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

The road to My Lai enters its final stretch as the Tet Offensive leaves the American military desperate for a win and willing to count any Vietnamese body as Viet Cong. Along the way, the boys get into Project 100,000, Task Force Barker, “Mad Dog” Medina, and the dangerously incompetent Lieutenant William Calley before Charlie Company prepares to march into My Lai.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:01Speaker 02

  There's no place to escape to. This is the last. On the left.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  That's when the cannibalism started.

• 1:21Speaker 03

  I mean, when you're ready, my sweet Roberto. Are we ready? Wow.

• 1:27Speaker 04

  Henry, what's your new favorite song?

• 1:28Speaker 03

  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, I do understand sort of the sensitivities that I portrayed in a lot of my characterial kind of presentations. Characterial. Characterial presentations back in the day. But I do wish you all could meet Hanoi, Henry Zebrowski. Because I have been listening to nothing but 1960s, to all of the music that we inspired. All of that Vietnamese soul and funk.

• 2:05Speaker 04

  Nam nay ni phep.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  Oh. Dude, dude, dude, gok, block, tang. Honestly, I'm not even saying, that's not even racist. No, that's it. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not, I'm just saying. And I am 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's just me genuinely trying.

• 2:36Speaker 04

  It's a love crime.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a love crime.

• 2:38Marcus Parks?

  That's a great way of putting it.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  It's a crime of fashion.

• 2:41Marcus Parks?

  Welcome to our podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with love criminal Henry Zebrowski.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Yes, everything I do is on the edge of legality. But don't worry, I save my Hanoi, Henry Zebrowski for my family.

• 2:56Marcus Parks?

  Yes, as do we all.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  And I don't even do it hardcore. I'm just trying to hit the words.

• 3:00Marcus Parks?

  Of course, yeah. And they're great words. It's a beautiful language and a very difficult, incredibly difficult language.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  It's weird because it seems so simple when you look at it. Cause all of the words are like three or four letters tops.

• 3:11Marcus Parks?

  No, but it's, well, it's a tonal language. So like one word is can be spelled one way and there are five different ways to pronounce it. And all five ways have wildly different meanings.

• 3:21Speaker 04

  Didn't McNamara make a fool out of himself making a speech over there?

• 3:24Marcus Parks?

  He did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was like, bing dong go, bing dong go. And it meant something like my kitty is sleeping with a duckling to me.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  That's my favorite. That's my favorite. Oh, it's been on Berlin.

• 3:39Marcus Parks?

  He did. It was the very same thing. And we have master linguist Ed Larson.

• 3:43Speaker 04

  That's right. That's right. Give me a language. I got it.

• 3:46Marcus Parks?

  Uh, Indonesian.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Ya tu ti. Oh, that's all Eddie. Eddie did that. That was not me.

• 3:54Marcus Parks?

  It's not bad. That's not bad at all.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  I know how to speak. I know how to listen. I know how to act. You gotta speak with the eyes and the hands if you're in a different country.

• 4:01Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. Eyes, hands, loud.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  Me need bathroom. I know what to do. I know what to do.

• 4:11Speaker 04

  International sign for sandwich.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  Sometimes is eating a ladyboy's butthole.

• 4:19Speaker 04

  Still good between two buns.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  All right, let's get back into the Mila massacre.

• 4:26Marcus Parks?

  Let's do it. Now I'm gonna go ahead and say something right up top.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  Uh oh.

• 4:31Marcus Parks?

  While the Mila massacre is the entree to this series, I realize now that we're three parts in and have still not gotten to the Mila massacre. It's good to think of these episodes as something like a 10 course meal.

• 4:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:42Marcus Parks?

  Mila is 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 Mila. You have no idea how much cutting I had to do. But I assure you, everything we mentioned here has bearing on what happened in March of 1968. And while I understand this is a lot to take in, I personally think that the road to Mila is just as fascinating as the massacre itself.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  I'll put it this way, you don't get to Mila in Ken Burns Vietnam until like episode like six.

• 5:20Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  Like there's a, I just got through episode like four and a half. I'm in the, like in the middle of five now and you're just, by the time you get your, I'm just at the Ted offensive.

• 5:29Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  We're not even there yet. And you're just like, wow, there's a lot left to go.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, no. And that was my least favorite Bob Hope movie.

• 5:36Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  The road to Mila.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. But Danny Kaye does an amazing Vietnamese accent.

• 5:42Speaker 04

  It's good. And he really, you know, they said there was no reason to dance, but he found one.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  He did. I love that.

• 5:49Marcus Parks?

  He always does.

• 5:50Speaker 03

  That patty sequence, when he's just on top of all the guys with the hats on and he's dancing on top of the hats.

• 5:56Speaker 04

  And the ox was surprisingly nimble.

• 5:58Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, but then they blew his legs off with that bouncing Betty and he had to go home in a fucking pine box.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  Old Danny Kaye, R I P.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Oh, T A P. I'm sorry.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  What's behind that banana tree? Good work, Danny.

• 6:16Marcus Parks?

  So when we last left the chain of events that would lead to the Mila 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.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. Do you remember when he said that he, we said it last week where he went like, just so you know, it's gonna be a bit of a problem there. Okay. Just wanna kind of just lay that out there and peace, bye. You say, gotta get out of here. Bye bye.

• 6:51Speaker 04

  Disgustingly rich.

• 6:52Marcus Parks?

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He had said like, I didn't know to this day if whether I was fired or whether I quit. And everyone was like, you were fired.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  In 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 if we're like, okay, like 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, and armories and, 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. And they looked at it and said, you already won the war in 1965. Because there's no, they didn't figure the entire Vietnamese rebellion, all of them by the Vietcong, there were other people in South Vietnam, everybody else. They didn't actually include any of that.

• 7:39Marcus Parks?

  No, 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 sent in ground troops in 1965.

• 7:57Speaker 04

  We didn't even like steal oil or nothing.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  No. No yellow cake. There's no uranium. There's just nothing there. No little girls we could give to anybody. I think we might've done that.

• 8:09Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, we did do that. Operation Rolling Thunder, that's LBJ's bombing campaign in the North that had done nothing to stop Vietcong 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 Vietcong, you know, there, I was talking with Carolina about it and she was a little confused. It's like, you know, is the Vietcong in the North or in the South? Where they're from? The Vietcong is fucking everywhere. They're from the North, but they are all over Vietnam, top to bottom.

• 8:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, they used the Ho Chi Minh Trail to get everywhere.

• 8:50Marcus Parks?

  Yes. But while the Americans were seeing this war in terms of people killed, the North Vietnamese were engaged in a struggle of wills. And 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 gonna end any day now. So at the start of 1968, the commander of US forces in Vietnam at the time, General Westmoreland, he made an announcement.

• 9:34Marcus Parks?

  Speaking in terms of eventual victory, Westmoreland 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 Vietcong soldiers killed, then surely there would come a point where we had killed enough. Basically, Westmoreland was treating this war like a video game where you have to defeat wave after wave of enemies. And if you survive to the end of the wave, then you've won. According to Westmoreland, 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 Vietcong soldiers we had already killed.

• 10:18Marcus Parks?

  Problem was, the crossover point was an imaginary metric that Westmoreland 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 Westmoreland was bragging about the crossover point, the CIA, who had been in Vietnam longer than anyone, they were reporting that the number of Vietcong troops in the South had actually increased to 1.3 million.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  That's almost everybody. That's kind of all of them.

• 10:51Marcus Parks?

  It had doubled since 1965, and this was while General Wes Moreland was on TV all but declaring victory.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  Well, you see, we're, Marcus, this is where ignorance really shows. See, we are a obviously elevated, more wizened, urban economy, superpower.

• 11:12Marcus Parks?

  America.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 11:24Marcus Parks?

  That is true.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  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.

• 11:33Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  Then they would just be like, oh, we'll stop then.

• 11:36Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, or we'll just all die.

• 11:38Speaker 03

  We'll just die.

• 11:39Marcus Parks?

  We'll just get to that crossover point.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Actually, right? Could we all just tell us where we should all be and then you just nuke that place? That'd be great.

• 11:48Marcus Parks?

  That is the problem with the rest of the world. They just don't fucking listen to America.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  They just don't fucking listen. We got a lot of answers. Well, I like, the idea of just creating a, this is, the more I research this topic, Marcus, the existential sadness of the current state of the world continues to pour over me.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  It is interesting how we are so consistently the bad guys while pretending we're the good guys.

• 12:14Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, that's the story of America.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Well, it's because we got great movies.

• 12:18Speaker 04

  We got great movies, we got great music, and the food's pretty good, too.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  The food's great.

• 12:21Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  And air conditioning rocks.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  Air conditioning's right on the fucking line.

• 12:26Marcus Parks?

  No, our greatest victory has always been culture. And the stories, like, Americans are the best, we, I can't say we are the best storytellers in the world.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, fuck all y'all.

• 12:36Marcus Parks?

  We told.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  Fuck all y'all.

• 12:38Marcus Parks?

  Because the stories that we told were believed by, and those stories that we were told were believed by nobody harder than ourselves.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  That's right, yeah. The Greeks like to claim they are, but they only got two stories.

• 12:49Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, yeah, we got like, nine.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:53Marcus Parks?

  Now, as to why there was such a buildup of Vietcong troops in the South, remember, there's 1.3 million down there, operatives were 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 had 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.

• 13:35Marcus Parks?

  Like, 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 a 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.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  It's good for morale, probably, too.

• 13:58Marcus Parks?

  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.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  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?

• 14:21Marcus Parks?

  That is the thing. They, yeah, they just, it's, come on, man.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, Americans don't fight on holidays. We have PTO sometimes.

• 14:27Marcus Parks?

  And we're in your country, we're trying to abide by your rules, sir.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Come on, guys, come on, hey, we want to celebrate too.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm gonna take Tet off this year.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Wow. Actually, Eddie, I think you can only take Tet off if you can accurately sing one Vietnamese song.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  All right, here goes.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Oh, my, too, man, wait, we'll get to it, we'll get to it, we need a, we need a Vietnamese woman in here. Side stories, LPTL, GMO, let's come.

• 14:58Marcus Parks?

