Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 334 - The Battle of Saragarhi

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

Get tickets to our show in Belfast this weekend! https://www.universe.com/events/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-belfast-tickets-83V5QD Can't make it to belfast? we're streaming it! https://www.eventbrite.com/e/livestream-lions-led-by-donkeys-live-in-belfast-tickets-1008166803047?aff=oddtdtcreator&keep_tld=1 Support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/lionsledbydonkeys Check out the merch store: https://llbdmerch.com/ Stranded in the mountains of Afghanistan, 21 Sikh soldiers face off against thousands of Afghan tribesmen. Hamstrung by British military racism and some of the dumbest battle plans the brits could come up with, they fight till the last. Sources: Jay Singh-Sohal. Saragarhi: The Forgotten Battle. Col Kanwaljit Singh. Saragarhi Battalion: Ashes to Glory https://www.sikhnet.com/news/battle-saragarhi-tale-sacrifice-and-unyielding-bravery-sikh-history https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/when-21-sikh-soldiers-stood-against-10000-men-the-battle-of-saragarhi/

Hey everybody! Lion's Head by Donkeys is live in Belfast at the Oye Music Center Saturday, 26th October. Tickets are still available and if you can't make it to Belfast, good news, we are live streaming it and tickets are still available for that as well. You can find both of the links for either of those tickets, or both, in our show notes, So click on those and get your tickets. Our merch store is restocked. So if you missed any of the live shows, specific merch, and wherever date that we went to and you couldn't make it to, it's all on our merch store. LLBDmerch.com.

So get your orders in while they last. We only have certain sizes and certain numbers and whichever one it happens to be. So if you want something, get your order in. Once again that is LLBDMerch.com and the link will also be in the show notes. Thank you. Hey everyone, and welcome to the Lions I Buy Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and I've unfortunately been transported back in time and got myself enlisted in the British Army circa the 1880s. Nate and I are wandering through the Afghan mountains. It's hot, our boots suck, and we assume this must be the last time any British soldiers will ever set foot on these hills, and certainly

the last of our ancestors. Our commanders keep telling us our mission is rounding a corner. We've read some good news that said that the people that we've been killing, wounded, and all around ruining their lives for years actually like us, which makes us feel nice and cozy inside. I'm about to ask Nate what he's going to do over his upcoming leave when a man with a Giselle pops up from behind a rock and punches a speed hole directly through my chest. It hurts, but that's okay. A smile creases my face as I begin to taste blood because finally I'm no longer British. Ha ha. I knew you were going there. Oh my God. When you said British Army 1880s, I was just like,

I'm just imagining a voiceover narration being like, don't worry, Nathan Biffay, this is the last time that this Lee Enfield rifle will be pointed at someone who looks like you. I promise it will never be pointed at anyone of your generation or younger ever again. I think I've made this joke before on the show is like a handshake between me and like my Soviet Armenian ancestors, like shaking hands,

like wandering through the Afghan mountains until some rando tries to kill us. There is a story totally apocryphal. And because it reminds me a little too much of a popular Hollywood movie, I have this feeling that it didn't happen. But I did hear this story from multiple people independently of one another who said that when my unit, first brigade, or rather fourth brigade, 25th

infantry division relieved, I believe, first ID in Iraq in... Where were they? They would have been in, I think, Bab-il province, and then to some extent in Anbar, and in 2005 to the very, very beginning of 2007. They were there like 14 months. And supposedly when they relieved first ID, there was a story about left seat, right seat rides. So basically for non-military people or non-US people, that's like when the outgoing unit basically takes you on its patrols and shows you how it does stuff. And then like the idea is that you will slowly transition to then like you being in charge in the driver's seat and them in the passenger seat. Like you kind of transition it out,

but it's supposed to be seamless. It never is. No, it's absolutely never is. Supposedly during this, there was a guy, one of like the Joes, who was up in the turret on a vehicle. I presume it would have had to have been like a Humvee or maybe a Bradley. I don't know. But he was like, fuck you, I'm going home. Was just like flipping people off everywhere as they were rolling around, you know, escandaria.

And then someone shot him through the hand with a crossbow. Now that reminds me a little bit of Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. And so that's why I'm like, I think the soldiers may have made this up. However, if you told me someone got shot through the hand with an arrow in Afghanistan, I would 100% believe it immediately. You don't have to qualify. It reminds me immediately of that joke from half baked, which I will not quote directly. Was I want to be the first motherfucker to die from getting hit with a crossbow?

Yeah. quote directly was I want to be the first motherfucker to die from getting hit with a crossbow. Yeah, I mean, I would say the thing about Afghanistan is that someone could shoot you like with a $20,000 surface to air missile, or they could shoot you with what I would best describe as like a bedazzled arrow from Hyrule. Either one is completely plausible. The one thing is they probably wouldn't waste the $20,000 Sam on you because in the same vein as When they tried to do stuff where they would be like, hey I wonder if we tactically leave certain weapons out if we might be able to observe people and see like where they take them No one ever picked up the Sam's because they're like that's too fucking valuable Yeah, either this is a trap or whoever owns this wants this back and they are gonna get it and like pick up an RPG 7. Hell. Yeah AK 47

Hell, yeah fucking what is it TC 6? I think was the the Italian mine. They'll take those. Yeah, absolutely You can sell that shit. You can break it down You can probably make fucking stern out to cook shit on from fucking all of the the plastic explosive But they will not take you know an SA-7. They're not doing it. They will not take a, certainly not a Stinger missile. Yeah. Well, also they have batteries and stuff. They know they can't charge them and like, yeah, I'd rather have the bedazzled Hyrule art. I want Gandalf's fucking, no, no, no, no, no. Ganondorf's goddamn bedazzled bow and arrow quiver with sequins all over it.

Imagine getting gut-shotted by the bedazzled Hyrule bowed. You're like, oh man, look at the drip on that motherfucker. As you're like- I don't want to be flippant, but one of my soldiers once said that Afghanistan is going to a combat zone where it's Hyrule with cell phones. And he was right. This was before I deployed and then when I went there and I'm like- Respect, honestly? It's just the aesthetics like 100% the toughest dudes

you've ever met. And they're like climbing mountains in sandals or flip flops. And then like a guy is shooting at you with an AK 47 that's like twice as old as he is, but he's wrapped it in like blue saran wrapped basically to look like a Siroc vodka shop. Honestly, I respect the drip because I mean drip because we recovered a lot of Taliban weapons that had stickers and jewelry attached to them. Yes. Beads. Our own Afghan soldiers did the same thing.

We would often be like, hey, why don't you guys wear boots? We gave you boots and you're like, nah bro, don't need them. Okay, fair enough. I'm too fly to die. My pussy ass feet need boots. Like we gave you boots and like, nah bro, don't need them. Like, okay, fair enough. I'm too fly to die. My pussy ass feet need boots, yours don't. I got calluses like nobody's business. I wear sandals in the snow. They absolutely do. I mean, sometimes you see some wild sartorial choices, but I guess the thing I'd say-

I mean, it's just like a jingle trucks, like as we call them, like drip the fuck out semi trucks. Shit whips, man. They paint murals everywhere. They put beads and doilies and fucking decorative finishes on everything. I was thinking about this the other day, you and I were talking about mailing stuff long distance between countries,

to countries that aren't really on the normal logistics chain. And I remember I bought some of those dream chests. I had one of my interpreters buy me some of it in the bizarre and they were like $10 each for like the sort of like made out of tin chests that would like all the heart decorative crazy fucking painted murals. Like the heart on fire with arrows behind it. Heart with an arrow through it, heart with a dagger

through it, blood dripping everywhere. Like just the wildest artwork. Unfortunately they all got damaged over the years and I had to get rid of them. But like I'm sure they weren't recyclable because they probably gave you cancer. But like, I mean, I made a joke once to my friend that I was like, yeah, when they came over and saw it, I was like, nah, there's the little locking compartment inside of the chest. And

I'm just like, just open it up. I've got nothing but the soon. Just giving you flashbacks. Oh my God. Yeah, dude. I just, what I was going to say is more that we're kind of on a reverie about Afghanistan, but it's just, I think the point we're making here is that one of the things about Afghanistan, at least in the time we were there, I was there at 0910. You were there, I think before then, then also after that. Yes. Is that you will encounter, you know, a situation in which you are in a room where a guy has a satellite modem to use on a laptop and outside of that room is a donkey cart or a guy wearing fake Oakleys and sandals

powering his welding rig with an old Chinese generator with a drive belt that's five sizes too big. Hell yeah. And it just looks like a floppy garden hose. Like not making light of how war torn and impoverished that country is. It's one of the poorest countries on earth and people, they make do. Like they fucking make do. It's not, you know, we're not making light of the current situation of

Gannison as well because things have gotten worse for many, many different reasons that we obviously don't need to go into to talk about the 1800s. But yeah. I want to say this, that the war sucked was completely not just wrong, but also made no sense from the beginning. But I came away from it from all the bad experiences with profound respect and admiration for Afghan people. And also like on the comical side, the aesthetic in that country is just so wild. It is so hard. Undefeatable drip.

Undefeatable drip and also just like the combination of like completely different culture of how things are communicated that like this guy was like a Taliban fighter or a Hukani network or you know, any one of these organizations like fighter, he gets killed. How do they commemorate him? They put out a Photoshop of him like Photoshopped badly into a field of flowers holding him with another dude and just like flaming heart arrow, masha la stuff all over it. Hell yeah, man. I have seen the wildest truck decals I've ever seen in my life. I've seen when a soldier says I saw seven people on a motorcycle or I saw 40 people in a minivan, he's not lying. I just, it's such a, I have profound respect

for that country. And this is relevant to your opening statement because you will encounter 1890s shit there. Or 1880s shit. You will encounter, far older than that, you will go past a calat that was recently built. Up the hill is a castle that was probably built during Alexander the Great's time. That's exactly what happened to my first, in my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar. We had an outpost that was overlooked by an Alexander the Great cat. So we were told, but yeah. We were driving down the road that the MSR that went from Sharana to Kushimand. And yeah, there was one alumn people said was from, you know, when the Alexander of Macedon was

occupying Afghanistan. It was kind of hilarious to see our outpost was overlooked by a castle, as we were told, was used or built by Alexander the Great, like maybe half a kilometer away from a former Soviet fire base. It's like, wow, this is just a string of defeats, isn't it boys? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Karakot Castle, one of the places that we would drive to was a former Soviet battalion CP. And then the Four Corners Junction on the road from Sharana that would take you to to Gazanye City. There was the Bandisarday Dam that was built by the Soviet Union. It has Bandisarday or Dasarday Bond written in Pashto and in Russian. This

is like 1967 on it. And it's like the only Afghan astronaut, the Soviet cosmonaut from Afghanistan was from Bandesarde. But then also down the street, like I said, is as you were going past the four corners, you might encounter Kuchy people on a... Basically taking their animals from Pakistan to Afghanistan for pasture and mule trains, wagon trains of mules and camels and stuff like that. You know, I ran into an interesting fact here, Nate, while writing this episode. I don't know if you want to call it an interesting fact, but something that kind of reinforced

just how long we've been doing this show. A long time ago, we did an episode about the infamous British retreat from Kabul during the first Anglo-Afghan War. It was one of our earliest episodes and it happened so long ago, it happened before the American retreat from Kabul. That is how long we've been doing this show. So yeah, we recorded that episode years and years and years before the US returned from Afghanistan. And of course it is full of jokes about hopefully this doesn't happen again. And you know, here we are six and a half years later.

