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want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingano Show. Carl
Dahl is back and we're not talking about the Spanish
Civil War this time how you don't.
Speaker 2: Call doing great, Pete.
Speaker 1: All right, So you sent me this presentation of called
the Secret War in Laos is the template for US
proxy war, and I went through it and I was
just like, yeah, we just we just got to do this.
So I'm just gonna turn I'm going to turn it
over to you and I'll interject when I have questions,
and yeah, we'll go from there. So tell us about this,
all right.
Speaker 2: So this is this is my thesis, and I'm not
the only person who's who has such a thesis that
the activities in Laos in the fifties, sixties, and seventies,
but especially in the sixties and seventies are the template
for what we see in the world when it comes
to utilizing various you know, weak kind of buffer states
for US foreign policy, from CIA to military to US
AID and such things. And I think I make a
pretty good case in this presentation. And I am frankly
echoing the thoughts of CIA alum who have stated as much.
And I'll be citing a lot of great folks, will
I think what I'll do, Pete, is I'll provide you
with some links that you can put into into wherever
this recording will dwell so that people can view some
of the materials that I'm referencing themselves. So great, So
before I start, Pete, when we say Laos, and again
you're a person who's very familiar with, you know, the
twentieth century and American activities therein. But what do you
think of when you hear the name of this country?
Speaker 1: Immediately think of the Vietnam War.
Speaker 2: Yeah, great, that's the it's its own theater, and but
it's you cannot decouple Laos and American activities in Laos
from the Vietnam War in any way, shape or form,
and everyone's attempt to do so has been stupid and disastrous,
and it's actually quite tragic also because of the human cost.
So I am just going to move forward and reiterate.
So you know, one of the greatest examples of Laos
as a template for US proxy war is if you
look at Ukraine. It's different because there are many more
countries that are involved in supplying material, money, et cetera
to Ukraine versus Laos, and there's a big difference in
terms of who Ukraine is next to, you know, geographically,
but it's very very similar. If you step back and
you look at it as you know, other than US
air power being directly involved. So it's very similar to
what was attempted in Laos, except US air power plus
Allied air power was totally different story in Lau than
in Ukraine. So anyway, let me make my case. So
this is an image from a very famous press conference
that newly elected a president, John F. Kennedy made March
twenty third, nineteen sixty one. He had only been in
office for about two months at this time, and he
had inherited a you know, the Eisenhower administrations foreign policy
and had been briefed for a long time on the
importance of what was going on in Laos as it
related to American interests and involvement in various activities in Vietnam.
And so it's funny because Kennedy hated the pronunciation of
the country's name because to him, it sounded like Laos,
like the biting insect, and so he pronounced it lay Offs.
And I'll explain here shortly. You know where we get
these strange pronunciations. But how this is relevant is that
the United States as part of the Cold War. Again,
and let me step back. I had said, you cannot
look at American activities in Laos outside of the context
of the Vietnam War. But most importantly, you cannot look
at it from outside the context of the Cold War.
It's one hundred percent a Cold War baby, and it's
America attempting to follow essentially containment of communism, specifically the
Soviet Union at the time of nineteen sixty one and
in the fifties, And a really good resource for everyone listening.
If you really want to dig into this, check out
the shows that Pete and Thomas have done about the
Cold War. There's a recent batch of three parts of episodes.
The second one, the second batch focus is on Vietnam
and it's really good. You know, Thomas is a is
a treasure and I'm not just kissing his ass. I'm
genuinely saying like you will get so much out of
that in terms of it'll contextualize for you in six
hours of listening, how you can actually study this in
a coherent fashion and bits and bites. So when you
look at Laos, you have to look at it in
terms of the Cold War. Indo China was a when
it broke up. There was a Geneva agreement in nineteen
fifty four about how the Powers would interact with the
former Indo Chinese states. Laos was declared to be a
neutral country. What this map represents here is not only like,
hey everyone, this is a country that you've never heard
of on the other side of the world, but the
white territories are in under government or governmental control. And
a very cool nineteen sixties progression slide was done with
a cube that they rotated and these the black and
then the gradient areas showed the progress of expansion of
communist forces out of North Vietnam, although that was never
explicitly stated in this presentation across the country in the
past couple of months, and the fact that Soviet airlift
was involved as a key part of this. In the
plane of jars the Soviets were flying, I think he
mentioned at one point at least one hundred sorties in
a very brief period to provide equipment, et cetera to
the in his term commune gorillas. Very interestingly, like I said,
he doesn't really emphasize the fact that this is coming
straight out in North Vietnam. So let's step back and
this is sort of I'm going to put on my
mini putin hat. I'm not going to do a super
long deep dive into the background history. I'm going to
hit you with a couple of slides. What is this country?
What is this thing? What is this place? So Laos
is a landlocked Southeast Asian nation. In nineteen sixty one,
it had about two million people in the population, and
we'll see why it's kind of hard to quantify that
those were best estimates at the time. Currently there are
about seven million people, a little over seven million. It's
landlocked between Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and China. The Maykong
as you can see from this image, the Meekong River
is a critical part of the delineation of its current border,
and it's named for the people who live there in
the dominant people group in the country, those who had
been the ruling class, the Lao. So unfortunately we get
this crazy Laos Laos and term Laotian to describe them,
because the French described the country as Royam Do Lao Shen,
which is literally the kingdom of the Lao people. So
Lao Shen became Laotian in English, so they're really the Lao.
The language is Lao et cetera. You can see here
how big the country is. It's quite small. It's northern
Laos Is basically Ohio, plus you know parts of Appalachia
going down into the southeast. So not a very big
country at at all. Stepping back, how and I'm explaining
this because I want you to understand how this country
came to be, which informs the challenges that the American uh,
you know, operational forces there had in trying to coalesce
this into a country. So Europe had a migration era,
Southeast Asia had a migration era that was very influential.
And shortly I'll explain a few things that I'm going
to skim over here currently. But there are all these
tribal groups. When you see this purple text, that's what
they call the Thai or Dae people's it's the label
for language and people group. There's you'll notice that that
sounds similar to Thailand. Yes, that's where Thailand get got
its name. Retroactively, that was the name given by the
Siamese king when they wanted to step back and try
to kind of legitimize their rule over foreign people because
they came out of China, just like all the rest
of these folks came and the biggest driver of the
migrations down into Southeast Asia from southern China which had
been going on over time. They know that there were
people going down into the Meekong River basin around vang
Chan which is the current capital and became a later
kingdom around seven hundred eighty and substantial numbers. And they
were essentially groups of warrior bands with families that would
follow the river valleys south because they were less populated
until they ran into other people who were there in
great numbers, such as the Khmer kingdoms. They sometimes pronounced
it Kamai, but anyway, they ran into those folks and
that turned into kind of stabilizing general groups where of
where these people were at the biggest pressure came when
the Mongols conquered down into what I'll call the Thai
homeland of Sipsong Pana which means a thousand rice fields
in the thirteen hundreds. That that was the biggest press
that really created a massive migration that resulted in a
whole bunch of actual kingdoms of Lao in substantial numbers.
Among other groups Suko Thai down there, which became the
Thai Ayataya et cetera. The kingdoms of the kind of
bordering the Burmese, like the Shan and the Kunin and
the Yuan, who are still at it kind of fighting
against the Uh, the Burmese government from time to time.
That's where all these people came from. There's also a
tribe here, the which is Uh that means one, like
the number one or the first people. They became mercenaries
in Southeast Asia for American operations, and a whole bunch
of them.
Speaker 1: Ye let me ask you a question. Yeah, this migration pattern,
it almost yes, could you relate it to how we're
told the Native American tribes got here? It sounds very like,
I mean, we don't really know how that happened. This
happened in more correct but it sounds like like you
could relate that in some way. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So you'll notice there's this huge area and a lot
of these people stayed here and they became sinusized. You
know when when you look at the the Chinese claim, oh,
well this is like ninety we're ninety some percent Han
ethnic group, and then there's these small minority groups. Well,
an awful lot of these people were you know, absorbed, syncretized,
essentially absorbed into what they call han because of just
time and everything like that. Yeah, it's it's an interesting question,
like was it was the Native American settlement? Was that
strictly straight lines, you know, like we see here where
they following game. Did they come to the you know,
the land bridge and keep moving or were their pressures
beyond that at the time, we don't have a way
of knowing. It sounds it's funny because sometimes you'll you'll
see in these old histories and one of the biggest
problems with Southeast Asia is there been the total war.
