Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 678: My Lai Massacre Part III - Murder Dressed Up as Victory

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

The road to My Lai enters its final stretch as the Tet Offensive leaves the American military desperate for a win and willing to count any Vietnamese body as Viet Cong. Along the way, the boys get into Project 100,000, Task Force Barker, “Mad Dog” Medina, and the dangerously incompetent Lieutenant William Calley before Charlie Company prepares to march into My Lai. For Live Shows, Merch, and More Visit: www.LastPodcastOnTheLeft.comKevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of Last Podcast on the Left ad-free, plus get Friday episodes a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. Oh, we ready? Henry, what's your new favorite song? Well, the problem is that I can't pronounce it. And I wish the audience could be with me in my car, only just because, yes, I have learned.

I've grown as a performer. Oh. I do understand sort of the incentive. sensitivities that I portrayed in a lot of my characterial kind of presentations. Characterial. Characterial presentations back in the day. But I do wish you all could meet Hanoi Henry Zabrowski. Because I have been listening to nothing but

1960s, all of the music that we inspired all of that Vietnamese soul and funk. Nong-ne-Ni-Feph. Oh, yeah. Dun-guk-Lok-Tang. Honestly, I'm not even saying, that's not even racist. No, that's it. Yeah, yeah, I'm not, I'm just trying.

My best, because I've heard now a couple of the same songs over and over again. I don't know what they mean, but I love them so much. So now, like, I can sort of semi-sing along to some of them, but I do know that what I'm doing is a hate crime. And I know that if I were, but it's just me genuinely trying it. It's a love crime. Yeah, it's a love crime. That's a great way of plug.

It's a crime of fashion. Welcome to the last podcast on the left ladies. Gentlemen, my name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with Love Criminal, Henry Zabrowski. Yes, everything I do is on the edge of legality. But don't worry, I save my Hanoi, Henry Zabrowski, for my family. Yes, as do we all. I don't even do it hardcore.

I'm just trying to hit the words. Of course, yeah, and they're great words. It's a beautiful language in a very difficult, incredibly difficult language. It's weird because it seems so simple when you look at it, because all the words are like three or four letters tops. No, but it's a tonal language. So, like, one word can be spelled one way, and there are five different ways to pronounce it. And all five ways have wildly different meanings. Didn't McNer make a fool out of himself making a speech over there?

He did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He went, like, was like, bing dungo! Bingongo! And it meant something like, my kitty is sleeping with a duckling time. That's my favorite. That's my favorite. Oh, you did.

It's been all in Belenna. He did. It was the very same thing. And we have master linguist Ed Larson. That's right. That's right. Give me a language. I got it. Indonesian. Yata to do you.

Oh! That's on Eddie. Eddie did that. That was not me. That's not bad. That's not bad at all. I know how to speak. I know how to listen. I know how to act. You got to speak with the eyes and the hands if you're in a different country. Yeah. Eyes, hands.

Loud. Me need. Bathroom. I know what to do. I know what to do. International sign for sandwich. Yeah. Oh.

Sometimes he's eating a lady boy's butthole. Yeah. Still good between two buns. Hey. All right. Let's get back into the Mealai Massacre. Let's do it. Now, I'm going to go ahead and say something right up top.

Uh-oh. While the Meelai Massacre is the entree to this series, I realize now that we're three parts in and they've still not gotten to the Mili Massacre, it's good to think of these episodes. is something like a 10-course meal. Milai is the culmination of everything we're discussing here. And there's a lot of everything to get to before things pop off into the massacre itself

during the last episode. Admittedly, this did turn into an overall history of the Vietnam War up until Milai. You have no idea how much cutting I had to do. But I assure you, everything we mentioned here has bearing on what happened in March of 1968.

And while I understand, this is a lot to take in, I personally think that the road to Milai is just as fascinating as the massacre itself. I'll put it this way. You don't get to Mili in Ken Burns, Vietnam, until, like, episode like six. Yeah. Like, there's a, I just got through episode like four and a half. I'm in the middle of five now, and you're just, by the time you get your, I'm just at the TED offensive. Yeah.

We're not even there yet. And you're just like, wow, there's a lot left to go. Yeah, no, no. And that was my least favorite Bob Hope movie. Yeah. The Road to Mealai. Oh, wow. But Danny Kay does an amazing Vietnamese accent.

It's good. And he really, you know, they said there was no reason to dance, but he found one. He did. I love that. He always does. That Patty sequence, when he's just on top of all the guys with the hats on and he's dancing on top of the hats? And the ox was surprisingly nimble. Yeah, but then they blew his legs off with that bouncing Betty, and he had to go home in a fucking pine box.

Oh, Danny K. R-I-P. Oh, T-A. I'm sorry. Thank you. What's behind that banana tree? Good work, Danny. So when we last left the chain of events that would lead to the Milai massacre, the year was 1968. And even the men in government who had pushed for escalating involvement in Vietnam since the early part of the decade, men like Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense. Robert McNamara was already recognizing in 1968 that the Vietnam War had been a massive mistake.

In fact, he had recognized it in 1967. Oh yeah, do you remember when he said that he, we said it last week where he went like, just so you know, it's going to be a bit of a problem there, okay? Just want to kind of just lay that out there and peace, bye, see. Got to get out of here, bye, bye, bye, bye. Disgustingly rich. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he had said, like, I didn't know this day whether I was fired or whether I quit.

And everyone was like, you were fired. And Ken Burns, Vietnam, I just got to the point where they said they had put together, they got all the computers together. And they decided if you're like, okay, like, about this time period, what do we do here? where are we at in the war? They took every single quantifiable number. They took all the vehicles and armories and soldier numbers and ammo numbers and they put it in the computer and they started.

They let it go on Friday and they came back on Monday and they said there was one card that shot out of it. They looked at it and said, you already won the war in 1965. Because there's no, they didn't figure, the entire Vietnamese rebel, all of them, by the Viet Cong, there were other people in South Vietnam, everybody else.

They didn't actually include any of that. No, no, they did not include the will of the North Vietnamese people in their calculations. Now, despite what LBJ had been telling the American people, the United States had not actually achieved anything substantial during its occupation of South Vietnam since it had sent in ground troops in 1965. We didn't even, like, steal oil or nothing. No, God, no yellow cake, there's no uranium, there's just nothing there, no little girls we could give to anybody.

We might have done that. Yeah, we did do that. Operation Rolling Thunder, that's LBJ's bombing campaign in the north, that had done nothing to stop Vy Kong troops from taking the Ho Chi Men Trail to infiltrate the South, although the bombings had killed and estimated 60,000 Vietnamese soldiers and civilians by this point. This was good news to Americans who had come to see this war totally in terms of body counts. And just so to make it clear for everyone, the Viet Cong, you know, I was talking with Carolina, about it and she was a little confused. It's like, you know, is the

Viet Cong in the north or in the south? The Vietong is fucking everywhere. They're from the north, but they are all over Vietnam, top to bottom. Yeah, they use the Hocuman Trail to get everywhere. Yes. But while the Americans were seeing this war in terms of people killed, the North Vietnamese were engaged in a struggle of wills. An Operation Rolling Thunder's bombing campaign had failed

to break the will of the North Vietnamese people in any way whatsoever. In fact, it had done quite the opposite. The North Vietnamese Vietnamese were now convinced that they had to push out the Americans completely if they had any chance of survival, much less independence. The American military was therefore under extreme and increased pressure to give the American people some sign that this war was going to end any day now. So at the start of 1968, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam at the time, General West Moreland, he made an announcement. Speaking in terms of eventual victory, Westmoreland said that

communist North Vietnamese forces had reached what he called the crossover point. See, if America was indeed measuring victory by the amount of Viet Cong soldiers killed, then surely there would come a point where we had killed enough. Basically, Westmoreland was treating this war like a video game where you have to defeat wave after wave of enemies, and if you survive to the end of the wave, then you've won. According to Westmoreland, by the start of 1968, America had indeed survived enough waves.

We had therefore made it to the crossover point, in which North Vietnam did not have enough people physically to replace the Viet Cong soldiers we had already killed. Problem was, the crossover point was an imaginary metric that Westmoreland had created himself, and it had no basis in reality. It was all guesswork, and it was extremely optimistic guesswork at that. See, at the same time that Westmoreland was bragging about the crossover point, the CIA, who had been in Vietnam, longer than anyone, they were reporting that the number of Viet Cong troops in the South had actually increased to 1.3 million. That's almost everybody. It had it doubled since 1965 and this was while General

Westmoreland was on TV all but declaring victory. Well you see we're Marcus this is where ignorance really shows. See we are a obviously elevated more wizened urban economy, superpower. America. You see, Americans, you see, we just come up with the concepts and like everybody

snaps too, right? It's just the Vietnamese who didn't understand that they had crossed the crossover point. That is true. Right? And that to me is a lack of communication between us and them. And I feel like if we just could explain to them this is what we're trying to do.

Then they would just be like, oh, We'll stop then. Yeah. Or we'll just all die. We'll just get to that crossover point. Actually, you're right? Could we all just tell us where we should all be? And then you just nuke that place.

That'd be great. That is the problem with the rest of the world. They just don't fucking listen to America. We got a lot of answers. The idea of just creating this is the more I research this topic, Marcus, the existential sadness. of the current state of the world continues to pour over me. It is interesting how we are so consistently the bad guys

while pretending we're the good guys. Yeah, that's the story of America. Well, it's because we got great movies. We got great movies, we got great music, and the food's pretty good, too. Food's great. Yeah, and air conditioning rocks. Air conditioning's right on the fucking around us.

No, our greatest victory has always been culture. Yeah. And the stories, like Americans are the best, we can't say we are the best storytellers in the world. Fuck all y'all. We told... Fuck out y'all! Because the stories that we told were believed by...

And those stories that we were told were believed by nobody harder than ourselves. That's right. Yeah. The Greeks like to claim they are, but they only got two stories. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. We got like...

Nine. Yeah. Now, as to why there was such a buildup of Viet Cong troops in the South, remember there's 1.3 million down there. Operatives were starting to hear rumors of a massive North Vietnamese operation that was going to be long. launched around the Vietnamese Lunar New Year at the end of January 1968. This was a holiday known as Tet.

See, the North Vietnamese had decided that it was time to strike a decisive blow against American and South Vietnamese forces. Tet was traditionally a time of truce, which meant that a lot of Vietnamese people were going to be traveling throughout the country to spend the holiday with friends and family. And this was something that was, this is very much embedded in the Vietnamese culture. Like, when they talk to North Vietnamese soldiers, they said that nobody was ever charged with desertion because sometimes you'd get a guy who's a Viet Cong down in South Vietnam. He'd get homesick and he'd just disappear to walk a thousand miles north to see his mother and then he'd come right back.

And that was accepted because it was just a part of the culture. It's good for morale probably too. Amazing for morale. But since there were so many Vietnamese people moving throughout the country around the Tet holiday, TET provided cover for the movement of Viet Cong forces to various strategic locations throughout South Vietnam. But don't they understand, again, Marcus, this is where a lot of cultural ignorance is showing. Don't they understand, we don't fight on holidays. Yeah.

That is the thing. Yeah, it's, come on, man. Yeah, Americans don't fight on holidays. We have PTO sometimes. And we're in your country. We're trying to abide by your rules. Come on, guys. Come on, hey.

