Episode 679: My Lai Massacre Part IV - Making a Massacre

This week, the boys descend into Gold Star Territory, concluding the story of the My Lai Massacre with the horrifying events of March 16, 1968, as Charlie Company descends upon the village of My Lai and carries out one of the darkest atrocities in American military history. From chopper pilot Hugh Thompson’s heroic attempt to stop the slaughter to the massive cover-up, Seymour Hersh’s investigation, and the trials that followed, we examine how the truth of My Lai finally reached the American public… and how nearly everyone responsible walked away.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  On October 30th, Dexter Morgan is back. In this season, he's facing the scariest threat yet. Middle age. A lifetime of blending in gets to you. And now Dexter is up against two rival killers stealing the spotlight. Taking them down means changing his MO and things are gonna get messy. Starring Michael C. Hall, Uma Thurman, Dan Stevens, and Brian Cox. Dexter: Resurrection. New season, October 30th on the Paramount Plus Premium Plan.

• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:01Speaker 02

  There's no place to escape to.

• 1:02Speaker 03

  This is the last. On the left.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  That's when the cannibalism started.

• 1:19Speaker 04

  Man, sometimes I wake up in a bad mood, you know? And I just get a little angry. And then, you know, I'll go outside and I'll destroy a pile of ants. I'm saying, I'm just saying, I just do it.

• 1:30Speaker 05

  Hit it with the hose, right?

• 1:31Speaker 04

  Hit it with the hose. Sometimes, one time I cooked up a bunch of grease and I put it on the ant pile and I watched all the ants die. I did it.

• 1:39Speaker 05

  So this is a confession. I love that we're doing confessions. I do love to kill flies. I love killing flies. I actually like to kill flies.

• 1:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, bugs in the house, dead for sure.

• 1:52Speaker 05

  Yes, except for spiders. I save spiders and I take them.

• 1:55Speaker 04

  I don't save every spider.

• 1:57Speaker 06

  See, I really enjoy watching spiders eat other insects. So I actually, I keep, there's a lot of spider webs around my house, massive spider webs.

• 2:07Speaker 05

  I watch them.

• 2:07Speaker 06

  So I can watch them eat my enemies.

• 2:10Speaker 05

  Oh, that's nice. On top of question, okay, we had a little bit of a sidebar when we did Brighter Side yesterday.

• 2:15Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 2:16Speaker 05

  Better, all right, before we get into all how horrifying today is gonna be. Best War Four films. Cause we were talking about this is that, so right now in my mind, right? It's like, obviously from the American perspective, World War II, Vietnam have the best war-based films, cause obviously masks can go fuck.

• 2:39Speaker 04

  Here's the problem.

• 2:40Speaker 05

  Hate masks.

• 2:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, we all hate masks.

• 2:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, World War I's too sad, Civil War, the music sucks, you know? That's why I think Vietnam War wins. The soundtrack alone.

• 2:52Speaker 05

  The movies are cooler, but World War II might have made better films.

• 2:58Speaker 06

  I think, yes, Vietnam does have the better soundtrack, but World War II has the better plot.

• 3:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, Saving Private Ryan, you got, uh...

• 3:06Speaker 04

  Apocalypse Now is the best plot.

• 3:08Speaker 06

  It is. No, and you know, that's my second favorite movie. I love Apocalypse Now, but overall, I think World War II just has more opportunities for different types of stories.

• 3:20Speaker 05

  Bridge over River Kwai.

• 3:21Speaker 06

  It's one story.

• 3:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, you wanna see almost every person who gets killed, get killed in the World War II movies. In the Vietnam movies, you don't want anyone to get killed.

• 3:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  Or sometimes you want that one guy to get killed. Tom Berenger.

• 3:33Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 3:33Speaker 04

  Always.

• 3:36Speaker 06

  And here we are, ladies and gentlemen, we're here on Milai, Part Four, and I must say, this is the longest script I've ever written.

• 3:44Speaker 05

  Great. And we're gonna get all the way through this and we wanna say thank you for joining us in this wonderful trip down through the jungle. And I just gotta say, Marcus, I've loved every minute of it.

• 3:56Speaker 06

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 4:01Speaker 04

  Me lie, you tell the truth.

• 4:03Speaker 05

  Eddie, stop it. Eddie, save it.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  No, I don't think I'll be able to make jokes.

• 4:10Speaker 05

  No, we're not allowed. We are not allowed to. We will have to figure that out.

• 4:15Speaker 06

  So when we last left Charlie Company, it was the night before the mission that would take them into the village of Milai. Charlie Company was acting on the orders of Task Force Barker, which had been charged with clearing out the Viet Cong soldiers who were supposedly hiding in a civilian-heavy area of South Vietnam called Pinkville. Now, in addition to their general task of conducting search and destroy missions within Pinkville, Task Force Barker had gotten intelligence that the hated and feared 48th Viet Cong Battalion had retreated back to the province containing Pinkville after the Tet Offensive. That's the Quang Nai Province.

• 4:49Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 4:49Speaker 06

  But before we get into the massacre itself, cause fucking Christ, we can't start with the massacre, let's talk about where they got the information that sent them to Milai. It is, as it's been with this whole series, another important piece of the puzzle when it comes to how all this happened. See, in March of 1968, the Army had received intelligence that narrowed the location of the 48th from the entire Quang Nai Province, specifically down to the village of Milai. This intelligence, however, had been obtained through a CIA-backed initiative within South Vietnam called the Phoenix Program.

• 5:24Speaker 04

  Ca! No, they're more of a squaa! Cause it's on fire.

• 5:30Speaker 06

  Yes. He's more of a squeal than a ca.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. Also, Pinkville, better known as Pun Tang.

• 5:40Speaker 05

  I got Vietnam now.

• 5:41Speaker 06

  Honestly, you got it.

• 5:42Speaker 05

  No, it's great, you got to, you got to.

• 5:44Speaker 06

  Offload it. Peaks and valleys, my friend, peaks and valleys. Now, even though the CIA had been in Vietnam as advisors since the mid 1950s, they had just started the Phoenix Program in February of 1968, when they obtained the information that led to the Milai massacre. From 1968 until 1972, the CIA coordinated operations between the American and South Vietnamese militaries. Amongst other activities, including assassination, Project Phoenix involved the brutal torture of North Vietnamese soldiers to obtain information. And that torture was conducted by both South Vietnamese and CIA officials. Over 26,000 Vietnamese people were killed as a result of Project Phoenix.

• 6:29Speaker 06

  That's through assassinations or by, you know, dying during torture. And this was all done with not only the blessing of the CIA, but with their direct training.

• 6:39Speaker 05

  How would they torture them?

• 6:40Speaker 06

  I'm about to get into that.

• 6:42Speaker 05

  Okay, cool.

• 6:42Speaker 06

  It's really bad. Now, the Phoenix Program was under the command of a CIA veteran called Robert Ramsdale. Now Ramsdale wasn't allowed to say, "Hey y'all, CIA here." So it was said that Ramsdale was sent to Vietnam as an advisor to the Special Police Branch of the South Vietnamese Government. Personally, though, Ramsdale had quite the high opinion of himself. He considered himself the hub of the CIA's wheel in Vietnam. And like any good company man, Ramsdale was not afraid to get his hands dirty by torturing North Vietnamese prisoners himself.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  Hubba hubba. Let me get in there.

• 7:24Speaker 06

  A doctor named Margaret Nelson testified during a congressional hearing in 1970 that as a part of the Phoenix Program, she had treated dozens of Vietnamese prisoners who had been tortured by electricity with wires that were attached to their ears, nipples, and genitalia. Prisoners were also tied up and suspended from rafters, upside down, were left there for hours, and many were beaten so badly that they regularly coughed up and/or urinated blood. And as it went, it was Robert Ramsdale, working on behalf of Project Phoenix, who showed up near Pinkville to interrogate a North Vietnamese prisoner using these tactics in March of 1968.

• 8:05Speaker 06

  Allegedly, Robert Ramsdale used a branding iron on this prisoner's stomach during the interrogation, and he even cut out his tongue.

• 8:14Speaker 05

  Seems counterproductive.

• 8:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't want to get into that. Well, you know, you get one of those, you get one of those boards and you know, until he gets to A, you know, C, yeah.

• 8:23Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, I figured you could also take like those sign language interpreters we had at Midsummer Scream. They were great.

• 8:31Speaker 06

  Ma'am, have you ever worked for the CIA?

• 8:35Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 8:36Speaker 06

  But by the end of it, the prisoner had given Ramsdell the location of the 48th Vietcong Battalion. Ramsdell contacted Task Force Barker with this intelligence and told them that the 48th Battalion was headquartered at a village in Pinkville called Mela.

• 8:52Speaker 05

  You know, it's crazy. If you look up the Phoenix program, the first thing that comes up, weirdly enough, is a Japanese RPG created by Creative Intelligence Arts.

• 9:00Speaker 06

  Interesting.

• 9:01Speaker 05

  Isn't that weird?

• 9:01Speaker 04

  That is weird.

• 9:02Speaker 05

  It's, yeah, it's by the CIA.

• 9:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's the only Japanese, uh, Phoenix-related thing I know of is, uh, you know, Ace, uh, Phoenix Attorney at Law.

• 9:11Speaker 05

  Whoa!

• 9:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, Ace Attorney at Law.

• 9:12Speaker 04

  Stop!

• 9:14Speaker 06

  Objection! And now, at long last, we have arrived at the massacre itself. So the operation that resulted in the Mela massacre was an early morning affair. After Charlie Company got a night's rest following the rousing pep talk in which their captain, Ernest Mad Dog Medina, had promised them revenge and told them to kill everyone they found, the 1st Platoon boarded nine helicopters at 7:22 a.m.

• 9:40Speaker 05

  Now, you guys got your phone chargers? You got your, you got all your, you're ready to go. You got your plugs right? Everybody had breakfast?

• 9:49Speaker 06

  Has everybody downloaded their podcasts?

• 9:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, make sure we're not gonna get, you're gonna need it when we're airborne because they don't have wifi on these yet.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  That's probably what happened, though. They all skipped breakfast. They were a little bit cranky.

• 10:02Speaker 05

  You know what? Yeah, Snickers could have helped here.

• 10:06Speaker 06

  Well, to put everything into perspective here, this was actually the largest military operation happening in all of Vietnam that day. Colonel Barker had actually borrowed helicopters from other units, and all the airspace around Mela was cleared of any other traffic. In fact, before the 1st Platoon even arrived, between 60 and 100 artillery shells rained down on the village of Mela. The CIA had given them intelligence that the 48th Battalion was there, so the Army was doing everything they could to soften the village up before sending in the troops. This was standard practice.

• 10:40Speaker 05

  They literally thought they were going in for the fight of their lives against the hardest fucking killers in all of Vietnam.

• 10:46Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  And they're incredibly green.

• 10:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're very green. They're three months into it. To catch any Vietcong that might flee the area, Task Force Barker had also set up blocking positions north and south of Mela. That's all to say that as far as the Army was concerned, this was 100% a legitimate mission that was expected to be a massive battle between American soldiers and a deadly battalion of VC. One member of Charlie Company even remembers that their commanders framed this operation as having, and this was his words, shades of Iwo Jima. As such, Charlie Company-

• 11:20Speaker 04

  Goddamn Iwo Jima!

• 11:24Speaker 06

  As such, Charlie Company was told to pack triple the regular amount of ammunition when they went to Mela. And they were told that everyone within Mela was either a VC or they were supporting the VC. And so, after two months of Charlie Company being mined and booby-trapped and sniped by an unseen enemy, two months of multiple fatalities and dozens of casualties that had resulted in a fair amount of lost limbs, Charlie Company were told that they were going to be facing the enemy head-on in Mela at long last. But as anyone with half a fucking brain knows, intelligence obtained through torture is rarely, if ever, correct.

• 12:07Speaker 06

  And what Charlie Company found when they got to Mela was not in any way shades of Iwo Jima. Instead, Charlie Company's actions would contain shades of a different World War II event: the Holocaust.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  Yikes!

• 12:22Speaker 05

  Does it help?

• 12:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, it does. No, it helps. Yeah, yeah, it's a-

• 12:25Speaker 04

  Yikes! Not the Holocaust!

• 12:30Speaker 05

  Hold on, are you saying we shouldn't have cut out the tongue of the guy?

• 12:32Speaker 04

  Wow! I feel like, that's a boner!

• 12:38Speaker 05

  I'll be, that's my new nickname, that's my new catchphrase for, for today.

• 12:41Speaker 06

  That's a boner!

• 12:42Speaker 04

  That's a real boner!

• 12:44Speaker 06

  I like, jeezle weasel!

• 12:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, oh, great. Honestly, I'll save that.

• 12:49Speaker 06

  Now, Charlie Company did know that they were gonna encounter civilians that morning. Mela was populated by around 700 people, and most of those villagers lived in thatch-covered huts that the GIs called hooches or houses built from red brick.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  So this is like the size of the town you grew up in?

• 13:06Speaker 06

  Uh, actually, it's a little larger. It's, um, almost twice as large as the town I grew up in.

• 13:11Speaker 04

  Fucking crazy.

• 13:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 04

  Wow, we could have done it real good, huh? We could have killed all y'all. You wouldn't even know.

• 13:18Speaker 06

  Really could have, yeah, you really could have. This operation, however, was on a Saturday. So Charlie Company were told that many of the women and children within this village would be gone to market at nearby Quang Nai City. So the GIs were not expecting to find a lot of civilians, some, but not a lot. So, minutes after the artillery stopped their barrage, the 1st Platoon landed at the LZ just outside the village of Mela, led by who else but Lieutenant William Callie. But Callie was not the first to kill someone that day. In fact, people had already started dying before Callie and the rest of Charlie Company even landed. See, after the artillery had begun, hundreds of civilians had started running towards the direction of Quang Nai City.

• 14:02Speaker 06

  But if you remember, Captain Mad Dog Medina had given very specific orders the night before about such a situation. He had said, quote, If they're running, they're the enemy. So, the helicopter gunships opened up on the fleeing crowd, killing dozens. Helicopter crews would continue to shoot and kill fleeing villagers throughout this mission. And by the end of the day, between 30 and 50 people would be killed by helicopter crews, while these people were simply trying to flee the carnage that had begun their Saturday morning.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  Do you think, like, maybe, like, Medina, like, bit his cheek earlier that day? Because I did that the other day. I was eating a ham sandwich from upstairs. Thank you for providing sandwiches.

• 14:45Speaker 05

  Your cheeks are getting too thick.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  I know, and I, and I bit into it. I bit my cheek and then, you know, and then you, every time, it gets swollen and then you keep biting it and you just get angrier and angrier and angrier. And then I, I went home and I yelled at Ernie, my dog, and he didn't deserve it. He's a good boy.

• 14:59Speaker 05

  This is one of the other puzzle pieces of how Mela happened.

• 15:03Speaker 06

  And they're all important.

• 15:04Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 15:05Speaker 06

  Now Lieutenant Callie's orders when he got on the ground was to secure the landing zone for the second wave of helicopters. Before Callie even landed, a pilot had told him that the LZ was hot, meaning Callie was under the impression that they were gonna land under VC fire. There is, however, no evidence that any shots were fired from any Vietnamese person that day.