All I can say is we love to be like, Oh, we're not going to be like the Russians. And you know here we are six and a half years later All I can say is we love to be like, oh, we're not gonna be like the Russians and you're right We're not because we stayed longer and they they were able to drive out. That's right We were not in that position. We were not in Eddie's position to drive up through the fucking Friendship bridge. What is it up into? Oh, I can't even fucking remember anymore. Is it Tajik? There's the Tajikistan crossing. There's also the crossing that goes to Turkmenistan. And then, I mean, you definitely don't want to... You wouldn't be going through Badakhshan to try to do the crossing into China and or Pakistan because that's just called like truck loses traction and you fall down a thousand mountains.

That's going to kind of be what the area we're talking about today is like. For the sake of today's show, we have to jump ahead to the late 1800s. Though just because we've moved ahead a few decades, the reasons for what will become the Battle of Saragari, which is what we're talking about today, are all virtually the same reasons why the first Anglo-Afghan War and all the other preceding Anglo-Afghan Wars happened. The great game between Britain and Russia and Central Asia. The British fought another war in Afghanistan in 1878. This one went a lot better than the first for them. And a lot of Afghan land was ceded over to become part of British India. However, the border and the decision of what exactly was Afghan and what was British had yet to be

decided officially. At least to the British who still thought to themselves to be in a position to force things upon the weakened Afghan state, which was then led by an emir named Abdur Rahman Khan, who was the grandson of Dost Mohammad, the man who defeated the British during the First War. He had become emir in 1880 and set upon attempting to unify Afghanistan under his rule through a system of a crushing military dictatorship partnered with a horrific genocide against the Hazara people. Thankfully, a system that does not keep coming back. Oh my God. Yeah. Every time you bring that up. So just because people may not be familiar

with this, I'll give you a really quick summary. So Hazara people are Shia. There are not a lot of Shia groups in Afghanistan. Almost everybody is Sunni Muslim, but probably the largest ethnic group and visibly Shia group are Hazara. Hazara people also are ethnically different looking than Pashtun and Tajik people, Turkmen people. Basically, the kind of apocryphal sort of folk legend is that they're descended from Mongols, but they look more like East Asian people Stereotypically East Asian people then Pashtuns and Tajiks who are the largest ethnic groups in Afghanistan by percentage Who look what you would describe as like using the term sometimes they say Aryan But basically a lot of people look more like how you would stereotypically

Associate with Europeans like Indo-European people. They are, basically put it this way, Joe and I could both be Pashtun. Now, we wouldn't look like we do because of the situation in that country in terms of stuff like nutrition, and also just people typically are very, very thin there because of lack of access to food and clean water. But like ethnically, Joe and I, if we were,

it wouldn't be like you're faking. Even me, genuinely, I've seen people who look like me in Afghanistan, who are from Afghanistan it wouldn't be like you're faking. Even me, genuinely I've seen people who look like me in Afghanistan, who are from Afghanistan, red hair, blue eyes. Like, absolutely. However, the reason I bring this up is that, I'll give you a quick little story that I'm hearing about this,

because Hazara people have been persecuted significantly. They've been targeted significantly. Then and now, they are constantly targets of both the Taliban and then also ISIS-K and the even more extreme groups that have shown up. So the Taliban in the 90s used to have this kind of joke they'd say. They'd be like, we just think Afghanistan, you know, it's like, we have a solution for this country. Everyone just needs to go back to their own country. So that means Afghans have Afghanistan

and by Afghan they mean Pashtuns. Tajiks go to Tajistan, Turkmen go to Turkmenistan, Uzbeks go to Uzbekistan, Pazar go to Khyberistan, which means graveyard. Ah, so yeah. And it has started up again as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you can go back and you can find stuff from the 1400s where there are massacres of Hazaras. You can find stuff from the 1800s and find stuff from now. Yep. There was a Hazara girls school that was targeted by a suicide bomber that killed lots of people in 2021, I believe, and the 2020 beginning of 2021, I believe. Like it's, it's horrific.

Yep. And unfortunately, for the context of this episode, this system worked. He crushed multiple rebellions against him, which are mostly led by his relatives, before eventually forcing the various warlords and regional leaders to fall in line because they knew what would happen if they didn't. But while this is going on, he had Russia pressing in from one side and the British continuing to annoy him over the border in what was British India and what is today Pakistan. He would need to keep them both happy or at the very least keep them at bay so he didn't get spit roasted by the both of them in a two- pronged invasion. His negotiations with the British about the hard line between British India and Afghanistan brought us the Durand line.

The Durand line. Yeah, good old Mortimer Durand decided to make us this amazing line. And don't worry, it'll never be relevant ever again. Thankfully it solved all of the issues. Basically. So for people who are the great game, the idea basically being that like the Russian empire was expanding at the same time as the British empire or rather the British empire had gotten to its zenith around this time. And particularly the concern was Russian colonialism and occupation of central

Asian republics and regions meant that like at a certain point Russia and Britain were going to have a share border and they didn't, basically the Brits didn't want that. And so the idea was to have Afghanistan be this buffer state. Right. Well, here's the thing. So it's a Russia and India's borders don't touch. They draw this line. They cut the Pashtun homeland in half. And also Britain no longer rules India. India partitions along religious lines. So now it's Pakistan, a country with half the Pashtun population, but certainly not ruled by Pashtun people. And Pashtun people are not treated particularly well by the Pakistani government. And yeah, I mean, I'm not going

to go so far as to say Pakistan shouldn't exist, but it's a bit of an anomaly in terms of like that it's the Northwest of what's now called a hyper Pakhtunk and the camera the name of the other province I want to say it's a the federally administered travel areas and then and then the hybrid pocket and law and then Baluchistan which is a completely different group unrelated to a kind of an autonomous region and then have loads simmering national liberation struggles if you want to come then you have Punjab and Sindh, and then you have Jammu and Kashmir. Famously another place where nothing bad has ever happened. The Durand Line, we have touched upon it before in the Context for Soviet Afghan War series,

where one of the reasons why Pakistan ISI supported at first the communist revolution in Afghanistan was because the king of Afghanistan believed in the reunification of Pashtunistan as far as it's considered. And going so far as even after all of that was over, the Soviet Union leaves, the PDPA falls, and they're trying to form a government which before what's called the Afghan Civil War, a lot of people thought, let's put the king back. And once again, the ISI fought that because he still believed in reunifying Pashtun lands leading directly to the Afghans of war. So the Durand line has crossed a lot of things we have talked about.

King Zahir Shah is ready to take power and reunite Afghanistan. And it would have been more of like a constitutional monarchy, like they could have used him as a unifying, you know, symbol. And instead the ISI is like, no, let's blow this shit up again. The ISI is like, he's been in Italy too long. If an Afghan king becomes Italian, he'll be just too powerful. Afghan King becomes Italian, he'll be too powerful. However, even with the British kind of getting what they wanted, the vast majority of land in the Northwest of British India was rough, remote and sparsely populated. It also happened to be incredibly strategically important due to the fact

that the Khyber Pass cuts right through it. Yep. And now for those who don't know, the Khyber Pass has probably seen more invasions than just about any small mountain pass in the world. It's pretty much the only connection between these two regions, and on top of it being incredibly militarily important, it was obviously a major trade artery and continues to be so to this day. However, like the area around it, it's pretty hard living.

It's rough as hell. It's inhospitable if you're unfamiliar with it and how to survive there. And this is not only due to the complex politics that cross multiple different tribes of Pashtun people, but also because of simple logistics. Because of all of those things, it also happens to be a nightmare to support and resupply soldiers that you have stationed there. And this was before they had the kind of vehicles we have today that can get over this terrain. Basically Afghanistan is landlocked. I presume you come into this podcast aware of this fact. And back then, as well as now, the resupply routes for garrisons along this border, along

this route, and then specifically up to the border with Afghanistan or the entry to Afghanistan, because you have the road that runs from Peshawar to Jalalabad. And then it's, what is it, Torqam. Torqam gate basically is the border in the Khyber Pass. Basically stuff comes in by boat, typically nowadays to Karachi, but back in British India days, I don't know the other ports they were using. And then has to be rail lined, whatever mule train carried on backs up basically to Peshawar, to Jalalabad, and then to Kabul. It's a bit of a hike. It's still the same way to this day. And if you know this, everything the US military brought

into that country that wasn't like so deemed strategic and important that it needed to be airlifted, which is just a very expensive and planes can't carry that much, relatively speaking. It was brought in this way. Port of Karachi, either trucked or train transported up to Peshawar, Peshawar onto truck, flatbed trucks in containers, driven up. And then it came to American bases with about a third of it burned down because it was shot with fucking RPGs. Or stolen. Stolen was always a possibility. That happened to us quite a few times. Yeah, yeah. The story of the guy buying the Wi-Fi router from Walmart in 2004. When he opened it up, it was just a bag full of dirt with puto written on it in Spanish, which is a homophobic slur in

Spanish. Imagine that, but for a shipping container. And this happened all the time. When we were leaving my first tour in Afghanistan, you pack all your bags, the stuff that you're not bringing with you, obviously nothing super important. It's your personal stuff. Load into a shipping container. And eventually it does that same incredibly long convoluted and hard route all the way back to get to us where we were in Texas. It's not that they stole the shipping container. We got the shipping container. It was closed. Its custom seal was still on it. They had cut the roof off of it. They cut the whole top off of it, stolen everything in and then welded the top back on. So we cut the custom take off and it's just nothing.

In retrospect, it's quite funny. I didn't have that much stuff in there, so I was fine. Exact same thing, except in our case case it was they cut out the bottom. They did the same thing. So it wasn't visible from above. Yeah. Well did it back on and oftentimes we put just like bricks, sand, whatever in there. But yeah, this is a hundred percent. Yeah. The Brits took one look at what we just talked about and did the same exact thing our government did. Let's outsource this shit. I feel like if you're curious,

you should just look on YouTube for videos of truck drivers Kiber pass and just see what it's like now. This is shot on like a digital video camera in the contemporary era. Yeah. You can see these guys just whipping work in jingle trucks on roads that like would give anyone a panic attack if they weren't, you know, from there, like genuinely such incredibly harsh terrain. Everything is up or down. And that's after hundreds of years of building roads. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The roads are improved now. Mostly not. I don't believe they're paved through all of it, but I don't know because I've never been on the road, but it's so, so, so rough. And the only other real route to get to

It's so, so, so rough. And the only other real route to get to Afghanistan is not particularly useful to the Brits at the time, because it would be going from Quetta in Baluchistan to Kandahar, which the train isn't as bad to get there. But then you're in Kandahar and you have to get through, up basically from Kandahar, through the fucking Hindu Kush mountains to Kabul. Yeah, I drove that in the modern times and it wasn't easy.

It is. It is. Well, there's a ring road now. That was like one of the first projects at the occupation. The coalition did. But I'm be real with you. It's rough now and it's paid. It was much, much worse then. I'm doing the mental math here and I'm like, I'm going to, I'm going to go out on a limb. I'm going to risk my non-historical credentials here. They didn't have combustion engines because we're talking about the second Anglo-Afghan war. Yeah, yeah, you are correct.

