Episode 678: My Lai Massacre Part III - Murder Dressed Up as Victory

There's no place to escape to, this is the last talk. On the left. That's one of the cannonballs I'm starting. It was bad. Yeah! Yeah! I mean, when you were at home, my streets were out of town. Oh, are you ready? Henry, what's your new favorite song? Well, the problem is that I can't pronounce it. And I wish the audience could be with me in my car. Only just because, yes, I have learned, I've grown as a performer. Oh. I do understand sort of the insensitivities that I portrayed in a lot of my characterial kind of presentation. It's characterial. Characterial presentations back in the day. But I do wish you all could meet Hanoi and Rizabrowski. Because I have been listening to nothing but 1960s, all of the music that we inspired. All of that Vietnamese soul and funk. Oh! Oh! Dude, dude, dude, gawk block thing. Honestly, I'm not even saying that's not even racist. No, that's it. Yeah, I'm not even. I'm just trying. My best. Because I've heard now a couple of the same songs over and over again. I don't know what they mean, but I love them so much. So now, like, I can sort of semi-sing along to some of them. But I do know that what I'm doing is a hate crime. And I know that if I were. But it just means genuinely. It's a love crime. That's a great way of putting that crime back. Welcome to Las Buckeyes and the Love Ladies and Gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parkes. I'm here with Love Criminal, Henry Zabrowski. Yes, everything I do is on the end of legality. But don't worry, I saved my Hanoi Henry Zabrowski for my family. Yes, as do we all. I know anybody do it hardcore. I'm just trying to hit the words. Of course, yeah, and they're great words. It's a beautiful language and a very difficult, incredibly difficult language. It's weird because it seems so simple when you look at it. Because all of the words are like three or four letters tops. No, but it's a tonal language. So, like, one word can be spelled one way and there are five different ways to pronounce it. And all five ways have wildly different meanings. Did McNamara make a fool out of himself, making a speech over there? He did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was like, Bing-dong-go! Bing-dong-go! And it meant something like my kitty is sleeping with the duckling time. That's my favorite. That's my favorite. It's been on Balena. He did. It was a very safe thing. And we have master, linguist, Ed Larson. That's right, that's right. Give me a language. I got it. I got a question. Yet to do it. That's what I mean. And he did that. That was not me. That's not bad. That's not bad at all. I know how to speak. I know how to listen. I know how to act. You got to speak with the eyes and the hands. If you're in a different country. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Eyes, hands, loud. Need. Need. Bathroom. Oh. Sometimes he's eating a ladyboy's butthole. So good. Between two buns. Yeah. All right. Let's get back to the Meal Eye Master. Let's do it. Now, I'm going to go ahead and say something right up top. Uh-oh. While the Meal Eye Master is the entree to this series. I realize now that we're three parts in. And it's still not gotten to the Meal Eye Master. It's good to think of these episodes as something like a ten-course meal. Yeah. The culmination of everything we're discussing here. And there's a lot of everything to get to before things pop off into the massacre itself during the last episode. Admittedly, this did turn into an overall history of the Vietnam War up until Meal Eye. You have no idea how much cutting I had to do. But I assure you, everything we mention here has bearing on what happened in March of 1968. While I understand this is a lot to take in. I personally think that the road to Meal Eye is just as fascinating as the massacre itself. I'll put it this way. You don't get to Meal Eye in Ken Burns, Vietnam until like episode like six. Yeah. Like, there's a, I just got through episode like four and a half. I mean, I'm like in the middle of five now. And you're just by the time you get your, I'm just at the TED offensive. Yeah. We're not even there yet. And you're just like, wow, there's a lot left to go. Yeah. No, no. And that was my least favorite Bob Hope movie. Oh, wow. But Danny K doesn't amazing Vietnamese accent. He really, you know, they said there was no reason to dance. He found one. I loved it. It always does. That happy sequence when he's just on top of all the guys with the hats on. And he's dancing on top of the hats. And the ox was surprisingly nimble. Yeah, but then they blew his legs off with that bouncing betty. And he had to go home in a fucking pine box. Oh, Danny K. R.I.P. Oh, T.A.P. I'm sorry. What's behind that banana tree? Good work, Danny. So when we last left the chain of events that would lead to the Miele massacre, the year was 1968. And even the men in government who had pushed for escalating involvement in Vietnam since the early part of the decade, men like Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense. Robert McNamara was already recognizing in 1968 that the Vietnam War had been a massive mistake. In fact, he had recognized it in 1967. Oh, yeah. Do you remember when he said that we said it last week where he went like, "Just so you know, it's going to be a bit of a problem there, okay? I just wanted to kind of just lay that out there. Peaceful. Yeah, we got it. Disgustingly rich. Yeah, yeah. I didn't know for this day whether I was fired or whether I quit. And everyone was like, you were fired. And Ken Burns, Vietnam, I just got to the point where they said they had put together. They got all the computers together. And they decided for like, okay, this is like about this time period. What do we do here? Where are we at in the war? They took every single quantifiable number. They took all the vehicles and armories and soldier numbers and ammo numbers. And they put it in the computer and they started. They let it go on Friday and they came back on Monday and they said there was one car that shot out of it. They looked at it and said, you already won the war in 1965. Because there's no, they didn't figure the entire Vietnamese rebel, all of them by the Vietnam, the other people in South Vietnam, everybody else. They didn't actually include any of that. No, they did not include the will of the North Vietnamese people in their calculations. Now, despite what LBJ had been telling the American people, the United States had not actually achieved anything substantial during its occupation of South Vietnam since it had sending ground troops in 1965. We didn't even like steal oil or nothing. No yellow cane. There was no uranium. There was just nothing there. No little girls we could give to anybody. I didn't mind it on that. Yeah, we did do that. Operation Rolling Thunder, that's LBJ's bombing campaign in the North, that had done nothing to stop the Hong Troops from taking the Ho Chi Minh Trail to infiltrate the South. Although the bombings had killed an estimated 60,000 Vietnamese soldiers and civilians by this point. This was good news to Americans who had come to see this war totally in terms of body counts. And just so to make it clear for everyone, the Viet Cong, you know, I was talking with Carolina about it and she was a little confused as like, you know, is the Viet Cong in the North or in the South where the Viet Cong is fucking everywhere. They're from the North, but they are all over Vietnam, top to bottom. Yeah, they used the Ho Chi Minh Trail to get everywhere. Yes, but while the Americans were seeing this war in terms of people killed, the North Vietnamese were engaged in a struggle of wills. An Operation Rolling Thunder's bombing campaign had failed to break the will of the North Vietnamese people in any way whatsoever. In fact, it had done quite the opposite. The North Vietnamese were now convinced that they had to push out the Americans completely if they had any chance of survival, much less independence. The American military was therefore under extreme and increased pressure to give the American people some sign that this war was going to end any day now. So at the start of 1968, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam at the time, General West Marlin, he made an announcement. Speaking in terms of eventual victory, West Marlin said that communist, North Vietnamese forces had reached what he called the crossover point. See if America was indeed measuring victory by the amount of Viet Cong soldiers killed, then surely there would come a point where we had killed enough. Basically, West Marlin was treating this war like a video game where you have to defeat wave after wave of enemies. And if you survived to the end of the wave, then you won. According to West Marlin, by the start of 1968, America had indeed survived enough waves. We had therefore made it to the crossover point in which North Vietnam did not have enough people physically to replace the Viet Cong soldiers we had already killed. Problem was the crossover point was an imaginary metric that West Marlin had created himself. And it had no basis in reality. It was all guesswork, and it was extremely optimistic guesswork at that. See at the same time that West Marlin was bragging about the crossover point, the CIA, who had been in Vietnam longer than anyone, they were reporting that the number of Viet Cong troops in the South had actually increased to 1.3 million. That's almost everybody. It had doubled since 1965, and this was while General West Marlin was on TV, all but declaring victory. Marcus. This is where ignorance really shows. See, we are a obviously elevated, more guisined urban economy, superpower America. You see Americans, you see, we just come up with the concepts and like everybody snaps too, right? It's just the Vietnamese who didn't understand that they had crossed the crossover point. That is true. Right. And that to me is a lack of communication between us and them. And I feel like if we just could explain to them, this is what we're trying to do. Yeah. Then they would just be like, Oh, we'll stop then. Yeah. Or we'll just all die. We'll just get to that crossover point. Actually you're right. Could we all just tell us where we should all be? And then you just nuke that place. That'd be great. But is the problem with the rest of the world? They just don't fucking listen to America. We got a lot of answers. Well, I like the idea of just creating this is the more I research this topic, Marcus, the existential sadness of the current state of the world continues to pour over me. It is interesting how we are so consistently the bad guys while pretending we're the good guys. Yeah. That's the story of America. Well, it's because we got great movies. We got great movies. We got great music and the food's pretty good too. It foods great. Yeah. Our air conditioning rocks. Our greatest victory has always been culture. Yeah. And the stories like Americans are the best we add cancer. We are the best storytellers in the world. Because we told because the stories that we told were believed by and those stories that we were told were believed by nobody harder than ourselves. That's right. Yeah. The Greeks like to claim they are, but they only got two stories. Yeah. Yeah. We got like nine. Now, as to why there was such a build up of Vietcong troops in the South. Remember, there's 1.3 million down there operatives. We're starting to hear rumors of a massive North Vietnamese operation that was going to be launched around the Vietnamese lunar new year at the end of January 1968. This was a holiday known as Tet. See, the North Vietnamese have decided that it was time to strike a decisive blow against American and South Vietnamese forces. Tet was traditionally a time of truce, which meant that a lot of Vietnamese people were going to be traveling throughout the country to spend the holiday with friends and family. And this was something that was, it was, this is very much embedded in the Vietnamese culture. Like they, when they talked to North Vietnamese soldiers, they said that nobody was ever charged with desertion because sometimes you'd get a guy who was the Vietcong down in South Vietnam. He'd get homesick and he'd just disappear to walk a thousand miles north to see his mother. And then he'd come right back. And that was accepted because it was just a part of the culture. It's good for morale, probably true. Amazing for morale. But since there were so many Vietnamese people moving throughout the country around the Tet holiday, Tet provided cover for the movement of Vietcong forces to various strategic locations throughout South Vietnam. But don't they understand, again, Marcus? This is where a lot of cultural ignorance is showing. Don't they understand we don't fight on holidays? Yeah. That is the thing. They get it's, it's, come on, man. Yeah, Americans don't fight on holidays. We have PTO sometimes. And we're in your country. We're trying to buy by your rules. Come on, guys, sir. Come on. Hey, we want to celebrate too. Yeah. I'm going to take Ted off this year. Wow. Actually, Eddie, I think you can only take Ted off if you can accurately sing one Vietnamese song. We need a Vietnamese woman in here. Science or its OPL gmo.com. And so at the beginning of 1968, 84,000 Vietcong troops positioned themselves to attack hundreds of South Vietnamese cities and American outposts all over the South in preparation for what came to be known as the Tet Offensive. Now, the best outcome for the Tet Offensive as far as North Vietnam was concerned was that a concentrated attack against literally every place that