The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1187: The 'Secret War' in Laos as the Template for U.S. Proxy Wars w/ Karl Dahl

Episode Date: March 16, 2025

2 Hours and 26 MinutesPG-13Karl Dahl is an author specializing in the Spanish Civil War and historical "fiction."Karl comes on the show to give the history of the U.S. 'secret war' in Laos and how it was a blueprint for all subsequent proxy wars, especially in Ukraine.Journey From Pha Dong: A Decision in the Hills (The Secret War in Laos), English VersionThe Secret War in Laos -1/4Faction: With the CrusadersKarl's SubstackKarl's MerchPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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So thank you for the support. Head on over to freeman beyond the wall.com forward slash support and do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Piquanese show. Carl Dahl is back and we're not talking about the Spanish Civil War this time. How you don't call? Doing great, Pete. All right. So you sent me this presentation called The Secret War in Laos is the template for U.S. proxy war.

And I went through it and I was just like, yeah, we just got to do this. So I'm just going to turn it over to you. And I'll interject when I have questions. Great. Yeah, we'll go from there. So tell us about this. All right. So this is my thesis and I'm not the only person who's, who has such a thesis that the activities in Laos in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, but especially in the 60s and 70s, are the template for what we see in the world when it comes to utilizing various, you know, weak kind of buffer states for U.S. foreign policy from CIA to military to U.S. aid and such things. And I think I make a pretty good case in this presentation.

And I am frankly echoing the thoughts of CIA alum who have stated as much. And I'll be citing a lot of great folks. I think what I'll do, Pete, is I'll provide you with some links that you can put into, into wherever this recording will dwell so that people can view some of the materials that I'm referencing themselves. So great. So before I start, Pete, when we say Laos, and again, you're a person who's very familiar with, you know, the 20th century and American activities therein, But what do you think of when you hear the name of this country? Immediately think of the Vietnam War. Yeah.

Great. It's its own theater, but it's you cannot decouple Laos and American activities in Laos from the Vietnam War in any way, shape, or form. And everyone's attempt to do so has been. stupid and disastrous. And it's actually quite tragic also because of the human cost. So I am just going to move forward and reiterate. So, you know, one of the greatest examples of Laos as a template for U.S. proxy war is if you look at Ukraine, it's different because there are many more countries that are involved in supplying material, money, etc. to Ukraine versus Laos.

And there's a big difference in terms of who Ukraine is next to, you know, geographically. But it's very, very similar. If you step back and you look at it as, you know, other than U.S. air power being directly involved, So it's very similar to what was attempted in Laos, except U.S. air power plus allied air power was a totally different story in Liao than in Ukraine. So anyway, let me make my case. So this is an image from a very famous press conference that newly elected President John F.K. Kennedy made March 23rd, 1961.

He had only been in office for about two months at this time. And he had inherited a, you know, the Eisenhower administration's foreign policy and had been briefed for a long time on the importance of what was going on in Laos as it related to American interests and involvement in various activities in Vietnam. And so it's funny because Kennedy hated the pronunciation of the country's name because to him it sounded like louse, like the biting insect. And so he pronounced it layos. And I'll explain here shortly, you know, where we get these strange pronunciations. But how this is relevant is that the United States, as part of the Cold War, again, and let me step back, I had said you cannot look at American activities in Laos outside of the context of the Vietnam War. But most importantly, you cannot look at it from outside the context of the Cold War. It's 100% a Cold War baby.

and it's America attempting to follow essentially containment of communism, specifically the Soviet Union at the time of 1961 and in the 50s. And a really good resource for everyone listening if you really want to dig into this. Check out the shows that Pete and Thomas have done about the Cold War. There's a recent batch of three parts of episodes. The second one, the second batch focuses on Vietnam, and it's really good. Thomas is a treasure, and I'm not just kissing his ass. I'm genuinely saying, like, you will get so much out of that in terms of it. it'll contextualize for you in six hours of listening how you can actually study this in a coherent fashion and bits and bites.

So when you look at Laos, you have to look at it in terms of the Cold War. Indochina was a, when it broke up, there was a Geneva agreement in 1954 about how the powers would interact. Act with the former Indochinese states, Laos was declared to be a neutral country. What this map represents here is not only like, hey, everyone, this is a country that you've never heard of on the other side of the world, but the white territories are under governmental, governmental control and a very cool 1960s progression slide was done with a cube that they rotated. And the black and then the gradient areas showed the progress of expansion of communist forces out of North Vietnam, although that was never explicitly stated in this presentation across the country in the past couple of months.

the fact that a Soviet airlift was involved as a key part of this in the plane of jars, the Soviets were flying. I think he mentioned at one point at least 100 sorties in a very brief period to provide equipment, et cetera, to the, in his term, communist guerrillas. Very interestingly, like I said, he doesn't really. emphasize the fact that this is coming straight out in North Vietnam. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale

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Volkswagen Financial Services, Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. So let's step back. And this is sort of, I'm going to put on my mini Putin hat. I'm not going to do a super long deep dive into the background history.

I'm going to hit you with a couple of slides. What is, what is this country? What is this thing? What is this place? So Laos is a landlocked Southeast Asian nation. In 1961, it had about 2 million people in the population, and we'll see why it's kind of hard to quantify that. Those were best estimates at the time. Currently, there are about 7 million people, a little over 7 million.

It's landlocked between Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and China. the May Kong, as you can see from this image, the May Kong River is a critical part of the delineation of its current border. And it's named for the people who live there and the dominant people group in the country, those who had been the ruling class, the Lao. So unfortunately, we get this crazy Laos Laos and term Laotian to describe them, because, the French described the country as Royam du Lauschen, which is literally the kingdom of the Lao people. So Laoshen became Laotian in English. So they're really the Lao. The language is Lao, etc. You can see here how big the country is. It's quite small. It's northern Laos is basically Ohio, plus, you know, parts of Appalachia going down into the southeast.

So not a very big country at all. Stepping back how, and I'm explaining this because I want you to understand how this country came to be, which informs the challenges that the American, you know, operational forces there had in trying to coalesce this into a country. So Europe had a migration era. Southeast Asia had a migration era that was very influential. And shortly, I'll explain a few things that I'm going to skim over here currently. But there are all these tribal groups. When you see this purple text, that's what they call the Thai or die peoples.

It's the label for a language and people group. there's you'll notice that that sounds similar to Thailand yes that's where Thailand got its name retroactively that was the name given by the Siamese king when they wanted to step back and try to kind of legitimize their rule over foreign people because they came out of China just like all the rest of these folks came and the biggest driver of the migrations down into South East. East Asia from Southern China, which had been going on over time. They know that there were people going down into the May Kong River Basin around Vangchang, which is the current capital and became a later kingdom, around 700 AD in substantial numbers. And they were essentially groups of

warrior bands with families that would follow the river valleys south. because they were less populated until they ran into other people who were there in great numbers, such as the Khmer kingdoms. They sometimes pronounce it Kamai. But anyway, they ran into those folks, and that turned into kind of stabilizing general groups of where these people were at. The biggest pressure came when the Mongols conquered down. down into what I call the Thai homeland of Sipsongpana, which means a thousand rice fields. In the 1300s, that was the biggest press that really created a massive migration that resulted in a whole bunch of actual kingdoms of Lao in substantial numbers. Among other groups,

Sukhothai down there, which became the Thai Ayataya at etc. The kingdoms of the kind of bordering the Burmese, like the Sean and the Kun and the Yuan, who are still at it, kind of fighting against the Burmese government from time to time. That's where all these people came from. There's also a tribe here, the Nung, which is that means one, like the number one or the first people, they became mercenaries in Southeast Asia for American operations. And a whole bunch of them...

Let me ask you a question. This migration pattern, it almost... Could you relate it to how we're told the Native American tribes got here? It sounds very like, I mean, we don't really know how that happened. This happened in more recent history. But it definitely sounds like,

like you could relate that in some way. Yeah, so you'll notice there's this huge area. And a lot of these people stayed here and they became sinusized. You know, when you look at the Chinese claim, oh, well, this is like 90, we're 90 some percent Han ethnic group. And then there's these small minority groups. Well, an awful lot of these people were, you know, absorbed, syncretized. essentially absorbed into what they call Han because of just time and everything like that. Yeah, it's an interesting question.

Like, was it, was the Native American settlement? Was that strictly straight lines, you know, like we see here, were they following game? Did they come to the, you know, the land bridge and keep moving or were there pressures beyond that at the time? We don't have a way of knowing. It sounds, it's funny because sometimes you'll see in these old histories, and one of the biggest problems with Southeast Asia is there been, the total war was the way everything was done there until a couple hundred years later when there was some slightly more civilized or modern way of thinking and conquering and everything, handling war that way. what they would typically do is they would raise the records, they would raise capitals and burn all the records of everything. And so there's surviving stories in a variety of, in a variety of formats.

Sometimes they're old songs. And so you don't know quite how accurate, you know, some of these stories are. There's written records that are a thousand years old. all over the place, but a lot of the records get destroyed, so you kind of have to just make assumptions about it. But yeah, it's an interesting, that's an interesting question. And my guess is there's a lot more migrations in human history that we just don't have a way of quantifying in detail. So

south of, when they moved south, because a bunch went west and following the mountains and basically skirting the edges of the great mountain ranges of Asia, but moving south, they were moving through river valleys, which were strictly, sharply defined by these very high mountains,

and many of them quite steep where you can't even scale the mountains in Southeast Asia, except for maybe a couple of spots. And so all they could do is push down. And so what the pattern would be at this point is that they would, if they could drive out the populations in the river valleys, because they're wet rice farmers, the people who were there would go into the highlands. or they would just absorb them sometimes.

