There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk on the left. That's when the cannibalism started. Alright, let us know when we're ready. Can you put some just gunfire up there for us? Do you have any burning children? If you have constant fire fights over and over again, that would be great. In honor of our episode today, I didn't masturbate this morning. And that is what you can come to expect that height of intelligence. You can come to expect that throughout the rest of this series. Shit! How am I still inside, girl? Damn, I'm here. Charlie's everywhere, man! Charlie did treat you! That's so great as we're not on YouTube. I can just start the episode with a bunch of flocks. Yeah, you're really can, it's fantastic. I saw our little peeper sticking out of the elephant grass and I knew. I was in for you. No. And that's about guys and the left ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with Saigon Henry Zabrowski. Yeah, I'm going to try it. Guys, are you ready? It's time finally to see my brand new accent. Let's just say the last two weeks have really been spent that every single time my eyeballs are closed. I like just here, just. And you know what? I'm getting numb to it. It's kind of fun. It's what happens. It's just kind of fun to just be places like getting your prescription medication. The whole time I'm like staring at the woman, I'm not hearing her. And all I'm hearing is. And of course we also have Hanoi Adlarson. How you doing? I am annoying. That's right. You would be the height of humor. You would see such a disgusting lady boy. Oh my god. You as the Mata Hari, you as a fake Vietnamese. Hey there, fellas. How you doing? A little boy. Come on in. Sex with me. Showing duck. That's correct. I could see who's being like the most popular guy at the Hanoi Hilton. Oh my god. I would be a great mate or do over there. Yeah, honestly. I just feel like if you have any local restaurants you recommend or any place I could possibly go to. Oh my god. The reason I'm talking about all this is because today starts a four week long journey into the Bowls of the Vietnam War with a focus on the Meal Eye Massacre. Saigon. Shit. How long have I been here? Apparently it's not like the movies. Yeah. No. When you talk about Saigon it really helps when you take a sip at your ice coffee right after. This is my war. If only they had Cold brew. So in the morning of March 16, 1968, as the war in Vietnam continued to climb towards a bloody and savage apex, a force of about 100 American GIs stormed a village in South Vietnam expecting to fight one of the most dangerous North Vietnamese battalions in existence. Instead, these army soldiers found Vietnamese civilians, women, children, and old men, cooking breakfast in anticipation of the work day to come. It was simply another rural village trying to survive in the midst of a conflict that had been dragging on in one form or another for almost 25 years, first with the French and now with the Americans. But unlike so many other villages that were burned down throughout the Vietnam War and countless search and destroy missions, history would remember this one more than any of the others, because this one would be the site of the Meal Eye Massacre. So while the Americans had every opportunity to halt their offensive that day, they still attacked these civilians with all the bloodthirsty and brutality that should have been reserved for their enemy, the dreaded North Vietnamese force known as the "Viet Cong". By the end of it, more than 500 Vietnamese civilians have been murdered by American soldiers in ways that can only be described as "savage". And all of it had been done under orders from their captain, Ernest Mad Dog Medina. Captain Medina had told these soldiers to "kill everything that moved, everything that breathed, and his men followed those orders without question, although men might be an overstatement. These were boys, teenagers, doing what their commanders told them to do. Now this was not the only massacre of Vietnamese civilians to happen during the Vietnam War, far from it. Tragically, it wasn't even the only massacre to happen in Vietnam that fucking morning. But in the end, the Meal Eye Massacre became emblematic of everything that was wrong with the Vietnam War. You know, I see so many memes now that are like, "My boyfriend is obsessed with the Roman Empire." And you're like, "Even if there's people, we'll war two boys." Sure, yeah. We find it interesting. It's an easy war to read about in many ways, because you've got clear delineated sides. Good guys, bad guys. Good bad guys are fucking awesome. Right, the fucking good guys are fun. Right, there's lots of stories of high adventure, there's intrigue, there's all these kind of things, world building. And in the end, the good guys win, and everybody goes home, and everything's fine. When it turns out, that's not true. And that this war is actually what we should be reading about. Yes. Because we are currently still sitting in the filled diaper that this war filled. Like we're still sitting in that diaper. 100%. Now, there is the world before 1975, before the fall of Saigon, and there's the world after it. And the world after the fall of Saigon is the world we are currently living in. And Vietnam explains so much of it. Very seldomly since then, if we've been the good guys. Yeah, yeah, we really haven't been. This is then Vietnam is when everything starts to crumble. Now, I think being actually last time we were all good guys is when we were all collectively making fun of that ray gun woman. Yeah. That's when we were finally all on the right side of his train away and break dancer woman. We all attacked that teacher. That's what I actually felt. I was like, "Oh, America's back." That was, you know, that was worldwide unity. Yeah, right. It really was. We were even in Australia when that was happening. And it was wonderful to be in America and make fun of Australians in Australia. I don't like how it must have been to be like in New York during the Mamdani Nick stuff. That's how it felt being in Australia when the ray gun stuff hit. I was like, "Oh, my God, this is my melee massacre. This is something I can really get by." Now, for many, the melee massacre marked a point in American history in which our military lost the moral high ground that we'd held ever since we'd played a major part in securing victory over the Axis powers in World War II. You have been fine with us killing hundreds of thousands of Asians by dropping bombs from planes. First, of course, in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo, and then later, all up and down Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Everyone felt a little rattled when a company of American soldiers conducted themselves on the ground as if they were a squad of Nazi Ainsatz group. One soldier who participated in me lie even described the invent himself as a, quote, "Nazi-type thing." "Oh, and I hate that's a horrific, right-wing cover of that stone-temple pilot song." That's actually kind of, "I want you to gas me like an animal." But the difference between the American soldiers in Vietnam and the Ainsatz group in operating in the Eastern Front of World War II is that the Ainsatz group had specific targets. Namely, they were after Jewish people, communists, and other political enemies of the Third Reich. By contrast, American GIs in South Vietnam spent the morning of March 16, 1968, bathed in the blood of whoever was unlucky enough to find themselves in the sights of American guns and artillery, just so long as they were Vietnamese. Old men, women, children, and even babies were slaughtered on mass in a massacre that lasted less than two hours. In fact, that became a protest sign after me lie was exposed even babies, because they asked one of the people who were there, like they asked like, "Even babies, you killed?" And he said, "Even babies." Oh, they were going to say something about the time limit, because we're all looking for a massacre to be under two hours. Odyssey's like three and a half hours long. I don't know if I can fucking take it. But hey, man, I mean, you bring up a good point. Think about that. All this happened in less than a time that the average feature film takes to watch. That's insane.
Some of the dead had been raped before their murder, others had been tortured, and some had their deaths turned into competitions, like the Japanese had done during the rape of Nanking. Everyone cries and looks at those pictures of Japanese soldiers bayonetting babies. We did the same shit. Stunningly, it could have been even worse, had it not been for the incredibly brave actions of other American soldiers. These men finally stopped the killing only by threatening to open fire on their fellow GIs, because those dudes had every intention of finishing this massacre. But once it was over, the entire event was not just covered up by the army. Instead, the civilians were declared to be "Viet Cong", the enemy, and the massacre was reframed as a great victory for American forces in the press. New stories about it. Me lie, therefore, remained a secret for another two years, and had other soldiers who had heard about the massacre, not insisted the truth be brought to light, we would have never known about the Me lie massacre. Not only that, we don't know how many me lies there actually were. The way it sounds like, because of the way the war resulted in how our ever-shifting goalposts for what constituted victory, it's unfamiliar, continued to move forward, and it became into the higher body count that you got. It sounds like, yeah, that this then turned into a gigantic murder machine. It did. And then we're definitely, certainly in the next episode, episode after that, we're going to get heavily into body count, kill ratio, and what happens when you put a businessman in charge of war? Yeah. So what is it? Because it was like two million. Right in the end, something that we killed. How many, three million? The enemy is four. It's more like four. Yeah. And the problem is bigger than any number to anything we are currently protesting. Oh, yeah. Now, the biggest question here is, how? How did the war in Vietnam create the conditions for over 100 American GIs to commit war crimes on a scale where a Nazi comparison is not only approachable, but valid? How did the goals of the war become so lost that officers up and down the chain of command were not only approving of massacres like me lie, but were in some cases actively participating? How did it get this fucking bad? Now, in my opinion, the only way to answer these questions is to tell the story of the Vietnam war up until me lie, because for me, knowing the path towards me lie is the only way that the massacre makes even a modicum of sense, at least getting to the point where you can possibly explain it. So over the next four weeks, we're going to cover as much of the history of the Vietnam war as we can leading up to me lie from the French occupation to the TED offensive and beyond. Every drop of history in Vietnam paired with American Cold War policies contributed to the me lie massacre. And we can't understand me lie without that history anymore that we could understand the Einsatzgruppen without learning the history of the Nazi party. Cold War just kind of sounds like we were so happy with doing war during World War II and everybody got so good at war and we're so happy with their lives at war and they didn't have to see their families and stuff, and we're like, what if we just keep this going? Yeah. It almost seems like we thought we had to be at war to be a country. Well, we'll get along, we get so many different grand sweeping stuff about this, which is hard to pass through, but what happens when you start a war machine, do you shut the war machine off? Well, then if you want to keep making money. Yeah, exactly. Now, you might already be bristling at the comparison between Nazi and American soldiers. So I want to make it clear that we aren't going to make the same mistakes that anti-Vietnam war protesters made in the '60s and '70s when they all called Vietnam vets baby killers and murderers upon their return to America. Really, I think that's extremely reductive, that makes no sense. The boys were also a lot of the soldiers were in a way, victims too. They got pulled into the system, but we'll look, you know, we'll go into deeper. Yeah. I mean, the role of the soldier in Vietnam, the role of the American soldier in Vietnam is like everything else about this war. It's fucking complicated. While there was plenty of bravery and honor displayed by the soldiers on the ground throughout America's occupation to Southeast