Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 270- Operation Paul Bunyan

Episode Date: July 30, 2023

Joe, Nate, and Tom talk about the time the US and North Korea almost went to war over a poplar tree. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/06/axe-murder-north-korea-1976/562028/ https://ns.clementspapers.org/briefing-books/korea-tree-incident https://medium.com/@qz_li/korean-axe-murder-incident-48f3e16e47b6 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/14/north-korea-1976-axe-murder-incident-215605/

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now back to the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I am Joe, and with me, several thousand miles to the left in the content dungeon in London, is Tom and Nate. How's it going, fellas? Hello. Hello. It's going pretty well. Just so that people aren't feeling like they're left out of the in-joke,

right before we started recording, I realized that neither Joe nor Tom had seen the album cover for the Trick Daddy album, www.thug.com. And I shared it with them and they're both losing their minds because to us, this was a normal album cover in the late 90s. I'm old enough to remember how dumb shit was regarding the internet back then. People thought the internet was magic and shit. And I listened to a lot of hip hop back then as well.

And I do not remember this at all. It's a masterpiece. It's the greatest album cover I've ever seen in my life. I mean, so obviously, a lot of the Pen and Pixel album covers were amazing. I think it was like No Limit made them famous, but they were doing that stuff for other Houston rappers and for Memphis rappers too at the time, which is like the wildest like 90s photoshop and i think uh the um the best one ever was the cover for the young star album throat young playa where it's basically him at his house except his house has like an amusement park and looks like the fucking white house and there's like a ferris wheel in the background and he's eating from like a platinum spoon of

like diamonds from a cereal bowl that his mom is pouring diamonds out of a cereal box genuinely it's it's so unreal i mean there was i love huge fan of pen and pixel shit talking about obscure hip-hop i mean it's not even really obscure but uh uh lost to the times hip-hop album covers reminds me of and i i the the the artist himself his name is escaping me right now, but there was a guy who put out an album almost immediately after 9-11. And it was the two of them superimposed in front of the Twin Towers pushing a giant cartoon. No, no, no, no.

You're wrong. You're wrong. It's the coup. The album is called Party Music and the cover was designed before 9-11. And they are pushing a button and blowing up the World Trade Center yes I thought I thought it was immediately after I didn't know it was before that's Boots Riley's band Boots Riley the guy who directed yeah yeah

of course Bother You that's his band yeah yeah that was the coup and that yeah that album was supposed to come out and like I couldn't support it came out beforehand or it was scheduled to come out it might I don't think it was literally scheduled to come out on 9-11 but long story short they obviously got a little bit of heat for that fucking album party music and yes it's them but like so I love the whole list of like

oh all the music that was banned immediately after 9-11 do you know what the last recorded visual of the Twin Towers is no Joe do you know what the last recorded visual of the Twin Towers is? No. Joe, do you know? No, I do not.

It's Limp Bizkit's rolling video. That's how I would like to be remembered. Before I'm inevitably killed in a drone strike, I want Lil Xan to shoot a music video, and I'm walking by in the background or something. Look, it's a horrible tragedy, but we grew up in the background or something? I mean, look, it's a horrible tragedy, but we grew up in the shadow of it and have to make jokes about it.

I will say that there are not necessarily any better instructions for someone who's trapped in the top of the World Trade Center than breathe in, now breathe out, hands up, now hands down, back up, back up, tell me what you're going to do now. Jump out the window, window, window, window, jump out the window window window window jump out the

window window window window didn't the pilots just keep on rolling i was gonna say if i was i mean i said it before i'll say it again that if i was trapped in the world trade center i would have fucking gotten on dial-up internet and hit up girls for nudes and see if i could have gotten fucking sony mavica nudes like this is why i am adamant that Nate is the podcasting Paul Wall. Why? What about me makes no sense. I'm fine with derailing the episode to hear the greater Nate Bethea Paul Wall theory. Please go on.

So, Paul Wall, famous Houston rapper, got the whole city on his back. Just like Nate, yeah. Just like Nate. Paul Wall, the white man who's ingratiated into the culture he's down with the shit married to an african-american woman so is nate both purveyors of that houston dj screw sound and they both me i like that immediately so paul wall has an incredible song called internet going nuts that has an incredible video it's about him on like a proprietary like chat room and he's like chatting up women and trying to get

get laid online and the fact that you immediately went to that when he's like if i'm in not in the twin towers during 9 11 i'm not i got the internet going nuts i'm'm on chat rooms. I'm looking for some ass. I mean, what is Paul Wall other than, you know, the one-to-one connection between Paul Wall and Honkball Hooftaclossa? I mean, like, we need to get Nate in, like, a long-line tea, I feel like. See, I wonder if Nate could get waves.

Ah, dude, I don't know. I mean, I think the thing with Paul Wall is just, like, he grew up, like, Paul Wall's, like I said, his wife's black, all his friends are black, all Paul Wall. Like I said, his wife's black. All his friends are black. All his fucking bands he was in. Everyone else is black. He and Slim Thug are like good friends.

Like he he wasn't he he he was not sort of like, hey, it's this guy. He's a white rapper. It's just no, this is just a dude you meet in Houston. Yeah. Like Paul Wall is a type of guy who lives in Houston. Nate is more closely culturally related to the Juggalos. Yeah. I mean, being from the Midwest, I feel like it's hard to escape that stuff. Yeah.

And although I do sometimes think of the lines of what is it in Chunk of Padoose where he says, what is it? That ain't igloo. That's my watch. And that ain't snow, baby. That's my chain. That's not an ice girl. That's my teeth.

And that's not a snow cone. That's my ring. He also, Houston rappers have an appreciation for things made out of wood because they love having wood grain steering wheels and so they talk about you know grabbing the wood gripping grain stuff like that and as a purveyor someone who enjoys wood furniture i also think of myself as gripping grain on a regular basis so you know what like maybe i am in my heart like i want to be a houston houston rapper uh i don't want to deal with living in houston where it's like there's zero fucking diet man there's zero zoning so like you can have like a strip club next to a

daycare and oil refinery next to an old folks home like fucking whatever uh also it's hotter than shit there but it stinks uh but uh yeah joe if uh if we are have both of us have an affinity for icp who's shaggy too dope and and who's ViolentJay between me and you? I don't know I mean Gathering of the Juggalos was literally last week. Yeah and I missed my annual hajj to a cornfield in the Midwest

like honestly I know we've set a lot of Patreon goals for this show since we've had a lot of growth recently I feel like we need to set a goal that if we reach it, we will go to Gathering of the Juggalos. I don't know if I'm capable of... I don't know if I'm capable of

actually doing that. So let's set it at like 10,000 patrons. Speaking of a large amount of people trapped in a place they can't quite escape while being ripped out of their mind on drugs, we're kind of talking about the Korean War today. And this is one of those episodes that's quite rare. Maybe this happens on purpose and why I

rarely talk about Vietnam or Algeria, but this is a connection to one of us, because today we are talking about Operation Paul Bunyan, otherwise known as that time that a second Korean War almost started over a tree. I thought, so you're saying that Liberty Prime from Fallout 3 is based on the US's weaponization of Paul Bunyan during the Korean War? Goddammit. They just had a giant man with an ox cutting down Koreans? Paul Bunyan is actually an evangelion yeah so this is an interesting story but um my connection to operation paul bunyan is that my dad was there my dad wasn't there for the axe murder incident but my dad was there uh for the whole spin-up because he was back in those days uh you the guys that were on the dmz the american troops on the dmz were actually on the dmz doing patrols with the

what they call the rock army the republic of korea army or the south korean military and now that's changed a lot of people don't realize this but the actual combat presence for american troops in korea is basically a figurehead it's one brigade A lot of people don't realize this, but the actual combat presence for American troops in Korea is basically a figurehead. It's one brigade. Almost all the troops in Korea are just logistics and support, so if they have to scale up the presence they can.

Basically, back in those days, though, there was from the late 60s onward, there was a pretty decent insurgency happening in South Korea. Yeah, we'll talk about that a little bit. We'll talk about that a little bit, yeah. And also a lesser known ACDC song, DMZ, Dynamite.