It kind of depended on a variety of cases and conditions. So what I've done here is I'm reiterating wet rice farmers love river valleys. And why am I going to all this detail? Because the way the war is conducted has very similar pressures and parameters. on it that the actual settlement of the area had. So the red lines that I have here are very steep mountain ranges, and you'll notice I have a couple little gaps in places. These are where modern day mountain passes, you know, in waypoints, highways, et cetera,

are. And otherwise, these areas were almost... impassable like over these red lines or they were so steepest to not be worth it. And so kind of an old school natural way when you have you catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive by design. They move you even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range for Mentor, Leon and Teramar. Now with Blas, flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers.

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sometimes a couple times in history, the Vietnamese to the east would get together and do a survey with the Lao with representatives of the Lao kingdom. And what they would do is they would travel the animite mountain range, or anamite, I should say. And they would say, okay, on an eastern slope of a mountain, If the houses on stilts were still in Lao territory, because the Lao would build their houses on stilts. If it's on the ground, it was Vietnamese territory.

And some of the later hill tribes that would come in, build their houses on the ground. But this was something that was a rule well into the 18th century, I'd say, maybe even early 19th century, when it came to the way that the, that the Lao and the, and the Vietnamese interacted with each other. And then the western border, these are rivers that form the borders. And you'll notice here, there's a yellow outline here. There's two provinces in modern Laos and Laos of the period that we're talking about, which is post-World War II. There's only two little provinces that are west of the Macong River. Otherwise, the Macong River forms the key border along Thailand and Burma. This is China up here. And then down here is Cambodia. And Cambodia was delineated from both Thailand and Laos by mountain ranges. And then at the

Maykong River, there are massive waterfalls. So it was found to be by the French to be non-navicable later when they showed up and we're trying to think of ways to penetrate the interior. Wasn't going to work. All right. So this is just a view of the topography of Laos, and it's a very beautiful country. You'll notice something immediately. You have extremely sharp, steep mountains that are not, these are not gradual-like. mountains in the Alps. This is limestone karst that just shoots up and is essentially unusable,

covered in jungle. And then down in the lowland, you know, basins where anywhere there's flatland and water people settle and farm there. And again, they don't only farm, wet, you know, wet rice, which is like sticky rice, which, you know, flooded, flooded fields for substantial parts of the year. But that is the primary staple crop. And so large areas of the country are either unpopulated or lightly populated because there's just such a small amount of arable land. But it is the tropics, and that means that, things will grow anywhere. And they have monsoon season and they have a wet, you know, so there's a wet season and a dry season rather than having four seasons as you would in the more temperate climates.

But that means that they can get water, you know, pretty much everywhere. There's nowhere that's arid except for some plateau areas in the far south. But ultimately, it's very fertile, but it's very difficult to grow crops in huge amounts of the country, which means they can't support significant populations. All right. So let's put the Indo in Indochina. So the meaning of this term is essentially that this is, there's a bit of a hand-waving where, you know, it was European saying it's the area of China and they are Chinese appearing, like, as they would say, oriental rather than being, you know, Pijit's. So, but the important thing to understand is that culturally, they

were heavily influenced in a, at the upper levels, I should say, by Indian culture. So what would happen is that the local hegemons, whether it was through missionaries or priests that would be invited from India, and there's different stories depending on the countries specifically where they came from in Lao, it was Sri Lanka, where they brought some basically Hinduism. first, much like Indonesia, and polyscript, which is the writing script that was used in the early Buddhist scriptures. And then most importantly, the Indian forms of government, so the social hierarchies, which were looser. But what it brought was a hierarchy, frankly, pomp, and the feeling of perceived legitimate. So it was putting together formal, formal structures that were then used by the rulers to manage their regions. The other key concept is this mandala concept. You'll see these rings radiating out from these cities.

And this is really important to understand because of the topography. And frankly, this should make sense to anyone like power. radiates outward and it defines zones of influence. And so you have these areas of overlap between these kingdoms where, for example, like a weaker ethnic group, the whole ethnic group, their leader will pay tribute to their more powerful neighbors until they have enough power themselves to not have to pay tribute to be seen as equals, etc. So this is really important to understand because there's this huge kind of blending of power that was this natural way that people had related to each other in this area for a long time, which worked great until it

didn't. So kind of the ethnogenesis of Laos, and I'm not going to spend a whole bunch of time diving into this, but there was a prince from Mwangsua, which later became Long Prabong, which is the old royal capital, who was exiled, his father had been exiled by the grandfather. And he grew up in the court of Angkor in Cambodia, the kingdom of Cambodia in 1316. He married a Khmer princess, persuaded the king to lend him a 10,000 man army so he could go back and reconquer his kingdom. And he really enjoyed that process. So what he did is he brought the Thai peoples south of of Yunnan, which was held by the Mongols, under his control. You'll notice this is 1316,

and I had been talking about how, like, really in the 13th and 14th centuries, were the biggest drifts southwards. So there were all these people who'd been scattered all over this area, and Phanum coalesced them under his control. And it was known as, the kingdom of a million elephants in the white parasol, which is a very high-fluting name, but you see this symbol into the future. It's called Lanzang. And so anyway, he made Theravada Buddhism the formal religion of his kingdom. And again, this gave that kind of legitimacy. He brought in the Buddhist monks who began teaching, you know, teaching. the religion and ultimately like these became this red band became the limits of his kingdom so or la na was suzerain to him you'll notice

shang Mai is a city that's in northern Thailand um this whole area that was the capital of lan na and it was basically a la a la kingdom um and they went kind of back and forth for a couple hundred years with marrying between the various kingdoms. But this was considered one large country with these kind of principalities beneath them. The most important thing to understand is that Lanagh was a useful buffer state in the future against the Burmese. because, and again, these are borders defined by mountain ranges largely. And the Burmese were constantly, like, flooding east and invading. And so it was useful to have a friend to the West that you could work together,

but usually better not to piss off the Burmese and have a buffer state there instead. All right. So Lansong broke into several regional kingdoms, Lana, Lang Prabang, Shinkwang, Vengchang, and Chumpasak down in the south. They had dynastic disputes. The biggest issue is that European technology was beginning to really change things in the 17th century, but in the 18th century. it was that was it. It was super rapid change after pretty sedentary couple hundred years of a great deal of local power because Lansong had men and they had a powerful central authority. They were very wealthy. They had tons of elephants that they would use in war. But when, you know, modern firearms came into play, which were not super easy to use the old school firearms. We're very challenging, but by the time you start getting into flintlocks, et cetera,

that is much more useful for warfare in the tropics. And so Siam became very strong. The Vietnamese became very strong. And the Vengchon, you know, Chompasak, etc., these internal interior groups, they just, they have to trade with people to get these weapons. They had very little contact with Europeans, other than some missions that had been able to get to them. Some Dutch came in the, in the 1600s and we're really impressed. by the kingdom. And so when the French got there later, after Vengchon and many other areas were raised and depopulated, after they got Uppity and were tired of being really, frankly, abused slave suzerains by the Siamese who pushed it way beyond the levels that people would engage in in the past,

They found basically ruins and very few people. So like I said, the Siamese depopulated the capital and pretty much the whole left bank of the Mekong all the way up to the kingdom of Lung Prabong, who stayed independent. But so that was way up in the north. So everywhere else, the Siamese were doing slave raids. And I just have to tell this story because it's a true story. The French and some English travelers reported seeing these huge flotillas of canoes and narrow riverboats coming down the May Kong, where the local slaves had had bamboo split pleaded. you know, and they would, the Siamese would shove the bamboo pleats through the hands of these people to basically permanently handcuff them until they got to where they were at and just floating thousands of people down river to be slaves to build Bangkok. And you see all the canals around Bangkok and those were dug out by slaves from, from, from, of Lack.

people mostly. So the people, obviously, you know, you don't have a lot of time to organize when this is going on. What do you do? You head out to the principalities that are staying independent that are too far away. You go up into the mountain borderlands into areas you can control and blockade, you know, some narrow passes to keep the Siamese from getting in there or even going into into Vietnam. So just totally depopulated. So right when this happens, just decades after the first, you know, conflagration, the French had acquired colonies in Cambodia,

Koshin Shina, which is South Vietnam. They had a consulate up in Long Prabong. And then Annam in Vietnam on the coast. And so they're kind of getting a feel for what the local, you know, situation is. There's the Siamese who are... You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design.

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Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Ready for huge savings? Well, mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th, because the Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items, all reduced to clear.

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funzies, but didn't work with the French. To their credit, the Siamese were the only Asian country that were never colonized or brought to heal by Europeans, not. not to be sneezed at. So in the 1870s and 1880s, due to various internal things going on in China, they had what they called the Black Flag Army, which was various southern Chinese groups that were making incursions into Tonkin, which is North Vietnam, as well as Laos and eventually Siam. that caused the King of Long Prabong to reach out to the French at their consulate there and say, we would like to be brought in as a protectorate along with your territories that you have in Vietnam,

because otherwise they would have absolutely just collapsed and probably been essentially genocided, my opinion. So France granted a protectorate status in 1889, had a little bit of a war with Siam to consolidate their control over the east bank of the Mekong River and the Siamese relented. So after that was a fairly peaceful period, you know, while World War I, et cetera, was going on. And things were pretty chill in French Indochina. The French made a net investment into Laos during the protectorate in colonial eras. Some of this is French proclivities, but they also needed a buffer, a buffer state against the Siamese who became the tie in the 1920s. So obviously there's historical grudges that the Lao held against the Siamese, the Thai. So the French were encouraging Lao nationalism as long as it didn't manifest as anti-French.