Asia, because that's the only way to describe it. It was an occupation. It is important to note that the bravery those soldiers showed was largely a show of loyalty to each other. And they talked about this amongst each other. That is one of those interesting things. The more Vietnam vets stuff I listen, they talked about how like every 10-foot sphere had a different experience for Vietnam and that we were left on our own out there. And so they had to just depend on each other, which was both like a way to keep them loyal against each other, but also created fear of the outsider. Yeah. A lot of fear. Because they were put out there alone to attract enemy fire. Yeah. A lot of these guys, they were uneducated and they not only had never left the country, most of them probably never even left like the county. Yeah. That's 100% true. Like I think about when it comes to like the fear, I think about, I was at Tim O'Brien, something that he said about it. He said that walking in Vietnam was an active extreme courage. Just putting one foot in front, he would look down and he would think, "How am I doing this? How am I walking right now?" By 1968, when the MeeLie Massacre occurred, a lot of the GIs and Grants on the ground, they didn't give a fuck about the ideological goals behind the war itself. They just wanted to get themselves and their friends back to America in one piece, if possible. These were guys who were only there because they'd been drafted into service and they didn't have any choice but to be there. And yeah, you might say they could have run off to Canada, but not every draftee was a middle-class white kid who could just run off to a commune in Vancouver. That shit took money, resources, and social networks that most draftees didn't have. So most guys had no choice but to put their heads down and hope that they weren't one of the soldiers who were regularly sent out into mine-infested rice patties on search and destroy missions. Yeah. And the first class of draftees looked at us like, "Oh, I can get college paid for." You know, it was like a way to like, they was almost like good until everyone started dying. And then you can just fucking terrify. And the majority of appliquies would end up not even fighting. Like you know, the majority of people that would volunteer or even get drafted, they would end up like working behind the line in various logistical places because it was like eight soldiers behind the line for every one soldier fighting. Yeah. But then they started really ratcheting up how we can build more people that will come and die for us. Yeah. I would have loved to have been a cook. I don't think you would have. I mean, well, if I had to pick a job. Yeah, sure. That was plenty of amount there. That would have been on the radio. Do you want to see them stuff like 10 years ago? But fighting right alongside the dudes who had no choice were soldiers who truly believed that they were doing the right thing by fighting in Vietnam. For them, the defeat of the North Vietnamese was a victory for freedom and democracy. The actions of these Gunghau soldiers were guided by the now infamous domino theory, which had been a part of America's post-World War II foreign policy since the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. Richard Nixon, when he was Eisenhower's vice president, went on TV and explained the domino theory to the American people as with most post-World War II foreign policies. Think about how fucking now we're looking at that. That's like a breath of fresh air. Yeah. The fact that he's not trying to explain wider in this war, trying to win people over, trying to say, hey, look, look at that. Like, you know, I'm not pro-Nixon, but it's kind of amazing to be like, wow, there should be like a government that would talk and know things that you would be able to explain things to the American people and actually wanted to have some sort of fucking accountability with the American people. They cared about what the fuck we thought. Well as with most post-World War II foreign policies, the domino theory was based solely on anti-communist Cold War paranoia. And the domino theory positive that if even a seemingly inconsequential country like Vietnam were to fall to the forces of international communism, forces whose sole purpose as far as we were concerned was to wipe out the American way of life than other countries would quickly fall behind it like a row of dominoes. As far as how Vietnam came to be seen as the first domino, the Vietnamese were embroiled in a civil war that had split the country into following their defeat of French colonial forces in the 1950s. Both the French were defeated in 1954, Vietnam was divided in half, like North Korea and South Korea are still split today. North Vietnam was designated as the communist half, and were therefore our enemies. While South Vietnam was supposedly a republic. Now South Vietnam ended up being more of a corrupt dictatorship, but for America, the only thing that mattered about South Vietnam was that it wasn't communist. That sounds familiar. The North Vietnam domino and then South Vietnam will see this. This is great. This is a great series. We're from Papa John's, right? This is a great series for Eddie. It's good for him. He spent most of his high school career drunk and dumb. He's really get for him. I will say I did spend a lot of my high school drunk and dumb, but I was watching movies about Vietnam all the time. Constantly. Yeah. You and I are the same. There's so many Vietnam movies, both you and I were so excited, we're like, oh yeah, we get to watch all the Vietnam movies and then you're like, oh, they were all wrong. Yeah. They're all wrong and wow, it was way worse. It's interesting rewatching a lot of them now because I've been seeing a lot of them in like 20 years and rewatching them now. You're like, oh, wait a second. We're not heroes. Yeah. Nope.
They were just actors. There's a little part of me of them being like, it was so hot when we filmed Apocalypse Now. I was so uncomfortable. Can you believe it how hard this was for me? I will defend them. After watching Hearts of Darkness, I will defend like because Apocalypse Now was one of the few movies that kind of nailed it. It did. Well, they also were one of the first two at the gate. Yeah, that's all. Yeah, 78. No, it's that great scene where they're at the bridge. And you know, he asked who's your commanding officer. And he says, ain't you? I was thinking about that today, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that guy's book it all. Yeah. Well, the idea in the domino theory was that it's South Vietnam fell than the whole of Southeast Asia. That's countries like Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Indonesia. They would all become a red communist block controlled by the Soviet Union and or the People's Republic of China. After Southeast Asia fell, the Philippines were sure to fall to, followed by Japan and eventually Australia. If all that went red, then the Cold War against international communism would become unwinnable. Why? But we didn't. We tried and we didn't. I'm just saying if there was an actual like war, like a big ol' all right democracy and communism are showing up today at the war. But we did. It's called Vietnam. We lost. We lost. We lost. It was our guns versus their guns and their guns won. We just should just blew up the island. Come on, guys. No, that is that is what some soldiers ended up saying. The only way to win this war is if we took ever and it is incredibly racist, but they would say you'd have to take all the South Vietnamese, put them on a boat, nuke the entire country, kill every Vietnamese person left and then and then sink the boat. And that would be the only way to win. And the North Vietnam kind of said the same thing. Yeah, well North Vietnam said you'll have to kill every single one of us and that's the only way you're going to win. Well the people who subscribed to the Domino theory came to believe that we had no choice but to fight against the communists in Vietnam's civil war. That is unless you fucking wanted the communists to sap and impureify all of our precious bodily fluids. And thus you have the reasoning for our involvement in Vietnam. I just don't I just you know that's my belief is that like if we had just let it all play out and then watch it all fail like then we would have not have to fight all these crazy wars. Well, it's not even that it failed. It's just let it play out like it's like another country like it doesn't involve us because the thing is they won and then it played out and now Vietnam is a tourist destination. Yeah. It's incredible place now. You can go and like crawl in the fucking tunnels and take a picture with it. You know, it's really fun. The the booby trap like I love the booby trap escape rooms. Some of my favorite stuff and I love going in there. I'm like is that my uncle Kevin? Is he still here? Now I can't wait to go to Vietnam. It's been our vacation list for for a decade. Oh my god. I'm very excited ever since that Anthony Boyd day, no reservations. I have been wanting to go. He looks so delicious and cheap. It does. Now when you listen to interviews with Vietnam vets who went into the war believing that their cause was just the most heartbreaking thing is that many of them truly believed that they were fulfilling their duty to the cause of freedom just as their fathers had done in World War 2. These men were raised in an America that we today can't fucking imagine. It's an America where most of the white population couldn't even entertain the thought that their own government might lie to them for any reason. Of course, the black guys and, you know, the Latinos and the agents, they had a much different view. But if you're white, let's rose the view. But if you're white, now if the president says it's necessary, it's necessary. And that's all people needed to know. But as we'll learn over the course of the next month, president after president did indeed lie to the American people and the Vietnam war was anything but necessary. Instead to use a term I learned as a young boy from the Vietnam classic full metal jacket, the war in Vietnam skull fucked America as a country. And it remains to be seen over 50 years after Vietnam's end if we will ever fully recover. What are you talking about? We hand Saddam Hussein. That's easy. And then Assam has been locked. We don't know where his corpse is. We got him. And then we did the thing was slow, but done. Milose of it. So we got some W's in there. Yeah. Yeah. We kidnapped the president of another nation. South America is done. Look at he splat. I heard with Iran, the boys are going to be home by Christmas. Oh, wow. Great. Now an estimated four million Vietnamese were killed as a result of America's cold war paranoia. And while plenty of soldiers, both North and South Vietnamese were killed, the majority of Vietnamese dead were civilians. Most of those were killed by American bombs. We really cannot fathom how many bombs we dropped on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. There were certain like, there were certain weeks when we dropped more bombs on certain parts of the jungle than we dropped in the entirety of World War 2. And then it would just strife in it all night with artillery shells and gunfire all night. Yeah. And that's not even account in a Palmyno agent orange. I don't think there's no way to actually know how many people we killed. They say it's between 3.2 and 4 million. 