Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 423 - The Battle of Pork Chop Hill

Episode Date: July 19, 2026

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys SEE US LIVE IN CORK, IRELAND SEPTEMBER 26TH: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-cork-26th-september-tickets-1993823733459 WE'RE LIVESTREAMING IT (WITH VOD) https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/livestream-lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-cork-26th-september-2026-tickets-1993900928351 BUY JOE'S BOOK! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GSG5CNXX AND IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BUY IT ON AMAZON, BUY IT STRAIGHT FROM US! https://lagunairepress.com/ CHECK OUT NATE'S BAND'S ALBUM! https://secondhomesband.com/ During the Korean War, the People's Volunteer Army of China and the UN fought a meaningless battle over a hill shaped like a pork chop in order to leverage ongoing negotiations. Thousands died, and everyone claimed they won. SOURCES: Marshall, S.L.A. (1956). Pork Chop Hill: The American Fighting Man in Action, Korea, Spring 1953. Hermes, Walter G (1966). "Truce Tent and Fighting Front". The United States Army in the Korean War. Vol. 2. Center of Military History. The Korean War. The Battle on Pork Chop Hill. https://historynet.com/korean-war-battle-on-pork-chop-hill/ https://warhistory.org/article/july-6-11-1953-the-battle-of-pork-chop-hill-hill-255 https://web.archive.org/web/20061109043603/http://www.historynet.com/magazines/military_history/3034286.html

Come see us live, September 26th in Cork, Ireland at the Kino Events House. Tickets are available now, both live show and live stream. If you can't make it, the live stream will also have video on demand so you can watch it later for whatever reason, time zones or whatnot. We'll have new merch, we'll have some old merch. I might even have some books available. So come on down, get your tickets, and we'll see you in Cork. 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, audiobooks, 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 and welcome to the Lions at by Donkeys podcast, the only military history podcast in the entire known world. I'm Joe, and with me is Tom and Nate Bellas.

How are we doing today? Today I do not feel Congolese anymore. As in you were supporting Congo. We need some context since this is coming out weeks into July. Yeah, currently England are still in the World Cup My friend Joe Panama has not gotten his wish of No More England But unfortunately I had to go watch the match last night with my mate And was surrounded by ham-faced people and a dude with a Paul Weller haircut

Who is wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Paul Weller on it So a full spectrum of London Brit vibes I have something of the sports kiss of death during this World Cup Or everyone I have cheered for has lost So go England. I don't pay attention to it because I don't know enough about it and I don't want to bring my own fan curse with me that when I start paying attention to something they always lose.

But it's finally cooled off a little bit and I had this strange feeling this morning of like, wait, isn't this what summer is supposed to be like? This is so nice. Imagine if it's like this all the time. Apparently it used to be. But then one of the reasons why it's so hot here in summer is it's nowhere near as polluted anymore.

And so like the pollution used to protect you from fucking direct sunlight. not no more. That's the real Mr. Burns disease of climate change. It's like, no, when everything is shoving itself through the door, it's actually cool. But now that we've done something about it, fuck, it's hot. I mean, yeah, summer used to be like this, but then your dumb cousin wanted to animate a picture of your dead me-all with AI. So now this is just the future we live in. I mean, it didn't escape my notice that it was hotter in Geneva than in Cairo.

Like, that the median temperature was pretty much bang on the same as dad. of Bangladesh. And it's like, this is obviously not, I mean, don't get me wrong. Like, we're in a much better situation than in those countries in terms of like if you have extreme heat being like, like, I recognize this is like a zeroth world country. But there is an extent to which I'm like, the degree to which like everything is supposed to continue as normal when it's this obviously abnormal is is a bit of a shock to me. So I am grateful that we now have normal European summer weather. And then my daughter is yelling at me because she says it's cold. And life goes on. You were being beset upon.

by the ghost of Muammar Gaddafi taking his final revenge against Switzerland. Yeah, I would just be living in France then. But the good news is in France, you can actually get air conditioning here. They just don't think it exists. If you keep comparing the weather to those places, you're going to make the Swiss even more racist. Bellas, I was actually going to start this off by making a lot of people mad,

by bringing up a topic that nobody likes, and that is the TV show The Bear. Hey, the first season of that show was good. The rest? Look, I legitimately, I ultimately don't care what anybody says. I love the show every single season. I binge watched the show last night, the final season last night. It's lovely. It means something different to me than other people because long time listeners of the show will know that my brother was a chef and I know he would have loved it. So it had more to it for me than a lot of people. And if you get really mad at me for liking the show, you should know I don't care. The bear is big in the dead brother community. substance abuse problems, a.e. I.

All of them. Community. Yes. It's realistic. It shows a lot of it. And again, I don't care if you don't like it. You don't have to like anything.

Everything. It means something to me. But the reason why I'm bringing it up is because they often cook pork chops on that show. Actually, I don't know if that's true. And fellas, today,

we're talking about the Battle of Porkchop Hill. Have you ever heard this before? In the Korean War, correct? Yeah, that's correct. Yep. I'm familiar with it because I believe that my old unit was reactivated after World War II and went to Korea and was involved. It was a different organization, but it was the 506th Infantry Regiment. I believe Porchap Hill, they were involved, but I might be wrong. I do know about it because Slam Marshall, the famous U.S. War historian who, yeah, he. Oh, we'll talk about him in a sec. He has a book on it and it has the most GI Joe. ass artwork on the paperback. I have a copy of it. And it's like no second lieutenant has ever looked that like John Wayne ass screaming into a radio for artillery. But it can't paint a picture of it

being positive. It just looks like fucking hell. So yeah, I'm excited to talk about it. I also know a little bit about the Korean War because I was stationed in Korea. And I saw the landscape there. And I was like, this would have fucking sucked. So there you have it. That's pretty much all accurate, especially Marshall being a, let's say, a character. A character. Is SLA Marshall is his name? but he is referred to as slam marshal because the Symbionese Liberation Army Marshal. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. He had a strange late career turn. He's doing all of his weird history actually as a sort of like he's trying to heighten the contradictions. He's actually a Leninist. So the Korean War, that conflict that nobody really likes talking about when imperial powers divided

up Korea, empowered a bunch of assholes, and then reacted in shock when they went on a death drive to reunification that ultimately failed, at least so far. And on a long enough timeline, it brings us K-pop and one very stupid Seth Rogen film. Oh yeah, Jesus, I forgot about that. It's best that we all do.

I will say the actor that played Kim Jong-un is legitimately the only fun part of that entire film because he's just a great actor. But some longtime listeners of the show might also remember it as a topic that I was researching for the better part of half of a year. in the early day of the podcast and attempt to write a series about it.

That was probably going to be north of 10 parts before my computer died and took all my work with it because I was not yet using cloud storage of any kind and that was a lesson I learned the hard way. Things have not gotten much better. Dear listener at home, Joe still does not understand technology.

Yes, we all get that because you never fail to bring it up. Everyone wants to return to the olden days. they don't want to return to, I accidentally turn my dad's computer off in his office and he lost like an entire day's work. And I definitely got my ass beat for that. Yeah. And that's not something that will happen to me anymore. Unless of course, for some reason, our various recording systems fail because technology has gotten worse. Oh, I thought you were saying that your dad wouldn't beat your ass anymore. I'm like, yeah, that's true. That's true. I won that battle.

