Welcome To The Suck | Part 10

One night during the early 60s, two divers from underwater demolition team 15 were making their way through the Inky darkness and the water off the coast of Vietnam. The two Navy divers were on a hydrography mission, meaning that they'd been assigned the task of surveying the ocean bottom along coastal bays and harbours all along the Vietnamese coast. Even this early, Vietnam was teetering and that put all of the dominoes behind it at grave risk. The United States might have to do an amphibious invasion and not only would the landing beaches have to be mapped and cleared, it was also critically important to know the depth and layout of the harbours all along the coast. Deploying from a rubber raft offshore, this night's mission meant a relatively short swim, maybe five or six miles tops, and all of it underwater of course. They were wearing a new re-brither system, which chemically scrubbed the exhaled CO2 rather than releasing it as a scuba tank would. Now these re-brithers were rare, expensive and occasionally temperamental compared to a scuba tank in a regulator, but the Navy was willing to put up with all of that in exchange for the re-brithers one big advantage. They did not leave a bubble trail. The water was relatively warm that night, but both men were wearing full wetsuits mostly to protect them from the occasional swarms of box jellyfish, which were utterly invisible at night and whose long trailing tentacles contained a particularly nasty toxin that could incapacitate or even kill men in even that kind of peak physical condition. The waters of Southeast Asia are also perennially ranked as some of the most dangerous in the world with regard to sharks, including carcarrot-on-freaking carcarius or the great white shark that could grow to the size of both men lined up head to tail. Now this particular night was memorable because of a relatively rare phenomenon known as bioluminescence. At certain times, in certain conditions, immeasurably vast numbers of small marine plankton will glow like billions of microscopic fireflies, although they produce an electric blue color even more striking than the yellow green of the morph-moyer lightning bugs. The water soon became alive with billions of these plankton and sudden motion would cause them to flurass meaning that the slow, steady strokes of the divers' legs left both men trailing what looked like a fantastic blue plasma. It was absolutely beautiful and absolutely dangerous since the last thing the UDT guys wanted was to be outlined in bright blue as they tried to sneak right up into an inhabited active enemy harbor. Now needless to say they were swimming blind but that wasn't a problem for these two men from UDT 15. The two divers were connected by about 10 feet of regular clothesline. One of the divers kept close watch on the dimly glowing compass strap to his wrist while his partner did the same thing with his depth gauge. One man constantly monitoring direction and the other paying attention to depth. If the guy with the compass started to swim too shallow or too deep he would feel the tug of his buddy through the clothesline, same thing would happen if the other fellow started to drift left or right off of course. Now as they approached their target and the water became shallower, the blue flashes of feeding fish grew more frequent and more pronounced. And then in an instant a blue wall of light lit up on their left a breathtaking huge flash of bioluminescent light. As it faded a vague electric blue outline of a roughly cylindrical shape perhaps 15 feet in length could be seen fading away into the darkness leaving the slashes of swirling blue wake as a giant tail swept slowly from side to side and then disappeared into the gloom just ahead. This was the cold war two quiet dark dangerous and lonely. Alone or in pairs men would swim for miles through the ink black darkness or lie breathless as a line of enemy troops stomped through the heavy bush just a few feet away. The cold war was fought deep in the bowels of unglamorous unromantic supply ships with men peeling potatoes and sweltering galleys that could reach 120 degrees with 100% humidity. The cold war was fought in parkas and heavy mittens at remote radar installations in the frozen Canadian wilderness. It was fought in dark basements littered with cigarette butts and styrofoam coffee cups by analysts who listened with my numbing boredom for an enemy transmission worth intercepting. It was fought in quonset huts with typewriters by quartermasters who had to feed, house and then move tens of thousands of men. And it was fought in recruiting offices often by hardened former warriors who now commanded desks instead of fire bases and who had to defend themselves not from incoming enemy fire but rather the spit and insults from their fellow American citizens. You know the term was coined in Vietnam but applied equally well to any FNGA that would be a new guy just starting on one of those dirty, thankless jobs that were faithfully carried out for the four decades known as the Cold War. And that expression was welcome to the suck man. Today in the world of freedom the proudest post is, is the indelible. The only answer to communism is a massive offensive. Well, this is a must be a system of international control and conform. You and I have a rendezvous with them. Never give in. Never, never. Mr. Gorbachev teared down this world. But of course the suck wasn't limited to where you were stationed. In fact, the suck wasn't strictly confined to Vietnam. In my opinion, looking back at all of it, it seems to me that the suck was a specific period of time that began in 1964 and ended in 1980. Now that doesn't mean that everything between 1964 and 1980 was part of the suck on the contrary. The biggest and best part of the space race took place during the suck, including the flight of Apollo 11 in 1969. The space race was in fact the period when the vague, gauze-like sequence of events called the Cold War came into sharpest focus. The space race was its own self-contained story, which I covered in four and a half hour detail right here on esoteric radio theater in the series Apollo 11, What We Saw, the link is in the description below. But putting that aside, perhaps the best way to think about the suck, was that it marked a break between Cold War I where most of the interesting stuff occurred and Cold War II, which began with the end of the suck in 1980. Much of what I'm calling the suck took place in Vietnam, but much of it took place after Vietnam as well. The suck was a worldwide phenomenon, and if we're going to put down another milestone to make some sense out of this 42 year conflict, then I maintain that the suck started on August 2, 1964. Like virtually every aspect of the Cold War, the conflict in Vietnam was born during the final days of World War II. Towards the end of the Mad Scramble for European colonies that marked the 1800s, the French had laid claim to the entire South East Asian peninsula, and the boundaries of what we today call Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were merged into a district called French Indochina. To the French, it remained a dreary backwater during the Bloodbath of World War I, which utterly decimated the European nations with France, home to almost all of the horrific battles on the Western Front, perhaps suffering worst of all. And the world was not paying particularly close attention to French Indochina as the turmoil and rising militancy of the 1920s and 30s consumed the European continent. A resurgent Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, began World War II with his Blitzkrieg invasion of Poland in 1939. After pausing to pass a bipolar, resupply and remobilize, Hitler stuka dive bombers and panzer tanks headed west into the heart of Germany's ancient enemy, France. And what was the single greatest military catastrophe of the 20th century, France, which