4 million is the highest estimate. Yeah, yeah, which is, you know, which is crazy when 800,000 is the fucking in the middle. Yeah, but while most were killed by bombs, many were killed point blank by American soldiers, looking at them in the eye and pulling the trigger. Now the melee-mouthed admission, some former officials in the armed forces have given, is that the killing of Vietnamese civilians was not policy, but neither was it an aberration. That's a fucking cowardly way of saying it was common. And since it happened so often, the armed forces had to cover it up again and again, and there's evidence for all of this. It definitely is a perverse care for the soldiers in a way, because they hung them out to dry. So they put the soldiers out to dry to go do all of the dirty work for them. So in a way, what they thought, in my mind, this is the validation of the cover-up, is this protection of the dudes, but they don't understand that what they did was damn their very souls, right? And it goes past like whether or not they go to jail or not. You know what I mean? It's like you damn the soul of a million people and they were never correct and they had to come back and live in the United States of America and then bring that vibe. Oh, and not only did they live in the United States of America, but they had to deal with nobody in America wanting to even talk about it. Do you know how many times? That's how we got over it. Do you know how many times mental health care for Vietnam vets was struck down in Congress dozens, like going throughout the 70s and 80s and 90s dozens of times, they say like, no, we don't need to deal with that. All while these fucking vets are on the street, like trying to deal with the shit that they did that their government told them to do. Yeah. Lieutenant Dan was supposed to die out there. Lieutenant Dan was supposed to die in the patties just like his father and his father before him. I'm also supposed to die in the patties from a heart attack from too many hamburgers. Yeah, dying of the patties. Well, the journalist who exposed me lies, Seymour Hirsch, looked at dozens of cases where soldiers were charged with murder during active duty in Vietnam. And he found that in every case, the charges were either dropped or reduced to manslaughter. And even the manslaughter cases were eventually exonerated. And you want to talk about, like, if you want to remove the soul of your soldiers, remove accountability from the battlefield. And that's what we did. Because that's what Nazis did. Yeah. As such, Hirsch wrote that the real conspiracy was that as far as the US Army was concerned, there was no such thing as the murder of a Vietnamese civilian. And this was very much by design. As we'll show over the course of this series, the way the war was fought and the policies enacted by the people in charge, they may not have explicitly encouraged the killing of civilians, but it certainly incentivized it. In fact, the man who became the scapegoat for Milai, Lieutenant William Callie, argued in his trial that on the day of the massacre, he was simply doing what he'd been trained to do since boot camp. And he sucks, but I can't disagree with him. No, he does suck, though. Lieutenant William Callie, like, I will say, he does suck because I'm reading Milai for right now. And let's just say he was the scapegoat, but he also was very guilty. Yeah, also a goat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Incredibly guilty. Incredibly guilty. But that's the thing when I killed many people that his own hands and who's an extremely enthusiastic about it and had to be stopped. When I say scapegoat, I mean that he was he was the one that got the bill. He was the one that got the bill. Yeah, there were many men who should have got the bill. Oh, yeah, they all should have went to jail for life. Yeah, Ernest Medina. Fuck me, because should have gone to jail forever. But it sees an interesting policy, which is if you don't call it a crime, then it's not one. So then no crimes happened because you just don't call it these crimes. You don't give it this severity because then you're not guilty of it. It's like not testing for COVID. Well, it's, it's the same thing. It's just what if we just don't charge them. Well, it's all very Nixonian. You know, it's the idea of, you know, if the mayor, if the president does it, it can't be illegal. Yeah. It's the idea that if America does it, it can't be wrong. In the name of democracy, how dare you think that we made a mistake. Exactly. Now, if America had taken off their Cold War glasses and looked at what was happening in Vietnam objectively, we would have known that Vietnam's Civil War was not a fight over whether or not communism was the right system of governance for the Vietnamese people. That was so-
certainly a part of it, but this was more about the end of European colonialism and the right of people, the world over, to choose their own destiny. We were the invaders here, and as we'll soon see, Vietnam had a long and successful history of turning invaders into corpses. Now, that's not to say that the North Vietnamese were the good guys here. We're not going full Hanoi Jain on this series. North and South Vietnamese soldiers also committed plenty of war crimes all on their own. We're definitely going to be covering the massacre at way. But in the end, distinctions of good or bad, they don't really apply. Ultimately, this was not America's fight, but Nor was it the Soviet's fight. Nor was it China's. Vietnam should have only mattered to the Vietnamese, but because the United States, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China made it a part of our Cold War. The conflict in Vietnam was far deadlier, far longer, and far more brutal than it ever would have been without us. It's fucking stupid for going over there. We couldn't even flip Cuba. Seriously. How do we do it? Cuba has barely had running water, has no electricity, and even they're like, we like Communism. We're not in there, they're just culturally not into it. They're not into it. And even this, as we'll get into, the Communist part of it was never even really the very main thrust of the OG, like, build there, the whole point was to just, like, we just want to be Vietnam. What we missed the force for the trees completely, like how we saw Communism as the point, but for the Vietnamese Communism was like a means to an end, because the only thing they cared about was an independent Vietnam. Communism and democracy and all these political philosophies when it comes down to it are just the way for statehoods to lay claim on other fucking people. Like it just gets to a point where I just don't understand, you know, whatever. Oh fuck it. Whatever that is. Oh yeah. Whatever that is. We shouldn't discuss it. No. No, that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. I was just like, it's this funny thing of like all of these little people, all these smaller countries are just pieces on chessboard for all these people that have bigger plans for them. Yeah. But Vietnam War is spoiler alert, incredibly fucking complicated. No. But what about what we've said so far is complicated. But that's why there were so many misunderstandings and bad decisions made by no less than four consecutive presidents concerning Vietnam. Everyone likes to pretend like Vietnam started with Johnson and ended with Nixon. No, it started with fucking Truman. But that's also why our extremely long source list is going to wait until the end. But to be fair to those policy makers and I think this is very important to remember when it comes to Vietnam. No one could have predicted how complicated the world was going to become in the 20th century. It was the first time in human history that the whole world became interconnected and we didn't know how to handle it. One could argue we still don't know how to handle it. But the point is the Vietnam War was the culmination of those 20th century complications. Damn near as complicated as World War One because almost everything leads to Vietnam in one way or another, including World War One. So we have to be very judicious about what we include here, lest we give a complete history of Europe, Asia, and America throughout the 19th and 20th century. No, Mark. No. No, we got it. No, we got it. You got to be an ambulance. Just so much in context. We're going to be explaining how light is made in context as Henry's Vietnam. I will say Vietnam is the ultimate context black hole. It's every direction and you keep going. But to the point of information, it's also important to remember that our common knowledge about the Vietnam War, just what we take for granted, it actually gives us more information about the inner workings of the conflict than 99% of the people who are actually involved in it at the time, which gives us a lot of hindsight. I mean, it's incredible to think that up until 1967, 1968, we didn't even know that Ho Chi men wasn't really the guy in charge. It's fucking insane. We didn't know what the country was before we went there, most of us. Yeah, most of us. Well, for so many people involved on every side of the conflict, Vietnam was the definition of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. So to try to make all of this as easy to understand as possible for everyone, we're going to take this in sections, explaining each part of this world individually. Therefore, the natural place to start is the Vietnamese people themselves because had we bothered to learn their history back then, we would have known the last thing anybody in the world should ever do is fuck with the Vietnamese. Yeah, man. They are good at fighting in their backyards. Yes. They don't give a fuck, man. They don't give a fuck. Yeah. One thing I learned though is no matter what color our skin is, we all pink. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. We all pink, man. Once we explode. Yeah. Yeah. Then we're pure fuses. Lots of fuses in there. I'm pretty much the only country to get a real handle on Vietnam for any significant length of time was China. And they did it a very long time ago. They conquered the area known as Vietnam in 111 BC, I think it's the farthest back we've ever got. I'm sorry, guys. We almost got it. Jesus. Stop it. Yeah. I'm Jesus. Yeah. Oh, wow. Well, Chinese held on to it. And all of this trust me, all of this, yeah, the Chinese held on to it for about a thousand years. But the Chinese still had to deal with constant bloody revolts led by a cast of increasingly unorthodox leaders. Unorthodox would of course become Vietnam's style and warfare from this point forward. In the year, fucking 40, 40 AD, so he did war like Madonna does close. Nobody. Oh, they just always trying to figure out how she does it. In the year 40, two sisters named Chung Chok, you were fucking 40. Yeah. This is great. Two sisters named Chung Chok and Chungni led a rebellion that established an independent viet kingdom. Chung Chok's husband was a Vietnamese lord who'd been assassinated by a Chinese general. So in response, these two sisters led forces that captured 65 Chinese fortresses in North Vietnam. The Chung sisters ruled for three years before a Chinese general retook their lands. But after the Chung's were unable to accept defeat, they drowned themselves rather than surrender. So the story goes, difficult. Besides being an example of Vietnamese tenacity, the Chung sisters played an important role in integrating Vietnamese forces when it came to gender, and that's why I'm mentioning this because this tells you how long this has been going on. The Chung sisters became long-standing martyrs for Vietnamese independence, later becoming popular communist propaganda figures in what the Vietnamese would call the American War. Just as we call it, the Vietnam War. But because of tradition started by the Chung sisters, the Vietnam War was one of the few modern wars in which women played a sustained, organized, and militarily significant role from beginning to end, which would cause a lot of confusion for American forces. You're talking from little kids to old ladies, yeah. Like the few soldiers, not the few, but like the soldiers with morality didn't want to kill women. Yeah. And they would, no problem killing them. Oh, no. Whatever. Well, it's estimated that 1.5 million women served in major combat roles for North Vietnam at every level of the Vietnam War. Yeah. That's clapping. Fuck it, bitch. Yeah. They served as guerrilla fighters, commanders, engineers, and artillery gunners. Help one female Vietnam soldier who led an all-women squad called the Long Hair Army. She became a general and eventually vice president of Vietnam. Cool. Do you think the Chung sisters could be played by Emma Watson in a dual role, where she plays both sisters? Well, in other words, the Vietnamese had a reputation for using any and every resource at their disposal in service of expelling any invader who might decide that Vietnam was theirs to do as they pleased. And they'd been doing it for almost 2,000 years by the time the first American even heard the fucking word Vietnam. After a thousand years of Chinese rule, the Vietnamese finally took that crazy idea of just like very casual. They just been like, that was like just a temporary spot for China. Yeah. And they were there for like a thousand years. Mm-hmm. Yeah. They really have been. Now, after a thousand years -- We're open for purchase, China. They know. They listen. Yeah, they know. Oh, yeah. Now, after a thousand years of Chinese rule, the Vietnamese finally took advantage of a week and corrupt Chinese dynasty and in 939 AD, the Vietnamese army destroyed a massive Chinese army using one of their favorite tactics, ambush, not led to the creation of their own nation. Daviett. Daviett expanded. after their first civil war between the North and South.
