Episode 676: My Lai Massacre Part I - Ho Money Ho Problems

This is the last talk on the left.

That's one of the cannibalism started. Let's go. Alright, let us know when we're ready.

“Can you put some just gunfire up there for a while?”

Yeah, just a while. So I can feel comfortable. Yeah, do you have any burning children? Well, we can look away. If you have constant fire fights over and over again, that would be great.

In honor of our episode today, I didn't masturbate this morning. I looked at my hand and I said, "Nay, palm, and I didn't do it. I just didn't." and that is what you can come to expect that height of intelligence. You can come to expect that throughout the rest of this series. Oh, my God, how am I still in sagong?

That's so great as we're not on YouTube. I can just start the episode with a bunch of foxes and I didn't. Yeah, you're really kidding. It's fantastic. I saw a little paper sticking out of the elephant grass and I knew.

I was in for you. No.

“What was the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen?”

My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with Saigon Henry Zabrowski. Yeah, I'm going to try it. Guys are happy.

It's time, finally this is my brand new accent.

Let's just say the last two weeks have really been spent that every single time my eyeballs are closed. All I like just here, just don't lie, don't lie, I'm getting numb to it, it's kind of fun. It's what happens. It's just kind of fun to just be places like getting your prescription medication,

the whole time I'm staring at the woman I'm not hearing or she's going, I'm hearing it. The course we also have Hannah Oye, Ed Larsen, how you doing? Yeah, I am annoying. You would be the height of your heart.

How did you, you would see such a disgusting lady boy. Oh my god, you as the model, Harry, you as a fake Vietnamese. Hey there fellas, how you doing? A little boring. Come on in.

Sex with me. What are you saying? Young duck. That's correct. I could see you being like the most popular guy at the Hannah Oye Helping.

Oh my god, I would be a great man to do over there.

“Honestly, I just feel like if you have any local restaurants, you recommend or any”

place I could possibly go to. Oh my god, my preparation is just, but I've been slathering my insides with Bami sandwiches. Thank you. Because I'm trying to find the brighter side of this whole thing. And it's the Bami sandwich.

That's a really the only one. And room pair Los Angeles. Well, that's Thai food. It's just close. Challenge right there.

Yeah, wow. The reason why we're talking about all this. Today starts a four week long journey into the bowels of the Vietnam War with a focus on the Mi Lai massacre. Saigon, shit.

Long of a pin here. Barely, it's not like the movies. Yeah. No. When you talk about Saigon, it really helps when you take a sip at your ice coffee right

after. This is my war. This is my war. So in the morning of March 16, 1968, as the war in Vietnam continued to climb towards a bloody and savage apex, a force of about 100 American G.I. stormed a village in South

Vietnam, expecting to fight one of the most dangerous North Vietnamese battalions in existence. Instead, these army soldiers found Vietnamese civilians, women, children, and old men. Cooking breakfast and anticipation of the workday to come. It was simply another rural village trying to survive in the midst of a conflict that

had been dragging on one former another for almost 25 years, first with the French, and now

with the Americans. But unlike so many other villages that were burned down throughout the Vietnam War and countless search and destroy missions, history would remember this one more than any of the others, because this one would be the site of the Mi Lai massacre.

attacked these civilians with all the bloodthirsty brutality that should have been reserved

for their enemy.

“The dreaded North Vietnamese force known as the "Viet Cong."”

By the end of it, more than 500 Vietnamese civilians have been murdered by American soldiers in ways that can only be described as savage, and all of it have been done under orders from their captain, Ernest Mad Dog Medina. But Medina had told these soldiers to "kill everything that moved, everything that breathes" and his men followed those orders without question, although men might be an overstatement.

These were boys, teenagers, doing what their commanders told them to do. Now, this was not the only massacre of Vietnamese civilians to happen during the Vietnam War, far from it. Traditionally, it wasn't even the only massacre to happen in Vietnam that fucking morning. In the end, the Mi Lai massacre became emblematic of everything that was wrong with the Vietnam

War. You know, I see so many memes now that are like, "My boyfriend is obsessed with the Roman Empire." And he wrote like, "Even if there's people, right, we're, we're, we're two boys." Sure.

Yeah. We find it interesting.

It's an easy word to read about in many ways, because you've got clear delineated

sides. Good guys. Good guys. Awesome. Right.

The fucking good guys are fun. Right.

“There's a lot of stories of high adventure.”

There's intrigue. There's all these kind of things world building. And then the end. The good guys win and everybody goes home and everything's fine. When it turns out, that's not true.

And this war is actually what we should be reading about. Yes. Because we are currently still sitting in the film, the diaper, that this war fell. Like we're still sitting in that diaper. Yeah.

100%. Now, there is the world before 1975, before the fall of Saigon, and there's the world after it. And the world after the fall of Saigon is the world we are currently living in. And so Vietnam explains so much of it.

Yeah. Very seldomly since then, if we've been the good guys. Yeah. Yeah. We really haven't been.

It's, this is then Vietnam is when everything starts to crumble. Now, for me. So that's how we roll. Good guys is when we roll collectively, making fun of that ray gun woman. Yeah.

“That's what we'll finally hold on the right side.”

It has the right way in break dance. Break dance at women. We all attack that teacher. Yeah. That's what I actually felt.

I was like, oh, America's back. Yeah. That was, but that was, you know, that was worldwide unity. Yeah. We were even in Australia when that was happening.

And it was wonderful to be an American and make it fun of Australians in Australia. It felt like how it must have been to be in New York during the month. I knew York during the month. I'm donning next stuff like that. That's how it felt.

Being in Australia. When the ray gun stuff hit, I was like, oh my God, this is my mili massacre. This is something I can really get by. For many, the mili massacre marked a point in American history in which our military lost the moral high ground that we'd held ever since we'd played a major part in

securing victory over the Axis Powers in World War II. While people have been fine with us killing hundreds of thousands of Asians by dropping

bombs from planes, first of course in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo, and then later all

up and down Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, everyone felt a little rattled when a company of American soldiers conducted themselves on the ground as if they were a squad of Nazi Einsatzgruppen. One soldier who participated in mili even described the invent himself as a "nazi type thing."

Oh, I hate that's a horrific right wing cover of that stone temple pilot. [laughter] I want you to gas me like an animal. But the difference between the American soldiers in Vietnam and the Einsatzgruppen operating in the Eastern Front of World War II is that the Einsatzgruppen had specific targets.

Namely, they were after Jewish people, communist, and other political enemies of the third Reich. By contrast, American G.I.s in South Vietnam spent the morning of March 16th, 1968, based in the blood of whoever was unlucky enough to find themselves in the sights of American guns in artillery, just so long as they were Vietnamese.

Old men, women, children, and even babies were slaughtered on mass, and a massacre that lasted less than two hours. In fact, that became a protest sign after mili was exposed even babies. Because they asked one of the people who were there, like they asked like even babies. You killed?

He said even babies. Oh, they were going to say something about the time London because we're all looking for a massacre to be under two hours. Odyssey's like three and a half hours long. I don't know if I can fucking take it.

But hey, Matt, I mean, you bring up a good point. Think about that. It's all this happened in less time that the average feature film takes to watch. That's insane.

Others have been tortured and some had their deaths turned into competitions.

Like the Japanese had done during the rape of Nanking. Everyone cries and looks at those pictures of Japanese soldiers bayonetting babies. We did the same shit. Stunningly, it could have been even worse. Had it not been for the incredibly brave actions of other American soldiers.

These men finally stop the killing. Only by threatening to open fire on their fellow GI's. Because those dudes had every intention of finishing this massacre. Who once it was over, the entire event was not just covered up by the army. Instead, the civilians were declared to be Viet Kong, the enemy.

And the massacre was reframed as a great victory for American forces in the press. We're news stories about it.

“Milai therefore remained a secret for another two years.”

And had other soldiers who heard about the massacre, not insisted the truth be brought to light.

We would have never known about the Milai massacre.

Not only that. We don't know how many Milai's there actually were. The way it sounds like because of the way the war resulted in how our every shifting goal posts for what constituted victory sound familiar, continued to move forward and it became into the higher body count that you got.

It sounds like, yeah, that this then turned into a gigantic murder machine. It did. And then we're definitely certainly in the next episode of the episode out to that. We're going to get heavily into body count, kill ratio, and what happens when you put a business man in charge of war. Yeah.

So what is it? Because it was like 2 million. Right in the end, something that we killed. How many million? The enemy is four.

It's more like four. Yeah.

Which is bigger than any number to anything we are currently protesting.

Oh, yeah. Now, the biggest question here is how. How did the war in Vietnam create the conditions for over 100 American GIs to commit war crimes on a scale where a Nazi comparison is not only approachable, but valid. How did the goals of the war become so lost that officers up and down the chain of command were not only approving of massacres like Milai, but were in some cases actively participating.

How did it get this fucking bad?

“Now, in my opinion, the only way to answer these questions is to tell the story of the Vietnam war up until Milai.”

Because for me, knowing the path towards Milai is the only way that the massacre makes even a modicum of sense. At least getting to the point where you can possibly explain it. So over the next four weeks, we're going to cover as much of the history of the Vietnam war as we can leading up to Milai. From the French occupation to the Tete offensive and beyond. Every drop of history in Vietnam paired with American Cold War policies contributed to the Milai massacre.

And we can't understand Milai without that history anymore that we could understand the Einsatzgruppen without learning the history of the Nazi party. Cold War just kind of sounds like we were so like happy with doing war during World War II. And everybody got so good at war and we're so happy with their lives at war and they didn't have to see their families and stuff. And we're like, what do we just keep this going? Yeah.

It almost seems like we thought we had to be at war to be a country. Well, we'll get it as long. We get so many different grand sweep and stuff about this, which is hard to parse through. But it's kind of, you know, well, what happens when you start a war machine? Yeah.

Do you shut the war machine off?

“Well, then down if you want to keep making money.”

Exactly. Now, you might already be bristling at the comparison between Nazi and American soldiers. So I want to make it clear that we aren't going to make the same mistakes. The anti-Vietnam war protesters made in the 60s and 70s when they all called Vietnam vets. Baby killers and murderers upon their return to America.

Literally, I think. Like, that's got to get extremely reductive that makes no sense. The boys were also a lot of the soldiers were in a way victims too. They got pulled into the system. But we're like, you know, we'll go into deeper.

Yeah, I mean, the role of the soldier in Vietnam, the role of the American soldier in Vietnam, is like everything else about this war. It's fucking complicated. While there was plenty of bravery and honor displayed by the soldiers on the ground throughout America's occupation of Southeast Asia because that's the only way to describe it.

It was an occupation. It is important to note that the bravery those soldiers showed was largely a show of loyalty to each other. And they talked about this amongst each other. That is one of those interesting things.