But there was an interesting rub. The French administration in both Laos and Cambodia was primarily Vietnamese. A lot of this is because of the fact that the Vietnamese, you'll recall Thomas talking about how they followed a, oh gosh, why can't, like a Mandarin, not in terms of like the Mandarin language, but like the social structure. The Vietnamese made very good administrators. And the merchant class was largely Vietnamese, although to a lesser extent, there were Chinese who had migrated into their, and even some Indians. Indian merchants in Southeast Asia were a very, very old thing. But at this point, there were only some. So the interesting thing is that the French founded a lot of institutions that published Lao historical texts. So they basically saved the culture in many ways. They undertook major archaeological works. So an awful lot of the really famous

temples and stupas in Laos were restored by the French and they basically the French essentially redeveloped and cultivated what became Lao nationalism.

So World War II comes and there were various kinds of tricky sneaky people that started showing up. as well as outside ideas. So again, I mentioned the Vietnamese influence in Laos and Cambodia. It's really important to understand that 60% of the population of Laos's six urban areas, the cities and large towns, 60% of the population were Vietnamese. The Vietnamese held key positions in the civil bureaucracies, as well as the police. And so this became almost a colony, a Vietnamese colony, in these Lao territories.

So when Japan invaded French into China in September 1940, the Vichy French negotiated a deal, which allowed them to still administer the colony. The Thai tried to take advantage of this situation and invaded parts of Western Laos in January 1941. This rapidly became a stalemate. It was a very small kind of war. And the Japanese mediated a ceasefire to calm things down, enforced by the Japanese and the Japanese and the Siamese. So there was a partial seeding of those territories along the West Bank

of the May Kong during the war, period. The fellow that you see here is Aaron Bank, who was an OSS operative. Yes, his relatives are involved in banking. Author Peter Kemp in his book for Alms for Oblivion when he's on the ground in French Indochina and Thailand during the war, doing his sneaky Pete thing, and especially at the tail end of the war, when they're trying to kind of figure out collectively how the peace is going to work in this area. He spoke very, Peter Kemp spoke very passionately about how bank essentially, essentially, allowed the murder of a French officer by

Vietnamese for no good reason. But he didn't care about it. Because again, you have to keep in mind that the American position was the French colonies are finished. You got to get out of here. This

red banner with Chinese characters up at the top and then Vietnamese writing below it with the hammer and sickle, This is the banner of the Indo-Chinese Communist Party. The Indo-Chinese Communist Party was almost 100% Vietnamese. The common turn, the Communist International and Oregon of the Soviet Union, were encouraging the Vietnamese to get some non-Vietnamese,

into this thing to kind of legitimize their activities. So what they began attempting to do, which was to deal with an anti-colonialist movement

that was named the Lao Isara, which was a native thing that started springing up under Japanese and Vichy French co-occupation. It was a national

nationalist movement, the Indo-Chinese Communist Party tried to bring them in and with mixed results. So after the war, the French returned, reclaimed the provinces seized by the tie. So imagine this. You just fought World War II, and you have to go to the other side of the world and reclaim old colonies. A lot of that was done by the French Foreign Legion. We know who were there. There's a, oh, can I see the title of it? Yeah, there it is. Devil's Guard. There's a fantastic quote-unquote fictional novel called Devil's Guard about a, it's written by an American, and it is supposedly the the recordings of conversations that he had had, this American had had with a retired German Foreign Legion veteran.

That's a fantastic story about what took place during the First Indo-Chinese War. but I will note that this was required reading for a friend of mine who was in Marine Recon. His lieutenant made all the guys read this because it had. It has incredible counterinsurgency doctrine baked into it. So good stuff. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the little Newbridge warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite LIDLL items all reduced to clear.

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So the territory is reconstituted as the Kingdom of Laos and the Lao Isara, that independence movement, was quite openly absorbed by the Vietnamese. So even in February 1951, I had talked

about how the common turn was pressuring the Vietnamese to get more non- Vietnamese representation in their ICP. And by February, 1951, there were only 81 LOW members out of like 2,100 in Lao territory who were Lao. The rest were almost entirely Vietnamese. An example, the first president of the Lao People's Democratic Republic, which was Institute in 1975. His name was Kaisan Pomavan, and his real surname was Nguyen. He changed his name. He was half, half Lao, half Vietnamese. And in the, there's a very famous cave, like right on the border

with North Vietnam and far eastern, northeastern Laos. There's a famous cave where the, Patate Lao, which was the Lao Communist Party, hit out during the war and all of the books, it's all Marxist-Leninist-type doctrine, material, et cetera. It's all in Vietnamese. Who taught these people to change their names? I know, right? Damn, shapeshifters. Keep in mind, this is coming from the common turn. You said it, man. So it's straight out of the common turn instructions. Now, one other thing that I'll point out that's interesting. So

do you remember that map of the settlement, you know, during the migration period? So an awful lot of these supposed Lao communist troops are from the various tribal peoples that so cousins in North Vietnam, so like the black tie, the white tie, that the colors refer to stuff they wear in their costume to identify their tribal affiliations. Yeah, so a lot of them were folks from from North Vietnam anyway, but because they speak the same language, it was good for their cover. There were also actual Lao who were communists, but they were mostly people in these areas that had been conquered up in the northeast. Although for their legitimate public face, a half-brother of the King of Laos, Prince

Suponavon became known as the Red Prince. He aligned with the communist, because frankly, he saw the writing on the wall. But a lot of it was due to the fact that, again, the education administration creative elements during, you know, during the French and the Chinese period, we're in the much more developed Vietnamese centers, like around Hanoy and such. So the, the Lao would go there to get educated and quite often go from there to France and such. And Thomas was talking about it himself, you know, when I was listening to your Cold War series on the Vietnamese, such as Ho Chi Men, they would go to the university in France and socialism was the thing. Socialism and communism

and communism was on the menu for learning about and studying at the time. So not surprising that it works out this way. So the French lost the first Indo-Chinese war. The Kingdom of Laos was granted full independence in 1953. And again, this is right in the period where we were looking at that map earlier with JFK. And this is really the calm before the second Indochina war. So next door, Vietnam split into communist north, American-sponsored Republic of Vietnam in the South. And again, I just like to point this out. So in the South, South, South Vietnam is Cushin Shina and parts of Anam. These largely ethnic, and historically different than the north, which was Tonkin. The rulers of South Vietnam

were Vietnamese, Koshin Shina and Anam. They had been conquered by the Nguyenlords and other Vietnamese groups, but a lot of the people were ethnically, they were going through kind of an ethnogenesis and fusing to become the modern Vietnamese. But old school, they were not necessarily quite often. They were not descended from people who came down from the Vietnamese who came down from China. There was a linguistic assimilation. And even regionally, there's differences in the way that they speak, especially in the old days. It's different now with standardized education.

But in the early 20th century, they were quite different. I'm sure there's Vietnamese people. who are mad at me right now, if any are listening. It's okay. Anyway, so what happens when, you know, when there's a, when there's a new gap? American government and quote, unquote, private aid money. We know how that works these days. Aid workers, volunteers, and quote unquote, advisors flooded into the Republic of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. to resist communist expansion. And this had actually been going on in Thailand for several years, since after the war. The OSS and the British had been involved in Thailand. Very, very involved.

You may recall also that at the end of World War II, and Kemp talks about this a lot, something like 100,000 British soldiers who had just been released, there were the ones that were captured around Singapore and some of other locations, Hong Kong, they were like rearmed and brought to Vietnam to essentially transition the Japanese out. And a lot of the idea was that they wanted, the Western powers wanted to control like all the weapons that were sitting around now to try to prevent internecine warfare. So, so, What happens when lots of money, aid money and stuff and material flows into a place that connected people become rich? Tons of weapons are everywhere.

And the Vietnamese and Chinese communities in these areas become insurgents, again, driven by nationalism and communism. So there was a very brief overt U.S. military project in Laos called White Star, Operation White Star, where U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers came in, not undercover in uniform and were training Lao forces just like was done in Vietnam and continued in Vietnam. But what happened was in 1960, a fellow on the left who was a veteran of the French Indochinese forces. And I think he was also affiliated with French Foreign Legion. Captain Gongle, he led his battalion into Vengchan, the capital, where they overthrew the Royal Lao government there in a coup d'etat as a protest. against corruption due to U.S. funding caused by U.S. funding. And what he pointed out was there was the Geneva agreement that stated that Laos would be neutral.

But here's all this American money and equipment. And he felt like, you know, something wasn't, wasn't right. But he was also very naive. He was ousted in December of 1960 by rightist troops. It came up from Savoniquette, which was the home of a surviving, like, right-wing, Lao nationalist remnant of King Anouang's army, who had failed in their rising against the Siamese and been crushed 130 years before. It was a remnant down there, and so a bunch of these families stepped in because they understood there's no such thing as a neutral country.

It's you're against the communists or you're with the communists. And the communists were Vietnamese. Gongle fell for the ideology trap. So thus begins the Second Indochina War. things are heating up in the east but you're starting to see these big movements of armed forces.

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and discover our latest offers Cooper design that moves finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen financial services Ireland limited subject to lending criteria terms and conditions apply Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland limited trading as Cooper financial services is regulated by the central bank of Ireland in Laos fellow up at the top Bill Lair he was a World War II veteran who went to college on the GI Bill and then went to work for the CIA.

