Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 398 - The Kagera War: Part 4

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys The conclusion to our series on the Kagera War!

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Welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe. And with me is Tom and Nate. I don't have a cold open for this episode. And the reason for that is on part three of this four-part series that you're currently listening to. We talked about crocodiles and listening to. We talked about crocodiles enlisting in the military. And gentlemen, in the week since then, I've been trying to come up with a name for these crocodiles.

The best I could come up with is tactodial, which sounds like some kind of awful special forces crocodile Pokemon that when it was brought to the United States, it had to be censored and the gun was taken away. Why don't you just call them crockerators or crockmandoes? Those are both better. I'm not good at this. This is so much better. Tell us how you doing? I am experiencing what feels like a very slow motion heart attack right now. I am experiencing chest pains that I'm like, should I go to the doctor?

No, I'll podcast instead. It's a medicinal podcast. Yeah. I am solo parenting this week. So I'm actually in a weird state of bliss because when you acknowledge that there are blocks of time that you simply won't be able to do anything besides what's immediate. in front of you. It can actually be kind of liberating. I think the anger, the frustration, the irritation comes from the idea that you might be able to do two things at once.

And when you fully, I'll take it as given that you will not, then you're free. It's kind of like dad's in, I guess. So I'm doing pretty good. Yeah. Baby Nirvana. Yeah, except for the fact that my daughter wanted to insist on walking and then be like, no, actually, I don't want to walk home from daycare. I want you to carry me. And I was pushing the stroller and carrying a almost 30 pound two year old, which meant my arms are fucking. being smoked right now because I'm doing all sorts of like farmers carries one arm shit, swap back and forth. And it's like, my beloved daughter, if you would just hold on to me, this would be a lot easier. No. Now, I actually think this is an incredible business idea.

What if we sell expectant dads a like fitness boot camp? That's like, oh, you're going to get ready to be a dad. You're doing nothing but farmers carries and hammer curls. Pushing the stroller around the gym while holding like a 15 kilo dumbbell up to your shoulder. Yeah, you need like a sand dummy though because it can't be actual kids for safety reasons and also because for example if my daughter was volunteered to be the training aid for people to, instead of actually playing along, she would just stand very indignantly and talk about the French comic Simon Super Rabbit and just be like, Simon's a rabbit. And they're like, can we work out? She'll be like, Simon, he's a rabbit. That is. Yeah, the hardest part about staffing your gym with actual infants

is, you know, the pensions. Well, yeah, exactly. You know, they've got crew rest and stuff like that. Yeah. They can only be training aids for three hours a day before they, uh, you'd have to hire nothing but twins like they did in full house. Like full house and fucking like the, the, was the Sprouse twins for a big daddy. It's like, yeah, exactly. And also occupational hazards, you have to have extra cleaning staff because, uh, you didn't realize that part of the mobility training was dodging pots of yogurt thrown at

you among other things. I don't know why. And this has nothing to do with anything, but the pots of yogurt thing, I'm glad to hear that that is something that's universal and knows no age. Because recently when I was back in the United States, my older sister shared a story with me that she was babysitting us. And so she was probably like 11 or 12. I'm six years younger than her. And my brother is three years younger than her.

And we were left alone in the kitchen for all of five seconds. And we took pots of yogurt and chucked them up into the ceiling fan. It was like a six pack. Yeah. And it just, it was like a Jackson Pollock in the kitchen of strawberry yogurt or whatever. we used to do that in school where we'd get packs of easy singles cheese and like throw it at the ceiling and see how many we could get to stick to the ceiling before after lunch the teacher came back in and realized the ceiling was covered in the easy singles cheese that's worse than what we did which is throwing pencils into the drop ceiling because like pencils don't rot I mean I have made the joke oftentimes that the area around my daughter's chair in our living room slash dining room is both. the dirtiest and cleanest space in the house because I am constantly cleaning up something. She managed to dunk her toy fox in yogurt this morning and then got really mad at me that the

fox was wet. And I was like, because I'm cleaning the yogurt out of his fur. Fox is like being clean. She was trying to feed it, Nate. Do asshole. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The French word for Fox and the French word for duck are similar. And she thinks saying the wrong thing on purpose is really funny. So you know what? She's going to be a podcaster despite my best efforts. But Joe, you talking about babysitting, just Proustian reverie of the time? I think I might have been like four or five and my parents had like gone out for dinner or something and trusted my older brother to look after me for the first time. And they came home and he had tied me to a chair and was reenacting the execution of James Connolly. What an omaha anything for him to do?

Yeah, I was just laughing at, remember what I used to say at live shows? You all know any normal Irish people? I hate to be fair, he did teach me that a, he, he, would put like the phone book over my chest and punch it because it's like my brother taught me that too. Don't leave any bruises. Yep. Yep. It shouts out to to big brothers teaching us all the worst things possible forever. Fellas, we're here on the Kigara War part four. Our conclusion to our series. And when we left you last time, Tanzanian forces supported by a coalition of Ugandan exiles had punched into southern Uganda. Uganda forces had mostly run away without putting up too much of a fight

as its army and air force rapidly disintegrated. Leaving behind so many weapons and vehicles, they had become the main supplier for the guys that were invading their country. Meanwhile, the Tanzanians were kind of depending on a popular uprising to topple Ediamine once they had invaded, but then it never kicked off, forcing them into a situation of a much larger war than they had originally intended. Julius Nayeure, the president of Tanzania, went into the war with a lot of questions,

namely could his untested, barely supported military conduct a campaign and actually fight Uganda, who on paper were one the strongest militaries in the region, and not to mention better support it. But now he knew the answer to that question. But now a different question is where he goes from here. Does he commit to the full invasion when this rebellion is not going to kick off? And some part of that was a humanitarian answer. He was warned that if he withdrews forces from Uganda, the thousands of the thousands of, of civilians that now fell under Tanzanian occupation were going to leave with him

because Amin would label them all collaborators and have them killed. And not to say Amin was right or anything because fuck that guy, but out of the areas the Tanzanians took over, several thousand Ugandan men did volunteer to join the Ugandan exile militia forces. And you could absolutely see why they would do that. And you could also see why they would not want to stick around if the Tanzanians were going to leave without finishing the job. This was an important part of Nayurie's plan because,

he came to the conclusion that, diplomatically, Tanzania might not survive the international blowback of marching on Kampala. So, he would get around that. He still hadn't admitted that Tanzanians were directly invading Uganda, so he would carry that forward and kind of sort of make it real. Tanzanian forces would march on Kampala, destroy as much of Amin's army as they possibly could, and then the Ugandan exiled militias would take Kampala itself. Some of this started to work in the beginning of March as a much larger exile force operating at its own attacked the Ugandan army base near the Kenyan border. Like pretty much every other battle, the Ugandan forces hoofed it as soon as the fighting started, running for

the Kenyan border, leaving behind all of their weapons. As the exiles rolled up and started collecting all the shit left behind, a Ugandan reserve force attacked them, forcing them to defend the same base they had just taken over. Then two jets from the Ugandan Air Force appeared overhead to started dropping bombs on them. These bombs blew up on both sides, both the exiles and the Ugandans, forcing both of them to drop their weapons and run for the Kenyan border together as Jets circled around and strafe them, making no attempt whatsoever to suss out who was who. Nobody should really trust any sort of artillery in this war.

World's most confused Kenyan border guards, like watching them all run past. Hey, aren't y'all supposed to be fighting? other turn around and do it over there. I love the idea. Like, you just, you think it's like, oh, no, precision strike. And it's like, no, it's kind of like, like someone casts a spell and the spell's got a wide zone.

And it's like, it's just going to fuck up everybody. Yeah, the Ugandan Air Force cast area of effect fireball. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ugandan Air Force basically becomes like a meteor shower, but like an even-handed meteor shower. It doesn't discriminate. Kenyan Border Force is feeling

like the, what's the name of Dennis the menace's neighbor. Fuck. I can't remember. Is it Mr. Wilson? I can't remember. I feel like it's Wilson. Yeah.

But at the front line, things were pretty complicated. In the north area of the Masaka front, where the Tanzanians had advanced so far, was some of the most mountainous terrain of the entire region, making any military operation there a nightmare. More so for a military like the Tanzanians, who it's not like they weren't capable. It's just they had never done any of the shit before. But then there are other problems coming to the surface. Namely, there's only one single road taking the Masaka front to Kampala,

crossing through the town of Lukaya, where a single length of bridge crossed an otherwise impassable swamp. Obviously, the military answer to this is quite simple. The Ugandans blow the bridge, cutting them off. And that's what the Tanzanians were worried about. Thankfully for the Tanzanians, Abid flat out refused to blow up the bridge. Because if he did, according to him,

he would not be able to launch a counterattack and drive the Tanzanians out of the parts of Uganda they were occupying because Amin had yet to accept that simply was not going to happen and the reason why he believed this was a true possibility was because Daddy Momar Gaddafi was finally

coming to his rescue Idiot Amin sending Omar Gaddafi feetpakes PayPal balance boosted time to buy some guns That's like the one nicest thing I could save out Gaddafi, not his feet. But like, he never loaned anybody money.