Mine, he could technically try, but he's like, he's five, six and weighs like maybe a hundred pounds now. So you know what? It's going to be basically unfair match. Much like the Taliban, I just had to wait like a decade and I won by default. Today's episode brings us to the end of the war. Kind of. Well, technically as well, because, you know, it's out of war that legally has an ending. But it's when the big red pause button got slapped. Negotiations that bring the war to some kind of end had been going on since virtually when it started.

The U.S. had been looking for a way out since December of 1950, but owing to all the moving pieces, but especially the leaders of the two Koreas, Kim Il-sung and Singman-Ree, really wanted to continue the war because they both saw actual reunification being within reach, which is something that nobody else really believed in at that point anymore. Like the way that the backers of North Korea saw it, it was like, this is going to be like a lightning strike, will be reunified. immediately. They did not think of this is going to be a long drawn-out war. And it's also only, you know, five years after World War II. The U.S. did not see South Korea as being able to unify the Koreas because of, well, they purposefully didn't give Sigmarie the shit he needed

to do that because they didn't want this war the first place. It wasn't until 1951, when thousands of people were dead, that both leaders kind of started to back down somewhat. This was thanks to the realities of the battlefield and the North's allies in China and the Soviet Union, joining with the U.S. to try to get their proxies to shut the fuck up and come to the table.

And as you can tell from the date, this did not work for a while. Yeah. There were huge gaps between the two sides, thanks to normal stuff like disagreements over the terms and whatnot, but also really big fuckups that made negotiations very difficult.

Like, for example, when the UN accidentally bombed the meeting site in K-Song, resulting in everything having to be put on hold, and then move to Panmunjohn, which is famously where the negotiations would be complete. As the various sides bickered, the war on the ground continued, which of course would in turn only make negotiations harder as one side lost more and the other side gained more. They thought they had the advantage and would stretch things out. But by early spring of 1953, there are a few breakthroughs that made everyone a little bit optimistic, unless, of course, you still were like pro reunification.

For one, Stalin died. And the new Soviet leadership really wanted this shit to be done with. Mao and China was pushing back hard. He still wanted to see this war through to the end. He was fighting most compromises that came up, but also realized that if the Soviets hit the bricks, he would have to foot even more of the bill than he already had, which he really did not want to do. Which was a lot because, I mean, like, from late 1950 onward,

the PLA were the bulk of the fighting force there. Ah, but it wasn't the PLA. It was the PVA, and we'll talk about that in a second. Right, right. It was Chinese irregular Chinese soldiers. It was Chinese military units doing the fighting. How dare you? They were volunteers that's right in the name.

Yeah, yeah. I'm not going to pretend that I'm massively. schooled up on this, so I'm not trying to speak too authoritatively, but things changed when the PVA got involved in 1950, and that's the reason why it was such a nightmare. Oh, it's the reason why there's a North Korea at all anymore. Yeah, yeah, because, I mean, they literally got into the old boundaries of, yeah, it's hard to define completely, because obviously there's Korean parts of China and Russia, or there were before Stalin deported the Koreans from the Far East, but the Yalu River was the boundary that was sort of defined, you know, the, the

border of Korea at the time. They got there in 1950. Most people hopefully know this, but basically MacArthur attacked it in Chan. They surprised North Koreans. They went from basically having this tiny pocket in Busan in the very southeast of the country to basically retaking the entire peninsula. And then they kept going across the Yalu River

and the Chinese invaded. After telling them multiple times, stop. If you go to the Yalu River, we will attack you. Yes. Stop doing this. Because MacArthur was part of this coterie of weird freaks who had been missionaries in China or related people who are missionaries in China.

And they were like, we're going to nuke Beijing. We're going to retake China and install Shanghai Shaq. We don't care if Truman says don't do it. He wanted to nuke this shit out of China. And that among other reasons is one of the, is why he got fired. Yeah. But there were also goodwill gestures to show both sides that they're working towards a peaceful end.

There was Operation Little Switch when both sides would exchange sick and wounded prisoners. And this is the first of its kind during the war. And that brings us to the reality of the war in general. Most people probably know of the Korean War from the big northern offensive that started it, like Nate said, trapping the UN. I'm going to use the term UN and US interchangeably throughout this episode, just though they're kind of one and the same at the Pusan perimeter. And then the resulting UN counteroffensive, the Inchon landings that drove north, the entrance of the Chinese and yet another drive south. And all of that was over by 1951. And in the time since, the Korean War had turned into a horrific stalemate across the 38th parallel.

Trenches were dug, bunkers and outposts were built, and the two sides began to claw and kill one another over these tiny little changes of the line over what became known as the Battle of the Outposts. This didn't shrink this scale of the war, only the scale of the tactical decision-making being involved. So rather than grand offensives, like Inchon, for example, thousands of men were. were sent to fight over a tiny little nothing hills that better their positions along the previously established line for a couple hundred meters at a time. And contrary to popular belief, this stage of the war, this battle of the outposts, is what the United States would take the majority of their casualties. The best way you can think of it is, what if World War I took place in the mountains of Korea?

A horrible meat grinder of constant unrelenting artillery bombardment and largely unsupported frontal attacks. And as negotiations continued, the war would become a battle of inches, because one of the key agreements that almost everybody knew would come down is the final borders, which of course would become the DMZ and then the actual borders of the two Koreas, would follow the line being drawn wherever the fighting lines happened to be when it stopped. The entire war came down to seeing how many meters one side could kick that line in one direction or another. And that brings us to one of those meaningless little hills

in the middle of this charnel house. Hill 255. Nicknamed Porkchop Hill, because it's full of Americans and we can only think of things as food. Yeah, and the hamburger hadn't been popularized yet in America either, so. Well, Hamburger Hill would be a battle during Vietnam. To be fair. But by that time, Amerifat's had adopted

everything is burger, so. We're still at everything as pork chop. still. Yeah. Also, I know it was shaped like a pork chop. Yeah, the semantic comparison is comparing it to some kind of food item that we recognize, but then invariably it becomes this horrific battle. And we're like, oh, yeah, the battle where Americans got turned into pork chops,

the battle where Americans got turned into hamburgers, et cetera. That wasn't the intention. But, well, I think with Hamburger Hill, that is absolutely how it got its name after the fact. Because they just had a number. Whereas Pork Shop Hill, like you said. It was already named that. It was already named that.

Yeah. We need to come up with a name for this hill. a hamburger. Yeah, it was an infantryman that was being interviewed after the battle. There's slightly before the battle was over

at Hamburger Hill. That said they were being ground up like hamburger meat. We did an episode on it. People should go listen to it. But in 1952, the American stationed along Korea's West Central line

launched an offensive to capture several hills that were directly in front of their main line of resistance and a classic case of wanting to control the high ground. And these were going to be made into outposts to be something of a breakwater if there was any major attack on the main line. You know, the Chinese, it's mostly the Chinese

at this point because the KPA or the Korean People's Army, the Army of North Korea, was pretty much shattered at this point. But they were still obviously involved in the war. They would have to attack these outposts first if they wanted some kind of large scale offensive. One of these hills would be pork chop hill. The operation works, and soon U.S. forces begin digging in, and they're joined by elements of the Royal Thai Army, the Colombian Army,

and the Imperial Ethiopian Army, which were handpicked from the Ethiopian Emperor's own bodyguards, because this is the kind of thing you get when the UN gets involved in something. It's like the world's strangest joint circle. Yeah, like we had this happen

with the UN being involved in Somalia in the early 90s, where there was an incident where a bunch of Pakistani military got killed because they were the ones who kind of drew the straws to be out doing stuff. And then when things went bad, it was like, it was dozens, I believe,

of dudes got killed. Yeah, that's actually a really good pitch, Nate, because we did a bonus episode of that with Greg Foley from Bloodwork. So support the show of Patreon. Listen to Bloodwork. You're welcome,

Tom. Yes, I'm here all day, baby. Here all day. Now that we've talked about the UN forces that it had taken pork chop, We should talk a little bit about the people's volunteer army of China, because we haven't really done that on the show before. Like we kind of alluded to in the beginning here, the PVA was not technically the People's Liberation Army, the standing army of China.