I don't know why that reminds me of a very stupid story that a military police soldier told me once. soldier told me once that the song thunderstruck is based on the story of their tour bus being pulled over and then being ticketed by military police and thunderstruck was their unit motto and they would say it when they gave people tickets because mps are exactly how you would imagine they would be um and so they said you've been thunderstruck when they got it i have no idea i'm 100 certain that's not true but um he was also hands across the ocean because thunderstruck whenever it's played at like an irish wedding all of the men will like roll up their suit trousers and do like the angus young thing across the floor like there's so many videos of just like dads at irish weddings like tie around their head like expensive suit trousers rolled up to their knees like doing like windmill guitar moves across

the floor do not own a pair of pants i'd be able to roll up to my knees anymore yeah well it's because you get huge weight lift your legs but i was gonna say what i was to say is basically, to end off my little mini segment, my dad was a second lieutenant in 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment and was stationed in, I think, at Pamunjam at the time or at one of the small camps there. I can't quite remember. There were a bunch of camps right on the D&Z, right on the Imjin River. One named after one of the guys that died in the incident. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure, yeah, Camp Boniface was named something else before,

and that was, yeah, basically where this happened. And hilariously, so my dad was there in 76 to 77. I was in 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry at Camp Casey, Korea in 2013 to 2014 so um yeah i i was not only i was in the same unit as my dad but yeah my dad uh missed barely missed panama missed the gulf war and got out before 9 11 the only thing he got in before vietnam the only combat he went to was actually just this yeah sweet so his closest but it's weird because his closest experience in terms

of like actual awards happening kind of thing was like probably one of the most insane and now completely almost completely forgotten events in the cold war so yeah i'm hoping that i can my dad's unfortunately a little bit unwell he's got parkinson's but i'm gonna try and see if i can do an interview with him and put it out as bonus content uh so i'm gonna pretend i know next to nothing about this joe's gonna tell the whole story and maybe i won't play this episode for my dad because i don't want to confuse him talking about paul wall but uh but i will talk to him and see if maybe we can get get him to talk about also most importantly and a very forgotten historical fact about this incident was that you know your dad was instrumental in capturing the defector known as Colonel Sanders, hence

giving birth to KFC, Korean fried chicken. All I'm going to say about defectors is that there has been a surprising number of dudes who just were like, fuck this army bullshit and just walked north. We've done episodes on

Joseph Dresnick, notoriously the biggest piece of shit of them all uh his two sons are still there um and they are actors in north korean cinema yeah i mean and and if i remember correctly he uh they were like well juche won't permit us to have you marry a korean wife so here's a japanese woman we kidnapped um that's no i think his wife you're thinking of a different defector um he's the one that ended up going back to japan with his wife um right yeah yeah he i i think joseph dresnick married a romanian uh or something like that um but yeah he was like we did an episode on joseph dresnick he was there's there's

documentaries on him that kind of smooth over a lot of the fucked up shit that he did like he was uh pretty pliant to North Korea. He was like, this is where I can't possibly go back, so I'm going to do my best to do whatever it is that they want me to do, which turned into beating the other defectors. He was effectively like when the North Koreans

wanted to punish the defectors, they would send in... Because Dresnok was a big guy. Even when he was much older and very sickly in the documentary I'm thinking of. He was a big guy um even when he was much older and and very like sickly and the documentary i'm thinking of he was a big he's like my size with a name like that you assume he's going to look like one of the members of the goo dolls and those guys are fucking big you know it looks more like the world see me because i'm voiding minds into minefield i mean i'm just saying fucking robbie take act from uh, from Google dolls is a, is a

big, big guy. He's, he's, he's just big guy, energy, huge guy. Great. First album as well. He looks more like the Goonies. Um, but, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not all, not all. I can't remember if they're like Lithuanian or Polish, their last names, but yeah, they're

all basically, um, Eastern European guys from Buffalo, New York, a place you want to get out of as much as you possibly can. So anyway, we're going to talk about setting the scene for a fateful day in 1976 on the Imjin River, or rather on the DMZ in between North and South Korea. The joint security area. Now, for our story today, it begins at the end of the Korean War, also known as a topic that I once wrote an entire series of scripts for and then lost when my computer bricked itself. And I lost all of that research. Also, I've heard some bad things happen during that time period that I can't be sure. Moving on. With the signing of the 1953 ceasefire,

the Military Armistice Commission was formed. It was an agency formed specifically to make sure that the two sides followed the rules laid out in the armistice that didn't technically end the war, but much like that book that everybody insists they're eventually going to totally finish, it hit the pause button. Spoiler alert, nobody ever listened to this shit, and a second Korean war like Nateate talked about was pretty much happening for years across the dmz this include everything from an insurgency to airstrikes to large-scale semi-offensives uh like brigade size offensives across the dmz north korea built a ton of tunnels directly under it including they sent they sent a midget subs

full of commandos some of them actually got onto the grounds of the blue house which is like the korean president's residence um yeah like it was it basically if i as i understand the history of it uh kim il-sung saw the u.s kind of taking loss after loss in vietnam and said we can also do this um and they basically started trying to destabilize south kore, which you have to understand, South Korea's economy didn't surpass North Korea's economy until 1993. South Korea was a very poor country, and things weren't great, and as a result, it was far less stable than people want to talk about.

This wasn't really acknowledged to be a combat zone in the way Vietnam was, but I've met dudes who were there, and they're like, bro, we were fucking getting shot at and shooting back all the time on patrols and stuff in the way Vietnam was, but I've met dudes who were there and they're like, bro, we were fucking getting shot at and shooting back all the time on patrols and stuff in the late 60s. So there was basically a second Korean War. It just was kind of overshadowed by a thing that's always set to

CCR songs in movies. Okay, so because you said that, and this is a fact that I'm sorry to derail this again, but this really annoys me. This episode was never never on the rails it started with thug.com so fortunate son was not popular during vietnam it came out in like i think 1971 and like didn't chart until afterwards and it was only because of vietnam movies who came out subsequently after the war that Fortune's son became associated with the Vietnam War. Well, it's because they were also blown away by how cool the scene with Lawrence Fishburne

on the boat rocking out when it's playing. I can't get no satisfaction in Apocalypse Now, but it's so expensive to license Rolling Stone songs. They had to find a different one. So they just retroactively created this narrative. Also, really funny note from my interruption. So we finally found something about the Vietnam War that was actually actually a lie thank you damn i never knew uh is that there was this band and they were like they were students at kent state and when the shootings

happened when the national guard killed four protesters in kent state they were like okay we need to be serious we need to fucking actually like like this is society's fucked up we need like be really serious about music now and fucking get with it and that band was, and I'm not joking Devo you must whip it I don't even know how to respond to that, like a somber moment they're like, and now playing at this

tribute to the fallen is Devo but another band who decided to take their career seriously after a major tragedy is my chemical romance jared way was so moved by 9-11 that he started my chemical romance i thought yeah we don't know if that's a good or a bad thing yet i remember the yeah you know what i'm not going to talk about the my chemical romance fanfic where they all die on 9-11 uh that's a famous internet story.

Let's talk about South Korea, North Korea, the DMZ. Okay. So, like we talked about, these offensives were huge. There's several tunnel systems. Though my favorite one was the one that North Korea knew was going to be discovered. So, they painted the walls black and claimed it was a coal mine. Yeah, that was 4D chess shit. I see the cave walls and I want to paint it black.