• 15:27Speaker 05

  They really needed Tony Hinchcliffe.

• 15:31Speaker 05

  He would have torn them to pieces. He's a killer.

• 15:33Speaker 06

  But because Charlie Company were told that they were landing under fire, Callie and the rest of the 1st Platoon jumped out of their choppers that morning at 7:30 a.m. and immediately opened fire on every Vietnamese person they saw. They started by firing directly towards the village, because they were told that the village was full of VC and most of the civilians had gone to market. They also did not want to get pinned down at the landing zone by enemy fire. This happened fairly often in Vietnam. But there was still no returning fire at all, so Callie reported the LZ as secure. The helicopters then went back to base to get the other platoons, while Callie and his men entered the village of Mela to find and kill the 48th Battalion.

• 16:18Speaker 06

  Quite quickly, though, it became apparent that the 48th Battalion was not there. The villagers had actually been in the middle of breakfast when the artillery started, but not a single villager was showing an ounce of resistance towards the American troops. Callie's platoon walked further into the village, but found nothing but old men, women, and children. Everyone was cowering, terrified. And here, we have the moment on which this entire story turns. Charlie Company had every chance to radio back and say, "There's no VC in Mela. Scrub the mission. It's a bust." But Charlie Company was already keyed up. Their heads were full of vengeance and fear. And according to the recollection of one Charlie Company GI,

• 17:03Speaker 06

  a couple of the so-called crazy guys in the platoon turned to Callie and said that these villagers must be VC, because Charlie Company had been told that everyone in the village was VC. So, following orders in a way that only McNamara's Mohans could, Charlie Company decided to leave logic and basic human decency behind. Just as commanders manipulated body counts to get the results they wanted, Charlie Company interpreted their orders to get what they wanted. They had been promised revenge, and they were gonna get it. And so, after one soldier introduced the idea that all the villagers were VC, the GIs just started shooting the villagers.

• 17:47Speaker 06

  And once the first civilian was killed, it was too late to turn back. Charlie Company had committed, and once they were committed to the idea that everyone in the village was VC, then they could justify any action they took. They were not committing war crimes. They were following orders. And those orders were to not stop until everyone was dead and the village was destroyed.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  Jeezle weasel!

• 18:17Speaker 05

  I'm really helping. This really feels good to be of service.

• 18:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:22Speaker 05

  This is what I would have done in Vietnam.

• 18:23Speaker 06

  Thank you for your service.

• 18:24Speaker 05

  This would be, this is my Vietnam. You're talking about Vietnams and how inappropriate is to say that this is my Vietnam. But finding humor in Vietnam is my Vietnam.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  I always thought like to, a situation like that, if I was ever going to Rikers on the bus over, I'd be like, hey, everyone, welcome to Yikers Island.

• 18:47Speaker 05

  Okay, now, everybody, before you wanna beat and rape me to death, you're gonna wanna line up. I need you to line up just cuz, alright, I need to, we gotta do this in an order.

• 18:59Speaker 06

  I've actually brought name tags and if you, and I got a pen, you can just write that down.

• 19:04Speaker 05

  Big guy two, Mr. Piledriver, tiny guy. Ooh, you got a big penis.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 19:12Speaker 05

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• 21:43Speaker 05

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• 23:20Speaker 03

  Live from Northridge.

• 23:22Speaker 06

  Now, the massacre began with various one-on-one murders, as if the soldiers were trying it out to see how it felt. At 7:35 a.m., an old man climbed out of a hole waving his arms in fear. One of Cali's men shot and killed him. And soon after, another G.I. shot and killed a man who was standing dumbfounded near a rice paddy. From there, members of Charlie Company just shot anyone they came across. One G.I. killed a woman running across a field carrying a child, while another woman was killed carrying two children. Two young men were killed the same way, just casually shot, simply for existing within the village of Mili. By the time the helicopters returned to the village with the second and third platoons at 8 a.m.,

• 24:06Speaker 06

  Cali's platoon had killed 17 more villagers, but the massacre was just getting started. Now, things could have turned around even at this point, because after 40 minutes on the ground, there still had not been a single shot fired at Charlie Company. But since Cali's platoon was committed, the platoons who came after them were committed as well. So instead of stopping, Charlie Company escalated the cruelty to the next level. Once the platoons got to the houses where the villagers were hiding, G.I.s began entering homes and pulling people outside to interrogate them. After gathering one group of villagers, the G.I.s, without warning, just started stabbing the prisoners with bayonets or shooting them.

• 24:50Speaker 06

  From there, the G.I.s began expanding on their methods of murder, as if they were serial killers, speed-running their experimentation phase. What started as shootings and stabbings soon turned into methods of murder so varied that one G.I. said that he couldn't even remember all the ways that Vietnamese people were killed that day. Concerning the use of grenades, for example, G.I.s took an old man and threw him down a well. Then they dropped a live hand grenade inside after the old man to finish him off and poison the well water. One survivor, who was just a child at Mili, remembered that he was huddled with his family inside their house when a grenade bounced inside and killed everyone but him.

• 25:32Speaker 06

  He was left covered in the gore and blood that had once been his parents and siblings. He just had to wait. He just had to sit in it until the Americans decided to leave. Entire families were slaughtered that day, and not just with grenades. Another survivor, who was just a child at the time, saw his parents and grandparents shot dead in front of him. Each was shot one by one. The G.I. doing the shooting even shot this kid's three-year-old brother directly in the head. Kid's head exploded right in front of him.

• 26:06Speaker 04

  This is more like Columbine than war.

• 26:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:09Speaker 04

  It's a spree shooting.

• 26:11Speaker 06

  It is very much a spree shooting.

• 26:12Speaker 05

  It's literally shooting fish in a barrel. It's kinda the way they described it, well, the way they described the other fight against the Americans. But you wonder if somebody already had a Vietnam, do they get a new Vietnam? Like, you know, like if you've been through Vietnam and you're like, you know, I was in the old Vietnam, but I gotta say, replacing all my current apartment's furniture with IKEA furniture, that's my new Vietnam.

• 26:36Speaker 05

  And you think that when he goes to sleep, he's like, you know, at night I go back to old Vietnam. But then I wake up to my brand-new Vietnam.

• 26:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, cuz the furniture is so poorly put together.

• 26:46Speaker 05

  It's so difficult and it's crick.

• 26:48Speaker 04

  And it's Swedish.

• 26:50Speaker 06

  You know, Henry, I've been thinking about it. You should work for the VA.

• 26:52Speaker 05

  Thank you. Hey, listen, here we go. I got my Ho Chi Minh puppet. I do the Ho Chi Minh puppet. They love it. At the VFW, I can do Hanoi Henry's approach.

• 27:03Speaker 05

  They don't mind it. They seem to encourage me, throwing money at me.

• 27:09Speaker 06

  There's this other guy, he's, we're doing shows together. It's Hanoi Henry and his name's Baghdad Barry.

• 27:14Speaker 05

  Is there Baghdad Barry? I love that guy.

• 27:18Speaker 05

  He's funny. Now that's common. Sad um Hussein.

• 27:24Speaker 04

  Stop it. Stop it. You're blowing my shit. You're blowing my material. Stop it.

• 27:30Speaker 06

  Now, the two children I just mentioned, they only survived the slaughter of their families because the members of Charlie Company either didn't notice them or believed them to be dead because children were not in any way exempt from the slaughter that day. A group of 15 to 20 children were found huddled together in a temple, kneeling and praying. But a group of GIs found them while exploring the village and they executed the kids on the spot. But even to this day, some of the GIs in Charlie Company will maintain, on camera no less, that their orders were to kill everyone in that village and it wasn't their fault that children just happened to live there. Certain Charlie Company veterans therefore claimed to have no regrets as to what they did that morning

• 28:13Speaker 06

  because they were only doing what they had been trained to do.

• 28:16Speaker 05

  They said regrets, though. They no regrets because that's super funny. It's very cute. It's very, it's amazeballs. That's a lot of them say. Super amazeballs.

• 28:26Speaker 06

  Now, I of course don't agree with the no guilt part, but this GI does have a point that these guys were trained to do exactly this. And members of Charlie Company had seen examples of this happening on a smaller scale for months by this point. And they'd also been doing it for months. They'd been escalating little by little. In fact, the men of Charlie Company had seen soldiers get rewarded over and over for doing just this sort of thing. But as far as we know, it had never been done on the scale that it was done in My Lai.

• 28:58Speaker 05

  But it could have.

• 28:59Speaker 06

  It might have.

• 29:00Speaker 04

  That's the crazy part. This, there might be worse situations than My Lai.

• 29:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, because they killed everybody. We might know. They might have just killed everyone.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  Well, they also just firebombed places, so who knows what happened then.

• 29:10Speaker 06

  Oh, well, we, we know. Yeah, and there are, I mean, you know, there are pictures of little girls running down the road naked and covered in napalm because all the clothes have been burned off. So, yeah, we know. But yeah, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of villages were burned to death.

• 29:24Speaker 05

  Oh, mentioning that picture, that reminds me. I gotta change the background on my laptop. Because I've had that for so long, it's just like burn on my apple.

• 29:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, I get it. I get it. That isn't to say that some GIs didn't-

• 29:36Speaker 05

  Changing it to Kathy Ireland.

• 29:38Speaker 06

  Ooh, Kathy Ireland now or Kathy Ireland like 1994?

• 29:43Speaker 04

  Butterhead's Cheeseburger?

• 29:46Speaker 05

  It's a little more pleasant.

• 29:50Speaker 06

  That isn't to say that some GIs didn't regret what they did in My Lai. One GI named Varnado Simpson, who finally died by suicide in 1997 after he just couldn't fucking live with it anymore. Simpson said that he personally committed atrocities against these villagers. He said that he cut their throats, he cut off their hands, he cut out their tongues, he scalped them. He said that he lost all direction that day. But he also said he was not, but he also said that he was not the one who started this carnage. He claimed that he was just following the lead of the other GIs. And the brutality of their actions just continued to increase as the massacre went on. It starts with stabbing, then it moves on to something bigger and something bigger and something bigger.

• 30:35Speaker 05

  Can I ask you though, Varnado, can you do QuickBooks? I know that this is like, we've been asking you your flaws in this interview and I really appreciate your candor. We really just need to know if you can work with Microsoft Teams.

• 30:49Speaker 06

  More familiar with Slack.

• 30:53Speaker 05

  Well, we'll cut you some slack. I will let you join no matter what you've done.

• 30:57Speaker 06

  Well, these GIs, they were soon realizing, perhaps even subconsciously, that they could do whatever they wanted with these people. Every ugly impulse, every violent thought they'd ever had, every shred of anger that lived in their souls. It could all be unleashed on these people in this village at this very moment. And as far as they knew, there would be no consequences.

• 31:21Speaker 04

  Now, do you think there was like one like nice soldier that hugged somebody to death?

• 31:29Speaker 05

  Lenny. Oh, Lenny.

• 31:32Speaker 06

  Oh, God, Private Lenny.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  I don't know why they keep running from me.

• 31:37Speaker 06

  Now, the great irony here is that since Charlie Company became so immediately focused on murdering civilians, they actually missed the one VC who was actually in the village.

• 31:51Speaker 06

  A deputy commander in the Vietcong hid when he heard the artillery. And this guy could only watch as the GIs murdered the villagers. These were people he knew. Eventually, a group of 80 villagers were herded into a plaza by three GIs. And at 8:15 AM, Cali radioed from his position and told his soldiers to, quote, "waste them." The three soldiers stood 15 feet from the villagers. Just imagine that, 15 feet away. And emptied four clips each from their M16 rifles before all 80 villagers were dead. They reloaded four times each. This tragically would only be the first mass execution of the day.

• 32:35Speaker 06

  There were actually so many bodies piling up that some villagers survived simply by hiding underneath the fresh corpses. The VC officer's mother and sister, in fact, survived by hiding under bodies and ditches. In other words, Charlie Company had not only committed war crimes, they had even failed to complete their mission to kill VC and VC sympathizers.

• 32:58Speaker 05

  But don't worry, we made a bunch more.

• 33:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, the thing is, like, no one ratted this guy out?

• 33:08Speaker 06

  Which guy?

• 33:09Speaker 04

  The one VC.

• 33:10Speaker 05

  No.

• 33:10Speaker 06

  Well, that's the thing, is that there really wasn't time.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, they probably weren't even listening.

• 33:15Speaker 06

  They weren't. I mean, by, by this point, the interrogations had stopped. And it's just, it's just, it's getting to the point where it's just, the mission does not matter anymore. They, they know that there's no VC here. They're just taking the opportunity. Now, after a long while, a GI in Charlie Company's second platoon finally radioed Charlie Company's commander, Captain Mad Dog Medina, and told Medina that there were no Vietcong in the village of My Lai. The only people there were elderly villagers, women and children. Medina, however, he was also committed. So he ordered the platoon to keep going. Another group of civilians were lined up in front of a drainage ditch.

• 33:56Speaker 06

  And again, the soldiers executed them as if they were members of the Einsatzgruppen, liquidating Jewish populations across Eastern Europe in 1939. And that's an important thing to remember here. Names of these perpetrators were not Heinrich, Oscar, Adolf or Reinhardt. This is done by guys named Bill, Ernest, Herbert and Fred. These were Americans through and through.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, less than, just a couple decades later.

• 34:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:20Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:21Speaker 04

  So it's not like they weren't alive to know.

• 34:24Speaker 05

  I think also it's really just due to the unpopularity of the names Heinrich, Oscar, Adolf. It's Adolf didn't care. There's not a lot of Heinrichs anymore.

• 34:33Speaker 06

  Oscar could have been around. There were plenty of Oscars in Vietnam.

• 34:37Speaker 04

  I had a dog named Oscar.

• 34:38Speaker 06

  That's a nice dog name.

• 34:39Speaker 05

  I bet you there was an Ed.

• 34:42Speaker 04

  What, you think there was an Ed Nazi?

• 34:44Speaker 05

  No.

• 34:45Speaker 06

  No, in Vietnam.

• 34:45Speaker 04

  Oh, there are plenty of Eds.

• 34:47Speaker 05

  That's what I'm saying.

• 34:48Speaker 04

  A lot of Eds.

• 34:49Speaker 06

  Lot of Eddys, yeah.

• 34:50Speaker 05

  Lot of guys just like you.

• 34:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:52Speaker 05

  God damn it, Eddie, your legs, you're gone. You're out of your legs.

• 34:55Speaker 04

  Thank God. Yeah, otherwise I would have just lost some of my dad beat.

• 34:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, thank you. Send me home, please. Bring me my basket.

• 35:03Speaker 06

  And I bet all the Henrys were Hanks.

• 35:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, oh, yeah. A Hank is a good name for a gay Henry.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  Side stories, L P O T L at gmail dot com.

• 35:16Speaker 06

  Now, once the bodies began filling that drainage ditch, Lieutenant Cali ordered more people to be tossed in the ditch and shot. Not all of those thrown in the ditch, however, died immediately. Several soldiers remembered seeing a very young boy covered in blood crawling his way out from the pile of murdered corpses. Those same soldiers watched as Lieutenant Cali grabbed the kid, threw him back amongst the bodies and murdered the child with his rifle himself.

