Episode 677: My Lai Massacre Part II - Ain’t No Daylight in Vietnam

That's one of the cannibalism started.

So working with Danny Elfman, worse or equal to working with Elbija, I would say better. No, I would rather work with Elbija. Yeah. I feel like I can handle seeing a president's penis often, because he'd be like the boss of the room. And if you only can handle that more like Elbija with his casual penis use would be kind of fine to me. But there's just something about Jack Skellington being nude.

“That's the only thing I just don't want to see it or just warn me. You know he's probably got a long penis Jack Skellington.”

I imagine that Danny Elfman has totally a long thin penis. Yeah. Not like Elbija because Elbija had a bit of a Louisville slugger on him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Pringles can. But also I'm proud of him for that.

You know what I mean? It's hard to keep it in and out. It's also like you've got to keep it working. The hardest part about having a big penis from what I've heard when I read about a magazines is getting it completely hard. It's keeping it there.

It's keeping it hard. It's a lot of blood. You've got to be fat. You don't know blood. You definitely know.

More blood makes the penis harder.

I would imagine. Yeah, of course. Wow, that's blood goes to the penis and it makes it in court. It shows the sack. But what about a hungry vampire?

Imagine a penis would be a great place for a vampire to bite. Yeah, I would imagine so.

“Except we also learned you can't bleed to death from the penis because the body naturally cuts off”

it in a natural sort of sphincter closing. So it's more of a snack. Yeah. That's not bad. Also I was thinking LBJ.

LBJ would be a great name for a gay luchador. What a way to start. Well, the last one. That's what I was waiting for. My name is Marcus Parks.

I'm here with Henry's Nebraska deep in the shed. I am up to my eyeballs in Duky covered sticks. You've got to be careful in Vietnam, man. You've got to be careful. They say that just a walk to the bathroom requires a bravery not seen since the revolutionary war.

And that makes me nervous. It's rough out there, huh? It is.

And we have the man who never left the shed.

It's at Larson. I just took a big one. I know. And honor and honor of the show. You would have been so that I, your shit.

You're a bunch of sticks in there and the toilet. And you guys might have to call someone to fix it. That's fine. I'll call Ho Chi Minh. He just seems like he's got the most experience.

I imagine your fecal matter. Could fuel the vehicle's booby trap bank account for like a month. I'd love to work for that. If you were just the shitter. Like if you work for the vehicle and you supplied the shit.

wide the shit. - What a job. - Oh. - It's just beautiful. - Beautiful.

- Delicious, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh - Delish the boat on in some of the hills. - Grimm and jelly noodles. - We need more shit. - Yeah, all right?

- We're gonna have to get a little bit more pork. - Yeah, you can go ahead and slaughter another oinker. (laughing) - You mean this guy from Texas? - Yeah.

- Oh, God. - Here we are at MIUI part two. So when we last left the march of history that led to the MIUI massacre, the year was 1960.

The North Vietnamese had officially established a guerilla fighting force called the National Liberation Front, whose ultimate goal was to reunify the country after it had been split into following the French's humiliating loss at DMBN Food.

- Lazy French. (laughing) - You know, laugh, however, would come to be known by the South Vietnamese and American forces as the Viet Cong.

In since years of Vietnam movies have drilled this name into the American psyche, we'll refer to the North Vietnamese guerilla forces as the Viet Cong from here on out. Now concerning how deep America was involved in Vietnam

by 1960, the United States had become allies of South Vietnam's government after the creation of the Republic of Vietnam in the mid-1950s. This was all of course as a part of a larger effort to win the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

At the time, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president and the Eisenhower administration had been full of men committed to winning the Cold War at any cost.

“Remember the dullest brothers were a part of that.”

The guys who did the coups in Iran and Guatemala. - They were just itching for a new worldwide war. - Yeah. - Until forget, lurking in the background as Eisenhower's vice president

throughout the administration was none other than Richard Middlehouse Nixon.

- It's not the heat that got you in Vietnam.

It's the humanity. (laughing) - In fact, when Eisenhower had to sell

“the domino theory to the American public,”

you know, the theory that if one country and Southeast Asia fell, then all the rest would follow, he put vice president Nixon on television to patiently explain the whole thing using charts and maps.

- Senate fucking milhouse. (laughing) - I don't care. I don't care. What else do I have to do to what not see today?

- Senate fucking milhouse. (laughing) - Nixon, of course, had won every election he'd entered up till this point by telling blatant lies about his opponents being communists.

None of Nixon's opponents had actually been communists. They were, in fact, good people who were all but destroyed by Nixon's accusations. But Nixon had learned that he could win elections by pretending that the communist threat

was far larger than it really was. And he would not be the last American politician to learn this lesson before the Cold War was over. - How about before 2026 is over? (laughing)

- It was still bringing up communists. - This is fucking day. - As if there wasn't one half socialist

“that filled fucking puddles once, once, once.”

(laughing) Did he call Kennedy a communist? - No, no, no, no, Kennedy was a-- - You lost. - Yeah.

- He was fucking blue blood as fuck it as fuck. He could not, he was so fully tied into the American system. - No one would've believed that JFK was communist. - No, we wouldn't stick. - No, Kennedy had been talking about South Vietnam

as the bastion of freedom in Southeast Asia since 1957. So by the time 1960 came around, Kennedy was also already a committed Cold War here, along with Nixon. Nixon had nowhere to go with Kennedy. Now Eisenhower had been sending financial

and military aid to South Vietnam in addition to putting American military advisors on the ground to train the South Vietnamese Army on how best to fight and defeat the Vietnam. That means our involvement in Vietnam started in like 1955.

- Yes. - The South Vietnamese Army's official name was the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.

“So America would come to know them as the Arvin.”

From here on out, if you hear me refer to the Arvin, I'm talking about South Vietnam's military. - Yeah, 'cause sometimes the Arvin refers to the super, super skinny guy that's like making the fried fish, but we're not talking to that Arvin.

- Yeah. - Arvin. - Arvin, wait, where's your car? (laughing) - I will get as hard as I can.

- Arvin, don't come more camp-efficient friends. - I think I can't go to the house. - My, thank you. - Thank you. - Now the training of the Arvin seemed to be going well.

And Richard Nixon was hoping that in 1960, he could graduate from Vice President to President by continuing his fervently anti-communist agenda.

But Nixon was ultimately deemed to be Yucky

by the American people when compared to his opponent that year. - He was. - Nixon would therefore lose the presidency to a young charismatic senator who had been making a lot of noise

about Saudi Vietnam being the cornerstone of freedom in Southeast Asia. That senator was none other than John F. Kennedy and JFK would barely squeak past Nixon to win the presidential election in 1960

having already made Vietnam an issue. - Yeah. - Because it's television. - Yeah, that's the infamous things that win Kennedy. - It was the first debate, right?

That was televised. - It was the first debate that was televised when Kennedy and Nixon debated. People who listened on the radio said that Nixon won. People who watched on TV said that Kennedy won

because Nixon was obviously quite shifty. - Yeah, and sweaty as fuck. - Yeah, look like shit and ugly. - Yeah, you know, by that point, he had already had the nickname Tricky Dick

for like six years.

- But like that was in his second election.

- Yeah, and if you're not a Pimp from South Chicago, it's not a great name. (laughs) - But because Kennedy was shot in the head in Dallas in 1963. - Yeah. (laughs) - Oh, I was a clown. (laughs)

- Hell, it's a whole different series. - Oh, my God, I'm so behind. (laughs) - Yeah, y'all, you know what I mean? - They made sure they got to the very very bottom of it. - Because of Kennedy's untimely in,

people like to look at his presidency using the utmost optimism that things would have gone differently for America if Kennedy had survived. Because his optics were perceived. - But while that's certainly true in some respects,

you know, we go through all of the consequences of Kennedy's assassination during our series on that, we really have no idea if things would have gone differently in Vietnam had Kennedy not been killed.

that Kennedy might have continued along

the exact same course as his successor, had he remained in office. See, by the time JFK became president, the Vietcong had already expanded gorilla warfare throughout their entire nation.

And while journalists, members of Congress and American allies were calling for less involvement in Vietnam, Kennedy's advisors were calling for more action. And that's an important thing to know about Vietnam is that all of our allies, none of them came with us.

- Absolutely, none, it wasn't like they, we had more support for the fucking Iraq war than we did for Vietnam. - Yeah, it seemed like it was a really bad idea.

“- Well, that's what Robert McNamara and self say,”

is that if you're making a decision and other nations of comparable values are telling you to not do it, it's time to re-examine your decision. - Yeah. - Of course, he said that in hindsight.

- Really? - He made the decision. - What's 'cause he made the decision back then when it was awesome to make the decision? And he loved that, Robert McNamara.

- That's what he was like. - Oh, Robert, you did bird again. - Oh, he's Robert. - Oh, Robert, what did you do, bird? - What did you do, bird and be it?

- No, man, I'm re-watching the fog of war right now. - And how much he doesn't care about what he did is astounding to me. - It really is. And we're about to get into Robert McNamara right now.

- Ben, Robert, it's a good problem, but I should be ashamed. - But if you haven't seen it, it's an Errol Morris documentary, so it's absolutely brilliant. I watched it, like, the funny thing is that

forgot me in Carolina to watch it like two years ago, and I watched it again last night.

And it's incredible when, by the time you get to the,

like, it's not until the end, the Errol is like, oh, he's not taking responsibility for anything. - Yeah. - Well, JFK had promised during his campaign to fight the Cold War even more vigorously than Eisenhower.

And the cabinet that JFK chose was full of men who are absolutely dedicated to battling communism wherever it reared its head. And this is where we get into the subject of the documentary, the fog of war.

Particularly, JFK's Secretary of Defense, who had previously been president of the Ford Motor Company, firmly believed that spreading America's influence throughout countries like Vietnam,

“the so-called third world, was essential to beating”

the Soviet Union in the Cold War. That man was Robert McNamara. McNamara had taken the Secretary of State Post in Kennedy's cabinet reluctantly, because he was in his own words, unqualified for the job.

- I bet it, you don't want me. - You don't want to be a robin.

- I bet, and I don't really know cause,

why would I go in there? - I mean, it worked for Ford, and there were, you know, did such a good job with the Nazis? - Bring him in now. - I was only, I've only ever worked for one Nazi

and I tell you what, he was hilarious. - Why would you do this? - Don't make me do this. - One point, did you decide that McNamara was gonna be snaggle for this?

- That is, I know. - I can't believe he's literally in his room. - I mean, I love him. - I'm down for it. - You can't even do that.

- Oh, I'd like to do that. - Well McNamara's only military experience was three years in the Air Force during World War II, where he'd helped plan the fire bombing of Japan. - You're gonna want him hit him here.

We're all the food. - I don't know what he is. - That's a chopstick factory. - No, yeah, he famously said in the documentary that he agreed with Curtis Lamey,

who was the man who planned the fire bombing of Japan. He's like, if we would've lost that war, we would've been prosecuted as war criminals. In other words, he was already very comfortable with killing Asians by the hundreds of thousands.

- It's what I'm good at. (laughing) - It's a problem, right? - It's a problem. - It's a barbecue, even. - No, you want it for me.

- It's like a job, a kill-a-lation. - The fun of the meat. - Don't take that from me. (laughing) - In fact, even though McNamara routinely try putting the blame on other people.

- They've did it. (laughing) - I'm just gonna steal. - Steve did it. - Yeah, when Morris asked him, like, "Who has the responsibility in Vietnam?"

He's like, "The president, you would be hard press "to find a person in the United States government "who would bear more responsibility "for the chaos, the death, and the cruelty "committed by the soldiers of the United States military

"during Vietnam than Robert McNamara." Now every man in Kennedy's cabinet agreed that the United States needed to intervene in Vietnam

“and not just because they believed it was important”

to the Cold War. See again and again, "America's involvement in Vietnam "contented to revolve around elections." And Kennedy was a Democrat.

The last time a Democrat was an office that's Harry S. Truman in the '40s, China had gone communist. The Democrats, therefore, been blamed by Republicans like the infamous communist witch hunter, Joseph McCarthy,

for losing China to communism. As a result of the hangover from McCarthy, Kennedy's cabinet feared that if another Asian country went communist, the Republicans could use that issue to win the 1964 presidential election.

