Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 397 - The Kagera War: Part 3

Episode Date: January 18, 2026

Support the show on Patreon and get the conclusion to our series right now! https://www.patreon.com/posts/early-episode-4-148529099 The Ugandan military stumbles over a series of problems of their own creation while the Tanzanians are defeated by a single independent contractor and a ferry boat. Part 3/4

Hey everyone, it's Joe. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you access to our entire bonus episode catalog, as well as every regular episode, one full week early. Access to all of our side series that are currently ongoing and our back catalog of those as well. Gets you e-books, audio books, first dibs on live show tickets and merchandise when they're available, and also gets you access to our Discord, which has turned into a lovely little community. So go to patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys and join the Legion of the Old Crow today. Hello everyone.

It's me, Edie Amin. I've been listening to this podcast and I've been reading comments and I've seen your remarks about me being a huge drunken, gout, riddle freak. And I've decided to do something about it. While searching for ways to improve myself, I found the website called looksmaxing.org, a place for men, just like me, Ediamine. Somewhere between reading threads titled, I Got Blue Eyes from Peptides, my favorite mandible growth methods, is trend that bad?

And thoughts about sports betting? I decided maybe I should hit up my friend MoMar for his TRT and OZempa cookup. From here, I feel like I can ascend. Boys, how are you doing? I am obsessed with the idea of Ediamine being aware of bone smashing. This website is real, and so are all of those titles. Meanwhile, I was thinking I was like, is the Chad Jaw Haram, you know, the hottest thread in all forums history, locked by moderators after 10,000 pages of furious debate? I don't know how I had a brainworm enters sometime over our mini break from recording of looks maxing.

Edia meme and it has not left. I waited a week hoping something else would enter my gray matter and still it's not working. I always find it funny that dudes get this obsession that like looks are the only thing that can possibly matter and that everything else can be neglected as if like if you were good looking enough based on an ideal that is seemingly governed solely by dudes about other dudes in a kind of like fight club, but I swear it's not homoerotic way that somehow you gain the power to do like the thing in the matrix to where you send like the order. orgasm, text message across the air.

You know what I mean? Like, the women will just fall all over you somehow. You can fucking control their brains. Like, it's insane. Yeah, what about the whole middle ground where you're a fucking asshole? I was going to say, exactly. Is there's plenty of hot dudes who can't fucking do well at all in relationships because they're dickheads and they're weird. If you're just a funny little guy, you normally could clean up.

Like, you can clean up dirty. The two infamous tweets that completely obliterate that theory is, one, she let me hip because I'm goofy and too she fucking the text man for texts and I'm like yeah you're fucking the weed man for weeds says the bitch who's fucking the text man

for texts yeah like it's one of those things where the older that I get to more bizarre it is and I realize it's not the topic of this episode today so we can move right back in but yeah the fact that those are all real thread titles like both doesn't surprise me

and also gives me a kind of like I don't know like I'm tired of this world kind of feeling yeah Nate, we have been on some deep, dark corners of the internet since we've been children. And we were a little bit older than Tom. Like, we grew up on pure horrors of our own creation. I remember, like, hey, don't watch this video of the Russian soldier getting beheaded with a pocket knife in Chechnya. And we're like, oh, I'm totally going to watch that.

I bet it'll be cool. I'm sharing this with my friends. Cool. Now it's 25 years and I still remember it. Yeah, we got our brain chemistry altered at the same time as you guys were in Afghanistan. and at the same time, I was watching beheading videos, except I was 10 years younger than you. So, Joe, you were watching real dead bodies at 19 and I was watching fake dead bodies on rot.com. I mean, we were doing that too years before we were in the military.

And it's been a long time. Also, I don't recommend anybody does that. I don't know if you need to be told that. Watch the videos or join the military. No, if you join the military, you're just idiot friends that you work with every day, also share you with those videos. But it's been a while since I've logged on to a website. And I have been filled with such horror than when I stumbled upon looksmaxing. org, which shout out to Reddit.

Of course, that's where I found it. And I did not have to look far for those titles of those threads. They're all front page made within like the last two weeks. Horrible place. All those people need intense therapy, much like EDME. there, I've completed the circle. After this episode, I will send the two of you, the picture of the jaw, Chad.

We'll save that for later, and we can circle back on it on episode four. I have a thing that I really want to say, but I'm not going to because I actually have taken all the comments to heart about how we should stay on topic, so you know what? It's a new year. It's a new me. Let's get into some history. Or I'll just say it right now. One time, I don't know how the fuck I got on this, but I wound up finding a weird form of what I can only describe as like gay groipers, like 4chan guys who were gay.

And one dude was like, they were talking. about whether or not bisexual tops actually exist. And one guy said bisexual tops are just guys who own diesel jeans with white belts who can't get a girlfriend. Real. I was like that sounds exactly like a guy I was roommates with in the army. Diesel jeans, white belt. Can't get a girlfriend. Unknown of top or bottom or sexual status. But look, it's all coming. He was also a huge racist. So he could be the bisexual top. He was probably on that for him. He was the guy who was writing about himself. It was auto fiction. Yep. To the surprise of but he became a cop in California.

Now, would we left you last time, a Ugandan army officer kind of sparked a war due to him getting his ass kicked in a bar fight. Uganda invaded Tanzania, and both countries were blindly flinging artillery at one another within hours. This is due to escalate wildly, and we'll get back to that in a second,

but first we should probably jump over the border to Tanzania to talk just a little bit about Ugandan exile politics, because this is obviously going to become pretty important to our narrative. As it's been established, Milton Abote was overthrown by Amin, leading to him and several thousand of his loyalists or failing that, just dudes who fell on to the wrong side of Ediamin, which could be anybody at this point.

They run to Tanzania where they're welcomed by the Tanzanin president, Julius Nayire, who recognizes Abote as the legitimate president of Uganda. We also already talked about Yawri Museveni's Front for the National Salvation or Fronasa, a militant group, that was kind of sort of ally. with Milton Abote, but only loosely to the extent that they both hated Edie Amin. However, the devil is always in the details. Abote sees himself as president of Uganda. His politics were kind of the same vague, left-leaning shit, but not really. More like Amin, he seemed fine with whatever outward-facing politics he needed to adopt,

which would allow him to stay in power while stealing as much as possible from the country. If we're looking for a title for this, I guess, he's a populist. But even that isn't really accurate. Musevedi and Fronassau were different. Fronassau was formed by left-wing intellectuals. They were generally college-educated and well-read. But most importantly, many of them were former Abote supporters who saw his gestures towards left-wing reform as a little more than it had been in the past.

And because of the situation that they found themselves in, powerless in exile or hiding in Uganda, they naturally were far more militant than Abote was. when it came to fighting back against the mean. Muse 70 himself declared a mean primitive fascists who needed to be destroyed. Virtually all of the cross-border raids we've been talking about, that was Fronassa.

They constantly attempted to set up secret bases inside of Uganda, oftentimes leading to horrific crackdowns and mass murders by the SRB when they were discovered. For NASA fighters trained in Mozambique during their war there, they trained with Chinese advisors in Tanzania, and in turn,

Mussevni, politically, and militarily, became something of a rival to Abote. Abote had his own backers, not only the Tanzanian and Sudanese governments, but his own militia, the Kokose Malum, roughly translated to special battalion. This was a core of Abote loyalists, largely made up of those he had empowered with the Ugandan military before he had been forced from power. Also, the intelligence branch and everything, all those guys got a job next door. They were in turn, train, funded and armed by Sudan and Tanzania, and were based in both countries.

So eventually Sudan got sick of them and kicked them out. This will never happen again. Do not Google Al-Qaeda Sudan in 1996. Sometimes your roommates end up being real motherfuckers, even if they pay the rent on time. Also, Sudan is just bad at picking roommates, apparently. Al-Qaeda kicked out of Sudan for not washing the dishes. Attracted to toxic tendencies. Or, you know, maybe they fill the dishwasher all fucked up like.

I don't know. Maybe that just pisses me off. I had a roommate in the past that did that. That's definitely what people want to hear is dudes arguing about the correct way to load a dishwasher or a conversation that's always gone well and has never been annoying. That's right. Maybe that's my old guy thing. I was waiting to develop an old guy thing. Like, I don't care if you leave the light on. I don't care about the thermostat.

Maybe the dishwasher is my old man thing. We all need one. Like, obviously it can't be World War II. I'm a fucking historian. I mean, it kind of is your thing. So yeah, maybe that's it. Maybe I'm the dishwasher guy. Fuck, I was hoping for something way cooler.