He had worked with the Thai for 10 or 12 years, if I remember correctly. And what he was doing was, again, following that what became in the, I think Army Special Forces were formally developed around the 52 or 53, maybe slightly later, in terms of force multiplication. Um, you know, their, their primary mission was to go in and basically build guerrilla armies from the ground up. And so he had been building quote unquote border police in Thailand, um, and basically light infantry units. And so he went into Laos with a bunch of these Thai border police because in northeast Thailand, they are ethnically Lao and speak the same language despite some, you know, some of the specific dialect that the central government pushed. But it's basically the same when you actually are on the ground in northeast Thailand. It's the same language. And they started looking for people who they could build into these, just like in Vietnam, the civilian

irregular defense groups doing the same thing in Laos. And they really found purchase among the the Hmong Hill tribes up in northeast Lao, hard up against that border with Vietnam, because these guys, the Hmong tribe had clicked up with the French and the royal Lao government because they understood that they were just going to get bulldozed by the Vietnamese. It's not, you don't want to be an ethnic minority under under the Vietnamese. So they were a great group because they are mountain people. They're tough. They're used to being on the run. They had just come down from China in the 19th century themselves, kind of scooting along in the highlands. And they made a really good observers,

local defense, and, you know, shoot and scoot and kind of guys. And they were completely deniable as U.S. assets. They got armed with all this World War II equipment, garnd rifles, M1 carbines, you know, the old, the old bazookas, BARs, et cetera. You know, we had millions and millions and millions of these things. And so they would go to regular armies all over the place, including South Vietnam or Anne in Laos. They gave them, they handed those weapons over to the regular army. which we'll talk about a little bit later. I'm making quote, quote marks off, off camera.

But they also went to these guerrilla groups. So in a follow up to JFK's presentation, there was another agreement in Geneva that was signed, you know, underscoring the neutrality of Laos in July 1962 and all signatories immediately violated the agreement, but they did it covertly. And so the important thing to understand is this is the frame. The frame about Laos comes out of the fact that America, Vietnam, China, well, China wasn't a signatory to it. I don't think the second one.

And the Soviets all ignored the fact that the other signatories were violating this, this because they were also violating the terms of the international agreement. So, um, but what happened was because of this written agreement overt U.S. military forces essentially stayed off the ground henceforth in Laos. The U.S. State Department via U.S. aid and the embassy, um, and the CIA ran the ground war in Laos, not the U.S. military. If U.S. military personnel were needed to do something in Laos, they were sheep dipped, which meant that they were on paper mustered out and given a lot of times state department IDs, you know, issued by foreign consulates with civilian covers, particularly being assigned to

CIA front companies. What kind of front companies? Glowy logistics. So I think a lot of people are really familiar with Air America because of that movie. And there's been a number of books on the subject. But essentially, that was, Air America was just one of many CIA front companies that were their aviation assets. So there was the Pacific Corporation, civil air transport. You'll see a picture of a C-47 up top left painted to look commercial. It was a nationalist Chinese airline, and I have quotes around both of those, that were founded by Claire Chenal, who was the founder of the Flying Tigers. They were gifted surplus World War II aircraft by the U.S. military, and they used them for civilian air travel routes and freight, as well as covert operations. Do you think a lot of regular normie civilians in any of these countries were traveling by air?

No. It was almost entirely covert operations or doing stuff, you know, American assets flying like local allies around, even if it wasn't technically like a CIA operation. The company was transferred to the CIA in 1959. rebranded as Air America. It wasn't like there was paper that said CIA to this, but they were acquired by another shell company. Continental Airlines operated an air transport division that was contracted to the U.S. government known as Continental Air Services Inc. CASI. And so when you look at paperwork that American civilians had, like I have a cool image coming up here in a second that shows there's a CASI phone number that they could call to get flights. So here's the thing.

The topography of Laos necessitated that they mostly use the short takeoff and landing aircraft here and later helicopters because you're flying into these remote mountainous areas most of the time. But the C-47s were used wherever possible just because of the sheer volume of carrying capacity. there was a CIA-run air maintenance company called Air Asia Company Limited that would maintain all these aircraft, and they would use American, foreign, and local employees. And armed U.S. military aircraft, so formal U.S. military, U.S. Air Force, etc., they operated out of Thai. land and Vietnam exclusively, they never touched airfields in Laos. All right. Americans on the Lao front, there were different kinds of folks, whether members of the

State Department, civilian contract workers or U.S. aid employees, they were brought into the war by the expansion of ground combat operations and the guiding hand of the CIA. Top right, you'll see a bunch of dudes, white guys. all Americans with all kinds of firearms who are actual CIA employees. To the left is an American aid worker named Pop Buwell. He joined the International Voluntary Services, which was a organization founded by Mennonite Brethren and Quaker Brethren in in 1953. And they started doing aid work all around, mostly focusing on, you know, allies,

Coptic Christians in Egypt. They started getting funding from U.S. aid and grew like crazy. So again, there's an original NGO in the pattern that we're used to seeing. So he is a Pop Buell is doing work for U.S. foreign policy. through the auspices of US aid, you know, but with a NGO cover. The dudes at the right are CIA paramilitary officers and sometimes case officers. So early on, they were just like World War II and Korea vets with training in guerrilla warfare, et cetera. later on, the primary source of new CIA paramilitary officers were special forces guys.

So you do a tour or two in SF. And if you're good at the leadership and training role, hey, we have a special project for you in Laos. Do you want to become a civilian again, you know, quote unquote? And then there were also case officers or operations officers who were more focused on clandestine intelligence gathering. There's a really great book. I have some reading material listed at the end of this, but there's a really great book called Cash on Delivery that was written by a case officer who was managing small teams for intelligence, enemy snatches, and he never talks about it, but reading between the lines. I should say he doesn't talk explicitly about it, but probably assassinations were carried out also. The key thing to keep in mind

is that USAID, IVS, paid contract workers, etc., they were taking care of the logistics to support these guerrilla forces that were being trained, led, and managed by the paramilitary officers and most importantly, their families, because, you know, you got a, you got a gorilla. He's, you know, he's 23 years old. He's already married and has a couple kids. So that was a key, a key thing. The hospitals and, you know, air evac for injuries and relocating people to get them, the civilian population to get them away from the war zone. What weapons am I seeing in that picture? Ah, yes.

I see an AK. AK, this is a PPSH 41, M16. I think this is an M16. This is, I think this is a Savage 67 pump shotgun piece of shit. I had one. S-KS. M-16. It's too faded to see what it is.

But all kinds of good stuff. And then they have- Got at least a couple. got at least a couple going native yes absolutely quite a few these guys were total cowboys man yeah they often speak very fondly of it and uh let me put it this way a one of my mentors when i was a young man who's no longer with us i dedicate my first novel to him jim um the dedication of that is boys he walks in one day one night rather doing petrily patrolling his property around midnight.

And he says, boys in an ambush always err on the side of violence and just goes upstairs. We're like, yes, sir. But anyway, the way he put it is he was in advice, different from the person I was talking about earlier people before we started recording. But he was a, he was in the Air Force. And he was sheep dipped as a state department advisor, quote unquote, at age. 20, you know, and he was one of the first. Yeah, so much experience on international affairs. Exactly. Especially the making love part. That became a specialty, but making love and reigning death from the sky because he became one of the first spooky gunship weapons operators.

So anyway, he said that it was a great time before it got really military. So he didn't like it when, after 1965, when the regular army and everyone showed up and you couldn't pretend. When it was the Wild West, everything was fine. Now we got to follow regs. What's up? Oh, my God. Yeah, exactly. I'll, I think I'm going to, I'm going to do some, I'm going to do some stuff for him because he's passed and I'll post, he's got a lot of great stories. And I'll post, I'll post some of the, I'll post some pictures and some other cool stuff. his son's gone too. So there's no one will complain. All right. So these are some, I'm about to get back into the abstract again, but here's a few more details. And these are really people who became part of the legend of the American involvement in Laos. So on the left, this is Tony Poe, the American, I think is Posh.

It's a Polish surname. He was a longtime CA paramilitary. He was a USMC veteran. He was training Koreans in South Koreans in guerrilla warfare before the Korean War started. He was organizing guys in Tibet, who he called the greatest guerrillas in history. There just weren't enough of them. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th

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Like he's that guy. And he's with Vang Pao, a young Vang Pao here who was the leader of the Hmong, the whole, the anti-communist clans within the Hmong Hill tribe, because some Hmong Hill tribe clans became pro-communist, if they had connections in North Vietnam primarily. It was kind of accidents of geography and how things worked out in World War II. And then this is, I can't remember his name, one of Vung Pao's lieutenants, but anyway, this is the like the dark, gruesome, you know, legend in America, the folks on the left. And I'll talk more about Vang Pao in a second.

But on the right is the positive, cheerful, youthful, sensitive understanding aspect, which is this is Vint Lawrence. his grandfather founded General Electric. He was extremely well off. He graduated from Princeton with an art history degree. And at the time, they had the draft. He was tagged to go into the army and used family connections to get an assignment in the CIA. And so he was in Laos from 1962 to 1966. He stayed in the CIA for a little while after that.

And then went on to become a cartoonist for the New Yorker and other folks. But he took a lot of great photos in Laos. And he also filmed some footage that I'll talk about shortly. His reports, his writing for the CIA when he got back to the states is among the most thoughtful and interesting stuff about the war. he just passed away a couple years ago very um very cool and interesting like uh you know upper crust old school american um you know elite you know just a man of quality um and so we get i'll have some resources that you can share about him because his stuff is very interesting All right. So Americans on the May Kong. So in the background, this is actually a phone book that Americans in Laos were handed that someone who had grown up there because his folks worked for USAID. He had kept a bunch of this material and did scans and put him online about 10 years ago or so. But anyway, so.