The more Vietnam vets stuff I listen, they talked about how like every ten-foot sphere had a different experience for Vietnam. Yeah. And that we were left on our own out there. And so they had to just depend on each other, which was both like a way to keep them

loyal against each other, but also created fear of the outsider. Yeah. And that's kind of a fear. Because they were put out there alone to attract enemy fire.

Now, a lot of these guys that were uneducated and they not only had never left the country,

but some of them probably never even left like the county. Yeah. That's a hundred percent true.

“Like I think about when it comes to like the fear I think about was that Tim O'Brien,”

some that he said about it, he said that walking in Vietnam was an act of extreme courage. Yeah. Just putting one foot in front of him, he's he would look down and he would think, "How am I doing this? How am I walking right now?"

By 1968, when the Meal Eye Massacre occurred, a lot of the GI's and grunts on the ground, they didn't give a fuck about the ideological goals behind the war itself. They just wanted to get themselves in their friends back to America in one piece if possible. These were guys who were only there because they'd been drafted into service and they didn't have any choice but to be there.

And yeah, you might say they could have run off to Canada, but not every draftee was a middle class white kid who could just run off to a commune in Vancouver. That shit took money, resources, and social networks that most draftees didn't have. So most guys had no choice but to put their heads down

and hope that they weren't one of the soldiers who were regularly sent out into mine-infested rice patties on search and destroy missions.

Yeah, and the first class of draftees looked at us like, "Oh, I can get college paid for."

You know, it was a good way to like, they was almost like, "Good until everyone started dying." And then you get fucking terrified.

“And the majority of Apple keys would end up not even fighting.”

Like, you know, the majority of people that would volunteer or even get drafted, they would end up working behind the line in various logistical places because it was like eight soldiers behind the line for every one soldier fighting. But then they started really ratcheting up

how we can build more people that will come and die for us. I would have loved a bit of a cook. I don't think you would have. I mean, well, if I had to pick a job. Yeah, sure.

That would have been on the radio. Two of his games were like a 10 years ago. But fighting right alongside the dudes who had no choice were soldiers who truly believed that they were doing the right thing by fighting in Vietnam. For them, the defeat of the North Vietnamese was a victory for freedom and democracy.

The actions of these gung-ho soldiers were guided by the now infamous domino theory, which had been a part of America's post-World War II foreign policy since the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. Richard Nixon, when he was Eisenhower's vice president, went on TV and explained the domino theory to the American people

as with most post-World War II foreign policies. Think about though how fucking now we're looking at that. That's like a breath of fresh air. Yeah. He's like, "I'm trying to win people over trying to say, hey, look, look at that."

Like, you know, I'm not pro Nixon.

But it's kind of amazing to be like, wow, there's to be like a government

that would talk and know things. You would be able to explain things to the American people and actually wanted to have some sort of fucking accountability with the American people that cared about what the fuck we thought. Well, as with most post-World War II foreign policies,

the domino theory was based solely on anti-communist-called "war paranoia." From the domino theory positive that if even a seemingly inconsequential country, like Vietnam, would have fallen to the forces of international communism, forces whose sole purpose, as far as we were concerned, was to wipe out the American way of life

than other countries would quickly fall behind it, like a rogue domino's. As far as how Vietnam came to be seen as the first domino, the Vietnamese were embroiled in a civil war that had split the country in two following their defeat

of French colonial forces in the 1950s. Once the French were defeated in 1954, Vietnam was divided in half, like North Korea and South Korea, are still split today. North Vietnam was designated as the Communist half,

and were there for our enemies. While South Vietnam was supposedly a republic. Now, South Vietnam ended up being more of a corrupt dictatorship,

“but for America, the only thing that mattered about South Vietnam”

was that it wasn't communist. That sounds familiar. So North Vietnam, domino, and then South Vietnam will seasers. See this is great. This is a great series.

It's good for him. He spent most of his high school career drunk and dumb. He would re-get for him. I will say I did spend a lot of my high school drunk and dumb, but I was watching movies about Vietnam.

I can't. I can't. I can't. You're not in the same way. There's so many, but Vietnam movies,

and both you and I were so excited. Oh, yeah, we get to watch all the Vietnam movies, and then you're like, oh, they were all wrong. Yeah. They're all wrong, and wow, it was way worse.

It's interesting. We're watching a lot of them now. I've been seeing a lot of them in like 20 years, and we're watching them now. You're like, oh, wait a second.

We're not heroes. No. No. And they were just actors.

Of them being like, it was so hot when we filmed the apocalypse now. I was so uncomfortable. Can you believe it? How hard this was for me? I will defend them.

“After watching hearts of darkness, I will defend them.”

Like, because apocalypse now was one of the few movies that kind of nailed it. It did.

Well, they also were one of the first two.

Yeah, the gate. That's the whole, yeah. Yeah, 78. No, it's that that great scene where they're at the bridge, and, you know, he asks who's your commanding officer,

and he says, ain't you? I was thinking about that today, man. Yeah, brunch. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, the idea in the domino theory, is that it's a soft Vietnam felt in the whole of Southeast Asia. That's countries like Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Indonesia. They would all become a red communist block

controlled by the Soviet Union, and/or the people's Republic of China. After Southeast Asia fell, the Philippines were sure to fall too, followed by Japan, and eventually Australia.

If all that went red, then the Cold War against international communism would become unwinnable. Why? We're going to school this time.

Put together. We can be the China out of all those guys. Put together if we wanted to. But we didn't. We tried, and we didn't.

I'm just saying if there was an actual like war, like a big ol' alright democracy and communism are showing up today at the war. But we did. It's called Vietnam.

We lost. It was our guns versus their guns. And their guns won. We just should've just blew up the island. Come on, guys.

Well, that is, that is what some soldiers ended up saying.

“The only way to win this war is if we took ever,”

and it is incredibly racist, but they would say, you'd have to take all the South Vietnamese, put them on a boat, nuk the entire country, kill every Vietnamese person left,

and then sink the boat. Yeah. It knows the old that would be the only way to win. And the North Vietnam kind of, said the same thing.

Yeah. Well, North Vietnam said you'll have to kill every single one of us. And that's the only way you're going to win. Well, the people who subscribed to the domino theory came to believe that we had no choice,

but the fight against the communist and Vietnam civil war. That is, unless you fucking wanted the communist to sap and impureify all of our precious bodily fluids. And thus you have the reasoning for our involvement in Vietnam. I just don't.

You know, that's my belief. Is that like, if we had just let it all play out, and then watch it all fail, like then we would have not had to fight all these crazy wars. Well, it's not even that it failed.

It's just let it play out like it's like another country. Like it doesn't involve us. Because the thing is that they won and then it played out. And now Vietnam is a tourist destination. Yeah.

It's a incredible place now.

“You can go and like crawl in the fucking tunnels”

and take a picture with it. It's really fun. The booby trap. Like I love the booby trap of scape rooms. Some of my parents died.

And I love going in there. I mean, is that my uncle Kevin? Is he still here? I can't wait to go to Vietnam. In our vacation list for a decade.

Oh, my God. I'm very excited. Ever since that Anthony Bourdain, no reservations. I have been wanting to go.

It looks so delicious and cheap. It does. Nope. When you listen to interviews with Vietnam vets, who went to the war,

believing that their cause was just the most heartbreaking thing, is that many of them truly believed that they were fulfilling their duty to the cause of freedom, just as their father said done in World War II. These men were raised in an America

that we today can't fucking imagine. It's an America where most of the white population couldn't even entertain the thought that their own government might lie to them for any reason. Of course, the black guys and the Latinos and the agents,

they had a much different view. Yeah. But if you were white, let's rose to you. Yeah. But if you're white,

no, if the president says it's necessary, it's necessary. And that's all people needed to know. But as we'll learn over the course of the next month, President, after president,

did indeed lie to the American people. And the Vietnam War was anything but necessary. Instead, to use a term I learned as a young boy from the Vietnam Classic Full Metal Jacket, the war in Vietnam skull fucked America as a country.

And it remains to be seen over 50 years after Vietnam's end, if we will ever fully recover. What are you talking about? We hanged Saddam Hussein. That's easy.

Yeah. And then, as I've been locked, we know where his corpse is. We got him. And then, um, then, we did the thing was slow,

but don, malosevic. So we got some w's in there? Yeah. Yeah. We kidnapped President of another nation,

South America. And this way, yeah. Don, don't get he's playing. All right. With the Iran, the boys are going to be home by Christmas.

Oh. Wow. Great. Fly from your grave.

Now, an estimated 4 million Vietnamese were killed.

As a result of America's cold war paranoia. And while plenty of soldiers, both North and South Vietnamese were killed, the majority of Vietnamese dead were civilians. Most of those were killed by American bombs.

Cambodia and Laos.

“There were certain, like, there were certain weeks.”

We would drop more bombs on certain parts of the jungle than we dropped in the entirety of World War II. And then, just strafing it all night with artillery shells and gunfire all night. Yeah.

And that's not even a count in a palm and an agent orange. I don't think there's no way to actually know how many people we killed.

They say it's between 3.2 and 4 million.

4 million is the highest estimate. Yeah. Which is, you know, which is crazy. 1,800,000 is the fucking in the middle. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh. Oh. But while most were killed by bombs, many were killed. Point blank by American soldiers.

Look at them in the eye and pull in the trigger. Now, the melee mouthed mission, some former officials in the armed forces had given, is that the killing of Vietnamese civilians was not policy, but neither was it an aberration. That's a fucking cowardly way of saying it was common.

And since it happens so often, the armed forces had to cover it up again. And again, and there's evidence for all of this.

“It definitely is a perverse care for the soldiers in a way,”

because they hung them out to dry. So they put the soldiers out to dry to go do all of the dirty work for them. So in a way, what they thought, in my mind, this is the validation of the cover up, is this protection of the dudes. But they don't understand that what they did was damn their very soldiers.

Right. And it goes past like whether or not they go to jail or not. You know what I mean? It's like you damn the soul of a million people.

And they were never correct.

And they had it come back and live in the United States of America. And then bring that vibe. Oh, and not only did they live in the United States of America, but they had to deal with nobody in America wanting to even talk about it. Or do you know how many times we got over it?

Do you know how many times mental health care for Vietnam, Vets was struck down in Congress, dozens. Like going throughout the 70s and 80s and 90s, dozens of times. They say like, no, we don't need to deal with that. All while these fucking vets are on the street,

like trying to deal with the shit that they did, that their government told them to do. Yeah. Lieutenant Dan was supposed to die out there. Lieutenant Dan was supposed to die in the baddies.

Just like his father and his father before him. I'm also supposed to die in the paddies from a heart attack from too many hamburgers. Yeah. He's dying of the baddies. Well, the journalists who exposed me lies seem more harsh.

Looked at dozens of cases where soldiers were charged with murder during active duty in Vietnam.

