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Head on over to Freeman Beyond the Wall dot com,

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forward slash support and do it there. Thank you. I

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want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingano Show. Carl

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Dahl is back and we're not talking about the Spanish

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Civil War this time how you don't.

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Speaker 2: Call doing great, Pete.

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Speaker 1: All right, So you sent me this presentation of called

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the Secret War in Laos is the template for US

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proxy war, and I went through it and I was

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just like, yeah, we just we just got to do this.

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So I'm just gonna turn I'm going to turn it

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over to you and I'll interject when I have questions,

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and yeah, we'll go from there. So tell us about this,

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all right.

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Speaker 2: So this is this is my thesis, and I'm not

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the only person who's who has such a thesis that

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the activities in Laos in the fifties, sixties, and seventies,

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but especially in the sixties and seventies are the template

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for what we see in the world when it comes

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to utilizing various you know, weak kind of buffer states

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for US foreign policy, from CIA to military to US

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AID and such things. And I think I make a

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pretty good case in this presentation. And I am frankly

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echoing the thoughts of CIA alum who have stated as much.

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And I'll be citing a lot of great folks, will

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I think what I'll do, Pete, is I'll provide you

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with some links that you can put into into wherever

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this recording will dwell so that people can view some

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of the materials that I'm referencing themselves. So great, So

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before I start, Pete, when we say Laos, and again

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you're a person who's very familiar with, you know, the

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twentieth century and American activities therein. But what do you

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think of when you hear the name of this country?

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Speaker 1: Immediately think of the Vietnam War.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, great, that's the it's its own theater, and but

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it's you cannot decouple Laos and American activities in Laos

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from the Vietnam War in any way, shape or form,

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and everyone's attempt to do so has been stupid and disastrous,

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and it's actually quite tragic also because of the human cost.

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So I am just going to move forward and reiterate.

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So you know, one of the greatest examples of Laos

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as a template for US proxy war is if you

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look at Ukraine. It's different because there are many more

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countries that are involved in supplying material, money, et cetera

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to Ukraine versus Laos, and there's a big difference in

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terms of who Ukraine is next to, you know, geographically,

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but it's very very similar. If you step back and

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you look at it as you know, other than US

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air power being directly involved. So it's very similar to

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what was attempted in Laos, except US air power plus

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Allied air power was totally different story in Lau than

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in Ukraine. So anyway, let me make my case. So

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this is an image from a very famous press conference

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that newly elected a president, John F. Kennedy made March

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twenty third, nineteen sixty one. He had only been in

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office for about two months at this time, and he

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had inherited a you know, the Eisenhower administrations foreign policy

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and had been briefed for a long time on the

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importance of what was going on in Laos as it

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related to American interests and involvement in various activities in Vietnam.

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And so it's funny because Kennedy hated the pronunciation of

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the country's name because to him, it sounded like Laos,

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like the biting insect, and so he pronounced it lay Offs.

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And I'll explain here shortly. You know where we get

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these strange pronunciations. But how this is relevant is that

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the United States as part of the Cold War. Again,

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and let me step back. I had said, you cannot

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look at American activities in Laos outside of the context

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of the Vietnam War. But most importantly, you cannot look

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at it from outside the context of the Cold War.

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It's one hundred percent a Cold War baby, and it's

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America attempting to follow essentially containment of communism, specifically the

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Soviet Union at the time of nineteen sixty one and

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in the fifties, And a really good resource for everyone listening.

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If you really want to dig into this, check out

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the shows that Pete and Thomas have done about the

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Cold War. There's a recent batch of three parts of episodes.

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The second one, the second batch focus is on Vietnam

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and it's really good. You know, Thomas is a is

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a treasure and I'm not just kissing his ass. I'm

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genuinely saying like you will get so much out of

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that in terms of it'll contextualize for you in six

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hours of listening, how you can actually study this in

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a coherent fashion and bits and bites. So when you

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look at Laos, you have to look at it in

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terms of the Cold War. Indo China was a when

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it broke up. There was a Geneva agreement in nineteen

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fifty four about how the Powers would interact with the

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former Indo Chinese states. Laos was declared to be a

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neutral country. What this map represents here is not only like,

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hey everyone, this is a country that you've never heard

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of on the other side of the world, but the

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white territories are in under government or governmental control. And

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a very cool nineteen sixties progression slide was done with

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a cube that they rotated and these the black and

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then the gradient areas showed the progress of expansion of

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communist forces out of North Vietnam, although that was never

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explicitly stated in this presentation across the country in the

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past couple of months, and the fact that Soviet airlift

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was involved as a key part of this. In the

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plane of jars the Soviets were flying, I think he

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mentioned at one point at least one hundred sorties in

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a very brief period to provide equipment, et cetera to

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the in his term commune gorillas. Very interestingly, like I said,

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he doesn't really emphasize the fact that this is coming

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straight out in North Vietnam. So let's step back and

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this is sort of I'm going to put on my

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mini putin hat. I'm not going to do a super

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long deep dive into the background history. I'm going to

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hit you with a couple of slides. What is this country?

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What is this thing? What is this place? So Laos

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is a landlocked Southeast Asian nation. In nineteen sixty one,

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it had about two million people in the population, and

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we'll see why it's kind of hard to quantify that

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those were best estimates at the time. Currently there are

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about seven million people, a little over seven million. It's

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landlocked between Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and China. The Maykong

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as you can see from this image, the Meekong River

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is a critical part of the delineation of its current border,

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and it's named for the people who live there in

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the dominant people group in the country, those who had

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been the ruling class, the Lao. So unfortunately we get

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this crazy Laos Laos and term Laotian to describe them,

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because the French described the country as Royam Do Lao Shen,

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which is literally the kingdom of the Lao people. So

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Lao Shen became Laotian in English, so they're really the Lao.

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The language is Lao et cetera. You can see here

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how big the country is. It's quite small. It's northern

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Laos Is basically Ohio, plus you know parts of Appalachia

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going down into the southeast. So not a very big

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country at at all. Stepping back, how and I'm explaining

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this because I want you to understand how this country

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came to be, which informs the challenges that the American uh,

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you know, operational forces there had in trying to coalesce

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this into a country. So Europe had a migration era,

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Southeast Asia had a migration era that was very influential.

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And shortly I'll explain a few things that I'm going

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to skim over here currently. But there are all these

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tribal groups. When you see this purple text, that's what

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they call the Thai or Dae people's it's the label

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for language and people group. There's you'll notice that that

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sounds similar to Thailand. Yes, that's where Thailand get got

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its name. Retroactively, that was the name given by the

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Siamese king when they wanted to step back and try

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to kind of legitimize their rule over foreign people because

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they came out of China, just like all the rest

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of these folks came and the biggest driver of the

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migrations down into Southeast Asia from southern China which had

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been going on over time. They know that there were

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people going down into the Meekong River basin around vang

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Chan which is the current capital and became a later

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kingdom around seven hundred eighty and substantial numbers. And they

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were essentially groups of warrior bands with families that would

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follow the river valleys south because they were less populated

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until they ran into other people who were there in

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great numbers, such as the Khmer kingdoms. They sometimes pronounced

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it Kamai, but anyway, they ran into those folks and

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that turned into kind of stabilizing general groups where of

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where these people were at the biggest pressure came when

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the Mongols conquered down into what I'll call the Thai

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homeland of Sipsong Pana which means a thousand rice fields

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in the thirteen hundreds. That that was the biggest press

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that really created a massive migration that resulted in a

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whole bunch of actual kingdoms of Lao in substantial numbers.

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Among other groups Suko Thai down there, which became the

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Thai Ayataya et cetera. The kingdoms of the kind of

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bordering the Burmese, like the Shan and the Kunin and

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the Yuan, who are still at it kind of fighting

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against the Uh, the Burmese government from time to time.

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That's where all these people came from. There's also a

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tribe here, the which is Uh that means one, like

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the number one or the first people. They became mercenaries

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in Southeast Asia for American operations, and a whole bunch

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of them.

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Speaker 1: Ye let me ask you a question. Yeah, this migration pattern,

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it almost yes, could you relate it to how we're

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told the Native American tribes got here? It sounds very like,

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I mean, we don't really know how that happened. This

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happened in more correct but it sounds like like you

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could relate that in some way. Yeah.

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Speaker 2: So you'll notice there's this huge area and a lot

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of these people stayed here and they became sinusized. You

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know when when you look at the the Chinese claim, oh,

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well this is like ninety we're ninety some percent Han

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ethnic group, and then there's these small minority groups. Well,

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an awful lot of these people were you know, absorbed, syncretized,

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essentially absorbed into what they call han because of just

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time and everything like that. Yeah, it's it's an interesting question,

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like was it was the Native American settlement? Was that

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strictly straight lines, you know, like we see here where

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they following game. Did they come to the you know,

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the land bridge and keep moving or were their pressures

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beyond that at the time, we don't have a way

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of knowing. It sounds it's funny because sometimes you'll you'll

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see in these old histories and one of the biggest

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problems with Southeast Asia is there been the total war.

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Was the way everything was done there until you know,

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a couple hundred years later, when there was some slightly

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more civilized or modern way of thinking and conquering and

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everything handling war that way, what they would typically do

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is they would raise the records, you know, they would

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raise capitals and burn all the records of everything. And

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so there's surviving stories in a variety of in a

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variety of formats. Sometimes they're old songs, and so you

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don't know quite how accurate you know, some of these

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stories are. There's written records that are that are thousands

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a thousand years old all over the place. But a

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lot of the records get destroyed, so you kind of

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have to just make assumptions about it. But yeah, it's

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it's an interesting that's an interesting question. And my guess

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is there's a lot more migrations in human history we

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just don't have a way of quantifying in detail. So

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south of when when they moved south, because a bunch

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went west and following the mountains and basically skirting the

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edges of the great mountain ranges of Asia, but moving south,

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they were moving through river valleys which were strictly sharply

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defined by these very high mountains, and many of them

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quite steep, where you can't even scale the mountains in

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southeast Asia except for maybe a couple of spots, and

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so all they could do is push down. And so

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what they would that what the pattern would be at

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this point is that they would if they could drive

240
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out the populations and the river valleys because they're they're

241
00:18:54,720 --> 00:18:59,400
wet rice farmers, the people who were there would go

242
00:18:59,759 --> 00:19:03,839
into the highlands, or they would just absorb them. Sometimes

243
00:19:03,839 --> 00:19:09,200
it kind of depended on a variety of variety of

244
00:19:10,880 --> 00:19:16,920
cases and conditions. So what I've done here is I'm

245
00:19:16,960 --> 00:19:21,960
reiterating wet rice farmers love river valleys. And why am

246
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I going to all this detail because the way the

247
00:19:24,319 --> 00:19:29,400
war is conducted is very similar, has very similar pressures

248
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and parameters on it that the actual settlement of the

249
00:19:33,920 --> 00:19:38,799
area had. So the red lines that I have here

250
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are very steep mountain ranges, and you'll notice I have

251
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a couple of little gaps in places. These are where

252
00:19:49,400 --> 00:19:56,759
modern day mountain passes, you know, and waypoints, highways, et cetera. Are,

253
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And otherwise these areas were almost impassable like over these

254
00:20:03,119 --> 00:20:06,359
red lines, or they were so steepest to not be

255
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worth it, and so kind of an old school natural

256
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way when you have pretty powerful groups of people who

257
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are defining their borders in kind of these marginal areas

258
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some you know, sometimes a couple times in history, the

259
00:20:30,079 --> 00:20:35,359
the Vietnamese Uh in the to the east would get

260
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together and do a survey with the Lao with representatives

261
00:20:39,920 --> 00:20:42,279
of the Lao Kingdom. And what they would do is

262
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they would travel the Animite mountain range or Anamite, I

263
00:20:46,599 --> 00:20:51,240
should say, and they would say, okay on on an

264
00:20:51,279 --> 00:20:55,839
eastern slope of a mountain. If the houses on stilts

265
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were still in Lao territory, because the Lao would build

266
00:20:59,640 --> 00:21:02,960
their house is on stilts. If it's on the ground,

267
00:21:03,519 --> 00:21:06,039
it was Vietnamese territory, and some of the later hill

268
00:21:06,079 --> 00:21:09,599
tribes that would come in build their houses on the ground.

269
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But this was something that was a rule well into

270
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the eighteenth century, I'd say, maybe even early nineteenth century,

271
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when it came to the way that the Uh that

272
00:21:22,720 --> 00:21:26,039
the Lao and and the Vietnamese interacted with each other.

273
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And then the western border. These are rivers that form

274
00:21:32,039 --> 00:21:35,039
the borders. And you'll notice here there's a yellow outline

275
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here there's two provinces in modern Laos and Laos of

276
00:21:40,319 --> 00:21:43,559
the period that we're talking about, which is post World

277
00:21:43,559 --> 00:21:48,400
War two, there's only two little provinces that are west

278
00:21:49,039 --> 00:21:52,559
of the Mekong River. Otherwise, the Meekong River forms the

279
00:21:52,640 --> 00:21:59,920
key border along Thailand and Burma. This is China up here,

280
00:22:00,720 --> 00:22:04,759
and then down here is Cambodia, and Cambodia was delineated

281
00:22:04,920 --> 00:22:09,200
from both Thailand and Laos by mountain ranges and then

282
00:22:09,319 --> 00:22:13,359
at the Mekong River there are massive waterfalls, so it

283
00:22:13,440 --> 00:22:16,960
was found to be by the French to be non navigable.

284
00:22:18,440 --> 00:22:22,039
Later when they showed up and we're trying to think of,

285
00:22:22,279 --> 00:22:26,279
you know, ways to penetrate the interior wasn't going to work,

286
00:22:27,799 --> 00:22:32,480
all right. So this is just a view of the

287
00:22:32,519 --> 00:22:36,319
topography of Laos and it's a very beautiful country. You'll

288
00:22:36,359 --> 00:22:44,160
notice something immediately. You have extremely sharp, steep mountains that

289
00:22:44,200 --> 00:22:48,640
are not These are not gradual like mountains in the Alps.

290
00:22:49,039 --> 00:22:52,559
This is limestone karst that just shoots up and is

291
00:22:52,680 --> 00:22:58,880
essentially unusable, covered in jungle. And then down in the

292
00:22:58,920 --> 00:23:04,599
lowland you know basins where anywhere there's flat land and water,

293
00:23:05,480 --> 00:23:10,720
people settle and farm there. And again they don't only

294
00:23:10,799 --> 00:23:15,839
farm wet you know, wet rice which is like sticky rice,

295
00:23:16,720 --> 00:23:22,319
which you know, flooded flooded fields for substantial parts of

296
00:23:22,359 --> 00:23:26,559
the year. But that is the primary staple crop. And

297
00:23:26,680 --> 00:23:32,839
so large areas of the country are either unpopulated or

298
00:23:32,920 --> 00:23:36,599
lightly populated because there's just such a small amount of

299
00:23:37,119 --> 00:23:39,839
arable land. But it is the tropics, and that means

300
00:23:39,880 --> 00:23:46,480
that things will grow anywhere, and they have monsoon season

301
00:23:47,039 --> 00:23:48,720
and they have a wet you know, so there's a

302
00:23:48,720 --> 00:23:51,880
wet season and a dry season, rather than having four

303
00:23:51,960 --> 00:23:55,759
seasons as you would in the more temperate climates. But

304
00:23:56,880 --> 00:24:01,000
that means that they can get water. You know, pretty

305
00:24:01,039 --> 00:24:05,200
much everywhere. There's nowhere that's arid except for some plateau

306
00:24:05,279 --> 00:24:09,160
areas in the far south. But ultimately it's very fertile.

307
00:24:09,200 --> 00:24:13,759
But it's very difficult to grow crops in huge amounts

308
00:24:13,759 --> 00:24:18,480
of the country, which means I can't support significant populations.

309
00:24:18,960 --> 00:24:26,119
All right, So let's put the Indo in Indo China.

310
00:24:26,359 --> 00:24:31,400
So the meaning of this term is essentially that these

311
00:24:31,559 --> 00:24:34,519
this is there's a bit of a hand waving where

312
00:24:34,720 --> 00:24:38,279
you know, it was Europeans saying it's the area of China,

313
00:24:38,880 --> 00:24:44,279
and they're they are Chinese, appearing like as they would say,

314
00:24:44,319 --> 00:24:50,839
Oriental rather than being you know, pajeets. So, but the

315
00:24:50,960 --> 00:24:55,839
important thing to understand is that culturally they were heavily influenced,

316
00:24:56,480 --> 00:25:00,640
uh in a at the upper levels, I should say,

317
00:25:01,240 --> 00:25:07,440
by Indian culture. So what would happen is that the

318
00:25:07,559 --> 00:25:13,200
local hegemonds, whether it was through missionaries or you know,

319
00:25:13,279 --> 00:25:20,799
priests that would be invited from India. And there's different

320
00:25:20,839 --> 00:25:25,759
stories depending on the countries specifically where they came from.

321
00:25:26,119 --> 00:25:31,240
In Lao, it was Sri Lanka where they brought some

322
00:25:32,559 --> 00:25:40,680
basically Hinduism first, much like Indonesia and polyscript which is

323
00:25:40,839 --> 00:25:48,960
the writing script that was used in the early Buddhist scriptures,

324
00:25:49,359 --> 00:25:53,359
and then most importantly the Indian forms of government, so

325
00:25:53,400 --> 00:25:57,319
that the social hierarchies which were looser, but what it

326
00:25:57,480 --> 00:26:03,480
brought was a higher bierarchy frankly, pomp and the feeling

327
00:26:03,599 --> 00:26:10,799
of perceived legitimacy. So it was putting together formal, formal

328
00:26:10,920 --> 00:26:15,880
structures that were then used by the rulers to manage

329
00:26:16,279 --> 00:26:23,440
their regions. The other key concept is this mondola concept.

330
00:26:23,519 --> 00:26:27,960
You'll see these rings radiating out from these cities, and

331
00:26:28,000 --> 00:26:30,839
this is really important to understand because of the topography

332
00:26:31,160 --> 00:26:34,759
and frankly, this should make sense to anyone like power

333
00:26:34,839 --> 00:26:39,039
radiates outward and it defines zones of influence, and so

334
00:26:39,160 --> 00:26:43,799
you have these areas of overlap between these kingdoms where,

335
00:26:43,799 --> 00:26:48,400
for example, like a weaker ethnic group, the whole ethnic group,

336
00:26:48,759 --> 00:26:53,119
their leader will pay tribute to their more powerful neighbors

337
00:26:54,039 --> 00:26:58,160
until they have enough power themselves to not have to

338
00:26:58,160 --> 00:27:03,000
pay tribute to be seen as equals, etc. So this

339
00:27:03,119 --> 00:27:06,519
is really important to understand because there's this huge kind

340
00:27:06,519 --> 00:27:12,480
of blending of power that was this natural way that

341
00:27:12,519 --> 00:27:14,880
people had related to each other in this area for

342
00:27:14,920 --> 00:27:21,039
a long time, which worked great until it didn't. So

343
00:27:21,160 --> 00:27:24,319
kind of the ethnogenesis of Laos. And I'm not going

344
00:27:24,359 --> 00:27:26,200
to spend a whole bunch of time diving into this,

345
00:27:26,519 --> 00:27:31,759
but there was a prince from muang Sui which later

346
00:27:31,799 --> 00:27:36,559
became Long Probang, which is the old royal capital, who

347
00:27:37,079 --> 00:27:42,920
was exiled. His father had been exiled by the grandfather,

348
00:27:43,640 --> 00:27:47,519
and he grew up in the court of Encore in Cambodia,

349
00:27:47,640 --> 00:27:51,359
the Kingdom of Cambodia. In thirteen sixteen, he married a

350
00:27:51,440 --> 00:27:54,960
Khmer princess, persuaded the king to lend him a ten

351
00:27:55,000 --> 00:27:57,440
thousand man army so we could go back and reconquer

352
00:27:57,519 --> 00:28:01,119
his kingdom, and he really enjoyed that process. So what

353
00:28:01,200 --> 00:28:07,480
he did is he brought the Thai peoples south of Yunnan,

354
00:28:09,559 --> 00:28:13,119
which was held by the Mongols, under his control. You'll

355
00:28:13,160 --> 00:28:15,680
notice this is thirteen sixteen, and I had been talking

356
00:28:15,720 --> 00:28:19,839
about how like really in the like thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,

357
00:28:20,880 --> 00:28:24,519
the were the biggest drifts southwards. So there were all

358
00:28:24,599 --> 00:28:28,240
these people who'd been scattered all over this area, and

359
00:28:28,920 --> 00:28:36,279
Fannum coalesced them under his control, and it was known

360
00:28:36,440 --> 00:28:39,519
as the Kingdom of a million elephants in the white parasol,

361
00:28:40,839 --> 00:28:43,960
which is a very high fluting name. But you see

362
00:28:43,960 --> 00:28:52,200
the symbol into the future, it's called Lansong. And so anyway,

363
00:28:53,200 --> 00:28:57,359
he made Theravada Buddhism the formal religion of his kingdom,

364
00:28:57,759 --> 00:29:01,839
and again this gave that of legitimacy. He brought in

365
00:29:02,680 --> 00:29:07,359
the Buddhist monks who began, you know, teaching the religion,

366
00:29:08,119 --> 00:29:13,480
and ultimately like these became this red band became the

367
00:29:13,640 --> 00:29:19,519
limits of his kingdom. So or Lanna was suzerain to him.