He never sold anybody anything. He was giving it all away. Yeah. Like, the Soviet Union is still the number one creditor to Uganda. But Libya is just giving him everything for free to money, guns, hypothetical training, which never really surfaced, you name it. Africa's largest mosque for some reason. Again, still named after Bobar Gaddafi to the,

this day. Gaddafi is flashing cash like he's experiencing suicidal ideation. Sad Gaddafi. Amin announced publicly that hundreds of members of the Palestinian liberation organization, otherwise as the PLO, were already on the ground in fighting. Now this is something that the Tanzanians already knew, thanks to the fact they had found several dead bodies who were decidedly not African, but most importantly carrying PLO identification cards, which was a thing that existed. Motherfuckers brought your PLO ID cards to this war? I am pulling up eBay right now.

I need to own one of the PLO ID cards. Yasser Arafat tugged on his collar a bit and said that the PLO was absolutely not involved in this. Because they intended to keep the whole thing under wraps, thanks to the fact that everybody knew that Ediamen was an ally of the Israelis and various apartheid regimes in Africa, all things that PLO was obviously against. not to mention that Tanzania was a massive supporter of the Palestinians for quite some time and a staunch opponent of the Israelis.

Because this is what happens would you introduce Gaddafi into any situation. Shit gets weird fast. I apologize and I ask your forgiveness for constantly coming back to the same reference. But Joe, Tom, you both played Final Fantasy 6, right? No. I did. You did, Joe. Tom, you didn't.

This is not meant to downplay the problems, the crises or the human consequences. but when you describe Gaddafi this way and what Gaddafi brings to the table, he is basically 20th century altros. He just shows up, the octopus who just throws up and shows up and just causes fucking chaos. With no discernible motivation.

None whatsoever. He just sort of just shows up. You just do things. And sometimes his plans work and sometimes like the one scene in Final Fantasy 6 where he tries to push a weight on someone on a stage. He's like, wow, it's so heavy. It's going to take me five minutes to push this weight.

the ticker just ticks down. Like, it's nuts. You watch, he was like, what are you thinking, dude? And weirdly, both Altros and MoMar Gaddafi kind of supported Rhodesia. And also, you can imagine that if Altros was wronged in some way, he too would want to split Switzerland into three different countries, create long Germany. The Tanzanians were only really concerned about the possibility of Libyan intervention. They didn't give a shit about the PLO.

And they publicly accepted Arafat's fake voucherals. of neutrality, despite the fact they knew they were lying. The way that, like, Nairi fell on this is, well, eventually this war is going to end. And we'll go back to, you know, being on the side of the Palestinians because their cause is a just one. And Libya and Gaddafi enemy. And they'll not be a concern anymore. And the PLO will no longer be anything to worry about. And not to mention, the PLO only sent like a couple hundred people.

There was a few dozen there already for a training mission in Uganda when the war started, they were not consulted about. It was all very confusing and everybody seemed fine with just pretending it never happened. Yeah, I mean, like, that's what I was literally about to say is like, I can't imagine the PLO would be able to spare that many people to make a noticeable difference in the conflict. They had a few hundred people. And in comparison to your average Ugandan officer, the PLO ground leadership was much more effective. If you think about it, think of the era, this is the late 70s. A lot of the PLO on the ground militant leadership, was former Jordanian military

due to events. A lot of them were like colonels in the Jordanian military or captains or majors, all of them had professional military education. So like, they are quite a bit better than your rank and file

Ugandan commission officer at this point. Okay. Which is strange, I know. But as far as Tanzanian intelligence went, they had no confirmed reports of Libyan forces entering Uganda. And this is where things get pretty strange for the Tanzanians.

Since the beginning of the war, the UK had been footing the bill for their ammunition, but little else. And even then, that bill that the UK was paying wasn't that much, obviously because it still wasn't enough. The UK wanted to see Amin get kicked out, but they didn't really want to try very hard in order to do so, nor spend a lot of money, which is quite honestly the most British thing about their geopolitics we've talked about so far in the series. Because the UK did have intelligence reports about thousands of Libyan soldiers' tanks,

artillery and supplies, entering in Tebi Airfield, but they just didn't bother to tell the Tanzanians. So when the Tanzanians advanced quickly towards Lukai, worried that Amin might blow the bridge, they had no idea they're advancing towards a newly reinforced Ugandan military. Lukai itself fell like any other town. Tanzan sailed it. The Ugandans retreated. But north of the town, an allied force of Ugandans, Libyans, and PLO soldiers were gathering. However, when this story is often told, it's at the Libyan military reinforced Uganda, which is technically correct. But these were not soldiers from the regular Libyan military.

These were soldiers to the Pan-African Legion and the Libyan people's militia. Now, we've talked about the Pan-African Legion before, weirdly enough, but it was a long time ago. They were a mostly conscripted force of non-Libian men from within Libya with the political goal of liberation. of Africans in general. And liberation just meant for whatever the fuck Gaddafi believed in on that particular week. In reality,

they were men who had immigrated to Libya to look for work and got kidnapped off the goddamn street. Fun. Yeah, they weren't even trained by Libyans. Rather, that job also got seconded over

to the PLO. Yeah, you know, it's like, you know, you have a job, it pays okay. Unfortunately, you have to do these stupid stand-up meetings

every Friday, where no one actually, makes any progress or says any insulting substantive, but you still got to show up and do the work. I mean, Gaddafi is just doing like Dubai shit before Dubai got the chance to do it. Like no, totally. There's

oil jobs over here for you that are incredibly high paying and I just need to hold on to your passport, put on the uniform. Abibi comes to Tripoli. Uh, yeah. I'm getting words that Mark it off. You might have been problematic. Perhaps. Perhaps.

Let me open this book that's colored green and on my to reference it further. But like, Moimar Gaddafi died way too soon that I am convinced I would argue way too late. Well, yes,

well, yeah, I mean, in the context of what I'm about to say is that like, if he had been alive, maybe like seven years longer, I feel like we could have successfully

like catfish him on Instagram DMs out of thousands of dollars. It's probably true. Yeah. All we have to say is we're a part of some militia somewhere seeking to undermine the United States and her bank account would get fat. Yeah.

Moorma Dapheth. actually has a personal Twitter account before they delete the ability to see likes and you go and it's nothing but cat boy picks. The people's militia was actually even weirder than the Legion. So the people's militia was supposed to be a territorial defense militia that operated regionally inside Libya under regional military commanders responding to immediate crisis within the country. It's kind of like the National Guard.

The militia was like the Legion. They were both armed and uniformed, perfectly fine. It's not like they were being armed with, you know, a 50-year-old rifle or whatever. They were getting the cutting edge of weapon technology available to Libya. Gaddafi had no shortage of that stuff. The problem for the militia came to training. These were civilians. And I know I compare them to the National Guard,

but, you know, the National Guard at minimum generally goes to training for two days above. That was not the case for these guys. they were normally put on a role and then never really had to show up to do anything? They were civilians and their training was the responsibility of their regional commander who politically and practically had a hard time

pulling people away from their day jobs to force them to go play soldier. So most of these guys had really nothing that could be considered a standardized training. Some of them were familiarized with the rifles. That was about it. None of them were prepared to defend

Uganda. And you might be one how Gaddafi sold this to the men of the people's militia and the Legion he was sending into battle. Well, if you remember back, he didn't even bother to consult the commander of his military about getting involved in Uganda. And similarly, he did not tell the men of the Legion, nor the men of the militia, that they were going to war. According to Libyans who were captured during the war, they were told they were going to Uganda for a training mission and only learned that they were actually going to war. war when they landed an Antebbe airport, were jammed into trucks and given live ammunition. Perfect. Yeah, not a good bait switch to experience while in work.

Yeah, we call that the modern Russian conscript experience. Once the Libyans conscripted migrant laborers and PLO soldiers all joined his army to the north of Lukia, Amin then demanded they capture the town of Masaka within three days. So on the night of March 11th, the Tanzanians, sitting in Lukaiya get the shit scared out of them as Libyan forces opened fire with several North Korean manufactured rocket artillery systems firing Katusha rockets at them. Thankfully for the Tanzanians, they could also not aim their artillery. But as anybody who sat under a rocket rush can tell you, them shits are scary.

It doesn't always matter. I mean, like if it's hitting stuff, especially despises the size of the Katush's like, it's causing problems. And yeah, they're louder. They're loud as fuck. They're so loud. Like, it's just... What if the sky itself was screaming at you?

Yeah, yeah. And they have this horrible noise about them too because of the kind of like weird spirally sound. It's kind of like a... We're shooting a train at you through the sky, but it has the motion path of the Tasmanian devil. Like, it's just... It's unpleasant. The most dangerous of artillery. Train artillery.

But not like train towed artillery. We're firing trains at you. It's not like the fucking the goose stop or whatever. No, no, it's different. We're shooting trains at you. Chew-choo, motherfucker. Exactly. I mean, once again,

because my brain is in the Final Fantasy Sixth space. Yeah, I was just about to say, yeah. The heads no, if you can make Sabin fucking suplex the train when you fight the ghost train, and the motherfucker picks the entire train up and body slams it. It's incredible. Instead of having, um, like an anti-artillery system shooting rockets out of the air,

every time the train artillery fires at you, you have to fire Sabin at it. Yeah, exactly. He grabs it and suplexes it through the sky. shit out of it, exactly. Now, at the sound of this sustained barrage, really the first that the Tanzanians have had to sit through. They packed up their shit and got a Lukaya too.

