Rich Pitts 🇺🇦🐈‍⬛🏴‍☠️🔬

On December 12, 1952, a nuclear reactor in Canada went out of control. Someone had to go inside and take it apart. One of the young men who did it would later become President of the United States. The reactor was called NRX, at the Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario. It was one of the most important research reactors in the world at the time. That day, a series of mistakes caused its power to surge. Part of the core overheated and melted, and about a million gallons of radioactive water flooded the basement. It was one of the first serious nuclear accidents in history. The reactor had to be dismantled before it could be repaired. But the radiation inside was so strong that no one could stay near it for long. At the time, the United States Navy was working on the first nuclear-powered submarines, and its engineers had a strong interest in learning from the accident. A young Navy lieutenant who was working on the program was sent to Chalk River with a team of American sailors to help. He was 28 years old. His name was Jimmy Carter. The plan was carefully worked out. Each man could only be exposed to the radiation for about 90 seconds. So the team built a full-size copy of the damaged part of the reactor on a nearby tennis court. Over and over, they practiced every movement until they could do their part perfectly and fast. Then, one at a time, they went in. Carter later described being lowered into the damaged reactor in a protective suit, working as fast as he could on his task, and then being pulled out. In those 90 seconds, he said, he absorbed the maximum amount of radiation considered safe for a whole year. For months afterward, his urine was tested for radioactivity. Years later, he would joke that he and his men were "hot" for a while afterward. But at the time, nobody knew exactly what the long-term effects of that much radiation would be. The young sailors volunteered anyway. They knew the reactor had to be fixed, and they knew someone had to do it. The work took weeks. Team after team went in, each man doing one small job in his 90 seconds before the next man took his place. Slowly, piece by piece, the damaged parts were removed. The reactor at Chalk River was eventually rebuilt and ran for decades afterward. He later said the experience changed the way he thought about nuclear power and nuclear weapons for the rest of his life. He had seen with his own eyes what happens when something that powerful goes wrong. Carter rarely made a big deal of it. In his memoir, he described it in a few plain sentences, the way a man describes a job that simply had to get done. Many Americans who voted for him never knew it had happened. The following year, his father died, and Carter left the Navy to go home to Plains, Georgia, and run the family peanut farm. He went into local politics, then became governor of Georgia, and in 1977 he became the 39th President of the United States. After the White House, he spent decades building homes with Habitat for Humanity, monitoring elections, and fighting diseases in some of the poorest countries on earth. In 2002 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Jimmy Carter died on December 29, 2024. He was 100 years old, the longest-lived president in American history. Few people knew that before any of it, as a young officer, he had once been lowered into a broken nuclear reactor with 90 seconds to get the job done. Did you know this part of Jimmy Carter's life?

In 1936, a man named William Branch sat down to be interviewed. He was 86 years old, and what he remembered spanned nearly a century of American history that was about to disappear forever. He was born enslaved on May 13, 1850, on a Virginia plantation where 75 people lived in bondage, growing tobacco and cotton, sleeping on dirt floors in log houses. He made clothes for the enslaver's family. He ate hoecakes baked in hot ashes. This was simply his reality for eleven years. Then one day in 1861, Union soldiers arrived. A sergeant lifted young William onto his horse and rode with him all the way to Washington, D.C. Just like that, a child who'd been considered property was carried toward freedom. For nine years, he worked as a houseboy in the capital, learning what freedom meant. And then at age 20, William Branch made a choice: he enlisted in the United States Army. He became a Buffalo Soldier—one of the Black cavalrymen who earned that name from Plains Indians who saw their courage and spirit. These were segregated regiments, mostly formerly enslaved men, serving a country that had barely acknowledged their humanity. William marched across Texas carrying his gun and bedroll, sleeping under trees, eating hardtack and hunting deer when they could find them. He fought in the brutal frontier wars—conflicts where the U.S. government was systematically destroying Indigenous peoples' ways of life. This is where his story becomes uncomfortable and important: a man who'd escaped slavery was now serving the same government that had enslaved him, fighting against Indigenous peoples who were also being destroyed by that government. Some Buffalo Soldiers deserted to join Native tribes, recognizing the parallel struggles. Others served with pride, seeing military service as one of the few paths to dignity in a country that denied them almost everything else. There are no simple heroes in this story. Only human beings navigating impossible choices in impossible times. At the end of his interview, someone asked William if he liked being in the army. His answer was just eight words: "I'd rather be in the army than a plantation slave." Think about what that means. He'd seen terrible violence. He'd lost fellow soldiers. He'd slept on frozen ground and been shot at. All of that—every hardship, every danger, every moral compromise—was still better than slavery. That single sentence tells you everything about how brutal slavery truly was. After his service, William settled in San Antonio and worked until age made it impossible. By 1936, he was among the last living witnesses to both slavery and the frontier wars. The Federal Writers' Project interviewed over 2,300 formerly enslaved people between 1936 and 1938, racing against time to capture these voices before that generation vanished. Within a few years, they would all be gone. William Branch's words survived. His testimony survived. His truth—complicated, painful, and profound—survived. He described his life without sentimentality or glorification. He told the truth as he lived it: that he was born enslaved, carried to freedom on a soldier's horse, served in morally complex wars, and survived long enough to tell us what he saw. History is never simple. People who lived through it rarely were either. William Branch was neither just a victim nor just a hero—he was a human being who lived through extraordinary times and left us his voice. The least we can do is listen to what he told us, honor the complexity of his experience, and remember that the voices of ordinary people who lived through extraordinary times matter most of all. Because William Branch sat down in 1936 and gave us a gift: his story, in his own words, about survival and choice and what it cost to be free. And that gift is still here, waiting for us to receive it.