Yeah, I mean, what North Korea lacked in what you might call sophisticated weaponry, they made up for with just sheer insane determination. You got a respected enemy that has gumption well this is this is where my personal beliefs and juje like crossover is that like pure brute force and ignorance get it gets a lot of stuff done also like they were

still doing this into like the 90s i remember my for my friend whose mom is korean he grew up there as his dad was in the military he said that like his mom's hometown was the one where sometime in the 90s they were doing another commando raid and they ran the midget sub aground by mistake and so when the korean cops showed up they found the crew of the sub because they'd been summarily executed for incompetence by the commandos like i'm dead serious dead serious man so they eventually i think the commandos all got caught but like they some of them it took a while they were like like rucking a hundred miles just fucking going yeah and like there's a lot of korean

commando raids uh north korean commander raids into south korea the raid on the blue house was certainly their high water mark but that did not make them stop trying. Now, with the Military Armistice Commission came the Joint Security Area, commonly known as the JSA, which was plopped down right in the middle of the military demarcation line, which splits Korea into two states. The JSA still exists today, and you can go there as a tourist. I've been there for work i i've never been you know in the fucking guys doing drill and ceremony standing staring down the gate guard like the border guards etc shit but like yeah i've had to go to jsa a bunch of times because that is one place you can get sent to korea as an infantryman if you're like a big guy who looks good in a

uniform but uh as i as i said again basically the long story short is that because some guys forgot to fucking qa qc or uh their vehicle and they were driving a bridge mover like the fucking AVLB, they ran over some middle school girls walking on their way to a birthday party in Yangju. I do remember that. response everything was terrible and korea basically erupted in a general strike and that forced a renegotiation of the status of forces agreements uh and so as a result basically american troops don't patrol dmz except standing at the border doing dnc at fucking pamunjam and there's basically no training land in korea that the u.s military controls anymore so like yeah well a lot of the story and the plots of movies about the 30 000 troops holding back the line it's like nah man they're holding down the fucking chow hall like all the way down and like they're just committing crimes at bars as is tradition yeah exactly they're just they're yeah yeah a hundred percent but yeah but back in

those days it was different yeah well now when you go to the jsa today you can go as a tourist if you go to south korea or if it goes a tourist to north korea i suppose but uh you know if you go it looks much different than the jsa we're going to be talking about today. The line that cuts the Koreas in half now exists within the JSA that you cannot cross unless you're Donald Trump, I guess. And even the buildings within it are cut in half because when it was originally built and originally envisioned, it was not to be divided. Koreans from both sides, as well as Americans and other allied forces,

could go anywhere within that small JSA. Soldiers from North and South Korea and the U.S. kind of awkwardly intermingled with one another. The peace was supposed to be kept by the military police from all sides, having no more than 35 total on duty at one time. However, that number is actually much, much higher because there were soldiers, a ton of soldiers, very nearby on both sides in observation posts and barracks. Yeah. And something that I want to point out that I think you'll get to, but just in case it's not in the notes, is that this is from my dad's recollection.

Prior to the incident we're talking about, one of the other ways that it was kind of the commingling thing was that some South Korean korean iraq army or or joint forces ops were on the north side of the dmz and some of the uh north korean ones or the dprk ones were on the south side of the dmz they were kind of staggered back and forth um leading to a situation in which you could basically be surrounded by north korea and north korean military on all sides as a JSA, as a US NATO fucking soldier there. God dang JSA line split

my turlet in half. This didn't mean the two sides would just treat this place as a friendly hangout, however. Pranks, hazing, and outright assault were not only commonplace, but a daily occurrence. Groups of soldiers from one side would occasionally mug and jump soldiers from the other side out of nowhere they'd play pranks and uh soldiers that like fell asleep on guard duty one soldier remembered like there was a north korean post

that was like a metal box and they would walk up next to it and like slam it with a hammer to scare the shit out of them uh they just all constantly fucked with one another, and they did so in the way that soldiers know how, and it was amplified especially with the casual physical assaults, that it was clear that the only thing stopping the two sides from murdering one another was just the lack of a declared war.

A soldier who was stationed there said American soldiers would play hopscotch halfway down the bridge of no return, so named because it crosses the demarcation line, and after the Korean War war pows from both sides were given a choice of defecting to whichever side had happened to capture them if they wanted to go to their home country or stay where they were if you wanted to go home you'd walk across the bridge while being warned if you cross this bridge there's no turning back um and in case anybody's curious we have talked about the last time this bridge is used in 1968 during the uss pueblo incident so you know

go and listen to that i guess but uh you know the americans are playing hopscotch down the bridge of no return and the north koreans responded to that by jumping in a kamaz truck and trying to run them over um you know harmless fun yeah yeah like now you would just have like prank invasion making youtube videos it's like we're pulling baddies in the dmz the the jsa uh like knockout game if i remember correctly this area they called it the z because of like the way that the river kind of zigzags in that area. And yeah, like that whole area where there's, it's right by the JSA at Pemjohn. But like you're,

you said there are small garrisons very close, like that are full of thousands of soldiers, very nearby on both sides. And like, and they would show up into the JSA all the time. Yeah. And for my dad's recollection, I mean like they were basically when you were up there at what became

Camp Boniface, I can't remember what it was called before you were patrolling. Like you day night patrols, day patrols, whatever. You were out in the DMZ patrolling like you had to have the shit to fucking like know to not walk through minefields. Like it was it was full on like live ammo combat patrol kind of stuff. It's just that. Yeah. So, yeah, it happened frequently, like between the late 50s and 60s, nearly 100 American soldiers died, around 300 South Korean soldiers,

and an unknown number of North Korean soldiers died. So it was an undeclared war. They were shooting constantly. Not to mention there was hundreds of wounded. It was something that was really a kind of eye-opening thing was in my battalion's regimental room at Camp Casey. um it was something that was a really like a kind of eye-opening thing was in my battalion's regimental room um at camp casey they had a lot of memorabilia from like the various eras of the u.s military presence in south korea and one of them was from around this era and it was just some photos that some guys from the units had left behind and it was like photos of like their

buddies and like in a group photo like five or six people would have red Xs crossed out of their face, just like KIA. These dudes were killed in combat on the DMZ in 1967, 68, 69, something like that. Their military police that were stationed at the JSA, they were armed, which means it's a minor miracle that there weren't many shootings there, but there were shootings.

Korea-wide was a different story. We're talking specifically the area considered the JSA. North Korea was a different story we're talking specifically the area considered the jsa uh north korea was a prime shitsters in this area for the reasons that nate already talked about they knew that if they were to fuck with the united states now's the time to do it because there's no way that we could fight a war in vietnam and korea simultaneously so they knew that this is like this is our time to poke Americans in the eye. And by poke Americans in the eye, I mean conduct ambushes in the JSA. For instance, a full complex ambush

involving machine guns, grenades, rocket launchers, and rifles was launched against a truck that was an American and South Korean truck that was driving to the JSA. The soldiers were just showing up for their guard rotation in 1968. Like, these weren't isolated incidents. If you served along the DMZ and the JSA during this time period, you were seeing combat and probably a lot of it. South Korean and American rules of engagement were incredibly strict, as you can imagine. And I would imagine the North Koreans were as well, but, you know,

we can't really confirm what exactly the rules of engagement were. I do not have access to the North Korean internet for some reason. Even though they were armed, they were forbidden from using their guns, barring a few occasions and a few situations. Soldiers could open fire without orders if they were shot at first, but in literally any other situation, they would need direct orders from an officer first. For example, if someone was being assaulted, but not with a gun, and their life was being threatened, they would need orders to intervene with deadly force. This sentence is what you can consider foreshadowing. But that never stopped shit from popping off. It just means when it did, fights looked a lot more like a street brawl

than a war. Or like people are quite famously the border crossing between china and india where the firearms are banned so they get in like braveheart style battles with one another with clubs and shields and shit for example in 1970 a fight started after a north korean guard walked by an american guard and attempted to steal something off his uniform the american soldier then pushed him and soon 30 north k armed with shovels, pipes, and rocks ran out to fight him. They were then matched with 50 Americans and South Koreans who armed themselves pretty much the same way.

Soldiers cannot carry firearms but what was very common was axe handles because there was plenty of them. So everybody's armed with was effectively a big wooden stick that they beat the shit out of each other with. The only thing that stopped this from turning into an outright murder

somehow was self-restraint because the North Koreans started losing and a North Korean soldier walked into the JSA with a Kalashnikov and everybody decided things have gone too far. Let's go home. This is like the world's

most deadliest game of hold me back, bro, outside of a kebab shop. Pretty much. Something I'll throw in for context. I don't know the exact date, but they established the civilian control line on the DMZ in like 1954.

But there wasn't really like the reinforced fences and stuff at this point. Like that came later. Like there were some in some areas, but like... It's pretty much just a line in the dirt. Yeah, the DMZ wasn't and quite frankly even now there are still villages that are technically in the dmz uh where i believe they've expanded the kind of like quarantine

zone and so like there's people you have special permits as a south korean citizen if you can live in those you can go to those areas they also pay more uh like the government the government for living in that area. I can't wait for Charlton Copley to make a movie about it. But back in those days, it just wasn't, the border wasn't as like

tightly demarcated or enforced in a lot of ways. And so like, yeah, the North Koreans, South Koreans would defect, North Koreans would defect and the North Korean military.