  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 Vietnam altogether. That's the pie in the sky hope. At the very least, Ho Chi Minh hoped that the attack might lead to negotiations that would end Operation Rolling Thunder. In other words, LBJ's deadly and indiscriminate bombing campaign

• 15:40Marcus Parks?

  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 My Lai massacre. The opening moves of the final act, however, began with Tet.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Because wasn't this like, as the Tet 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?

• 16:09Marcus Parks?

  There's so many of those moments, where we're thinking like, okay, I think at this point, we can maybe give things over to the South Viet- because that was ostensibly the whole point, that was the whole idea, is that it was going to become a point where we could hand everything over to the South Vietnamese, the Republic of South Vietnam.

• 16:23Speaker 04

  We got this thing moving in the right direction, we're a little successful, here you go, boys.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  Now you do it, now it's your problem again.

• 16:28Marcus Parks?

  Now you do it, yeah. And we had no idea that the Tet Offensive was coming.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  No, they're very good.

• 16:34Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  They were quite a good.

• 16:36Speaker 04

  And not just that, the people we're going to hand it all over to are deeply corrupt.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:39Marcus Parks?

  Incredibly corrupt, beyond the point of being able to battle off, you know, some of the best fighters who have ever existed in history.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  And the South Vietnamese government was also extremely corrupt. And everybody else was corrupt. Every single person involved in the story was completely corrupt.

• 16:54Marcus Parks?

  Yes. Now, we're not going to get into the nitty gritty of the Tet Offensive because hardcore 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?

• 17:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:39Marcus Parks?

  That's the Tet Offensive.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  Yes, that makes sense.

• 17:41Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. 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 ruins, 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 Vietcong 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.

• 18:24Marcus Parks?

  Anyone who worked for the South Vietnamese government in Way or anybody who held like, any kind of view that could be even seen as anti-communist, those people were murdered and buried in mass graves. Sometimes the Vietcong 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 Offensive. This is just one city in the entire South.

• 18:52Speaker 04

  They did it, the Tet Offensive was just done no warning whatsoever?

• 18:55Marcus Parks?

  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. That even the South Vietnamese had no idea that an entire, an attack, I mean, yeah, imagine that. Imagine here in America, if somebody were to be within 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 Okala has troops outside of it, every outpost, every prison, everything. And nobody knows that those people are there until they fucking attack.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  Can we do this?

• 19:38Speaker 03

  Something that we can work out. I actually really think that we can do this. We can get the woke army together. I'll get the furry brigade.

• 19:42Marcus Parks?

  Sure. Yeah, yeah. Can we get the Soviet Union arm?

• 19:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. You know I can.

• 19:47Marcus Parks?

  Because honestly, that's the only way that it works.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Well, they were to I was just, you know, in that world and every single one of them, obviously constantly highly complimentary of the VC. Uh, 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.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  They smoke too much. You could follow their cigarettes everywhere. They fall like they they literally fall for every trap.

• 20:19Speaker 04

  It's not even cigarette smokes, but it has like a little cherry like connected to your head.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  It was just easy to do. And they talked about they 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, he's like, we were the fish. Way was the fucking barrel. The VC sucked their fucking shotguns in and just blew us all to fucking hell.

• 20:46Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  And so the worst part of the whole thing, number one, it was one of the worst part, truly one of the worst parts of the whole thing is just, um, how you didn't see him and all of a sudden they're right next to you.

• 20:57Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  And they fucking use, it's just always like Tony Alames. 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. I think there might be something, I don't think it's good. Yeah. They don't sound like that in the WW2 documentaries I watch.

• 21:16Marcus Parks?

  No, they sound proud.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:18Speaker 04

  It was a little easier to kill someone when they they're a Nazi.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  It is.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  I can't wait.

• 21:24Marcus Parks?

  Ultimately, though, the Tet 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 Tet Offensive over the coming weeks and months. It was at a high cost, but they took all of them back. In military terms, the goals of the Tet 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 buildup of troops to protect Saigon

• 22:07Marcus Parks?

  based on the rumors that he'd been hearing. See, most military leaders believed that the Tet Offensive would be focused on the American outpost at Khe Sanh. And there was a massive fucking attack on Khe Sanh, but this commander had a feeling that the that the Tet 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 Tet Offensive in January of 1968. Of course, it still fell in 1975, but it could have fallen far earlier.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  That probably would have been a good thing.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, dude. At this point, you're like, just lose already and leave, guy. Like, it's like reading a movie where you're just like, god damn. As you're watching this, I go, I feel like I'm watching a horror movie where you're like, get out of the house.

• 22:59Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 23:00Speaker 03

  Don't go to that fucking house, you fucking moron.

• 23:02Speaker 04

  Upstairs?

• 23:03Speaker 03

  Get the fuck out of here. Out the attic window. Get out of there, white boy. Get the fuck out of there. Go home. Go to Springfield.

• 23:12Marcus Parks?

  But even with the extra troops, Vietcong forces still managed to breach the walls of the US 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, or actually, maybe it was in Gary Ridgeway, what a man does when he gets embarrassed.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, I want to bring up right here. We're sitting here live from Saigon, the invasion of the VC. I have a wonderful VC assassin here with me. I'm a reporter here from US News. Let me ask the questions on everybody's lips. What do you think of trans people in sports?

• 24:02Marcus Parks?

  Asking the hard-hitting questions.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  Are you gonna ask you a question too? How do we feel about the rise of Kim Kardashian? Is she a yes queen or no queen?

• 24:12Marcus Parks?

  It's amazing to watch reporters in Saigon during the the Tet Offensive because reporters in Vietnam have this permanent hunched overlook where they're always, their their shoulders are almost above their fucking ears and they're just constantly like, we are Saigon.

• 24:31Speaker 04

  He's just used to bombs going off behind him.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. One was the worst was they they were showing the footage of them talking about how they took over some hill 815 on Thanksgiving Day. And they were like doing this like thought think piece where the reporter was there. As you can see, fresh hot turkey and mashed potatoes are being flown in fresh from the American frontlines. And you just see these soldiers covered in blood, just like sitting looking and like they're like afterwards, all the guys were like, we're like sitting here like, are we on fucking Three's Company?

• 25:04Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  Like, what the fuck is this? Like, what the fuck is this? So we are we we're the news story of the fucking night? We just get like, they're gonna, we're walking away from this hill. We're not gonna ever see it again.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. Also, uh, don't give them all tryptophan. You gotta stay up.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  That's where the cocaine comes in, my friend.

• 25:23Marcus Parks?

  Now, while the Tet 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 Tet, LBJ had launched a huge PR campaign to restore faith in the war by promising the American people that victory was imminent. But after Tet, 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.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  It's both.

• 26:00Marcus Parks?

  It's both. Yeah, it's absolutely both.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  It's a shame it couldn't lead to any Tet Talks.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  There was some Tet Talks, but we can't understand a lot of it. Most of it is expletives and people saying, mama, mama, where's my mama?

• 26:15Speaker 03

  I have your legs right here. Put him over there, okay? I'm busy with not having arms.

• 26:21Marcus Parks?

  Furthermore, pictures from the Tet 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 seen pictures of soldiers, American soldiers, dying in the jungles every day on the evening news. But Tet 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, fucking punk bands love to use it for seven inches. That came from the streets of Saigon during Tet. That picture showed America that we had absolutely no control over what was happening

• 27:04Marcus Parks?

  in the fucking capital. And that's not even to count 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 Tet Offensive and gave the opinion that the Vietnam War was utterly unwinnable. Tet 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.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  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 sticks and the explaining of everything. We have no fucking clue what's going on in Iran right now.

• 27:51Marcus Parks?

  Uh, I'm still unclear as to why we attacked them in the first place.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Because they bad.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  They bad and they said mean things.

• 28:01Marcus Parks?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  It's bad. They got stuff over there. We gotta go get that stuff.

• 28:06Marcus Parks?

  You're right. It is simple. It is very simple now. That's simple. I'm on your side.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  I've been working with the government.

• 28:17Speaker 03

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• 31:21Marcus Parks?

  Now, the pressure to increase body counts certainly had a ripple effect that contributed heavily to the massacre at Mi Lai, but the Tet Offensive had another consequence when it came to the events of March 16, 1968. So the Army had received intelligence that the Viet Cong's 48th Battalion, one of the Viet Cong's deadliest, had suffered heavy losses during Tet. The 48th were supposedly on the run, and wiping out the 48th Viet Cong Battalion would provide a much-needed victory for American forces. Supposedly, the survivors of the 48th had escaped to a mountain range in the Quang Nai Province after they had their battle in Quang Nai City.

• 32:00Marcus Parks?

  This was located just 200 miles south of the DMZ that split North and South Vietnam. Now, Quang Nai Province was densely populated with farmers, and its people lived at the foothills of this mountain range. These people worked rice paddies and farmlands stretched from the mountains to the sea. Fucking gorgeous, beautiful.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  Beautiful place to strafe. That's what I was always thinking about that. When we went to fucking, when we were in Sorrento in Italy, first thing I thought was, let's just fucking name-palm this whole fucking thing.

• 32:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I got mad because their lemons were too big.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, gross.

• 32:38Marcus Parks?

  Quang 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.

• 33:10Speaker 04

  It's more of a pink tin than a pinkville.

• 33:12Marcus Parks?

  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 Hickville, which many people do.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  Is it a derogatory way or just fun? Don't sound nice.

• 33:30Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, well, it depends on who's saying it. Yeah, it don't sound good, but yeah.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  But tell them I'm in a pride.

• 33:36Marcus Parks?

  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, sure am. But this same principle applied in Vietnam to Pinkville. It's just an area with a lot of small villages contained therein.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  You always remember 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 see pink things. That pink things sent him into PTSD, like, like, literally can't look at a peeps. Easter must be fucking a nightmare for him.

• 34:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, God, or the Aerosmith album.

• 34:18Speaker 04

  Gender reveals the really 50/50.

• 34:20Speaker 03

  Oh, my fucking God. He's just sitting there, knees bouncing. Fucking be a boy, be a fucking boy, be a fucking boy.