Was the way everything was done there until you know,
a couple hundred years later, when there was some slightly
more civilized or modern way of thinking and conquering and
everything handling war that way, what they would typically do
is they would raise the records, you know, they would
raise capitals and burn all the records of everything. And
so there's surviving stories in a variety of in a
variety of formats. Sometimes they're old songs, and so you
don't know quite how accurate you know, some of these
stories are. There's written records that are that are thousands
a thousand years old all over the place. But a
lot of the records get destroyed, so you kind of
have to just make assumptions about it. But yeah, it's
it's an interesting that's an interesting question. And my guess
is there's a lot more migrations in human history we
just don't have a way of quantifying in detail. So
south of when when they moved south, because a bunch
went west and following the mountains and basically skirting the
edges of the great mountain ranges of Asia, but moving south,
they were moving through river valleys which were strictly sharply
defined by these very high mountains, and many of them
quite steep, where you can't even scale the mountains in
southeast Asia except for maybe a couple of spots, and
so all they could do is push down. And so
what they would that what the pattern would be at
this point is that they would if they could drive
out the populations and the river valleys because they're they're
wet rice farmers, the people who were there would go
into the highlands, or they would just absorb them. Sometimes
it kind of depended on a variety of variety of
cases and conditions. So what I've done here is I'm
reiterating wet rice farmers love river valleys. And why am
I going to all this detail because the way the
war is conducted is very similar, has very similar pressures
and parameters on it that the actual settlement of the
area had. So the red lines that I have here
are very steep mountain ranges, and you'll notice I have
a couple of little gaps in places. These are where
modern day mountain passes, you know, and waypoints, highways, et cetera. Are,
And otherwise these areas were almost impassable like over these
red lines, or they were so steepest to not be
worth it, and so kind of an old school natural
way when you have pretty powerful groups of people who
are defining their borders in kind of these marginal areas
some you know, sometimes a couple times in history, the
the Vietnamese Uh in the to the east would get
together and do a survey with the Lao with representatives
of the Lao Kingdom. And what they would do is
they would travel the Animite mountain range or Anamite, I
should say, and they would say, okay on on an
eastern slope of a mountain. If the houses on stilts
were still in Lao territory, because the Lao would build
their house is on stilts. If it's on the ground,
it was Vietnamese territory, and some of the later hill
tribes that would come in build their houses on the ground.
But this was something that was a rule well into
the eighteenth century, I'd say, maybe even early nineteenth century,
when it came to the way that the Uh that
the Lao and and the Vietnamese interacted with each other.
And then the western border. These are rivers that form
the borders. And you'll notice here there's a yellow outline
here there's two provinces in modern Laos and Laos of
the period that we're talking about, which is post World
War two, there's only two little provinces that are west
of the Mekong River. Otherwise, the Meekong River forms the
key border along Thailand and Burma. This is China up here,
and then down here is Cambodia, and Cambodia was delineated
from both Thailand and Laos by mountain ranges and then
at the Mekong River there are massive waterfalls, so it
was found to be by the French to be non navigable.
Later when they showed up and we're trying to think of,
you know, ways to penetrate the interior wasn't going to work,
all right. So this is just a view of the
topography of Laos and it's a very beautiful country. You'll
notice something immediately. You have extremely sharp, steep mountains that
are not These are not gradual like mountains in the Alps.
This is limestone karst that just shoots up and is
essentially unusable, covered in jungle. And then down in the
lowland you know basins where anywhere there's flat land and water,
people settle and farm there. And again they don't only
farm wet you know, wet rice which is like sticky rice,
which you know, flooded flooded fields for substantial parts of
the year. But that is the primary staple crop. And
so large areas of the country are either unpopulated or
lightly populated because there's just such a small amount of
arable land. But it is the tropics, and that means
that things will grow anywhere, and they have monsoon season
and they have a wet you know, so there's a
wet season and a dry season, rather than having four
seasons as you would in the more temperate climates. But
that means that they can get water. You know, pretty
much everywhere. There's nowhere that's arid except for some plateau
areas in the far south. But ultimately it's very fertile.
But it's very difficult to grow crops in huge amounts
of the country, which means I can't support significant populations.
All right, So let's put the Indo in Indo China.
So the meaning of this term is essentially that these
this is there's a bit of a hand waving where
you know, it was Europeans saying it's the area of China,
and they're they are Chinese, appearing like as they would say,
Oriental rather than being you know, pajeets. So, but the
important thing to understand is that culturally they were heavily influenced,
uh in a at the upper levels, I should say,
by Indian culture. So what would happen is that the
local hegemonds, whether it was through missionaries or you know,
priests that would be invited from India. And there's different
stories depending on the countries specifically where they came from.
In Lao, it was Sri Lanka where they brought some
basically Hinduism first, much like Indonesia and polyscript which is
the writing script that was used in the early Buddhist scriptures,
and then most importantly the Indian forms of government, so
that the social hierarchies which were looser, but what it
brought was a higher bierarchy frankly, pomp and the feeling
of perceived legitimacy. So it was putting together formal, formal
structures that were then used by the rulers to manage
their regions. The other key concept is this mondola concept.
You'll see these rings radiating out from these cities, and
this is really important to understand because of the topography
and frankly, this should make sense to anyone like power
radiates outward and it defines zones of influence, and so
you have these areas of overlap between these kingdoms where,
for example, like a weaker ethnic group, the whole ethnic group,
their leader will pay tribute to their more powerful neighbors
until they have enough power themselves to not have to
pay tribute to be seen as equals, etc. So this
is really important to understand because there's this huge kind
of blending of power that was this natural way that
people had related to each other in this area for
a long time, which worked great until it didn't. So
kind of the ethnogenesis of Laos. And I'm not going
to spend a whole bunch of time diving into this,
but there was a prince from muang Sui which later
became Long Probang, which is the old royal capital, who
was exiled. His father had been exiled by the grandfather,
and he grew up in the court of Encore in Cambodia,
the Kingdom of Cambodia. In thirteen sixteen, he married a
Khmer princess, persuaded the king to lend him a ten
thousand man army so we could go back and reconquer
his kingdom, and he really enjoyed that process. So what
he did is he brought the Thai peoples south of Yunnan,
which was held by the Mongols, under his control. You'll
notice this is thirteen sixteen, and I had been talking
about how like really in the like thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
the were the biggest drifts southwards. So there were all
these people who'd been scattered all over this area, and
Fannum coalesced them under his control, and it was known
as the Kingdom of a million elephants in the white parasol,
which is a very high fluting name. But you see
the symbol into the future, it's called Lansong. And so anyway,
he made Theravada Buddhism the formal religion of his kingdom,
and again this gave that of legitimacy. He brought in
the Buddhist monks who began, you know, teaching the religion,
and ultimately like these became this red band became the
limits of his kingdom. So or Lanna was suzerain to him.
You'll notice cheng Mai is a city that's in northern Thailand,
that this whole area that was the capital of Lanna,
and it was basically allow kingdom. And they went kind
of back and forth for a couple hundred years with
marrying between the various kingdoms. And but this was considered
one large country with these kind of principalities beneath them.
The most important thing to understand is that Lanna was
a useful buffer state in the future against the Burmese
because and again these are borders defined by mountain ranges largely,
and the Burmese were constantly like flooding east and invading
and so it was useful to have a friend to
the west that you could work together, but usually better
not to piss off the Burmese and have a buffer
state there instead. All right, So Lonsong broke into several
regional kingdoms Lena Lang, Prabang Shin, Kwang ving Chan, and
Chumpasak down in the south. They had dynastic disputes. The
biggest issue is that European technology was beginning to really
change things uh in the seven seventeenth century, but in
the eighteenth century it was that was it. It was
super rapid change after pretty sedentary couple hundred years of
a great deal of local power because Lansong had men
and they had you know, a powerful central authority. They
were very wealthy. They had tons of elephants that they
would use in war. But when you know, modern firearms
came into play, which were not super easy to use.
The old school firearms were very challenging. But by the
time you start getting into flintlocks, et cetera, that that
is much more useful for warfare in the tropics. And
so Siam became very strong, the Vietnamese became very strong,
and veng Chan, you know, chump A sak et cetera.
These internal interior groups, they just they have to trade
with people to get these weapons. They had very little
contact with Europeans other than some missions that had been
able to get to them. Some Dutch came in the
sixteen hundreds and were really impressed by the kingdom. And
so when the French got there later after, veng Chan
and many other areas were raised and depopulated after they
got up at Eat and we're tired of being really
frankly abused slave suzaraines by the Siamese who pushed it
way beyond the levels that people would engage in in
the past. They found basically ruins and very few people. So,
like I said, the Siamese depopulated the capital and pretty
much the whole left bank of the Maykong all the
way up to the Kingdom of Long Probang, who stayed independent,
But so that was way up in the north. So
everywhere else the Siamese were doing slave raids. And I
just have to tell this story because it's a true story.
The French and some English travelers reported seeing these huge
flotillas of canoes and narrow river boats coming down the
Meekong where the local slaves had had bamboo split pleaded,
you know, and they would the Siamese would shove the
bamboo leads through the hands of these people to basically
permanently handcuff them until they got to where they were
at and just floating thousands of people down river to
be slaves to build Bangkok. And you see all the
canals around Bangkok, and those were dug out by slaves
from of allow people mostly so the people obviously, you know,
you don't have a lot of time to organize when
this is going on. What do you do? You head
out to the principalities that are staying independent that are
too far away. You go up into the mountain border lands,
into areas you can control and blockade, you know, some
narrow passes to keep the Siamese from getting in there
or even going into into Vietnam. So just totally depopulated.
Speaker 1: So so.
Speaker 2: Right when this happens, just decades after the first you know, conflagration,
the French had acquired colonies in Cambodia, Koshinshina, which is
South Vietnam. They had a consulate up in Long Probong
and then on am In in Vietnam on the coast,
and so they're kind of getting a feel for what
the local, you know, situation is. Uh, there's the the
Siamese who are totally in control. The King of Siam, interestingly,
was a huge fan of Napoleon and was heavily inspired
by Napoleon in the way that he operated where he
went back to this total war depopulation kind of an
approach of doing things inspired by Napoleon just just for funsies,
but didn't work with the French. To their credit, the
Siamese were the only Asian country that were never colonized
or brought to heal by Europeans, not to be sneezed at.