368
00:29:19,680 --> 00:29:25,440
You'll notice cheng Mai is a city that's in northern Thailand,

369
00:29:27,559 --> 00:29:31,160
that this whole area that was the capital of Lanna,

370
00:29:31,559 --> 00:29:35,759
and it was basically allow kingdom. And they went kind

371
00:29:35,799 --> 00:29:38,079
of back and forth for a couple hundred years with

372
00:29:39,440 --> 00:29:44,440
marrying between the various kingdoms. And but this was considered

373
00:29:44,519 --> 00:29:50,599
one large country with these kind of principalities beneath them.

374
00:29:52,160 --> 00:29:57,200
The most important thing to understand is that Lanna was

375
00:29:57,240 --> 00:30:03,440
a useful buffer state in the future against the Burmese

376
00:30:03,480 --> 00:30:08,799
because and again these are borders defined by mountain ranges largely,

377
00:30:10,680 --> 00:30:16,000
and the Burmese were constantly like flooding east and invading

378
00:30:16,079 --> 00:30:18,920
and so it was useful to have a friend to

379
00:30:18,960 --> 00:30:23,960
the west that you could work together, but usually better

380
00:30:24,079 --> 00:30:28,759
not to piss off the Burmese and have a buffer

381
00:30:28,839 --> 00:30:38,359
state there instead. All right, So Lonsong broke into several

382
00:30:38,680 --> 00:30:43,839
regional kingdoms Lena Lang, Prabang Shin, Kwang ving Chan, and

383
00:30:44,000 --> 00:30:51,799
Chumpasak down in the south. They had dynastic disputes. The

384
00:30:51,920 --> 00:30:56,880
biggest issue is that European technology was beginning to really

385
00:30:57,039 --> 00:31:02,559
change things uh in the seven seventeenth century, but in

386
00:31:02,599 --> 00:31:06,319
the eighteenth century it was that was it. It was

387
00:31:06,640 --> 00:31:12,720
super rapid change after pretty sedentary couple hundred years of

388
00:31:14,200 --> 00:31:20,160
a great deal of local power because Lansong had men

389
00:31:20,880 --> 00:31:26,480
and they had you know, a powerful central authority. They

390
00:31:26,480 --> 00:31:30,319
were very wealthy. They had tons of elephants that they

391
00:31:30,359 --> 00:31:34,680
would use in war. But when you know, modern firearms

392
00:31:34,720 --> 00:31:38,039
came into play, which were not super easy to use.

393
00:31:38,079 --> 00:31:41,640
The old school firearms were very challenging. But by the

394
00:31:41,680 --> 00:31:47,240
time you start getting into flintlocks, et cetera, that that

395
00:31:47,400 --> 00:31:52,599
is much more useful for warfare in the tropics. And

396
00:31:52,680 --> 00:32:00,519
so Siam became very strong, the Vietnamese became very strong,

397
00:32:01,279 --> 00:32:07,440
and veng Chan, you know, chump A sak et cetera.

398
00:32:07,680 --> 00:32:12,920
These internal interior groups, they just they have to trade

399
00:32:12,960 --> 00:32:15,880
with people to get these weapons. They had very little

400
00:32:15,920 --> 00:32:20,920
contact with Europeans other than some missions that had been

401
00:32:20,920 --> 00:32:24,559
able to get to them. Some Dutch came in the

402
00:32:25,519 --> 00:32:29,319
sixteen hundreds and were really impressed by the kingdom. And

403
00:32:29,359 --> 00:32:34,400
so when the French got there later after, veng Chan

404
00:32:34,640 --> 00:32:40,079
and many other areas were raised and depopulated after they

405
00:32:40,079 --> 00:32:43,240
got up at Eat and we're tired of being really

406
00:32:43,440 --> 00:32:50,480
frankly abused slave suzaraines by the Siamese who pushed it

407
00:32:50,599 --> 00:32:55,440
way beyond the levels that people would engage in in

408
00:32:55,519 --> 00:33:05,079
the past. They found basically ruins and very few people. So,

409
00:33:05,240 --> 00:33:11,599
like I said, the Siamese depopulated the capital and pretty

410
00:33:11,680 --> 00:33:16,039
much the whole left bank of the Maykong all the

411
00:33:16,079 --> 00:33:25,359
way up to the Kingdom of Long Probang, who stayed independent,

412
00:33:25,720 --> 00:33:28,519
But so that was way up in the north. So

413
00:33:28,680 --> 00:33:32,839
everywhere else the Siamese were doing slave raids. And I

414
00:33:32,960 --> 00:33:35,440
just have to tell this story because it's a true story.

415
00:33:36,359 --> 00:33:42,319
The French and some English travelers reported seeing these huge

416
00:33:42,359 --> 00:33:48,119
flotillas of canoes and narrow river boats coming down the

417
00:33:48,160 --> 00:33:55,400
Meekong where the local slaves had had bamboo split pleaded,

418
00:33:55,880 --> 00:33:59,359
you know, and they would the Siamese would shove the

419
00:33:59,440 --> 00:34:04,759
bamboo leads through the hands of these people to basically

420
00:34:04,799 --> 00:34:08,119
permanently handcuff them until they got to where they were

421
00:34:08,159 --> 00:34:13,760
at and just floating thousands of people down river to

422
00:34:13,880 --> 00:34:18,719
be slaves to build Bangkok. And you see all the

423
00:34:18,760 --> 00:34:22,800
canals around Bangkok, and those were dug out by slaves

424
00:34:23,360 --> 00:34:32,679
from of allow people mostly so the people obviously, you know,

425
00:34:32,719 --> 00:34:34,559
you don't have a lot of time to organize when

426
00:34:34,599 --> 00:34:37,440
this is going on. What do you do? You head

427
00:34:37,440 --> 00:34:40,679
out to the principalities that are staying independent that are

428
00:34:40,679 --> 00:34:43,840
too far away. You go up into the mountain border lands,

429
00:34:44,000 --> 00:34:48,199
into areas you can control and blockade, you know, some

430
00:34:48,360 --> 00:34:51,880
narrow passes to keep the Siamese from getting in there

431
00:34:52,360 --> 00:34:59,159
or even going into into Vietnam. So just totally depopulated.

432
00:34:59,719 --> 00:35:00,159
Speaker 1: So so.

433
00:35:01,880 --> 00:35:09,480
Speaker 2: Right when this happens, just decades after the first you know, conflagration,

434
00:35:10,199 --> 00:35:15,880
the French had acquired colonies in Cambodia, Koshinshina, which is

435
00:35:16,239 --> 00:35:20,639
South Vietnam. They had a consulate up in Long Probong

436
00:35:22,480 --> 00:35:28,119
and then on am In in Vietnam on the coast,

437
00:35:28,880 --> 00:35:33,079
and so they're kind of getting a feel for what

438
00:35:33,199 --> 00:35:38,639
the local, you know, situation is. Uh, there's the the

439
00:35:38,719 --> 00:35:43,639
Siamese who are totally in control. The King of Siam, interestingly,

440
00:35:44,280 --> 00:35:48,880
was a huge fan of Napoleon and was heavily inspired

441
00:35:48,920 --> 00:35:51,400
by Napoleon in the way that he operated where he

442
00:35:51,440 --> 00:35:56,440
went back to this total war depopulation kind of an

443
00:35:56,440 --> 00:36:01,800
approach of doing things inspired by Napoleon just just for funsies,

444
00:36:02,760 --> 00:36:07,559
but didn't work with the French. To their credit, the

445
00:36:07,599 --> 00:36:11,320
Siamese were the only Asian country that were never colonized

446
00:36:12,320 --> 00:36:19,480
or brought to heal by Europeans, not to be sneezed at.

447
00:36:20,039 --> 00:36:25,880
So in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, due to

448
00:36:26,119 --> 00:36:31,960
various things internal things going on in China, they had

449
00:36:32,000 --> 00:36:35,199
what they called the Black Flag Army, which was various

450
00:36:35,239 --> 00:36:41,199
Southern Chinese groups that were making incursions into Tonkin which

451
00:36:41,239 --> 00:36:46,800
is North Vietnam, as well as Laos and eventually Siam.

452
00:36:47,000 --> 00:36:49,079
That caused the King of Long Probong to reach out

453
00:36:49,079 --> 00:36:53,000
to the French at their consulate there and say, we

454
00:36:53,039 --> 00:36:58,599
would like to be brought in as a protectorate along

455
00:36:58,639 --> 00:37:03,199
with your territories that you have in Vietnam, because otherwise

456
00:37:03,239 --> 00:37:07,719
they would have absolutely just collapsed and probably been essentially

457
00:37:07,800 --> 00:37:15,440
genocided my opinion. So France granted a protectorate status in

458
00:37:15,480 --> 00:37:18,840
eighteen eighty nine, had a little bit of a war

459
00:37:18,920 --> 00:37:24,840
with Siam to consolidate their control over the east bank

460
00:37:24,880 --> 00:37:33,599
of the Mekong River, and the Siamese relented. So after

461
00:37:33,719 --> 00:37:38,000
that was a fairly peaceful period. You know, while World

462
00:37:38,079 --> 00:37:43,039
War One, et cetera was going on, things were pretty

463
00:37:43,119 --> 00:37:47,559
chill in French Indo China. The French made a net

464
00:37:47,639 --> 00:37:53,199
investment into Laos during the protector and colonial eras you know,

465
00:37:53,639 --> 00:37:58,559
some of this is French proclivities, but they also needed

466
00:37:58,559 --> 00:38:03,920
a buffer a state against the Siamese, who became the

467
00:38:04,039 --> 00:38:09,960
Tie in the nineteen twenties. So obviously there's historical grudges

468
00:38:10,719 --> 00:38:14,599
that the Lao held against the Siamese the Tie. So

469
00:38:15,000 --> 00:38:19,400
the French were encouraging Lao nationalism as long as it

470
00:38:19,440 --> 00:38:23,199
didn't manifest us anti French. But there was an interesting rub.

471
00:38:24,119 --> 00:38:29,760
The French administration in both Laos and Cambodia was primarily Vietnamese.

472
00:38:31,360 --> 00:38:33,199
A lot of this is because of the fact that

473
00:38:33,800 --> 00:38:39,639
the Vietnamese you'll recall Thomas talking about how they followed

474
00:38:39,760 --> 00:38:45,440
a oh gosh, why can't like a Mandarin not in

475
00:38:45,519 --> 00:38:49,199
terms of like the Mandarin language, but like the social structure.

476
00:38:50,960 --> 00:38:59,480
The Vietnamese made very good administrators, and the merchant class

477
00:38:59,679 --> 00:39:03,559
was largely Vietnamese, although to a lesser extent there were

478
00:39:04,239 --> 00:39:08,320
Chinese who had migrated into their and even some Indians.

479
00:39:09,000 --> 00:39:14,039
Indian merchants in Southeast Asia were a very very old thing,

480
00:39:14,079 --> 00:39:18,000
but at this point there were only some. So the

481
00:39:18,360 --> 00:39:20,679
interesting thing is that the French founded a lot of

482
00:39:20,760 --> 00:39:25,760
institutions that published Lao historical texts, so they basically saved

483
00:39:25,880 --> 00:39:31,639
the culture in many ways. They undertook major archaeological works,

484
00:39:31,719 --> 00:39:38,400
so an awful lot of the really famous temples and

485
00:39:38,760 --> 00:39:45,119
stupas in Laos were restored by the French and they

486
00:39:45,199 --> 00:39:51,360
so they basically the French essentially redeveloped and cultivated what

487
00:39:51,480 --> 00:39:59,199
became Lao nationalism. So World War two comes and there

488
00:39:59,199 --> 00:40:04,159
were various kinds of tricky, sneaky people that started showing up,

489
00:40:05,480 --> 00:40:10,519
and as well as outside ideas. So again I mentioned

490
00:40:10,519 --> 00:40:20,079
the Vietnamese influence in Laos and Cambodia. It's really important

491
00:40:20,079 --> 00:40:24,320
to understand that sixty percent of the population of Laos's

492
00:40:24,400 --> 00:40:29,360
six urban areas, the cities and large towns, sixty percent

493
00:40:29,400 --> 00:40:34,519
of the population were Vietnamese. The Vietnamese held key positions

494
00:40:34,559 --> 00:40:40,079
in the civil bureaucracies as well as the police, and

495
00:40:41,400 --> 00:40:48,639
so this became almost a colony, a Vietnamese colony in

496
00:40:48,719 --> 00:40:53,239
these Lao territories. So when Japan invaded French into China

497
00:40:53,280 --> 00:40:58,800
and September nineteen forty, the Vishi French negotiated a deal

498
00:40:58,840 --> 00:41:03,719
which allowed them to still administer the colony. The Tie

499
00:41:04,360 --> 00:41:09,039
tried to take advantage of this situation and invaded parts

500
00:41:09,039 --> 00:41:15,000
of western Laos in January nineteen forty one. This rapidly

501
00:41:15,039 --> 00:41:18,480
became a stalemate. It was a very small kind of war,

502
00:41:19,960 --> 00:41:25,400
and the Japanese mediated a ceasefire to calm things down,

503
00:41:26,440 --> 00:41:30,000
enforced by the Japanese and the Siamese. So there was

504
00:41:30,039 --> 00:41:33,360
a partial seating of those territories along the west bank

505
00:41:33,400 --> 00:41:38,920
of the Mekong during the war period. The fellow that

506
00:41:39,000 --> 00:41:47,440
you see here is Aaron Bank who was an OSS operative. Yes, yes,

507
00:41:47,679 --> 00:41:53,599
his relatives are involved in banking. Author Peter Kemp in

508
00:41:53,679 --> 00:41:56,039
his book for Alms for Oblivion, when he's on the

509
00:41:56,079 --> 00:42:00,920
ground in French Indo China and Thailand, and during the

510
00:42:00,960 --> 00:42:04,320
war doing his sneaky peate thing, and especially at the

511
00:42:04,360 --> 00:42:07,840
tail end of the war when they're trying to kind

512
00:42:07,880 --> 00:42:13,119
of figure out collectively how the piece is going to

513
00:42:13,199 --> 00:42:18,000
work in this area. He spoke very Peter Kemp spoke

514
00:42:18,159 --> 00:42:25,400
very passionately about how Bank essentially allowed the murder of

515
00:42:25,440 --> 00:42:33,280
a French French officer by Vietnamese for no good reason,

516
00:42:34,320 --> 00:42:36,559
but he didn't care about it because again you have

517
00:42:36,599 --> 00:42:40,199
to keep in mind that the American position was the

518
00:42:40,280 --> 00:42:43,360
French colonies are finished. You got to get out of here.

519
00:42:45,039 --> 00:42:49,639
This red banner with Chinese characters up at the top

520
00:42:49,679 --> 00:42:53,039
and then Vietnamese writing below it with the hammer and sickle,

521
00:42:54,800 --> 00:43:00,519
this is the banner of the Indo Chinese Commune Party.

522
00:43:01,880 --> 00:43:07,920
The Indo Chinese Communist Party was almost one Vietnamese. The

523
00:43:08,000 --> 00:43:13,639
common turn, the Communist International and organ of the Soviet

524
00:43:13,760 --> 00:43:23,239
Union were encouraging the Vietnamese to get some non non

525
00:43:23,400 --> 00:43:28,880
Vietnamese into this thing to kind of legitimize their activities.

526
00:43:30,559 --> 00:43:36,400
So what they began attempting to do, which was to

527
00:43:36,880 --> 00:43:40,800
deal with an anti colonialist movement that was named the

528
00:43:40,920 --> 00:43:45,280
Lao Isara, which was a native thing that started springing

529
00:43:45,360 --> 00:43:52,960
up under Japanese and Vshi French co occupation. It was

530
00:43:53,000 --> 00:44:00,159
a nationalist movement. The Indo Chinese Communist Party tried to

531
00:44:00,199 --> 00:44:08,559
bring them in and with with mixed with mixed results.

532
00:44:09,519 --> 00:44:17,519
So after the war, the French returned reclaimed the provinces

533
00:44:17,519 --> 00:44:19,679
seized by the Tie. So imagine this. You just fought

534
00:44:19,719 --> 00:44:22,880
World War two and you have to go to the

535
00:44:22,880 --> 00:44:28,079
other side of the world and reclaim old colonies. A

536
00:44:28,079 --> 00:44:30,719
lot of that was done by the French Foreign Legion

537
00:44:31,360 --> 00:44:35,719
we know who were there. There's a Oh can I

538
00:44:35,760 --> 00:44:37,719
see that? The title of it? Yeah, there, it is

539
00:44:37,840 --> 00:44:44,440
a Devil's Guard. There's a fantastic quote unquote fictional novel

540
00:44:44,880 --> 00:44:49,840
called Devil's Guard about a It's written by an American

541
00:44:50,079 --> 00:44:57,440
and it is supposedly the the recordings of conversations that

542
00:44:57,519 --> 00:45:02,719
he had had this American had had with a retired

543
00:45:05,159 --> 00:45:12,920
German Foreign Legion veteran. That's a fantastic story about what

544
00:45:13,079 --> 00:45:20,440
took place during the First Indo Chinese War. But I

545
00:45:20,480 --> 00:45:25,199
will note that this was required reading for a friend

546
00:45:25,199 --> 00:45:30,599
of mine who was a in marine recon. His lieutenant

547
00:45:30,719 --> 00:45:33,679
made all the guys read this because it had it

548
00:45:33,719 --> 00:45:40,079
has incredible counterinsurgency doctrine baked into it, so good stuff.

549
00:45:42,039 --> 00:45:48,480
So the territory is reconstituted as the Kingdom of Laos

550
00:45:49,320 --> 00:45:56,440
and the Laoissara. That independence movement was quite openly absorbed

551
00:45:56,519 --> 00:46:03,000
by the viet min So even in February nineteen fifty one,

552
00:46:03,039 --> 00:46:05,920
I had talked about how the Common Turn was pressuring

553
00:46:05,960 --> 00:46:14,880
the Vietnamese to get more non Vietnamese representation in their ICP,

554
00:46:16,679 --> 00:46:20,679
and by February nineteen fifty one, there were only eighty

555
00:46:20,760 --> 00:46:26,159
one Lao members out of like twenty one hundred in

556
00:46:26,920 --> 00:46:32,280
Lao Territory who were Lao. The rest were almost entirely Vietnamese.

557
00:46:33,159 --> 00:46:36,840
An example, the first president of the Lao People's Democratic Republic,

558
00:46:36,840 --> 00:46:40,159
which was institute in nineteen seventy five, his name was

559
00:46:41,960 --> 00:46:48,440
Kaison Pomevan and his real surname was Nuen. He changed

560
00:46:48,480 --> 00:46:53,199
his name. He was half Lao, half Vietnamese. And in

561
00:46:53,239 --> 00:46:57,440
the there's a very famous cave, like right on the

562
00:46:57,480 --> 00:47:02,239
border with North Vietnam and far or eastern northeastern Laos,

563
00:47:02,679 --> 00:47:06,559
there's a famous cave where the Potet Lao, which was

564
00:47:06,599 --> 00:47:11,360
the Lao Communist Party hit out during the war and

565
00:47:11,679 --> 00:47:17,679
all of the books. It's all Marxist Leninist type doctrine, material,

566
00:47:17,679 --> 00:47:21,440
et cetera. It's all in Vietnamese. It's also these.