• 34:26Speaker 04

  It's Aerosmith's song, the album was Nine Lives, which is how many of his friends were killed in front of him.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Oh, we laugh.

• 34:38Marcus Parks?

  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.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  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, 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, and my grandparents were here, and their grandparents were here, and now you're here.

• 35:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, we just take care of the goats. The goats got to live here, the goats can't live at your shelter.

• 35:52Marcus Parks?

  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. Partly, this was because this area had long been declared a permanent free-fire zone. In 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.

• 36:22Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, they were supposed to do it.

• 36:23Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 36:24Speaker 04

  To wonder why they didn't like us.

• 36:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's weird, right?

• 36:28Marcus Parks?

  So the running joke among soldiers sent to march through this area is that anything that was dead and was not white was, by default, Viet Cong. 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.

• 37:10Marcus Parks?

  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.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, while they were literally mourning.

• 37:34Marcus Parks?

  Troops were told these guys were in Pinkville, and eventually, they were told that the 48th Battalion was in a village called Mi Lai.

• 37:44Speaker 03

  Oh, that's how we got here.

• 37:45Marcus Parks?

  And with that, after hours and hours of context bukhaki, we have...

• 37:53Marcus Parks?

  We have the setup for My 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 My Lai at their feet. There was an architecture to the mass slaughter of civilians in Vietnam. So, we're gonna do our best to explain all the moving pieces, one at a time. Now, the My Lai massacre came about when the military and psychological consequences of the Tet Offensive smashed into an operation called Task Force Barker.

• 38:38Marcus Parks?

  See, in Vietnam, task forces, like Task Force Barker, were routinely put together to carry out both small missions and larger operations.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  Can it be said that like, once they're out there? It seems 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 until they get punched in the face? And it seems that, once they got out there, there was all these big plans, and a lot of these task forces and all this kind of stuff were just kind of like, slapdash put together?

• 39:08Marcus Parks?

  Very much so.

• 39:09Speaker 03

  And it's all just kind of, everybody's just kind of making shit up as they go?

• 39:12Marcus Parks?

  Uh huh, absolutely. Yeah, 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, a lot of them were made commanders when they had never commanded before, and so, once people went out into the bush, into the shit, they're like, okay, figure it out once you get there.

• 39:30Speaker 03

  Every Vietnam Vet 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."

• 39:40Marcus Parks?

  Yep.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  And guess what the running through line is? Nothing! They told them nothing!

• 39:48Marcus Parks?

  Now, Task Force Barker was a product of the Army, and Task Force Barker had been formed just before the Tet 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 and impressive kill ratios.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  And even just being in Pinkville meant that this was going, this was going to escalate in a way that was extremely fucking bad?

• 40:17Marcus Parks?

  Indeed, yes.

• 40:18Speaker 04

  Cause you're inevitably gonna kill the people on your side.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  Well, you're just with civilians.

• 40:22Marcus Parks?

  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, cause all other search and destroy missions, you're going out into the jungle to take Hill 842, and all you're gonna, you're just gonna, you're gonna find Vietcong, yes, but that's all you're gonna find.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 40:39Marcus Parks?

  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.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Cause the goal now is just, now it's like a punish, they're just trying to punish them and they're trying to break it down.

• 40:54Marcus Parks?

  Well, not just that, but it's also just, you know, it's desperation.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:59Marcus Parks?

  You know, it's like-

• 40:59Speaker 03

  It's killing who you can get.

• 41:00Marcus Parks?

  It's just killing, yeah, killing who you can get, getting those bodies.

• 41:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I think it's important to remind everyone, one more time, that Pinkville is in the south.

• 41:08Marcus Parks?

  Yes!

• 41:08Speaker 03

  Yes!

• 41:09Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, 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.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 41:19Marcus Parks?

  It is not.

• 41:20Speaker 03

  No.

• 41:21Marcus Parks?

  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.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Oh, that's a good idea.

• 41:33Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, that's a good, yeah, it's a pretty good idea, yeah. Or, you could go with an absolute psychopath who saw the Vietnamese as animals.

• 41:39Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 41:39Marcus Parks?

  Problem was, the commander in charge of choosing who was gonna lead this mission, he was himself an absolute psychopath who saw the Vietnamese as animals. And this commander was absolutely dedicated to the body count metric of victory in Vietnam. The commander's name was Colonel Orin Henderson, and it was his leadership that led to the massacre at My Lai. 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.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  Alright, well, let's hear it out.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  I just want, I don't wanna judge a book by its cover, you know? I wanna just make sure we give it, give it, I'm open.

• 42:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:28Marcus Parks?

  Well, Henderson had personally ordered a program where helicopter pilots could earn three-day leave passes for bringing in military-aged Vietnamese males from the countryside for questioning.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  You kill five VCs, you get your own personal pan pizza. Now, that is what's hard, you know, we only got us pepperoni cheese, the charge is limited.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  Now, if you kill 10, we'll give you this case of bullets.

• 42:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's good, now you're gonna wanna hold on to bullets, cause that'll allow you to get the next tip.

• 42:58Marcus Parks?

  Kill 15, we'll throw in a 2-liter bottle of Pepsi. Wow!

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Oh my god, well, I'm a coke drinker.

• 43:06Marcus Parks?

  Get outta here, Texas! Is Pepsi okay? Well, quite quickly, this program turned into a wide-scale human hunt using military helicopters.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  Oh!

• 43:18Marcus Parks?

  Some pilots-

• 43:19Speaker 03

  Oh, that's a bad plan, guy.

• 43:20Marcus Parks?

  That's a real bad thing, yeah.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  I was open, but-

• 43:23Marcus Parks?

  Some pilots actually used lassos 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 in 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.

• 44:03Speaker 04

  No.

• 44:03Marcus Parks?

  But helicopter crews continued hunting human civilians with guns and grenades from the air throughout the war. Some of the guys, some of these helicopter crews even had reputations for it, like, oh yeah, that, they've killed hundreds of villagers, like, they're really fucking good at it.

• 44:18Speaker 04

  I imagine it's easier emotionally to do it from a helicopter than it is on the ground.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  They talked about that.

• 44:24Marcus Parks?

  You don't have to look at them, you know, it's that whole, it's that-

• 44:27Speaker 04

  It's like, more like a video game.

• 44:28Marcus Parks?

  Again, it's full metal jackets, that joke, like, you know, gotta lead them so much, you know?

• 44:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:32Marcus Parks?

  Like, that helicopter, you know, just fucking killing all of them.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  And also, the racism, like, you know, we gotta forget, we don't forget, we can't forget that 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.

• 44:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, even Vietcong is something we made up, right?

• 44:58Speaker 03

  Yes, well, yeah, it's a-

• 44:59Marcus Parks?

  The south made it up.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:00Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, it's a contraction, it means communist traitors to the Vietnamese nation.

• 45:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:04Marcus Parks?

  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 Vietcong 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 GI, I'm talking about a soldier who is a part of the Army. We could get into why they're called GIs, but honestly, there's no good answer for it, there's like, five different answers for why they're called GIs.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  And we're at the point where we're like, "But why are they called GIs?" I'm just gonna be like, "You're paying attention to the wrong parts of the fucking story? I need you to focus, okay? It's not about acronyms."

• 45:47Marcus Parks?

  Generalized Infantry, Galvanized Iron, so many different acronyms, so many different ways, it's just, it's a slang term, GI is a guy in an army.

• 45:53Speaker 03

  I can't get to you!

• 45:54Speaker 04

  Gastrostril infection?

• 45:58Marcus Parks?

  Well, because-

• 45:59Speaker 03

  That's what I got from having lettuce, yeah.

• 46:01Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. Well, 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 incentivized 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 Vietcong they'd killed, and individuals and units with the highest body counts were rewarded, again, with three-day leave passes.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  And your own personal pan pizza. Now, it's nice about your own little pizzas, you don't have to share it. That's why you get it all to yourself, okay? Get some of that Vietnamese blood off of it. There we go, I'll get ready to go.

• 46:51Marcus Parks?

  Well, let me tell you why these three-day leave passes were so fucking important, why it was such a, why it 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 Vietcong. So, when a GI went into Pinkville, they were fucking terrified, out of their mind, every time.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:19Marcus Parks?

  But 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, turned 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.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  We win! We try to, we really go for it.

• 47:41Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, we may not win every time, but we try really fucking hard to win.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  And then we'll blow up the stadium so you can't play the sport again. And then we're gonna go to where you live and we're gonna kill the team that tried to play us.

• 47:52Marcus Parks?

  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 and Vietnamese could be counted as dead Vietcong.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  Now, the three day passes, where, they would basically, do you just, you go to Saigon for three days?

• 48:14Marcus Parks?

  Saigon, yeah, Saigon, Hanoi, or not Hanoi, Saigon, Way, once it was, you know, put back together again. Way never really recovered, but...

• 48:22Speaker 03

  You visit the, uh, the old Mama Sands?

• 48:24Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  Right, get some heroin, and you get ready, you get relaxed, fucking clear your head?

• 48:29Speaker 04

  Do your laundry, I guess?

• 48:31Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that's super huge, cuz Vietnam loves laundry.

• 48:35Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 48:36Speaker 03

  You know, they, uh, 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.

• 48:44Marcus Parks?

  Oh, then the M16, that, that's, that's the worst, that's one of the worst parts of it for American soldiers.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  They legitimately, like, could barely work. As soon as they got dirty, they'd stop working, so they has to constantly be cleaned. And the, and the Soviet AK-47s that all of the Vietnamese had were amazing, incredible.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, just worked no matter what.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  And they said that one of the worst parts about going on leave was losing your rifle. And that they had to, guys would talk about, like, the defensiveness that they would get over if they had a good M16.

• 49:11Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 49:21Speaker 04

  Wasn't that the, the other thing, like, if all the officers died, the guy who shot the M16 was then in charge? Isn't that, like, is, I think I've, that's something I've heard, but I don't know for a fact.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  That I don't know. I know there are guys who, like, when you start to realize, like, the guys...

• 49:34Speaker 04

  I think that's how Animal Mother came in charge in Full Metal Jacket.

• 49:37Marcus Parks?

  Hmm, no, the M16 was, that was the standard issue rifle that everyone had.