However, these were not the only exile groups working in Tanzania. There was also the Ugandan nationalist organization, or Uno, who was probably involved in one of the weirdest attempts to overthrow me during the era of exiles, let's call it. They were led by a guy named Robert Siramaga, a Ugandan absurdist playwright who studied economics at Trinity University in Dublin. This guy sounds cool as fuck, sorry, it sounds cool as shit. He was also like a hardcore Catholic. So he's a Catholic nationalist playwright.

Also the irony that he's a hardcore Catholic and went to Trinity College, Dublin, the most Protestant college in all of Ireland. That used to not let Catholics in. Maybe it didn't count as a Catholic because he wasn't Irish. Do you know vaguely what time he went to university? It would have probably been in the 60s, 50s maybe. Oh, being an African guy in Trinity College in the 60s, not a good, not a good vibe. But you know, those plays probably slapped. Think of the weird shit he was going through. Yeah, you basically found Ugandan Samuel Beckett.

I was about to make him waiting for God out joke. I was going to say, or Samuel Beckett was Irish slash francophone this guy. Maybe. He eventually also became a monarchist. Oh. But, you know, like we had the traditional monarchy system, like the Bugandan monarchy in Uganda, but he wasn't that kind of monarchist. He was like, we need a king and a queen with all of the trappings of like the British royal family to run Uganda. Once again, most Trinity College Dublin opinion ever. Under Sarmaga's direction, the Uno reached out to Israeli Colonel Baruch-Barlev. Yes, the same guy who had helped him come to power and were arguably friendly. I don't know if you want to call them friends. They drank together quite frequently. But Sera Maga wanted to

hire him to kill Amin, despite the fact that they were in a very close working relationship and everybody knew it. And Bar-Lev said, yeah, sure, but I need two million dollars to do it. They're sending the Dadaist Trinity graduate to kill Ediamine. He's literally going to bore him to death with waiting for Godo. And like, Barr Lab said he needs two million dollars thinking this will get Saramaga to like, fuck off. But Saramaga's like, well, I don't have two million dollars. I'm a playwright who wrote a nationalist organization in exile. That's not the kind of funds that we have, but I'll tell you what.

Do you help me kill Amin? I'll let you open a casino in Uganda and just keep all of the money and you don't have to pay any taxes on it. And Bar-Leb was like, sure, all right. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal. But I also like the idea, too, what if you send the absurdist-da-ist playwright to kill Ediamine? and he's like, well, I've killed him figuratively. I've buried him up to his neck and sand on stage. He's just there the whole time.

I've killed him figuratively. Meanwhile, E.D. Bid is just punching his skull into much. Yeah, exactly. Eidie, I mean, it's just like, he's making the fight over the fucking, like, you know, whatever they call it in mixology, where you smash the herbs into a pace, but he's doing it out of humans. I've muddled this playwright. I'm making a Dadaist, Catholic monarchist, mint, jula with this guy's head.

I'm getting muddled by the Israeli pit boss at the Ugandan casino. Barlev thought this deal was quite good, but he still needed startup fees because, you know, Amin is a paranoid freak. So he needs money to put together a team, to plan, all this stuff. He says he needs $50,000 bucks. Saramaga's like, yeah, all right, I'll put you up at a hotel and you and your boys come up with a plan to kill Amin. So they take the money. They run up an absolutely massive bar tab in the tens of thousands of dollars and then just ghost Saramaga.

That's completely unimportant to our storyline, but it is legitimately what the funniest things to happen during this entire time period. There's also the Save Uganda movement. Unlike other groups we've talked about, these guys were largely non-political outside of, you know, their politics boiling down to Ediamine has to die. Though some of their members were anti-eobote as much as they were. were anti-amine. Anyone could join, regardless of politics, as long as they agreed to do direct action. That's what they did. Like, no, we are not going to be arguing about shit in committees. We're going to take rifles and we're going to shoot people. We're going to blow stuff up. There was no unified leadership. It was more of a loosely aligned group of factions with their

own leaders. And some of these guys were also members of groups like Kikosi-Balum, Fronasa, Uno, whatever. It wasn't an explicit membership. It was kind of, you know, it's something I did on my Saturdays and I had something to do, you know? They all operated independently, occasionally banding together for larger actions. This obviously has its weaknesses, but because they were largely decentralized, it made them really hard for a mean to hunt down and actually do damage to as a group. And like the other groups, they were mainly based in Tanzania, but they had secret bases in Uganda,

as well as Kenya, which is quite interesting because Kenya is really interesting because Kenya is really not on board with this whole Tanzanian anti-amine effort. Anyway, these groups and others didn't really change or shift their politics in order to ally with one another. Instead, it just happened to be a classic case of what we call around here, the greater unifying theory

of fuck that guy. There was another factor as well. The countries aiding and funding these exile groups were pretty sick of their constant infighting. And this infighting was literal. Their gunfights were not uncommon. But also the headaches of trying to fund them made

things even worse because when you are trying to support like five rebel groups all at the same time, a lot of that money just ends up disappearing. And not to mention, you know, they have weapons and ammunition to supply training and it's a hard time to train these guys when sometimes you can't have them in the same room due to their interpersonal beefs. So they really wanted to streamline all of this. And it eventually turns into the Uganda National Liberation Front, which is now working side by side with the Tanzanian military. which brings us back to the Ugandan invasion in October. Just as a refresher, Ugandan Colonel Joma Rikoni,

a man so crazy that his fellow soldiers had nicknamed him after the local psych ward, had ordered a lieutenant's only name given in any book I read on this as just Lieutenant Beyonce to invade Tanzania because Rikoni's brother-in-law got his ass kicked by Tanzanians at the local bar. They invaded, set some buildings on fire, promptly get clapped by some Tanzanian artillery. Rikoni, meanwhile, is demanding reinforcements from elsewhere in Uganda. It seems as far as anyone can tell that this is the first time Ediamine is hearing about any of this shit. Mind you, at this point, artillery duels are happening across the Ugandan Tanzania border, though I do use that term loosely, because as far as anybody can tell,

they really could not aim. They did not have the ability of forward controllers, of forward observers to accurately call an artillery, but they were flinging artillery at each other. Remember, Amin had wanted war against Tanzania for years now. He had been making claims to the Kigara region for as long as he'd been in power, while simultaneously accusing Tanzania of planning an invasion, or six other different countries for using Tanzania as a springboard for one,

which in the case of the Aguzaa militias was kind of true that one time. But Amin had never pulled the trigger on the war, but it seemed now the trigger had been pulled for him by Rekone. Amin was left with two choices. He could refuse the army and have them stand down. It would be just another border blow up. One of dozens. That's exactly what Tanzania thought it was.

When the colonel at the border, Louis Angano of the Tanzanian military, asked for reinforcements, they were denied. At least at first, because the government and Dara Salam just assumed Amid would cut that shit after a couple of hours and go back home. The Tanzanian government didn't even bother talking about what happened on the radio to people. They just thought it was another day at the office, for a lack of a better term. Instead, Amin, I would imagine, was a bit worried about losing face with his own military. So he just went with it.

Reinforcements from across Uganda began making their way towards the border, though this was very slow moving. We talked about the shit state of the Ugandan military already. They had no real qualified mechanics. Their trucks hardly worked. Anyone even halfway qualified to run anything in a large scale was thrown into the basement in the torture mansion or had fled the country. but they were moving nonetheless.

And in contrast to the totally silent Tanzanian radio, Ugandan radio went full wag the dog mode. They announced to the world that Tanzanian soldiers had invaded Uganda, which was not true. In fact, according to the radio, the Tanzanian invasion had been going on for a week. Oh, but don't worry, radio reports said that Ugandan forces were winning all of the battles.

Of course, of course. Which begs the question then how is it going on for a week? They just invented battles to talk about on the radio that Ugandan forces were winning at a level that it sounds like reading like Chinese history. It's like, oh, like a million Tanzanian soldiers were killed. We lost five men. Ugandan soldiers are fighting on the astral plane. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, they're war maxing. Ugandan jets began bombing Tanzanian border villages while simultaneous crackdowns were ordered within Uganda. This is where things get kind of murky as who is ordering what at this point? Now, Amin is never far away from incredible unspeakable violence. But there are things that begin to happen that make no sense in the context of his own tyranny. We've mentioned the SRB in our last episode. The state torturers trained by the Stasi who are wearing bell bottoms in aviator sunglasses. Well, they had become as political and factionalized as the army itself.

