Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 432 - Korea in the Vietnam War

Episode Date: September 20, 2026

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys COME SEE US LIVE SEPTEMBER 26TH IN CORK, IRELAND https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-cork-26th-september-tickets-1993823733459 Nate, Joe, and Tom discuss the time where, under the auspices of "internationalizing" the Vietnam War, the US paid huge sums for South Korea to deploy troops to combat. On one hand, Park Chung-Hee secured the bag. On the other...there were some war crimes. A lot of them. SOURCES: Tae Yang Kwak (Spring–Summer 2003). "The Nixon Doctrine and the Yusin Reforms: American Foreign Policy, the Vietnam War, and the Rise of Authoritarianism in Korea, 1968—1973". The Journal of American-East Asian Relations Blackburn, Robert M. (1994). Mercenaries and Lyndon Johnson's "more flags": the hiring of Korean, Filipino, and Thai soldiers in the Vietnam War. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Publishing Shulimson, Jack (1997). U.S. Marines in Vietnam: The Defining Year, 1968 Jang HG. People’s Tribunal on War Crimes by South Korean Troops during the Vietnam War. Asia-Pacific Journal Armstrong, Charles (2001). Critical Asian Studies: America's Korea, Korea's Vietnam. https://www.newmandala.org/politics-of-denial-south-korean-war-crimes-in-vietnam/ https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/south-korea-vietnam-war-sexual-violence-women-b1806764.html https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1167951366/south-korea-vietnam-war-massacre-court-case

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Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe. With me is Tom and Nate. Fellas, gentlemen, scholars. How you doing? Britain has returned to its natural state of rain and the train's not working and I have turned my knees into absolute fucking dust over the past weekend. end because I had my exhibit of my photography and I did like nearly 75,000 steps in like a 12 meter square area over the course of four days. You're wearing boots, weren't you? No, I wasn't. I was actually wearing comfortable shoes for once. It's 34 degrees here today, but apparently there's going to be a storm and it's going to get actually kind of chilly. So maybe this is the last gasp of summer. But I live above them all. Many of you know this. And they are.

constantly at war with whatever kind of abrasion that people's feet due to the tiles at the entryway. And they're constantly refinishing them only to have them get fucked up. The other day, I saw somebody while the stuff with the lacquer they put on or whatever was still wet, like leaning over to check it out with a lit cigarette. It smelled like a gas station. And I was like, okay, I'm clearing out of this before this becomes like fucking the, you know, protests outside of the embassy in Saigon. The other day, I realized there's another problem. As they're doing it, they block off half of the tiles and leave you their half opens if you can walk in and out of the mall. Now, if you grant old Swiss people a 2x multiplier on their ability to get in the fucking way, you have no idea what kind of chaos this is going to cause.

It was a double XP weekend in Geneva. I mean, I'm just saying, like, as I've said before, even though the median age in this country is 44, you would think that's incredibly low for what you observe. as Fred of the show Ari Nielsen has described the Norwegians, but the Swiss are apparently worse. World champions at getting in your way. It's unreal. And it's just like, deep down, I actually admire it. I want to get to some point where I give so little of a shit about everything around me that I can just basically be Mario Karting, but like one mile per hour Mario Karting in everyone's way

and not even be bothered. And that's the natural order of things. I'm really happy that in Armenia's desperate attempt to become Europeans, we found something in common. apparently with Swiss people. Armenians in general, but specifically like old Armenians, they get in the fuck in your way and they will not. Like walking through the streets of Yoravon, you have to be the rudest person you've ever,

which Nate, as I know you're, you are aware of this. As a Midwesterner is really hard to do. Like you just have to shoulder check people, but nobody shoulder checks you harder to get in your way than like a 90 year old grandma who will just lay the boom on you. she's a fucking linebacker. Yeah, but see, Joe, you have the benefit of being able to see over the crowd.

So you are in Yerevan experiencing like a video game waypoint and like the path is just like lighting up blue in front of you. That's true, but it means my stomach is at perfect shoulder height for the old pop-eeks and tatiques to just lay me the fuck out. Like I have had the wind knocked out of me by old people. And if they're in your way, you can't just like say, excuse me. you have to like meet force with force. Joe's vital organs are exposed in the same way that like giraffes have really weak knees. I was going to say Joe is being spear tackled by Armenian Batista. That's actually how members of the Kasabian family solve our differences.

If you've ever seen giraffes fight by just slamming their necks into one another. But what I wanted to say, Joe, is as a segue because I know we're going to be talking about South Korea today. You want to talk about a culture in which old people don't give a flying fuck about anything. South Korea, a Korean culture in general, and I'm saying this with respect, is a society where you're basically born into the military. You're born a private and you'll die a four-star general. It's based on your age alone. And everyone knows their rank and you're allowed to treat your support. It's like absolute dog shit, but you have to be completely deferential to your superiors. And it is the rules. So maybe what I'm actually saying is Switzerland is the Korea of Europe.

Yeah, perhaps. What would Swiss kimchi be? Sourcrow, probably. Oh, spicy sourcrow. Sourcrow as much here. They do love, I will say, Soju and Kyrrish is basically a handshake. Okay, okay. Nate teed me up perfectly here

because everybody probably thought we were done talking about Korea. Nope. And I know we just spent, you know, a month plus talking about some pretty horrific things regarding the Imgen War. and all of the horrible crimes that occurred there.

So I thought we would take a nice lighthearted approach. And this is where I have to tell everybody, content warning for horrible war crimes again. Oh, great. It's Korea's turn this time. It's not just the Japanese. That's where I thought this would be an interesting follow-up to the Imgen War, because we are going to talk about Korea's involvement,

South Korea's involvement in the Vietnam War. And I will throw this one in our history. of our show, we love to focus and home in on people who probably wouldn't have been as big of bastards if they hadn't failed the civil service exam. That's a common thread in this show. And this is actually relevant because Pachchungi was going to be a civil servant, but he got caught speaking Korean by the proctors when the Korean language was outlawed by occupation Japanese forces.

And as such, he was expelled and wasn't allowed to take the exam. So then he became the guy who sent the Korean army to Vietnam. Yep. So the Vietnam War is known for a lot of things. A horrible crime against humanity. The first of what would become many pointless wars on the other side of the world that America would fight, lose, and then make movies about afterwards about how sad it made American soldiers. But most importantly, it was an American war fought by Americans for American political imperial goals, a war that much like other more recent ones, pretty much any nation with any semblance of ethics, morals, or sense stayed out of. Which is why the Australians got involved.

And the Kiwis. But except that isn't what happened. Even though in the American consciousness and especially what we're taught in. schools, what we see and consume in our media, America was not fighting on its own in the jungles, the rice patties, the highlands, and the mountains of Vietnam. Instead, like the wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, America had a lot of allies. They were joined by hundreds of thousands of soldiers from several different countries from around the world. In the English-speaking world, and especially judging from the metrics of our listeners, some of you are probably very

familiar with this because you happen to be from Australia or New Zealand. Tens of thousands of Aussies and Kiwis fought in the war, hundreds were killed, and thousands were wounded. However, this episode isn't about that. Maybe we'll do a different episode on them in the future. Instead, we're going to talk about the country that supplied the second most soldiers to the Vietnam War effort, and these did not come from what you could consider at the time a traditional American ally, like the UK or Canada, who the U.S. has dragged into multiple of more modern forever wars. Instead, it was

South Korea. I'm just tumbling around the idea of Australia being very enthusiastically involved in the Vietnam War and the possibility of the existence of Australian John Rambo. Instead, he just went home and became the most racist man in Canberra.

To be fair, if you follow the Rambo film franchise, that's also what Rambo did. John Rambo actually was a hero in the beginning against cops. Cops were the enemy. And somehow he then became the guy who retroactively wins the Vietnam War.