So in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, due to
various things internal things going on in China, they had
what they called the Black Flag Army, which was various
Southern Chinese groups that were making incursions into Tonkin which
is North Vietnam, as well as Laos and eventually Siam.
That caused the King of Long Probong to reach out
to the French at their consulate there and say, we
would like to be brought in as a protectorate along
with your territories that you have in Vietnam, because otherwise
they would have absolutely just collapsed and probably been essentially
genocided my opinion. So France granted a protectorate status in
eighteen eighty nine, had a little bit of a war
with Siam to consolidate their control over the east bank
of the Mekong River, and the Siamese relented. So after
that was a fairly peaceful period. You know, while World
War One, et cetera was going on, things were pretty
chill in French Indo China. The French made a net
investment into Laos during the protector and colonial eras you know,
some of this is French proclivities, but they also needed
a buffer a state against the Siamese, who became the
Tie in the nineteen twenties. So obviously there's historical grudges
that the Lao held against the Siamese the Tie. So
the French were encouraging Lao nationalism as long as it
didn't manifest us anti French. But there was an interesting rub.
The French administration in both Laos and Cambodia was primarily Vietnamese.
A lot of this is because of the fact that
the Vietnamese you'll recall Thomas talking about how they followed
a oh gosh, why can't like a Mandarin not in
terms of like the Mandarin language, but like the social structure.
The Vietnamese made very good administrators, and the merchant class
was largely Vietnamese, although to a lesser extent there were
Chinese who had migrated into their and even some Indians.
Indian merchants in Southeast Asia were a very very old thing,
but at this point there were only some. So the
interesting thing is that the French founded a lot of
institutions that published Lao historical texts, so they basically saved
the culture in many ways. They undertook major archaeological works,
so an awful lot of the really famous temples and
stupas in Laos were restored by the French and they
so they basically the French essentially redeveloped and cultivated what
became Lao nationalism. So World War two comes and there
were various kinds of tricky, sneaky people that started showing up,
and as well as outside ideas. So again I mentioned
the Vietnamese influence in Laos and Cambodia. It's really important
to understand that sixty percent of the population of Laos's
six urban areas, the cities and large towns, sixty percent
of the population were Vietnamese. The Vietnamese held key positions
in the civil bureaucracies as well as the police, and
so this became almost a colony, a Vietnamese colony in
these Lao territories. So when Japan invaded French into China
and September nineteen forty, the Vishi French negotiated a deal
which allowed them to still administer the colony. The Tie
tried to take advantage of this situation and invaded parts
of western Laos in January nineteen forty one. This rapidly
became a stalemate. It was a very small kind of war,
and the Japanese mediated a ceasefire to calm things down,
enforced by the Japanese and the Siamese. So there was
a partial seating of those territories along the west bank
of the Mekong during the war period. The fellow that
you see here is Aaron Bank who was an OSS operative. Yes, yes,
his relatives are involved in banking. Author Peter Kemp in
his book for Alms for Oblivion, when he's on the
ground in French Indo China and Thailand, and during the
war doing his sneaky peate thing, and especially at the
tail end of the war when they're trying to kind
of figure out collectively how the piece is going to
work in this area. He spoke very Peter Kemp spoke
very passionately about how Bank essentially allowed the murder of
a French French officer by Vietnamese for no good reason,
but he didn't care about it because again you have
to keep in mind that the American position was the
French colonies are finished. You got to get out of here.
This red banner with Chinese characters up at the top
and then Vietnamese writing below it with the hammer and sickle,
this is the banner of the Indo Chinese Commune Party.
The Indo Chinese Communist Party was almost one Vietnamese. The
common turn, the Communist International and organ of the Soviet
Union were encouraging the Vietnamese to get some non non
Vietnamese into this thing to kind of legitimize their activities.
So what they began attempting to do, which was to
deal with an anti colonialist movement that was named the
Lao Isara, which was a native thing that started springing
up under Japanese and Vshi French co occupation. It was
a nationalist movement. The Indo Chinese Communist Party tried to
bring them in and with with mixed with mixed results.
So after the war, the French returned reclaimed the provinces
seized by the Tie. So imagine this. You just fought
World War two and you have to go to the
other side of the world and reclaim old colonies. A
lot of that was done by the French Foreign Legion
we know who were there. There's a Oh can I
see that? The title of it? Yeah, there, it is
a Devil's Guard. There's a fantastic quote unquote fictional novel
called Devil's Guard about a It's written by an American
and it is supposedly the the recordings of conversations that
he had had this American had had with a retired
German Foreign Legion veteran. That's a fantastic story about what
took place during the First Indo Chinese War. But I
will note that this was required reading for a friend
of mine who was a in marine recon. His lieutenant
made all the guys read this because it had it
has incredible counterinsurgency doctrine baked into it, so good stuff.
So the territory is reconstituted as the Kingdom of Laos
and the Laoissara. That independence movement was quite openly absorbed
by the viet min So even in February nineteen fifty one,
I had talked about how the Common Turn was pressuring
the Vietnamese to get more non Vietnamese representation in their ICP,
and by February nineteen fifty one, there were only eighty
one Lao members out of like twenty one hundred in
Lao Territory who were Lao. The rest were almost entirely Vietnamese.
An example, the first president of the Lao People's Democratic Republic,
which was institute in nineteen seventy five, his name was
Kaison Pomevan and his real surname was Nuen. He changed
his name. He was half Lao, half Vietnamese. And in
the there's a very famous cave, like right on the
border with North Vietnam and far or eastern northeastern Laos,
there's a famous cave where the Potet Lao, which was
the Lao Communist Party hit out during the war and
all of the books. It's all Marxist Leninist type doctrine, material,
et cetera. It's all in Vietnamese. It's also these.
Speaker 1: People who taught these people to change their names.
Speaker 2: I know, right. Keep in mind, this is coming from
the common Tern, you said it, man, So it's it's
straight out of the common Tern instructions. Now, one other
thing that I'll point out that's interesting. So do you
remember that map of the settlement, you know, during the
migration period. So an awful lot of these supposed Lao
communist troops are from the various tribal people that still
cousins in North Vietnam. So like the black tie the
white tie that the colors refer to stuff they wear
in their costume to identify their tribal affiliations. Yeah, so
a lot of them were folks from from North Vietnam anyway,
but because they speak the same language, it was good
for their cover. There were also actual Lao who were communists,
but they were mostly mostly people in these areas that
had been conquered up in the northeast. Although for their
legitimate public face, a half brother of the King of Laos,
Prince Supanovoon, became known as the Red Prince, he aligned
with the communists because frankly, he saw the writing on
the wall. But a lot of it was due to
the fact that again the educator administrative elements during you know,
during the French Indo Chinese period, we're in the much
more developed Vietnamese centers like around Hanoi and such, So
the Lao would go there to get educated and quite
often go from there to France and such. And Thomas
was talking about it himself, you know, when I was
listening to your Cold War series on the Vietnamese, such
as Ho Chi Minh, they would go to the university
in France and socialism was the thing. Socialism and communism
was on the menu for learning about and studying at
the time. So not surprising that it works out this way.
So the French loss the First Into Chinese War, the
Kingdom of Laos was granted full independence in nineteen fifty three.
And again this is right in the period where we
were looking at that mapper earlier with JFK. And this
is really the calm before the Second Indo China War.
So next door Vietnam split into communist North American sponsored
Republic of Vietnam, in the south, and again I just
like to point this out. So in the south South
Vietnam is Koshinshina and parts of Onam. These largely ethnically
and historically different than the north, which was Tonkin. The
rulers of this of South Vietnam wered Vietnamese koshin Hina
and Onam. They had been conquered by the new end
Lords and and other Vietnamese groups, but a lot of
the people were ethnically they were going through kind of
an ethnogenesis and infusing to become the modern Vietnamese. But
old school they were not necessarily quite often they were
not descended from people who came down from the Vietnamese
who came down from from China. They there was a
linguistic assimilation, and even regionally, there's differences in the way
the way that they speak, especially in the old days.
It's different now with standardized education, but in the early
early twentieth century they were they were quite different. I'm
sure there's Vietnamese people who are mad at me right now.
If any are listening, it's okay anyway. So what happens
when you know, when there's a when there's a new
gap American government and quote unquote private aid money. We
know how that works these days, aid workers, volunteers and
quote unquote advisors flooded into the Republic of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia,
and Thailand and to resist Communist expansion. And this had
actually been going on in Thailand for several years since
after the war. The oss and the British had been
involved in Thailand, very very involved. You may recall also
that at the end of World War two, and Kemp
talks about this a lot something like one hundred thousand
British soldiers who had just been released. They were the
ones that were captured around Singapore and some other locations
Hong Kong. They were like re armed and brought to
Vietnam to essentially transition the Japanese out, And that a
lot of the idea was that they wanted the Western
powers wanted to control like all the weapons that were
sitting around now to try to prevent you know, internecine warfare.
So what happens when lots of money made, money and
stuff and material flows into a place that connected people
become rich. Tons of weapons are everywhere and the Vietnamese
and Chinese communities in these areas become insurgents again driven
by nationalism and communism. So there's there was a very
brief over at US military project in Laos called White Star,
Operation White Star, where US Army Special Forces soldiers came in, uh,
not undercover, in uniform and we're training Lao forces, just
like was done in Vietnam and and continued in Vietnam.