• 49:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a shitty rifle, it's a shitty thing.

• 49:43Marcus Parks?

  Well, that was why, that was part of why our casualties were also so high, is because 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, it jammed constantly. Uh, you, like Henry said, you have to clean it constantly, and you're in the fucking jungle. It's not gonna stay clean, so a lot of times, you know, a, you know, a guy might be walking along, you know, an ambush happens, he goes to fire his gun, he had, may not have fired it in weeks, and he pulls the trigger, and nothing fucking happens, and that guy gets his fucking head blown off.

• 50:18Speaker 03

  They basically said the majority of guys, like, especially in ambushes, the guys that you found dead were the ones whose M16s were jammed.

• 50:25Speaker 04

  Oh, that's why you always see them, like, wrapped in trash bags with, uh, rubber bands and stuff.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  Yes, because they were extremely sensitive. And then, this was also, you gotta remember, Forrest Gump rain was happening.

• 50:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:34Speaker 03

  The whole Forrest Gump, like, before the Tet Offensive.

• 50:37Speaker 04

  It's a swamp.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  That's real, like, that whole story about him being like, "It came one day, and it came from the ground." Like, that's what they said, like, it was raining for, like, three months one day.

• 50:45Marcus Parks?

  It's called monsoon season.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:47Marcus Parks?

  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,

• 51:29Marcus Parks?

  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, said that 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 in 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 Vietnam.

• 52:08Marcus Parks?

  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.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 52:25Marcus Parks?

  So, men like Barker sent soldiers into the rice paddies 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 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.

• 53:09Marcus Parks?

  In February of 1968, for example, Task Force Barker reported that they had killed 155 Vietcong.

• 53:17Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 53:17Marcus Parks?

  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.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  And very violent and super aggressive.

• 53:40Marcus Parks?

  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 ultimately, successful. But in the end, Barker's methods were just murder dressed up as victory.

• 54:10Speaker 03

  This whole thing is just murder dressed up as victory.

• 54:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, and these people they're killing, the supposed VC, are they all men?

• 54:17Marcus Parks?

  No.

• 54:17Speaker 04

  That they're counting, they're, so they're counting, they're killing women and children and counting them as the enemy?

• 54:21Marcus Parks?

  If it's dead and it's not white, it's a VC. That's, 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.

• 54:33Speaker 03

  Well, because they also had an Gallatian army, so there was women serving in the army, literally, as VC, but, you know, not the ones in the villages.

• 54:40Speaker 04

  Did they have to prove that they had actually killed the people, that the numbers, like, did they have to, like, take pictures or something like that?

• 54:47Marcus Parks?

  You know what? I actually don't know. I think it was kind of an honor system, but it was like an honor, like, they, the honor system worked to the, to the point where they had to say, like, "Okay, we're gonna count that as a body. I've seen a body, and so I'm not lying." Because if you don't see the, if you don't see anybody, and you say, like, "I killed 10 VC", then they are now lying. But, by the, 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 are therefore not lying. The body count thing even got to the point where there was, uh, one, one battle where, uh, a bunch of dudes, a bunch of VC were killed, and I think, like, napalm raids, uh, and, you know, their, their, you know, compatriots had buried them,

• 55:32Marcus Parks?

  and American soldiers actually went and dug up the corpses so they could count every person. That's how important, that's how important body count was.

• 55:39Speaker 03

  And then it also became VC started hiding their own bodies

• 55:42Marcus Parks?

  Yes.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  in order to fuck with the body counts.

• 55:44Marcus Parks?

  Yes, exactly.

• 55:45Speaker 04

  Fucking crazy.

• 55:46Marcus Parks?

  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 Mela was known as Charlie Company. Now Charlie Company is not to be confused with the slang term "Charlie", which some soldiers use to refer to their enemies in Vietnam, you know, Charlie in the Trees, we've all heard that joke.

• 56:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:11Marcus Parks?

  See, Vietcong was often shortened to the initials 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, uh, the Vietcong came to be known.

• 56:33Speaker 03

  Charlie's in the fucking trees, man!

• 56:34Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, Charlie don't surf.

• 56:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, Charlie don't surf, yeah.

• 56:36Marcus Parks?

  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 Mela.

• 56:53Speaker 04

  I would've been Beta Company.

• 56:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, you would've been, yeah, you would've been, oh, Beta Company would've been so much fun. Us hanging out, just fucking on book talk. Yeah, just like, you know, talking to the villagers, like, "Oh, how do I make a basket?" "Oh, that's amazing." Have you ever heard of, do you guys... Guys have oolong here? Is it, do this oolong country?

• 57:17Marcus Parks?

  Despite what you might think, the men of Charlie Company were not battle hardened soldiers who had spent years in the shit and had come out the other end more animal than man. The My Lai massacre occurred in March of 1968. Charlie Company had arrived in Vietnam in December of 1967.

• 57:37Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 57:38Marcus Parks?

  Four months earlier.

• 57:39Speaker 03

  So it was, it was in jitters?

• 57:41Marcus Parks?

  Like mid, in like mid-December.

• 57:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, so you can't even be like, they were like heavily disgruntled.

• 57:46Marcus Parks?

  No, no, no, they had ju, they'd been there for months, months and like there are 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, 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, what was it about these guys, this company at this point in time? That's why all this explanation is here, because it's the only way it makes any fucking sense.

• 58:18Speaker 04

  It has to be just straight fear, right? At a basic level?

• 58:21Speaker 03

  It's part of it. It's, 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 war all coming together, because I actually think their inexperience is part of why they did this.

• 58:33Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, no, inexperience, fear, all of it. It all comes together and it's also fucking, and it's idiocy and it's cruelty. It's, it's humanity, it's everything.

• 58:42Speaker 03

  And also there was many My Lais leading all, it was many Me, My Lais happening all over the place. So it's also just kind of par for the course for these people.

• 58:49Marcus Parks?

  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 My Lai 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.

• 59:09Speaker 04

  So I don't understand that. How do you volunteer for the draft?

• 59:13Marcus Parks?

  You say, hey, send me.

• 59:14Speaker 03

  My dad did.

• 59:15Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 59:15Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, you say, I, I'm not gonna wait for my number to come up, just fucking send me, just do it. Do it, do it now.

• 59:21Speaker 04

  So you're enlisting?

• 59:22Marcus Parks?

  You're enlisting.

• 59:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, my, my dad volunteered.

• 59:24Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, but it's also important to note 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 My Lai massacre.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  It definitely does.

• 59:44Marcus Parks?

  See, this 10% had 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 gonna win. So we need more men, more, more, more. But since Project 100,000 let 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.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  You know, being drunk and stupid's no way to go through this life. 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.

• 1:00:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, you know, I mean, as long as you're not killing a bunch of people, drunk and stupid is a fine way to go through.

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  As long as you're over there. Sit over there in that chair and just work at the parking garage.

• 1:00:53Marcus Parks?

  I do, I do love that, um, that joke at the end of Animal House during the, during the epilogue, that the guy who headed the dickhead house was killed by his own men in Vietnam.

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  Because honestly, I see Cali all over that guy.

• 1:01:08Marcus Parks?

  Oh, yeah. Now, 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, you know, might have like a bum leg,

• 1:01:50Marcus Parks?

  uh, guys that are fucking idiots, or guys that are out of their fucking mind. They are now allowed into the, uh, 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.

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. The test is really interesting because the test to find out, uh, if you were dumb enough, they just painted a door on the wall and they tried to see if you tried to use it.

• 1:02:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, and then how long you would try to use it.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, eventually if you knock down the, a hole in the wall, they're like, great. He's gonna be great dead over there.

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  I can't wait for him to die over there.

• 1:02:24Speaker 04

  I always think of like Alice's restaurant where he talks about trying to go to the draft board and he just like, acted like he just wanted to really kill people really hard and then they wouldn't send him to Vietnam.

• 1:02:34Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, be like, I can't wait to kill, let me kill, let me kill.

• 1:02:40Speaker 04

  Mr. Sun, you're a little too crazy.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  Okay, sorry then.

• 1:02:44Marcus Parks?

  Not after Project 100,000.

• 1:02:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:47Marcus Parks?

  Well, as far as the mentally underqualified went, many of these guys had IQs between 72 and 91.

• 1:02:52Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:02:53Marcus Parks?

  30,000 draftees brought under this program had an IQ below 71. That's your Forrest Gump's right there.

• 1:03:00Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:03:00Marcus Parks?

  Well, as far as how those who couldn't read got in, and there were many recruiters, just took the test for them.

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  Oh, great.

• 1:03:07Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. Now, Project 100,000 was passed off as a part of President Johnson's Great Society program.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  Too many names, just fucking come up with the, just do the thing. Yeah, we know because the, giving it a name makes it sound like a thing that's gonna work, Eddie. 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.

• 1:03:28Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, you gotta give it a name and then give it a designation, everything has to have a reason and everything has to be done for a reason.

• 1:03:34Speaker 04

  I hate when people like name the group chat, ugh.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  How do you have so much time?

• 1:03:44Marcus Parks?

  Well, it was claimed that this project was gonna teach underprivileged kids how to read while it also trained them how to kill.

• 1:03:51Speaker 03

  Oh, wow, yeah, of course, yeah.

• 1:03:53Marcus Parks?

  It was said that these young men would be learning skills that would be useful in the American labor force after they served.

• 1:03:59Speaker 03

  One of the nicest things that happened right before My Lai is that they did a group bedtime story. Like, they got all the VC together, that was one of the part of the pacification. And they read them all, the, the three little bears, right? And then they understood, oh, those, that Goldilocks is a fucking occupier. Right? Like, that was the first thing they thought of, they were like, kill Goldilocks. Shoot Goldilocks in the fucking head, right? Fucking, I wanna dis, let's fucking disembowel Goldilocks, right? And then that's kind of what, the whole thing soured, and then just stopped trying to teach them to read.

• 1:04:33Marcus Parks?

  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 posed to themselves, McNamara's Morons were also a danger to others.

• 1:04:45Speaker 04

  No way.

• 1:04:47Speaker 03

  I feel like Richard Ramirez's cousin is like one of these.