We want to celebrate two. I'm going to take Ted off this year Wow Actually Eddie I think you can only Take Ted off if you can Accurately sing one Vietnamese song And so wait We'll get to it

We'll get to it We need a Vietnamese woman in here Side stories LPOTLGMO.com And so at the beginning of 1968 84,000 Viet Cong troops positioned themselves to attack hundreds of South Vietnamese cities and American outposts all over the South in preparation for what came to be known as the Tet Offensive.

Now, the best outcome for the Tet Offensive, as far as North Vietnam was concerned, was that a concentrated attack against literally every place that mattered in the South would shock America into leaving Vietnam altogether. That's the pie in the sky hope. At the very least, Ho Chi Men hoped that the attack might lead to negotiations, that would end Operation Rolling Thunder. In other words, LBJ's deadly and indiscriminate bombing campaign

had only made the North Vietnamese more aggressive. And this aggression would continue to ping pong between the two forces until it ultimately culminated in the Mili Massacre. The opening moves of the final act, however, began with Tet. Because wasn't this, like, as the intent of offensive was beginning, it was like right before

we almost were considering pulling out. Wasn't there like a sort of an inner thing where we were... There's so many of those moments where we're thinking like, okay, I think at this point we can maybe get things over to the South Vietnam. Because that was ostensibly the whole point. That was the whole idea is that it was going to become a point where we could hand everything over to the South Vietnamese, the Republic of South Vietnam. We got this thing moving in the right direction.

We're a little successful. Here you go, boy. Now you do it. Now it's your problem again. Now you do it. Yeah. And we had no idea that the Tidefense was coming.

They're very good. They were quite a good. And that's just not that people were going to hand it all over to are deeply corrupt. Oh, yeah. Incredibly corrupt. Beyond the point

of being able to battle off some of the best fighters to have ever existed in history. And the South Vietnamese government was also extremely corrupt. And everybody else was corrupt. Every single person

involved in the story was completely corrupt. Now, we're not going to get into the nitty of the Tet Offensive because parkour military history is not our forte. And this was indeed

a massive military operation. It temporarily plunged the entirety of South Vietnam into chaos. Ted came as a massive surprise to American and South Vietnamese forces. And when the North Vietnamese attacked on the night of January 30th, the entire South exploded into fighting in the streets on every major city in the South. And this happened literally overnight. Additionally, every major American Outpost also came under heavy fire. Remember that scene in Full Metal Jacket where they're hanging out in the camp they're joking around and then all of a sudden

the bombs just start falling? Yeah. That's the Tet Offensive. Yes. That makes sense. Yeah. But Tet was not just an overnight attack. Speaking of Full Metal Jacket, the last act of that movie where the squad is patrolling the ruins, that's actually a portrayal of the Battle of

Way. The Battle of Way marked the most sustained fighting of the Tet Offensive. North Vietnamese forces occupied the old imperial Vietnamese capital of Wei for 26 days. And while the Viet Cong did have intense battles with American and South Vietnamese forces throughout that occupation, the North Vietnamese also took the opportunity to engage in war crimes all of their own. They slaughtered nearly 8,000 civilians during their occupation of the city of Wei. Anyone who worked for the South Vietnamese government in Wei or anybody who held, like,

any kind of view that could be even seen as anti-communist. Those people were murdered and buried in mass graves. Sometimes the Viet Cong threw people who were still breathing into the body pits, thereby burying South Vietnamese civilians alive under a mountain of corpses. And this is just part of the Tet Offensive. This is just one city in the entire South. They did it. The Ted Offensive was just on no warning whatsoever.

No, no warning whatsoever. There were rumors. People were hearing rumblings. They knew that some attack was coming somewhere, but that's how good the North Vietnamese were. Even the South Vietnamese had no idea that an attack. I mean, yeah, imagine that. Imagine here in America if somebody were to be within Texas, like let's just say Texas, you know, or even Florida. Let's just compare it to Florida.

Somebody secretly plants enough troops outside of every city, every major, not even every major city, even like fucking Okala has troops out. outside of it, every outpost, every prison, everything. And nobody knows that those people are there until they fucking attack. Can we do this? Is it something that we can work out? I actually really think that we can do this. We can get the woke army together? I'll get the furry brigade?

Sure. Yeah, yeah. Can we get the Soviet Union arms? Absolutely. You know I can. Because honestly, that's the only way that it works. Well, they were to, I was just, you know, in that world, in every single one of them, obviously, constantly highly complimentary of the BC.

funnily enough, just always just being like unkillable, nothing to do. During the TED Offensive, one of the worst things about it was, number one, was hearing the guys from the VC being like, Americans are so easy to kill. They smoke too much.

You could follow their cigarettes everywhere. They fall like, they literally fall for every trap. It's not even cigarette smokes, but it has like a little cherry connected to your head. Yeah. They were like, they was just easy.

easy to do. And they talked about, the one guy was just saying in battle away, they got to a point where they were specifically, because it's the term fish in a barrel, where they were, he was like, he was like, we were to fish, way was the fucking barrel, and the VCs sucked their fucking shotguns in and just blew us all to fucking hell. Yeah. And so the worst part of the whole thing, number one, it was one of the worst part, truly one of the worst parts of the whole thing, is just how you didn't see them. And all of a sudden they're right next to you. And they fucking used, it's just always like, Tony Alames, I'll always remember that name. I watch Tony hold his own face in his hands, you know, and you're like, I don't think there's any good reason for this war.

I think it might be something like that. I don't think it's good. Yeah, man. They don't sound like that in the WW2 documentaries I watch. No, they sound proud. Yeah. It was a little easier to kill someone when they're a Nazi. It is. Yeah.

I can't wait. ultimately, though, the Tet Offensive was a massive gamble for the North that did not pay off in a military sense. South Vietnamese and American forces retook all of the towns and cities that the Viet Cong had conquered during the Tet Offensive over the coming weeks and months. It was at a high cost, but they took all of them back. In military terms, the goals of the Tet Offensive failed, although the Viet Cong did come close to taking the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, and they very well might have had it not been. for the gut feeling of one American commander. See, just before the Viet Cong launched their attack on the Tet Holiday, an American military commander ordered a buildup of troops to protect Saigon based on

the rumors that he'd been hearing. See, most military leaders believe that the Tet Offensive would be focused on the American outpost at Kaysan. And there was a massive fucking attack on Kaysan, but this commander had a feeling that the Tet Offensive was going to be far larger than one attack on one position. As it turned out, this commander was entirely correct. The extra troops he called in to protect Saigon were what ultimately saved the capital from falling to North Vietnamese forces during the Tet Offensive in January of 1968.

Of course, it still fell in 1975, but it could have fallen far earlier. That probably would have been a good thing. Yeah, dude. At this point, you're like, just lose already and leave, guys. I'm like, it's like reading a movie where you're just like, God, damn. As you're watching this, I feel like I'm watching a horror movie where you're like, get out of the house. Yeah. Don't go over that fucking house, you fucking moron.

Upstairs? Get the fuck out of there. Out the attic window. Get out of there, white boy. Get the fuck out of there. Go home. Go to Springfield. But even with the extra troops, Viet Cong forces still managed to breach the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

That means that technically, the North Vietnamese made it to American soil. Saigon was full of reporters. So the intense battle for the embassy, a battle we barely won. That was broadcast across the world to the massive embarrassment of the United States. And remember what I said on the first episode about, or actually maybe it was in Gary Ridgeway, what a man does when he gets embarrassed. Oh, yeah. Well, I got him bring up right here.

We're sitting here live from Saigon, the invasion of the VC. I have a wonderful VC assassin here with me. I'm a reporter here from U.S. News. Let me ask the questions on everybody's lips. What do you think of trans people in sports? Transmated women's sports. Asking the hard-hitting questions. Are you going to ask you a question to?

How do we feel about the rise of Kim Kardashian? I share yes queen or no queen? It's amazing to watch reporters in Saigon during the TED Offensive because reporters in Vietnam have this permanent hunched over Look where they're always their shoulders are almost above their fucking ears and they're just constantly like talking. We are. Oh, God.

It's just used to bombs going off behind them. Dude, one was the worst was the, they were showing the footage of them talking about how they took over some Hill 815 on Thanksgiving Day and they were like doing this like thought think piece where the reporter was there. As you can see, fresh hot turkey. and mashed potatoes are being flown and fresh from the American front lines

and you just see these soldiers covered in blood just like sitting looking and like they're like afterwards all the guys were like we're like sitting here like are we on fucking three's company

like what the fuck is this like what the fuck is this are we we're the news story of the fucking night we just get like they're gonna we're walking away from this hill we're not gonna ever see it again yeah also

don't give them all triptophan you gotta stay up it's hard That's where the cocaine comes in, my friend. Now, while the Tet Offensive was a failure in military terms, it was a massive success psychologically. So the anti-war movement in America was reaching massive numbers by 1968, and in the months leading up to Tet, LBJ had launched a huge PR campaign to restore faith in the war by promising the American people that victory was imminent. But after Tet, America had but one of two conclusions to draw.

Either LBJ had no fucking clue what was going on in Vietnam, or he'd been lying to them about how well the war was going this entire time. It's both. It's both. Yeah, it's absolutely both. It's a shame it couldn't lead any Tet talks. There was some TED talks, but we can't understand. A lot of it, most of it is expletives, and people saying,

Mama, where's my mama? That's fun. I have your legs right here. Put him over there, okay? I'm busy with not having art. Furthermore, pictures from the Tet Offensive were showing America that South Vietnam was a far more chaotic and brutal place than they'd been led to believe.

See, they'd seen pictures of soldiers, American soldiers, dying in the jungles every day on the evening news. But Tet had brought the war to the streets of Vietnam. The infamous picture of a South Vietnam police officer shooting a Viet Cong soldier in the head, the one that captures the bullet at the very moment it exits the officer's skull,

fucking punk bands love to use it for seven inches. That came from the streets of Saigon during Tet. That picture showed America that we had absolutely no control over what was happening in the fucking capital. That's not even to count the

rest of the fucking country. Finally, though, in February, Walter Cronkai, the most respected newsman of his generation. He went on TV after the Tet Offensive and gave the opinion that the Vietnam War was utterly unwinnable. Tet, therefore, put pressure on America to win the war faster. And for America, the only way to win the war was to drive that body count even higher.

Man, they really explained a lot more in the old days. I was watching that coverage of Walter Cronkite, the maps and the pointer sticks and the explaining of everything. We have no fucking clue what's going on in Iran right now. I'm still unclear as to why we attack them in the first place. Because they bed. Yeah. They bed.

And they said mean things. Oh, yeah. It's bad. You got stuff over there. We got to go get that stuff. You're right. It is simple. It is very simple now.

That's simple. I'm on your side. I've been working with the government. Now the pressure to increase body counts certainly had a ripple effect that contributed heavily to the massacre at Milai. But the Tet offensive had another consequence when it came to the events of March 16th, 1968.

So the army had received intelligence that the Viet Cong's 48th battalion, one of the Viet Cong's deadliest, had suffered heavy losses during Tet. The 48th were supposedly on the run. and wiping out the 48th Viet Cong Battalion would provide a much-needed victory for American forces. Supposedly, the survivors of the 48th had escaped to a mountain range in the Kwong Nai province, after they had their battle in Kwong Nai City.