Unfortunately for them, they sprinted directly into the swamp, which, you know, sucks. Nothing really bad happens to them into the swamp, but, you know, nobody wants to go into the disease pit. The Allied Ugandan force storms Lukaya afterwards. Fun fact, this is also the last major military offensive spearheaded by the noble Sherman tank.

Remember all the way back when I told you like what Edie Amean was buying for his military, he had purchased roughly about a dozen Sherman tanks from Israel. And he still had at least five-ish of them operative. Because I mean like this point we're in the late 70s. Like the Germans would be close to 40 years old. Oh yeah, baby.

Yeah. Remember. So to go into the history of these particular Sherman tanks. Israel purchased them secondhand, refurbished a lot of them, and then in turn sold them to Amin. So, I mean, they're still very fucking old. And there's some reports that all the way up until the end of the Ugandan Bush War, which we'll talk about in a little bit, there was still a few Sherman's operating. So these things lasted damn near to the 90s. It's just, I mean, wow. Imagine, like, I'm so happy to be a tank crew, but like, here's your

relic, folks. Yeah, I mean, that's literally war ham. 40K shit. I was thinking Siv 6, you forgot to upgrade a unit and you've got like, like, you know, heavy armor and you've also just got a spearman for some reason. You've got a slinger. Nate, hold that thought about the spear. Oh, God damn. I mean, look, they can't aim fucking rockets or artillery.

Maybe they can aim a spear. Maybe someone can aim a Sherman tank as long as, you know, they're fighting something else from the 40s. Well, just also imagining the idea of like an infantry company and it's like, all right, we've got weapons squads in every single platoon and like every weapon, squad has to, you know, this era, you'd probably have things like, you know, if you had U.S. weapons, you had M60s, you had Soviet weapons, you'd have a RPK. Yeah, and there's definitely RPGs and shit floating around as well. And then there's one, there's one weapon squad that just

only has Maxim guns for some reason. It's like, fuck. It's not fair. Opening up my crate, and there's a rapier inside. I got my stupid arm crank. Like, it's a fucking model T while I'm shooting this thing. I'm opening up my weapons crate shipped to me by someone. And inside is just a rapier that's in French. It has like the Napoleon. EGle- I was going to say exactly. It's got like a wax seal on it. It's got some like 1870s fucking all the instruction manuals are like hand calligraphy with fountain pens. I fire by RPG at the enemy Sherman tank. It passes clean through one side and out the other. It just keeps going. Yeah. We've actually got some smoke grenades and some concussion grenades, but for some reason,

they play debut C's Irabesque number one when you fire them. Like I said, I'm not entirely sure how many of these things that you got and still had operating at this point at Lukaia though I've seen multiple ports at least three of them involved flanked by Jeeps from the same era

and Libyan T-55s which is the weirdest bash up I've ever seen I'm just imagining too because it'd be like this is American military hardware from the 1940s being repurposed does it still have Kilroy carved in like the dashboard has said I don't so somebody were like my life fucking sucks bitch or whatever

whatever in there. Or like 8th, 1940s version like, gee Willickers or something like that. Gee Wilkers, I'm going to kill myself. Yeah, 23 Skidoo. I sure do Miss Oklahoma. You know, too, that we'd be like weird dub affectations, but they'd also be drawing cock and balls on everything. So it's just like the strange, the strange juxtaposition. At three genera, you got Americans drawing dick and balls on it from World War II.

You got Israeli soldiers trying dick and balls in it. Now you have Ugandan soldier drug dick and balls. It's just a tapestry that tells the history of this one specific tank. And you can still find some of them. Someone took a picture of one of these Ugandan Germans. It doesn't work anymore. It's not even a museum piece. It was just like parked in a field somewhere in Kampala 10 years ago.

That's the best kind of museum when it just belongs to some guys. Yeah, fuck it. We were a tank. Yeah, it's my yard Sherman. Hey, you know what? every now and again, you know, kids come around trying to steal fruit from my orchard. I just pretend I'm turning it on, you know, they run away. Start cranking the turret manually.

That Sherman is experiencing, I don't know if you saw that viral video of the only cyber truck in Uganda rolling on the road. Like two weeks ago, it tries to take like... I would rather be driving the Sherman, to be fair. It's more mechanically reliable. It tries to take like a very, very slight turn and just fucking rolls over and explodes. Coppola has... Uganda's got plenty of... paved roads, then I'm going to be real with you. I would rather do the entirety of Paris Dakar and a fucking DeLorean than drive five miles down the road in a cyber truck.

You go faster in a DeLorean because a DeLorean is built on cocaine, whereas the cyber truck is built on ketamine. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. The thing is, the Allied forces probably could have stomped on the gas and stormed all the way to Masaka at that moment, because according to the book, War in Uganda, the only thing standing in the way of their offensive towards that town was three Tanzania tanks. And depending on which sources, one of them was a T-35. But like the Chinese knockoff version, but still pretty much a T-335. Ordering your T-35 from T-Mu. And it shows up after the war is done. Hey, at least it's slightly newer. But it's really small. But after they roll in the Lukaia, the allies just kind of stood around

amazed at their own success are unsure of what to do when they actually took something. Seeing the brewing emergency, Tanzania General Musigiri ordered all forces, any forces nearby, to immediately turn and head for the town. But the nearest unit wasn't a full completed unit, rather it was elements of an armored unit without any infantry support. When their commander pointed out that attacking without infantry support was a pretty bad idea, the general drove over there himself to demand they move in anyway because they didn't really have time for this shit. As the armored unit charged in, they picked up stragglers from other retreating Tanzanian forces, though nobody was really organizing anything. Nobody was sure who was in direct command anymore. Nobody was sure who was

who was platoon sergeant, company commander, where anybody was. They just knew they needed to get to Lukia and launch a counterattack. So they did. If they sound disorganized, then they were. The allies were just as bad, if not worse. At no point of deploying together did the various elements of the pro-amene side actually figure out how to work together, who was an overall command, or even what language to communicate in. I was literally about to say that. Yep. So, generally speaking, everybody working with Gaddafi spoke Arabic.

Most Ugandans could not speak Arabic, and the Libyan certainly cannot speak Swahili. A few of them found common ground in English, but none of it was fluent. So when the Tanzanians counterattacked, every part of every element of every side of the battle, all got very confused and smashed into, one another. Nobody knew what side anybody was on and everybody was shooting at everything all at once.

It was a completely moonless night as well, meeting that all of this was happening in total darkness. Fallen. Concerned that their troops were breaking to Ugandan generals, Yusuf Gowan and Isaac Malayumongo ran into the battle personally, trying to rally their men around them, which is the first time we've seen a Ugandan leader really try to be a quality officer here. Since there was so much chaos going on and there was so much incoming fire from every direction, both from their enemies and themselves, soldiers began to believe that generals were somehow drawing more fire towards them, as if the enemy could tell that there was generals there, which they couldn't. So they consider them something of a bad omen to be around, which might be the first time an officer fighting on the front with their mid actually lowered morale. Eventually soldiers began heckling the generals to go the fuck away until they did. Another Ugandan general, Godwin Sulei, one of the few talented officers still left in the

Ugandan military, was trying to get his men into something resembling a battle line to launch a counterattack of the counterattack when a Ugandan tank ran him over and he died. Whoops. I was thinking about what you said earlier because like I've seen APCs and tanks have collisions in the U.S. military when driving at night, even when, you know, there's a lot of training and pretty cool. Yeah, I've been in one. And there's night vision. It doesn't matter. Like, so the idea of doing it where there's no common language and comms are fucked, it's old equipment. Yeah, bad idea, I think. It's like if the commission officer version of the hair

from Alice and Wonderhalayan just ran in and screamed at all the soldiers like, change places. The Mad Hatter. That's the name I was looking for. But yeah, he got fucking steamrolled by his Sherman and he died. What a way for the best officer left of the Ugandan military to go down. The only useful commander unit in your Warhammer Army gets flattened. I mean, I've definitely lost important parts of my Warhammer Army in very stupid ways. I've never ran one of them over. Now, the Ugandan soldiers broke and ran at.

some point in the night on the 11th, leaving the Libyans to face the brunt of the fighting themselves before they two decided fuck this and they retreated. Because of all this confusion and how inflated every side of the war tend to be when they reported the enemy's casualties, there are really zero reliable numbers from any source about the outcome of this battle, other than the Tanzanians win. It's thought at minimum several hundred people died, though the breakdown of which is kind of unknown. Most of the casualties seem to have been Ugandan and Libyan. And after the Battle of Lukaya, Nairai had finally done away with all of his previous concerns of international blowback and bad PR, you would get for having his soldiers Storm Kampala.