had fought the Germans to a bloody stalemate through four years of World War I, utterly collapsed in a mere 46 days. Hitler kept a northern part of France under German military occupation and installed the former French Marshal Philippe Patin as a German puppet, governing the southern half of the country from the city of Vichy, where much of the government had retreated following the fall of Paris. When the Japanese swarmed into China and southeast Asia in the years prior to Pearl Harbor, Vietnam was one of the many nations that suddenly found itself part of the greater East Asia, co-prosperity sphere, which was the public relations term used to mask the real structure, which of course was the Empire of Japan. Vichy France, firmly under the boot of Japan's German allies, needless to say, did not raise much of an objection and lying utterly defeated in Europe, there was nothing the French could do about it in either case. After the surrender of Germany in May of 1945, the Big Three, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States, redrew the post-war map during the Potsdam conference, which ended just a week before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought to the end of the war. a sudden end to the war in the Pacific. And from one of those lines drawn on one of those maps, a great deal of heartbreak was to flow. A line had been drawn by sexting Communist North and capitalist South Korea along the line of 38 degrees North latitude. In an identical one, split Communist North Vietnam from Democratic South Vietnam at the 17th parallel. Upon Japan's surrender at the end of World War II, all Japanese occupation forces stationed in Vietnam would surrender to the Chinese if North and to Great Britain if to the South. It wasn't long after the shooting had stopped that the French decided that they wanted French and Do-China back. That this was allowed to occur in the first place, owed less to France's shaky status as a World War II ally and more to the Truman Doctrine of Containment in regard to the Communist nations in orbit around Moscow. And it wasn't just Vietnam, now two separate nations, North Vietnam calling itself the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and South Vietnam or simply the Republic of Vietnam. Vietnam would represent the line drawn in the sand, well, line drawn in the jungle anyway, and South Vietnam had to be defended because if it wasn't, the line of free countries falling to communist aggression would continue to accelerate. First China and then North Korea had already fallen to communist regimes, if South Vietnam was allowed to fall, then more countries would follow each defeat setting up the next. If the line was not held in Vietnam, then Laos would be lost. The loss of Laos meant that Cambodia would fall. Cambodia's fall would trigger Thailand's. Laos would impact Malaysia, which would lead to Indonesia, then Burma, and then even India, each one falling like a line of dominoes, each falling nation toppling its neighbor. Well, that was the domino theory anyway. So who started the Vietnam War? And when did it actually begin? That the communist North began armed attacks on the South as they had in Korea. Well that was just beyond any doubt in Vietnam. The Vietnamese were led by a diminutive white bearded and inauspicious man named Ho Chi Minh, who'd been a US ally in the fight against the occupying Japanese. Ho claimed that these attacks on the French were their only means of prying all of Vietnam free of European colonialism. To accomplish this, he would employ scattered raids and guerrilla warfare by Vietnamese forces called the Vietnam Min. Ho Chi Minh would also employ his most powerful weapon, his patience. This cross-border roughhousing eventually escalated to full-blown war between Vietnam and the French Republic, which was supported almost exclusively by its World War II ally, the United States of America. By the end of the 40s, the first Indo-Chinese war was in full swing, and while it had seemed inconceivable that Ho Chi Minh and his scrawny skeletons could even hold out, let alone win, by 1950 the tide had surprisingly begun to turn in Vietnam's favor. With the United States now directly engaged with communist insurgents 20 degrees to the North on the Korean Peninsula, the French continued to lose ground. On September 30, 1950, the Vietnamese attacked and forced along Root Colonial 4, a highway that had supplied the French base at Cal Bang. By the 18th of October, the fighting was over, the French had been utterly defeated with such heavy casualties that entire units ceased to exist except in name only. The first Indo-China war continued to grind down the French with hit-and-run guerrillas tal tactics, denying the Europeans a target on which to deploy their superior firepower. In 1954, the French attempted to bait Vietnam into a set piece battle where Western weaponry could finally be deployed effectively. They continued to fortify and reinforce their field headquarters, located at DNBN FOO. The Vietnamese, under the command of Vo Wing Yap, had besieged the French by March 13th and for one month, three weeks and three days, bitter fighting resembling the trench warfare of World War I, raged along the steadily shrinking French perimeter. On May 1, 1954, the communists launched a massive assault upon the exhausted defenders of DNBN FOO overrunning several defensive outposts. The French managed to hold out for another week. On May 7, Japsent 25,000 Vietnamese against the 3,000 battered and bloody survivors, in the last radio transmission from the French defenders at DNBN FOO, hand-to-hand fighting could be heard just outside of the radio room. The enemy has overrun us while the radio operator. We are blowing up everything Viva La France. Something like 2,000 French soldiers had died in almost 12,000 taken prisoner. Perhaps 8,000 Vietnamese had died during the siege in the final assault. It was the decisive battle of the First Indochina War. After the battle, a French inquiry into the catastrophe concluded that the loss of DNBN FOO did not significantly alter the military equation. By this time, 80% of French military expenditures in French Indochina was being paid for by the seemingly bottomless pockets of Uncle Sam. Nevertheless, the fall of DNBN FOO was such a catastrophe and such a shock that the morale effect on both sides was incalculable. Americans would have to endure the same experience 14 years later. The day after the fall of DNBN FOO, the Geneva conference opened. The French agreed to leave, which had been Ho Chi Minh's goal all along, but the south refused to be governed from Hanoi. Ho and Japp had won the northern half of Vietnam. Winning the other half would require a 10-year hiatus after which another furious war was to begin in earnest. It would start on August 2, 1964 and with it would come the suck. 