567
00:47:21,320 --> 00:47:24,320
Speaker 1: People who taught these people to change their names.

568
00:47:25,079 --> 00:47:30,519
Speaker 2: I know, right. Keep in mind, this is coming from

569
00:47:30,519 --> 00:47:33,559
the common Tern, you said it, man, So it's it's

570
00:47:33,559 --> 00:47:38,519
straight out of the common Tern instructions. Now, one other

571
00:47:38,599 --> 00:47:41,280
thing that I'll point out that's interesting. So do you

572
00:47:41,320 --> 00:47:45,840
remember that map of the settlement, you know, during the

573
00:47:45,880 --> 00:47:53,400
migration period. So an awful lot of these supposed Lao

574
00:47:53,559 --> 00:48:00,760
communist troops are from the various tribal people that still

575
00:48:00,880 --> 00:48:04,119
cousins in North Vietnam. So like the black tie the

576
00:48:04,159 --> 00:48:09,599
white tie that the colors refer to stuff they wear

577
00:48:09,599 --> 00:48:15,519
in their costume to identify their tribal affiliations. Yeah, so

578
00:48:15,559 --> 00:48:20,280
a lot of them were folks from from North Vietnam anyway,

579
00:48:20,320 --> 00:48:23,039
but because they speak the same language, it was good

580
00:48:23,039 --> 00:48:27,360
for their cover. There were also actual Lao who were communists,

581
00:48:27,400 --> 00:48:31,840
but they were mostly mostly people in these areas that

582
00:48:31,880 --> 00:48:38,320
had been conquered up in the northeast. Although for their

583
00:48:38,760 --> 00:48:44,039
legitimate public face, a half brother of the King of Laos,

584
00:48:44,480 --> 00:48:50,719
Prince Supanovoon, became known as the Red Prince, he aligned

585
00:48:50,719 --> 00:48:52,960
with the communists because frankly, he saw the writing on

586
00:48:53,000 --> 00:48:55,360
the wall. But a lot of it was due to

587
00:48:55,679 --> 00:49:03,000
the fact that again the educator administrative elements during you know,

588
00:49:03,079 --> 00:49:06,119
during the French Indo Chinese period, we're in the much

589
00:49:06,119 --> 00:49:11,480
more developed Vietnamese centers like around Hanoi and such, So

590
00:49:11,880 --> 00:49:15,559
the Lao would go there to get educated and quite

591
00:49:15,559 --> 00:49:19,920
often go from there to France and such. And Thomas

592
00:49:20,000 --> 00:49:22,719
was talking about it himself, you know, when I was

593
00:49:22,800 --> 00:49:26,719
listening to your Cold War series on the Vietnamese, such

594
00:49:26,719 --> 00:49:31,320
as Ho Chi Minh, they would go to the university

595
00:49:31,360 --> 00:49:35,599
in France and socialism was the thing. Socialism and communism

596
00:49:35,960 --> 00:49:40,559
was on the menu for learning about and studying at

597
00:49:40,559 --> 00:49:47,639
the time. So not surprising that it works out this way.

598
00:49:47,719 --> 00:49:51,519
So the French loss the First Into Chinese War, the

599
00:49:51,599 --> 00:49:55,119
Kingdom of Laos was granted full independence in nineteen fifty three.

600
00:49:56,480 --> 00:49:58,800
And again this is right in the period where we

601
00:49:58,800 --> 00:50:04,199
were looking at that mapper earlier with JFK. And this

602
00:50:04,280 --> 00:50:07,760
is really the calm before the Second Indo China War.

603
00:50:08,440 --> 00:50:13,599
So next door Vietnam split into communist North American sponsored

604
00:50:13,639 --> 00:50:17,159
Republic of Vietnam, in the south, and again I just

605
00:50:17,199 --> 00:50:21,679
like to point this out. So in the south South

606
00:50:21,760 --> 00:50:29,480
Vietnam is Koshinshina and parts of Onam. These largely ethnically

607
00:50:29,960 --> 00:50:34,360
and historically different than the north, which was Tonkin. The

608
00:50:34,440 --> 00:50:41,760
rulers of this of South Vietnam wered Vietnamese koshin Hina

609
00:50:41,960 --> 00:50:45,400
and Onam. They had been conquered by the new end

610
00:50:45,400 --> 00:50:50,199
Lords and and other Vietnamese groups, but a lot of

611
00:50:50,199 --> 00:50:53,239
the people were ethnically they were going through kind of

612
00:50:53,280 --> 00:50:59,280
an ethnogenesis and infusing to become the modern Vietnamese. But

613
00:51:00,360 --> 00:51:04,119
old school they were not necessarily quite often they were

614
00:51:04,119 --> 00:51:08,360
not descended from people who came down from the Vietnamese

615
00:51:08,400 --> 00:51:13,079
who came down from from China. They there was a

616
00:51:13,199 --> 00:51:17,199
linguistic assimilation, and even regionally, there's differences in the way

617
00:51:17,440 --> 00:51:19,159
the way that they speak, especially in the old days.

618
00:51:19,199 --> 00:51:23,280
It's different now with standardized education, but in the early

619
00:51:23,719 --> 00:51:28,239
early twentieth century they were they were quite different. I'm

620
00:51:28,280 --> 00:51:30,360
sure there's Vietnamese people who are mad at me right now.

621
00:51:30,360 --> 00:51:38,000
If any are listening, it's okay anyway. So what happens

622
00:51:38,400 --> 00:51:42,559
when you know, when there's a when there's a new

623
00:51:42,719 --> 00:51:47,880
gap American government and quote unquote private aid money. We

624
00:51:47,920 --> 00:51:52,800
know how that works these days, aid workers, volunteers and

625
00:51:53,079 --> 00:51:59,239
quote unquote advisors flooded into the Republic of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia,

626
00:51:59,360 --> 00:52:03,000
and Thailand and to resist Communist expansion. And this had

627
00:52:03,039 --> 00:52:06,400
actually been going on in Thailand for several years since

628
00:52:06,639 --> 00:52:10,199
after the war. The oss and the British had been

629
00:52:10,239 --> 00:52:15,400
involved in Thailand, very very involved. You may recall also

630
00:52:16,079 --> 00:52:20,039
that at the end of World War two, and Kemp

631
00:52:20,079 --> 00:52:23,519
talks about this a lot something like one hundred thousand

632
00:52:23,599 --> 00:52:26,800
British soldiers who had just been released. They were the

633
00:52:26,800 --> 00:52:31,800
ones that were captured around Singapore and some other locations

634
00:52:32,599 --> 00:52:37,159
Hong Kong. They were like re armed and brought to

635
00:52:38,159 --> 00:52:45,559
Vietnam to essentially transition the Japanese out, And that a

636
00:52:45,639 --> 00:52:48,559
lot of the idea was that they wanted the Western

637
00:52:48,639 --> 00:52:52,000
powers wanted to control like all the weapons that were

638
00:52:52,400 --> 00:52:58,119
sitting around now to try to prevent you know, internecine warfare.

639
00:52:59,519 --> 00:53:04,280
So what happens when lots of money made, money and

640
00:53:04,320 --> 00:53:09,639
stuff and material flows into a place that connected people

641
00:53:09,760 --> 00:53:18,599
become rich. Tons of weapons are everywhere and the Vietnamese

642
00:53:18,639 --> 00:53:26,639
and Chinese communities in these areas become insurgents again driven

643
00:53:26,719 --> 00:53:35,800
by nationalism and communism. So there's there was a very

644
00:53:35,880 --> 00:53:40,159
brief over at US military project in Laos called White Star,

645
00:53:40,599 --> 00:53:46,639
Operation White Star, where US Army Special Forces soldiers came in, uh,

646
00:53:47,039 --> 00:53:53,159
not undercover, in uniform and we're training Lao forces, just

647
00:53:53,280 --> 00:53:57,800
like was done in Vietnam and and continued in Vietnam.

648
00:53:58,440 --> 00:54:05,440
But what happened was in nineteen sixty fellow on the left,

649
00:54:05,480 --> 00:54:11,360
who was a veteran of the French into Chinese forces,

650
00:54:11,440 --> 00:54:14,199
and I think he was also affiliated with French Foreign Legion,

651
00:54:16,199 --> 00:54:21,119
Captain Gongle. He led his battalion into veng Chan, the capital,

652
00:54:21,519 --> 00:54:25,199
where they overthrew the Royal Lao government there in a

653
00:54:25,280 --> 00:54:30,559
coupdetas as a protest against corruption due to US funding

654
00:54:30,719 --> 00:54:36,239
caused by US funding. And what he pointed out was

655
00:54:36,599 --> 00:54:41,280
there was the Geneva Agreement that stated that Laos would

656
00:54:41,280 --> 00:54:48,360
be neutral, but here's all this American money and equipment,

657
00:54:49,039 --> 00:54:53,679
and he felt like, you know, something wasn't wasn't right.

658
00:54:54,199 --> 00:54:59,480
But he was also very naive. He was ousted in

659
00:54:59,559 --> 00:55:03,079
December of nineteen sixty by rightist troops. It came up

660
00:55:03,079 --> 00:55:07,599
from Savannaquette, which was the home of a surviving like

661
00:55:07,920 --> 00:55:15,119
right wing Lao nationalist remnant of King Anu Anuvong's army

662
00:55:16,880 --> 00:55:22,480
who had failed in their rising against the Siamese and

663
00:55:22,559 --> 00:55:27,119
been crushed one hundred and thirty years before. It was

664
00:55:27,159 --> 00:55:29,760
a remnant down there, and so a bunch of these

665
00:55:29,800 --> 00:55:34,199
families stepped in because they understood there's no such thing

666
00:55:34,239 --> 00:55:38,519
as a neutral country. It's it's you're against the communists

667
00:55:39,519 --> 00:55:42,760
or you're with the communists, and the communists were Vietnamese.

668
00:55:44,639 --> 00:55:55,440
Gong Lei fell for the ideology trap. So thus begins

669
00:55:55,599 --> 00:55:58,519
the Second Indo China War. Things are heating up in

670
00:55:58,559 --> 00:56:03,480
the East, but you're starting to see these big movements

671
00:56:03,719 --> 00:56:10,960
of armed forces in Laos. Fellow up at the top,

672
00:56:11,760 --> 00:56:16,119
Bill Lair. He was a World War Two veteran who

673
00:56:16,519 --> 00:56:18,719
went to college on the Gi Bill and then went

674
00:56:18,760 --> 00:56:22,519
to work for the CIA. He had worked with the

675
00:56:22,639 --> 00:56:27,760
TIE for ten or twelve years, if I remember correctly,

676
00:56:29,039 --> 00:56:33,079
and what he was doing was again following that what

677
00:56:33,280 --> 00:56:39,159
became in the I think army special forces were formally

678
00:56:39,239 --> 00:56:43,360
developed around the fifty two or fifty three, maybe slightly

679
00:56:43,440 --> 00:56:50,360
later in terms of force multiplication. You know, their primary

680
00:56:50,800 --> 00:56:54,559
mission was to go in and basically build gorilla armies

681
00:56:54,559 --> 00:56:58,199
from the ground up. And so he had been building

682
00:56:58,280 --> 00:57:05,840
quote unquote border police in Thailand and basically light infantry units,

683
00:57:06,519 --> 00:57:09,760
and so he went into Laos with a bunch of

684
00:57:09,760 --> 00:57:14,000
these Thai border police because in Northeast Thailand they are

685
00:57:14,280 --> 00:57:18,000
ethnically Lao and speak the same language, despite you know,

686
00:57:18,280 --> 00:57:24,400
some of the specific dialect that the central government pushed,

687
00:57:25,000 --> 00:57:27,880
but it's basically the same when you actually are on

688
00:57:27,880 --> 00:57:32,480
the ground in northeast Thailand, it's the same language. And

689
00:57:33,280 --> 00:57:38,320
they started looking for people who they could build into

690
00:57:38,360 --> 00:57:42,920
these just like in Vietnam, the civilian irregular defense groups

691
00:57:43,360 --> 00:57:46,000
doing the same thing in Laos. And they really found

692
00:57:46,079 --> 00:57:50,760
purchase among the Mung hill tribes up in northeast Lao,

693
00:57:52,199 --> 00:57:57,679
hard up against that border with Vietnam. Because these guys,

694
00:57:58,159 --> 00:58:05,840
the Mung tribe had clicked up with the French and

695
00:58:06,079 --> 00:58:10,079
the Royal Lao government because they understood that they were

696
00:58:10,079 --> 00:58:12,719
just going to get bulldozed by the Vietnamese. It's not

697
00:58:13,000 --> 00:58:16,199
you don't want to be an ethnic minority under the Vietnamese.

698
00:58:17,199 --> 00:58:23,360
So they were a great group because they are mountain people,

699
00:58:23,480 --> 00:58:27,559
they're tough, they're used to being on the run. They

700
00:58:27,559 --> 00:58:30,239
had just come down from China in the nineteenth century

701
00:58:30,320 --> 00:58:35,320
themselves kind of scooting along in the highlands, and they

702
00:58:35,360 --> 00:58:42,440
made a really good observers local defense and you know,

703
00:58:42,519 --> 00:58:46,360
shoot and scoot kind of guys. And they were completely

704
00:58:46,599 --> 00:58:49,960
deniable as US assets. They got armed with all this

705
00:58:50,079 --> 00:58:55,559
World War two equipment, garand rifles and one carbings, you know,

706
00:58:55,599 --> 00:59:00,280
the old the old bazookas, baars, et cetera. You know,

707
00:59:00,480 --> 00:59:03,400
we had millions and millions and millions of these things.

708
00:59:03,480 --> 00:59:06,480
And so they would go to regular armies all over

709
00:59:06,519 --> 00:59:11,280
the place, including South Vietnam or Annon. Laos they gave them,

710
00:59:11,880 --> 00:59:15,159
they handed those weapons over to the regular army, which

711
00:59:15,159 --> 00:59:18,599
we'll talk about a little bit later. I'm making quote

712
00:59:18,639 --> 00:59:23,159
marks off camera. But they also went to these gorilla groups.

713
00:59:24,239 --> 00:59:32,079
So in a follow up to JFK's presentation, there was

714
00:59:32,199 --> 00:59:38,679
another agreement in Geneva that was signed, you know, underscoring

715
00:59:38,719 --> 00:59:43,360
the neutrality of LAOS in July nineteen sixty two, and

716
00:59:43,440 --> 00:59:47,599
all signatories immediately violated the agreement, but they did it covertly.

717
00:59:48,800 --> 00:59:53,079
And so the important thing to understand is this is

718
00:59:53,159 --> 00:59:56,559
the frame. The frame about LAOS comes out of the

719
00:59:56,599 --> 01:00:02,039
fact that America Vietnam. Well, China was in a signatory

720
01:00:02,039 --> 01:00:06,719
to it. I don't think this second one and the

721
01:00:06,760 --> 01:00:12,719
Soviets all ignored the fact that the other signatories were

722
01:00:12,800 --> 01:00:17,440
violating this because they were also violating the terms of

723
01:00:17,480 --> 01:00:23,400
the international agreement. So, but what happened was because of

724
01:00:23,480 --> 01:00:30,440
this written agreement, overt US military forces essentially stayed off

725
01:00:30,519 --> 01:00:36,960
the ground. Henceforth, in Laos, the US State Department, via

726
01:00:37,239 --> 01:00:42,039
USAID and the embassy and the CIA ran the ground

727
01:00:42,079 --> 01:00:46,239
war in Laos, not the US military. If US military

728
01:00:46,320 --> 01:00:49,960
personnel were needed to do something in Laos, they were

729
01:00:49,960 --> 01:00:54,760
sheep dipped, which meant that they were on paper mustered

730
01:00:54,800 --> 01:00:59,679
out and given a lot of times State Department IDs,

731
01:01:02,000 --> 01:01:07,519
you know, issued by foreign consulates with civilian covers, particularly

732
01:01:07,559 --> 01:01:12,559
being assigned to CIA front companies, what kind of front

733
01:01:12,559 --> 01:01:17,400
companies glowy logistics. So I think a lot of people

734
01:01:17,440 --> 01:01:21,440
are really familiar with with Air America because of that movie,

735
01:01:21,719 --> 01:01:24,800
and there's been a number of books on this subject,

736
01:01:24,840 --> 01:01:30,400
But essentially that was Air America was just one of

737
01:01:30,639 --> 01:01:37,719
many CIA front companies that were their aviation assets. So

738
01:01:37,840 --> 01:01:44,000
there was the Pacific Corporation Civil Air Transport. You'll see

739
01:01:44,000 --> 01:01:47,559
a picture of a C forty seven up top left,

740
01:01:49,039 --> 01:01:55,360
painted to look commercial. It was a nationalist Chinese airline,

741
01:01:55,400 --> 01:01:58,519
and I have quotes around both of those that were

742
01:01:58,800 --> 01:02:01,440
founded by Claire Chanel, who was the founder of the

743
01:02:01,480 --> 01:02:05,480
Flying Tigers. They were gifted surplus World War Two aircraft

744
01:02:05,519 --> 01:02:09,880
by the US military and they used them for civilian

745
01:02:09,960 --> 01:02:13,519
air travel routes and freight as well as covert operations.

746
01:02:14,400 --> 01:02:18,480
Do you think a lot of regular, normy civilians in

747
01:02:18,559 --> 01:02:23,079
any of these countries were traveling by air. No, it

748
01:02:23,159 --> 01:02:27,280
was almost entirely covert operations or doing stuff, you know,

749
01:02:28,000 --> 01:02:35,440
American assets flying like local allies around even if it

750
01:02:35,519 --> 01:02:39,880
wasn't technically like a CIA operation. The company was transferred

751
01:02:39,920 --> 01:02:44,320
to the CIA in nineteen fifty nine and rebranded as

752
01:02:44,400 --> 01:02:46,800
Air America. It wasn't like there was paper that said

753
01:02:46,840 --> 01:02:52,239
CIA to this, but they were acquired by another shell company.

754
01:02:52,239 --> 01:02:56,920
Continental Airlines operated an air transport division that was contracted

755
01:02:56,960 --> 01:03:02,239
to the US government known as Continental Air Services Inc. CISI.

756
01:03:02,599 --> 01:03:08,000
And so when you look at paperwork that American civilians had, like,

757
01:03:09,239 --> 01:03:11,199
I have a cool image coming up here in a

758
01:03:11,239 --> 01:03:15,119
second that shows there's a CISI phone number that they

759
01:03:15,119 --> 01:03:19,679
could call to get flights So here's the thing. The

760
01:03:19,719 --> 01:03:23,519
topography of Laos necessitated that they mostly use the short

761
01:03:23,559 --> 01:03:28,079
takeoff and landing aircraft here and later helicopters because you're

762
01:03:28,119 --> 01:03:31,360
flying into these remote mountainous areas most of the time.

763
01:03:31,920 --> 01:03:36,119
But the C forty seven's were used wherever possible, just

764
01:03:36,119 --> 01:03:41,679
because of the sheer volume of carrying capacity. There was

765
01:03:41,719 --> 01:03:46,320
a CIA run air maintenance company called Air Asia Company

766
01:03:46,400 --> 01:03:51,079
Limited that would maintain all these aircraft, and they would

767
01:03:51,159 --> 01:04:01,719
use American foreign and local employees and armed US military aircraft,

768
01:04:02,599 --> 01:04:08,119
so formal US military, US Air Force, et cetera. They

769
01:04:08,159 --> 01:04:12,079
operated out of Thailand and Vietnam exclusively. They never touched

770
01:04:13,599 --> 01:04:21,440
airfields and Laos. All right, Americans on the Lao Front.

771
01:04:22,519 --> 01:04:26,400
There were different kinds of folks, whether members of the

772
01:04:26,440 --> 01:04:31,000
State Department, civilian contract workers, or USAID employees. They were

773
01:04:31,039 --> 01:04:34,039
brought into the war by the expansion of ground combat

774
01:04:34,119 --> 01:04:38,119
operations and the guiding hand of the CIA. Top right,

775
01:04:38,159 --> 01:04:42,639
you'll see a bunch of dudes, white guys, all Americans

776
01:04:42,800 --> 01:04:49,239
with all kinds of firearms who are actual CIA employees.