mattered in the South would shock America into leaving a Vietnam altogether. That's the pie in the sky. Hope. Yeah. At the very least, Ho Chi men hope that the attack might lead to negotiations that would end Operation Rolling Thunder. In other words, LBJ's deadly and indiscriminate bombing campaign had only made the North Vietnamese more aggressive. And this aggression would continue to ping-pong between the two forces until it ultimately culminated in the Mi Lai massacre, the opening moves of the final act, however, began with Tet. Because wasn't this like as the attempt to offensive was beginning, it was like right before we almost were considering pulling out, right? Wasn't there like a sort of an inner thing where we were so many of those moments where we're thinking like, okay, I think at this point, we can maybe get things over to the South because that was ostensibly the whole point. That was the whole idea is that there was going to become a point where we could hand everything over to the South Vietnamese, the Republic of South Vietnam. We got this thing moving in the right direction. We're a little successful. Here you go. Now you do it. Yeah. And we had no idea that the Tet offensive was coming. They're very good. They're not just that people were going to hand it all over to our deeply corrupt. Incredibly corrupt beyond beyond the point of being able to battle off a, you know, some of the best fighters to have ever existed in history. And the South Vietnamese government was also extremely corrupt. And everybody else was corrupt. Every single person involved in the story was completely corrupt. Yes. Now we're not going to get into the nitty gritty of the Tet offensive because parkour military history is not our forte. And this was indeed a massive military operation. It temporarily plunged the entirety of South Vietnam into chaos. Tet came as a massive surprise to American and South Vietnamese forces. And when the North Vietnamese attacked on the night of January 30th, the entire South exploded into fighting in the streets on every major city in the South. And this happened literally overnight. Additionally, every major American outpost also came under heavy fire. Remember that scene in full metal jacket where they're hanging out in the camp. They're joking around and then all of a sudden the bombs just start falling. That's the Tet Offences. But Tet was not just an overnight attack. Speaking of full metal jacket, the last act of that movie where the squad is patrolling the runes, that's actually a portrayal of the battle of way. The battle of way marked the most sustained fighting of the Tet offensive. North Vietnamese forces occupied the old imperial Vietnamese capital of way for 26 days. And while the Viet Cong did have intense battles with American and South Vietnamese forces throughout that occupation, the North Vietnamese also took the opportunity to engage in war crimes all of their own. They slaughtered nearly 8,000 civilians during their occupation of the city of way. Anyone who worked for the South Vietnamese government in way or anybody who held any kind of view that could be even seen as anti-communists. Those people were murdered and buried in mass graves. Sometimes the Viet Cong threw people who were still breathing into the body pits thereby burying South Vietnamese civilians alive under a mountain of corpses. And this is just part of the Tet Offences. This is just one city in the entire South. I mean, did the Tet Offences was just on no warning whatsoever? No, no warning whatsoever. There were rumors. People were hearing rumblings. They knew that some attack was coming somewhere, but that's how good the North Vietnamese were. They even the South Vietnamese had no idea that an attack. I mean, yeah, imagine that. Imagine here in America, if somebody were to be with in Texas, like just let's just say Texas, you know, or even Florida. Let's just compare it to Florida. Somebody secretly plants enough troops outside of every city, every major, not even every major city, even like fucking O'Cala has troops outside of it, every outpost, every prison, everything. And nobody knows that those people are there until they fucking attack. Can we do this? It's something that we can work out. I actually really think that we can do this. We can get the woke army together or get the furry brigade. Sure. Yeah, yeah, can we get the Soviet Union army? Absolutely. You know I can because honestly, that's the only way that it works. Well, they were just, I was just, you know, in that world in every single one of them. Obviously, constantly highly complimentary of the BC, funnily enough, just always just being like unkillable, un, nothing to do. During the Tet Offensive, one of the worst things about it was the number one was hearing the guys from the VC being like, Americans are so easy to kill. They smoke too much. You could follow their cigarettes everywhere. They fall like they literally fall for every trap. It's not even cigarette smokes, but it has like a little cherry like connected to your head. Yeah. They were really, they was just easy to do. And they talked about the one guy was just saying in battle away, they got to a point where they were specifically because it's the term fish in a barrel where they were, he was like, it's like, we were the fish. Where was the fucking barrel? The VC sucked their fucking shotguns in and just balloon us all the fucking hell. Yeah. And so the worst part of the whole thing, number one, with one of the worst part, truly one of the worst parts of the whole thing is just how you didn't see it and all of a sudden they're right next to you. Yeah. And they fucking use what's just always like Tony Allen. mess. I'll always remember that name. I watched Tony hold his own face in his hands. You know, and you're like, I don't think there's any good reason for this war. Yeah, but they don't sound like that in the WWE two documentaries. I watch. No, they sound proud. Yeah. It was a little easier to kill someone with the Thera Nazi. It is. Yeah. I can't wait. Ultimately though, the Ted Offensive was a massive gamble for the North that did not pay off in a military sense. South Vietnamese and American forces retook all of the towns and cities that the Vietcong had conquered during the Ted Offensive over the coming weeks and months. It was at a high cost, but they took all of them back. Military terms, the goals of the Ted Offensive failed. Although the Vietcong did come close to taking the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, and they very well might have had it not been for the gut feeling of one American commander. See, just before the Vietcong launched their attack on the Tet holiday, an American military commander ordered a build up of troops to protect Saigon based on the rumors that he'd been hearing. See, most military leaders believe that the Ted Offensive would be focused on the American outpost at K-San. And there was a massive fucking attack on K-San, but this commander had a feeling that the Ted Offensive was going to be far larger than one attack on one position. As it turned out, this commander was entirely correct. The extra troops he called in to protect Saigon were what ultimately saved the capital from falling to North Vietnamese forces during the Ted Offensive in January of 1968. Of course, it still fell in 1975, but it could have fallen far earlier. Is that what it probably would have been a good thing? Even with the extra troops, Vietcong forces still managed to breach the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. That means that technically, the North Vietnamese made it to American soil. Saigon was full of reporters, so the intense battle for the Embassy. A battle we barely won. That was broadcast across the world to the massive embarrassment of the United States. And remember what I said on the first episode about? Actually, maybe it was in Gary Ridgeway. What a man does when he gets embarrassed. Oh, yeah. Well, I got him bring up right here. We're sitting here live from Saigon on the invasion of the V.C. I have a wonderful V.C. assassin here with me. I'm reporting here from U.S. News. Let me ask the questions on everybody's lips. What do you think of trans people in sports? (Laughter) That's in the hardening questions. Are you going to ask you a question? Do how do we feel about the rise of Kim Kardashian? (Laughter) It's amazing to watch reporters in Saigon during the Ted Offensive because reporters in Vietnam have this permanent hunched overlook where their shoulders are almost above their fucking ears and they're just constantly telling us, "We are Saigon. Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead." It's just used to bombs going off behind them, dude. One was the worst. They were showing the footage of them talking about how they took over some hill 815 on Thanksgiving Day and they were doing this thought-think piece where the reporter was there. "As you can see, fresh, hot, turkey, and managed potatoes." They're being flown in fresh from the American front lines and you just see these soldiers covered in blood just sitting looking and afterwards all the guys were like, "We're sitting here like, are we on fucking threes company?" What the fuck is this? What the fuck is this? Are we, we're the news story of the fucking night? Like, they're going to, we're walking away from this hill, we're not going to ever see it again. Yeah, also don't give them all a trip to fan. You got to say that. That's where the cocaine comes in my grand. No other Ted Offensive was a failure in military terms. It was a massive success psychologically. So the anti-war movement in America was reaching massive numbers by 1968 and in the months leading up to Ted, LBJ had launched a huge PR campaign to restore faith in the war by promising the American people that victory was imminent. But after Ted, America had but one of two conclusions to draw. Either LBJ had no fucking clue what was going on in Vietnam or he'd been lying to them about how well the war was going this entire time. It's both. It's both. Yeah, it's absolutely both. So, there was some Ted talks, but we can't understand a lot of it. Most of it is exploitive, saying, "Mom, mom, where's my mama?" I have your legs right here. Put him over there, okay? I'm busy with not having art. Furthermore, pictures from the Ted Offensive were showing America that South Vietnam was a far more chaotic and brutal place than they'd been led to believe. See, they'd just seen pictures of soldiers, American soldiers dying in the jungles every day on the evening news. But Ted had brought the war to the streets of Vietnam. The infamous picture of a South Vietnamese police officer shooting a Vietcong soldier in the head, the one that captures the bullet at the very moment it exits the officer's skull, a fucking punk band's love to use it for seven inches. That came from the streets of Saigon during tech. That picture showed America that we had absolutely no control over what was happening in the fucking capital. That's not even account the rest of the fucking country. Finally, though, in February, Walter Cronkite, the most respected newsman of his generation. He went on TV after the Ted Offensive and gave the opinion that the Vietnam war was utterly unwinnable. Ted, therefore, put pressure on America to win the war faster. And for America, the only way to win the war was to drive that body count even higher. Man, they really explained a lot more in the old days. I was watching that coverage of Walter Cronkite with the maps and the and the pointer stick and the explaining of everything. We have no fucking clue what's going on in Iran right now. I'm still unclear as to why we attack them in the first place because they bad. They said mean things. Oh, yeah, it's bad. You got stuff over there. We got to go get that stuff. You're right. It is simple. It is very simple now. That's simple. I'm on your side. I've been working with the government. Now, the pressure to increase body counts certainly had a ripple effect that contributed heavily to the massacre at me lie, but the Ted Offensive had another consequence when it came to the events of March 16th, 1968. So the army had received intelligence that the Vietcong's 48th battalion, one of the Vietcong's deadliest, had suffered heavy losses during Ted. The 48th were supposedly on the run and wiping out the 48th Vietcong battalion would provide a much-needed victory for American forces. Supposedly, the survivors of the 48th had escaped to a mountain range in the Kwang Nai Province after they had their battle in Kwang Nai City. This was located just 200 miles south of the DMZ that split north and south Vietnam. Now, Kwang Nai Province was densely populated with farmers, and its people lived at the foothills of this mountain range. These people worked rice patties and farmlands, stretched from the mountains to the sea. Fucking gorgeous, beautiful, beautiful place to strafe. I'm sort of always thinking about that. We went to fucking, we were in surrender in Italy. First thing I thought was, let's just fucking name-pom this old fucking thing. I got mad because their lemons were too big. Kwang Nai Province also contained one of the most dreaded areas in all of Vietnam if you were an American soldier. They called this area Pinkville, because the area that marked it on the map was colored red to signify that this area had one of the densest populations of Vietnamese villagers in the whole country. Now, just to be clear, Pinkville was not just one village. It was a slang term for an entire area and multiple villages and hamlets were contained within the area that Americans called Pinkville. More of a pink tin than a pink fill. Sure. To draw a parallel, you could look at the area of northwest Texas where I'm from, which is also made up of a lot of small farming communities and you could collectively call the entire area, Pinkville, which many people do. Is it a, is it a derogatory way or just fun? Don't sound nice. Yeah. Well, it depends on who's saying it. Yeah. Yeah. It don't sound good, but yeah, I got. But tell me a minute, proud. Oh, it's fun when someone with a Texas accent says, oh, you're from Hickville, huh? Oh, yeah. Yes, I am. Yeah. Or you're from the big empty. Like, yep. Wow. Sure am. But this same principle applied in Vietnam to Pinkville. It's just an area with a lot of small villages contained therein. And it was remembered the guy that was talking about how he said that the color pink became so bad for him after Vietnam that he literally can't pink things. That pink thing sent him into PTSD like literally can't look at a peeps. Yeah, Easter must be fucking a nightmare. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. God. Or the Erasmith album. Jennifer feels a really fifty-fifth. Oh my fucking god. He's just in there. He's bouncing fucking be a bully. Fucking boy. Be a fucking boy. It's Erasmith song. The album was nine lives, which is how many of his friends were killed in front of him. Oh, we laughed. The pinkville had already seen its fair share of death and destruction by 1968. This province had actually been where the ground war had technically started back in 1965. It had been the very first target for American Marines during the first operation, Operation Starlight, and its villagers had suffered through two and a half years of constant patrols from American forces ever since. Now just about every American soldier who entered pinkville's province saw every Vietnamese villager contained therein as the enemy because dense populations outside of cities were automatically assumed to be full of hidden Viet Cong soldiers or Viet Cong sympathizers. Viet Cong sympathizers, of course, built the booby traps that killed American soldiers. And that has to be a thing, right? Like you're watching us. This is one of these issues of like we're being told to the soldiers. Anybody who hasn't left any of these areas is an enemy, but essentially like and that if they're there, they have to be conspiring when it's really just a lot of people that were like, no, I've just been here. Yeah. And my grandparents were here and their grandparents were here. Yeah. And now you're here. Yeah, we just take care of the goats. Yeah, the goats got to live here. The goats can't live at your shelter. Yes, American troops had also been told by 1968 by their superior officers that there was no chance of winning the so-called hearts and minds of the people in pinkville. And parley, this was because this area had long been declared a permanent free fire zone and a free fire zone any soldier could shoot and kill any Vietnamese person for any reason regardless of age or gender and they would not even be reprimanded much less punished. Yeah, they were supposed to do it. Yeah, it's a wonder why they didn't like us. Yeah, it's weird, right? So the running joke amongst soldiers sent to march through this area is that anything that was dead and was not white was by default, be it Kong. Now to be fair, American soldiers were not just going to go into this area to kill villagers. The aforementioned 48th Viet Cong battalion had returned to pinkville's province after Tet because that was where they had been based from the beginning. The Tet Offensive had merely drawn the 48th Viet Cong battalion out from their hiding places in the jungles and the tunnels of this province. The 48th had actually been fighting and killing Americans in hit and run attacks and ambushes ever since American forces had invaded the area two and a half years earlier. So the 48th battalion had a formidable reputation as accomplished killers. These were guys that American soldiers were fucking terrified of. Therefore, American soldiers were quite excited when they got intelligence that there was a chance to wipe out the 48th battalion while the 48th was still reeling from their losses incurred during the Tet Offensive. Yeah, while they were literally in mourning, troops were told these guys were in pinkville and eventually they were told that the 48th battalion was in a village called Mi-Lai. Oh, that's how we got here. And with that, after hours and hours of context bukakis, we have the setup for Mi-Lai on a global scale. That's the full top-down view of the big events that contributed to the massacre. So let us now move on to what was happening on the ground while we also get to know the actual men who were behind the massacre itself. Now unfortunately you can't just point to one policy or one man and lay all the blame for Mi-Lai at their feet. There was an architecture to the mass slaughter of civilians in Vietnam. So we're going to do our best to explain all the moving pieces one at a time. Now the Mi-Lai massacre came about when the military and psychological consequences of the Tet Offensive smashed into an operation called Task Force Barker. See in Vietnam, task forces like Task Force Barker were routinely put together to carry out both small missions and larger operations. Can it be said that like once they're out there it seems from one thing I keep picking up from all you know hearing guys talk is that like once you got out there there was like like the Mike Tyson quote everybody's got a plan so they get punched in the face and it seems that once they got out there it was all these big plans and a lot of these task force and all this kind of stuff were just kind of like slap dash put together very much so and it's all just kind of everybody just kind of making shit up as they go. Uh-huh absolutely yeah that everybody's making shit up as they go along nobody knows what they're doing a lot of these people that we're gonna get into it in a second most of these people were had no experience they a lot of them were made commanders when they had never commanded before and so once people went out into the into the bush into the shed there's like okay figured out once you get there every Vietnam that video I see is now because they have the clickbait title but it's all the same it's all like what they didn't tell you before we got to Vietnam yep and guess what the running lot through line is nothing nothing. Task Force Barker was a product of the army and Task Force Barker had been formed just before the Ted Offensive their job was to go out on constant search and destroy missions within the province that contained pinkville and their job was to wipe out as many vietcong as possible in service of racking up high body counts in impressive kill ratios and even just being in pinkville meant that this is going this was going to escalate in a way that was extremely fucking bad indeed yes because you're inevitably going to kill the people on your side well you're just with civilians well that's the thing that's what made Task Force Barker different from all these other missions all these other search and destroy missions because all other search and destroy missions you're going out into the jungle to take Hill 842 and all you're get you're just going to you're going to find vietcong yes but that's all you're going to find yes Task Force Barker was focused on wiping out the vietcong in an area that was heavily populated by Vietnamese civilians that made it an entirely different game goal now it's just there now it's like a punish they're just trying to punish them and it's trying to break it down not just that but it's it's also just you know it's desperation you know it's killing who you can get just killing yeah killing who you can get getting those bodies yeah and I think it's important to remind everyone one more time that pinkville is in the south yes it's close-ish to the nor it's only 200 miles from the northern border but yeah it's in the south it's in the area of the country that is supposedly under our control yes it is not no now if you're a commander there were two types of guys you could choose to undertake something like Task Force Barker you could choose a guy who understood the population and would do everything he could to limit civilian casualties yeah that's a good idea yeah or you could go with an absolute psychopath who saw the Vietnamese as animals problem was the commander in charge of choosing who was gonna leave this mission he was himself an absolute psychopath who saw the Vietnamese as animals and this commander was absolutely dedicated to the bodycount metric of victory in Vietnam the commander's name was Colonel Orren Henderson and it was his leadership that led to the massacre at me lie now to give you a bit of a background on how big of a piece of shit Colonel Henderson really was he was the man behind a program that was informally known as Operation Body Snatch all right well let's hear it out what hitters in a personally ordered a program where helicopter pilots could earn three-day leave passes for bringing in military-aged Vietnamese males from the countryside for question you kill five VCs you get your own personal pan pizza no no no we only got a pepperoni two years to try to claim it now if you kill ten we'll give you this case of bullets yeah that's good yeah you're gonna want to hold our lip bullets because I'd allow you to get the next camp if Dean will throw in a two-liter bottle of Pepsi oh my god I'm a coke drink get out of here Texas is Pepsi okay well quite quickly this program turned into a wide-scale human hunt using military helicopters oh some pilots that's a bad I was open but some pilots actually used lasso's to stop fleeing peasants like fucking cowboys and if the helicopter crew was feeling cruel that day they would sometimes strip the victim naked after they roped him they would then move the lasso up to the peasant's neck to form a noose then they would take off and the helicopter again at low speed with the peasant running behind and after a few minutes the peasant would inevitably trip with the noose around his neck and he would break said neck eventually operation body snatch was called off because it produced so much cruelty and no intelligence at all no but helicopter Cruze continued hunting human civilians with guns and grenades from the air throughout the war some of the guys some of these helicopter Cruze even had Reputations for it like yeah that they've they've they've killed hundreds of villagers that they're really fucking good at it I imagine that it's Easier emotionally to do it from a helicopter than it is on the ground. They talked about that. You don't have to look at him Yeah, it's that all it's that it's like a more like a video game again. It's well metal jackets that joke Like you know got to lead him so much. Yeah, yeah, that helicopter and just fucking killing all of it and also the racism But you know, we got to forget that we don't forget we can't forget that the The racist ways they talked about the Vietnamese in training the idea that you only say the G word you only say the various Terms for them, so you never once talk about them as Vietnamese people, you know, even Viet Cong is something we made up. Yes. No. Well, yeah, it's the South made it up Yeah, it's a contraction. It means communist traitors to the Vietnamese nation. Yeah, yeah, but yes, that is also yeah They call themselves the people's liberation army Now regarding the task force that was created to clear out Pinkville Colonel Henderson created it to find and kill the Viet Cong amongst civilians But he did not give any guidelines or any structure on how GIs should go about piling up the bodies and just so everyone knows when I say G.I I'm talking about a soldier who is a part of the army. We could get into why they're called G.I.'s But honestly, there's no good answer for there's like five different answers for why they're called G.I Generalized infantry galvanized iron so many different acronym so many different ways. It's just it's a slang term G.I.'s a guy in an army Because that's what I got from having to the lettuce Because Colonel Henderson gave no guidelines There was no such thing as an innocent civilian in Pinkville as far as the army was concerned To make matters worse Colonel Henderson also personally incentivize the killing of civilians in Pinkville just as he had with the helicopter crews Once things got going Henderson would radio his officers every day to ask how many Viet Cong they'd killed And individuals and units with the highest body counts were rewarded again with three-day leave passes and your own personal pan She now what's not spot your own little pizzas you don't have to share it That's just got you get it all to your cell okay You said my dad Vietnamese blood off of it Yeah, there we go. Yeah, I get ready to go Well, let me tell you why these three-day leave passes were so fucking important. Oh, there was such a white was such a big deal It's not just three days off, you know like think about this besides the presence of the 48th battalion in Pinkville This area was known for its mines and booby traps. They were fucking everywhere GIs were also told that the entire area was entirely dominated by the Viet Cong So when a GI went into Pinkville they were fucking terrified out of their mind every time Based on Henderson's incentives They could leave Pinkville's terror factory for three days if they reported a higher body count than everyone else Which of course turn the whole thing into a competition on top of everything else going on And we all know