As we've explained, this is just kind of part of end. military dictatorship that makes the state security apparatus into politicians. This created rival bands of SRB men, and while the war was starting, they launched a parallel war on one another. Gangs of SRB men launched ambushes on other groups. There's also one group that decided it would be a great idea to just rob a fucking bank right now. I really hate having to live through the warriors during Idiot Means Rain. I robbed a bank by simply standing outside of it and banging empty bottles together. Yeah, the SRB group that robbed the bank did it in an armored vehicle.

I mean, that's not that far off from the Cadillac Hearst from the Warriors. That's true. Yeah. It's the Cadillac Hearst if it was created by General Dynamics, in which case it would break down much faster than an actual Cadillac. Other groups of SRB men just began shooting at soldiers on their way to the front, accusing them of being dissidents and deserters or traders or whatever. other SRB groups tried to arrest a politician who had fallen out of favor with Amin,

only for that man's bodyguards to shoot ten of them dead? Like, Kampala is going off for no discernible reason. In short, as Uganda entered the war, Amin always talked about, the country itself began to collapse virtually on day one. But at the front, things looked a lot different. Kind of. Colonel Sagano virtually had no soldiers at the border. He himself was stationed 40 kilometers away,

owing to that treaty we talked about in part two, with the one overseen by Syed Bear, that kind of made a DMZ over the border, and Tanzania listened to it. They kept their soldiers and commanders and military equipment 40 kilometers away, and were the only ones to do so. So seeing resistance as hopeless until reinforcements arrived,

Sagano ordered his soldiers to withdraw to his location and leave the border wide open, these being your standard everyday border patrol guys, like the other kind of a paramilitary. military, only maintaining a largely blind drumbeat of artillery to keep the Ugandans at bay. However, Sengano was pretty confused. Thanks to Chinese assistance and horrible Ugandan signal security, he could listen to all of the Ugandan radio traffic.

So he sat there with no soldiers on the border, listening to Ugandan officers advancing and screaming over the radio, blasting with every weapon system they had, saying they were beating with heavy resistance. there was nobody there. They were just shooting wildly in every direction. So, Sagano, thinking he might be fighting either the most incompetent or dumbest men to ever wear a uniform, began to order his men to go back to the border, which is called the Mutu Kula Front. The Ugandan's had tanks, armored personnel carriers, jets, artillery.

They had everything. Meanwhile, Sagano's men, about 55 dudes, were lightly armed with rifles and a couple of mid-ranged mortars. They settled into a hillside and began plunking some mortars at the Ugandans as well as just taking some pot shots with the rifles. And this was enough to halt the entire Ugandan advance. It must be really, really wild to see your enemy basically doing the equivalent of howling at the moon except with guns. And then like you basically hit them with the small arms equivalent of a few spitballs and they freak out completely. Yeah. It's exactly like when I went through basic training, they had us go through stick. lanes, which for people who don't know is just like a training lane where you walk down or

drive down and you go through a scenario. But, you know, we're all 17 or 18. None of us are actually soldiers yet. And the second that a drill sergeant fires a blank round, we all just immediately freeze and have no idea what to do. It's like that except it's several thousand people and there's tanks involved. I remember doing sort of like night attack at a patrol base where we were defending when I was a cadet and they had us with a old, old, old, old M16s and just like, oh, we're taking contact and just dumping magazines into the bush. I'm granted, it was blank rounds, but like, you realize how easy it would be. You'd be like, no, I'm just shoot all of my ammo at something green.

There's a lot of green all around me. Whatever. Yeah. The military doctrinal title for this is Death Blossom. Yes, everyone's shooting from all directions. Yep. Fire everything everywhere all at once. So at this point, the Ugandan column, after taking very few losses, it seems that they had maybe a couple guys get wounded from the mortar shrapnel.

They turn around and they drive back across the border. Sigano and what amounted to be slightly over a platoon of soldiers had stopped the entire Ugandan invasion. Though the Tanzanines had nothing on the border to counter the Ugandan Air Force, as jets constantly streaked over the border and bombed at will. Though, I should point out here, the Ugandan pilots were so badly trained, they could not hit anything with their bombs. It seems that most of their training boiled down to you can keep the jet in the air, you could take off and land, but all of the training that came with like doing gun runs, close air support, and that shit was all like online training or something, I don't know.

They tried to bomb the town of Bacaba and virtually all of their bombs just landed in the middle of Lake Victoria hitting absolutely nothing. It's nice to see that the entirety of their training summed up to the equivalent of a kid in a cardboard box pretending to go to the moon. Yeah, you have one pilot in the box. You have another pilot behind him pushing him making propeller noises with his mouth. All of that change when Tanzanian reinforcements arrived in the form of Strella anti-aircraft teams. The Strella, for people who don't know, is a shoulder-fired weapon that launches a heat-seeking

anti-aircraft missile. The team camped out near Sagano's headquarters in the town of Keaka and shot down a Ugandan mig a short time later. Now the pilot survived. His jet crashed into the woods. He simply got out and walked back across the border to Uganda. Man, he must have been really embarrassed. I guess if you're going to be doing this, you might as well make it as low stakes as possible. Yeah. If I'm going to get shot down, it better be close to home. You know, I want a nine to five work schedule even at war. Yeah, exactly. it's like getting shot down, but it basically the equivalent of like the check engine light coming on. Getting shot down crashing near a public transportation hub and making sure it's highly connected to my house back home.

However, those were the only real reinforcements that the Tanzanids got at the border despite his pleas to Daris Salam. He seemed to be the only guy who thought Amin's forces would come back. So he rapidly came up with his own tactics. He had artillery as we've established. but not enough to cover every approach that the Ugandan military could take across the border. His artillery was also not self-propelled, meaning they were cannons. His soldiers would have to physically drag around and face any incoming threats. So he orders men to run around town and simply jack any truck that they could then use to tow their artillery

to better respond to wherever the Ugandans might invade next. And on October 30th, the Ugandans did exactly what Sagano thought they would do. After massing thousands of men and hundreds of tanks and armored personnel carriers, they started back across the border, this time at four different spots. The Tanzanians who lived north of the Kigara River, in the way of the Ugandan advance, had been trying to flee the area for days, but due to traffic jams and absolutely zero assistance from the state, they were left to their own devices, which is never a good thing in a humanitarian crisis. So Sagana watch as civilians ran for their lives.

Unfortunately, the Tanzanians had planted landmines in the same set of the river, something they did warn civilians about, but never marked them, nor told the civilians exactly where the landmines were for fear they'd tell the Ugandans. So in the chaos of self-evacuation, if you want to call it that, people ran directly into a minefield, killing dozens of them and cows, blowing up cars, things like that. Meanwhile, the Ugandan's advance at a crawl, shooting at anything they saw. saw anyone who survived was kidnapped and shipped back to Uganda to be pressed into literal slavery.

At this point, the Ugandan military is operating slave camps full of Tanzanians. The Tanzanian military, which in this context pretty much just means Sagano and his 50-oddudes, put up zero resistance because there was just so many Ugandans. The Ugandan's blindly fired across the Kigarasalient, covering the entire distance by nightfall. Just across the bridge was Kyaka and Sagana's command center, which was completely collapsing around him as his few soldiers he had ran for their lives. The Ugandan commander, Colonel Marjani, had no idea that the Tanzanian army he was facing was just as if not more fucked up than his own at the moment.

He had no clue that the entire path to punch deeper into Tanzania was literally wide open and sat just north on the other side of the bridge, which Sagano could not blow up and had not enough soldiers to defend. Though, to be fair here, as much as there ever any real overarching war aims or goals from the Ugandan government needy ameen, they had technically been met. Amid claimed the entire Kigara salient at this point. He had taken it in a single day, sort of. And the Ugandan conquerors of Kigara acted exactly the way you probably expected they would, given everything else we've talked about so far. We spent several hours talking about how the Ugandan militaries little more than uniformed bannings, even against their

own people. Well, now they were unleashed on the Tanzanians, and they acted as a death squad. Anything worth anything was stolen? Members of the local government and the ruling Tanzanian political party, the Chama Chama Mezzapundi, or the CCM, were hunted down, dragged out in front of hooting soldiers, and beheaded. Women were pressed into sexual slavery or murdered and sent back into Uganda to be held captive for those purposes. Soldiers got blind drunk and turned their weapons on nearby buildings

and people blowing them up for fun. Fucking hell. And Radio Uganda broadcasts his stories about the liberation of Kigara and declare the Kigara River was now the new border between the two countries. Amin himself traveled there for photo ops, holding a couple weapons that were left behind

by Tanzanian soldiers for the camera. In response to the international condemnation and bad PR for the crimes, I mean challenged President Nairé to a boxing match to simply settle everything like men. You're fucking joking. No, not at all. He said, fuck this, 1v1 right now. Oh, okay. Mind you, Nire is quite smaller and much older.