Much like the U.S. never declared war in China or North Korea, for that matter. They technically fell under the banner of a UN police force. The PVA was like the Chinese counterpart to this. We didn't declare war. our standing army isn't involved, but we do have a people's volunteer army. It was technically, but not really,

an all volunteer force, separate from the PLA, but also it wasn't. They followed all of the standard practices of the PLA. Most importantly, they had no formal ring structure. The Chinese government

had abolished the traditional rank structure owing partially to political ideology and partially to counter warlordism in China. We've talked a little bit about the warlord era. We'll talk about it more in the future. But this kind of rank inflation into the higher ranks

created political factionalization, people hoovering up power both politically and militarily. But it's a little bit from column A, a little bit from column B. Instead, people were given titles directly corresponding to their duties. If you're a squad leader,

your title was squad leader. If you're a platoon leader, your title is platoon leader. all the way up the chain. If this sounds like it could lead to some problems, you're right. For example, if two squad leaders were standing next to one another, they had the same title. There was no way to differentiate who was actually in charge, unless they were given a new explicitly given title, and that doesn't always happen in the chaos of war.

You can see how this causes a very top-heavy military politically, because that's how they got the titles, right? So they tried to do this to get rid of rank inflation and a top heavy military. And that's exactly what they created just with a new coat of paint. Yeah, Joe, I don't like you undermining perfect Maoist Confucian thought and how we should structure our military. I personally think you should be sent to a dungeon somewhere in a mountain for doubting the supreme leader. It's still better than a lot of politically propped up militaries. Like there's other cases of revolutionary forces having to elect their leader. which, look, obviously I am pro-electing political leadership,

but you should really not run your military based on the popular vote. You should really just pick the guy who's best qualified for the job and promote them. You're going to get two options. You're going to get the guy who wants to kill everyone and will appeal to the, you know, the kill everyone voting base. And then you'll have the guy who will promise, you know, pop tarts and jerking off on Fridays. and that will appeal to that crowd. Yeah.

And the second crowd is normally more popular. Yeah. Yeah. They're not doing anything crowd. Yeah. As a soldier, that rules. But if you want to win the war, it's probably not the best choice. But it actually gets worse than this because of political officers.

Commissars, as they're commonly known, the Soviet Union, political officers are a hardly new thing to both this show and armies of a certain political lean. But for example, in the Soviet Union, a commissarer. had no say over operational decisions. They could not legally overrule a military officer. There were cases this happened.

There was also cases where commissars were also military leaders to make things a little bit more complicated. And, you know, the Soviet Union played quite fasted and loose with these rules. World War II was bad. But in the PVA, political officers did have the ability to simply

overrule the officers that they were with. Also, in the Soviet Union, a political officer having a military command was a rare thing. It wasn't so rare in the PVA, and this blurred the lines even further, and to make things even more complicated, technically while a military leader could plan and execute operations without the input or approval of a political officer, if a political officer simply walked into the room, they could cancel anything at any time for any reason. That doesn't sound like it's really good. This is a bad thing? It's less than ideal.

I think we could all agree. And to make things even more complicated, all of the military leaders by nature of it being post-revolutionary China and even today, all of the higher ranking military leaders or even junior leaders were members of the Communist Party. They had to be. They had to be considered trusted political characters coming from a good background. So, fearing for their career and, you know, a serious fuck up their life,

they almost always bowed to the pressures of the political officers, unless, of course, they also happened to be one because it would ruin their political career otherwise, which was really the only career if you happened to be working for the government. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Though there is something that people kind of bring up a lot when you talk about the PVA, and it is funny. And that is the strange habit of passing orders from higher command to lower,

down the line in the form of poetic verse. Oh, fuck yeah. Please tell me you have some examples of this. There are some examples out there. And this is already a long episode and I would get lost in this. But the reason for this was due to a low literacy rate and the idea of if you made them into poetic verse, they were more easily memorized correctly rather than playing some game of telephone.

Yeah. And this is something that PVA is often. mocked for because let's all be honest here, that is very funny at face value. But then again, I mean, think about the shit that they make us memorize. But it worked. That's most important here. If it's dumb and it works, it's not dumb. It's like the oldest military rule on earth. I mean, think about the like when assessing a casualty, the, the acronym and the sort of dumb shit they taught us to remember, I know that there's a polite version, but the one being, you know, amongst infantrymen before, back when it was all male was rub better balls for both head,

which was responsiveness, breathing, bleeding. I can't remember the rest because it's been so long. See, you'd remember if it was a poem. Yeah. Almost 20 years later, I still remember the acronym because it's like, that stuff's drilled into you. And it's like, if this is a thing that works, I mean, that's why mnemonic devices work.

It makes sense. It sounds goofy, but like... It's similar if you go to paramedic school. Everything is a series of acronyms. You need to memorize. That is a little different than memorizing an entire poem. It's the same. idea, right? Like, if you

have this thing that you memorize, it's not passing explicit orders down the line, things get lost because, and there's also a very long tradition of poetic verse being used through government, political and social means

in China. Everyone is aware of these things. So people who, you know, were illiterate, you know, because a lot of these guys in the PVA are veterans of, which we'll go into. This is something they're also very used to

because they did it all throughout the Chinese Civil War and World War II, which is obviously kind of both at the same time and also not. But this is something that everyone is very used to. It's something that we love to laugh at and mock because it is funny, but it worked. Also couldn't really

expect the average American soldier to understand the beauty of Confucian poetic verse. But I mean, we have to memorize fucking stupid songs like the army goes marching or the army goes rolling along and, you know, we have to remember the soldiers creed and the NCO creed and the Ranger creed. Yeah, but that's not like operational orders. Yeah, you're handing down orders through the form of old McDonald how to farm. I mean,

to be honest with you, man, the level of, if there was a way to make something that fucking like instrumentalized like that wrote, like, if it worked, they would do it. Like, we don't know. It's very difficult to imagine what would be like in an environment where most people were illiterate. So it's like, I mean, I don't have like a side here because we're fucking, I'm like, no, I'm a hardline PLA supporter. I am the mod of the subreddit PLA fans number one. Like PLA fans 1950. That's me.

It's the PVA. They're different, but also they're not. Get it right. What I was going to make is that like, yeah, it sounds, it sounds ridiculous. But then I remember having to memorize upon otherwise being harshly physically punished, recognizing that I volunteered as a ranger fully knowing the haves of my chosen profession, I will always endeavor to uphold the prestige honor and high spriticor of my ranger regiment. Like, come on.

Yeah, but like, there's no beauty in that. There's no, there's no, there's none whatsoever. And there's six fucking stanzas. See, that was only one stanza. What I'm getting is there is nothing even remotely close to what we've ever had to do because those are songs, those are mottos, those are whatever. We all practice to memorize them. These are orders.

Like, dude, like young platoon leader, whatever. The orders he's getting for a couple hours from now that he then has to pass down to his squad leaders is a poetic verse. And he needs a pull from that. The actual intention of the orders. Memorize it exactly. Pass it down. They need to do the same thing.