• 1:04:49Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, fucking crazy. From what standard soldiers said, you could always spot one of McNamara's Morons because those are the guys who are bumbling across the countryside, making a lot of noise, talking very loud about dumb bullshit.

• 1:05:04Speaker 04

  When I get home, I'm gonna get me a golden retriever, and I'm gonna get me a Mustang, it's gonna have a reverse top, it's gonna be nice, man, I remember chewing gum.

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  See, when I get home, I'm gonna get a Dotson. Nice. Yeah, then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna join the local farmer's market and make vagina scented candles. Yeah, I've been thinking about this thing, you know, you know how we walk around, we're covered in this goop? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I was thinking about making a store called that.

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  That's what I did. Yeah, right, oh, what's going?

• 1:05:45Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, no, these are the guys that's like,

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  hey, what do you think gonna happen if I lift up this basket? Blam!

• 1:05:51Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  You got a light? Shh, you got a light for my cigarette?

• 1:05:58Speaker 03

  They're right over there.

• 1:05:59Marcus Parks?

  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 welcomed 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 were discharged other than honorably. And being dishonorably discharged removed their financial benefits and limited their access to veteran services.

• 1:06:34Speaker 04

  Which was why we had the homeless veteran epidemic, which led to the homeless, up to the veteran suicide epidemic.

• 1:06:41Marcus Parks?

  I mean, that, and 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, um, was investigating this because he was like, this is really fucked up, like, we, we sent these, we sent guys who were not meant to be in the military to the front lines specifically to die.

• 1:07:03Speaker 03

  And then we punished them when they came home.

• 1:07:04Marcus Parks?

  And then we punished them when they came home, uh, but that investigation died when RFK was killed in 1968. The same year as, uh, My Lai.

• 1:07:13Speaker 03

  I fucking hate waiters, man.

• 1:07:14Speaker 04

  I'll tell you what, I'm just glad his son lived. Because without him, where would be? My shit would be so messy.

• 1:07:22Marcus Parks?

  RFK, let me, RFK Junior, excuse me, let me ask you, yeah, yeah, how, how's your, how's your fecal matter these days? Smooth as an egg.

• 1:07:31Marcus Parks?

  It's really one of the nicest things about having a smooth, chocolate kind of.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  And that makes officers, I mean, would keep Cheryl occupied.

• 1:07:45Speaker 04

  Another thing that kinda stuffs-

• 1:07:47Speaker 03

  Why did he fucking go?

• 1:07:48Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:49Speaker 04

  Man, he belie- well, cuz he bel- he still believes to this day that Sir Antsir Ant didn't kill his father.

• 1:07:53Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  You might be right about that one. We'll get there. Whole long story on that one.

• 1:07:58Marcus Parks?

  The whole story. No, I actually had written like an entire thing about how insane of a year 1968 was and that Milai was only a part of it.

• 1:08:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:06Marcus Parks?

  Uh, but yeah, just needless to say, like 1968 was the most insane year in America's existence.

• 1:08:11Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 1:08:11Marcus Parks?

  Uh, we almost, uh, ate ourselves that year.

• 1:08:14Speaker 03

  Thank God we're out of that mess.

• 1:08:16Marcus Parks?

  Yep. Thank God things are calm. Well, actually, they've- they're far calmer than they were. Yeah. I mean, like, that was- that was when, you know, we were having riots that were lasting for an entire week and-

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  And they sent the military into Detroit to shut them down.

• 1:08:27Marcus Parks?

  Dozens of people were dying. Like, at the end of the riots after MLK's assassination, forty-two people died in those fucking riots.

• 1:08:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:34Marcus Parks?

  Forty-two.

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, we don't get angry enough anymore.

• 1:08:36Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. Now, it bears repeating that ten percent of the company that was responsible for Milai, Charlie Company, that 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 One Hundred Thousand. 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 One Hundred Thousand, none were more consequential than the man who would become the face of the Milai massacre, Lieutenant William Calley Jr. Now, to put Calley straight in your head, as far as competency and respect goes,

• 1:09:19Marcus Parks?

  Lieutenant Calley was basically Private Pyle from Full Metal Jacket if Pyle was an officer. Calley also was far smaller than Vincent D'Onofrio. Calley was just five foot, three inches tall.

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  Well, I don't think you understand that actually makes me almost invulnerable to the enemy, eye of this size.

• 1:09:39Speaker 04

  They might think I'm one of them. Yep. Yeah. Well, he- it's interesting you say Private Pyle because, like, by the end of boot camp, he was doing a really good job. And if he didn't go fucking crazy, he probably would've became an officer.

• 1:09:53Marcus Parks?

  He might have.

• 1:09:53Speaker 03

  Well, yeah. I never thought of how good Private Pyle could've been.

• 1:09:57Marcus Parks?

  He could've been. Yeah, he might've been an NCO.

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:00Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, maybe. Now, William Calley 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 Calley almost aggressively average. His reddish hair caused people to call him rusty, and while he was mischievous, he had no criminal record nor any history of violence. Really, what defined William Calley was that he was a chronic fuck-up throughout his entire life. Calley was also extremely entitled, cuz when he flunked out of Palm Beach Junior College in 1963-

• 1:10:37Speaker 03

  Which you actually have to try to do.

• 1:10:39Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:39Speaker 03

  I have no fucking idea how you flunk out of Palm Beach Junior College.

• 1:10:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't remember one book I read.

• 1:10:48Speaker 03

  Dude, you at least got like an AA, you know what I mean? Like, you just quit school.

• 1:10:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I didn't get an AA, but that's fine.

• 1:10:54Marcus Parks?

  Well, after he- after that happened- well, after that happened with Calley, he became emotionally cold toward everyone around him. He blamed the world for flunking out of Palm Beach Junior College.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  Nobody understands me. Nobody knows how hard it was to be in junior college. They make me take a class on beach balls. I had to identify the beach balls, and it was hard. I didn't know it had stripes.

• 1:11:20Marcus Parks?

  He also began chain smoking, four packs a day. That got him an ulcer by the age of nineteen.

• 1:11:25Speaker 03

  That's cool. That guy's cool.

• 1:11:27Marcus Parks?

  A bereft of direction, Calley tried joining the army in 1964, but because he had hearing problems, he was rejected from service. He worked on a number of low-skill jobs. Instead, he worked as a bellhop, a dishwasher.

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  He would've been a great bellhop.

• 1:11:41Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, well, he- he switched from job to job. Finally, he was made a switchman for a railroad in Fort Lauderdale.

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  I love that. Any job that could be done by a lever and instead done by a whole human, he absolutely could've done.

• 1:11:53Marcus Parks?

  You gotta know when to fucking pull the lever.

• 1:11:56Speaker 03

  It's when the train's coming, Marcus.

• 1:11:57Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. Calley soon lost the switchman job.

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  Oh, God, I can't believe I didn't know.

• 1:12:06Marcus Parks?

  He lost that job in his first massively public fuck-up. He was arrested. He was- he was criminally negligent.

• 1:12:14Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 1:12:15Marcus Parks?

  He was arrested for allowing a freight train to block rush hour traffic, which brought the entire city of Fort Lauderdale to a standstill.

• 1:12:23Speaker 03

  What to do with this train? Oh, no, what do we do about this train?

• 1:12:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, cuz people in Fort Lauderdale are already famously doing nothing.

• 1:12:33Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:12:34Speaker 03

  Nothing. There's nothing there. It's just beach and sand, and they're all just hanging out. Oh, great.

• 1:12:40Marcus Parks?

  Calley's fuck-up made the papers.

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:12:43Marcus Parks?

  So Calley left Florida for the West Coast in what I assume was a cloud of shame.

• 1:12:48Speaker 03

  You don't have Calley to kick around anymore.

• 1:12:53Marcus Parks?

  Calley's friends and family had assumed that he had actually died after leaving Florida.

• 1:12:57Speaker 04

  They didn't even care to call.

• 1:12:59Speaker 03

  He's probably dead. I don't fucking care.

• 1:13:01Marcus Parks?

  It tells you a lot about Calley, like, his relationships to other people, but specifically how other people think of him. It's like, where's, uh, was it William Calley, your son? Well, I don't know. I haven't heard from him in three years. I think he's dead.

• 1:13:13Speaker 03

  It's like, my- oh, my son Will- oh, yeah, my son. Really, I- yeah, where- where is he? He hasn't been around for, like, many Christmases, right?

• 1:13:22Speaker 04

  I imagine he walked into traffic.

• 1:13:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. But wouldn't traffic wanna avoid him like us?

• 1:13:30Marcus Parks?

  Well, instead, William Calley was working a job taking photos for an insurance company in San Francisco. But in 1966, Project One Hundred Thousand made the army a possible career for William Calley once more.

• 1:13:44Speaker 03

  Oh, goody gob drops. They're low with the IQ. Now I can go die in Vietnam. Oh, yay. Oh, yay. They made it so worse. People can get in there. I can't wait to die over there.

• 1:13:56Speaker 04

  I heard that if you die in Vietnam, when they bury you, it's free.

• 1:14:00Speaker 03

  Oh, that's nice, saving expense.

• 1:14:02Marcus Parks?

  Well, for Calley, it wasn't IQ. For Calley, the reason why-

• 1:14:05Speaker 03

  It was everything else.

• 1:14:06Marcus Parks?

  No, it was hearing. That was speci- that was the only reason why Calley didn't get in, cuz his hearing wasn't good enough, uh, to meet army standards at the time.

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  I just feel like that's like one of those things that could very much stay in. You know what I mean? I understand. I actually kinda understand lowering the IQ for just killing everybody, but the idea of if they are then taking away the hearing and all the other kind of things, that feel like-

• 1:14:28Marcus Parks?

  He could hear. He just didn't have great hearing. He was- drummer hearing.

• 1:14:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'm saying, you know, it's just kinda funny. It feels like, uh, that'd be important.

• 1:14:36Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:37Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. You'd be like a good soldier.

• 1:14:38Marcus Parks?

  Hearing does seem pretty important when you're, uh, yeah, out in the jungles of Vietnam.

• 1:14:42Speaker 03

  You only get five senses, and I feel like if you lose twenty percent of your senses, you shouldn't be in war.