Remember, Nixon is lurking in the corner

Vietnam, therefore, became a source of anxiety for Kennedy due to how it might affect his electability. - Okay, I'm just gonna be completely ignorant and just put out the question, why didn't we just corporate bomb Moscow?

Like, if we wanted to fight, right? Like, just I know it's because that nuclear,

that if we didn't first, right?

Like, let's see what Patton wanted to do, but right after we'll work too, I'm just saying, like if we really wanted it, we really were so worried about the communist threat from coming inside of Soviet Union.

“Why didn't we attempt to just fucking flatten that one?”

- There were a lot of people who wanted to, but a lot of the people in the American government decided it's not a good idea. - It's because they didn't wanna pick up, they didn't wanna pick a fight with somebody their own size.

- Well, they didn't wanna pick a fight with Soviet. I mean, they had already seen how the Germans have been absolutely fucking decimated by going into Russia. - True, but we don't have to do it from here. - But at that point, we also didn't really have a reason for it.

- Of course, but except for the fact that we're fighting them by proxy and all these other places to stop the flow of communism, but we don't wanna, we're also fucking tired, man. - I didn't, I just died, we're fucking barely eaten bread,

we're just getting our money back. I don't know, but they were already revving up the next war. They're already doing it. The cold war was already going. - And we did just go in the career, right?

- Yeah, it was already going. - And we wouldn't agree in 50, or 50, 51. - So it's just 4 years after. - This is like, SideStore's [email protected]. - That's just like one of those, I can answer for you.

- Yeah, yeah.

“- We just, we didn't have a good enough reason”

at that point and by the time there was a, according to quote, "good enough" reason, they had nooks, and by the time they had nooks, it's an absolute stalemate. It's mutually assured destruction.

Nobody wants to fuck with nuclear war at all. - Yeah, I guess, yeah. - Yeah, that's right. That's it. - You're right.

- But soon after Kennedy took office, the Soviet Union would make moves that would put Kennedy an even more of a bind when it came to the communist issue,

although Kennedy would admittedly make the first move.

In April of 1961, the CIA attempted to overthrow the Soviet-backed Cuban communist leader, Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs invasion. This attempt at regime change in Cuba had utterly failed and it had been a massive worldwide embarrassment

for Kennedy. - Your father was there. - Really? - My grandfather's right. - Petty.

- Yeah. - My grandfather was there. - You talked about it. - Pepsi and Cuba?

“- Pepsi helped fund the Bay of Pigs invasion.”

- Ah! - Yeah, they were part of the private corporation, which was John F. Kennedy wouldn't allow to have it be official. So they got money from all these private corporations,

which said it's standard. (laughing) Gay then invaded Bay of Pigs in their own and got their asses handed to them and it went extremely poorly.

And yeah. - My grandfather said it was a mistake. - Yeah, but he also worked for the soda. - Yeah, yeah, I mean, and it wasn't necessarily like American troops that had tried invading,

we were backing Cubans. - We were trying to, being a go-on regime change and all that. - Yeah, we were doing all things. - Then you had the Cuban missile crisis

in October of 1962, in which the USSR snuck nuclear warheads into Cuba just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. This was seen as another failure on JFK's part in the fight against the Communists.

But concerning the Cuban missile crisis, you really can't overstate how badly this entire thing frightened America. Imagine this. 13 day straight, everyone in America

living under the threat, the Russians might launch nuclear missiles into America at any moment.

On the upside, at best, 90 million Americans

were estimated to be killed in just the initial attack if the Russians decided to fire missiles from Cuba and the entire world would probably end up in nuclear winter and the following nuclear exchange. Now, Kennedy managed a peaceful resolution

after 13 days, because he thankfully listened to the people who were arguing against over military action. There were plenty of people who were saying, like, "Sin the missiles, let's take our fucking chances." But that fear towards communist

that had been building since 1945 had settled into the bones of the American people. For many, this brought home the reality that the Cold War against Communism could easily become existential at any moment.

And that fear spread to include any battle anywhere on the globe where Communism might prevail. Vietnam was, of course, on the top of the list, as far as where this battle was already happening. - And we know that there was an entire Cold War pop culture

movement that came out of this paranoia. Like, you know, all of 1950s horror was based on this. And like, the big spiders and all that show. - Oh, this kind of atomic monsters. - We were afraid of this and this created paranoia.

So it was great for movies. - It was, it was faster than it was. - Yeah. - I love the purge.

- I love the purge. (laughing) - I'm your great.

“- Now, events kept unfolding in Southeast Asia”

that continued to make Kennedy nervous. A smaller conflict broke out within the borders of Vietnam's neighbor, Laos. And Laosian communists supported by North Vietnamese communists were coming close to taking Laos over.

So, after Cuba and Laos, Kennedy told his staff that there were only so many concessions that his administration could make to the communists in one year and survive politically. Kennedy could not, therefore, have another defeat in Vietnam.

- Is it a true that JFK sort of invented that they had that like, they were the ones that put in the phone that goes directly to the Cremlin and that he was talking with the red line. - Yes, he was like talking with them directly.

It was not like a whole thing where they sat and had personal conversations.

It was the first time anybody ever spoke to them about

the like directly is like, like, that was kind of, I don't, I'm just that asking. - That may have been after the Cuban Missile Crisis 'cause I know during the Cuban Missile Crisis it was all telegrams.

- That's what it was telegrams. - Yeah, it was telegrams. But yeah, the hotline may have been installed afterwards. - So, all right, hypothetical. We do nothing.

North Vietnam takes South Vietnam, they become communist. What really happens? - Nothing. - Nothing, right? - They just do their thing over there

and they wouldn't even wear a thing over here. - And to be frank, they probably wouldn't have been necessarily communist either. They would have probably had a Vietnamese forward state like nation state that would have probably

have had communism involved in it. But very much so could have not have been. It could have just been a any form of social discovery. There's so many ways to do what happens with various political ideologies.

It doesn't always have to turn to the Soviet Union

or China, like it could have been whatever. - Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of shit that had, like after Vietnam, after we had our Vietnam, Vietnam, then had what's called Vietnam's Vietnam,

“where they tried going into, I think Cambodia”

and fucked up as well, and they got fucked up very badly. And I think there was a small world with China. - Yeah, it's just jump, it's more, it's the 20th century marching on, it's impossible to really know what it happened. - Of course.

- But the domino theory was never going to happen. - It just wasn't reasonable. - Now JFK quickly found a nice clean term for increasing America's involvement in Vietnam. This first of many euphemisms concerning Vietnam

was called "Limited War" and in the spring of 1961, Kennedy widened America's involvement in Vietnam using this term. He sent more financial support, more weapons,

and more advisors, all while giving the operation

hilariously homoerotic title. They called it "Operation B-Fop." - B-Fop. - Project B-Fop, oh no, we're giving me my B-Fop. - Project B-Fop coming soon.

- This, and me, oh, give me my project B-Fop. - Ah, that's what I'm like. - Project B-Fop. - You can see it in him saying, be like, "That's right, get it, nah, we're going into Vietnam."

- B-Fop, B-Fop, B-Fop. - And so by the end of 1962, over 9,000 American military advisors were present on the ground of Vietnam. A lot of these guys were CIA, and the only job test of these advisors was the training

of the South Vietnamese Army, the Arvin, on how best to fight and kill the Vietnam. JFK also proved the use of chemical weapons, which began America's application of the infamous defolient known as Agent Orange.

See, the jungles of Vietnam present in a challenge because the Vietnam could easily disappear into the foliage. So the bright idea of America had was this.

“What if we used science to make the jungle disappear?”

- He can't even see in there. We're going to get rid of the leaves. (laughing) You know, he's going to go, maybe he leaves clearing this. Look how good we did in the desert in Morocco.

It's so easy to see there, everything's wrong. It's nice, you wear white, you stick out. Oh, it's nice, it's easy to do. (laughing) - The American Plains began spreading this highly

constant chemical known as Agent Orange, and it was called Agent Orange because the barrels that came in had these big orange stripes on them. They started spreading this across all of Vietnam by air. Side effects to Agent Orange included,

but we're not limited to a wide array of cancers, Parkinson's disease massive birth defects that lasted generations, and of course, mass death. It's estimated that hundreds of thousands died from Agent Orange exposure alone.

- My uncle got hit with Agent Orange and it's why all of my cousins are mentally handicapped. - Yep, my uncle got it and he currently has Parkinson's. - Yep, that Parkinson's is that that's one of the main side effects of Agent Orange.

Just kind of flips the switch. - But he was too proud to take the benefits. (laughing) - That's smart at him. (laughing) - And Agent Orange was of course in addition

to the introduction of Naepalm in 1963.

any ground troops there.

Over the next 10 years, Naepalm dropped from American Plains

would kill thousands upon thousands of Vietnamese, both civilians and combatants and fires that were said to have burned hotter than the flames of hell itself. - So obviously, and they know that, for fact, 'cause they've all been to hell.

(laughing) - They've all been to hell, but yeah. But obviously, they didn't work, right? Like if it's Agent Orange's job was to eliminate the forest, we fought in the forest the entire fucking time.

So it didn't destroy anything. - That was just used bleach. - It destroyed some but not anywhere near enough for to actually make a difference. - So it's also was so toxic.

I think that's a part of it.

“I think what we're seeing is they're like,”

this is great, we'll do this. This is all gonna be a lick of this split. I still feel like there's this prevailing idea that's gonna come up, which is, this is gonna be easy. - They're all, they're not gonna be,

so I think when they started with the Agent Orange, they had to do it in limited sections because of how extremely toxic they knew it was, so they're own people. So they had to put it in places

where the people gonna have access to it afterwards, that they were farther and off of it. So it had to be very carefully, quote unquote, carefully spread, but it still spreads. So it's very hard to make it direct.

So you can see why they did it in little, they tried to do it in chunks, being like, they're gonna be so scared by us doing this. They're all just gonna give up. - Another river, like Vietnam is relatively large.

When you think like it's twice the size of Florida, and that's a lot of fucking land. - Okay, yeah, I'm sure you've driven from the bottom of Florida to the top. - 10 hours, yeah.

- Also, it's kind of crazy.

“We know what we know is that most of their warfare”

since the French days was underground, and they have all these underground tunnels and shit. So when they see the planes come, everybody's high, they just, they knew where to go. - Yeah, just immediately going on to ground.

- It's chemical warfare. - Yes, yeah. - And was that not, this is limited war? - Is it okay? - It was not illegal by the Geneva before?

- No, no, no. - Did you even convince you was an, an effect, but. - Yes, it's limited. - Whatever. - All right, limited.

You don't understand it, it's limited. It's also, it's like a sale. It's like a diet war. - So we could call John F. Kennedy a war criminal. - Yo, yeah.

- Yeah, definitely. - I did, I did it in Dallas. (laughing) - I do need one. - Well, I mean, yeah, I think with Agent Orange,

they got around it by saying like, well, it's not technically a chemical weapon. It's a defolian. It's not, we're not trying to kill people using this. We're just trying to kill the jungle

so we can find the people and shoot them as, by the, and that will be fine with the Geneva convention.

“But I think, I believe that's how we got around it.”

Still think they should have used bleach. (laughing) - Yeah, it makes you a fucking monster. And you and Robert McNamara would have been best friends. (laughing)

- The JFK was confident that his limited war approach was gonna give South Vietnam and the orphan, everything they needed to defeat the Vietnam. He even told Secretary Defense, Robert McNamara, to begin preparation for total American withdrawal

from Vietnam by the end of 1963. But as it would go again and again, the reality on the ground and Vietnam did not match the optimism of the White House. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was operating at full capacity

by 1962 and North Vietnam had managed to send 10,000 via Kong along with plenty of heavy artillery provided by the Soviets and the Chinese. And all this was inch by inch through the jungle. America had also been betting that the massive amount

of helicopters given to the South Vietnamese were gonna make a big difference

'cause Vietnam was the first war

where helicopters were widely used. But while the helicopters had been effective at first, the Viet Kong discovered how to take helicopters down by 1963 using a tactic that involved firing machine guns from fortified foxholes in the tree line.

- Oh, it is shoot 'em. - Yeah, yeah. (laughing) - There you go. - You gotta figure out how to shoot 'em.

And it took 'em like two years to really get it down. But finally, they just discovered like, "They got it down before the war started." - Yeah, yeah, they got it down. But yeah, in fact, like one of the first big losses

of American life were when the Vietnam figured out how to take down helicopters. - Yeah. - They didn't even have an air force, right? - No, no.