It depends on if you set a horse on fire if it runs faster. Really really dumb guy who's into history completely misreading the burn the boats allegory. So the Brits, like I said, did the same thing her government did and outsource that shit. And they reached out to the Afridi tribe. Their job was to guard the pass and keep it open in exchange for a pretty decent subsidy. And they were folded under the command of kind of a regional paramilitary unit known as the Khyber Rifles, who still exist today in heraldry and all that. This was probably not the smartest choice on the part of the British,

as the Ifriti hated the Brits, they hated India, and they fought against both of them multiple times. They also had an avowed idea of, you guessed it, uniting the Pashtun people which would require them to, you know, pull large pieces of land the Brits had just taken back away from them. This is not a new struggle, the tribe had been fighting for it for over a hundred years at this point. So you might be wondering why exactly the Brits thought they should hire the Ifriti people to work with them despite the fact that they clearly fucking hated their guts. Well, that brings us back to something we've talked about before. The Marshall races theory that was created by the British in 1857 in India after the Indian

rebellion of the same year. Oh, God damn it. You know, you said Marshall races theory and I thought Oh, a theory of race is based by a guy named Marshall. And then I was like, no, Marshall, like, like conflict, military, et cetera, that as an adjective. Would it shock you if this came from a guy named like Marshall Smithers first Baron of Sandwich or something? Yeah.

Yeah. Rupert Blythe Marshall. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. To explain this all as good old fashioned racism is true, but it's also reductive, because it's somehow dumber than this. The Brits did denote various castes and tribes as all being effectively quote unquote soldier races.

The most famous of these that our listeners may have heard of is Sikhs and Gurkhas. But the ideas of this aren't probably based in what you think they would be. It's not necessarily that they were just natural soldiers. The Brits believed what made a soldier race a soldier race was a simple fact that they were, in essence, what the British believed to be dumb. The British believed them to be uneducated, rural, and therefore easy to manipulate, taking the people to the Brits. Again, I'm saying this according to the Brits, easy to follow orders given to them by white officers. They believed if they

took the educated classes, the educated castes, and the races they believed to be more high up in society that lived in cities, that they were lazy. And more importantly, that they would have independent ideas that they would then spread through the rest of the ranks and therefore becoming dangerous. Ideas like freedom, human rights, or possibly the concept of nationalism. The right to not have your waterproof cartridges of gunpowder be covered in pig fat when you're Muslim. Yeah, possibly that one.

Yeah, the Sapoi Mutiny, which I swear we'll talk about at some point in the future. Sure enough. I don't know, when you talk about some of the ridiculous British theories, this is a joke that appears on my other show, Trash Future, a lot, but Joe, are you familiar with something called the satatic zone?

No. Okay, so the Brits had this theory they called the cetatic zone that basically said that within like tropical latitudes, people were just more prone to homosexuality because of the hot weather and the climate. Now, obviously this was meant to explain both like non-Christian cultures not being as hung up about same-sex relations and also the fact that so many people from the British Empire who went over were engaged in same-sex acts. The thing that's very funny about this is it's sort of like explaining that like there's an unobserved corner of some property where people are constantly dumping trash illegally and it's like being like, oh yeah, because like there's a magnet in the earth that attracts

trash. You know what I'm saying? Like genuine. It's like, it's like, oh yeah, there's this, this is farm field where people go to fuck. And it's like, it must be the vibes of the farm field. Make people horny for each other. It's so stupid, but they genuinely believed that if you go into the latitudes, the satatic zone, you'll just become gay.

You see Reginald when I go to our tropical islands, I simply cannot help but make the booty clap like Wembley. I mean it is the British Empire in so many ways, among other, rapacious, greedy, exploitative, extractive aims, was also kind of like a pressure release valve for the most closeted, pent up homosexuals of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. And this would be very funny if not for the fact that so often this was also both exploitative and also like, let's just say Age of Consent wasn't really a concept. Yeah, of course. Thankfully a problem that has so far passed the United Kingdom in the modern age.

So basically, yes, as an aside, on top of the martial race theory, there's also, they had this other theory that tropical latitudes Just like caused people to become gay I don't even have anything to add You know, man, I can't help it whatever I go to like the british caribbean. I can't I certainly just crave endless amounts of dick bermuda triangle, but the B is actually meant as a stand-in for bottom obviously the the martial races theory is just about the dumbest shit on earth well I would say that until I heard about the satanic satanic so well I mean like you said martial races theory in the way when you say it with your your and I say this with love because I your accent is great

your Michigan accent it just sounds like you're saying the martial racist theory. And I'm like, yeah, that's what it is. That's also correct. That's also correct. And it's incorrect, but simultaneously correct. It just speaks to how uninformed the British were about their own subjects. For example, the Afridi people,

they didn't need to have book learning to hate the British and want to unite their people. But because the British saw anyone who didn't go to Oxford Or whatever as a backward savage they just ignored all of that shit and hired them and gave them guns anyway It's kind of like us where it's like Oh, yeah If we go to this village and show these kids like teenagers a DVD of what 9-eleven was they'll be like Oh, that's why the Americans are in a country and not be mad at us for running their grandma over with an emirate

Like I I've come to you. I've rappelled on for this helicopter to show you American culture. You will be amazed, shocked and awed as you slide in a pirated DVD of like, what is it? Like Do Spigalobill Jiggle Up. Yeah, 1212 Strong, the hangover. Yeah, you make, you're like, we're going to show this village in Nuristan. We had all the boys age 13 and up and all the men show up in one room So we can make them watch the music video for Alan Jackson's where were you where the world stopped turning like They were like yeah country music. Well, you know what? It's like the medieval peasant joke It's like they're like actually, you know, not too bad slap some auto-tune on that shit, though. I really need that Not too bad. Slap some autotune on that shit, though. I really need that.

I've gathered the juraga here today to show you the music video for Olympus gets rolling. I will say, man, I can't think of anything that had a more profound effect on the non-English speaking and non-developed world than T-Pain. Once people learned about what you could do, I mean, shares believe also, but it's like once people learned about what you could do with autotune, I mean, bro, I heard people playing autotune in the sheets. I've heard that. Yeah. Yeah. Like it was such a thing. You know, it's even worse than that. Is T-Pain actually really good at singing? He didn't

need autotune. No, no, no. It was all for style. I can respect. The T-Pain, tremendous musician, tremendous singer, genuinely. Yeah. Tremendous pain. That's what the T stands for. Tremendous. We didn't, we did not respect him enough, you know, for what he was. He was a maestro. He was an absolute auteur. This whole time I just thought he was in love with a stripper. Yeah, exactly. I was going to say, yeah, exactly. It's just that the vagaries of the music industry required him to perform the songs that he did.

For once for people keeping track at home, your scoreboard, your podcast scoreboard, Nate referenced a musician and I knew who it was. I will say though that in a way, because of the comparison to agricultural products, if you were to show an Afghan village the video for Flow-Rite as Lo featuring T- featuring T pain they would understand what apple bottom jeans are They might be like this is this is scandalous and quite frankly Indecent but they would understand I respect your music video sir But I feel like boots with the fur would not work well in the fields So kindly fuck on me personally. I like sandals in the snow maybe with some socks

I do also in fact when I'm going about my daily life in my village keep rolling rolling rolling But I don't really like the soul patch. Please get this out of here Yeah, yeah crank frankly if I wore the baggy sweatpants in the Reeboks with the straps they'd get caught on So there's this it's a fairly exploitative YouTube video series. I don't know if they still make them, but it reminds me of that guy. It's just like white boy speaks immaculate Cajun shit. But it's a guy who feeds fast food to people from hybrid people from from the tribal regions of Pakistan. Yes. I've seen it. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Like tribal people react or whatever it is. Yeah.

I don't want to say how real it is or anything. It's probably not. But one of them was like they feed. I think they give them like the worst. I think they give like pizza hut or something. And one of them is like this. This makes me deeply unhappy. It's like it's like travel. It's like vice the vice news in the 2000s and early 2010s approach to journalism. You have this incredible access and it's like, yeah, we basically hired a fucking helicopter service that can bring us to hybrid pocket of law. And we've met Mohammed John Abderrahman,

the leader of this village, and we're gonna give him Mike and Ikes and see what he does. Like, and he's just sitting there with his like, why do I need this? Get out of my face. Sush Alvi manages to talk to one one of the, like the senior figures of the Liberians, second Liberian civil war. And he's like, yo, do you guys smoke weed?

I mean, to be fair, they did interview general butt naked. They did. They did. Yes. Yes. And he talked about how he caught people who were selling human jerky because he bought some and he tasted that sweet flesh and he knew exactly what it was. Yes. Fuck. No. Oh, man. I don't even know how we got here.

Oh, it's you and me, buddy. It's you and me. Tom is actually a moderating force, apparently. The Afridi were more than happy to take large paychecks and close to modern British weapons that were sent their way to guard the pass. And they did so for 16 years, without any kind of issue. However, eventually the British decided, let's cut their paychecks. The Afrini responded immediately, turning against them and beginning to strike up an alliance with another Pashtun tribe in the area, the Aroksai, who also hated the British.

The joint anger that they had against the Brits was simple. It wasn't their Pashtun nationalism exactly that was driving them this time around. It was because they had been working for them for over a decade, It wasn't their Pashtun nationalism exactly that was driving them this time around. It was because they had been working for them for over a decade and the pay cut coincided with a British troop buildup in the Samana region, which was an effort to assert direct control over the area. These two tribes realized their job was temporary. The job that was paying them a salary, the head cents, you know, paid for things for

their family. This was going on for 16 years. This is a local career. And now the Brits are very clearly slowly taking that away. And the Ifriti and the Aroksai had kind of accepted British rule at that point, but at arm's length. Now the Brits were getting closer and closer. They're building roads and stringing up telegraph wire, two things that would ease future British

efforts to directly control the area. And with that, they knew it eventually come British administration because up until then, out on the frontiers, the tribes are pretty much allowed to govern themselves to a certain extent. They knew that that would change and they wanted the Brits out of Samana and the Swat valleys. The Khyber area, while legally under British control, was never really under British control. Small scale attacks were pretty commonplace,

and it was for that reason that the Commander-in-Chief of India, General Sir Frederick Roberts, ordered two forts to be built along the Samana range, Fort Lockhart and Fort Goldistan, with supporting outposts nearby on higher parts of the mountain range. One of these outposts was to the west of the village called Saragahi, which is the main focal point of our episode today. A mile and some change from either fort and visible from both. Each fort held around 200 men and the outpost itself only around 21.