Raged from the 17th until the 19th century, the Vietnamese people had fully established the long, thin, s-shaped country we now know as Vietnam. Marked by 800 miles of coast from the Chinese border to the Gulf of Thailand, the Vietnamese now had a country that's roughly twice the size of Florida. Most of the American fighting, however, would occur in the bottom half of the country, South Vietnam. So remember that from here on out. All of the shit that's going to happen within the borders of South Vietnam is happening in an area that is no larger than the state in which Ed and Henry here were raised. They also got the same animals. Yeah, and the snakes and alligators, swamps, bugs and stuff. Well, they got, they got more camons than gators. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and they got those Jamaican crabs and all that shrimp. Do you think, hmm, there should be a Disney there. That's what they should have done. Oh, Disney sure got a whole of them. You tried. Make 'em all lumpa lumpas. It took us a really long time to figure out that America's greatest imperial power was our culture. Yeah. It took a really fucking long. It took way too long for us to remember that. It's definitely the most boring way to win and save, though. Yeah. It's true. Cultural victory is the best way to win them. Yeah. No, you can get in there. Speaking of which, another brighter side of the whole war, go to the public playlist on Spotify, Funky, Vietnam. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we didn't use this fucking awesome. All the music that we brought over to kill them to, they liked. Yeah. And then they pulled the raided into their sound and it's fucking great. Yeah, because they listened to it because we took over the radio. Yep. Yeah, South Vietnam. Vietnam didn't enjoy long period of peace following the end of their long and bloody civil war. In the mid 19th century, Europe's industrial revolution inspired a new wave of colonization and into China, which included Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam itself, came into the sights of the French. This is the second way, like the first wave of colonization, if you want to know about that, listen to my series on, holy shit, I forgot it's fucking name, the boat, the big boat. The Dutch East Indies. Oh, the Batavia. The Batavia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Batavia. Well, everything is connecting, huh? Yeah. Every single series is connects, huh? It really is. By the time we're done with this thing, yeah, we're going to have like a history of humanity going. Wow. Dutch imperial forces claimed that they were on a so-called civilizing mission to bring material advancement to the Indochinese people, that they're, of course, they're doing them a favor. Of course. But they were really, after Vietnamese rice, and more importantly, for the industrial revolution, Vietnamese rubber. Because it is the way to ever sex, without putting a baby inside of the world. The French, however, were one of the most powerful militaries in the world in the 1850s. So because France's military technology was vastly superior, the Vietnamese courts accepted French rule in exchange for a shared power structure. A small number of Vietnamese elites would therefore greatly benefit from serving French colonial authorities, but French rule profoundly changed life in Vietnam for everyone else for the worse. And the Vietnamese never forgot what happened when they handed control to outsiders. And also how it felt to be sort of turned out from the inside. Yeah. No, because that is in this, this relationship between the French and the Vietnamese elites, like this, it creates a sort of rift that lasts all the way up until the Americans, the creation of South Vietnam, is that this like collaborator thing. Yeah, of course. Because it's the idea of they are, because it's, which wield our version of it, will also not work. Yeah. It's a really remade Vietnam in its own image, it's why Bon Mi sandwiches are on baguettes. But this created a wealthy. And that was to honestly, if all the violence, all the degradation, I know, if there was one thing, they made it all worth it, it's a bon mi. If that's how all this shakes out because of the pate and the rose pork and then a beautiful piece of fucking, when you get a really good baguette and the fresh cilantro and the pickle of that, like that's something of my favorite things in the face of the planet. Carrots on a sandwich? What a thought! I didn't know. I will admit, my favorite sandwich in Manhattan is a Bon Mi down and so home. See, it works. Colonialism works. But this created a wealthy Vietnamese middle class who were loyal to the French instead of their own people. These westernized Vietnamese began living an opulent European lifestyle by exploding the vast majority of their countrymen. See, 90% of Vietnam were peasants who saw no benefits whatsoever from French colonial rule. Instead, the life of the peasant got far worse after many were converted from landowners or farmers into basically slaves for the French. The working conditions of the French rubber plantations were so horrendous that managers began recruiting workers from outside Vietnam because outsiders were less likely to know about the cruelty, disease, and malnutrition that awaited them on the plantation. One and four rubber plantation workers died on the job, but once you were in, you were stuck. Anyone. So like the glue factory. Yeah. Cause the only thing stick to rubber, they stick to glue and stuff. Me and stick to glue. Yeah. Yeah. You figure they would have been able to bounce out of this. Yeah. Marcus, why are you wrong? Why are you wrong? Well, anyone who ran away from service was executed by the French through torture, hanging or stabbing, and the treatment only got worse with each decade of French rule. I didn't so hard to get hung over there because you just bounce. The rubber tree. Yeah, the rubber factory. Yeah. Boy, you boy, you boy. But you know, the brighter side is it's where we got the bungee cord. This really is turned out to be a sun-chainy episode. It really is. Nice. Now, as a result of French rule, there was a gap forming between the Vietnamese people once again. These loyal to the French were making out like bandits, but the majority of the country was wondering what the fuck ever happened to an independent Vietnam, which brings us in the timeline to World War I, where actually in the 20th century-- I'm going to watch the internet, I'm going to watch the internet, I'm going to watch the news. We're moving. We're going to watch the news, we're moving. Yeah, but it just keeps getting thicker and thicker from here. It does, though, but if we didn't start before Jesus Christ. Yeah. Well, since the French were pretty busy during World War I, some Vietnamese began to advocate for violent revolution against the French. When you're busy doing something else and everybody shows up so fucking bloody. But the movement was mostly centered around the intellectuals in the cities. The revolutionaries had completely ignored Vietnam's massive rural population, so the revolution went nowhere. But the Vietnamese would not make that mistake twice. On the next go-round, they would be taking inspiration from the man who realized that the peasants were the key to everything. This man would eventually lead North Vietnam, hell, he would found North Vietnam. In his name, Ho Chi Minh would be cursed by millions of Americans throughout the 1960s, the 1970s, and beyond. He had that good old-fashioned comic book guy beard, man. They loved him. That's for damn sure. Ho Chi Minh, they called him Uncle Ho. He definitely got that, he's got them long ass fucking pussy ass whiskers, man. He looks good. Yeah, he does. As far as horrible dictators go, he's learning that he's horrible. He's in there. I mean, I mean, one could make the argument that he wasn't a horrible dictator. I mean, there's the thing is that he's one of the most misunderstood figures of the 20th century. So because of American propaganda, we grew up thinking that Ho Chi Minh was an evil, bloodthirsty, communist warlord, whose only desires were the slaughtering of Americans and the torture of POWs. But while Uncle Ho, as his people called him, did indeed oversee atrocities and the mistreatment of prisoners of war, nobody's saying the Hanoi Hilton was a good fucking time. He was also an incredibly complicated character whose only true goal was an independent Vietnam. The Ho Chi Minh had a deep understanding of both his own country's history and of his own people. Ho, therefore, had a deep understanding of what the Vietnamese were truly capable of. He knew how to appeal to urban radicals while also mobilizing the peasantry for warfare with the ultimate goal of ridding Vietnam of the French. I'm putting this out there for my zoomers. He's the tailor swift of South Asian communism. He was a broad spectrum appeal, he was a broad spectrum appeal, he was cross genre. And he would definitely love pageantry. Yeah, and his wife was a tight end. Actually, Ho Chi Minh never took a wife. He never had a family. That was one of the reasons why they called him Uncle Ho is because he, in Vietnam, having a family is a big deal and choosing to not have a family is considered a massive sacrifice. So people would love him for that. They would say like, "Oh, a Ho Chi Minh, Uncle Ho has sacrificed his family for the good of Vietnam. He will sacrifice everything. Therefore, I will sacrifice everything for Ho Chi Minh." It's a grim. Just. Oh my. He just reopened that wound. Oh, you just reopened that wound. I can't even think about how he must be him and Ho Chi Minh. Because what do you think of Ho Chi Minh then? I mean, do you think you need to shoot blanks or something? No, I actually truly want, maybe Ho Chi Minh was gay. I mean, there are many confirmed bachelors, quote unquote, throughout history. Alexander the Great. Yeah. And it is possible. It's over. Yeah. How was being gay? It's being gay. Okay, over there. I don't even know. I couldn't. Honestly, I couldn't.
I could not tell you one way or another. I don't know. - That's stories
[email protected]. - Yeah, I'd love to know. - Now, Ho Chi Minh was exiled from Vietnam like a lot of other nationalist troublemakers during the early 20th century. But even though he would be gone from Vietnam for decades, Uncle Ho still became the leading voice in the Vietnamese independent movement. But since the Western powers were uninterested in helping out Vietnam, Ho instead looked towards Russia. See, only a few years earlier, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had overthrown a cool and indifferent ruling class in a bloodbath that had ended only when the entire Russian Imperial family were turned into corpses in a dank basement. - Yeah! - Yeah, the Lannastasia down there with a hole in her head. - Get her again! (all laughing) - She didn't live! - She didn't feel anything though. - Nah, it's all the administration. - I didn't think so. (all laughing) - That was good, that I liked. - Well, the Bolsheviks had done to the Russian royal family. That wasn't too far off from what the Vietnamese wanted to do to the French. So Ho Chi Minh became a dedicated communist. And from that point forward, the Vietnamese independence movement became inextricably linked to communism as well. And that's incredibly important to understand, is that communism is a means to an end, but the end is independence. - 'Cause he also trained in, he went to school in America. - Well, he traveled through America. - Yeah, he lived in Boston, New York for a time. He was a pastry chef in London for a bed. He traveled all over the world. It wasn't, he ended up back in France in like 1919. He started calling himself when the Patriot. But yeah, he traveled all over the world before going back to Vietnam. - Reminds me of, there's a sum of them. - Oh. - Yeah. - It's very similar. And in terms of the, obviously, you can't really compare the two. 'Cause one's a terrorist and one's like a revolutionary leader. I don't know what you, I feel like there's a lot of people that's, side stories, LPL, GML.com, please. - I would say you can't make the only comparison you could make is that they did both travel a lot. - And they trained him to, in the US, trained him as well. - Ho Chi Minh? - Yeah. - Kind of, kind of sorta. - They did it all. - We'll get to that later. - America did a lot of stuff, man. - Yeah, 'cause I'm kind of extended, like I'm not getting into America just yet, with Ho Chi Minh because there is a lot of stuff with America and Ho Chi Minh, but I wouldn't say we-- - He liked a Boston lady, though. (laughing) - You see it with a big ol' fuckin' broad out there? It's goin' like, "Oh, Chi, what ya doin'?" (laughing) Just like laughin' at 'em, you know? Just go to a Bruins game and have some sense there, Ho Chi. - Yeah, man. - Ho soon attracted the attention of the Soviets. - Oh, Chi Minh. - He soon attracted the attention of the Soviets who invited him to Moscow in 1923. And even though Ho disliked how the Soviets treated peasants as disposable, he still stayed in Moscow long enough to work out how communist ideas could be applied to his home country of Vietnam, because the only thing that mattered to Ho Chi Minh was Vietnam. Now, as I mentioned earlier, fucking everything leads to Vietnam in one way or another. And the next phase of Vietnam's story involves the fucking Great Depression, which plunged the world into economic chaos after the stock market crash in 1929. So the Great Depression was indeed a global crisis. And when we talked about how badly it affected Germany and the lead up to World War II, and it affected Vietnam just as much as everyone else. Starvation due to the economic turmoil led to Vietnamese rioting in 1930. And while the Vietnamese revolution led by Vietnamese communists seemed to be on the brink of success, the French quickly put the rebellion to bed. Thousands of Vietnamese rebels were killed in the process. While tens of thousands of Vietnamese peasants were also murdered by the French as dozens of battles between colonial and communist forces raged on. This was, in essence, the opening act of a conflict between the Vietnamese and a revolving cast of outsiders throughout the 20th century that would last for over four decades. And it had been sparked by things that had happened all the way over in America. But while the first 20 years of this conflict would be taken on by the French, the last 20 would be America's fight to win or lose. Spoiler alert, we fucking lost. - Fuck, Marcus, why would anyone listen to the rest of the series? - How will they know what had happened? - Yeah, that's true. - Because the journey is knowing how we lost, and why we lost and what we lost. - And we're actually not gonna even get to us officially losing. - No, we're gonna get there. - Yeah, we're actually gonna end like five years before we lose. - Yeah, that's great. - Then we're still winners. - Yeah. (laughing) - And as long as we as long as our series ends directly after the Meal I Massacre, then everything's fine. - 'Cause he didn't even come a crime until like 10 years later. - Now, one of them in fighting during the first real conflict between the French and the Vietnamese was a man from the old Vietnamese Imperial capital of Wei. His name was Vaughn Wenzap. Zap was another important figure in Vietnamese history because while he was from the South, his tactical brilliance on behalf of North Vietnam would one day drive the American military to the point of pure insanity. Like Uncle Ho, Vaughn Wenzap knew the history of Vietnam and therefore knew that his people had a knack for resisting occupation by foreign powers. In fact, before becoming one of the architects of Vietnam's war for independence, Zap was a history teacher. This, in case you haven't noticed, is a lesson. The guys who knew their history, they were the victors in Vietnam. The guys who didn't were the ones who lost. - Oh yeah. - And the French, it's kind of interesting 'cause each time you go back and you listen to them complain about their situation of Vietnam, they all have the same exact complaints. - The French? - Yo, got it. - They all have the same complaint. They've been like, they come out of nowhere, they never stop and they keep telling us we have to kill all of them. - And that is all by design, as we'll get into later. - They didn't have a chance, a little like cream. That's what so hard can do. They eat snails. - They don't really have to slow you have to be to choose to eat a snail. - They probably got so distracted, all the extra snails sitting around Vietnam. - Yeah, and they fucking don't spend enough time preparing, shaving their armpits, wearing the odor, and God knows these French are fucking lazy. - Yep. - Man, man. - Man, man. - That's the third. - See, we can make fun of them. - Yeah, fuck them, fuck the French. - Yeah, fuck them, they're fine, whatever, man. - Yeah, the Vietnamese turn them into toast. - French toast. - Cut it out. - That's the one, that's the one that's gonna fall. That's gonna bring it down. It's gonna bring them around. - They ride 'em. - It's gonna bring them around, man. - We're already, I'm about to shoot myself in a head. I feel like I'm like ending Phil. I'm sitting here, raining, and I'm an old Vietnamese woman. Are you gonna get shot in the head? - Nope. - They kissed them. - Yeah. - French kissed them. - Yeah. - Yeah. - I make a giant regret. This is not, this is good. This is not great. He's not helping the history. - Surprisingly, I'm enjoying it. - Yeah, like I'm good, so you got to. - Someone's a word, Smith. (laughing) - Now, by the mid-1920s, Vaughn Wenzop had learned about the brutality. The French had been inflicting upon the Vietnamese people for almost 70 years. And if you're reading a pamphlet written by Ho Chi Minh about Vietnamese independence, Zop joined the revolution. - The pamphlets changed the world. - Fuck yes, they are. - There's so many things about pamphlets and how you just drop them and it changes so much. It's so crazy. - Yeah, it's crazy because you also look at how the Vietnamese started. It is quite similar to how America started. - It's very similar. - And we're gonna get into that. Now, the Vietnamese were so used to fighting stronger enemies that they had a fucking term for this situation. They called it Toy Ka, which roughly translates in English to opportune moment. And also apologies for all the butchering I've been doing with the Vietnamese pronunciation. It is a fucking incredibly difficult language. - But that's why I'm going to take this Toy Ka to ask if I can go to the bathroom. (laughing) - All right, let's do it. - Bye, I'm your blade. - Back in. - Side girl. - We're back in the fiend up. I thought I got out. We're not back in. - You're gonna be in for a while. - Oh fuck. - A bit, yeah. - Yeah, we're not. - Tell you to rotate back to the world. - It's human. You should have brought an extra pair of socks. - Ooh, it's not enough. It's not for my ankle socks. - Let's get back to the concept of Toy Ka, or opportune moment. The concept of Toy Ka was simple. Prepare for war constantly, but wait for the so-called opportune moment to strike. The Vietnamese were and still are many incredibly patient people. But to take down the French, the Vietnamese combined the ancient concept of Toy Ka with a type of warfare that had been written about extensively by Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist leader. After studying Mao's writings on battle tactics extensively, the Vietnamese would use Mao's instructions to defeat both the French and American militaries, Mao called it guerrilla warfare. And put simply, guerrilla warfare is a strategy used by smaller countries to win wars against powerful imperialist regimes, wars in which the home team would be trained to engage in conflicts that could last decades. - I'm definitely not what we're currently in right now, and I'm pretty certain that we're gonna nip this current guerrilla war we're in in the bud, though. Not only the other ones, though. - Yeah, it's definitely not the type of war that we fought in, I don't know, every war that we fought since Vietnam. - No, no, no, no, no. - What do these guys just come out and fight us? Like men!