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Part of the South China Sea, the Gulf of Tonkin curves around North Vietnam, first running Northwest and then arcing to the Northeast towards the Chinese border. North Vietnam's major port, Haifong, lies at the very top of North Vietnam just south of the Chinese border. The Communist capital, Hanhoy, lies a few hundred miles inland. But just a glance at the map shows why the North Vietnamese would be especially tender here because the coastline does not lie open to the South China Sea at all. Instead, the huge Chinese island of Hainan sits like a granite shield. There's even a small Chinese peninsula at the very top of Hainan that furthers this perception, heading out from the mainland as if it were the arm holding the shield. The top of the Gulf where the arm of the mainland hangs down to hold the shield of Hainan Island, it's quite narrow and the southern part of the Gulf of Tonkin is wide open. Yet despite all of this, a quick look at the map gives you the impression that the Gulf of Tonkin feels quite a bit like an inland sea. After his victory in the North and the first into China War, Ho Chi Minh had managed to cool his heels for several years. But by 1960, the strategy of guerrilla raids and sabotage that had brought France into direct conflict a decade earlier was now being repeated throughout the South. These insurgents, agitators, and spies, formerly known as the "Viet Minh", were now called the "Viet Cong" or just as often the "VC". "VC" in the military phonetic alphabet used in radio communications is read as "Victor Charlie". And that's how Charlie came to be applied to the lightweight, unpredictable and ruthless cadres that continued to harass the people. and terrorized South Vietnam. Now, on that particular afternoon, August 2, 1964, a series of ongoing covert actions were taking place, part of an ongoing retaliation campaign known as Operation Plan Alpha. Three fast, small torpedo boats had been surreptitiously purchased from Norway by the CIA, crewed by South Vietnamese, these coastal boats, and the inland patrols that they launched, were part of an effort on the part of South Vietnam to make it clear that it had had enough from Hanoi and would retaliate in kind. While these coastal actions continued, USS Maddox was on what was by now a fairly routine patrol in the Gulf, recording North Vietnamese radio transmissions as part of an ongoing intelligence gathering campaign named Dysoto. Dysoto had started in response to a surprise Chinese Communist announcement that it had extended its claim of territorial waters from three miles out to twelve. An eyed list to say this caused a great deal of consternation among many of the nations bordering the South China Sea. If left standing, this unilateral expansion would change a number of highly traffic sea lanes from international waters into Chinese territorial waters overnight. This original declaration on the part of the People's Republic was accompanied by stern warnings to the ships of the US Seventh Fleet that China would not accept intrusions inside this new twelve-mile zone. In April of 1962, the Navy responded by sending a destroyer USS Dehaven deep inside the twelve-mile boundary. She patroled just outside the three-mile limit that had been recognized earlier. Their bluff called the Chinese could do nothing. Nothing except to begin to construct a deep water navy of its own so that it could try the tactic again in the early 21st century. Dehaven, meanwhile, continued to patrols saucy up and down the coast by the end of 1964, five more US Navy destroyers had joined these Dysoto patrols. USS Al Juhon extended the patrol south into the waters of North Vietnam in December of 1962. USS John R. Craig, USS Morton, and USS Richard S. Edwards would eventually deploy to these show the flag patrols along the coast of China and North Vietnam. But by July 28, 1964, it was the USS Maddox that had resumed the Dysoto patrols after a four-month hiatus. So by the afternoon of August 2nd, here's what was in play. The North Vietnamese had continued to operate their Viet Cong insurgency and pin-prick naval raids throughout the south, which responded with three torpedo boats and raids of their own. At least one of those boats had just landed a covert patrol on the North Vietnamese shore which had been discovered and surrendered almost immediately. Just two nights earlier, South Vietnamese commandos had attacked a North Vietnamese radar station on Hanmei Island, a speck of land just off the coast of North Vietnam. Simultaneously, the Maddox had orders to patrol no closer than eight miles from the Vietnamese mainland and no closer than four miles from the speck of Hanmei Island. Another small island, not much further along Maddox's patrol plot. By August 1st, the North Vietnamese patrol craft shadowing the Maddox reported that the U.S. destroyer was preparing to attack. But USS Maddox had nothing to do with the raids and it was well outside the three mile limit recognized by most nations, but well inside the 12 mile limit announced by China and later North Vietnam. So finally, in the pre-don darkness of August 2nd, USS Maddox had retreated back out to sea when word came of an imminent night attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. So, small wonder then that just before the events that would put the words Gulf of Tonk and on televisions and newspapers around the world, one observer remarked that quote, "The situation along North Vietnam's territorial waters has reached a near-boil." This was how thermonuclear war would have begun, a series of guesses, missteps, and gamesmanship heated by days of nearly unbearable tension and all cloaked by the fog of war. The Gulf of Tonk and sat like a keg of gunpowder just waiting for a match. What transpired next did not sit off a nuclear armageddon, but it did launch a conventional one. By the early morning of August 2nd, USS Maddox was making good speed back to her patrol station, but that afternoon they reappeared. Three North Vietnamese P4 motor torpedo boats chasing Maddox from behind their engines firewall as they sliced through the water at over 40 knots. They were clearly on an intercept course. As the North Vietnamese PT boats began to close, Maddox was not inside the three-mile territorial limit, nor was she even inside the 12-mile limit declared by North Vietnam. Maddox was roughly 25 nautical miles off the Vietnamese coast, twice the maximum disputed claim and beyond any question sailing in international waters. And although she was gathering intelligence for Dissoto, USS Maddox was not some simple spy platform disguised as a fishing vessel. She was a battle-hardened, subnur class destroyer commissioned late in the Pacific war, and despite being 20 years old, she was fast and heavily armed carrying six five-inch guns with two double turrets forward and one aft of the funnels. In other words, she was a warship. Technically, under the command of Commander Herb Ojiir, the ship's captain. However, Navy Captain John J. Herrick, commander of the 7th Fleet's Destroyer's Division 192, was also on the command deck that day, and it would be Herrick making the strategic decisions, leaving it to Captain Ojiir to actually fight his ship. As the Vietnamese PT boats tried to overtake the destroyer in order to position themselves for a torpedo attack, Herrick put the spurs tour and Maddox accelerated to 25 knots, which was just under her flank speed of 28 knots. He also requested air support from the nearest carrier USS Taikander-Roga. As the Vietnamese continued to advance, one of the boats, T-333, maneuvered to get ahead of the American destroyer while the other two, T-336 and T-339 continued to close from a stern. Now the torpedoes they carried were really quite pathetic with a very short effective range, but if they could manage to get close and up to fire their torpedoes, they were a deadly threat, especially against the thin skin of a destroyer, which had earned them the nickname Tincans. Maddox's six main guns had a maximum range of 16,000 yards. Herrick ordered that at the enemy patrol boats continued to close, Ojiir was to fire three warning shots across their bow if they got inside of 10,000 yards. This they soon did, and ignoring the warning shots continued to close on the Maddox. She opened up on the tube behind her and her fast and accurate gunfire caused both of those boats to fire their torpedoes early and well behind the American destroyer, nearly an impossible shot. All four torpedoes missed clearly visible as they passed USS Maddox on her starboard side. T-333, with a much better firing solution, they can get much closer than 5,000 yards and launch both her torpedoes well before it could close to really effective range. Maddox combed their wake, turning directly into the attack, presenting the narrow front to the torpedo tracks rather than the wide beam, and she managed to evade these two torpedoes as well. T-333 then found itself in a shooting