• 35:46Speaker 05

  Well, he specifically absolutely hated children.

• 35:49Speaker 06

  He did, yeah, and he took the opportunity.

• 35:51Speaker 04

  Is that true?

• 35:52Speaker 06

  Yes. Yeah, he hated Vietnamese children.

• 35:54Speaker 04

  Oh, that's right. You brought that up in the last episode.

• 35:56Speaker 06

  Yeah. Now, while some soldiers focused on murder, others began the task of systematically destroying the village as per Captain Medina's orders. They poisoned the wells, scattered the food stocks and set fire to anything that would burn, focusing particularly on the villages, hooches and houses. Once the damasal was set on fire, more villagers would run out to escape the flames and those villagers were of course shot one by one. The GIs then moved on to the livestock and the livestock slaughter was used as an opportunity to experiment. One GI stabbed a cow to death with a bayonet. Another group pumped a cow full of bullets until it keeled over. Another GI used a grenade launcher to blow up a water buffalo at point blank range.

• 36:40Speaker 06

  One of those situations, you know, the, I always wanted to try this.

• 36:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, literally, yeah.

• 36:45Speaker 06

  They did, that's what My Lai was. I always wanted to try this. In one bizarre scene, a soldier was just seen chasing around ducks with a knife. But one has to wonder if this guy merely found something to focus upon so he didn't have to participate or appear to disapprove of what the other soldiers were doing.

• 37:04Speaker 04

  Maybe it was part Labrador.

• 37:08Speaker 05

  I hate these ducks. I can't believe how they decimated my stale bread collection.

• 37:17Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, if that was this guy's plan, it was a good plan. You focus on pretending to kill the ducks so you don't have to kill women and children by the hundreds.

• 37:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'll kill a million ducks.

• 37:27Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'll kill a million ducks before I kill one person. Yeah. Yeah.

• 37:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. Are there any reports of like soldiers like?

• 37:34Speaker 06

  I thought you were gonna ask me, is there any number of ducks that you would not kill?

• 37:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, like what's your maximum amount of ducks?

• 37:41Speaker 04

  What is the count of ducks?

• 37:44Speaker 05

  I gotta get to the real problem here. It's like four million Vietnamese and I want to say about 28 ducks. Yeah. It's like I got all this orange sauce. It's just burned in a fucking hole in my pie. China. It's Hong Kong and we actually technically, we invented it. General So was an American.

• 38:01Speaker 04

  Well, my question was, were any like sold, any of our soldiers killed by our soldiers? Like not like trying to stick up for people or?

• 38:08Speaker 06

  Not on, no, not on this day, but we'll get to what they tried to do afterwards later on in the episode.

• 38:14Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 38:15Speaker 06

  Well, the slaughter of the livestock only served to show just how much these GIs looked at Vietnamese villagers as animals, which was exactly what they've been trained to think since boot camp. The guy who killed the water buffalo with the grenade launcher immediately handed it over to another GI who used that launcher to fire grenades into bunkers full of people. Then there was the group who'd killed the cow by shooting it until it collapsed. While the cow was still dying, a woman poked her head out from behind some brush. Those GIs turned their fire from the cow to the woman and began pumping bullet after bullet into her body long after she was dead. One GI remembered that you could see this woman's bones flying in the air, chip by chip.

• 38:59Speaker 06

  The GIs did it wordlessly because the questioning of the villagers had stopped altogether. The soldiers in My Lai were now focused completely on slaughter.

• 39:10Speaker 05

  Technically, General So is it was Asian. I just wanted to make sure I corrected that. So that people weren't all over me. Once they stop the show because, you know, we do a little minor corrections. You know, obviously sometimes we speak off the cuff here.

• 39:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 39:24Speaker 05

  And sometimes, you know, maybe we're not super correct when we come up with it, but I just wanted to be transparent and say, yeah, he is, he was Asian. And then it was brought over by Peng Cheng Kai.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay. Thank you.

• 39:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. But was most popular in, in America.

• 39:37Speaker 05

  It was. Popularized, yes.

• 39:39Speaker 06

  Yeah. And Pad Thai was also like, that was made for the American palate. Yeah.

• 39:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. Until the nut allergy fucking came through, ruined everything. Everybody fucking.

• 39:50Speaker 06

  That's Thailand's Vietnam.

• 39:52Speaker 05

  Yeah. The nut, the nut chow, nut allergy.

• 39:59Speaker 06

  Now, once it became obvious that there was going to be no resistance from the villagers, some members of Charlie Company decided to take their victims down into the next level of hell. Some GIs were going through victims' clothing, searching for money, while others were raping villagers with all the brutality that they'd applied to the murders and of course, killing the women just after. Some GIs were shouting and yelling throughout the massacre, obviously enjoying themselves. Some were even laughing and joking. And as one GI who was there put it, when someone laughs and jokes about what they're doing, they're usually enjoying it. The laughing and joking, quite unfortunately, also included Charlie Company's commander, Mad Dog Medina. While Mad Dog didn't enter My Lai until Charlie Company had totally secured the vill,

• 40:44Speaker 06

  he participated in the ultra violence immediately upon his arrival. One GI said that as soon as Medina showed up, he made a beeline towards a Vietnamese girl. He knocked her to the ground with his rifle butt and shot her in the head. Mad Dog was absolutely enjoying himself because after another GI saw Mad Dog Medina grab a woman by the hair and shoot her in the head with his pistol, Medina remarked that he'd sent her to quote, "the big rice paddy in the sky."

• 41:13Speaker 04

  Now, are you sure just because he was laughing, he was enjoying it? Because I'm not enjoying this.

• 41:21Speaker 05

  This sucks, but we are laughing. But you're not actively, if you were actively murdering and laughing, now I think that's a difference.

• 41:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's a difference. Yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 05

  For me.

• 41:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. And, and you know, and we're all enjoying this on some level.

• 41:37Speaker 05

  Well, I'm interested in history.

• 41:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right.

• 41:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:41Speaker 05

  Learning about history is my Vietnam.

• 41:44Speaker 04

  I'm gonna, actually, you know what? I'm gonna go sign up for the serious contract.

• 41:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, if you could listen. You can re-listen to it. Yeah. She would listen to it. That'd be pretty great.

• 41:54Speaker 06

  Now, as incredible as this may sound, there was actually a photo journalist embedded with Charlie Company during its mission that day. But this is only unbelievable if you forget that Charlie Company was actually sent to My Lai for what was supposed to be a legitimate battle against the Vietcong. This is supposed to, and it was supposed to go well. This was supposed to be like something to make people feel good after the Tet Offensive.

• 42:17Speaker 05

  It's like, look, we're getting back at them. We're doing something. And then the guy's like, oh, no.

• 42:22Speaker 06

  Oh, no. And soldiers in Vietnam, however, were so used to journalists being along for the ride that guys in Charlie Company either totally forgot that there was someone there documenting everything they did that day, or Charlie Company was never told that the journalist was there in the first place. But even after the soldiers realized a photographer was there, they still didn't change their behavior that much.

• 42:44Speaker 05

  Well, I think it's because they thought they were following orders.

• 42:46Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:47Speaker 04

  And he was an army sergeant, so they probably thought he was on their side.

• 42:50Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 42:51Speaker 06

  When the photographer, an army sergeant named Ronald Haberly, came upon a group of soldiers surrounding a group of six villagers, three women, two children and a man, the soldiers actually waved him over and said, hey, take a picture, take a picture. The photo Haberly took in that moment, a photo of absolutely terrified children clutching an old woman. And this old woman's face, I've never seen a face like this in my life. It is the, the, it is the utter essence of anguish and disbelief. That photo became one of the most important photos of the entire Vietnam War. It's up there with the guy getting shot in the head, little girl naked and covered in napalm.

• 43:31Speaker 06

  For so many Americans, this was the photo that made them ask, what the fuck are we actually doing here?

• 43:39Speaker 05

  But photographers are supposed to sort of stay, like in this state, they're kind of supposed to be like not involved, right?

• 43:48Speaker 06

  No, no, they're not supposed to be involved.

• 43:49Speaker 05

  The goal is like, you're supposed to stand from afar and be an objective view in.

• 43:54Speaker 06

  Are you, what are you doing right now? Are you criticizing what he did, that he took the picture?

• 43:58Speaker 05

  No, no, honestly, I'm mostly like just trying to explain like the idea of like, that's why he didn't step in. That's why he wasn't saying stuff. He's literally just like, oh my, he's, he's like click. Like, it's like the movie Civil War.

• 44:11Speaker 06

  Oh, no, there's no, there is no way in hell that this guy could have done anything to stop anything.

• 44:16Speaker 04

  Yes. And, but you know, it's, it's hard though, you know, like, I mean, he did what he could and you're about to get into it.

• 44:23Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, what's not often said is that soon after Haberly took his photo, those soldiers shot and killed every single one of those villagers. Haberly witnessed soldiers cutting out tongues and scalping person after person. And most of the photos he took that day were of dead bodies, but those photos were taken with his own personal camera. He knew what was happening that day and he knew that it was fucked and he knew that people had to see it. Because he took the photos with his personal camera, this allowed Haberly to avoid army censorship because they absolutely would have confiscated and buried his photos had they known that he had taken pictures that day. It's because of Haberly that we have no doubt as to what happened to My Lai.

• 45:06Speaker 06

  It was far more important for him to take these pictures and document it than it was for him to make some sort of futile stand in which he'd get shot in the fucking head immediately. But to that point, when Haberly went back to America and showed the pictures of the bodies piled up on the road or pictures of children who laid dead from bullet wounds to the face, he did not get the reaction he was expecting. Instead of outrage, the people from the local civic groups that he showed these pictures to, they responded with outright denial. They refused to believe that this could have happened at the hands of American soldiers and some even accused Haberly of faking the photos altogether.

• 45:47Speaker 05

  How fucked up would I have to be to Photoshop this shit? Yeah. Like, that's even more fucked up. I know, like pose, people, like put it all together and being like, yeah, now I'll take down the US Army. Like, no, he was, he was a soldier.

• 46:03Speaker 04

  I understand. Okay. I, I, in a way, like, you know, I don't think they're correct, obviously, but you see something that's so outrageous.

• 46:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:12Speaker 04

  That's so crazy. You're like, this cannot be true.

• 46:16Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 46:16Speaker 04

  This is too far. You're fucking making this up because you believe in America still.

• 46:21Speaker 05

  We see it all the time. We see it with people with crimes and people refuse to understand why they will do it. And so they'll come up with many different Byzantine, other conspiracy theories around it to try to say that there's somebody in charge.

• 46:35Speaker 06

  Trying to make it make sense.

• 46:36Speaker 05

  Trying to make it make sense.

• 46:37Speaker 04

  If I was alive during then, it would have taken me a little while. I'd say probably a week of reading shit before I fully believed what happened.

• 46:46Speaker 06

  Sure. I can understand that.

• 46:47Speaker 04

  So crazy. Yeah. Cause it's fucked up.

• 46:50Speaker 06

  Now, out of the hundred some odd members of Charlie Company who entered My Lai that day, only two GIs refused to participate in the mass murder. GI Roy Wood, for example, actually vomited when he saw the men in his platoon shoot an unarmed Vietnamese villager in the head. The other soldier in Charlie Company who refused to participate in any way was GI Michael Bernhardt. And sure enough, he was almost killed for it in the weeks after the massacre. And this is how people took care of troublemakers in Vietnam. You don't just shoot a guy in the head. What you do is you do what they did to Bernhardt, what Cali specifically did to Bernhardt. You send them out on long assignments all alone, or you make them walk point every single time the platoon goes out into the countryside of the jungle.

• 47:34Speaker 06

  Point man, that's the guy who walks at the front of the patrol. Somebody's got to do it. And sure enough, time after time, Bernhardt was given that job. Guy who's walking point is the one who's most likely to be killed by a booby trap, a mine or a sniper. Bernhardt was also refused medical treatment when he came down with a condition called jungle rot, which was similar to the World War condition known as trench foot. Jungle rot was caused by bacteria common in tropical climates. It invades the skin painfully and chronically, turns the skin half a dozen colors, go orange sometimes. It can lead to amputation. And while jungle rot itself is not fatal, it certainly weakens a soldier and leads him to mistakes that could get him killed.

• 48:16Speaker 06

  Lieutenant Cali, of course, refused to let Michael Bernhardt get his jungle rot treated in the weeks after My Lai. So it is safe to say that Cali was doing everything he could to get rid of anyone who had objected to what Charlie Company had done in My Lai that day.

• 48:33Speaker 06

  Did you have something, Edward? You looked like you very much wanted to say something.

• 48:36Speaker 04

  I mean, I was just, you know, I had like a little quip that I was gonna say. If I was Bernard, I'd, you know, write on my shirt, like, I'd have a white shirt underneath my green shirt and just be like, say, "VCOK USA" behind me.

• 48:57Speaker 04

  That's all. That's why I didn't say it.

• 48:58Speaker 05

  Yep, it's good.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  That's why I cut it in.

• 49:00Speaker 06

  But I'm glad I heard it, though.

• 49:03Speaker 04

  I liked it. I liked it.

• 49:05Speaker 06

  Callie, however, was not the only one who tried silencing men who objected to the massacre that day. And that brings us to the only hero in this entire story: helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson. Now Hugh Thompson had been a young funeral director when he joined the Army in 1966 with hopes of becoming a pilot. He earned a spot flying helicopters, and he was shipped to Vietnam the same month that Charlie Company was, December 1967. And by the time Charlie Company marched into My Lai, Thompson had flown a fair amount of missions, and he had remained, by all accounts, a decent and honorable man. So Hugh is the type of guy that people like to think of when they imagine the ideal American.

• 49:50Speaker 06

  I mean, these, when people talk about the ideal American, they do exist. It's just the problem is that people start to think that every American is like this, and we're not.

• 49:58Speaker 04

  No, no, no. It's like one out of a hundred. And they're all named Hugh, I think.

• 50:01Speaker 05

  Pretty much, shit. A lot of them are just working in a nice job, you know, just loving life, volunteer firefighters.

• 50:08Speaker 06

  Yeah. No, it's like Hugh Thompson, he was a funeral director. Like, that's...

• 50:12Speaker 04

  No, you ha- funeral director is a job where you take care of your fucking community.

• 50:16Speaker 05

  It is.

• 50:17Speaker 06

  And growing up, Hugh Thompson had been a literal Boy Scout who always stepped in to protect other kids when they were being bullied. And he acted no differently on March 16th, 1968. It's a man of principle. See, Thompson was not on the ground with Charlie Company, so the reality of the situation had to dawn on him moment by moment as Thompson circled My Lai in his helicopter. When he saw a group of wounded Vietnamese on the ground, and this is well into the massacre, he assumed that they had been accidentally shot in the crossfire. So he dropped a green smoke grenade to mark them for pickup and removal to a nearby hospital. Thompson then flew away from My Lai to refuel, but when he returned at 9:00 AM,

• 51:00Speaker 06

  he found that the people that he'd marked with green smoke, they were now dead. They'd obviously been shot by somebody in his absence. Thompson, however, I mean, it took a bit for him to reel out, like, think, like, "Well, that's kinda weird, but I guess maybe somebody, I don't know what's going on here."

• 51:14Speaker 05

  Maybe somebody freaked out, or maybe something, yeah, God knows, you know?