Because he had just gotten done fighting thousands of Libyans and hundreds of PLO men. He decided having Tanzanians openly involved in taking the capital was only fair at this point. And if you're thinking that such a massive cluster fuck would change Gaddafi's mind on supporting Ediamin, you'd be wrong. A constant stream of planes carrying men and materials kept flying into Antebe. However, this itself led to a problem. Yes, Gaddafi was dumping every kind of military supply imaginable on Uganda, but what he didn't send Uganda and what the Ugandans did not have was a anything resembling a functioning logistic system to actually disperse this shit.

So despite Libya bringing in literally tons of badly needed supplies of all kinds, virtually all of them remained in an untouched pile at Entebbe Airport. Well, untouched but for local officer stealing shit when nobody was looking. The airlift operation led to quite possibly the funniest story of the war. As a Libyan plane flew towards Antebe, Tanzanian soldiers stationed at the Mwanza airfield got on their radio, pretending to be Ugandan, telling them, hey, don't land at Antebe, we're taking artillery fire, divert to Mwanza. The Libyans having no idea who held what.

Believe them, turn their plane around, and landed at the Tanzania-in-controlled airport and got arrested. But things get even weirder, because they weren't Libyans at all. Nor do they work for Gaddafi, or were they carrying weapons. It was a plane from a Belgian shipping company flying in Tantebe to pick up coffee that was meant to be sold in Djibouti. Whoops. Okay.

Accidentally caused an international incident. The Belgian seemed weirdly fine with it, though. They're like, no, we get it. We'd do that too. They didn't even get to steal the coffee because there's nothing at the plane at all. They were like held in custody for like overnight until they could prove that they weren't some kind of smugglers. And then they were just kind of like, all right, be on your way then. On the ground, the Ugandan army was falling apart.

After the battle of Lukaya, officers just began leaving their units, finding any excuse to go back towards Kampala and away from the front line. Other officers in Kampala simply vanished, fleeing into Kenya, Congo, or Sudan. Air Force pilots, the ones that still had functioning jets, climbed in their jets and simply deserted, all while Libyan jets bombed Tanzania. As Libyan forces got more and more involved, Ugandan forces melted away further and further, putting the responsibility of the fighting on the Libyans and the PLO, even as they fought a slow grinding Tanzanian offensive at Sambunbalet. Now, the defense at Sambubali was easily the hardest fighting that the Tanzanians had run into,

and a lot of that was unexpected. The Ugandan Tiger Brigade, as it was known, the one garrisoning the town, was badly under strength largely thanks to desertion, and had been reinforced by soldiers of the local infantry school. Meanwhile, the Tanzanians attacking, the 208th Battalion, had just kind of been slapped together, meaning neither side had any experience to back them up. Tanzanian assault into the town were kicked back for three weeks, and several Tanzanian soldiers who were wounded, left behind, and captured by the Ugandans were discovered by their comrades beheaded during the next assault.

It was only after two more Tanzanian battalions were committed that the Ugandans finally broke and ran for good. Across Uganda, soldiers were throwing off their uniforms and getting the hell out of there as the SRB, you know, the Ugandan Bell Bottom Death Squad, was snatching and murdering. any deserter they could find. Soldiers they suspected of deserting, or failing that, soldiers they heard talking about they were losing the war, were just as good. The Libyans, thought of as a professional force that would prop up the Ugandans, began running away as fast as the Ugandans, because they were being left with all of the fighting. In a war, they didn't want to be involved with.

I was just got to say, you really know that a war is going well when you have to deploy the militarized dog catchers? Yeah, it's never a good sign when you have to send the guys, and aviator sunglasses, floral pattern shirts, and bell bottoms to start pulling people apart like prime rib. Yeah, running after deserters with a giant nace.

That would be better than what the SRP did, to be fair. Yeah. Take away all their pliers and just give them a net gun. Yeah, exactly. Like, they might look like the dudes waiting in line

outside of Studio 54, and it's funny until they kill you. I mean, they're doing just as much cocaine. I don't doubt it. I don't doubt it in the slightest. I mean, at the same time, though, it's just like, sometimes the setting and sometimes the costumes, if you want to call it that, can make it seem funnier because it feels so ridiculously of its time. But then you get into the

details, you're like, I don't know, it's just, this is just horrible, brutal nightmare shit. Yeah, these are just psychos. They just picked a very strange uniform. It's like if we had a death squad, actually, I was going to say, like, if we had a death squad that dressed up like clowns, but that did kind of happen in Sierra Leone. Well, also, it's like that scene in summer, and was it, uh, summer of Sam where it's like, on one hit, it is very funny that they're all beating up Adrian Brody. It looks like there's eight, like, 800 different clones of Tony Danza. But what they're representing is like a psychotic, xenophobic, homophobic mob. Yeah. And I've been to the Bronx, so I know it's real. Things were going so badly that men were running away so quickly and without

organization that advancing Tanzanian forces began capturing entire busloads of Ugandan soldiers her weren't even trying to fight anymore, but instead got stuck in traffic with others while trying to run away. Like we talked about before, the Tanzanians were stuck on that one road heading towards Kampala. But they knew if they were going to strangle off the Ugandans and Tanzanians stationed in Kampala, they would have to not only secure the route, but the one town that was in the way, the town of Impege. The town was right in their path in advance and laid directly between Antebi Airport and the city of Kampala. Amin understood how important a defense of Mpege would be. So he ordered an all-out defense to the last man type situation. Apparently,

not understanding that his military did not want anything to do with any kind of fight to the death anywhere, really. Small problem, however, that traffic jam I talked about? Yeah, that was still going on. Consider it to make things more clear, a completely unorganized retreat turned traffic

jam after the defeat of Lukai. Thousands of Ugandans, Libyans and PLO men, tanks, ABCs, everything were smashed together on the road, either trying to run to Kampala or Antebe, with everyone trying to get the hell away from the advancing Tanzanians.

Virtually nobody attempted to follow Amin's orders to prepare Last Ham at Mpege. It was one of those situations where even if officers wanted to follow orders, the men were so broken that it was impossible to get them to do anything. The one thing that finally did slow the Tanzanians down, though, was rain. And it ruins the roads, wrecks the shoulders of the roads, makes any kind of military advance slow to a crawl, but they were crawling. And while doing so, they storm through a small list. Libyan camp, the only real defense that the Ugundans were able to put up at MPEGA.

There was no large-scale plan, no overall commander and reality, only small groups, a platoon at most at a time, who fought the Tanzanians and running gun battles for a few minutes before they two would try to get the fuck out of there. Allegedly, according to Tanzanian sources in the middle of this battle, Ediamine personally drove right into MPEG and his personal Mercedes-Benz, trying to rally its defenders. This does line up with public broadcasts from Radio Uganda at the time, so it really could be true. The Tanzanians allegedly could have killed him, but were worried that if they did that, Amin would be replaced by someone who would immediately surrender and rob the Tanzanians of their ultimate goal of now marching on Kampala.

And there are hints that that would have happened. For example, there are elements within the Ugandan military and government, which are virtually the same thing, who told Amin that he should step down and then maybe the Tanzanians, might come to the negotiation table. Of course, Amin didn't do that. And anybody who suggested it got disappeared into an SRB torture basement, but an attempt was made. How brave is that guy at that point?

You know, like, you are the minister of like public works or whatever ministerial position hasn't already been fed into the wood chipper. And you're like, excuse me, Mr. Amin, have you concerned resigning? I think I would rather jump into a fire pit on my own. Edia me just looks you directly in the eyes like, I will eat your heart. I'm going to say there's a, we've already heard about a lot of places where there's crocodiles.

I feel like that's actually kind of convenient in the situation. I would just go find one of them. Have you considered what you'd look like without legs? But in a short time after his visit, Mpegé fell on March 22nd. And the Tanzan forces now had artillery on the high ground between Antebe and Kampala. With this, Nairéy pumped the brakes once again.

This time to better organize the political side of the Ugandan exile. There was no longer any question. how this war was going to end, and the time had come to organize a Tanzanian-supported government that'd take over in its aftermath. If you were thinking this is already handled due to Nairi's previous support of Abate,

you'd be very, very wrong. Nairi understood that a fair amount of people, both within Uganda and the exile movement, fucking hated Abote. He was hardly a unifying figure at this point. The exiles had been working on what government might look like for a long time, which is unsurprising,

and was even less surprising as all these different factions had really not made a lot of headway. There were a lot of fundamental differences in their politics, combined with the fact that Habote really didn't see the point of any of it, because it was obvious to him, he was going to be president. So other factions organized without him in what became known as the ad hoc committee, mostly led by the leftist pan-Africanist Danny Nabudere. They, in turn, invited other Ugandan exile groups from around the world to take part.

The political infighting of the committee is legendary, which you would expect from any group that included Marxists, Maoists, socialist, conservatives, and liberals all hanging out together. For example, they all agreed on a return to democracy and the total deposing of Ediamin. But others took time out of their day to complain about the Tanzanian invasion on its own, comparing it negatively to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia to depose the Khmer Rouge, which is certainly a stance to have. This is just like that other fucked up thing that I didn't like.

Oh, what was the thing? Oh, you know. The one where, uh, I was like, like the guy shows up wearing a fucking red bandana and the sandals made out of used tires. Like actually, I believe in Uganda, year zero. I also was thinking about an assemblage of this many different political viewpoints. The only time this has ever happened in America is when they opened the first legal weed stores in Washington. That and, uh, any morning line at a Costco. I was just waiting in line.