- Organize, set a line up. - I want us to dig trenches and we set the day and we break for Christmas. - They left the drums at home on the fuck, right in the whistles. - What is the guy with the flag? - One of the things, the guerrilla warfare is the only warfare left because it's either, at this point, either guerrilla warfare or nuclear warfare because any other military that could field a military that would go against ours is a nuclear power. - Unless, hey, you're discounting autonomous robot warfare. - Yes, which could also be very much happen. - I forget about that, which is already happening. - Yeah. - No, that's fucking Ukraine. - Soon everyone, soon everyone will not even, be there or even be people there. - Yeah, I love how we blindsided us when guerrilla warfare is how we beat the British to get our own country. - Yeah, partly, we didn't call it that. We called it Goddamn the formation of a god damn America. (laughing) - Yeah, it had to be, we were red-white bluerner in the bay. - I mean, but the Revolutionary War, that was still a pretty conventional war by those standards. Like, you know, you know, the Battle of Bunker Hill, there was-- - There were engagements. - There was plants, there was engagements. - Not Mel Gibson's voice. - No, they were, they took it to the fucking hill. - That was a great documentary. - Well, rather than fighting massive battles and fields between soldiers and uniform, battles that colonized countries could never hope to win, guerrilla warfare was defined by countless small conflicts meant to bleed out the invading nation using death by a thousand cuts. The idea was that the colonized nation could outlast the colonizers. Because while the colonizers were usually fighting and dying for economic or ideological reasons, the guerrillas were fighting and dying for their home and they were doing it on their own turf. Now, the Vietnamese had already been fighting wars using guerrilla warfare tactics all the way back to the earliest conflicts with the Chinese. They used it against the fucking Mongols. They knew how to do this. But after reading Mao, ironically, they could expand on the concept, codify it, and when the time was right, nationalize it to an extreme effect. Now, at this point in the story, we're in the 1930s and small resistance movements have been fighting the French and the Vietnamese elite who supported the French for decades. They hadn't made much headway, but when Vaughn Wenzop took charge at the end of the 1930s, the Vietnamese forces became more focused. Then another so-called opportune moment came with World War II, especially after Germany shocked the world by whipping the shit out of France with lightning speed in 1940. - It's all the cream. - De Blitzkrieg. - Yeah, they were all again, it was all the cream. Without shaving, we were talking about this a little lazy French. (laughing) Stinky French. - I don't feel like it. - I do not want to fight the world. - I'm not the go. I don't want to have it in power no more. - Why does the world come to fight us? Why do they come to fight us? (laughing) - Well, from a Vietnamese perspective, France's defeat weakened its grip on its colonies, but instead of the Vietnamese taking over another cruel colonial power stepped in. I'll be it briefly. That cruel colonial power was the last people you wanted to show up, the fucking Japanese. - They're crimes of the Japanese. (laughing) - They always begins. - Now the Japanese era in Vietnam is extremely complex, but to put it very simply, the Japanese were mostly interested in Vietnam as a staging ground for larger operations during World War II. Vietnam is in an extremely strategic location, right there on the Gulf. - And the Vermicelli fields. (laughing) - But since the French government have been replaced with Nazi collaborators after Germany's victory, the Vietnamese people had to deal with both Japanese and French occupiers throughout World War II. - So they were like a third, I hate everybody. - Yeah. - They were just like, "We're our own group." - Yeah, but honestly, God, what great food must have come out of this? - Japanese, French, Vietnamese, fusion. - Japanese? - Yeah. - I don't think there was much cooking going on. It was a pretty brutal occupation. - I wish they had stopped making war. (laughing) - Yeah, I wish they had focused on food. - It would have been fun if it was just snacks. (laughing) - It would have been more than snack wars. - Yeah, it would be cute, it's fun, and all of a sudden, snack wars has gone hot. (laughing) It's gone hot, they're fucking, they just blew up the Reese's fat. - No, my God, all the flaming Cheetos. - No, fuck it's Cheetos. (laughing) - Now by 1941, the Vietnamese were really starting to get their shit together. After three decades in exile, Ho Chi Minh finally returned to his home country to form a new organization called the League of Independence of Vietnam. This group came to be known better as the "Viet Minh". The "Viet Minh" would become an incredibly deadly fighting force of guerrilla soldiers. And eventually, they would evolve into America's deadliest enemies in the Vietnam War, the "Viet Cong". But the thing about the evolution of the "Viet Minh" into the "Viet Cong" is that it showed America's extreme arrogance concerning this war. See, America showed up in "Viet Cong" with ground troops in 1965, swinging our big military industrial complex dick, thanking we got this shit in the back. - We kicked the Nazis fucking ass, man. And that was a real hard, that was a hard team, right? We kicked the Nazis ass, we blew the Japanese into fucking oblivion, we could do anything, oh yeah. But we were ignoring the fact that we were entering a war that had already been going on for 20 years in the veterans of that 20-year war. Men like Vaughn wins up. They knew how to fight this war and they knew how to win it long before the first Marine even fucking showed up. - They know fighting more than they know not fighting. - Yeah. You know, we get it a lot here on the show about how we're very American-centric, 'cause we are, we're up in order. - We're in the war. - We're in the war. - Physically there, yeah, we're Americans. - Everyone has a bias when it comes to their home country. - But it do think it's interesting that it really was the, that's kind of the main thing was our deep, deep ignorance. The show up. - Airgants too. - Airgants and ignorance. - This is assuming we knew better that we were automatically just gonna scrush this. - I love our confidence. - Yeah. - I don't, I love American confidence. Don't get me wrong. - Sure. - It just misplaced. Again, when it's Michael Jackson, that's a big win for America. - Oh, culturally again. - Not the way you did, not what he did and not all the stuff in the music. I'm talking about the music. - The music, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Bill Cosby. - Bill Cosby, yeah. - Great example, the humor that brought everywhere, Vietnam loves the films of Woody Allen as well. - Yeah, they love that, 'cause they're favorite. You ever see that besides the toy car, they also said, "I'll have what she's having." - Yeah, man. - Oh, we know, I'm sorry. That's some-- - I'm hearing that sound. - That's Rob Reiner, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - There's still morning Rob Reiner's death currently to the state in Vietnam. - Yeah. - But you know, now that they're doing so well, I got more money, more problems. - Yeah. - Thank you, sir. - Home money. - Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. - That's even the episode. - Now one thing that is extremely important to remember about Ho Chi Minh is that he was an idealist, and Ho Chi Minh's idealism brings us to the next section of involvement when it comes to this conflict. It is time to talk about our part in all this, America's part. See, when the worldwide stage shifted, once again during World War II, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, because the Japanese went into Vietnam before they attacked us. The Vietnamese were filled with hope that the Americans might help them in their ongoing struggle against the occupying Japanese forces. Beyond that, America had also explicitly said that we wanted to help places like Vietnam. When America joined the war, we didn't just say that we're out for revenge against the Japanese for attacking Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt also explicitly said that we were defending the world for the purposes of, quote, self-determination and anti-colonialism. And the Vietnamese independence movement took us at our word. And so Uncle Ho reached out to the United States. This was not the first time that Ho Chi Minh had tried contacting a president. Back in 1919, Ho Chi Minh had actually tried contacting President Woodrow Wilson for assistance in Vietnam based on Wilson's statements about self-determination after World War I. Think about that, 1919. That's how long these guys have been thinking about how to win this fight. Oh, yes. And then you also think about that. That was also probably the first time that the will of Ho Chi Minh to get to the, someone that would care inside the United States government would be controlled by forces right outside the president. So what you have is like, you know, the OSS and stuff like this that would intercept these messages and the people inside the Pentagon. Well, in 1919, the OSS didn't exist. But you know what I mean? At the time when they were sending through trusted sources to get to Woodrow Wilson, it depended on that person to show the letter to Woodrow Wilson. There's actually no, there's no evidence either way as to whether Wilson ever even got the letters. That's what they're saying. We don't know whether or not that was even, if they decided by even by then, they were like, well, you know, you don't need a bother the president with this. That kind of thing. Well, Lord knows if he would have helped them the world would have been a better place. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. We have so many chances. Like we're about to get into it. this. See, while Wilson's administration had ignored Ho Chi Minh, the OSS, that's the precursor to the CIA, they formed a partnership with Uncle Ho during World War II, focused on fighting the Japanese. Now, it wasn't as big of a thing as us, you know, arming Afghanistan and all that against Afghanistan, against Russia's Vietnam, Afghanistan. But definitely don't not sound like it. When you got OSS guys in there talking with Ho Chi Minh and doing all this stuff and giving them all this lip service, just giving them radios and guns, you know, and saying, you know, yeah, we're here. We're with you, buddy. Oh, we're with you, exactly. We're with you. And if we give you guns, know that down the road, we're going to have to kill you. You're going to have to shoot us with those guns. Every time we drop off guns, those guns are then used to shoot at us. Every single time. Well, America actually worked very well with the Vietnamese during World War II. And eventually, the Vietnamese' efforts were brought to the attention of President Franklin Roosevelt. President Roosevelt had repeatedly offered assistance to Vietnam. And he told the Vietnamese that when the war was over, America was interested in a sort of trusty ship. The Allies would have temporary control over Vietnam with the goal of preparing Vietnam for eventual independence. Now, it sounds like bullshit, but this was Roosevelt's goal. He did a lot of shit too. And I believe that he was going to at least try to follow through, because Roosevelt was fucking brilliant. He was smart enough to know that Vietnam's global position right South China, it would make Vietnam a far better friend than an enemy in the global order to come. But before the war ended, Roosevelt fucking died in office from a massive cerebral hemorrhage almost as if God himself wanted life on Earth to suck even fucking harder. We learned our lessons, Marcus. See, God has to make it hard for us so that we'd learn. That's right. Yeah, he has to kill our fucking leaders, go, "Beep, we made it hard on FDR too." Yeah, he did. Yeah. And one can argue that the polio made him the man that he was. Yeah, professional liar. When Roosevelt died, any chance we had of a relatively peaceful second half to the 20th century died with him. Just as I said in the Manhattan Project series, I cannot stress how greatly Roosevelt's premature death changed history for the worse. And you you can throw Vietnam into that mix along with everything else. So while Franklin Roosevelt might have meant what he said about anti-colonialism, that sort of thing didn't mean shit to his successor, President Harry S. Truman. Although Ho Chi Minh did still try to break through to Truman after World War II. There's no reasoning with a man with that kind of bow tie. Like his bow tie was always tied to