But the first Rambo movie is basically about a guy who just wants to be left alone being harassed by dipshit cops. But then also giving a long speech, but they didn't let us win. Yeah. And don't forget the most recent Rambo film where he, for some reason, digs a tunnel under his house to do PTSD in and then ends up killing a bunch

of Mexicans. It's the most confusing film I think I've ever watched for this show. It's like the opposite of an anxiety sock. You know, like people put on those like compression socks. If they're overstimulated to feel a little bit better, American veterans just dig a tunnel and hide in it when they're experiencing PTSD. Yeah, like that was what John Rambo had to do. And that's why like both of you have been to the studio.

It's why I have a port of John here. So if I'm feeling overstimulated, I just go in there and jerk off like crazy. And then draw something obscene on the walls with a Sharpie, a really anthropomorphically confused rendition of the female body, something along those lines. I have to throw the one thing out John Rambo before we move on, which is that, and I know I've told this story before,

but I don't know if I've told it on a free episode. And obviously, you know, people listening to this will maybe have not heard this. But obviously, First Blood, the Rambo movie where he fights cops in Oregon, is very different than Rambo, First Blood Parts, too, the famous, you know, where he has to fight the Russian, in Afghanistan. Wasn't that part three? Dedicated to the brave fighters,

the Mujahideen. Yeah, the second one was when he goes back to Vietnam to free POWs. The third one is when he fights in Afghanistan. You're right. I made a mistake. You're right. Rambo 2 is when he goes and he fights in Vietnam and he does Chuck Norris shit. And Rambo 3, he goes to Afghanistan.

But my point still stands about Rambo 3. Rambo 3 was originally supposed to be directed by Russell Mulcahy. He famous for directing Duran Duran Duran's music videos in the 80s and also Bonnie Tyler's total eclipse of the heart. It was mostly filmed in Israel, and Russell Mulcahy went to Israel and cast basically Russian Israelis. And he basically made the Russian troops a whole battalion of hot twinks. And when Sylvester Stallone saw, he's like, no, we can't have gay Rambo and he fired

him. And so, like, that's what we could have, we could have had. We lost something important because Rambo, basically, Sylvester Stallone said, like, I don't like the idea of Rambo basically fighting a beautiful male model army. I'm taking over this project. Instead of gay Rambo, we got the giant statue that I saw in Hanoi to John McCain being shot down. I like to live in a timeline where both of these things happened. Gay John McCain. Yeah, Gay John McCain crashes in the USS Forestall because he can't drive or fly. If he was bisexual, John McCain, his phone is not charged.

his plane was in charge. That's why he crashed. So today we have the story of how the United States effectively rented the entirety of the South Korean Army to go and commit terrible war crimes and the only large scale overseas war effort in Korean history. At least until North Korea got involved in Ukraine. But that's a story for a different time. And even North Korea's effort supporting Russia's illegal war in Ukraine were much, much smaller than the South Korean effort in Vietnam. The North Korean soldiers in Ukraine getting completely nerfed by access to porn hub. Happens to the best of us. But first, we have to talk about the 38th parallel of context.

Go fuck yourself. Yes, I made you both mad. Obviously, the United States have been involved in Vietnam for a very long time before the first assholes from Nebraska began landing on the coast of Danang. And this isn't a place to have an exhaustive history of all of that. But just though a lot of stuff happens, my grandpa nearly gets murdered, and North and South are divided on communist and capitalist lines in spheres of influence, and the U.S. is trying hard to prop up the South with the claim famously that if you allow one country to fall to communism, it'll spread to its neighbors like falling dominoes. Probably the dumbest shit you've ever heard an American president say alongside, I don't know, the concept of trickle-down economics. Yeah, I didn't realize that that's what that Bruce Springsteen album was about.

It was like, they blew up the chicken man and Pusan last night. One president after another gets pulled further and further into Vietnam, while also simultaneously insisting they wouldn't be. And then by 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson becomes president after JFK's head just does that funny thing that one time in Dallas. You ever see a asso fat, your head explodes? And like, we've talked about LBJ a lot on this show. Famously, we had the audio clip of him trying to order a pair of pants because his dick was too big to fit a normal ones. I think LBJ bullying people by making them come talk to while he was taking a shit as another one of my factoids about him.

Yeah. Yeah. He was canny while being the world's biggest redneck. LBJ is the proto version of the 48 laws of power. That's the 49th law of power is make your subordinate to talk to you while you're taking a Dome? What do you think of doing right now? Yeah, Joe's planning out a new project called Porta John of a CEO. We have to come talk to him through the door. By 1964, the U.S. was trying to gather more and more support for South Vietnam, which had declared independence almost a decade before and fallen under one of what would become a series of cartoonishly corrupt kleptocrats.

We've talked about various forms of this. For example, President Naudin Diem declaring presidential victory. with more votes than people that existed in Saigon at the time. He's an all-time classic. But by 1964, the roiling guerrilla campaign of South Vietnam was joined by an open offensive by the conventional northern forces. There was a series of escalations rather than a declaration of war, because those really don't exist anymore. As we covered on the show before, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or Arvin and

the Ferrets, as we've established, was quickly losing. the war to the forces of the Viet Cong and the People's Army of Vietnam. And because we're here, we should point out because this little detail seems to get lost whenever anybody talks about the history of the Vietnam War, the People's Army of Vietnam, the Northern forces, the conventional forces of North Vietnam were not a group of rice farmers wearing sandals and carrying Daddy's rifle. They were, for the region, a modern military. They had a modern Air Force, complete with supersonic jet fighter interceptors, and eventually aces that went along with them

that pretty effectively countered American air power. They had a modern navy, modern artillery, modern small arms. This really isn't important for our story here today, but whenever they come up, whenever we're talking about an episode, I really feel like we need to underline this because I really hate when people don't do that. Yeah, if you go to the War Museum in Hanoi, there's a gigantic sculpture made exclusively out of like airplane parts that were blown apart over northern Vietnam.

Yeah, they had like modern air defense specifically like people seem to kind of ignore North Vietnam's air power because they didn't commit it in what was considered a conventional sense at the time. They weren't trying to dog flight. They didn't see the point of it and said they specifically targeted American bombers because they were doing the most damage. and they did a pretty good job at countering them for the resources that they had. Yes, the V.Kong, for the most part, was a guerrilla force and looked and act accordingly. But the Army of North Vietnam Army was a modern military that was superior to the South

in various ways. Hence why they fucking won. Because there's kind of this laziness and kind of like simplification of Vietnam, V. Kong and the North Vietnamese army. And it's like, no, they were, very different things. Yeah. And like you just said,

it was a, they wore uniforms and had military structure because they were an army. Yes. Obviously, the Viet Cong weren't going to be that because they were literally in South Vietnam doing guerrilla stuff. Yeah. Like,

you typically don't, you know, have your, like pass and review fucking regimental parade shit when you're in a country that, you know, you are a hostile internal force. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Like, because then you're going to get targeted. The People's Army of Vietnam went toe to toe with the U.S. military on multiple occasions, fighting a war. on the same footing as the United States and won frequently. There was this little thing that happened in the 1950s

that really proves that the Vietnamese army was really good. It's called Jemben Fu. Yeah, you should talk to my grandpa about it. Jien Bienfu is a great story about how planes can solve every problem and you shouldn't investigate any further. Hey, there's a reason why I have a hand-printed poster above my desk

like bought in Vietnam. It's printed on rice paper. And it's just a giant B-52 being shot down. Yeah. Now, the U.S. at this point is not at open war with the North or the concept of Vietnamese communism, but they are still heavily supporting the South. There's tens of thousands of advisors on the ground. They're training them.

They're equipping the Arvin forces. And in a lot of cases, they're leading them. And we've talked about a few cases of this on the show before. The U.S. is dumping billions onto South Vietnam in combined economic and military aid. But LBJ didn't want this to look like an American-only war effort. He saw this like a lot of Americans did as a possible propaganda tool, a battleground between the so-called free world, that being the capitalist nations of the world, mostly the West and communism.