And I mean, it is quite a top heavy military. So they're not doing a lot of planning at that level, but like, this is intensely more complicated than our system, but it works. Can you imagine getting an order in the commander's intent to determine if C was wind dark? Imagine like, okay, this is we're going on a

react to contact patrol. Here's a book of Shell Silversed poem. Yeah, exactly. Figure it out, motherfucker. No, you open up the paper and it says, when the lotus flower blooms in the east, the horse has done their forward. And it's like, oh, we need to charge at 6 a.m. Okay, fine. Yeah. The American mind

cannot comprehend that. We legitimately cannot. We absolutely cannot. We just read the giving tree and they basically want artillery barrage here. The point of the giving tree was that like stuff rains from the sky. So in this case, like, yeah, they want to fire the battalion six on it. And the second you read the giving

tree incorrectly, you invent Agent Orange and kill the giving tree. So the PVA's equipment is a mishmash of World War two surplus, but as the war continues and the Soviet support picks up, they're mostly replaced, but then as the war continues

to progress, the American bombers made the Chinese supply lines into the logistic system that gets you blown to pieces. And a lot of Chinese guys would drop their weapons and instead pick up American weapons. Because they're so close to the front lines. I mean, the South Korean military, the Rock Army, is also using American weapons.

There's American shit everywhere, making it easier to get resupplied. You know, they're doing loot drops. That being said, that is pretty much all they had. The PVA is an entirely light infantry-based army. They have no real armor support to speak of. It does exist, but it's so minuscule it might as well. they have no real air support air support during the Korean War

is mostly carried up at the Soviet Union but they're not doing close air support really it's few and far it might as well not be there they did have an absolute metric fuck ton of artillery which we'll get into and their supply situation is at

best always one notch above dire they are quite literally sniping an American soldier as they get off the battle bus and running over and stealing their loot drop Steels pants Steal's pants Don't forget the tea bag The corpse private

No no The order come down In an extremely poetic way Is like after watering the teaped One must bloom the jasmine And it's like yeah That's putting your Giving someone

A pair of goggles with your nutsack As the current of the wind You must go up down Up down Doing the Kahnami code With my balls on his face. The PVA was also

obviously drawn from the PLA, but they're different. Remember that. They have no standardized training system because they didn't need one. The PLA is almost entirely made up of an endless supply of combat veterans from the Chinese Civil War at World War II.

And they also really didn't go through a standardized training system. They didn't go to a normal basic training system or anything like the Joe or Nate of his dad. day would have gone through. Instead, they learned through on the job training and since they didn't die,

they decided this is probably good enough. Yeah, it's that diagram of the airplane. That's a really, really good military doctrine. And, you know, if you survived, you would impart the wisdom onto the next poor fucker who joined the ranks. Yeah. Chinese leaders also knew they're

sending men to go fight a vastly superior technological enemy. This is not something that Mao, or Zhao Enlai or any of these people had any fucking misconceptions about. They're like, we are fighting these guys with shit old weaponry, and there's nothing we can do to bridge this gap. So they came up with a counter that they could do.

They fell back an unrelenting discipline, political lessons, struggle sessions, things of that nature, to build morale. Quite literally, one of the things that Mao believed is that they could overcome technological shortcomings if their men were so disciplined and morale so high that it didn't phase them. We will defeat the American devil with a combination of courage, uniqueness, nerve, and talent. And it worked. I mean, obviously, North Korea still exists, right? Like, they did not lose this.

Yeah. But over time, these two things begin to degrade, and you can see that in both their conduct of the war and the results. Combat veterans get pasted as casualties begin to pile up. They're replaced by completely new recruits who still have no formal combat training and now also no experience to lean on. And the experienced guys are thin and out a bit. Which in turn led to more political-based discipline lessons, which is not a good substitute to like knowing how to move correctly while under fire. But despite all of these weaknesses, the PVA was a highly effective army.

and like I said, it's the only reason why the war ended the way it did. The KPA is gone at this point. Unlike the American popular narrative likes to paint things, this is not because of relentless frontal human wave attacks. Rather, they fully embraced and understood their weaknesses and work around them, which is more than you can say for most of the armies we tend to talk about in this show. For the UN forces, it probably did look like that, though. When a Chinese army unit sprung their attack, it really did look like they were everywhere all at once and they would never stop coming.

And that was by design. The PVA were masters of nighttime movement, born from pure practicality and tactical genius. If you move at night, it's harder to get bombed. It's the 1950s after all. If you move at night also, you don't get seen by the defenders and you can move around them more freely. And that's why they would zero in on infiltration tactics. Getting in so close to the flanks and the rear of an enemy unit or position and only launching their attacks once those were in place,

it meant that most of their assaults were total surprises, and they would be so close that the UN's massive fire support capabilities wouldn't be able to be brought to bear fully once the fighting started. Someone's grandad definitely is like at the later stage of his life and is like mumbling shit like the Chinese can see in the dark. Yeah, they eat a lot of carrots. Yeah. It's just like, I think it was British or American propaganda during World War II.

It's like, no, we don't have any bomb sites or anything. We just eat a lot of carrots so people can see better. Adding to this, they were masters of force concentration. If a Chinese unit was attacking you and they knew that this area of the line was maybe a little bit weaker, the fighting was going a little bit better, they would rapidly redeploy their forces, to these areas. So if you were a defender, it would feel like you were suddenly

fighting human waves attacks. For every 10 enemies, there is one of you, even if that wasn't true all of the time. Meanwhile, on Porkchop Hill, engineers were brought in. The area was reinforced with trenches, bunkers, and foxholes. They were all dug very deep

and reinforced thanks to this being largely an artillery battle, like a lot of stuff was during the Battle of the Outposts era. But due to the terrain of the hill itself, standard military layouts for defensive networks didn't really work very well. This is because Porkchop Hill had what was described as a big old dent in the center of the

hill. It was concave. So it naturally broke up defensive lines and didn't allow them to be mutually supporting or connected. So while they sat there and waited, the attack came for someone else. The nearby hill called Old Baldi. Insert the given dick joke here. but it was actually given this nickname

because it had been hit with so much artillery that there was no vegetation or even dirt left there. It was all just blown away to stone. Old Baldy was garrisoned by a combination of Colombian and American forces, and by all accounts for the soldiers there, it sucked. And not a two different existence of the soldiers on Porkchop Hill.

They were hit around the clock by artillery, mortars, and the occasional sniper attack before the Chinese launched their ground attack. Over several days of brutal fighting, Old Baldy falls and the Chinese take it over. And that put Porkchop in a really bad position. Previously, Porkchop was the furthest point forward of the breakwater outposts that we talked about

in front of the main line. Now, Old Baldy, the anchor to Porkchop's flank had fallen, leaving this forward hill just kind of flapping in the wind with its flank wide open. According to, as Nate said, slam marshal, I'm not really going to go into him too deeply here. He's considered something of a problematic character and not in the, like, the online sense of the word. Problematic in the sense that it's alleged that he was a fraud.

That he either plagiarized or just made up a lot of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. In some of his work, not all. Yeah. A lot of his exaggerations. I did use his book on Porkchop Hill as one of, but not the only source on this episode, of course. Some of his stuff holds up better than others.