• 51:17Speaker 06

  He continued on and tossed another smoke grenade to mark another wounded woman. But then Thompson watched as a group of GIs led by Captain Mad Dog Medina walked up to the wounded woman. Thompson himself saw Medina put a boot on the woman before shooting her dead.

• 51:36Speaker 04

  Man, he must have been fucking haunted by giving anyone the benefit of the doubt.

• 51:40Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:40Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm. From that day forward, Thompson then saw one of the ditches where Callie had ordered the mass execution of so many civilians. Because, you know, he's flying around up in the air, and he sees, like, "Holy shit, that ditch is full of dead bodies."

• 51:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, and he's the only one that really understands death.

• 51:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 51:57Speaker 04

  Dude, these other guys are new. They've never really been in a battle like, or anything similar to this.

• 52:02Speaker 06

  He'd worked at a, um, he'd worked at a funeral home since he was in high school. He'd been around death for, for many, many years, so he understood the finality of it.

• 52:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:10Speaker 06

  And it's at this point that Thompson felt as if he had no choice but to get involved. In a moment of incredible bravery that he would continue throughout the morning, Thompson radioed the ground troops and told them that if he saw them kill one more woman or one more child, he was gonna start shooting GIs himself. Thompson actually backed up that threat when he saw a group of women and children huddled together as a group of GIs approached them with obvious murderous intent. Thompson landed his helicopter and told his crewmen to aim their weapons directly at the GIs on the ground. One sergeant in the murderous group told Thompson, "Hey, all we wanna do is put these people out of their misery."

• 52:53Speaker 06

  And that tells you that by this point, all pretenses of the villagers being VC had been dropped.

• 52:57Speaker 05

  This is just murder. That's like a crazy, new validation that kinda comes out of just in the process of murder.

• 53:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 53:04Speaker 05

  Like, it kind of like, or even kind of continuing to say, like, "Oh, no, there, there's a good here."

• 53:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, there's a good.

• 53:10Speaker 05

  There's a positive here.

• 53:11Speaker 06

  Don't worry, like, you're actually hurting them right now.

• 53:14Speaker 05

  Yes. You're, you're keeping us from saving them.

• 53:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 53:16Speaker 04

  Put you out of your fucking misery.

• 53:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, and that, however, is the moment that Lieutenant William Callie showed up. After arguing with Hugh Thompson for a bit, Callie tried pulling his old trick to get soldiers in line by telling Thompson, quote...

• 53:30Speaker 05

  "I'm the boss."

• 53:34Speaker 06

  But Thompson didn't give a fuck what this sniveling little coward had to say. Instead, Thompson radioed for another helicopter to land and pick up the civilians who were just about to be murdered. And the other pilots, they did what Thompson asked. Callie did not have the balls to open fire on Thompson, but he did complain after Thompson left that Callie was the boss, not some helicopter pilot.

• 53:57Speaker 05

  So funny, he couldn't stand up to him in the fucking, in the moment.

• 54:00Speaker 06

  Couldn't do it.

• 54:01Speaker 04

  After he killed a hundred people.

• 54:03Speaker 06

  And he wasn't even, he was not done yet, because he needed to prove that he was the boss, and to prove that he was the boss.

• 54:08Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, now he's tripling down.

• 54:09Speaker 06

  He ordered the GIs around him to return to the ditch and make sure that there were no survivors.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, because that's where all the bad people are, in the fucking ditch.

• 54:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, at this point, it's, all pretense is gone. You know, it, it's now, now it is, "Kill everyone."

• 54:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's free fire time.

• 54:27Speaker 06

  Yeah. But that was just the first time that Hugh Thompson squared up against his fellow soldiers on that morning. After leaving Callie, Thompson spotted a group of about ten villagers running towards a bunker, and they were being chased by several Charlie Company soldiers. So Thompson landed his helicopter right in between the two groups, and he told his crew to open fire on those fucking bastards if they opened fire on me or the civilians. And as the crew trained their guns on their fellow Americans, Thompson was able to coax the villagers out of their bunker and get them onto another helicopter. After those civilians were safely away, Thompson and his crew returned to the ditch.

• 55:10Speaker 06

  One of Thompson's crewmen spotted movement amongst the bodies. And when they landed, that crewman found a child crying and clinging to his dead mother. The crewman reached down and pulled the kid out of the body pit, then sent him to the South Vietnamese Army Hospital in Quang Nai City. That child survived, and he's still alive, to tell this story to this day. Now, after all the houses were burned, the food was destroyed, and the livestock were killed, the GIs that had laid waste to My Lai were more or less drifting aimlessly by 10:30 AM. That was around three hours after they'd arrived.

• 55:48Speaker 06

  One GI named Herbert Carter just watched as another GI named Fred Widmer wandered through the village shooting wounded civilians. Widmer asked for Carter's .45 pistol, and he used that pistol to kill a young boy by shooting him in the neck. After killing a few more wounded civilians, Widmer stopped only because the pistol jammed. Widmer handed the pistol back to Carter, but when Carter tried clearing the jammed round, the gun went off, and Carter accidentally shot himself in the foot. It was the only American casualty suffered at My Lai, and it was described on the official report as a hostile gunshot wound.

• 56:27Speaker 04

  I mean, it was, because he's a piece of shit killing people, and he shot himself.

• 56:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:33Speaker 06

  Now, not too long after Carter shot himself in the foot, Hugh Thompson returned to base in his helicopter to report the massacre to his superiors. Eventually, word of what happened reached the head of the task force, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker. And Barker radioed Captain Medina and said, "Hey, knock it off. Been enough of that." Medina, in turn, somewhat came out of his ghoulish haze, and he became frantic. Started telling his men, "Uh, we gotta get the fuck out of here." When one GI radioed that there were still three men alive, Medina replied with orders, "No, no, no, don't kill them. There's been too much of that today already." So they knew what they were doing.

• 57:12Speaker 05

  Weird. It's so fucking weird in a way, like, they're all like...

• 57:16Speaker 06

  Uh-huh, like, they just come out of this haze, yeah.

• 57:19Speaker 04

  They were in a trance, man. They were probably, I bet...

• 57:22Speaker 05

  They don't all remember it.

• 57:23Speaker 06

  Probably not. A lot of, a lot of the guys, like, there was that one guy's like, I don't even remember all the different ways that people were killed that day. Yeah, to a lot of guys, I bet they did kind of look at it as like, sort of a dream, sort of a haze. The shooting was over by 11 a.m., which is when Charlie Company broke for lunch. Thompson, meanwhile, filed an official report to Colonel Orin Henderson. Colonel Henderson was the guy who had ordered the creation of Task Force Barker. That was the guy who had also created Operation Body Snatch. He was the guy who incentivized the killing of civilians to beef up body count reports to his superiors. As such, Colonel Henderson was already in the process of covering up the massacre by filing false reports based on what Charlie Company

• 58:07Speaker 06

  had initially radioed back to base early on in the mission. See, at about 8:40 a.m., after Charlie Company had been in My Lai for about an hour, they had reported back to base that they had killed 84 Viet Cong in My Lai. Now, Charlie Company knew this was not the truth, but as I said last episode, that was the story of Vietnam. In reality, Charlie Company had murdered over 500 civilians and left them to rot in the open air by the end of the day, and nary a VC was among those dead bodies. But because Colonel Henderson had received reports that Charlie Company had killed Viet Cong, he followed their lead and reported what Charlie Company told him, all while

• 58:52Speaker 06

  ignoring the reports of helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson. As far as Henderson was concerned, it's like, well, I got Mad Dog, I got Medina telling me one thing, I got Thompson telling me another thing. It is his choice as to like, which one he's gonna believe, which, which, which report he's gonna give to his superiors.

• 59:07Speaker 05

  Medina's a captain.

• 59:09Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 59:09Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 59:10Speaker 06

  And just as it was with Cali's dissenting G.I., Thompson's superiors were soon sending Thompson out on one dangerous mission after another. And this was after Thompson had made it clear that he wasn't gonna let My Lai go. Like, they'd, so after Thompson came out of his meeting with Henderson that day, he was like, damn near in Yosemite Sam mode. Like, he's throwing shit around, he's fucking yelling, this goddamn army is, you know, is a bunch of bullshit. And that's the thing, while Thompson had not been shot down once before My Lai, his missions after My Lai were so dangerous that Thompson was getting shot down over and over and over again. His

• 59:49Speaker 06

  chopper went down four times in quick succession. Fourth crash shattered his fucking spine. And it's not just Thompson that being sent out to get killed, it's his crew, it's the guys that are with him.

• 1:00:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, they got nothing to do with nothing.

• 1:00:02Speaker 06

  No. Now, Thompson barely survived Vietnam, but the army had certainly done everything they could to get Thompson killed before he could return to America, because Thompson had every intention of telling everyone what he'd seen in the village of My Lai, and he also had the intention to talk about how the army had done absolutely nothing about it. Nope. I understand that My Lai itself is a lot to take in.

• 1:00:28Speaker 05

  What?

• 1:00:30Speaker 05

  Marcus, I think that this is one of the, God, I've been having a blast.

• 1:00:34Speaker 06

  It ain't over yet.

• 1:00:35Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 1:00:36Speaker 06

  Charlie Company was not the only unit in Task Force Barker to commit a massacre, nor were they the only unit to commit a massacre in Task Force Barker that fucking morning. See, while Charlie Company were destroying My Lai, Bravo Company, another unit in Task Force Barker, they were bringing their own special brand of hell to a nearby hamlet called Mi K. Mi K had only 100 residents, as opposed to My Lai's 700, but while the massacre at My Lai had a higher body count, the massacre at Mi K was far, far more brutal, and unfortunately, more inventive. See, Bravo Company had been sent to another nearby village on the morning of

• 1:01:18Speaker 06

  March 16th, 1968, just in case the 48th Battalion was over in this other village instead of in My Lai. But Bravo had come across an area that was heavily mined and booby-trapped. Within minutes of landing, Bravo Company's lieutenant was killed and four other GIs were seriously injured by Viet Cong traps. So Colonel Barker scrapped their mission and sent Bravo instead to the village of Mi K. Mi K had the same escalation as My Lai, except in Mi K, Bravo Company got more imaginative. In fact, one G.I. described Mi K as a shooting gallery. And keep in mind, this is all happening at the same time that the massacre in My Lai was happening,

• 1:02:03Speaker 06

  and it's happening about a mile and a half away.

• 1:02:05Speaker 05

  So you could hear it?

• 1:02:06Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:02:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, that's crazy.

• 1:02:10Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm. In Mi K, one soldier used his machine gun to literally tear a woman in two at the waist, using just a stream of bullets. GIs found an infant at Mi K, and they used the infant as a target in a marksmanship contest. The baby was only 10 feet away when the first G.I. took a shot with his 45 pistol, but when that G.I. missed, he got six feet closer. His second shot also missed, which caused all the GIs who were sitting around, watching this, they all roared with laughter. So the G.I. got right on top of the baby and fired the gun point-blank

• 1:02:49Speaker 06

  into its head, causing the skull to explode. Soldiers in Bravo Company then threw dynamite into houses and even had a contest to see which G.I. could blow up a house with the shortest fuse on his dynamite. By the end, Bravo had used 150 pounds of TNT to blow up 30 houses in the village of Mi K. The women in Mi K were also raped, and any who resisted were hit with a rifle butt until she gave up, before ultimately being murdered. And all Bravo Company murdered up to 100 civilians, at least 90, almost completely wiped the village of Mi K off the map. And yet, this part of the My Lai massacre, perhaps the cruelest part of all, is rarely

• 1:03:32Speaker 06

  mentioned when people talk about My Lai. There was no Mad Dog Medina or Lieutenant Cali in Bravo Company to lead these men astray. This was just men being monsters, as men often are in times of war, and it shows without a doubt that the American military and its civilian commanders had created the conditions for these massacres to happen twice on the same fucking day, just a mile and a half away from each other.

• 1:03:59Speaker 05

  So we're asking if, so, you know, if anybody's asking, was My Lai a singular event? We actually know for a fact that it's kind of crazy that even just on the day itself, it was not a singular event.

• 1:04:10Speaker 06

  A mile and a half away.

• 1:04:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:12Speaker 05

  It was just the craziest event.

• 1:04:13Speaker 06

  It was the largest event.

• 1:04:15Speaker 05

  It was the one that they could maybe get some attention on, too. You know, like, the idea of that level, they can finally, maybe somebody will pay attention. Well, it took a long time, and the pictures, yeah, you were saying, the photographer being there helps a lot.

• 1:04:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:28Speaker 05

  I'm surprised we even know about Mi K.

• 1:04:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:31Speaker 05

  Well, they had to write that shit down. Somebody wrote it down. Someone wrote down pinning the baby to the wall and shooting it in the head?

• 1:04:38Speaker 06

  Uh, a lot of this stuff came out through testimony later on, uh, and some guys eventually just said, as the years went by, like, I have to talk about this, I have to get this off my, I cannot die with this secret, I have to tell somebody.

• 1:04:51Speaker 05

  And Vietnamese survivors as well.

• 1:04:53Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:04:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There, there were survivors at both My Lai and Mi K, but yeah, in, the fair amount does come from Vietnamese survivors. And so, after Bravo Company finished their massacre at the village of Mi K, they joined Charlie Company after their massacre at My Lai. And the two com, oh, and also, sorry, by the way, uh, army investigators, in case someone out there's saying like, oh, well, you can't, you know, the, the Vietnamese are the enemy, they're like, uh, invest, army investigators went to both locations and, uh, did forensics.

• 1:05:24Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:24Speaker 06

  Uh, so, um, and, and there were many, many, many, many people who said even in 1968, like, yeah, we killed a lot of babies in My Lai and Mi K.

• 1:05:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're villagers.

• 1:05:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:05:35Speaker 05

  Even if they are the enemy, they're fucking villagers.

• 1:05:37Speaker 06

  They're just villagers, they are civilians in the war.

• 1:05:39Speaker 05

  Who cares if they are VC?

• 1:05:41Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:05:42Speaker 05

  They're fucking villagers, they got nothing to do with this shit.

• 1:05:45Speaker 06

  Well, what I'm saying is that, in case someone-

• 1:05:46Speaker 05

  I'm not yelling at you, I'm just mad.

• 1:05:48Speaker 06

  Well, no, I know. What I'm saying is, like, in case someone's like, well, that was Vietnamese propaganda, you know, like, you can't go off of what the enemy says, or what, you know, anything, like, that's, I know what you mean.

• 1:05:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:58Speaker 06

  Uh, but there was proof.

• 1:05:59Speaker 05

  We're clearly the ones you can't trust.

• 1:06:04Speaker 06

  There, there was proof for all of us. And so, after Bravo Company finished their massacre at the village of Mi K, they joined Charlie Company after their massacre at My Lai. And the two companies walked the coast of a nearby river, burning or dynamiting every home they came across. They continued killing people.

• 1:06:24Speaker 05

  Now it's just, it's out, the devil's out.

• 1:06:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:26Speaker 05

  They're just jealous they can't afford waterfront property themselves. They're like, I would never have a home.