And he wanted to create an image of international struggle for the sake of a, quote, democratic and free South Vietnam, very similar to what happened during the Korean War. with the UN coming to aid South Korea. Obviously, the dynamics are a little bit different, and the Soviets really fucked that one up. I originally had this in the script and I cut it out, but now I'm bringing it up again. But the UN vote only went through

because the Soviet Union was boycotting the UN at the time because the UN refused to recognize China in the seat of China and instead it was recognizing Taiwan. And if the Soviet Union had taken their seat for that vote, they could have stopped the UN from getting involved in the Korean War. Whoops! Anyway, in order to facilitate this, LBJ creates the so-called many flags,

sometimes called the More Flags Program. This at first amounted to being a campaign to get as many countries from the Western bloc to send economic assistance to South Vietnam. It didn't matter what a country sent, or which country it was, as long as they sent something and publicly talked about how much they supported South Vietnam. The U.S. was so desperate to get people on board for

the sake of public relations that even nations that were already helping South Vietnam in the form of, say, just like basic humanitarian aid from like the Red Cross were all lumped in because countries were already helping South Vietnam for like flood relief. So like, for example, Turkey and a few other countries were listed by the U.S. State Department as supporters of South Vietnam, when in reality, they already had a... infrastructure in the country to help with flooding and disease prevention that came with flooding. Far be it for me to ever say anything positive about the Republic of Turkey, but they were not involved. Soon the U.S. State Department was beaming about however, like 30 countries had joined them in their

alliance against communism, when in reality it was like nine who directly answered LBJ's call under the more flags program. it's basically the same thing as if you can recall about 20 odd years ago, something that they like to call the Coalition of the Willing. Yeah, exactly. It's almost like we have form for this. My favorite part of the Coalition of the Willing was one nation whose name I cannot remember signed up because just like we're going to talk about, the U.S. was paying for people to voice or show their support for the war in Iraq. and one of the countries really didn't have a military. He's like, well, we'll train monkeys to run across minefields for you.

And the U.S. is like, uh, no thanks. There are some countries that will surprise you that were at some point involved in the Iraq war. And Afghanistan, for that matter. There's a lot of weird ones. I recall encountering, uh, I know I definitely encountered the New Zealand, New Zealand military and the Danish military in Afghanistan, but I believe Iceland as well. had like some kind of civil defense thing involved there. Yeah, it was like a weird armed gendarme thing because they don't have a military.

Yeah, it's something that I also know that was involved in Iraq with El Salvador. It's like a hundred, like a company of troops from El Salvador. El Salvador is a tiny country. Iraq was such a confusing war for the geopolitical community that both Armenia and Azerbaijan simultaneously deployed soldiers and kept them there for years. As did Georgia, because I encountered Georgian soldiers in or who had been in Iraq elsewhere. It's bizarre. And famously, the Ghanians, too.

A lot of bases in Iraq, I never went to Iraq, apparently had Ghanian guards because they decided that that was what the job should be. So that I don't know. On more than one lonely mountain top in parts of Afghanistan, I shared porn with soldiers from New Zealand. Was it upside down so they could read it? But even this aid that the U.S. was able to elicit from various countries was hardly anything. A lot of places just contributed nothing other than words in order to please

the United States and to stop them from, and this is true, endlessly sending requests via their local embassies. At first, it was the U.S. doing this directly and then they managed to get the South Vietnamese government to do it to the point that they were just handing paperwork to the South Vietnamese government saying send this to their embassies. And everybody knew it was coming from the United States. So a lot of countries literally just answered the call to get the U.S. to leave them the fuck alone and stop blowing up their phones. It is kind of wild. They're like, you know, just blow, like, oh, fine. Fuck, these guys won't leave my phone alone. I'll send you some kids to get killed. Please, here are some 18 year olds. You can kill them all.

We're not actually to the combat soldier part, but we are getting there. Because the U.S. wasn't asking for soldiers. And they didn't care about saving money or even trying to spread the cost of the Vietnam War across its allies, because when this program initially failed, they shifted what they were willing to do. Within a few months, the U.S. simply offered to pay for everything as long as a nation said they would donate whatever it was they were donating. For example, if you're donating food, the U.S. would pay for the food, pay for the transportation of the food to South Vietnam, and then pay the salaries of the workers who would distribute it as long as it was, you know, West Germany or France or the U.K. or whoever would slap their flag on the side of it and say they probably support the cause of

South Vietnam. Even this didn't really work very well because it turned out people just didn't want to get involved with this bullshit. Enter South Korea, baby. Because South Korea was, in the 1960s, a bit of a fucking basket case. But their connection to Vietnam goes back even further than that. In 1954, only one year after the end of the Korean War, when France was fighting and losing in Indochina and my grandfather was generating a whole new genre of nightmares, slowly drawing in more American resources like air support, logistics, and there was talks of American force getting directly involved. There were some psychos in the US government that were saying maybe we should just nuke

Vietnam. The president of South Korea, Sigman Re, offered thousands of Korean soldiers to immediately be deployed to assist the French. Now, again, this is one year after the Korean War, and the reasons for this were many, but also insane. He wanted to support France and the fight against communism because, surprise, surprise, South Korea was militantly anti-communists, while also supplying soldiers that would free up American forces that could quite possibly be drawn away from Korea and sent a fight in Vietnam.

Because the DMZ had just been established, and everyone assumed the war could start at any minute. And don't forget, we've talked about this a lot. There was a low-level war happening across the Korean DMZ already at this point. Soldiers were dying, most of them South Korean and North Korean, but also Americans. And this would get worse as the years go by and America gets more involved in Vietnam. But both France and the U.S. thought the South Korean idea was fucking ridiculous for countless reasons and told Sigman Rie to shut up. Fast forward a few years.

and suddenly that's not the case. It's like asking your friends like, oh, remember you said you'd like let me hold like $5? Like, can I get that now? Also, it bears mentioned that, um, uh, Pukcheng Yi, even though he was insanely hardline anti-communist, was for a long time suspected of being communist somehow.

Yes, because he was involved in some student group or something like that. Having the opportunity to be like, no, I'm dead seriously anti-communists, like to sort of rub that in the U.S.'s's face, also to garner support because I'll let you continue in the script, but it just bears mentioned that South Korea was one of the forest countries on the planet. Oh yeah, we're going to get to that. Yeah, at that time. At this point,

it's not South Korea going to the U.S. and saying, hey, let us support you. It's now the U.S. asking for their help in Vietnam. And South Korea is immediately on board in a way more hardcore way than the U.S. planned. Because when the U.S. brings it up, like, hey, maybe some aid, you know, maybe some military advisors, whatnot. Park Chung, he is like, we'll deploy a division. of combat soldiers immediately. And the U.S. isn't asking for combat soldiers yet. But the U.S. had to once again tell him no and instead ask for other military support, like advisors or ammo, which something Korea does have a ton of.

And Park Chen, he agrees to sending Korean military advisors in the form of 10 Taekwondo instructors. Yes. Yes. Now, these guys are sent and they're completely paid for by the U.S. government. And it takes like five seconds for everyone to discover that the South Korean advisors are completely worthless. Not to say they don't know Taekwondo, I'm sure they do. But the purpose of their training, the Arvin Officer Corps couldn't really work with them. For starters, the Arvin Officer Corps spoke three languages, French, Vietnamese, and a growing number of them spoke.