And this is just ridiculous. Ediamine went forward in time. He watched the movie Troy with Brad Pitt and he's like, this is how we should settle our. shit. Ediamine wanted to do the first Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson fight. I mean, I was thinking about, you mentioned Mike Tyson. I was thinking of the sort of passing line of dialogue and do the right thing where the

old guys are hanging outside. The guys are like, man, fuck Mike Tyson. I'll whip his ass. And it's like, uh, you're sure about that ruddy? It's 1989. Congratulations time. You found the one guy that could fight Jake Paul and I would root for Jake Paul. And that's Ediamid.

Meanwhile, in Darbyn, Islam Tanzania, President Nairi was in a bit of a shit spot. One of the reasons that he thought there would never be a Ugandan invasion was simply because he thought that the Ugandan military was so deeply messed up they could simply never manage it. Meanwhile, he was confronted with the fact that he wasn't sure that his own military, officially called the Tinsdian People's Defense Force, would be capable of expelling them now that they had actually pulled it off. His military commander General Abdullah Tualipo insisted that they could do it, but they would need time to mask their forces. Nairi ordered them to start while also sending out messages to the Ugandan exile forces to get their men together.

Now, he was unsure of his own military capability because, in short, they were not at all prepared for war. The only real experience the Tanzanian military had was in its support of the rebel group, the Zimbabwe National African Union, in their fight against the Rhodesian apartheidians. But in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't the kind of military effort that gives institutional experience and knowledge, especially in conventional warfare. However, Tanzania had something that the Ugandans didn't, a very well understood concept of military doctrine. Tanzania, like Uganda, was quite poor.

But not in nearly in such a bad shape as Uganda, owing to the simple fact that Ediamine wasn't in charge there. A lot of armies when adopting weapons systems from a supplier tend to adopt the tactics that those suppliers use. For example, most countries who became Soviet allies, adopted Soviet equipment, also adopted Soviet tactics. This makes sense, as weapons tend to be designed around established doctrine of the country that produces them, to make a long story short. However, unlike Uganda, Tanzania did not have one major military supplier. They bought weapons from anywhere they could, ending up with a strange collection of weapons and vehicles from

across the goddamn world. Hell yeah, Mad Max Warfare. As long as someone would sell them something that they could fight a war with at a price point they could afford, Tanzania would buy it. I've somehow fit an AK-47 clip into an M-16. That's right. I have made the worst thing I've ever imagined in my head. The bullpup AK-47. Likewise, they did something incredibly practical.

They sent their officers anywhere in the war. world that would train them. Despite the fact that Nairi was an avowed leftist and that put him at odds with the West, Tanzania was just as likely to send officers to the United States and the United Kingdom as they were to the Soviet Union in China. If there was a spot available for an officer, a Tanzanian would go there. That is incredibly practical. What a concept. That meant while the Tanzanians were not in a great position, for example, they had few tanks, fewer armored personnel carriers, and virtually no replacement parts for their vehicles if they were damaged, they had by far the best educated professional officers of the war and arguably in Africa as a whole. However, that being said,

they were pretty limited just by the reality of a military operating with virtually no budget whatsoever. For example, Tanzia only had four brigades, and only one of them happened to not be on leave at the time. They were all the way in the south of the country. But this happened to be the perfect situation for anything to pop off. Because this brigade had just finished participating in an international training exercise where they reportedly did very well. So these guys went from faking a war to, oh God, now we actually have to go and do it, which is the best case scenario.

Yeah, really, you'd be so lucky, especially like if you're a guy who somehow took annual leave right before this kicked off. And I'm like, yeah, sorry, guys. I'm out of office. out of offices on. No bullets from me. Thank you. Yeah, my automatic email response is on. Yeah, exactly. It's like, hey guys, I actually had annual leave scheduled. I realized you need to go fight a world weapon, but, you know, I'm going to have to sit

this one out. The Tanzan military doctrine is quite interesting because despite all of these different weapon systems, all of these different training backgrounds, they kind of all molded together into, for a lack of a better term, a very practical and very modular doctrine. of we will make do and we know how to. Because like, yeah, we have a tank, we can't fix it. Therefore, we're not going to go driving directly into battle with it. We'll find something else to do. Like, they were predominantly at this point a light infantry army, but they were a very good one.

Strict adherence to the military doctrine of country girls make do. That's right. Thank you. All right. Things should have been pretty easy for the soldiers of the Southern Brigade to get from their base to the front line. but of course we would not be talking about it if that was the case. They took a series of trains to Mwanza on the shores of Lake Victoria. And for people who are unaware, Lake Victoria is massive. It is the largest lake in Africa, larger than all of the Great Lakes minus Lake Superior.

And if you don't know how big the Great Lakes are, well, go visit them. They're honestly quite lovely. But Victoria is massive. And the government has plans for that. Countries in the African Great Lakes region generally have a system of ferries to transport. where people and goods across them. Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika, which we did a series on and more of war one.

Go listen to it. That boat that we talked about during our series on Lake Tanganyika is still operating as a ferry on Lake Tanganyika during the story. So, yeah, weird connection point. And it was on those ferries that the army was going to rely on. But the ferry operator was an independent contractor. It had a strangely specific clause in his contract that said, in the event of a war, his ferry could not be pressed into service or be forced to transport anything to do with any country's military.

So the brigade would have to walk all the way around Lake Victoria. Oh. Yeah. And all of this is happening while Jane Goodall is with the chimps. So it's like two very strange worlds existing on opposite banks of the lake. And the chimps are fighting their own war. We did a bonus episode on that. We also did a bonus episode about that.

This podcast has got it all, basically. from Gundams to chip fights. I'm pretty sure this conflict came up in that episode. I think some of the researchers got kidnapped. Yeah, it sounds about right. I love the idea that Tanzania in the middle of

one of the greatest crises they've had since independence is defeated by a single independent contractor. Sorry, can't do it. Not in my contract. I love it. I mean, fuck that guy because, you know, obviously the Tanzans are going to depose Ediamine, which is inherently a good

thing. But it is very funny that he's like, no, I'm not doing it. You guys don't tip well. Pulling your boat slowly away from the shores like, yeah, come out and get me. Bet you can't because you ain't got a boat. Sorry, I can't

hear you. I'm over on my motherfucking boat. He's just pulling the foghorn like taunting them. Whipping shitties at the middle of Lake Victoria. very slowly because it's like at a hundred-year-old ferry, but yeah. So the brigade begins their walk, walk slash drive, because they do have vehicles, but the vehicles aren't very reliable.

Fuel is an issue. It's a giant brigade-wide slinky back and forth down the road as anybody who's been in the military has seen this happen. But they get more problems. Rain had begun dumping on them. And Tanzania, with a lot of. similar problems as Uganda had a bit of an infrastructure issue. Namely, a lot of the roads in this region were still unpaved.

So the road to Kianca had been churned to mud. The mud swallowed their tanks and trucks, and as more and more vehicles drove over the muddy shithole, it got worse and worse. Virtually everything got stuck in the brigade-wide traffic jam as thousands of soldiers were forced to begin pulling and pushing on them to try to get them free, reducing every vehicle to pure soldier power, the only measure of power worse than horse power. You know, the hardest part about like keeping soldier power up

is reshoeing the soldiers. You know, you have to get the ferrier up. You have to pin the soldier down and nail a horseshoe into them. It's very hard. Instead of giving a horse a sugar cube, you're just giving the soldier a very small energy drink. It's a sugar cube made specifically for soldiers, which is somehow,

it's a powdered nicotine mixed in with an ice cube made out of Monster Energy drink. Oh, nobody go and make that. That is physically possible. Nobody make that. A soldier just chewing tobacco, you know, the way horses chew hay with their lips out? I think I've seen someone do that. Yeah, it's called any guy from the South. Like, I actually knew a guy.