match. Six radar-directed guns on the American destroyer versus a single twin machine gun on T-333. And right around this time, a flight of four F-8 crusaders arrived on the scene having been scrambled from Ticonderoga and charging towards the flight on full afterburners. USS Maddox's brisk and accurate gunfire as well as the death handling of her rudder had managed to fight off the attack on her own, and now both the American destroyer and the four American fighter jets continued to work over the retreating torpedo boats. All three were severely damaged, but they managed to limp back to port with many North Vietnamese being wounded and four of them killed. One of the crusaders had a portion of its left wing shot off, but all four jets managed to return safely to Ticonderoga. Later inspection showed that USS Maddox had been hit by one single round of machine gun fire from T-333. There were no American casualties. As President Johnson conferred with his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, and the joint chiefs of staff regarding the nature of the response, word came that just after midnight on August 4th, in rough weather and heavy seas, Maddox and another US Navy destroyer USS Turner Joy were engaged in a second attack. Considerably more modern than the Maddox, the four Assureman class Turner Joy had state of the art radar, sonar, and electronic warfare suites. In the pre-Dond darkness of August 4th, both Maddox and Turner Joy repeatedly engaged targets identified on radar and sonar, and even claimed to have spotted torpedo wakes. When it was all over on the morning of August 4th, Turner Joy alone had fired somewhere in the vicinity of 220, 5 inches, into the darkness of the Gulf of Tonkin, but this second attack differed significantly from the one two days earlier. The second attack took place at night and more to the point. On the night of the second attack, the enemy boats they'd been engaging simply weren't there. Now this kind of thing had happened before, in ferocious, confusing and terrifying night battles with the Japanese at Iron Bottom Sound off of Guadalcanal, and during the American ambush of a Japanese task force at Suriago Strait. Water plumes from incoming rounds could show up as target blips on radar, especially at night, especially in rough seas and most especially, with fully-atrenalized radar and sonar operators desperate to detect a small, fast, difficult to detect target before they could launch their deadly torpedoes. So the actual Gulf of Tonkin incident ended up consisting of an initial torpedo boat attack on USS Maddox on August 2nd, and a false attack on USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy in the early morning hours of August 4th. Now despite the Keystone Cops aspect of the so-called second attack, the actual engagements were small, the US ships and aircraft equated themselves well, and there was not a single American casualty. How was it then that in my view the Gulf of Tonkin incident began a 16-year downer that I like to call this suck? The Gulf of Tonkin incident was the flashpoint, but it was the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that set the United States on a course that would cause its serious, perhaps irreparable damage and last for many dark years. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a tangible event in what was already a morass of guerilla warfare, assassinations, and coastal raids, and Lyndon Johnson used it to push hard for the congressional approval he needed. In order to dramatically increase the US military footprint in Vietnam. After nine hours of deliberation and debate, the House and Senate issued a joint resolution which read in part, whereas the United States is assisting the peoples of Southeast Asia to protest their freedom and has no territorial, military or political ambitions in that area, but desires only that these people should be left in peace to work out their own destinies in their own way. Now, therefore it be it resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled that the Congress approves and supports the determination of the President as Commander-in-Chief to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution essentially wrote a blank check to the President authorizing him to carry out whatever measures he saw fit. The authorization was not the problem. The events that followed with a different set of characters might have been carried out cleanly and thoroughly. Now, the Suck came about as a result of the peculiar character of Lyndon Baines Johnson and his seemingly endless faith in his Wonder Boy Defense Secretary Bob McNamara. Robert Strange McNamara, that's his real name, suffered from a disability that would cause the United States an ocean of woes and sorrows. The disability that McNamara suffered from is called intellectualism. The term political science is not just a misnomer, it's an oxymoron. Politics has not been, is not, nor will ever be anything remotely like a science, and it is the curse of humanity that so many intellectuals seem to think that it is. Robes Pierre was an intellectual, Karl Marx was an intellectual, so was Woodrow Wilson and Neville Chamberlain. Lenin was the penultimate intellectual, so passed only by Leon Trotsky, who was at his pen defending the political theory that had already killed tens of millions, including virtually his entire extended family. When fellow communist Joseph Stalin sent fellow communist Ramon Mercator to sink at Isaacs into his skull at his Fortressome in Mexico in 1940. To communist Chinese intellectual Mao Zedong, these were the actions of Pikers and Amateurs. He would kill 50 million of his own people in defense of a theory. Now here's the thing about those kind of intellectuals. Let's say that after months spent in the bowels of a sailing ship working on his map, when finally coming up on deck and seeing granite cliffs where his map predicted a river delta, the intellectual will come to the conclusion that the coastline must be wrong. For the intellectual, everything that matters happens inside the mind, which means that a particular idea or theory can become so intriguing to them, that it becomes the equivalent of a model train set down in the basement. At the end of every day, the enthusiast, Huries Home, rushes through dinner, then descends the stairs to the model of the world that they have created. They spend years, decades, painting the little mustache on the station master, arranging trees and rails and crossings and little signs that flash when the little train approaches. Over a lifetime, they become so emotionally invested in this train set, this model, that the closer they feel it approaches reality, the harder and faster they want to dive in and finish it. Tweet it, make it perfect. When you love an idea that much, that in poker terms you are emotionally pot committed and you will overlook or immediately discard whatever evidence contradicts that idea and cherish and enlarge any evidence that supports it. You give an intellectual like that actual power over real people and what will inevitably follow is nothing but endless suck. On December 2, 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy approached Harry Truman's former Secretary of Defense, Robert Loveett, and asked if he would reprise his role as Secretary of Defense in Kennedy's new administration. Loveett declined but recommended a bright young executive named Bob McNamara for the post, who just one month earlier had become the first president of the Ford Motor Company whose last name was not Ford. When offered the job, McNamara, to his credit, told Kennedy that he didn't think he was right for the job because in his own words, he didn't know anything about government. Kennedy replied, "We can learn our jobs together. I don't know how to be President either." McNamara said he would like to think it over. A week later, he told Kennedy that he would accept the job but only