This was located just 200 miles south of the DMZ that split north and south Vietnam. Now, Kong-Nai province was densely populated with farmers, and its people lived at the foothills of this mountain range. These people worked rice paddies and farmlands stretched from the mountains to the sea. Fucking gorgeous, beautiful. Beautiful place to strafe. That's what I always thinking about that.

We went to fucking, when we were in Sorrento in Italy, first thing I thought was, let's just fucking name palm this old fucking thing. Yeah, I got mad because their lemons were too big. Yeah, gross. Kwongnai province also contained one of the most dreaded areas in all of Vietnam, if you were an American soldier.

They called this area Pinkville, because the area that marked it on the map was colored red to signify that this area had one of the densest populations of Vietnamese villagers in the whole country. Now, just to be clear, Pinkville was not just one village. It was a slang term for an entire area, and multiple villages and hamlets

were contained within the area that Americans called Pinkville. It's more of a pink tin than a Pinkville. Sure. To draw a parallel, you could look at the area of Northwest Texas where I'm from, which is also made up of a lot of small farming communities, and you could collectively call the entire area Hickville, which many people do. Is it a derogatory way or just fun? Don't sound nice. Yeah, well, it depends on who's saying it.

Yeah, it don't sound good, but yeah. But tell my man a proud. It's fun when someone with the Texas axis is, oh, you're from Hickville, huh? Oh, yeah. Yes, I am. Yeah, or you're from the big empty. Like, yep. Wow.

Sure am. But this same principle applied in Vietnam to Pinkville. It's just an area with a lot of small villages contained therein. You always remember the guy that was talking about how he said that the color pink became so bad for him after Vietnam that he literally can't see pink things. Yeah. That pink things send him into PTSD like literally can't. look at a peeps. Yeah.

Easter must be fucking a nightmare for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, God, or the Aerosmith album? Gender reveals a really 50-50. Oh, my fucking God.

He's just in there's knees bouncing. Fucking be a bully. Be a fucking boy. Be a fucking boy. It's an Aerosmith's song. The album was nine lives, but just how many of his friends were killed in front of him.

Oh, we laugh. We laugh. The Pinkville had already seen its fair share of death destruction by 1968. This province had actually been where the ground war had technically started back in 1965. It had been the very first target for American Marines during the first operation, Operation Starlight, and its villagers had suffered through two and a half years of constant patrols

from American forces ever since. Now, just about every American soldier who entered Pinkville's province saw every Vietnamese villager contained therein as the enemy, because dense populations outside of cities were automatically assumed to be full of hidden Viet Cong soldiers or Viet Cong sympathizers. Viet Cong sympathizers, of course, built the booby traps that killed American soldiers. And that has to be a thing, right? Like you're watching us, this is one of these issues of like we're being told to the soldiers, anybody who hasn't left any of these areas is an enemy, like essentially. Like, and that if they're there, they have to be conspiring when it's really just a lot of people

that were like, no, I've just been here. Yeah. And my grandparents were here and their grandparents were here. Yeah. And now you're here. Yeah, we just take care of the goats. Yes. Yeah.

The goats got to live here. The goats can't live at your shelter. Yes. American troops had also been told by 1968, by their superior officers, that there was no chance of winning the so-called hearts and minds of the people in Pinkville. Partly, this was because this area had long been declared a permanent free fire zone. In a free fire zone, any soldier could shoot and kill any Vietnamese person for any reason, regardless of age or gender, and they would not even be reprimanded, much less punished. Well, yeah, they were supposed to do it.

Yeah. To wonder why they didn't like us. Yeah, it's weird, right? So the running joke among soldiers sent to march through this area is that anything that was dead and was not white was, by default, be it calm. And to be fair, American soldiers were not just going to go into this area to kill villagers. The aforementioned 48th Viet Cong Battalion had returned to Pinkfield's province after Tet because that was where they had been based from the beginning. The Tet Offensive had merely drawn the 48th Viet Cong Battalion out from their hiding places

in the jungles and the tunnels of this province. The 48th had actually been fighting and killing Americans in hit-and-run attacks and ambushes ever since American forces had invaded the area two and a half years earlier. So the 48th Battalion had a formidable reputation as accomplished killers. These were guys that American soldiers were fucking terrified of. Therefore, American soldiers were quite excited when they got intelligence that there was a chance to wipe out the 48th Battalion while the 48th was still reeling from their losses incurred during the Tet Offensive.

Yeah, well, they were literally in mourning. Troops were told these guys were in Pinkville. and eventually they were told that the 48th battalion was in a village called Mi Lai. Oh, that's how we got here. And with that, after hours and hours of context Bukakis, we have... We have the setup for Mili on a global scale. That's the full top-down view of the big events that contributed to the massacre. So let us now move on to what was happening on the ground while we...

We also get to know the actual men who were behind the massacre itself. Now, unfortunately, you can't just point to one policy or one man and lay all the blame for Milai at their feet. There was an architecture to the mass slaughter of civilians in Vietnam. So we're going to do our best to explain all the moving pieces one at a time. Now, the Milai massacre came about when the military and psychological consequences of the Tet Offensive smashed into an operation called Task. Force Barker. See, in Vietnam, task forces like Task Force Barker, were routinely put together to carry out both small missions and larger operations.

Can it be said that, like, once they're out there, it seems one thing I keep picking up from all, you know, hearing guys talk, is that like, once you got out there, there was like the Mike Tyson quote, everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face. And it seems that once they got out there, it was all these big plans. and a lot of these task force and all this kind of stuff were just kind of like slap dash put together. Very much so. And it's all just kind of, everybody's just kind of making shit up as they go. Uh-huh. Absolutely.

Yeah, everybody's making shit up as they go along. Nobody knows what they're doing. A lot of these people that were going to get into it in a second. Most of these people were had no experience. A lot of them were made commanders when they had never commanded before. And so once people went out into the bush, into the shit, they're like, okay, figure it out once you get there. Every Vietnam vet video I see is now,

because they have the clickbait title, but it's all the same. It's all like, what they didn't tell you before we got to Vietnam. Yep. And guess what the running through line is? Nothing. They told them nothing. The Task Force Barker was a product of the Army, and Task Force Barker had been formed just before the TED Offensive.

Their job was to go out on constant search and destroy missions within the province that contained Pinkville, and their job was to wipe out as much as much. mini-Viet Cong as possible in service of racking up high body counts and impressive kill ratios. And even just being in Pinkville meant that this was going to escalate in a way that was extremely fucking bad. Indeed. Yes. Because you're inevitably going to kill the people on your side.

Well, you're just with civilians. Well, that's the thing. That's what made Task Force Barker different from all these other missions, all these other search and destroy missions. Because all other search and destroy missions, you're going out into the jungle to take Hill 842 and all you're just going to, you're going to find Viet Cong, yes, but that's all you're going to find.

Yes. Task Force Barker was focused on wiping out the Viet Cong in an area that was heavily populated by Vietnamese civilians that made it an entirely different game. Because the goal now is just, now it's like a punish. They're just trying to punish them and trying to break it down.

No, not just that, but it's also just, you know, it's desperation. Yeah, it's killing who you can get. It's just killing who you can get, getting those bodies. Yeah, and I think it's a, important to remind everyone one more time that Pinkville is in the south. Yes.

Yes. It's close-ish to the north. It's only 200 miles from the northern border. But yeah, it's in the south. It's in the area of the country that is supposedly under our control. Yes. It is not. No.

Now, if you're a commander, there were two types of guys you could choose to undertake something like Task Force Barker. You could choose a guy who understood the population and would do everything you could to limit civilian casualties. Oh, that's good idea. It's a great, yeah. It's a pretty good idea, yeah. Or you could go with an absolute psychopath who saw the Vietnamese as animals. Problem was, the commander in charge of choosing who was going to lead this mission, he was himself an absolute psychopath who saw the Vietnamese as animals. And this commander was absolutely dedicated to the body count metric of victory in Vietnam.

The commander's name was Colonel Oren Henderson, and it was his leadership that led to the massacre at Milai. Now, to give you a bit of a background on how big of a piece of shit, Colonel Henderson really was. He was the man behind a program that was informally known as Operation Body Snatch. All right, well, let's hear it out. I just want to judge a book by its cover, you know. I want to just make sure we give it. I'm open. Well, Henderson had personally ordered a program where helicopter pilots,

could earn three-day leave passes for bringing in military-aged Vietnamese males from the countryside for questioning. You kill five VCs, you get your own personal pan pizza. Now, that's what part of you don't know. We only got us pepperoni cheese. Yes, the torres is limited. Now, if you kill 10, we'll give you this case of bullets. That's good, now you're going to want to hold on them bullets because that'll allow you to get the next temp. Kof 15 will throw in a two-liter bottle of peasant.

Pepsi. Oh, my God. Well, I'm a Coke drinker. Get out of you, Texas. Is Pepsi okay? Well, quite quickly, this program turned into a wide-scale human hunt using military helicopters. Oh. Some pilots...

Oh, that's a bad thing. That's a real bad thing. I was open, but... Some pilots actually used lassoes to stop fleeing peasants, like fucking cowboys. And if the helicopter crew was feeling cruel that day, They would sometimes strip the victim naked after they roped him. They would then move the lasso up to the peasant's neck to form a noose. Then they would take off in the helicopter again at low speed with the peasant running behind.

And after a few minutes, the peasant would inevitably trip with the noose around his neck and he would break, said neck. Eventually, Operation Body Snatch was called off because it produced so much cruelty and no intelligence. at all. No. But helicopter crews continued hunting human civilians with guns and grenades from the air throughout the war. Some of the guys, some of these helicopter crews even had reputations for it. Like, oh yeah, that they've, they've killed hundreds of villagers. Like, they're really fucking good at it. I imagine it's easier emotionally to do it from a helicopter than it is on the ground. They talked about that. You don't have to look at them. Yeah. It's that whole, it's more like a video game. Again, it's full metal jackets. It's that joke like, you know,

We've got to lead him so much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That helicopter, you know, just fucking killing all of them. And also the racism. Like, you know, we got to forget. We can't forget that the racist ways they talked about the Vietnamese in training, the idea that you only say the G word, you only say the various terms for them. So you never once talk about them as Vietnamese people.

Yeah, even Viet Cong is something we made up, right? Yes. Yeah. Well, yeah. The South made it up. Yeah. Yeah, it's a contraction. It means communist traders to the Vietnamese nation. Yeah. But yes, that is also, yeah, they call themselves the People's Liberation Army.

Now, regarding the task force that was created to clear out Pinkville, Colonel Henderson created it to find and kill the Viet Cong amongst civilians, but he did not give any guidelines or any structure on how GIs should go about piling up the bodies. And just so everyone knows, when I say GI, I'm talking about a soldier who is a part of. of the army. We could get into why they're called GIs, but honestly, there's no good answer for. There's like five different answers for why they're called GIs.

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

Generalized infantry, galvanized iron, so many different acronyons, so many different ways. It's just, it's a slang term. GI is a guy in an army. I can't continue. Gastrural infection? Well, because...

That's what I got from having to lettuce. Well, because Colonel Henderson gave no guidelines, there was no such thing as an innocent civilian in Pinkville as far as the army was concerned.