But what happened was in nineteen sixty fellow on the left,
who was a veteran of the French into Chinese forces,
and I think he was also affiliated with French Foreign Legion,
Captain Gongle. He led his battalion into veng Chan, the capital,
where they overthrew the Royal Lao government there in a
coupdetas as a protest against corruption due to US funding
caused by US funding. And what he pointed out was
there was the Geneva Agreement that stated that Laos would
be neutral, but here's all this American money and equipment,
and he felt like, you know, something wasn't wasn't right.
But he was also very naive. He was ousted in
December of nineteen sixty by rightist troops. It came up
from Savannaquette, which was the home of a surviving like
right wing Lao nationalist remnant of King Anu Anuvong's army
who had failed in their rising against the Siamese and
been crushed one hundred and thirty years before. It was
a remnant down there, and so a bunch of these
families stepped in because they understood there's no such thing
as a neutral country. It's it's you're against the communists
or you're with the communists, and the communists were Vietnamese.
Gong Lei fell for the ideology trap. So thus begins
the Second Indo China War. Things are heating up in
the East, but you're starting to see these big movements
of armed forces in Laos. Fellow up at the top,
Bill Lair. He was a World War Two veteran who
went to college on the Gi Bill and then went
to work for the CIA. He had worked with the
TIE for ten or twelve years, if I remember correctly,
and what he was doing was again following that what
became in the I think army special forces were formally
developed around the fifty two or fifty three, maybe slightly
later in terms of force multiplication. You know, their primary
mission was to go in and basically build gorilla armies
from the ground up. And so he had been building
quote unquote border police in Thailand and basically light infantry units,
and so he went into Laos with a bunch of
these Thai border police because in Northeast Thailand they are
ethnically Lao and speak the same language, despite you know,
some of the specific dialect that the central government pushed,
but it's basically the same when you actually are on
the ground in northeast Thailand, it's the same language. And
they started looking for people who they could build into
these just like in Vietnam, the civilian irregular defense groups
doing the same thing in Laos. And they really found
purchase among the Mung hill tribes up in northeast Lao,
hard up against that border with Vietnam. Because these guys,
the Mung tribe had clicked up with the French and
the Royal Lao government because they understood that they were
just going to get bulldozed by the Vietnamese. It's not
you don't want to be an ethnic minority under the Vietnamese.
So they were a great group because they are mountain people,
they're tough, they're used to being on the run. They
had just come down from China in the nineteenth century
themselves kind of scooting along in the highlands, and they
made a really good observers local defense and you know,
shoot and scoot kind of guys. And they were completely
deniable as US assets. They got armed with all this
World War two equipment, garand rifles and one carbings, you know,
the old the old bazookas, baars, et cetera. You know,
we had millions and millions and millions of these things.
And so they would go to regular armies all over
the place, including South Vietnam or Annon. Laos they gave them,
they handed those weapons over to the regular army, which
we'll talk about a little bit later. I'm making quote
marks off camera. But they also went to these gorilla groups.
So in a follow up to JFK's presentation, there was
another agreement in Geneva that was signed, you know, underscoring
the neutrality of LAOS in July nineteen sixty two, and
all signatories immediately violated the agreement, but they did it covertly.
And so the important thing to understand is this is
the frame. The frame about LAOS comes out of the
fact that America Vietnam. Well, China was in a signatory
to it. I don't think this second one and the
Soviets all ignored the fact that the other signatories were
violating this because they were also violating the terms of
the international agreement. So, but what happened was because of
this written agreement, overt US military forces essentially stayed off
the ground. Henceforth, in Laos, the US State Department, via
USAID and the embassy and the CIA ran the ground
war in Laos, not the US military. If US military
personnel were needed to do something in Laos, they were
sheep dipped, which meant that they were on paper mustered
out and given a lot of times State Department IDs,
you know, issued by foreign consulates with civilian covers, particularly
being assigned to CIA front companies, what kind of front
companies glowy logistics. So I think a lot of people
are really familiar with with Air America because of that movie,
and there's been a number of books on this subject,
But essentially that was Air America was just one of
many CIA front companies that were their aviation assets. So
there was the Pacific Corporation Civil Air Transport. You'll see
a picture of a C forty seven up top left,
painted to look commercial. It was a nationalist Chinese airline,
and I have quotes around both of those that were
founded by Claire Chanel, who was the founder of the
Flying Tigers. They were gifted surplus World War Two aircraft
by the US military and they used them for civilian
air travel routes and freight as well as covert operations.
Do you think a lot of regular, normy civilians in
any of these countries were traveling by air. No, it
was almost entirely covert operations or doing stuff, you know,
American assets flying like local allies around even if it
wasn't technically like a CIA operation. The company was transferred
to the CIA in nineteen fifty nine and rebranded as
Air America. It wasn't like there was paper that said
CIA to this, but they were acquired by another shell company.
Continental Airlines operated an air transport division that was contracted
to the US government known as Continental Air Services Inc. CISI.
And so when you look at paperwork that American civilians had, like,
I have a cool image coming up here in a
second that shows there's a CISI phone number that they
could call to get flights So here's the thing. The
topography of Laos necessitated that they mostly use the short
takeoff and landing aircraft here and later helicopters because you're
flying into these remote mountainous areas most of the time.
But the C forty seven's were used wherever possible, just
because of the sheer volume of carrying capacity. There was
a CIA run air maintenance company called Air Asia Company
Limited that would maintain all these aircraft, and they would
use American foreign and local employees and armed US military aircraft,
so formal US military, US Air Force, et cetera. They
operated out of Thailand and Vietnam exclusively. They never touched
airfields and Laos. All right, Americans on the Lao Front.
There were different kinds of folks, whether members of the
State Department, civilian contract workers, or USAID employees. They were
brought into the war by the expansion of ground combat
operations and the guiding hand of the CIA. Top right,
you'll see a bunch of dudes, white guys, all Americans
with all kinds of firearms who are actual CIA employees.
To the left is an American AID worker named Pop Buel.
He joined the International Voluntary Service, which was a organization
founded by Mennonite Brethren and Quaker Brethren in nineteen fifty three,
and they started doing aid work all around, mostly focusing
on uh, you know, allies, Coptic Christians in Egypt. They
started getting funding from US AID and grew like crazy.
So again there's an original NGO in the pattern that
we're used to seeing. So he is a pop Bowel
is doing work for US foreign policy through the auspices
of US AID, you know, but with a NGO cover.
The dudes at the right are CIA paramilitary officers and
sometimes case officers. So early on they were just like
World War Two in Korea vets with training in guerrilla warfare,
et cetera. Later on, the primary source of new c
i A. Paaramilitary officers were Special Forces guys. So you
do a tour or two in s F and if
you're good at the leadership and training role, hey, we
have a special project for you and laost do you
want to become a civilian again, you know, quote unquote.
And then there were also case officers or operations officers
who were more focused on clandestine intelligence gathering. There's a
really great book I have. I have some reading material
listed at the end of this. But there's a really
great book called Cash on Delivery that was written by
a case officer who was managing small teams for intelligence
enemy snatches, and he never talks about it, but reading
between the lines, I should say he doesn't talk explicitly
about it, but probably assassinations were carried out. Also, the
key thing to keep in mind is that USAID ivs
paid contract workers, et cetera. They were taking care of
the logistics to support these gorilla forces that were being trained,
led and managed by the paramilitary officers. And most importantly,
they're families because you know, you got to you got
a gorilla he's you know, he's twenty three years old,
he's already married and has a couple of kids. So
that was a key, a key thing. The hospitals and
you know, air evac for injuries and relocating people to
get them the civilian population, to get them away from
the war zone.
Speaker 1: What weapons am I seeing in that picture? Ah, I
see an I see an ak ak.
Speaker 2: This is a pps H forty one M sixteen. I
think this is an M sixteen. This is I think
this is a Savage sixty seven pump shotgun. Piece of shit.
I had one sks M sixteen. It's too faded to
see what it is, but all kinds of good stuff.
Speaker 1: And then they have at least a couple, got at
least a couple going native.
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, quite a few. These guys were total cowboys. Man. Yeah,
they often speak very fondly of it. And let me
put it this way. A one of my mentors when
I was a young man who's no longer with us,
I dedicate my first novel to him, Jim. The dedication
of that is boys. He walks in one day, one
night rather doing patrolling, his patrolling his property around midnight,
and he says, boys in an ambush always air on
the side of violence and just goes upstairs. We're like, yes, sir.
But anyway, he the way he put it is he
he was an advised different from the person I was
talking about earlier before we started recording. But he was
a he was in the Air Force, and he was
sheep dipped as a State Department advisor quote unquote at
age twenty, you know, and he was one of the
first so much experience on exact affairs exactly, especially the
making love part that became a specialty. But making love
and reigning death from the sky because he became one
of the first, uh, spooky gunship weapons operators. So anyway,
he said that it was a great time before it
got really military. So he didn't like it when after
nineteen sixty five when the regular army and everyone showed
up and you couldn't pretend.
Speaker 1: When it was the wild West everything was fine. Now
we got to follow REGs.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, yeah, exactly. All Uh, I think I'm
gonna I'm gonna do some I'm gonna do some stuff
for him because he's passed, and I'll post. He's got
a lot of great stories and I'll post. I'll post
some of the I'll post some pictures and some other
cool stuff. His son's gone too, so there's no one
will complain, all right, So these are some I'm about
to get back into the abstract again. But here's a
few more details. And these are really people who became
part of the legend of the American involvement in Laos.
So on the left, this is Tony Poe, the American
I think is push Shipney. It's a it's a Polish surname.