if granted the right of final approval over all appointments made to the Department of Defense. "It's a deal," said Kennedy. "So far so good." McNamara became an outspoken advocate of a policy known as "flexible response." While outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower's position was the sledgehammer, namely a full-scale, all-out nuclear war as a deterrent to America's enemies, McNamara rightly realized that the post-World War II world would be far more nuanced and an American president would require more options than the simple on-or-off switch that had been Ix position throughout his eight years of fighting the Cold War. Robert McNamara brought to the Defense Department all of the Wizzbang ideas sweeping the big business world of the early 1960s, efficiency experts, systems analysis, program consolidation and all the rest. Now take it separately, none of this was inherently harmful on the contrary. Much of the country's military establishment had become dusty and obsolete. But where McNamara went off the rails was with his absolute certainty that he was right and career military officers who begged to differ with him were old, high bound, behind the times and therefore just plain wrong. Perhaps the most telling remark made by McNamara was one made in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis. "There is no such thing as strategy, only crisis management," he said. "Now coming from the man responsible for a military strategy for the United States, this is a shocking admission. In fact, during the first half of the Vietnam War, there is no strategy, there is only crisis management, pretty much sums up how Kennedy, McNamara and Johnson took America to war in Southeast Asia. For example, it was McNamara who simply mandated that the new M16 would immediately replace the tried and tested M14 rifle previously in service. The M14 was simpler, more rugged, and fired the heavier 7.62mm round used by the near universal communist rifle, the indestructible AK-47. The new M16 was chambered for the lighter 5.56mm cartridge with a lighter bullet, but a higher muzzle velocity. Now over time, adjustments to the direct impingement mechanisms on the original M16A1 would reduce most of the fouling caused by the direct venting of exhaust gases and a mechanical linkage called a forward assist would eventually be added in order to remove jammed cartridges. Over time, the original M16A1 would evolve into the M4 carbine used by the military to this day, the civilian version, the AR-15, would become one of the most popular rifles in history. All of that would happen over time, but the M16 was not eased in over time. Without question, it had been inadequately field-tested under combat conditions, the malfunction rate on the M16A1 was an appalling two jams or misfires per thousand rounds fired. At a time when fully automatic fire was the norm, this failure rate was catastrophic and heartbreaking. A June 1969 edition of Time magazine quoted a Marine who understandably chose to remain unnamed. He said, "We left with 72 men in our platoon and we came back with 19. Believe it or not, you know what killed most of us? Our own rifle. Practically every one of our dead was found with his M16 torn down next to him where he had been trying to kill him." to fix it. Look, the point is not that the early Model M16 had a reliability problem. The point is that the decision to replace the reliable and popular M14 was made in an office in Washington based upon theory and test data. And this data-driven, pointy-headed style of war fighting did not just kill American grunts down in the muck. It would condemn an unconscionable member of U.S. air crews as well. Being a defense procurement in the cost-cutting manner of an auto-executive, McNamara decreed that the Air Force would not get a new jet, but rather adopt the Navy's F4 Phantom Fighter and A7 Corsair attack jets until the replacement, known as the TFX, could be made operational. In very efficient fashion, this new fighter would fill both Air Force and Navy squadrons with big savings in procurements and maintenance. The problem was, and remains, that the kind of jet you need in order to launch from the 300 feet of steam-powered catapult available on an aircraft carrier would not be able to carry nearly as much ordnance as one operating from a 10,000-foot runway. Conversely, an aircraft designed to carry a much beefier combat load would be far too heavy to launch or recover from a ship, even one as big as an aircraft carrier. Navy jets and Air Force jets inherently have fundamentally different missions, and worse than all of that. When the new FTX fighter finally arrived in 1967, it was in the form of the F-111, a huge overweight swing-wing flying brick, which in a dog fight with light, nimble, and lethal Soviet migs ended up having a turning radius comparable to that of the Titanic. In the world of McNamara's data analysis, the overweight, ungainly F-111 wasn't a problem, however. Studies clearly showed that the next generation of American combat aircraft would not need to be able to turn because dog fights were clearly a relic of the past. Air-to-air missiles, like the radar-guided AIM-7 Sparrow and the shorter range heat-seeking AIM-9 Sidewinder, would see that, according to McNamara's equations, enemy planes would drop like flies while still BVR beyond visual range. That meant that neither the F-4 nor the F-111 were equipped with guns for closing combat, because, well, because missiles. That was the theory anyway, and like the theory behind deploying the M-16, theory seemed to be enough for the Secretary of Defense. A post-war analysis showed that only 15% of the early AIM-9 Sidewinder actually hit their targets. The radar-guided AIM-S sparrow was even worse, 8% of those missiles launched resulted in a kill. Now, obviously, that's less than one out of ten. Just as an example, the F-4 Phantom, the workhorse of the Vietnam War, could carry four sparrow's mounted to the bottom of the aircraft and perhaps four more on underwing pilots. That's eight missiles. With an 8% PK probability of kill, it was likely that even if an American pilot somehow survived long enough to get all eight of them off the rails, statistically speaking, all eight of those missiles were likely to miss. Now, that was a lot of suck, but you ain't seen nothing yet. During the Kennedy administration, the number of US troops in Vietnam went from 900 at the beginning of his administration to 16,000 at the time of his assassination. These advisors were theoretically banned from direct contact with enemy forces and who were intended solely for training the arven, the army of the Republic of Vietnam. In other words, the South Vietnamese. But with a passage of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his utterly modern Secretary of Defense could finally take the gloves off. McNamara convinced Johnson that the war could be quickly won if the president would provide the troops he needed. How did McNamara determine that victory was possible and how did he calculate how many US troops it would take? All that's easy. His computer program showed that it would, irrefutably. Yes, that's right. You heard me correctly. In 1964, the Secretary of Defense, the man who said that there was no such thing as strategy, there was only crisis management, produced a computer model which neatly foretold how soon the war would be over based on the number of troops input into the equation. And McNamara had total confidence in these numbers because McNamara and much of his staff were intellectuals. They had built the computer models themselves, nothing had been left out and nothing had been left a chance. The brightest guys in the room had it all figured out and they loved their model because they had lovingly built it themselves down in the basement where they painstakingly painted the mustaches on the railroad station managers. Just before the awesome geyser