- No, no. - Fucking crazy. - None at all. - They had a lot of Soviet and Chinese made anti artillery craft. But with the helicopters, they didn't need that shit. They used machine guns and automatic rifles.

'Cause they figured out that if you fire ahead of the helicopters, they're gonna fly right into the fucking bullets and they're gonna go down. - Yeah, damn arena do that, you throw it a little bit ahead to get there.

- Yeah, also the Vietnam, the Danerino, the revolutionary forces.

And we're finally here. - So, even though we have this incredible new military technology, that advantage is already lost by the time. - Yeah, did. - Well, what it meant is that we could get people out

And we could get people to medical facilities really fast.

But that's defensive. Offensively, you know, helicopters were not great for anything except the killing civilians. We'll get to that here in a bit. Furthermore, American military advisors simply couldn't turn

the armed forces into a competent military capable of fighting an enemy as dedicated as the Vietnam.

“Because if you remember, South Vietnam was essentially”

a corrupt dictatorship, the Vietnam, therefore, began winning major victories in the South. And the make matters worse, the South Vietnamese government was edging closer to collapse because of the actions of its highly incompetent leader, Nodin Ziem,

who had changed his title from Prime Minister to President Ziem. Now, I assure you that all of this is very important because all of it leads to America eventually saying, "Fuck it, we'll just do it ourselves." See, as I said last episode,

President Ziem was Catholic, but Vietnam was only 10% Catholic

because being Catholic meant that you were automatically linked

to the old days of the French occupation. Yeah, sounds like something he could have kept to his fucking self. Well, it's a very, it was a saddest thing. I know, like if you're, if you're connected to whites. Yeah, if you're Catholic, then you're at the top of the heap.

You still think, I'm like, the French are still around. Yeah, I'm sure Kennedy loved it. The other 90% of the country was Buddhist. And Ziem began cracking down on Buddhists in May of 1963.

For reasons that are still kind of like, I can't even really understand why he chose to pick this fight. I think it's just because he wanted to. Yeah, he's a dictator. He's just another piece of shit in a long line

and long chain of pieces of shit. Well, that month, President Ziem ordered South Vietnamese troops to stop a Buddhist celebration in the South Vietnamese city of way.

And after the situation escalated,

often troops open fire and through grenades at their fellow Vietnamese. By the end of it, South Vietnamese forces had killed nine civilians, including two children who had been crushed under the wheels of armored vehicles

provided by the Americans. In protest of this slaughter, a Vietnamese monk named Tick Kong Duke descended from the mountains of Vietnam after three years in isolation. He made his way to the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon

and sat down in the middle of a busy intersection on June 11, 1963. After covering himself in gasoline from the five gallon tank, he'd brought with him. He chanted a prayer to Buddha.

And after his last words were said, the monk let him match, dropped it on his robes, and engulfed himself in flames. Oh, fuck! (laughing)

This is the famous one, yes. Yeah, Duke sat there unmoving as he quickly burned to death. All while his fellow Buddhist monks yelled two sentences into a microphone in both Vietnamese and English. They wanted everybody to know what this was about.

They said, over and over again, a Buddhist priest burned himself to death, a Buddhist priest becomes a martyr. The burning monk, as he's come to be known, was photographed by an American journalist

in that picture, which our generation knows best as the cover, Rage Against the Machine's debut album, introduced the world to what was happening in Vietnam by the early 1960s. Now, allegedly, when the picture reached the desk

of John F. Kennedy, he reacted by yelling, quote, "Jesus Christ!" (laughing) Oh God, did we do this? Was this some kind of horrible accident?

Who did this? Is this hair? Is he outside? Oh, he's not Catholic, okay. Oh, that's fine.

“Oh, well, did somebody go and give him his last rights?”

Oh, no, no, he's going to hell. Yeah, and a few years later, an American Quaker would do this same thing outside the offices of Robert McNamara. He walked outside the Pentagon.

- There's a cover himself. - I'm just gonna do it myself, Nick Clos. - There's his clothes, what would you put in the clothes? What'd you go to talk, and it's nice? Hey, what are you doing this?

Well, it's happening now, still. - Yeah, now President Ziam was unmoved by the priest protest as was his family. Ziam's family still had quite a bit of friendship, and they saw themselves as living above the rest of Vietnam.

- That's not a good idea. - No, President Ziam's sister-in-law was a particular piece of work who had a special talent for making bad situations worse. She could not keep her fucking mouth shut,

and she thought she was very funny. The sister-in-law who had the villainous name of Madame New gave an interview soon after the burning monk incident, in which she said she wanted more monks

to set themselves on fire, joking that she would quote, "Clap hands at seeing another barbecue show." That's a direct quote.

“- And honestly, it's technically called a hobochi.”

(laughing) - And you might need to go over it. - I believe it's centered in Japan. (laughing) - So, her statements would only make the South Vietnamese

even anger than they already were at President Ziam's administration. - It's the gluttony cake. - Yeah, more monks set themselves on fire throughout the summer of 1963,

So the JFK administration made a fatal mistake,

“and it stopped by some that this mistake”

was what led America to wider involvement in Vietnam. America ended up supporting a military coup involving an arvin general. There's a lot of confusion and a lot of ins and outs that lead to that point, but in the end, we supported it.

And this general would become merely the first

in a long line of military leaders who would try and fail to control South Vietnam over the next 12 years. While, of course, they also had to defeat the North Vietnamese at the same time.

- I really feel like they're doing too much. - Yeah, they got a lot of their plates here. - In the middle of a war, you don't wanna overthrow your own government. - It's just so hard to do.

It's so hard to be overthrow your own government while trying to set up your own fucking war base within the place in which you're trying to get rid of the local government and then also fight the other half of the country.

- Yeah, it happens a lot. With the assistance of the CIA, General Duang Van Min launched a coup that caught President Ziem and his brother as they tried escaping Saigon via an underground tunnel.

Both men were executed. And while President Ziem was a son of a bitch, there was at the very least a consistency in having him in charge. And so with the death of President Ziem

and the first of many military coups to come,

the Republic of South Vietnam lost any chance it had for stable leadership during its short tragic life. And the Americans came to believe more and more that it was gonna fall on them to write the ship. - We're just leaving the ship alone.

“- Yeah, they just go back home and say these guys, this guy's a sucks. Yeah, this really fucking sucks. Why don't we go home? Didn't that exact thing happen like over and over again? Like just right within a year?”

- Many, many times. Yeah, this is just one general kept replacing another, kept replacing another. And every general that came in charge, the one thing they all shared is that they knew they had America by the shortened Carlies. We didn't tell them what to do. They told us what to do. Oh yeah, they were gangsters. Yeah. Now the chaos in South Vietnam, along with the crackdown on Buddhists, throughout 1963, was nothing but good news for Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese.

They recruited even more people in the south to their side. In the increased support caused the Vietnam to become even more aggressive. Ironically, considering America's fears, the Soviet Union was actually advising North Vietnam to slow things down, pull back on the attacks, you're getting too aggressive. But the leadership in the North became more and more convinced that they could handle anything the Americans threw their way. And this is one of those things that points me towards the idea that they would not have been so easily just a communist outpost.

You know, like it would not have been all big, everybody thought that they were just going to take over this area and control it.

And I think that they were all like no. No, no. The Vietnamese always did whatever they wanted to do.

Yeah. And the Chinese were also well aware. It's like, you don't fuck with the Vietnamese. Like, you don't need to get involved in that. Yeah, you guys keep showing up. They keep picking your asses. Yeah. But it's at this point that things really started fucking up in more ways than we can count. Because on November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Now some believe that JFK had some grand plan when it came to Vietnam that he was keeping to himself.

But the fact that he thought that this whole thing was going to be wrapped up by the end of 1963. That shows that he was just as arrogant and ignorant as everyone else when it came to Vietnam. It is entirely possible that Kennedy would have made the exact same decisions that his successor made. Because when President Lyndon Baines Johnson took his oath of office on Air Force One with Kennedy's body, Rodding in the cargo hold, LBJ kept Kennedy's cabinet, and LBJ's foreign policy was built by Kennedy's men.

I now understand that JFK might have been a bit of a no-bama. Yes. He was an ineffective man. What are you saying that we're running on Vibes? Running on Vibes by President.

“He's a Vibes president. And that I think that he was in way over his head.”

And it sounded like, yeah, I just think, I think, to be honest, whatever happened in Vietnam was going to happen under a John F. Get in the second term. Unless he, oh, I guess I don't know what he'd have to what would have to happen. I mean, he got shot in the head in November 22nd. He thought the whole war was going to be over by the end of the year. That's five weeks. But it's very stupid. They were saying it. Knowing full well, they were not getting out of there.

Well, he also, he had said that before President Ziem was, uh, a set was executed. Oh, uh, like, because that's it. They were kind of looking at the Ziem as a minister. He's like, okay, I think that maybe they can get this gone. But then after after the coup, like that changed everything. And Kennedy was kind of in the middle of dealing with the coup and dealing with the consequences of that and trying to figure out what to do next

he would have told his cabinet. Probably. Yeah, would have tried to enact it.

“Most likely. Maybe. Yeah. I don't think he had a plan. I think they were just trying to see”

how far they could go. Yeah. But now we come to Lyndon Baines, Johnson. Oh, Lyndon Baines, Johnson. Now my hot take in this series is that while Ho Chi Minh might be one of the most misunderstood characters at the 20th century, LBJ might have been even more misunderstood. And he was certainly a more tragic figure. See, Lyndon Baines, Johnson was an incredibly complicated individual as many

Texans are want to be. We're a highly complicated people. He's an interesting man. Very interesting man. LBJ is he's often called was a lifelong Democrat who'd been an

accolite of Franklin Roosevelt. LBJ greatly believed in the new deal that Roosevelt had created

to pull America out of the Great Depression. And Roosevelt encountered on LBJ when Johnson was a representative to whip votes for new deal policies. LBJ actually believed that the new deal hadn't gone far enough. And his main goals throughout his political life were to eliminate poverty in America completely while introducing education, healthcare, and civil rights for all. And he truly believed that it could be done. Actually, I get kind of chills thinking about it.

He legitimately believed in the idea that America was supposed to stand for. We are the most educated. There is no hungry person here. Yep. Everybody, they are, you are taken care of. The idea that you come to America to be safe enough to live your dreams and to give you

“it all to the American economy. That's what we were supposed to do. And he understood that.”

He understood that implicitly is that we are only as strong as our weakest link. Yep. He called his plan the Great Society and his goals with the type of things that even today's mainstream Democrats, it's shit that they now call like some of the Bill Mar would call dangerously socialist. Oh yeah, they're all figured out everybody is just, yeah, whatever. But all of it, however, came from a surprisingly Christian perspective. As opposed to the social

Darwinism that informs so many of our political decisions today, Johnson subscribed to a theory put forth by activist William Jennings Brian, who equated obscenely wealthy Americans to weeds in a garden. I'll be Jay believed that you do not let weeds triumph over roses in your garden simply because the weeds are stronger. You protect the roses from the weeds. And if you want a society made up of good people, kindness and equality, you gotta do some fucking

weeding in the garden every now and then. This was LBJ's dream to weed America and create a society where everyone no matter their race, creed, or social standing had a chance to live a happy and fruitful life. And make no mistake, LBJ made some great fucking strides in office. Silverites act in 1964 was LBJ. Great. He didn't compromise on it at all. He pulled every favor he had earned throughout his entire political career to pass the Silverites act intact.