To make matters worse, Colonel Henderson also personally incentivized the killing of civilians in Pinkfell, just as he had with the helicopter crews. Once things got going,

Henderson would radio his officers every day to ask how many Viet Cong they'd killed, and individuals and units with the highest body counts were rewarded, again, with three-day leave passes. And your own personal pan pizza.

Now, what's not about your own little pizzas, you don't have to share it. That's right to get it all to yourself, okay? Get some of that Vietnamese blood off of it. There we go. I'll get it ready to go. Well, let me tell you why these three-day leave passes were so fucking important. Why it was such a big deal. It's not just three days off.

You know, like, think about this. Besides the presence of the 48th Battalion in Pinkville, this area was known for its minds and booby traps. They were fucking everywhere. GIs were also told that the entire area was entirely dominated by the Viet Cong. So when a GI went into Pinkville, they were fucking terrified out of their mind every time. Yeah. But based on Henderson's incentives, they could leave Pinkville's terror factory for three days if they reported a higher body count than everyone else. which, of course, turn the whole thing into a competition on top of everything else going on.

And we all know what happens when you give Americans a chance to compete. We win! We try to. We really go for it. Yeah, we may not win every time, but we try really fucking hard to win. And then we'll blow up the stadium so you can't play the sport again. And then we're going to go to where you live and we're going to kill the team to try to play us. So before long, Pinkville and the surrounding areas, it became places where the murder of Vietnamese civilians, was agonizingly common

because according to the rules of a free fire zone, anyone that was dead in Vietnamese could be counted as dead Viet Cong. Now, the three-day passes, basically, you go to Saigon? Saigon, Hanoi, or not Hanoy, Saigon, Wei, once it was put back together again. You go, you visit the old mama sons,

get some heroin, and you get ready, you get relaxed, fucking Cleveland. your head. Do your laundry, I guess. Oh, yeah, that's super huge. Because Vietnam loves laundry. You know, they were super big on it. Honestly, one of the worst things I was reading

about was about how the M16 was such a bad gun. Oh, then, the M16. That's one of the worst parts of it for American soldiers. They legitimately, like, could barely work. As soon as they got dirty, they'd stop working, so they has to constantly be cleaned. And the Soviet AK-47s that all

of the Vietnamese had were amazing. Incredible. It just worked no matter what. And they said that one of the worst parts about going on leave was losing a rifle. And that they had to. Guys would talk about, like, the defensiveness that they would get over if they had a good M16. Yeah. And they would fight over it.

And then they would literally like, if you left, they'd steal your shit. They'd steal your good M16. And then leave you a shitty one. Wasn't that the other thing? Like, if all the officers died, the guy who shot the M16 was then in charge? Isn't that? I think that's something I've heard but I don't know that I don't know

I know there are guys when you start to realize I think that's how animal mother came in charge in full metal jacket No the M16 was that was the standard issue Rifles that everyone had Yeah it's the shitty rifle it's a shitty thing Well that was why that was part of why our casualties were also so high

is because we had made this The American military had made this deal to make this new kind of rifle specifically for Vietnam And it was awful It was shitty. It was, it jammed constantly. Like Henry said, yeah, you have to clean it constantly and you're in the fucking jungle. It's not going to stay clean.

So a lot of times, you know, a guy might be walking along, you know, an ambush happens. He goes to fire his gun. He may not have fired it in weeks and he pulls the trigger. Nothing fucking happens. And that guy gets fucking head blown off. They basically said the majority of guys, like especially in ambushes, the guys that you found dead were the ones whose M16s were jammed. Oh, that's why you always see. him like wrapped in trash bags with

rubber bands and stuff. Yes. They're extremely sensitive. And this was also, you've got to remember Forest Gump rain was happening. Yeah. The whole forest, like before the TED offense is a swamp. That's real. Like that whole story about him being like, it came one day and it came from the ground. Like, that's what they said, like, it was raining

for like three months one day. It's called monsoon season. Yeah. Yeah. Now, to run the task force to clean out Pinkville, Colonel Henderson chose a lieutenant colonel named Frank Barker. The task force, therefore, was known quite simply. as Task Force Barker. To accomplish his mission, Barker was given a battalion of 500 men organized into three companies. He had orders to find and destroy Viet Cong soldiers in the

province containing Pinkville in January of 1968. Task Force Barker therefore began just before the Tet Offensive. Now, Frank Barker was an administrator who had no command experience at all when he was given this task force. He'd only got the job because he'd been the driver for a well-connected high-ranking officer, and Barker had a reputation for shutting his mouth and following orders. But since Barker had no experience, he was considered a weak commander. A major serving under Barker said that Barker had no idea what to do with this task force or how he wanted to do it. Barker, therefore, rarely talked to his company commanders about how to carry out operations within this densely populated area. So before long,

the commanders and task force Barker who actually went out on the missions, they were doing whatever the fuck they wanted. Now, Barker's inexperience was not in any way out of the ordinary in Vietnam. Men were given extremely difficult tasks with a little idea of how to actually succeed all the time, because on the surface level, every man had a very simple goal. That simple goal was go out and get confirmed kills of Viet Cong. That's all you had to do. That's it. So, men like Barker sent soldiers into the rice patties and villages of Pinkville with the express purpose of making bodies. It was, however, quite obvious to anyone paying attention that the men in Task Force Barker were simply murdering civilians and calling them Viet Cong after the fact.

So the vast majority of the deaths and injuries suffered by men in Task Force Barker, they were from booby traps and mines, but their overall casualties were suspiciously low. They were suspiciously low because these men were reporting a high number of Viet Cong KIA, a suspiciously high number of Viet Cong KIA. In February of 1968, for example, Task Force Barker reported that they had killed 155,000, Viet Cong. But they had only captured six weapons. They had also suffered very low casualties. This quickly became a pattern. High VC kills, but few weapons recovered, and low to no casualties.

This didn't make any sense because the VC were well-armed and extremely deadly. Very violent, super aggressive. So Barker's men were killing villagers and calling it a day. But as long as Barker kept receiving reports of impressively high kill ratios from the men out in the field who were killing villagers and counting them as VC, then he was still contributing to the so-called success of the Vietnam War. He could therefore report to his superiors that his operations were well planned, well executed, and ultimately successful. But in the end, Barker's methods were just murder dressed up as victory. This whole thing is just murder dressed up as victory. Yeah. And these people they're killing, the supposed VC, are they all men?

No. So they're counting, they're killing women and children and counting them as the enemy. If it's dead and it's not white, it's a VC. It does not matter if it's a man, if it's a woman, if it's a child, if it is dead and not white, it is a VC. That is the order of the day from the top down, especially in Pinkfield. Well, because they also had an egalitarian army. So there was women serving in the army literally as VC, but not the ones in the villagers. Did they have to prove that they had actually killed the people that the numbers, like, did they have to, like, take pictures or something like that?

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

And American soldiers actually went and dug up the corpses so they could count every person. That's how important body count was. And then it also became VC started hiding their own bodies in order to fuck with the body counts. Yes, exactly. Fucking crazy. Yeah. Now, Task Force Barker was made up of three companies of men

who would go out into Pinkville to carry out Barker's orders. These companies were made up of about 130 soldiers each, and the company that was eventually sent to the village of Milai was known as Charlie Company. A Charlie Company is not to be confused with the slang term, Charlie, which some soldiers used to refer to their enemies in Vietnam. You know, Charlie and the Trees. We've all heard that joke.

Yeah. See, Viet Cong was often shortened to the initials V.C. in conversation. And the military phonetic alphabet code for V.C. was Victor Charlie. So, Victor Charlie, people got tired of saying Victor Charlie over and over again. So that was eventually shortened to just Charlie. So that's how, that is how the Viet Cong came to be known. Charlie's in the fucking trees, man. Yeah, Charlie don't surf.

Yeah, Charlie don't surf. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Army companies followed the same naming convention. So Task Force Barkers, three companies, were Alpha Company, Bravo Company, and Charlie Company. And coincidentally, the company that shared a name with the enemy was also the one that would commit the massacre at Mili. I would have been a beta company. Yeah, you would have been.

Yeah, you would have been. Oh, beta company would have been so much fun. Us hanging out, just fucking gone book talk. You know, talking to the villagers. They're like, oh, how do I make a basket? Oh, that's amazing. Have you ever heard of, do you guys have U-Long here? Is it, do this U-Long country?

Now, despite what you might think, the men of Charlie Company were not battle-hardened soldiers who had spent years in the shit and had come out the other end more animal than man. The Melye massacre occurred in March of 1968. Charlie Company had arrived in Vietnam in December of November. 1967. Four months earlier. Oh, so it was in jitters. Like mid in like mid-December. Yeah, so you can't even be like they were like heavily disgruntled.

No. No, no, no. They had been there for months. Months and like there are so, so many people went through. So many companies went through worse shit than Charlie Company went through. But Charlie Company was the one that did it. And that's one of the reasons why we're going through all this is to, is to explain like, why? Why was Charlie Company specifically?

Why were they capable of large mass scale murder in such a short amount of time? What was it about these guys, this company at this point in time? That's why all this explanation is here, because it's the only way it makes any fucking sense. It has to be just straight fear, right? At a basic level? It's part of it. It's all of it. We're now seeing the symptoms of every bit of the flaws that are coming together that are about this war all coming together.

Because I actually think they're inexperience as part of why they did this. Yeah. In experience, fear, all of it. It all comes together. And it's also fucking, and it's, and it's idiocy and it's cruelty. It's, it's humanity. It's everything. And also there was many milis leading all, it was many milis happening all over the place. So it's also just kind of a part for the course for these people. Very much so. So let's get into the stories of the men who made up Charlie Company itself. So we can kind of try to figure out how Milai happened. Now, most of the men in Charlie Company had volunteered for the draft. These were grunts. They were foot soldiers. These were men who understood that they were there to take orders, not question them. So I don't understand that. How do you volunteer for the draft? You say, hey, send me.

My dad did? Oh, okay. Yeah, you say, I'm not going to wait for my number to come up. Just fucking send me. Just do it. Do it now. So you're enlisting. You're enlisting. Yeah, my dad volunteered. Yeah. But it's also important to note that out of the 130 men in Charlie Company, 10% of them were well below average intelligence. But I only point this out because this was a direct result of the policies instituted by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and it has a bearing on the Milai massacre. It definitely does. See, this 10% have been brought into the army as a part of an initiative spearheaded by McNamara called Project 100,000. This program's goal was to widen the pool of possible draftees after it became obvious that the military standards for the draft were too high, at least too high if they weren't an army.

that was big enough to overwhelm North Vietnam, because that was believed that was the overwhelming them with men and military might. That was the only way we were ever going to win. So we need more men, more, more, more. But since Project 100,000 led in so many young men who were not smart enough to be effective soldiers, turns out their standards were at just the right place the first time.

Those who joined the military, as a result of this program, came to be known as McNamara's morons. You know, being drunk and stupid, is no way to go through this life. And it really is sad what we do to the stupid. Because you guys just, like, it's hard because it's just a bunch of stupid guys been like, I bet it'll be fine. You know, I mean, as long as you're not killing a bunch of people,

drunk and stupid is a fine way to go through. As long as you're over there. You just sit over there in that chair. I just work at the parking garage. I do love that joke at the end of Animal House during the epilogue that the guy who headed the dickhead house was killed by his own men in Vietnam. Yeah. Because honestly, I see Cali all over that guy.