what happens when you give Americans a chance to compete we win We try to we really go for it. Yeah, we may not win every time But we try really fucking hard to win I know it blow up the stadium So you can't play the sport again And then we're going to go to where you live and we're going to kill the team to try to play us. Yeah So before long Pinkville and the surrounding areas It became places where the murder of Vietnamese civilians was agonizingly common because according to the rules of a free fire zone Anyone that was dead in Vietnamese could be counted as dead Viet Cong Now the three-day passes where they would basically do just you go to Saigon? Saigon yeah Saigon Hanoi or not Hanoi Saigon way once it was you know put back together again You go you go you visit the uh the old Mama sons yeah break it some heroin and you get ready to get relaxed Fucking clear your head to your laundry. I guess oh yeah, that's super huge because yeah the Vietnam loves laundry You know they were super big on it Honestly one of the worst things I was reading about was about how The m16 was such a bad gun oh then the m16 that that's that's the worst That's one of the worst parts of it for American soldier legitimately like a barely work as soon as they got dirty They'd stop working so they has to constantly be cleaned and they in the Soviet 8k 47s that all of the Vietnamese had were amazing Yeah, yeah, no matter what and they said that one of the worst parts about going on leave was losing a rifle And that they had you guys would talk about like the defensiveness that they would get over if they had a good m16 yeah, and they would fight over it and then they would literally like if you left They'd steal your shit. They'd steal your good m16 and then leave you a shitty one Wasn't that the the other thing like if all the officers died the guy who shot the m16 was them in charge Isn't that like is it I think I that's something I've heard but I don't know for that. I don't know I know they're guys were like when you start to realize like the guy's animal mother came in charge and full metal jacket No, the m16 was that was the standard issue rifles that everyone had Well, that's what that was why that was part of why our casualties were also so high is because that we had made this the American military had made this deal to make this new kind of rifle Specifically for Vietnam and it was awful. It was shitty. It was it jammed constantly You like Henry said yet you have to clean it constantly and you're in fucking jungle. It's not gonna stay clean So a lot of times you know, you know a guy might be walking along You know an ambush happens. He goes to fire as gun. He had may not have fired it in weeks And he pulls the trigger and nothing fucking happens and that guy gets fucking head blown off They basically said the majority of guys like especially in ambushes the guys that you found dead Where the ones whose m16s were jammed. Oh, that's why you always see them like wrapped in trash bags with rubber bands and stuff Yes, they are extremely sensitive and this was also got to remember force gun brain was happening Yeah, the whole force got like before the 10 defense. It's a swamp. That's real like that whole story about him He's like you came one day no came from the ground like that's what they said like It was raining for like three months one day called monsoon season. Yeah, yeah Now to run the task force to clean out pinkville colonel Henderson chose a lieutenant colonel named Frank Barker The task force therefore was known quite simply as task force Barker To accomplish his mission Barker was given a battalion of 500 men organized into three companies He had orders to find and destroy vietcong soldiers in the province containing pinkville in January of 1968 task force Barker therefore began just before the tet offensive Now Frank Barker was an administrator who had no command experience at all when he was given this task force He'd only gotten the job because he'd been the driver for a well-connected high-ranking officer And Barker had a reputation for shutting his mouth and following orders But since Barker had no experience he was considered a weak commander a major serving under Barker So the Barker had no idea what to do with this task force or how he wanted to do it Barker therefore rarely talked to his company commanders about how to carry out operations within this densely populated area So before long the commanders and task force Barker who actually went out on the missions they were doing whatever the fuck they wanted Now Barker's inexperience was not in any way out of the ordinary in vietcong men were given Extremely difficult tasks with little idea of how to actually succeed All the time because on the surface level every man had a very simple goal that simple goal was go out and get confirmed kills of vietcong That's all you had to do it. So men like Barker sent soldiers into the rice patties and villages of pinkville With the express purpose of making bodies It was however quite obvious to anyone paying attention that the men in task force Barker were simply murdering civilians And calling them vietcong after the fact So the vast majority of the deaths and injuries suffered by men in task force Barker They were from booby traps in mines, but their overall casualties were suspiciously low They were suspiciously low because these men were reporting a high number of vietcong KIA a suspiciously high number of vietcong KIA In February of 1968 for example, task force Barker reported that they had killed 155 vietcong But they had only captured six weapons. They had also suffered very low casualties This quickly became a pattern high vc kills, but few weapons recovered and low to no casualties This didn't make any sense because the vc were well armed and extremely deadly and very violent super aggressive So Barker's men were killing villagers and calling it a day But as long as Barker kept receiving reports of impressively high kill ratios from the men out in the field who were killing villagers and counting them as vc Then he was still contributing to the so-called success of the vietnam war He could therefore report to his superiors that his operations were well planned well executed and also Ultimately successful, but in the end, Barker's methods were just murder dressed up as victory. This whole thing is just murder dressed up as victory. Yeah. And these people, they're killing the supposed VC. Are they all men? No, they're counting. So they're counting, they're killing women and children and counting them as the enemy. If it's dead and it's not white, it's a VC. That it does not matter if it's a man, if it's a woman, if it's a child, if it is dead and not white, it is a VC. That is, that is the order of the day from the top down, especially in Pinkville. Well, because they also had an egalitarian army. So there was women serving in the army literally as VC, but not the ones in the villages. Did they have to prove that they had actually killed the people, that the numbers, like, did they have to take pictures or something like that? You know what? I actually don't know. I think it was kind of an honor system, but it was like an honor, like the honor system worked to the point where they had to say, like, okay, we're going to count that as a body. I've seen a body. I'm not lying, because if you don't see that, if you don't see anybody, you say, like, I killed 10 VC, then they are now lying. But if you're going by the rules and doing all the mental gymnastics, then you can kill someone, say, that's a VC and you were there for not lying. The body count thing even got to the point where there was one battle where a bunch of dudes, a bunch of VC were killed and I think, like, Napalm raids and, you know, their, their, you know, compatriots had buried them and American soldiers actually went and dug up the corpses so they could count every purse. That's how important body count was. And then it also became VC started hiding their own bodies in order to fuck with the body counts. Yes, exactly. Fucking crazy. Yeah. Now Task Force Barker was made up of three companies of men who would go out into Pinkville to carry out Barker's orders. These companies were made up of about 130 soldiers each and the company that was eventually sent to the village of Mealai was known as Charlie Company. A Charlie Company is not to be confused with the slang term Charlie, which some soldiers used to refer to their enemies in Vietnam, you know, Charlie and the trees. We've all heard that joke. Yeah. See, Viet Cong was often shortened to the initial VC in conversation and the military phonetic alphabet code for VC was Victor Charlie. So Victor Charlie, people got tired of saying Victor Charlie over and over again. So that was eventually shortened to just Charlie. So that's how that is how the Viet Cong came to be known. Charlie, you're not fucking trees. Charlie. Yeah, Charlie don't surf. Yeah. Now, Army companies followed the same naming convention. So Task Force Barker's three companies were Alpha Company, Bravo Company, and Charlie Company. And coincidentally, the company that shared a name with the enemy was also the one that would commit the massacre at Mealai. I would have been a beta company. Yeah. You wouldn't have been. Yeah. You would have been, oh beta company would have been so much fun. I was hanging out. Just fucking God book talk. Just like, you know, talking to the villagers, they go, how do I make a basket? Oh, that's amazing. I've never heard of. Do you guys have Oolong here? Is it uses Oolong country? Now, despite what you might think, the men of Charlie company were not battle hardened soldiers who would spend years in the shit, and it come out the other end more animal than man. The Mealai massacre occurred in March of 1968. Charlie company had arrived in Vietnam in December of 1967, four months earlier. Oh, it was in jitters. Like mid in like mid December. Yes. You can't even be like, they were like heavily disgruntled. No, no, no, they had just, they had been there for months, months and like, they're so so many people went through, so many companies went through worse shit than Charlie company went through, but Charlie company was the one that did it. And that's one of the reasons why we're going through all this is to explain like, why? Why was Charlie company specifically? Why were they capable of large mass scale murder in such a short amount of time? What was it about these guys, this company at this point in time? That's why all of this explanation is here because it's the only way it makes any fucking sense. It's a straight fear, right, at a basic level. It's part of it. It's all of it. We're now seeing the symptoms of every bit of the flaws that are coming together that are about the, this world coming together because I actually think their inexperience is part of why they did this. Yeah. No, inexperience fear. All of it. It all comes together. And it's also fucking inst, and it's idiocy and it's cruelty. It's, it's humanity. It's everything. And also there was many Mealai's leading all, it was many Mealai's happening all over the place. It's kind of a part for the course for these people. Very much so. So let's get into the stories of the men who made up Charlie Company itself. So we can kind of try to figure out how Mealai happened. Now most of the men in Charlie Company had volunteered for the draft. These were grunts. They were foot soldiers. These were men who understood that they were there to take orders. Not question them. So I don't understand that. How do you volunteer for the draft? You say, hey, send me. Like I did? Oh, okay. I'm not going to wait for my number to come up. Just fucking send me. Just do it. Do it now. So you're enlisting. You're enlisting. Yeah, my dad volunteered. Yeah. But it's also important to know that out of the 130 men in Charlie Company, 10% of them were well below average intelligence. But I only point this out because this was a direct result of the policies instituted by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and it has a bearing on the Mealai massacre. It definitely does. Maybe this 10% have been brought into the army as a part of an initiative spearheaded by McNamara called Project 100,000. This program's goal was to widen the pool of possible draftees after it became obvious that the military standards for the draft were too high. At least too high if they wanted an army that was big enough to overwhelm North Vietnam. Because that was believed that was the overwhelming them with men and military might. That was the only way we were ever going to win. So we need more men. More, more, more. But since Project 100,000 led in so many young men who were not smart enough to be effective soldiers turns out their standards were at just the right place the first time. Those who joined the military as a result of this program came to be known as McNamara's morons. You know, being drunk and stupid is no way to go through this. And it really is sad what we do to the stupid because you guys just like it's hard because it's just a bunch of stupid guys been like, I bet it'll be fine. Yeah. I mean, as long as you're not killing a bunch of people, drunk and stupid is a fine way to go through. As long as you're over there, you can sit over there in that chair and just work at the parking garage. Yeah. I do love that joke at the end of animal house during the up-a-log that the guy who headed the dickhead house was killed by his own men and be it now. Yeah. Yeah. Because honestly, I see Pally all over that guy. Oh, yeah. The impetus behind Project 100,000 was that a lot of young men