He was a longtime c a paramilitary. He was a
USMC veteran. He was training Koreans in South Koreans and
guerrilla warfare. Before the Korean War started. He was organizing
guys in Tibet who he called the greatest gorillas in history.
There just weren't enough of them, et cetera. But he
became the model for Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. He
was super hardcore. I won't tell stories, but they involved
beheadings and like ear necklaces, like he's he's that guy,
and he's with Vong Pau a young Vong Pau here,
who was the leader of the Mung the whole uh,
the anti communist clans within the Mung Hill tribe because
some Long tribe clans became pro communist if they had
connections in North Vietnam Prime. Primarily it was kind of
accidents of geography and how things worked out World War two.
And then this is I can't remember his name, one
of Vung Powe's lieutenants, but anyway, this is the like
the dark gruesome um you know legend in America. The
folks on the left, and I'll talk more about Vung
Pou in a second, but on the right is the
positive cheerful, youthful, sensitive understanding aspect, which is this is
Vin Lawrence. His grandfather founded General Electric. He was extremely
well off. He graduated from Princeton with an art history degree,
you know, and at the time they had the draft,
he was tagged to go into the army and used
family connections to get in an assignment in the CIA,
And so he was in Laos from nineteen sixty two
to nineteen sixty six. He stayed in the CIA for
a little while after that and then went on to
become a cartoonist for the New Yorker and other folks.
But he's he took a lot of great photos in Laos,
and he also filmed some footage that I'll talk about shortly.
His reports, his writing for the CIA when he got
back to the States is among the most thoughtful and
interesting stuff about the war. He's a he just passed
away a couple of years ago, very very cool and interesting,
like you know, upper crust, old school American, you know, elite,
you know, just a man of quality. And so we
get I'll have some resources that you can share about him,
because his stuff is very interesting, all right. So Americans
on the Maykong so in the background. This is actually
a phone book that Americans in Laos were handed that
a that someone who had grown up there because his
folks worked for USAID. He had kept a bunch of
this material and did scans and put them online about
ten years ago or so. But anyway, so the really
important thing to understand is there were a lot of
Americans that ended up in Laos. And again, remember this
is a country of two million people at the time,
and so around the embassy and any of these specific
missions along the cities is where the bulk of these
kind of civilian workers would be. Along the Mekong River now,
as in the Ukraine, the key thing to understand is
that the Royal Au government's entire budget was paid for
the American aid dollars. All development programs, refugee assistance, education,
medical missions, and so on were paid for and were
designed in pursuit of US foreign policy. All aspects of
the war, military or civilian, were subservient to overall US
foreign policy aims. Again, this is I'm going to re
emphasize the context of, as I say in the next bit,
the Cold War geopolitical realities. The State Department via the
percentage of the ambassador to Laos, the American ambassador, and
the CIA, So the guys on the ground, and you know,
USAID was subservient to the ambassador. The CIA was its
own thing, and so they would clash quite often over
execution of the war. But again, the overall execution of
the war, whether you cared about the people that you
were leading into battle or not, were being done based
on Cold War geopolitical realities and US foreign policy aims.
So anytime you read anything, you'll read root some really
passionate stuff from these like CIA paramilitaries and people like that,
or the USA guys that are actually up in the highlands,
and they'll be so mad at the ambassador about this
or that, because the ambassador could say, and right now
is not a good time for you know, heavy US
Air Force air support. Sorry. Total US eight expenditures of
all types and laws from nineteen fifty five to nineteen
seventy three, not counting US Air Force, probably not including
the cost of director laundry equipment transfers, is between seven
point five and eleven point one billion dollars in twenty
twenty five dollars. Nineteen seventy three dollars, it was one
to one point five billion. And again, this doesn't count
money that was that was associated with US military you know,
operations and in Vietnam or supporting the Vietnam you know sphere.
It doesn't count money that was spent on Vietnam that
trickled over, It doesn't count you know, the equip meant
that was US Air Force and then it just gets
handed to the locals. That's a lot of money, especially
when you look at the budgets in those eras, it's
a lot a lot of money. It's a country of
two million people.
Speaker 1: So yes, also you know, at least we get to
see Ukraine on TV. Yes, this is something that was
completely clandestine.
Speaker 2: Clandestine and slides the next couple slides. We'll talk a
little more about that, and and it sounds crazy and
naive to us right now, but it we should understand.
It was a different era and they had total control
over what went out over the area and what was published,
which causes significant distortions in the story. That's actually the
next slide, but let me finish this slide. So here's
a bunch of these guys. Are CIA led special Gorilla
units in Laos. So the forces raised let me step
back for a second. Ground combat operations were carried out
using the Special Forces model, which is US leadership and training,
but then you use local combatants to do all the fighting,
and then you have American or local air assets. The
the government, the Formal Royal Lao Army was largely sitting
in a garrison and their commanders creating ghost armies and
skimming their salaries. So if you were a if you
were one of these, if you were one of these
remnants of the old days, and you wanted to fight
against invaders because the Ho Chiman Trail ran through your
your homeland and your aunt died when she was press
ganged to be Koli labor for the North Vietnamese Army,
You're not going to join the Royal Lao Army. You're
gonna You're gonna click up with the the CIA led guys.
So the originally their forces were primarily defensive in nature
or focus on gathering intelligence. There was a lot of
work with small groups who would go in and do
kind of bomb damage assessment, you know, after bombing along
the Ho Chiman trail and trying to identify better targets.
Technology was an issue because of the limits and when
you see that topography, like small, slow, low flying planes
were the only way that you could really get precision,
but then that exposes you to you know, anti aircraft
fire and even small arms from the ground were a
big threat. And so it's this really interesting push pull
between all these these demands and are you supporting are
you fighting to defend laos and your communities, or are
you just targeting the logistical chain that's going from the
north down into into South Vietnam. And these are all
kind of like debates that the locals were having because
these are not these are not chumps. I mean a
lot of the junior infantrymen were very just very unaware
of the world beyond their front door, like why why
wouldn't they be? But the leadership of these groups were
very These are people who whose families had been elite
for fifteen hundred years, and they would they knew their lineages.
And so this was a big challenge for the CIA
leaders because there would be language barriers, but there's also
the local thing of where they just wouldn't talk to
the American advisors about what the real debates taking place were,
and the Americans would typically have fairly limited language, local
language skills, the guys that stuck around for a long time,
that tended to resolve itself, and then it would be
up to the locals, to the local leadership. They would
typically speak French and English or be forced to learn English.
They would do all their radio commands in English and such.
So anyway, really interesting push pull the mond got.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because they don't really You have these Americans
going there and they don't really understand the culture, and
you have these American advisors who are working in Ukraine
and don't realize Ukraine is most of them don't realize
Ukraine's about a three hundred and fifty year old ethnic grievance.
Speaker 2: One hundred percent the parallel that I'm shooting for, dude,
that that's one hundred percent. They know twenty years of history.
They know, oh, I remember President Kennedy's presentation, and they
get that like after World War two thing, but they
don't know the past history. They don't know any of
the context that's really important to understand. And so it's
just this it's just this mess. There's another thing that's
really important to understand, and it's as it relates to
weather patterns. So this is the tropics, and I mentioned
before there's two seasons. Basically, there's the rainy season in
the dry season. When you look at the topography of
the country and the fact that it's like mountains, river valleys,
and that means rivers, which means water. What would happen
is the Vietnamese would be able to advance in the
dry season, but then would get pushed back by these
small gorilla units going in and calling in air strikes
on them during the wet season, and then they would
have to consolidate defensible holdings and try to hold during
the wet season to progress. So it was this push
pole and then again the challenge there is that it's
easier to move on the ground in the dry season.
In the dry season, there's better visibility for the aircraft
as well, so they're going to be able to be
a little more effective in making strikes. But then you're
also really at an advantage if you can have very
small teams go in and identify these guys during the
wet season and clobber them right, And so it was
the tactical realities were really we're really kind of strange,
but they really make sense if you keep that in
mind for looking at any of the patterns of how
did they get so far and then they ended up
losing ground in the next year, and then like they
fight over the same ground over and over again. It's
because of these weather patterns and kind of the the
tactical and strategic approach that America was taking with the
local troops. And then there was another kind of just
as a last consideration, as local forces would be defending operations,
they would defend positions supporting operations against North Vietnam. So
there would be these pockets of what they call these
indigenous troops that were called the Commando raiders, which were
really highly trained raider groups that would get dropped into
North Vietnam. You don't hear a lot of stories about them,
but they have crazy, crazy stories. I've talked to one
of those guys before. And then there was this other
There was a site called Lima Site eighty five, which
was in Poopati mountain Pooh means mountain in Lao, and
it was a mountaintop radar installation like almost almost all
the way to the North Vietnamese border that was used
to guide American bombers in the bombing raids in Hanoi,
so they could triangulate their positions accurately for more precise
bombing of military targets, because you know, despite the reputation,
like the goal of like arc light raids of B
fifty two scattering bombs everywhere isn't to blow up brown people,
It's to hit militarily relevant targets, right, And so they
would have these positions up there and there would be
just these insane battles of the North Vietnamese trying to
capture them. So good times, all right. So that's I'm
going to pivot slightly and then I'm going to get
back into the bombing. And I'm bringing this up because
I talked about Tony Poe and Vin Lawrence and Vong
Pow and you know, a lot of a lot of
the stuff just because it was in the dark for
so long, it's it's remained in the dark, and the
little dribs and drabs of information that comes out a
lot of times, it's it's really it's almost it's almost
transparently subversive when you look at it, although it can
be hard to make the case. And let me make
the case here on these two guys, these guys own
two big memes that will give you like mental aids.