And he found that in every case, the charges were either dropped or reduced to manslaughter. And even the manslaughter cases were eventually exonerated. And do you want to talk about like,

“if you want to remove the soul of your soldiers,”

remove accountability from the battlefield. And that's what we did. Because that's what the Nazis did. Yeah. As such, Hirsch wrote that the real conspiracy,

was it as far as the US Army was concerned, there was no such thing as the murder of a Vietnamese civilian. And this was very much by design. As we'll show over the course of this series, the way the war was fought and the policies

enacted by the people in charge. They may not have explicitly encouraged the killing of civilians, but it certainly incentivized it. In fact, the man who became the scapegoat for me lie, Lieutenant William Callie argued in his trial

that on the day of the massacre, he was simply doing what he'd been trained to do since boot camp. He sucks, but I can't disagree with him. No, he does suck, though. He does suck.

Because I'm reading me lie for right now. And let's just say he was the scapegoat, but he also was very guilty. Yeah, so we'll go. Yeah.

Yeah, incredibly guilty. Incredibly guilty. But that's the thing. When I killed many people that his own hands and he was an extremely thuse enthusiast about it,

and had to be stopped. When I say scapegoat, I mean that he was the one that he was the bell. He was the one that got the bell. Yeah, there were many men who should have got the bell.

They all should have went to jail for life. Yeah, Ernest Medina, fuck me, could should have gone to jail forever. But it's season, interesting policy, which is if you don't call it a crime,

then it's not one. So then no crimes happen because you just don't call it these crime. You don't give it this severity because then you're not guilty of it.

It's like not testing for COVID. It's like, it's the same thing. It's just what if we just don't charge up. Well, it's all very Nicksonian. You know, it's the idea of, you know,

if the president doesn't, it can't be illegal. Yeah. It's the idea that if America does it, it can't be wrong. In the name of democracy,

how dare you think that we made him a state? Exactly. Now, if America had taken off their cold war glasses and looked at what was happening in Vietnam objectively, we would have known that Vietnam's civil war

was not a fight over whether or not communism was the right system of governance from the Vietnamese people. That was certainly a part of it. But this was more about the end of European colonialism

the world over to choose their own destiny. We were the invaders here. And as we'll soon see, Vietnam had a long and successful history of turning invaders into corpses.

Now, that's not to say that the North Vietnamese were the good guys here. We're not going full Hanoy Jane on this series. North and South Vietnamese soldiers also committed plenty of war crimes all on their own.

We're definitely going to be covering the massacre at way. But in the end, distinctions of good or bad, they don't really apply.

Ultimately, this was not America's fight,

but Nor was it the Soviet's fight. Nor was it China's. Vietnam should have only mattered to the Vietnamese, but because the United States, the Soviet Union

and the People's Republic of China, made it a part of our Cold War, the conflict in Vietnam was far deadlier, far longer, and far more brutal than it ever would have been without us.

I could stoop in for going over there. We couldn't even flip Cuba. Seriously. We don't want to go to Cuba because barely has running water. It's like no electricity.

And even there like we like communism. We're not in there. They're just culturally not into it. They're not into it. And even this, as we'll get into,

the communist part of it was never even really

the very main thrust of the OG, like build there, the whole point was to just like, we just want to be Vietnam. What we missed the force for the trees completely.

Like we saw communism as the point, but for the Vietnamese communism was like a means to an end.

“The only thing they cared about was an independent Vietnam.”

Communism and democracy and all these political philosophies when it comes down to it are just a way for statehoods to clay claim on other fucking people. Like it just gets to a point where like I just don't understand it whenever.

We shouldn't discuss it. No, that's not what I'm saying. I just want you to think of like all of these little people. Well, these smaller countries are just pieces on chessboard for all these people that have bigger plans for them.

Yeah, the Vietnam war is spoiler alert. Incredibly fucking complicated. No. But what about what we've said so far as complicated? But that's why there were so many misunderstandings

and bad decisions made by no less than four consecutive presidents concerning Vietnam. Everyone likes to pretend like Vietnam started with Johnson and ended with Nixon. No, it started with fucking Truman.

But that's also why our extremely long source list is going to wait until the end. But to be fair to those policymakers.

“And I think this is very important to remember when it comes to Vietnam.”

No one could have predicted how complicated the world was going to become in the 20th century. It was the first time in human history that the whole world became interconnected and we didn't know how to handle it. One could argue we still don't know how to handle it.

But the point is the Vietnam war was the culmination of those 20th century complications. It's damn near as complicated as World War I. Because almost everything leads to Vietnam in one way or another including World War I.

So we have to be very judicious about what we include here. Unless we give a complete history of Europe, Asia and America throughout the 19th and 20th century. No, Mark. No, we've got to be an enemy.

Just so many contexts. We're even explaining how light it is made. Context is Henry's Vietnam. We have to sometimes you're got a judgecat. So you go read a textbook.

Then go back. I will say Vietnam is the ultimate context black hole. Oh, no. This is every direction. It's just you keep going.

But to the point of information,

“it's also important to remember that our common knowledge”

about the Vietnam war, just what we take for granted, it actually gives us more information about the inner workings of the conflict than 99% of the people who are actually involved in it at the time. Which gives us a lot of hindsight.

I mean, it's incredible to think that up until 1967,

68, like we didn't even know that Ho Chi Minh wasn't really the guy in charge. It's fucking insane. We didn't know what the country was before we went there. You're most of us. Yeah, most of us.

Well, for so many people involved on every side of the conflict, Vietnam was the definition of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. So to try to make all of this is easy to understand as possible for everyone, we're going to take this in sections, explaining each part of this world individually.

Therefore, the natural place to start is the Vietnamese people themselves. Because had we bothered to learn their history back then, we would have known that the last thing anybody in the world

Yeah, man. They are good at fighting in their backyards. Yes. They don't give a fuck, man. They don't give a fuck.

Yeah. One thing I learned, though, is no matter what color or skin is, we all pink. Yeah. Yeah, you're right.

You all pink, man. What's we explode? Yep. Then we're pure fuchsious. That's a fuchsious on there.

And pretty much the only country to get a real handle on Vietnam for any significant length of time was China. And they did it a very long time ago. They conquered the area known as Vietnam in 1/11 BC.

“I think it's the farthest back we've ever got.”

That's what it was, man. He's like, "I'm sorry, guys. We hope it's done." Jesus. We hope it's done.

We hope it's done. We hope it's done. We hope it's done. We hope it's done. Oh, wow.

Yeah. And then he's held onto, and all this trust me. I'll get there. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's not for him.

Yeah. The Chinese held onto it for about a thousand years, but the Chinese still had to deal with constant bloody revolts led by a cast of increasingly unorthodox leaders. Unorthodox would of course become Vietnam's style and warfare

from this point forward. In the year fucking 40, 40 ADs. He's fucking right. He did war like Madonna does clothes. No way.

Oh, they just always trying to figure out how she does it.

[laughs] Near 40. Two sisters. Name Chiung Chao. You were fucking 40.

Yeah, this is great. Two sisters. Name Chiung Chao and Chiung Mi led a rebellion that established an independent Viet Kingdom. Chiung Chao's husband was a Vietnamese lord who been assassinated by a Chinese general.

So in response, these two sisters led forces that captured 65 Chinese fortresses in North Vietnam. The Chiung sisters ruled for three years before a Chinese general re-took their lands, but after the Chiungs were unable to accept defeat, they drowned themselves, rather than surrender. Or, so the story goes. Difficult?

[laughs] No, besides being an example of Vietnamese tenacity, the Chiung sisters played an important role in integrating Vietnamese forces when it came to gender.

“And that's why I'm mentioning this because this tells you how long this has been going on.”

The Chiung sisters became long-standing martyrs for Vietnamese independence. Later becoming popular communist propaganda figures in what the Vietnamese would call the American War. Just as we call it, the Vietnam War. But because of traditions started by the Chiung sisters, the Vietnam War was one of the few modern wars, in which women played a sustained, organized, and militarily significant role from beginning to end,

which would cause a lot of confusion for American forces. And you're talking from little kids to old ladies. Yeah. And like the few soldiers, not the few, but like the soldiers with morality, didn't want to kill women.

Yeah. No problem killing them. No problem.

But it's estimated that 1.5 million women served in major combat roles for North Vietnam

at every level of the Vietnam War. [laughs] They served as guerrilla fighters, commanders, engineers, and artillery gunners. One female Vietnam soldier who led an all-women squad called the Longhair Army, she became a general and eventually vice-president of Vietnam.

Do you think the Chiung sisters could be played by Emma Watson in a dual role? Or she plays both sisters? [laughs]

“In other words, the Vietnamese had a reputation for using any and every resource at their disposal”

in service of expelling any invader who might decide that Vietnam was theirs to do as they pleased. And they'd been doing it for almost 2,000 years. By the time the first American even heard the fucking word Vietnam. After a thousand years of Chinese rule, the Vietnamese finally took... That was just a temporary spot for China.

Yeah. And they were there for like a thousand years. Yeah. They really have been. They really have been.

After a thousand years. We're open for purchase, China. [laughs] They know. They listen.

Yeah, they know. They oh yeah.

After a thousand years of Chinese rule, the Vietnamese finally took advantage of a week in corrupt Chinese dynasty.

And in 939 AD, the Vietnamese army destroyed a massive Chinese army using one of their favorite tactics. Ambush. Not led to the creation of their own nation. Dovia. Dovia expanded.

And after their first civil war between the north and south, they arranged from the 17th until the 19th century, the Vietnamese people had fully established the long, then, as shaped country.

Marked by 800 miles of coast from the Chinese border to the Gulf of Thailand,

the Vietnamese now had a country that's roughly twice the size of Florida. Most of the American fighting, however, would occur in the bottom half of the country. South Vietnam. So remember that from here on out. All of the shit that's going to happen within the borders of South Vietnam.

It's happening in an area that is no larger than the state in which ad in Henry here were raised. They also got the same animals. Yeah. And the same snakes, an alligator, lots of swamps, big bugs, and stuff. Well, they got nothing more chemins than gators.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They got those Jamaican crabs.

Oh, that's true. Do you think there should be a Disney there? That's what they should have done. Well, Disney should have got a hold of them. You try it.

It took us a really long time to figure out that America's greatest imperial power was our culture. Yeah. To the really fucking long.

“It took way too long for us to remember that.”

Stefflin was born way to win and save them. Yeah. It's true. Cultural victory is the best way to win them. Yeah.

You know, you can get there. Speaking of which, another brighter side of the whole war. Go to the public playlist on Spotify. Funky. Vietnam.

We're getting used to this fucking awesome. All the music that we brought over to kill them to. They late. Yeah. Oh, right.

Into their sound. It's fucking great. Yeah, because they listen to it because we took over the radio. Yep. South Vietnam.

Now, Vietnam didn't enjoy long period of peace following the end of their long and bloody civil war. In the mid-19th century, Europe's industrial revolution inspired a new wave of colonization. And into China, which included Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam itself came into the sights of the French. This is the second way.