who could have been used to fight and die in Vietnam, they were either too smart, too crazy, or too dumb to be drafted. Those who were too smart were getting deferments by going to college, while those who were too dumb could not pass the armed forces qualification test. Those are the guys who couldn't read. So to get 100,000 more recruits for the war in Vietnam, McNamara lowered the standards to allow the entry of young men who were previously considered mentally, physically or psychologically underqualified for military service. So you got people, you got guys that might have like a bum leg, guys that are fucking idiots or guys that are out of their fucking mind, they are now allowed into the, now allowed into the military. And it didn't stop at 100,000, actually 300,000 guys were brought into the military eventually under this program. Yeah. It's interesting because the test to find out if you were dumb enough, they just painted a door on the wall and they tried to see if you try to use it. Yeah. And how long do you try to use it? Yeah. And actually if you knock down a hole in the wall, they're like great, he's gonna be great dead over there. I can't wait for him to die over there. I always think of like Alice's restaurant where he talks about trying to go to the draft board and he's just like acted like he just wanted to really kill people really hard and then they wouldn't send him to Vietnam. Yeah. I'm like I can't wait to kill, let me kill, let me kill, kill, kill, kill. Mrs. Sun, you're a little too crazy, sorry then. Not after project one or a thousand. As far as the mentally underqualified went, many of these guys had IQs between 72 and 91. Yeah. 30,000 drafties brought under this program had an IQ below 71, that's your forest gumps right there. Okay. Those who couldn't read got in and there were many recruiters just took the test for them. Oh, great. Yeah. Now project 100,000 was passed off as a part of President Johnson's great society program. So many names. Just fucking come up with the project. Just do the thing. Yeah. We know. We're gonna be giving it a name. It makes it sound like a thing that's gonna work at it. Yeah. Like, you know, it sounds like a plan. It sounds like no, you know, we're in charge. We know exactly what's going on. Yeah. It's a name and give it a designation, everything has to have a reason and everything has to be done for a reason. I hate when people like name the group chat. Oh. So long. Oh. So long. a group bedtime story, like they got all the VC together. That was one part of the pacification. And they read them all, the three little bears, right? And then they understood all those, that Goldilocks is a fucking occupier. Yeah, right now, the first thing they thought of, they're like kill Goldilocks, shoot Goldilocks in the fucking head, right? Fucking hell, I want to, let's fucking, disembowel Goldilocks, right? And then that's kind of what, the whole thing's soured. And then you just stop trying to teach them to read. Well, in reality, McNamara's morons were meant to be the raw meat that was being fed into the grinders on the front lines of Vietnam. But besides the danger these guys posted themselves, McNamara's morons were also a danger to others. No way, I feel like Richard Ramirez's cousin is like one of these. Yeah, fucking crazy. From what standard soldier said, you could always spot one of McNamara's morons because those are the guys who were bumbling across the countryside, making a lot of noise, talking very loud about dumb bullshit. Why get home? I'm gonna get me a gold retriever. And I'm gonna get me a Mustang. It's gonna have a reverse pop. It's gonna be nice, man. I remember it muck chewing gum. Oh, wow, wow, wow. See, when I get home, I'm gonna get a dots in. Nice. Yeah, then what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna join the local farmers market and make vagina-centred candles. (laughs) Yeah, I have a thing about this thing. You know, we walk around, we're covered in this goop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was thinking about making a store call this. (laughs) Goop, goop, goop. That's a bad idea. Yeah, right? Oh, wait, what's going on? (laughs) Fuck, cheers, cheers, cheers, cheers, cheers. Yeah, no, these are the guys that's like, hey, what do you think gonna happen if I lift up this basket? Boom. Yeah. You got a life? Shhh. You got a life? (laughs) (laughs) You're right over there. Well, these guys fired too much ammunition. They couldn't understand orders. And as a result, well over 5,000 men brought in through this program were killed. 1,500 of which were killed by triggering mines or booby traps. Another 20,000 were wounded. But even if these guys did make it home, most were not welcome back as heroes. Because they were idiots who made bad decisions or they were fucking out of their mind and couldn't make good decisions, a lot of these guys was discharged other than honorably and being dishonorably discharged, removed their financial benefits and limited their access to veteran services. That was why we had the homeless veteran epidemic. Which led to the homeless, to the veteran suicide epidemic. I mean, that was just part of it. And that was just part, then that was just a small part of that entire fucking milieu that you're talking about there. And in fact, there actually was an investigation into this. Like RFK was investigating this because he was like, this is really fucked up. Like we sent these guys who were not meant to be in the military to the front lines specifically to die. And then we punished them when they came home. But that investigation died when RFK was killed in 1968. The same year as me lying. I was like, wait, I'll tell you what. I'm just glad his son lived. Oh yeah, because without him, where would be? My shit would be so messy. RFK, let me out, let me out. Let me out. Excuse me, let me out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How is your, how's your fecal matter these days? Smooth, isn't it? (laughing) It's only one of the niceest things about having a smooth and chocolate kind of. I make soft serve coming out of me is what keeps Cheryl occupied. (laughing) Fuck it. I know the thing that kind of stuff. What did he fucking go? Yeah. Man, he believed, well, cause he still believes to this day that sir and sir and didn't kill his father. Yeah, he might be right about that one. We'll get there. (laughing) Oh, long story on that one. One of those stories. No, I actually had written like an entire thing about how insane of your 1968 was and then me lie was only a part of it. Yeah. But yeah, just needless to say, like 1968 was the most insane year in America's existence. We almost ate ourselves that year. I think I'll ride that mess. Yep, thank God things are calm. Well, actually, they're far calmer than they were. Yeah, I mean, that was, that was when, you know, we were having riots that were lasting for an entire week and a military and a Detroit to shut them down. It does, dozens of people were dying. Like at the end of the riots after MLK's assassination, 42 people died and those fucking riots. Yeah. 42. Yeah, we don't get angry enough anymore. Yeah. Now, it bears repeating that 10% of the company that was responsible for me lie, Charlie Company, it was made up of McNamara's so-called morons and that includes the officers in Charlie Company. See, it wasn't just the standards for mental acuity that were lowered as a result of McNamara's Project 100,000. Men who had previously been rejected from the military for physical problems were also allowed in. And out of everyone sent to Vietnam, as a result of Project 100,000, none were more consequential than the man who would become the face of the melee massacre. Lieutenant, William, Cali, Jr. Now to put Cali straight in your head, as far as competency and respect goes, Lieutenant, Cali was basically private pile from Full Metal Jacket if pile was an officer. Cali also was far smaller than Vincent Denofrio. Cali was just five foot three inches tall. Well, I don't think you understand that it actually makes me almost invulnerable to the enemy. I have this size. (laughing) They might think I'm one of them. Yeah. Well, it's interesting you say private pile because by the end of boot camp, he was doing a really good job. And if he didn't go fucking crazy, he probably would have became an officer. He might have. Well, yeah. I never thought of how good private pile could have been. He could have been. Yeah, he might have been an NCO. Yeah, maybe. Now, William Cali had been born and raised in Miami to a perfectly normal set of parents who had raised him in a perfectly normal 1950s suburban environment, which made William Cali almost aggressively average. His reddish hair caused people to call him "resty" and while he was mischievous, he had no criminal record nor any history of violence. Really, what defined William Cali was that he was a chronic buck up throughout his entire life. Cali was also extremely entitled 'cause when he flunked out of Palm Beach Junior College in 1963-- Would you actually have to try to do? Yeah, I have no idea how you flunk out of Palm Beach Junior College. Yeah, I don't remember one book I read. You at least got like an AA, you know what I mean? Like, you just quit school. Yeah, I didn't get an AA, but that's fine. Well, after that happened with Cali, he became emotionally cold toward everyone around him. He blamed the world for flunking out of Palm Beach Junior College. Don't let the other states be-- Don't let those halada was to be a junior college. They'd make me take a class on beach balls. I didn't identify the beach balls, and it was hard. I didn't know it had stripes. He also began chain smoking four packs a day. That got him an ulcer by the age of 19. That's cool. Yeah, that's cool. A bereft direction, Cali tried joining the army in 1964, but because he had hearing problems, he was rejected from service. He worked on a number of low-skilled jobs instead. He worked as a bellhop, a dishwasher. He would have been a great bellhop. Yeah, well, he switched from job to job. Finally, he was made a switch man for a railroad in Fort Lauderdale. I love that any job that could be done by a lever-- Yes, said done by a whole human. He absolutely could have done it. You got to know when to fucking pull the lever. It's when the train's coming, Marcus. Cali soon lost the switch man job. Oh, God, I can't believe I didn't know. You lost that job in his first massively public fuckup. He was arrested. He was criminally negligent. He was arrested for allowing a freight train to block rush hour traffic, which brought the entire city of Fort Lauderdale to a standstill. What to do with this train? Oh, no, what do we do about this train? That's him, because he was for a lot of the already famously doing nothing. Yeah, exactly. There's nothing there. It's just beach and sand, and they're all just hanging out. Oh, great. Cali's fuckup made the papers. So Cali left Florida for the West Coast, and what I assume was a cloud of shame. You won't have Cali to kick around anymore. Cali's friends and family had assumed that he had actually died after leaving Florida. They didn't even care to call one. It's probably dead out fucking care. It tells you a lot about Cali, like, his relationships to other people, but specifically how other people think of him. It's like, was that William? Cali, your son went, I don't know. I haven't heard from the three years. I think he's dead. It's like, oh my son will. Oh, yeah, my son, really, he's been around for like, many Christmases, right? I imagine he walked into traffic. Yeah. (laughing) Wouldn't traffic want to avoid him like us? (laughing) Well, instead William Cali was working a job, taking photos for an insurance company in San Francisco, but in 1966, Project 100,000 made the army a possible career for William Cali once more. Oh, goodie cup drops, they're low with the IQ. Now I can go die in Vietnam. (laughing) Oh, yay, oh, yay, he made it so worse people could get in there. I can't wait to die over there. I heard that if you die in Vietnam, when they bury you, it's free. Oh, that's nice, saving expense. Well, for Cali, it wasn't IQ. [BLANK_AUDIO] Callie the reason was everything else. No, it was hearing that was specific. That was the only reason why Callie Didn't get ends because his hearing wasn't good enough to meet army standards at the time I just feel like that's like one of those things that could very much stay in you know what you mean? I understand I actually kind of understand lowering the IQ for just killing everybody Mm-hmm, but the idea if they are then taking away the hearing and all the other kind of things that feel like You could hear you just didn't have great hearing. He was about you drummer hearing. Yeah I'm saying, you know, it's just kind of funny if it feels like that'd be important. Yeah Hearing a good soul's hearing does seem pretty important when you're out in the challenge of your arm You only get five senses and I feel like if you lose 20% of your senses, you shouldn't be in war Maybe maybe not I just gift you get. Yeah, we're not being able to hear very well Sure enough. Yeah, I've got out for flat feet. Yeah, but now look at it and then he died if I didn't get a bit fire to speak Yeah, they're even flatter So after receiving a letter, but telling him that he was indeed eligible to return to the army Callie started basic training as soon as possible But while Callie had never held a position of authority nor shown any leadership qualities prior to enlistment his demeanor changed drastically during basic training. He took to it after doing eight weeks of boot camp