tight. It was too big. He was a mean face little man. He was. Ho wrote multiple letters to President Truman in which Ho Chi Minh literally quoted Thomas Jefferson asking for any support the US could offer in Vietnam's fight for some of that fucking self-determination America was always talking about. Ho Chi Minh was actually he was massively inspired by the United States. In fact, when the Communist later took power in Vietnam for the first time, Ho Chi Minh quoted the declaration of independence at length during his victory speech plagiarism. In other words, the Vietnamese were taking America at our word concerning self-determination. And they believed that America would be sympathetic towards Vietnam because we were also a former colony. And understand you become in some new company. You become in some new country man. That's competition, brother man. Thomas Jefferson would love to fuck his way up and down Vietnam. Oh my god. Thomas Jefferson had gotten a taste. A taste to Thailand, a taste to Vietnam. Oh man, we'd be using chopsticks. I tell you that man. Well, in Ho Chi Minh's faith in America, he proved that it wasn't just the Americans who had misunderstood their enemy. See, Ho Chi Minh didn't know enough about American history to understand that the United States was arguably the most successful colonial power of the age. While we were a former colony, one of the first things we did after forming our own country was to colonize the rest of the North American continent. We did this happily, brutally, and proudly. And we actively tried to wipe out an entire race of people while we did it. God told us to. Yeah. I mean, we not only did it, we celebrated it. New Mexico. New Mexico. New Mexico. It's great. California. We named it. They named it something we don't like. California. So we changed it. All right. No, we celebrate New York blue. We celebrated this. We named it. And we taught it to each and every one of our children as manifest destiny. We were just born to be that awesome. Yeah. And by the time of World War II, we'd already won our colonial battles so thoroughly that most people had forgotten that it had ever been any other way. Now, Roosevelt was making moves to turn this attitude around. But President Truman saw the Vietnamese the same way Colonials looked at all non-white people. They were the natives. They were at best a resource to be used. But at worst, there was always the option we chose with the Native Americans that of wholesale slaughter. So what you want to choose? Do you want to choose? Or do you want to be Vietnam? What would you like? So Ho Chi Minh did not remember the LMO. No, he did not. No. No. Do you think that also this is where the specific anti-Asian kind of races part? Because like, no, no, no, no. We're going to get to that more in the next episode. That should start in the 1890s. I just find it because like, you know, every type of racism has its sort of like beginnings in a way and there's specific types of racism because that was like, our view of Asian people like essentially was like, they're unfeeling monsters. Yeah. Our view, we'll get into it much more in the next episode, but our view really began with the Philippines. Yeah. Yeah. Which came long before, which was, yeah, 1880s, 1890s, long, long before Japan. Like all the stuff like we don't, they don't believe in family that they delete their babies. A lot of shit. Yeah. At this point in the story, it's after the internment camps. You're right. Yeah. Yeah. We've already imprisoned many, many, many Japanese people, and Asian people throughout this entire country. My family's still on Poland. Now that's all to say that President Truman had absolutely no interest in any anti-colonial goals, and he therefore had no interest in helping the Vietnamese. All Truman cared about was keeping a good relationship with France, but after World War II. France, like most of the European colonial nations, they wanted to do everything they could to hold on to their colonies, which brings us to the next section of this episode, the French. Colonialism provided cheap labor and trade, which would be helpful in rebuilding Europe after the war. In France, with a colonial empire that spanned six million square miles worldwide. I mean, remember how many people out there speak fucking French. They were loads. Too many. Yeah. They were loads to give up a colony as profitable as Vietnam. But during the chaos of World War II's end, the Vietnamese saw their opportune moment against the French at long last. In August 1945, Vietnamese forces led by vote winds up, marched into Hanhaui, marking the first time the city was under Vietnamese control since 1873. Now another thing the Vietnam did not understand about the Americans was just how goddamn terrified we were going to be by the Soviet Union after World War II. So after Germany was defeated, America and the USSR were immediately at odds and that conflict would of course come to be known as the Cold War. France, however, decided to take almost immediate advantage of the hostilities between America and Russia. They hinted that if America didn't support their efforts and holding colonies like Vietnam, I don't know. Maybe the Soviet Union would be interested in being friends with France. I don't know. America, what do you think? You don't fuck yourself. That ever. Go to him. I just don't understand. Just fucking go to him. Fuck him. We'll get to the old fail. The old fail. You're gonna be hungry. You're gonna be so angry when they come and they put all the Soviet block styling in the middle of Paris. You're gonna be angry and you're gonna be mad. You're gonna want you're gonna come out. I mean, we really do forget. And that's part of the American propaganda is that the French are cowards and they surrendered. GZ and surrender monkeys all that shit. The French are fucking vicious. They were incredibly vicious fighters. Because they were old world power. That's an old world power. Yeah. Napoleon took over a whole shit ton of the world. Yes. So America stood aside while France dove back into Vietnam to try and retake their colony. The colonial battle between France and Vietnam, therefore became the first proxy conflict of the Cold War. Congrats. That's amazing. Wow. 1945 again. Immediately right on the heels of the fucking world war two. The Cold War proxy war started. Boom. Right there. First tire definitely took a break. Why everybody took a break. Everybody should have. Why didn't everybody like, okay, let's start the Cold War. 1951. Okay. We can make some movies. We're gonna hang out. That's a big kids. Holy shit. The sides taken by war.
world powers in the immediate aftermath of World War II would form deadly alliances that would last decades. - Today, till today. - Yeah. So the French war in Vietnam, or as historians call it, the first into China war, at began in September of 1945, when French troops retook Saigon in South Vietnam. - Indochina is a good new old fashioned racist term for the area too, you know what I mean? Like it's like, oh, you don't hear it anymore unless it's a guy at a bus stop. I've only heard the words Indochina, like right now, like from some like Canadian homospangal. - I'll kick your ass back to Indochina. - Yeah, yeah, the last time I heard it was a Marcellus Wallace. - Yes. - Yeah, I think Indochina is, I think it's still accepted. You know, Indo-Indian-China Chinese, it's like between India and China. - Oh, I'm sure we'll hear about it. - Yeah, we'll find out. (laughing) - Well, I know stories,
[email protected]. What else can't we say? - Well, I know that historians call the French war the first Indochina war. And our, what we call the Vietnam War is known to historians as the second Indochina war. And they call it Indochina because technically our war didn't involve just Vietnam. It also involved Cambodia and Laos as well. - Oh, yes. - So all these countries were all involved. - Great, good. When the French retook Saigon, they terrorized, raped, and murdered hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in the process. They focused on the communists and multiple gory public spectacles. 'Cause don't forget, the French used the fucking guillotine liberally. They used it until the same year fucking Star Wars came out. They only stopped using it in 1977. - I could just see the president of France just watching Star Wars and as the credits go up, he's like, "This insanity must stop." (laughing) "We must not do this anymore. Darth Vader would be so embarrassed." (laughing) - To get past it, they invented the toilet flush from upstairs. - No, it was nice, that's nice. - I love it, I love a chain. - But in Saigon, you know, piles of Vietnamese heads. Four days after the French took Saigon, hey, I'm staying on track here, pile. - No, no, it's not. - Piles of heads. - Piles of heads. - Piles of heads. - Piles of heads. - Piles of heads. - Heaps. - Yeah. - I'd say heaps of heads. - Heaps of heads. - Yeah, pyramids. Four days after the French took Saigon, Ho Chi Minh's army retook the city and committed their own war crimes by massacring French men, women, and children with their own rifles, pistols, and machetes. The French answered that with a force of 25,000 ground troops. And they were, of course, aided by their allies, the British. Then after the Truman Doctrine was established in which America pledged to support Indian all foreigners who were actively fighting the commies, we officially sided with France in 1950. As far as we were concerned, Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh were now our enemies, simply because they were communist. And for no other reason beyond that, no nuance, no strategy, just communist bad, not communist good. I just don't find them as compelling of a villain. When you look at the Indiana Jones movie with Kate Blanchett playing the communist, that was stupid. And it was really a bad villain. I've never really understood the whole communist or extremely evil when they're, we just had the Nazis. The Nazis were obviously very evil. Communists were, I mean, they were horrible stuff. Soviets were pretty evil too. - Yeah, when they did was done. - Don was pretty bad. - Yeah. - We got into Vietnam because we were two big buses to fight Russia. - Oh my god, we shall have war down the fucking street. Sid Roddy Rooney fighter. - Oh my god. - To the fucking cramlin. I'll fight it myself. I'll fight voodamite, put myself. - You will, and I bet you'd win. - At this point, he's very sick. - Now the French war in Vietnam would last for nine years. And over that period, Vaughn winds up would develop strategies for winning a war against a great world power, knowing the whole time that it might take decades to claim victory. But the reason why we're talking about zap strategies is because while these strategies would be used to defeat the French, the Vietnamese would also use these exact same strategies to defeat America when we showed up a few years after. - When you look at diaries from the French soldiers to the American soldiers, they're literally saying the same exact thing. - The same thing. I mean, there's a reason why the first episode of the Ken Burns Vietnam series is called deja vu. - Yeah. - Well, we were just as helpless against these strategies as the French were the first time around. And both of us would commit multiple atrocities in our efforts to win. Like us, the French would be humiliated by a defeat in Southeast Asia. And even the threat of humiliation can cause men to do absolutely horrific things. I mean, it's like on the highest level, it's like war crimes, lowest level, family annihilation. - Oh yeah. - And it's just about avoiding the threat of humiliation, the possibility of it. - Never of family annihilations, the lowest level. (laughing) - The lowest level when murder's involved. - I can't. - It's my report card. (laughing) - We're talking about doing like horrific, horrible things. Yeah, like men will do it. - I've been being embarrassed. - Yeah, men will do anything to avoid being embarrassed. - Yeah. - Well, that's the whole, that's the, - Yes, the men start doing jujitsu. - Yeah. - Get any of them in their forties. - Yeah, well, that's the old joke that women make is that men are afraid that women will embarrass them and women are afraid that men will kill them. - Yeah, no. - Because we're embarrassed. - We'll kill 'em. - We'll kill 'em ourselves as our bare hands, just choke 'em to death. - You're easily-- - Easily. - You're over-emotion. - I mean, I'm not me. - They're not fucking me. - Think about Gary Ridgeway. - You thinkin' 'em on my penis? (laughing) You're joking 'em on my penis? - I know. - Oh, no. (laughing) Gotta kill a woman. I gotta kill a woman. - Remember with Gary Ridgeway, every person who got away with them said that he started choking them after he couldn't get hard. That happens over and that happens on a fucking