“Like the first wave of colonization, if you want to know about that, listen to our series on Polish shit.”

I forgot it's fucking name. The boat, the big boat. The Dutch East Indies. Oh, the Batavia. The Batavia.

Yeah. The Batavia. Well, everything is connecting. Yeah. Every single series is connects.

It really is. By the time we're done with this thing, yeah. We're going to have like a history of humanity going. Wow. Yeah.

Well, the French imperial forces claimed that they were on a so-called civilizing mission to bring material advancement to the Indochinese people. They're, of course, they're doing them a favor. Of course. But they were really after Vietnamese rice.

And more importantly, for the Industrial Revolution, Vietnamese rubber. Because it is the way to have a sex. Well, that's the building of Batavia inside of the hill. The French, however, were one of the most powerful militaries in the world. In the 1850s.

So, because France's military technology was vastly superior, the Vietnamese courts accepted French rule in exchange for a shared power structure. A small number of Vietnamese elites with therefore greatly benefit from serving French colonial authorities, but French rule profoundly changed life in Vietnam for everyone else for the worse.

And the Vietnamese never forgot what happened when they handed control to outsiders.

And also how it felt to be sort of turned out from the inside. Yeah. No. Because that is, in this relationship between the French and the Vietnamese elites, like this, it creates a sort of rift that lasts all the way up until the Americans, the creation

of South Vietnam, is this, like, collaborator thing. Yeah, of course. Because it's the idea of they are, because it's, which wield our version of it, will also not work. Yeah. France quickly remade Vietnam in its own image.

It's why Bond Me sandwiches are on baguettes. But this created a wealthy, obviously, if all the violence, all the degradation. I don't know. If there was one thing, they made it all worth it. It's a Bond Me.

“If that's how all the shakes out because of the paté.”

And the roast pork and then a beautiful piece of fuck. And when you get a really good baguette and the fresh cilantro and the pickle, that's something to do with the flavor things of the face of the planet. Carrots on a sandwich, you want to thought? I didn't know.

I will admit my favorite sandwich in Manhattan is a Bond Me down in Soho. Yeah. It works.

Come on, he always works.

Yeah. But this also created a wealthy Vietnamese middle class who are loyal to the French, instead of their own people. These westernized Vietnamese began living an opulent European lifestyle by exploding the vast majority of their countrymen. See, 90% of Vietnam were peasants who saw no benefits whatsoever from French colonial rule. Instead, the life of the peasant got far worse after many were converted from landowners or farmers into basically slaves for the French.

The working conditions of the French rubber plantations were so horrendous that managers began recruiting workers from outside Vietnam, because outsiders were less likely to know about the cruelty, disease, and malnutrition that awaited them on the plantation. One and four rubber plantation workers died on the job.

Anyone.

Well, so like the glue factor.

Yeah. Because they only didn't stick to rubber. They stick to glue. They don't stop me and stick to glue. Yeah.

Yeah.

“You think they would have been able to bounce out of it?”

Yeah. Marcus, why are you wrong? Why are you wrong? What? Anyone ran away from service was executed by the French through torture, hanging or stabbing.

And the treatment only got worse with each decade of French rule. Kind and so hard to get hung over there, because you just bounce. You know what I mean? The rubber tree. The rubber tree.

Yeah. Going, going, going, going. But you know, the brighter side is, it's where we got the bungee cord. This really is turned out to be a sunshiney episode. It's really, really nice.

Now, as a result of French rule, there was a gap forming between the Vietnamese people once again. Those loyal to the French were making out like bandits. But the majority of the country was wondering what the fuck ever happened to an independent Vietnam, which brings us in the timeline to World War I. We're actually in the 20th century.

We're good on to you. We're moving. Yeah. But it just keeps getting thicker and thicker from here. It does.

But we did start before Jesus Christ. But since the French were pretty busy during World War I, some Vietnamese began advocating for violent revolution against the French. And you're busy doing something else. Everybody shows up.

But the movement was mostly centered around the intellectuals in the cities.

The revolutionary to completely ignored Vietnam's massive rural population.

So the revolution went nowhere. But the Vietnamese would not make that mistake twice.

“On the next go round, they would be taking inspiration from the man who realized that the peasants were the key to everything.”

This man would eventually lead North Vietnam. How he would found North Vietnam. In his name, Ho Chi Minh would be cursed by millions of Americans throughout the 1960s, the 1970s and beyond. He had that good old-fashioned comic book guy beard man. They loved him.

He definitely got that. He's got them long ass fucking pussy ass whiskers man. He looks good. Yeah, he does. As far as horrible dictators go, he's a little man, he's horrible.

He's in there. I mean, I mean, one could make the argument that he wasn't a horrible dictator. I mean, it's Moib, there's the thing is that he's one of the most misunderstood figures of the 20th century. See, because of American propaganda, we grew up thinking that Ho Chi Minh was an evil bloodthirsty communist warlord who's only desires were the slaughtering of Americans in the torture of POWs. But while Uncle Ho is his people called him, did indeed oversee atrocities and the mistreatment of prisoners of war, nobody say in the Hanoi Hilton was a good fucking time.

He was also an incredibly complicated character who's only true goal was an independent Vietnam. The Ho Chi Minh had a deep understanding of both his own country's history and of his own people. Ho, therefore, had a deep understanding of what the Vietnamese were truly capable of. He knew how to appeal to urban radicals while also mobilizing the peasantry for warfare with the ultimate goal of ridding Vietnam of the French. I'm put this out there for my zoomers. He's the Taylor Swift of South Asian Communism.

He was a broad stretch of appeal, used crawshonra, and he would definitely he loved pageantry. Yeah, and his wife was a tyrant.

Actually, Ho Chi Minh never took a wife. He never had a family.

That was one of the reasons why they called him Uncle Ho's because he in Vietnam having a family is a big deal and choosing to not have a family is considered a massive sacrifice. So people would love him for that. They would say like, oh, a whole team of Uncle Ho has sacrificed his family for the good of Vietnam. He will sacrifice everything, therefore, I will sacrifice everything for Ho Chi Minh. Oh my god, you made me just reopen that moon.

I'm just me over that moon, I can't even think about how he must have been Ho Chi Minh. Because what do you think, Ho Chi Minh then? I mean, do you think he would just shoot blanks? No, I actually truly want, maybe Ho Chi Minh was gay. I mean, there are many confirmed bachelors, quote unquote, throughout history.

Alexander the Great. Yeah. And it is buzzer over. Ha ha ha. How was being gay?

Is being gay okay over there? I don't even know.

“I couldn't honestly, I could not tell you one way or another.”

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I'd love to know.

Now, Ho Chi Minh was exiled from Vietnam, like a lot of other nationalist troublemakers during the early 20th century.

But since the Western powers were uninterested in helping out Vietnam, Ho instead looked towards Russia. See, only a few years earlier. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had overthrown a cruel and indifferent ruling class in a bloodbath that had ended only when the entire Russian Imperial family were turned into corpses in a dank basement. Yeah.

Yeah, little Anastasia down there with a hole in her head. Get her again. She didn't live. She didn't feel anything though. No.

It's all the devastation. I didn't say. That was good. That I liked. Well, the Bolshevik's had done to the Russian royal family.

That wasn't too far off from what the Vietnamese wanted to do to the French. So Ho Chi Minh became a dedicated communist. And from that point forward, the Vietnamese independence movement became inextricably linked to communism as well.

“And that's incredibly important to understand.”

So it is communism is a means to an end, but the end is independence. Because he also trained in America. Well, he traveled through America. Yeah. He lived in Boston, New York for a time.

He was a pastry chef in London for a bed. He traveled all over the world. He ended up back in France. In like 1919, he started calling himself when the Patriot. But yeah, he had traveled all over the world.

He didn't work that back to Vietnam. Reminds me of. - There's a summer, a lot. - Oh, mm. - I work similar. - No, and in terms of the, well, obviously you can't really compare the two,

'cause one's a terrorist and one's like a revolutionary leader,

and I know what you have, like, I feel like there's a lot of people that's side-saurus LPOTL, a GML.com, please. - I would say you can't make, the only comparison you could make is that they did both travel a lot. - And they trained him to end the U.S. trained him as well. - Oh, do you mind?

- Yeah. - Kind of sorta. - Like, it did it all. - We'll get to that later. - America's a lot of stuff, man. - Yeah, 'cause I'm kind of extending, like, I'm not getting into America just yet, with Ho Chi Minh,

because there is a lot of stuff with America and Ho Chi Minh, but I wouldn't say we lacked a Boston lady, though. - Let's see if we have a big old fucking broad out there. Go like, "Oh, Chi, what you're doing!" - Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Just like, laugh at Adam, you know, just go to a Bruins game, and get some sense there, Oh, Chi. - Yeah, man. - Well, host soon attracted the attention of the Soviets, who invited him to Moscow in 1923,

and even though Ho disliked how the Soviets treated peasants as disposable, he still stayed in Moscow long enough to work out how communist ideas could be applied to his home country of Vietnam,

“because the only thing that mattered to Ho Chi Minh was Vietnam.”

Now, as I mentioned earlier, fucking everything leads to Vietnam in one way or another. And the next phase of Vietnam's story involves the fucking great theme of Vietnam's history, and the Vietnam's story involves the fucking great depression,

which plunged the world into economic chaos after the stock market crash in 1929. So the great depression was indeed a global crisis. Remember we talked about how badly it affected Germany in the lead up to World War II,

and it affected Vietnam just as much as everyone else. Starvation due to the economic turmoil led to Vietnamese writing in 1930, and while the Vietnamese revolution led by Vietnamese communists seemed to be on the brink of success,

the French quickly put the rebellion to bed. Thousands of Vietnamese rebels were killed in the process. While tens of thousands of Vietnamese peasants were also murdered by the French as dozens of battles between colonial and communist forces raged on.

This was, in essence, the opening act of a conflict between the Vietnamese and a revolving cast of outsiders throughout the 20th century that would last for over four decades. And it had been sparked by things that had happened

all the way over in America.

But while the first 20 years of this conflict

would be taken on by the French, the last 20 would be America's fight to win or lose. Spoiler alert, we fucking lost. Fuck, market it. I wouldn't listen to the rest of the series.

I wouldn't even know what happened. Yeah, it's true. Because the journey is knowing how we lost and why we lost and what we lost. And we're actually not going to get to us officially losing.

No, we're going to get there. Yeah, we're actually going to end like five years before we lose. Yeah, that's great. Then we're still winners.

Yeah. [LAUGHTER] It's longer than our series ends directly after the Meal Eye Massacre and everything's fine. Because it didn't come a crime until like 10 years later.

Now, one of them in fighting during the first real conflict

between the French and the Vietnamese was a man from the old Vietnamese imperial capital of way. His name was Vone Winsup.

“Zop was another important figure in Vietnamese history.”