at Fort Bliss in Texas He was accepted into officer candidate school But only because the army had an urgent need for trained officers in Vietnam Just as they had had an urgent need for grants. I don't know if you're Detecting a pattern here. Yes, but it's basically America had with Vietnam had bitten off far more than it can chew Very much so and we did not have the people To put into positions of competence and we had a lot of people that were incompetent in places of power Yeah, if you have to force your citizens to go to war and then you have to threaten them with going to prison If they don't do that, then that's probably not going to lead to the best soldiers. I don't think so. Yeah That's really it's really not going to lead to the best soldiers But it's but even then like that this is going like beyond that because there were a lot of guys in World War two that you know We're drafted and did like a fantastic job, you know fought you know fought galantly but with this is like we we have this This strategy in Vietnam of like overwhelming the enemy and we need a lot of guys to do it far more than our willing to go or Not even far more than are willing to go far more than our competent than what we need like we need a lot of competent guys For this strategy and we don't have them so instead we're putting guys like William Cali in those places where competent men should be and People are a lot of people are going to die really horrible deaths as a result Well, the reason why that they're putting people like Cali in these positions is because the Citadel and West Point That was usually those schools with that's usually where the army went for commissioned officers guys who were trained to be Officers before they even get to the battlefield the smart oil guys Yes, but those places were unable to fulfill the growing demand for CEOs in Vietnam. That's commissioned officers Because we were also churned and threw them yeah growing. Yeah, they were getting killed a lot because the Vietnamese snipers Really loved shooting guys with stripes on their sleeves and the fucking hand down for get your hand down You don't ever salute to me when we're sitting here. You never salute to me. They could love better and fucking shoot them. They didn't they got to me There you go, right furthermore the ROTC programs on college campuses that had previously been a steady source of commissioned officers Those had all but run dry because of the growing anti-war movement amongst the youth wasn't cool to be in ROTC anymore No, so since the army immediately needed more commissioned officers guys like William Cali who otherwise wouldn't have even been Considered as a recruit at the private level guys like Cali were now eligible and wanted for officer training So after Cali was put into an accelerated program for infantry. He certainly learned how to kill But he was having a hard time mastering the most important part of officer training namely Cali had no idea how to convince his infantryman how to follow his orders Put your pack in your step come on Yeah, come on. Let's go. Let's go. I know it's hot. I know it's hot. I'm hot too. You don't think I'm that hot And there was easy everyone would do everyone would love to kill the Vietcong That would love to kill but they don't have they won't go All right Was one of the Cali's commanding officers put it Cali had neither the command presence nor the command voice to get grunts to follow his orders Cal have to kill them Go kill kill them on that hill go over that hell no risk Yeah, no risk and just so we're clear here this had absolutely nothing to do with William Cali being five foot three I grew up with a student named John Mark. He was about the same high-disk Cali He joined the Marines in the year 2000 right after high school And he ended up becoming a fucking drill sergeant after fighting in some of the deadliest battles in the second Iraq war He was also the one who accidentally injured me during football practice junior year by pulling up and reaching down And he put reaching out my fucking shoulder pads. He snapped my leg with just one hand cool. He's a tough fucking guy I think he was about five four five five Cali by contrast was just a little bitch regardless of his diminutive size He couldn't even reach the shoulder pads. He couldn't even get in that I can't get to the water. I can't get to the little cups You know, you know what it is too is that the the idea of like I find that guys that are super tiny often Go the extra step can be tough like this like a lot of times like I Sadly, and any other arena of war Unlike other ones being small it's great for Vietnam. Oh, it's the only way you survive in Vietnam. Yeah, ox gets shot in the fucking head Yeah, I saw head survives. I watched house the very bad horror movie that has a whole Vietnam through line in it And one of the best is having um, what's his name uh from night court bull Yeah, bull from night court plays like the crazy like I'm crawling the G words and as he gets in there It's like, but he's too tall. Yeah, he would have been really easy to shoot. Yeah, yeah, he would have been dead immediately Loved to shot fucking bull if I was in the visa. You know, you take a couple though. Oh, yeah I heard Cali's favorite catchphrase was is anyone else hot Excuse me excuse me is there something we could do about the box? If you have any citronella candle Friday I thank god I brought my candles Happy smuggle them all the way. He loves his candles dip teak I love my dip teak can Now after Cali graduated from officer candidate school raked 120 out of a class of 156. Oh wow He was confident that he had learned the essentials of command even though he absolutely had not Then in September of 1967 just six months before me lie Cali was assigned to Charlie company as a second lieutenant where he was going to be expected to command a platoon of around 30 men Cali was then sent to Hawaii in preparation for his first deployment into Vietnam in December of 1968 And it was in Hawaii that Cali met his commanding officer the guy who ran Charlie company That was captain Ernest Medina, but Ernest Medina was known to his men as mad dog Medina The mad dog Medina had earned his nickname because he was rapidly aggressive towards communists And this was even when he was fighting mock battles during training Medina could not wait to get to Vietnam to kill as many vietcong as he could And he would indeed prove himself to be an utter psychopath once he got out into the field Medina was 33 years old by the time of the me lime massacre But he'd actually light his way into the national guard at the age of 16 He'd joined the army in 1956 after a couple years in the national guard And he'd served eight years as mostly an instructor by the time he was promoted to captain and sent to Vietnam Now it was said that Medina had a tremendous grip on his menus very charismatic But while lieutenant Cali had respect for mad dog Medina and thought of him as a real leader Medina absolutely despised lieutenant Cali Medina routinely referred to Cali as lieutenant shithead And he did so in front of the men that Cali was supposed to be commanding himself Could I give you one no command to Medina like I just want to say lieutenant Medina He said I do think you call me or like lieutenant Sally I would give you just a pitch in terms of because the lieutenant doesn't even like rhyme With my name. How about fuck face. I'll go away I'll leave you alone eating lunch Someone fuck him. Someone fuck him in the air. Why don't we just let's just make love to me. I'll take a hug So now we got two men two men that were commanders that were very much In responsible for some of the horrible shit that happened during me live captain Ernest Medina and lieutenant William Cali And once mad dog Medina lieutenant Cali in the rest of Charlie Company got to Vietnam in December of 1967 Cali immediately proved himself to be a woefully inept officer Although they were not immediately assigned to task force Barker upon their arrival in country At first they're just being sent out on simple search and destroy mission So they're not yet a part of of the larger operation in Pinkville just yet. - Yeah, they're just out collecting tennis balls. (laughing) - But Callie, when he got to Vietnam, he didn't know how to read a map. He didn't know how to use a compass. These are both fairly important aspects when it comes to the whole search function of a search and destroy mission. - Excuse me, is there an information kiosk? (laughing) Oh, what do I do? I know that does it more scroll on shells on the north? (laughing) A side of them? - Look at the math that it says up is north, but in real life, up is the sky. - Yeah, so which way do we go? How do I get go south? I don't have a shovel. (laughing) - Besides his inability to read a map, Callie was also forgetful. When Charlie Company went out into the Vietnamese countryside for the first time ever, Callie forgot to bring the hand grenade. - What? - Am I forgetting that? Am I forgetting? - Oh, well, the hand grenade. (laughing) - Oh, the Bumbu make course. - So the entire mission had to be delayed until Callie could run back to the ammo center to get what he was supposed to bring in the first place. - So what's gonna go back and get a shitload of dice? (laughing) - I've all the two. I've all the two. - Once they were out in the countryside, Callie also proved himself to be a bad decision maker. And he was also far too jumpy. When they rested for the night, Callie set up his platoon in the middle of a cornfield without cover. And when he heard rustling in the corn stalks, he freaked out and fired a bunch of yellow flares into the air, which only drew the enemy's attention directly to his platoon's location. - I saw a mouse. (laughing) There's a mouse out here. (laughing) Luckily, there were no vietcong around that night, but Medina still laid into Callie. He called Callie a fuckin' knit whip and said, quote, - Y'all without a doubt, the most stupid second lieutenant on the face of the earth. - I'm sure it was a little rude in there. - You know? (laughing) - I was trying to do a ton of loax time. - Yeah. - Yeah, you're the stupidest lieutenant around here. - Yeah, I'd say that. - You didn't do that. - Yeah, I am out here. - Without that, the most stupid second lieutenant on the face of the earth. - I just imagine everyone like coach Taylor and Friday night lights, like, what do you do it? What do you do? (laughing) - Really he's gone and I've been out rough. - I was scared. I had a dream that I fell off a curb and I could make my leg twitch. (laughing) - A Charlie company was divided into four platoons of about 30 men each. And as I said, Callie was in charge of one of those platoons. His men, however, had just about as much respect for Callie as Medina did. Callie's men saw him as one of those guys who was always trying to be a big man, like a kid trying to play at war. But since the men did not respect Callie, he was the butt of many a joke. For example, there was a popular detective show on TV at the time called Surfside 6. So Callie's platoon joke that Callie was surfside five and a half. (laughing) I guess, referred to a size. - This is even being generous. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're looking at his driver's side, this photo, you can see his feet. (laughing) That's a good one. - That's really good, yeah. - Now if Callie had not entered Vietnam as a commissioned officer, he would have been just another little guy who was trying to be a big boy. Someone who everyone could mock and ignore. - That's me. (laughing) - That's my job. - But Callie had 30 men under his command. And those men were expected to follow Callie's orders. Now soldiers often put up resistance when it came to Callie's orders, but all Callie had to do to get those men to fall in line with say, quote, oh, I'm the boss. (laughing) I'm the boss. Not you, me. Number one, all Callie. Lieutenant Shithead. Yeah, I'm taking it. I'm taking Lieutenant Shithead, I'm owning it. - But before long, Callie had to say, I'm the boss so often that it more or less became his catchphrase. - If you constantly have to do that, you're not really the boss. - No, no. - Also anyone with a catchphrase does not belong in Vietnam. (laughing) - Not again, Mr. Kong-Ting. (laughing) - Why? You don't like that? That's what we-- (laughing) - That's a funny. - Tiger, I barely know her. (laughing) - Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, my fucking gun. My fucking gun. - He's got them catchphrases and getting boys killed left and right. - I can't hear what I'm getting too old for this. - Shit! (laughing) - It soon became clear that Callie was a coward in every way, because it became very clear that Callie was particularly terrified of Vietnamese children. - Yeah, I get it. - I get it. - Yeah. (laughing) - Well, as it went in Vietnam, those whom you feared were those that you hated. And as one vet put it, I think, what the hell was his name? - It was the guy in Dick and Burns thing. - The guy in the Dick and Burns thing. - He scared her, I got the mole I was filled with hatred. - Yeah, yeah. And he said that his hatred for them was pure. - Yeah, my hate was pure. - Yeah, it was pure. - Oh yeah, I watched it this morning. - Yeah. - Because my hate was pure. - Yeah. - He was pure in the skin. And I was so scared. - Yeah. - He was scared to our God. - The pure my hate, God. - Yeah. - Yeah. And that was a lot of guys. - Yeah. (laughing) - I was fucking. - Fuck. (laughing) - But there were, however, men and Charlie Company who saw the Vietnamese kids as kids nonetheless. - Of course. - At least when they first arrived. A lot of GIs gave out gum cookies and candy to these kids. They just, they'd run up to the soldiers and the soldiers would be nice. - Stop doing that, they'd leave it everywhere. Stop doing that, they'd leave the rappers and they'd leave the gum everywhere. It's all up. - You're gonna get a call, they don't cover the mouth when they call us. - Dick Rose. (laughing) - Kelly on everything. - But Kelly soon put a stop that any sort of friendliness towards the kids. One day when a private first class was being nice to some Vietnamese kids while Cali's platoon was guarding a bridge, Cali balled out the private and threatened to take his stripes. The private, however, just laughed at Cali because he thought it was ridiculous that an officer would be so afraid of children. Cali complained about this GIs in subordination to Captain Mad Dog Medina. Mad Dog also laughed at and mocked Cali. But Medina was mocking Cali mostly for failing to control his men. So Cali took a different tack when it came to dealing with the kids. The next time one of his soldiers interacted with a Vietnamese child, Cali told him that someday, one of those little sons of bitches is gonna grenade you. And the more Cali said this, the more likely it seemed to all of the men in Charlie Company that something like that might happen. And it goes from might happen to could happen to will happen. - Yeah, 'cause they're all terrified. - Yeah, I see that. I also see him targeting the children because it's easier and that it feels like somebody, like I genuinely just believe because he's so immature and he was so bad at what he did and he was such a bad person, that I genuinely believe it's like I can bully the kids. 