• 1:06:32Speaker 06

  Now, people say that America didn't know about My Lai for another year, but that's not strictly true. See, on March 17th, the day after the massacre, the My Lai mission was the subject of a glowing article in the New York Times. The article claimed that two companies of American GIs had caught the North Vietnamese troops in a pincer movement, resulting in 128 dead Viet Cong soldiers. As far as anyone in America knew at the time, this was exactly what had happened on March 16th, 1968, in the village of My Lai. So, worth the wait?

• 1:07:10Speaker 05

  I don't want to go to Vietnam. Yeah.

• 1:07:16Speaker 05

  Maybe that New York Times journalist was just celebrating St. Patrick's Day a little early. That's right. He's like, I gotta get this article done so I could finish my Guinness.

• 1:07:30Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. But that's the, that is the My Lai massacre. That, that's it. So let's now get into the cover up.

• 1:07:35Speaker 05

  Oh, fun. Oh, great.

• 1:07:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, honestly, it's good to know because this is where, this is where, you know, the big sins of America really get stained in there.

• 1:07:46Speaker 06

  Now, the cover up to the My Lai massacre was simple and quick. As I said, the cover up began as the massacre was still happening when Charlie Company radioed back to base to report dozens of dead Viet Cong. But because the military were now on a ride that they could not exit, well, of course, that ride came to measuring victory by body count, the army couldn't reprimand the men in Charlie Company for what they'd done because then the entire fucking system for victory in Vietnam would fall apart. So as Charlie and Bravo Companies hung out together in a literal graveyard as the sun went down on March 16th, they laughed and joked about how they were probably about to get a whole lot of praise for murdering all those women and children by the hundreds.

• 1:08:28Speaker 06

  And in this, they were absolutely correct. Captain Medina actually promoted Lieutenant Calley to First Lieutenant. And Colonels Henderson and Barker publicly praised Charlie Company for defeating such a, quote, "large force of Viet Cong soldiers in My Lai."

• 1:08:44Speaker 05

  And a lot of this is obviously the beginning of the ass covering.

• 1:08:47Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm. By the standards and practices established by Task Force Barker, My Lai had been an extremely successful mission. So the people above Barker did not ask questions when Barker delivered reports of great success in My Lai. And so Charlie Company returned to routine search and destroy missions for the rest of the year. But something had changed in these formerly gung ho killers after they'd instigated and participated in a massacre. Word of My Lai had already begun to spread on the day of the slaughter itself. And before long, Charlie Company was known in Vietnam as the guys who'd killed a lot of women and children,

• 1:09:27Speaker 06

  but had reported 128 VC killed. It must be said that this was not something that the other GIs in Vietnam were applauding.

• 1:09:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is kind of a, it is, this is where it's kind of be fascinating. So kind of watch how that affects the other soldiers that hear about it. Because I'm certain there's a lot of guys that have killed a lot of VC and have seen a lot of action that were like,

• 1:09:52Speaker 05

  I can't, like, how would you do that?

• 1:09:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. Why, why are you doing that?

• 1:09:56Speaker 04

  And also, when they go home, even if it's just for leave for a little while before they come back and they're called a fucking baby killer, it's these guys' fucking fault.

• 1:10:05Speaker 05

  Yes, they're getting the, they're getting the bill because of that.

• 1:10:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. And really, like, the Quang Nai province was, it was kind of special within Vietnam. Like, it had been known since, you know, the days of like the Chinese occupations, like, people in Quang Nai hate invaders. They, they do can't, do not deal with invaders. They, they do not, like, they, they have a, a special thing of like, the invaders cannot come in here. And so, yeah, like, they were always, you know, unfriendly towards American soldiers, and so it was very tense. But across the rest of the country, most other soldiers were like, Vietnamese kids are great. Like, how could you kill these fucking, like, they're, they're just people. They're fine.

• 1:10:46Speaker 05

  The best part of what we do here is meet normal people. Like, we're finally here, because some of them, when they did have relationships with villagers, it was like a, you know, the slightest humanity that they could experience.

• 1:10:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. And if you only watch the Green Berets, John Wayne fucked one on that beach. Yeah.

• 1:11:05Speaker 05

  I'm gonna marry that little boy. Come with me, Ning Pan. You'll be my new boy wife.

• 1:11:13Speaker 06

  The Task Force Barker was disbanded in mid-April, which partly came as a result of reports from Robert Ramsdell, who is, if you remember, the CIA officer in charge of Project Phoenix.

• 1:11:27Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:11:27Speaker 05

  Really good.

• 1:11:28Speaker 06

  See, Ramsdell reported a sharp drop in VC activity in Pinkville after the My Lai mission. This meant that Ramsdell had essentially created a problem in Pinkville by reporting faulty intelligence that My Lai was harboring the 48th Battalion. Ramsdell then decided that the problem he created had also been solved. And he decided that by using reports from Task Force Barker. And Task Force Barker was, of course, killing villagers and reporting them as dead VC. Again, this is fucking Vietnam in a nutshell. Now, as it turned out, Barker and Medina were both subpar leaders, to say the least.

• 1:12:10Speaker 06

  And other officers began to notice, especially after My Lai. One officer called Charlie Company "the most ragtag, undisciplined horde of soldiers in all of Vietnam."

• 1:12:21Speaker 05

  You mean, that sounds like fun. That's like John Candy. That's right.

• 1:12:25Speaker 06

  They go two months without haircuts.

• 1:12:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:28Speaker 06

  That's what they said about Charlie Company.

• 1:12:29Speaker 05

  That's the worst thing they do. Honestly, I'm really offended. Now, now I'm offended. Yeah.

• 1:12:36Speaker 06

  While two months without haircut sounds a little silly, considering what Charlie Company did, they really were an absolute fucking mess. They didn't shower, their discipline was lax, if not nonexistent, and Charlie Company rarely provided cover for other units in Vietnam. They're fucking cowards. So everyone in the army were basically hoping that Charlie Company would just fade away and their crimes would hopefully fade away with them. Neither wish, however, would come true. Now, while the story of the My Lai massacre would take a while to reach American soil, it was exposed almost immediately within Vietnam itself. Survivors of the massacre made it to the nearest city a few days later, and a report was soon published in South Vietnam, mind you,

• 1:13:18Speaker 06

  that 480 civilians had been murdered in My Lai and another 90 had been killed in My K. I mean, that's the thing about My K. It was reported days later. It was not a secret. These numbers were actually on the low end, but even so, the American military could not have created a stronger propaganda piece for the North Vietnamese if they had actively tried to do so.

• 1:13:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, they just made like a million VC.

• 1:13:44Speaker 04

  Yes, because this is in South Vietnam.

• 1:13:48Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:13:49Speaker 05

  Not where the enemy lives.

• 1:13:51Speaker 06

  No. Yeah. By mid-April, reports of the massacre were distributed throughout Hanoi and North Vietnam and then to the rest of the world. But the US military, again and again, dismissed the reports as communist propaganda. The military just kept referring back to Colonel Henderson's report, which stated that 128 Viet Cong had been killed. To guess, 20 civilians had died in the crossfire, but, you know, collateral damage, that's what's happened. The military did actually lightly investigate, but their investigation didn't really go beyond just looking at Henderson and Barker's reports one more time and saying, yep, looks good to me.

• 1:14:27Speaker 04

  We have investigated ourselves and we have found ourselves to be entirely innocent.

• 1:14:32Speaker 05

  Congratulations yourself. Congratulations, Me. You're right. Thank you. Thank you, Me. Thank you, you. Goddamn, I'm awesome. Could use a haircut, though. Yeah, it's one thing. I feel, and for that, I give you two demerits.

• 1:14:48Speaker 06

  And so by March of 1969, one year later, My Lai was in the rearview of the American military, and the military were hoping and praying that it would be just another forgotten atrocity of war. The officers who'd been in charge had been given other assignments, and most of the GIs who had participated had either gone back to America having fulfilled their duty, or they were running short on their service in Vietnam. But while nobody who had participated in the massacre in My Lai went to the press that year, mostly because many of them were well aware they had committed war crimes, a lot of them woke up every morning and wondered, is this the day when people are gonna find out?

• 1:15:27Speaker 06

  The soldiers who had heard about the massacre while they were still in Vietnam, they were finding it difficult to stay quiet. Specifically, a GI named Ronald Ridenhour had heard about My Lai just a little over a month after the massacre happened from a guy that he had trained with who had been assigned to Charlie Company after Basic. This guy was named Charles Groover.

• 1:15:51Speaker 05

  Ooh.

• 1:15:53Speaker 06

  And when Groover and Ridenhour were catching up one day in Vietnam, Groover asked Ridenhour if he'd heard about what Charlie Company had done in Pinkville.

• 1:16:02Speaker 05

  I tell you what, man, it wasn't like my name. I tell you what, man, it was nothing Groover about, man.

• 1:16:11Speaker 04

  No, Pinkville is not called Poon Tang.

• 1:16:14Speaker 05

  I know. I gotta tell you, man, it's false information, brother. It's a war. I listened to this fat guy tell me that.

• 1:16:22Speaker 06

  Well, when Ridenhour said, no, he hadn't heard about what happened in Pinkville, Groover's...

• 1:16:26Speaker 05

  Oh, fuck, yeah. I tell you the whole fucking thing, man.

• 1:16:28Speaker 04

  Light a J. It's gonna be a long night.

• 1:16:31Speaker 05

  Come on, let's go, dude.

• 1:16:32Speaker 04

  Have a fucking s'more.

• 1:16:34Speaker 06

  Groover spilled the whole story, saying that Charlie Company had gone into a village and killed everyone inside. And Groover himself had seen a soldier shoot a little boy, point blank.

• 1:16:44Speaker 04

  Not Groover at all, man.

• 1:16:46Speaker 05

  So Groover was involved?

• 1:16:48Speaker 06

  Uh, Groover was there, and that's, well, you know, that is the biggest fucking question when it comes to My Lai. Who did what, when? You know, like, there was some, there was around a hundred guys, uh, they say that there were two who didn't participate, and...

• 1:17:04Speaker 05

  So that means 98 participated?

• 1:17:06Speaker 06

  I don't know. Like, you really don't know. It's, it's so hard to prove, you know, who did what, when?

• 1:17:11Speaker 04

  Also, anyone who keeps their mouth shut's just as guilty in my fucking eyes.

• 1:17:15Speaker 05

  Very much so.

• 1:17:16Speaker 06

  Now Ronald Ridenhour was understandably haunted by the story he'd heard, but after a year of living with it, Ridenhour couldn't stand it anymore. In the spring of 1969, Ridenhour wrote letters to the Pentagon, the White House, and 24 congressmen, pleading for someone to investigate what happened at My Lai. To the military's credit, someone in the Pentagon read Ridenhour's letter and came to the realization that there was a lot of shit happening on the ground in Vietnam that he wasn't privy to. See, as I said, the guys on the ground in Vietnam were routinely lying and telling their superior officers what they wanted to hear. And that bullshit kept traveling up the chain of command all

• 1:17:57Speaker 06

  the way to Washington. So there were a lot of military men at the Pentagon who had never been to Vietnam. They only knew it by reports and stats. And of course, you know, any sort of anti-war, anything that you hear that is negative about the war, you can, ah, it's anti-war, it's communist propaganda, it's bullshit. They, in fact, they thought like Nixon was convinced that the anti-war protests, all the anti-war movement, was entirely backed by communists. He thought there's no way that Americans could be against it like that. They were not.

• 1:18:27Speaker 05

  That's fascinating.

• 1:18:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, communists don't pay anyone, especially protesters.

• 1:18:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, he had a bunch of brown uniforms and everybody eats salt. I know about communism. And I don't want to fucking hear about it, okay? I know everything about it. It's borscht, boots, and ass.

• 1:18:46Speaker 06

  If you wanted to get a communist to stop talking, just say, I know and I agree.

• 1:18:52Speaker 06

  And they'll, and they just turn off. They just stop.

• 1:18:57Speaker 06

  These guys in the Pentagon had no idea about the realities behind all those body count numbers. So when Ridenhour's letter landed on the right desks, men in the military and men in Congress sure as shit started asking questions about My Lai.

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• 1:21:10Speaker 05

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• 1:21:44Speaker 06

  And by the summer of 1969, a Colonel in the Pentagon started tracking down members of Charlie Company who had rotated back to America. Based on their statements, this Colonel actually had Lieutenant William Calley shipped from Vietnam back to America just for questioning. Immediately, they took this seriously.

• 1:22:01Speaker 05

  Just a questioning?

• 1:22:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:22:04Speaker 05

  Well, you know, that is, that is vaguely serious, I guess.

• 1:22:08Speaker 06

  It's very, no, it's, if you're bringing brought back for, back to America for questioning, you're fucked. At the same time, journalist Seymour Hersh had begun his own investigation into the My Lai massacre. And once Hersh sunk his teeth into the story, there was no way that My Lai was going to stay hidden, short of the CIA killing Hersh and calling it a suicide.

• 1:22:28Speaker 05

  They don't do that. Yeah, Marcus, they don't, they didn't do anything like that.

• 1:22:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've never done that.

• 1:22:33Speaker 06

  Never done, never ever.

• 1:22:34Speaker 04

  A heart attack's impossible to fake.

• 1:22:37Speaker 05

  Well, let's just say, I will say they're not great at it, but yeah.

• 1:22:42Speaker 06

  Well, by the time the My Lai story first hit the presses in September of 1969, Lieutenant Calley had already been charged with the murder of 109 civilians. And by November, Army investigators, as I mentioned, had returned to My Lai. There, they found three mass graves containing the bodies of up to 500 people. And those bodies did indeed belong to mostly old men, women, and children. And, and by the way, it wasn't the Americans who would put all the bodies into the mass graves after the Americans left. The remaining villagers came and cleaned up the bodies the best they could. Around the same time, Seymour Hersh published his expose on the massacre, My Lai Four, and it caused outrage the world over.

• 1:23:25Speaker 05

  If you want to be real upset, give that a read.

• 1:23:27Speaker 06

  Yeah. And with that, the Army's hand was forced. They had to find out not only why this massacre happened, but why nobody knew about it until well over a year later. So the Army chose a Lieutenant General named William Pierce to head what came to be known as the Pierce Panel. Like Hugh Thompson, General Pierce was a decent man by all accounts. And under his guidance, the panel compiled enough evidence to file charges against 15 men for both the murders and the subsequent cover-ups.

• 1:23:57Speaker 04

  So it was a trial of their peers?

• 1:24:03Speaker 05

  I wish she could have been there, Eddie. Oh, what I would have given. I'm sure someone said it. Anybody? Anybody? Yeah, he's just saying, like, all right, well, I'll just go back to the CIA.

• 1:24:18Speaker 06

  As far as what President Lyndon Baines Johnson thought about all this.

• 1:24:22Speaker 04

  Baines, please.

• 1:24:23Speaker 06

  Of course. He was actually well out of the White House by the time the My Lai story broke. While LBJ was president when My Lai occurred, he had declined to run for a second term because Vietnam had completely and utterly defeated him. And honestly, LBJ had made the right call. It was his decisions and the decisions made by his cabinet that had made this war so fucking brutal. Coincidentally, though, LBJ had announced his decision not to run again just two weeks after the My Lai massacre, although LBJ did not have any knowledge of My Lai at all. But since Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in April of

• 1:25:02Speaker 06

  1968, three days after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, 1968 was a wild fucking year in American history.