Oh, yeah. Now, the impetus behind Project 100,000 was that a lot of young men who could have been used to fight and die in Vietnam, they were either too smart, too crazy, or too dumb to be drafted. Those who were too smart were getting deferments by going to college, while those who were too dumb could not pass the Armed Forces qualification test. Those are the guys who couldn't read. So to get 100,000 more recruits for the war. war in Vietnam, McNamara lowered the standards to allow the entry of young men who were previously

considered mentally, physically, or psychologically underqualified for military service. So you got people, you got guys that, you know, might have like a bum leg, guys that are fucking idiots or guys that are out of their fucking mind. They are now allowed into the, uh, now allowed into the military. And it didn't stop at 100,000. Actually, 300,000 guys were brought into the. military eventually under this program. Yeah. The test is really interesting because the test to find out if you were dumb enough,

they just painted a door on the wall and they tried to see if you try to use it. Yeah. And how long you would try to use it. Eventually, if you knock down a hole in the wall, they're like, great. He's going to be great dead over there. I can't wait for him to die over there. I always think of like Alice's restaurant where he talks about trying to go to the draft board and he just acted like he just wanted to really kill people really hard and then they wouldn't send him to Vietnam. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, be like, I can't wait to kill.

Let me kill. Kill, kill. And this son, you're a little too crazy. Okay. Sorry, then. Not after Project 100,000. Well, as far as the mentally underqualified went, many of these guys had IQs

between 72 and 91. 30,000 draftees brought under this program had an IQ below 71. That's your Forrest Gump's right there. Okay. Well, as far as how those who couldn't read got in, and there were many, recruiters just took the test for them.

Oh, great. Yeah. Now, Project 100,000 was passed off as a part of President Johnson's Great Society program. Too many names. Just fucking come up with the program. Just do the thing.

Yeah. We know it because they'll be giving it a name makes it sound like a thing that's going to work, Eddie. Yeah. Like, you know, it sounds like a plan. It sounds like, no, you know, we're in charge.

We know exactly what's going on. Yeah. You got to give it a name and give it a designation. Everything has to have a reason. and everything has to be done for a reason. I hate when people like name the group chat. Ugh.

It's so annoying. You know, like, how do you have so much time? Well, it was claimed that this project was going to teach underprivileged kids how to read while it also trained them how to kill. Oh, wow. Yeah, of course. Yeah. It was said that these young men would be learning skills that would be useful in the American labor force after they served.

One of the nicest things that happened right before Miline, is that they did a group bedtime story. Like, they got all the VC together. That was one part of the pacification. Yeah. And they read them all the three little bears, right? And then they understood, oh, those,

that Goldilocks is a fucking occupier. Right? That was the first thing they thought of. They were like, kill Goldilocks. Shoot Goldilocks in the fucking head, right? Fucking, I want to disembowl Goldilocks, right? And then that's kind of what, the whole thing soured.

And they just stopped trying to teach him to read. Well, in reality, McNamara's morons were meant to be the raw meat that was being fed into the grinders on the front lines of Vietnam. But besides the danger these guys posed themselves, McNamara's morons were also a danger to others. No way. I feel like Richard Ramirez's cousin is like one of these. Yeah, fucking crazy. From what standard soldiers said, you could always spot one of McNamara's morons because those are the guys who are bumbling across the countryside, making a lot of noise, talking very. Very loud about dumb bullshit.

When I get home, I'm going to get me a gold retriever, and I'm going to get me a Mustang. It's going to have a reverse pop. It's going to be nice, man. I remember chewing gum. Oh, wow. See, when I get home, I'm going to get a Dotson. Nice. Yeah.

Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to join the local farmer's market and make vagina-scented candles. Yeah, I'm thinking about when this thing, you know, you know how we walk around? were covered in this goop. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was thinking about making a store call that. Goop.

Yeah, that's a bad idea. Yeah, right? Oh, wait, what's going? Go, go, go, go, go, got, fuck. Fuck, fuck, see, shush. Yeah, no, these are the guys that's like, hey, what are you think going to happen if I lift up this basket? Blam!

Yeah. You got a lie? Shh. You got a lie for my cigarette? They're right over there. Well, these guys fired too much ammunition. They couldn't understand orders, and as a result, well over 5,000 men brought in through this program were killed, 1,500 of which were killed by triggering mines or booby traps.

Another 20,000 were wounded. But even if these guys did make it home, most were not welcome back as heroes. Because they were idiots who made bad decisions or they were fucking out of their mind and couldn't make good decisions, a lot of these guys were discharged other than honorably. and being dishonorably discharged, removed their financial benefits, and limited their access to veteran services. That was why we had the homeless veteran epidemic,

which led to the homeless, up to the veteran suicide epidemic. I mean, and that was just part of it. And that was just part, and that was just a small part of that entire fucking milieu that you're talking about there. And in fact, there actually was an investigation into this.

Like, RFK was investigating this because he was like, this is really fucked up. Like, we sent these. We sent guys who were not meant to be in the military to the front line specifically to die. And then we punished them when they came home. And then we punished them when they came home. But that investigation died when RFK was killed in 1968. Weird.

The same year as a mili. Well, I'm just glad. I'll tell you what. I'm just glad his son lived. Oh, yeah. Because without him, where would be? My shit would be so messy. RFK, let me ask you.

Yeah. How's your fecal matter these days? smooth as an egg. Truly one of the more nicest things about having a smooth chocolate kind of I make soft serve common enemies would keep

shallow occupied. Another thing that kind of stuck. Why did he fucking go? Man, he believe, well, because he still believes to this day that Souran and Sourant didn't kill his father. He might be right about that one. We'll get there.

A long story on that one. A whole story. No, I actually had written like an entire thing about how insane of a year in 1968 was and that Nelai was only a part of it. Yeah.

But yeah, just needless to say like, 1968 was the most insane year in America's existence. We almost ate ourselves that year. Well, thank God we're out of that mess. Yep. Thank God things are calm. Well, actually, they're far calmer than they were. Yeah, I mean, like that was when, you know,

we were having riots that were lasting for an entire week. And they sent a military into Detroit to shut them down. dozens of people were dying. Like at the end of the riots after MLK's assassination, 42 people died in those fucking riots. Yeah. 42.

Yeah, we don't get angry enough anymore. Yeah. Now, it bears repeating that 10% of the company that was responsible for Mili, Charlie Company, that was made up of McNamara's so-called morons, and that includes the officers in Charlie Company. See, it wasn't just the standards for mental acuity that were lowered as a result of McNamara's Project 100,000.

Men who had previously been rejected from the military for physical problems were also allowed in. And out of everyone sent to Vietnam, as a result of Project 100,000, none were more consequential than the man who would become the face of the Milai massacre, Lieutenant William Callie Jr. Now, to put Callie straight in your head, as far as competency and respect goes, Lieutenant Callie was basically private Pyle from Full Metal Jacket, if Pyle was an officer. Cali also was far smaller than Vincent Donofrio. Callie was just five foot three inches tall. Well, I don't think you understand that actually makes me almost invulnerable to the enemy. Pry of their size.

They might pick on one of them. It's interesting you say Private Pyle because by the end of boot camp, he was doing a really good job. And if he didn't go fucking crazy, he probably would have became an officer. He might have. Well, yeah. I never thought of how good private pile could have been. He could have been. Yeah, he might have been an NCO. Yeah, maybe. Now, William Calley had been born and raised in Miami to a perfectly normal set of parents who had raised him in a perfectly normal 1950 suburban environment, which made William Calley almost aggressively average.

His reddish hair caused people to call him resty, and while he was mischievous, he had no criminal record nor any history of violence. Really, what defined William Callie was that he was a chronic fuckup throughout his entire life. Callie was also extremely entitled because when he flunked out of Palm Beach Junior College in 1963... Which you actually have to try to do. Yeah, I have no idea how you flunk out of Palm Beach Junior College. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I don't remember one book I read. You at least got like an AA, you know what I mean? Like, you just quit school.

I didn't get a thing, but that's fine. Well, after that happened with Cali, he became emotionally cold toward everyone around him. He blamed the world for flunking out of Palm Beach Junior College. Nobody understands me. Nobody knows how hard it was to be in junior college. They make me take a class on beach balls. I had to identify the beach balls and it was hard. I didn't know it had stripes.

He also began chain smoking. four packs a day. That got him an ulcer by the age of 19. That's cool. That's cool. A bereft of direction, Cali tried joining the Army in 1964, but because he had hearing problems,

he was rejected from service. He worked on a number of low-skilled jobs. Instead, he worked as a bellhop, a dishwasher. He would have been a great bellhop. Yeah, well, he switched from job to job. Finally, he was made a switchman for a railroad in Fort Lauderdale. I love that any job that could be done by a lever

and instead done by a whole human he absolutely could have done. You gotta know when to fucking pull the lever. It's when the train's coming, Marcus. Callie soon lost the Switchman job. Oh God, I can't believe I didn't know. You lost that job in his first massively public fuck-up. He was arrested.

He was criminally negligent. He was arrested for allowing a freight train to block rush hour traffic, which brought the entire city of Fort Lauderdale to a standstill. What to do with this train? Oh no, what do we do about the train? Because people's Fort Lauderdale already famously doing nothing. Yeah, exactly.

Nothing. There's nothing there. It's a beach and sand and they're all just hanging out. Oh, great. Cali's fuck up made the papers. Yes. So Cali left Florida for the West Coast and what I assume was a cloud of shame. You won't have Cali to.

kick around anymore Callie's friends and family had assumed that he had actually died after leaving Florida. They didn't even care to call. It tells you a lot about Callie. His relationships to other people, but specifically how other people think of him. It's like, where's a, what was it,

William, Callie, your son, what? I don't know. I haven't heard from him in three years. I think he's dead. He's like, my, oh my son. Oh yeah, my son. Oh yeah, my son. Really? I, yeah, wait. He hasn't been around for like many Christmases, right? I imagine he walked into traffic.

Yeah. But wouldn't traffic want to avoid him like us? Well, instead, William Calley was working a job, taking photos for an insurance company in San Francisco. But in 1966, Project 100,000 made the Army a possible career for William Calley once more. Oh, goody gum drops. They lowered the IQ. Now I can go die in Vietnam.

Oh, yay! Oh, yay! They made it so worst people can get in there. I can't wait to die over there. I heard that if you die in Vietnam, when they bury you, it's free. Oh, that's nice save and expense. Well, for Callie, it wasn't IQ. For Callie, the reason why...

It was everything else. No, it was hearing. That was the only reason why Callie didn't get in, because his hearing wasn't good enough to meet Army standards at the time. I just feel like that's like one of those things that could very much stay in. You know what you mean? I understand. I actually kind of understand lowering the IQ

for just killing everybody. But the idea if they are then taking away the hearing and all the other kind of things, that feel like... He could hear, you just didn't have great hearing. He was a drummer hearing. Yeah. I'm saying, you know, it's just kind of funny.

It feels like that'd be important. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. He'd be like a good soldier. Hearing does seem pretty important when you're, yeah, out in the jumpers of Vietnam. You only get five senses. Yeah.