I had never seen chewing tobacco until I joined the military. Was it much of a thing in Michigan growing up. I don't know if that's changed all, but like, you obviously have dip, but he was doing like literal, uh, like red man chewing tobacco, like a fucking cowboy from the 1800s or whatever,

like chewing on that shit like it's cudd and spitting up the nastiest shit onto the ground. The sweet, sweet, sweet bulls cold. They eventually struggled through all this, got to Kiaka and began digging in, establishing field hospitals, kitchens,

everything you'd expect a brigade to have, but everything and everyone is absolutely caked up to the eyes in mud. Meanwhile, Tanzania declares a full mobilization, not just of men, but of everything. Vehicles of all kinds were given to the government as a kind of ad hoc logistics systems, from personal cars to buses to trucks. Anything with an engine was commandeered to shuttle soldiers

and resources from all over Tanzania towards the front line. Factories were put to work cranking out clothing, boots, tinned food for the army, all men report to regional conscription centers. But I don't want to make it sound like Tanzania wasn't going through, let's call them wartime growing pains. A flight of three Tanzania and Miggs supplied by China, or flying over Lake Victoria on a normal patrol. However, nobody told the aforementioned Tanzan anti-aircraft batteries that they were coming. So as they turned back home, they ran into a cloud of friendly fire, blowing up all the planes. And if that wasn't bad enough, they killed all three pilots as well.

It would be hard for Tanzania to replace the jets. That is something that is possible. But something that is not thought of in modern warfare is just how long it takes to train people to operate this shit. Pilots are, unless a war you happen to be in, goes on for the better per of a year or more, depending on the kind of jet we're talking about, effectively irreplaceable. Like, these are The highest trained people in any country's military are pilots. When one dies, that is a massive loss. Tanzania just lost like 15% of their pilots on accident. Rip.

Whoops. Man, you got to know the incredible highs and sudden lows of that aircraft battery, too. Oh, we got all three. Oh, wait, what's that symbol on the tail? You see the tail falling through the sky. You just hear the fucking curb your enthusiasm music start. I am so fired. I am fucked.

Meanwhile, the Ugandan military is met with a titanic struggle. They were worried that the Tanzanians might launch a counterattack across the bridge. They were now on opposite sides up. So they made an obvious decision. Blow it up. A simple basic tactic that any military would do when attempting to deny area access to an enemy. Small problem, though. Ediamine, fearing being blown up in an ambush.

and assassinated, disbanded the entire Ugandan army corps of engineers, i.e., the people who professionally blow shit up. Whoops. They did not have anybody that knew how to blow it up. This is one of those issues. Like, obviously, I knew I served in the U.S. military. Nate, you served in the U.S. military. So our opinions of soldiers and capabilities are very flawed in the grand scheme of things. But if you get a group of people in any military together, a group of them will figure out how to blow something up. It's what they live for. They got tanks just blow it up with a tank, right? That's what I would do to shoot at it.

They don't do that. Instead, the decision is made to bomb it with jets. But the guys who are really, really good at hitting targets. That's right, yeah. But on the opposite side of the river, the Tanzanians had turned the hillside into something of a pop-up anti-aircraft battery. As Uganda jets had dived low enough so they might actually be able to hit it, they got slammed with missiles and machine gun fire,

dropping several jets into the river. So the Air Force stopped trying to die. which meant that they released their bombs very, very high up, just kind of flinging them towards the bridge. They missed and occasionally one of the bombs would fly over the wrong side of the river and bomb their own soldiers on accident. They're just taking Ls after L after L,

all on their own dick. I don't know how bad. Obviously they're not dealing with smart bombs here. There are targeting systems. There are ways to do this, but it's impressive to fail at, such a high rate. Like, I don't know if the Ugandan Air Force effectively hits anything over the entire time period of this war. I hate sending out your, um, your bombing run that is led

by a guy called one-eyed gym. Going back to the drawing board, the Ugandans decide to try something else. We have mines in Uganda. We blow things up in those mines. Let's get someone from one of those mines to blow up this bridge. So they go to the nearest mine in Uganda. nearly 200 kilometers away, which happened to employ a British guy as its demolition expert. They kidnap him at gunpoint, they drive him all the way to the front line, and they push him towards the bridge and tell him to blow it the fuck up. All right. So on the night of November 3rd, he does.

He drops the middle span of the bridge into the river and successfully blown up in the dumbest way possible. This is the only successful movement the Ugandans have made. That is correct. Yeah. just as the two sides were digging in, the strange geopolitical situation that had been created began to crank into overdrive. Despite Amin switching gears,

at least openly in pretending to be a liberation ideology believing pan-Africanists who supported Palestine and all the other stuff we've talked about. He still had quite honestly some of those confusing politics and relationships I've ever seen outside of someone who developed their personal ideology based on how many hours of hearts of iron they've played. Amin, of course, was supporting.

by Libya and the PLO. And Libya quickly began the process of deploying thousands of soldiers to aid Uganda, as well as PLO units who are already in Uganda because they were doing training, though Yasser Arafat would eventually greenlight further reinforcement soon afterwards. To Omar Gaddafi, the war was a religious one, because he was in his Pan-Islamism phase, and he sought as a war of Islam versus Christianity. He ordered his military to get ready to deploy without consulting literally, literally, any other Libyan politician or military leader.

And once he finally did have to tell his army commander about what he was doing, the army commander's like, yeah, we absolutely should not do that. Like, that is not our problem. Also, his army commander was weirdly only a major owing to that weird thing that Gaddafi never officially promoted himself beyond the rank of colonel. So, like, so yeah, the most struggling major in military history. I mean, I should have just hit up Gaddafi. for you to get a demolitions expert from Belfast flown over.

The problem we have with this fucking bridge going into Tanzania is you're not using Cassio watches to set your timer. Yeah, all do you have to do is tell that the other side is led by a guy who went to Trinity. But, I mean, like we've talked about before, pissed off virtually every country on the continent not named Libya due to his overt and covert support. of Rhodesia, South Africa, and Israel, which had continued this entire time. He had been completing about British colonialism. Look, I'm not saying I expect Edia mean to have coherent politics or anything.

I just assume you'd hide it better. I don't know. This is all very stupid. Also, like, Tanzania openly supports Palestine as well. Like, there's PLO Cadres training in Tanzania. This is going to become a thing later. We'll talk about more in part four. But soon, Mozambique, Tanzania's ally in the war against Rhodesia via Zanu, went to Tanzania's aid.

Not only did Mozambique tell Tanzania to withdraw all of their forces from the Rhodesian Bush War, but they would also be sending a battalion to support Tanzania because they saw defeating Amin as another front against white settlers in Africa. I should pause here and say there are also a fogload of rumors about other international support that was given to Tanzania. And normally in these tellings, it's like Cuban military. advisors, thousands of them by some tellings. No, did not happen. I'm 100% certain that Cuba would definitely be down to clown in this situation, but zero evidence that they were ever actually deployed. The only evidence that I ever see cited in any historical telling is that this dead body looks kind of light-skinned. Seriously, that's it. Hey. Yeah. Like, that guy must be Cuban.

Like, that's literally it. That's all of it. And obviously, the fact that Cuba was involved in other African wars. Not this one. There's also a weird story that I found. I tried to follow it back to the source and it just doesn't have one which is Tanzan anti-aircraft crews were so skilled in shooting down Ugandan jets

was because they had assisted the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War which is also not true. Yeah, but it feels true, Joe. How funny would it be if it was true? Like what if McCain got shot down by a Tanzanian guy.

But that did not happen. Obviously, the Tanzanian government was vocally supportive of North Vietnam. But no, the Tanzanian defense forces were not forward deployed to Vietnam. But it would take time for these reinforcements from either side, whether it be the PLO and the Libyans for Uganda or the Mozambiqueans and their own soldiers who are in Mozambique for the Tanzanians. And in the meantime, the Tanzanians were massing on their side of the river, digging in and preparing for the coming operations. One of the things they did was dig in even more artillery and use it to suppress Ugandan forces on the other side. Again, I say suppress rather than shell because they're still kind of figuring out how to use forward observers.

Somehow of all of the professional military education that Tanzanian officers got, apparently none of them went to artillery school. So they're kind of having to do on-the-job training. and to their credit, they do learn this quite quickly. You got to do the manual handling information video where they tell you to, you know, squat down and don't bend your back when you're picking up rockets to load into the artillery.