777
01:04:50,559 --> 01:04:54,559
To the left is an American AID worker named Pop Buel.

778
01:04:56,159 --> 01:05:02,239
He joined the International Voluntary Service, which was a organization

779
01:05:02,400 --> 01:05:09,719
founded by Mennonite Brethren and Quaker Brethren in nineteen fifty three,

780
01:05:10,280 --> 01:05:14,840
and they started doing aid work all around, mostly focusing

781
01:05:14,960 --> 01:05:22,280
on uh, you know, allies, Coptic Christians in Egypt. They

782
01:05:22,320 --> 01:05:26,360
started getting funding from US AID and grew like crazy.

783
01:05:27,440 --> 01:05:31,239
So again there's an original NGO in the pattern that

784
01:05:31,280 --> 01:05:34,760
we're used to seeing. So he is a pop Bowel

785
01:05:35,119 --> 01:05:40,360
is doing work for US foreign policy through the auspices

786
01:05:40,480 --> 01:05:46,400
of US AID, you know, but with a NGO cover.

787
01:05:48,800 --> 01:05:52,480
The dudes at the right are CIA paramilitary officers and

788
01:05:52,519 --> 01:05:58,719
sometimes case officers. So early on they were just like

789
01:05:59,639 --> 01:06:05,119
World War Two in Korea vets with training in guerrilla warfare,

790
01:06:05,400 --> 01:06:11,800
et cetera. Later on, the primary source of new c

791
01:06:11,840 --> 01:06:16,840
i A. Paaramilitary officers were Special Forces guys. So you

792
01:06:16,920 --> 01:06:21,039
do a tour or two in s F and if

793
01:06:21,119 --> 01:06:26,119
you're good at the leadership and training role, hey, we

794
01:06:26,159 --> 01:06:28,519
have a special project for you and laost do you

795
01:06:28,559 --> 01:06:34,079
want to become a civilian again, you know, quote unquote.

796
01:06:34,480 --> 01:06:37,840
And then there were also case officers or operations officers

797
01:06:37,840 --> 01:06:44,119
who were more focused on clandestine intelligence gathering. There's a

798
01:06:44,159 --> 01:06:47,320
really great book I have. I have some reading material

799
01:06:47,360 --> 01:06:50,199
listed at the end of this. But there's a really

800
01:06:50,239 --> 01:06:53,840
great book called Cash on Delivery that was written by

801
01:06:54,159 --> 01:07:00,599
a case officer who was managing small teams for intelligence

802
01:07:01,079 --> 01:07:05,800
enemy snatches, and he never talks about it, but reading

803
01:07:05,840 --> 01:07:08,639
between the lines, I should say he doesn't talk explicitly

804
01:07:08,679 --> 01:07:14,800
about it, but probably assassinations were carried out. Also, the

805
01:07:14,880 --> 01:07:18,119
key thing to keep in mind is that USAID ivs

806
01:07:19,239 --> 01:07:21,719
paid contract workers, et cetera. They were taking care of

807
01:07:21,920 --> 01:07:29,760
the logistics to support these gorilla forces that were being trained,

808
01:07:29,960 --> 01:07:34,880
led and managed by the paramilitary officers. And most importantly,

809
01:07:34,920 --> 01:07:38,840
they're families because you know, you got to you got

810
01:07:38,840 --> 01:07:42,280
a gorilla he's you know, he's twenty three years old,

811
01:07:42,559 --> 01:07:44,880
he's already married and has a couple of kids. So

812
01:07:46,320 --> 01:07:51,159
that was a key, a key thing. The hospitals and

813
01:07:51,960 --> 01:07:56,840
you know, air evac for injuries and relocating people to

814
01:07:56,880 --> 01:08:00,440
get them the civilian population, to get them away from

815
01:08:00,480 --> 01:08:01,119
the war zone.

816
01:08:01,760 --> 01:08:04,800
Speaker 1: What weapons am I seeing in that picture? Ah, I

817
01:08:04,840 --> 01:08:07,159
see an I see an ak ak.

818
01:08:07,639 --> 01:08:12,639
Speaker 2: This is a pps H forty one M sixteen. I

819
01:08:12,679 --> 01:08:15,239
think this is an M sixteen. This is I think

820
01:08:15,280 --> 01:08:19,039
this is a Savage sixty seven pump shotgun. Piece of shit.

821
01:08:19,239 --> 01:08:26,680
I had one sks M sixteen. It's too faded to

822
01:08:26,720 --> 01:08:29,479
see what it is, but all kinds of good stuff.

823
01:08:29,520 --> 01:08:31,319
Speaker 1: And then they have at least a couple, got at

824
01:08:31,399 --> 01:08:32,560
least a couple going native.

825
01:08:33,520 --> 01:08:42,199
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, quite a few. These guys were total cowboys. Man. Yeah,

826
01:08:42,520 --> 01:08:46,279
they often speak very fondly of it. And let me

827
01:08:46,319 --> 01:08:49,039
put it this way. A one of my mentors when

828
01:08:49,079 --> 01:08:50,920
I was a young man who's no longer with us,

829
01:08:50,960 --> 01:08:56,119
I dedicate my first novel to him, Jim. The dedication

830
01:08:56,239 --> 01:08:59,199
of that is boys. He walks in one day, one

831
01:08:59,359 --> 01:09:05,239
night rather doing patrolling, his patrolling his property around midnight,

832
01:09:05,279 --> 01:09:08,199
and he says, boys in an ambush always air on

833
01:09:08,279 --> 01:09:11,880
the side of violence and just goes upstairs. We're like, yes, sir.

834
01:09:13,720 --> 01:09:16,680
But anyway, he the way he put it is he

835
01:09:16,680 --> 01:09:19,079
he was an advised different from the person I was

836
01:09:19,079 --> 01:09:24,159
talking about earlier before we started recording. But he was

837
01:09:24,199 --> 01:09:27,039
a he was in the Air Force, and he was

838
01:09:27,079 --> 01:09:30,800
sheep dipped as a State Department advisor quote unquote at

839
01:09:30,840 --> 01:09:33,680
age twenty, you know, and he was one of the

840
01:09:33,680 --> 01:09:40,720
first so much experience on exact affairs exactly, especially the

841
01:09:40,720 --> 01:09:43,920
making love part that became a specialty. But making love

842
01:09:44,039 --> 01:09:46,439
and reigning death from the sky because he became one

843
01:09:46,439 --> 01:09:54,439
of the first, uh, spooky gunship weapons operators. So anyway,

844
01:09:54,760 --> 01:09:57,520
he said that it was a great time before it

845
01:09:57,560 --> 01:10:03,439
got really military. So he didn't like it when after

846
01:10:03,560 --> 01:10:06,439
nineteen sixty five when the regular army and everyone showed

847
01:10:06,520 --> 01:10:08,399
up and you couldn't pretend.

848
01:10:08,199 --> 01:10:10,479
Speaker 1: When it was the wild West everything was fine. Now

849
01:10:10,479 --> 01:10:12,079
we got to follow REGs.

850
01:10:12,359 --> 01:10:16,720
Speaker 2: Oh my god, yeah, exactly. All Uh, I think I'm

851
01:10:16,760 --> 01:10:19,439
gonna I'm gonna do some I'm gonna do some stuff

852
01:10:19,439 --> 01:10:22,159
for him because he's passed, and I'll post. He's got

853
01:10:22,159 --> 01:10:25,239
a lot of great stories and I'll post. I'll post

854
01:10:25,319 --> 01:10:28,800
some of the I'll post some pictures and some other

855
01:10:28,880 --> 01:10:32,880
cool stuff. His son's gone too, so there's no one

856
01:10:32,920 --> 01:10:40,840
will complain, all right, So these are some I'm about

857
01:10:40,840 --> 01:10:43,880
to get back into the abstract again. But here's a

858
01:10:43,880 --> 01:10:47,680
few more details. And these are really people who became

859
01:10:47,760 --> 01:10:52,239
part of the legend of the American involvement in Laos.

860
01:10:52,279 --> 01:10:57,720
So on the left, this is Tony Poe, the American

861
01:10:57,880 --> 01:11:04,000
I think is push Shipney. It's a it's a Polish surname.

862
01:11:05,840 --> 01:11:09,199
He was a longtime c a paramilitary. He was a

863
01:11:09,319 --> 01:11:16,720
USMC veteran. He was training Koreans in South Koreans and

864
01:11:16,720 --> 01:11:22,479
guerrilla warfare. Before the Korean War started. He was organizing

865
01:11:22,520 --> 01:11:27,479
guys in Tibet who he called the greatest gorillas in history.

866
01:11:27,520 --> 01:11:32,239
There just weren't enough of them, et cetera. But he

867
01:11:32,319 --> 01:11:36,560
became the model for Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. He

868
01:11:36,800 --> 01:11:40,640
was super hardcore. I won't tell stories, but they involved

869
01:11:40,680 --> 01:11:45,000
beheadings and like ear necklaces, like he's he's that guy,

870
01:11:46,039 --> 01:11:48,720
and he's with Vong Pau a young Vong Pau here,

871
01:11:48,800 --> 01:11:53,479
who was the leader of the Mung the whole uh,

872
01:11:53,840 --> 01:11:58,239
the anti communist clans within the Mung Hill tribe because

873
01:11:58,279 --> 01:12:05,560
some Long tribe clans became pro communist if they had

874
01:12:05,640 --> 01:12:08,479
connections in North Vietnam Prime. Primarily it was kind of

875
01:12:09,159 --> 01:12:12,840
accidents of geography and how things worked out World War two.

876
01:12:14,359 --> 01:12:18,039
And then this is I can't remember his name, one

877
01:12:18,039 --> 01:12:22,840
of Vung Powe's lieutenants, but anyway, this is the like

878
01:12:23,000 --> 01:12:29,399
the dark gruesome um you know legend in America. The

879
01:12:29,439 --> 01:12:33,880
folks on the left, and I'll talk more about Vung

880
01:12:33,960 --> 01:12:36,960
Pou in a second, but on the right is the

881
01:12:37,640 --> 01:12:46,319
positive cheerful, youthful, sensitive understanding aspect, which is this is

882
01:12:46,399 --> 01:12:52,960
Vin Lawrence. His grandfather founded General Electric. He was extremely

883
01:12:53,039 --> 01:12:57,439
well off. He graduated from Princeton with an art history degree,

884
01:12:58,880 --> 01:13:02,600
you know, and at the time they had the draft,

885
01:13:02,840 --> 01:13:06,199
he was tagged to go into the army and used

886
01:13:06,239 --> 01:13:08,840
family connections to get in an assignment in the CIA,

887
01:13:09,119 --> 01:13:11,359
And so he was in Laos from nineteen sixty two

888
01:13:11,399 --> 01:13:15,079
to nineteen sixty six. He stayed in the CIA for

889
01:13:15,159 --> 01:13:19,920
a little while after that and then went on to

890
01:13:19,960 --> 01:13:24,039
become a cartoonist for the New Yorker and other folks.

891
01:13:24,079 --> 01:13:27,920
But he's he took a lot of great photos in Laos,

892
01:13:28,880 --> 01:13:32,800
and he also filmed some footage that I'll talk about shortly.

893
01:13:33,960 --> 01:13:38,960
His reports, his writing for the CIA when he got

894
01:13:39,039 --> 01:13:43,520
back to the States is among the most thoughtful and

895
01:13:43,640 --> 01:13:47,600
interesting stuff about the war. He's a he just passed

896
01:13:47,600 --> 01:13:55,560
away a couple of years ago, very very cool and interesting,

897
01:13:56,159 --> 01:14:05,520
like you know, upper crust, old school American, you know, elite,

898
01:14:05,760 --> 01:14:09,159
you know, just a man of quality. And so we

899
01:14:09,239 --> 01:14:12,479
get I'll have some resources that you can share about him,

900
01:14:12,479 --> 01:14:20,079
because his stuff is very interesting, all right. So Americans

901
01:14:20,079 --> 01:14:23,159
on the Maykong so in the background. This is actually

902
01:14:23,199 --> 01:14:29,439
a phone book that Americans in Laos were handed that

903
01:14:29,760 --> 01:14:33,439
a that someone who had grown up there because his

904
01:14:33,560 --> 01:14:37,680
folks worked for USAID. He had kept a bunch of

905
01:14:37,680 --> 01:14:41,279
this material and did scans and put them online about

906
01:14:41,520 --> 01:14:46,840
ten years ago or so. But anyway, so the really

907
01:14:46,880 --> 01:14:48,880
important thing to understand is there were a lot of

908
01:14:48,920 --> 01:14:53,000
Americans that ended up in Laos. And again, remember this

909
01:14:53,119 --> 01:14:55,239
is a country of two million people at the time,

910
01:14:56,239 --> 01:15:00,720
and so around the embassy and any of these specific

911
01:15:00,800 --> 01:15:04,359
missions along the cities is where the bulk of these

912
01:15:05,039 --> 01:15:11,319
kind of civilian workers would be. Along the Mekong River now,

913
01:15:12,279 --> 01:15:15,800
as in the Ukraine, the key thing to understand is

914
01:15:15,840 --> 01:15:20,319
that the Royal Au government's entire budget was paid for

915
01:15:21,279 --> 01:15:29,079
the American aid dollars. All development programs, refugee assistance, education,

916
01:15:29,600 --> 01:15:34,399
medical missions, and so on were paid for and were

917
01:15:34,439 --> 01:15:39,640
designed in pursuit of US foreign policy. All aspects of

918
01:15:39,680 --> 01:15:46,119
the war, military or civilian, were subservient to overall US

919
01:15:46,199 --> 01:15:48,600
foreign policy aims. Again, this is I'm going to re

920
01:15:48,640 --> 01:15:52,720
emphasize the context of, as I say in the next bit,

921
01:15:53,159 --> 01:15:58,199
the Cold War geopolitical realities. The State Department via the

922
01:15:58,239 --> 01:16:04,359
percentage of the ambassador to Laos, the American ambassador, and

923
01:16:04,479 --> 01:16:08,479
the CIA, So the guys on the ground, and you know,

924
01:16:08,680 --> 01:16:13,159
USAID was subservient to the ambassador. The CIA was its

925
01:16:13,199 --> 01:16:16,199
own thing, and so they would clash quite often over

926
01:16:16,279 --> 01:16:21,840
execution of the war. But again, the overall execution of

927
01:16:21,880 --> 01:16:25,399
the war, whether you cared about the people that you

928
01:16:25,439 --> 01:16:29,840
were leading into battle or not, were being done based

929
01:16:29,880 --> 01:16:34,439
on Cold War geopolitical realities and US foreign policy aims.

930
01:16:35,079 --> 01:16:38,279
So anytime you read anything, you'll read root some really

931
01:16:38,319 --> 01:16:44,079
passionate stuff from these like CIA paramilitaries and people like that,

932
01:16:44,600 --> 01:16:47,960
or the USA guys that are actually up in the highlands,

933
01:16:48,399 --> 01:16:51,479
and they'll be so mad at the ambassador about this

934
01:16:51,600 --> 01:16:55,279
or that, because the ambassador could say, and right now

935
01:16:55,399 --> 01:17:00,520
is not a good time for you know, heavy US

936
01:17:00,600 --> 01:17:10,199
Air Force air support. Sorry. Total US eight expenditures of

937
01:17:10,239 --> 01:17:13,039
all types and laws from nineteen fifty five to nineteen

938
01:17:13,119 --> 01:17:20,760
seventy three, not counting US Air Force, probably not including

939
01:17:20,800 --> 01:17:24,399
the cost of director laundry equipment transfers, is between seven

940
01:17:24,439 --> 01:17:28,600
point five and eleven point one billion dollars in twenty

941
01:17:28,680 --> 01:17:33,399
twenty five dollars. Nineteen seventy three dollars, it was one

942
01:17:33,479 --> 01:17:38,960
to one point five billion. And again, this doesn't count

943
01:17:39,880 --> 01:17:44,319
money that was that was associated with US military you know,

944
01:17:44,479 --> 01:17:49,239
operations and in Vietnam or supporting the Vietnam you know sphere.

945
01:17:50,159 --> 01:17:53,920
It doesn't count money that was spent on Vietnam that

946
01:17:53,960 --> 01:18:00,399
trickled over, It doesn't count you know, the equip meant

947
01:18:00,760 --> 01:18:03,880
that was US Air Force and then it just gets

948
01:18:03,880 --> 01:18:09,000
handed to the locals. That's a lot of money, especially

949
01:18:09,239 --> 01:18:13,119
when you look at the budgets in those eras, it's

950
01:18:13,319 --> 01:18:15,960
a lot a lot of money. It's a country of

951
01:18:16,000 --> 01:18:16,920
two million people.

952
01:18:18,680 --> 01:18:22,399
Speaker 1: So yes, also you know, at least we get to

953
01:18:22,439 --> 01:18:26,920
see Ukraine on TV. Yes, this is something that was

954
01:18:26,920 --> 01:18:31,119
completely clandestine.

955
01:18:29,960 --> 01:18:36,000
Speaker 2: Clandestine and slides the next couple slides. We'll talk a

956
01:18:36,000 --> 01:18:38,880
little more about that, and and it sounds crazy and

957
01:18:39,000 --> 01:18:44,600
naive to us right now, but it we should understand.

958
01:18:44,600 --> 01:18:46,960
It was a different era and they had total control

959
01:18:47,560 --> 01:18:51,680
over what went out over the area and what was published,

960
01:18:53,479 --> 01:19:00,159
which causes significant distortions in the story. That's actually the

961
01:19:00,199 --> 01:19:02,800
next slide, but let me finish this slide. So here's

962
01:19:02,840 --> 01:19:08,279
a bunch of these guys. Are CIA led special Gorilla

963
01:19:08,439 --> 01:19:13,039
units in Laos. So the forces raised let me step

964
01:19:13,079 --> 01:19:18,439
back for a second. Ground combat operations were carried out

965
01:19:18,600 --> 01:19:22,239
using the Special Forces model, which is US leadership and training,

966
01:19:23,000 --> 01:19:25,760
but then you use local combatants to do all the fighting,

967
01:19:25,880 --> 01:19:31,840
and then you have American or local air assets. The

968
01:19:33,399 --> 01:19:41,560
the government, the Formal Royal Lao Army was largely sitting

969
01:19:41,560 --> 01:19:45,199
in a garrison and their commanders creating ghost armies and

970
01:19:45,239 --> 01:19:52,359
skimming their salaries. So if you were a if you

971
01:19:52,399 --> 01:19:56,640
were one of these, if you were one of these

972
01:19:56,760 --> 01:20:00,600
remnants of the old days, and you wanted to fight

973
01:20:00,840 --> 01:20:08,680
against invaders because the Ho Chiman Trail ran through your

974
01:20:09,479 --> 01:20:14,600
your homeland and your aunt died when she was press

975
01:20:14,640 --> 01:20:18,920
ganged to be Koli labor for the North Vietnamese Army,

976
01:20:20,199 --> 01:20:22,439
You're not going to join the Royal Lao Army. You're

977
01:20:22,479 --> 01:20:30,199
gonna You're gonna click up with the the CIA led guys.

978
01:20:30,920 --> 01:20:38,760
So the originally their forces were primarily defensive in nature

979
01:20:38,960 --> 01:20:42,960
or focus on gathering intelligence. There was a lot of

980
01:20:43,000 --> 01:20:48,760
work with small groups who would go in and do

981
01:20:48,960 --> 01:20:53,159
kind of bomb damage assessment, you know, after bombing along

982
01:20:53,199 --> 01:20:57,479
the Ho Chiman trail and trying to identify better targets.