And I feel like if you lose 20% of your senses, You shouldn't be in war. Maybe, maybe not. That's a gift you get for not being able to hear very well. Sure enough. My dad got out for flat feet. Yeah, but now look at him. Then he fucking fired his feet.

Yeah, they're even flatter. Yeah. So after receiving a letter that telling him that he was indeed eligible to return to the army, Callie started basic training as soon as possible. But while Callie had. never held a position of authority nor shown any leadership qualities prior to enlistment, his demeanor changed drastically during basic training. He took to it.

After doing eight weeks of boot camp at Fort Bliss in Texas, he was accepted into officer candidate school, but only because the army had an urgent need for trained officers in Vietnam, just as they had had an urgent need for grunts. I don't know if you're detecting a pattern here. Yes. But it's basically America had with Vietnam had bitten off far more that it can chew. Very much so. And we did not have the people to put into positions of competence.

And we had a lot of people that were incompetent in places of power. Yeah. If you have to force your citizens to go to war and then you have to threaten them with going to prison. If they don't do that, then that's probably not going to lead to the best soldiers. I don't think so. No, it's really not going to lead to the best soldiers. But even then, like this is going. like beyond that because there were a lot of guys

in World War II that you know were drafted and did like a fantastic job you know fought you know fought gallantly but with this is like we have this this strategy in Vietnam of like overwhelming the enemy and we need a lot of guys to do it far more than are willing

to go or not even far more than are willing to go far more than are competent than what we need like we need a lot of competent guys for this strategy and we don't have them so instead we're putting guys like William Cali in those places where competent men should be. And a lot of people are going to die really horrible deaths as a result.

Well, the reason why they're putting people like Cali in these positions is because the Citadel and West Point, that was usually, those schools, that's usually where the army went for commissioned officers, guys who were trained to be officers before they even get to the battlefield. The smart, loyal guys. Yes, but those places were unable to fulfill the growing demand for COs in, Vietnam. That's commissioned officers. Because we were also churning through them. Yeah. Oh yeah, they were getting killed

a lot because Vietnamese snipers really loved shooting guys with stripes on their sleeves in the fucking face. Get that fucking hand down for it. Get your hand down. You don't ever salute to me when we're sitting here. You never salute to me. They couldn't love them better than fucking shooting a lieutenant that goddamn hand. There you go.

That's right. Furthermore, the ROTC programs on college campuses that had previously been a steady source of commissioned officers, those had all but run dry. because of the growing anti-war movement amongst the youth. Wasn't cool to be an ROTC anymore. No. So, since the Army immediately needed more commissioned officers,

guys like William Cali, who otherwise wouldn't have even been considered as a recruit at the private level, guys like Cali were now eligible and wanted for officer training. So after Cali was put into an accelerated program for infantry, he certainly learned how to kill, but he was having a hard time mastering the most important part of officer training. Namely, Callie had no idea how to convince his infantrymen how to follow his orders. Put your pep in your step. Come on.

One, two. Come on. Let's go. Let's go. I know it's hot. I know it's hot. I'm hot too. You don't think I'm not hot.

And that was easy everyone would do it. Everyone would love to kill the Viet Cong. That would love to kill, but they don't have, they won't go. All right. Well, as one of the Cali's commanding officers put it, Cali had neither the command presence nor the command voice to get grunts to follow his orders. Kill them. Go kill them on that hill. Go over that hell.

No Riz. Yeah, no Riz. And just so we're clear here, this had absolutely nothing to do with William Callie being five foot three. I grew up with this dude named John Mark. He was about the same height as Callie. He joined the Marines in the year 2000 right after high school. And he ended up becoming a fucking drill sergeant after fighting in some of the deadest. deadliest battles in the second Iraq war.

He was also the one who accidentally injured me during football practice junior ear by pulling up and reaching down and reaching down with my fucking shoulder pads. He snapped my leg with just one hand. He's a tough fucking guy. I think he was about 5455.

Cally, by contrast, was just a little bitch, regardless of his diminutive size. He couldn't even reach the shoulder pads. He couldn't even get in there. I can't get to the water. I can't get to the little cup. You know what it is, too, is that the idea of, like, I find that guys that are super tiny often go the extra step. Can be.

And stuff like this. Like, a lot of times, like, I do, sadly, in any other arena of war, unlike other ones, being small, it's great for Vietnam. Oh, it's the only way you survive in Vietnam. Yeah. Yeah. Ox gets shot in the fucking head. Yeah. Jughead survives.

I watched House, the very bad horror movie that has a whole Vietnam thing. line in it. And one of the best is having, what's his name, from Nightcourt? Bull. Yeah. Bull from Nightcourt plays like the crazy, like, I'm killing the G-words. And as he gets in there, it's like, but he's too tall. Yeah, he would have been

really easy to shoot. Yeah, yeah, he would have been dead immediately. I would love to have shot fucking bull if I was in the VC. You know you could take a couple though. Oh, yeah. I heard Kelly's favorite catchphrase was does anyone else hot? Oh.

Excuse me. Excuse me. Is there something we could do about the bugs? Do you have any citronella candles? Yeah, I just a candle. VIII! Frank! Yes.

Thank God I brought my candles. He smuggled them all the way. He loves his candles. Dipique. I love my diptee candles. Now, after Cali graduated from Officer Candidate School, raked 120 out of a class. of 156, he was confident that he had learned the essentials of command, even though he absolutely

had not. Then in September of 1967, just six months before Milai, Cali was assigned to Charlie Company as a second lieutenant, where he was going to be expected to command a platoon of around 30 men. Cali was then sent to Hawaii in preparation for his first deployment into Vietnam in December of 1968, and it was in Hawaii that Cali met his commanding officer, the guy who ran Charlie Company. That was Captain Ernest Medina, but Ernest Medina was known to his men as Maddoog Medina. A mad dog Medina had earned his nickname because he was rabidly aggressive towards communists, and this was even when he was fighting mock battles during training. Medina could not wait to get to Vietnam to kill as many Vietnam.

as he could. And he would indeed prove himself to be an utter psychopath once he got out into the field. Medina was 33 years old by the time of the Milai Massacre, but he'd actually lied his way into the National Guard at the age of 16. He'd joined the Army in 1956 after a couple years in the National Guard, and he'd served eight years as mostly an instructor by the time he was promoted to captain and sent to Vietnam. Now, it was said that Medina had a tremendous grip on his menus. Very charismatic. But while Lieutenant Callie had respect for Mad Dog Medina and thought of him as a real leader, Medina absolutely despised Lieutenant Callie. Medina routinely referred to Callie as Lieutenant Shithead, and he did so in front of the men that Callie was supposed to be commanding himself.

Could I give you one note, Command to Medina? I just want to say Lieutenant Medina, he said, I do think you call me more like Lieutenant Sally. I would give you just a pitch in terms of because The lieutenant shit that doesn't even like rhyme with my name. How about fuck face? I'll go away.

I'll leave you alone. You eat lunch. Someone fuck him. Someone fuck him in the ass. Why don't we just let's just make love to me. I'll take a hug.

So now we've got two men. Two men that were commanders that were very much responsible for some of the horrible shit that happened during me life. Captain Ernest Medina

and Lieutenant William Callie. And once Mad Dog Medina, Lieutenant Callie, and the rest of Charlie Company got to Vietnam in December of 1967, Callie immediately proved himself to be a woefully inept officer, although they were not immediately assigned to Task Force Barker upon their arrival in country. At first, they're just being sent out

on simple search and destroy missions. So they're not yet a part of the larger operation in Pinkville just yet. Yeah, they're just out collected tennis, balls. But Cali, he got to Vietnam, he didn't know how to read a map. He didn't know how to use a compass.

These are both fairly important aspects when it comes to the whole search function of a search and destroy mission. Excuse me, is there an information kiosk? Oh, what do I do? I know that doesn't moss grow on shells on the north side of them? Now look at the math and it says,

up is north, but in real life, up's the sky. So which way do we go? Oh, I can't go south. I don't have a shovel. Besides his inability to read a map, Cali was also forgetful. When Charlie Company went out into the Vietnamese countryside for the first time ever, Cali forgot to bring the hand grenades. What am I forgetting?

What am I forgetting? Oh, all the hand grenades. Oh, the boomer. Boomer corks. So the entire mission had to be delayed until Callie could run back to the ammo center to get what you were supposed to bring in the first place. Someone's got to go back and get a shitload of dyes. I volunteer.

I volunteer. Once they were out in the countryside, Callie also proved himself to be a bad decision maker. And he was also far too jumpy. When they rested for the night, Callie set up his platoon in the middle of a cornfield without cover. And when he heard rustling in the corn stalks, he freaked out and fired a bunch of yellow flares into the air, which only drew the enemy's attention directly to his platoon's location. I saw a mouse. There's a mouse out here.

Luckily, there were no Viet Cong around that night, but Medina still laid into Cali. He called Cali a fucking nitwit and said, quote, You're, without a doubt, the most stupid second lieutenant on the face of the earth. I'm sure it was a little ruder than that. I was trying to do a tone lokes style. Yeah, he's like, yeah, you're the stupidest lieutenant around me. I'd say that. You are without that most stupid second lieutenant on the face of the earth.

I just imagine everyone like coach Taylor and Friday night lies like, what are you doing? What are you doing? I was scared. I had a dream that I fell off a curb and my leg twitch. Well, Charlie Company was divided into four platoons of about 30 men each. And as I said, Callie was in charge of one of those platoons. His men, however, had just about as much respect for Callie as Medina did. Callie's men saw him as one of those guys who was always trying to be a big man, like a kid trying to play at war. But since the men did not respect Callie, he was the butt of many a joke. For example, there was a popular detective show on TV at the time called Surf Side 6.

So Callie's platoon joke that Callie was Surfside 5 and a half. Which I guess referred to his size. It's even being generous. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're looking at his driver's light, this photo, you can see his feet. That's a good one, that's. That's really good, yeah. Now, if Callie had not entered Vietnam as a commissioned officer, he would have

been just another little guy who was trying to be a big boy, someone who everyone could mock and ignore. That's me. That's my job. But Callie had 30 men under his command, and those men were expected to follow Callie's orders.

Now, soldiers often put up resistance when it came to Callie's orders, but all Cali had to do to get those men to fall in line was say, quote, I'm the boss. I'm the boss. Me. Not you. Me. Number one,

old Cali Lieutenant Shithead Yeah I'm taking it I'm taking Lieutenant Shithead I'm owning it But before long Callie had to say I'm the boss

So often That it more or less became his catchphrase You constantly have to do that You're not really the boss No no Also anyone with a catchphrase Does not belong in Vietnam

Oh no Not again Mr. Kong Ting Plan You don't like that? That's what we... That's how funny! Tiger, I barely know her.

Oh, fuck, oh fuck. My fucking guts. My fucking guts. These goddamn catchphrases are getting boys killed left and right. I tell you what, I'm getting too old for this shit. It soon became clear that Callie was a coward in every way. because it became very clear that Cali was particularly terrified of Vietnamese children.

Yeah, I get it. I get it. Well, as it went in Vietnam, those whom you feared were those that you hated. And as one vet put it, I think, what the hell was his name? Dude, it was the guy in the Ken Burns thing. He was like, scared her, our God, the more I was filled with hatred. Yeah, yeah, and he said that his hatred for them was pure. Yeah, my hate was pure.