Yeah, that's the only class they took, not how to aim it. They went to one marksmanship class in the United States and you have a Tanzanian military officer trying to figure out a Kentucky windage is cannon. Just like hitting next. the next button over and over and over again on the training videos to try to get through as quickly as possible and the only one you actually watch is the mandatory one of how to lift a box.

The Tanzanian Ford Observer is doing the exact same thing I'm doing while attempting to play Battlefield 6 right now. And I will say he learns a lot better than I do. But like before, this worked. Just the shells flying overhead was enough to scare the shit out of Ugandan forces. Once the Ugandans were too busy running or hiding from the artillery, the Tanzanians sent small teams across the Kigara River and boats to conduct raids, which also worked.

Out of this comes another bullshit story, which I do want to say how much I wish it was true. But a story has survived in the decades since the war has ended, of one of these raids was stopped via a surprise crocodile, attack, which somehow killed dozens, if not hundreds of Tanzanian soldiers. This story was completely made up by Idi Amin on Ugandan radio and was in turn picked up by the international press. This never happened and somehow has made its way into multiple tellings of the war. But like this is, you know, Belize a bigger point about like so much stuff about Idi Amin

and like this period involving Uganda. It's so muddled because he made up so much shit and people made up. so much shit about him and the myth making around Idi Amin the man has affected the wider history of Uganda at this period. Yeah, I mean, he has made up a ton of shit about his own personal history about what other people are doing.

People have made up a lot of stuff about what Ediamine has done. And then Ediamine has done so much horrible shit that when you see or hear a story about something awful happening, you just kind of default to, yeah, Ediamine would do that. Because he has done, you know,

equally horrific things in a different time. Yeah, like the classic example is the cannibalism thing. Like, is there any evidence he actually ate someone? Not really. Heavily contended, I'll say. It seems like something he would do though. Yeah, exactly.

Like if he didn't mean ate a guy, you'd be like, yeah, sure. Why not? Just like if somehow he managed to weaponize crocodiles in some form of World of Warcraft Druid in a way. Sorry, it'd be a hunter that could control animals and have. a herd of crocodile. There's no word for this. Crackers don't live like that.

They're not in the military. This is not the Russian military situation where they lost the boat to crocodiles. I really wish it was. I really like the idea that somebody was able to impose military order and discipline on crocodiles. And then you'd have to come up with a tactical graphic to represent a formation of crocodiles.

Yeah. You'd have to come up with like the proper tactical displacement of each crocodile while they death roll. What do you do? What are you doing? like when you're doing defense in depth and all of a sudden it's like there's like a battalion size element of crocodiles coming at us right now. It's like they're amphibious. It's got

fucked up. They can do shit on land and the water. Like we kind of can't get away. It's like, well, I guess you can fly. But they're really bad at flying. Yeah. Crocodiles are notoriously bad at flying. Thank you. As you, Ugandan, Tanzanian, whomever, defender, you're also kind of like your pilots, well, Ugandan pilots suck really bad. So imagine that. It's like you're trying to get away. But the Tanzanian pilots are dead. Denetanian pilots are dead. You goton pilots are really, really good at doing everything besides flying and hitting targets. You don't really have a safe route to get into the air.

You're basically Armenian. And now there's crocodiles. I love the idea that like somehow there would have been a crocodile flight program if the Israeli radon and Tebe never happened. Like they blew up all the holding pins. Like Benjamin Netanyahu's shitty brother got his skull shot apart by a crocodile who was just there for flight training. But these small raids told the Tanzanian military that the Ugandan's were so badly deployed that they might actually just be able to cross the river.

But it would require them to do something they have never done before and only practiced about three times ever in training. Deploying pontoon bridges to make a tactical river crossing. These aren't the kind of retractable bridges that you see nowadays loaded up on tracked vehicles. Instead, they're literally just sections of floating bridge piled up in the back. of a truck, chucked out in the river in a generally rough line, and then a soldier has to jump across them and attach them into one single piece. And it can, you know, ferry across trucks, soldiers, it just can't handle tanks and armored personal carriers.

They're testing which soldier has to do it, who has the best long jump? They have just frogger's set up and is like, okay, who's the best out of it? Your branch pin for the military is just frogger's head. This is where the crocodile core would come in handy. I was about to say. You just have to have the crocodiles line up and just walk across them. But nobody thought about it. Nobody could pay the crocodiles pension. Or the Tanzanian counter-Ugandan crocodiles can attack the people deploying the bridge. That's true. It's true. We're all fucked up here. Every situation could be solved with more crocodiles.

A crocodile is much like a gun. It all depends on who wields it. So starting at 3 a.m. on November 19. the operation began. And just like the Tanzanians thought, the Ugandanans just didn't seem to keep any night watch up over the river. They didn't even shoot at the Tanzanians as they spent three hours building a bridge. However, they did build a bridge leading directly into that minefield I previously talked about, which is a problem. Though they didn't not remember the minefield. It was just the best place to build the bridge. So after they finished building the bridge, they sent over trained combat engineers to clear their minds,

which was only partially successful because it still killed three of their own men. Even with that little, let's call it a tactical whoopsie, the Tanzanians crossed the river with the bridge rated for everything other than tanks. The next day, they launched their counterattack and found absolutely no Ugandan's waiting for them on the other side. They sent forward scouts ahead to see just where the hell they had gone, and to their complete and utter confusion, they found nobody. Their shelling at Ugandan positions in Kigara had been so effective in scaring the Ugandan's that the entire Ugandan army had simply packed up and drove back across the border.

All right. And this left Nairiere in a very weird spot. He had expected a massive battle, something conclusive, and had walked right back into Kigara. It was clear that Ugandan forces were digging in in their positions and he would need to wait if he was going to invade, and defeat the Ugandan military. So his force began to dig in as well. And even though things had effectively returned to how they had been since before the Ugandan invasion, Amidin hadn't agreed to talks, he hadn't renounce his claims to the cagaris salient, and really nobody was trying to mediate the whole situation.

So it was clear to Nairi that he would have to press on if he wanted a conclusion to this war. The war aims changed to invading Uganda and seizing the southern towns of Masaka and Mbara, creating effectively a buffer zone. Nehuri settled on this for a few reasons. One was simple revenge. He wanted to do to them what Uganda had done to Kigera. The other was Milton Abote and the other exiles insisting, if you launch an invasion,

Amin would collapse and the military would probably rebel. It's a situation of kicking in the door and the whole rotten structure coming down. But again, Tanzania had never done anything like this before. It took them a few months to build up their forces. and supplies, not only reinforcements from the army but their Mozambican allies, and thousands of mobilized men who'd found their way into the ranks of the People's Militia. Within a matter of months, as the war stalled into sporadic firefights, artillery shellings, and

wildly inaccurate bombings from Air Forces. During that time, the Tanzanian military had gone from maybe 40,000 men to over 150,000. And sure, the People's Militia and even the regular Army, which was in turn supported by the police that even militarized prison guards had really tapped out all logistics available, like there weren't enough uniforms, the quality of weapons spanned about three generations within a single unit, and even helmets were a little more than a pipe dream, but they had been effectively deployed. They had undergone several weeks of basic training, which should be noted here, was still more training than the majority of anyone in the Ugandan ranks, to say nothing about their officers' professional education.

They also put out a call to any anti-amine Ugandans from anywhere in the world to come and join them if they were not part of an already existing militia group. Thousands entered the call from all over. A lot of them are soldiers, but they were from every walk of life and political cross-section. Any assault into Uganda would first require them to attack the Ugandan positions in the high ground at Mutukula owing to its commanding position. On January 27th, 1979, the attack began with a plan so simple, it is honestly pretty funny. A Tanzanian column would drive straight up towards Mutakula.

And once the Ugandan's began shooting at it, they would flank them, thinking that the Ugandan's would be so incompetent, they would not know how to protect their flanks. This worked perfectly well. Yeah, I was going to say, one could assume. At this rate, this is almost unfair, but then like you have to remember the Ugandan's invaded them first. Like, they violated the prescient rule of don't start no shit. There won't be no shit. This worked so well that the Ugandans ran away so quickly, they barely had any time to lose soldiers in the defense of the hill.

Like, that's the other thing that's quite shocking during all of this, is that in no battle, is there a high body count? I mean, I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Of course, it's just interesting because these battles are not small. They encompass entire battalions, brigades, thousands of men, tanks, air forces, whatever. It's just that the Ugandan's run away so fast. They barely have time to take losses, which is, in my opinion, the best way to fight a war.