The really important thing to understand is there were a lot of Americans that ended up in Laos. And again, remember, this is a country of 2 million people at the time. And so around the embassy and any of these specific missions, along the cities is where the bulk of these kind of civilian workers would be along the Meekong River. Now, as in the Ukraine, the key thing to understand is that the royal out government's entire budget was paid for via American aid dollars. All development programs, refugee assistance, education, medical missions, and so on were paid for and were designed in pursuit of U.S. foreign policy. All aspects of the war, military or civilian, were subservient to overall U.S. foreign policy aims. Again, I'm going to reemphasize the context of, as I say in the next bit, the Cold War geopolitical realities, the State Department via the percentage of the ambassador to Laos, the American ambassador, and the CIA. So the guys on the ground and, you know, U.S. aid was subservient to the ambassador.

The CIA was its own thing. And so they would clash quite often over execution of the war. But again, the overall execution of the war, whether you cared about the people that you were leading into battle or not, were being done based on Cold War geopolitical realities and U.S. foreign policy aims. So anytime you read anything, you'll read some really passionate stuff from these CIA paramilitaries and people like that or the USA guys that are actually up in the highlands. And they'll be so mad at the ambassador about this or that. Because the ambassador could say, eh, right now is not a good time for, you know, heavy U.S. Air Force air support. Sorry. Totally U.S.8 expenditures of all types in Laos from 195 to 1973, not counting U.S. Air Force,

probably not including the cost of director laundered equipment transfers is between $7.5 and $11.1 billion in 2025. $1973. It was $1.1.5 billion. And again, this doesn't count money that was associated with the U.S. military operations in Vietnam are supporting the Vietnam sphere. It doesn't count money that was spent on Vietnam that trickled over. It doesn't count money that was spent on Vietnam that trickled over. It doesn't count, you know, the equipment that was U.S. Air Force and then it just gets handed to the locals, that's a lot of money, especially when you look at the budgets in those eras. It's a lot, a lot of money. It's a country of two million people. So, yeah. Well, it's also, you know, at least we get to see Ukraine on TV. Yes. This is something that was completely clandestine. 100% clandestine. And slides, the next couple slides will talk a little more about that. And it sounds crazy and naive to us right now, but we should understand it was a different era.

And they had total control over what went out over the air and what was published, which causes significant distortions in the story. That's actually the next slide. But let me finish this slide. So here's a bunch of these guys are CIA-led special guerrilla units in Laos. So the force is raised. Let me step back for a second. Ground combat operations were carried out using the special forces model, which is U.S. leadership and training.

But then you use local combatants to do all the fighting. and then you have American or local air assets. The government, the formal Royal Lao Army was largely sitting in a garrison and their commanders creating ghost armies and skimming their salaries. So if you were a, if you were one of these, if you were one of these remnants of the old days and you wanted to fight against invaders, because the Ho Chi Mantrail ran through your homeland and your aunt died when she was press ganged to be coolly labor for the North Vietnamese army,

you're not going to join the Royal Lao Army. You're going to click up with the CIA-led guys. So originally their forces were primarily defensive in nature or focus on gathering intelligence. There was a lot of work with small groups who would go in and do, kind of bomb damage assessment, you know, after bombing along the Ho Chi men trail and trying to identify better targets. Technology was an issue because of the limits. And when you see that topography, like small, slow, low flying planes were the only way that you could really get precision. But then that exposes you to, you know, anti-aircraft fire and even small arms from

the ground were a big threat. And so it was this really interesting push-pull between all these demands. And are you supporting, are you fighting to defend Laos and your communities, or are you just targeting the logistical chain that's going from the north down into South Vietnam? And these were all kind of like debates that the locals were having. Because these are not these are not chumps. I mean, ready for huge savings. We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back.

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Cooper financial services is regulated by the central bank of Ireland a lot of the junior infantrymen were very just very unaware of the world beyond their front door like why why wouldn't they be but the leadership of of these groups were very, these are people whose families had been elite for 1,500 years, and they knew their lineages. And so this was a big challenge for the CIA leaders, because there would be language barriers, but there's also the local thing of where they just wouldn't talk to the American advisors about what the real debates taking place. um, were. And the Americans would typically have fairly limited language, local language skills.

This, the guys that stuck around for a long time that tended to resolve itself. Um, and then it would be up to the locals to the local leadership. They would typically speak French, um, and English, or be forced to learn English. They would do all their radio commands in English. Um, and, and such, So anyway, really interesting push pull. It's interesting because they don't really, you have these Americans going there and they don't really understand the culture. And you have these American advisors who are working in Ukraine and don't realize Ukraine is, most of them don't realize Ukraine is about a 350 year old ethnic grievance. 100% the parallel that I'm shooting for, dude. that that's 100% it.

They know 20 years of history. They know, oh, I remember President Kennedy's presentation. And they get that after World War II thing, but they don't know the past history. They don't know any of the context that's really important to understand. And so it's just this, it's just this mess. there's another thing that's really important to understand and as it relates to weather patterns. So this is the tropics, and I mentioned before, there's two seasons, basically. There's the rainy season and the dry season.

When you look at the topography of the country and the fact that it's like mountains, river valleys, and that means rivers, which means water. What would happen is the Vietnamese would be able to advance in the dry season, but then would get pushed back by these small guerrilla units going in and calling in air strikes on them during the wet season. And then they would have to consolidate defensible holdings and try to hold during the wet season to progress. So it was this push pull. And then again, the challenge there is that it's easier to move on the ground in the dry season. In the dry season, there's better visibility for the aircraft as well.

So they're going to be able to be a little more effective in making strikes. But then you're also really at an advantage if you can have very small teams go in and identify these guys during the wet season and clobber them. And so it was the tactical realities were really, were really kind of strange, but they really make sense if you keep that in mind for looking at any of the patterns of how did they get so far. And then they ended up losing ground in the next year. And then like they fight over the same ground over and over again. It's because of these weather patterns and kind of the tactical and strategic. approach that America was taking with the local troops. And then there was another kind of just as a last consideration is local forces would be defending

operations. They would defend positions supporting operations against North Vietnam. So there would be these pockets of what they call these indigenous troops that were called the Commando Raiders, which were really highly trained. raider groups that would get dropped into north vietnam you don't hear a lot of stories about them but they have crazy crazy stories i've talked to one of those guys before um and then there was this other there was a site called lima site uh 85 uh which was in puppati mountain a pooh means mountain in in lao and uh it was a mountain top radar installation uh like almost almost all the way to

the north vietnamese border um that was used to guide american bombers in the the bombing raids in hanoy so they could triangulate their positions accurately for more precise bombing of military targets because you know despite the reputation like the goal of like arc light raids of B-52 scattering bombs everywhere isn't to blow up brown people. It's to... Discover five-star luxury at Trump Dunebeg. Unwind in our luxurious spa.

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Beg, search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunbiog, Kosh Farage. Hit militarily relevant targets, right? And so they would have these positions up there, and there would be just these insane battles of the North Vietnamese trying to capture them. So good times. All right. So that's, I'm going to pivot slightly. And then I'm going to get back into the bombing.

And I'm bringing this up because I talked about Tony Poe and Vint Lawrence and Vang Pao. And, you know, a lot of, a lot of this stuff just because it was in the dark for so long, it's remained in the dark. And the little dribs and drabs of information that comes out, a lot of times it's really, it's almost, it's almost transparently subversive when you look at it, although it can be hard to make the case. And let me make the case here on these two guys. These guys own two big memes that will give you like mental aids. You didn't even have to like spell out the second,

the guy in the picture on the right. I mean, it's right there. Yeah, dude. So the guy on the left is Professor Alfred McCoy. This is a little reductionist. He doesn't say Laos was all about the CIA trafficking heroin. But that's the takeaway that has been made because he wrote a book called The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia that was published in 1972. And then it turned into, I forget what it is.

It's like the CIA and the politics of heroin or something like that with an addition that was released in, I think, the 80s because he was talking about the contras and such. But here's the challenge. He's a LibTard who graduated from Columbia University, completed his master's at UC Berkeley in 1969. and he was working on his PhD in Yale for the next eight years. And he obviously comes from money and he was comfortable and he was running around. And what happened was, what I believe is that he was spoon-fed bad information to distract from the real story. bear with me. So his, McCoy went to loud.

He's on democracy now. So yes, exactly. That lines up. So, oh yeah. And he was, he ultimately became a, a professor at like Madison, you know, University of Wisconsin at Madison. And he's basically a professor of, being really gay when talking about Asia and claims to be a big expert on Laos, but what happened was

in 1969, he was given introductions to CIA or former CIA operatives who spoonfed him the talking points that he would go on to repeat. He had no local language skills. He only spent two weeks in Laos. up country for like less than a day, he saw some material being loaded onto an America plane and was told that it was heroin. And then he had, then he would talk to locals who, and then a translator would tell him things. Now, here's the thing. It's really quite simple.

Opium was 100% a staple, an economic staple in Southeast Asia for a couple hundred years. The Hill tribes of Laos had long paid the local princes taxes in the form of opium. What they would do is they would grow opium and then they would trade it with an authorized trader for the local principality and under the French. They did the exact same thing. And then that trader would trade them for steel and cloth and salt. Because when you're up in the highlands, you can't get salt. And so anyway, this was this thing that had been going on for hundreds of years.