• 1:25:10Speaker 05

  Insane. It's crazy weak.

• 1:25:13Speaker 06

  The Democrats did not have a strong candidate to run in LBJ's place. That paved the way for who else but President Richard Nixon, who'd been waiting in the wings for another chance at the office ever since he'd lost the California governor's race in 1962. He had said you didn't have old Richard Nixon to kick around anymore. And he, he did actually decide, he was a lawyer for a little while, but man, when the opportunity came back up, he could not resist politics, could not resist getting back in. Nixon fucked up in Vietnam like every president before. But Nixon was special because he had fucked things up in Vietnam before he was even elected. See, Nixon actually sabotaged peace talks between

• 1:25:56Speaker 06

  North and South Vietnam in late October 1968, just before that year's presidential election. There had been a path towards peace in 1968, but Nixon had backchanneled to the South Vietnamese government just days before his election against Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Nixon told the South Vietnamese that they would get a better deal if they held off on peace talks until after Nixon was elected president. So peace talks between North and South Vietnam fell apart just before the election, which was of course bad for Hubert Humphrey. Richard Nixon was therefore elected president by committing literal treason against

• 1:26:38Speaker 06

  the United States. And that's not my opinion. LBJ is recorded saying that son of a bitch Nixon committed treason. LBJ knew about the back channel because the CIA had bugged the South Vietnamese government without the South Vietnamese knowing.

• 1:26:57Speaker 05

  Everybody sucks.

• 1:26:58Speaker 06

  And LBJ couldn't call Nixon out on his treasonous acts in public without revealing that the CIA had committed espionage against one of our allies. So LBJ let Nixon go and Nixon continued escalating the war, just like every president before him, all while constantly talking about finding a path towards a so-called honorable peace.

• 1:27:22Speaker 04

  Well, if LBJ was about to fucking get out, why didn't he rat everyone out anyway?

• 1:27:29Speaker 06

  Well, it wasn't about him, it was about America and it was about the CIA, you know, it was about America's image because, you know, it's, it was only in recent years that the rest of the country, or the rest of the world realized, and funny Freudian slip, the rest of the world realized that America does spy on its allies and we've been doing it for a very, very long time.

• 1:27:48Speaker 05

  Because we told everybody we didn't.

• 1:27:50Speaker 06

  Yep, we told everybody we didn't and, you know, having a bug in, you know, the president, presidential office of an allied government is a massive no-no.

• 1:27:58Speaker 05

  I call it a no-no.

• 1:27:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, big no-no, yeah. So, yeah, so LBJ did what he thought, again, what he thought was best for America and in reality, it would have been best if he would have ripped the fucking Band-Aid off and said like, oh no, Nixon is a fuck, he's treasonous, he's, he's committed treason.

• 1:28:15Speaker 05

  Honesty is the best policy.

• 1:28:17Speaker 06

  It is.

• 1:28:18Speaker 04

  Do we think if Hubert went by Hugh, he would have had a better chance?

• 1:28:21Speaker 06

  Hugh, no, Hugh Humphrey sounds worse than Hubert Humphrey.

• 1:28:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're right.

• 1:28:26Speaker 05

  Hugh Humphrey, is that not the character from Lolita? Like literally, I don't remember.

• 1:28:33Speaker 06

  Now, after Seymour Hersh broke the My Lai story and leading national magazines and newspapers covered it further, some Americans were starting to realize that there was nothing honorable about the war in Vietnam. Other Americans, however, decided that they just weren't gonna believe that My Lai happened. This unfortunately, isn't anything new in America. The internet may have made this worse, but as we're about to see, America has been comfortable with cognitive dissonance for a very long time. Even though there were fucking pictures of the bodies and testimony from the GIs who had actually done this, all this was being published all over the country, the initial informal polls revealed that most Americans refused to believe the allegations as to what happened in My Lai.

• 1:29:16Speaker 06

  In fact, the first paper to publish photojournalist Ronald Haverly's photos got calls criticizing them for printing documentation about what happened in My Lai, just as it had been with people in Ronald Haverly's hometown. Readers of this paper, I think it was the Cleveland Plain Dealer, they were alleging that the photographs had been faked.

• 1:29:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I saw an interview with Haverly and he said that he has never let go of the guilt of not saying something sooner.

• 1:29:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:29:41Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, I bet, it haunts him his whole, his whole life.

• 1:29:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, he considers himself one of the bad guys.

• 1:29:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, I know, and it's fucking horrible. It's, it's, I tried to say horrible, but then I said awful-able.

• 1:29:51Speaker 05

  Awful-able.

• 1:29:53Speaker 06

  Now, further polls about My Lai were even more disturbing. A Time Magazine poll showed that the American public considered My Lai to be, by a margin of 65 to 22%, an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of war. A similar margin also rejected the idea that My Lai proved that the Vietnam War had been a mistake. But again, to be fair to this incredibly complicated time in American history, almost 50,000 Americans had already died in Vietnam by December of 1969. A lot of families had either lost sons, or at an even larger number, a much, much, much larger number, were dealing with kids who were coming back with lost limbs and/or shattered psyches.

• 1:30:36Speaker 06

  For many Americans, it was unthinkable to consider that their sons had not only died for nothing, but had died for something that was morally wrong from the very beginning. So, while many people saw My Lai as tragic proof of America's overall mistake concerning the war, My Lai also became an extension of America's shared sunk cost in Vietnam. That inability to face reality was unfortunately being shared by more and more Americans every day in 1969. The more kids came home in boxes, the more people did not want to believe that something like My Lai could happen.

• 1:31:15Speaker 05

  Because then it's all for nothing.

• 1:31:17Speaker 06

  It's all for nothing and, and, you know, and shit, just think about this, you know, like there's, everyone knows somebody who knows somebody who was in 9/11 or died in 9/11. And that was, you know, that 3,000 people dead, this is 50,000, you know, and that's 50,000 killed and it's not even counting the hundreds of thousands who came back wounded.

• 1:31:34Speaker 04

  How about this, My Lai is one-sixth the size of 9/11.

• 1:31:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:31:39Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:31:39Speaker 06

  Jesus.

• 1:31:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's, it's a My Lai's, yeah, so 9/11, six My Lais.

• 1:31:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:31:44Speaker 05

  That's great math. What fun, is this common core?

• 1:31:48Speaker 04

  I like, I like doing math by My Lais.

• 1:31:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, me, same from now on, from now on, that's how I'm doing it. In memory of them.

• 1:31:58Speaker 06

  Now, the trials to convict the perpetrators of the My Lai massacre, it's the same as everything else in this story, it was fucking complicated. By the time the trials began, 25 GIs and officers were charged with something related to the massacre and each of those cases had to be tried and proved individually and fairly. These trials had all the same standards as a regular court trial, so while a GI could certainly testify that they saw a fellow soldier shoot and kill villagers, it still had to be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the charged GI had actually pulled the trigger.

• 1:32:31Speaker 05

  And that's very difficult.

• 1:32:32Speaker 06

  And then there was the matter of the charges surrounding the cover-up. This was even harder to prove because who's to say who knew what and when they knew it? And this is all during the so-called fog of war and it's even harder when you consider all of the lying that had already happened in Vietnam. And so, as army lawyers began working on what they could prove, cases started falling apart and by the time they actually got to who was gonna be facing a court martial for My Lai, the number had gone from 25 military men to just six.

• 1:33:03Speaker 05

  God.

• 1:33:04Speaker 06

  Now, only one officer faced charges for the cover-up, that was Colonel Orin Henderson, the man who ordered the creation of Task Force Barker. See, Hugh Thompson had told Henderson what had happened at My Lai directly and Thompson had done it on the very day of the massacre, but Henderson was a man without a single fucking shred of honor. He just lied, he said, nah, Thompson didn't tell me nothing. I heard the fucking testimony myself, you know, he just said, nope, he didn't tell me, uh-uh.

• 1:33:32Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 1:33:33Speaker 06

  So Henderson's court martial became case of he said, she said, and Henderson, who had incentivized the killing of civilians, ended up walking as a result, he just perjured himself and walked.

• 1:33:44Speaker 04

  Didn't Thompson write it down that he like told him?

• 1:33:47Speaker 05

  It's still, he said, she, there's no, you know?

• 1:33:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, just writing a report down, don't make it true, you know, and it doesn't mean that that's what actually happened because he has, on one hand, he has Medina's report, Henderson does, on the other hand, he has Thompson's and so which ones, he's like, which one am I supposed to prove, how am I supposed to know?

• 1:34:03Speaker 05

  Well, Medina's is covered in blood.

• 1:34:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, speaking of Captain Mad Dog Medina, he also dodged any sort of punishment, he went to trial and this is, you know, many GIs saw him kill civilians, Thompson saw him kill civilians. It was argued that Mad Dog had created the conditions for the massacre, he knew that civilians were being killed and he had failed to stop it. Medina faced 175 counts of murder, but a jury also sent Medina away as a free man because the prosecution could not meet the burden of proof.

• 1:34:36Speaker 04

  Didn't have the courage to put down old Yeller.

• 1:34:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:34:40Speaker 06

  The others who were charged for My Lai were GIs like Sergeant Charles Hutto, who became the poster boy for the just following orders defense. A psychologist painted Hutto, I think it's Hutto.

• 1:34:51Speaker 05

  It don't matter.

• 1:34:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, it don't matter. A psychologist painted Hutto as, he was a country bumpkin, he's a roob. They said his rural upbringing and his lack of basic education.

• 1:35:01Speaker 05

  He's a poop butt.

• 1:35:02Speaker 06

  He's a, he's a rumkin.

• 1:35:03Speaker 05

  He's a rumkin, poop butt.

• 1:35:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, his rural upbringing and lack of basic education made it impossible for Hutto to determine the legality of an order. Now, we don't know if Hutto was one of McNamara's morons, we tried looking, couldn't find any evidence of it, but going off of the defense's argument, I'd say it was a safe bet.

• 1:35:21Speaker 05

  His last name is Hutto.

• 1:35:23Speaker 04

  He wasn't one of McNamara's maestros.

• 1:35:28Speaker 06

  Well, it was argued that Hutto did not have the ordinary sense and understanding to exercise the right a soldier has to deny an illegal order. An illegal order like say, go into a village and kill a bunch of women and children, and person in the army is supposed to say no to something like that. The defense claimed that Hutto followed orders blindly because he was basically a fucking idiot from the sticks and his jury agreed, Hutto also went free.

• 1:35:54Speaker 04

  I also agree, but it doesn't mean that he should go free.

• 1:35:58Speaker 06

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:36:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, it's just like one of those things, people, they charge him with manslaughter. How about that?

• 1:36:04Speaker 06

  Huh, just wait till we get to Cali. So GI after GI was acquitted, but in the end, someone had to go down for My Lai and it seems like everyone was most comfortable settling on the one guy that fucking nobody liked, Lieutenant William Cali Jr. Cali's trial was one of the longest in military history and during the five months he was in the hot seat, he became a sort of cult-like folk hero for the shitheads of America. For people of our generation, the closest comparison I can make is the Trayvon Martin murder trial of 2013.

• 1:36:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, he's like a George, he's a proto George Zimmerman.

• 1:36:38Speaker 06

  He is. If you're old enough to remember that trial, then you probably remember how a lot of shitty people either lionized or made excuses for defendant George Zimmerman. Jim Zimmerman had of course, shot and killed an unarmed teenager named Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2013 because George was scaled. He was super scaled about this kid.

• 1:36:58Speaker 05

  He was scared.

• 1:36:59Speaker 06

  He was super scared.

• 1:37:00Speaker 05

  He was scared, it was about the hoodie, because about hoodie, hoodie means, when you see somebody in a hoodie, you're like, oh, it's a criminal, oh, it's a criminal.

• 1:37:09Speaker 06

  Well, it's not a perfect one-to-one, but the support that people gave to Luke.

• 1:37:13Speaker 05

  Also, by the way, George Zimmerman is homeless now.

• 1:37:15Speaker 06

  Oh, fucking wonderful.

• 1:37:17Speaker 05

  Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

• 1:37:18Speaker 06

  Really couldn't.

• 1:37:18Speaker 04

  He sold the gun that he killed Trayvon with, made a bunch of money off it and beat his girlfriend.

• 1:37:23Speaker 05

  But then he spent it all.

• 1:37:24Speaker 04

  So I'm glad they let him out.

• 1:37:24Speaker 05

  And they spent it all.

• 1:37:27Speaker 06

  Now, it's not a perfect one-to-one here, but the support that people gave to Lieutenant Cali in 1968, who Lieutenant Cali murdered an entire village because he was also wee-wee scaled, it was similar to the support people gave to George Zimmerman in 2013. Mostly the thing that links these two cases is racism. Both Zimmerman and Cali saw their victims as things to be feared, things that were less than human and their supporters believed that the actions of those murderers were justified because those supporters share those same cowardly racist opinions.

• 1:38:01Speaker 04

  It's insane how much everyone can be so passionate about right and wrong, but it just goes away once killing children's involved.

• 1:38:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, right?

• 1:38:11Speaker 04

  It's just like, it's wild.

• 1:38:13Speaker 06

  Now, now, shades of gray.

• 1:38:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, we don't really think about the nuance, there's a nuance here.

• 1:38:19Speaker 06

  And one of the most bizarre features of the Mille Lie story is the music that was released around the time of Calley's trial. But it may not be the type of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Fortunate Son protest music you'd expect. Lieutenant Calley and the Mille Lie massacre overall created a kind of mini-genre of music during the Vietnam era. I think 91 Songs is enough to call it a mini-genre. 91 Songs specifically referenced Mille Lie. Most of them were specifically about Mille Lie. And these weren't album filler tracks either. These were fucking singles. And out of the 91 songs released about Mille Lie, the songs written in support of William Calley outnumbered the anti-Calley songs 2 to 1.

• 1:39:04Speaker 06

  Now, these songs do acknowledge that the massacre occurred, but they all find a way to justify it, claiming that Calley had actually been under attack, or he had just been confused that day.

• 1:39:17Speaker 04

  Either thing is not a answer.

• 1:39:20Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:39:21Speaker 06

  Those are, of course, your standard Pete Seeger folk songs decrying Mille Lie. You know, "Last Train to Nuremberg," I know you enjoy.

• 1:39:30Speaker 04

  I liked it, I enjoyed it.

• 1:39:31Speaker 06

  But the most interesting Mille Lie songs are the ones that are pro-Calley but against the war. Now, I say interesting, not correct, because from those artists' point of view, Calley himself was just another victim of Vietnam. Pro-Calley, anti-war songs like "Hang On, Bill" by the country artist Rick Riddle, they take the position that Calley was just following orders, and that the real criminals were the men who gave those orders and sent these boys to war in the first place.

• 1:40:02Speaker 04

  But they did the orders! But then they did the orders!

• 1:40:05Speaker 06

  But the order, yeah, I know, I know.

• 1:40:07Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:40:08Speaker 06

  I know.

• 1:40:09Speaker 04

  But also, you know, go get them. Yeah, go get those guys then.

• 1:40:14Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, other songs like "Set Lieutenant Calley Free" by Big Bill Johnson.

• 1:40:19Speaker 05

  Kind of on the nose.