If you're going to fight one, run away from it instead. Cowardous always a tactical option. Tactical cowardice. It's me hiding in a ditch while covered in Mali gear. Maybe a dozen men were killed, and they left behind so many weapons and so much ammo, it resupplied the Tanzanian military. They even captured a fully operational, fueled and loaded tank, which they then used to spin around and fire on other Uganda tanks, destroying several of them.

It's like straight up tactical GTA shit. It's Battlefield 6 shit. Yeah, the only thing missing was like a guy surfing on top of a jet, jumping off and doing a sniper shot and immediately killing Julie's Naire. Jesus Christ. Dropping from the Ugandan Battle Bowl. This was a trend. Ugandan forces were much better supplied. Say what you will about the conduct and the ability of the Ugandan military,

but they were never short of any kind of supplies. And they dropped everything, every time to haul ass. And the Tanzanians began to joke that the Ugandan army was the best quartermaster they had ever had. But that wasn't even a joke. The Ugandan military was effectively a loot drop for the Tanzanians. They supplied virtually all of their ammo and fuel to forward forces. I have never seen some shit like this before in my life. Julius Nairi, I really said to Idi Amin, run them pockets.

Like a Tanzanian soldier sitting in a foxhole, eating food, like cleaning his weapon, loading his vest down with more ammo. I was like, man, thank God for Ediaemean. This was becoming a problem because the Tanzanians were caverns were caverns. capturing so much equipment to include vehicles like motorpools worth of tanks. They captured more tanks in 48 hours and the Tanzan military previously had entirely. That the Tanzan logistical system was like effectively being crushed under the weight of transporting all of the captured material to a place where it could be dispersed.

It's like our arrows will blot out the sun, but it's like our left behind ammo will crush their logistics system. They'll never see this coming. It's 8D chess. You can't possibly steal everything we'll leave behind. Remember what I said about revenge a little bit ago? Well, Tanzan tanks quickly advance into the town of Mutakula and began opening fire as if they were recreating their favorite Spetsnaz rescue mission.

They shelled everything that moved. They killed multiple innocent civilians. And it got to the point that Julius Nayere, the president of the country, had to pass down a specific order. that this would not be allowed to happen anymore. For very practical reasons, remember very few times who militaries or governments do something on the grounds of compassion or ethics,

this is purely practical. Butchering a bunch of civilians when you're kind of hoping them to support you and overthrow ediamine is bad for PR, to make a long story short. Another thing that's bad for PR is, you know, invading another country. Asterix, your experience may vary on that one. So Nairéire constantly said to,

international media that he did not want a single inch of Ugandan land and made sure to kind of waffle on the issue of what his soldiers were doing to international diplomats and the press to cover his ass. Nairi just began to lie and say all of the forces advancing into Uganda were actually Ugandan exile militias and he was simply supporting them, not the other way around. Like, oh, those entire battalions of Tanzanian people's defense forces? Ah, those are, that's all Milton Abote's guys. It's crazy that they're all Tanzanian, though. That's weird. With the Mutakula Heights captured, the invasion into southern Uganda could finally be planned. Command of the effort passed to General David Musaguri, who had once been in the same unit

as Ediamine back during the colonial days. Unlike Amin, Musiguri was a World War II veteran, turned insurgent, turned professional officer. He was also famously huge. Oh, Battle of the big guys. Yes. We got two huge dudes fighting in the eternal words of Big E. Big meaty men slapping meat. I mean, that's what we're here for, isn't it?

That's what we're all waiting for. No, you're right being like, bring me the biggest man. I got promoted because I'm the biggest. That's actually how I got promoted too. Like, yeah, you're kind of a dumbass. You never show up to work on time. But you're very big. It's like being huge is almost as good as having a really good runtime.

Musiguri knew they couldn't attack the town of Masaka if they didn't first capture the Ugandan military airstrip at Lekoma, which was in turn defended by three reinforced hills named Musambaya, Kikanda, and Simba, all of which would need to individually be taken. Musigiri later joked that every operation he planned would become the largest in Tanzanine military history. But that isn't a joke either, kind of like Uganda being the number one quartermaster of Tanzania. Literally, every time he planned something, it was the first time as an institution the Tanzan military had done it. So as they planned the offensive, they scouted forward and discovered a Ugandan position at a place called Katera on the banks of Lake Victoria.

That would need to be taken to free up the road. The only way to take it would be either a drive directly into it and take it in a forward assault or flank it through a horrible nearby swamp. So they decided on swamp time. Yes. They're flipping the coin of are the crocodiles going to be our friends or foe? Once again, if they had crocodiles, the tactical crocodile corps could handle this. It would have handled it.

Yeah, exactly. That's what it's there for. The job to cut through the swamp is given to a brigade commander named John. Black Mamba Walden. Fuck yes. Is this man African? Yes. Okay, good.

I was about saying, is this kind of like a T.E. Lawrence kind of situation where just a white British guy shows up and gets the nickname Black Mamba. I mean, he's mixed race, but yeah, he's Tanzanian. Okay. Yeah. His dad was a white British military officer and his mom was Tanzanian. Very.

So, yeah. It's not decided. not a T.E. Lawrence type thing. No, that'd be really weird. It'd be even weirder if he had a camel to ride. Yeah. Like T.E. Lawrence. He wrote a camel, right?

I feel like it's something. Maybe I'm inventing that because there's some horrible cartoon I saw one. No, it's because of your hatred of horses that you were siding with the camel. That's also a fair guess. Now, Walden warned that going through the swamp was going

to make everybody sick as hell because this is not a small swamp. It was going to take hours and hours. to cross this. And when someone said, hey, maybe you should not lead your men across the disease pit. He said, fuck that. And he decided to lead them personally. Unfortunately, this is after heavy rain, like we already talked about. So the disease pit was flooded with shoulder deep water. That forced all of the soldiers that carry all their supplies on their heads. I was about to say, time for everybody to get swamp related illness.

I got swampeditis. Hey, listen, it is one way to get. swamp ass. Yeah. My doctor told me not to get swamp in me. Why? Why? My doctor told me to have at least five swamp pieces a day. I was told that actually that was the mark of being, you know, a certain degree of vitality was you got that swamp in you.

Not a lot of people know the fifth humor is swamp. The swamp also ruined all of the radios to the point that their Tanzanian command just thought they had been wiped out by, Ugandans and just kind of said, well, I guess we're going to have to bomb them with artillery. We lost Walden and all of his boys to the swamp. They've all been got by the crocodiles. Bombers. We can't let the crocodiles out. They're the best soldiers in this war.

They're free agents. Doing whatever they want. Oh, that's my next book. A loose cannon crocodile mercenary. Yeah, and then those crocodiles will ingest some sort of goop and have to fight four teenage turtles in New York. But they emerge on the other. other side of the swamp. Everybody is very, very sick. And they find that the Tanzanian artillery

had once again scared off all of the Ugandans that they were supposed to be attacking. And they had done all that for nothing. They got a lot of like weird nicknames from it. So I saw one said that they're the swamp Rangers. Another one just called them the Moist. I'm part of that is a Hideo-Kajima ask unit name. My name is John Moist. No, John Watt is the leader of the moist unit. Despite everything going well so far, there was no way the Tanzanians could hide their advance towards the Simba Hills. However, that didn't mean that the Ugandan military was ready, willing, or even prepared to fight. Tanzania isn't intercepting most of Uganda's radio traffic.