The French continued it. And what did the French do? They turned it into an industry. It started to getting refined into heroin and morphine. So there's the legitimate purposes. And then there's the shadow deal. As you'll recall, the French connection was about the, the sanitized term is that they were, I think they were Sicilian.

Not Sicilian. Corsican, excuse me, Corsican mafia were trafficking heroin. And what would happen is it would come out of mostly Laos and a little bit from Vietnam. And then it would be processed in the old days. It would be processed in Turkey using these old networks. and then the Corsican mafia would distribute it from there. Alfred McCoy got fixated on the true statement that the Hmong Hill tribes had this thing going on, and totally blamed Vong Pao,

and this goes back to Tony Poe telling him this stuff. Tony Poe had washed out by this time and was just an alcoholic, like, pickling himself in splitting his time between Ven-chan and Bangkok being a degenerate and just telling wild stories. So he hand-feeds him this story, because here's the truth. the Lao government was controlling this. The general of running the Royal Lao Army, one which means fat, lan reticon, and he was fat by local standards.

He was basically a hub who had a processing plant that was refining the opium intake. heroin and then it would get shipped out through the French connection. And dumbass McCoy says Vang Pao and the Hmong were drug dealers. Because, and here's why this is absurd. By 1967, there was no substantial holdings of the Hmong of territory where they had been settled for a long time because the PAVN was everywhere. The North Vietnamese army was everywhere up there.

They didn't have these strongholds. The strongholds that they had were farther north and west, which were no longer Hmong. So the Hmong weren't, I mean, I'm sure there were still Hmong who had poppy fields like a little bit by that time. But what it was is it was all coming from somewhere else. So, Al McCoy, Dr. Al McCoy as of 1977, tells a story where, like, Little Vang Pao, who was chewed up and spit out by the CIA was like the big drug dealer who was responsible for getting, you know, American GIs hooked on heroin in Vietnam and stuff. Now, some of what he says is true, which is that, like, everyone was. on it. But the most important thing to understand is the CIA did not traffic heroin.

I'm going to repeat that. The CIA did not traffic heroin. What happened was that the CIA looked the other way while these old networks did their thing. And the old, the people way way up top in the CIA are part of these old networks, or at least, or telling the CIA what to do, are part of these old networks. So the, the Corsicans, you know, wink, wink, the French, wink, wink, you know, the Turkish, wink, wink, all this stuff is just like, you know, steps in the totem pole, like low steps in the totem pole of something that went on for a really long time. Now, what happened. When that war ended, the heroin just came from somewhere else, like the raw materials just came from somewhere else. So you have to be really careful thinking about it,

because McCoy made it all about, you know, the non-democratic, you know, general of the Hmong, who was a really bad guy and claimed that, you know, he had all this, you know, who was this big drug trafficker, but he basically ended his days in America, like getting donations from Hmong who would send a tiny bit of their welfare check to their tribal leader. And a bunch of the ruling class people at the top retired to France mostly with gobs of stolen aid money and frankly their skim from the drug. drug money, but where did the real drug money go? The drug money went to the people who are running these operations since, you know, the 20s, the teens before that in the West. So you have to be

really careful because McCoy gives you that democracy now to your bullshit. Are you implying a continuation of the old opium wars kind of thing? A hundred percent, I'm implying it, because that's where a lot of the heroin that ended up in China was from Southeast Asia, Burma, in India. So it's the French basically said, oh, look at what the, and it isn't like, it isn't like the president of France. It's like the people with names similar to Bramfman, and as well as, you know, actual French French people. They make these decisions based on these existing networks and watching, hey, look at the English or, you know, and wink wink English.

The city of London is being really successful at this stuff. But it's like he does this hand waving where you look in the wrong direction. So it's a real thing, but he didn't have enough knowledge to come to the conclusions that he was repeating that had been fed to him. So what that tells me is that there was, one, there was a struggle going on because of this at the time. And there was, there, there were DEA or the precursor organization to the DEA in Laos after about 1967 or 68. I forget exactly. And they could have shut down the whole thing like immediately, but they never did. Go figure. But they were going after the small. timers. So it's this really, it's this obfuscation that takes

away from the real story. Now he did talk about the fact that again, the U.S. government was allowing these things to happen, and he did tell some really relevant stories about organizations

that were involved, but it's like this stuff is being hand-fed to him for a reason. I also find him very annoying. So like, and he, and he repeated a bunch of stuff that was just pure obfuscation. So anyway, so this is me telling you don't overdose on red pills. You can't just believe the stuff that sounds accurate. Now, speaking of that, Fred Bramfman in government secret bombing fellow at the top right. He was an educational advisor in Vengchon working for USAID. In September 1969,

there was a flood of Lao that were displaced because of ground combat operations in the plane of jars. And the plane of jars, I'll show you some images about it here in a second. It's right on the border with Vietnam. A part of North Carolina, North Vietnam is traditional Lao territory. And there was a flood of refugees into the capital, because they didn't have anywhere else to put them. Bramfman spoke Lao functionally. And so he would be talking to people, and he was like, what? They're telling me something that's really important. And so he got connections with some people who were translating for these folks, who later became known as members of the Patate Lao. They were Lao communists that were translating these stories from these refugees.

Because when you have basic functional language, you can't get into the internecine stuff. You just, you're not going to be able to do it. So he was reliant on translations from other people. And he heard about these U.S. bombing campaigns going on up there. So he claims that he went to U.S. officials in Vangchan, and they told him, the U.S. had nothing to do with aerial bombing, and he believed that they literally didn't know about it. There's no fucking way that any U.S. official, like a real official, wouldn't know about what was going on. It's impossible. And all of his stories about this avoid the fact that there was a communist invasion, North Vietnamese invasion, and ground combat operations taking place.

it's like there in the Garden of Eden, the brown people who are in the world and at peace started having 500 pound bombs dropped on them for no reason. Now here's the thing. There was no public information about the operations going on at the time. But when you don't talk about ground. combat operations and the false framing of this, that it was, there's all this false framing that's attributed to him being the first person to push this stuff out. And all of his framing is they were at peace and Americans just started bombing them for no reason. Now, I agree that

bombing civilians is not a nice thing to do and you should avoid doing it. But his framework fits perfectly into a communist propaganda campaign. And he was indeed a, at least open left socialist and, you know, third worldist, right? In the original sense, not in the anti-Semitic sense. So I wanted to cover those before I get to the next phase. So the, official American framing of bombing operations in Laos and Cambodia has always focused on the Ho Chiman Trail, which was a real thing. And then in Cambodia, the Sihanuk Trail. These are all bombing operations to target North Vietnamese supply lines going through these countries. This bombing did take place in great volume. And the interesting

thing that happened, though, is it intensified over time when the smaller, like, tactical bombers and tactical ground attack aircraft transitioned to be replaced by bigger and bigger, faster, more ordinance, et cetera, up to the B-52s, and the local forces, whether it was LOW, Cambodia, Vietnam, or Thailand was given the old attack aircraft. And so it became strategic bombing. And you might remember Thomas mentioned that the Kent State, oopsie, the oopsies that happened in Kent State was part of a wave of protests caused by the first awareness of bombing in Cambodia being. shared to the American public. On the heels of Bramfman talking about this stuff and my digging in on that,

everyone knew that we were bombing North Vietnam and bombing supply lines associated with the North Vietnamese. And then they said, oh, yeah, and some of this is in the countries right next door, which are controlled by the Vietnamese and that are these are the supply lines. but Americans being retarded think, oh, they must be bombing the capitals because I remember like World War II pictures and stuff like that. It's this weird thing that I feel it's really strange and maybe I'm naive, but like it seems like they're brutally naive to believe that like you can have people can hop over the borders of countries and then magically there's. no war there. It's because they're thinking that like everything's this nice, orderly Western country. So I mean, it's really important to understand the differences between these things.

And yeah, the U.S. government was not openly talking about it. I agree. But this this whole thing fits beautifully into a, and I hate to say it because I know people will get mad at me for saying communist propaganda, but you know what I mean. It's like, it's this deception that's taking place that actually serves the other guys, even though, like, yes, Americans are right to be like, wait, this is expanding, this is way more expanded than the war that we were already sold that we don't like. You get the distinction that I'm trying to make here, Pete? Yes, I do. Okay. It's very nuanced, and like we cannot like it, but it's important. to understand the difference. And that's why I was talking about those other guys. So again,

the dominant Bramfman influence narrative that you'll still hear today, that that is the official Lao communist government position when they talk about all the unexploded ordinance, particularly in along the eastern border of Vietnam. And America's State Department repeats this bullshit, pardon my French, which is that American aircraft engaged in sorties over North Vietnam, were not permitted to land at U.S. Air Force bases in Thailand or South Vietnam with bombs still attached because there is danger, so they had to get rid of them. So they randomly dropped them on civilians in Laos because they're racist.

That's like literally the story that they provide. In reality, those bombs that were being dropped in Laos were targeted by forward air controllers or local forward air guides on the ground who would assign targets. So in the 60s and the 70s, aerial bombing was not particularly precise. It was more precise than it was during the Spanish Civil War in World War II. The fast movers jets were too fast to guarantee accuracy in like little narrow valleys. Like when you see those limestone karsts, especially in bad or cloudy weather, or if they're staying high, because they don't want to get so low that they can get hit by 52s or, you know, bigger stuff or even AKs. When I say 52, it's the, it's the, is it the 14.5 millimeter heavy machine guns, the Soviet ones. And so up in the north and in the mountains of Laos, and you've already seen how mountainous it is there, it's always cloudy.