Yeah, it was pure. Oh, yeah, I watched it this morning. Yeah. I was like, my hate was pure. Yeah, he was pure. And I was so scared. Yeah. The scared of our God.

The pure my hate got. Yeah. Yeah. And that was a lot of guys. Yeah. Vietnam was fucking rough. Yeah. But there were, however, men and Charlie Company who saw the Vietnamese kids as kids nonetheless.

Of course. At least when they first arrived. A lot of GIs gave out gum, cookies, and candy to these kids. They just, They'd run up to the soldiers, and the soldiers would be nice. Stop doing that. They leave it everywhere. Stop doing it leave the rappers and they leave the gum everywhere.

You're going to get a cold. They don't cover the mouth when they cough. They're gross. Getting jelly on everything. But Callie soon put a stop to any sort of friendliness towards the kids. One day when a private first class was being nice to some Vietnamese kids while Callie's platoon was guarding a bridge, Cali balled out the private and threatened to take his stripes. The private, however, just laughed at Callie because,

He thought it was ridiculous that an officer would be so afraid of children. Cali complained about this GIs insubordination to Captain Mad Dog Medina. Mad Dog also laughed at and mocked Callie, but Medina was mocking Callie mostly for failing to control his men. So Callie took a different tack when it came to dealing with the kids. The next time one of his soldiers interacted with a Vietnamese child, Cali told him that someday one of those little sons of bitches is going to grenade you. And the more Callie said this, the more likely it seemed to all of the men in Charlie Company that something like that might happen.

And it goes from might happen to could happen to will happen. Yeah. Because they're all terrified. Yeah. I see that. I also see him targeting the children because it's easier. And that it feels like somebody, like I genuinely just believe because he's so immature and he was so bad at what he did and he was so, he was such a bad person.

that I genuinely believe it's like, I can bully the kids. Yeah. Because I'm not afraid as the kids as much as I'm afraid of the adults. Yeah, and it's easy for the kids to get grenades when you forget them all. That's the thing. And then kids, this is a little super tip. Kids love grenades. I love, my grandfather let me hold one.

Actually, I did have a grenade when I was a kid. I had bought, like a family friend bought it for me at an Army surplus store. Fucking miss real family friends. It was my mom. most cherished possession. I carried that grenade with me everywhere. Dude. It was a real grenade. It already had all the shaken out. Taken out. Yeah, I love it. And the hole in the bottom.

I love that. Yeah, I loved my grenade so much. Seriously, if you give a grenade, most of the time he's not even going to throw it. He's going to keep it. So honestly, the safest people with... Draw a little eyes on it, give it a tail. Most of them, they keep it as pets. They're not even really trying. That's what kids that's okay for them to have grenades. Oh, yeah. The water balloons that looked like grenades? Oh, those are the best.

Now, since Callie was unable to control his platoon, morale plummeted, and the low morale in Callie's platoon began to spread to the rest of Charlie Company. One GI said that around this time they could sense that something was wrong. They could feel it. You've said they could smell it. Something smells wrong. There was no sense of community in Charlie Company, no sense of discipline, no sense of responsibility, no sense of pride. And the stress of low morale was only added to the already psychologically and, physically demanding situation that these troops have been thrown into.

But the thing was, all this shit was going down before Charlie Company or Lieutenant Cowley or Captain fucking Mad Dog Medina. All this was what was going through their heads and what was happening to them before they saw one fucking Viet Cong soldier. And this is like one of those big cruxes in this story. It's because of the building up tension of wanting to have some kind of traditional one versus one contact. A battle like your daddy used to talk about.

Yeah. You know, your daddy who, you know, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge and he's got all these stories. These amazing stuff. The Germans are there. We are here. And at the night, we hear them singing. We sing back at them and then we kill each other in the morning again. Yes. And then we

take a break for lunch. You know, we have Easter. No, these guys are just wandering around the country. And since arriving in Vietnam in December 1967, Charlie Company had conducted search and destroy missions without making any enemy contact at all. But that would certainly change in January of 1968, when Cali, Medina, and the rest of Charlie Company were assigned to Task Force Barker. Charlie Company was moved to the province that contained Pinkville, which, as I said, was a permanent free fire zone.

And then at the end of January 1968, the Tet Offensive came. which only added to the pressure that had been put on Task Force Barker to kill more Viet Cong so General Westmoreland could report good news to Lyndon Baines Johnson. Lyndon Vaines Johnson. But while Task Force Barker had been on a province-wide mission since its beginning, the focus was starting to narrow more and more on the villages within Pinkville, and that included Milai. Now, Captain Medina said that he had received intel, that Pinkville had been under the control of communists for decades.

So Medina told his men that if they shot a villager in the Pinkville area and found ID indicating that the person wasn't Viet Cong, it was perfectly acceptable to plant a grenade on them after the fact and make them Viet Cong. And these guys, they all went on to be cops, right? But while Charlie Combs. Anthony had only been in country for about a month by the time they were sent to Pinkville, it's important to understand that these young men were walking into an absolutely hellish environment where cruelty and barbarism was the norm. I don't think that you can separate. I really want the audience to understand that they were literally walking into hell itself. Yeah.

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

Maybe. Maybe. We might end up killing some random people again. I'm going to go ahead and say never say never on that one. You're right, Mark. I'm sorry. I'm definitely going to say never say never. Because they do, I did get several messages

from people talking about it. Now they teach me lie. That is like a centerpiece that they teach people in officer school and all this kind of stuff. They put it forward saying, like, yeah, basically being like this, this is an example of a thing that can't happen again. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean... Which is so far really worked. Yeah, but when these guys walk in, like Charlie Company walked in to Pinkville, and one soldier remembered seeing a troop carrier drive by and hanging off the troop carrier's antenna, he estimated about 20 human ears. And that's first thing he sees. What was it with the ears? They were collectibles.

There were tabs. They were easy to cut off? Yeah, and they're collectibles. And there was a part of the thing. They were looking for proof of bodies. Proof of bodies, yeah. So when they would do that, that was a part of what it was. And then they got, and to be honest, it's just guys going fucking literally going jungle.

Like literally just becoming the most. Because they have to motivate themselves, unfortunately. You're fucked out there. You're fucked. Now we're past the point of politics. Now you're just one guy in the jungle. You've got to go and fight. If you don't kill somebody, you're probably going to die.

And so they have to kind of come up with this fucking validation system. Fuck politics. They're beyond civilization at that point. Yeah. I mean, like, they get there treating Vietnamese civilians with nothing but brutality. That was a well-established doctrine in Pinkville by the time Charlie Company showed up. It wasn't just accepted. It was expected of them.

Captain Medina, of course, doubled down on this idea. He had convinced Charlie Company that most of the people in this area were VietCon. And since Medina led the entire company, he set the tone for all the officers and the grunts below him. That included Lieutenant Cali. So when Medina or one of his officers entered a village in Pinkville, they would grab the first Vietnamese man they found and immediately accuse him of being Viet Cong by beating him for information. If the only male in the village was a child or an old man, that didn't matter. They were still beaten and treated as if they were Viet Cong. Once Medina surprised an old man by jumping out.

out from behind a rock and grabbing an old man in a bear hug. The old man already scared out of his mind, shit himself. Then and there, Medina just laughed, then pulled out his survival knife and cut a gash behind the old man's ear to intimidate him even further. That's basically where it started. You know, all my ears of comedy, I know that's not funny. You're right. You're right.

I would say, huh. Yeah, yeah. That would be my first stop. It was like, hmm. I don't think he understands joke structure. Yeah. Yeah, just startling an old man and then an old man shit in himself. It's really not funny.

You know what's funny? It's sad no matter what, really. You know what's funny is that a house is just a place for your stuff. Yeah. And then when you go on vacation, you just take a smaller version of your stuff. How many times can you say stuff? Stuff! Stuff!

And then when you go on vacation within your vacation, you've got to take an even smaller version of your stuff. Stove. For all you kids out there. You guys know it's brand new. He loved Vietnam. Oh, he was great. Despite being told that there was a VC behind every tree and bush,

Charlie Company patrolled Pinkville for weeks without seeing any action. Of course, any action besides the action they created for themselves by beating up old men and children. But day by day, Charlie Company's actions began escalating and the tone set by Captain Medina. was catching on. After Charlie Company captured an old man in February, they brought this old man to Lieutenant Callie. Callie discovered through an interpreter that this old man was just a farmer, but Callie decided to treat this old man as if he was VC. Cali had one of his men punched the old man in the stomach, then Callie ordered that GI to throw the old man down a well. Now, the old man survived the fall, but when he tried climbing out again, Callie ordered one of his men

to smash the old man's fingers. Once the old man was at the bottom of the well, Cali shot the old man himself, killed him. And then he reported to Captain Medina that his platoon had killed a Viet Cong soldier who had tried to escape down a well. Taking Callie at his word, Medina ordered him to search the well

for an underground tunnel system, but of course no one in Charlie Company was willing to climb down there. So Cali reported, back to Medina, hey, we searched the well, No tunnel. And this was Vietnam in a nutshell. Needless cruelty begets a lie, which begets orders based on that lie.

Another lie is then told in response to that order, and it's all reported to commanders as a success. So in the end, nothing connected and nothing worked in Vietnam because so many actions were based on everyone telling the person above them what they wanted to hear. And that chain that started with one soldier on the ground, that shit went all the way to the president. president. You know, it's easy to tell if a well leads to a tunnel. If there's a splash, there's no tunnel. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Unless the tunnel starts below the, above the water line. And then how many times you throw a Vietnamese old man into what you think is a well, and then they end up in the water world of Super Mario 3? And I think that that's truly frightened. Yeah, down there with all those turtles trying to kill you. Yeah, yeah, shooting fireballs and stuff.

I bet he's like, what a relief. But Charlie Company went three weeks in Pinkville without any enemy contact, but they were still keyed up and on edge psychologically. They were both tired and confused as to what they were actually doing there. Charlie Company went three weeks in Pinkville without any enemy contact, but they were still keyed up and on edge psychologically. As far as Charlie Company was concerned, they had come into contact with the enemy every single day,

because every villager was the enemy. And Charlie Company was convinced that any of these villagers might make a move at any time. As the weeks went by, Charlie Company's low morale began translating to increased cruelty towards the Vietnamese. Instead of giving the local children candy, some soldiers were following Callie's lead and were kicking the children when they approached. But things changed at the end of February when men in Charlie Company actually began dying themselves. which of course made the entire situation a thousand times worse. Because now they're finally going to see some action. Well, now they have a reason to be angry.

Yeah. On February 25th, 1968, six men in Charlie Company were killed and another 12 were wounded when they wandered into a minefield while patrolling Pinkville. Morale sunk even lower because the minefield had been clearly marked on the map. Most likely, Lieutenant Callie's poor map reading skills had resulted in these deaths. This is what I'm talking about. This is why you can't add these guys out there. But the blame was placed on Allied troops from South Korea.