The voting rights act, fair housing, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, all of this was LBJ, all of it, and he did it all in one term with a bonus year from finishing Kennedy's term. But while LBJ could have been remembered as a progressive hero and a progressive hero from fucking Texas no less, his entire presidency would come to be defined by the absolutely horrendous decisions he made in Vietnam. Because those decisions were

wrong every single fucking time. If there were all two, there were decisions were too hard and he didn't want to make them. No. His only concern was making America better. That was his that that's all he wanted to do. That's all he cared about. But I saw really his last interview did you watch? Do you ever see that? The one where he's got kind of long hair on his ranch down in Texas. Yes. And it's fascinating because he's talking about the Silver because I was like

his the thing he was most proud of. He been working on it for years. It was this whole thing of the Silver Rights Act and you see him munks all of these like there's a lot of people because he did the he famously said the thing if you make any white man feel higher than any black man you'll get their vote himself. Yeah, but he's talking about it in the Senate like you saw him like in a cynical way

“pointing it out. He wasn't saying like this is a strategy. That's what hard I think that quotes also”

been taken way out of context for a long time. Oh, yes. Because people say no he did he was saying that as a as a warning. Yeah. Yeah. He was an asshole. He was like it's like sometimes assholes could do good things. Well, do you see he was good at the job? There's a distinct difference. Well, I've had for the job. Yeah. He was good at domestic. He domestic side of it. He was

good at the job of president. He just was a very, very bad world leader. He was incredible American

politician, incredible. One of the best of the entire century. But by my reading, LBJs had a two towards Vietnam came down to three emotions. Anger, boredom, and fear. So even though LBJ said

while he did subscribe to the domino theory, he was still incredibly angry throughout his presidency

“that the war in Vietnam was constantly distracting from his ultimate goal of building his great”

society. He didn't decide to get us in Vietnam. He showed when LBJ showed up, Kennedy had already buried America in Vietnam shit up to our waist. Yeah. He just had to deal with it. And if he were to just left, they would have been called a coward. Oh, yes. They would have he would have raped him over the fucking goal. Actually, he said that he's like, if I leave, they're going to crucify me. But another reason why LBJ was angry about Vietnam was because

he found foreign policy extremely boring and difficult to grasp. When I watched the documentary, I forget his whole thing. Like, well, you have a girlfriend. You know how it is to chip, to chip

monks get into a bag of dice. You know what I mean, shit is all like, you just home spawned out. Of course,

well, you can get a car, no land, a blue J in or a car together. You could say it was a man.

“You shouldn't be dealing with Vietnam. No, not at all, but he also at times was incredibly insightful”

with that foreign wisdom where he would just hit my favorite quote from him where he'd say, "I ain't no daylight in Vietnam." And that was 100% true. But every time you see a picture of LBJ having a meeting about Vietnam with this cabinet, he is slumped down in his chair with his head leaning on the heel of his palm. He looks like a kid who's sitting through his least favorite class. Like, oh, when this is going to be, oh, the LBJ didn't understand

foreign cultures. He said that he was, quote, uncomfortable with the strangeness of foreign leaders. Say different things. They're due to the eight different things. I don't like what they eat. I don't, I don't have just the sticks. You just fit in the sticks. He is just a, oh, man, what a, what a fucking goof. Yeah. And as far as President Johnson was concerned, the happiness and comfort of the American people, that should have been his only focus. Yeah, he's a regular dubious.

Mm-hmm. But even though, well, okay. No, not, not, not, not even dubious. A pale, fucking entertainment. I'm just saying, of course. I'm just mostly just saying like, no, and no world should we have chosen. Dick Cheney should not have chosen George W. Bush to be the man who got 9/11. That's not how that should have went. Yeah. No, it's, I actually did kind of think about that last night when when I was writing this of like the comparison of LBJ to,

to W, but the thing is that W didn't do anything. He didn't do anything good at all. No, he said, he did. Oh, wait, the Patriot Act. It was great. Oh, yeah. Oh, well, that was Biden. Oh, God, I love him. God, I love him. God, I love him. He's going to, I'll live. Trump, bring it up. Well, even though LBJ was bored and angry about having a deal with the mess that Eisenhower started in Vietnam and Kennedy had made worse, he was also absolutely

fucking terrified of making the wrong decision at every turn. In his mind, he was damned if he involved America deeper in the conflict, but also damned if he did nothing. But in his words, he would rather do something than do nothing and a lot of people died as a result of that decision. Now, there were plenty of people in the government and in the press who were already saying in 1963 and 1964 that America should not be in Vietnam in any capacity. An LBJ had every chance

to listen to those voices, but in the interest of a smooth transition of power and in the interest of giving a sense of consistency to the public after JFK's death, LBJ kept most of Kennedy's cabinet when he took over as president. See, LBJ knew what he didn't know and he believed these men

“when they claimed erroneously that the only way to stop communism was to beat the communist in”

Vietnam. In fact, he thought Robert McNamara was the smartest man he had ever met and he started every day with a conversation between the two of them. And he also, he said that he thought the Robert McNamara could have been any member of any member of the cabinet. Yeah, well, that's the

thing. Secretary of Defense was the second position Kennedy offered him. He originally had offered

him secretary of treasury and McNamara is like, I don't really know much about fine. Oh, why would I want to do it with money? It's not something I understand. Give me the bomb. But when you listen to recorded conversations about Vietnam between LBJ and Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, it's hard to tell who was leading who. In some conversations, it sounds like McNamara was urging caution while LBJ was the one who was marching

America to war. In other conversations, it feels like the exact opposite is happening. The LBJ wants nothing to do with the conflict, but McNamara is giving a hundred reasons why America has to be in Vietnam. For what this tells me is that ultimately, these were just dudes in a room

entire war. Now, don't get me wrong. McNamara was an objectively brilliant man, but McNamara and LBJ were just making this shit up as they went along. See, men like McNamara could make good decisions concerning the Soviets during events like the Cuban Missile Crisis, because they could empathize with the Soviets. They could imagine what the Russians were thinking, and they could imagine what decisions the Russians might make, because we'd fought World War II together.

And we're cutting the same level that we're in, we're peers in this small,

whole hegemony. Exactly, we're, we're the two most powerful countries in the world.

Yeah, we care about money. Yeah. Exactly. But neither Johnson nor the men left over from Kennedy's cabinet knew anything useful about the Vietnamese as a people. This was 1963. They couldn't just fucking Google what do Vietnamese people believe. But then they get Google I'd saying, they, but they talked to a bird each morning that gave them the truth. Every day they have one kernel of corn to pass through their systems. If it passes whole, they know it will be a

good day for the fishermen. I'd like to shit on sticks. They like to do it. No, I also, but you know, it's pretty nice to see to me. People around, get a grab somebody. Yeah, but you're like, you go,

“bring me, bring me five of them, bring you five of these to me's memory. Yeah. That's what they needed”

to do. But we've barely been over there. We'd barely talked to any of them. They were a ghost of a

country to us, but this boy. And we're also incredibly arrogant. We're, we think it's the whole white man's burden thing. You know, where we think we're going to go. We're going to show the savages how it's done. No, no, no, I don't need to hear about what you have to say about your civilization and how you've been living here for thousands of years. Yeah, yeah, America's here. America's here. Get used to it. But it wasn't until the 1990s that Secretary of State McNamara

actually went to Vietnam and asked him, "Hey, what was all that really about?" It should just shut the fuck up. It was just stupid. It was just stupid. I wouldn't know. What would put the be in your body? Well, they told them. And McNamara finally realized like

holy shit. Vietnam was never a cold war conflict. Vietnam had always been a civil war and we had no

“business ever involving ourselves in this. I'll remember that for next time. But in the end,”

whether they knew what they were doing or not, these were the men who made the decisions that led directly to the massacre at me lie. And that's not even counting all the other countless atrocities they were committed by the United States military in Vietnam. There's lots of many, many, many, many lies. Now, I want to make it clear that while I do admire LBJ for his intentions to make America into a more equitable society, that does not remove his culpability

when it comes to Vietnam. That is actually just more of an understanding that we, as a country, we used to actually have a spectrum of political beliefs. Yes, we used to be, yeah, far different man from Texas could be a progressive, you know, and could be present. But like when Vietnam forces killed American advisors, LBJ immediately authorized retaliatory strikes. And in the end, it was this tit for tat that sunk LBJ deeper into the conflict at every level. What really

muddy the waters here is that as the years went by, the military routinely exaggerated its descriptions of American and South Vietnamese successes while also downplaying North Vietnam's victories. LBJ was therefore constantly misinformed on the reality of the war. And the worst the situation got on the ground, the more lies, the military told. God was my last question, how's the war going

“this morning? It's fine. Why's your voice going up when you say fine? Why's your voice going up?”

Why did it go up? I was so blind, so I go. I think you're lying. I think you're lying. I think you're lying, but even though the picture painted for LBJ was roseier than it really was, it was still bad. And LBJ would have to paint an even roseier picture to the American public. And LBJ therefore constantly lied to Americans about how all of this was going from beginning to end. And the boys will be home by Christmas. Yep, every fucking year. Yep. They do come on for Christmas, though.

Yep. And body bags. Yeah. Yeah. And various wheelchairs. I sometimes they come back just to sort of rest from the killing. And then they have to then they get to go back. Yeah, they got to come home and beat their family and harass their trailer parts. Yeah. And then they go up. They got to go home prove that they've been absolutely broken and can't live an actual society. And they have to go back

effectiveness of their advisers and Vietnam by the end of 1963. It's going really good. The head American diplomat in Saigon, David Ness, was desperately trying to tell LBJ that any American victory was already impossible. I'm going to shoot you straight here over Jason shit's not good.

“Shit's not fine. Okay. You know, fucking get me, dude. How you need a fucking gun?”

Fucking gun, get me, man. There he is. I'm here, bro. I'm fucking shutting it in my dick. I tell you what, I saw my luck to see. When this gave the reality, which is that the South Vietnamese population was exhausted after 20 years of civil conflict. The Viet Cong, meanwhile, were discipline, ideologically dedicated, connected to the desires of the peasant tree in the countryside, and absolutely fucking ruthless in their desire to win. In other words, we knew in 1963,

before we even had ground troops in Vietnam. To the South Vietnamese, we're going to lose, and there was nothing we could do to stop it. But LBJ's cabinet was still convinced that victory was possible in Vietnam. It's possible. We can try it. Don't even worry about it. We got this in the book. You know what I'm saying? Valentine's Day. We're going to nail it by Valentine's Day,

“but say Patrick's Day. Everybody's out. This is when, like, the optimism of America, the”

can-do attitude of America really works against us sometimes. It's toxic positivity. Yeah, it is. Because, I mean, by 1964, even Robert McNamara was seeing that any victory had a slim chance at best. But by then, the Johnson Administration was in too deep. And events were about to unfold that would give America the chance to commit even deeper. That's right, ladies and gentlemen. It's time to talk about the event that introduced the term "false flag" into the American

Lexicon. And for Ever Destroyed, America's trust in its government, it's time to talk about the Gulf of Tongka. Tongka is that it's the only natural water formation that has ever created Alex Drones. This is the one. This is, like, this is before we got into, yeah, after you arc and fucking walk, yes, we allowed, we allowed them to attack Pearl Harbor. No, we didn't.

This is the first real one. Such a great conspiracy theory. Yeah, well, it's not a conspiracy theory.

It is a conspiracy fact. Okay. Well, the Gulf of Tongka incident has a lot of ends and outs. But for the purposes of this series, what you really need to know is that this was the pretext America used to finally put ground troops in Vietnam as opposed to just sending advisors, weapons, and aid. By this point, America, we'd already been involved in Vietnam for a fucking decade. Jesus Christ. So in early August, 1964, an American destroyer named the USS Maddox

was patrolling the Gulf of Tongka and off the North Vietnamese coast when it came under attack from North Vietnamese torpedoes. American ship attacked by North Vietnamese. Yes, this attack did actually happen and it was said to be in retaliation to South Vietnamese, Arvin Commando raids on the northern coast. What a war. Yeah. But while the Maddox was unharmed, the attack put the American military on edge. Two days later, the USS Maddox and another destroyer called the USS Turner Joy

reported being targeted by North Vietnamese torpedoes again in the Gulf of Tongka. But patrolling

American pilots saw no signs of enemy craft. This second incident was determined a day later

to be either a mechanical or electrical malfunction with the USS Turner Joy's radar or it was the

“result of jumpy sonar operators seeing ghosts on their screens. Yeah. Yeah, and who fighters?”

Yeah, they'll bug us. But even those some military officials in Vietnam knew that no second attack had occurred other officials reported a president Johnson to up to nine North Vietnamese torpedoes have been fired on American destroyers. And this made shit real simple for LBJ. Yeah. Like, you know, I mean, it made this issue then like, okay. They've attacked. Yeah, the first attack, you know, that you don't really know what's going on. Who knows what's happening.

Second, it's back. But now there's there's two attacks. How many torpedoes?

Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. You sure say you wish went up again. Oh, I like that number better. You know I like it better. It's a good two numbers. Well, LBJ, therefore went on television to announce that North Vietnam had taken hostile actions against the United States. And hours later, a massive air strike was launched over North Vietnamese soil. But even though, by this point, it was known to everyone in power, including LBJ, that their head been no second strike. LBJ

that their head been two strikes. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, gay president Johnson,

“the ability to use all necessary measures to resist aggression in Vietnam. But we still never”

declared war. Well, that's the thing. privately, Johnson joked that the resolution was quote, "Lot grandma's not sure." It covers everything. Yep. But joking aside, the resolution had given President Johnson the ability to wage war in Vietnam without having to actually declare war. And thus, the Vietnam war, as we know it officially began. Yes, he sometimes though, Grandpa has grandma with the hose. And there you go. You can see Danny or anything.

But even though it was known, the second attack had never occurred and was reported by mistake.

Johnson felt that he was justified in continuing to sell this story, because had we not sent in ground troops, South Vietnam would have no doubt fallen to communist forces from the North within a year, maybe less. But there's one other factor we haven't mentioned here. 1964 was an election. Yeah. And Vietnam have become a wedge issue for the cold warriors. But after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August, LBJ, he was behind. He won the election by a

fucking landslide. How do we know that? And he had a 70% approval rating throughout 1965 as a nice little

“bonus. We just like feeling we're doing something. We really love it. I mean, that's what”

LBJ said, I want, I can either do nothing and do something. I'd rather do something. Yeah. And plus, Hubert Humphrey's a horrible name. Terrible name. I think it was Goldwater in this one. Oh, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah, Humphrey. Yeah, that's, that's a, that's a, that's a mix guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was his guy. Yeah. But before long, it would become common knowledge that the Gulf of Tonkin incident had ultimately been a false flag to justify ground troops in Vietnam

and help LBJ win the election. And that decision haunts America to this very day. As a joke, if you want to know why people are so quick to claim that 9/11 was a false flag and why they continue to argue that point to this day, the Gulf of Tonkin is the reason why.

Because they can always point and say, we did it once before and look what happens. Oh, yeah,

“because we really did it. And then, you know, we're looking at it now. We're looking at even,”

like, a little, mini one with the, what's going on with Fauci and shit like that. We're, they're literally just trying to kind of remake the rules. Now, shortly after the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was passed, Congress put the military draft back into action between 1964 and 1973. Two million young men would be drafted into the war in Vietnam. And 58,200 American soldiers would die in the process. Initially, President Johnson sent in 40,000 troops with the first 3,500

Marines arriving in March of 1965. By the end of the year, Johnson had sent 100,000 more the North Vietnamese, however, were unimpressed. They were confident that their superior morale,

patience, and tactical innovation would prevail no matter how many troops the American sent,

because they'd already gone through all of this with the French. And in this, they were absolutely correct. It's really hard to fight somebody that's in their backyard. Hell, you could argue that the French actually had an advantage because they'd already been there for fucking 70 years. Yeah, when they showed up, yeah, they still lost. I love it. I don't love, but I, when I'm listening to all the interviews on the Ken Burns documentary, they talk about

how the Americans were so easy to shoot because I helped all day work. Yeah, yeah, yeah, as I get so big. Yeah, you just fucking shoot him in the head. Yeah, because when you see the pictures of American soldiers next to Arvin soldiers, they're a foot taller. No, and it's why the Arvin soldiers work. It's why it works. No, not not not not be a combat. The Arvin soldiers did not work. No, they did not. I'm just saying like, they're because it took, you know,

it just works. It's fucking, they are built to fight there. Yes. Yeah, we're just too big. Way too big. Now, by March of 1965, LBJ authorized Operation Rolling Thunder, which was a bombing campaign against Northern soil that was supposed to take out the Ho Chi Minh Trail and destroy the morale of the North Vietnamese. But as we're currently discovering once more in Iran, bombing a population tends to raise the morale of the people who are being bombed. Yeah, they don't

like it. No, it unifies the population while pushing more people towards the fight. It creates more enemies who are resolved to get revenge. An Operation Rolling Thunder did exactly that. Furthermore, Operation Rolling Thunder did a little to stop the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was only growing more and more tendrils throughout the Vietnamese jungles. And it's neighboring countries as the years went by. It's really hard to bomb something.

knew like specific points where they knew like, okay, the Ho Chi Minh Chels here. It's here, it's here, but for the most part,

no, no fucking close. It's underground. Well, not the Ho Chi Minh Trail. That was underground. Yes, but it's like it's all like, oh, you can't see that shit. What's it? Yeah, it's a tree. It's under the British. There were, there were points where they had no choice, but to go out in the open, but for the most part, yeah, they were very good at hiding it. The rate of North Vietnamese infiltration into the South actually increased after Operation Rolling Thunder. In between 1965 and

1967, the number of Vietcong soldiers crossing the 17th parallel rose from 1500 a month to 6000 a month. This was in the face of constant bombing, disease, and injury as a fully gender neutral

Vietcong force moved everything from weapons to food to all artillery to wounded veterans,

sending them back up north. They moved all of us through the jungle inch by inch, just as they

“had done to defeat the French at DMBMFU a decade prior. Now, why they're doing that again?”

Yeah, we're doing it. Yeah, we're doing it. It's a dress up now. Why they're doing that? There's a sick of the cleverness. I hate the strangeness of the cleverness. I do love hearing that recording of LBJ, where he's talking about like a certain, I think it's like case on or something like that, and he keeps saying like, I don't want another goddamn DMBMFU. Yes, I want another DMBMFU. There's some about me. I'm Texas man yelling Vietnamese words.

Wow. Oh, yeah, because they just turned into Spanish. Yeah, you can't. I know you can't. I know you can't. I know you can't. I'm not going to. We're tail him. The president Johnson had a hard time accepting the fact that in his words, a damn little pissant country like Vietnorm could continue to hold out against the obviously superior military might of the United States. It became a matter of pride for Johnson, and if LBJ had a fatal failing,

it was pride. He took it personal. Yeah. So you remember what I said last episode about America swinging its big military and industrial complex dick? Well, LBJ had a legendary large penis all of his own, allegedly seven inches soft. And about as girthy as you could get without it turning into a freak show, he even had a nickname for it. He called it jumbo. Everyone called it jumbo. Yeah, he'd be like, you ever seen a set on like this? You ever seen a set like this? Yeah.

It's been so long. I've never had anybody do that to me. Seven inches soft is only good when

you're talking about yogurt. But let's just say Mrs. Johnson, she didn't complain. She was hollow, I believe. Yeah, she was a protracicadol. Oh, lady bird. For China like an Austrian. Yeah, I did. I have Mavajana has the wingspan of the American condol. He's the only president to actually have sex with the Oval Office.

“That's what's a lot on my own lady. I called her lady bird because her vagina was so”

hold out that you know, goes, oh, I thought it was like a colloquium. You know, let's see it or else. Oh, it was just one big hole. No, but you know, that's just talking about the first lady. Yeah, his dick was so big that when they would have cabinet meetings, his dick would show up and he'd still be sleeping. Yeah, you got it. That's how it's cool. That's how it's cool. He used to pick up spares for him in the White House bowling. Oh, wow.

Johnson was incredibly proud of jumbo and he had been in the habit of literally swinging his own dick in governmental business to get what he wanted for decades by the time he became president. If LBJ was urinating in a bathroom and a colleague came in, LBJ would sometimes turn to talk to his colleague with his penis still in his hand. LBJ would then begin a conversation holding and shaking jumbo to intimidate his colleague to make points. Let's go leash for a doll.

Once LBJ became, and that was when LBJ was a representative. Yeah, that's when he was just walking around. Yeah. Once he became president, he'd invite male aides to go skinny dipping at the White House pool, then spend the whole time making fun of the size of his aides' penises and comparison to his own just to intimidate and humiliate him. I don't think I've ever heard of a

“president going in the pool. Nope. I think it's the only one I know that he directly went in the pool.”

Skinny dip in in the White House pool. Yeah, disgusting. Yeah. You got to be careful when you say the words aides and penis is next to each other. No, no, okay. I understand. I understand. Well, Johnson was also notorious for urinating in front of people male and female just so they

remarked that LBJ's strong stream was splashing on a secret service agent's pants.

“Oh, that's what filled the pool. Yeah. Yeah. LBJ then turned to face the agent. Still pissing.”

Now fully pissing on his pants and said, quote, I know I am. That's my prerogative. Yeah. That was very common with LBJ. It's a very Texas. Yeah. The other trick was when he taught it on a shy and shoes form. Oh, man. Look at this week. He was lucky. When the most famous incident during a private conversation with reporters and off the record conversation about the Vietnam War, one reporter kept asking LBJ to fully explain why the US was in Vietnam. LBJ got so frustrated

that he stood up, unzipped his pants, pulled out his massive cock and said, quote, this is why

too big to fail. Yeah. That's fascinating. Like, that is literally the entire thing in one symbolic

movement. Yeah. You know, like, that is why we are doing this. My dick is so big that I can do anything. Yes. Yeah. And it's so it's not sexual. No. No. No. Not in any way. What's the word of sex? Yes. It's

“very old school man stuff. It's power. Yeah. That's what it is. It's dumb. It's like, he's very,”

he's acting very animalistic. He's very power. He's very, he knew how to do that because it's like, like, like, Putin does the thing where he like brings in the dogs. Sure. Right. Right. You know, like, that kind of thing where he's like, was he people and nervous around his dogs? So he brings it's like four huge dogs in the room. When he did that to Angela Merkel because he knew that she was terrified of dogs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She was slapping around. So before Nixon, he was the White House

Plummer. Maybe. Now, LBJ kept sending more and more troops into Vietnam. And by the end of 1965, it was obvious the American military superior firepower would win against the Vietcong in any conventional battle. Like, say, if you put the American military on one side at the end of one rice patty and, you know, the Vietcong on the other, you put them together. American military is going to win.

Yeah. We'll take them out in a second. Yeah. But, and just tell us where you are. Yeah. Tell us where

to be. We'll take our drums. We'll bring our flags. You just know where you gotta go. I will be right there. And you better get marked your words. 5 p.m. I got your ass in a slink. Now, do you have five stores in Vietnam or should be bring our own? Because I've been thinking about getting a new five, but like, someone a little bit of flair to it. How about not pack everything? We can get our pipes in Vietnam. Well, in December, Ho Chi Minh ordered a change to the way the war was fought.

From then on, the Vietcong would avoid battles with the Americans, and less the odds were clearly in favor of the North Vietnamese. This is right out of Chairman Mao's hand, Grill of Warfare Handbook. The North began to terrifying Grill of Warfare that would lead to me lie, focusing on hitting run attacks and ambushes every time the Americans left the cities. Just as the Viet men had done with the French. This, however, was not the only tactic the Vietcong used.

Once American soldiers were out in the shit, so to speak, they were faced with an endless barrage of the infamous booby traps in minefields that the Vietcong were such experts at laying and making. Every part of the countryside, from trails to rice paddies to abandoned buildings to village paths, were all mined in booby trap in increasingly dangerous and inventive ways. The aim of the mines and the booby traps were to wound, delay, and demoralize American troops. They also

served to channel the troops into vulnerable positions that were perfect for ambushes and hit run attacks. The North Vietnamese knew the territory, the Americans didn't, so hurting Americans into kill zones was very easy, and they were also the same kill zones they had heard of the French into. Yeah, and the traps, I mean, you're so tired, you're so beat up, you're fucking feet are bleeding, you're not paying attention every step you take, no matter if you see

someone get killed. Recently, you're just so beaten down, you're gonna fall for it. And this is technically at the beginning of the ground troop invasion. Very began. So when it begins, it's almost a novelty when you're like, oh, whoa, everything's bugged, everything's fucking booby trapped. And it starts as an almost an interesting, says one Tim O'Brien, he was talking about the, the term was the pressure of the mystery of violence. What's the thing he said? What's

“incredible, which is this this idea of everywhere you go, it as it went. That's why it was bad,”

because then you'd be sent on a purposeless looking fine mission. You'd hit three booby traps. You'd watch your guy fucking loses eyeballs. They're making shit out of fucking like just cartillary shells all giggled up and shit. There's blow like homemade stuff like really compiled it stuff. And then you come back thinking, did all that shit? You hit it already.

if you were a good soldier or not. It was just half of it was luck getting out of there. Yes.