And there, and there's bad weather a lot. And so they're doing their best. And again, They're still dropping bombs all over a country that were supposedly not at war with, but they were dropping bombs under control of forward air controllers to support ground combat operations between Lao and Hmong, you know, forces. So official military forces in Laos of the legitimate government of Laos, led by the CIA, yes. against the people's army of Vietnam who had invaded the country. And they don't say this. They don't say this. And I feel like it's intentional. And it's really easy to explain this and go, oh, yeah, of course, it makes sense.

So the tactical bombing, like the in tight, close quarters, was conducted by early, by prop aircraft and they were really happy if they could get like the old T-28s that were converted into attack aircraft if it was needing precise placement of bombs because those guys would drop in and put it right where you need it to or like an A1 Sky Rater, which is a sweet plane. And then the fighter slash attack craft were a little too fast, but they had ordinance. Now later in the war, there were interesting developments. Like when the F-1-11 was released, and Thomas mentioned this also, the F-1-11 was originally designed to, like, cruise in with, like, nuclear weapons, you know, and tactical nukes, basically. And there was a bunch of experimentation with, like, homing

beacons in Laos, because they could have the local forces go into, positions with these homing beacons and like frame between multiple units frame an area for bombing, whether it's saturation bombing or precision bombing. And there's this one story of Hmong who couldn't who couldn't understand the concept because they're literally Iron Age Hill Tribe guys who are suddenly flying around on helicopters and stuff. And so a guy said, an American figured out how to describe it. And he said, this little machine has a spirit in it, just like the spirits of the rivers that are around you and everything like that.

And the spirit in this machine, when you turn it on and it glows, can communicate with the spirit in an airplane. And if you hold the spirit and you tell us where the enemy is, the spirit in the airplane will be able to see this spirit and precisely put bombs where they need to be. And they successfully did this where these guys, like they blew up like almost a company of PAVN infantrymen around this little group of Hmong guys who are like huddled hiding basically in a bomb crater. And they're like, the spirit worked perfectly. Thank you. After the operation.

So, like, you're limited by the technology that you have to how precise he can be. I'm going to move pretty quickly here because I've belabored this point so much. This is the plane of jars. It was named so because there are these huge jars that were built that were put in place in between 1240 and 660 BC. so like bronze age people. They're huge chiseled out of stone. They have not all of them have lids that are still left identifiable as lids, but they seem to be like this one here is cut to fit a lid in a style that was seen elsewhere.

They've discovered human remains in these with burial goods and ceramics around them. And the Lao legend is that there was a race of giants who lived here and left these giant jars. But a French researcher in 1930, Madeline Colani concluded that they were associated with burial practices. And that's been, seems to have been verified with later excavations by Laughan, Japanese archaeologists in the meantime. So this is all this big plane. You can see this doesn't look like the other images of Laos I've seen, but you can see the hills there. So it's this plane with like rolling hills, kind of like the central plains in America, in kind of this narrow band ringed by mountains, which is like this highway for invading Laos from Vietnam. So they have 90 of these, more than 90 of these jar sites that are identified as.

in this area, Genkong Province, and they have from one to 400 stone jars. They're very big. You can see people here. They're a couple meters high. Very cool, but that's where that name Plain of Jars comes from. So when we're talking about the bombing patterns, and I'm reiterating this so much because this is like the biggest takeaway from this is, oh, it's the most bombed country on earth. it's like, well, it was extremely heavily bombed.

But there's, that's a per capita number. And there's only two million people in this, in this country. And maps can make things look crazy. Like if you look at this map here, this is the 30,000 foot view, and we'll take a closer look in a second. So this is Laos. And you see, oh, look, all of these bombing operations are in areas like, it's a path from Vietnam into this country.

And then later bombings were later in the war when the Vietnamese were pressing westward. But they didn't have any success. It's 1974 to 1975 when the Americans pulled all the funding. That's why you see all this bombing so far west. It looks crazy dense when you look at pictures like this. However, let's look at this provincial map. And this was blaze orange. This is Shenquam province in the plain of jars.

This looks insane. But right here, pick is this little sub-provence or district. If you look at it, you can see it follows. The bombing follows these. these patterns. You can see it's along roads and rivers and around like these are areas where all these operations or were taking place or you know combat operations or positions or positions that the PAVN took. So you look at that high level. It looks atrocious. You zoom in and you're like, oh, I can see a pattern here. This isn't scattering bombs all over the

place. I'm going to take a couple quick views. This makes me sound like an American U.S. military apologist. I assure you I'm not, but I want people to understand this. So look, when people talk about seeing people putting their houses up on bombs, these are auxiliary fuel tanks for jets, not bombs. So their stilt house has these cool auxiliary tanks. That's pretty rad. This is really what set me off on digging into this. This is a UXO Unexploaded Ordinance Visitor's Center. These are small arms.

RPG, so Soviet, Chinese. These are Chinese and Vietnamese grenades. The recoilist rifle, you know, housing, those are possibly Vietnamese probably American weapons used by the Lao. A bunch of this stuff is Soviet or Chinese. Like, this is not, these are not bombs dropped by American planes. Now this is a cluster munition,

and this is the biggest problem in Laos, because these are basically, they're like M-67 hand grenade size, and these are, they call them bombies there, the cluster munitions. The biggest problem, because they scatter all over the place in these areas where the idea is that you're blowing up North Vietnamese soldiers. But 25 years later, when families come back and they try to, they say, hey, this is really nice, like, farmland.

They either get dug up by hose and, you know, sometimes and people get blown up or like children think they're toys, which is trash. The West, in America in particular, have spent a lot of money building up an unexploded ordnance disposal, basically group in Laos, and they're making progress on clearing these areas. But at the current clearance rate, Laos will be UXO-free in 200 years. But what really matters is getting it under control. I don't want to say it's not as bad as it used to be, but they've identified the areas much more the danger zones than they did in the past. And so they seem to be making a lot of progress in the past like 20 years. And again, the United States is providing a ton of aid through U.S. aid.

to the advisory groups from the West that are training people to do this stuff. I also want to point out, so these are all mortars, right? Laos is not the only country in the world with this issue. North Vietnam got bombed to shit. We don't hear about this being an issue in North Vietnam, and it's because they went after it right away. Laos was basically depopulated by this war. And we'll talk a little more in a second, but I'm getting close to wrapping up here.

But they just weren't able to commit resources to it. Belgium is still cleaning up World War I battlefields, and there's still a bunch of areas in Belgium where you go through the fields and the farmers push ordinance to the side of their fields. and they or they tag stuff that's too concerning and then the experts go out and blow it up. All right. Why does this look cut off? Oh, I've totally forgot that this would show up in slideshow mode and not my fixed thing. But for some reason, it cut off to like a standard ratio. So obviously this is from Apocalypse now.

But so the end of the war and the aftermath, so the Paris Peace Accords, which resulted in U.S. forces withdrawing from Vietnam, were signed January 1973. Soon after there was a treaty under tremendous pressure from the United States for the Lao government to sign a ceasefire with the police. Potet Lao in Vang Chan. And then they created a quote unquote coalition government to do joint security in the major cities. The guys who had done the real fighting on the ground for the Royal Lao government, the special guerrilla units, they knew what was up.

They destroyed all their documentation, their photos, their ID, and they either left the country if they could or they lived under a suit. named names. This was before the huge refugee migration. And then the Patet Lao, who were never more than figureheads of the People's Army of Vietnam, who did all the real fighting, they unmasked and said, oh, yeah, Laos is now a Marxist-Leninist state in August 15, 1975. The king and a bunch of members of the royal family and people who'd fought in the special guerrilla unit. and everything were executed in in re-education camps and something like a third of the country, a third of the population of the country left, huge, huge outflows. And I want to say by 1985 or so, there were like 300,000 Lao and Hmong and other ethnic groups who came to the United States, an awful lot of them ended up going to Australia and France. Also, the big boys all went to France with their stolen money or their drug money.

Hank Hill's neighbor, con. Oh, yes, Hank Hills neighbor Khan. If I recall, his wife's referred to her father as the general. So, very, very amusing. Okay, so other than King of the Hill, Laos has been represented in two fictional films and actually a drama based on a real story down at the bottom. So Apocalypse now takes place in fictionally in Vietnam and Cambodia, but Colonel Kurtz was almost certainly modeled upon Tony Poe, who I talked about before, and also fed that end for information to Alfred McCoy. Air America is another one that's really famous because it helps reinforce that. The CIA was

like physically transporting bundles of drugs, knowing that it was bundles of drugs, which is insane. When you talk to people who are there, they literally say, you know, we later, we would, we would become aware at some point about the opium tax having been in in place. But like there's no there's no scenario where where anyone has said I literally saw bundles of heroin be put on. It's more like small amounts of it probably because you're moving people. And sure, they can also load, you know, rice and hard rice. Hard rice was a term for weapons and ammunition onto these planes and move it around and have heroin in there or opium in there. But the biggest thing is that, you know, one of the explanations is that proceeds from

drugs fund the war effort. And it's more like, no, proceeds from drugs were used by the underground cabals to do what they do. It's not to pay the government and all that stuff. So, and again, the mong weren't growing opium in significant quantities in the war zone by 1967 or so, et cetera. But very dramatic story that's also pretty absurd because, again, it's based on this like, we had no idea what was going on, pretending that it wasn't quite what it was. And then actually a pretty good one is Rescue Dawn that Christian Bale is in. from 2006, it's the story of Dieter Dengler, who was a German who joined the U.S. Navy and became a pilot,

and he was shot down and captured in Laos in 1966. It's inaccurate because he was in a North Vietnamese Army POW camp, but in the film, because he got shot down in Laos, they're supposed to be Lao guards, although they're actually speaking that strong. like Northeast Thai dialect because they filmed it there. But it's pretty good. The documentary on the subject Little Dieter needs to fly is a lot better. This is where the bangers are. So Journey from Pa Dong, a decision in the Hills, is a CIA-produced documentary.