Yeah, Americans, yeah, Americans at the JSA would just be like, fuck this shit. I hate gate guard and just walk over.

But like, it's just, we conceive of it a I hate Gate Guard, and just walk over. But it's just we conceive of it a certain way nowadays, but you just have to think of it as not being anywhere near as rigidly enforced. Patrols would occasionally... Way more militarized. Patrols would occasionally just run into one another because they accidentally cross the border. And they'd be like, oh, fuck, they're on our side

of the border. Then the other people are like, oh, fuck, they're on our side of the border. And everybody would start shooting at each other. Well, also, like I was thinking about, you think about the whole thing with the OPs. It's like our fuck they're on our side of the border and everybody would start shooting well also like i was thinking about you think about the whole thing with the ops it's like fucking you technically are on their side of the border it's a very stupid situation how more people didn't die is kind of astonishing because we're this is several decades you know um there was one of my favorite incidents uh was a few years later there was an incident like you talked about nate One of these isolated outposts then under UN command, because this

area is technically UN command, North Koreans ran in there and just started kicking a guy in the balls. And then the guy just falls down, covering his dick and balls up, and the Koreans just start painting DPRK slogans on the inside of the observation falls down covering his dick and balls up and the koreans just start like painting uh like dprk

slogans on the inside of the observation point and to this day that is the most popular movie in north korea man gets hit in groin with 50 pairs of boots like i doing i as a soldier who spent too much time on boring guard duty sometimes alone sometimes with someone else sometimes being alone is better because the guy you can be stuck in a bunker with is a fucking asshole but like you're already like half asleep you're hungry you're just counting the minutes till your relief shows up and

just like a fucking wave of North Koreans come in they just start hammering your dick and balls exactly just getting like not tapped 50 times in a row. I'm also just imagining too that back in those days with North Korea having both the bulk of industrial production on the peninsula and also tons and tons of support

from the Soviet Union, like North Koreans could spare like their jacked, huge, most big boy soldiers just like... Yeah, they did. It was the same on both sides. Like if you're in the JSA, the North Koreans would pick pick their biggest we'd pick our biggest the south koreans pick their and it makes sense that they would those dudes would just brawl and fight because they're regular soldiers but in my mind it would be funnier if they were just like right within eyesight of the

of the un troops just like fucking doing the weird military parade shit where they're like driving motorcycles over a dude's abs or like you know like breaking doing fucking taekwondo shit to shatter a million concrete bricks the battlefield medal that they're gonna get is just like bronze and on it has a pair of bruised testicles they're just basically doing the bonus level from fucking final fight where you just smash a car with a pipe and

stuff with your fist just beat a car up hitting a dude in the nuts with a rasengan it's just fucking incredible then um like the dude just ripped out of their mind just like kicking you in the ball so hard you could taste them and also they were mega everyone was mega on speed pills back then you could buy like you could buy speed as like diet pills over the counter in korea and just just sounds like being in an all boys catholic school i school. It's a lot like just being in the army, except that now

an enemy soldier is the one coming up and giving you testicle trauma. It's like we drafted the entirety of two different hardcore scenes and put them fucking on the DMZ. One of our soldiers was involved in a testicular incident. He reported an encounter

five miles across the dmz and he neutralized the enemy's testicles and you know afterwards there had to be some kind of like eye for an eye so they'd pin down some like north korean soldier kick him in the balls too well what what if the reason you know that like whole thing that like people in north korea are like statistically shorter than south koreans that has to do with the arduous march in the 90s yeah yeah that's later yeah i was gonna say like but what if it's not because of like malnourishment instead it's because all of their grandfathers were all kicked in the nuts way too much now another occasion another very weird one a u.s army major got into a fight with a North Korean journalist.

Now, both the major and the journalist were kind of known for being hot-headed. And, you know, the major's like, fuck this journalist. I've had too much. He, like, pushes him. And then North Korean soldiers show up. He gets the shit kicked out of him. And the journalist, like, waffle stomps him on the throat sometimes on rock army soldiers they'll have like these skill badges and like they're kind of

some of them like cool but also ridiculous looking and one of them i swear to god it's like a martial arts skill badge like it would be like your airborne wings but it's like in color on like a patch on their uniform it's just like a fist with like a cartoon like punching thing and i was like what if the north koreans had that but it was a boot connecting with the dick and balls yeah if if anyone is listening and has artistic skills please draw a challenge coin for us that's a dprk nut kicker challenge coin but this makes sense because kim jong il or is it kim jong il kim il sung right now yeah no what his son it was kim jong il yeah he was a well-known fan of ballet he was also a well-known fan of cocaine and ecstasy yeah i mean who among us he's culturally british he loved ballet so there is a

strong chance that he heard about this and got really into seeing the nutcracker he's like he he what he sits down and watches a nutcracker for the first time he's like this is not what i expected disappointed yeah so so joe you got the script i know we love derailing but now we aren't talking about the gsa uh now we aren't talking about the jsa because a bunch of dudes got their dick and balls kicked in even though that's pretty fucking funny uh instead we're talking about a time that a full scale where it nearly started because of a single poplar tree. So for starters, you should know that, like we talked about, both sides of observation posts all over the place. Soldiers sit in them, bored as hell, trying not to fall asleep and occasionally jerking off.

Probably a key reason for these points was, you know, in the event of another invasion starting, whether to the north or the south, they could see it coming for about five seconds before being wiped off the face of the earth by enough artillery that could kill God himself. So every once in a while, they'd have to trim away bushes and trees that grow so large that it might obscure one of these lines of sight. That is what's going to happen on the morning of August 18th, 1976, when Captain Arthur Boniface and First Lieutenant Mark Bennett led a work party of five South Korean laborers and 11 unarmed soldiers, both American and South Korean, toward the Bridge of No Return. Captain Bonerface. Now, you might feel a little bad about that when you hear the rest of the story. What, does he get his dick kicked off?

He gets hacked to death with an axe. Oh, okay. Like in Don't Mess With The Zohan. I guess. I've never seen that movie. There is a massive poplar tree that is blocking the view of a nearby UN observation point and needed to be trimmed back a little bit. Previous attempts were made to trim the tree back,

but they had been met by large groups of North Korean soldiers, hence why they brought security, though unarmed. Though they were completely unarmed. Oftentimes, security and the JSA would bring their axe handles. They didn't bring anything. The last time they had tried to prune the tree, a North Korean officer, a guy named Lieutenant Pak Choi,

insisted that the tree was sacred, as it had been personally planted by Kim Il-sung, the forever leader of North Korea, which is absolutely not true. And a trend that North Koreans would... It was a trend that they would tell that story on the JSA and the surrounding area whenever anyone wanted to change anything. Because there were... The glorious Kim Il-sung arboretum.

Yeah. There was a protocol in place if you want to change something, trim something, whatever, you would have to both agree upon it. And every time that happened, every time they wanted to cut a tree down, trim a bush, which they did do all the time without

North Korean approval because whenever they'd submit for approval, they'd be like, no the deer leader personally planted that or personally christened this cement block or whatever. So they just ignored them all the time. Nothing that's going to start here is out of the ordinary, is what's important to remember going forward. This kind of stuff happened all the time there was always work parties trimming trees back you know digging moving rocks whatever uh from both sides there's nothing that we're going to talk about it's like oh my god they let out a wood cutting party like all of this is completely

normal but uh joe do you know what's really funny so um for some reason well our uh the host of one of our irish national broadcasters like late night talk show on a friday evening is in love with jfk he's written three books about jfk but jfk's family came from where i'm from in ireland and the famine ship that uh people went over during the famine is like it's kind of repaired, kind of recreated as in the harbour in New Ross but then even better, much like Camille Sung's Arboretum, there's a John F. Kennedy Arboretum with a

hedge maze that every year when I was in primary school we'd have to go to like our yearly school trip would just go to this park that's like 20 minutes away from school So strange There's going to be a Joe Biden one soon trip would just go to this park that's like 20 minutes away from school so strange they're gonna be there's gonna be a joe biden one soon um okay so so when boniface or the workers to start trimming back this poplar tree a group of north koreans appeared led by pack joy pack had a hell

of a reputation at the jsa whenever there was a fight uh you know large scale small scale whatever he was pretty much always there he was known for being an abrasive prick even for like even in the context that of the jsa where nobody was really friendly uh a lot of the north koreans south koreans and americans they had working relationships because they had to uh not it wasn't always fistfights and ball kicking but uh pack was well known for being an asshole. And only a few days before, Pack had a group of soldiers hold Boniface up at gunpoint, accusing him of insulting Kim Il-sung for his insistence that that same poplar tree was not planted by him and was just a tree. Please be normal.