Because while he was from the South, his tactical brilliance on behalf of North Vietnam

to the point of pure insanity.

Like Uncle Ho, Vone Winsup knew the history of Vietnam and therefore knew that his people had a knack for resisting occupation by foreign powers. In fact, before becoming one of the architects of Vietnam's war for independence, Zop was a history teacher.

This, in case you haven't noticed, is a lesson. But guys who knew their history, they were the victors in Vietnam. So guys who didn't were the ones who lost. Oh, yeah. And the French, it's kind of interesting.

Because each time you go back and you listen to them complaining about their situation of Vietnam, they all have the same exact complaints. The French, oh, God. Nope.

They all have the same complaint they've been like, they come out of nowhere. They never stop. And they keep telling us we have to kill all of them. And that is all by design that we'll get into later.

They didn't have a chance, a little like cream.

That's what's so hard, man.

They eat snails.

“You don't have to slow you have to be to choose to eat a snail.”

They've probably got sort of straacked it all. The extra snails sitting around me at home. Yeah, and they fucking don't spend enough time preparing shaving their armpits. We're in the order, and God knows these French are fucking lazy.

Yep. They're not even a lady. Easy. Easy. See, we can make fun of them.

Yeah, yeah, fuck 'em, fuck the friends. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Vietnamese turn them into toast. French toast, kind of now. (laughing)

That's what they're doing. That's what they're doing. That's going to fall. That's going to bring it down. It's going to bring them around.

They fried them. It's going to bring them around. We're already, I'm about to shoot myself and I had. I feel like I'm in the, I'm like, in the, I'm like, (laughing)

I'm in the, I'm in the, I'm in the whole Vietnamese woman reading a child's head. (laughing) Nope. They kissed them. Yeah.

French kissed them. (laughing) I'm not shy, man.

“He's not a, he's not, he's not helping the history.”

He's surprisingly, I'm enjoying that. I feel like I'm doing that. I feel like I'm doing that. So, what's the word, Smith? (laughing)

Now, by the mid-1920s, Vone wins up had learned about the brutality. The French have been inflicting upon the Vietnamese people for almost 70 years. And after reading a pamphlet written by Ho Chi Minh,

about Vietnamese independence, Zop joined the revolution. Pamphlets, chip change the world. Fuck, yes, they have. There's so many things about pamphlets

and how you just drop them and it changes so much, it's so crazy. Yeah, it's crazy because you also look at how the Vietnamese started, it is quite similar to how America started. And very similar.

And we're gonna get into that. Now, the Vietnamese were so used to fighting stronger enemies that they had a fucking term for this situation. They called it Toi Ka,

which roughly translates an English to opportune moment. And also apologies for all the butchering been doing with the Vietnamese pronunciation. It is a fucking incredibly difficult language.

“But that's why I'm going to take this Toi Ka”

to ask if I can go to the bathroom. (laughing) Let's get back to the concept of Toi Ka, or, you know, opportune moment. But I'm going to take this to the bathroom.

I'm going to take this to the bathroom. I'm going to take this to the bathroom. I'm going to take this to the bathroom. And I'm going to take this to the bathroom. And I'm going to take this to the bathroom.

And I'm going to take this to the bathroom. And I'm going to take this to the bathroom. And I'm going to take this to the bathroom. And I'm going to take this to the bathroom. And I'm going to take this to the bathroom.

And I'm going to take this to the bathroom. The concept of Toi Ka was simple. Prepare for war constantly. But wait for the so-called opportune moment to strike. The Vietnamese were and still are incredibly patient people.

But to take down the French, the Vietnamese combined the ancient concept of Toi Ka with a type of warfare that had been written about extensively by Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist leader. After studying Mao's writings on battle tactics,

extensively, the Vietnamese would use Mao's instructions to defeat both the French and American militaries. Mao called it Gorilla Warfare. And put simply Gorilla Warfare is a strategy used

by smaller countries to win wars against powerful imperialist regimes.

Wars in which the home team would be trained to engage in conflicts that could last decades. I'm definitely not what we're currently in right now. And I'm pretty certain that we're going to nip this current Gorilla War in in the buddo, not like the other ones.

Yeah, it's definitely not the type of war that we fought in. I don't know, every war that we fought since Vietnam. Keep one of these guys just come out and fight us. Like men, to organize, set a line. I want us to dig trenches and we set the day

and we break for Christmas. They left the drums at home. I don't know whistles. Oh, this is the guy with the flag. Well, the thing is the Gorilla Warfare is the only warfare left

because it's either, at this point, either Gorilla Warfare

field a military that would go against ours is a nuclear power.

“Unless, but hey, you're discounting autonomous robot warfare.”

Yes. Would you go through my chapter? I forget about that, which is already happening. Yeah, no, that's fucking Ukraine. Soon, everyone, soon, everyone will not even be there.

Wouldn't even be people there. Yeah, I love how we blindsided us when Gorilla Warfare is how we beat the British to get our own country. Yeah. It didn't call it that.

We called it, got them the formation of a goddamn America. [LAUGHTER] Have to beware. Redwood, blue and Urner Bay. I mean, but in the other revolutionary war,

that was still a pretty conventional war by those standards. Like, you know, Battle of Bunker Hill. There were-- No, in Gage, there was funds. There was engagement.

No, Gibson's boys. No.

“Remember that day, where they took it to the fucking Hill.”

Yeah, that was a great documentary. Well, rather than fighting massive battles and fields between soldiers and uniform, battles that

colonized countries could never hope to win.

Gorilla Warfare was defined by countless small conflicts meant to bleed out the invading nation using death by a thousand cuts. The idea was that the colonized nation could outlast the colonizers, because while the colonizers were usually

fighting and dying for economic or ideological reasons, the gorillas were fighting and dying for their home, and they were doing it on their own turf. Now, the Vietnamese had already been fighting wars using Gorilla Warfare tactics all the way

back to the earliest conflicts with the Chinese. They used it against the fucking Mongols. They knew how to do this. But after reading Mao, ironically, they could expand on the concept, codify it,

and when the time was right, nationalize it to an extreme effect. Now, at this point in the story, we're in the 1930s.

“And small resistance movements have been fighting the French”

and the Vietnamese elite who supported the French for decades. They hadn't made much headway. But when vone wins up, took charge at the end of the 1930s, the Vietnamese forces became more focused. Then another so-called opportune moment came with World War II,

especially after Germany shocked the world by whipping the shit out of France with lightning speed in 1940. It's all the cream. Dead, blitz, clique. Yeah, they were all again, it was all the cream.

They're not shaving, we're talking about this. They're all lazy, French, don't speak French. Ah, I don't feel like it. I don't want to fight the world. I don't want to go.

I don't want to have it. Empower, no more. Why does the world come to fight us? Why do they come to fight us? Well, from a Vietnamese perspective,

France's defeat weakened its grip on its colonies. But instead of the Vietnamese taking over another cruel colonial power step-to-end, I'll be at briefly. That cruel colonial power was the last people you wanted to show up. The fucking Japanese.

The crimes of the Japanese. It always begins. The Japanese era in Vietnam is extremely complex, but to put it very simply. The Japanese were mostly interested in Vietnam as a staging ground

for larger operations during World War II. Vietnam is in an extremely strategic location right there on the gulf. But since the, in the Vermicelli fields. Yeah. But since the French government have been replaced with Nazi collaborators.

After Germany's victory, the Vietnamese people had to deal with both Japanese and French occupiers throughout World War II.

So there you were like a third.

I hate everybody. Yeah, no, there was just like where we're our own group. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but honestly, God. What great food must have come out of this? No, Japanese French Vietnamese fusion.

Japanese. I don't think there was much cooking going on. It was a pretty brutal occupation. I wish they had stopped making war. I wish they had focused on food.

I'd be fun if it was just snacks. Who is that? Yeah, we killed his body and then all of a sudden. Stack wars has gone hot. It's gone hot, they're fucking, it is blew up the Reese's fat. No, my god.

No, the flame in Chido. No, fuck it's me. Now by 1941, the Vietnamese were really starting to get their shit together.

After three decades in exile, Ho Chi Minh finally returned to his home country

to form a new organization called the League of Independence of Vietnam. This group came to be known better as the Vietnam. The Vietnam would become an incredibly deadly fighting force of guerrilla soldiers. And eventually, they would evolve into America's deadliest enemies in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War.

But the thing about the evolution of the Vietnam into the Vietnam is that it showed America's

See, America showed up in Vietnam with ground troops in 1965 swinging our big military and

“industrial complex dick thinking we got this shit in the back.”

We kicked the Nazi's fucking ass, man, and that was a real hard, that was a hard team. We kicked the Nazi's ass, we blew the Japanese and the fucking oblivion. We could do anything, oh yeah. But we were ignoring the fact that we were entering a war that had already been going on for 20 years in the veterans of that 20-year war.

Men like Vonuensop, they knew how to fight this war and they knew how to win it.

Long before the first Marine even fucking showed up.

They know fighting more than they know not fighting. Mm-hmm. You know, we get a lot here on the show about how we're very American centric. 'Cause we all were up in a war if we're in the war. The war quarters were in there.

Physically there, yeah. Yeah, I mean, everyone has a bias when it comes to their home country. But it do think it's interesting that it really was the, that, that's kind of the main thing was our deep deep ignorance. Let's show up.

The arrogance and ignorance. Just assuming we knew better, that we were automatically just going to crush this. Yeah. I love our confidence. I love American confidence.

So get me wrong. Sure. And just misplaced.

I get when it's Michael Jackson.

That's a big win for America.

“Oh, culturally, against, not totally, not what he did and not all the top of the music.”

I'm talking about the music. Yeah, yeah. Guilt Cosby. Yeah. Great example.

The humor that brought everywhere. Vietnam loves the films of Woody Allen. Yeah. They love that. Because they're, their favorite.

You ever see that besides the, um, the toy con. They also said, I'll have what she's having. Yeah. Oh, we know. I'm sorry.

That's what I'm trying. Yeah. This morning, Rob Reiner's death currently to the state. In Vietnam. Yeah.

But, you know, now that they're doing so well, I got my money. My problems. Yeah. I'm sure. Oh, money.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That's it.

The one thing that is extremely important to remember about Ho Chi Men is that he was an idealist. And Ho Chi Men's idealism brings us to the next section of involvement when it comes to this conflict. It is time to talk about our part and all this. America's part. See, when the worldwide stage shifted once again during World War II, after the Japanese attack

Pearl Harbor, because the Japanese went into Vietnam before they attacked us. The Vietnamese were filled with hope that the Americans might help them in their ongoing struggle against the occupying Japanese forces. Beyond that, America had also explicitly said that we wanted to help places like Vietnam. When America joined the war, we didn't just say that we're out for revenge against the Japanese

for attacking Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt also explicitly said that we were defending the world for the purposes of, quote, self-determination and anti-colonialism. And the Vietnamese independence movement took us at our word.