'Cause I'm not afraid as the kids as much as I'm afraid of the adults. - Yeah, it's easy for the kids to get grenades when you forget them all. - That's the thing. - I mean, kids is a little super tip. Kids love grenades. - I mean, these, I love grenades. My grandfather let me hold one. - Actually, I did have a grenade when I was a kid. I bought it, like a family friend bought it for me at an army surplus store and it was my most cherished possession. I carried that grenade with me everywhere. - Dude, it was a real grenade. It already had all the. - It's taken out. - Yeah, it's taken out. - Yeah, I love it. - And the hole on the bottom. - I love that grenade. - Dude, I love my grenade so much. - Seriously, if you give a grenade, most of the time he's not even gonna throw it. He's gonna keep it. - Yeah, so honestly, the safest people will always on it, give it a tail. - They keep his pets. Like, they're not even really trying. That's what kids, it's okay for them to have grenades. - Oh, yeah, the water balloons that looked like grenades. - Oh, that's awesome. - Now, since Callie was unable to control his platoon, morale plummeted and the low morale in Callie's platoon began to spread to the rest of Charlie Company. One GI said that around this time, they could sense that something was wrong. They could feel it. He said they could smell it. Something smells wrong. There was no sense of community in Charlie Company, no sense of discipline, no sense of responsibility, no sense of pride, and the stress of low morale was only added to the already psychologically and physically demanding situation that these troops have been thrown into. The thing was, all this shit was going down before Charlie Company or Lieutenant Callie or Captain, fucking mad dog Medina. All this was what was going through their heads and what was happening to them before they saw one fucking Vietcong soldier. - And this is like one of those big cruxes in this story. It's because of the building up tension of wanting to have some kind of traditional one versus one contact. - A battle like your dad used to talk about. Like your dad, your dad, you know, but he fought in the battle of the bulge and he's got all these stories. - He's amazing. - All this stuff. - The Germans are there. We are here at the night. We hear them sing in. We sing back at them and then we kill each other in the morning again. - Yes. - And then we take a break for lunch, you know, we have Easter. - No, these guys are just wandering around the country. And since arriving in Vietnam in December 1967, Charlie Company had conducted search and destroy missions without making any enemy contact at all. But that would certainly change in the end. January of 1968. When Cali, Medina, and the rest of Charlie Company were assigned to Task Force Barker. Charlie Company was moved to the province that contained Pinkville, which, as I said, was a permanent free fire zone. And then, at the end of January 1968, the Tet Offensive came, which only added to the pressure that had been put on Task Force Barker to kill Morviet Kong, so General Westmoreland could report good news to Lyndon Baines Johnson. Lyndon Baines Johnson. But while Task Force Barker had been on a province-wide mission since its beginning, the focus was starting to narrow more and more on the villages within Pinkville, and that included me-ly. Now, Captain Medina said that he had received intel that Pinkville had been under the control of communists for decades. So Medina told his men that if they shot a villager in the Pinkville area and found ID indicating that the person wasn't Viet Kong, it was perfectly acceptable to plant a grenade on them after the fact and make them Viet Kong. And these guys say I went on to be cops, right? But while Charlie Company had only been in-country for about a month by the time they were sent to Pinkville, it's important to understand that these young men were walking into an absolutely hellish environment where cruelty and barbarism was the norm. I don't think that you can. I really want the audience to understand that they were literally walking into hell itself. This was like the den of every single crime against humanity that could happen across all sides. Right now, they're about to walk into an area that no one will ever see in a warfare zone ever again, and not in America, not us. Maybe. I'm going to go ahead and say never say never. You're right. I'm sorry. I'm definitely going to say never say never because I did get several messages from people talking about it. Now they teach me lie. That is like a center piece that they teach people in office or school and all this kind of stuff. They put it forward saying, like, yeah, basically being like this, this is an example of a thing that can't happen again. Yeah, well, I mean, which is so far really worked. Yeah, but when these guys walk in, like Charlie Company walked in to Pinkville and one soldier remembered seeing a troop carrier drive by and hanging off the troop carrier's antenna, he estimated about 20 human ears. And that's first thing he sees. Wow. What was it with the ears? They're collectibles. They were tabs. They were easy to cut off. Yeah, they're collectibles. And there was a part of the thing they were looking for a proof of bodies. Proof of bodies, yeah. So when they would do that, that was a part of what it was. And then they got into, be honest, it's just guys going fucking literally going jungle. Yeah, they're really just becoming the most because they have to motivate themselves. Unfortunately, you're fucked out there. You're fucked. Now we're past the point of politics. Now you're just one guy in the jungle. You've got to go and fight. If you don't kill somebody, you're probably going to die. And so they have to kind of come up with this fucking validation system. Fuck politics. They're beyond civilization at that point. Yeah. I mean, like they get their treating Vietnamese civilians with nothing but brutality. That was a well-established doctrine in Pinkville by the time Charlie Company showed up. It wasn't just accepted. It was expected of them. Captain Medina, of course, doubled down on this idea. He had convinced Charlie Company that most of the people in this area were Viet Cong. And since Medina led the entire company, he set the tone for all the officers and the grunts below him. That included Lieutenant Callie. So in Medina, or one of his officers entered a village in Pinkville, they would grab the first Vietnamese man they found and immediately accuse him of being Viet Cong by beating him for information. If the only male in the village was a child or an old man, that didn't matter. They were still beaten and treated as if they were Viet Cong. Once Medina surprised an old man by jumping out from behind a rock and grabbing an old man in a bear hug, the old man already scared out of his mind, shit himself. Then in there, Medina just laughed, then pulled out his survival knife and cut a gash behind the old man's ear to intimidate him even further. That's basically where it started. You know, all my ears are comedy. I know that's not funny. You're right. You're right. I would say, every my first stop, it was like, hmm, I don't think he understands joke structure. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, you know, startling an old man and then an old man shit himself. It's really not funny. You know what's funny? It's sad, no matter what, really. Is it a house? It's just a place for your stuff. Yeah. And then when you go on vacation, you just take a smaller version of your stuff. How many times can you say, stop, stop, stop. And then when you go on vacation, within your vacation, you've got to take an even smaller version of your stuff. Yeah. Old George Carlin that probably you kids out there. You guys know it. It's brand new. It's, it's, he's loving it though. Yeah. Oh, he was great. And despite being told that there was a VC behind every tree and bush, Charlie Company patrolled Pinkville for weeks without seeing any action. Of course, any action besides the action they created for themselves by beating up old men and children. But day by day, Charlie Company's actions began escalating and the tone set by Captain Medina was catching on. After Charlie Company captured an old man in February, they brought this old man to lieutenant Cali. Cali discovered through an interpreter that this old man was just a farmer. But Cali decided to treat this old man as if he was VC. Cali had one of his men punched the old man in the stomach, then Cali ordered that GI to throw the old man down a well. Now the old man survived the fall. But when he tried climbing out again, Cali ordered one of his men to smash the old man's fingers. Once the old man was at the bottom of the well, Cali shot the old man himself, killed him. And then he reported to Captain Medina that his platoon had killed a Vietcong soldier who had tried to escape down a well. Taking Cali at his word, Medina ordered him to search the well for an underground tunnel system. But of course, no one in Charlie Company was willing to climb down there. So Cali reported back to Medina, hey, we searched the well, no tunnel. This is Vietnam in a nutshell. Needless cruelty begets a lie, which begets orders based on that lie. Another lie is then told in response to that order and it's all reported to commanders as a success. So in the end, nothing connected and nothing worked in Vietnam because so many actions were based on everyone telling the person above them what they wanted to hear. And that chain that started with one soldier on the ground, that shit went all the way to the president. You know, it's easy to tell if a well leads to a tunnel. If there's a splash, there's no tunnel. The tunnel starts below the above the waterline. And then how many times you throw a Vietnamese old man into what you think is a well. And then they end up in the water world of Super Mario 3. And I think that's truly right. Yeah, down there with all those turtles. I bet he's like, what a relief. But Charlie Company went three weeks in Pinkville without any enemy contact. But they were still keyed up and on edge psychologically. They were both tired and confused as to what they were actually doing there. Charlie Company went three weeks in Pinkville without any enemy contact. As far as Charlie Company was concerned, they had come into contact with the enemy every single day because every villager was the enemy. And Charlie Company was convinced that any of these villagers might make a move at any time. As the weeks went by, Charlie Company's low morale began translating to increased cruelty towards the Vietnamese. Instead of giving the local children candy, some soldiers were following Callie's lead and were kicking the children when they approached. But things changed at the end of February when men in Charlie Company actually began dying themselves, which of course made the entire situation a thousand times worse. Because now they're finally going to see some action. Well now they have a reason to be angry. Yeah. On February 25th, 1968, six men in Charlie Company were killed and another 12 were wounded when they wandered into a minefield while patrolling Pinkville. Morale sunk even lower because the minefield had been clearly marked on the map. Most likely, Lieutenant Callie's poor map reading skills had resulted in these deaths. This is what I'm talking about. This is why you can't add these guys out there. But the blame was placed on allied troops from South Korea, according to the officers, those South Koreans. They were supposed to disarm these mines long before we marched through. So it doesn't matter if we read the map wrong or not. It's the South Koreans fault. It's not our fault. Fucking idiot just passing the buck because he's worried about getting in trouble. That's like one of those things. That's not a fucker at that point is worried about getting fracked. Yeah, dude, because