Now, Pack ordered Boniface to stop working, and Boniface just ignored him. Now, soldiers who served under Boniface said that this was his normal way of dealing with things at the JSA. He told his soldiers that their job was to get spit on, insulted and harassed, and to simply ignore it, since the North Korean soldiers just wanted to get a reaction out of them. This is the 1970s version of, like, don't feed the trolls.

Since Boniface had been there, he learned the quickest way to de-escalate pretty much every situation on the JSA was to simply ignore it and North Koreans would then get bored and they would leave him alone. Boniface is a bit of an early proponent of be kind. Boniface literally

turned his back on Pack, which was not a good idea Pak had then called for reinforcements which Boniface did not know about eventually around 30 North Korean soldiers appeared Pak yelled at Boniface quote the branches that are cut will be of no use

just as you will be after you die in English now Boniface again still didn't think anything of this. He thought this was just another incident of shit-talking that he had encountered countless times during his tour at the JSA. It was nothing. It might turn into a fight, but he assumed Pak would just yell at him, someone might get a rock thrown at him, whatever, and then this would go away. Instead, one of the South Korean laborers noticed that Pak had took his watch off,

wrapped it in cloth, and put it in his pocket. Other North Koreans began rolling up their sleeves and loosening up their shoulders and arms. They were literally warming up to commit crimes. A South Korean sergeant saw this unfolding and yelled out to Boniface that something was wrong. Just as Pak then yelled to his soldiers in Korean, kill the bastards. The 30 North Koreans charged at the work party. Now, these guys are armed with mostly axe handles and some with actual axes. The laborers that were working on the tree panicked and dropped their work tools behind them as they ran. The North

Koreans then scooped those tools up, arming themselves with more weapons, along with the tools they'd already brought with them, with the express purpose of violence. Captain Boniface was taken down within seconds and had his skull caved in with the blunt side of an axe. He died almost instantly next to the tree. Boniface was due to leave Korea in three days. Lieutenant Barrett ran for his life and jumped over a nearby retaining wall with an axe-wielding North Korean chasing after him. Then everybody kind of lost track of him. The other soldiers then fought for their lives trying to get away because they were completely unarmed. All but one of them were wounded in one way or another. Another body of UN soldiers showed up to reinforce them and the

fight ended. Now, many of these people that showed up in the second wave were military police and they were armed, but the only nearby officers were Captain Boniface, who was dead, and Lieutenant Barrett, who was missing, so nobody could give them orders to open fire. So they didn't. The entire ordeal lasted about 30 seconds. You can actually watch this entire thing on YouTube because it was recorded by UN soldiers at a nearby outpost. So if you really want to watch that, you can. Now at this point, UN soldiers took away Boniface's body, but nobody could find where Barrett had gone. Time went by and soldiers in observation posts could see the retaining wall that he had jumped over.

And they began to see something very strange was going on. North Korean soldiers kept going over the wall, which led to a tree-filled depression. One would come back, hand an ax to another soldier, and then they would go back down the depression. This went on for 90 minutes before a soldier at the outpost reported it to his supervisor because something seemed off. They sent a team of armed soldiers to go see what was going on, and that's where they found Barrett, who had been hacked to pieces over the course of several hours by North Koreans. He had fallen about 15 feet after he jumped off the retaining wall and broken his leg upon impact, meaning there was never a chance he could have gotten away. Now, as you

can imagine, the fallout from this situation happened pretty much immediately. North Korea immediately blamed the US for everything. A news broadcast in Pyongyang said, quote, At about 10.45 a.m. today, the American imperialist aggressors sent 14 hoodlums with axes into the joint security area to cut down a tree of their own accord, although such work may be mutually consented beforehand. Four persons from our side went to the spot to warn them not to continue work without our consent. from our side went to the spot to warn them not to continue work without our consent. Against our persuasion, they attacked our guards in Moss and committed a serious provocative act of beating our men, wielding murderous weapons, and depending on the fact that they outnumbered us. Our guards could not resort to anything other than self-defense measures under the circumstance

of this reckless provocation. Now, at the same time, Kim Jong-il, future leader of North Korea and Kim Il-sung's son, was actually addressing a conference of the non-aligned nations, which I believe was going on in Sri Lanka at the time. And he asked for a resolution to be passed, blaming the US for all of it and the disillusion of the JSA as a whole um and it was passed yeah um well done boys now in the u.s the ford administration was pissed obviously they're very upset that two of their soldiers had been murdered but they're also really confused at the fact that it happened in the first place like uh now like some of their quotes are incredibly mean uh like're like, how the fuck could they allow themselves to be beaten to death? Why did nobody shoot them? Stuff like that. I guess those are some pretty fair questions to ask of how this could occur in the way that it did.

Um, and it's also, in my opinion, it's fucked up to be like, how could these soldiers allow themselves to be murdered when the reason why nobody opened fire is because they were just following their orders of restraint and de-escalation that was mandated for the JSA. And they didn't go out with weapons because the whole idea was that you wanted it to be non-provocative in the first place. Right. And even if they did bring their axe handles with them or whatever there was still massively outnumbered could would boniface and and barrett not be murdered it's hard to say probably i mean they were up against they were outnumbered like two to one against these axes i don't know what they

could have done um honestly like i can't imagine a more gruesome death than being turned into human bim and bop. I mean, I guess for Boniface, he died pretty much instantly. We don't really know what happened with Barrett, but it was bad. It was real fucked up. Now, the US began talking about a response. Noted psychopath and current Secretary of State at the time, Henry Kissinger, wanted to find a North Korean fishing boat to, quote, shoot up. There was also another thing. Ford was currently fighting for his life to secure his nomination for his run for president. So for people who are unaware, maybe if you're not American, maybe if you are American, you don't know too much about this kind of thing. He actually was never elected president, and he accidentally led his way into the White House.

And this is going to be his first actual election. Basically, Spiro Agnew had to resign for corruption in Watergate. It might not even have been Watergate. It was corruption back in his home state. And so Ford was put in to replace him, and then Nixon had to resign after Watergate in 74. And so Ford was then president. So, yeah, he Michigan's first president, baby. King of the meeting.

That is the Michigan story. Becoming president, never winning an election, leaving Gerald Ford and baby Tron. Here we go. And he would go on to lose the 76th election to Jimmy Carter. He sure would. And so the CIA and Kissinger figured this entire thing may have been cooked up by North Korea, specifically Kim Jong-il, to influence the election, which may have been true. And there was more than one person in the room, specifically Kissinger,

who called for an immediate military response in the form of bombing North Korea. Now, Kissinger's idea was to bomb a nearby military barracks that might contain Lieutenant Pack and the men who committed the murders. William Clements, the deputy secretary of defense, said, quote, I think we should just cut the goddamn thing down, meaning the tree. And so he like, let's send a squad of armed soldiers as a show of force while others cut it down then he backpedaled worried that the entire thing might blow up into a full-scale war so clements thought of a better idea and by better i mean acme ass shit a single soldier would be sat on a bicycle armed with a bomb and then have them pedal over to the tree throw the bomb at the tree and pedal away why is it always the bicycles

henry kissinger effectively told him to shut the fuck up which might be the only time i've ever agreed with henry kissinger before god i cannot wait until that man fucking dies like it will be we will achieve you know that scene in like the simpsons when uh what's his face the lionel hutz is like, imagine the world without X. Imagine the world without lawyers. And everybody's dancing arm in arm around a rainbow. Imagine the world without Henry Kissinger.