And so, Uncle Ho reached out to the United States, this was not the first time that Ho Chi Men had tried contacting a president.

Back in 1919, Ho Chi Men had actually tried contacting President Woodrow Wilson for assistance in Vietnam, based on Wilson's statements about self-determination after World War I. Think about that, 1919.

“That's how long these guys have been thinking about how to win this fight.”

Oh, yes. And then you also think about that. That was also probably the first time that the will of Ho Chi men to get to the, someone that would care inside the United States government would be controlled by forces right outside the president. So, would you have as like, you know, the OSS and stuff like this that would intercept these messages and people inside the Pentagon.

Well, 1919, the OSS didn't exist. But you know what I mean? At the time, when they were sending through trusted sources to get to Woodrow Wilson, it depended on that person to show the letter to Woodrow Wilson. There's, there's actually no, there's no evidence either way as to whether Wilson ever even got the letter.

That's what they're saying. And we don't know whether or not that was even if they decided whether by even by then they were like, You know, you don't need a father, the president with us. You need that country. Well, Lord knows if you would have helped them, the world would have been a better place.

Yeah, I mean, and that's the thing that we have had so many chances. We're about to get into it. We had so many chances. See, while Wilson's administration had ignored Ho Chi Minh, the OSS, that's the precursor to the CIA. They formed a partnership with Uncle Ho during World War II focused on fighting the Japanese.

It wasn't as big of a thing as us, you know, arming, you know, I Afghanistan and all that against Afghanistan's against Russia's Vietnam, Afghanistan. But definitely don't not sound like it.

and giving them all this lip service, giving them radios and guns.

“Yeah, and saying, you know, yeah, we're here. We're with you, buddy.”

Oh, we're with you, buddy. Exactly. We're with you, buddy. We're with you. And if we give you guns, know that down the road, we're going to have to kill you. You have to shoot us with those guns. Every time we drop off guns, those guns are then used to shoot at us.

Every single time. Well, America actually worked very well with the Vietnamese during World War II. And eventually the Vietnamese's efforts were brought to the attention of President Franklin Roosevelt. President Roosevelt had repeatedly offered assistance to Vietnam. And he told the Vietnamese that when the war was over,

America was interested in a sort of trusty ship. The Allies would have temporary control over Vietnam with the goal of preparing Vietnam for eventual independence. Now, it sounds like bullshit, but this was Roosevelt's goal. He did a lot of shit, too.

“And I believe that he was going to at least try to follow through because Roosevelt was fucking brilliant.”

He was smart enough to know that Vietnam's global position right south of China. It would make Vietnam a far better friend than an enemy in the global order to come. But before the war ended, Roosevelt fucking died in office from a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Almost as if God himself wanted life on earth to suck even fucking harder. And then we learned our lessons, Marcus.

He got it to make it hard for us so that we'd learn. That's right. Yeah, he has to kill our fucking leaders to go. Yeah, he made it hard on FDR, too. Yeah, he did.

Yeah. And one could argue that the polio made him the man that he was. Yeah, professional liar. Well, when Roosevelt died, any chance we had of a relatively peaceful second half to the 20th century died with him.

“Just as I said in the Manhattan Project series, I cannot stress how greatly Roosevelt's premature death changed history for the worse.”

And you can throw Vietnam into that mix along with everything else. See, while Franklin Roosevelt might have meant what he said about anti-colonialism, that sort of thing didn't mean shit to his successor, President Harry S. Truman. All the Ho Chi Minh did still try to break through to Truman after World War II. There's no reasoning with a man with that kind of bow tie.

Like his bow tie was always tied to tight.

It was too big. He was a mean face little man. He was, ho wrote multiple letters to President Truman in which Ho Chi Minh literally quoted Thomas Jefferson asking for any support the US could offer in Vietnam's fight for some of that fucking self-determination America was always talking about. Ho Chi Minh was actually he was massively inspired by the United States. In fact, when the communist later took power in Vietnam for the first time, Ho Chi Minh quoted the declaration of independence at length during his victory speech.

Just plagiarism. In other words, the Vietnamese were taking America at our word concerning self-determination. And they believed that America would be sympathetic towards Vietnam because we were also a former colony. Man understand, you've become in some new company. You become in some new country, man?

That's competition, brother man. Thomas Jefferson would have loved to fuck his way up and down Vietnam. It's Thomas Jefferson had gotten a taste. Oh man, we'd be using chopsticks. Well, in Ho Chi Minh's faith in America, he proved that it wasn't just the Americans who had misunderstood their enemy.

See, Ho Chi Minh didn't know enough about American history to understand that the United States was arguably the most successful colonial power of the age.

While we were a former colony, one of the first things we did after forming our own country was to colonize the rest of the North American continent.

We did this happily, brutally, and proudly, and we actively tried to wipe out an entire race of people while we did it. God told us too. Yeah, I mean, we not only did it, we celebrated it. What is that? New Mexico.

Yeah, bro. It's not new. That's Mexico. New Mexico. It's a great California.

We named it. They named it something we don't like. California. Yeah, that's how we changed it. All right.

No, we celebrate York Blue. We celebrated this. We named it and we taught it to each and every one of our children as manifest destiny. We were just bored to be that awesome. Yeah.

And by the time a World War II, we'd already won our colonial battles so thoroughly that most people had forgotten that it had ever been any other way. Now Roosevelt was making moves to turn this attitude around, but President Truman saw the Vietnamese the same way

They were the natives. They were at best a resource to be used.

But at worst, there was always the option we chose with the Native Americans that of wholesale slaughter.

So what do you want to choose? What do you want to choose? Yeah. Where do you want to be Vietnam? What do you want to choose?

What do you want to choose? So Ho Chi Minh did not remember the Elamo. No, he did not. No. No.

“Do you think that also this is where the specific anti-Asian kind of racist part?”

Because like, we're going to get to that more in the next episode. That should start in the 1890s. That's what I'm saying. I just pointed it because like, you know, every type of racism has its sort of like beginnings in a way.

And there's specific types of racism because I was like our view of Asian people, like essentially was like, they're on feeling monsters. Yeah, our view, we'll get into it much more in the next episode. But our view really began with the Philippines. Yeah.

Yeah, which came long before, which was, yeah, 1880s, 1890s long before Japan. I think all the stuff like we don't, they don't believe in family. They delete their babies and all that kind of shit. A lot of shit. Yeah.

At this point in the story, it's after the internment camps. You're right. Yeah. Yeah. We've already imprisoned many, many, many Japanese people and Asian people throughout

this entire country. My family's still on Poland. [laughter] That's all to say that President Truman had absolutely no interest in any anti-colonial goals. And he therefore had no interest in helping the Vietnamese.

All Truman cared about was keeping a good relationship with France, fought after World War II. France, like most of the European colonial nations, they wanted to do everything they could to hold onto their colonies. Which brings us to the next section of this episode.

The French. Well, colonialism provided cheap labor and trade, which would be helpful in rebuilding Europe after the war.

In France, with a colonial empire that spanned six million square miles worldwide.

“And I mean, remember how many people out there speak fucking French.”

They were loads too many. Yeah. They were loads to give up a colony as profitable as Vietnam. But during the chaos of World War II's end, the Vietnamese saw their opportune moment against the French at long last.

In August 1945, Vietnamese forces led by von Winsop, marched into Hanoi, marking the first time the city was under Vietnamese control since 1873. Now, another thing the Vietnam did not understand about the Americans was just how goddamn terrified we were going to be

by the Soviet Union after World War II. So, after Germany was defeated, America and the USSR were immediately at odds, and that conflict would of course come to be known as the Cold War. France, however, decided to take almost immediate advantage

of the hostilities between America and Russia. They hinted that if America didn't support their efforts in holding colonies like Vietnam, I don't know. Maybe the Soviet Union would be interested

in being friends with France. I don't know, America, what do you think? No fuck yourself. Whatever. Go to them.

I just don't understand. Just fuck it. Go to them. Fuck off. We can't go the old fail.

The old fail. I mean, I'm going to be hungry. You're going to be so angry.

“When they come and they put all the Soviet blocks”

styling in the middle of Paris, you're going to be angry. And you're going to be mad. You're going to come out. I mean, we really do forget.

And that's part of the American propaganda is the French or our cowards. And they surrendered. It's easy to surrender monkeys. All that shit.

The French are fucking vicious. They were incredibly vicious fighters. Because they were old world power. That's an old world power. Yeah.

I bullied. It's over. I should turn on the world. Yes. So America stood aside while France dove back into Vietnam

to try and retake their colony. The colonial battle between France and Vietnam

therefore became the first proxy conflict

of the Cold War. Congrats. That's amazing. Wow, 1945. Again.

Immediately. Right on the heels of the fucking world war, too. The Cold War proxy war started. Boom.

Right there. First a tire. Definitely took a break. Why everybody took a break. Everybody shut up.

Why didn't everybody like, okay. Let's start to cold war. 1951. Okay.

We just couldn't stop. Maybe we could make some movies. We're going to hang out. That's a big question. Holy shit.

Besides taken by world powers in the immediate aftermath of World War II would form deadly alliances that would last decades. Today, till today. Yeah. So the French war in Vietnam, or as historians call it,

the first into China war, up again in September of 1945. When French took troops, retook Saigon in South Vietnam. Indo-China is a good new old-fashioned racist term for the area, too.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, it's like a whole, like, you don't hear it anymore. Less is a guy at a bus stop. Finally heard the words, "Indo-China," like,

right now, like, from some, like, Canadian,

Oh, I'll kick your ass back to Indo-China. Yeah, yeah, the worst time I heard it was Marcellus Wallace. Yes. Yeah.

“I think Indo-China is, I think it's still accepted.”

You know, Indo, Indian, China, Chinese. It's like between India and China and the China. Yeah. Yeah, we'll find out. Yeah, we'll find out.

Yeah. But I'm sorry, it's [email protected]. What else can we say? Well, I know that, you know, historians call the French war

the first Indo-China war, and our, what we call the Vietnam war

is known to historians as the second Indo-China war. And they call it Indo-China, because technically our war didn't involve just Vietnam. It also involved Cambodian loss as well. So it's all these countries.

We're all involved. Great. Good. Well, when the French retooks side gone, they terrorized, raped, and murdered

“hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in the process.”

They focused on the communists in multiple gory public spectacles. Because don't forget, the French use the fucking guillotine liberally. They used it until the same year fucking Star Wars came out. They only stopped using it in 1977. I could just see the president of France just watching Star Wars.

And as the credits go off, he's like, "This insanity must stop." We must not do the same anymore. Darth Vader would be so embarrassed. To get past it, they invented the toilet flush from upstairs.

That's nice. That's nice. I love that. I love a chain. But here, yeah, but in Saigon, you know, piles of Vietnamese heads.