People who may have recognized the name, Joe just mentioned the Swat Valley. If you're familiar with the humanitarian activist and gunshot survivor, and I'm not making a joke here because she was shot in the head for basically protesting for girls' rights to go to school, Malala Yousafzai, she's from the Swat Valley. Yeah. Yep. That's where her family's from. That's where that story took place. That's the area we're talking about. And that's the, this is relevant today and relevant in the NATO war in Afghanistan. And then also relevant during the various British wars, like this stuff. For being derided as a forgotten corner of the world sure does seem to be relevant a

Lot it does tend to happen now that last part that where that's the outpost of sargai was was because the Heliographic signal communications that were used to talk to one another for people who don't know and we've talked about this before a Heliograph is a form of Morris code that you use via redirected flashes of sunlight with a mirror. And in case you're wondering why they didn't have telegraph lines this late in the game, well they did. Wires connected the two forts, but not the outposts. And the wires themselves kept getting dug up and chopped in half by pissed off locals. So the outposts had a dual duty as a picket position and a relay station between the two forts when it came to

manning the communications mirrors. The forts were further linked to a longer string of helio relay stations, 20 in total, that could send messages 180 miles away all the way to Peshawar. This is a pretty strong communications network of using heliographs. You know what's really funny is I told you about the Banditsardai dam and something you'll notice if you're ever, if you happen to find yourself near Banditsardai on the Chiron and to Gosney road and at four corners is that in around the areas of the, I don't know the name of the, it might be the Gosney river. I can't remember, but that river valley where the Banditsardai basically served as both a power station and also like an irrigation

control area, like a, area, like obviously water control. They built power lines and they built power poles, but the poles they built out of concrete with like holes at the top of them to run the various circuits and switches and stuff through. The reason for that is exactly what Joe's just described is that whether it was sabotage or just the fact that like this is a resource pour in terms of like wood and stuff and also like very very very impoverished country would just get stolen wire and so now when that's just worth money yeah you when we drive on these roads you see these little they're sort of like you know every every 50 meters there's like concrete obelisk yeah

because there's no wires left there's nothing left but the concrete still there yeah stealing concrete is much harder. Yeah, similarly anywhere the US was like, let's build solar lights for lighting the road. Oh yeah. That shit's worth money, man. See a lot of metal poles and empty frames and empty light bulb holders, just saying. Other efforts were put in place to supply the forts with food and ammo, and each would have a large iron water tank, as was the outpost,

which was built from solid stone in a simple square shape, but it'd be good enough to hold off limited attacks that they'd grown accustomed to. The outpost also had breastworks, a tower, walls, and a raised platform behind said walls so riflemen could shoot out over them. As far as forts go in the history of the show, we've certainly seen worse. Manning these forts would be the 36th Sikh regiment of Bengal infantry raised by Colonel Jim Cook and Captain Henry Home. They purposefully recruited out of the Sikh former class because the men

thought they were in particular totally yoked. I swear to God. Obviously the martial race's theory played heavily into this, but Holmes, he himself was apparently a brick shit house who spent all of his time either working out or wrestling if he could help it. And he only wanted to recruit like fellow brick shit houses. And he saw like, man, farmers, they're fucking, they're buff, right? Like, so these are the only people that I want. And he would tour the countryside looking for new Sikh recruits and would goad them into fighting him. And if they lost, which they

often did, he would explain them, look here son, if you enlist, you can become a big fucking hoss like I am and this worked I also it's like imagine 1880s Jim, bro Yeah, like Jim culture doesn't really exist yet So it's sort of like yeah I don't know like has this man just sort of like made like the what was it clan of the cave bear movie where the guy Has like a bow flex in the cave that he works out with

1880s British bow flex It's made out of human bones flex in the cave that he works out with. 1880s British bow flex. It's made out of human bones. Or is he just like going around doing feats of strength, you know, like like pick finding a big rock to pick up and things along those lines. Like what is 1880s Jim Brokaw? He is wearing a singlet, but with one strap. He has one giant dumbbell and he's just going, Hup, ho, hup, hup, ho.

And like the Sikhs are like, man, that guy's fucking jacked. I wanna be like him. Yeah, exactly. Like that guy looks like if someone challenged him to throw a rock really far, he would always win. Yeah. And that's my highest aspiration in life. That guy throws rocks really good.

That's how I felt it the fucking, the Brits would call the waste tip, which sounds goofy in American English, but like the dump, the recycle center, like throwing scrap metal stuff from when I'm getting rid of things here at the place in London and like doing the sort of, put your hands in your chest and throw it

like it's a shot put. I'm just like launching this metal into this big container and sort of like, yep, that's right. It's like a metal IKEA table, but I'm like, I'm a fucking strong man. It's that animal urge in the back of your head when you're going to throw trash into a dump. Like, I wonder how far I can throw this. Yes. Man longs to dig and throw. Dig a tunnel and man longs to throw things very far, particularly if they're heavy.

Holmes just rocks up to like the Sikh farm is like that's a nice tractor you have there balances it on his shoulder and just fucking shot puts it like 20 meters and Everyone's like I feel like we need to enlist in this man's regiment or he's gonna start throwing her family's next exactly He's gonna start picking our house up and throwing it like we don't know if this is a small fraction of his total power He's gonna go the British version of super saying, I can't say that word because I pronounce it wrong. You guys are going to make fun of me again. So you know,

if anybody can, can tell you this, it's me, you get used to it. After a while, the seeks were of course one of the Marshall races that the British love so much. And also for other reasons, according to famed Dickhead Winston Churchill, one of the martial races that the British loved so much, and also for other reasons. According to famed dickhead Winston Churchill, the Brits wanted to recruit Sikhs so they could leverage age-old racial and religious hatred, some of which the Brits of course helped stoke, to make sure they had loyal forces in the region, by region I mean British

India, to put down any kind of Hindu or Muslim uprising. That's why they prize Sikhs so much. Now this unit got to Samana on December 31st, 1896 with 21 men under the command of Sergeant Ishar Singh. And while all of that was happening, the small blow up of the Ifriti and the Iraqsai began to catch fire and spread through to other tribes because this may surprise you Nate, there were no shortages of grievances against the British in British India and the rural frontiers of Afghanistan. That doesn't surprise me. Right?

Like you don't have to throw a normal sized rock very far to find someone who hates the British for some reason. You know, I feel as though there's this kind of like faux innocence. Okay. Maybe it's genuine in the sense that people are just this dumb or guileless, but it's like, well, why don't they like us? And it's like, Oh man, think about it. Yes. I do think it's both. I think it's like a kind of stupidity based innocence and a complete lack of, you know, like have you ever met someone when you just see them walk around like it's your friend and they clearly have no concept of where their body is in space?

Yes. They can't keep... They barge into people's personal space. They'll bump into people on the roads. They don't even notice if anything moves. They're like a human version of a puppy. That's like a whole country. It's like that. As opposed to your friends, the guys who are still working through some mental health byproducts of our previous job, who are the opposite of that, who are too aware of their personal space, loud noises, things moving. I would say, I can't believe I'm defending them, but I'm just gonna say in defense of

the Brits, Americans are also completely guilty of this. Oh God, yeah. Any empire is guilty of this. It's like the foundation is racism because you have to look down on the group of people you're doing this to and think that only clearly I can better them. And then it graduates into a kind of superiority based stupidity of like, I don't understand why don't these people like what we're doing for them as you've like built a school, but you've laid waste to a dozen villages. I mean, that is what empire looks like generally. And you know the US has done

it, the British done it, of course the Russians and then the Soviets and other Russians again are doing it. The Dutch have done it. Every, every empire has done this. So it's like, why can't you people see what I'm doing to you as good as you've been saluted for like 18 generations but then you built a train. like who gives a fuck. Yeah, exactly It's like thanks for building the train that doesn't go into any population centers and just happens to go to like major resources Depots mines, it's my god is that King Leopold the second theme music We're Queen Victoria for that matter but you know to be honest with you with a crown the only reason why the Dutch language isn't like a

Significant language in the world is because the Dutch were like, and we don't want Indonesians to know what we're saying because many people don't realize this. Indonesia is one of the most populous countries on the planet. I think it's like the fourth or fifth most populous country. It's got a huge population and it was a Dutch colony, but the Dutch didn't teach the Dutch language to Indonesians except to a very, very small elite cast of people because they're like, no, we don't want them to understand what we're saying.

No. Basically like small European countries often seem to get off. They're like, oh yeah, the Brits, the French. Yes, correct. But also the Dutch, the Belgians. The Spanish. Germans. The Portuguese. The Portuguese. Yeah. Wow. The Italians. I mean, they tried.

Bless their evil little hearts. Yes. But I mean, like there's a direct through line between like the general fuckery of what it is like to live in Eritrea and it goes right back to the Italian. Yeah. It's also some really good art deco architecture in Eritrea. It's kind of weird in that like it's still there. Like going back to what we're saying that like superiority to the point it seems stupid level of innocence is like a constant through line in

virtually every kind of empire we've ever talked about in the show and also the ones we haven't talked about. And then also like in the sort of Imperial Corps society, the idea, like you said, the person isn't coming from a position of like hostility, but they have this baked in assumption that like, oh, but I'm superior and these people should be receptive and pleased with my efforts to quote, scare quotes here better than exactly like that mentality. Like you can find permutations of that and everything to include like the way that white culture in America treats non-white people. All of this is the same mentality. And yeah, the Brits, I mean, totally guilty of it. It's just that because of the historical era in question, if you go back and you read primary sources, you will discover that it's

a lot less couched in platitudes or fluffed up to be NGO speak. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? It's just flat out like, no, we need to elevate these mud races, basically. Yeah, yeah. They're brain pants. Can I simply do this without us? Yeah. It's like nowadays we have all this stuff about building equity in the developing world and back then it's the pear soap ad about like, you know, hygiene is the first task of the white man's burden. Yeah.

Now instead of having a crown and doing that, you are in charge of some think tanker NGO. Yeah, exactly. And people forget that Roger Kipling wrote The White Man's Burden meant to be both like, not quite satirical, but more or less like a sort of like, Hey, are you sure America now you've taken over the Philippines? You want to do this shit? Cause guess what? It sucks and it'll fucking corrupt you too. And I'm not saying he was a good person. I'm just saying that was the mentality of the poem and people read the poem like, Oh yeah, take up the White Man's

Bird. That's great. I'll definitely do that. A lot of these people had like ancestral lands, grazing lands, farm lands, cut in half by the drawing of the Duran line. And despite the Afghan Amir being involved in the creation of that line, everyone rightfully held the British at fault for it. The Afridi actually wrote a letter to the Amir of Afghanistan saying the British had given them no choice but to declare war, to which the Amir pretty much said, hey man, I don't have anything to do with this, you're on your own. So the various tribes of tribes, sub-tribes,

allies of the Afridi and the Arakzai would be on their own, but that is no small thing. They could call up, I estimate at least 50,000 fighting men. However, according to the British intel, only around 12,000 were in the Samana area. But that is a hell of a lot when you only have a few hundred men. However, according to the British intel, only around 12,000 were in the Samana area. But that is a hell of a lot when you only have a few hundred men.

There is also a few police and militia stations in the valley that the British depended on as a kind of canary in the coal mines type situation. There were a speed bump that wouldn't really slow the enemy down as much as it would simply let the Brits know that they were coming. But that didn't work either, as the Ifriti and the Aroxai simply rocked up to these stations, told us, hey, join us or go home. Don't fight and die for the British, because if you stay, we will fucking kill you. The men inside decided, that sounds like a pretty good sales pitch, and promptly got

the fuck out of there. By the time the British figured out what was happening, 4,000 enemy soldiers had appeared about a mile west of Fort Colistan, climbing up the surrounding high ground and securing the best positions around the fort. The British hunkered down inside as the enemy opened fire on them, but they were like a mile away. For people who aren't super knowledgeable about guns, you can't really shoot someone from a mile away, especially with a gun that they had like back then. One source called this, quote, speculative shooting, which is honestly a pretty great term. And an officer's diary described as, quote, very annoying to the men.