• 1:40:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, he was also, Big Bill Johnson, also known as the Singing Drywall Man.

• 1:40:24Speaker 04

  And he's the guy I looked to. If I need spiritual guidance, I love anybody whose nickname involves drywall. I mean, say what you want about him, but I bet he could really fucking hang some drywall.

• 1:40:36Speaker 05

  Oh, I bet. Hey, bet you can't see any seam, right? No seam, huh? Right there, huh?

• 1:40:42Speaker 04

  I still hate you, but God, great job.

• 1:40:44Speaker 05

  Right, you can't deny, you can't deny the power of my spade.

• 1:40:47Speaker 06

  He loved the name The Singing Drywall Man so much. Like, I got that from his fucking obituary.

• 1:40:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the Singing Drywall Man will now go down as the dying Drywall Man.

• 1:41:02Speaker 04

  Would they make us casket out of him? She rock, yeah.

• 1:41:08Speaker 06

  Well, "Set Lieutenant Calley Free" by Big Bill Johnson portrays Calley as a Jesus-like figure. He crucified, they said. He's, Calley was punished for all the sins of the war. And honestly, I mean, it ain't a bad song if you like this era of country music. But I will say that it is a bizarre feature of American culture that a fucking massacre would have dozens upon dozens of songs attached to it. Let's hear some Big Bill for a second, just to give you a taste, because this shit is, it's surreal to listen to.

• 1:41:43Speaker 04

  It's upsetting.

• 1:41:44Speaker 05

  We're a sick, sick, sick society. We've never can and Calley do a tree. We're a sick, sick, sick society. If we don't set Lieutenant Calley free, the Americans are tired of a war that can't be won.

• 1:42:09Speaker 04

  How much should we get to hear?

• 1:42:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, I can't hear anymore.

• 1:42:13Speaker 06

  All right, we can take it. Well, it's just, the lyrics are, it's fascinating, because, you know, he's saying, "We're a sick society if we don't set Lieutenant Calley free," but then the next thing he says is, "We're tired of a war that can't be won." It's pro-Calley, anti-war.

• 1:42:29Speaker 04

  It's more like trying to explain that Calley is, it's almost like what you were saying, that Calley's just another kind of symptom of the problem, in a way, but he's, so in that way, he's kind of innocent.

• 1:42:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, but it's all, but that, the thing is about it is that it also completely discounts the lives of the Vietnamese people that he killed. It's like, it's, they're not worth, like, oh yeah, it's not worth, they're just Vietnamese people, like, who, who care? Why, why should we ruin this? It's that whole thing of like, do you really want to ruin this young man's life?

• 1:42:58Speaker 04

  It's like, yeah, I do.

• 1:42:59Speaker 06

  Fucking the Murdochs.

• 1:43:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, or Brock Turner. Fucking, uh, I do. Yeah, I, I like the, um, "The Mille Lie Incident" by The Shaw. I sent it to you. It's a reggae song.

• 1:43:09Speaker 05

  Dude, it's a bit too happy.

• 1:43:11Speaker 04

  I've been really, it's honestly been helping me process all this, but there's a lot of really good reggae songs about Vietnam, including "Vietnam" by Jimmy Cliff. Phenomenal song.

• 1:43:22Speaker 06

  Incredible song.

• 1:43:23Speaker 04

  It's so weird, it's so relaxing.

• 1:43:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. That, yeah, I mean, and that's the other side of it, because, you know, all the pro-Calley songs are, of course, all country songs written by white artists, uh, but the black artist, there was a soul artist named James Armstrong, he wrote a song from a civil rights perspective, very simply and truthfully, that song was called "Thank God Calley Wasn't Black."

• 1:43:44Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:43:45Speaker 06

  It's pretty good. I listened to it, it's pretty good, it's, it's pretty, you know, it's just regular soul.

• 1:43:52Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, the old Betty White defense.

• 1:43:55Speaker 06

  But the most popular pro-Calley song, and the most popular Mille Lie song overall, was "The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley" by a real piece of shit named Terry Nelson. This song was featured on Nelson's album, Wake Up, America!

• 1:44:10Speaker 04

  I'm sleeping.

• 1:44:12Speaker 06

  And then "Wake Up, America" was no shit, released on a label called Plantation Records.

• 1:44:17Speaker 04

  Yes, and, um, don't worry, there's definitely a Confederate flag on the cover.

• 1:44:22Speaker 06

  No, yeah, oh, you better believe it.

• 1:44:25Speaker 04

  That's how I know to buy it. That's how I know, and there's no reason why otherwise, because I've got to see the rebel flag. Have you ever heard some, you ever some rebel flag poker?

• 1:44:36Speaker 06

  Nelson's song certainly isn't good enough to play. You know, you heard one Battle Hymn, you heard them all. But the gist of the lyrics is this: Nelson believed that Calley was being unfairly tried because the civilians killed at Mille Lie were ultimately collateral damage, and Calley was only doing what he had been told to do by his commanding officers. America, therefore, had no right to punish Calley or any other soldier for anything they ever did, just so long as their actions fell under the "just following orders" umbrella. In other words, Nelson would have made a fantastic fucking Nazi.

• 1:45:05Speaker 04

  Phenomenal.

• 1:45:06Speaker 06

  Nelson's song, however, sold over a million copies and peaked at number 37 on the Billboard charts.

• 1:45:16Speaker 04

  For a Battle Hymn? Come on!

• 1:45:18Speaker 06

  Yes, that, but that tells you a lot.

• 1:45:19Speaker 04

  We got too many crackers in this fucking country. Yeah, dude. Who's Italian Yellow with it? There's like a couple of big songs that were kind of like that.

• 1:45:27Speaker 06

  There's a ton of them.

• 1:45:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, there were a lot of big Vietnam, like, country songs. But to show you just how divided America was at this time, "The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley" shared the charts that month with one of the greatest protest songs ever written. It was the same month "What's Going On" by Marvin Gaye came out. Marvin, thankfully, charted much higher than fucking Nelson.

• 1:45:48Speaker 04

  It's one of those interesting things where talent still always kind of wins.

• 1:45:52Speaker 06

  Most of the time.

• 1:45:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, where it's like, most people, like, their hate, hate drove them to do the Lieutenant Calley song, but then they hear "What's Going On," they're like, "God damn it, it's just fucking nice grooves."

• 1:46:03Speaker 06

  It's really good, that bassline. Bassline is revolutionary.

• 1:46:08Speaker 04

  It's incredible, it's breaking all these barriers, color barriers inside of me. I hate, I hate, I hate having my color barriers destroyed. Now, Nelson, your song's great, but it's hard to fuck to. All right, no. I gotta say, ain't the first time I heard that, so I'm just gonna remind you, go to the beat. Dun, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. Aw, shit, I'm off. Now, make sure, a wife likes a regular thrust. Like, you're a broken machine, you want to be like a, a broken hoeing machine. Aw, just like Lieutenant Calley, I fired too early. Yeah. Man, wouldn't the first one of my fans to do that?

• 1:46:51Speaker 06

  Despite all the songs in support of Lieutenant Calley, his crimes were, in fact, very real. While it could not be proved that Captain Medina or Colonel Henderson specifically ordered the killing of civilians, nor could it be proved that they had intentionally concealed the murders afterwards, prosecutors could prove Calley's crimes. They were able to prove that Calley had personally participated in, ordered, and/or caused the killing of unresisting civilians who were under US control.

• 1:47:19Speaker 04

  Dig them all up and hang them!

• 1:47:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:47:21Speaker 04

  Sorry, go ahead, I didn't mean to interrupt.

• 1:47:23Speaker 06

  The Body Pit, for example, pretty clear example of what happened as a result of Calley's orders that day. So, on March 16th, 1971, coincidentally, the third anniversary of the massacre, the case went to the jury. After 79 hours of deliberation, the court came back with a guilty verdict, finding Calley responsible for the murder of just 22 Vietnamese civilians, because 22 was all they could prove. He was sentenced to life in prison, doing hard labor at Fort Leavenworth. But Calley's conviction was an extremely unpopular decision. The White House received 5,000 telegrams after the verdict, and those telegrams were

• 1:48:05Speaker 06

  in support of Calley by a margin of 100 to 1.

• 1:48:10Speaker 04

  Well, who's gonna write in, "Good job, good job locking them up"?

• 1:48:15Speaker 05

  I just wanted to take a little moment to say, "Thank you." It's so hard, I wanted to personally thank you for doing this, and here is a $5 McDonald's gift certificate.

• 1:48:27Speaker 04

  This is why you gotta leave positive Google reviews. Seriously, guys. These motherfuckers are out.

• 1:48:32Speaker 05

  Just understand, you only get the negative emails. They don't get positive emails. This is just, this is the story of what I deal with on a day-to-day basis, because how do I know what's proper criticism or not, when you guys only send an email when you're angry?

• 1:48:52Speaker 06

  After getting these telegrams, President Nixon, in a recorded conversation with Henry Kissinger about Lieutenant Calley, said-

• 1:48:59Speaker 05

  "Most people don't give a shit whether he killed them or not."

• 1:49:02Speaker 06

  Direct quote. And in this, Nixon was absolutely right. After the trial, 79% of Americans actually believed that Calley should never have been convicted at all, much less sentenced to life in prison.

• 1:49:16Speaker 05

  Also would like to take a moment here, since he came up, to have a moment of silence, because this just came down on my news desk. Nancy Kissinger died today.

• 1:49:25Speaker 04

  Wow!

• 1:49:26Speaker 05

  Just now Nancy Kissinger died, 92 years young.

• 1:49:29Speaker 04

  Kiss her ass goodbye.

• 1:49:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, semen poisoning.

• 1:49:31Speaker 04

  They both lived so long.

• 1:49:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, evil is really strong.

• 1:49:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, he died last year or this year?

• 1:49:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, a couple of years ago.

• 1:49:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, maybe a couple of years ago.

• 1:49:39Speaker 05

  He might have died of COVID?

• 1:49:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:49:41Speaker 05

  I don't remember, actually.

• 1:49:41Speaker 06

  I don't remember.

• 1:49:42Speaker 04

  Whatever got him, I'm glad, I'd give that thing money.

• 1:49:44Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:49:47Speaker 04

  I don't care if it's bowel cancer. I support it.

• 1:49:51Speaker 06

  Now, it may not come as a surprise to hear that Lieutenant Calley did not end up serving life in prison. Three days after the conviction, President Nixon himself ordered Calley removed from jail and placed under house arrest. In August, Calley's sentence was reduced from life to 20 years. And upon appeal in 1974, Calley was released on bail before getting his sentence reduced again to 10 years. And since Calley had already served three years by this point, he was therefore up for parole. Parole was granted in short order, and Lieutenant Calley was set free in September of 1975. He stayed

• 1:50:35Speaker 06

  out of the public eye for the rest of his life. Guess where Calley moved to? Just guess.

• 1:50:39Speaker 04

  I mean, I know, it's Florida.

• 1:50:46Speaker 05

  Where every hated American goes to be forgotten is Florida! It's not so much I want to be forgotten, I just want to be celebrated for being a bad person. So I'm gonna go to Florida, where they like-

• 1:50:59Speaker 06

  Calley was so forgotten that when he died in Florida in 2024, his death went unnoticed for three entire months. This is a major figure in American history, but-

• 1:51:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, 91 songs written about him.

• 1:51:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, and people had forgotten about him. Three months, he was dead before someone finally noticed.

• 1:51:17Speaker 04

  Just like Screamin' Mad George.

• 1:51:20Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 1:51:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, I tried to watch The Giver last night, and his name-

• 1:51:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's terrible film.

• 1:51:27Speaker 05

  Terrible, terrible movie.

• 1:51:28Speaker 06

  Sure, but his band, The Mad, is fucking incredible.

• 1:51:32Speaker 05

  Ooh.

• 1:51:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, he was in the, you know, he was in the New York punk scene in the early 80s with the Beastie Boys, before he went and did all the fucking amazing makeup shit.

• 1:51:40Speaker 05

  Really?

• 1:51:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, he started, he did all that makeup shit onstage at like CBGB.

• 1:51:45Speaker 05

  That's awesome!

• 1:51:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, The Mad is fucking, they're one of my favorite hardcore bands ever.

• 1:51:50Speaker 05

  Man, a lot of talented people are fucking dead, man.

• 1:51:53Speaker 06

  That's true.

• 1:51:53Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:51:54Speaker 06

  That's true, but he has a wonderful legacy of turning a woman into a cockroach.

• 1:51:57Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah!

• 1:51:59Speaker 06

  Now, by the time Lieutenant Calley was released from prison, most Americans simply didn't care. People were actively trying to forget about anything having to do with Vietnam, because by September in 1975, the Vietnam War was done and dusted. Nixon had pulled out American ground troops altogether in 1973, after years of extremely low morale amongst American ground troops. And that low morale had been partly due to My Lai. See, despite Calley's supporters, 58% of Americans held the opinion after Calley's trial that the war in Vietnam was morally wrong, and these Americans favored complete withdrawal. By 1971, GIs in Vietnam were refusing to participate in combat because

• 1:52:44Speaker 06

  it had become common knowledge that the war was lost. Fraggings, that's soldiers murdering commanding officers, usually for giving orders that might get GIs killed. Fraggings greatly rose in 1971. And as future failed presidential candidate John Kerry put in his speech to the Senate in 1971, speaking as a Vietnam veteran-

• 1:53:03Speaker 04

  Hell!

• 1:53:04Speaker 06

  No, dude, no, I've got a fucking Kerry that will kill you.

• 1:53:07Speaker 04

  Please do, dude.

• 1:53:08Speaker 06

  "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

• 1:53:15Speaker 05

  Amazing! That's amazing!

• 1:53:18Speaker 06

  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

• 1:53:19Speaker 05

  You're so good, I almost fucking hit you.

• 1:53:23Speaker 04

  Wow, I hate John Kerry.

• 1:53:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, we all do, we all do.

• 1:53:26Speaker 05

  You helped kill a bunch of people. Oh, yeah, thank you, you're right.

• 1:53:32Speaker 06

  Now, as far as South Vietnam was concerned, we had left that country in absolute fucking ruins. We'd not only killed or helped kill a lot of Vietnamese, we'd also left behind rampant unemployment and runaway inflation. The South Vietnamese were worse off than when we'd arrived in nearly every single way. Then, when Nixon resigned as president in 1974 as a result of the Watergate scandal, leaders in Hanoi saw the opportunity to go big, because Nixon was known to still do a few bombings here and there, even after we pulled out ground troops.

• 1:54:06Speaker 05

  Just for fun.

• 1:54:07Speaker 06

  Just-

• 1:54:08Speaker 05

  Just to keep you loose.

• 1:54:10Speaker 06

  The North Vietnamese launched an actual invasion into South Vietnam in December of 1974. And even though President Gerald Ford tried to be the sixth US president to throw good money after bad into Vietnam, Congress finally said, "Fuck you." And by April of 1975, Saigon finally fell.

• 1:54:32Speaker 05

  Bye, Saigon!

• 1:54:34Speaker 06

  It's now-

• 1:54:34Speaker 05

  See you next time we're on vacation!

• 1:54:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, next time we're on vacation into Ho Chi Minh City, that's what it's called now.