of Suck that erupted in the wake of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, McNamara's computer models showed that Arvins' entire seventh division encircling three small, Viet Cong communist companies in the small village of APEC would be more than adequate to deal with the communist insurgents, the South Vietnamese outnumbered them by literally 10 to 1. And it wasn't just numbers. The South Vietnamese seventh division had tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, and helicopters. Charlie just had their own rifles. But neither side apparently had access to McNamara's computer data and since neither side had been appraised of the inevitable result, some confusion had occurred, with the Viet Cong soundly whipping the Arvins forces and driving them into the jungle. Colonel John Paul Van, the US Army advisor to the Arvins' seventh division, described the results with distinctively non-data driven language. He called it "a miserable f***ing performance just like what it always is." Clearly overestimating the fighting effectiveness of the South Vietnamese forces had naturally enough skewed the data, more reliable results would be obtained once US troops were in direct action. On April 24, 1965, McNamara advised LBJ that his number showed an imminent collapse unless 40,000 additional US troops were dispatched immediately. Johnson agreed. By June, reports from US commanders in the field had been sufficiently sorted, collated, and analyzed to reveal that another 180,000 troops would be needed to stabilize the situation, but the math showed that an additional 100,000 on top of that would be enough to retake the initiative. Much to McNamara's satisfaction, the numbers were looking better as US troops began to tell. Yes, the US was taking heavy losses, but fortunately, the statisticians running the war had factored all of that in the only data that really amounted to anything was the body count. Now we knew to a man how many Americans had been killed, wounded, went missing, or were taken prisoner, what was needed was a metric to confirm that we were hurting Charlie worse than he was hurting us. In other words, if we lost 100 lives in order to take a hill, but the communists lost 200, then clearly were winning the war. It didn't matter if we then evacuated the ground that we'd fought so hard for and paid for with so much blood and treasure, if the enemy regained control of the territory, well, we'd simply spin up the rotors and go back and take it again. Now that would mean more dead Americans, which was a tragedy, of course, they goes without saying. But as long as we killed more of them than they did of us, we could go back and fight for the same hill again and again and again. They would run out of men before we did, and then victory would be ours. It was all right there in the printouts. Robert McNamara's Madison Avenue approach to warfare was to say the absolute least flawed. But at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, there were 194 million Americans, and Bob McNamara was just one of them. He came to the job reluctantly, candidly admitting that he had no idea what he was doing, and he was appointed by the one person among those 194 million with the power to do so, and that person was President John F. Kennedy. McNamara's relationship with President Kennedy was very different from the one McNamara would have with Kennedy's successor. Both men were very nearly the same age McNamara being just over a year older than Kennedy. Kennedy had been born in Brookline, a trendy suburb of Boston. McNamara was born in San Francisco. Both were from triumphantly Irish families. Both of them were young for politics and noticeably young. McNamara was a product of Harvard, of course, while McNamara had graduated from UC Berkeley, majoring in economics with minors in mathematics and philosophy. He was elected to the prestigious Baja Capra fraternity while still a sophomore. That and his Eagle Scout work ethic was more than enough to gain him admission to the Harvard Business School. It's unclear whether they were acquainted in the time both of them were on campus together, but McNamara had let it in crew at Berkeley while Kennedy had made the swimming team at Harvard. McNamara graduated Harvard with an MBA in 1939 while Kennedy graduated cum laude with a bachelor's degree in government and international relations the following year. But there was one thing that both men had in abundance and in common. Both were golden boys, both the fair-haired child, both top of the class, ahead of the curve, out on the bleeding edge. Both had known from infancy that they were very likely to become great men, and as brilliant as McNamara was, it seems from his time as Kennedy's Secretary of Defense that one of the few people in the entire country that was impressed but not intimidated by that blinding intellect and drive was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And the world. World of those seemingly born to power, no one, was more golden than the boy from Hianna's port in Massachusetts and son of the mayor of Boston. While it was clear that JFK respected, admired, and aggressively recruited Bob McNamara, and was himself a man of many flaws, one could say with confidence that having a massive inferiority complex was not something that President Kennedy suffered from. Kennedy had grown up having too much fun to really be an intellectual, but there's no doubt he knew how to handle the breed. Looking back, it seems that Kennedy's self-confidence kept McNamara in the sweet spot, allowing him to inject new ideas, but not allowing him to run away with him. But by the morning of November 23rd, 1963, that all would change. Lyndon Baines Johnson did not hail from Sinek San Francisco, nor was he from Blue Blooded Boston. Johnson was born in 1908 in Stonewall, Texas, named after the legendary Confederate General, Stonewall Jackson. Both Kennedy and McNamara were striking handsome men and young when they rose to national prominence in the late 50s, eight years older than McNamara, and nine years older than Kennedy. Johnson was not handsome, not striking, and from the looks of a photo taken of him in coveralls and a cowboy hat at the age of seven, it seems that Lyndon Johnson didn't look young even when he was a kid. He did not attend Berkeley, nor did academic brilliance, family connections, or money get him into Harvard. He was instead a graduate of the Southwest Texas State Teachers College. He'd been an awkward but talkative kid in high school, but by the time he got to Southwest Texas State, he began to blossom. He was active in campus politics. He joined the debate team and became editor of the small school newspaper The College Star. Johnson's liberalism was not limited to sad reflections muttered from the back of an air condition limousine. For nine months in 1928 and 29, Lyndon Johnson dropped out of school, not to sail to Europe as JFK would later do, but to teach Mexican-American kids in the blistering heat of Wellhousing School in Cotula, Texas, 90 miles south of San Antonio. As president, Johnson had this to say after signing into law, the Higher Education Act of 1965, quote, "I shall never forget the faces of the boys and the girls in that little Wellhousing Mexican school, and I remember even yet the pain of realizing and knowing that college was closed to practically every one of those children because they were too poor." And I think it was then that I made up my mind that this nation could never rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American, unquote. Johnson had as many and as deep flaws as any man ever to hold the presidency, but hypocrisy was not one of them. While the Golden Boys were rowing and swimming their way down the Charles River, Lyndon Johnson was out stomping the dusty plains of Texas, trying to make life better for his fellow Texans, as well as himself. Unlike the perfectly groomed, area-dyte