983
01:20:58,439 --> 01:21:02,359
Technology was an issue because of the limits and when

984
01:21:02,399 --> 01:21:09,439
you see that topography, like small, slow, low flying planes

985
01:21:09,520 --> 01:21:11,920
were the only way that you could really get precision,

986
01:21:12,640 --> 01:21:16,920
but then that exposes you to you know, anti aircraft

987
01:21:17,000 --> 01:21:19,800
fire and even small arms from the ground were a

988
01:21:19,800 --> 01:21:26,119
big threat. And so it's this really interesting push pull

989
01:21:26,279 --> 01:21:32,079
between all these these demands and are you supporting are

990
01:21:32,079 --> 01:21:36,760
you fighting to defend laos and your communities, or are

991
01:21:36,800 --> 01:21:41,800
you just targeting the logistical chain that's going from the

992
01:21:41,840 --> 01:21:45,720
north down into into South Vietnam. And these are all

993
01:21:45,840 --> 01:21:50,560
kind of like debates that the locals were having because

994
01:21:50,560 --> 01:21:55,199
these are not these are not chumps. I mean a

995
01:21:55,239 --> 01:22:00,520
lot of the junior infantrymen were very just very unaware

996
01:22:00,600 --> 01:22:04,399
of the world beyond their front door, like why why

997
01:22:04,399 --> 01:22:10,239
wouldn't they be? But the leadership of these groups were

998
01:22:10,560 --> 01:22:15,079
very These are people who whose families had been elite

999
01:22:15,239 --> 01:22:20,079
for fifteen hundred years, and they would they knew their lineages.

1000
01:22:20,680 --> 01:22:25,720
And so this was a big challenge for the CIA

1001
01:22:25,880 --> 01:22:31,359
leaders because there would be language barriers, but there's also

1002
01:22:31,399 --> 01:22:33,319
the local thing of where they just wouldn't talk to

1003
01:22:33,359 --> 01:22:39,199
the American advisors about what the real debates taking place were,

1004
01:22:39,920 --> 01:22:43,560
and the Americans would typically have fairly limited language, local

1005
01:22:43,640 --> 01:22:47,039
language skills, the guys that stuck around for a long time,

1006
01:22:47,159 --> 01:22:51,479
that tended to resolve itself, and then it would be

1007
01:22:51,560 --> 01:22:55,279
up to the locals, to the local leadership. They would

1008
01:22:55,279 --> 01:23:02,199
typically speak French and English or be forced to learn English.

1009
01:23:02,239 --> 01:23:07,680
They would do all their radio commands in English and such.

1010
01:23:07,760 --> 01:23:12,479
So anyway, really interesting push pull the mond got.

1011
01:23:12,760 --> 01:23:18,960
Speaker 1: It's interesting because they don't really You have these Americans

1012
01:23:19,039 --> 01:23:22,640
going there and they don't really understand the culture, and

1013
01:23:23,000 --> 01:23:26,039
you have these American advisors who are working in Ukraine

1014
01:23:26,119 --> 01:23:29,479
and don't realize Ukraine is most of them don't realize

1015
01:23:29,560 --> 01:23:32,439
Ukraine's about a three hundred and fifty year old ethnic grievance.

1016
01:23:33,119 --> 01:23:36,640
Speaker 2: One hundred percent the parallel that I'm shooting for, dude,

1017
01:23:36,800 --> 01:23:41,760
that that's one hundred percent. They know twenty years of history.

1018
01:23:41,800 --> 01:23:45,840
They know, oh, I remember President Kennedy's presentation, and they

1019
01:23:45,880 --> 01:23:49,520
get that like after World War two thing, but they

1020
01:23:49,560 --> 01:23:52,960
don't know the past history. They don't know any of

1021
01:23:53,000 --> 01:23:59,560
the context that's really important to understand. And so it's

1022
01:23:59,800 --> 01:24:06,399
just this it's just this mess. There's another thing that's

1023
01:24:06,439 --> 01:24:11,479
really important to understand, and it's as it relates to

1024
01:24:11,560 --> 01:24:18,279
weather patterns. So this is the tropics, and I mentioned

1025
01:24:18,319 --> 01:24:21,720
before there's two seasons. Basically, there's the rainy season in

1026
01:24:21,760 --> 01:24:25,359
the dry season. When you look at the topography of

1027
01:24:25,399 --> 01:24:29,760
the country and the fact that it's like mountains, river valleys,

1028
01:24:30,439 --> 01:24:35,199
and that means rivers, which means water. What would happen

1029
01:24:35,279 --> 01:24:38,760
is the Vietnamese would be able to advance in the

1030
01:24:38,840 --> 01:24:41,760
dry season, but then would get pushed back by these

1031
01:24:41,760 --> 01:24:45,520
small gorilla units going in and calling in air strikes

1032
01:24:45,520 --> 01:24:50,079
on them during the wet season, and then they would

1033
01:24:50,119 --> 01:24:55,359
have to consolidate defensible holdings and try to hold during

1034
01:24:55,359 --> 01:24:59,199
the wet season to progress. So it was this push

1035
01:24:59,279 --> 01:25:04,359
pole and then again the challenge there is that it's

1036
01:25:04,399 --> 01:25:06,880
easier to move on the ground in the dry season.

1037
01:25:07,479 --> 01:25:10,640
In the dry season, there's better visibility for the aircraft

1038
01:25:10,720 --> 01:25:12,680
as well, so they're going to be able to be

1039
01:25:12,720 --> 01:25:17,000
a little more effective in making strikes. But then you're

1040
01:25:17,039 --> 01:25:21,960
also really at an advantage if you can have very

1041
01:25:22,000 --> 01:25:25,239
small teams go in and identify these guys during the

1042
01:25:25,239 --> 01:25:28,960
wet season and clobber them right, And so it was

1043
01:25:29,359 --> 01:25:35,479
the tactical realities were really we're really kind of strange,

1044
01:25:35,239 --> 01:25:39,039
but they really make sense if you keep that in

1045
01:25:39,079 --> 01:25:42,800
mind for looking at any of the patterns of how

1046
01:25:43,479 --> 01:25:45,560
did they get so far and then they ended up

1047
01:25:45,640 --> 01:25:48,920
losing ground in the next year, and then like they

1048
01:25:49,239 --> 01:25:51,520
fight over the same ground over and over again. It's

1049
01:25:51,560 --> 01:25:55,920
because of these weather patterns and kind of the the

1050
01:25:55,960 --> 01:26:00,119
tactical and strategic approach that America was taking with the

1051
01:26:00,159 --> 01:26:04,600
local troops. And then there was another kind of just

1052
01:26:04,640 --> 01:26:15,199
as a last consideration, as local forces would be defending operations,

1053
01:26:15,920 --> 01:26:20,880
they would defend positions supporting operations against North Vietnam. So

1054
01:26:21,000 --> 01:26:23,840
there would be these pockets of what they call these

1055
01:26:23,840 --> 01:26:26,479
indigenous troops that were called the Commando raiders, which were

1056
01:26:26,520 --> 01:26:29,680
really highly trained raider groups that would get dropped into

1057
01:26:29,720 --> 01:26:32,399
North Vietnam. You don't hear a lot of stories about them,

1058
01:26:32,439 --> 01:26:36,560
but they have crazy, crazy stories. I've talked to one

1059
01:26:36,600 --> 01:26:41,880
of those guys before. And then there was this other

1060
01:26:42,479 --> 01:26:46,399
There was a site called Lima Site eighty five, which

1061
01:26:46,439 --> 01:26:51,319
was in Poopati mountain Pooh means mountain in Lao, and

1062
01:26:51,760 --> 01:26:56,800
it was a mountaintop radar installation like almost almost all

1063
01:26:56,880 --> 01:27:00,600
the way to the North Vietnamese border that was used

1064
01:27:00,640 --> 01:27:05,319
to guide American bombers in the bombing raids in Hanoi,

1065
01:27:05,640 --> 01:27:09,279
so they could triangulate their positions accurately for more precise

1066
01:27:09,359 --> 01:27:14,840
bombing of military targets, because you know, despite the reputation,

1067
01:27:15,159 --> 01:27:18,880
like the goal of like arc light raids of B

1068
01:27:19,039 --> 01:27:22,920
fifty two scattering bombs everywhere isn't to blow up brown people,

1069
01:27:22,960 --> 01:27:27,720
It's to hit militarily relevant targets, right, And so they

1070
01:27:27,720 --> 01:27:30,760
would have these positions up there and there would be

1071
01:27:30,920 --> 01:27:35,079
just these insane battles of the North Vietnamese trying to

1072
01:27:35,119 --> 01:27:45,159
capture them. So good times, all right. So that's I'm

1073
01:27:45,199 --> 01:27:48,680
going to pivot slightly and then I'm going to get

1074
01:27:48,720 --> 01:27:52,840
back into the bombing. And I'm bringing this up because

1075
01:27:53,479 --> 01:27:57,279
I talked about Tony Poe and Vin Lawrence and Vong

1076
01:27:57,399 --> 01:28:01,479
Pow and you know, a lot of a lot of

1077
01:28:01,479 --> 01:28:04,239
the stuff just because it was in the dark for

1078
01:28:04,279 --> 01:28:09,039
so long, it's it's remained in the dark, and the

1079
01:28:09,079 --> 01:28:12,840
little dribs and drabs of information that comes out a

1080
01:28:12,880 --> 01:28:22,000
lot of times, it's it's really it's almost it's almost

1081
01:28:22,119 --> 01:28:25,760
transparently subversive when you look at it, although it can

1082
01:28:25,800 --> 01:28:31,039
be hard to make the case. And let me make

1083
01:28:31,079 --> 01:28:35,880
the case here on these two guys, these guys own

1084
01:28:37,159 --> 01:28:40,640
two big memes that will give you like mental aids.

1085
01:28:41,159 --> 01:28:45,039
Speaker 1: You didn't even have to like spell out the second.

1086
01:28:45,199 --> 01:28:48,199
The guy in the picture on the right, I mean

1087
01:28:48,399 --> 01:28:49,840
it's right.

1088
01:28:49,720 --> 01:28:55,119
Speaker 2: There, yeah, dude. So the guy on the left is

1089
01:28:55,159 --> 01:29:01,560
Professor Alfred McCoy. This is a little auctionist. He doesn't

1090
01:29:01,600 --> 01:29:05,359
say Laos was all about the CIA trafficking heroin, but

1091
01:29:05,439 --> 01:29:09,600
that's the takeaway that has been made because he wrote

1092
01:29:09,600 --> 01:29:12,359
a book called The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia

1093
01:29:12,520 --> 01:29:15,319
that was published in nineteen seventy two, and then it

1094
01:29:15,399 --> 01:29:18,319
turned into I forget what it is. It's like the

1095
01:29:18,359 --> 01:29:23,079
CIA and the Politics of Heroin or something like that,

1096
01:29:23,600 --> 01:29:27,680
with an addition that was released in I think the

1097
01:29:27,680 --> 01:29:31,760
eighties because he was talking about the contras and such.

1098
01:29:32,399 --> 01:29:38,960
But here's the challenge. He's a libtard who graduated from

1099
01:29:39,079 --> 01:29:43,039
Columbia University, completed his masters at UC Berkeley in nineteen

1100
01:29:43,119 --> 01:29:48,560
sixty nine, and he was working on his PhD in

1101
01:29:48,720 --> 01:29:55,479
Yale for the next like eight years. And he obviously

1102
01:29:55,520 --> 01:29:58,600
comes from money, and he was comfortable and he was

1103
01:29:58,680 --> 01:30:04,880
running around and what happened was what I believe is

1104
01:30:04,920 --> 01:30:10,479
that he was spoon fed bad information to distract from

1105
01:30:10,520 --> 01:30:17,119
a from the real story. Bear with me. So his.

1106
01:30:18,840 --> 01:30:23,199
Speaker 1: McCoy, I mean he's on democracy now, so yes, exactly,

1107
01:30:23,279 --> 01:30:23,960
that lines up.

1108
01:30:24,600 --> 01:30:31,079
Speaker 2: So oh yeah, and he was. He ultimately became a

1109
01:30:31,239 --> 01:30:39,119
professor at like Madison, you know, University of Wisconsin at Madison,

1110
01:30:41,760 --> 01:30:45,439
and he's basically a professor of being really gay when

1111
01:30:45,479 --> 01:30:49,600
talking about Asia and claims to be a big expert

1112
01:30:49,640 --> 01:30:55,680
on Laos. But what happened was in nineteen sixty nine

1113
01:30:55,720 --> 01:31:03,520
he was given introductions to or former CIA operatives who

1114
01:31:03,640 --> 01:31:06,560
spoon fed him the talking points that he would go

1115
01:31:06,600 --> 01:31:11,000
on to repeat. He had no local language skills. He

1116
01:31:11,079 --> 01:31:14,279
only spent two weeks in Laos. He went up country

1117
01:31:14,319 --> 01:31:18,319
for like less than a day. He saw some material

1118
01:31:18,399 --> 01:31:25,199
being loaded onto a Air America plane and was told

1119
01:31:25,279 --> 01:31:31,880
that it was heroin, and then he had Then he

1120
01:31:31,920 --> 01:31:36,399
would talk to locals who and then a translator would

1121
01:31:36,399 --> 01:31:43,119
tell him things. Now here's the thing, It's really quite simple.

1122
01:31:45,000 --> 01:31:52,439
Opium was one hundred percent a staple, an economic staple

1123
01:31:53,039 --> 01:31:58,600
in Southeast Asia for a couple hundred years. The hill

1124
01:31:58,640 --> 01:32:03,800
tribes of Laos had long paid the local princess taxes

1125
01:32:03,920 --> 01:32:06,319
in the form of opium. What they would do is

1126
01:32:06,359 --> 01:32:09,840
they would grow opium and then they would trade it

1127
01:32:10,239 --> 01:32:17,600
with an authorized trader for the local principality or under

1128
01:32:17,640 --> 01:32:20,239
and under the French they did the exact same thing,

1129
01:32:22,279 --> 01:32:28,079
and then that trader would trade them for steel and

1130
01:32:29,239 --> 01:32:33,000
cloth and salt, because when you're up in the highlands

1131
01:32:33,039 --> 01:32:37,439
you can't get salt. And so anyway, this was this

1132
01:32:38,000 --> 01:32:40,560
thing that had been going on for hundreds of years.

1133
01:32:41,640 --> 01:32:44,479
The French continued it. And what did the French do.

1134
01:32:45,399 --> 01:32:47,960
They turned it into an industry. It started be getting

1135
01:32:48,000 --> 01:32:54,560
refined into heroin and morphine. So there's the legitimate purposes

1136
01:32:55,359 --> 01:33:00,800
and then there's the shadow deal. As you'll recall, the

1137
01:33:00,880 --> 01:33:06,119
French connection was about the the sanitized term is that

1138
01:33:06,159 --> 01:33:11,960
they were I think they were Sicilian, not Sicilian, Corsican,

1139
01:33:12,039 --> 01:33:20,520
excuse me. Corsican mafia were trafficking heroin. And what would

1140
01:33:20,520 --> 01:33:24,039
happen is it would come out of mostly Laos and

1141
01:33:24,159 --> 01:33:28,560
a little bit from Vietnam, and then it would be

1142
01:33:28,680 --> 01:33:32,760
processed in the old days, it would be processed in

1143
01:33:32,960 --> 01:33:41,920
Turkey using these old networks, and then the Corsican mafia

1144
01:33:41,960 --> 01:33:49,800
would distribute it from there. Alfred McCoy got fixated on

1145
01:33:49,920 --> 01:33:56,520
the true statement that the Mung Hill tribes had this

1146
01:33:56,560 --> 01:34:03,560
thing going on and totally blamed Wong Pao. And this

1147
01:34:03,600 --> 01:34:07,479
goes back to Tony Poe telling him this stuff. Tony

1148
01:34:07,520 --> 01:34:10,680
Poe had washed out by this time and was just

1149
01:34:10,720 --> 01:34:15,960
an alcoholic like pickling himself in Uh, splitting his time

1150
01:34:16,000 --> 01:34:21,319
between Veng Chan and Bangkok, being a degenerate and just

1151
01:34:21,479 --> 01:34:27,399
telling wild stories. So he had he hand feeds him

1152
01:34:27,600 --> 01:34:34,720
this story. Because here's the truth. The the Lao government

1153
01:34:36,359 --> 01:34:42,279
was controlling this. That the general of the running the

1154
01:34:42,359 --> 01:34:48,399
Royal Lao Army one, which means fat Lan Retakon, and

1155
01:34:48,439 --> 01:34:54,319
he was fat by local standards. He was basically a

1156
01:34:54,439 --> 01:34:59,319
hub who had a processing plant that was refining the

1157
01:34:59,359 --> 01:35:04,399
opium in into heroin and then it would get shipped

1158
01:35:04,439 --> 01:35:09,680
out through the French, the French connection, and dumbass McCoy

1159
01:35:10,880 --> 01:35:15,880
says Vong Pao and the Mung were drug dealers because

1160
01:35:16,359 --> 01:35:21,239
and here's why this is absurd. By nineteen sixty seven,

1161
01:35:22,199 --> 01:35:26,439
there was there were no substantial holdings of the Mung

1162
01:35:26,680 --> 01:35:30,399
of territory where they had had been settled for a

1163
01:35:30,439 --> 01:35:36,159
long time, because the PAVN was everywhere, the North Vietnamese

1164
01:35:36,239 --> 01:35:41,279
Army was everywhere up there. They didn't have these strongholds.

1165
01:35:41,359 --> 01:35:45,359
The strongholds that they had were farther north and west,

1166
01:35:46,159 --> 01:35:48,960
which were no longer Mung. So the Mong weren't. I mean,

1167
01:35:49,119 --> 01:35:52,880
I'm sure there were still Mung who had poppy fields

1168
01:35:53,439 --> 01:35:56,239
like a little bit by that time. But what it

1169
01:35:56,359 --> 01:35:58,640
was is it was all coming from somewhere else. So

1170
01:36:00,039 --> 01:36:04,039
Al McCoy, doctor Al McCoy, as of n Or nineteen

1171
01:36:04,079 --> 01:36:09,039
seventy seven tells a story where like little Vung Paw,

1172
01:36:09,359 --> 01:36:13,760
who was chewed up and spit out by the CIA,

1173
01:36:14,960 --> 01:36:18,439
was like the big drug dealer who was responsible for

1174
01:36:18,479 --> 01:36:23,000
getting you know, American gis hooked on heroin in Vietnam

1175
01:36:23,079 --> 01:36:25,520
and stuff. Now, some of what he says is true,

1176
01:36:25,520 --> 01:36:29,720
which is that like everyone was in on it, and

1177
01:36:29,920 --> 01:36:33,079
but the most important thing to understand is the CIA

1178
01:36:33,239 --> 01:36:37,199
did not traffic heroin. I'm going to repeat that the

1179
01:36:37,239 --> 01:36:42,000
CIA did not traffic heroin. What happened was that the

1180
01:36:42,239 --> 01:36:48,279
CIA looked the other way while these old networks did

1181
01:36:48,319 --> 01:36:52,119
their thing. And the old the you know, the people

1182
01:36:52,279 --> 01:36:55,399
way up top in the CIA are part of these

1183
01:36:56,199 --> 01:36:58,920
old networks, or at least or telling the CIA what

1184
01:36:59,039 --> 01:37:03,399
to do, are part of these old networks. So the

1185
01:37:03,399 --> 01:37:08,439
the Corsicans, you know, wink wink, the French wink wink,

1186
01:37:09,720 --> 01:37:13,840
you know, the Turkish wink wink. All this stuff is

1187
01:37:13,920 --> 01:37:18,000
just like you know, steps in the totem pole, like

1188
01:37:18,159 --> 01:37:20,960
low steps in the totem pole of something that went

1189
01:37:21,000 --> 01:37:23,359
on for a really long time. Now, now what happened

1190
01:37:24,439 --> 01:37:31,000
when that war ended? The heroin just came from somewhere else,

1191
01:37:31,079 --> 01:37:34,439
like the raw materials just came from somewhere else. So

1192
01:37:35,359 --> 01:37:37,640
you have to be really careful thinking about it, because

1193
01:37:37,760 --> 01:37:42,159
McCoy made it all about you know, the non democratic

1194
01:37:43,800 --> 01:37:48,359
you know general of the MUNG who was a really

1195
01:37:48,439 --> 01:37:51,439
bad guy and claimed that you know, he had all

1196
01:37:51,479 --> 01:37:54,560
this you know it was this big drug trafficker, but

1197
01:37:55,159 --> 01:38:01,079
he basically was, you know, ended his day in America

1198
01:38:01,159 --> 01:38:05,359
like getting donations from MUNG who would send you know,

1199
01:38:05,399 --> 01:38:08,239
a tiny bit of their welfare check to their tribal leader.