Yeah. So like the terminal range of modern high powered rifles and machine guns is less than a mile. And the effective range is far, far, far less than that. It's typically unlikely for a marksman to be able to hit a target unless they're using a specialty rifle. Like a spotter and they're very well trained. And optics. I mean, you hear these stories about people taking shots at like, you know, kilometer and people taking shots at like, kilometer and a half, two kilometers, but that's very, very, very rare. And typically when you train, you don't expect a rifleman to be able to effectively engage a target more than 500 meters away and more like in training for the US Army, it's more like 300 meters. So a mile, a metric mile is, I believe 1500 meters. So do you think that this is happening

in the 1880s? It's hard to say why they're wasting their ammo other than they were trying to arrange their own weapons as well. It's not like the fighting men of the Afridi or the Aresxai tribe had basic training or anyone to really teach them the capabilities of their weapons. They had learned from using them in some ways, but just because some of them fought in a few small scale ambushes before, they didn't know their weapons specs. On the job training only gets you so far. And Colonel John Hawton commanded the defense of the Samana, and his original plan was to go on the attack. His idea was, yeah, he only had a few hundred men, but he thought if he sent

them into battle, they would break at the first sign of British military violence, which is probably the most British thing he could think. The man is outnumbered, conservatively, a hundred to one, and he's just straightening his dumb pith helmet and saying, yep, got him right where I want him. So just FYI, in military doctrine in the US military, you typically want to attack with a three to one superiority and you want to defend with at least a bare minimum of a one to three defender to attacker ratio. So it's basically the inverse. If you're the attacker three to one, if you're the defender at least one to three. 100 to one, not really advisable.

They don't have artillery. They don't have any kind of rapid firing weapons systems They had their armed well, we'll talk a little bit about what the British and what the Afghans are armed with here in a little Bit, but it's a little bit of daring do yeah Daring do and a stiff upper lip and all that other shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you know just thinking about More dumb Rudyard Kipling poems because inescapable but everyone knows about the whole you know when wounded alone on Afghanistan's plains. Yeah. The natives come out to cut off what remains just roll to your rifle and blow out your

brains and go to your god like a soldier's like oh yeah Rudyard Kipling said that because it was a good thing right. Yeah yeah. Thankfully he was told by political leaders hey you fucking idiot don't go on the attack. So he didn't. Instead he ordered detachments of 30 people to move around the much larger force to set up flanking positions. One of these, under the command of lieutenants, Munn and Blair did exactly that.

They worked their way up around the Iraq-sized flank, completely successfully. They set up a flanking position, immulately by the textbook and were rapidly reminded it was 30 against 6,000 and they were shot to pieces. Yeah. I mean, as I've said this before at other shows, I believe on this one, it's one of these things where it's like you could try, but it's sort of like when they've done like a free world exploration, not linear video game, but there's obvious things where it's like, no, don't try this mission yet,

or you'll just die, because it's meant to like sort of be a wall without a wall. And the Brits seemed, through their military history, seemed to love being like, oh, yes, I'm definitely gonna go. I feel as though I definitely have done enough. Now I'm at level five, I've done enough XP grinding that I can just go and attack.

Don't worry, I have the ephemeral, imperial version of a Game Shark. I could just cheat my way around this. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm gonna... I'll be fine. You know what? RIP to those other people who died, but I'm different. And you know, this detachment wasn't wiped out. Many of them managed to survive getting shot at by 6,000 angry people and ran back to the fort. After this, the allied tribes began to snipe the forts and getting closer and closer. They continued to give the walk or die speech to other outlying police outposts.

And in the night, they snuck up as close as 150 yards and planted a flag in the dirt as a flex against the British. So when the sun came up, they could see, wow, look how close they can get to us. Then they began to set things on fire. Outside the forts, there were hedgerows of thorn bushes and stuff like that, natural defenses to ward off any attacker things that no one wants to run through. I assume because the British could only find a military contractor to work with them who was also a druid. A military druid. Military druid is a whole new one. Yeah, you got a big golden sickle you're going around casting incantations and it's like, yeah, all right, everyone gather

around their fallout fallen in a circle around the druid. He's got some. He's got some mistletoe and does some bore bore entrails he's going to read. He's coming up with our battle plan slaughtering a pig. I was thinking about this with the yeah like every time you bring this up and just like oh yeah yet another reference to a Rudyard Kipling. Rudyard Kipling poem I was thinking thinking about, what is it? Arithmetic on the frontier. What's the line like a, like a, like a skirmish at a border station, a canter down some dark defile 2000 pounds of education falls to a 10 rupee

desire. It's just like, man never ran out of source material when writing about Afghanistan. I was only thinking that maybe if he consulted the military Druid, he wouldn't have got his son killed in world war one, but that's just me. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize we're talking about Theodore Roosevelt. Also. Yes. Yeah. I mean, Theodore Roosevelt, you know, uh, the Spanish American war, the occupation of the Philippines, you know, it's like he's all kind of roll heaping helpings of valor from black soldiers on

the charge of San Juan Hill, which we talked about in a few episodes a while ago. I believe it was an athlete. It was a black athlete who had dinner at the White House and all the American press basically wrote even more racist versions of Rudyard Kipling poems about how Teddy Roosevelt had fucking sullied America. Yeah, it's a different time, bad time. America is always in some ways 20 20, 20 years ahead of Britain and otherwise 20 years behind. Traditions are important, Nate. Yeah, I'm excited for some sort of joyous sporting event that happens in America where they set up surface to air missiles everywhere on apartment blocks because that happened in 2012 in London. Anyway.

I think that might just be called the Super Bowl. Yeah, yeah, fair enough, but not a Trump rally emphatically No, I mean up until recently that even saw a bulletproof glass for those No, he was just doing some speculative shooting as it's been called. He was just yeah He was into parkour the urban exploration nobody consulted with the local druid Yeah, the druid would have told you I sense sense a disturbance in like, you know, cause apparently druids are also Jedi. I don't know enough druid lore and I can't remember enough about asterisks and obelisks to fucking make druids.

Are you a druid? Right into the show. Please tell us more about druidry and druids. The military industrial complex druid. We've had military wizards, we've had the Iraqi wizard, we've had sorcerers, wizards are always funny, druids are also funny because they're kind of wizards in a way. They're just vegetarian wizards. Yeah. I don't know. I think I'm having them confuse druids as portrayed in Diablo 2. Yeah, and all I can think of is yeah, is the French cartoons, Astra's, Ganobalix, which are not, I don't really think they knew anything about druids either. So you know what? And that's why I got the

boar shit too, because that's what fucking Astros is always eating. I think or Obelix, I can't, Obelix. Yeah, it has to be Obelix. Yeah. Our historiography of druids is severely lacking. Now, like the fire from the druid-based defenses eventually spread to the Fords outbuildings and toilets and stuff. The tribes burnt down their shitter, which is unfortunate. Soon soldiers were rushing out of the fort to try to put the fires out, forming a bucket brigade, all while the tribesmen began to snipe at them. And soon, while one part of the base was put out, another would be lit on fire, repeating

the entire thing. Then this went on all day. Then when the night fell, other soldiers were sent out to light fires outside the fort so they could keep an eye on enemy movements in the night. But they found out that this is hard to do since the allied tribes have already burnt everything down. You know, this a hundred percent would have happened the exact same way in the US occupation of Afghanistan, except that we had close air support at night vision because like a hundred percent the human way of attack things or like You know outposts getting attacked like the only thing that ever stopped it was they had you know teams of a h-64

Apache helicopters showing up close air support druids Exactly like like normally a wizard has to like summon an albatross, but the US Army can just bring in helicopters What if we put a druid in an a 10 war dog? No, Jesus Christ Yeah, the Soviets trying to like resurrect Siberian Druidry so they can have them fucking pilot and it's su-26 is like The druid just steals all the bolts off of it gets fucked up off of boot polish on toast Yeah, the Siberian Druid piloting a frog foot goes full Metal Gear Solid 3. It eats those magic mushrooms to gain night vision. Somehow during all of this, the Brits had only had four people wounded during the fire

and the snipe fest. But the returning fire had been enough to drive back the tribesmen, but only temporarily. This is also a tactic. The tribes knew that there weren't that many British soldiers in the Samana, and they would be moving a detachment from fort to fort, which is exactly what Houghton, the commander, was doing. Gullistan was under threat, so he moved them in there. Now it looked like the tribesmen were gone, he pulled his men back towards Fort Lockhart. Then seeing that the tribesmen turned to Fort Gulistan and back and forth this went. They were obviously sounding out what the Brits would do. They're figuring them out. The Brits assumed that they were afraid because they made sure to keep their

distance. There are no large frontal assaults against the forts, though that probably could have worked at this point due to sheer force of numbers alone. But the tribesmen didn't try it. This is just like the genuinely this happened sort of thing happened in modern context in the Burma Valley. And with like Cop Tillman, Cop Zirak, places like that. They test you first. I mean, it's they're doing reconnaissance. This isn't some like crafty, rural version of war. They're doing reconnaissance. And the Brits thought so little of them that they're like, they couldn't be doing basic reconnaissance missions on us.

Genuinely, it's like we make the comment about fascism is it's from Umberto Eco's thesis on fascism that like fascists are unable to assess their enemy because in their mind the enemy is always impossibly strong and impossibly weak. It feels like British military imperialism is just the enemy is always impossibly weak and stupid. There is no strong part. It's like they keep just getting like, you know, like you said, like she's graded by bolt action rifles or less advanced weapons and being like, oh, you know, it must just been a lucky shot. They must also have a druid. Like there's no, there's no, the druid gap has been closed. The idea that like

people who are fighting either for a living or fighting are dedicated to this fight are going to learn how to not die. Yeah. And part of that is for example, doing reconnaissance. Seeing the tribesmen do reconnaissance, they just kind of like guffaw, push their monocle back into place, tip their top hat slightly. And they assume they still have the upper hand on the local savages. And I just realized I turned the monopoly guy into a British officer, but still. It's just like, yeah, it's like, okay, they didn't spend three years at Sandhurst getting fucking like, marching around parade grounds and getting screamed at, and then probably

having unspeakable things happen in the barracks. But it's just like, if you guys had grown up hunting in a way that wasn't hunting like, oh, we plopped this Fox in the middle Of a field now we have a thousand dogs They're gonna tear it to shreds if you'd actually grown up hunting like hunters to reconnaissance. Yeah, they learned how to shoot too Yeah, yeah exactly. Yeah typically like because either for sport or cuz they're eating and they need to kill the thing so they can eat it But cavemen did fucking reconnaissance. Yeah, Neanderthals did reconnaissance. They plotted fucking ambitious You eventually learn on your own. To chase wooly mammoths off fucking cliffs so they die and they could just cut up the meat though. Like, it's basic stuff in terms of like a society.