Yeah. But there has been pretty in-depth studies. on his work, and it's considered mostly fine. I'm pretty sure he was the official historian for the Army in World War II. He was a World War I veteran. I will say that obviously, like, since his death in the 70s, I think, there's been a re-evaluation of it. Not all of it is bad, but some of it is quite, uh, he's most famous, if I remember

correctly, he's most famous for the argument that, um, like, only a quarter of infantrymen fired their rifles in World War II. But in general, the methodology. is very, very hard to substantiate. That's the biggest argument I've heard about. There was none, really. And it's one of the methodologies used for a lot of problematic stuff in the modern day, but it was used to transition away from semi-automatic rifles to battle rifles and assault rifles, that the idea of if you give them a shorter range, higher output weapon, people won't have to aim so much and will take away from that human complete.

to not murder people. But it was also his idea to reshape targets in the shape of a man to make people. He's a fucking complicated character. But he was, let's call him 70% decent on a lot of his history. He wrote probably the best book on Pork Chop Hill, which is saying something. But the military decision making process regarding Pork Chop Hill, according to him, and I do not disagree, should have been very simple. Leave pork chop hill for the Chinese.

It would functionally change very little, and you wouldn't be in a vulnerable position with no flank protection, right? But they weren't withdrawn. A good reason for that, well, has absolutely nothing to do with military necessity. There's a combination of bad PR and stupid matro bullshit. When old baldy fell, the American press was quite vicious, at least for its day, towards the people in charge and even the capability of the soldier. station there. Like they insulted their willingness to fight, their commander's ability to lead,

all of this. Like for the 1950s, you don't expect this to be in major American media. And the soldiers station at Old Baldy, the Americans anyway, not the Colombians, fell under the exact same division, the exact same overall commander as the ones at Pork Chop. So they kind of took it as a personal slight and in return refused to abandon Porkchop. even if it made sense to do it. So as the Chinese dug into their new positions and moved supplies up, the gears continued to turn behind the scenes. Remember Operation Little Switch that we talked about a little while ago?

I think so, yeah. Well, that hadn't happened yet. It was being discussed, this prisoner exchange, to take place at the end of April 1953. And both sides of the war had something of an unofficial but also kind of official policy in place that if they were ever close to an agreement on almost anything, they would attack the other one. They did this to prove that, hey, we're willing to talk, but we're also more than willing to kill a whole bunch of our teenagers

to show that we're willing to fight for as long as we need to. This is mostly blamed on the Chinese, and that's largely unfair. The UN side did the same shit. But on this case, it is the Chinese who planned for an attack on pork chop, which was approved in the beginning of April. So it was then put on the shelf for when it was needed. So when Operation Little Switch was agreed upon and to begin on April 20th, the attack on pork chop was ordered to hit on the 16th. But this time around, the Chinese ended up being the ones that were kind of surprised.

Obviously, they've been fighting for years at this point, and they were the undisputed nighttime champions of the peninsula. But that didn't mean that the UN was going to not try to counter them. It becomes standard policy to send out night patrols to try to catch these Chinese infiltration units. and also they're called units. That makes them sound smaller than they actually are. The Chinese infiltration units would be like a battalion.

It was a lot of guys. Sometimes they were smaller because obviously they do night patrols of their own but like full infiltration units were quite large, hundreds of men at a time. My base has been infiltrated by 600 Chinese men

who can see in the dark. Yeah. This time at around 11 p.m. on the 16th, an American patrol had set up an ambush at a river at the base of pork chop, and they ran into Chinese infiltration teams opening fire at them. And this is how the Battle of Porkchop Hill starts. They rapidly attempt to fall back, which is what they were supposed to do. They were the tripwire. Everybody knows they're there now because they opened fire, and then they're supposed to run back to their

positions, right? Nobody wants to be the observation post that gets bogged down in a fight, because that's how you get things named after you posthumously, pretty much. But as soon as they begin falling back, Chinese artillery starts landing on porkchop hill, which completely cuts them off from running up the hill and withdrawing. And that's where they would stay the whole battle. And it only gets worse because soon the Americans start slinging artillery back the other way. And they just have to hunker down in a ditch in between the two artillery barrages

for pretty much the next day and a half. And while this is going on, Chinese artillery begins raining down on pork chop. This pins the UN forces inside the trenches and dugouts. Other infiltration teams slipped by the forward listening posts and ambush teams unlike the first one. They begin climbing up the hill on every side of it while it's still under bombardment. That's something that a lot of people kind of don't give credit or credits do here. The PVA artillery crews were incredibly good.

They were very accurate. And I don't know what kind of discipline it requires you to advance to, only a few dozen meters away from an ongoing artillery bombardment to the point that it physically causes you pain to get in position. And they close the distance on the American position on the hill. There are two platoons garrisoning pork chop at the time. One on the left flank, the first, and one on the right, the second platoon. The first platoon sergeant said he could actually hear Chinese soldiers speaking to one another outside of his position, but could not stick his head up thanks to the accurate artillery fire that was coming down directly on top of his head.

Once again, someone's racist granddad in a retirement home is saying he can hear Chinese whispers in the walls. Also, how loud were those Chinese soldiers shouting at one another to be heard over the artillery department? And I even shouting anything other than like beautiful poems? Yeah, it's like, I can't understand what they're saying. They're just spitting out the world's most beautiful verse. but reality it translates to we need to kill the guys at this trench line

on the other side of this hill the guy that are doing like a cipher on the other side of the trench soon he was under attack by these Chinese close combat teams almost all of which were armed with Soviet submachine guns and he quickly loses contact

with the other platoons and the command element there are only 96 men dug in at porkchops split up by the train like we talked about before the command element is at the very rear of the hill. There normally have been 50 more men's station there, but as was normal for the time, they were being rotated out. Soldiers were only expected to sit at these forward positions for maybe a week, maybe a week and a half at a time, and then fresh troops would be brought in,

rotating them bit by bit, so the incoming and outgoing elements weren't all caught in one place at the same time. Chinese scouts and intelligence had figured this out, which is why they timed the attack mid-rotation. This is also something they had done at old Baldy and nobody had figured out how they had done it yet. Sacket platoon had no idea what was happening to the first, and even if they did, they

couldn't move to help them either. The company commander at the rear position immediately figured out that first platoon must have been completely cut off. So he ran out and fired a red flare into the air. This was the signal for the position behind him to hit First Paltoon's position

with artillery. So now First Paltoon's position with artillery. So now, first multitude is being hit by all of the artillery. All right. Like someone getting shelled by the Chinese submachine guns barking at them like, wow, this could possibly get worse. Your own artillery starts bombing you too because they think you're all dead.

I was going to say on the topic of the beautiful verse, the idea of you dress up what you're trying to say in a sort of encryption of the most impanetrably pretentious things you can possibly imagine. That is kind of how me and Tom talk on this show. So we can't really criticize it too much. Yeah, hey, you said it, not me. I love having my military orders written by David Foster Wall. It's like, man, my op order is 1,500 pages long, and it says nothing.

Sir, they're supposed to be annexes, but there's not supposed to be footnotes. When the hill got lit up, it soon became clear that they were not only surrounded, but each of the positions had been cut off by other small infiltration teams, and all of them were now fighting them off individually. But also, the Chinese had fucked up, too. Despite their all-around good scouting in the lead-up to this, they actually somehow managed to miss the company commander's position and then just kind of bumbled into it as they tried to surround the other two platoons.