1200
01:38:09,159 --> 01:38:12,359
And the you know, a bunch of the ruling class

1201
01:38:12,439 --> 01:38:17,840
people at the top retired to France mostly with gobs

1202
01:38:17,840 --> 01:38:22,000
of stolen Aid money and frankly their skim from the

1203
01:38:22,079 --> 01:38:24,720
drug money. But where did the real drug money go.

1204
01:38:25,479 --> 01:38:28,039
The drug money went to the people who were running

1205
01:38:28,119 --> 01:38:32,560
these operations since you know, the twenties the teens before

1206
01:38:32,680 --> 01:38:36,000
that in the West. So you have to be really

1207
01:38:36,319 --> 01:38:41,399
careful because McCoy gives you that democracy. Now, tier are

1208
01:38:41,439 --> 01:38:42,039
you bullshit?

1209
01:38:42,279 --> 01:38:47,439
Speaker 1: Are you implying a kind of a continuation of the

1210
01:38:47,439 --> 01:38:49,079
old Opium Wars kind of thing.

1211
01:38:49,960 --> 01:38:54,039
Speaker 2: One hundred percent I'm implying it because that's where a

1212
01:38:54,039 --> 01:38:56,439
lot of the heroine that ended up in China was

1213
01:38:56,520 --> 01:39:07,079
from Southeast Asia, Burma in India. So it's the French

1214
01:39:07,239 --> 01:39:11,479
basically said, oh, look at what the and it isn't

1215
01:39:11,600 --> 01:39:15,640
like it isn't like the president of France. It's like

1216
01:39:16,760 --> 01:39:21,039
the people with names similar to Bramfman and as well

1217
01:39:21,079 --> 01:39:25,239
as you know, actual French French people that they make

1218
01:39:25,279 --> 01:39:28,399
these decisions based on these existing networks and watching Hey

1219
01:39:28,399 --> 01:39:32,079
look at the English or you know in Wink Wink English,

1220
01:39:32,399 --> 01:39:35,760
the city of London is being really successful at this stuff.

1221
01:39:36,520 --> 01:39:40,720
But it's like he he does this hand waving where

1222
01:39:40,760 --> 01:39:43,439
you look in the wrong direction. So it's a real thing.

1223
01:39:43,720 --> 01:39:46,800
But he didn't have enough knowledge to come to the

1224
01:39:46,840 --> 01:39:50,560
conclusions that he was repeating that had been fed to him.

1225
01:39:51,920 --> 01:39:55,000
So what that tells me is that there was one

1226
01:39:55,039 --> 01:39:58,760
there was a struggle going on because of this at

1227
01:39:58,760 --> 01:40:02,720
the time, and there was as there were DEA or

1228
01:40:02,760 --> 01:40:09,439
the precursor organization to the DEA in Laos after about

1229
01:40:09,520 --> 01:40:13,439
nineteen sixty seven or sixty eight, I forget exactly, And

1230
01:40:13,479 --> 01:40:15,800
they could have shut down the whole thing like immediately,

1231
01:40:16,119 --> 01:40:19,439
but they never did go figure but they were going

1232
01:40:19,479 --> 01:40:24,439
after these small timers. So it's this really, it's this

1233
01:40:24,600 --> 01:40:29,960
obfuscation that takes away from the real story. Now, he

1234
01:40:30,000 --> 01:40:34,600
did talk about the fact that again the US government

1235
01:40:34,720 --> 01:40:38,640
was allowing these things to happen, but and he did

1236
01:40:38,680 --> 01:40:43,520
tell some really relevant stories about organizations that were involved.

1237
01:40:43,920 --> 01:40:46,359
But it's like this stuff is being hand fed to

1238
01:40:46,439 --> 01:40:51,319
him for a reason. I also find him very annoying,

1239
01:40:51,479 --> 01:40:57,479
so like and he took and he repeated a bunch

1240
01:40:57,520 --> 01:41:01,399
of stuff that was just pure obfuscation. So anyway, so

1241
01:41:01,600 --> 01:41:04,279
this is me telling you don't overdose on red pills.

1242
01:41:04,439 --> 01:41:09,279
You can't just believe the stuff that sounds accurate. Now,

1243
01:41:09,600 --> 01:41:14,279
speaking of that, Fred Bramffman in government secret bombing fellow

1244
01:41:14,319 --> 01:41:19,039
at the top right. He was an educational advisor in

1245
01:41:19,159 --> 01:41:26,880
veng Chhan working for USAID. In September nineteen sixty nine,

1246
01:41:27,039 --> 01:41:32,239
there was a flood of LAO that were displaced because

1247
01:41:32,279 --> 01:41:36,600
of ground combat operations in the Plane of Jars and

1248
01:41:36,640 --> 01:41:39,880
the Plane of Jars, I'll show you some images about

1249
01:41:39,880 --> 01:41:42,520
it here in a second. It's right on the border

1250
01:41:42,520 --> 01:41:47,159
with Vietnam, a part of North Vietnam. Vietnam is traditional

1251
01:41:47,159 --> 01:41:54,720
Alloo territory, and there was a flood of refugees into

1252
01:41:54,800 --> 01:41:58,159
the capitol because they didn't have anywhere else to put them.

1253
01:41:58,520 --> 01:42:05,359
Bramfman spoke Lao functionally, and so he would be talking

1254
01:42:05,399 --> 01:42:08,800
to people and he was like, what are they're They're

1255
01:42:08,840 --> 01:42:13,920
telling me something that's really that's really important, And so

1256
01:42:14,039 --> 01:42:18,840
he got connections with some people who were translating for

1257
01:42:18,920 --> 01:42:25,079
these folks who later became known as members of the

1258
01:42:25,119 --> 01:42:29,000
Patt Lao. They were Lao communists that were translating these

1259
01:42:29,039 --> 01:42:34,039
stories from these refugees. Because when you have basic functional language,

1260
01:42:34,079 --> 01:42:38,000
you can't get into these into the internecine stuff. You

1261
01:42:38,119 --> 01:42:40,199
just it's you're not going to be able to do it.

1262
01:42:40,479 --> 01:42:46,239
So he was reliant on translations from other people, and

1263
01:42:46,279 --> 01:42:53,039
he heard about these US bombing campaigns going on up there.

1264
01:42:54,399 --> 01:42:56,720
So he claims that he went to US officials in

1265
01:42:56,800 --> 01:43:01,279
veng Chan and they told him the US had nothing

1266
01:43:01,319 --> 01:43:07,279
to do with aerial bombing, and he believed that they

1267
01:43:07,840 --> 01:43:12,359
literally didn't know about it. There's no fucking way that

1268
01:43:12,520 --> 01:43:16,760
any US official, like a real official, wouldn't know about

1269
01:43:16,760 --> 01:43:22,960
what was going on. It's impossible. And all of his

1270
01:43:23,159 --> 01:43:28,600
stories about this avoid the fact that there was a

1271
01:43:28,760 --> 01:43:35,680
Communist invasion, North Vietnamese invasion and ground combat operations taking place.

1272
01:43:36,600 --> 01:43:39,960
It's like there in the Garden of Eden, the brown

1273
01:43:40,079 --> 01:43:44,239
people who were you know, in the world and at

1274
01:43:44,279 --> 01:43:48,479
peace started having five hundred pound bombs dropped on them

1275
01:43:48,520 --> 01:43:53,680
for no reason. Now here's the thing. There was no

1276
01:43:54,279 --> 01:43:59,239
public information about the operations going on at the time.

1277
01:44:02,640 --> 01:44:09,000
But when you don't talk about ground combat operations and

1278
01:44:09,039 --> 01:44:12,600
the false framing of this that it was there's all

1279
01:44:12,640 --> 01:44:17,239
this false framing that's attributed to him being the first

1280
01:44:17,239 --> 01:44:19,840
person to push this stuff out, and all of his

1281
01:44:19,920 --> 01:44:23,840
framing is they were at peace and Americans just started

1282
01:44:23,840 --> 01:44:27,880
bombing them for no reason. Now, I agree that bombing

1283
01:44:27,920 --> 01:44:29,840
civilians is not a nice thing to do and you

1284
01:44:29,880 --> 01:44:37,520
should avoid doing it, but his framework fits perfectly into

1285
01:44:37,800 --> 01:44:45,039
a communist propaganda campaign. And he was indeed a at

1286
01:44:45,119 --> 01:44:51,319
least open left socialist and you know, third worldist right

1287
01:44:51,960 --> 01:44:55,479
in the original sense, not in the anti Semitic sense,

1288
01:44:57,279 --> 01:45:00,239
So I wanted to cover those before I get to

1289
01:45:00,279 --> 01:45:06,279
the next phase. So the official American framing of bombing

1290
01:45:06,319 --> 01:45:09,279
operations in Laos and Cambodia has always focused on the

1291
01:45:09,319 --> 01:45:11,800
Houchiman trail, which was a real thing, and then in

1292
01:45:11,800 --> 01:45:18,920
Cambodia the Sihanu trail. These are all bombing operations to

1293
01:45:19,039 --> 01:45:26,640
target North Vietnamese supply lines going through these countries. This

1294
01:45:26,720 --> 01:45:34,600
bombing did take place in great volume. And the interesting

1295
01:45:34,640 --> 01:45:40,520
thing that happened though, is it intensified over time when

1296
01:45:40,800 --> 01:45:50,520
the smaller like tactical bombers and tactical ground attack aircraft

1297
01:45:51,760 --> 01:45:57,479
transitioned to be replaced by bigger and bigger, faster, more ordinance,

1298
01:45:57,520 --> 01:46:01,800
et cetera up to the B fifty two, and the

1299
01:46:01,880 --> 01:46:06,840
local forces, whether it was Lao, Cambodia, Vietnam, or Thailand,

1300
01:46:07,279 --> 01:46:12,479
was given the old attack aircraft and so it became

1301
01:46:12,800 --> 01:46:19,680
strategic bombing. And you might remember Thomas mentioned that the

1302
01:46:19,760 --> 01:46:24,560
Kent State oopsie, the oopsis that happened in Kent State

1303
01:46:26,239 --> 01:46:30,119
was part of a wave of protests caused by the

1304
01:46:30,119 --> 01:46:35,319
first awareness of bombing and Cambodia being shared to the

1305
01:46:35,319 --> 01:46:40,960
American public on the heels of Bramfman talking about this

1306
01:46:41,000 --> 01:46:44,319
stuff in my and my digging in on that everyone

1307
01:46:44,399 --> 01:46:47,359
knew that we were bombing North Vietnam and bombing supply

1308
01:46:47,439 --> 01:46:50,680
lines associated with the North Vietnamese. And then they said, oh, yeah,

1309
01:46:50,680 --> 01:46:52,520
and some of this is in the countries right next

1310
01:46:52,560 --> 01:46:57,920
door which are controlled by the Vietnamese, and that are

1311
01:46:57,960 --> 01:47:04,119
these are the supply lines. But Americans, being retarded, think oh,

1312
01:47:04,239 --> 01:47:06,880
it must they must be bombing the capitals because I

1313
01:47:06,960 --> 01:47:10,279
remember like World War two pictures and stuff like that.

1314
01:47:11,199 --> 01:47:15,359
It's it's this weird thing that I I feel, it's

1315
01:47:15,439 --> 01:47:20,000
really strange and maybe I'm naive, but like it seems

1316
01:47:20,039 --> 01:47:24,800
like they're brutally naive to believe that like you can

1317
01:47:24,880 --> 01:47:28,039
have people can hop over the borders of countries and

1318
01:47:28,039 --> 01:47:31,560
then magically there's no war there. It's because they're thinking that,

1319
01:47:31,720 --> 01:47:37,119
like everything's this nice, orderly western country. So, I mean,

1320
01:47:37,159 --> 01:47:41,119
it's really important to understand the differences between these things.

1321
01:47:41,159 --> 01:47:44,560
And yeah, the US government was not openly talking about it.

1322
01:47:45,119 --> 01:47:53,920
I agree, but this this whole thing fits beautifully into

1323
01:47:54,199 --> 01:47:56,359
a And I hate to say it because I know

1324
01:47:56,399 --> 01:47:59,319
people will get mad at me for saying Communist propaganda

1325
01:47:59,359 --> 01:48:02,079
but you know what I'm mean, It's like it's this

1326
01:48:02,239 --> 01:48:07,479
deception that's taking place that actually serves the other guys,

1327
01:48:08,119 --> 01:48:13,079
even though like, yes, Americans are right to be like, wait,

1328
01:48:13,159 --> 01:48:15,960
this is expanding. This is way more expanded than the

1329
01:48:15,960 --> 01:48:18,399
war that we were already sold that we don't like.

1330
01:48:19,119 --> 01:48:22,119
You get the distinction that I'm trying to make here, Pete, Yes,

1331
01:48:22,199 --> 01:48:26,000
I do. Okay, it's very nuanced and like we cannot

1332
01:48:26,119 --> 01:48:29,520
like it, but it's important to understand the difference. And

1333
01:48:29,560 --> 01:48:32,600
that's why I was talking about those other guys. So

1334
01:48:32,720 --> 01:48:39,359
again the dominant Bramfman influenced narrative that you'll still hear

1335
01:48:39,439 --> 01:48:44,000
today that that is the official law Communist government position

1336
01:48:44,079 --> 01:48:50,399
when they talk about all the unexploded ordinance in particularly

1337
01:48:50,640 --> 01:48:56,880
in along the eastern border of Vietnam, and America's State

1338
01:48:56,960 --> 01:49:05,119
Department repeats this bull part in my French, which is

1339
01:49:05,159 --> 01:49:10,079
that American aircraft engaged in sorties over North Vietnam were

1340
01:49:10,079 --> 01:49:12,960
not permitted to land at US Air Force bases in

1341
01:49:13,039 --> 01:49:18,079
Thailand or South Vietnam with bombs still attached because there

1342
01:49:18,159 --> 01:49:20,600
was danger, so they had to get rid of them,

1343
01:49:20,920 --> 01:49:24,359
so they randomly dropped them on civilians and Laos because

1344
01:49:24,359 --> 01:49:30,359
they're racist. That's like literally the story that they provide.

1345
01:49:30,479 --> 01:49:35,920
In reality, those bombs that were being dropped in Laos

1346
01:49:37,000 --> 01:49:43,600
were targeted by forward air controllers or local forward air

1347
01:49:43,680 --> 01:49:48,079
guides on the ground who would assign targets. So in

1348
01:49:48,119 --> 01:49:52,399
the sixties and the seventies, aerial bombing was not particularly precise.

1349
01:49:52,439 --> 01:49:55,000
It was more precise than it was during the Spanish

1350
01:49:55,039 --> 01:50:00,479
Civil War. In World War Two, the fast movers jets

1351
01:50:00,520 --> 01:50:05,000
were too fast to guarantee accuracy in like little narrow valleys,

1352
01:50:05,319 --> 01:50:08,960
like when you see those limestone karsts, especially in bad

1353
01:50:09,039 --> 01:50:12,880
or cloudy weather, or if they're staying high because they

1354
01:50:12,880 --> 01:50:14,880
don't want to get so low that they can get

1355
01:50:14,960 --> 01:50:19,399
hit by fifty two's or you know, bigger stuff or

1356
01:50:19,439 --> 01:50:23,640
even aks. When I say fifty two, it's the it's

1357
01:50:23,720 --> 01:50:29,560
the four is it? The fourteen point five millimeter heavy

1358
01:50:29,600 --> 01:50:36,239
machine guns that the Soviet ones and so up in

1359
01:50:36,319 --> 01:50:39,600
the north and in the mountains of Laos, and you've

1360
01:50:39,640 --> 01:50:43,079
already seen how mountainous it is. There is always cloudy,

1361
01:50:44,000 --> 01:50:47,319
and they're in this bad weather a lot, and so

1362
01:50:48,119 --> 01:50:51,800
they're they're doing their best, and again they're still dropping

1363
01:50:51,840 --> 01:50:54,439
bombs all over a country that were supposedly not at

1364
01:50:54,479 --> 01:50:59,199
war with, but they were dropping bombs under control of

1365
01:50:59,279 --> 01:51:06,920
forward air control rollers to support ground combat operations between

1366
01:51:07,039 --> 01:51:13,399
Lao and Mung you know forces, So official military forces

1367
01:51:13,520 --> 01:51:18,239
in Laos of the legitimate government of Laos led by

1368
01:51:18,279 --> 01:51:23,159
the CIA, yes, against the People's Army of Vietnam who

1369
01:51:23,199 --> 01:51:29,279
had invaded the country. And they don't say this, they

1370
01:51:29,359 --> 01:51:35,439
don't say this, and I feel like it's intentional and

1371
01:51:36,039 --> 01:51:39,039
it's really easy to explain this and go, oh, yeah,

1372
01:51:39,079 --> 01:51:43,760
of course it makes sense. So the tactical bombing, like

1373
01:51:43,840 --> 01:51:51,079
the tight close quarters was conducted by early by prop aircraft,

1374
01:51:51,199 --> 01:51:53,479
and they were really happy if they could get like

1375
01:51:54,079 --> 01:51:58,000
the old T twenty eight's that were converted into attack

1376
01:51:58,079 --> 01:52:02,359
aircraft if it was needing precise placement of bombs, because

1377
01:52:02,399 --> 01:52:05,359
those guys would drop in and put it right where

1378
01:52:05,399 --> 01:52:07,479
you need it to, or like an A one sky Raider,

1379
01:52:07,560 --> 01:52:11,319
which is a sweet plane. And then the fighter slash

1380
01:52:11,359 --> 01:52:16,960
attack craft are a little too fast, but they had ordinance.

1381
01:52:17,159 --> 01:52:21,079
Now later in the war, there were interesting developments, like

1382
01:52:21,119 --> 01:52:24,520
when the F one eleven was released, and Thomas mentioned

1383
01:52:24,520 --> 01:52:27,920
this also. The F one eleven was originally designed to

1384
01:52:28,079 --> 01:52:35,039
like cruise in with like nuclear weapons, you know, in

1385
01:52:35,399 --> 01:52:40,680
tactical nukes basically, And there was a bunch of experimentation

1386
01:52:40,840 --> 01:52:45,000
with like homing beacons in laos because they could have

1387
01:52:45,119 --> 01:52:50,279
the local forces go into positions with these homing beacons

1388
01:52:50,800 --> 01:52:57,840
and like frame between multiple units, frame an area for bombing,

1389
01:52:58,039 --> 01:53:01,680
whether it's saturation bombing or perci bombing. And there's this

1390
01:53:01,720 --> 01:53:06,159
one story of Mung who didn't who couldn't understand the

1391
01:53:06,199 --> 01:53:10,640
concept because they're literally iron age hill tribe guys who

1392
01:53:10,720 --> 01:53:15,560
are suddenly flying around on you know, helicopters and stuff.

1393
01:53:16,319 --> 01:53:21,600
And so a guy said, an American figured out how

1394
01:53:21,600 --> 01:53:24,720
to describe it, and he said, this little machine has

1395
01:53:24,760 --> 01:53:28,359
a spirit in it, just like the spirits of the

1396
01:53:28,479 --> 01:53:31,319
rivers that are around you and everything like that. And

1397
01:53:31,359 --> 01:53:34,640
the spirit in this machine, when you turn it on

1398
01:53:34,760 --> 01:53:40,199
and it glows, can communicate with the spirit in an airplane.

1399
01:53:40,439 --> 01:53:43,560
And if you hold this spirit and you and you

1400
01:53:43,720 --> 01:53:49,199
tell us where the enemy is the spirit in the airplane,

1401
01:53:50,199 --> 01:53:53,279
we'll be able to see the spirit and precisely put

1402
01:53:53,319 --> 01:53:56,920
bombs where they need to be. And they successfully did

1403
01:53:56,960 --> 01:54:00,399
this where these guys like they they blew up like

1404
01:54:00,439 --> 01:54:05,680
almost a company of PAVN infantrymen around this little group

1405
01:54:05,720 --> 01:54:08,720
of mong guys who are like huddled hiding basically in

1406
01:54:08,760 --> 01:54:12,399
a bomb crater, and they're like the spirit worked perfectly,

1407
01:54:12,560 --> 01:54:16,600
thank you after the operation. So like you're limited by

1408
01:54:16,640 --> 01:54:20,640
the technology that you have to how precise he can be.