How many things would have gone so much more differently and better if that man had been nuked at birth? Most things that he was involved in. Now the u.s had withdrawn from vietnam not too long before this and the military insanity wing of the u.s administration thought that just taking this tree out would look pathetic in the grand scheme of

things america needed a goddamn win fuck that tree which is a serious conversation that was going on not only within the white house but the entire fucking pentagon because the world is very stupid sometimes the pentagon is just like you know petty british neighbors arguing over a tree on a boundary wall with bombs i mean like to be fair it would not be that far of a leap for some gammon-faced guy in London to be like, I'm going to nuke my neighbor. I'm going to put a bomb on his wall because his oak tree is slightly leaning into my garden. And to the surprise of nobody, I'm sure Henry Kissinger also wanted to nuke Pyongyang. Yeah, I figured we were going to get to that. We came very close to that point, which is where we're about to end up.

I figured we were going to get to that. We came very close to that point, which is where we're about to end up. Ford wanted to do something, some kind of show of force that would scare the North Koreans, but maybe not kick off another full-scale war. So he settled on what has to be one of the largest dick-measuring contests the world has ever seen, called Operation Paul Bunyan. Three days after the murders took place, a convoy of 23 armed soldiers drove into the JSA. They were supported by two platoons, about 60 men, who were armed with pistols and axe handles.

Bombs on bridges leading into South Korea that had been planted to prepare for any northern invasion were activated. B-52 bombers armed with nuclear weapons were sent into the direction of Pyongyang from Guam, accompanied by combat aircraft that had been launched by a whole-ass naval task force just off the Korean coast. The amount of aircraft deployed was bigger than the entire North Korean Air Force, and the naval assets deployed were bigger than the entire North Korean Navy. deployed were bigger than the entire North Korean Navy. So we should also say this because most of our audience is American, but many people are not.

And they may not be familiar with Paul Bunyan as the sort of folklore figure in American folklore. But he's basically a big guy with a big blue ox named Babe. And he's a lumberjack. And he's gigantic. And he fucking just does all these. He does like Arthurian legend shit, like feats of daring do. It's an attack on Titan prequel. Yeah, he's just he these like he does like arthurian legend shit like feats of daring do it's an attack on titan prequel yeah he's just he's just he does it's literally like tristan

and his old level of like paul bunyan is just the character that just gets worked into these stories i love the idea of i know the joke about like americans can only conceptualize things in terms of a burger but like the american response to arthurian legend is what if a dude was really big and really good at cutting down trees and his best friend was a fancy cow huge huge cow yes i mean they went for this rather than henry kissinger's idea of the johnny apple seed offensive where he just litters uh pion yang with bombs just drops nukes everywhere yeah so basically they named because paul bunyan cuts down trees are going to cut down a tree. Tree is the center of the inciting incident.

So who better to name it after than than big guy with an axe? It's like you guys have Pak Che, the fucking the kind of like bulldog North Koreans first lieutenant who kills people with an axe. We have a bigger guy with a bigger axe and a fucking cow. Who's blue for some reason. Who will be turned into burgers. That is true. All comes back to burgers. The blue ox when,

I can't remember if babe is male or female, but I presume an ox, I think babe always has horns, so it has to be male. When he reached the end of his fucking, you know, available service period, I presume Paul Bunyan made him into burgers.

He feeds him into the world's largest meat grinder. The Russians observing, the Americans are sending large men with cow made for burger. They are going to drop burger on Pyongyang to feed North Koreans. I have no idea what they are facing. Can you imagine how many burgers they can make

with this guy? They are going to do agitprop in North Korea by giving burger. He has a big cow. They're going to send a with this guy. They are going to do Agitprop in North Korea by giving burgers. He has a big cow. They're going to send a huge fucking guy. Well, the North Koreans sent their big guy, so we got an even fucking bigger one. As soldiers got close

to the DMZ, close air support aircraft as well as attack helicopters circled overhead. 12,000 other soldiers were emergency airlifted to Korea from Japan, while the general populace in South Korea was told to prepare for a nuclear holocaust, just in case. And all well over 1,000 soldiers, airmen, and Marines from the US and South Korea directly took part in the operation.

I don't mean the staging of just in case this turned into something more. I mean, they were actively moved into the jsa yeah my my dad's recollection was that they got a full activation which was a thing they had drilled for but never expected and they basically had to like take their full combat load go out and like like as if as a light infantry company platoon in his case but like the whole the whole brigade got activated and that they just went out and like yeah yeah, it's like y'all are going to go. And literally if anything kicks off, we are fighting.

Yep. I also just Googled. Apparently there is a recipe for a Paul Bunyan burger. The hard part is the hard part is finding a blue cow. So it's a, it's a burger with like cooked bacon and cheese inside of us. That's just like some shit you found off Pinterest. That's literally just like it could be some random dude on the internet

that's like, I got a Paul Bunyan burger. That's like a staple in American cuisine. That's just like all those terrible videos on TikTok of like, check out the TikTok robot voice or whatever. Look at this burger and you cut into it and it just jizzes cheese everywhere.

There's multiple websites. Have you ever heard of a paul bunion burger that might also be like some shit they do in north dakota dakota dakotans we're putting this blame on you um now so over a thousand people directly took part moving into the jsa that's not counting the tens of thousands that were waiting in the wings and the thousands of sailors who were floating just off the coast. Of course, South Koreans also took part in the operation. One of the men happened to be Moon Jae-in, the

future South Korean president when they would start actually electing their presidents in a decade or two. Ironically, this is not important, but Moon Jae-in was born to North Korean parents and then he would famously meet Kim Jong-un around the same time the most awkward diplomatic

mission in American history took place you know the one where Donald Trump saluted a North Korean general and asked a photographer to make sure him and Kim Jong-un looked skinny on camera that one it's a great shame that the US is greatest diplomat of the past 60 years is dennis

rodman dennis rodman rules dennis rodman is so cool i would it is so funny i would put an asterisk next to that until you look into his personal life yeah yeah you know like very weird and sometimes a lot of times bad dude but like. There's a lot of people who are iconic. That does not mean it's a good or a bad thing. Dennis Rodman or Kelly, Philip Schofield. Every soldier assumed that this was going to spiral into an all-out war. Even the Secretary of Defense, when asked about it, he was like, I give it 50-50. So, you know, it could go either way in fact if anything popped off the first response the u.s was going to do

was to nuke pyongyang assuming that anybody who opened a fire at this point meant for the war to start henry kissinger probably has a heart of hard on at this time that would fucking rip off your trousers he wanted to start with a nuke, to be fair. So this is the more normal response when Kissinger is in the room. Then trucks full of North Korean soldiers showed up at the JSA. Hundreds of them got trucked in, jumped out and began sending up fighting positions and machine gun nests in the road opposite of the team sent to cut down the tree. positions in machine gun nests in the road opposite of the team sent to cut down the tree and as soldiers thought they're about to get a front row seat to what would probably be world war iii the engineers who are ordered to use chainsaws to take out the poplar tree kept

breaking their chainsaws so like imagine how anxious everybody is that like everybody's staring down the barrels of machine guns rifles there's nuclear bombers circling overhead there's close attack choppers like a couple hundred feet above you and then some private just keeps snapping chains and burning down fucking uh chainsaws i really do hope i can do an interview with my dad but the thing i would say that he told me that he found really striking about this incident was that like when they actually called to muster all their shit he realized he's like we're so fucked because none of our stuff is working like this is all in such bad shape people haven't been doing

maintenance he's like i had a platoon and i think they probably had three machine guns he's like only one of them was operational because like one of them was just fully down the other one like they had they had so freaked out fucking getting things ready that they they had jammed the gas tube in backwards because his story and he's he's like, genuinely, I remember him telling me this. He just thought that this being an actual muster that no one ever thought would happen, you realize like, wow, we are in such fucking disarray here, which completely tracks with my experience being in the US military in South Korea. I mean, it tracks with my time in the army in general. And clearly nobody thought to double check the chainsaws.

