human when everything else is falling apart.

This is an episode about endings, and about what they demand of us.

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