• 1:14:49Marcus Parks?

  Maybe. Maybe not.

• 1:14:50Speaker 03

  That's a gift you get-

• 1:14:52Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:52Speaker 03

  For not being able to hear very well.

• 1:14:55Marcus Parks?

  Sure enough.

• 1:14:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:56Speaker 04

  My dad got out for flat feet.

• 1:14:58Speaker 03

  Yep, and now look at him. Then he died. He fucking fired his feet.

• 1:15:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're even flatter.

• 1:15:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Speaker 04

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• 1:17:02Speaker 04

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• 1:18:36Speaker 04

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• 1:19:19Speaker 04

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• 1:20:03Marcus Parks?

  Live from your grave. So after receiving a letter that telling him that he was indeed eligible to return to the army, Cali started basic training as soon as possible. But while Cali 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 grunts. I don't know if you're detecting a pattern here.

• 1:20:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:20:45Marcus Parks?

  But it's basically America had with Vietnam had bitten off far more than it can chew.

• 1:20:50Speaker 03

  Very much so.

• 1:20:51Marcus Parks?

  And we did not have the people to put into positions of competence. So we had a lot of people that were incompetent in places of power.

• 1:20:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:21:08Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, it's really, it's really not going to lead to the best soldiers, but it's, but even then, like this is going like beyond that because there were a lot of guys in World War II that, you know, were drafted and did like a fantastic job, you know, fought, fought gallantly. But with this is like, we, we have this, um, this strategy in Vietnam of like overwhelming the enemy and we need a lot of guys to do it far more than are willing to go, or not even far more than are willing to go, far more than are 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.

• 1:21:52Marcus Parks?

  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, that's usually where the army went for commissioned officers, guys who were trained to be officers before they even get to the battlefield.

• 1:22:08Speaker 03

  The smart loyal guys.

• 1:22:09Marcus Parks?

  Yes, but those places were unable to fulfill the growing demand for COs in Vietnam. That's commissioned officers.

• 1:22:16Speaker 03

  Cause we were also churning through them.

• 1:22:18Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, they were getting killed a lot because Vietnamese snipers really loved shooting guys with stripes on their sleeves in the fucking face.

• 1:22:27Speaker 03

  Get that fucking hand down, get your hand down. You don't ever salute to me when we're sitting here. You never salute to me. They couldn't love better than fucking shooting lieutenant in the goddamn air.

• 1:22:35Marcus Parks?

  There you go. 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.

• 1:22:50Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:22:51Marcus Parks?

  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 infantrymen how to follow his orders.

• 1:23:23Speaker 03

  Put your pep in your step. Come on, one, two, 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 not hot? And if it was easy, everyone would do it. Everyone would love to kill the Vietcong. They would love to kill, but they don't have, they won't go. All right?

• 1:23:42Marcus Parks?

  As 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.

• 1:23:50Speaker 03

  Kill them, kill them. Go kill, kill them in that hell, go over that hell. No riz.

• 1:23:56Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, no riz. And just so we're clear here, this had absolutely nothing to do with William Cali being five foot three. I grew up with this dude named John Mark. He was about the same height as 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 reaching down with my fucking shoulder pads, he snapped my leg with just one hand.

• 1:24:26Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 1:24:27Marcus Parks?

  He 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.

• 1:24:35Speaker 03

  He couldn't even reach the shoulder pads. He couldn't even get in there. 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.

• 1:24:52Marcus Parks?

  Can be.

• 1:24:53Speaker 03

  And stuff like this, like a lot of times, like I sadly, in any other arena of war, unlike other ones, being small is great for Vietnam.

• 1:25:03Marcus Parks?

  Oh, it's the only way you survive in Vietnam. Yeah. Ox gets shot in the fucking head.

• 1:25:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:08Marcus Parks?

  Jughead survives.

• 1:25:09Speaker 03

  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 killing the G words. And as he gets in there, it's like, but he's too tall. Yeah, he would have been real easy to shoot.

• 1:25:27Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, yeah, he would have been dead immediately.

• 1:25:28Speaker 03

  I would love to have shot fucking Bull if I was in the VC. You know, you could take a couple though. Oh, yeah. I heard Cali's favorite catchphrase was, is anyone else hot? Oh, excuse me, excuse me, is there something we could do about the bugs?

• 1:25:46Marcus Parks?

  Do you have any citronella candles?

• 1:25:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, light a candle. Frank, Frank, light a candle. Thank God I brought my candles. Anthony smuggled them all the way. He loves his candles. Dip teak. I love my dip teak candles.

• 1:26:08Marcus Parks?

  Now, after Cali graduated from Officer Candidate School, raked 120 out of a class of 156.

• 1:26:13Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 1:26:14Marcus Parks?

  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 Meli, 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. Now, Mad Dog Medina had earned his nickname because he was rabidly aggressive towards

• 1:26:59Marcus Parks?

  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 Meli massacre, but he'd actually lied his way into the National Guard at the age of 16. He'd joined the army in 1956 after a couple of years in the National Guard and he had 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.

• 1:27:41Marcus Parks?

  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.

• 1:27:59Speaker 03

  Could I give you one note, Commander Medina? Like I just want to say Lieutenant Medina is that I do think you call me more like Lieutenant Sally. I would give you just a pitch in terms of, because Lieutenant Shithead doesn't even like rhyme with my name. How about fuckface? I'll go away. I'll leave you alone, you eating lunch. Someone fuck him. Someone fuck him in the ass. Why don't we just, let's just make love to me, I'll take a hug.

• 1:28:27Marcus Parks?

  So now we've got two men, two men that were commanders that were very much, uh, in responsible for some of the horrible shit that happened during Meli, Captain Ernest Medina and Lieutenant William Cali. And once Mad Dog Medina, Lieutenant Cali, and 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 missions. So they're not yet a part of the larger operation in Pinkville just yet.

• 1:29:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're just out collecting tennis balls.

• 1:29:08Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. But Cali, 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.

• 1:29:25Speaker 03

  Excuse me, is there an information kiosk? Oh, what do I do? I know that doesn't moss grow on shells on the north side of them? I look at the map and it says up is north, but in real life, up's the sky. Yeah. So which way do we go? Oh, I can't go south, I don't have a shovel.

• 1:29:51Marcus Parks?

  Besides his inability to read a map, Cali was also forgetful. When Charlie Company went out into the Vietnamese countryside for the first time ever, Cali forgot to bring the hand grenades.

• 1:30:02Speaker 04

  What am I forgetting? What am I forgetting? Oh, well, the hand grenades. Oh, the Boom Boom A-Quads.

• 1:30:10Marcus Parks?

  So the entire mission had to be delayed until Cali could run back to the ammo center to get what he was supposed to bring in the first place.

• 1:30:16Speaker 04

  Someone's gotta go back and get a shitload of dice. I volunteer. I volunteer.

• 1:30:24Marcus Parks?

  Once they were out in the countryside, Cali also proved himself to be a bad decision-maker, and he was also far too jumpy. When they rested for the night, Cali set up his platoon in the middle of a cornfield without cover, and when he heard rustling in the cornstalks, 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.

• 1:30:48Speaker 04

  I saw a mouse. There's a mouse out here.

• 1:30:54Marcus Parks?

  Luckily, there were no Viet Cong around that night, but Medina still laid into Cali. He called Cali a fucking nitwit and said, quote,

• 1:31:02Speaker 04

  "You're without a doubt the most stupid second lieutenant on the face of the earth." I'm sure it was a little ruder than that. I'm trying to do a Tone Locs vibe. Yeah, he's like, "You're the stupidest lieutenant around."

• 1:31:18Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, I'd say that.

• 1:31:19Speaker 04

  You're the... You are without a doubt the most stupid second lieutenant on the face of the earth.

• 1:31:26Marcus Parks?

  I just imagine everyone like Coach Taylor in Friday Night Lights, like, "What are you doing? What are you doing? You think you go out here and go Vietnam, bro?"

• 1:31:34Speaker 04

  I was scared. I had a dream that I fell off a curb and I... My leg twitched.

• 1:31:43Marcus Parks?

  Now, Charlie Company was divided into four platoons of about thirty men each. And as I said, Cali was in charge of one of those platoons. His men, however, had just about as much respect for Cali as Medina did. Cali'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 Cali, he was the butt of many a joke. For example, there was a popular detective show on TV at the time called Surfside Six. So Cali's platoon joked that Cali was Surfside Five and a Half, which I guess referred to his size.

• 1:32:18Speaker 04

  And Stephen being generous.

• 1:32:19Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:21Speaker 04

  If you look at his driver's license photo, you can see his feet.

• 1:32:27Marcus Parks?

  That's really good, yeah. Now, if Cali 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.

• 1:32:38Speaker 04

  That's me. That's my job.

• 1:32:42Marcus Parks?

  But Cali had thirty men under his command, and those men were expected to follow Cali's orders. Now, soldiers often put up resistance when it came to Cali's orders, but all Cali had to do to get those men to fall in line was say, quote,

• 1:32:55Speaker 04

  "I'm the boss. I'm the boss. Me, not you. Me, number one, old Cali, Lieutenant Shithead. Yeah, I'm taking it. I'm taking Lieutenant Shithead. I'm owning it."

• 1:33:09Marcus Parks?

  But before long, Cali had to say "I'm the boss" so often that it more or less became his catchphrase.

• 1:33:15Speaker 03

  You constantly have to do that. You're not really the boss.

• 1:33:18Marcus Parks?

  No, no.

• 1:33:19Speaker 04

  Also, anyone with a catchphrase does not belong in Vietnam. Oh, no. Not again, Mr. Cong Ting. Play! You don't like that? That's not funny?

• 1:33:35Marcus Parks?

  Tiger, I barely know her.

• 1:33:38Speaker 04

  Go, go, go, go, go. Oh, fuck, oh, fuck. My fucking guts. My fucking guts. These goddamn catchphrases are getting boys killed left and right. I tell you what, I'm getting too old for this shit.

• 1:33:56Marcus Parks?

  It soon became clear that Cali was a coward in every way, because it became very clear that Cali was particularly terrified of Vietnamese children.