Then as everything was going stupid, everybody was sure that someone was going to open fire the North Koreans back down. They packed up their shit and they left. And according to army intelligence reports, who, of course, have been spying on North Korea for decades at this point and monitoring Korean tactical radios the North Korean response this is abject terror and panic they're like

oh dear fucking god what is why are all these so like what are they doing seems a little disproportionate they got this mad and we hacked two of their dudes up with axes they're well past the fucking around window and now they're in the finding out phase and i would also point out too that like they i mean it's worse now but like i can imagine that since a lot of their equipment they still have was old even at this point a lot of it was like

world war ii vintage soviet stuff like they probably also like the exact same fucking platoon leader equivalent of my dad on the north korea so i was like oh fuck oh shit like you know like you know people i i open up a case of ammo at every fucking round in the fucking link of it just has cigarette butts stuffed into it where a bullet should be i see they imported these this ammunition from albania uh and so at this point uh kim il-sung himself had to like get on uh some kind of radio and start screaming at his military commanders like what the fuck are you doing back off uh like they had because the it all happened so quickly that the north korean military officers at the jsa and in the general area reacted to it like they would in any other situation without really fully grasping what was happening.

I don't think the military commanders on the North Korean side at that moment realized how close everything was to war, but Kim Il-sung did. And he was like, oh, fuck. Oh, shit. Everybody go home. Go home. Get in the truck. I'm thinking of the scene from Copland just because it was in the episode of Kill James Bond that Tom and I just worked on where the guy's like, fuck out. Get lunch. Go get lunch. Clays is closed. Get the fuck.

Go. Go get lunch. And it's like basically that you remember the G.I. Joe PSAs like G.I. Joe is like, oh, no, the the my pork chop sandwich is on fire and the gi joe runs is like kid what the fuck are you doing get the fuck out get the fuck out this is this is some extremely old millennial shit these were like viral videos on like was it new ground place this in at this point in the early 2000s where they took and they the guy basically chopped up the old psas from the end like don't don't take medicine out of your parents medicine cabinet

fucking psas from the episodes of the animated tv show from the 80s gi joe and basically made them into just completely surreal like if i talk to a guy my age from america all i gotta do is like hey what the fuck are you kids doing on my fucking lawn? And don't look at me when I'm talking to you. Like, that's, yeah. Those were like the, honestly, one of the first like viral internet memes I remember. Yeah. And because we're older than shit, we're going to have to cut in the entire pork chop sandwich ad at the end of this episode. Get the fuck out of it.

God, that smelled good. Yeah. Of course I know these. Yeah. Why wouldn't I? So this entire operation took about 40 minutes the tree was left little more than a stump which sat there for years afterwards now within hours of this entire operation winding down kim il-sung came as close as he politically could to apologizing for the

murder of the two soldiers he acknowledged it happened, but he did not apologize. Because in the first statement, it was self-defense. And this one, it was like, you know what? We attacked the Americans. And it wasn't like, oh, we apologize for our action.

I think he said it was regrettable. It was as close as he could come. It's funny because this is a thing that you'll experience if you work with, certainly if you work with the Korean military. It's just a cultural difference thing and I'm sure it's the same in North Korea as in South Korea, but there is definitely a culture like there cannot be a kind of military AAR

or after action review culture where you're like, here's what we fucked up. Here's how we'll improve it because acknowledging what you fucked up, like, wait, you just said out loud that you fucked up? Like, this guy fucked up. Does anyone know? How is this guy fucked up does anyone know how is this guy allowed to have his job he said he fucked up like everything is about like i saw the rock army company fucking put two platoon size firing positions pointed directly at each

other during exercise and guys were like everything everything went according to plan i'm sitting in the dprk ar and like lieutenant Pack is like okay so I guess I shouldn't order I shouldn't have ordered my soldiers to brain those two guys with axes next time we'll just kick them in the balls all right three sustains three improves sustains great motivation great

fucking hustle all right there's always someone who gives great communication assault element you were absolutely on of it the three improves um uh we killed two guys with an axe. They've got a trillion fucking dollar military budget. They're absolutely going to kick us in the balls. Maybe we should just do ball kicking next time.

They're inventing pneumatic boots so you can kick people in the nuts harder. Rocket power boots. We invented the steam engine that aims directly for the nutsack. Running around with like Ratchet and Clank style weapons hitting each other in the nuts. The North Korean CEO just be like, guys, look, okay, I know you want to kick them fucking the balls. That's fine.

I just don't want to have to know about it. All right. You kill him with an axe. I have to know about it. You kick him in the nuts 50 times and write shit on their OP. That's cool. All right. Just don't make me have to know about it.

And they're like, huh, in North Korea. know about it and they're like uh now afterwards uh within days and weeks several rounds of talks later i assume more than one bout of nut kicking north korea removed its guard post from the southern side of the joint security area everyone else did the same side from the northern side

and everyone agreed that the military demarcation line would run smack dab through the jsa and separate North Korean forces from everybody else so this shit would never happen again. And hence, that is why the JSA is separated to today. Everyone in the Ford administration considered this operation a massive success other than Henry Kissinger. Of course, nobody died. He was pissed that he wasn't allowed to blow up a barracks or two, and he told President for that the government should, quote,

conduct a study of how many Americans and North Koreans have to kill before we have them deforested and change their climate, which means until we nuke them. Yeah, it's like, how many do they have to kill? Because I want to kill American soldiers, among other people. I've been doing a lot of it. Henry Kissinger's just

floating in a tank like Motoko Kusanagi like fueled by his own hate floating in his own he's corn the blood God from fucking Warhammer 40k he doesn't care where the blood comes from the blood just must flow you know so a monument to the two murdered officers sits where the tree once

did today nobody was of course held accountable for it that we know of because we have no idea what happened to Lieutenant Pack. We're not even sure if Pack Joy is his real name. That's just what he was known as. He seemingly disappears from history at this point.

If you are a listener and you're in North Korea and you know what happened to Pack Joy, let us know. I will say, I don't know if I'm reading this correctly, but that name Pac Che, it sounds a little interesting to me because Che is a surname and Pac is a surname. Like Park is Romanized.

Pac, that's the same thing. So like, probably not Israel. Kind of funny because normally, normally Korean, actually all Korean names are basically like single, uh,

it'll be like one syllable surname and then two syllables for your, for your given name. Like, uh, uh, who's like Kim daejon that kind of a thing kim il-sung kim jong-il his name was probably something that the americans just called him and they knew he was a lieutenant so like it's probably not his real name like they

call him the bulldog and shit like that pack almost certainly wasn't his actual name so we we have no idea what happens to him it's also really funny too because i'm just imagining one guy who was bad at fucking Korean, but went to DLI, fucking sees his name tape. And he's like, oh, it says Park. And the other guy says, no, it's just Che. And they're like, oh, it's just Park Che. No, it's just some dickhead like officer from Iowa

who thinks his name is Park Choi, but can't say it right. Fucking God. And then one of the Americans was going to ask a Katusa, but they were missing because they were at a Katusa meeting. Yeah, exactly. They were doing, singing patriotic songs and,

uh, and, and trading one book of pornography. Um, like the, some, like we can end this on a somewhat ironic note, uh,

because our podcast kills us on the inside. The axes used during this murder, uh, these murderers rather are on display in a North Korean museum, ironically known as the museum of peace yeah honestly like north korea is just purely goaded for their ironic names of things i would say also like the more you dig into anecdotes like that's from the cold war or just in general in korea korean peninsula whatever any era but you find these insane stories and one

i'll end on because i just as my hypothetical name of Kim Dae-jung, the president of South Korea, I think in the early 90s, I'm not joking, Park Chung-hee, the military dictator of South Korea, didn't like him because he was an anti-government sort of figure. And so while he was at a conference in Japan, the Korean CIA, literally the KCIA, kidnapped him and they were going to throw him overboard in the sea of Japan. But the US ambassador literally had to fucking intervene and call Park Chung-hee personally and be like, we will fucking cut off all military and economic assistance if you kill this guy. I mean- I swear to fucking God. And so they were able to radio the boat in the middle of the sea of Japan

and be like, don't throw them overboard, please. It wouldn't be the weirdest thing the Korean CIA ever did, which included murdering one of the presidents. Seemingly out of the blue. He was killed by the fucking head of the CIA. Like during. So basically, with Park Chung-hee, like his whole story was like he was taking the civil service exam in occupied Korea and someone overheard him speaking Jap or Korean and he got expelled. He got disqualified from the exam because he weren't allowed to speak.

The degree of what the Japanese did in Korea is unbelievable. Like my, my ex-girlfriend, her, her, her grandmother spoke Korean as her native language, but could only read and write in the Japanese alphabet because she was forbidden from learning the Korean alphabet in school.