It's very good. Vint Lawrence produced it. So after his two tours and last, House, he became an assistant, not like the, but an assistant to CIA director William Colby. And so he took footage that he and another CIA officer named John Wilhelm had filmed, had shot in Laos. And then he created this film. It's short to show to the Senate Arms Committee. So again, this is early 1966, early mid-1966, when he puts this together and it's shown.

to the Senate arms committee, explaining the secret war in Laos. So it wasn't this thing that U.S. officials didn't know about. And then the other one is the secret war in Laos. I have links in here. I'll just grab them and I can send him to you, Pete. This is about an hour and a half documentary by CBS News that dates from, I believe, 72 when the war is going very, very badly. And the government is speaking super openly about what's going on.

It mostly takes place around Longtien, which is up in the north, which was a huge CIA base. And it's really funny because they're just these news guys and congressmen talking to CIA paramilitary officers. And they're horrible public relations guys. They're like their feet are up and they're all casual talking about this insane combat that's taking place. It's really wild, but they're totally worth watching. And then I will close. I have a list of books. What I'll do is I'll do a thread on X, and I can also put this up on my substack.

A bunch of great books about the secret war. One of the best was released by the People's Army of Vietnam, history of the People's Army of Vietnam. They talk in great detail about their campaigns in Lao. as well as the the um hocheemen trail although they of course have a different name for it um and then a then i have a bunch of more general histories and um cia centric kenneth comboy is this guy who's been writing books about this topic since the 70s um i believe he's a journalist who just got super interested in it um so shadow war is really good he recently released the arrow Irrawan War, volumes 1 and 2, which is about the CIA paramilitary campaign.

And then spies on the May Kong is cool because it talks about CIA clandestine operations, including the first, I think it was the first-turned-soviet double agent was recruited in Vangchon. So it's really interesting. And then the others are a little more general. And the very last one, Dr. Charles, Wen, Weldon Jr., tragedy in paradise. He was the director of a medical mission to Laos for USAID. And again, it's really telling because these are just, this is how this is how this stuff works, is these are people who volunteer for USAID.

They're nice people. and they're used to further U.S. operations and, you know, the mission, but they care deeply about the people, and it's just this tragic, this tragic grind that they become a critical component to. So that wraps it up for me, unless you have any questions, Pete? No, I think that's, that makes it pretty clear. Anyone who's been paying attention for the last, what are we three years now into Ukraine, I hope they can see the parallels and see, you know, where this is, it's just a playbook that they use over and over again.

100%. And they, one of the interesting things is that James Parker here who wrote covert ops, he was, the, oh, wait, no, I'm thinking of cash on delivery is Thomas Briggs. Thomas Briggs stayed with the CIA for a very long time. And he, in his intro to this book, which is his memoir about his time in Laos, basically says, this is how we should run the war in Afghanistan. I think he published it in the odds. And the whole thing is, don't use Americans or use as few Americans. Americans as possible, have locals do it. This way you can get the results that you want without, you know, the political backlash and all this stuff. And it's very cynical. It's very, very cynical.

Well, it also sounds like somebody who doesn't, it sounds like somebody who doesn't understand Afghani culture. He doesn't. He doesn't give a shit about Afghani culture. Yeah. That's the first thing that the guys who got there said. was like Vietnam we don't know who the players are we don't know who's on our side and exactly you know it's you end up fighting and protecting the pedophiles and the and the opium and the poppy

farmers and everyone else you is targeted for death you know the interesting thing pete is that the average guy who was a veteran of the war in Vietnam who operated in Laos said that in Laos we were on the side of the angels despite the despite some not good people at the tippy top but it was hard to see that it wasn't in your face like in Vietnam the leaders of South Vietnam were really horrible And so, but it's also one of those things where you see a certain amount of rationalization taking place when they talk about it, right? Well, that's how they have to do it, right? I mean, you can't, yeah, you can't basically start a, I don't want to say genocide because that word is overused, but, you know, a meat grinder. A meat grinder, 100%. the there were whole the mong were totally totally wasted by this they they lost something like

35 to 40 percent of their of their adult males in the war that could be a slight exaggeration that this sounds so familiar exactly it's during it's during the war and in the aftermath it's it's right about that number i want to say um Well, think about how much worse Ukraine is. I mean, it wasn't like we, there were people in, I mean, at least not that I know of, that were in the State Department or in the government who had it out for, you know, for the Laotian people. Yeah, exactly.

But here you definitely have, when it comes to Ukraine, you have people who absolutely hate the Russian people and the Ukrainians. And they're just using the Ukrainians to just Christians, Christians slaughtering Christians. And I think the real takeaway is that, I mean, I know a lot of Vietnam veterans, you know, given my age. I know a lot. I had a lot who were mentors and stuff and family members. And what they would inevitably be. do is they would go to war when they were young and then they would then they become obsessed with it. They come home and they read about it. They read about the culture and they learn about the people and the place after the war. So you really need to learn about people and people in places

before you have any kind of engagement with them. But, you know, they were also, you know, draftees or they were just like, this is where it's, this is where it's happening. This is where, you know, instead of fighting the Russians, we're going to be over there. You don't want the Russians here. We got to fight over there. And it sounds good at the time when, you know, when it's pretty raw, raw. But man, like, like you know about Ukraine because of the series that you're doing with Dr. Johnson and God, I hope every single person listening to this, listening to the series of 200 years together because you need to know the history of these places

before you can have any opinion about anything else. That's why I started off with my Putin hat. Like, let's go back to before, you know, the oceans drank Atlantis. Like, you have to do that when you look at any situation to be able to have any kind of, you know, commentary or anything on it. I'm glad you brought up Putin.

because then it doesn't seem like I'm doing a non-sequitur here. But the people who say, well, you know, Putin just, he just shouldn't have invaded. It's his fault. I mean, these are the dumbest fucking people I've ever, I've ever, if you're saying that as a propagandist, I have more respect for you than someone who's saying that out of sheer stupidity. Oh, yeah. And that's where I'm like, that's why I said these guys will give you mental aids. Like, I don't like them.

But at least Bramfman knew what he was doing. I don't think Alfred McCoy knows anything. But like at least he knew what he was doing when he was repeating this, this nonsense. He was framing something in an advantageous fashion for his, his bent and the people that he aligned with at the time, or at least the position that he aligned with at the time, at least be that smart. Instead of just being like, well, we have to do this because that's bad. And it's like you totally understand why the North Vietnamese went into Laos and Cambodia. It totally makes sense.

Of course they would. And then when they marched west and conquered the country and installed a puppet government, you understand why they did that too. You don't like it, but it is what it is. And it's like, are you going to send your kids to die to stop that from happening? Who fucking cares? I mean, it's like, it's not, it's crazy. It's crazy.

And look at the money that we spent, the equipment. And I can't think of his name. There was a guy, one of the guys who was in the campaign in the north, working with the Hmong. And I think, oh, what's his name? Food guy, Anthony Bourdain, when he did a show in Laos, and he quoted this guy. and it was so spot on. Like you go in there with the best of intentions and you end up arming 12-year-olds. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, at this point, I have less contempt for Victoria Newland and Robert Kagan and Anthony Blinken than I do for the NAFOga people. Oh, my God. Because those three are just doing what they're doing. Yes. They're not useful idiots for. a fucking literal Christian genocide.

And they want to reduce the draft to age 14 in Ukraine now. Playbook. Same thing. Yep. You got to get these people out of our they cannot be allowed to hold power or be anywhere near power.

I'm going to legally ask my congressman to put together a new law where or or some kind of some kind of legal structure to have them pushed through fine mesh screens it only takes a couple horrible people and the make these epic disasters that destroy a country for for centuries if not forever Yeah. Yeah. All right, man. Promote away. Carl doll. Carl doll.com. That's where my longer form stuff is. Once this goes public,

I'll put together an article with both the podcast link to your stuff as well as links to all these materials and books and everything. A lot of it is free online now. The older stuff, I should say. I don't know if you said at the beginning, do you want to say why this is even an interest of yours, something you have planned? Yeah, sure. Okay. Yeah, I can do that. I'm working on the memoirs of a person I know who is a a veteran of this of this war he worked for the CIA in Laos for seven years and he's it'll be published posthumously it won't be under good old Carl Dahl's name it'll be his name and probably my probably my real name maybe maybe a pen name I don't know but it's wild

wild stuff, but it's, it can be a bit much. It gets very, it gets very emotional. So it's kind of slow going. So hence all the research that I've done. But yeah, it's, it's something I've been working on for some time. And so there's something coming in the future. It's in the future. I don't think he's ever going to die though. He's invincible. So it's probably, it could be another 10 years. Awesome. And I'm not even choking. Awesome. Just give you more time to work on this. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. More time to perfect it. And yeah. Well, here's, yes, here's the question is when you, by the time it is time to finish this and we will mourn the dead, will Ukraine be over. Oh my God. I hope so. I hope that ends very soon. Very soon. I'm worried.

that it won't. All right, man. Always good talking to you. Take care of yourself, right? Yeah. Thanks, Pete.