Speaker 1: You didn't even have to like spell out the second.
The guy in the picture on the right, I mean
it's right.
Speaker 2: There, yeah, dude. So the guy on the left is
Professor Alfred McCoy. This is a little auctionist. He doesn't
say Laos was all about the CIA trafficking heroin, but
that's the takeaway that has been made because he wrote
a book called The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
that was published in nineteen seventy two, and then it
turned into I forget what it is. It's like the
CIA and the Politics of Heroin or something like that,
with an addition that was released in I think the
eighties because he was talking about the contras and such.
But here's the challenge. He's a libtard who graduated from
Columbia University, completed his masters at UC Berkeley in nineteen
sixty nine, and he was working on his PhD in
Yale for the next like eight years. And he obviously
comes from money, and he was comfortable and he was
running around and what happened was what I believe is
that he was spoon fed bad information to distract from
a from the real story. Bear with me. So his.
Speaker 1: McCoy, I mean he's on democracy now, so yes, exactly,
that lines up.
Speaker 2: So oh yeah, and he was. He ultimately became a
professor at like Madison, you know, University of Wisconsin at Madison,
and he's basically a professor of being really gay when
talking about Asia and claims to be a big expert
on Laos. But what happened was in nineteen sixty nine
he was given introductions to or former CIA operatives who
spoon fed him the talking points that he would go
on to repeat. He had no local language skills. He
only spent two weeks in Laos. He went up country
for like less than a day. He saw some material
being loaded onto a Air America plane and was told
that it was heroin, and then he had Then he
would talk to locals who and then a translator would
tell him things. Now here's the thing, It's really quite simple.
Opium was one hundred percent a staple, an economic staple
in Southeast Asia for a couple hundred years. The hill
tribes of Laos had long paid the local princess taxes
in the form of opium. What they would do is
they would grow opium and then they would trade it
with an authorized trader for the local principality or under
and under the French they did the exact same thing,
and then that trader would trade them for steel and
cloth and salt, because when you're up in the highlands
you can't get salt. And so anyway, this was this
thing that had been going on for hundreds of years.
The French continued it. And what did the French do.
They turned it into an industry. It started be getting
refined into heroin and morphine. So there's the legitimate purposes
and then there's the shadow deal. As you'll recall, the
French connection was about the the sanitized term is that
they were I think they were Sicilian, not Sicilian, Corsican,
excuse me. Corsican mafia were trafficking heroin. And what would
happen is it would come out of mostly Laos and
a little bit from Vietnam, and then it would be
processed in the old days, it would be processed in
Turkey using these old networks, and then the Corsican mafia
would distribute it from there. Alfred McCoy got fixated on
the true statement that the Mung Hill tribes had this
thing going on and totally blamed Wong Pao. And this
goes back to Tony Poe telling him this stuff. Tony
Poe had washed out by this time and was just
an alcoholic like pickling himself in Uh, splitting his time
between Veng Chan and Bangkok, being a degenerate and just
telling wild stories. So he had he hand feeds him
this story. Because here's the truth. The the Lao government
was controlling this. That the general of the running the
Royal Lao Army one, which means fat Lan Retakon, and
he was fat by local standards. He was basically a
hub who had a processing plant that was refining the
opium in into heroin and then it would get shipped
out through the French, the French connection, and dumbass McCoy
says Vong Pao and the Mung were drug dealers because
and here's why this is absurd. By nineteen sixty seven,
there was there were no substantial holdings of the Mung
of territory where they had had been settled for a
long time, because the PAVN was everywhere, the North Vietnamese
Army was everywhere up there. They didn't have these strongholds.
The strongholds that they had were farther north and west,
which were no longer Mung. So the Mong weren't. I mean,
I'm sure there were still Mung who had poppy fields
like a little bit by that time. But what it
was is it was all coming from somewhere else. So
Al McCoy, doctor Al McCoy, as of n Or nineteen
seventy seven tells a story where like little Vung Paw,
who was chewed up and spit out by the CIA,
was like the big drug dealer who was responsible for
getting you know, American gis hooked on heroin in Vietnam
and stuff. Now, some of what he says is true,
which is that like everyone was in on it, and
but the most important thing to understand is the CIA
did not traffic heroin. I'm going to repeat that the
CIA did not traffic heroin. What happened was that the
CIA looked the other way while these old networks did
their thing. And the old the you know, the people
way up top in the CIA are part of these
old networks, or at least or telling the CIA what
to do, are part of these old networks. So the
the Corsicans, you know, wink wink, the French wink wink,
you know, the Turkish wink wink. All this stuff is
just like you know, steps in the totem pole, like
low steps in the totem pole of something that went
on for a really long time. Now, now what happened
when that war ended? The heroin just came from somewhere else,
like the raw materials just came from somewhere else. So
you have to be really careful thinking about it, because
McCoy made it all about you know, the non democratic
you know general of the MUNG who was a really
bad guy and claimed that you know, he had all
this you know it was this big drug trafficker, but
he basically was, you know, ended his day in America
like getting donations from MUNG who would send you know,
a tiny bit of their welfare check to their tribal leader.
And the you know, a bunch of the ruling class
people at the top retired to France mostly with gobs
of stolen Aid money and frankly their skim from the
drug money. But where did the real drug money go.
The drug money went to the people who were running
these operations since you know, the twenties the teens before
that in the West. So you have to be really
careful because McCoy gives you that democracy. Now, tier are
you bullshit?
Speaker 1: Are you implying a kind of a continuation of the
old Opium Wars kind of thing.
Speaker 2: One hundred percent I'm implying it because that's where a
lot of the heroine that ended up in China was
from Southeast Asia, Burma in India. So it's the French
basically said, oh, look at what the and it isn't
like it isn't like the president of France. It's like
the people with names similar to Bramfman and as well
as you know, actual French French people that they make
these decisions based on these existing networks and watching Hey
look at the English or you know in Wink Wink English,
the city of London is being really successful at this stuff.
But it's like he he does this hand waving where
you look in the wrong direction. So it's a real thing.
But he didn't have enough knowledge to come to the
conclusions that he was repeating that had been fed to him.
So what that tells me is that there was one
there was a struggle going on because of this at
the time, and there was as there were DEA or
the precursor organization to the DEA in Laos after about
nineteen sixty seven or sixty eight, I forget exactly, And
they could have shut down the whole thing like immediately,
but they never did go figure but they were going
after these small timers. So it's this really, it's this
obfuscation that takes away from the real story. Now, he
did talk about the fact that again the US government
was allowing these things to happen, but and he did
tell some really relevant stories about organizations that were involved.
But it's like this stuff is being hand fed to
him for a reason. I also find him very annoying,
so like and he took and he repeated a bunch
of stuff that was just pure obfuscation. So anyway, so
this is me telling you don't overdose on red pills.
You can't just believe the stuff that sounds accurate. Now,
speaking of that, Fred Bramffman in government secret bombing fellow
at the top right. He was an educational advisor in
veng Chhan working for USAID. In September nineteen sixty nine,
there was a flood of LAO that were displaced because
of ground combat operations in the Plane of Jars and
the Plane of Jars, I'll show you some images about
it here in a second. It's right on the border
with Vietnam, a part of North Vietnam. Vietnam is traditional
Alloo territory, and there was a flood of refugees into
the capitol because they didn't have anywhere else to put them.
Bramfman spoke Lao functionally, and so he would be talking
to people and he was like, what are they're They're
telling me something that's really that's really important, And so
he got connections with some people who were translating for
these folks who later became known as members of the
Patt Lao. They were Lao communists that were translating these
stories from these refugees. Because when you have basic functional language,
you can't get into these into the internecine stuff. You
just it's you're not going to be able to do it.
So he was reliant on translations from other people, and
he heard about these US bombing campaigns going on up there.
So he claims that he went to US officials in
veng Chan and they told him the US had nothing
to do with aerial bombing, and he believed that they
literally didn't know about it. There's no fucking way that
any US official, like a real official, wouldn't know about
what was going on. It's impossible. And all of his
stories about this avoid the fact that there was a
Communist invasion, North Vietnamese invasion and ground combat operations taking place.
It's like there in the Garden of Eden, the brown
people who were you know, in the world and at
peace started having five hundred pound bombs dropped on them
for no reason. Now here's the thing. There was no
public information about the operations going on at the time.
But when you don't talk about ground combat operations and
the false framing of this that it was there's all
this false framing that's attributed to him being the first
person to push this stuff out, and all of his
framing is they were at peace and Americans just started
bombing them for no reason. Now, I agree that bombing
civilians is not a nice thing to do and you
should avoid doing it, but his framework fits perfectly into
a communist propaganda campaign. And he was indeed a at
least open left socialist and you know, third worldist right
in the original sense, not in the anti Semitic sense,
So I wanted to cover those before I get to
the next phase. So the official American framing of bombing
operations in Laos and Cambodia has always focused on the
Houchiman trail, which was a real thing, and then in
Cambodia the Sihanu trail. These are all bombing operations to
target North Vietnamese supply lines going through these countries. This
bombing did take place in great volume. And the interesting
thing that happened though, is it intensified over time when
the smaller like tactical bombers and tactical ground attack aircraft
transitioned to be replaced by bigger and bigger, faster, more ordinance,
et cetera up to the B fifty two, and the
local forces, whether it was Lao, Cambodia, Vietnam, or Thailand,
was given the old attack aircraft and so it became
strategic bombing. And you might remember Thomas mentioned that the
Kent State oopsie, the oopsis that happened in Kent State
was part of a wave of protests caused by the
first awareness of bombing and Cambodia being shared to the
American public on the heels of Bramfman talking about this
stuff in my and my digging in on that everyone
knew that we were bombing North Vietnam and bombing supply
lines associated with the North Vietnamese. And then they said, oh, yeah,
and some of this is in the countries right next
door which are controlled by the Vietnamese, and that are
these are the supply lines. But Americans, being retarded, think oh,
it must they must be bombing the capitals because I
remember like World War two pictures and stuff like that.