So as the American artillery fire opened up on Chinese units rushing in to reinforce the attack, the commander in his men, numbering only six guys had to fight at the rear of the hill, which also happened to be the only route of supply and reinforcement. but they're leaning out of their foxhole with a radio in one-handed shooting at people with the pistols and the other. As each position fought to the death on their own,

reinforcements from the American side were quickly rushed in. Though this does not go great. Think of all the chaos going on here. The platoons can't talk to each other. The company commander cannot even figure out if First Platoon is still alive. Shit's fucked, to quote Tom. So one platoon is loaded into trucks

and they just gun it towards Porkchop Hill. And I should point out here, this is not a long distance. Porkchop Hill is roughly about a football pitch away from the main line. And it might as well have been a hundred miles away at this point because of thousands of shells of artillery that are suddenly exploding everywhere. So the truck trying to navigate the road while dodging artillery blasts gets lost and never shows up. Several other platoons marching in from nearby positions run into other Chinese ambush teams and either get bogged down in gunfights of their own or take so many casualties they're forced to pull back. Others are just liquefied with artillery.

In the total chaos of the bombardment, the fighting, the darkness, commanders just start throwing whatever they have at the hill in order to save it. One commander, Lieutenant Colonel John Davis, alerted two of his company commanders that they're to launch a coordinated counterattack at dawn when they might be able to see something. But he leaves out a little detail here. He doesn't actually tell the two commanders that they're supposed to be working together. He tells them both the orders individually and doesn't tell him what company they are meant to be working with.

Yes, it's American meritocracy. Whoever comes up with the best solution wins. We're always saying that. So when the attack starts, one company, King Company, and 135 men set off towards pork chop. Like I said, only slightly larger than a football. pitch, but this walk takes them a half hour. Not because they're being shot at. They're actually not hit at all.

But because the terrain had been just chewed up with artillery bombardments. It's laced with barbed wire. There's dead bodies everywhere now that clog their way. They're also dragging ammo boxes with them because they assume correctly that pork chop must be running low on ammo.

And there's no other good way to get shit up there other than with your Chevro legs. Then the second company, Love Company, which is supposed to be supporting King, but also neither of them know that's their job, set off. They run into a Chinese ambush position and they get obliterated. Its remnants are forced to pull back, leaving King on their own, but also there's another wrinkle to this. King doesn't know Love is supposed to be supporting them, which also means they have no idea that Love is forced to pull back. So they just keep charging head,

assuming that their support element must be on their flank like they told they would be. King attacks across pork chop anyway, because this really doesn't seem to slow them down. And this is where things get even more confusing. At this point up on pork shop, nobody has any idea where the Chinese are, they have no idea where the Americans are, they have no idea which bunkers are still held by the Americans or which have been taken over. Everything is complete chaos. And even in the best of times, the hill was not easy to navigate anyway. One soldier described pork chop as, quote, Pork chop was a maze. A rat's nest of bunkers, lines,

commo trenches, shell holes, rock clumps and barbed wire. And also remember, it's still dark. One soldier from King moved towards a bunker, grenade in hand, ready to throw it inside, only for an American to pop out of it, also with a grenade in hand,

because they both thought the other was Chinese. In times of war, even your friends could be Chinese. both men freeze in place because they'd both been told to assume anyone coming towards your bunker or anybody in the bunker is an enemy. So they just kind of stand there, grenade in hand, like, huh, all right. And then an artillery shell comes directly down on their heads, wounding everybody. The Chinese continued funneling in reinforcements, and a lot of the hill is still under the control,

allowing fresh soldiers to link up with the guys who survived the initial push, join in, and push again. The Americans hold and then and the lull between the attacks would launch their own, trying to claw back the positions, but in two hours of fighting, about over half of pork chop pills in the hands of the Chinese. More American reinforcements are set in. Once again, this includes a love company, which had been reinforced, but now only had 62 men. The men of love ran forward once again into artillery bombardments and machine gun nests.

Its company commander was killed and the guy that took his place was killed. and the guy who took his place was also killed. By the time, they fought their way just to get on top of Porkchop Hill. Company commanded fallen to the last surviving officer of the company, which itself not only had 12 men. At that point, even with all of the reinforcements coming in here, Porkchop only had 65 Americans on it. We have no idea how many Chinese soldiers were on the other side of that hill or still fighting

there, but we can assume it was more, or at least the same, thanks to a lot of the same reasons. All of the reinforcements were getting shelled, just like the Americans were as they ran in, they're running into their own ambushes, but by 11 a.m., they had been reinforced enough, and their push continued. The Americans were in very bad shape. The wounded were crowded into bunkers, they controlled, everybody was running low on everything, and King Company commander, Lieutenant Joseph Clemens, got on the radio, and said, quote, I must have water, plasma, and medical assistance, flamethrowers, litters, ammunition, several radios, I need everything. They sent him water.

I'll send you one crisp bottle of Desani, sir. I once had a friend request resupply, went on a really, really long mission in Afghanistan during the search, and I wasn't in charge of his resupply. He said, we need water. All we need is water. Here's our grid coordinate. We need a palette of water. They got two pallets, one of muffins and one of sundry items, so like laundry soap and

toothbrushes. Hell yeah. Needless to say, it wasn't water. So they just left it. You have to suck the moisture out of the Otis Spunkbire. Take the Otis Spunkmire, which sounds way worse to Brits than two Americans and just put it in your mouth and suck as much moisture as you can get. I mean, but a muffin seems like a really dry proposition to me.

It's very dry, but Otis Spunkmire muffins are weirdly moist, but they won't replace water. Yes, they are. Also, Otis Spunkmire sounds, I don't know how to describe it. I don't, I don't want to eat a wet muffin made by a man whose last name is Spunkmire. Otis Spunkmire. Why'd you think it was moist? A character in a story that's supposed to be set in Appalachia written by like the most vulgar British schoolboys

who are like have really confused stereotypes about America and they're combining all of their various prejudices into one. I love Otis Bunkbeer muffins but also I will never eat one again in my entire life. I don't love them and I will never eat one again either because I value my body and my sanity more than that. At the next live show someone throw muffins at me. Oh, don't fucking do that. come to the live show

in a respectful mood with an open mind. Keep them wrapped so they can get velocity. At the live show in Cork on September 26th

if you could hit Nate square in the forehead with an Otis Spunkmire muffin I will give you a free t-shirt. If you throw anything at me

if you throw anything at me I am going to unsheath a katana all right. You're going to slice it in half in the air

like you're playing Fruit Ninja. I'm sorry I get shit thrown at me all day long. I have a two-year-old. Okay? Do not make me mix it. Exactly.

He loves it. He's used to it. Now, if all of this wasn't bad enough, Colonel Davis, the guy who already decided not to tell two company commanders that they're supposed to be worked together, sent orders to Clemens that he needed to withdraw all the soldiers from Easy Company,

which were the original soldiers that were stationed at Porkchop, as well as a second company, Fox Company. Clemens stood there, staring down at his radio in utter confusion. confusion because like, hey, we don't have enough people now. Why are you taking them away from us? Davis didn't even bother to answer his complaint. He did send more reinforcements, but they weren't enough. Also, those reinforcements were weirdly under Clemens' brother-in-law's command, because, of course. But like, these didn't make up for the men that were already being ordered

away. As the fighting continued into the afternoon, the 7th division, the command that all these men fell under was starting to get worried that they might be losing too many men. Porkchop was an important position to them, if not actually tactically. But it was a matter of whether the human juice was worth the squeeze. Division command radioed to the next level higher, Corps command, asking in a very roundabout way, how many dudes are you willing to lose over this hill? The Corps then decided to not make a decision. They instead sent it to hire Eighth Army Command, asking the same question. And then weirdly, the Eighth Army Command went higher, the Far East Command, which was not even in Korea. It was in Japan, wasn't it?