Are you sure that the British officer didn't throw the wooly mammoth off the cliff? Yeah, he's like, yeah, the caveman actually had a time traveling British strongman. He was like, I have run out of feats of strength to perform in the modern era. So I have run out of feats of strength to perform in the modern era So I have invented time traveling Eddie Hall Throwing fucking wooly man that's off of cliffs It's like the world's most annoying crossfit or traveling through time to find the hardest wad He can and he has to go back into prehistory doing the world's shittiest pull up off of the tusk of a wooly mammoth Yeah, yeah, let's see

The Iceman is holding off a spear off a cliff and I'm doing kippling pull ups off it. Not to be confused with Rudyard Kipling pull ups. Rudyard Kipling pull ups is basically yeah. That's just every time you do a pull up at the top you see a racial slur. Every time you do a pull up you have to come up with a rhyming couplet that is very, very obviously racist. By now, the forts in the Samana were under siege. Supplies were not going to be brought

in as the pass was closed for the British because remember the people guarding it were now fighting them. They were put on half rations and they were ordered to stretch out their food as long as possible. And I don't say this often. Credit the Brits. The first thing they did was try to fix that situation. General Yeatman Briggs immediately ordered a supply mission to get to the forts, and with them would be engineers to repair damages, to shore up defenses, to continue the fighting. His resupply mission was 2,500 men strong,

and the men in the forts originally believed that these were just reinforcements, but they weren't. They fought through the valley, dumped all their supplies, fixed the forts and then turned around and left. Guess you got guard duty again the night, dude. That's all I'm gonna say. They got supplies. Yeah, they did. Most of these episodes we cover, they just like, and then everybody forgot they existed

and they died. Yeah. And to be honest with you, when, when I think about the human wave attacks and like cops getting overrun and stuff and these sorts of attacks that happened in my, I mean, it didn't happen to me, but like our sister battalion had one happen and, you know, they happened all over the Afghan theater while I was there. Running out of ammo is a thing that that typically led to a situation like... It's widely known as being less than ideal. Yeah. Like what happened at Copainnott in Nuristan, I believe.

They also were quite a bit... If I remember correctly, the investigation showed that the rifles were breaking down at them. One of the outposts that was overrun found that one of the soldiers died with his weapon disassembled because it was just breaking down and he was trying to fix it. I can't remember if it was in Kunar province or in Nuristan, basically in far East Afghanistan, east of Jalalabad. Yeah. There was an attack in 2008 where a unit from the 173rd Airborne was on their last week of rotation before they were going back to home station. And they had a temporary outpost set up in a village and it got overrun and I think eight or nine US soldiers died. And it was like at the time

one of the highest number of people killed in action since the war began. Nine killed, 27 wounded. Later on in the war you had a CH-47 full of SEALs that got shot down in Warrantac province that killed a significantly larger number than this. But yeah, in 08, this was like, and this was sort of like the, wow, what could happen? How did this happen sort of situation? It's like- And the investigation showed that like, oh, we put them in a valley that was surrounded by high ground. We didn't have secure supply. It was like a checklist of like, how could we fill a bunch of body bags? Literally, if you had gone like done bait like English composition to an analyzer racist

Rudyard Kipling poem, you could build like a checklist of all the things that are going to happen to you in a valley in Afghanistan. The Center for Army Lessons Learn, you know, they need to, they need to be the center for army dash Rudyard Kipling lessons learned. The problem was is that they go to the army lessons learned and nobody goes like three doors to the left and knocks on the druids door. You know, the druids, the druid could have told them everything. Military working druids absolutely underutilized. You know what? If you had just read this terrible photocopied document that the previous unit had put together of like stuff you should know about Afghanistan and cut out all the like insanely racist and homophobic shit that

one really salty commander put in, and I'm speaking from experience from having seen this thing. Jesus Christ. There might be something about, hey, guess what, you probably shouldn't set up a cop where literally it's just C-wire and vehicles in a valley surrounded on all sides, right near the border, in a place where people hate you.

Oh, PS, make sure you have ammo. Yeah, you probably want that. All these soldiers leaving probably really disappointed the Brits in Samana because soon scouts were reporting that around 20,000 tribesmen had gathered. This is disappointed the Brits in Samana because soon scouts were reporting that around 20,000 tribesmen had gathered. This is when the Brits discovered that the tribesmen weren't afraid of launching an attack like they previously thought.

Instead, you know, they were figuring out how the British defenses work, how they could best approach these forts. Again, basic reconnaissance, because that's what they did. And most importantly, they had figured out how the British communication network in Samana worked. It ran through the small village outpost at Surigaahe. It was a relay station on the heliograph system. If they took it out, it would cut off the system from the rest of the forts. So the first thing they did was flood into the valley and surround the Surigaia outposts with 10,000

fighters. And I should remind you, the Surigaia outposts was manned by 21 people. Man, we really love bad defense ratios here. We really love just like extremely, they should probably have rethought the force projection ratios of defenders to, you know, perceived most dangerous course of action. But you know what? Yeah. It's not good. It's not good. They had one camp follower. So technically 22 people, but the outpost is surrounded immediately in three sides because the fourth side was backed up against a sheer cliff. I mean,

I didn't intend this for the wooly mammoth comparison, but Hey, also, I'm just laughing. They had one camp follower. It's like, it camp follower. It's like 21 defenders, one gut truck selling burritos. One guy selling white monsters to the Sikh soldiers. We have no communications. This guy somehow has a card reader that works. Always. For those keeping track at the odds at home, that is 476 to one. Now, the men in the outposts were armed with Martini-Henry rifles, which were badly out of date, and they came with a severe flaw, which we have talked about before on the show. Rapid firing of the rifle would cause it to overheat, which would cause

the cartridges to be stuck in the internal components when they began to swell and contract as they heated up. This would require individual casings to be extracted with a knife, if at all. This is a known flaw and the Henry rifle had been replaced by the Lee-Metford rifle in the regular British Army service several years before. So why were the Sikhs using an out of date rifle with a fatal flaw built right into it? Were the Brits like mega racist and they were like, well, the Sikhs all have knives, they can solve the problem with their knives. It's actually worse than this. It's not because the Brits didn't care to outfit their colonial forces. They're like, ah, whatever weapons will trickle down. Or they're such good

fighters because they're a martial race that they don't need these things. They made sure that the Sikhs were issued worse rifles on purpose. You see, in 1857, there's a massive uprising in India, sometimes known as the Sapoi Mutiny, which we'll talk about at length at some point in the future. I'm not going to go to it really at all here, but around 90% of British Indian soldiers joined that mutiny, all armed with the same weapons as British soldiers with British training. Obviously this made it pretty hard for the Brits to put it down, and after that

whole thing, the Brits made sure to arm their Indian Army units worse than their main units, just in case they had to fight them again. So they were, you know, it's a bit from Kung Pao, enter the fist. We trained him wrong on purpose as a joke. They purposefully outfitted them worse in case they had to fight them in the future. I feel as though if you are then forward deploying these units and formations, and you're expecting them to hold the line that will then prevent your white British sunburn to the point of death formations from getting overrun, you may reconsider, you might want to reconsider this policy of only issuing them, you know, cardboard cutouts of guns and a satchel of rocks to throw.

It is possible. Yeah. But nope. But they also issued each man 400 rounds of ammo. So you know, fair amount of ammo, not enough, but I just love the fact it's like at least when you burn out of 50 cal barrels, because you're shooting a lot of fucking 50 cal rounds, a lot of them. Like if you're using a bolt action rifle and it's burning out the barrel and jamming up the cartridges and you have to then basically do like basic knife maintenance. Like that's just, I believe this would be considered a trap door rifle, but semantics. I'd be real with you. I don't really know a lot about people. No, I never have been in like, I know the ones that I know because I had to learn them and the other ones like I presumed it was because of the era. But yeah, if it's

not a bullet action, then even yikes. I mean, why don't you have a muzzleloader? This brings us to how the Afghans were armed. They were also carrying Martini-Henry rifles, kind of. Some of them were the real thing, but most were this wonderful thing called a Kuiper Pass copy. Now, the Kuiper Pass has something of a storied history cranking out unlicensed handmade counterfeit guns from muskets to rifles all the way up into the modern day and modern assault rifles and machine guns. The gun makers go so far as to counterfeit gun badges, manufacturer years, brand markings, all that. Though there's an easy tell on a lot of them because they're spelled incorrectly and occasionally with backwards letters because sometimes the gunsmiths only have the Cyrillic alphabet as stamps. So they'll

use the Cyrillic letter E, which looks like a backwards English N in place of an actual N during stamping. It's just so funny because I was going to make a joke about whipping work on a 125 CC motorcycle that was called a Honda. Or a Tonda. Kind of, yeah. I didn't realize that it was the exact same phenomenon. You can find pretty entertaining YouTube videos of people going. I mean this place is very very unsafe to outsiders to this day

Yeah, I mean what they're doing is it's a black marketplace. That's very illegal, but some people have taken videos of it They'll be like wall to wall M4s AKs machine guns. Some of them are real, other ones are Kiberpass copies, and they look remarkably real. And they work, but they're all made with hand tools and whatever metal happens to be nearby. Meaning the quality on a gun by gun basis can vary wildly from working flawlessly to literally blowing up in your face. And they also hand make their own ammunition to the same level of success. The shells are often under loaded due to bad measuring or because they're using a homemade gunpowder

made from repurposed film melted down for its nitrocellulose, which can be used to make gunpowder. I don't know if I have to bleep that out or not, but I should point out here other gun makers in the Kuiber Pass purposefully make under loaded bullets as a safety feature because they know that their backyard guns cannot withstand the pressure of real bullets and they will explode. So they're like, no, no, no, you have to use my bullets in this if you don't want to die or lose an eye. This is incredible. This is the kind of thing where like, you know, extremely going to die in a safety violation YouTuber content could never come close.

Like it's just, yeah, I didn't, I know vaguely about this, but I didn't realize it was to this extent. Oh, it's, it's fucking awesome. You can find videos that people like, oh yeah, you know, can I test it? And they're like, yeah. And they'll hand them a magazine and it'll rip a burst into the air like see it works I was just thinking about the similar videos like we're in, you know near the border the Afghan border into Jika stand or whatever And like they're you know, here's like a truck market where they're offloading opium and this like we're only filming from the dashboard

Like yeah, cuz you'll die if you step out of your fucking vehicle with a camera. Just saying. Yeah. I wouldn't want to go be doing film in MrBeast YouTubes and the Khyberpass gun market. White boy shocks Khyberpass gun merchant by speaking fluid Kalashnikov. White boy speaks fluent Pashto. Is immediately executed. Depending on connections and fixers and everything, some journalists have absolutely got in and shot footage there.

But yeah, it's, it's hairy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things where it's like, you know, even if your intention is just to learn about an interesting thing, when you go to a place where people are doing incredibly illegal stuff in a place where there isn't really rule of law, it's kind of not looked upon fondly for you to whip out a camera and be like, the world is going to know all about this illegal shit you are doing. Yeah. Welcome to the lines led by donkey's trip advisor, where we tell you, please don't

go on your on holiday to the Khyber pass. It's like reading Wiki travel in the mid 2000s and just reading the Iraq travel article and be like, sounds like a great vacation. The state department warning about traveling to Mogadishu is one of my favorites. It's like, leave a DNA sample so someone can identify your body when you die. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Or like the, I remember the British Foreign Office talking about, don't come within 10 miles of the Syrian border on any side. Like, yeah, probably wise. Yep. Anyway, I just had to shoe hoard in the Khyber Pass copies thing because it's something that interests me deeply. But it was hoped that the other forts and outposts would send help to the Sikhs. But the tribesmen had already launched attacks against them, pinning them in and leaving the Saragahi stranded. Now, the obvious answer here is surrender. However,

there's a bit of a history here as to why they wouldn't. For people who haven't listened to our very old episode about the retreat from Kabul, here's a Cliff Notes version. On multiple occasions, they were promised safe passage if they surrendered, and they accepted the surrender from the Afghans and they were slaughtered. So that is a story that sticks out at every British soldier's mind here is like, I cannot surrender even if they offer it because it can't be trusted. This was recently repeated in 2021 when Afghan soft units surrendered to the Taliban and were all shot on. Yeah, they were like texted said, like, if you just surrender, we have no problem with you. And yeah, they got sped hold out back. They literally, yeah, just, just took them out and shot them with flash. And videotaped it, put it on the internet.