Before days at the French, took Saigon. Hey, I'm staying on track here. Piles of heads. Piles of heads. Yes.

I'd say heaps ahead. Heaps ahead. Yeah, pyramids.

“Before days after the French took Saigon, Ho Chi Minh's army re-took the city and committed their own war crimes by massacring French men, women and children with their own rifles, pistols and machetes.”

The French answered that with a force of 25,000 crown troops. And they were, of course, aided by their allies, the British. Then after the Truman doctrine was established in which America pledged to support any and all foreigners who were actively fighting the comics, we officially sided with France in 1950. As far as we were concerned, Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh were now our enemies simply because they were communist. And for no other reason beyond that, no nuance, no strategy, just communist bad, not communist good.

I just don't find them as compelling of a villain. When you look at the Indian, in the Anna Jones movie with Kate Blanchette playing the communist, that was stupid. And it was really a bad villain.

I've never really understood the whole like communist or extremely evil when we just had the Nazis.

The Nazis were obviously very evil. Communists were, I mean, they did horrible stuff. Soviet's were pretty evil too. Yeah, when they did was done was pretty bad. Yeah, we got Vietnam because we're too big upussies to fight Russia.

Yeah, I can't wish I had the fucking street, everybody behind me. So the fucking crammed me. I'll find it myself. I'll buy food and my put myself. You will.

And I bet you'd win. At this point. Interesting. Now the French war in Vietnam would last for nine years. And over that period, vone wins up would develop strategies for winning a war against a great world power.

No, in the whole time, that it might take decades to claim victory. But the reason why we're talking about Zap strategies is because while these strategies would be used to defeat the French, the Vietnamese would also use these exact same strategies to defeat America when we showed up a few years after. When you look at diaries from the French soldiers to the American soldiers, they are literally saying the same exact thing.

The same thing. I mean, there's a reason why the first episode of the Kind Burns Vietnam series is called deja vu.

Yeah. Well, we were just as helpless against these strategies as the French were the first time around. And both of us would commit multiple atrocities in our efforts to win. Like us, the French would be humiliated by a defeat in Southeast Asia. And even the threat of humiliation can cause men to do absolutely horrific things.

I mean, it's like on the like the highest level is like war crimes, lowest level family annihilation. And it's just about, and it's just about avoiding the threat of humiliation, the possibility of it. Never. Yeah. Family annihilation is the lowest level.

Well, I'd say lowest level when murder's involved. Yeah. Yes, by report card. Yeah. Room talk about doing like horrific horrible things.

Yeah. Like men, men will be being embarrassed. Yeah. Men will do anything to avoid being embarrassed. Yeah. I mean, well, that's the whole, that's the, Yeah.

So men start doing jujitsu. Yeah. I mean, they're 40s.

Well, that's the, you know, the old joke that, you know, women make is that, you know, men are afraid that,

“you know, women will embarrassed them and women are afraid that men will kill them.”

Yeah. Yeah. Because we embarrassed. Because we're killed. We'll kill them ourselves or bare hands just choke them to death.

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“Up with ground troops in 1965, we quickly became frustrated and enraged at these terrifying”

hit-run ambushes. Just as the French had been terrified and raged back in the '40s and the '50s, but our rage in fear would lead directly to the Meal Eye Massacre. By 1948, the Vietnamese hit-and-run attacks had caused a stalemate in the French war, which would be the exact same stalemate we would reach 20 years later.

The French controlled the cities, the Vietnamese controlled everything else. The French could extend their forces outside a city, fight a battle, and they might even win against the Vietnamese. But the French would immediately lose that territory as soon as they return to the city because the French could not hold the countryside.

This is yet another reason why any war in Vietnam was unwinnable. Also, why these wars are unwinnable in places like Afghanistan. So, the wars in Vietnam were not fought like World War II, where armies were defeated, when opposing forces took and held territory. Because I was like organized, get to a certain point, and then all of the parties would

agree it was gone too far, and now we'll sit and have our peace treaty, and they used to trade back and forth, and they would almost be by percentages, kind of like it was a organized way. Like, oh, we got this amount of territory, the wars now over. Yeah, we take an old territory and tell, or you just had to do it like we did it with

Germans that you keep taking holding territory until you hold all of their territory. That's risk. And the thing with the jungle is, it's really hard to just keep to stay out there. Yeah. After you leave your like, "Ah, let's come back to the city."

And if you go, "Hey, I want to go to a hotel, this place sucks." Yeah, exactly. And they fucking love it out there. But they live out there.

“They know how the fuck to live out there.”

And the thing isn't Vietnam taking and holding territory was impossible because so much of it was jungle, furthermore the North Vietnamese forces, they not only knew the territory, they had been preparing the territory for decades by the time we showed up. The infamous tunnels and underground bunkers used by the Viet Cong to seemingly disappear after ambushing American forces again and again, they had actually built those during

the French war. Consequently, throughout both wars and invading force couldn't step outside of a Vietnamese city in the north or the south without possibly running into a force taking orders from Ho Chi Minh. And that force was more than happy to blow your ass away before disappearing back into

the jungle. And this is in the French section where it's even slightly less complicated as it will get when you're like also there's like three other groups too. Yeah. But they're trying to kill you as well.

Not even just the main army. Yeah. There's like split off armies. And there's all this other shit. It's pretty simple, it's like the Viet Cong is the guerrilla force, the man in the black

pajamas as they put it.

army army. Yeah. That's, I mean, that's basically, and then you have all the civilians who also want to kill you because you're killing them because you're killing them. And you're in their home.

Yes. And you're burning your home to the room. Yes. France was in over its head on this war financially and militarily by 1949. So they reached out to their allies for help.

The United States, gamely agreed to send aid. So the Viet men began reaching out to America's enemies to balance the scales. By 1950, both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China had decided that they had a responsibility to intervene in Vietnam as well, which introduced the final reason

why this war was always unwindable.

Very good.

“As long as China and the Soviet Union were supplying weapons to the Vietnamese, the only way”

to win would be to nuke the entirety of the country and wipe it off the face of the earth. Otherwise, the Vietnamese were not going to stop until every invader was gone. But just as China promised unlimited support to Vietnam, the United States promised unlimited support for France. And so, American aid gave the French army the ability to wage war in ways that were both

increasingly bloody and destructive. This, however, only produced more bodies, with no real breakthrough on either side. We learned our lesson and never did a ligament. And we decided to keep to ourselves, and that's why we now have hotels on Mars. And we are, I want to say last podcast and left, first podcast on Mars, and it's been

amazing. I've got four tits. I'm a man and a woman at once. These are good. Actually, it kind of is the concept between the TV show for all mankind, which I

fucking love. But it is just sort of like, what if we spent the money on space instead of Vietnam? Oh my god. What would that have been like?

“I always think about like Germany and Japan.”

After we won the war, it took away their armies. They just became great places. Yeah. Yeah. They were made.

They're good. It's almost like if you stop trying to kill everyone, you could take a few moments and make your own home nice. Yeah.

Germany and Japan are both incredible countries.

Yeah. But they don't got the fucking bomb, like we do, man. Wow. We do. We do things are great here.

Just as it would be in America during the 1960s, popular support for the French war in Vietnam dropped dramatically when the French death toll reached 50,000 soldiers. French critics, in fact, began calling it the dirty war. But with America's direct involvement in the so-called dirty war, the Vietnam now counted America amongst its sworn enemies, because by 1953, the United States was already paying

for 80% of the cost for France's war to keep their colony. We are footing 80% of that bill. I'll get to a second. I'll get it in a second to exactly how much money that translated to. But that meant the sunk cost was already in full effect before a single American even

set foot on Vietnamese soil. Now both sides of the Cold War were encouraging both the French and the Vietnamese towards peace by 1953. I mean, things that, you know, we'd art the Korean war had already started and ended while the Vietnamese were fighting the French.

Yeah. Well, I guess this is expensive. But before peace talks could take place, the Vietnamese ended the war all on their own. In March of 1954, Vietnamese forces led by Vone Winsop launched an offensive at a place called Jim Bin-Fu.

That's a man. It's hard one. That's hard one. Yeah.

In preparation for this offensive, a quarter of a million Vietnamese, half of them women,

lugged artillery, provided by the Soviets through the mountains, from the north to the south, inch by inch, preparing for their final opportune moment. Once the Vietnamese were in position, they had an entire garrison of 25,000 French soldiers completely surrounded. French had no fucking clue it was coming.

The Vietnamese began a constant attack that would last seven weeks. The siege became world news. For many people, this was the first time they had ever heard of Vietnam. And the French commander was so ashamed over his role in letting it all happen that he shot himself in the head on the battlefield.

But by May, the French finally surrendered thus ending the first Indo-China war in victory for the Vietnamese in 1954.

“Do they have a lot of POWs left behind like we did?”

No. I don't believe so.

North Vietnam.

“And the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese were shooting down our pilots with Soviet artillery”

and they were really fucking good at it.

But I don't think the French were quite as in to bombing as we were. They definitely did it. Of course they did it. But no one had the full court press like we did. Yeah, nobody, nobody full court press air attacks like America didn't be a non.

That's what he won. Yeah. Now by this point, both China and the Soviet Union, they wanted better relations with Europe and America. But America was fully in the Eisenhower era and you can't have President Eisenhower without

“of the notorious director of the CIA, Alan Dullis.”

- No, God, no, God, no. - And you can't have Alan Dullis without his brother, Secretary of State, John Foster Dullis. - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

- And the world wide that might introduce even the slightest foothold for international communism. Someone who likes a socialist president. - Oh, tell him. - And if they could do it, they will put whoever is willing to suck our dick in place. It doesn't matter what they then believe in and they don't give a fuck. They don't give a fuck because they think just because, oh, he's telling us he's on our team that this guy

now they'll be in our pocket and get some of they never are, no, they're never on our team

because they lied to you, they lied to you, Dullis brothers. - Yeah, and then they go kill them and find another guy and they kill that guy and they lie.

“- Yeah, the only thing that mattered to the Dullis brother is long, if they were not communist”

or anything even close to communist, it was considered a dubious. By the mid-1950s, the Dullis brothers had already helped to depose democratically elected leaders in Guatemala and Iran and haven't gone too for two without consequence or at least no consequence that the fucking Dullis brothers would live to see. The Dullis brothers set their sights on Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh.

This was despite the fact that America had already spent three billion dollars total. - Three billion in 1953 money. - That's a fucking lot. - Yes, that literally is that was our Mars money. - Yes, three billion helping the French fight their failed war and we'd come away with nothing to show for it but an enemy who had desperately tried over and over again to be our ally and when the French war ended, international

negotiations split Vietnam along the 17th parallel into the communist north and the ostensibly

democratic south. - It's done. - I don't think that's great. I always love that when they do

that with these things. We're like, "Well, caught up in half, it's gonna be fine." - How many times have we done this? - Twice. - This is the guy who just read down the middle and everything's going to go to court or need to play out. Everybody can tell me a little bit of something like, "How do they work like that?" I don't think I don't think country building works like a

sizzle or buffet. When did North Korea end the war? - 53. - 53 are. - Well, the Vietnamese were told that elections were going to come in which they would be free to choose whatever leader they please. After they chose that leader, the country would be re-unified afterward. - Wow. - Yeah. But the problem was, is that it was very, very obvious that the guy who was going to win was going to be Ho Chi Minh. - Ooh. - He didn't like that.