English. The Korean advisors, on the other hand, spoke Korean only. I thought you were going to piss off a certain section of the martial arts community by saying Taekwondo is fucking useless. It is. It is the Dane Cook of martial arts. But there is also racism at play. Of course. The Vietnamese officers who do not want to be taught by Koreans and the Koreans see the Vietnamese is a little more than backwards savages. So they are not working well to get. We're getting into inter-Asian racism now. I stumbled upon

no less than four academic papers on this subject as it relates to Korea's effort in the Vietnam War. And I really did not have time to go into it because the length of

the script, but it is intense. Obviously, eventually, South Korea does send combat soldiers. And on multiple occasions, American officers note how intensely racist

the South Koreans are towards the Vietnamese. And I cannot explain to you how insanely racist you have to be to make it concerning for an American commander during the Vietnam War. That is fucking crazy. But this does not stop the Korean involvement from expanding. Within a year of the more flags program clearly failing, the US change what they're asking from, from simple economic assistance with a few other nations doing what like South Korea had in sending advisors or like others did, and that is bringing South Vietnamese officers to their

own countries for training, which is what a lot of people did. And instead, they started asking for active military assistance on the ground. South Korea was the first to agree, as long as the deal remained the same as it did the first time around, meaning the U.S. pays for everything. However, obviously, that would look really bad if it got out to the American public that the U.S. is footing the bill for all of this. So Korea stood up what was called the dove force. This was engineers and a field hustle so they're non-combat

forces and the US had to think of a very creative way to pay for it. Are they going to use the tried and true scammer method of paying with the Google gift cards? In a way. Fuck off. So instead of just like writing a check to the South Korean government

to just pay for the total deployment of the dove force like they had been with like supplies, and everything else so far. Instead, the U.S. diverted extra food aid to South Korea, which the South Korean government could then sell. The U.S. that shifted military aid from both South Korea and Japan into footing the rest of the bill. So by the time they were done, the U.S. had footed the bill for the Dub Force entirely through illegally selling food aid and kind of taking money from Japan. The whole time Korea is doing this, they're still saying, look,

We have thousands of combat soldiers ready to go. You just have to let us. And as early as December 1964, it began being openly discussed within the American administration, but negotiations to iron out the details didn't begin until months later in May when Park Chunhee traveled to D.C. and met with President Johnson. And we should pause here and talk about just what South Korea looked like in 1965. In short, it was desperately poor.

It had one of the lowest GDPs in the whole world. Nearly half of its population was destitute. Malnutrition was commonplace and it hadn't even come close to recovering from the damage done during the Korean War. But also, even before that, South Korea was not exactly in great shape when the Korean War started. And they were dealing with the after effects of Japanese colonialism, more war, infrastructure is crumbling. And this is even without going into all of the notorious corruption problems, within Park Chung-He's regime, and, of course, the administration before hits. Yeah, it's going to say, Park-Chang-Hie comes across like he's, you know,

Mr. Clean dictator compared to Sigmundry, who was, like, novelty oversized, like the Gallagher's big, gigantic hammer of corruption. There was not nearly enough money to rebuild, let alone meet Park Chun He's goal, which was transforming the overwhelmingly agricultural South into a modern industrial state. And it kind of goes without saying that nobody thought South Korea would be able to pay for the deployment of what amounted to be tens of thousands of soldiers into a foreign war. Everyone in the U.S. government knew there's going to be a price tag attached to Korea's promises, but nobody was sure what it was going to be. That was until Park submitted a 10-point list of demands that would be required to be met before he agreed to send soldiers. And I have all of them here.

They were no decrease in American forces in Korea during the entirety of Korean deployment to Vietnam. The American defense of Korea would never be harmed by the ongoing Vietnam War. Military assistance program funds would be increased to fully arm and train three reserve brigades within Korea. A total reform, rearm, and retraining program for the whole of the Korean Armed Forces. procure as much military and humanitarian supplies as possible from only Korean vendors, hire Koreans as much as possible for all labor within Vietnam, pay for and supply everything in connection to the deployment of Korean forces in Vietnam, but also the laborers, pay the salaries of all Korean forces in Vietnam at a level that met American forces,

increase American imports to Korea at a much lower cost, effectively making them at cost for exporters, provide hundreds of millions of dollars in development loans to Korea, and continue giving them until all agreed upon projects within all of South Korea are completed. At no point, will the U.S. ever give less than an agreed upon amount of aid, provide employment and welfare for Koreans in South Korea in need, which at this point is, the entire population, and all technical and professional assistance in Korea will continue, but at a level higher, to meet the level of American forces. Effectively, Park Chun He asked the U.S. government, you are going to pay for the entire rebuilding process of my nation and

armed forces. And LBJ said, yeah, sure, fine, whatever. Listener, you might be asking yourself, oh, what a great, what a great deal. That's awesome for those Korean soldiers who are going to get paid at a much higher rate. Oh, we'll get to that point. Oh, whoops. Wait, what? You're saying there's a catch? The U.S. agreed to all of this with a loan concession of being any pay increase to Korean soldiers be tied to the rest of the military assistance program rather than being a separate spending project. Just for comparison's sake, the Dove unit that engineer and hospital unit of Korean forces, cost the U.S. government about $2 million per year while they were in Vietnam.

This package that the U.S. government agreed on with Park Chun He, and it would not be the only package, has no real agreed-upon amount of money, as it effectively just was an infinite spending bill pouring everything into South Korea in exchange for deployment of soldiers. I have found some numbers about how much this kind of cost, but again, there's no agreed-upon amount here. Somewhere between 100 and 106 million per year, in 1965 and what ingested for inflation is roughly a billion dollars. But this is not accurate. It is an infinite money glitch on the part of the South Korean government.

The Americans would give them everything. That's what I was literally about to say is Park Chong He like, was watching like infinite money glitch videos on YouTube. Yeah, except he's on the other side of it. And he's like, yeah, fine, whatever. And, you know, if this sounds insane and, and it is, It wasn't to LBJ, who thought the price tag of having someone else come fight and die on behalf of America's interest is quite reasonable. Or as messages between American embassies in Seoul and D.C. said, quote, it saves America a great deal in blood and treasure.

Well, yeah, and also it's like at this time when you think about the world economy, like it's still the case to some extent, but even more so back then. America was just effectively the money store. And Pachang, he managed to get them to, you know, agree to something that's massively to his benefit. I mean, like, I'm not defending him by any means because God knows what Korea was like under Park Tonghi. It's, it's mind-blowingly bad. But he saw an opportunity at security. I mean, you can say he did in fact secure the bag in this case. And we're never going to come to the defense of any dictator. No. But it is fair to say that Park Chong-hee is history's first big money hustler. Like, maybe this is where ICP got the idea from for their really bad film. He's employing the if you ever want to drink for free,

find the lonely alcoholic at the bar and they will buy you drinks for the company. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he's like, I'll let you build my entire country to go throw some dipshits into a fucking tiger pit. I don't give a shit. He's like, I trained in a different type of taekwondo. It taught me how to do major money moves. Yeah.

This taekwondo form is called I'm stealing your fucking wallet. He's scamming people and doing a Taekwondo money moves. He's just doing T.JX6 scammer lyrics. And that is how the Republic of Korea, South Korea's capital division, nicknamed the Tiger Division,

was deployed to the Vietnam War, immediately making them the second largest force in the American War effort. And with that, we should pause for a second and talk about how Korea gathered these men that it needed in the first place. Obviously, from the very beginning, going back to the Dove Unit.

South Korea would only slot men in who volunteered for overseas. service, which begs the question, how do you suddenly convince tens of thousands of dudes to volunteer for a war that does not matter to them at all? Well, I regret to inform people who didn't already know this. Generally, when you ask a group of people who are already soldiers to volunteer for a war, you normally don't find yourself short of people sticking their hands up in the air. But the real reason for this, as always, is incentives. For starters, the South Korean military much like today, has its foundations built a national service or conscription, the draft.