McNamara or the effortlessly elegant Jack Kennedy, Johnson was in his soul a political animal. He loved meeting people and was a natural shomant arrival PT Barnum when it came to creating excitement, you know, political sizzle. In his first run for the US Senate in 1948, Johnson stunned his critics by beating former Texas governor, Koch Stevenson, in the Democratic primary largely due to the fact that LBJ had drawn huge crowds at fairgrounds throughout the Lone Star State by showing up in a never-before-seen by-god actual helicopter, which he named the Johnson City Windmill. The primary wind was hardly a landslide, but it did garner national attention because out of the 988,295 votes cast, Johnson had prevailed in the primary by 87 votes. And shortly after his victory, it was clear that no less than 200 ballots and probably a great many more had been, quote, "patently fraudulent," unquote. Thirty years later, an election judge named Lewis Salas said in a 1977 interview that he had personally certified 202 clearly fraudulent ballots for Johnson. Writing in 1990, journalist Robert Carrows in-depth research led him to believe that thousands of ballots had been altered in Johnson's favor, including 10,000 switched votes in San Antonio alone. But since these wacky hijinks had taken place in the Texas Democratic primary, the Texas Democratic State Central Committee ended up certifying the results anyway by a vote of 29-28. The Democratic Convention upheld that decision, and LBJ went on to thrash Republican Jack Porter in the general election that November. Landslide Lyndon was heading to Washington, and as it turned out, he wouldn't be going home anytime soon. LBJ clearly lacked McNamara's intellect and Kennedy's charm and wit, but he had one quality they did not have, one that would have made him write at home even in the cutthroat politics of the Kremlin. Lyndon Baines Johnson was naturally cunning and more importantly, utterly ruthless. Before joining the Kennedy ticket in 1960, Johnson had developed a reputation still standing as the most effective Senate majority leader in the nation's history. He accomplished this the way he'd accomplished everything else, not through charm or intellect, but through sheer hard work. He relentlessly studied, courted, or confronted every single member of the Senate. He knew their affections and fancies. He knew what they liked to drink and how much. He knew each member's particular strengths and weaknesses, each one's prejudice and critically, each of their soft spots. He would send senators on fact-finding missions to Europe conveniently times so that their dissenting votes would not be cast. And Johnson had the brass to get an inch away from a fellow member's face and give him what became known as the treatment. Several authors Robert Noback and Roland Evans described the treatment in their 1966 book Lyndon B. Johnson, the exercise of power. "The treatment could last ten minutes or four hours. It came and developed against target at the Johnson Ranch swimming pool in one of Johnson's offices in the Senate cloakroom on the floor of the Senate itself wherever Johnson might find a fellow senator within his reach. This tone could be supplication, accusation, cajolary, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint, and the hint of threat. It was all of these together. It ran the gamut of human emotions. Its velocity was breathtaking and it was all in one direction. Interjections from the target were rare." Johnson anticipated them before they could be spoken. He moved in close. His face, a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling from his pockets poured clippings, memos, statistics, mimicry, humor, and the genius of analogy made the treatment an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless "unquote." Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th president of the United States, was as far from a pushover as American politics has ever seen. McNamara did not have his way with Johnson. Johnson had his way with McNamara. A dose of the treatment from LBJ could wither his defense secretary about as effectively as it scorched everyone else. He had a deep-seated contempt for the Golden Boys, certainly he thought that he would be at the top of the 1960 Democratic ticket with a pretty boy hotshot from Massachusetts as his "vip" bringing in the Blue Nose Yankee votes. And while he may have regarded both Kennedy and McNamara with the contempt that the hard working have always had for those who could coast by on looks or brains or money, Johnson nevertheless knew that McNamara and his computer printouts were functioning on an intellectual level far beyond his own. McNamara believed his computer predicted victories because it was after all his train set. Johnson believed them because McNamara believed them, and this dynamic of overbearing boss and brilliant underling would combine with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution firmly in hand to produce a perfect storm of suck unparalleled in American history. President Johnson fought the Vietnam War in the same way a man might try to pet a feral cat. He would reach out his hand and then the cat would run away. So he'd back off, he'd put down some food, and then watch as it approached wearily, the cat would begin to eat, the man would step forward, slowly, hand extended at which point the cat would bolt and the entire process would begin all over again. Johnson, Kojolary, Carrots and Sticks would and could be changed literally overnight. He would bomb the Vietnamese communists and then suddenly stop bombing them to see if the cat would come out of the bushes. He would tip toe around targets in a way never before seen an American military history, engaging a ruthless enemy in desperate battles while maintaining the fantasy that by keeping certain areas off limits he could somehow persuade them of what. No one knew that we're nice guys. It's been said countless times that America fought the Vietnam War with one hand tied behind its back, but I think a better way to look at how Johnson and McNamara handled the conflict is to say that America fought the Vietnam War with one hand tied behind its back, and when it started winning with one hand it immediately tied up the other. Speaking of military operations on the other side of the globe, Johnson once boasted that "those boys can't hit an outhouse without my permission," and it strains human credulity to realize that this was absolutely literally true. A hidden run guerrilla war against a light, fast and imagined of enemy was being conducted from the war room below the White House half a world away, Midnight in Washington being for all intents and purposes high noon in the actual theater of battle and vice versa of course. Moving pins on an oversized map of Vietnam, the control freak from Stonewall, Texas, would nightly try to divine enemy intentions and set up targets for the following day. Now in the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, any sergeant with a radio could call in fire support and a 15 minute wait for artillery or closer support was considered to be a long time. In Vietnam, a request for permission to fire had to work its way out of the jungle through layers of army command and then through a committee of Vietnamese civilian politicians who would have to sign off on the request. It would then be cable to Washington, the president might or might not move a pin on a map and then reply had to make its way back down to Southeast Asia. I have read from reliable sources that while we were engaged in Laos, the average wait time for this kind of routine support mission was not 15 minutes as it is today and it wasn't 15 hours either. It has been reported that when the fighting moved to Laos, some of these requests for fire support took 15 days to penetrate all of those layers of suck and finally make it back down to the ground. Johnson and MacDamerah found