- I don't think America didn't like it. - I don't like him. - I don't like him. I'm done he fever. - But in the meantime, Ho Chi Minh and the North didn't do themselves any favors when it came to settling America's fears about the Reds. The North Vietnamese government enacted multiple Soviet style communist policies, which only confirmed the suspicions of the Eisenhower Administration. After famine struck the North, Ho Chi Minh instituted a land reform plan,

very Soviet style that took private land and made its state owned to alleviate food shortages. Many people refused to comply and some 15,000 people were executed by the North Vietnamese government as a result. - I knew we'd get one. I knew something they do bad shit too. - They knew that they were going. - Yeah, this is what you were talking about the other day. There's no good side in this entire story. - Yeah, the communists were also taking over all media and the North,

while also launching indoctrination programs to maintain order. The South Meanwhile was a republic with far more freedoms, but it was also far more chaotic and far more corrupt.

who was staunchly against communism and the Vietnam. Additionally, his Catholicism was attractive

to the Americans because we equated any type of Christianity as the opposite of communism. - No, he'll be a servant of the pope. - Yeah. - Well, I mean, at the time, that's the thing. We love him because even though Vietnam is, I think 90% Buddhist, 10% Catholic, if you're Catholic, that kind of means you lean towards the French a little bit. We liked anybody who kind of leaned more into continuing that imperialist power

structure that the French had established. - It's almost like, if you believe in the Catholic like ideologies, you'd also be much easier to manipulate as a human being.

“- Well, that's what we thought. - Yeah. - But this guy, no, because he's in charge.”

- Okay. - I'm talking about everybody else. - No, the leaders in South Vietnam realized very quickly that they had America by the fucking balls and they could do anything they wanted. - Unless, of course, we have them killed. - But Prime Minister, we tried. - We tried. - But Prime Minister Jim's Republic was closer to a dictatorship, run by Jim and his family. They rewarded loyalty above everything if we know how well that works.

- Oh, really? - It really does work out great. When a leader rewards loyalty above everything else.

- Always. - Always. - Yeah, corruption ran rampant.

In South Vietnam, Vietnam, for the very beginning. In this corruption, we didn't sure that the South would never match the dedication of the North. The Prime Minister also didn't care about

“getting support from the peasants in the countryside, which, of course, made up the majority of the”

population. Ho Chi Minh, however, did care about the peasants. See, splitting the country in two under an imaginary line, it didn't magically send every communist to the North and every capitalist to the South. I mean, anyone who was even close to capitalist did leave the North immediately. But even after the country was split into, the countryside and South Vietnam was still filled with communist Vietnamese supporters. And this mixture of loyalties would also

directly contribute to the massacre at Me Lai. - Brother, Brother, Brother, Blue versus Grey. - Oh, yeah. - You know, when you listen to the Vietnamese talk, that is, they say, even North Vietnamese veterans will say the greatest tragedy of this war was that it was Vietnamese killing Vietnamese. - Oh, of course. - Yeah. But even though the South Vietnamese Prime Minister

“was a corrupt son of a bitch, America stepped in almost immediately as his ally after France”

withdrew their army for good. None other than John F. Kennedy himself, speaking as a senator in 1957, would declare South Vietnam to be quote, "The court has stormed up the free world, and South East Asia." But it wouldn't be long before even soldiers on the ground were realizing that communist or not, America had chosen the wrong fucking side. Now Prime Minister Jim, immediately cracked down on communist by executing 25,000 of them in 1955 alone. In addition

to torturing anyone who's even friendly towards communist. And when I say like executing 25,000 communist, I mean both confirmed and suspected communist. But every time Jim, executed communist on mass, all he did was drive more Vietnamese people towards Ho Chi Minh, whether those people actually believed in communism or not. - You just got to kill one non-communist, and then everyone said, "Oh, well fuck, we got to run." - Yeah. - Yeah, fuck. No, I have to do anything I can to overthrow

this government. I don't give a fuck who it is. - It's almost like mass purges, or it's great.

- Not great. - And they don't always help policy. - Not really. - It seems to make people

upset. - Yeah. - And then policy does just seem to matter as much anymore. - Yeah, well that's what they say is that you, especially once we started doing the search and destroy on these villages, looking for communist, as I said that if you killed one communist, they would be replaced by one communist. If you killed one non-communist, they would be replaced by 10 communist, 10 new communist, who were now out to get your ass. - Fuck today. - And they'll have to share the one toothbrush.

- Which is that no one talks about that side of communism. - No one brings it up. - Fuck a neighborhood toothbrush. - I hate my neighborhood toothbrush, that's course. But perhaps the biggest black mark against Prime Minister Jim and his government, was that they were increasingly being seen as a puppet government controlled by outsiders, controlled by the Americans, while Uncle Ho and his people represented independence for Vietnam.

under a slogan that roughly translated to extermination of traders. - I actually found this set of

plans for their plan. It seems that they're saying extermination of traders. What do you think that

“means? - I think they're going to do with that. You think they mean,”

better traders? - Send it back to the Pentagon. - Yeah, better. It would roll Wilson at home. - Oh my God, he's been dead for 30 years. - Go visit him in Arlington. - Yeah, you can. - Take it up as fucking bones, set them on fire. But to pull off these raids, the Vietnamese still had to cross the North South border, and they had to do it in secret. So the North began building a massive network of trails

through the jungle leading from the north to the south to give themselves multiple arteries to send troops and supplies. This network, which would eventually extend into neighboring countries like Laos and Cambodia, would soon be known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Ho Chi Minh Trail would ensure that nothing would ever keep the North Vietnamese from establishing and holding a constant presence in the south, and even our own NSA would have to admit that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was one of the

greatest achievements of 20th century military engineering. - Jam. - It is incredible,

“what they managed to achieve. - Like, it's like, how do you move all of this Soviet stuff?”

All these artillery, jeeps, food, people, everything. It was a constant, like there was just

a, it never stopped between the North and the South. - Every day was Fitzgerald. - Yes, it was.

That's the great way to put it, and they also would then have like, hidey hole spots, so they could put stuff places and leave it there and surprise you with it. All every single factor that they needed, they had total mastery of the, the war arena. - Yeah, and they had it before we even fucking showed up. It must be so hard to put together a surprise party in North Vietnam. - Oh my god. You know, especially, you've got to get all the bamboo spears covered in shit.

You've got to get that little girl who's willing to explode. That's the hardest part.

“Using the Ho Chi Minh Trail, several thousand North Vietnamese fighters crossed the border”

at the 17th parallel, and using 31 tons of Soviet weapons. They began assassinating South Vietnamese government officials at the rate of 150 per month in 1960. By the end of that year, the North Vietnamese have begun putting together a plan to challenge Prime Minister Jim for control of Saigon. In December, they essentially rebranded the Vietnam by changing the name to the national liberation front. This new guerrilla group was more nationalist than communist,

so it could attract a broader following. Their goal was to launch a new war against whoever was preventing Vietnam for being ruled by the Vietnamese, and it was becoming more and more apparent that this role was going to be played by the United States. Now, they called themselves the national liberation front, but we would come to know them better by the insulting name that was given to them by the South Vietnamese Prime Minister Jim. The full name translated to communist traders

to the Vietnamese nation, but when you contracted the name, and it's original Vietnamese, the Vietnamese became the Vietnamese Kong. These fighters would be not only the deadliest enemies America faced in Vietnam, but some of the deadliest fighters we have ever faced before or since. Some people consider the Vietnam Kong to be among the most talented soldiers in the history of warfare and it is there. I'm a fan. I mean, it's insane to watch even

interviews with soldiers on the ground in Vietnam in 1965, 1966. They'll talk to a commander and he'll just be like these are the finest soldiers in the history of the world. If I had four battalions of these men, I could take over the entire planet. They just had this as such an extreme

utmost respect for just how incredible these guys were. And we're not just guys, but guys and women.

It was a fully integrated force. Yeah. They could stick over the whole planet if they got in in their 20 years earlier and built a bucket. But it is there that we will pick back up next week

large and small that would lead directly to the massacre at Nila. And that's how it's going to

“be for the next three weeks of my life. Every day just just different Vietnam vets going.”

And I was in the brush. And I saw his eyes, leave his head, he picked up the canister, blew his face off,

and I was my best friend. Now there's a guy that I always think of. He was a journalist and he said,

"I reached down to pick up this man's to very said, grab his feet and get him out of here." And so I put my hands around his ankles and I just, my hands just, it was so burnt, my hands just went through the flesh and all I could feel was bone and I can still feel it now. We knew there was a

“cubby hole. We knew that there was a cubby hole in the old man kept waving and saying,”

"We knew you was trying to attack us at the little grenade and the cubby hole."

Who's trying to say his family was in there. I exploded his wife. His two children, my god, I love Donald Trump. Oh my god, I love this new war. So welcome going, talking about new war, the war rages on in the world. The darkness, world of darkness here at LPN go and see Bloodbath 77. Which is after the events of me lie. The war begins. So it's like, don't worry, but go and see

“vampire. We are going watch. We have an incredible cast. Marcus is leading them out. I'm very happy with it.”

Go and check out. We cannot wait for you to see this over on LPN TV. Go and check out Bloodbath 77.

Also this weekend, mid-summer screen. We are there Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Go see our panel, August 9th on, and it's end. It's called last month on the left. That mid-summer screen and you go by tickets at mid-summerscream.org. That's right. And next weekend, I'm going to be over a dynasty typewriter. That's going to be on August 16th for Deadmantele. Some tales. This is my dark Disney history show. And Henry's be joining me as well. It's one of the blasts. Come and check us out.

Well, it's going up. We got YouTube. YouTube's going up. YouTube's going up. You're going up. You're going up. You're going up. You're going up. You're going up. You're going up. I'm just like, I'm just staring off in this space at this point. YouTube.com/atsomeplace underneath at LPN Romant to see who's the be. Check out. Go for it. No dogs in space. LPN TV, the Brighter Side LPN Page 7. All kinds of shit. We're all connected. Go subscribe to those channels and watch our pretty faces. Do the

shows you've been listening to forever. And go check out our brand new song from the Inigmatic Band Master Trash. Yeah. It is our single of our Halloween album called Gods and Leather. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. I got a whole lot of creative stuff at acting, singing. You really are. You're on track right now. Yeah. Yeah. You're a regular Sydney Swing. If people enjoy it. Yeah.