Yeah, you've got. You've got the year zero Camaro Roos people and then like guy who absolutely has like a fucking compound where he's planning on doing Turner Diary shit, but you're all trying to buy dank. You're like, yo, I hear they have shatter. I hear they have really fly gubies. I hear they got, they've got that new Scrooge McDuck weed. Scrooge McCobrad duck.

It gets you so fucked up. You dive into a pool of coins. Nabuderi attempted to bring together the various elements. And one of the examples he used. was the alliance between Mao and Chiang Kai Shek during World War II as an example of how nationalists and leftists could work together when shit get stupid. Probably not the best example. That's when Mahmoud Mamdani, uh, yes, the mayor of New York Zorhan's father.

Yep. Argue that no, leftists need to work together and exclude nationalist elements because they will certainly turn against you in the end, which, yes. Damn. That is what happens. He's odd to something. It was Musaveni who argued that since, It was he who fell in with the left-wing factions and did the majority of the recruiting and fighting alongside the Tanzanians, that they were at least an equal strength to Abote and his loyalist corps.

And it made sense for them to enter into an equal partnership and a unity-based government. Then Britain showed up, telling Nairi that they and the Kenyans were concerned that if they returned to Bote to power, it would be really unpopular specifically to them. So, when Nairi finally got to the point he could hold the conference with all the different, from factions, he asked Abate not to attend. New government conference, who dis? We're holding the conference in the tree house, like in the Simpsons,

and it's just no Abotees allowed. It's like, yeah, but you let John Abotei in. It says, abotais. Yeah, we already have one. The conference began at March 24th, and after a lot of arguing, they hash out a power sharing agreement. Divided up different committees along faction lines to make sure everybody at least got something,

making them a little happy, kind of. Abote was obviously pretty best. And what was formed was known as the National Executive Committee, with three commissions covering finance, military diplomacy, and administration led by an executive chair. The chair effectively being the future interim president. The parties also signed a lot of other agreements and how the future government would work.

Most notably, thanks to their experience with a guy named Ediamine, the president would be fairly weak and forced to listen to the eventually elected legislature, I think we can all see the merits of that. Though the Abotei wing was still quite powerful, and due to their strength, they could still threaten to blow up the whole thing. So a power-sharing deal was cut to keep them in the loop,

namely in the form of a guy named Yusef Lulae, who was made executive chair. He was Abote's buddy, and it effectively made him the head of government in exile. He was the ultimate appeasement candidate. The Southerners liked him. he was considered a apolitical moderate, and most importantly, a long history of being a professional civil servant, with little to know scandals or corruption. None of this is true. This is just his public-facing personality.

He was a longtime civil servant, but Lule's wife owned and operated the largest clothing store in Kampala under Edie Amin, meaning he had been waste goddamn deep in institutional corruption at minimum that flourished in Uganda during the period of Amin's peak. At minimum, there's a lot of other shit that could be attached to running a large business in Uganda at the time and being loosely connected to Amin's government. Also, he was not an apolitical moderate. He was a hardcore conservative who thought Uganda should be run like a business in order to help the economy, guided by a very strong presidency. A strictly pro-Aboate guy, Paula Mawanga, was given the chair of military commissions. And you could see all of the issues they're going to come up in the future because of this shit. to the war though. As soon as the conference is wrapped up, Nairier was pretty surprised

to get a message from Libya, specifically from the office of Omar Gaddafi. Getting a U-up text from Murathe at the end of war. He was sending a threat demanding that Tanzania withdraw from Uganda immediately or he would

enter the war on the side of Uganda. This is pretty confusing. I love Muradhafi so much. No consistent ideology. no consistent allegiances. It's just like, how people trusted him at any point past

like the mid-70s is kind of like, you are all fucking stupid. You're asking for this. Like, I'm not going to start humming video game music at you, but this man needs a theme. He needs a theme that starts playing. We're like, fuck, he's back.

God damn it. Because he just shows up. Like, he just throws chaos smoke bombs at people. He's a classic JRP boss that you beat, but like, then the cut scene hits and he manages to get away. Yeah. So you have to fight again like 12 times throughout the course of the story. Yeah. No, no, realistically, Gaddafi is the 21 year old that shows up to the party when you're 16 because he can buy beer.

It's like, okay, no one really wants him here, but he did bring the beer that we can't buy legally. So, you know, we have to tolerate the presence of shady Moamar. He's idling a Sherman outside a 16 year old school. Look, that would be a surefire way to kidnap me when I was 16 to show up to my high school asking for me, driving a Sherman tank. That might still work now. I don't know if you pull up to the studio with a six pack of beer and a Sherman tank, you could kid that at me.

100%. I don't think we need to spark the idea of Joe Kasavian age gap, Yahweh with Muammar Gaddafi. We've already done enough Muammar Gaddafi erratica on this show. Nate, you've spoken into existence. Okay, I'm pulling up A.O.3.

Writing along in Gaddafi. down the highway in Uganda, side by side it is tricked out Sherman Tang. He leans over to the radio. He flicks on. What's that? Fallout boy. And he looks over at me and sometimes you're like, sometimes we do be going down swinging.

Now, like this message from Gaddafi is pretty confusing because they had already been fighting for several weeks at this point. And Nairi at first is as confused as we are. Not about being kidnapped by Gaddafi at a tricked out Sherman Tank, but he's like, how long was this message waiting? Like, did he send this like a month ago and I'm only now getting it? No, not at all. And it's even more confusing because it's not like Gaddafi was trying to keep any of the

secret. He was making public statements about the war already. Nairie instead, as a counter, went public with Gaddafi's threat. So Gaddafi dispatch a Soviet-supplied T-U-22 supersonic bomber to attack the ton of Mwansohzo with antipersonic. Sinell bombs. This is where things get weird again. Um,

the pilot made it to its target without being detected and deployed his bombs too soon. So instead of bombing a town full of civilians, he dropped several bombs at a nature preserve and killed a bunch of gazelle. Fuck. Gaddafi's pilots bus too soon. The camera zoomsued on the pilot. It's a fucking lion. He's like,

I got you motherfucking. Or just the curb your enthusiasm music plays. And you just see like, the gazelles. exploding in the background. I was going to say, like, every, every time Gaddafi's Air Force starts flying fucking, like an entire decade of Carl Ladeus's life gets wiped off the planet,

you can just burn those encyclopedias. Those animals don't exist anymore. The Tanzanians struck back, and rather than bobbing's of Gaddafi's own gazelle in the world's strangest form of escalation, the Tanzanian Air Force hit Kampala, ginger, and Tororo. They hit oil depots,

which are, you know, pretty good place to drop your bombs if you can aim them, but also managed to hit the Libyan Ugandan developmental bank, which seems to have been largely an accident, but as a really poignant accident. After that, they also bombed in Tebe Airport, but really didn't disable it at all. The original plan for Naeria was to drive hard for Kampala, but now Tanzanian scouts could see that there's a large amount of buildup at Antebe. What they didn't know was that is because they are just kind of stuck there, unable to leave to reinforce the capital, nor move any of the supplies. But they had a practical worry that if they did take Kampala, the forces at Antebe,

which is only a short way as a way, would be able to easily launch a counterattack directly into the Tanzanian rear, which is something you only want to happen if someone picks you up from high school in a Sherman tank. Dirt bike George Potten picking up his knees in a Sherman. No, that would have been in a horse back then. Oh yeah, true. Which is, you know what, if there's two things I really hate, it's incest and

horses. Ha! I am just laughing as yeah, it's 3.15 p.m. outside the school, an entire armored column is out there revving. It's like all the birds are falling out of the sky because the exhaust from the tank engine is just straight, asphyxiation them.

Somehow they're playing evanescence over the loudspeaker. The principal of my house school leans over and says, Joe, he's here for you again. Hey, Joe. You know, uh, wake me up. wake me up inside. Exactly.

You know, normally you expect the Armacomans who are playing some dumb bullshit like Van Halen. Now they're playing Paramour for some reason. 20 minutes later, you just see the Murga Daffi trying to fit the tank through the McDonald's drive-thru.

My boy needs a strawberry milk shake. Don't worry. He gets an employment discount because that's where I worked at the time. So it was decided that Entebbe would need to be captured first and the job was given to General Moita Morara's 208th. And of course the first part of this

plan was to start shelling in Tebe. This was to soften up the target, but also the Tanzanians just knew that they launched some shells at the Ugans at this point. They would run away. It would save them the trouble and they thought this was a better idea than fighting several thousand soldiers they were either stationed at or stuck in Antebe. Interestingly, this had an unintended consequence. The Tanzanians had no idea, but Edie Amin was actually inside the city of Antebe itself when they opened fire. One of the shells ripped right down in front of the Antebe State House where Amin happened to be. And Amin began to think that they were trying to assassinate him, so he ran over to his personal helicopter and was immediately flown to Kampala. And watching your strongman dictator flee awkwardly for his life, because remember,

Edie Amin is quite an obese man that's suffering from gout. and watching him combat waddle to his helicopters really get a torpedo your morale. Yeah, I wouldn't imagine. As shells continue to fall on Antebe, the Libyans try desperately to get the fuck out of there.