1409
01:54:24,640 --> 01:54:28,680
I'm going to move pretty quickly here because I've belabored

1410
01:54:28,680 --> 01:54:30,920
this point so much. This is the Plane of Jars.

1411
01:54:31,079 --> 01:54:35,720
It was named so because there are these huge jars

1412
01:54:35,880 --> 01:54:39,199
that were built that there were put in place in

1413
01:54:41,479 --> 01:54:46,199
between twelve forty and six sixty BC. So like Bronze

1414
01:54:46,239 --> 01:54:52,800
age people, they're huge, chiseled out of stone. They have

1415
01:54:53,520 --> 01:54:56,119
not all of them have lids that are still left

1416
01:54:56,319 --> 01:55:00,760
identifiable as lids, but they seem to be like this

1417
01:55:00,800 --> 01:55:04,600
one here is cut to fit a lid in a

1418
01:55:04,640 --> 01:55:10,920
style that was seen elsewhere. They've discovered human remains in

1419
01:55:10,960 --> 01:55:14,600
these with burial goods and like ceramics around them. And

1420
01:55:15,520 --> 01:55:18,239
the Loo legend is that there was a race of

1421
01:55:18,359 --> 01:55:21,880
giants who lived here and left these giant jars, but

1422
01:55:22,039 --> 01:55:28,880
a French researcher in nineteen thirty, Madeline Kolani, concluded that

1423
01:55:28,920 --> 01:55:33,439
they were associated with burial practices, and that's been seems

1424
01:55:33,479 --> 01:55:37,439
to have been verified, but with later excavations by Lao

1425
01:55:37,520 --> 01:55:43,199
and Japanese archaeologists in the meantime. So this is all

1426
01:55:43,560 --> 01:55:46,159
this big plane you can see. This doesn't look like

1427
01:55:46,199 --> 01:55:48,000
the other images of Laos I've seen, but you can

1428
01:55:48,039 --> 01:55:50,640
see the hills there. So it's this plain with like

1429
01:55:50,880 --> 01:55:55,079
rolling hills, kind of like the Central plains in America

1430
01:55:56,439 --> 01:55:59,560
in kind of this narrow band ringed by mountains, which

1431
01:55:59,600 --> 01:56:06,000
is like highway for invading Laos from Vietnam. So they

1432
01:56:06,000 --> 01:56:09,039
have ninety of these more than ninety of these jar

1433
01:56:09,199 --> 01:56:14,000
sites that are identified in this area Chenkwong Province, and

1434
01:56:14,439 --> 01:56:17,880
they have from one to four hundred stone jars and

1435
01:56:18,039 --> 01:56:21,319
they're very big. You can see people here. They're a

1436
01:56:21,399 --> 01:56:26,359
couple meters high. Very very cool. But that's where that

1437
01:56:26,439 --> 01:56:31,000
name plane of jars comes from. So when we're talking

1438
01:56:31,039 --> 01:56:35,439
about the bombing patterns, and I'm reiterating this so much

1439
01:56:35,479 --> 01:56:38,479
because this is like the biggest takeaway from this is, oh,

1440
01:56:38,520 --> 01:56:41,159
it's the most bombed country on Earth, and it's like, well,

1441
01:56:41,720 --> 01:56:46,840
it was extremely heavily bombed, but there's that's a per

1442
01:56:46,920 --> 01:56:51,840
capita number and there's only two million people in this country.

1443
01:56:51,880 --> 01:56:55,119
And maps can make things look crazy. Like if you

1444
01:56:55,159 --> 01:56:57,680
look at this map here, this is the thirty thousand

1445
01:56:57,760 --> 01:57:00,000
foot view, and we'll take a closer look in a second.

1446
01:57:00,520 --> 01:57:03,720
So this allows and you see, oh look, all of

1447
01:57:03,760 --> 01:57:08,640
these bombing operations are in areas like it's a path

1448
01:57:08,960 --> 01:57:16,600
from Vietnam into this country. And then later bombings were

1449
01:57:18,960 --> 01:57:22,359
later in the war when the Vietnamese were pressing westward,

1450
01:57:22,479 --> 01:57:26,359
but they didn't have any success. It's nineteen seventy four,

1451
01:57:26,399 --> 01:57:29,640
in nineteen seventy five when the Americans pulled all the funding.

1452
01:57:29,880 --> 01:57:32,640
That's why you see all this bombing so far west.

1453
01:57:33,760 --> 01:57:38,159
It looks crazy dense when you look at pictures like this. However,

1454
01:57:40,680 --> 01:57:46,560
let's look at this provincial map and this this was

1455
01:57:46,640 --> 01:57:51,880
blaze orange. This is Shinkwong Province in the plane of jars.

1456
01:57:52,479 --> 01:57:58,000
This looks insane, but right here pick is this little

1457
01:57:58,039 --> 01:58:02,760
sub province or district. If you look at it, you

1458
01:58:02,800 --> 01:58:08,000
can see it follows the bombing follows these patterns. You

1459
01:58:08,039 --> 01:58:13,279
can see it's along roads and rivers and around like

1460
01:58:13,359 --> 01:58:16,800
these are areas where all these operations or were taking

1461
01:58:16,840 --> 01:58:23,359
place or you know, combat operations or positions that the

1462
01:58:23,680 --> 01:58:28,479
PAVN took. So you look at that high level it

1463
01:58:28,520 --> 01:58:31,399
looks atrocious. You zoom in and you're like, oh, I

1464
01:58:31,439 --> 01:58:35,760
can see a pattern here. This isn't scattering bombs all

1465
01:58:35,800 --> 01:58:41,159
over the place. I'm going to take a couple quick views.

1466
01:58:41,520 --> 01:58:44,760
This makes me sound like an American US military apologist.

1467
01:58:44,840 --> 01:58:47,159
I assure you I'm not, but I want people to

1468
01:58:47,279 --> 01:58:51,399
understand this. So look, when people talk about seeing people

1469
01:58:51,439 --> 01:58:54,760
putting their houses up on bombs, these are auxiliary fuel

1470
01:58:54,760 --> 01:59:01,600
tanks for jets, not bombs. So stilt House has these

1471
01:59:01,680 --> 01:59:08,399
cool auxiliary tanks. That's pretty rad. This is really what

1472
01:59:08,560 --> 01:59:13,159
set me off on digging into this. This is a

1473
01:59:13,439 --> 01:59:20,960
UXO Unexploded Ordnance visitor center. These are small arms RPG

1474
01:59:22,439 --> 01:59:29,239
so Soviet Chinese. These are Chinese and Vietnamese grenades, the

1475
01:59:29,359 --> 01:59:35,239
recoilist rifle, you know, housings. Those are possibly Vietnamese, probably

1476
01:59:35,479 --> 01:59:38,880
American weapons used by the LAO. A bunch of this

1477
01:59:38,920 --> 01:59:43,439
stuff is Soviet or Chinese. Like this is not. These

1478
01:59:43,479 --> 01:59:51,239
are not bombs dropped by American planes. Now, this is

1479
01:59:51,279 --> 01:59:54,680
a cluster munition. And this is the biggest problem in

1480
01:59:54,760 --> 01:59:58,520
LAOS because these are basically they're like M sixty seven

1481
01:59:59,079 --> 02:00:05,000
hand grenades, and these are they call them bombies. They're

1482
02:00:04,800 --> 02:00:09,239
the cluster munitions the biggest problem because they scatter all

1483
02:00:09,239 --> 02:00:12,319
over the place in these areas where they're you know,

1484
02:00:12,399 --> 02:00:16,840
the ideas that you're blowing up North Vietnamese soldiers. But

1485
02:00:16,960 --> 02:00:21,000
twenty five years later, when families come back and they

1486
02:00:21,039 --> 02:00:24,560
try to they say, hey, this is really nice. Like farmland.

1487
02:00:26,800 --> 02:00:29,560
They either get dug up by hose and you know

1488
02:00:29,600 --> 02:00:32,520
sometimes and people get blown up, or like children think

1489
02:00:32,560 --> 02:00:41,159
they're toys, which is tragic. The West in America in particular,

1490
02:00:41,279 --> 02:00:45,359
have spent a lot of money building up a unexploded

1491
02:00:45,800 --> 02:00:54,199
Unexploded Ordnance disposal basically group and LAOS, and they're making

1492
02:00:54,319 --> 02:01:00,319
progress unclearing these areas. But at the current clearance rate,

1493
02:01:00,479 --> 02:01:03,399
LAOS will be UXO free in two hundred years. But

1494
02:01:03,520 --> 02:01:09,319
what really matters is getting it under control. I don't

1495
02:01:09,319 --> 02:01:11,600
want to say it's not as bad as it used

1496
02:01:11,640 --> 02:01:17,600
to be, but they've identified the areas much more the

1497
02:01:17,720 --> 02:01:21,039
danger zones than they did in the past, and so

1498
02:01:21,640 --> 02:01:24,600
they seem to be making a lot of progress in

1499
02:01:24,640 --> 02:01:28,520
the past, like twenty years there and again. The United

1500
02:01:28,560 --> 02:01:36,720
States is providing a ton of aid through usaid to

1501
02:01:36,760 --> 02:01:40,560
the advisory groups from the West that are training people

1502
02:01:40,560 --> 02:01:43,720
to do this stuff. I also want to point out,

1503
02:01:43,760 --> 02:01:48,159
so these are all mortars, right. Laos is not the

1504
02:01:48,199 --> 02:01:52,319
only country in the world with this issue. North Vietnam

1505
02:01:52,399 --> 02:01:56,720
got bombed to shit. We don't hear about this being

1506
02:01:56,760 --> 02:01:59,680
an issue in North Vietnam, and it's because they win

1507
02:01:59,760 --> 02:02:05,359
after it right away. Laos was basically depopulated by this war.

1508
02:02:06,479 --> 02:02:09,600
And we'll talk a little more in a second, but

1509
02:02:10,079 --> 02:02:14,159
I'm getting close to wrapping up here. But they just

1510
02:02:14,239 --> 02:02:18,479
weren't able to commit resources to it. Belgium is still

1511
02:02:18,520 --> 02:02:21,079
cleaning up World War One battlefields and there's still a

1512
02:02:21,199 --> 02:02:24,600
bunch of areas in Belgium where like you go through

1513
02:02:25,079 --> 02:02:27,880
the fields and the farmers push ordnance to the side

1514
02:02:28,159 --> 02:02:32,039
of their fields and they or they tag stuff that's

1515
02:02:32,960 --> 02:02:38,479
too concerning, and then the experts go out and blow

1516
02:02:38,520 --> 02:02:46,960
it up. All right, Why does this look cut off? Oh,

1517
02:02:47,079 --> 02:02:50,119
I've totally forgot that this would show up in slideshow

1518
02:02:50,159 --> 02:02:53,199
mode and not my fixed thing. But for some reason

1519
02:02:53,239 --> 02:02:58,319
it cut off to like a standard ratio. Obviously this

1520
02:02:58,439 --> 02:03:02,239
is from apocalypse now. So the end of the war

1521
02:03:02,359 --> 02:03:07,119
and the aftermath, So the Paris piece Accords, which resulted

1522
02:03:07,119 --> 02:03:12,039
in the US forces withdrawing from Vietnam were signed January

1523
02:03:12,119 --> 02:03:17,800
nineteen seventy three. Soon after, there was a treaty under

1524
02:03:17,960 --> 02:03:23,159
tremendous pressure from the United States for the Lao government

1525
02:03:23,239 --> 02:03:28,079
to sign a ceasefire with the Potet Lao in Vang Chan,

1526
02:03:30,039 --> 02:03:33,760
and then they created a quote unquote coalition government to

1527
02:03:33,880 --> 02:03:38,439
do joint security in the major cities. The guys who

1528
02:03:38,479 --> 02:03:42,439
had done the real fighting on the ground for the

1529
02:03:42,520 --> 02:03:46,199
Royal Lao government, the Special Guerrilla Units, they knew what

1530
02:03:46,399 --> 02:03:50,199
was up. They destroyed all their documentation, their photos, their

1531
02:03:50,239 --> 02:03:54,760
ID and they either left the country if they could,

1532
02:03:54,840 --> 02:03:57,600
or they lived under assumed names. This was before the

1533
02:03:57,720 --> 02:04:03,039
huge refugee migration. And then the Patt Lao, who were

1534
02:04:03,079 --> 02:04:05,760
never more than figureheads of the People's Army of Vietnam,

1535
02:04:05,800 --> 02:04:11,039
who did all the real fighting, they unmasked and said,

1536
02:04:11,079 --> 02:04:16,199
oh yeah, Laos is now a Marxist Leninist state. In

1537
02:04:16,239 --> 02:04:21,920
August fifteen, nineteen seventy five, the king and a bunch

1538
02:04:21,960 --> 02:04:24,800
of members of the royal family and people who had

1539
02:04:24,800 --> 02:04:28,800
fought in the Special Gorilla Units and everything were executed

1540
02:04:28,960 --> 02:04:36,840
in re education camps and something like a third of

1541
02:04:36,880 --> 02:04:39,439
the country. The a third of the population of the

1542
02:04:39,439 --> 02:04:44,000
country left huge, huge outflows, and I want to say

1543
02:04:45,680 --> 02:04:50,760
by by nineteen eighty five or so, there were like

1544
02:04:51,279 --> 02:04:56,720
three hundred thousand Laong and other ethnic groups who came

1545
02:04:56,760 --> 02:04:59,840
to the United States. An awful lot of them ended

1546
02:04:59,920 --> 02:05:03,920
up up going to Australia and France. Also, the big

1547
02:05:03,960 --> 02:05:06,800
Boys all went to France with their stolen money or

1548
02:05:06,840 --> 02:05:14,680
their drug money. And Hank Hill's neighborn Oh yes, Hank

1549
02:05:14,720 --> 02:05:19,920
Hill's neighbor Kahn if I recall his wife's referred to

1550
02:05:19,960 --> 02:05:28,640
her father as the General, so very very very amusing. Okay.

1551
02:05:28,720 --> 02:05:34,760
So other than King of the Hill, Laos has been

1552
02:05:35,119 --> 02:05:44,800
represented in two fictional films and and actually a drama

1553
02:05:45,279 --> 02:05:47,399
based on a real story Down at the Bottom. So

1554
02:05:47,399 --> 02:05:53,520
Apocalypse now takes place in fictionally in Vietnam and Cambodia.

1555
02:05:53,960 --> 02:05:58,680
But Colonel Kurtz was almost certainly modeled upon Tony Poe,

1556
02:05:59,720 --> 02:06:03,560
who I talked about before and also fed that end

1557
02:06:03,640 --> 02:06:07,560
for information to Alfred McCoy. Air America is another one

1558
02:06:07,600 --> 02:06:12,680
that's really famous because it helps reinforce that the CIA

1559
02:06:12,720 --> 02:06:16,680
was like physically transporting bundles of drugs, knowing that it

1560
02:06:16,720 --> 02:06:20,760
was bundles of drugs, which is insane when when you

1561
02:06:20,840 --> 02:06:25,359
talk to people who are there. They literally say, we knew,

1562
02:06:25,439 --> 02:06:28,600
you know, we later we would we would become aware

1563
02:06:28,640 --> 02:06:35,000
at some point about the opium tax having been in place.

1564
02:06:35,560 --> 02:06:39,079
But like, there's no there's no scenario where where anyone

1565
02:06:39,119 --> 02:06:43,119
has said I literally saw bundles of heroin be put on.

1566
02:06:43,319 --> 02:06:46,760
It's more like small amounts of it, probably because you're

1567
02:06:46,800 --> 02:06:52,680
moving people, and sure they can also load you know,

1568
02:06:52,840 --> 02:06:55,600
rice and hard rice. Hard rice was a term for

1569
02:06:56,560 --> 02:07:00,640
weapons and ammunition onto these planes and of it around

1570
02:07:00,720 --> 02:07:06,560
and have heroin in there or opium in there. But

1571
02:07:06,640 --> 02:07:11,399
the biggest thing is that, you know, one of the

1572
02:07:11,479 --> 02:07:15,479
one of the explanations is that proceeds from drugs fund

1573
02:07:15,520 --> 02:07:18,399
the war effort. And it's more like no proceeds from

1574
02:07:18,479 --> 02:07:23,439
drugs were used by the underground cabals to do what

1575
02:07:23,479 --> 02:07:26,600
they do. It's not to pay the government and all

1576
02:07:26,640 --> 02:07:30,800
that stuff. So and again them weren't growing opium and

1577
02:07:30,920 --> 02:07:34,039
significant quantities in the war zone by nineteen sixty seven

1578
02:07:34,159 --> 02:07:42,000
or so, et cetera. But very dramatic story that's also

1579
02:07:42,039 --> 02:07:45,119
pretty absurd because again it's based on this like we

1580
02:07:45,159 --> 02:07:49,479
had no idea what was going on, pretending that it

1581
02:07:49,560 --> 02:07:53,720
wasn't quite what it was, and then actually a pretty

1582
02:07:53,720 --> 02:07:56,680
good one is Rescue Don that Christian Bale is in

1583
02:07:57,800 --> 02:07:59,920
from two thousand and six. It's the story of Deder

1584
02:08:00,079 --> 02:08:04,279
Dengler was a German who joined the US Navy and

1585
02:08:04,319 --> 02:08:06,560
became a pilot, and he was shot down and captured

1586
02:08:06,560 --> 02:08:13,159
in Laos in nineteen sixty six. It's inaccurate because he

1587
02:08:13,319 --> 02:08:18,039
was in a North Vietnamese Army pow camp, but in

1588
02:08:18,079 --> 02:08:22,399
the film, because he got shot down in Laos, they're

1589
02:08:22,399 --> 02:08:26,039
supposed to be Lao guards, although they're actually speaking that

1590
02:08:26,840 --> 02:08:30,720
strong like Northeast Tie dialect because they filmed it there.

1591
02:08:30,840 --> 02:08:34,640
But it's pretty good. The documentary on the subject, Little

1592
02:08:34,680 --> 02:08:41,119
Deader Needs to Fly is a lot better. This is

1593
02:08:41,159 --> 02:08:45,359
where the Bangers are So Journey from Podong A Decision

1594
02:08:45,399 --> 02:08:50,159
in the Hills is a CIA produced documentary. It's very good.

1595
02:08:51,119 --> 02:08:57,520
Vint Lawrence produced it. So after his two tours in Laos,

1596
02:08:58,640 --> 02:09:03,520
he became an assistant, not like the but an assistant

1597
02:09:03,560 --> 02:09:07,640
to CIA director William Colby, and so he took footage

1598
02:09:07,640 --> 02:09:12,319
that he and another CIA officer named John Wilheim had filmed,

1599
02:09:12,479 --> 02:09:15,680
had shot in Laos, and then he created this film.

1600
02:09:15,800 --> 02:09:19,720
It's short to show to the Senate Arms Committee. So

1601
02:09:19,880 --> 02:09:24,800
again this is early nineteen sixty six, early mid nineteen

1602
02:09:24,840 --> 02:09:27,119
sixty six when he puts this together and it's shown

1603
02:09:27,520 --> 02:09:32,159
to the Senate Arms Committee explaining the secret Warren Laos.

1604
02:09:32,279 --> 02:09:39,439
So it wasn't this thing that US officials didn't know about.

1605
02:09:39,840 --> 02:09:43,439
And then the other one is the secret Warren Laos.

1606
02:09:43,560 --> 02:09:45,239
I have links in here. I'll just grab him and

1607
02:09:45,239 --> 02:09:48,199
I can send him to you, Pete. This is about

1608
02:09:48,199 --> 02:09:51,279
an hour and a half documentary by CBS News that

1609
02:09:51,399 --> 02:09:54,720
dates from I believe seventy two when the war is

1610
02:09:54,760 --> 02:09:59,039
going very very badly and the government is speaking super

1611
02:09:59,079 --> 02:10:03,000
openly about what's going on. It mostly takes place at

1612
02:10:03,439 --> 02:10:06,000
around Long Tiang, which is up in the north, which

1613
02:10:06,079 --> 02:10:10,279
was a huge CIA base. And it's really funny because

1614
02:10:10,319 --> 02:10:15,399
they're just these news guys and congressmen talking to CIA

1615
02:10:15,479 --> 02:10:20,199
paramilitary officers and they're horrible public relations guys. They're like

1616
02:10:20,399 --> 02:10:23,039
they're feed are up and they're all casual talking about

1617
02:10:23,039 --> 02:10:27,359
this insane combat that's taking place. It's it's really wild,

1618
02:10:27,439 --> 02:10:33,840
but they're totally worth watching. And then I will close.