Like, and that's a tiny example example there are so many things they did and in this case yeah the guy who went on to be the military dictator uh was not allowed to join the civil service because or maybe in a military academy exam because he had spoken his native language aloud uh but then they were like oh you can be an officer in occupied manchuria instead and then he went on become to do a lot of shit. So unifying theory of the worst people in history are failed civil servants. Fuck. I can't remember if it was a civil service exam or if it was to get into a military academy. It was an exam that was pivotal in his life.

And he was expelled, disqualified solely because they overheard him speaking to another kid in Korean, not Japanese. Anyway, we've derailed. This is a long episode. But I'll just say weird anecdotes about Korean history are always fascinating also weird anecdotes about military history are always fascinating there was legitimately a dude who identified as a Black Panther who murdered some people on a fucking rifle range at Camp Casey in like the 80s

like Korea military stuff always gets crazy Korea was well known as like the wild west of the being in the US army until very recently very recently even when I was in people like oh i was in korea and people like oh so you're an alcoholic who committed multiple crimes and fucking yeah just loves blowing all your money on prostitutes um i i knew guys who were like uh either older

ncos or prior service guys who had been in korea before the yangju highway incident and the whole like renegotiation of the sofa and yeah the stories they took my my friend telling me stories about oh yeah running into the battalion chaplain at a brothel like just fucking it was a madhouse in so many ways as as kwan mills says a preacher's eat pussy too one of one of my one of my favorite uh anecdotes uh not an anecdote but like a joke whatever is like what's the fastest way to make sergeant when you get stationed in Korea is to go there as a staff sergeant? Staff sergeant yeah I mean what I'll say is that it's the same now but instead of insane behavior that's like more or less

sanctioned it's that they've ratcheted shit down so much because soldiers can't get stop fucking up but now basically literally breathing when you're off duty gets you an article 15 like it's so strict in a way that makes soldiers stupid and makes them fucking act out more. And also, don't get me wrong, American soldiers do a lot of

really fucked up shit in Korea. But now, if they do really fucked up shit, they go to Korean prison because of the way the sofa works. So I'm dead serious. RS1 had to have an accountability sheet for the battalion that included three soldiers on our books who were in Korean prison for, and I'm not joking, trying to import a whole fucking case of spice through the US.s postal service of course into korea um so that is operation paul bunyan

so we do a thing on the show called questions from the legion if you'd like to ask us a question support the show via patreon even down to a dollar ask us on discord uh you can ask us through a patreon dm twitter you could attach it to an axe and leave it next to Tom's front door. And today's question... Steal a hammer from outside the studio and then write it on the hammer and give it back to us. Today's question... We did have a hammer stolen. Anyway, please continue.

Today's question comes to us from Patreon. And as you guys record a lot, you've guessed it on a lot of different podcasts. You've recorded with a lot of different people. And I'm going to add my own thing here. Do not name who you're recording with at the time of this. Tell us a story of a recording gone terribly wrong that you hated. Look, I obviously see more of it from the side of the producer than the person on the show. There have been times when I've had shows that just, you know, the people are weird. One time a person came into our studio in London and clearly hadn't bathed in a very long time and the studio smelled awful.

Was this a guest or just a random person that wondered? It was a guest. It was a guest who came in and they smelled very, very bad. And they are extremely prominent in the UK. So it was one of those things where I'm like, I don't know what's happening here. However, I would say the worst for me was editing an episode of a show with a prominent podcast host from another show who was not only incredibly annoying, but managed to fuck his audio so badly. That was probably the longest i've ever had to spend on on an episode of a show that was probably an hour and 10 minutes long and also was just two people fucking talking i have one again this actually was in a podcast it was a stream um and it was

back in 2020 uh yeah 2020 when um the second karabakh war started uh here in armenia um and i was attempting to fundraise uh you know raise awareness whatever i could do because i couldn't get over uh to armenia at the time it was in the middle of covid i was in hawaii which actually had like probably the strictest covid uh rules in the entire united states also i didn't fully understand how armenia worked quite yet. But I was going on literally anybody who would have time for me. And I went on the stream and I was asking for... I believe they asked, what would you like the international community or whatever, NATO, EU, someone, what would you like someone to do? I was like,

fucking give us weapons like we need weapons we need everything you can get like go to a shed outside find an old AR throw it out of a plane it's better than what people have here um and they started calling me an American imperialist and shit

and like a warmonger like bitch war is already fucking happening we're being invaded like what if a podcaster was victor boo like how can i be a warmonger the capital city is being cluster bombed you know um people are being beheaded and executed like on like and the videos are being put on telegram uh but yeah i was the warmonger because people couldn't i mean it was baffling to me um and i have become since then significantly more picky on what shows i end up on which if anybody has been paying attention that's virtually none now tom just said something we had to cut out that reminded me of something that happened um probably what a year ago when we did the uh the nan king

series um where i had japanese nationalists swarming every layer of social media that not only i have what the show has they found my email they found the show's email i'm surprised they didn't find nate's email and i that went on for about nine months. I would just, if anyone ever sent me an email, I'll just respond with, Doc Doe is Korean. See, this Japanese nationalists have nothing on me because I found Nate's email, but they couldn't. So that's how we all got linked up.

Tom, what is yours? Mine? So, a bit of background. Obviously, I'm Irish. I've only ever held since how long have you been really proud of you for coming out as irish um so obviously like i've only really held one gun and uh recently i was interviewing someone who after we finished recording like casually mentioned oh yeah i just had a gun on me for the entire

interview in London? no no no he was in America it was just kind of like big disconcerting like oh yeah this guy was strapped up for the entire interview honestly like I've had very few unpleasant

recording experiences I have as well i should say i also have there was a time when i took just about any work and i've had a bunch of insane british tories worst people you can think of for a client podcast yes i've had i i unintentionally dissed the the tory mp who was my age by i didn't recognize the name was nigerian and i didn't recognize if it was male or female so i walked into the room and just started speaking to his basically his assistant who was probably like a 25 year old you know british nigerian woman like she was the mp and he clearly got fucking very unhappy with me and then i was like bro like you went to eat and you're younger

than me um like i i've had like generally like quite quite pleasant recording experiences for stuff I do myself stuff that I can talk about, like confidential stuff, like contract stuff, I have just encountered the highest levels of idiocy from people who

are infinitely wealthy but don't know how to use a laptop or don't know how to speak into a mic like yeah all right fellas thank you so much for joining me again here in the lines of by donkeys podcast use this area to plug your other shows uh listen to beneath skin the show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing listen to all the stuff that nate is gonna name but also since joe is so humble and never mentions it, buy Joe's books.

Yeah, buy his books. Please buy my books. They're good. And also listen to the audiobook that Tom produced of Joe narrating his book, The Hooligans of Kandahar. Tom's put a lot of work in this. Joe's put a lot of work in this. Joe wrote the fucking book.

So that's available on the Patreon. You should listen to it. I produce other shows. One is called Kill James Bond, movie podcast with three incredibly funny trans co-hosts. They're extremely great. Love that show a lot. I also produce What a Hell of a Way to Die, a show with me and Francis Horton about why you shouldn't join the military, and also dad advice and gardening advice. And I also produce Trash Future, a show about the tech industry and how dumb it is, and when you close to read what tech says about itself, you realize how just empty and vacuous and stupid

and also funny it is. Also, it's also a lot about British politics, so those all. As well, as an addendum, if you want to hear more of me on the hell of a way, Patreon, I do a show with a friend of this show, Shox, where we call 33rd County, where we plumb

the depths of the Irishish and irish american experience i had to watch boondock saints last night i came up with the fucking idea on a goddamn train back from fucking edinburgh last year and i texted the two of them and made a fucking group chat and i immediately made the logo of the group chat the house of pain album cover so you know what fucking i'm glad it's taken off i'm glad people like it listen it's really funny great show both natural podcasters those those two, so if I can listen to it. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon.

You get regular episodes like this early. You get five plus years of bonus content. You get the Hooligans of Kandahar audiobook. I'm planning on doing other audiobooks in the future. And failing that, consider leaving us a review on wherever it is you listen to to podcasts and until next time,

uh, jump on a bicycle, arm yourself with a bomb and blow up a nearby tree.