all of this is just like red day. They're all acting like these are office fucking problems and like little whoopsie to use in mistakes, but it's fucking them. They're everybody's diet also. if I'm leading a platoon and I know I'm bad at reading maps, I find the guy who reads the maps. You stay right next to me. You tell me what the map says. Where are we going? But you're a guy that knows how to admit when he's wrong. Lieutenant Callie was not that type of person. Lieutenant Callie was the type of person who is going to keep going no matter what until someone dies. Because what for him, it's more important for him to appear as a big man than it is for his buddy to survive and go back home. It's because these guys are all thinking of it's like it's just this other idea. It's almost like you're thinking of back home. Yeah, his secretive is career in his future. And it's just like no, bro. You're in it now. This is it now. Like it's very, it's fascinating. Watching all these people think that Vietnam was like a way to get away ahead and their fucking career. And it's just like no, you walked into hell itself. Yeah. The six deaths in Charlie Company was bad enough, but there is nothing that can rile a company up more than the death of a beloved member. Yeah, the funny guy, the funny guy. On March 14th, two days before Charlie Company marched into the village of Mili, a huge explosion from a booby trapped bomb killed a well-liked and well-respected sergeant named George Cox. Because you know what he was doing. His like lieutenant shit had dance act out that he does. Yeah, and the only love when he goes. He's like, you know, it's like with Call, he's got a fucking tight shoes, right? And it's like, ah, John. Yeah. No, George. No. He had his like shoes on his knees. Another GI in Charlie Company lost his eyes and arm and a leg in that same explosion. No one cared about that. Yeah, we don't even have a, we don't even have a name. It's just they ever know they had George. He's wearing St. George. Yeah, yeah, but not the other guy. He's like, ah, it's like shot. Oh, George is dead, but that's not George. I wish I could see George's corpse. But you actually bring up kind of an interesting point there, because even though this guy lost an arm, he lost an, his eyes, he lost an leg. He survived. Yeah. So he's not can, his name isn't mentioned. He's not, he's not enough any fucking memorial. I think he's doing great. Yeah. I bet so wherever he is right now, I bet you it's Palm Beach. Swimming in his pool, you know. Yeah, Bob and in his pool. Yeah. Well, after George Cox was killed, the fear, boredom and exhaustion that had settled into Charlie Company during their patrols throughout Pinkville, that very quickly focused into intense anger. That anger was supposed to be directed to the Viet Cong. But since Charlie Company believed that everyone in Pinkville was a potential VC, the anger was focused on anyone who was Vietnamese. And of course, as it often happens, the casual killing starts with one death. And that death came on the same day that Sergeant George Cox was killed. The GI's left on the ground that day were raiding a village when they saw something moving in the bushes. It was a woman hiding from the Americans because I'm sure she had seen what happened when a group of soldiers, specifically American soldiers, found a woman all alone. But on that day, the only thing on Charlie Company's mind was vengeance. The GI's took this woman and shot her and the soldiers kicked her repeatedly after she fell to the ground. One GI suggested they take her to a field hospital while she was still alive. But another GI gave his answer to that suggestion by shooting the woman in the chest. She was killed and another GI looted her corpse for a ring on her finger before Charlie Company returned to camp to, of course, collectively mourn Sergeant Cox. One thing that keeps coming up in my brain is that Charlie Company feels like when a serial killer ramps up, like it's putting itself in the scenario. Like it keeps putting it, you know, like we talk about serial killer sometimes put themselves up into a scenario where it becomes like I had to do it. I had to kill. I had to go do this where it seems to be like they're really like what's going on here would then happen in other companies. Yeah. But it feels like that where they're like looking for the reason. Yeah. I would say they are they are looking for the reason and that is part of what you know, that is one of the things that that leads to me lie is that it is that it's it's so many different thing like there's not one thing that you can point to is that oh they did it because of George Cox or they did it because of the body counts. It's it's all these things together. Yeah. In a way, she's like the first victim of me lie. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and also the old man don't I mean, like they they had killed civilians before this. Yeah. Plenty. Yeah. And there and there have been plenty of people in task force Barker besides Charlie Company that killed people in in the the villages of Vietnam. In fact, they weren't the they weren't even the only company in task force Barker to kill to commit a massacre in me lie in Vietnam that fucking morning. Yeah. You know, like in that province. Yeah. There was it's it was a whole thing. Yeah. We already talked about 155 in February. Yeah. Yeah. And those were not Viet Cong. Those were regular ass people. Yeah. Now this is the general mood of Charlie Company when Captain Mad Dog Medina and Colonel Frank Barker began planning a mission into a village that was just seven miles north of their command center. And I might have mentioned I might have referred to Frank Barker as Captain earlier, but you know, unless you're a military man, it doesn't mean anything to you. Well, I'm walking. I'm walking as a member of the cultural board of them. I'm a veteran of the cultural. Yeah. As far as I'm concerned, Barker's a dog. Yep. That's all he sees. He's actually cast every person in this story in his own mind as a dog. It was a little easier to digest. Yeah. And also something about dog on dog massacre is fascinating. Barker, however, did not file plans outlining the tactical aspects of this operation. Nor did he show his superior's mission plans. Barker did order the dropping of leaflets in the area to tell civilians that they needed to move to a nearby refugee center or they were going to be killed as Viet Cong supporters. This was of course the protocol. We talked about this in the first episode, I think, but true to the chaos of the Vietnam War, the refugee center was already overcrowded and anyone who tried to show up was turned away and sent back to their village. So even if they tried to get out of the way of the Americans, they couldn't. It's the grief that Charlie Company was feeling over over the death of Sergeant Cox. Task Force Barker had received intelligence that the infamous 48th Viet Cong battalion was hiding out in that nearby village with a force of at least 250 soldiers. Captain Medina had also been told that on the morning of the mission where they were supposed to go get the 48th battalion, the women and children were expected to be gone to the markets at one of the nearby cities. So go in as mean as you want, go in with everything you have to kill everything you see. The name of this village was, of course, melee. Charlie Company's mission was to go into melee, destroy the 48th battalion, burn down all the houses, blow up all the bunkers and tunnels and kill all the livestock. Anything to ensure the Viet Cong could not and would not return to this area. But there was no mention of what to do or what not to do with the civilians they found within the village. As it had been with every mission led by this task force, Barker had left the treatment of civilians up to the discretion of the commander. In this case, the commander was a man named fucking mad dog. Needless to say, it went poorly. Now, after the mission was planned, Captain Medina gave a pep talk to his men. This is the night before they were going to go out to the village of Miele to ostensibly find and kill the 48th Viet Cong battalion. At this point, the memories of various GIs and Charlie Company started getting a little fuzzy. Every GI would give a different version of what he heard Medina say leading up to the mission in Miele. Some said that Medina gave standard search and destroy orders. Others believed that Medina's orders were vague and up for interpretation. I, however, believed the soldiers who said that Medina gave direct orders to kill everyone in the village of Miele. One GI named Herbert Carter said that Medina told them that this was their chance to get revenge on these people, that it was open season in Miele. According to some soldiers, Medina had said that when this operation was over, nothing in Miele would be walking, growing, crawling, or even living. Everything had to go. Destroy the village. Make it uninhabitable. Another GI remembered someone asking Medina specifically, who is the enemy in Miele? Because after three months in country, nobody had really answered this question. Who the fuck is my enemy? Reportedly Medina said the enemy is anyone who's running. But whatever the orders were, Lieutenant Calli and the rest of Charlie Company came away from their pep talk with Medina with the impression that they could and should kill any human being they saw when they entered the village of Miele early the next morning. And it's there that we will conclude our series on the Miele massacre next week with the actual massacre itself and the fallout that eventually came when the massacre was finally revealed to the American people. Man, really good stuff. I'm glad we saved the funniest part for the Yeah, because that's really what it is. It's really about like because we wanted to leave you on a high note You know, which I think is the next episode. It's really just more of up. I call it a romp. Yeah I mean it is technically. Yeah, I guess in the romp. Yeah, I see Medina kind of like telling different guys different things too Well, he's no he's given a speech to all these guys like that he's standing up He's standing up in front and he's given him that he's doing the pattern Yeah, it's fascinating because literally they all say something different about what he said And I don't know whether it's not it's just they're fucking morons Yeah, if they weren't paying attention if they were exhausted or if they're covering for him You don't know like it's like a whole thing and the last thing I'm supposed to use is like my like Parameter on what's true and what's not true is an Oliver Stone movie But I think of like Barnes and his crew and how he had like certain guys in his platoon was like kill everybody and other guys He just wouldn't talk to because he knew they were good guys and I'm pretty certain that that is I can go Must-guarantee it would start with a big speech that was more vague and then he's got his boys He's like make sure you fucking kill him right back Yeah, but he was keeping it he might have said this is this is the one we're getting the vengeance on yeah I could definitely see him saying that to everybody Yeah, yeah, not necessarily saying like we're gonna go in and get vengeance for Sergeant Cox and for all the the other six guys that were killed by Going in and killing women and children. It's just saying like we're just gonna go in and kill everybody and it's sort of like understood that like we're going There's there's all this like assumed knowledge that should be said, but it's not said. Yeah Yeah, and it just sounds like or do they all go off road and all different kind of who fucking knows we'll talk about I know that they were directed to yeah And Medina also joins in yeah, and many many points. Yeah, does he loves it on porch. So we'll get to unforged We're gonna get to this next week Thank you so much go to patreon.com/lastpodcast and I'll up to listen to his ad free also see movie stories Video wise also you could see last stream every Tuesday live at 5 p.m. PST go check out our new YouTube channel So all we got so much good shit LPN TV with HGX - and vampire the masquerade that's going strong. Yeah, no dogs in space coming out with new stuff new shit videos on there Go see the foreign report fuck LPN romance to see go check it out the brighter side LPN also has it's on YouTube channel subscribe there We switched to Mondays could so go and to check that out We had too much coming out on Fridays and brighter side always seemed like a Monday show to me anyway I love it start your week off. It's up and crazy and Henry and I week last week we put out a bunch of dates for side stories We're coming all over the place, but we got to coming up soon So the ones I really want to stress to you are September 18th Norfolk for jenya at the addicts and September 19th at the Fletcher Opera House in Raleigh, North Carolina And then of course we're going to Brooklyn and Hartford and all that stuff But go to last podcast at lf.com to find out what's going on and of course come see me 9/11 weekend in dc. Oh, I love the laugh. I love the laugh. I love spending a 9/11 weekend in a nation's care It's my favorite thing. I just want to see the president so I feel safe So hail Satan everybody. Don't go to war. Yeah, I'm hugging Vietnam, huh? Hell, uh, hell Murphy my the dog we were fostering just got adopted halfway through this episode. I'm very happy about it It's really great. He looks just like the dog that Lance finds on the boat that they shoot up in nipocalypse now And so you kind of reminded me of Vietnam Listen to me so long me