“So much of it was luck. That's why they were real good at it. Yeah. Now the most infamous”

of the Vietcongs homemade traps was the Pungi steak. These were sharpened bamboo or wooden spikes hidden in pits and covered with brush. And these spikes were often smeared with feces to increase the likelihood in speed of infection. Provided by Edlarson from Tom's Rivers New Jersey. Yeah. And we just want to say thank you so much Ed. This is really helped the cause. You're sponsored by Midway Stakes. It's on it's Nazi side heads for the boardwalk.

Yeah, you can check it out there. It's halfway through right in the middle. They're amazing

great sauce to put on. It's all the Vietnambets that go their new way. But the goal here was not necessarily to kill the soldier as I said. Instead after a soldier fell into the pit set up by the Vietcong and he impaled himself on one of the sharpened Pungi steaks. The entire unit was slowed down while the victim was evacuated. You got to wait for a helicopter to come in, pick the guy up and take him out. Additionally, these traps were

specifically designed to maim the victim. While slowing down the unit was a huge plus, the traps were mostly psychological weapons designed to both increase fear in the field and increase opposition to the war at home. Because once a guy lost a leg to a mine,

he was sent back to America for everyone to see. Every vet I followed just it's really that it's

not death. They all talk about the haunting thing of seeing a buddy hold one of his limbs in his hands. Yeah, they all say like it's loss of limbs that seems to be the psychological pressure or because guess what it does. It means, yeah, you get out of Vietnam. Now you don't have any legs and you're in fucking, you got shipped off to America on a shitty GI bill and now you're fucked. So now like it's all you're you are kind of thinking of back home. And not only that, but when when you get back home,

nobody is talking to you. Nobody is acknowledging you. Like everyone is pretending. Everyone is pretending like the war in Vietnam isn't happening all while at the same time. Everything in America is happening is revolving around Vietnam. Well at the time too, every annoying person you hate is protesting the war and you went and thought the war and now everybody hates you and you are just sitting here like, well, I didn't even want to go. And then the government's not helping you have

your buddies are homeless. Yep. Yeah. Now to the American infantry on the ground, Vietnam was an

“unnerving experience to say the least. But set the best way you could put it unnerving. There were”

no battle lines. And the enemy was nearly ghost-like. The Vietcong didn't wear uniforms. So they could hide amongst the populace if they didn't simply disappear into a labyrinth of jungle trails and underground tunnels after a battle. But because the Vietcong could blend into the population, the American military solution was to drop leaflets into trouble spots that warn the people who inhabited South Vietnam's many villages that the Americans were coming. These leaflets told

the villagers in the South Vietnamese countryside that they could either leave and live in refugee camps or they could stay in their homes and die as supporters of the Vietcong. Problem was, a lot of the peasants couldn't read. So they had no idea what these pieces of paper even meant. The military brass, however, told the soldiers on the ground that once the leaflets were dropped, their responsibility had ended. The areas where the residents were supposedly warned,

they turned into so-called "free fire zones," where, by definition, any Vietnamese who remained

“had to be Vietcong or a Vietcong sympathizer. This is before passification, correct?”

No, passification. We're saying that was last. They were already doing this. Passification was the French, the Pacific Ocean. But then we tried to do something like that. We tried to add the Hamlet programs. Was that during this time period? That was before. Yeah, Hamlet, we'd already tried to Hamlet programs. I think Hamlets were under Kennedy. That was when we had tried, we had gone in to South Vietnamese villages and turned them into literal fortresses. We covered that like,

they were like old west forts covered, you know, disarrounded in moats and spiked fucking walls. And we'd semi-forced people to live within them in order to protect them. We forced them. Yeah. And so just to be clear, this is all happening in South Vietnam. All of its

happening and so everything happens in South Vietnam. Yeah. We never troops American troops never

once. So these people that were just slaughtering in their own homes are on our side. Technically, but like I said in the last episode, you know, when Vietnam split into, it's not like every communist just ran to the North and every capitalist ran to the South. No, we were trying to clear the south of the communist problem. Yeah. And the and the because of the whole team and trail, the North were just constantly popping up in the South. They were a constant, constant presence.

America's tactics resulted in the routine destruction of Vietnamese villages throughout South Vietnam. But contrary to what you might think, this destruction began happening with incredible speed and regularity following the arrival of American ground troops. This was not a slow build-up. This shit started happening almost immediately. For example, in July of 1965, about five months after our first ground troops arrived. American Marines entered a village where they were

followed by CBS correspondent, morally safer and a cameraman. Now, it's important to realize

that in Vietnam, journalists had access to missions on a level that had never been allowed before

“and has not been allowed since. I think in all, I think, 200 journalists died in Vietnam. As”

we'll soon see with me lie, soldiers rarely modified their behavior when journalists were around, because those soldiers, they were just doing what they had been ordered to do. So they didn't think they were doing anything wrong. So with one of the most famous journalists in America, watching and filming, Marines entered this village in July of 1965. Again, five months after ground troops showed up, with orders that if a single shot was fired by any Vietnamese,

the Marines were not only authorized, but were required to level the entire village.

Now, as far as I know, there were no shots fired, but the Marines nonetheless began systematically

torching every house in the village with zippos and flamethrowers. By the end of it, 150 homes were burned along with all the villagers' food. No weapons, nor any Vietcong were found, but one child and four women have been killed in the mayhem. Later, it was discovered that while the Marines were told this village was full of Vietcong sympathizers, the village had actually been targeted by the provinces South Vietnamese governor

for not paying enough taxes. This, once again, showed how the corruption in South Vietnam would further muddy the waters throughout this conflict and make victory fucking impossible.

Nobody's in charge, and nobody knows what's going on. It's just a media total confusion and

corruption. Yeah, immediately. And this fucking and morally safer. Have you ever seen his report? Yes. Or he's just like, I don't know what's going on here. He's trying to do it in the CBS Void. I don't know what's happening here in Vietnam, but it seems like all we're doing is burning down village villages back to you. I'm Leslie Slafer. The relations between American soldiers and South Vietnamese villagers continue to deteriorate

“along these lines with more and more civilians dying as a result. This again is all important,”

because it shows two things. One, Milai was not an isolated incident. And two, conditions on the ground were being set up for a large scale massacre from the very beginning of the groundwater. An August of 1965, for example, Marines entered a village after artillery had already blown it all to hell. These Marines had orders to kill everyone and leave nothing moving. So by the end of that operation, those Marines had murdered 25 villagers. Because again, they're told

everybody that would be here, would be quote unquote, "Viet Cong." Yeah, or a Viet Cong sympathizer. Before long, so many Vietnamese villagers were dying during combat operations, that the military had to come up with yet another euphemism. They referred to the growing number of dead-mounded villagers as collateral damage, which indicated that as far as the military were concerned, these dead bodies were acceptable losses. But the growing number of dead

villagers meant that more South Vietnamese were moving towards supporting the north. And it was long before American soldiers came to see any Vietnamese as the enemy, at least if they're out in the country. And that's if they were an old man, a woman, or a child. Well, that's because their army did not have those rules that we had. They didn't even have an age gap. Everybody could be.

“And that's what that was the main function. Viet Cong used it for fear-based, psychological warfare,”

like ideal. They used that. Yeah. And then we just started killing everybody, which then they slightly knew was just going to make people support them even more and get all kind of works together. Yeah. And they didn't really have uniforms, right? They didn't. They had most of them. I mean, that's why the officers did. But they call them like the man in the black pajamas. I mean, I mean, there were, I mean, that's the, yeah, there was a uniform.

Typically, there were four armies fighting in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. There was the Viet Cong, the Arvin, that's, you know, that's the Grilla forces in the South Vietnamese forces.

that would sometimes join the Viet Cong during operations. And of course, you had the entire American

“military. But the NVA were not the primary force, the Viet Cong were the primary force. And they”

did not were uniforms. And the Cambodians and the Loushians fighter, no. Not to my knowledge. I don't think, like, we definitely bombed Cambodians last quite a bit. But I don't think they came over. They may have been involved in operations. But actually, I don't, I couldn't tell you one way or another. But I do know a lot of them died in bombings. Now, it wasn't just the confusion on the ground that informed the attitude soldiers had towards the Vietnamese people. These soldiers

have been trained by design to see all Vietnamese as the enemy, at least Vietnamese who weren't in the Arvin or who didn't live in cities. There were a lot of guys who became extremely close to, you know, the Vietnamese soldiers that they fought with. But once you got out in the country side for most of them, all that's wrong. Yeah. You didn't walk out here with me here my anime. Exactly. Or a potential. Yeah. Now, seeing the Vietnamese as the enemy wasn't a hard

“cell. Because by this point in history, the American military had been working hard to dehumanize”

Asians since the 19th century. Long before we fought the Japanese and World War II, it didn't start there. The main slur used against the Vietnamese, the G-word, as it were, that had been used

by the military as far back as 1899. Soldiers had first used it to refer to Filipinos after the

United States occupied the Philippines. The G-word continued to be used throughout World War II and the Korean War to refer to basically any Asian person in American soldier might come across. But in Vietnam, the G-word became a slur to refer specifically to the Vietnamese, and it was used more than any other word to dehumanize the entire population. But it was not even close to the only word or term used. I'm actually, I'm not, the words stop proud,

but of the spectrum of racist term. All of the different slurs. There's so many colors of the wind of slurs that we used against the Vietnamese. So much so that I, um, because I'm reading me live for. Yeah. And we had to have our researchers like make a glossary for us. Yeah, yeah.

And so the thing is now after reading me live for, now that I keep seeing commercials for that

ever loving that torture, whatever that torture experience that that one guy from New Girl in, it's called the "Dink" that is being forced on me by Apple TV. There's a seriously a show called the "Dink." Yes, that is about pickleball. It's about pickleball. Pick it's the sound that quote unquote pickleball makes or whatever social term now. No, I'm sorry, guys. That's a racial slur. Yeah, it's like, I want you to just keep going on. It's like, that's my "Dink," you know,

like, like, that was a racial slur from Vietnam that comes from the phrase "Bu-Ku-Dinky Dow." But now it means he is very crazy. No, now it's, that's a Jake Johnson vehicle. Oh, yes. Good. Yes, I remember it like, I just keep shouting, I'm like, oh fuck, I was like, I was watching like the good place. I'm a huge fan of that show. I love it, but there's one character that uses "Dink" as an insult throughout. And every time they do him like, I don't think they know

the history and the people know history. It's one of those weird words. You don't understand

“has like a whole bunch of fucking bad shit attached. Oh, really bad shit. Yeah, if you want to hear”

all these slurs, of course, you can go to early episodes of roundtable, gentlemen. That's my mother. That's my mother who's still good. And also, if we could, maybe ask Jackie on her stream over on the jackie and the holden and remember some of some of the world's ways. No, the slurs were just a part of the dehumanization process. Really, everything started at boot camp. See, the purpose of military boot camp is to reduce recruits to a psychological state that's

something like childhood. They use shock, separation, and physical and psychological stress. This was even more important during the Vietnam War, because the majority of the soldiers on the front lines were drafted against their own wishes to fight for reasons that many of them simply did not understand. Oh, yeah. They did technically have a quote-unquote jungle school as well to also help them distance. Their fucking jungle school was it was a national forest in Kentucky,

but that was the best they could do. There's a jungle school. There's hot out here. There's hot. There's like the jungle, right? There's swaps of ways here. There we think that we sent them to a fucking national parking Kentucky. Also, with the swamp in Louisiana, it's not like Vietnam. - Yeah, it is very different. - It's worse.

(laughing) - Once a soldier is broken down into a clean slate, their reek program, using the same tactics that cults and to be fair communist reeducation camps used

The recruit is subjected to deep personalization, a lack of privacy for social relationships, sleep deprivation, disorientation, arbitrary rules, and strict punishment.

It's, I just described the first, you know, 45 minutes

of full metal jacket. - Yeah, mine is so party. - Yes, mine is. - Yeah.

“- That was 'cause he was bad at being the soldier, you know?”

- Man, I'll tell you what. Looking at all of that, the thing that gets me the most is the arbitrary rules. - Yeah, I fuck. - No, hey, arbitrary rules.

- It isn't. - You and I would not do well in the military. - And the military. - And I'm not an arbitrary rule follower. - It's just being a civil following mind.

- I would just, no, I would just, you got to put me in jail. - You got to put me in jail. I'm not going to be in jail. I'm not going to be in jail.

- I'm not going to be in jail. - I'm not going to be in jail in jail. - Oh, yeah, I'm not going to be in jail. - No. - Okay, I'm not going.