One desperate Libyan C-130 cargo plane pilot landed, loaded in as many soldiers as he possibly could, to try to fly them back to Libya. But as he took off, that plane got clapped with a shoulder-fired missile, sending the plane rocketing back towards the earth killing everybody on board.

Honk. Hey, the pilot had the right idea. Ugandan soldiers began trying to flee, leaving the Libyans behind, and the Libyans having no clue what to do, no understanding of Swahili, and only knowing they should probably try to get the Kampala, but had no idea how to get there,

or what roads went anywhere, the Libyans tried asking locals for help, simply repeating the word Kampala over and over and over again, and just kind of shrugging their shoulders, thinking that they would understand. The Sphilians said, yeah, we'll take you to Kampala, only to simply walk them into the direction of the Tanzanians and force them to surrender,

or failing that, beating them to death and running them for their shit. Can't give me your tire sandals? Imagine being a heavily armed soldier, convincing or thinking you're convincing the civilians to help you just to get a rock smashed over the back of your head and your wallet stolen. Nobody's deserved anything.

more than these guys do. Yeah, the joke, right? The Tanzanians discover this because they started driving down roads that they had yet

to advance over only to fight Libyan soldiers like bricked up on the side of the road like robbed blind. And finally a column of Libyans got

organized enough with armored cars, trucks and shockingly even a map and gunned it for a Kampala. At this point, the Tanzanians had the road on lockdown.

The column floored it directly into an ambush laid by 400 Tanzanian soldiers. The Libyans went down like that final scene from the devil's rejects, and 65 of them were killed in a matter of seconds. Another 50 were captured. There was no defense of the town itself, and the only real fighting that the Tanzanians had in capturing a Tebe came from Libyans who were desperately trying to run away. By the afternoon of April 7th, and Tebe had fallen completely.

When soldiers marched into the airport, they found almost the entirety of the surviving Ugandan Air Force waiting to surrender to them, having already changed out of their uniforms and into civilian clothing. Tanzanian soldiers were excited to loot the duty-free shops at the airport, only to unfortunately discover that the Ugandans and the Libyans had already stripped them bare. While they couldn't secure cheap booze and tax-free gummy bears, they did capture nine Ugandan Mugnid Mug-21s and quickly flew them back to Mwanza, though one pilot, unfamiliar with its controls, tried to land, crashed and died. you would absolutely catch me

loading up every single cigarette in that airport flying off, just Barbara Gold's falling out of the hatch. The cockpit, not all the way closed, just raiding Barbara Golds down at everyone. I'm boxing the players like, can I open a window

in here? I can't see anything. That's how you crash into Mwanza Airport because the whole cockpit's full of smoke. And much like Lucky Strikes, you're toasted. The Tanzania command moved to the Antebe State House to plan their operation against Kampala. And in comparison, only a few short months ago,

when the army was unsure if they could invade southern Uganda, and then being unsure if they could carry the war north, and then now being at the gates of Kampala, everything had changed. Nobody was unsure of anything anymore. Musigari and his officers were effectively planning their victory already. As far as they could tell, there was nothing organized standing in between them and Kampala. Kampala, which is only 35 kilometers away.

Things had been so wildly one-sided, outside of maybe the Battle of Lukaya, that one Tanzanian officer joked that the war was just like a Chinese war film, because you never see any of the good guys getting killed. As they planned their attack on Kampala, President Nairi got involved. Musiguri wanted a textbook urban assault. Surround the city, shelved the city, move in and clear block by block. But Nairi didn't want that, and said he wanted one road to be left. open, going from Kampala to Jinja as a route of escape. Not for the Ugandan soldiers, but rather

the remaining Libyans and Pialomen, which was a diplomatic approach that does make a lot of sense. Yeah, Libya had got involved in the war, but if Tanzanian troops surrounded and destroyed what could have been up to 3,000 Libyan soldiers alongside their Ugandan allies, it could spark a massive problem with Libya's Arab allies, who so far had stayed out of the war, outside of some financial and technical support. This approach, while practical, would have some drawbacks. Despite all of this, Ugandan, Libyan, and PLO troops in Kampala, were trying to organize something that looked like a defense.

The most of this work was done by the Libyans and the Palestinians. Somehow, out of this entire mess, like we talked about before, the PLO probably had the most qualified commander still on the ground inside Kampala, Mahmoud da As, who had not always been a PLO guy. He'd only become PLO in his late middle age. Before then, he was a professional officer in the Jordanian Armed Forces, specifically the commander of its engineering corps with the rank of colonel. He was arrested after taking part in a coup in 1957, and after this, he and many Palestinian

Jordanian officers left the army to join the PLO, who then went to war against the Jordanian king. Again, things happened. So somehow, through the magically stupid threads of history and geopolitics, a Jordanian-Palestrian-Palestrian Palestinian PLL Colonel became the most important commander in the defense of Kampala, defending Ediamine and ally of Israel. What a world. The Ugandan army, as much as it existed at the time, was effectively liquefied. Officers and soldiers who had already made sure to evacuate their own families. Civilians, unrelated to the military, also left town, leaving their homes and businesses to be looted by roving gangs of soldiers, who in turn were shot by the SRB,

who also began looting homes and shops. Gangs of SRB men were once again fighting each other as well, as other groups of them decided, it's about time to get off this sinking ship and fled for the Congo or Sudan. By April 10th, none of this mattered anymore. Tanzanian artillery opened fire around 3 a.m. After a short, 90-minute-long barrage,

soldiers began moving in. As the Tanzanians moved in, they faced literally no organized opposition. Civilians who had fled the city simply joined their march going back towards it, and it quickly morphed from a campaign to a victory parade before the city even fell. So what happened to the Libyans and the Palestinians and all of Mahmoud Da'a's hard work? Well, it became abundantly clear to them that the Ugandan military had no intention or ability to defend the city. So Da'as and other officers decided, well, if they're not

going to fight for their town, either are we. They packed up and took the open road out of there. But just because there's no organized defense didn't mean there. was no fighting. As soldiers advanced further and further into the city, they ran into looting gangs of soldiers who fired off bursts at them and tried to run away. Or, in what has to be my favorite episode of this entire war, a blacked-out

limousine, packed full of Ugandan soldiers that they drive by in a column of Tanzanians, hit nobody, and as they pulled away, got hit by a fucking tank and exploded. All right. I imagine being that tank crew, but instead of etching out like an X over an enemy tank, it's just

crossing out a limousine on the side of the armored skirts. All of this happened while the commander of the Tanzanian advance, Ben Masuya, walked around casualty, carrying a spear and smoking a pipe. There's pictures of this. Hell yeah. I told you I'd get back to the spear. You bet you thought I was fucking lying.

By the 11th, shit got very, very grim. The road towards Jinjo was closed off, and as Tanzanian soldiers continued their advance across the same, city, they're joined by elements of the Ugandan exile militias, who promptly began to hunt down anyone they considered an Amin collaborator, and this definition was very fluid. This included people who happened to be from any of Amin's favored ethnic groups, anyone connected to them, anyone they didn't like. A lot of settling of personal beefs happened here. In a lot of cases, militias are put in charge of banning checkpoints away from the front line, where they got

blind drunk and just began harassing, stealing, and murdering civilians. In some cases, this turned to a Mexican standoff situation as they tried to muscle Tanzanian soldiers who are passing by, leading to more than one shootout between the two sides. And in one case of, oh shit, they really should not have done that, a car speeding down the road, ripped by a militia checkpoint, and then the men manning it fired an RPG, somehow managing to hit the car. Honestly, an absolute chef's kiss of a shot if you weren't shooting at a civilian car. And members of the Ugandan military and government had been snatching civilian cars that should make a break for it since the very beginning. So it's not unheard of that this would have been okay to do. But this car was not

carrying Ugandan military, Uganda government, or Ugandan civilians. Instead, it was carrying the East German ambassador to Uganda and his whole family. They all died. Whoops. Whoopsie-Doodle. Damn, you've made an enemy of like the world's most competitive taking steroids team. Hey, they shouldn't have trained the SRB. Me sewing. Hell yeah.

Me reaping. But as the attack advanced, Ugandan civilians, seeing the troops walking down the streets weren't their own, rushed out to greet them. A lot of civilians made sure to tell the Tanzanians where the remaining defenders were hiding. While still others said, hell yeah,

and began looting shops and houses that hadn't are. been looted. Other people ran down to the SRB buildings to try to find missing loved ones, only to find the SRB men burning documents as the city fell around them. The soldiers that hadn't been able to flee yet changed into civilian clothes and only got into gun battles with Tanzanians when they ran into each other on accident. Other groups of Ugandan soldiers, who had changed into civilian clothes, attempted to rob the home of the first secretary of the French embassy, only to be set running by a rip of AK fire, fired by the first secretary's wife out the front door.