It's it's this weird thing that I I feel, it's
really strange and maybe I'm naive, but like it seems
like they're brutally naive to believe that like you can
have people can hop over the borders of countries and
then magically there's no war there. It's because they're thinking that,
like everything's this nice, orderly western country. So, I mean,
it's really important to understand the differences between these things.
And yeah, the US government was not openly talking about it.
I agree, but this this whole thing fits beautifully into
a And I hate to say it because I know
people will get mad at me for saying Communist propaganda
but you know what I'm mean, It's like it's this
deception that's taking place that actually serves the other guys,
even though like, yes, Americans are right to be like, wait,
this is expanding. This is way more expanded than the
war that we were already sold that we don't like.
You get the distinction that I'm trying to make here, Pete, Yes,
I do. Okay, it's very nuanced and like we cannot
like it, but it's important to understand the difference. And
that's why I was talking about those other guys. So
again the dominant Bramfman influenced narrative that you'll still hear
today that that is the official law Communist government position
when they talk about all the unexploded ordinance in particularly
in along the eastern border of Vietnam, and America's State
Department repeats this bull part in my French, which is
that American aircraft engaged in sorties over North Vietnam were
not permitted to land at US Air Force bases in
Thailand or South Vietnam with bombs still attached because there
was danger, so they had to get rid of them,
so they randomly dropped them on civilians and Laos because
they're racist. That's like literally the story that they provide.
In reality, those bombs that were being dropped in Laos
were targeted by forward air controllers or local forward air
guides on the ground who would assign targets. So in
the sixties and the seventies, aerial bombing was not particularly precise.
It was more precise than it was during the Spanish
Civil War. In World War Two, the fast movers jets
were too fast to guarantee accuracy in like little narrow valleys,
like when you see those limestone karsts, especially in bad
or cloudy weather, or if they're staying high because they
don't want to get so low that they can get
hit by fifty two's or you know, bigger stuff or
even aks. When I say fifty two, it's the it's
the four is it? The fourteen point five millimeter heavy
machine guns that the Soviet ones and so up in
the north and in the mountains of Laos, and you've
already seen how mountainous it is. There is always cloudy,
and they're in this bad weather a lot, and so
they're they're doing their best, and again they're still dropping
bombs all over a country that were supposedly not at
war with, but they were dropping bombs under control of
forward air control rollers to support ground combat operations between
Lao and Mung you know forces, So official military forces
in Laos of the legitimate government of Laos led by
the CIA, yes, against the People's Army of Vietnam who
had invaded the country. And they don't say this, they
don't say this, and I feel like it's intentional and
it's really easy to explain this and go, oh, yeah,
of course it makes sense. So the tactical bombing, like
the tight close quarters was conducted by early by prop aircraft,
and they were really happy if they could get like
the old T twenty eight's that were converted into attack
aircraft if it was needing precise placement of bombs, because
those guys would drop in and put it right where
you need it to, or like an A one sky Raider,
which is a sweet plane. And then the fighter slash
attack craft are a little too fast, but they had ordinance.
Now later in the war, there were interesting developments, like
when the F one eleven was released, and Thomas mentioned
this also. The F one eleven was originally designed to
like cruise in with like nuclear weapons, you know, in
tactical nukes basically, And there was a bunch of experimentation
with like homing beacons in laos because they could have
the local forces go into positions with these homing beacons
and like frame between multiple units, frame an area for bombing,
whether it's saturation bombing or perci bombing. And there's this
one story of Mung who didn't who couldn't understand the
concept because they're literally iron age hill tribe guys who
are suddenly flying around on you know, helicopters and stuff.
And so a guy said, an American figured out how
to describe it, and he said, this little machine has
a spirit in it, just like the spirits of the
rivers that are around you and everything like that. And
the spirit in this machine, when you turn it on
and it glows, can communicate with the spirit in an airplane.
And if you hold this spirit and you and you
tell us where the enemy is the spirit in the airplane,
we'll be able to see the spirit and precisely put
bombs where they need to be. And they successfully did
this where these guys like they they blew up like
almost a company of PAVN infantrymen around this little group
of mong guys who are like huddled hiding basically in
a bomb crater, and they're like the spirit worked perfectly,
thank you after the operation. So like you're limited by
the technology that you have to how precise he can be.
I'm going to move pretty quickly here because I've belabored
this point so much. This is the Plane of Jars.
It was named so because there are these huge jars
that were built that there were put in place in
between twelve forty and six sixty BC. So like Bronze
age people, they're huge, chiseled out of stone. They have
not all of them have lids that are still left
identifiable as lids, but they seem to be like this
one here is cut to fit a lid in a
style that was seen elsewhere. They've discovered human remains in
these with burial goods and like ceramics around them. And
the Loo legend is that there was a race of
giants who lived here and left these giant jars, but
a French researcher in nineteen thirty, Madeline Kolani, concluded that
they were associated with burial practices, and that's been seems
to have been verified, but with later excavations by Lao
and Japanese archaeologists in the meantime. So this is all
this big plane you can see. This doesn't look like
the other images of Laos I've seen, but you can
see the hills there. So it's this plain with like
rolling hills, kind of like the Central plains in America
in kind of this narrow band ringed by mountains, which
is like highway for invading Laos from Vietnam. So they
have ninety of these more than ninety of these jar
sites that are identified in this area Chenkwong Province, and
they have from one to four hundred stone jars and
they're very big. You can see people here. They're a
couple meters high. Very very cool. But that's where that
name plane of jars comes from. So when we're talking
about the bombing patterns, and I'm reiterating this so much
because this is like the biggest takeaway from this is, oh,
it's the most bombed country on Earth, and it's like, well,
it was extremely heavily bombed, but there's that's a per
capita number and there's only two million people in this country.
And maps can make things look crazy. Like if you
look at this map here, this is the thirty thousand
foot view, and we'll take a closer look in a second.
So this allows and you see, oh look, all of
these bombing operations are in areas like it's a path
from Vietnam into this country. And then later bombings were
later in the war when the Vietnamese were pressing westward,
but they didn't have any success. It's nineteen seventy four,
in nineteen seventy five when the Americans pulled all the funding.
That's why you see all this bombing so far west.
It looks crazy dense when you look at pictures like this. However,
let's look at this provincial map and this this was
blaze orange. This is Shinkwong Province in the plane of jars.
This looks insane, but right here pick is this little
sub province or district. If you look at it, you
can see it follows the bombing follows these patterns. You
can see it's along roads and rivers and around like
these are areas where all these operations or were taking
place or you know, combat operations or positions that the
PAVN took. So you look at that high level it
looks atrocious. You zoom in and you're like, oh, I
can see a pattern here. This isn't scattering bombs all
over the place. I'm going to take a couple quick views.
This makes me sound like an American US military apologist.
I assure you I'm not, but I want people to
understand this. So look, when people talk about seeing people
putting their houses up on bombs, these are auxiliary fuel
tanks for jets, not bombs. So stilt House has these
cool auxiliary tanks. That's pretty rad. This is really what
set me off on digging into this. This is a
UXO Unexploded Ordnance visitor center. These are small arms RPG
so Soviet Chinese. These are Chinese and Vietnamese grenades, the
recoilist rifle, you know, housings. Those are possibly Vietnamese, probably
American weapons used by the LAO. A bunch of this
stuff is Soviet or Chinese. Like this is not. These
are not bombs dropped by American planes. Now, this is
a cluster munition. And this is the biggest problem in
LAOS because these are basically they're like M sixty seven
hand grenades, and these are they call them bombies. They're
the cluster munitions the biggest problem because they scatter all
over the place in these areas where they're you know,
the ideas that you're blowing up North Vietnamese soldiers. But
twenty five years later, when families come back and they
try to they say, hey, this is really nice. Like farmland.
They either get dug up by hose and you know
sometimes and people get blown up, or like children think
they're toys, which is tragic. The West in America in particular,
have spent a lot of money building up a unexploded
Unexploded Ordnance disposal basically group and LAOS, and they're making
progress unclearing these areas. But at the current clearance rate,
LAOS will be UXO free in two hundred years. But
what really matters is getting it under control. I don't
want to say it's not as bad as it used
to be, but they've identified the areas much more the
danger zones than they did in the past, and so
they seem to be making a lot of progress in
the past, like twenty years there and again. The United
States is providing a ton of aid through usaid to
the advisory groups from the West that are training people
to do this stuff. I also want to point out,
so these are all mortars, right. Laos is not the
only country in the world with this issue. North Vietnam
got bombed to shit. We don't hear about this being
an issue in North Vietnam, and it's because they win
after it right away. Laos was basically depopulated by this war.