the perfect general to lead their non-strategies strategy of perpetual crisis management in William Westmoreland. Partly a dance but also not high on the list of those overly gifted with imagination. Westmoreland was a perfect fit for the data driven war, a man perfectly comfortable fighting a battle of attrition against an enemy of unimaginable ruthlessness, unquenchable will and the willingness and ability to suffer losses that the American people could not even dream of, much less endure. Westy, as he was known to friends, seemed perfectly content to feed ever more American men into the meat grinder such losses being acceptable if and only if the enemy body count was sufficiently high. Should not come as a surprise by now to realize as did every single US serviceman to ever set foot in country that this is what was really meant by welcome to the suck. It wasn't just the heat or the humidity or the insects. That's war. The suck was walking out of an air-conditioned big silver bird emerging into the blinding sauna of southeast Asia and realizing that you were about to be sent out to take a hill that had been taken and abandoned many times before or that you would strap yourself into a jet and go to hit the same targets at the same altitude on the same compass heading and at the same time of day that you had tried to hit it yesterday and would try again to hit it tomorrow. Forget the enemy placing surface to air missiles or anti-aircraft artillery all along the route to their fury and their heartbreak and their horror. American air crews began to realize that the North Vietnamese might as well put up a series of nets at appropriate locations knowing that the next day they would be ordered to fly right into them. This was insane. Some perfect storm of arrogance, stupidity, narcissism and denial had formed back in Washington and there's no better way for you to see just how deep and wide that insanity really was than for me to read to you some of the ROE as applied in Vietnam. The actual rules of engagement that American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines had to fight under. Let's start on the ground and I'm reading from the actual rules of engagement archived in the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University. Commanders in direct contact with the enemy in inhabited areas could only authorize direct fire in other words at targets within the direct line of sight only if their mission was in jeopardy and the enemy was positively identified and then only for defensive purposes. Indirect fire meaning you know every heavy artillery piece deployed since the end of the American Civil War could only be utilized after approval of the province chief for the province where the fire would be directed. Indirect fire in inhabited areas required the approval of the province chief, the battalion commander and the dropping of leaflets or the use of loudspeakers to warn civilians prior to the commencement. No artillery could be fired in areas where friendly troops were not operating without the prior use of leaflets or loudspeakers even if enemy fire was being received from that area. Attacks in inhabited areas required the commander explained to the inhabitants why the action was initiated after the attack was over and then there's this. Fleeing enemy troops could not be engaged unless they were first ordered to halt and fail to obey. Then they must be fired upon with the intent to wound only by firing at the lower extremities. Arizona Republican Barry Goldwater was so incensed and appalled at this waking nightmare that he insisted on having this read into the congressional record. "It is absolutely unbelievable that any secretary of defense would ever place such restrictions on our forces. It's unbelievable that any president would have allowed this to happen. I'm ashamed of my country for having had people who would have allowed such restrictions to have been placed upon men who were trained to fight, men who were trained to make decisions to win war and men who were risking their lives. I dare say that these restrictions had as much to do with our casualties as the enemies themselves. Those were the ROE for ground troops and it boggled to the mind to realize that the rules of engagement that applied to air crews were even more insane, for example. Hanoy, that'd be the enemy capital, and Haifang, the enemy's major port, had 30 mile perimeters that were no bombing zones. A 30 mile perimeter on the northern border of North Vietnam prevented pursuit of attacking make fighters. Real yards and switching stations, you know, places that they would use for supply or a mass attack were off limits, airfields were off limits. MiGs could only be shot at if they were airborne, clearly identified and displayed hostile intent. I have to actually stop for a minute because it's important to remind you that McNamara's Defense Department had categorically stated that guns and dog fighting war now ancient history and that beyond visual-range kills with air-to-air missiles launched from a flying bus would win the air war. Put aside the sidewinder's 15% PK in the Sparrow's even more dismal 8% chance of a kill. This one rule alone meant that the beyond visual-range missiles could not be used beyond visual-range because in order to launch a beyond visual-range missile, the American pilot had to first visually identify the target. You know, the fast agile and deadly ones that our radar had just detected rising from North Vietnamese airfields. And time and time and time again, the hostile intent that needed to be displayed before US pilots could engage came in the form of a burst of lethal cannon fire that would turn your very advanced jet into a flaming fireball and leave you either as flying pieces of hamburger or hanging under a parachute canopy on your way down to years of torture, starvation, and beatings at the North Vietnamese Prison of War camp known as the Hanoi Hilton. There's more. Enemy MiGs with landing gear lowered were off limits. Sam sites, surface-to-air missiles, could only be attacked if they attacked first. Sam sites and anti-aircraft sites could not be attacked while they were under construction. Locks, dams, and dikes could never be attacked. Hydroelectric plants could not be attacked. Military targets could not be attacked if they were in protected zones. Trucks in Laos and North Vietnam could not be attacked unless they were on a road and displayed hostile intent. How a truck displays hostile intent to a jet fighter is beyond me, but these are the rules. Military truck parks more than 200 meters from a road could not be attacked. A former pilot during the Vietnam War wrote a short addendum to this just so everything was crystal clear. Pilots had to travel routes specified by Washington, he said, and they would face court martial if they disobeyed. Pilots in South Vietnam could not provide air support to ground troops even if fired upon unless they got clearance and they first had to drop leaflets warning possible civilians to clear the area. Welcome to the suck, man. The United States was staggering towards a catastrophic defeat inflicted upon it by the only force capable of doing so, namely itself. Sometime, somehow, someone would have to come and save us, and not just from the threat of communism, someone was going to have to come and save us from ourselves. The Cold War, what we saw, is written and presented by Bill Whittle, produced by Robert Sterling, directed by Jonathan Hay. Executive producer is Jeremy Boring. Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our associate producer is Katie Swinerton. Post-production producer Alex Singaro, story producer Jared Sashel, edited by Matthew Scheller, audio recorded by Mike Coromina, original music and mixed by Kyle Perrin, designed by Cynthia Angulo. The Cold War, what we saw, is an esoteric radio theater production copyright, esoteric radio theater 2020. [BLANK_AUDIO]