• 1:34:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I get it.

• 1:34:07Speaker 04

  I do get it.

• 1:34:09Marcus Parks?

  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?

• 1:34:17Speaker 03

  It was the guy in the Ken Burns thing.

• 1:34:19Marcus Parks?

  The guy in the Ken Burns thing.

• 1:34:20Speaker 03

  The scarier I got, the more I was filled with hatred.

• 1:34:24Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, yeah, and he said that his hatred for them was pure.

• 1:34:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, my hate was pure. That guy, oh, yeah, I watched it this morning. That guy's like, "My hate was pure. It was pure, and I was so scared. And the scarier I got, the purer my hate got."

• 1:34:40Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, yeah, and that was a lot of guys in Vietnam.

• 1:34:44Speaker 04

  Vietnam was fucking rough.

• 1:34:48Marcus Parks?

  But there were, however, men in Charlie Company who saw the Vietnamese kids as kids nonetheless.

• 1:34:53Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 1:34:53Marcus Parks?

  At least when they first arrived. A lot of GIs gave out gum, cookies, and candy to these kids. They'd run up to the soldiers, and the soldiers would be nice.

• 1:35:02Speaker 04

  Stop doing that. They leave it everywhere. Stop doing that. They leave the wrappers and they leave the gum everywhere. It's horrible.

• 1:35:07Marcus Parks?

  You're gonna get a cold. They don't cover their mouth when they cough.

• 1:35:09Speaker 04

  They're gross. Getting jelly on everything.

• 1:35:12Marcus Parks?

  But Cali soon put a stop to 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' insubordination 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

• 1:35:55Marcus Parks?

  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."

• 1:36:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, because they're all terrified.

• 1:36:14Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:15Speaker 03

  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, uh, I can bully the kids.

• 1:36:34Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:34Speaker 03

  Because I'm not afraid of the kids as much as I'm afraid of the adults.

• 1:36:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's easy for the kids to get grenades when you forget them all at camp.

• 1:36:40Speaker 03

  That's the thing, and then kids, this is a little super tip. Kids love grenades. I love them. My grandfather let me hold one.

• 1:36:49Marcus Parks?

  Actually, I did have a grenade when I was a kid. I had bought, like, a family friend bought it for me at an Army surplus store.

• 1:36:56Speaker 03

  I fucking miss real family friends.

• 1:36:57Marcus Parks?

  And it was my most cherished possession. I carried that grenade with me everywhere.

• 1:37:02Speaker 03

  Dude.

• 1:37:02Marcus Parks?

  It was a real grenade. It already had all the shit.

• 1:37:05Speaker 03

  It's taken out.

• 1:37:06Marcus Parks?

  Taken out, yeah, I loved it.

• 1:37:08Speaker 04

  And the hole in the bottom.

• 1:37:09Marcus Parks?

  I love that. Yeah, I loved my grenade so much.

• 1:37:12Speaker 03

  Seriously, if you give a grenade, most of the time, he's not even gonna throw it. He's gonna keep it. So honestly, the safest people with...

• 1:37:17Speaker 04

  Draw little eyes on it, give it a tail.

• 1:37:19Speaker 03

  Who's gonna be keeping it as pets? Like, they're not even really trying. That's why, kids, it's okay for them to have grenades.

• 1:37:24Marcus Parks?

  Oh, yeah, the water balloons that looked like grenades? Oh, those were the best. Now, since Cali was unable to control his platoon, morale plummeted, and the low morale in Cali'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 even 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 had been thrown into. But the thing was, all this shit was going down before Charlie Company or Lieutenant Cali or Captain fucking Mad Dog Medina.

• 1:38:09Marcus Parks?

  All this was what was going through their heads and what was happening to them before they saw one fucking Viet Cong soldier.

• 1:38:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:38:28Marcus Parks?

  A battle like your daddy used to talk about. Like, you know, your daddy who, you know, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and he's got all these stories.

• 1:38:35Speaker 03

  These amazing stories, all this stuff.

• 1:38:37Speaker 04

  The Germans are there, we are here, and at the night, we hear them singing, we sing back at them, and then we kill each other in the morning again.

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  Yes, and then we take a break for lunch. You know, we have Easter.

• 1:38:47Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, 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 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 more Viet Cong so General West

• 1:39:31Marcus Parks?

  Moreland could report good news to Lyndon Baines Johnson.

• 1:39:36Speaker 03

  Lyndon Vane's Johnson.

• 1:39:40Marcus Parks?

  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 Mie Lai. 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 Cong, it was perfectly acceptable to plant a grenade on them after the fact and make them Viet Cong.

• 1:40:16Speaker 04

  And these guys, they all went on to be cops, right?

• 1:40:23Marcus Parks?

  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.

• 1:40:39Speaker 03

  I don't think that you can sep- I really want the audience to understand that they were literally walking into hell itself.

• 1:40:47Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:48Speaker 03

  Every- this was the- this was like the den of every single crime against humanity that could happen across all sides. There is no- right now, they're about to walk into an area that no one will ever see in a warfare zone ever again, and you know, not in America, not us.

• 1:41:08Speaker 04

  Maybe.

• 1:41:08Marcus Parks?

  Maybe.

• 1:41:09Speaker 04

  Who might end up killing some random people again?

• 1:41:11Marcus Parks?

  I'm gonna go ahead and say never say never on that one.

• 1:41:13Speaker 03

  You're right, Mark.

• 1:41:13Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:14Speaker 03

  You're right, I'm sorry.

• 1:41:15Marcus Parks?

  I'm definitely gonna say never say never.

• 1:41:16Speaker 03

  Cause they do- I did get several messages from people talking about it. Now they teach me lie. That is like a centerpiece-

• 1:41:22Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:23Speaker 03

  -that they teach people in officer school and all this kinda stuff. They- they put it forward saying, like, yeah, basically being like this, this is an example of a thing that can't happen again.

• 1:41:33Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, yeah, well, I mean-

• 1:41:34Speaker 03

  Which is so far really worked.

• 1:41:36Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, but when these guys walk in, like Charlie Company walked into 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 the first thing he sees.

• 1:41:51Speaker 04

  Why- what was it with the ears?

• 1:41:53Speaker 03

  They're collectibles, there were tabs.

• 1:41:54Speaker 04

  They were easy to cut off, or?

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're collectibles. And there was a part of the thing, they were looking for proof of bodies.

• 1:42:00Marcus Parks?

  Proof of bodies, yeah.

• 1:42:01Speaker 04

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:42:01Speaker 03

  So they- when they would do that, that was a part of what it was. And then they got- and to be honest, it's just guys going fucking, literally going jungle. Like, literally just becoming at 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 gotta go and fight. If you don't kill somebody, you're probably gonna die. And so they have to kinda come up with this fucking validation system.

• 1:42:31Marcus Parks?

  Fuck politics, they're beyond civilization-

• 1:42:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:34Marcus Parks?

  -at that point. Yeah, I mean, like, they get there, 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 Calley. So when 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.

• 1:43:17Marcus Parks?

  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 and 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- that's basically where it started.

• 1:43:40Speaker 04

  You know, all my years of comedy, I know that's not funny.

• 1:43:45Speaker 03

  You're right. You're right. I would say-

• 1:43:49Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, yes.

• 1:43:49Speaker 03

  Every time I first saw it, I was like, hmm, I don't think he understands joke structure.

• 1:43:53Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, yeah. Just startling an old man and then an old man shitting himself, it's really not funny.

• 1:43:59Speaker 03

  You know what's funny-

• 1:43:59Marcus Parks?

  It's sad no matter what, really.

• 1:44:00Speaker 03

  You know what's funny is that a house is just a place for your stuff. And then when you go on vacation, you just take a smaller version of your stuff.

• 1:44:10Marcus Parks?

  How many times can you say stuff?

• 1:44:12Speaker 03

  Stuff, stuff! And then when you go on vacation, within your vacation, you gotta take an even smaller version of your stuff!

• 1:44:23Marcus Parks?

  It's an old George Carlin bit for all you kids out there.

• 1:44:25Speaker 04

  You guys know, and it's brand new. He lumped Vietnam.

• 1:44:29Speaker 03

  Oh, he was great.

• 1:44:33Marcus Parks?

  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 Calley. Calley discovered through an interpreter that this old man was just a farmer, but Calley decided to treat this old man as if he was VC. Calley had one of his men punch the old man in the stomach, then Calley ordered that GI to throw the old

• 1:45:16Marcus Parks?

  man down a well. Now, the old man survived the fall, but when he tried climbing out again, Calley ordered one of his men to smash the old man's fingers. Once the old man was at the bottom of the well, Calley shot the old man himself, killed him. And then he reported to Captain Medina that his platoon had killed a Viet Cong soldier who had tried to escape down a well. Taking Calley 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 Calley reported, back to Medina, "Hey, we searched the well, no tunnel." And this was Vietnam in a nutshell. Needless cruelty begets a lie, which begets

• 1:46:00Marcus Parks?

  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.

• 1:46:24Speaker 04

  You know, it's easy to tell if a well leads to a tunnel, if there's a splash, there's no tunnel.

• 1:46:30Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:31Marcus Parks?

  Unless the tunnel starts below the- above the waterline.

• 1:46:34Speaker 03

  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 that's truly frightening.

• 1:46:48Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, down there with all those turtles trying to kill ya.

• 1:46:50Speaker 03

  Shooting fireballs and stuff. I bet he's like, what a relief.

• 1:46:55Marcus Parks?

  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, but they were still keyed up and on edge psychologically. 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

• 1:47:37Marcus Parks?

  children candy, some soldiers were following Calley'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.

• 1:47:54Speaker 03

  Cause now they're finally gonna see some action.

• 1:47:57Marcus Parks?

  Well, now they have a- now they have a reason to be angry.

• 1:48:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:01Marcus Parks?

  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 Calley's poor map-reading skills had resulted in these deaths. This is what I'm talking about. This is why you can't have 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.

• 1:48:44Speaker 04

  Fucking idiot just passing the buck cause he's worried about getting in trouble.

• 1:48:48Speaker 03

  That's like one of those things-

• 1:48:49Marcus Parks?