You could still draft me at 42.

I'm not going to run. I'm just going to lay down. I'm going to lay down until you pick me up and put me in a jail swell. - That's it.

That's what I'm going to do. You could all group beat me for a while. I'm just going to lay there.

“- If I were being truly, truly honest with myself,”

I would have gone to Vietnam, but I would have been able to game the system in a way that I did not have to fight in combat. - Of course, I'd be behind them again. - Radio.

- Right. - Yeah. - Ew, this is caught all of this. This is the shot now. - Yeah.

- I would have fucked up and done combat and quickly fucking regretted my decision. - Dan, well, you would have loved it. - From what I've heard Vietnam was a blast. (laughing)

- Well, these guys were indoctrinated in boot camp into a culture of violence and brutality, which above everything else emphasizes readiness to kill other humans without hesitation or guilt.

Now, all this is absolutely necessary when fighting another military. I'm not naive about human nature here. - It was not going away. - It was not going away.

- It was not going anywhere. But when you apply those principles to a civilian population as the American military did in Vietnam, it creates nothing but abject horror

for everyone involved. - And is it an against like all the rules? - Yes. - Yeah. - Well, I mean, that's debatable now

because the rules are constantly broken and no one's ever held accountable. - I think I'll guess, but that's also the rules in war. So this is an war. - Yeah, yeah, this is the act of liberation.

- But it's a conflict.

“But that's what they constantly refer to”

is a conflict police action was another war as rules. - Yes, this doesn't. - No, this is a conflict. Now, in preparation for sending soldiers to Vietnam, drill sergeants would tell recruits that the vehicles

were more animal than man and they should therefore be treated as if they were not human. But as the war went on and on and more Americans were killed, army GIs were told in boot camp that every Vietnamese person was a potential Vietnam.

Therefore, it was drilled into the heads of every grunt that the Vietnamese at large were not human. They were told that children could be expected to toss grenades or blow themselves up and suicide bombings, while the elderly were experts

building the booby traps that might take one year leg. So shoot whoever the fuck you want. - And they also, didn't they have a whole thing too about like they don't care for their children? - Yeah, they don't, they don't look at children the way

that we look at children, it's there. - They did everything they could to paint them as a completely alien race, a truly alien. - Yeah, no, I have to ask. Aren't some of those things slightly true?

- Slightly, but it's just in terms of how their military works, but it's more along the idea of it's getting you in the zone to kill somebody who doesn't look like their soldier. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, and today's a gap,

but some of that stuff might be slightly true. I mean, they were also told that all women were potential soldiers. That was actually true. - That is true. - At the point is, we shouldn't have been there

in the first fucking place.

- Absolutely. - There was no reason for us to fucking be there. - And they don't like you being there and they're gonna try to get you out of there. Every single, at every single level, everybody

in this conflict was felt stuck. Like, LBJ felt stuck. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do, I get there. And then down to the lowest, lowest grant

who gets out there is like, I don't know what to do. I don't know what, I'm supposed to kill these people, but I don't want to, but I have to, - Oh, and as it goes. - Everything's constantly confused.

- And as it goes, it only gets more fucking confusing. - Yeah, yeah, it gets worse and worse and worse. But that's the thing. All of us only added to the terror that these boys were feeling

as many of them were leaving not just the country for the first time. A lot of these guys were leaving a fucking hometowns for the first time. Some of these guys were leaving a fucking neighborhoods

for the first time. - What does that, the old term? I wanted to join the military because I love traveling the world and killing the people I made or like,

I wanna travel the world and, yeah, kill interesting people. - Yeah. - The metal jacket. Now, these recruits were told

or they were at least helping the Viet Kong.

And if you couldn't convert them, your only choice was to kill them. This was drilled into the head of each and every recruit before they even arrived in Vietnam. And while not every soldier took that chance,

a lot of them did. Now, this attitude towards the Vietnamese people at large was not just rooted in racism. It was also directly related to how the war itself was fought. See, like the French, the Americans could not take

and hold territory in Vietnam against the enemy. Aside from POWs like John McCain, who were shot down during bombing raids in North Vietnam, American troops did not once set foot across the 17th parallel into North Vietnam.

And, of course, 17th parallel came to be known as the demilitarized zone, the DMZ. - Oh, I thought the 17th parallel was LBJ's Kong.

“- No, no, no, that's what they called it in Vietnam.”

That was his nickname for there. - That is my mistake. - That is my mistake. - The demilitarized zones, what they called his pubic hair. - Yeah, that's where all the deals are made. - Once dead, American ground troops stayed in the south

to fight the Viet Kong soldiers who came down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But because the military couldn't take and hold territory, the administration needed some way to measure progress, and it was Robert McNamara

who came up with our metric for victory. See McNamara had been a corporate executive at Ford for years before he became Secretary of State. And he saw everything in terms of numbers. He's kind of the definition of two smart for your own good.

- Well, it's also definitely deep, because he was so smart, he thought that it was simple way to figure this out. - No. - McNamara declared that our metric for victory would be body counts.

And this metric was accepted by the military. How many of you, all we got to do to win is kill as many Viet Kong as possible. - You tried to money, ball it. - Yeah, exactly. - Yeah, exactly.

“- We got it, we got it, we got a good number breaking.”

- It's number crunching. - It's so much of it, it really is. It's number crunching in stats. It's all coming down to stats. They said that they produced so much paperwork

and reports on Vietnam every month that it would be impossible for anybody to not only read all of it, it would be impossible for anyone to draw any conclusions from it.

- Yeah, 'cause it's just facts about dead people. - Yeah, well, body counts soon morphed into kill ratios. And eventually, that was all that mattered in Vietnam. If a battalion killed 50 Viet Kong and only lost one man, that was a kill ratio of 50 to one.

And a good kill ratio could be rewarded with anything from a promotion to extra beer for the men back at camp. But because the rules of engagement were so lacks, officers on the ground began counting every Vietnamese body

as a Viet Kong soldier killed. See if a commander wanted to pad the numbers to make it look like his part of the war was going in the right direction.

There were always plenty of villagers

who could be killed and called Viet Kong after they were too dead to say otherwise. The officer could then report good news to their commander. That commander could then report good news to his superior. And that superior could then put all of that into a report

that was delivered to President Johnson as nothing, but good news all around. Number Sunchine have for America in Vietnam. - It just, this is what happens when we put a person that runs a business in charge of a government

that's supposed to take care of human beings. - Doesn't work. - Because it's so fucking stupid idea because it's not a direct fucking, it doesn't work. - It's not a correlation, it's not how it works.

- It's not the same, the same skills do not fucking apply. - No, because you're just killing more and more and more of them is just making more and more of them. - Yeah.

“- That's what they said what they were asking me”

talking about last time, where you kill one, you kill one Viet Kong, you kill one Viet Kong, you kill one civilian, you made 10 Viet Kong. - Yeah. - It's not, you're not counting windshield wipers.

- Yeah. - That's what he's good at. - Yeah, I let, of course, you know, windshield wipers becomes a racial term. - And if he's actually fucking against him,

he'll see a lot more dirty windshield wipers. - When you're skinny, you waste them. - And you're a rat tail.

- And the Viet Kong were always hard to find.

But American troops could always find Viet Amiz villagers. And once body counts became the metric of success, the Viet Amiz people were to put it simply utterly fucked. This, of course, was all while the administration went on and on about winning over the so-called

hearts and minds of the Viet Amiz people. That was ostensibly our other goal in the war, besides seeing how many bodies we could pile up. - You gotta blow up all the hearts and minds. (laughing)

- That's the idea. - Now, the commander of the military in South Vietnam

Westy. And he believed that superior American military power would lead to an inevitable crossover point where the north could no longer recruit enough Viet Kong to fight the Americans any longer.

He bought into the body count thing just as much as everybody else. - Essentially, they're gonna give up. - Yeah, they're gonna give up.

There's gonna be a, and he always had a crossover point's common.

And even sometimes we hit the crossover point. They never did, 'cause bodies didn't matter to the north Viet Amiz. The north Viet Amiz were prepared to spend every life they had in the pursuit of independence.

So in the end, the American military was playing an entirely different game than the Viet Kong. There's was a game, patience. While ours was a game of numbers.

“But to get those body counts that were so important”

to the administration, American commanders began ordering the infamous search and destroy missions throughout Vietnam's vast countryside. This, of course, had also already been attempted by the French with little to no success.

And during these search and destroy missions, American troops would be sent out to take a meaningless hill with the goal of killing as many Viet Kong as possible. That's where hamburger hill comes from. - Yeah.

- The joke in a Big Lebowski, you know? The boy that helped 365, you know, like that. That's the hills were all named by their elevation. So you know, that you have Hilt 432. Hilt 967, you know, and they would just send them.

There's Viet Kong go get them. And what's the hill was taken? Sometimes at the cost of dozens or even hundreds of American lives, the troops would sometimes hold it for hours before abandoning the site altogether.

The Viet Kong would then move back in and retake the hill. And this constant taking and losing of territory only served a further demoralized American troops who were becoming more and more frustrated with how this war was being fought.

There was some guys that would say like they would start to recognize places and like, we already took this. I lost my best friend taking this place. Why are we here again? - Yeah, they're doing war in the style of like

choco bow farming. (laughing) - Final famous, he said no. - It's this idea of like, you're just trying to like, ring up stats.

And these aren't fucking broccoli hair, call a duty boys yet. - Right, we're not there yet. I feel like we'll be able to get. - What do you mean? - The new broccoli boys with their call to duty brains.

- I have no idea what you're talking about. - Broccoli boys. - They're a little bit younger. They guys are gonna fight neuron. - Oh.

“- I think they're gonna have an easier time”

killing from afar, right? 'Cause they're gonna be able, they've been more like de-sensitized almost in a way, you know? Because they're used to harvesting stats and video games. - Yeah, it's not gonna work neuron either.

- No. - Didn't work and be at Noms. - No, what do you mean? - 'Cause I think Iran is far larger than Iran. - Wait, I think it's the big one.

I could have worked on it again. - Yeah. - Don't Iran's so scared of us. - Yeah. - Don't Iran's scared of us.

- We got 'em, we got 'em on the battlefield. - Oh, yeah, we do, yeah. - Both strates are closed down. - No. - Do you know that there was two?

- Oh, we should open the gaze. - Yeah. - We already have, they took over San Francisco. - Now, by the body count metrics, Americans were winning the game by 1967,

at least the game that they were playing. Since committing ground troops in 1965, the American military estimated that they had killed 179,000 communist troops, while the Vietcong had only killed 19,000 Americans, fantastic kill ratio, boy.

- For boy's sake. - That's amazing. - Wow. - Yeah, only 19,000 of us are dead. - No reason.

- Yeah. - It's only 19,000 dead, no. Oh man, don't even talk about the wounded. - Yeah. - That's only six, 9/11.

(laughing) - It's just a measuring it by now. - But by 1967,

they were 1.3 million communists in the South.

And their numbers were increasing every year. The South Vietnamese, meanwhile, were increasingly viewing all Americans, but the same distrust, the Americans were showing them. In other words, hearts and minds were not being won.

And many Vietnamese began to believe that America had simply arrived to replace the French's colonizers. These people didn't know what the fuck the cold war was. - We were!

- They just knew that they were more white people showing up with guns. - Yeah. - Killing them and telling them what to do. - If we quote one Vietnam,

we wouldn't have left either. - No. - We would have been there instead.

“- No, that's why in the Watchmen Universe,”

Vietnam becomes the 51st state. - Yes. - 'Cause it would have been. - So it was in this place of mutual distrust that the indiscriminate slaughter of Vietnamese women

and children became commonplace. Contrary to how the military likes to paint this situation in hindsight. If a soldier was killed or injured, their buddies would often,

but not always retaliate by killing civilians

by the dozens. One G.I. said that after you killed your first innocent civilian, you told yourself you were doing the right thing

Now, not every soldier murdered innocent civilians, but when you watch these guys tell their stories, so many of them have stories where they saw others do it.

Almost nobody says they never saw anybody do it.

Sometimes these guys even catch themselves right before they admit to killing civilians. And some of 'em will fully, we'll follow, we'll talk about it in detail in depth. Because you can tell,

I think their therapists had told them

“like you have to be honest with the world about what you did.”