Absolute guitar solo dudes rock moment. And a dude's rock moment is fluid when it comes to gender. It's just dudes rock. That could be the French secretary's wife hip firing an AK out the front door. It could be a tank crewman blowing up a limo. It could be anything. My friend showed me a video of a Bosnian serb doing a video on YouTube and like, I'm just sending out my greetings to everybody for a, you know,

Merry Christmas and a happy new year. And he's like, hey, mom hit it. And his mom points a gun out the window and just starts shooting. And it's like, that is, it was his mom doing the firing, but that's a dudes rock moment. Big Balkans energy. I love it. For all intents and purposes, by the night of the 11th, Kampala had fallen. This was followed by even more looting as Musuia was worried that any attempts of stopping

the civilians from, say, in one case, blowing the doors off Barclay's bank and stealing several milling shillings would require his men to shoot civilians. which he did not want them to do. So he just kind of shrugged and said, Go nuts. Lute away. He also let his men join in, but limited them to stealing only one wristwatch

and one radio per man. There was so much looting going on that it was jokingly nicknamed The Night of the Wheelbarrow's. You know, it's going fucking great when it gets a name like that. You know, it's going to be awesome. The Night of the Wheelbarrows.

The Night of the Oblong Objects. At any point, it's going to be night of blank. Wheelbarrows is the best possible outcome. Walking down the street looking like Trinidad James. Gold all of my watch. Hey, he said one pocket watch. So I still one for me?

My cousin? My cousin's cousin. Got pocket watches up to my fucking elbows. If there's any one thing we can say for sure about Trinidad James, all gold everything that would apply to this situation, it's Pop to Molly. I'm sweating. Whoop. I would like to think of General Missouia. still carrying his spear and smoking his pipe,

but the spear is just like lined with stolen watches and bracelets. He's like, oh, you know I had to get mine too. The shit doesn't pay much. Every single resident of Coppala suddenly looks like Johnny dying. I mean, I love the idea that like, you're just plausible deniability. They're like, no, man. They were just in the,

I just found them in the river. Just fished them out. Like, there was a thousand Rolexes in the river. Yeah, man. River currents are weird as hell. Universal basic Rolexes. That's my new government policy is the military occupational authority of Kampala

is I can't offer you health care. I can't offer you food. But what if I gave you one of Edia Means watches? Because he has so many. Everybody's approaching the Lord Miles economy. I don't know if you saw that. He's walking around. He's like, oh, if you're ever traveling,

get 50 watches off Timo and keep one on you. And if you get stopped by the police, I'm like, oh, I don't have any cash here. Take this. You can take my watch. grandfather's watch, I don't want to give it to you, but there you go. And it's just like, he falls over and watches just fall out of him. Like, he saw.

He's going to say fucking sonic rigs. Yeah, exactly. A radio broadcast is made over Radio Uganda. It's tower of him falling to Tanzania and militia forces. announcing the liberation of Kampala and the establishment of a new government. Idi Amin, who had already run the hell out of there at this point, had his own absolutely rambling, nonsensical radio broadcast that was broadcast from a, mobile transmitter, which really sucked.

Like, imagine how bad a mobile radio transmitter would be in the late 70s, all while he's doing it in a car in like a hotel room, insisting that Kampala hadn't fallen all while, like, arranging his ride out of the country first to Libya, and then living out the rest of his life in exile in Saudi Arabia. Did you mean doing a note's apopology in the 70s? Yeah. Doing a land acknowledgement, but just handing it over to the Tanzanians. I acknowledge this land now belongs to Tanzania.

All of the posters around Kampala Vita and me and just become all black avatars for some reason. It's just blackout image, you know. She's like, why? Why? Why would you do? Well, I guess that's probably happened anyway because I probably paid over that shit. I mean, he probably much happier in exile. Now, he can just sit around and pretend to be like a nice old man in exile in Saudi Arabia. But he doesn't have to pretend to be good enough to run a country. I mean, if there's ever a place where you can live contented, surrounded by a trillion. and Rolexes in Saudi Arabia.

That's true. RIPED mean you would love 2026, Dubai. There were still places held by Ugandan soldiers, but in reality, there was very little fighting left in the war, and the war was all but over. About that new government, though. For starters, exile militias were causing so many issues that Missouya eventually ordered them out of Kampala. Meanwhile, Lule, the executive chair of the government exile and agreed upon interim president,

hadn't even picked a cabinet yet because the war had ended so quickly he hadn't had time to do it. He was quickly rushed to Kampala to take his new office. A process that was greatly hampered by the fact that everybody had stolen everything from virtually every government office in Kampala.

Lule and Missouya had to put out a polite call to the public to please return all the state property you stole so we might be able to rebuild the state. Hey bro. Can you, any chance you could return the pens you still? We don't have any.

We have to sign all these like new laws and doctrine. We don't have any pens. Could you please return the chair, uh, the desk? Maybe a copy machine. Anything? A car perhaps? The limousine got blown up by a tank. We got nothing.

But that wasn't the only serious problem that Uganda was going to be facing in the aftermath of the war. For starters, the country was in rough shape even before this whole thing started. But so much have been looted. So much had been damaged. and the invasion had interrupted the traditional crop planting season, leading to catastrophic shortages and a famine. The new Ugandan authorities, nor the Tanzanians,

had the ability to really give effective humanitarian relief, or really enforce any kind of security. The Tanzanian armed forces were learning that they may have surprised themselves of the ability to conduct a military campaign and an invasion against Ediamin. That was something entirely different than the dreaded concepts of occupation and nation building. The Ugandan economy was dead in the water.

This was, to be fair, largely the fault of Edia mean. Another thing that the war and industrialized looting did not help, though. When the war introduced hundreds of thousands of guns into the mix, and soon gangs of bandits were raiding homes and acting as AK-wielding highwaymen, shit was getting worse and worse. The Ugandan state ceased to function. There were no courts, police, nothing. Everything fell to Tanzanian occupation forces, which was something that they were not prepared for, nor is any occupation force really. The militias, now in control of the country, turned on

one another as political assassinations and murder became a common feature of politics in Kampala. Lule, the new president, immediately began ignoring the agreements that gave him his position with the other political groups. So, a few months after taking over, he was voted out in June. Then, if that wasn't bad enough, Amin supporters hiding out in Sudan and Congo, funded in large part by North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Edia means vast stolen wealth himself, invaded Uganda, sparking what would become known as the Bush War. A few months after that, Uganda held its first election, and Milton Abote returned to power. This was an election that was largely considered fraudulent, and in response, Yowery Museveni and his men took up arms and joined the Bush War as a new faction.

Despite there still being Tanzanian soldiers in Uganda until 1981, Nairi, refused to be involved in the expanding civil war. Musfeni's National Resistance Army would eventually take Kampala, a 1986, and at the time of recording, he is still president of Uganda. So it might be wondering what happened to Tanzania after all of this. Well, this war detonated its economy, because it turns out war is really fucking expensive. Prior to the war, Tanzania had suffered through a drought, and the government had stripped back a lot of resources to try and combat that.

But then the war and the occupation happened, causing them to take money away from that and put it towards the war costs, which possibly costs over a million dollars per day for years for a country that did not have that money. And unlike Ediamine, Tanzania got no real international help to cushion any of the costs of this conflict and nobody helped them fund the rebuilding of the Kigera region or Uganda at large. Then when the war ended, the massively expanded Tanzanine armed forces weren't fully demobilized, owing to the worry that suddenly releasing tens of thousands of men from military service and them suddenly not getting a paycheck and there is no jobs waiting for them might be kind of a bad idea. So the government simply kept them around and paying their salary. But that could only last for so long. When they were finally released from service, a lot of these guys took glued weapons back home with them,

became cattle rustlers and began causing violent crime rates and smuggling to skyrocket in Tanzania. Julius Nayire remained present until 1985, only to watch his successor become embroiled in corruption scandals, chunk all of the socialist policies in the trash can, and further implode the economy. Tanzania was driven into deep poverty as the government was forced to spend most of its budget on the military. But even after that, the damage that the war caused to the Tanzanian economic health care and education development sectors wouldn't be zeroed out until the 2000s, though arguably a lot of people are still dealing with the after effects. Due to disputes with Museveni, normal trade wouldn't even return to the two countries until the 1990s, and the Kigara border dispute wouldn't

even be settled until 2001. Musaveni, who began his political life as an avowed leftist militant, has spent the last several decades turning into a deeply corrupt, violent, homophobic, transphobic, psycho, supported by American evangelical organizations he allowed into the country in the 1990s. Since then, he's helped them effectively reshape Uganda's religious, social, and political realities. This included lobbying by American evangelical dickhead Scott Lively, who's very bad book, The Pink Swastika, we have to thank for the still very popular, but incredibly wrong belief that a lot of Nazis were actually closeted gay men, which I cannot stress. enough is not fucking true. Stop saying it. Lively worked really hard to lobby

Uganda lawmakers to pass something that Uganda is unfortunately probably the most famous for a lot of people listening. And that is its infamous anti-homosexuality bill, a bill that became known as the Kill the Gays bill because that's what it would do. I guess in closing, I should say that regrettably, both lively and Musavany are still alive, which is thankfully one of the downsides that will have been. eventually be fixed with time. The end. I'm really happy that we got a limo being blown up by a tank in this episode. Otherwise, I don't know what other bright spots we'd have here. I mean, the French diplomat's wife firing an AK out the door. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I would like to think

that she was jumping up and down to dodge incoming fire. She's strafing like in counterstripe. Yeah. I mean, with the way these guys just pop off with RPGs. you imagine there probably was at least one real-life rocket jump. It didn't end well, but I bet it happened. Hey, not every attempt has a great outcome, but the important part is an attempt was made. I also like the image of calling in airstrikes, but the Air Force is so incompetent that it hits everyone. It's just sort of like you have like a mass effect, Esper, just fucking reigning terror on everyone. Like that is, there is something funny about that.