Yeah, yeah, I was going to say, yeah, they filmed it. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's... There's something of a history as to why these Sikhs didn't even entertain surrender. They assumed, probably correctly, that their death after surrender could be far, far worse than if they just died fighting. So the Sikhs inside settled in to try to hold off the tribesmen for as long as they possibly could, hoping that help would eventually come for them. They knew their position was very important as a key part of the communications network

that the Brits would need to contact Peshawar and they would also need them to coordinate their own relief. So like, okay, no matter what, we have to hold the relay station. But interestingly enough, it's because of that position and that communication system that we know exactly what was happening within that outpost as it happened. Because one man stayed at the mirror the entire time relaying minute by minute updates to the surrounding forts. So we have a second by second, minute by minute update as to what is happening inside this fort, which might be the first time

that's ever happened in military history. That's crazy. The whole time this is going on, there's one guy standing up in a tower, flashing sunlight. Like, oh, just got shot in the leg. Like he literally flashes relays to the forts as they take wounded and stuff like that. And how bad the wounds are.

It's like guy playing a trumpet in the walls of Vienna in the tower to signal people while Ottoman arrows are shooting at directly at your neck because they have like, you know, like Mustafa neck shooter with a huge bow. He's got the Hyrule bow. Yeah, that's the only more dangerous job than the one you're just describing.

The attack started at 9 a.m. as thousands of tribesmen pushed toward the outpost trying to take it in one big rush. But this has actually fought off. According to the relays, they think they killed around 60 people before the tribesmen withdrew. This is when the Sikhs discovered a weakness in their position. The ground in front of them was broken, covered in rocks and boulders, meaning it gave the tribes plenty of cover to use to slowly advance on them from behind cover and be protected from their rifles. So far one Sikh had been killed and three of their rifles had been rendered completely

unusable due to them being out of date pieces of pieces of shit with a fatal flaw Haughton who is at fork lot heart message them saying do not waste your ammo Pick your targets and we're putting together a relief force you want to guess what that relief force was 30 guys 14 Irish guys Don't worry these guys saw action at the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. They've seen some shit. They've got a guy named Calm who's also really good at throwing rocks. He'll help you. Their idea was the Sally Forth out of the fort and created diversion in the hopes that the tribes would take the bait, break their attack off from Saragahi, and give chase.

Instead, they devised a revolutionary tactic Just ignore them. They just think door the Not even like two squads of Irishmen who were shooting at them. They're like hey fuck off Go back home. We don't want you here tribesmen continued to rush the, setting portions of the wall on fire again, I assume greatly pissing off the local military druid, but each time the Sikhs took to the walls, shooting down at them, again, while they're actively on fire, they're standing in the middle of what is effectively a house fire, shooting back at their attackers. By 3pm they alerted via the relay that we're

running low on ammo and they need immediate resupply or, preferably, relief. Hawton ordered another column, this time 93 soldiers, to charge out and relieve them, but at this point the tribesmen kind of figured that a relief was coming. So they set an ambush for them. As soon as the forest left Fort Lockhart, they ran directly into an L-shaped ambush, that being one force in the front, another on the side, petting them in, and then immediately pinned them down, which forced Fort Lockhart to send another relief force out to rescue their own relief force. The Sikhs were still trapped.

Yeah. And then like, it's always sunny in Philadelphia style title card pops up. It says, the gang discovers and infilating fire. For those of you not familiar, infilating fire is probably the most dangerous you're going to deal with if you're a column in the sense that it's basically shooting down the long axis of whatever your formation is. So if you're in like a lot, like a file or like a broken up column, it's basically shooting down the long axis of whatever your formation is. So if you're in like a file or like a broken up column, it's like imagine if they positioned a machine gun or some kind of large weapon and it can shoot down your long axis.

Just because- It's bad. It's bad, bullets very likely to hit multiples of you. Yeah. Yeah, so don't want that. L-shaped ambush kind of takes advantage of this to some extent. You would typically position a most casually producing weapon down the long axis if you can.

And like Joe was saying, trapping you in, you know, so you're just kind of there. Harvesting the fields of meat. I've never made my big ass get smaller behind a gun shield before in my life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so fun. No fun. Remember the Sikhs inside the outpost can see all of this happening, because all of this is happening with an eye shot of them. And they're getting relief, like they're getting relays, messages sent to them like, don't worry, relief is coming. As they're watching that relief get like rapidly turned into blood, shit and piss on the mountainside.

They're watching their own relief force have to have a relief force sent to them because they're being rapidly connected to God's Wi-Fi via counterfeit British rifles Yeah, I mean you could imagine how frustrating it would be to be able to witness What effectively looks like someone who was learning to play the game the early 90s computer game lemmings and just failing miserably Like it's just... Don't worry, we're sending 14 Irish people to save you. I mean, if someone's trying to steal my cell phone somewhere in zone two London, great. Great do that. But if I'm in a 436 to one attacker to defender ratio and I'm the defender,

I kind of want more than 14 Irish D Just watching as a growing Congo line of different relief forces get more relief forces sent to them And everybody kind of forgets that you're the original point of the whole thing Yeah, it's just like every single one is a different ethnic group or nationality controlled by the British Empire It's like the worst version of it's a small world after all It's a small world after all that was sucking chest wounds. Yeah, exactly It's a small world after all now. There's less of us And then if to make all of this worse the eastern wall of the Sikhs outpost fucking Collapsed they had no idea but this entire time they had been fighting the tribesmen had sent a

Tunneling team under them, but they're not supposed to have sappers primitive savages Yes, you put 10,000 of them in formation They're just gonna hang out and light fires to make tea with exactly. They're not a martial race exactly Well, that's the funny part though the Brits knew they were a martial race. That's why they hired them. Nothing could be more the British conception of people as martial races than like the Gil Zai or the Yusuf Zai and like all of these tribesmen in this part of what's now Pakistan. Like they're mythologized about them. Yeah.

Well, sure, they accidentally discovered reconnaissance, but there's no way they're going to figure out sapping. And that's exactly what they did. Like the wall like half collapsed, there's a massive hole, and the diggers burst out from the hole and like tried to infiltrate the fort. And they did so by erupting from the earth armed with hammers and began smashing the wall trying to bring the rest down. It's like, he didn't, he's not separate qualified. He's not allowed to do that. It's like, it's like the joke you get shared around. It's like an old web comic where someone's calling

nine one one and they're like, help, someone's trying to murder me. And the dispatcher is like, but, but murder is illegal. That's impossible. Yeah. They're not supposed to dock down that wall with fucking subterranean ambers. And also it's like, you're already operating on a, you know, you only have three walls and then sheer cliff that lots of woolly mammoth skeletons are at the bottom of. It's like, do you know, you can't really afford to lose one of those three walls. For some reason, the British officer just keeps throwing pieces of the broken wall off the cliff. See how far he can get them.

Yeah, he's making it worse. He's having, he's decided to have like a, like a Scottish Highlands rock throwing contest in the middle of this fight. And that's when the Sikhs ran forward to fight off the hammer wielding sappers, leading to a brief bayonet versus hammer close quarter combat. Bayonets won, in case anybody's wondering. Yeah, I mean, you'd assume, but it's weird that- Spears versus war hammers. They've invented military engineering from First Principles. They've also invented the 90s Capcom video game final fight from first principles. You have Mayor Mike Haggard, British strongman versus the Yusufzai version of the Andor clan

holding hammers. There's got to be a latrine in the background with sex graffiti on the wall. Which they have also burnt down. They were chased off, but they did open a seven foot wide hole through the wall which they have also burnt down. That they were chased off but they did open a seven foot wide hole through the wall. 40 minutes after that thousands of tribesmen rushed towards that breach and the Sikhs abandoned their firing positions on the wall which again were on fire to run down and defend the gap. The only advantage the defenders had that the tribesmen seem to be like incredibly excited that the battle was about to be over

So they just try to jam way too many people through the hole at once, you know Kind of like the mr. Burns virus situation So as they fought to get through this hole in the wall It turned into a traffic jam and the Sikhs use what little ammo they had to a traffic jam and the Sikhs use what little ammo they had to shoot through the first waves and then resort to bayoneting them as they fought past one another to try to get through the gap. I was going to say you've invented the fatal funnel from first principles, but now you've invented the KitchenAid meat grinder attachment for first principles.

The drum order, the bugle order for attach the mincer device to your bayonet? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. The Sikh's, you know, highest military decoration in the British Army is the Cuisin Art Bag. Seeing the defense was lost, Sergeant Singh ordered his men to fall back into the inner defenses and he would cover them alone. He pocketed a few stray bullets and faced down thousands of dudes, slowing them down long enough for at least a couple minutes for the Sikhs to withdraw further inside. The last anyone saw of him, he was fighting off tribesmen with a bayonet and using his rifle as a club before they finally took him down. And remember, we know this because while this is happening,

there's still a guy in the relay tower flashing rapidly like Sergeant Singh is now beating a motherfucker to death with another motherfucker. He's stabbed six more up. Can't see him anymore. He's reeling this every minute dodging bedazzled Hyrulean arrows. He has not been shot. Yeah. That's wild. That's fucking wild, man. Wow. And then another Sikh soldier runs on his own to a guard tower, holding himself up inside. There's a small door that enters it, so he's able to effectively turn that into the world's smallest fatal funnel. It's so small, only one person can fit through at a time like an action movie. So he simply shoots each person as they come through

or drops a big fucking brick of broken masonry directly on their heads, holding up inside. He eventually stacks up 20 fucking corpses at the door to the point that tribesmen can no longer attempt to make entry. So they burn the guard tower down with him inside. The whole time this is happening, the signaller is still at work. His name is Gurmak Singh. He is continuing to update the Brits about what is happening, constantly asking for relief. How far out is our relief? The whole time

the British are saying, we're working on something, we're working on something. As the outpost burned and the tribesmen poured in from the breaches, he calmly messaged in Morris Code of course, quote, they're inside now. Should I go on signaling or should I take up a rifle? He does not get a response from his position above everyone else. He watches 20 other men fought to the death as a tribesman slowly began to advance up his post. He shot at them until he had one bullet left, smashed the mirror, apparently let out a war cry so loud that the other outpost could hear it, and shot himself in the head. You know, we joke a lot on this show and it's one of those things. I have this reaction

sometimes when seeing war movies about military disasters and other things that's sort of like all this incredible heroism and gallantry and bravery and and physical courage Etc for what for what it's always for nothing. That's the thing. It's just sad because like on one hand, you know Are the Brits like no, sorry. We've already sent like three or four. We only we don't have any other Colonial peoples and ethnic groups that we can deploy like we're trying to find a lone like Belize in unit We can send 15 guys to get massacred of. It's just... Yeah. And it's not like this battle, this roaring grasp of insane amounts of soldiering. Another thing I'm saying is devaluing what these Sikhs are able to

pull off, these guys are able to do. But it's not like this is happening in fucking Devin. This is happening in Afghanistan. British soldiers don't need to be there at all. And these colonial guys shouldn't be in their military. They should be at home. And for the practical sense of why the signaller did what he did is because he knew if he was captured, the tribesmen could then use him to decrypt transmissions and to teach them things. So he shot himself. And the defenders of the outpost had one last fuck you to get. The tribesmen had no idea when they had set fire to the outpost, but there's actually a large store of gunpowder cartridges inside one of the buildings because they were staged

there because the outpost was in the future going to be outfitted with artillery, which had yet to be delivered. The fire eventually reached said stores of gunpowder and it exploded in a massive fucking mushroom cloud, vaporizing dozens of people that were still inside celebrating their victory. Inventing the house-born IED from first principles yet again. Oh man. In the end, nobody's entirely sure how many of the Aroxai or the Ifriti were killed. It's thought to be anywhere between 300 and 600. A lot of them in the explosion though.