  And that motherfucker at that point is worried about getting fragged.

• 1:48:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, dude, cause all of this is just like red- they're all acting like these are office fucking problems and like little whoopsie doos and mistakes, but it's fucking, everybody's dying.

• 1:49:02Speaker 04

  Also, if I'm leading a platoon and I know I'm bad at reading maps, I find the guy-

• 1:49:08Speaker 03

  Who reads the maps! Yeah, who's reading the map?

• 1:49:10Speaker 04

  You stand right next to me! You stand right next to me! You tell me what the map says! Where are we going?

• 1:49:16Marcus Parks?

  But you're a guy that knows how to admit when he's wrong. Lieutenant Calley was not that type of person. Lieutenant Calley was the type of person who is going to keep going no matter what until someone dies. Because what- for him, it's more- it is more important for him to appear as a big man than it is for his buddy to survive and go back home.

• 1:49:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:49:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's thinking of his career and his future.

• 1:49:43Speaker 03

  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 ahead in their fucking career. And it's just like, no, you walked into hell itself.

• 1:49:57Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. Now, 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.

• 1:50:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, the funny guy.

• 1:50:09Marcus Parks?

  The funny guy. On March 14th, two days before Charlie Company marched into the village of Mela, a huge explosion from a booby-trapped bomb killed a well-liked and well-respected sergeant named George Cox.

• 1:50:22Speaker 03

  Cause you know he was doing his like lieutenant shithead dance act out that he does?

• 1:50:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:50:26Speaker 03

  And they all love when he goes, he's like, "You know what it's like when Calley's gotta fucking tie his shoes, right?"

• 1:50:33Speaker 03

  And everyone's like, "Ah, George! No, George! No!"

• 1:50:38Speaker 04

  He had his like shoes on his knees.

• 1:50:46Marcus Parks?

  Another GI in Charlie Company lost his eyes and arm and a leg in that same explosion.

• 1:50:52Speaker 04

  But no one cared about that guy. Yeah, we don't even have his name.

• 1:50:55Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, we don't even have his name. It's just everyone, they had George.

• 1:50:57Speaker 04

  He's hilarious.

• 1:50:58Marcus Parks?

  Saint George. Yeah, yeah, but not the other guy.

• 1:51:02Speaker 03

  It's like, shut up. George is dead.

• 1:51:04Marcus Parks?

  But that's-

• 1:51:05Speaker 03

  Not George! I wish I could see George's corpse.

• 1:51:10Marcus Parks?

  But you actually bring up kind of an interesting point there, because even though this guy lost an arm, he lost his eyes, he lost a leg, he survived.

• 1:51:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:19Marcus Parks?

  So, he's not, his name isn't mentioned. He's not, he's not on any fucking memorial.

• 1:51:25Speaker 03

  I bet he's doing great.

• 1:51:28Speaker 03

  I bet wherever he is right now, I bet you it's Palm Beach, swimming in his pool, you know?

• 1:51:35Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:35Speaker 03

  Bobbing in his pool.

• 1:51:36Marcus Parks?

  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 at the Vietcong, 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 GIs left on the ground that day were raiding a village when they saw something moving

• 1:52:17Marcus Parks?

  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 GIs 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.

• 1:52:59Speaker 03

  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 how like, we talk about serial killers 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.

• 1:53:28Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:29Speaker 03

  But it feels like that, where they're like, looking for the reason.

• 1:53:32Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, they are, 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 Mela, is that it is that it's, it's so many different things, like, there's not one thing that you can point to, is, 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.

• 1:53:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. In a way, she's like the first victim of Mela.

• 1:53:55Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, and also the old man, I mean, he, like, they, they had killed civilians before this.

• 1:54:01Speaker 04

  Plenty.

• 1:54:02Marcus Parks?

  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 villages of Vietnam. In fact, they weren't the only, they weren't even the only company in Task Force Barker to kill, to commit a massacre in Mela in Vietnam that fucking morning.

• 1:54:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:20Marcus Parks?

  You know, like, in that province.

• 1:54:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was, it was a whole thing.

• 1:54:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, we already talked about 155 in February.

• 1:54:26Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, yeah, and those were not Vietcong. Those were regular ass people.

• 1:54:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:54:31Marcus Parks?

  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 unless you're a military man, it doesn't mean anything to you.

• 1:54:48Speaker 04

  Well, that's why I'm walking. That's why I'm walking as a member of the cultural war, I'm a veteran of the cultural war. 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 makes it a little easier to digest.

• 1:55:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, and also something about dog-on-dog massacre is fascinating.

• 1:55:13Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. Barker, however, did not file plans outlining the tactical aspects of this operation, nor did he show his superiors mission plans. Now 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 Vietcong 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. Amidst the grief that Charlie Company was feeling over, over the death of Sergeant Cox, Task Force Barker had received intelligence

• 1:55:58Marcus Parks?

  that the infamous 48th Vietcong 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, Mela. Charlie Company's mission was to go into Mela, destroy the 48th Battalion, burn down all the houses, blow up all the bunkers and

• 1:56:39Marcus Parks?

  tunnels, and kill all the livestock, anything to ensure the Vietcong 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 Mela to ostensibly

• 1:57:23Marcus Parks?

  find and kill the 48th Vietcong Battalion. Now, at this point, the memories of various GIs in Charlie Company, they start getting a little fuzzy.

• 1:57:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I wonder why.

• 1:57:32Marcus Parks?

  Every GI would give a different version of what he heard Medina say leading up to the mission in Mela. 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 Mela. 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 Mela. According to some soldiers, Medina had said that when this operation was over, nothing in Mela would be walking, growing, crawling, or even living. Everything had to go. Destroy the

• 1:58:12Marcus Parks?

  village, make it uninhabitable. Another GI remembered someone asking Medina specifically, who is the enemy in Mela? Because after three months in country, nobody had really answered this question, who the fuck is my enemy?

• 1:58:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:25Marcus Parks?

  And reportedly, Medina said, the enemy is anyone who's running. But whatever the orders were, Lieutenant Calley 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 Mela early the next morning. And it's there that we will conclude our series on the Mela massacre next week with the actual massacre itself and the fallout that eventually came when the massacre was finally revealed to the American people.

• 1:59:00Speaker 03

  Man, really good stuff. I'm glad we saved the funniest part for the end.

• 1:59:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:59:04Speaker 03

  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 a, I call it a romp.

• 1:59:13Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:14Speaker 04

  I mean, it is technically.

• 1:59:15Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, yeah, I guess it is a romp, yeah.

• 1:59:17Speaker 04

  The, I see Medina kind of like telling different guys different things, too.

• 1:59:22Marcus Parks?

  Well, he's, no, he's giving a, a speech to all these guys. Like, he's standing up, he's standing up in front, and he's giving them, he's doing the patent.

• 1:59:29Speaker 03

  But it's fascinating, because literally, they all say something different about what he said. And I don't know whether or not it's just they're fucking morons, if they weren't paying attention, if they were exhausted, or if they're covering for him. I don't know. Like, it's like a whole thing.

• 1:59:46Speaker 04

  And the last thing I'm supposed to use is like, my, like, barometer 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 where he's like, kill everybody. And other guys, he just wouldn't talk to, because he knew they were good guys.

• 2:00:01Speaker 03

  And I'm pretty certain that that is, I can almost guarantee it would start with a big speech that was more vague.

• 2:00:08Speaker 04

  And then he's got his boys, where he's like, make sure you fucking kill and rape everybody.

• 2:00:11Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:00:20Marcus Parks?

  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 this almost like assumed knowledge that should be said, but is not said.

• 2:00:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:41Marcus Parks?

  You know?

• 2:00:42Speaker 03

  And it just sounds like, or, do they all go off-road and all different kinds of shit? Who fucking knows? We'll talk about, I know that they were directed to.

• 2:00:49Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, and Medina also joins in.

• 2:00:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:52Marcus Parks?

  At many, many points.

• 2:00:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it does seem so.

• 2:00:54Speaker 04

  He loves it. Unfort.

• 2:00:56Speaker 03

  So we'll get to Unfort. We're gonna get to this next week. Thank you so much. Go to patreon.com/lastpodcast and I'll have to listen to us ad-free, also see movie stories video-wise, also you can see Last's stream every Tuesday live at 5:00 PM PST. Go to check out our new YouTube channel, so all we got, so much good shit. LPN TV with HDX2 and Vampire the Masquerade that's going strong. No, No Dogs in Space is coming out with new stuff, new videos on there. Go see The Foreign Report, fuck LPN Romancacy. Go check it out.

• 2:01:28Speaker 04

  The Brighter Side LPN also has its own YouTube channel. Subscribe there. We switch to Mondays. So go and check that out. We had too much coming out on Fridays, and Brighter Side always seemed like a Monday show to me anyway.

• 2:01:40Speaker 03

  I love it.

• 2:01:40Speaker 04

  Start your week off with something crazy. And Henry and I, we, last week, we put out a bunch of dates for side stories. We're coming all over the place, but we got two coming up soon. So the ones I really want to stress to you are September 18th, Norfolk, Virginia, 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 [email protected] to find out what's going on. And of course, come see me, 9/11 weekend in DC.

• 2:02:09Speaker 03

  Oh, I love to laugh. I love to laugh.

• 2:02:13Marcus Parks?

  I love seeing a 9/11 weekend in our nation's care.

• 2:02:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:02:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:02:25Marcus Parks?

  No, no, again.

• 2:02:27Speaker 04

  Vietnam, man, huh? Hail, hail Murphy. My, the dog we were fostering just got adopted halfway through this episode. I'm very happy about it.

• 2:02:35Speaker 03

  That's really great.

• 2:02:36Speaker 04

  He looks just like the dog that Lance finds on the boat that they shoot up in Apocalypse Now, and so he kind of reminded me of Vietnam.

• 2:02:43Speaker 03

  The fucking dog, man! The fucking dog, man!

• 2:02:47Speaker 04

  The fucking dog! The fucking dog!

• 2:02:50Marcus Parks?

  You go out there, listen to Vietnamese Soul on Me.

• 2:02:54Speaker 03

  Fucking puppy, man!

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• 2:03:24Speaker 07

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