• 1:54:40Speaker 05

  That would have been the, the only thing that he did.

• 1:54:43Speaker 06

  Ooh.

• 1:54:44Speaker 05

  Gerald Ford.

• 1:54:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:54:45Speaker 05

  Oh, he fell down. He fell down, and then he has that, that thing. Yeah, he drank beer! He drank beer, and he had that big head. Uh-huh. And then, he was, we went to, what was his library? Where is that?

• 1:54:58Speaker 06

  It was in Grand Rapids.

• 1:54:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, we could see it out of our window.

• 1:55:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, it looked like a used car lot.

• 1:55:02Speaker 05

  Nobody knows the back rooms. It's truly, and you know what was really nice about his National Library is that it's a really good place to be inside a building.

• 1:55:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:55:10Speaker 05

  Like, if you, like, if you need to be inside a building, that's a building. It's right there. It's right there, you can walk inside that, no elements.

• 1:55:19Speaker 06

  He's responsible for one of my favorite Dana Carvey bits. Gerald Ford did say, "The age of 84."

• 1:55:26Speaker 06

  "Paw apart by a wall."

• 1:55:30Speaker 06

  Now, history has shown that the domino theory could not have been more wrong. Other Southeast Asian countries actually became more anti-communist after Saigon fell. And Vietnam actually ended up fighting yet another war against fucking China before the 70s were even over. If you remember, China had once given the North Vietnam weapons to fight us. And according to an email we got, the Vietnamese as a whole have a far lower opinion of the Chinese than they do the Americans.

• 1:56:00Speaker 05

  It is interesting, but it's because they were there for way longer and did way horrific shit for very, very long.

• 1:56:06Speaker 06

  Very long time. But concerning the whole reason why we fought this thing, the Cold War, it's actually possible that had we just let the Soviet Union do its thing in trying to take over or support other countries in the pursuit of spreading international communism, Soviet Union might have fallen even faster. See, after Vietnam bloodied America's nose so badly, the Soviet Union decided to support communism in Afghanistan, which soon turned into the Soviet Union's Vietnam War.

• 1:56:34Speaker 05

  Rambo III.

• 1:56:34Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:56:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, wow, that is Rambo III, that's history!

• 1:56:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:56:38Speaker 05

  See, you can learn history from Sly Stallone, yeah. Sly Stallone loves the Taliban! He loves the Taliban!

• 1:56:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, America, of course, stayed as an advisor and weapons supplier during that conflict by backing an up-and-coming Afghani warlord named Osama bin Laden.

• 1:56:55Speaker 05

  I wonder what he's up to now?

• 1:57:01Speaker 05

  He's kissing Ariel the Little Mermaid.

• 1:57:03Speaker 06

  And that just goes to show you that fucking everything is connected, everything. But in the end, the Soviet Union's 10-year war in Afghanistan was the final nail in their coffin, and the threat of international communism therefore died in 1991. No matter how much certain people in this fucking country seem to want to believe that the threat of international communism is still real, it's not.

• 1:57:26Speaker 05

  We're doing it again! We're talking about it again!

• 1:57:30Speaker 06

  Now, I will 100% concede that we definitely got a few things wrong throughout this series. We're not historians, we're just podcasters who like to talk about the things that we find interesting. And the weekly release schedule that we locked ourselves into years ago requires flying by the seat of our pants just a little bit.

• 1:57:47Speaker 05

  We do our best, but sometimes we do tuck off the cuff. And I do, and I do also believe that, yeah, sometimes we make mistakes, but also I'll say sometimes with historical episodes, it's up to interpretation.

• 1:57:58Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:57:58Speaker 05

  And then certain books have certain perspectives, and certain historians have certain perspectives. So we do our best to choose what we find is entertaining here as much as we can, and what makes sense to us and what works, but, yeah, we're not historians.

• 1:58:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, what makes, what makes sense to us, and that's, that's a big part of it.

• 1:58:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, before this episode, I thought Charlie Company was just hanging out with my nephew.

• 1:58:20Speaker 05

  Just continue, please. Please, just for the love of God, you have to continue the show, okay? We're so close. We're so close to the end of the episode. Oh, yes.

• 1:58:30Speaker 06

  But mistakes aside, I do believe that we at the very least showed in this series that Vietnam is full of incredibly important lessons. And if we learn those lessons, America could be a far better leader in the world and a far better country in which to live. We learned, for example, that America can be arrogant, self-centered, and entirely unable to admit that we've made a mistake even when it is incredibly obvious that we have made massive errors in judgment. That being said, those flaws are also partly why many Americans don't learn the lessons of Vietnam. See, it's hard, if not impossible, to say that we could have won that war. And there are even fewer people who can make a good argument that we should have ever even gone to Vietnam in the first place.

• 1:59:15Speaker 06

  There certainly aren't any sane people who say that we fought this war in a way that could be considered ethical or even halfway decent. So, to talk about Vietnam is to talk about America making a mistake. And if America made a mistake in Vietnam, then it calls into question a lot of shit America has done. And let me tell you, this country has made a lot of fucking mistakes over the years. So, people who don't want to learn the lessons, they don't talk about Vietnam. But in the end, that is the crux of Vietnam. And it was the crux of the conflict between the people who supported the war back in the 60s and those who were against it. See, on the pro-war side, you had a lot of patriots who were saying that we had to defend America's actions no matter what. If America did it,

• 1:59:59Speaker 06

  then it had to be the correct decision. On the anti-war side, you had a lot of patriots who loved America but knew that we could do better. People fuck up. That's the nature of people. But one of the things that makes a good leader is what you do after you realize you have fucked up. The Vietnam War persisted for so long because so many people could not even admit that they had fucked up in the first place. And unless you admit to fucking up, you can't do anything to fix those mistakes.

• 2:00:30Speaker 05

  And I do think it's our jobs as vaguely enlightened, new generations of especially guys, to be able to make, to make mistakes and then say this was a mistake.

• 2:00:42Speaker 06

  Say, "Hey, I fucked up."

• 2:00:43Speaker 05

  And then be able to come back and say, "Hey, I wish I could take this back. I wish I could do more. I wish I could do better." Because we've talked about how many times on just on other stories, about how redemption has to be possible. But you have to choose redemption, you got to find redemption.

• 2:00:57Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 2:00:58Speaker 05

  And it's difficult. So, like, yes, we all talk off. We all just do whatever we do. And it's just, but it's important. This is, it's important to be able to acknowledge mistakes and then also move forward.

• 2:01:07Speaker 04

  I love America. I'm always gonna love America. I think I'm very fortunate to be living here and growing up here. And I think also that has to come with knowing that we have done some of the worst shit this world has ever seen and accepting that and figuring out how to move forward from that.

• 2:01:22Speaker 05

  And much like the police, if we want to believe that we're held to a higher standard, then we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard.

• 2:01:30Speaker 04

  Exactly. If you're gonna pretend to be better than everyone else, then fucking be better than everyone else.

• 2:01:34Speaker 05

  Then you have to be better than everybody else.

• 2:01:35Speaker 06

  Yes. Now, today, we're in a fairly similar situation with a fairly similar split in opinion about what we're gonna do about America. A lot of Americans have fucked up in recent years by voting a bunch of psychopaths and criminals into office. But at this point, 10 years down the line, it is what it is. Like I said, people fuck up. It's what we do. But maybe we can apply a lesson from Vietnam to 2026. See, America could have saved itself a lot of pain, anguish, and treasure if we just admitted that Vietnam was a mistake years before we finally pulled our last people out of there in 1975. And the last American to die in Vietnam indeed died during the fall of Saigon. But, we knew

• 2:02:19Speaker 06

  with absolute certainty by 1967 that we had fucked up by sending troops into Vietnam. But we kept sending more troops to die and more troops to kill because we could not admit our mistake. Had we admitted our mistake in 1967, Milai would have never happened. And to that point, I'm sure there are people listening right now who know that America fucked up in the 2016 election and fucked up even worse in 2024. You may even be one of those people who fucked up.

• 2:02:50Speaker 05

  You fucked up!

• 2:02:51Speaker 06

  You fucked up! You felt the effects of those elections, no matter how much you tried to ignore it. Just like Robert McNamara and LBJ tried to ignore the mistakes they made. But if you're having a hard time admitting to this mistake, just remember that it is far better to admit you fucked up and act accordingly than it is to continue marching towards a future that has the potential to tear this country even further apart than it was torn during Vietnam. More people will get hurt. More people will be falsely imprisoned. And more people will die. But I'd like to think that if Americans took the time to truly search their souls about what they've supported over the last decade, they will find that

• 2:03:32Speaker 06

  stubborn pride is a poor substitute for basic human decency. If America had learned that lesson way back in the 1960s, it could have handed its children a far better world than the one we have now. Instead, over 50 years later, we live in a world in which we are still dealing with the consequences of the Vietnam War. And that will likely continue for a very long time.

• 2:03:58Speaker 05

  Fuck, yeah!

• 2:03:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:04:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's Vietnam, man! I gotta get the fuck out of here, man!

• 2:04:06Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:04:07Speaker 05

  Get out, get out now!

• 2:04:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, dude, I just want to say it's nice to catch Lash Chopper out of Saigon. And I'll see you fuckers over in California, where I will be starting a new thing called ketamine. I'll be making it up and selling it out. And I hope, and I'm certain it's gonna treat the 70s and 80s great.

• 2:04:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:04:28Speaker 05

  Um, also, I will say, because we did good, great work, Marcus.

• 2:04:31Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 2:04:32Speaker 05

  And I will say, everything that is like, because we get little tiny things wrong as we go.

• 2:04:37Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 2:04:38Speaker 05

  But this was like, you put so much work into these scripts.

• 2:04:41Speaker 06

  Thank you. No, it's a lot, a lot of work, a lot, a lot of thought, many years of thought. Thanks to Joel and Rachel, our research team, for the great work they did on it. Also, thanks to Carolina for helping me out on a couple of these episodes and, and reading them and saying like, "That doesn't make any sense."

• 2:04:58Speaker 05

  And we will put out the list of sources, too.

• 2:04:59Speaker 06

  We'll put out the list, we'll also put out the list of sources. And I also want to say that if you really dig this era of history and you want to see what people were doing in America during all this time, the new season of No Dogs in Space premieres on September 10th.

• 2:05:16Speaker 05

  Great!

• 2:05:16Speaker 06

  With a five-part series on the New York Dolls.

• 2:05:20Speaker 05

  Nice! And this will be great.

• 2:05:22Speaker 06

  It's Punk 2.0. We're covering a hell of a lot of, and we're, and we're coming back. We've got the episodes recorded. Uh, but we are, we're gonna...

• 2:05:29Speaker 05

  Video.

• 2:05:30Speaker 06

  And video. Yeah, we're all, and we've also got, we've been filming, just like we've been doing it with last podcast, we're gonna be doing, putting them on YouTube with a lot of visuals. Like, we've got a bunch of really great shit coming up. I can't, cannot wait to show people what we've been working on for so long.

• 2:05:43Speaker 04

  Hell, yeah. That makes me not wanna frag ya.

• 2:05:46Speaker 06

  Thank you!

• 2:05:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, we don't gotta get on right now.

• 2:05:48Speaker 04

  Oh, a good name for that, and, and No Dogs, Fraggle Rock?

• 2:05:55Speaker 06

  Go to patreon.com slash podcast and live. You can listen to the show ad-free. You can also get, you can get to see Lash streaming the left live every 5pm PST every Tuesday. Also, except for the next two.

• 2:06:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:06:07Speaker 06

  But then you're gonna go and see us on Netflix right now.

• 2:06:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, go for it!

• 2:06:12Speaker 05

  I'll be on the left for all your social fucking media needs. You don't have any, go to YouTube and see us all do all of our stuff. We've got new episodes of ETM, uh, coming out, Bloodbath 77.

• 2:06:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:06:24Speaker 05

  Is coming out. Uh, they are coming out, even though we are on break. And then Someplace Underneath has got new stuff coming out. LPN Romancity, Foreign Report, LPN TV is going strong. Go check it all out.

• 2:06:36Speaker 04

  Also, Henry was just on Brighter Side talking about the brighter sides of Vietnam, and it got a little unhinged. So, you really want to check that out.

• 2:06:42Speaker 06

  I'm pretty happy.

• 2:06:43Speaker 04

  That's also on YouTube. It was a lot of fun.

• 2:06:44Speaker 06

  It was good to be.

• 2:06:45Speaker 04

  It was surprisingly fun. Me, just, the whole time, it's just me raining in Henry and Amber, which is, uh, you were tight, you guys are powerful together.

• 2:06:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, wow.

• 2:06:54Speaker 05

  I will say...

• 2:06:55Speaker 06

  Do you know why I've, I've never put them on the same show, ever? Like, did you know, they were never on a chuckle hut together on Montable, ever?

• 2:07:02Speaker 05

  Dude, I'm the reasonable one. I'm reasonable. Most of the time, was me dialing back Amber's, whatever random fucking wicked fruit she got on Vietnam.

• 2:07:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:07:15Speaker 05

  The stuff that Amber quote-unquote "learned" about Vietnam is worse than anything you wrote today.

• 2:07:21Speaker 06

  Do not put anything, do not put these two in my, in a room together on microphones, ever. I knew that.

• 2:07:26Speaker 05

  I was the calm one. I was the real.

• 2:07:28Speaker 04

  I mean, I was the calm one.

• 2:07:29Speaker 05

  I was the logical one.

• 2:07:31Speaker 04

  I did say the story about shooting the rocket launcher through the nurse's butt hole. Spoiler alert, spoiler alert. Go ahead and listen to it. We're also on YouTube. Uh, it's on, uh, The Brighter Side LPN on YouTube. I'm hitting the road, September 11th and 12th, I'm in DC.

• 2:07:46Speaker 06

  Finally.

• 2:07:46Speaker 04

  And then Henry and I, in, uh, in, uh, September, we got some shows now. We're gonna be in Norfolk, Virginia, and in Raleigh, North Carolina. Am I really gonna go to Virginia twice in two weeks?

• 2:07:56Speaker 06

  I'm sorry.

• 2:07:57Speaker 05

  What am I doing to myself?

• 2:07:58Speaker 06

  You're gonna like it. It's the home of Thomas Jefferson.

• 2:08:02Speaker 06

  Montecello.

• 2:08:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then also, uh, September 27th, I'm gonna be in Milwaukee. If you want to see where I'm gonna be, go to editunes.com. You want to see where we're gonna be, go to lastpodcast on the left dot com. There's a lot of fun stuff coming down the pipe, especially in October. Uh, I'm loving everything that's going on these days, and I love you boys so much. Thank you for, uh, taking us down this fucking journey.

• 2:08:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:08:24Speaker 06

  Thank y'all for coming along with me, with us on this. This has been fun. I've been, wanted to do this for many, many, many years. So, it's nice to have it done. Can I go on vacation now, please?

• 2:08:34Speaker 05

  Yay! Hail Satan!

• 2:08:37Speaker 06

  Again.

• 2:08:38Speaker 05

  And let's never go back to Vietnam unless it's on a first-class plane ticket.

• 2:08:43Speaker 04

  Flown by Hugh Thompson. Hail Hugh Thompson.

• 2:08:45Speaker 06

  Hail Hugh Thompson.