Today, that forced time of playing soldier is roughly two years, though that does depend on what your job is. In 1965, it was three years. When the first things offered by the Korean government for people already within the ranks, was for every one year spent, deployed to Vietnam, which is a standard tour, just like their American counterparts. It would count for three years in national service. So, volunteer, do one tour in Vietnam, and your national service time is done. Normally, during national service, as is the case of every country on earth that has conscription, your pay is terrible. So at the time, a South Korean conscript would be paid the princely sum of 131 per month

for a private and 200 for a sergeant, which roughly equates to one dollar. Yeah, I was going to say 1001 is like a dollar. Yeah. Like they got paid nothing. They got paid just enough money to say that, well, you got paid for your time. This is it technically slavery. The payday being offered for Vietnam service was $40 a month. And their salary would be paid in American dollars rather than Korean won,

meaning they would make as much in a single day than they would in an entire month. More on that in a little bit. bit. So obviously, soon the South Korean government had way more volunteers than they had spots available. That allowed them to only pick the fittest, best of the best of the enlisted or conscripted men. And every officer that would go from the rank of lieutenant all the way up to senior staff would be hands selected by Park Chung He himself. Virtually as soon as the first agreement was made, the U.S. was soon asking for more soldiers, knowing that Park would then ask for more economic and military concessions from the United States government. LBJ was not in the business of

negotiating any of them. If Park asked for something, LBJ gave it to him, with every member of the administration coming to the conclusion that the cost was largely unimportant compared to the optics and practicality of having a nation willing to deploy thousands of men to fight in the war. I won't go into the second agreement like I did the first, but just know that every bullet point built off of the first one and expanded the American aid program, not just covering the Korean military, but every single sector of the Korean state and economy. The American government gave so much money in various forms to the Korean government that, like I said, the complete numbers are literally impossible to come up with. Well, yeah, and if the reason why you know

about companies like LG or Samsung or Hyundai or Daew or DuSahed is because, because the Chables were built with a lot of things, but a lot of resources came from what they were able to procure during this time and then subsequently. The best anybody could come up with is that the U.S. government paid Korean soldiers and contractors. And this is separate from the other price tag that I've already listed, another $1 billion. And that one is not adjusted for inflation.

Furthermore, the agreements made it so that Korean foreign exports, which previously were like nothing. The Korean economy before all of this was agricultural based almost entirely. And like South Korean exporters were trying to find literally anything to sell. Like, Whig exports were a thing because they would, they had nothing to sell. But suddenly, exports going to support the Vietnam War counted for half of all Korean exports. And those exports, which like I said were pretty much nothing. before this, increased by 25% as the South continued to industrialize in order to support

the war effort and creating a feedback loop that allowed all of South Korea to benefit wildly from being involved in the war. Like between 1965 and 1975, South Korea is transformed with the nucleus being the Vietnam War. I love that the small domino, big domino here is that, you know, the Americans get rinsed for money. They're pocket. Iran to support the Korean economy and the Koreans send soldiers to Vietnam. And then the big domino is just South Korea becomes

like the dominant nation in StarCraft too. And being like 90% of my Netflix feed. Yeah. I mean, I was going to say it's something, maybe you can go zoom out a little for more panoramic view. The tiny domino is guys shooting down a plane at D&BN Fu in 1954 and the big domino was

BTS. Also who have been in the South Green military. Yep. Now the modern Korean chase. system like we've already talked about already existed, to some extent, thanks to previous government policies in Korea dating back to the 50s. But now they're international brands, riding high on an imported war economy fueled by what was effectively free money. Part of this is also what was known as the container revolution, which thanks to leveraging contracts given to

Korean firms per the agreement, a massive international shipping corporation, Hanjin, which started the war as a small local Korean trucking company and by the end of it controlled pretty much all of international shipping. Though they were hardly alone in taking advantage of the suddenly massively privatized American war logistic system. Oh, and about that pay, the increase that Korean soldiers and laborers were supposed to get, it was all stolen by the Korean government. And this is something that Korean war veterans are still suing the government to try to, to get back pay for? Not going to happen, guys. You're fucked. If I remember correctly, yeah,

what wound up happening was they basically deducted everything in addition to what their Korean military salary would have been. And the government kept that money. In some cases, that's what happened in other cases, because it's not as though like they were getting their paychecks from the American government, of course. What would happen is the U.S. would give the money to South Korea to then pay their soldiers. And then the soldiers were in turn paid a slightly elevated fee over their normal conscription payday, but definitely not 40 bucks a month. And that $40 a month also increased per other agreements at Park Chung made to try to bring the pay as close as possible to a normal American soldier. So as the money increased, the money that the South Korean soldiers

saw never did. It was just theft across the board. And if you're thinking, wow, that sounds like South Korea effectively acted like a mercenary force for the U.S. government in order to enrich themselves, well, you wouldn't be alone. Even in the middle of the war, several members of the Korean National Assembly said as much, saying that we're mercenaries for the American government. Even the American officials were given guidance by the Johnson administration on how to answer questions about how maybe their agreement with South Korea was a mercenary thing and not a diplomatic one. Senator Stephen Young from Ohio would go on to compare what the U.S. was doing to what the British had done during the American Revolution, employing German

mercenaries to fight the revolutionaries. And in case you're wondering, yes, Young did understand that he was framing the U.S. as the British in the situation because he was in the first openly anti-war people in the Senate. He was also like a really honestly hilarious dude, like when constituents would write to him. And, you know, obviously anybody who writes a constituent takes time to do is normally like nuts or rude, he would always answer them back just as rude. Or like people would call him and he would tell them to fuck off because he didn't want to listen to them scream at him for being anti-war. It's funny because he's like, we are the bad guys like the British in the American Revolutionary War, but I am going to respond to you like a Tory

MP. Look, he's from Ohio. Ohioans need to be addressed that way. Over 300,000 South Korean soldiers would eventually be deployed to Vietnam over the course of the war, with 50,000 in the country at a time at their peak. 5,099 were killed and tens of thousands were wounded. And I guess that brings us to a question

that I assume at least one of you is asking, what were Korean soldiers up to in Vietnam? Well, I'm going to hazard a guess, Bokal. No, that would have been much better. Lots of bad stuff. Lots of things that, well... As one person put it, who I strongly dislike, so I won't say their name.

46 milis. So if you listen to what I assume and what most people are assumed who know about their efforts have hurt, the South Koreans were such good soldiers and such good fighters that the Americans and the North Vietnamese were terrified of them. Well, that part is true. Thanks to being specifically trained for the Vietnam War and thanks to years of small unit tactics on the DMZ, South Korean soldiers did have a much easier time adapting to the realities of combat in Vietnam than their American counterparts. It also helped that they were volunteers,

whereas Americans generally were conscripted. Not all, not even the majority, but certainly more than the South Koreans. The South Koreans volunteered to be there for the incentives. In fact, American accounts of the South Koreans go further. Not only were they amazing soldiers, but their discipline was legendary. And I find one account repeated countless times that reflect this. And that is that two South Korean soldiers were accused of sexually assaulting a local woman. And after a morning of physical exercise, you know, morning PT, as we call it, their commander. And this is like a company level commander, put them in front of everybody else and shot them in the back of the head. Fucking Jesus Christ. What? Now, it would be great if that's what happened.

Every time a South Korean soldier committed war crimes or arguably any time an American one did too. But that brings us to all the war crimes. Oh, this is the fun part of the episode of Lines Led by Donkeys. And I should pause here because what we're going to talk about now does not negate all of the terrible things that America did in Vietnam. We're well aware of them. We've talked about them before and we'll talk about them in the future. Nothing we're saying takes away anything that the U.S. did. And if the U.S. wasn't already doing those things, the South Koreans never would have been there in the first place.

But American war crimes are not the topic of today's episode. They certainly will be in the future. But virtually as soon as South Korean soldiers got into Vietnam, crimes against humanity started. According to researchers from Ho Chi Minh University, at least 80 massacres are attributed to Korean forces between 1964 and 1973, killing an estimated 9.4. thousand innocent civilians, but probably much higher than that. Korean forces were slaughtering so many people, it shocked their American allies. In one case, Koreans entered the village of Fong-Ni-Fong-Nat and slaughtered 70 people and then set it on fire. American soldiers stationed nearby attempted to intervene, but were refused entry by other Korean soldiers doing perimeter security,

and then were told by their commanders that they cannot force the Koreans to back down. The Americans were only allowed in afterwards and did find a few survivors. American soldiers took pictures, they took statements from the survivors, they wrote their own statements, and they attempted to start an investigation. This is similar to what happened in Milai. These documents were sent to American commanders in Vietnam, specifically General William Westmoreland, who in turn sent them to their Korean counterpart, General Chey Myeongshin. He said that Korean forces had absolutely nothing to do with this, and instead it was simply

the Viet Cong in disguise. And much like Milai, that's where the report stopped. Westmoreland stopped any further investigation into this and any other incident involving Korean soldiers. The massacre, by the way, happened one month before Mili. For fuck sake. Multiple American commanders, including generals, sent messages to their bosses in Saigon about Korean forces.