Yes. And they're also an overall command for all American forces in Korea and Japan, looking for answers. And what's interesting here, this is a total and complete failure of how the American command structure is supposed to work and the concept of independence of command. officers and NCOs are given quite broad strokes to figure out what to do next, of course, within boundaries, and it stops everything from freezing in place from a top-heavy command body, right?

Like you don't want all of your decisions on the battlefield to be made by a general. You want this to be made at the lowest level possible. And if you defer everything to hire time after time after time, shit on the ground just freezes and people die. All of this fails here. And Clemens and his men are just left without orders. A lot of people don't realize this is what the Creed song is about.

It's like, can you take me higher? How do we defeat the Chinese? No, I disagree with you entirely on that one. That might be a song that Scott Stapp writes these days to be fair. But I will say that the video for higher in which basically all sorts of meteorites and objects are falling down while Scott Stapp does a Jesus pose is probably what it was like getting hit by artillery barrages from both sides. So your comparison is not wrong in that regard. But I will also say, too, that if you wanted to make noise as the PVA fighters were able to do over the sound of all that, if you sang like this, you might be able to.

Maybe that's the resonant frequency that can cut through all of the other noise. Yeah, that's what would have turned all of the Americans communists if you just made Chinese Scott Stap. I'm just going to throw it out there since we've invented Chinese Scott Stap, which implies Chinese Alterbridge and Chinese Creed. That's the Chinese Mark Tramante. It says Ed Kowalchik from Live Walked so Scott Stapkin run. Sorry. That's just the way.

If you hate Creed, fine. I hate Creed too. But you got to be honest with yourself. Live did pave the fucking road for that. Lightning crashes on Porkchop Hill. Clemens abandoned a few of his positions and had his men that were still left. Concentrate maybe the 30 guys

still physically able to fight at a high point of Porkchop where they continued to hold out, not only throughout the day, but into the night, gathered into two bunkers. Clemens and his command staff remained where they had always been, just standing and holding the only route of survival open, while they waited for anyone to decide what the fuck they should do. But that's not even the worst part.

I think anybody who's been in the military has maybe been stranded waiting for orders, not necessarily in a situation this dire, But because Command could not decide whether to hold pork chop or abandon it, it also meant they stopped sending anything to pork chop, including min and supplies. So they were not getting any more reinforcements and they were running out of ammo now because they didn't want to send more people up if they were just going to withdraw. Which is not how withdrawal works in a military sense, especially if you wanted to be orderly or controlled in any way. finally, the 7th Division commander, General Arthur Trudeau, flew into the area on one of those really funny-looking early helicopters and decided definitively that we are going to hold Parkchop Hill no matter what.

Flying in on one of the Leonardo da Vinci helicopters, he's just peddling it really hard. You see him flying across the sky. Thank God my quads are so big. I was prepared for this. With this, everything finally began moving for the Americans. Entire battalions were getting moved forward to support the fighting. Reinforcements were not only called in, but with explicit orders to relieve the guys who've been fighting up on pork chop for the better part of a day and a half.

And they were finally relieved at 10 p.m. after a counterattack by two other companies. And an NCO from King Company who managed to survive this said, quote, King was relieved at 2400. We made her way one by one through the gaps between Chinese artillery salvos to the foot of pork chop. Here, 20 hours earlier, there were 135 men in nine six-by-six trucks. Now seven of us sat in a one-ton weapons carrier. On leaving, Fox Company, one of their medics, asked me to leave my first aid kit with him.

I showed him it was empty. I had used every single item I'd carried up that hill. King Company would need 150 replacements before we could fight as a full-strength rifle company again, which means they'd lost 100% of their people in one capacity. or another. But the battle was still not over. As Americans moved reinforcements and supplies in, so were the Chinese. They were still holding on to their part of Hill, doing the exact same shit the Americans were. At this point, the Americans are well dug in. They had a few lightly armored vehicles up on the hill now, armed with 50 caliber machine guns, which finally brought them

some kind of weapon support. Still another lieutenant, Gorman Smith. What fucking name? Gorman Smith? Totally on his own initiative. led his platoon all the way around the hill to the Chinese side of it to ambush them when they came up and down the hill. A final counterattack was launched by Easy Company, the original company that had been on the hill, pulled back, slightly reinforced and resupplied and sent back in. They pushed the Chinese back, but not all the way off the hill. Instead, the Chinese survivors fled into the American trench lines, leading into that same kind of chaotic close quarters fighting that the whole thing started with. And while all of this is going on unceasingly constant artillery,

the fighting would only end on the 18th as the PVA finally decided, well, this didn't work, took their ball, went home on the other side of the valley. And then Scott Stop wrote a song saying, Hold me now. I'm six feet from the hill and I'm Chinese. I fucking hate you. I remember reading a story in infantry school about a sort of like NCO who was bad at being an NCO but was really, really good at killing dudes in Korea. And like obviously, you know, military dress regulations and what personal hygiene grooming standard didn't apply when you were in this sort of situation.

And so he wore like hoop earrings. And sick. In a way, when I envision him now, thanks to you, I am going to envision him as Scott Stapp, Staff Sergeant Stap, squad leader, you know, Stap Sergeant. Breaking a fucking M1 Garand, you know, the wooden stock on a dude. Just, yeah, it's Sergeant Stap now because basically my

own prison is about being stuck at Porchop Hill. I mean, also it's, I suppose that if you have Staff Sergeant Stap or Stap Sergeant in this situation, when being asked to give an assessment of his own combat strength, when you've got

effectively 100% casualties, it's like how many combat effective troops do you have? He can just sing, one, oh, one, the only way is one, because I'm the only one left, that's why. Now, the human cost for the American side was 104 dead and about three times as many wounded, with many units being left with only a couple guys that survived the whole thing unscathed. We have no idea of the PVA's losses. They're both inflated by one side and deflated just as much by the other, but in just the general grim arithmetic of attacking a fortified position, we can safely assume they're much higher.

And frankly, you know, when addressing the total material human cost of this, to quote Staff Sergeant Stap, we may rise and fall, but in the end we'll meet our fate together. That actually applies to the death toll as well as the overall picture. I can do this all day, man. We want to fucking start throwing creed shit at me, dude. Like I said before, I didn't have my driver's license yet in the spring. spring of 2000 when their second album, or I think it was their second album came out and fucking higher was on the radio like six times an hour. I was steeped in Creed and I fucking hated it.

So if you try to bring that, you know, if you get a half is for Creed and I don't want to be. You know, if you get hit with enough artillery, you too will turn into human clay. I would agree. There we go. And that brings us to the artillery in the battle because it's sometimes ignored, but this was almost an artillery duel with the. the light infantry death match being a side character. But the amount of indirect scunnion brought to bear on pork chop

is astounding. The U.S. brought in nine artillery battalions that fired 37,000 shells on day one and 77,000 on day two. And we don't know how many the PVA fired for obvious reasons, but we could assume

it was at least close to that. So thankfully, we've saved the pork chop, right boys? I think that's speaking too soon. Well, not really. I mean, a few months, the pork chop was saved, which is older than you want to keep a pork chop around. After negotiations moved forward and things were inching closer to a ceasefire by the end of June, Sigmund Rhee fucked shit up again.