According to the officers, those South Koreans, they were supposed to disarm these minds long before we marched through. So it doesn't matter if we read the map wrong or not. It's the South Koreans fault. It's not our fault. Fucking idiot just passing the buck because he's working. worried about getting in trouble. That's like one of those things. And that motherfucker at that point is worried about getting

fragged. Yeah, dude, because all of this is just like red data. They're all acting like these are office fucking problems and like little whoopsie doos and mistakes, but it's fucking everybody's dying. Also, if I'm leading a platoon and I know I'm bad at reading maps, I find

the guy who reads the map. You sit right next to me. You stand right next to me. You tell me what the map says. Where are we going? But you're a guy that knows how to admit when he's wrong. Lieutenant Callie was not that type of person. Lieutenant Callie was the type of person who is going to keep going no matter what until someone dies.

Because for him, it is more important for him to appear as a big man that it is for his buddy to survive and go back home. It's because these guys are all thinking of it's like it's just this other idea. It's almost like you're thinking of back home. Yeah, he's secret of his career and his future. And it's just like, no, bro. You're in it now. This is it now. Like, it's very, it's fascinating, watching all these people think that Vietnam was like a way to get ahead in their fucking career.

And it's just like, no, you walked into hell itself. Yeah. Now, six deaths in Charlie Company was bad enough. But there is nothing that can rile a company up more than the death of a beloved member. Yeah, the funny guy. The funny guy on March 14th, two days before Charlie Company marched into the village of Milai, a huge explosion. from a booby-trapped bomb killed a well-liked and well-respected sergeant named George Cox. Because you know what he was doing his like lieutenant shithead dance act out that he does.

And they all love when he goes. He's like, you know what's like when Callie's got a fucking tie his shoes, right? And everyone's like, ah, Chuck. No, George. No! He had his like shoes on his knees. He was like, I'm protecting. Oh, God!

Another GI in Charlie Company lost his eyes and arm and a leg in that same explosion. But no one cared about that guy. Yeah, we don't even have his name. Yeah, we don't even have his name. He's hilarious. He's hilarious. St. George. Yeah, yeah, but not the other guy's like, ah!

It's like, shut up. George is dead. But that's... Not George! I wish I could see George's corpse! But you actually bring up kind of an interesting point there, because even though this guy lost an arm, he lost an... His eyes, he lost in a leg, he survived. Yeah.

So he's not, his name isn't mentioned. He's not enough any fucking memorial. I bet he's doing great. Yeah. I bet so wherever he is right now, I bet you it's Palm Beach, swimming in this pool, you know, bobbing in his pool. Yeah. Well, after George Cox was killed, the fear, boredom, and exhaustion that had settled into Charlie Company daring their patrols throughout Pinkville, that very quickly focused into intense anger.

That anger was supposed to be directed to the Viet Cong. But since Charlie Company believed that everyone in Pinkville was a potential VC, the anger was focused on anyone who was Vietnamese. And of course, as it often happens, the casual killing starts with one death. And that death came on the same day that Sergeant George Cox was killed. The GIs left on the ground that day were raiding a village when they saw something moving in the bushes. It was a woman hiding from the Americans because I'm sure she had seen what happened when a group of soldiers, specifically American soldiers, found a woman all alone. But on that day, the only thing on Charlie Company's mind was vengeance.

The GIs took this woman and shot her, and the soldiers kicked her repeatedly after she fell to the ground. One GI suggested they take her to a field hospital while she was still alive, but another GI gave his answer to that suggestion by shooting the woman in the chest. She was killed, and another GI looted her corpse for a ring on her finger before Charlie Company returned to camp, to, of course, collectively mourn Sergeant Cox. One thing that keeps coming up in my brain is that Charlie Company feels like when a serial killer ramps up. like it's putting itself in the scenario. Like it keeps putting it, you know how like we talk about serial killers sometimes put themselves up into a scenario where it becomes like, I had to do it.

I had to kill. I had to go do this where it seems to be like they're really like what's going on here would then happen in other companies. Yeah. But it feels like that where they're like looking for the reason. Yeah. They are look. I would say they are looking for the reason. And that is part of what, you know, that is one of the things that that leads to Milai is that it is that it's so many different things.

Like, there's not one thing that you can point to is, oh, they did it because of George Cox or they did it because of the body cancer. It's all these things together. Yeah. In a way, she's like the first victim of Mili. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and also the old man. I mean, he, like, they had killed civilians before this.

Plenty. Yeah, plenty. Yeah. And there have been plenty of people in Task Force Barker, besides Charlie. company that killed people in the villages of Vietnam. In fact, they weren't even the only company in Task Force Barker to commit a massacre in Milai in Vietnam that fucking morning. Yeah.

You know, like in that province. Yeah, there was, it was a whole thing. Yeah, we already talked about 155 in February. Yeah, yeah, and those were not Vietnam. Those were regular-ass people. Yeah. Now, this is the general mood of Charlie Company when Captain Maddog Medina and Colonel Frank Barker began planning a mission into a village that was just seven miles north of their command center.

And I might have mentioned, I might have referred to Frank Barker as captain earlier, but unless you're a military man, it doesn't mean anything to you. Well, that's why I'm walking. That's why I'm walking is a member of the cultural war. I'm a veteran of the cultural. As far as I'm concerned, Barker's a dog. Yep. That's all he sees.

He's actually cast every person in this story in his own mind as a dog. It makes it a little easier to digest. Yeah, and also something about dog-on-dog massacre is fascinating. Barker, however, did not file plans outlining the tactical aspects of this operation, nor did he show his superior's mission plans. Barker did order the dropping of leaflets in the area to tell civilians that they needed to move to a nearby refugee center, or they were going to be killed as Viet Cong supporters. This was, of course, the protocol.

We talked about this in the first episode, I think. But true to the chaos of the Vietnam War, the refugee center was already overcrowded, and anyone who tried to show up was turned away and sent back to their village. So even if they tried to get out of the way of the Americans, they couldn't. Amidst the grief that Charlie Company was feeling over the death of Sergeant Cox, Task Force Barker had received intelligence that the infamous 48th Viet Cong battalion was hiding out in that nearby village, with a force of at least 250 soldiers. Captain Medina had also been told that on the morning of the mission,

where they were supposed to go get the 48th Battalion, the women and children were expected to be gone to the markets at one of the nearby cities. So go in as mean as you want, go in with everything you have to kill everything you see. The name of this village was, of course, Milai. Charlie Company's mission was to go. in Amilai, destroy the 48th battalion, burn down all the houses, blow up all the bunkers and tunnels, and kill all the livestock, anything to ensure the Viet Cong could not and would not

return to this area. But there was no mention of what to do or what not to do with the civilians they found within the village. As it had been with every mission led by this task force, Barker had left the treatment of civilians up to the disdainment. discretion of the commander. In this case, the commander was a man named fucking mad dog. Needless to say, it went poorly. Now, after the mission was planned, Captain Medina gave a pet talk to his men. This was the night before they were going to go out to the village of Milai to ostensibly find and kill the 48th Viet Cong battalion.

At this point, the memories of various GIs and Charlie Company, they start getting a little fuzzy. Yeah, I wonder why. Every GI would give a different version. of what he heard Medina say leading up to the mission in Milai. Some said that Medina gave standard search and destroy orders. Others believe that Medina's orders were vague and up for interpretation. I, however, believe the soldiers who said that Medina gave direct orders to kill everyone in the village of Milai.

One GI named Herbert Carter said that Medina told them that this was their chance to get revenge on these people, that it was open season in Mili. According to some soldiers, Medina had said that when the... this operation was over, nothing in Milai would be walking, growing, crawling, or even living. Everything had to go. Destroy the village. Make it uninhabitable. Another GI remembered someone asking Medina specifically, who is the enemy in Mili? Because after three months in country, nobody had really answered this question. Who the fuck is my enemy? Yeah. And reportedly, Medina said, the enemy is anyone who's running. But whatever the orders were, Lieutenant Callie and the rest of Charlie Company,

came away from their pep talk with Medina with the impression that they could and should kill any human being they saw when they entered the village of Milai early the next morning. And it's there that we will conclude our series on the Milai massacre next week

with the actual massacre itself and the fallout that eventually came when the massacre was finally revealed to the American people. Really good stuff. I'm glad we saved the funniest part for the end. Yeah. Because that's really what it is.

It's really about like, because we wanted to leave you on a high note. You know, which I think is the next episode. It's really just more of a, I call it a romp. Yeah. I mean, it is technically. Yeah, I guess it's a romp, yeah. I see Medina kind of like telling different guys different things, too. No, he's giving a speech to all these guys.

Like, he's standing up, he's standing up in front, and he's giving him the, he's doing the patent. But it's fascinating because literally, they all say something. different about what he said. And I don't know whether or not it's just their fucking morons. If they weren't paying attention, if they were exhausted, or if they're covering for him. I don't know. Like, it's like a whole

thing. I know the last thing I'm supposed to use is like my like barometer on what's true and what's not true as an Oliver Stone movie. But I think of like Barnes and his crew and how he had like certain guys in his platoon where he's like, kill everybody. And other guys he just wouldn't talk to because he knew they were good guys.

And I'm pretty certain that that is, I can Gomez guarantee it would start with a big speech that was more vague and then he's got his boys where he's like make sure you fucking kill and rape everybody. Yeah. But he was keeping it he might have said this is the one we're getting the vengeance on.

Yeah. I could definitely see him saying that to everybody. Yeah. Not necessarily saying like we're going to go in and get vengeance for Sergeant Cox and for all the other six guys that were killed by going in and killing women and children. It's just saying like we're just going to go in and kill everybody.

And it's sort of like understood that like we're going. There's this almost like assumed knowledge that should be said, but is not said. Yeah. And it just sounds like, or do they all go off road and all different kind of shit? Who fucking knows? We'll talk about, I know that they were directed to. Yeah, and Medina also joins in. Yeah, he does.

And many points. Yeah, it does seem. So he loves it. On Forge. So we'll get to Unforch. We're going to get to this next week. Thank you so much. Go to patreon.com slash last podcast.

and we'll have to listen to us ad-free also see movie stories video-wise also you can see last stream every Tuesday live at 5 p.m. PST go to check out our new youtube channel so all we got so much good shit LPN TV with HGX2 and vampire the masquerade that's going strong no no dogs and space is coming out with new stuff new videos on there go see the forward report for elpian romantic see go check it out the brighter side LPN also has its own YouTube channel subscribe there we switched to Mondays. So go and check that out. We had too much coming out on Fridays,

and Brighter's side always seemed like a Monday show to me anyway. A little bit. Start your week off with something crazy. And Henry and I, last week, we put out a bunch of dates for side stories. We're coming all over the place. But we got two coming up soon. So the ones I really want to stress to you

are September 18th, Norfolk, Virginia, at the Addox, and September 19th at the Fletcher Opera House in Raleigh, North Carolina. And then, of course, we're going to Brooklyn and Hartford and all that stuff, but go to last podcast and a left.com to find out what's going on.

And, of course, come see me 9-11 weekend in D.C. Oh, I love to laugh. I love to laugh. I love spending a 9-11 weekend in our nation's care. It's my favorite thing. I just want to see the president so I feel safe. So, hail Satan, everybody.

Don't go to war. Yeah. No, and how again? Vietnam, man. Hail, hell Murphy. the dog we were fostering just got adopted halfway through this episode. I'm very happy about it. It's really great.

He looks just like the dog that Lance finds on the boat that they shoot up in Apocalypse now. And so you kind of reminded me of Vietnam. The fucking dog, man. The fucking dog, man. You go out there. Listen to the Vietnamese soul on me.

It's for free. Puffy man.