Just wiping out entire villages as a matter of course. In the book, U.S. Marines in Vietnam, There's an interview with Marine General Rathvon Tompkins, because we got one name alert this episode and take no joy in it, given the context. Made this sound so common that he believed it must have been some kind of standing policy within the Korean forces, that if you took fire from a village, you destroyed the village and everybody in it. Is that like, in his professional opinion, it happened so frequently, it had to be some kind of standard operating procedure. I already said content warning, so I'll say it again, because mass organized sexual violence was also commonplace by Korean soldiers, with an estimated tens of thousands of victims, with their conduct bringing to mind the comfort women that Japanese trafficked for their own purposes during their occupation of Korea. Jesus Christ. Now, reports of these war crimes are crushed altogether in Korea, which really shouldn't be that big of a surprise.

They have harsh censorship laws. The entire war effort was spun as a glorious heroic effort against communism. And while there was obviously censorship of American war crimes in Vietnam, with Mili being one that jumps to mind where there was an active coordinated attempt to cover it up, that was generally not what happened in the United States. They would certainly try to keep things quiet, but they didn't have the governmental ability to disappear journalists, for example. So while the American government did try their hardest to keep news of American war crimes out of the public eye, they did do the same thing regarding Korean war crimes. It's pretty simple as to figure out why this doesn't require a fucking flowchart. The American government did not want crimes of any kind to get out about their glorious war against communism, their soldiers or their allies. However, the biggest difference was American journalists were still freely able to report on them once information came.

came out, whether it was leaked to them, on earthed in other capacities, they weren't going to catch a bullet in the back of the head or a prison sentence for doing their job. And, you know, news of these war crimes did get out and they were reported on. And the same thing happened with Korean war crimes. Now, there's an infamous testimony called the Winter's Soldier Testimonies. You can look up, read about American veterans would stand up and talk about the war crimes that they took part in or witnessed. And a huge part of that was also crimes that their allies committed, mostly South Koreans. None of this was the case in South Korea.

Press freedom was not existent. Journalists could find themselves in prison for a very long time for a long list of different reasons. And much of the media came under direct or indirect government control, making sure nobody got any fucking ideas. And it would remain that way until the fucking 80s. Slowly over time, testimonies of South Korean soldiers admitting to committing crimes or being the witness to them or hearing people talk about them began to trickle out, especially to non-Korean researchers who were free to look into them. But really, in Korea, they only began to enter the public consciousness in 1999, leading to a very soft acknowledgement of Korean war crimes by the head of state at the time in 2001. Kim De Jong.

But his statement, as backpedaled and soft as it was, and he was not admitting to war crimes. Let's be clear here. He just said, like, it's regrettable what happened here, that kind of thing. It was widely objected by almost every part of Korean life, especially the political and social life. With Park Chung-he's daughter and future president, Park Yin He, saying that Kim's words had, quote, driven a stake into the, honor of South Korea. Now, you probably know her best for being the green president that fell under

the sway of a Rasputin shaman-like character who led a cult called the Church of Eternal Life, and then she was removed from power and thrown in prison. Yeah, she was convinced that the shaman could communicate with her dead father. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe not the one that we should be asking her opinion on. Also, maybe don't elect her president in South Korea, Jesus Christ. this kind of attitude remains. It's no longer forbidden to talk about, but nobody talks about it anyway, in a kind of systemic self-censorship. Occasionally a Korean head of state will say something about brave veterans fighting in Vietnam. They would then get yelled at by Vietnam because the two countries are close economic allies, and they have something of a standard policy where we don't

talk about your war crimes, and you don't celebrate your veterans, and we just keep working together. Don't bring that shit up. And that just kind of goes back to normal. Korean historian Kiel J. Yi explains this as the Korean government and the Korean people have been educated in condition to see themselves as victims of generations of colonial oppression and violence. So it's almost impossible to see themselves as a perpetrator. Going further, he says, quote, South Koreans in the 80s and 90s were encouraged to believe that their economic transformation was the miracle on the Han River, not the bloodshed of Individrated. China. To argue that one of the contributing factors was sending 300,000 soldiers to Vietnam,

some of whom acted very, very violently, doesn't fit very well with modern Korean history. Though there is a growing group of people calling for some form of reckoning. Many are the same people, the same campaigners, and the same activists demanding Japan apologize for what they did to Korea, specifically regarding the comfort women. There's a famous sculpture called the Statue of Peace that commemorates to comfort women of Korea. And those same artists, which is a husband and wife team, also made a statute to commemorate the victims of Korean war crimes in Vietnam. Since 2007, a group of Korean lawyers created what was known as the Civilian Peace Court

to hear testimonies of Vietnamese survivors of Korean crimes and render judgment on their behalf. And it kind of goes without saying, this is not a real court, it has no enforcement powers, It has no legal jurisdiction. And the Korean government denies anything and any kind of responsibility that comes out of it. With the most recent official denial coming in 2019, that's when a survivor of the massacre that we talked about, Nguyen Thi Thon, decided to go for actual litigation in 2020 and the Seoul Central District Court. She had been through the Civilian Peace Court and got really frustrated that while it's good on its merits, legally it's meaningless, right?

So she decided, fuck it. She was the survivor of a massacre that had tons of photographic evidence, tons of statements made by Americans during their very silence investigation, and even testimonies from Korean veterans who came forward and said that they heard other people bragging about what they had done there. South Korea, in their defense, stuck to the same story that they told back in the 60s and what they told the Americans. It was the Viet Cong in disguise.

Now, the district court of Seoul found that the government was clearly lying off their fucking ass and found in favor of the survivor. The government immediately appealed, and this started some kind of diplomatic problem between Vietnam and South Korea for a little bit, but as always, everybody wants to secure the bag and they dropped it. And in the second trial, a South Korean Marine testified that his unit carried out that massacre. Now, the government attempted to find a different veteran to say that he was making it all up and they promised the court that they would, but they couldn't find anybody. Like, no, this guy totally exists. He's going to come to over. They couldn't even find a guy to come live for them. The court, again, ruled in favor of the survivor,

awarding her the princely sum of 30 million won, or $24,000. In closing, even with all of this, the South Korean government continues officially to deny that any of this took place. this massacre and the estimated 40 or so other that their forces committed in Vietnam. And that's not something that ever looks like it's going to change. The end. Oh, nice somber ending to

an episode that was very front-loaded with jokes. That's what we're here for, baby. Yeah, I mean, I'm familiar with this story and so I knew that once you get into the actual details of what happened, it's the scamming up front makes for great jokes and back and forth, but when you actually hear what happened, it's really soul-crushing. Yeah, the scobbinge can get behind. The murder and rape, no. Yeah, that's a hard stance we have on the show, Tom. It's one of those things I wanted to bring up the story, and actually

what we're going to talk about next week to some extent. Everybody has this belief in a long enough timeline history bends towards justice. And I'm here to tell you that is not true. If you need any further evidence of that. Take a look around, just anywhere in what's happening. And this happened before any of us were born, before I assume most of our listeners were born. And it is still being denied in court as of six years ago in Korea. And that's why I think while discussing American war crimes in Vietnam is absolutely something we all need to be doing. And we will do it in the future in a series and episodes on their own. But talking about those, the ripple effects of these larger wars and what they drag other people into and what they end up doing is just as important.