global scale. - Every day. - So let's get into the tactics, the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese would allow the French and later the Americans to reach their peak military strength and consolidating their hold over the cities and the towns. Just fill 'em up with soldiers as much as they want to put in. At the same time, the Vietnamese and later the Viet Cong would gradually shift from defensive to offensive operations. These operations, however, would be in the places and times of the Vietnamese and later the Viet Cong's choosing. This would grind down the French and later American strength by creating a protracted conflict that was completely outside of the invading forces control. - The only thing you could, that's what they say. The only thing you can control in wars when you attack. - Yeah, and the Vietnamese were always in control of when the attack was gonna happen. See, the Viet men were not trying to gain and hold territory when they attacked. They were instead forcing the French as they would later force the Americans to spread their forces thin into small units who could only conduct static defense. Once the invading forces were spread thin, the Viet men and later the Viet Cong would conduct hit and run attacks over and over on these defenses. The Vietnamese therefore became incredibly adept at ambushing forces before disappearing into the jungle because they had spent nine years doing it to the French. By the time we showed up with ground troops in 1965, we quickly became frustrated and enraged at these terrifying hit run ambushes. Just as the French had been terrified and enraged back in the '40s and the '50s, but our rage and fear would lead directly to the Mi-Li massacre. And by 1948, the Viet men's hit and run attacks had caused a stalemate in the French war, which would be the exact same stalemate we would reach 20 years later. While the French controlled the cities, the Viet men controlled everything else. The French could extend their forces outside a city, fight a battle and they might even win against the Viet men. But the French would immediately lose that territory as soon as they returned to the city because the French could not hold the countryside. And this is yet another reason why any war in Vietnam was unwinnable. So also why these wars are in unwinnable in places like Afghanistan. So the wars in Vietnam were not fought like World War II, where armies were defeated when opposing forces took and held territory. Because I was like organized. You get to a certain point and then all of the parties would agree it's gone too far and now we'll sit and have our peace treaty and they used to trade back and forth. And it would almost be by percentages. Kind of like it was a organized way. Like we got this amount of territory. The war is now over. Yeah, we take and hold territory or until, or you just had to do it like we did it with the Germans that you keep taking and holding territory until you hold all of their territory. All of the territory, that's risk. And the thing with the jungle is it's really hard to just keep to stay out there. Yeah, after you win, you're like, yeah, let's come back to the city and have a break. I wouldn't go to a hotel, let's play something. Yeah, exactly. And they fucking love it out there. Though they live out there. Yeah, there's a room. They know they know what, how the fuck to live out there. Yes. And the thing is in Vietnam, taking and holding territory was impossible because so much of it was jungle. Furthermore, the North Vietnamese forces, they not only knew the territory, they had been preparing the territory for decades by the time we showed up. The infamous tunnels and underground bunkers used by the Viet Cong to seemingly disappear after ambushing American forces again and again, they had actually built those during the French war. Consequently, throughout both wars, an invading force couldn't step outside of a Vietnamese city in the North or the South without possibly running out there.
into a force taking orders from Ho Chi Minh. And that force was more than happy to blow your ass away before disappearing back into the jungle. - And this is in the French section, when it's even slightly less complicated as it will get, when you're like also there's like three other groups too that are trying to kill you as well, not even just the main army. There's like split off armies and there's all this other shit. - Well, it's, you know, there's the, I mean, it's pretty simple. It's like the Viet Cong is the gorilla force, the man in the black pyjamas as they put it. And then there's the NVA. - Yes, the NVA. - And the NVA is just like that's the, that's North Vietnam's like army army. I mean, and then you have all the civilians who also want to kill you because you're killing them. - Because you're killing them. - And you're in their home, yes. - And you're burning your home to the room. - Yes. Now France was in over its head on this war financially and militarily by 1949. So they reached out to their allies for help. The United States gamely agreed to send aid. So the Viet man began reaching out to America's enemies to balance the scales. By 1950, both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China had decided that they had a responsibility to intervene in Vietnam as well, which introduced the final reason why this war was always unwinnable. - Okay, good. - As long as China and the Soviet Union were supplying weapons to the Vietnamese, the only way to win would be to nuke the entirety of the country and wipe it off the face of the earth. Otherwise, the Vietnamese were not going to stop until every invader was gone. But just as China promised unlimited support to Vietnam, the United States promised unlimited support for France. And so American aid gave the French army the ability to wage war in ways that were both increasingly bloody and destructive. This, however, only produced more bodies with no real breakthrough on either side. - We learned our lesson and never did it again. - We decided to keep to ourselves. And that's why we now have hotels on Mars. And we are, I want to say last podcast and left first podcast on Mars. And it's been amazing. I got four tits. I'm a man and a woman at once. Things are good. - Actually, it kind of is the concept between the behind the TV show For All Mankind, which I fucking love. But it is just sort of like, what if we spent the money on space instead of Vietnam? - Oh my God, I mean, what would that have been like? - I always think about like Germany and Japan. After we won the war and took away their armies, they just became great places. - Yeah. - Yeah. - They were made there, but Germany is welcome. - It's almost like if you stop trying to kill everyone, you could take a few moments and make your own home nice. - Yeah, Germany and Japan are both incredible countries. - Yeah, but they don't got the fucking bomb. - Not like we do, man, wow. We knew that things are great here. (laughing) - Just as it would be in America during the 1960s, popular support for the French war in Vietnam dropped dramatically when the French death toll reached 50,000 soldiers. French critics, in fact, began calling it the Dirty War. - Dirty, they dirty were. - But with America's direct involvement in the so-called Dirty War, the Viet Minh now counted America amongst its sworn enemies. Because by 1953, the United States was already paying for 80% of the cost for France's war to keep their colony. We are footing 80% of that bill. I'll get to a second. I'll get it in a second to exactly how much money that translated to, but that meant the sunk cost was already in full effect before a single American even set foot on Vietnamese soil. Now, both sides of the Cold War were encouraging both the French and the Vietnamese towards peace by 1953. I mean, things that, you know, the Korean War had already started and ended while the Vietnamese were fighting the French. - Yeah, well, like this is expensive. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Something's gotta go. - But before peace talks could take place, the Vietnamese ended the war all on their own. In March of 1954, Viet Minh forces led by Vaughn Wenzop launched an offensive at a place called Jim Bin Foo. - It's a man, it's a hard one. - That's a hard one. - Yeah. In preparation for this offensive, a quarter of a million Viet Minh, half of them women, lugged artillery provided by the Soviets through the mountains from the north to the south, inch by inch, preparing for their final opportune moment. Once the Vietnamese were in position, they had an entire garrison of 25,000 French soldiers completely surrounded. French had no fucking clue it was coming. And the Viet Minh began a constant attack that would last seven weeks. - Woo! - The siege became world news. For many people, this was the first time they had ever heard of Vietnam. And the French commander was so ashamed over his role in letting it all happen that he shot himself in the head on the battlefield. But by May, the French finally surrendered, thus ending the first Indochina war in victory for the Vietnamese in 1954. - Wow. - Did they have a lot of POWs left behind like we did? - No, I don't believe so. Because with us and POWs, the vast majority of our POWs were pilots who were bombing North Vietnam. And the Vietnamese were shooting down our pilots with Soviet artillery and they were really fucking good at it. But I don't think the French were quite as in to bombing as we were. They definitely did it, of course they did it. - But no one had the full court press like we did. - Yeah, nobody, nobody full court press air attacks like America didn't Vietnam. - That's what he won. - Yeah. Now by this point, both China and the Soviet Union, they wanted better relations with Europe and America. But America was fully in the Eisenhower era. And you can't have President Eisenhower without the notorious director of the CIA, Alan Dulles. - No, God don't, God don't. - And you can't have Alan Dulles without his brother, Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. - No, no, no, no, no, I can't, fuck. - 'Cause these guys are bad, they're bad. - Yeah, the Dulles brothers were committed cold warriors who truly believed that it was not only America's right, but it's duty to do anything and everything within our power to overthrow any foreign regime worldwide that might introduce even the slightest foothold for international Communism. Someone like the socialist president. - Oh, and if they could do it, they will put whoever is willing to suck our dick in place. It doesn't matter where they then believe in, and they don't give a fuck, they don't give a fuck because they think just because, oh, he's telling us he's on our team that this guy'll now be in our pocket and guess what they never are. They never are on our team because they lied to you. They lied to you, Dulles brothers. - Yeah, and then they go kill them and they find another guy and they kill their guy. - And they lie. - Yeah, the only thing that mattered at the Dulles brothers is long, if they were not communists or anything even close to communists, it was considered a W. And by the mid-1950s, the Dulles brothers had already helped to depose democratically elected leaders in Guatemala and Iran and having gone two for two without consequence or at least no consequence that the fucking Dulles brothers would live to see. The Dulles brothers set their sights on Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh. This was despite the fact that America had already spent three billion dollars total, three billion in 1953 money. - That's a fucking lot. - Yes, that literally is, that was our Mars money. - Yes, three billion helping the French fight their failed war. And we'd come away with nothing to show for it, but an enemy who had desperately tried over and over again to be our ally. And when the French war ended, international negotiations split Vietnam along the 17th parallel into the communist north and the ostensibly democratic south. - It's done. - I always think that that's great. I always love that when they do that with these things, we're like, well caught up in half, it's gonna be fine. They do this how many times have we done this? - Twice. - This is like, don't worry. We're just right down the middle and everything's gonna go according to plan. Everybody gets a little bit of something they're like, I don't think it works like that. I don't think country building works like a Sizzler buffet. - I can't just look a little this, little this. When did North Korea end the war? - 53. - 53 are. - Yeah. Well, the Vietnamese were told that elections were going to come in which they would be free to choose whatever leader they please. - Yeah. - After they chose that leader, the country would be reunified afterward. - Wow. - Yeah. But the problem was is that it was very, very obvious that the guy who was gonna win was gonna be Ho Chi Minh. - We didn't like that. - I don't like him. - Yeah, America didn't like him. - I don't like him. I'm Donnie Viver. (laughing) - But in the meantime, Ho Chi Minh and the North didn't do themselves any favors when it came to settling America's fears about the Reds. The North Vietnamese government enacted multiple Soviet-style communist policies, which only confirmed the suspicions of the Eisenhower administration. After famine struck the North, Ho Chi Minh instituted a land reform plan, very Soviet style that took private land and