So when Tanzanian forces began massing for their attack in mid-February, the Ugandan officers in charge of defending the hills, called their commanders back in Kapala, tell them that the Tanzanians, were coming. Compala, in turn, told them to hold their positions. And in response, the officers on Simba Hills complained, saying, quote, we're going to change positions. How about I go there and you come here and fight? Ugandan soldiers began fleeing before the first shots were fired. And by the time that the Tanzanians began laying on the artillery, the battle was all but over. The hills were captured largely without sustained fighting. The only elements with the Ugandan forces that stood a follower because they ended up trapped between the advancing Tanzanians and the artillery shells

crashing down behind them and were given no choice. The Ugandan Air Force tried to intervene to act as close air support, but wouldn't you guess it, bomb their own men. I'm sensing a pattern emerging here. I was going to say this seems to keep coming up to the point where we can, whenever you talk about close air support, you're like, I bet they're going to bomb their people are not hit their targets. Nobody hates the Ugandan army more than the Ugandan Air Force. This is a toxic manipulator behavior that you're constantly underestimating these people. Like, maybe they were trying their best. The Ugandan army in the trenches, artillery streaking overhead as their own rockets start coming down on the backs of their heads saying,

am I being gaslit right now? Gaslit by close air support. And while doing this, Tanzania ground fire claims five more Ugandan jets, which is a mortal wound to the Ugandan Air Force and nothing but good news for the Ugandan army. because that means their guys will stop bombing them. Another advance captured the nearby air base. The Ugandan Air Force had lost so many planes and so many support facilities. They couldn't repair the planes they still had. And if that wasn't bad enough,

some of their precious few pilots that had yet to bomb their own army or get shot down, simply jumped in their jets and floored it clear across the Kenyan border and defected. And if that wasn't bad enough in this entire situation, the Tanzan artillery was shockingly affected. and the Tanzanians found out why when they got to the tops of the hills. This whole time, they thought the Ugandan military was dug in with concrete, reinforced bunkers and all the stuff. They weren't.

They hadn't dug in at all. Not a single trench had been built. Not a single bunker. Not anything. Nothing at all. The Ugandan Army's artillery was positioned behind the hills, as was their vehicles rather than on it. Meaning that there's a very good chance that the officers that are left in. command did not understand something as basic as the advantage of the high ground.

It was, in effect, a bunch of dudes just sitting on a hilltop with guns. Just a load of dudes hanging out. Like, the artillery, the tanks, and the armored personnel carriers were parked in a neat row behind the hill as if they were waiting for the Tanzanians to come and take them, which they did. Though not everything was going perfectly for the Tanzanians. Near the tent of Guyazza, Ugandans knocked out two Tanzanian tanks with rocket fire. and then withdrew into the Gaiazah Hills.

So the Tanzania commander, Colonel Nishimi, ordered his battalion to give chase directly into a textbook ambush. Ugandan forces had dug in this time on three sides. The colonel tried to get his men together, but they scattered. Some held their ground, others ran into the overgrowth to hide, but they were rendered unable to move in a short amount of time, trapping them for three days,

and what would be the only successful Ugandan up, operation of the entire war. This led to Tanzania and Colonel Silas Mayunga to order two more battalions into the area to flank the Ugandans and pull their asses out of the fire. They charged directly into the hills. Mayunga's men saved the guys that were trapped there. But they kept going. They surged over the Ugandan trenches and engaged them in hand-to-hand combat.

Something made much harder by the fact that almost nobody had been issued a bayonet. Sigh? Sometimes you just got a cave in a dude's skull. the butt of your rifle. I hate having to fight in the Tanzanian-Ugandan royal rumble. That's right. Once again, crocodiles would be better at it. When the smoke cleared, the Tanzanians had lost 30 men, about two times that injured,

which would be the most costly battle for the Tanzanians of the entire war. Elsewhere, the Tanzanians continued to advance towards Masaka and Umbara. The Ugandans, terrified of the Tanzan artillery, began hiding in every smoltan along the way, knowing that they had been given orders to not shell places where civilians might be. The Ugandans also hoped that forcing people to sit under the barrages would turn them against the invaders. But the civilians had actually outsmarted Ediamine's military. They had abandoned their towns before the Ugandan force even showed up. Meaning the Ugandans hit out in ghost towns, civilians ran over to the Tanzanians to tell them,

hey, nobody's there. And then the Tanzanid would shell them to pieces without worry. virtually each time the Tanzanines did this, the Ugandan's retreated as soon as they could. By the end of February 1979, Masaka was surrounded by Tanzan forces on three sides. Inside were thousands of Ugandan forces under the command of General Isaac Malamungo, who commanded what were considered the elite of all of the Ugandan forces, the suicide battalion guitar riff name there. They also had their own jazz band in their unit, which is pretty sick.

Yeah. If memory serves me correctly, one of Edia means wives was part of the Suicide Battalion Jazz Band, which is a sentence that has been created. The thing that pumped the brakes on the Tanzan offensive wasn't the Ugandans. It was the diplomats from the Organization of African Unity, or OAU. There is a meeting taking place in Nairobi, Kenya, aimed at ending the conflict, and Nairi ordered the army to stop their advance while he went to go in a tent. The meeting went nowhere, though.

Mostly because the OAU refused to openly address Amin as the aggressor in the war, which was a precondition for the Tanzanian delegation to take part in any meaningful negotiations. But while the Tanzanian forces had strict orders to not move from their positions during the talks, the Ugandans didn't. Malamungo ordered his forces within Masaka to counterattack. This did not go great. The Ugandan forces lacked any real organizational ability to go on the attack against a dug-in enemy. Parts of the battalions struck out on their own, without fire support, across the bush,

or open ground, only to get blown to pieces and run away. There was no large-scale counterattack. They just lacked the control capacity to do it. Other men took the chance to simply run for their lives once their units set out for the counterattack, which is the right decision. After each attack, the Tanzanians shelled the piss out of Masaka, because, hey, just because he can't advance doesn't mean he can't make it rain. After three days of talks that went nowhere, Nairéiree finally said, fuck it.

take the town. The Tanzanian attack into Masaka opened with a World War I amount of shells. Over 1,000 of them were fired over the course of the night, with a ground assault beginning at first light. By now you probably know what happened. At dawn, when Tanzan forces moved in, they found the town abandoned. This is actually why they only surround the town on three sides. The Tanzanians had figured out that if you give the Ugandan military a path to run away, they would normally take it and make fighting easier. What is interesting here is that Nierre was, again, a big bit worried about the international reaction to what an invasion of another country, even if it was the guy who started it. So instead of championing Tanzanian forces for taking Masaka, he had

Milton Abote's exiles create a fake statement supposedly made by the officers of the Ugandan Suicide Battalion saying that they had risen up against Edie Amin. They had taken Masaka for the cause of the liberation of Uganda, and they urge other garrisons to do the same. The next day, Embara fell, another town that was manned by another elite Ugandan form. the Simba Battalion. Again, largely without putting up a fight and both towns lay in ruins. The awaited popular uprising that everybody was sure was going to happen from Nairay to Abote to everyone. Just didn't. While the Tanzanian leadership went back to the drawing board to figure out what to do next, Amin was about to get some help on the ground in the form of thousands of

Libyans and PLO soldiers that were finally going to make it to the battlefield. And that is where we'll pick up next time on the finale. really need to get some sort of sound drop for any time Gaddafi is mentioned or Goddafi shows up. He needs his like, WWE entrance music. I got you, buddy. He's just around, you know, he's a famous heel. He shows up, you know. It's like you don't expect him and yet you do. The odds of Gaddafi showing up are never zero. I mean, he's like contemporary to wrestling. He is kind of like the undertaker and that he is like unequivocally bad, but kind of a cool character and just like has a career that lasted way too long.

Yeah, just like The Undertaker, they should have retired a long time ago. Who is Gaddafi's Paul Bearer then? Huh. A question for the listeners. It's kind of idiot. You know, like they were bros as much as Gaddafi was ever friends with anybody. I don't know. Boys, that is the Kigera War part three.

How you feeling here? We're almost at the end. I guess all I can say is that if I'm having a bad day, I'll just say to myself, well, at least I'm not calling for close air support from the Ugandan Air Force. That's true. Yeah. That's always a good way to look at it. Yeah, I'm learning a lot about what not to do when being invaded by Tanzania. See, I generally in my life, I do my best to never be invaded by Tanzania.

That's a difference between me and Edia mean. It's the only difference. Much like Gaddafi showing up. not a zero probability. You could be invaded by Tanzania. At any time. But everybody, that has been part three of the Kigar War. My lovely co-hosts here have other podcasts. Fellas, plug those podcasts. I can listen to Trash Shooter or What a Hell of Way to Dad, Kill James Bond, and No Gods, No Mayors. I am involved in some capacity with all of those, and they have free feeds and Patreon bonus content too.

Listen to Blood Worker Show about the Economy of Violence or post a picture of a gun and say, listen to blood work or listen to beneath skin. I had to show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing. This is all I got. Consider supporting us on Patreon. $5 a month gets you absolutely everything from years and years and years of bonus content. Every regular episode early, tons of side series that we're working on, Discord access, which is a lovely little community, all that for five bucks and a whole bunch of other stuff. Leave us to review and wherever it is, you listen to podcasting.

Until next time, arm the crocodiles. You know you want to.