Like the war crimes of the Kiwis, the Aussies, the Filipinos, who are also part of the same program. We didn't talk about them. There was other soldiers there of the South Koreans. Like, these are all a smaller part of the larger gross crime against humanity that was the Vietnam War. And the fact that we really don't talk about it in American history as it pertains to the wars is just kind of going along with soft denialism. And it goes along with how a lot of Americans talk about the war in general or the conduct of all soldiers. Like sure, there were some bad ones. But that wasn't what they were all doing. It doesn't fucking matter. It really fucking doesn't. And I would say this too, that I mean, because we're not trying to objectify this because it's a, you know, a foreign other or something along those lines. It's more that in the case of Korea at the time, there was a system in place that allowed this to happen with impunity with zero control, zero check, zero ability to raise it because anything that made the government look bad, as you said, Joe, could rewind you in prison or extrajudicially killed. That is exactly how the United States would have preferred to handle what happened to Vietnam. Had there not been a system in place that had some degree, I mean, it's not as though it stopped it, but it allowed some form of. of reckoning with it. And the point I make is that if you go back and you look at the U.S.'s

involvement in war crimes in Vietnam, which are massive, which are manifold and practically unending from the beginning to the very end, you will find- To this day. Yes. The after effects of Agent Orins and unexploded ordinance. You will find that, you know, for example, the pilot who basically held William, William Callie at gunpoint to stop me like. Hugh Thomas. Hugh Thomas basically had to go into hiding because, people in the army wanted to kill him and we're trying to because he was seen as a traitor because the system wanted to protect itself. Oh, correct. Sorry, Hugh Thompson was his name. Hugh Thompson. So the point that I'm making about this is we're not saying, oh, look, the Koreans are worse than us.

We're saying that they were in a situation created by the U.S., facilitated by the U.S., but also party to a system where they could operate with more impunity, which is exactly what the U.S. would have preferred given the choice. And it built modern South Korea, like blood money and blood treasure, whatever the fuck it is you want to call. And I mean, like, look, I'm going to be perfectly honest with you. My granddad was an advisor in Vietnam and then a battalion commander in Vietnam. My dad was on the DMZ in the 70s. I was in Korea, not quite on the DMZ in the 2010s.

I recognize it by being American, but also having volunteer for the military, there's a degree of complicity here on my part. But what I'm saying is rather... I'm walking complicity at this point. Rather than looking at it and saying... saying, oh, these foreigners who, you know, who aren't white, look at this horrible shit. No, it's not what we're saying at all. What we're saying is, this is what impunity and this is what imperialism, this is what colonialism occupation, forcing, you know, forcing something against the people's will through force of arms. This is what it creates. And in this case,

you've got an example of what the U.S. would have done more of if there hadn't been some degree of control, as feeble and ineffective as it was. Why do you think the U.S. government liked using South Korean soldiers so much, you know? Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yeah. Yeah. Now, fellas, I believe that's a podcast, but we do a thing on this podcast called Questions from the Legion.

If you'd like to ask us a question, you can support the show on Patreon where just $5 a month gets you a massive back catalog of eight years of stuff that we've been doing, including side series, bonus episodes, every regular episode early, Discord, access. e-books, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets and

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And by supporting the show, you make that possible that we can continue doing what we're doing and being an independent

show. Today's question is, has there ever been something for the show, a segment, a project, or anything else

that you had to cancel? I got a few. Because, you know, I've been here for a while and the

You guys, obviously, Nate, you've been here a very long time as, as audio producer, then taking a bigger role in the show. A lot of years ago, I came up with an idea to do a fake documentary on the concept of the Soda Wars. Like, you know, Fago would be against, uh, yeah, I remember this. Yeah. It got to the point that I wrote scripts. I had multiple people record lines for it. Some pretty big podcasters, actually. At least back, you know, seven years ago. go or whenever I was trying to do this. And then I just shit canned it because of like, I think I was talking to you, Nate, or maybe I was talking to Nick at the time.

And I was like, this is the dumbest fucking thing we've ever done. We can't do this. Lo and behold, we've done way dumber shit than that ever since. But that one definitely, there's been a lot of series that I've put on the shelf. Because the Korean War series is probably the most famous of them where my laptop exploded and took all of my documents and research with it and months of work. And I don't want to do that again. I don't know if there's anything that you guys have ever planned or planned for other shows that you ended up putting on the table or putting on the shelf, rather.

Hussain and I were talking about doing a documentary thing because we were both really impressed by the Trojan Horse Affair. And specifically, we wanted to talk about why the scandal in Rotherham had become this buzzword in the international far right, that this, if you're not familiar with it, Rotherham was basically a scandal in a town in Northern England where a bunch of, of vulnerable young girls and young women were trafficked into, basically into forced sex work, into sex slavery. And these kinds of scandals have taken place, situations like this have taken place all over the UK. This is referred to as like the Rotherham grooming gang scandal. But in the case of Rotherham, it was taxi drivers who were primarily a Pakistani British. And so as a result, this has become like this kind of clarion call for Nazis and far-right people about the sort of like, you know, defend Europa, Evropa with a V shit, like kind of

and people who have no idea anything about Europe, anything about the United Kingdom, anything about regional parts of England, suddenly no Rotherham because it's this thing that Nazis and glow-eyed, you know, avatar psychos know about. I knew about that even before I stepped put in the UK, for example. And to talk about it, we felt like we needed to talk about the fact that rather, what happened in Rotherham is not necessarily all that different than plenty of other situations throughout the UK. And as you go back further into the 90s, the 80s, the 70s, the 60s, you start to see stuff that's even more dire because it was, it's typically tied to vulnerable

children in care homes back when the UK now puts people in foster, puts kids in foster care, before, I believe it was the late 90s, they were put in residential homes. And the degree of, it's really hard to call it. It's not just incompetence. In some cases, it's complicity. In some case, it's like fully being involved in trafficking. And in some cases, in one in particular, there's some pretty clear overlap between this abuse happening and the parliamentary career of a, this doesn't exist anymore, but back

in the old days, a liberal party, MP, and then later night of the realm named Cyril Smith, who much like Jimmy Saville, his. his crimes against children didn't come out until he died. Convenient how that always happens. Yeah, it's amazing. And it turns out that actually, like, the Lancashire police wanted to arrest him even before he became the nominee to be an MP in 1970. And he apparently had friends somewhere that managed to kibashi investigation.

And before he was even an MP. He was just a counselor for the Liberal Party at the time. We started reading into it. And Hussein actually told me that he had been interested in a kind of a parallel track story in South London. and when he was a journalism student, and that when he met a source, it was a former cop who basically was like,

you will get killed if you try to report on this. So we thought, okay, let's try to read about it from going through these, the official inquiries that have been done about these care home scandals. And it was just too depressing. Not because, I mean, like, I have a, you know, it's very, very disturbing,

but I think more than anything else, it's not the victim testimony and victim statements so much as it's what happened to them, when they tried to seek redress, that they were threatened, because the UK's got insane libel laws. They were threatened with libel prosecution. In one case, there were attempts to refer them to social services. Like, they needed to be put in mental health institutions because they were, like, unwell and making threats. One of the people who was the absolute worst about prosecuting victims, you know, silencing, bullying victims,

is Dame Margaret Hodge, who was the head of Islington Council in North London when Islington had a care home where this kind of thing happened. And you started reading into it and it just, you've realized a lot of the stuff's out in the open, a lot of the stuff, you wouldn't have to pull very, very far to find more, but there's basically no way you can report on it in the United Kingdom because both the incredible amount of money required for defending against a libel, even a spurious libel accusation, and something called the official secrets act, which is that if you were to report on this and you were to put something out, in the United Kingdom, you would get basically like an ultra-cease and desist letter and you could go to prison for violating it and also even open information that's in archives,