made it state-owned to alleviate food shortages. Many people refused to comply and some 15,000 people were executed by the North Vietnamese government as a result. I knew we'd get one, they knew that they were going, "Yeah, this is what you were talking about the other day, there's no good side." There was no good side in this entire story. Yeah, the communists were also taking over all media in the North while also launching indoctrination programs to maintain order. The South, meanwhile, was a republic with far more freedoms, but it was also far more chaotic and far more corrupt. The puppet leader who eventually took power was a devout Catholic named No Din Jim, who was staunchly against communism and the Vietnam. Additionally, his Catholicism was attractive to the Americans because we equated any type of Christianity as the opposite of communism. No, he'll be a servant of the Pope! That's a thing, we love him because even though Vietnam is, I think, 90% Buddhist, 10% Catholic, if you're Catholic, that kind of means you lean towards the French a little bit. We liked anybody who kind of leaned more into continuing that imperialist power structure that the French had established. It's almost like if you believe in the Catholic like ideologies, you'd also be much easier to manipulate as a human being. Well, that's what we thought. Not this guy, no, because he's in charge. I'm talking about everybody else. No, the leaders in South Vietnam realized very quickly that they had America by the fucking balls and they could do anything they wanted. Unless, of course, we have them killed. But Prime Minister, and we tried. We tried. But Prime Minister Jim's Republic was closer to a dictatorship, run by Jim and his family. They rewarded loyalty above everything. We know how well that works. It really does work out great when a leader rewards loyalty above everything else. Always. Yeah, corruption ran rampant in South Vietnam for the very beginning. And this corruption would ensure that the South would never match the dedication of the North. The Prime Minister also didn't care about getting support from the peasants in the countryside, which, of course, made up the majority of the population. Ho Chi Minh, however, did care about the peasants. See, splitting the country into an imaginary line, it didn't just magically send every communist to the North and every capitalist to the South. I mean, anyone who was even close to capitalist did leave the North immediately. But even after the country was split into, the countryside in South Vietnam was still filled with communist Vietnamese supporters. And this mixture of loyalties would also directly contribute to the massacre at me lie. Brother versus brother. Blue versus grey. Yes, with his tail over and out. I always think it, man. Yeah, when you listen to the Vietnamese talk, that is, they say, even like North Vietnamese veterans will say the greatest tragedy of this war was that it was Vietnamese killing Vietnamese. Oh, of course. Yeah. But even though the South Vietnamese Prime Minister was a corrupt son of a bitch, America stepped in almost immediately as his ally after France withdrew their army for good. None other than John F. Kennedy himself speaking as a senator in 1957 would declare South Vietnam to be quotes the cornerstone of the free world and Southeast Asia. But it wouldn't be long before even soldiers on the ground were realizing that communist or not America had chosen the wrong fucking side. Now Prime Minister Jim immediately cracked down on communist by executing 25,000 of them in 1915, five alone in addition to torturing anyone who's even friendly towards communist. And when I say like executing 25,000 communists, I mean both confirmed and suspected communists. But every time Jim executed communists on mass, all he did was drive more Vietnamese people towards Ho Chi Minh, whether those people actually believed in communism or not. You just got to kill one non-communist than everyone's been like, oh, well fuck, we got to run. Yeah. No, this isn't, I have to do anything I can to overthrow this government. I don't give a fuck who it is. It's almost like mass purges aren't great. Not great. And that they don't always help policy. Not really. Because seems to make people upset. Yeah. And then policy doesn't seem to matter as much anymore. Yeah. Well, that's what he says is that you, especially once we started doing the search and destroy on these villages, looking for communists. As I said that if you killed one communist, they would be replaced by one communist. If you killed one non-communist, they would be replaced by 10 communists, 10 new communists who were now out to get your ass. And they'll have to share the one toothbrush, which is that no one talks about that side of communist. No one brings it up. Like a neighborhood toothbrush. I hate my neighborhood toothbrush. Of course. But perhaps the biggest black mark against Prime Minister Jim and his government was that they were increasingly being seen as a puppet government controlled by outsiders, controlled by the Americans while Uncle Ho and his people represented independence for Vietnam. Such by 1958, North Vietnamese communists were launching small-scale raids, fighting under a slogan that roughly translated to extermination of traitors. I actually found this set of plans for their plan. It seems that they're saying extermination of traitors. What do you think that means? I think they're going to do with that. You think they mean better traitors send it back to the Pentagon. Yeah, better send it to Woodrow Wilson at home. Oh my god, he's been dead for 30 years. Go visit him in Arlington. Yeah, you can. Take his fucking bones and set him on fire. But to pull off these raids, the Vietnamese still had to cross the North-South border and they had to do it in secret. So the North began building a massive network of trails through the jungle, leading from the North to the South to give themselves multiple arteries to send troops and supplies. This network, which would eventually extend into neighboring countries like Laos and Cambodia, would soon be known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Ho Chi Minh Trail would ensure that nothing would ever keep the North Vietnamese from establishing and holding a constant presence in the South. And even our own NSA would have to admit that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was one of the greatest achievements of 20th century military engineering. Damn, it is incredible what they managed to achieve. It's like how do you move all this Soviet stuff, all these artillery, jeeps, food, people, everything. It was a constant, like there was just, it never stopped between the North and the South. Every day was Fitzgerald. Yes, it was. That's the great way to put it. And they also would then have like hidey hole spots so they could put stuff places and leave it there and surprise you with it. All every single factor that they needed, they had total mastery of the war arena. Yeah, and they had it before we even fucking showed up. It must be so hard to put together a surprise party in North Vietnam. Oh my god. You know, especially you got to get all the bamboo like spears covered in shit. You got to get the little girls willing to explode. That's the hardest part. Now using the Ho Chi Minh Trail several thousand North Vietnamese fighters crossed the border at the 17th parallel and using 31 tons of Soviet weapons. They began assassinating South Vietnamese government officials at the rate of 150 per month in 1960. By the end of that year, the North Vietnamese had begun putting together a plan to challenge Prime Minister Jim for control of Saigon. In December, they essentially rebranded the Vietnamese by changing the name to the National Liberation Front. This new guerrilla group was more nationalist than communist, so it could attract a broader following. Their goal was to launch a new war against whoever was preventing Vietnam from being ruled by the Vietnamese and it was becoming more and more apparent that this role was going to be played by the United States. Now they called themselves the National Liberation Front, but we would come to know them better by the insulting name that was given to them by South Vietnamese Prime Minister Jim. The full name translated to communist traders to the Vietnamese nation, but when you contracted the name and its original Vietnamese, the Vietnamese became the "Viet Cong". These fighters would be not only the deadliest enemies America faced in Vietnam, but some of the deadliest fighters we have ever faced before or since. Some people consider the "Viet Cong" to be among the most talented soldiers in the history of warfare. Cool! It is there. It is cool. I'm a fan. I mean, it's insane to watch even interviews with soldiers on the ground in
Vietnam in 1965, 1966, they'll talk to a commander and he'll just be like, these are the finest soldiers in the history of the world. If I had four battalions of these men, I could take over the entire planet. They just had this as such an extreme utmost respect for just how incredible these guys were. And not just guys, but guys and women. It was a fully integrated force. Yeah, they could take over the whole planet if they had gotten in there 20 years earlier and built a bunch of tunnels. But it is there that we will pick back up next week with Kennedy's fuck-ups. Johnson's gigantic cock, the burning monk and all of the rest of the events, large and small, they would lead directly to the massacre at knee-line. And that's how it's going to be for the next three weeks of my life. Every day, just different Vietnam vets going, "And I was in the brush, and I saw his eyes leave his hat. He picked up a canister, bluish face off, and I was my best friend." Now, there's a guy that I always think of. He was a journalist and he said, "I reach down to pick up this man's, that he said, grab his feet and get him out of here." So I put my hands around his ankles and I just, my hands just, it was so burnt that my hands just went through the flesh and all I could feel was bone. I can still feel it now. We knew there was a cubby hole. We knew that there was a cubby hole in the old man kept waving and saying, "We knew he was trying to attack us a little grenade in the cubby hole." He was trying to say his family was in there. I exploded his wife and his two children. My God, I love Donald Trump. My God, I love this new war. So welcome, go and talk about new war. The war rages on in the world. The darkness, world of darkness here at LPN. Go and see Bloodbath 77, which is after the events of MeLi. The war begins. So it's like, don't worry, but go and see Vampire. We are going to watch, we have an incredible cast. Marcus is leading them out. I'm very happy with it. Go and check out. We cannot wait for you to see it. It's over on LPN TV. Go and check out Bloodbath 77. Also, this weekend, mid-summer scream, we are there Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Go see our panel August 9th on, it's end, it's called last panel on the left. That mid-summer scream, and you go by tickets at midsummerscream.org. That's right. And next weekend, I'm going to be over at Dynasty typewriter. That's going to be on August 16th for Dead Man Tell, Some Tales. It's my dark Disney history show. And Henry's be joining me as well. It's a fucking blast. Come and check us out. What else is going on? We got YouTube. Oh, yeah. You're going to die. You're going to die. You're going to die. I'm just staring up into space at this point. YouTube.com/atsomeplaceunderneath@lpnromand to see who's the bee. Check out the forum before it. No dogs in space. LPN TV, The Brighter Side LPN, Page 7, all kinds of shit. We're all connected. Go. Subscribe to those channels and watch our pretty faces. Do the shows you've been listening to forever. And go check out our brand new song from the Inigmatic band Mass for Trash. Yeah. It is our single of our Halloween album called Gods and Leather. Yeah. Check it out. Yeah. I got a whole lot of creative stuff at acting, singing, all kinds of shit. You're really are. You're trying right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're a regular Sydney Swings. Yeah.
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