1619
02:10:34,920 --> 02:10:37,159
I have a list of books. What I'll do is

1620
02:10:37,159 --> 02:10:39,359
I'll do a thread on X and I can also

1621
02:10:39,399 --> 02:10:42,840
put this up on my sub stack. A bunch of

1622
02:10:42,840 --> 02:10:46,840
great books about the Secret War. One of the best

1623
02:10:47,119 --> 02:10:49,560
was released by the People's Army of Vietnam History of

1624
02:10:49,560 --> 02:10:52,640
the People's Army of Vietnam. They talk in great detail

1625
02:10:52,680 --> 02:10:57,239
about their campaigns in Lao as well as the the

1626
02:10:57,279 --> 02:11:01,159
Ho Chiman Trail, although they of course have a different

1627
02:11:01,199 --> 02:11:04,800
name for it. And then I have a bunch of

1628
02:11:04,920 --> 02:11:10,359
more general histories and CIA centric. Kenneth Comboy is this

1629
02:11:10,439 --> 02:11:14,079
guy who's been writing books about this topic since the seventies.

1630
02:11:16,119 --> 02:11:19,079
I believe he's a journalist who just got super interested

1631
02:11:19,119 --> 02:11:24,079
in it. So Shadow War is really good. He recently

1632
02:11:24,319 --> 02:11:27,159
released The Arowon War Volumes One and two, which is

1633
02:11:27,199 --> 02:11:33,119
about the CIA paramilitary campaign. And then Spies on the

1634
02:11:33,159 --> 02:11:37,079
Mekong is cool because it talks about CIA clandestine operations,

1635
02:11:37,479 --> 02:11:40,439
including the first I think it was the first turned

1636
02:11:40,600 --> 02:11:46,880
Soviet double agent was recruited in veng Chan, so it's

1637
02:11:46,960 --> 02:11:53,119
really interesting. And then the others are a little more general,

1638
02:11:53,159 --> 02:11:56,760
and the very last one, Doctor Charles Wynn Weldon Junior

1639
02:11:57,279 --> 02:12:01,119
Tragedy in Paradise. He was a UH. He was the

1640
02:12:01,199 --> 02:12:06,560
director of a medical mission to allows for US AID.

1641
02:12:06,920 --> 02:12:13,439
And again it's really telling because these are just this

1642
02:12:13,560 --> 02:12:16,560
is how it this is how this stuff works. Is

1643
02:12:16,600 --> 02:12:20,960
these are people who volunteer for US AID. They're nice

1644
02:12:21,079 --> 02:12:29,399
people and they're used to further US operations and you

1645
02:12:29,439 --> 02:12:33,720
know the mission, but they care deeply about the people

1646
02:12:33,760 --> 02:12:38,640
and it's just this this tragic, this tragic grind that

1647
02:12:38,760 --> 02:12:45,880
they become a critical component. Two. So that wraps it

1648
02:12:46,039 --> 02:12:52,640
up for me. Unless you have any questions, Pete.

1649
02:12:51,039 --> 02:12:53,600
Speaker 1: No, I think that's uh, that makes it pretty clear

1650
02:12:54,840 --> 02:12:57,640
anyone who's been paying attention for the last what are

1651
02:12:57,680 --> 02:13:02,680
we three years now into Ukraine? Yeah, I hope they

1652
02:13:02,760 --> 02:13:07,079
can see the parallels and see you know where this is.

1653
02:13:07,199 --> 02:13:09,720
It's just a playbook that they use over and over again.

1654
02:13:09,560 --> 02:13:13,279
Speaker 2: One hundred percent and they One of the interesting things

1655
02:13:13,359 --> 02:13:19,079
is that James Parker here, who wrote Covert Ops, he

1656
02:13:19,399 --> 02:13:23,359
was the oh wait, no, I'm thinking of Cash on

1657
02:13:23,399 --> 02:13:30,000
Delivery is Thomas Briggs. Thomas Briggs stayed with the CIA

1658
02:13:30,199 --> 02:13:35,079
for a very long time and he, uh, in his

1659
02:13:35,279 --> 02:13:38,399
intro to this book, which is his memoir about his

1660
02:13:38,479 --> 02:13:42,199
time in Laos, basically says this is how we should

1661
02:13:42,279 --> 02:13:45,119
run the war in Afghanistan. I think he published it

1662
02:13:45,119 --> 02:13:48,720
in the oughts, and uh, the whole thing is, don't

1663
02:13:48,800 --> 02:13:52,039
use Americans, or use as few Americans as possible. Have

1664
02:13:52,199 --> 02:13:55,720
locals do it. This way, you can get the results

1665
02:13:55,720 --> 02:14:00,800
that you want without you know, the political backline and

1666
02:14:01,000 --> 02:14:05,920
all this stuff. And it's very cynical. It's very very cynical.

1667
02:14:05,960 --> 02:14:08,319
Speaker 1: Well, it also sounds somebody who doesn't It sounds like

1668
02:14:08,319 --> 02:14:10,399
somebody who doesn't understand Afghani culture.

1669
02:14:11,479 --> 02:14:14,239
Speaker 2: He doesn't, he doesn't give a shit about Afghani culture.

1670
02:14:15,880 --> 02:14:19,960
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the first thing that the guys who got

1671
02:14:20,000 --> 02:14:24,399
there said was, like Vietnam, we don't know who the

1672
02:14:24,399 --> 02:14:27,600
players are. We don't know who's on our side exactly.

1673
02:14:27,640 --> 02:14:33,079
You know, it's you end up fighting and protecting the

1674
02:14:33,119 --> 02:14:37,439
pedophiles and the and the opium and the poppy farm

1675
02:14:37,760 --> 02:14:42,199
farmers and everyone else you is targeted for death.

1676
02:14:43,239 --> 02:14:47,279
Speaker 2: You know. The interesting thing, Pete, is that the average

1677
02:14:48,079 --> 02:14:51,640
guy who was a veteran of the war in Vietnam

1678
02:14:51,680 --> 02:14:55,279
who operated in Laos said that in Laos we were

1679
02:14:55,279 --> 02:15:02,079
on the side of the angels, despite the despite some

1680
02:15:02,760 --> 02:15:06,319
not good people at the tippy top. But it was

1681
02:15:06,359 --> 02:15:08,840
hard to see that. It wasn't in your face like

1682
02:15:08,880 --> 02:15:13,880
in Vietnam. The leaders of South Vietnam were really horrible

1683
02:15:15,680 --> 02:15:19,560
and so but but it's also one of those things

1684
02:15:19,600 --> 02:15:24,000
where you see a certain amount of rationalization taking place

1685
02:15:24,079 --> 02:15:25,720
when they talk about it, right.

1686
02:15:27,119 --> 02:15:28,920
Speaker 1: Well, that's how they have to do it, right, I

1687
02:15:28,960 --> 02:15:33,319
mean they have to. Yeah, you can't basically start a

1688
02:15:34,399 --> 02:15:37,119
I don't want to say genocide because that word is

1689
02:15:37,119 --> 02:15:40,479
is overused, but you know, a meat grinder.

1690
02:15:41,199 --> 02:15:46,560
Speaker 2: A meat grinder, one hundred percent, there were a whole

1691
02:15:46,920 --> 02:15:52,720
the Mong were totally totally wasted by this. They they

1692
02:15:52,800 --> 02:15:57,039
lost something like thirty five to forty percent of their

1693
02:15:57,880 --> 02:16:01,960
of their adult males in the war. That could be

1694
02:16:02,000 --> 02:16:06,039
a slight exaggeration, because I think this sounds familiar. Exactly.

1695
02:16:06,119 --> 02:16:09,079
It's during, it's during the war and in the aftermath.

1696
02:16:09,399 --> 02:16:11,680
It's it's right about that number, I want to say.

1697
02:16:12,840 --> 02:16:15,760
Speaker 1: And well, think about how much worse Ukraine is. I mean,

1698
02:16:16,199 --> 02:16:20,199
it wasn't. It wasn't like we there were people in

1699
02:16:20,439 --> 02:16:22,920
I mean, at least not that I know of, that

1700
02:16:23,079 --> 02:16:26,000
were in the State department or in the government who

1701
02:16:26,039 --> 02:16:31,479
had it out for uh, you know, for the Laotian people. Yeah, exactly,

1702
02:16:31,880 --> 02:16:36,200
but here you definitely have when it comes to Ukraine,

1703
02:16:36,200 --> 02:16:41,600
you have people who absolutely hate the Russian people and

1704
02:16:41,680 --> 02:16:45,680
the Ukrainians and they're just using the They're just using

1705
02:16:45,719 --> 02:16:50,879
the Ukrainians to exactly. They just Christians, Christian slaughtering Christians.

1706
02:16:51,559 --> 02:16:54,639
Speaker 2: And I think that I think the real takeaway is that,

1707
02:16:54,920 --> 02:16:59,559
I mean, I know a lot of Vietnam veterans, you know,

1708
02:16:59,639 --> 02:17:03,200
given given my age, I know a lot. I had

1709
02:17:03,239 --> 02:17:06,840
a lot who were mentors and stuff or family members,

1710
02:17:07,200 --> 02:17:10,639
and what they would inevitably do is they would go

1711
02:17:10,719 --> 02:17:13,079
to war when they were young, and then they would

1712
02:17:13,239 --> 02:17:15,840
then they become obsessed with it. They come home and

1713
02:17:15,879 --> 02:17:18,760
they they read about it, they read about the culture,

1714
02:17:18,799 --> 02:17:24,079
and they learn about the people in the place after

1715
02:17:24,159 --> 02:17:29,760
the war. So you really need to learn about people

1716
02:17:29,840 --> 02:17:34,159
in places before you have any kind of engagement with them.

1717
02:17:34,639 --> 02:17:37,840
But you know that they were also you know, draft

1718
02:17:37,879 --> 02:17:39,840
ease or they were just like this is where it's

1719
02:17:40,079 --> 02:17:42,280
this is where it's happening, this is where you know,

1720
02:17:42,319 --> 02:17:44,639
instead of fighting the Russians, we're going to be over there.

1721
02:17:44,680 --> 02:17:46,879
You don't want the Russians here. We got to fight

1722
02:17:46,920 --> 02:17:51,520
over there. And it sounds good at the time when

1723
02:17:51,799 --> 02:17:57,399
you know, when it's pretty raw, raw, but man like

1724
02:17:57,399 --> 02:18:00,600
like you know, about Ukraine because of this that you're

1725
02:18:00,600 --> 02:18:04,760
doing with doctor Johnson and God, I hope every single

1726
02:18:04,760 --> 02:18:08,760
person listening to this listens to the to the series

1727
02:18:08,799 --> 02:18:12,959
of two hundred Years together, because you need to know

1728
02:18:13,200 --> 02:18:16,719
the history of these places before you can have any

1729
02:18:16,760 --> 02:18:19,239
opinion about anything else. That's why I started off with

1730
02:18:19,319 --> 02:18:23,639
my Putin hat, like, let's go back to before you

1731
02:18:23,680 --> 02:18:28,239
know the oceans drank Atlantis, Like you have to do

1732
02:18:28,280 --> 02:18:31,200
that when you look at any situation to be able

1733
02:18:31,239 --> 02:18:35,079
to have any kind of you know, commentary or anything

1734
02:18:35,120 --> 02:18:35,399
on it.

1735
02:18:36,000 --> 02:18:38,719
Speaker 1: Well, I'm glad you brought up Putin because that then

1736
02:18:38,760 --> 02:18:40,760
it doesn't seem like I'm doing a non sequitor here.

1737
02:18:41,040 --> 02:18:46,680
But the people who say, well, you know, Putin just

1738
02:18:47,920 --> 02:18:51,040
he just shouldn't have invaded. It's his fault. I mean,

1739
02:18:51,079 --> 02:18:54,200
these are the dumbest fucking people I've ever I've ever

1740
02:18:55,079 --> 02:18:59,520
If you're saying that as a propagandist, I have more

1741
02:18:59,559 --> 02:19:02,719
respect for you than someone who's saying that out of

1742
02:19:02,799 --> 02:19:04,040
sheer stupidity.

1743
02:19:04,680 --> 02:19:10,479
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and that's where that's where, That's why I said,

1744
02:19:10,600 --> 02:19:14,120
these guys will give you mental aids Like I don't

1745
02:19:14,200 --> 02:19:19,120
like them, but I at least Bramffman knew what he

1746
02:19:19,159 --> 02:19:25,159
was doing. I don't think Alfred McCoy knows anything, but like,

1747
02:19:25,280 --> 02:19:26,920
at least he knew what he was doing when he

1748
02:19:27,000 --> 02:19:31,159
was repeating this this nonsense. He was framing something in

1749
02:19:31,200 --> 02:19:38,360
an advantageous fashion for his bent and the people that

1750
02:19:38,440 --> 02:19:43,680
he aligned with at the time, or at least the

1751
02:19:43,680 --> 02:19:49,760
the the position that he aligned with at the time.

1752
02:19:51,959 --> 02:19:55,840
At least at least be that smart instead of just

1753
02:19:55,879 --> 02:19:58,920
being like, well, we have to do this because that

1754
02:19:59,239 --> 02:20:02,920
will batch you bad. And it's like, you you totally

1755
02:20:03,040 --> 02:20:08,280
understand why the North Vietnamese went into Laos and Cambodia.

1756
02:20:08,920 --> 02:20:11,200
It totally makes sense. Of course they would. And then

1757
02:20:11,200 --> 02:20:14,200
when they marched west and conquered, you know, conquered the

1758
02:20:14,239 --> 02:20:16,959
country and installed the puppet government, you understand why they

1759
02:20:16,959 --> 02:20:19,920
did that too. You don't like it, but it is

1760
02:20:19,959 --> 02:20:22,440
what it is. And it's like, are you know, are

1761
02:20:22,520 --> 02:20:24,680
you going to send your kids to die to stop

1762
02:20:24,719 --> 02:20:28,559
that from happening? Who fucking cares? It's like, it's not,

1763
02:20:29,319 --> 02:20:33,280
it's it's crazy. It's crazy. And look at the money

1764
02:20:33,280 --> 02:20:39,520
that we spent the equipment. And I can't think of

1765
02:20:39,559 --> 02:20:42,239
his name. There was there was a guy, one of

1766
02:20:42,280 --> 02:20:44,719
the guys who was in the in the campaign in

1767
02:20:44,760 --> 02:20:50,600
the North working with the mong and and I think, oh,

1768
02:20:50,639 --> 02:20:56,600
what's his name? Food guy Anthony Bourdain when he did

1769
02:20:56,600 --> 02:20:59,360
a show in Laos and and he quoted this guy,

1770
02:21:00,200 --> 02:21:02,879
and it was so spot on, like you go in

1771
02:21:02,920 --> 02:21:05,479
there with the best of intentions and you end up

1772
02:21:05,600 --> 02:21:09,440
arming twelve year olds. Yeah.

1773
02:21:10,079 --> 02:21:14,479
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean at this point I have less contempt

1774
02:21:14,559 --> 02:21:19,159
for Victoria Newland and Robert Kagan and Anthony Blincoln than

1775
02:21:19,159 --> 02:21:20,639
I do for the Nafoga people.

1776
02:21:21,639 --> 02:21:25,920
Speaker 2: Oh my god, because yeah, those.

1777
02:21:25,719 --> 02:21:29,479
Speaker 1: Three are just doing what they're doing. Yes, they're not

1778
02:21:29,680 --> 02:21:34,120
useful idiots for a fucking literal Christian genocide.

1779
02:21:36,200 --> 02:21:39,600
Speaker 2: And they want to reduce the draft to age fourteen.

1780
02:21:41,200 --> 02:21:45,920
Playbook in Ukraine now playbook, same thing. Yep.

1781
02:21:47,559 --> 02:21:52,479
Speaker 1: You got to get these people out of our They

1782
02:21:52,520 --> 02:21:55,239
cannot be allowed to hold power or be anywhere near power.

1783
02:21:56,920 --> 02:22:04,840
Speaker 2: I'm gonna legally, uh ask my congressman to uh put

1784
02:22:04,879 --> 02:22:08,680
together a new law where or or some kind of

1785
02:22:09,840 --> 02:22:14,840
some kind of legal structure to uh have them pushed

1786
02:22:14,879 --> 02:22:26,959
through fine mesh screens. It only takes a couple horrible

1787
02:22:27,000 --> 02:22:32,440
people and make these epic disasters that destroy a country

1788
02:22:32,520 --> 02:22:36,200
for for centuries. If not forever.

1789
02:22:37,120 --> 02:22:42,559
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, all right, man promote.

1790
02:22:42,200 --> 02:22:51,040
Speaker 2: Away, uh, Carl Doll Carldall dot substack dot com. That's

1791
02:22:51,079 --> 02:22:56,559
where my my longer form stuff is. Once this goes public,

1792
02:22:56,799 --> 02:23:02,200
all put together an article with both the podcast link

1793
02:23:02,479 --> 02:23:06,239
to your stuff as well as links to all these

1794
02:23:06,479 --> 02:23:09,280
materials and books and everything. A lot of it is

1795
02:23:09,319 --> 02:23:12,719
free online. Now. The older stuff, I should say, I

1796
02:23:12,719 --> 02:23:13,280
don't thought of.

1797
02:23:13,719 --> 02:23:15,399
Speaker 1: I don't know if you said at the beginning, do

1798
02:23:15,440 --> 02:23:18,719
you want to say why this is even an interest

1799
02:23:18,760 --> 02:23:21,440
of yours? What's something you have planned?

1800
02:23:26,920 --> 02:23:30,840
Speaker 2: Yeah? Sure, okay, yeah I can do that. I'm working

1801
02:23:31,120 --> 02:23:38,280
on the memoirs of a person I know who is

1802
02:23:38,600 --> 02:23:42,719
a veteran of this of this war. He worked for

1803
02:23:42,760 --> 02:23:49,000
the CIA in Laos for seven years and he's it'll

1804
02:23:49,040 --> 02:23:53,040
be published posthumously. It won't be under good old Carl

1805
02:23:53,079 --> 02:23:58,040
Doll's name. It'll be his name and probably my probably

1806
02:23:58,079 --> 02:24:00,760
my real name, maybe maybe a pen name. I don't know.

1807
02:24:02,079 --> 02:24:09,159
But it's wild, wild stuff, but it's it can be

1808
02:24:09,200 --> 02:24:11,840
a bit much. It gets very it gets very emotional,

1809
02:24:11,920 --> 02:24:14,879
so it's kind of slow going, so hence all the

1810
02:24:14,920 --> 02:24:20,520
research that I've done. But yeah, it's it's something I've

1811
02:24:20,559 --> 02:24:24,360
been working on for some time, and.

1812
02:24:24,840 --> 02:24:26,559
Speaker 1: So there's something coming in the future.

1813
02:24:27,280 --> 02:24:29,520
Speaker 2: It's in the future. I don't think he's ever going

1814
02:24:29,600 --> 02:24:32,920
to die though. He's invincible, so it's probably it could

1815
02:24:33,000 --> 02:24:36,079
be another ten years. Awesome and I'm not even choking.

1816
02:24:36,239 --> 02:24:38,440
Speaker 1: Awesome. Just give you more time to work.

1817
02:24:38,280 --> 02:24:41,920
Speaker 2: On this exactly exactly, exactly what time?

1818
02:24:42,959 --> 02:24:48,200
Speaker 1: And yeah, well here's yes, here's the question is when

1819
02:24:48,239 --> 02:24:52,559
you by the time it is time to finish this

1820
02:24:52,639 --> 02:24:56,000
and we will mourn the dead, will Ukraine be over?

1821
02:24:58,120 --> 02:25:01,600
Speaker 2: Oh my god, I hope so. I hope that ends

1822
02:25:01,719 --> 02:25:04,200
very soon, very soon. I'm worried that it won't.

1823
02:25:04,719 --> 02:25:07,840
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, man, always good talking to you. Take

1824
02:25:07,879 --> 02:25:29,079
care of yourself, right, Yeah, thanks Pete.