in records, testimony, whatever, can be sequestered if the government says, no, actually, that's going to threaten the, you know, the functioning of the government. You have no right to know it. Fuck you. So we realized that, and then also when we saw the reaction to the Trojan Horse Affair, that basically everyone just pretended it didn't exist until they found this tiny little inconsistency and said, look, it's all wrong. Fuck you. Woke New York Times, hates Britain. What we realized, we were looking at months, if not years of really soul-crushing, thankless work, that at best would be ignored and at worst could potentially get us sued or sent to prison. So we had to just walk away from, which is horrible because, I mean, like, there's no real redress for the victims of this stuff. But we've run into similar things on history of Armenia where the libel laws in Armenia aren't nearly as bad as the UK, but they're not great. And we had to drop a story because there's a very, very good chance we'd run a foul of them and, you know, didn't really feel like ending up an Armavir prison for my podcast. So it was dropped. Even though I think it's a very important

story to tell, maybe one day we'll be able to. I can't even tell you the topic of it. We made the joke that like there was a seriousness of tone required for this and that we wouldn't necessarily be able to express it because at the end of the day, the only way you can communicate, even just scratching the surface, what we were able to determine was the only title you could call this podcast is nonses all the way down. Because, like, quite frankly, and I'll give you, I'll leave you this one little detail before I handed over to you, Tom. I told you about Cyril Smith that the Lancashire police wanted to prosecute him because as a counselor, he was effectively using his position as like, oh, I'm the, I'm the government, you know, representative of, I don't

know, you go ombudsman or some shit of like these care homes and like what they called working men's homes were like kids who were technically minors, but were emancipated who were working jobs were basically made to live in, and he would abuse kids. He would violently abuse kids. And Lancashire police wanted to arrest him, but because he was politically connected, they had to ask for what was the predecessor, I believe, to the Crown Prosecution Service, the director of public prosecutions. So they sent it down to London to get signed off on, came back, refused, and they were really confused why. In the inquiry that happened decades later, they didn't recognize the name of the person who'd done it. They figured he was a deputy.

He was like a second in command. It's like the assistant attorney general of the United States. And they had no personal records of him. No one knew who this guy was. They couldn't figure out his name. They're like, I guess we'll never know. A guy who was effectively the assistant attorney general of the country. Like, we have no idea who he is and we'll never know. But there was a detail that came up, and this is also a weird bit of like hauntology. There was like an alternate left wing paper in the Lancashire area in the 70s that had a circulation of like 10,000 people, which is crazy to imagine. And they published an interview right before Cyril Smith was up for re-election in 1979 when there was the election that brought Thashtra to power. And they got a call from the guy

who had been the DPP at the time. He called. from a phone box in London. And he said, I never saw this. No one told me about it. I've never seen this prosecution packet. I would have agreed. I would have signed off to prosecute. This was kept for me. And effectively, they waited until he was out on business to then have some mystery deputy sign it, refuse it, and send it back. Why? But this got reported, and Smith increased his majority in his constituency. Rather than like tanking his career, people were like, that, whatever, they all voted for him. And so when you read that, you're like, how are two podcasters going to crack that?

You know what I mean? But it's there. It's right out in the open. And it's just like, yeah, yeah. That's why there's not really like true crime podcast to the same degree in Britain. It's just like no one wants to know. No one wants to know. It's a, it gets chucked in the room and forgotten about like a like Belgian trash

collection service. Anyway, Tom, you've got one. Oh, I have a few. Ironically, three of them are Spanish language ones. One of them was a series for this show. that I wanted to do that I started researching and kind of decided it was like you know what this isn't really

my story to tell and it was about the history of Etta in Spain that's the Basque separatist group read a lot about it and I just kind of decide and like you know I know people from the Basque region and from Spain in general and I just kind of decided that was like you know what this isn't really

my story to tell or I couldn't necessarily figure out a way to tell it in a way that worked with the way I write. Similarly, I really, really, really wanted to write something about the international brigades during the Spanish Civil War and particularly Frank Ryan and the Irish volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War. And like the story is quite, it's not necessarily straightforward, but like it is doable. But it's kind of one of those ones where, you know, I've read a decent amount about it and it's just kind of like sitting there in the back of my head. But it's like how to pull all those threads together the way.

So it works in a cohesive story that doesn't involve having to explain the entire Spanish Civil War. I actually ran into a similar years before you joined the show. I was going to do a series on the International Brigades. And I came to the conclusion, this is just a series on the Spanish Civil War. And that is, there's some topics that are just too big for a series. I don't want to take four months of episodes to cover one thing. So it got put on the shelf. I have another one just like that where the guy was a German who was an anti-fascist who fought in the Spanish of a war, emigrated to Australia, came to America, enlisted. They wouldn't let him be an officer, even though he was a major in the international brigades because he, because of the premature anti-fascist thing where they basically were too communist. He went up getting a battlefield commission to captain at the Battle of Bunagona. He went up dying in the Philippines. His name was Herman Botcher. But there's almost no information about him available beside like a small website that some World War II veterans

who fondly remembered him, created. And all of his personnel files were destroyed in a fire in an archive in the U.S. at some point between the end of the war. And so it's a fascinating story, but I don't know where you could find primary sources because he never married. He didn't have any descendants. His sister was, I think, older than him and she died. And so there's just like, it's this incredible narrative.

But you don't want it to just become like, you know, fanfic, basically. What do you do without those sources? And that's a lot of shit that I've always wanted to cover. that there's just not enough. It's unfortunate. Yeah. You know. There's a, there is one which is like my albatross, which has been hanging over my head for years.

And now actually involves the possibility of me going to Peru. It is Cindero luminosa. Oh, the shining path. Yeah. Oh, boy. I've been saving that one for you as our terrorism correspondent. There is now a likely possibility that I am actually going to go through at some stage next year

with a friend of mine who lived there for quite a while. So are you saying that we're going to have a chance to see Kiko Fujimori say Thomas Omahani on TV when they're sentencing to you to infinity jail? Possibly. But yeah, it's like that that is the one where it's like

I know it is possible and I have spent years at this stage reading about it like researching as much stuff as I can without being able fully fluent in Spanish. And it's like the last step is to actually go to Peru.

I similarly am interested if there's some way to thread it with some of the stuff we talked about about terrorism in the Cold War with the Burbank killings in Belgium. Yeah, this is the broadband killers. I have thought about it and I had actually done like kind of a

I've a giant whiteboard in my studio which you have seen. And like when I tried to figure out stuff I might like put stuff on like with post-it notes. And for me like the broadband killer while it is like a really fascinating topic, there is no conclusion to it.

Yeah. Yeah. That's very unfulfilling. They thought they might have found the guy, but they literally exhumed his body and he wasn't a DNA match for the DNA they had on file. But fellas, I believe that's a podcast.

And if you're listening to this, later this week, we will be live in Cork, Ireland, on September 26th. And there's still some tickets available. Check the links. Get some last minute tickets. and if you can't make it, we also are live streaming it and you can get those tickets as well.

There's no cap on those ones unless there's like 10,000 of you or whatever that try to join, in which case we have no problem with that. Please crash the servers. And if you're screening it in a bar and multiple people are watching, I am going to show up afterwards like the TV license inspector. You are under no legal obligation to let me in. But fellas, you host other podcasts, blog those podcasts. Trash future podcast about UK politics being bad and the tech industry being worse. Kill James Bond, a podcast, a feminist film podcast.

It's extremely funny. And also, I'm in a band called Second Homes. Our debut album is out everywhere on streaming as well as band camp if you feel like buying it. And fingers crossed, I think we will be able to get physical copies like a vinyl and CD and tape available for sale before Christmas. That's the goal. So stay tuned on that.

Blood work, a show about the economy of violence. Also, hopefully by the time this episode comes out, I will have my website up with the web shop. I recently had an exhibition of selection of my photography this past weekend. So you want to buy prints or any of my photo books, it'll be there. If it's available, the link will be in the description of this episode. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting the show.

And until next time, maybe you don't rebuild your country on Blood Money.