- Yeah, they were guys that are legitimately or when they are still confessing. - Yeah. - Yeah, I mean, there's a reason it's in every one of the movies.

(laughing) - Well, it's just the truth. It's, we, we didn't do good over there, man. - No, no, no, we didn't. - No, I didn't.

- And you should have been in there, man. - Yeah, yeah, Ken Burns really does try really hard

to make this like an honorable thing,

but there's actually, there's very little honor. - I don't involve a G at none. - That don't see much. - Now, it was the war dragged on. The cruelty of American troops became more pronounced.

In one incident in June of 1967, 52 villagers were murdered, including one woman who was tied to an armored vehicle and was dragged around until she was dead. At that same village, a pregnant woman

had her belly split open and both she and the baby were left out in the open to slowly die. By October of 1967, there were some army companies who had come to specialize in cruelty towards the Vietnamese, like company B of the 35th Infantry.

That month, in October of '67, company B came upon an armed boy. In the lieutenant asked, who wants to kill him? Two men volunteered.

And after they kicked the boy in the stomach,

they unloaded a full magazine into the boy's body and then reported him as enemy KIA. The next day, that same company beat an old man until he collapsed and then they threw him off a cliff. But this was just the opening act for company B.

Those same men crushed people under the wheels of their armored vehicles and made regular practice of throwing grenades into bunkers, full of villagers. Once a gang of them cut off a mother's ear while their fellow soldiers grabbed the women's baby

threw it to the ground and stomped it to death. Multiple witnesses for all of us. Why did they let us there now? Vietnam?

“Yeah, why did they not kill us when we arrived now?”

We said, I'm sorry. Interesting question. I mean, it is a very interesting question, actually. Yeah, because Vietnamese do welcome Americans with open arms nowadays.

Because they know that I do think that they have the wisdom of being forced into a shitty situation many times. And I think that they understand that it was extremely complex and there were many crimes that were committed across the board.

And some of these do-- And I really do feel bad for a lot of the service men, US people, and stuff that were over there that didn't want to be involved in stuff like this. You didn't have a choice?

We're fucked. They were all everybody was fucked. So I feel like they understand implicitly that this was fucked. And that was everybody.

And that was also not the experience of every Vietnamese person. We were talking about me lie. We're at least up to me lie. So we're also talking about all the atrocities that led to this.

You were talking about the worst shit that happened. There were a lot of people who worked with the Americans throughout and then were eventually brought to America. And there were also people that came to see the Americans with a sort of like came to see American soldiers

with a certain respect, like the other Viet Kong soldiers. But there were also others that also just-- Let's put it in live. Like the people that really saw this shit they just didn't fucking live very long.

Yeah, we killed a lot of them. Yeah, we killed a lot of them. We killed a lot of them. But they were also living very difficult lives. There are peasants.

You know, those people don't live a long time. Yeah, we don't know how many people die after you burned down a village and leave. Even if you leave everyone alive. If you've got nothing to do, they've got nowhere to go.

They've got no more supplies. They've got no more tools. Like how do you fucking start over from scratch? What do no one's going to help you? But they also have more community there.

So I imagine they also then can go to places and people take care of them. I'm like the United States of America. We're pretty prickly to helping people outside of our home. Yeah.

But it was really rough in Vietnam. Like by 67, like there were hundreds of thousands of people South Vietnamese and refugee camps and these crowded horrible places. And it's not like the South Vietnamese treated their prisoners of war any better than the North Vietnamese treated their prisoners of war.

Like there was horror.

“Like I think what it comes down to is that there was so much horror all”

around that it sort of comes out in the wash. You know, like there's because for most Vietnamese at the end of the day,

tragedy of the war is that it was Vietnamese killing Vietnamese.

“Because for them, even with America involved, it was still a civil war.”

Yeah, that was still, that was the heart of it. That was the heart of it. That was the whole thing. And so, again, the people caught in the middle. And the people caught in the middle of every conflict.

And the Vietnam weren't no bunch of Wilton lilies. I've, you know, I mean, they did a lot of fucked up shit too. So that's, we're going to talk about the massacre of way. Next episode, they did their fair share. I'm sure that everyone was just kind of happy it was over.

Yeah, yeah. No, you just get fucking tired of watching death. I don't, but that's me. Yeah, well, that's our jobs. Yeah.

Speaking of which, eventually, American soldiers and officers began celebrating

and making games at a killing of Vietnamese civilians. Some would see who could kill the most people in the shortest amount of time. While others tested who could burn down the most houses. Sometimes, however, the torture would be practical. It was common practice to kidnap a woman and tie a rope around your neck and then force

her to walk ahead of the unit as a human booby trap detector. This happened over and over. And that's, now you've been mentioned, the tens of thousands of civilians who were killed by helicopter crews. You know, that joke and full metal jacket, you know, you don't got to lead them as much.

That guy existed in spades across Vietnam. Like they, they hunted people. The most egregious unit when it came to the torture of civilians, however, was part of the 101st Airborne. These guys were made up of the baddest of the bad.

These men frightened even the Viet Kong. They were called Tiger Force, and they were responsible for the murder of hundreds of villagers between May and November 1967. This group of 45 men have been sent out into the deepest Viet Kong territory to hunt the Viet Kong itself, but they soon turned their guns on the villagers.

These are the guys who made necklaces at a human ears. That 100% happened. Yeah. They also collected the scalps of Vietnamese civilians. Once they even decapitated a fucking baby.

But while there were investigations into the ears in particular, people didn't like the ears, no man from Tiger Force ever faced serious repercussions for his actions during this campaign.

“That's Robert Duval's crew from a Paclips town, right?”

101st Airborne. Yeah. But 100, but Tiger Force was just a part of 101st Airborne. But yeah. 101st was Robert Duval's crew.

Nice reference. Thanks. I really didn't get that back in.

I mean, you know, you always, I spent my whole life looking at him as a hero.

Yeah. You know, right? One of those weird things. There were soldiers who tried speaking up about all the horror that particularly the army was creating.

But the Marines did their fair share of horror as well. See, this is the problem is that it really did. This is where things will read the, all of the scenes start falling apart. Yeah. Because there really, there was some pushback.

It was just small and quiet and they fucked you up. Well, there was some pushback, but the pushback against the pushback was even large. Yes. It was common practice for units to attack and punish any GI who spoke out or reported a war crime. some of these guys were imprisoned, court martialned, and busted down and rank

all before they were sent back out into the jungle where they were ordered to kill civilians all over again. Others who reported war crimes had to transfer units after it dawned on them, but their fellow soldiers just might murder them for standing up against these atrocities. And it's more complex than we hate the Vietnamese or trying to kill the Vietnamese.

There's a complex fucked up thing in here where it's, if you tell me, what I've done is a crime, then what I've done is a crime, and I'm a criminal. Yeah, and I have to accept that. And I have to then think about that. I am, I hang my thread, killing people, I know I should not be killing, and I am forcing

now my throat. I'm doing this for a purpose, a bigger purpose. So you do in your nimbipin be a little violence and war, like shit, it makes me crazy. Yeah.

“So I can, that is, it's not correct, way to think, but that's what we're, there's”

an intervalidation thing here that's not see like where it is this concept of, it can't be wrong because we're doing it under the guise of the military. Yeah. And we know that Americans kill Americans over there, but there's no way to know exactly how many.

By your ups start accepting the push back to the violence and the ultra violence, they are then going to have to also start thinking about what we're doing here, and they're going to have to acknowledge it that we're doing it. Well, not just that, but they have to rethink how they're fighting the war, you know, the body count thing.

No, we actually fighting a war, or we just massacring a bunch of people and losing.

And that's the thing. It wasn't just the fellow grounds that these guys had to worry about. Soldiers also learned to not report war crimes for fear that it could be seen as disobedience towards a commanding officer, because this shit was being done on orders from above. When we get to me lie, you're going to see that it was the commanders who said, go in and

kill everyone. Well, I said last episode, the murder of civilians was not encouraged outright. There was plenty of training about how they were supposed to treat the Vietnamese.

But that training was ultimately lip service.

So a lot of guys said that they laughed. It's like the equivalent of what you call it sexual harassment training today. As the war dragged on, body counts became more important, not less, and especially as the war became more unpopular. The killing was ultimately incentivized, more and more, because as long as the body counts

were high in the kill ratios were going in the right direction, the American people could be told that the war was going well. They are so bought and sold, and this idea that they're just going to give up. Yeah.

“They're just going to give up, and you have to tell, and that's how you can take down”

to send and protest, so you're giving comfort to the enemy. You're giving aid to the enemy by opposing this war. It's going in the right direction. Look, look at the kill ratio. Look at how well we're doing.

You're fucking me up, man. You're, you hate how many people are dying, right? Look how many were killing. I'm looking at her. Oh, the faster we kill the most of them, we can stop this.

By the end of 1967, even Secretary of State Robert McNamara was realizing that we had made a massive fucking mistake, and ever poking our nose into Vietnam's business. That's on me. Let's just say I was the one that kicked this little little shindig off, so let's just maybe call it an annual.

In 1967, McNamara's Sinden LBJ memos recommending that we begin pulling out troops as soon as possible, because it is not going to happen.

Victory is never going to happen.

This would ultimately lead to McNamara's exit from the Johnson Administration in February of 1968, just a month before me lie. But the damage had already been done, and the machine that McNamara had built was already in a state of forward motion towards a large-scale massacre. I look at how him and Eisenhower, they always say there's another example of a guy just

“just so you know, this thing might be not going well, all right?”

He's see you later. All right, just want to let you know, Vietnam might have been my mistake. I'm going to go run the World Bank for 13 years. Yeah, it's got a gap. I'm just going to go make a great job.

Yeah. All right. See ya. Exciting actual Viet Kong soldiers, the North had up until this point been focusing solely on hit and run attacks to defeat the Americans little by little.

But in 1968, which is perhaps the most insane year in American history, the Viet Kong would attempt an offensive that would both surprise the military and make it impossible for the administration to lie about how well things were going for any longer. It would also directly lead to the Mealine massacre. It was called the "Tet Offensive" and that is where we will pick back up next week for part

three where we'll finally start talking about the specific soldiers who actually committed

the massacre at Mealine. So when we get introduced to Mad Dog Medina, Lieutenant William Callie and all the rest. All those fucking pieces of shit that are now thankfully dead. But this has really been great, Marcus. Thank you.

Very entertaining. Not depressing. Oh.

“I think this is a positive message to see that I think that now that we've we're learning”

the blessings of Vietnam. Definitely not about to commit the exact same mistake. No. No. No.

No. No. Because you said Robert McNamara was specifically brilliant and we don't have one of those. No. So it can't happen.

God knows. I don't think it can. But don't you fix it. Oh, don't. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's over there. Yeah.

Oh, you should go to Iran. I'm going to page your dot com slash slash podcast and the left. You can't pay to listen to this show. Add free. We also have our show movie stories over there.

You're going to see last stream in the left live, 5 p.m. PST every Tuesday. Vietnam is in my fucking head. That's right. Also, JK Ultra is over.

The stream is gone, but we're unloading all the merch. I'm wearing the shirt right now. Go on over to our website. We're going to discount on our JK Ultra merch fucking go pick it up, especially if you weren't able to come.

Just know that we're, if we don't sell all of them, we are going to drop them over South Vietnam. I'm going to get it out.

Have you fun? No. It would be great. They'll be great. And follow us.

They'll get it.

“Follow us on the socials at L.P. on the left and don't forget to go check us out on Netflix.”

If you'd like to watch your podcast.

Yeah, right there. Go watch it. Yeah. Oh, this Sunday, come on out to Dynasty typewriter to see Henry and I. I got my dead man tells some tales, a dark dive in the Disney history.

Are you curious who was dead at the parks ever? Come on down. We'll tell you.

“We got a bunch of bad helicopters in our show, too.”

Oh. That was great. You're great. I love helicopters. Yeah.

And you got to get out there and enjoy yourself.

Hey. Don't get drafted. No. Hellsame. How keen.

Shoot yourself in the foot. Be gay. That's the best part.

That's one slice of a hexa.

You're right. Gay makes you safe again.

“Actually, that's how Iggy Pop got out of the draft as Iggy went to the draft office.”

And he kept holding onto his dick and yon. They're trying to touch my dick. They're trying to touch my dick. And they said go home. That's your fine.

It's fucking crazy. A lot of those guys did that. [LAUGHTER]