He refused to move the negotiations forward. So on July 6th, the Chinese launched another attack on pork chop. This attack looked a lot like the first one. massive artillery fight, close quarters light infantry death match, and it lasts for the better part of a week. By July 11th, the Chinese had won. Hundreds more were dead, possibly thousands on the Chinese side. At least thousands were wounded, because again, just the simple fact of a frontal attack on a fortified position. But it was a lot. And probably the best quote I can use to summarize the total

pointlessness of it all comes from a British general Mike West who was also a commander in Korea who also found himself fighting one of these outpost battles

because he was asked what should have been done with pork chop to stop this from happening after old baldy fell he said quite simply nothing there was only an outpost

you said it was 37,000 artillery rounds were fired during this in the first day by the Americans you said there were nine artillery battalions

as well correct Sometimes more, but nine most of the time. I just happened to know this from other stuff that I had to do when I was in the Army. And in around that time, there were typically three howitzers per battery and three batteries per battalions. So that means there were, if you had nine battalions, that's 81 howitzers. So that means each howitzer, if that was the correct number, would have had to fire like 451 times in one day.

Now, that is an abnormally large amount. typically even in lots of sustained artillery bombardment, that's a fucking lot. And that's just one side. And they never stop. That's just one side. That's insane. Just constant steel rain. Also, I feel like because we're very grateful that our audience has expanded past the United

States, I would just say that reigning Scunion may not be a term that you're familiar with, but it is an unofficial army doctrine for dropping a lot of ordinance on shit. Nate, I assure you the word scunion is the least confusing thing that we have brought up here today. Yeah, but you can Google Scott's staff. We've invented Staff Sergeant Scott Stap. And Chinese Scott Stap. We're all Scott Stap. Mowest Volunteer Scott Stap.

And in the end, was all of this worth it? No, no, no. Nobody thinks it was. Absolutely nobody. A lot of the soldiers interviewed an SLA Marshall's book as well. We're just like, it's kind of a perfect encapsulation of this late stage part of the Korean War where they're trying to kick the line a couple meters in one direction or another. And then the armistice that mostly ends.

the war. The sign three weeks after Park Chop falls. The end, but not to the Korean War, I suppose. That sucks. It's really horrible. It's not good. I mean, like, there are a lot of shit that we experienced in our military careers. You're like, that was completely pointless and didn't have to happen. But this feels like, what was the, there was an American comedian who once made this. I can't remember his name. He was like, you know, you try to go to your parents. And it's like, maybe you can talk to your mom. You're like, mom, I'm sad. I'm having a bad day. And your dad would be like, yeah, I was in Korea. I'm having a bad life. Yeah, shit sucks.

Shit sucks. Now, fellas, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. And if you'd like to ask us a question, you can support us on Patreon. You can ask us a question through Patreon. You can also ask us a question on Discord, which you'll also have access to, where you have a channel for these things, or you can write it on a muffin and throw it directly at Nate's fucking face in Cork, Ireland. Why can be the bad guy?

On the 26th of September. At Kino. Today's question is, which cryptid do you think you could beat an honorable combat? Bigfoot. I don't know. No, but see, Bigfoot has mass, but he is a gentle creature. I don't think he has an acumen for fighting. Yeah, but we're talking about like honorable combat.

This is like you have shamed him in some way and he is challenged you to a duel. You've been challenged. Bigfoot coming up and slapping you with a really big white song. You've got to out suck the chupacabra. Yeah. I got that beat for sure. good. So, like, this is a straight up fight. Okay. And it's honorable combat, so blades are guns, your choice, I suppose.

Bigfoot's beat my ass for sure. Chupacra's kind of small. But I assume it's fast. I could defeat the Bobby Yaga and sword fight. And I'm not even a particularly good swordsman. It's just that I imagine the Bobby Yaga, much like the times when I've had to cart off a screaming child, aka my own, is probably really fatigued with life in general and would welcome being dispatched by the blade. So, uh, please kill me. Doomed forever deal with screaming children. Uh, I think I could.

I could fuck up a leprechaun. Does a lepricon count is encrypted? I mean, yeah, I suppose. They're not real. Is it cryptozoology when the leprechaun is a person, just like a small, like diminutive person though? Yeah, because they're not really a monster. There's a fucked up person.

I think a lepercon is technically human. So it's not encrypted. It's just a weird guy. Joe has been really researching this by watching the, incredible Jennifer Anneson movie Leprocon 3 Indah Hood

That leprecon would beat me for sure Yeah Well that's like Is this the weird corpse guy From Tales from

The Crypt A cryptid No, it's just a weird guy Similar to the lepricon Yeah Like a zombie Yeah

So that isn't a Wropegson though So that isn't a Yeah Yeah exactly That's why it's not A cryptid Um

Stop denying a zombie It's personhood Joe I mean By definition It doesn't have Personhood Tom It's dead

I gotta say I want to do a W.W.E. Not necessarily hell in the cell, but similar gimmick match against Spring Hill Jack. That's good. I want the Mothman. I don't know if I could win.

Yeah. But Moths are like, you know, fragile, a Moth man. Mothman is huge and powerful, but you spray a little bit of water on his wings. He's just fucked up for good. Yeah. I just set a corner of the ring on fire. He gets really attracted to it, and I stab him a whole bunch of times in the kidney.

My question with the Mothman is, you know, the statue that they made of them in, is it point pleasant or men pleasant? With the sweet, fat ass, people keep putting coins in. Yeah, why did they give it such a big ass? And as a man with a big ass, it's like, why did they give the mock? Surely that makes it

like less efficient to fly carrying around that big juicy wagon. Look, man, I feel like sculpture is always a means of externalizing your internal vision, and it's like, I guess that person imagined that the sort of platonic ideal of mothman was caked up.

So what can you do? Who are we to debate this? I mean, I'm all for caked up moth man. And I will still kill the caked up mothman. I will mourn the passing of his sweet ass, but I will still kill him. I won't be happy about it.

I'd rather kill any other mothman than the caked up one. But if that's the one that wants honorable combat, you're fighting the mothman and dills at Rikishi's signature move. Oh, don't you tempt me with a good time. Anyway, fellas, I think that's a podcast.

But you host other podcasts. Plug those podcasts. I am the co-host and producer of Trash Future, a podcast about the tech industry in White's Bad and also about British politics and White's Bad. I'm also the producer of Kill James Bond. And I'm in a band called Second Homes. Our first album, Find a Way to Hate It is available everywhere. So if you want to listen to it and you can buy it on band camp and we'll actually get money.

Whereas on streaming, sadly, we get like novelty fractions of a penny. So band camp's the way to go. Yeah, you get paid like an independent wrestler with a hot dog and a high five. Yeah, it's unfortunate. in it, but the music industry loves to frotting artists. So there it is. I learned that podcasting is a much easier job when I became a musician. I'm not going to lie. No other podcast where you can hear about eating mothman's ass, but you can also listen to

Blood Worker Show About the Economy of Violence or Beneath the Skin, the show by the history of everything told through the history of tattooing. I'm sure someone has a mothman tattoo of Mothman's ass being eaten. I've seen so many weird tattoos. I've seen someone with a full front piece of the dream of the fisherman's wife. So there is someone out there. This is the only show that I host that it's about eating Mothman's ass.

I hope you consider supporting it on Patreon. We only talk about Mothman about once every nine years so far. Just $5. It gets you years and years of bonus content, Discord access every regular episode early. It gets you ebooks, audiobooks. And speaking of books, I have a book out that also

generally does not involve eating Mothman's ass. It's called the Highlands Burn. You can buy it directly from us or you can buy it on Amazon or wherever it is you get books. The links will be in the show notes. Leave us a review on wherever it is you listen to podcasts. Leave out the part about eating mothman's ass. And until next time, throw a muffin at Nate.