While all of the soldiers inside, as well as the camp follower, was killed. That slowed them down enough, as well as the other forts. Their continuing efforts continued to hold. They were never able to land a huge death blow on like Golostan or Lockhart. They weren't able to wipe out hundreds of soldiers. This is an output of 21 guys in it. You could hardly even consider this a victory. It's pure at best. It is tactically important, but it's, I mean, in a much larger scale. A long time ago, we talked about Napoleon's invasion of Russia and he won the battle of Borodino and everybody was like, yeah

And the points like we won what the fuck did we win? Yeah, it's like the sort of hamburger hill kind of thing, which is a Korean war but like yeah, you know fight Hamburger hill was Vietnam. Was it Vietnam? I could've sworn. Oh, I'm an idiot. You're right pork chop Yes is Korea hamburger hill is Vietnam. Yeah it Vietnam? I kind of swore. Oh, I'm an idiot. You're right. Pork Chop Hill is Korea. Hamburger Hill is Vietnam. Yeah, my bad. But yeah, at the end of the day, it's like, sure, wave the little flag or whatever. What did we achieve? Yeah, yeah. Going, jumping back in a time machine. It's like the one, the first skits of that show, web show, Red versus Blue. Like why are we in this valley? Oh, cause they're in this valley. That doesn't

make any fucking sense. Yeah. Also, it's very funny to me because I realize it's typically being used to describe what fighting on this terrain is going to do to a human body. But there is a part of me that's like, oh, one, I mixed up American military Pyrrhic victories at Hamburger Hill and Pork Chop Hill because everything has to be related to some kind of meat sandwich. That's right. Yeah. Everything must be burger. That's how we comprehend the world. Yeah. Eventually, the Afridis and their allies agreed to terms of surrender

with the British, leading to a partial disarmament. As for the Sikh soldiers, they've become heroes in British, Indian and Sikh history. Multiple statues in Gujarat, including one right next to the Golden Temple at Armatzar Memorials, are all built in their honor and even have an epic poem written about them which is something I wasn't aware it still happened but they had some shit that would happen in you know times of knights and stuff they did something so crazy that someone wrote an epic poem about them though you might be wondering how many victorious

crosses were were given out for this battle I presume none because they're Indian they didn't qualify despite the fact they were British subjects fighting for the British military, they were awarded the Indian Order of Merit, the highest award Indians in British service could receive at the time. The end. Oh my God. Yeah, man. Well, like. You know, it's weird because our experiences in Afghanistan let us riff a lot and have jokes and points of comparison and kind of like marvel at the similarities, but also because of knowing what it's like there,

hearing this stuff, you're just like, you can very clearly conceptualize, I don't know what it looked like, what it smelled like, that kind of thing, you know what I mean? And it's just that to me, it's just like absolute pit of your stomach, just horror. Because the thing for us was that like, what it smelled like, that kind of thing, you know what I mean? And it's just that to me, it's just like absolute pit of your stomach, just horror. Because the thing for us was that like, you said this on our episode of Hell of a Way about the collapse of Afghanistan is that no matter where we sent you, you always knew

that we will get you. We will come get you. We will help you. We will give you medevac. We will find you. Yeah, of course. And the Afghan soldiers in the war that we fought in didn't have that and British Sikh soldiers did not have this either.

And it's just, I don't know, man, it's just... And imagine that you could see the other Forts who can do nothing for you the whole time while it's happening. On a lighter note, Nate, we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion. And if you'd like to ask us a question, you can donate to the show at any level on Patreon. You can ask us through our patreon Dms or through our discord where we have a dedicated channel you can write a note stick it in your pocket Tunnel under the studio collapse half of the wall and pop up armed with a hammer

I will fight you with a bayonet until I free the question from your hands and I'll ask it on air I would say you can build a heliograph but we all know the Sun doesn't shine in the air. Yeah, the heliograph would never work here. Not at all. Today's question is favorite kind of footwear. Nice and chill question. Okay, I have two of course. I like a good pair of sandals. Mm-hmm. I had a very good pair of reef sandals that were like I had for years and years and years. Honestly the most comfortable sandals I've ever owned. I have since lost them. Not that I have a lot of use for sandals anymore living in the Netherlands. And I enjoy a good trainer. Us Americans call them running shoes because I spend a lot of time wearing them because I spend entirely too much

time working out. And I have really wide feet. Some shoes really don't fit me well so I prefer Brooks. They're also affordable. That helps. I'm back in the UK right now, but I'm leaving in a couple of days to go back to Switzerland. One of the things that I miss about South London when I'm not in South London is the kind of South London uniform of every single one of these words is different in American English versus British English. But what they would say is, you know, trainers, joggers and a jumper. So basically like a sweatshirt, like track pants or sweatpants and athletic shoes. It's just the uniform. And maybe throw a little, not satchel bag,

but another word that's a big old fucking trap for us in the sense that we would call it like a fanny pack in the Brits, we call it a bum bag. And fanny is British slang for vagina. And bum sounds like childish, goofy word for for butt like word that you would use I do that like a church lady would use to say But or your grandma would yeah. Yeah. Yeah regardless that that's part of the uniform, too But um my favorite I would say is I actually have a single definitive answer Is that I can tell you where it started my mom got me a pair of fluffy LL Bean slippers for Christmas.

The year I was on leave during Christmas from Ranger school. And then I went back to third phase of Ranger school in January and the whole time in like rainy, like two degrees above freezing rainy weather in North Florida in January, all I could think of was like, God, I can't wait. I really want to graduate this school. I really hope I'm okay. I'm stressed out as fuck. I want to pass this school. And then I can go home and wear my warm slippers because I love them so much.

I'm wearing warm slippers right now. I got these Uggs that Cynthia got me. Hell yeah. Have to throw them away because the slugs went wild on them. I had to clean them off. But you know what? I just love, I really love fluffy slippers to wear in the house. And British houses and British weather have really drilled it into me that having warm house shoes is important because it's just like 10, 11 months out of the year it's cold here. Yeah.

I've also crossed the barrier into house shoes though I am never cold. So I just don't want to touch the cold floor. So I'm rocking the household pair of Adidas sliders because three stripes on my soul motherfucker. Yeah. I mean, we lived in a ex council flat our first year in Britain. And it was like basically, you know, uh, wood laminate, fake wood on top of just solid concrete. That's pretty much what my apartment is. Yeah.

It wasn't necessarily even that it was cold as the floor was hard as shit. So like having slippers to wear in the house was important. And then we moved in this place, which has is an old Victorian house and has wood floors, but it's always cold. So- Until I moved, I was solidly Team Barefoot all the time indoors guy.

I can no longer do that. I had a pair of rainbows, the rainbow sandals, but I actually found them the other day in my old, I had to clean it, because I'd forgotten about some of the bags I had in storage under the stairs, which have gotten damp and a lot of stuff has molded and had to get thrown away, which is really irritating because it's Britain.

But one of the things I have that I found, basically I found my old uniforms, my old dress uniform, my last pair of ACUs I took off the day that I signed out on terminal leave. The bag containing all this stuff was a parachutist kit bag that I had used to pack a bunch of supplies for a pallet drop on a mission in Afghanistan and Then I got the bag back at the end and I kept it as like a suitcase duffel bag You know, it's like a it's the bag you stuff a parachute into after a jump Yeah, you know it but like I'm a people may not realize it's part of your kit you fold it up and you put it

It's actually like you wear it when you rig up a parachute underneath your it's where your reserve parachute gets mounted on to, the, uh, the harness and then you stuff everything into that. And, uh, I still have, so yeah, I'm going to keep that thing and keep my uniforms and stuff, but I had my nice sandals. Unfortunately they, they dry rod it. So, or more, I can't find they were, the leather was gross. Put it down. Yeah. It's unfortunate. I don't really have, I wish I still had my reefs, but rest in peace wherever you are dear sandals It's your pair of reefs dear pair of locals to your pair of rainbows. Sorry, you know all Floppy footwear has to go get it come away

I'm gonna get a commemorative t-shirt with just one reef This is our IP the British willing to give your reef sandals the Victoria Cross, but emphatically not this seek unit. That's right Nate, thank you so much for joining us here today. You have other podcasts. What are those podcasts? They are Trash Future podcast about the tech industry being stupid and British politics being stupid. What a Hell Waited Dad, a podcast about being a dad and also some military stories.

And I am the producer of Kill James Bond, a podcast about film that's very funny and you should watch, listen, et cetera. Before I plug the podcast you're currently listening to, I should tell you that we still have live show tickets available. You can get them at the show notes below. We're live in Belfast. In case you cannot make it on October 26th,

we are live streaming it so you can watch it anywhere and you can get those tickets in our show notes as well There's no cap on those obviously So if the show is sold out you can still get live show tickets But as for now tickets are still available get your tickets for Belfast or live show or both Livestream it while you're in the audience. I don't fucking know. It's gonna be it's still British summertime when we have the show So it's GMT plus when we have the show. So it's GMT plus one because literally the Sunday morning

after the show is fall back. GMT plus one, 8 p.m. start time in Belfast. And yeah, it's on Eventbrite. Also there is video on demand afterwards and I can, we will find a way to make the video available to people who buy tickets. So yeah, definitely check that out. And there is actually a limit, Joe.

It's 500,000. Okay, Joe. It's 500,000. Okay, so. So if 500,000 and one of you want to buy live stream tickets to our show that has a seating capacity of I think 275, please do that. Cause it would really greatly improve our fortunes in a lot of ways. Yeah, act now.

We're definitely running low on live stream positions. Yeah, we need 500,000, 500,001 of God's bravest podcast fan soldiers to defend against two billion attackers because we have to maintain the ratio of the British army in Afghanistan. If it's anything that Brits love more than anything else, it's getting ratioed.

Now, this is the only podcast that I host. You're already listening to it. But if you like what we do here and you want to support us, make everything we do possible, you can support us on Patreon. Just $5 gets you every episode a week early. It gets you years and years of bonus content. It gets you first dibs on live show tickets and merch. It gets you access to our wonderful Discord community, as well as ebooks and audiobooks. I'm currently recording the hooligans of Kandahar and releasing

it chapter by chapter every week so you can listen to my book in my voice. And once that is over, I will do my other books and there's a fucking lot of them to go through. So there'll be plenty of that. Leave us a review on wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. That helps us immensely, especially when it comes to securing live show venues, so maybe you can see us sometime when we come to your neck of the woods. And until next time, tunnel under buildings, fight British imperialism with a hammer. It can be done. It's been done before.