Very confused. Kenyan Border Patrol, not sure who they should be arresting. Yeah, absolute chaos. Ediamine sent to exile. the Saudi Arabia to largely just kind of fund a horrible civil war for a very long time. A lifetime piece of shit. Real piece of shit. Yeah, exactly. He died as he lived. A human cancer. Yeah.

That's sad. A buddy of mine was a stringer in Uganda for a really long time as a photographer and some of the pictures he had a really harrowing of just like, you know, people with from the subsequent conflicts as well, people with really horrible scars and amputations, the damage, like

the social people, the poverty. He had I remember he had a photo series of like encountering a gang of kids, none of whom could have been older than nine who were like blackout drunk on like bathtub gin. Like just, it's really bad. It's really bad. And it was aided and abetted by, you know, the sort of cold war powers in such a fucked way. And when you get into it, like there's details that make us laugh or that seems so ridiculous. You can't help but laugh even if you're trying to be fucking, you know, solid and professional. But, but in general, in aggregate, it's just, it's just really, really grim. you know, every one of those sort of like

dealing out ass-wippings and punishments and weird fixations had human consequences. You know, that's the thing that sticks with me. But I got my ass beat because I hadn't fucking made my bed by the cops. It would bother me a lot. And it's like, multiply that times a trillion and you have the human consequences of this.

Yep. Because every war is a human catastrophe before any and all else. But that is our series on the Kegara War. And fellas, we do a thing on this show called questions from the Legion. Today's question is your weirdest school trip story, field trip story slash location that your school's ever forced you to go to. Oh, I know he was 17. Our school

did like a trip to Barcelona, but it wasn't like you're flying there. No, we got on a bus in my hometown, then got on a ferry to Normandy, then drove the whole way to Barcelona, stopping along the way of various points. So, you know, we could show. shit at like a lorry stop, then got to Barcelona. I think we went to like Disneyland on the way back, got back to Normandy and like the teachers let us go to the car for and buy alcohol, but they would take it off us. So it's like they would give it to our parents and let me tell you, you put 60 teenage boys on a bus for a week and a half. It was like a biohazard

coming back. Yeah, God. That is a horrible idea for a trip. Jesus Christ. Yeah, see, the kids with money, I got to go on the school trip that was skiing, but the rest of us were like, no, you're getting on a bus for 10 days. Weirdest school trip. I mean, I had a proposed one. My school had a, I believe it was my middle school. Memory serves me correctly.

It's either middle school or like ninth grade, had a yearly trip for everyone in the grade to go to Washington, D.C. Yeah, we did that in eighth grade, yeah. Yeah. ours was scheduled to take place the month after 9-11, so that was canceled. And I wasn't going to go anyway because for people who aren't aware of how this works, maybe you're from a country where you just don't do shit like this, or maybe from a country where the school pays for field trips,

all this shit had to be paid for by our parents. Yeah, same. And the DC trip was the one time the school's going to fly us somewhere rather than drive. and my family could not afford that shit. So I wasn't going to go either way. And then afterwards, my mom's like, see, I knew there's a reason I wasn't going to say to you to D.C. Like, are you telling me, like, poverty, Nostradamus to your ass into thinking that, like,

you knew 9-11 was going to happen? So that's why you weren't going to pay for the fucking field trip. Because, I mean, like, for me, we took a bus. I went on it, but we took a bus. But we had to be at the bus, like, at school at, like, 5 a.m. And we drove from, you know, right outside Indianapolis to D.C. That was in 1998. I mean, I remember.

like, wow, DC is pretty rough. Like, it's very, very clear like a insanely segregated city aside from like where the monuments are. Yeah, thankfully, that's changed. Yeah, exactly, right? Well, now it's got some brunch spots, apparently. Actually, you know what? I'm not going to talk shit. DC's actually really cool city, but it is so fucking segregated.

It's not even funny. DC seems fine. I went there once. I was briefly detained by ice, which was less than ideal. I'm trying to think of weird school trips. I had a phone one, Nate, while you're thinking. It's just, it was fine. We went to like a park.

The park was called the John F. Kennedy Arboretum because JFK went to New Ross one day when he was in Ireland. So it's like, all right, we're going to name an entire park after him. And there's going to be a hedge maze. And you're going to get lost in it. And you're going to be really upset. You know, we have a road in Dennaw named after John F. Kennedy. It's right across the street or building. I don't remember which.

It's named after Eisenhower. Yeah. Yeah, we have stuff like that here in Geneva where it'll be like famous Swiss eugenicist, other famous Swiss eugenicist, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, you know, like that kind of a thing. But backstory on me. So I moved a ton until I was basically almost 12 because my dad was still on active duty. So I lived, I was born in Washington, but I don't remember it because we moved to California. And then I lived in Rhode Island for a year, Germany for three years, New Mexico for three years. And then we settled in Indiana when I was 11 and that's where we stayed. And when I think about

school trips in Indiana, like, I don't really have any recollection of like anything particularly out of the ordinary. Maybe they just like weren't very ambitious. I don't know. And we did the DC trip. Some, but I don't really remember anything significant. Obviously, I was a runner and a swimmer. And so we'd go like weird ass parts of Indiana to go to like meets and stuff. But thinking back on it, so when I was in fifth grade, I think it was fourth or fifth grade, my school somehow like got like a gift of like a parcel of land. I went to a really. really, really poor elementary school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I don't really know what they were

going to do with it, but like the school system had it. Like they were going to do some kind of like nature activities or something and like, you know, talk because I mean, obviously, like, ecology stuff is big out there. But they took us out on the field room. We just kind of spent all day out in like this tract of land where there wasn't anything. And I mean, we were 10, 11 years old. So it was cool. Because we're like, well, we're out in the fucking school is outside today. And the four thing, you know, the scrub land, whatever.

It was, it was cool. Um, maybe that one, when I was a younger kid in Germany, we had these like, the kind of like spring end of the school year activity days. and one of the activities you could sign up for was like nature cleanup. And I mean, I'm roughly translated because it was so long ago it was in German, but I would have been an eight. And like we had one of the activities, we went out to like this area of forest,

you know, the Germany you have things like a like a, like a, like a sort of forest service space, a local position. And I guess they had been, there's stuff they needed to clean up like clearing brush, but also like a truck had spilled like a bunch of like wood like logs, like kind of like scrap load.

I think it was meant for lumber and they needed to get rid of it. and they weren't so huge that, like, we couldn't pick them up, but you had to pick them up in teams. And I spent all day with my friends basically lifting these log kind of oversized toothpicks to like make stacks of them to get them out of this like kind of like marshy area. And it's weird because it's a strange field trip. Dude, I had the best time. I had the best fucking time. I was eight years old.

It was 1993. I was like, I am captain planet. I am German captain planet. This is what I want to do for a living. This is what I do for my job. I want to clean the forest all day long. I had the best fucking time. So, like, sometimes weird, you know, you just be like, hey, we're having class under a tree.

Kids will just go wild with it. I do have a brain condition that makes it hard for me to pay attention to things. So maybe my school being trooping through the woods and carrying shit is why I then joined the army and did that except with guns. Who knows? My friend getting roasted by his cousin at his wedding centers when we were kids, we used to play war on the front lawn throwing ice cubes at each other. And you managed to make that into a career.

Well, I mean, other than that, I went to the Henry Ford Music. him, which, you know, as a child, they didn't realize so much fucking ass the way it was. All right. That is a series. But fellas, you host other podcasts. Plug those podcasts. What a hell of a way to dad.

Trash feature. Kill James Bond. No gods, no mares. I'm involved in them in some capacity. And they all have free feeds and Patreon feeds. So if you like them, you can get more. Beneath the skin and blood work. That's all I do.

This is my podcast. Thank you for listening to it. Consider supporting us on Patreon, where you can get all sorts of other stuff. episodes early, years and years of bonus content, side series where we talk about robots or other history shows, Discord access, first dibs on live show tickets and merch and leave us a review on wherever it is. You listen to podcasts. It helps us immensely, especially when it comes to trying to schedule live shows because people tend to look at that stuff. So five stars are or don't leave one, maybe. Yeah, we call five for five, five like we're your Uber driver,

you know what I'm saying? You give us your podcast and we'll rank it five. You're like, just the best shit ever. And just, you know, that's how we keep this slap economy going. No haters allowed. Yeah. Otherwise, your limo will get hit by a tank. Otherwise, I'll find that French ambassador's wife here in Geneva and I will get her to fucking make it bark at you. She'll 360 no scope your ass through the window.

She's like 95 years old and she is still going to jump mags in your direction, all right? Or shot grouping is tight as hell. All right. You really don't want to fuck around. And until next time, brap. Slide over in that Sherman tank and make some room for me.