And we'll talk a little more in a second, but
I'm getting close to wrapping up here. But they just
weren't able to commit resources to it. Belgium is still
cleaning up World War One battlefields and there's still a
bunch of areas in Belgium where like you go through
the fields and the farmers push ordnance to the side
of their fields and they or they tag stuff that's
too concerning, and then the experts go out and blow
it up. All right, Why does this look cut off? Oh,
I've totally forgot that this would show up in slideshow
mode and not my fixed thing. But for some reason
it cut off to like a standard ratio. Obviously this
is from apocalypse now. So the end of the war
and the aftermath, So the Paris piece Accords, which resulted
in the US forces withdrawing from Vietnam were signed January
nineteen seventy three. Soon after, there was a treaty under
tremendous pressure from the United States for the Lao government
to sign a ceasefire with the Potet Lao in Vang Chan,
and then they created a quote unquote coalition government to
do joint security in the major cities. The guys who
had done the real fighting on the ground for the
Royal Lao government, the Special Guerrilla Units, they knew what
was up. They destroyed all their documentation, their photos, their
ID and they either left the country if they could,
or they lived under assumed names. This was before the
huge refugee migration. And then the Patt Lao, who were
never more than figureheads of the People's Army of Vietnam,
who did all the real fighting, they unmasked and said,
oh yeah, Laos is now a Marxist Leninist state. In
August fifteen, nineteen seventy five, the king and a bunch
of members of the royal family and people who had
fought in the Special Gorilla Units and everything were executed
in re education camps and something like a third of
the country. The a third of the population of the
country left huge, huge outflows, and I want to say
by by nineteen eighty five or so, there were like
three hundred thousand Laong and other ethnic groups who came
to the United States. An awful lot of them ended
up up going to Australia and France. Also, the big
Boys all went to France with their stolen money or
their drug money. And Hank Hill's neighborn Oh yes, Hank
Hill's neighbor Kahn if I recall his wife's referred to
her father as the General, so very very very amusing. Okay.
So other than King of the Hill, Laos has been
represented in two fictional films and and actually a drama
based on a real story Down at the Bottom. So
Apocalypse now takes place in fictionally in Vietnam and Cambodia.
But Colonel Kurtz was almost certainly modeled upon Tony Poe,
who I talked about before and also fed that end
for information to Alfred McCoy. Air America is another one
that's really famous because it helps reinforce that the CIA
was like physically transporting bundles of drugs, knowing that it
was bundles of drugs, which is insane when when you
talk to people who are there. They literally say, we knew,
you know, we later we would we would become aware
at some point about the opium tax having been in place.
But like, there's no there's no scenario where where anyone
has said I literally saw bundles of heroin be put on.
It's more like small amounts of it, probably because you're
moving people, and sure they can also load you know,
rice and hard rice. Hard rice was a term for
weapons and ammunition onto these planes and of it around
and have heroin in there or opium in there. But
the biggest thing is that, you know, one of the
one of the explanations is that proceeds from drugs fund
the war effort. And it's more like no proceeds from
drugs were used by the underground cabals to do what
they do. It's not to pay the government and all
that stuff. So and again them weren't growing opium and
significant quantities in the war zone by nineteen sixty seven
or so, et cetera. But very dramatic story that's also
pretty absurd because again it's based on this like we
had no idea what was going on, pretending that it
wasn't quite what it was, and then actually a pretty
good one is Rescue Don that Christian Bale is in
from two thousand and six. It's the story of Deder
Dengler was a German who joined the US Navy and
became a pilot, and he was shot down and captured
in Laos in nineteen sixty six. It's inaccurate because he
was in a North Vietnamese Army pow camp, but in
the film, because he got shot down in Laos, they're
supposed to be Lao guards, although they're actually speaking that
strong like Northeast Tie dialect because they filmed it there.
But it's pretty good. The documentary on the subject, Little
Deader Needs to Fly is a lot better. This is
where the Bangers are So Journey from Podong A Decision
in the Hills is a CIA produced documentary. It's very good.
Vint Lawrence produced it. So after his two tours in Laos,
he became an assistant, not like the but an assistant
to CIA director William Colby, and so he took footage
that he and another CIA officer named John Wilheim had filmed,
had shot in Laos, and then he created this film.
It's short to show to the Senate Arms Committee. So
again this is early nineteen sixty six, early mid nineteen
sixty six when he puts this together and it's shown
to the Senate Arms Committee explaining the secret Warren Laos.
So it wasn't this thing that US officials didn't know about.
And then the other one is the secret Warren Laos.
I have links in here. I'll just grab him and
I can send him to you, Pete. This is about
an hour and a half documentary by CBS News that
dates from I believe seventy two when the war is
going very very badly and the government is speaking super
openly about what's going on. It mostly takes place at
around Long Tiang, which is up in the north, which
was a huge CIA base. And it's really funny because
they're just these news guys and congressmen talking to CIA
paramilitary officers and they're horrible public relations guys. They're like
they're feed are up and they're all casual talking about
this insane combat that's taking place. It's it's really wild,
but they're totally worth watching. And then I will close.
I have a list of books. What I'll do is
I'll do a thread on X and I can also
put this up on my sub stack. A bunch of
great books about the Secret War. One of the best
was released by the People's Army of Vietnam History of
the People's Army of Vietnam. They talk in great detail
about their campaigns in Lao as well as the the
Ho Chiman Trail, although they of course have a different
name for it. And then I have a bunch of
more general histories and CIA centric. Kenneth Comboy is this
guy who's been writing books about this topic since the seventies.
I believe he's a journalist who just got super interested
in it. So Shadow War is really good. He recently
released The Arowon War Volumes One and two, which is
about the CIA paramilitary campaign. And then Spies on the
Mekong is cool because it talks about CIA clandestine operations,
including the first I think it was the first turned
Soviet double agent was recruited in veng Chan, so it's
really interesting. And then the others are a little more general,
and the very last one, Doctor Charles Wynn Weldon Junior
Tragedy in Paradise. He was a UH. He was the
director of a medical mission to allows for US AID.
And again it's really telling because these are just this
is how it this is how this stuff works. Is
these are people who volunteer for US AID. They're nice
people and they're used to further US operations and you
know the mission, but they care deeply about the people
and it's just this this tragic, this tragic grind that
they become a critical component. Two. So that wraps it
up for me. Unless you have any questions, Pete.
Speaker 1: No, I think that's uh, that makes it pretty clear
anyone who's been paying attention for the last what are
we three years now into Ukraine? Yeah, I hope they
can see the parallels and see you know where this is.
It's just a playbook that they use over and over again.
Speaker 2: One hundred percent and they One of the interesting things
is that James Parker here, who wrote Covert Ops, he
was the oh wait, no, I'm thinking of Cash on
Delivery is Thomas Briggs. Thomas Briggs stayed with the CIA
for a very long time and he, uh, in his
intro to this book, which is his memoir about his
time in Laos, basically says this is how we should
run the war in Afghanistan. I think he published it
in the oughts, and uh, the whole thing is, don't
use Americans, or use as few Americans as possible. Have
locals do it. This way, you can get the results
that you want without you know, the political backline and
all this stuff. And it's very cynical. It's very very cynical.
Speaker 1: Well, it also sounds somebody who doesn't It sounds like
somebody who doesn't understand Afghani culture.
Speaker 2: He doesn't, he doesn't give a shit about Afghani culture.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the first thing that the guys who got
there said was, like Vietnam, we don't know who the
players are. We don't know who's on our side exactly.
You know, it's you end up fighting and protecting the
pedophiles and the and the opium and the poppy farm
farmers and everyone else you is targeted for death.
Speaker 2: You know. The interesting thing, Pete, is that the average
guy who was a veteran of the war in Vietnam
who operated in Laos said that in Laos we were
on the side of the angels, despite the despite some
not good people at the tippy top. But it was
hard to see that. It wasn't in your face like
in Vietnam. The leaders of South Vietnam were really horrible
and so but but it's also one of those things
where you see a certain amount of rationalization taking place
when they talk about it, right.
Speaker 1: Well, that's how they have to do it, right, I
mean they have to. Yeah, you can't basically start a
I don't want to say genocide because that word is
is overused, but you know, a meat grinder.
Speaker 2: A meat grinder, one hundred percent, there were a whole
the Mong were totally totally wasted by this. They they
lost something like thirty five to forty percent of their
of their adult males in the war. That could be
a slight exaggeration, because I think this sounds familiar. Exactly.
It's during, it's during the war and in the aftermath.
It's it's right about that number, I want to say.
Speaker 1: And well, think about how much worse Ukraine is. I mean,
it wasn't. It wasn't like we there were people in
I mean, at least not that I know of, that
were in the State department or in the government who
had it out for uh, you know, for the Laotian people. Yeah, exactly,
but here you definitely have when it comes to Ukraine,
you have people who absolutely hate the Russian people and
the Ukrainians and they're just using the They're just using
the Ukrainians to exactly. They just Christians, Christian slaughtering Christians.
Speaker 2: And I think that I think the real takeaway is that,
I mean, I know a lot of Vietnam veterans, you know,
given given my age, I know a lot. I had
a lot who were mentors and stuff or family members,
and what they would inevitably do is they would go
to war when they were young, and then they would
then they become obsessed with it. They come home and
they they read about it, they read about the culture,
and they learn about the people in the place after
the war. So you really need to learn about people
in places before you have any kind of engagement with them.
But you know that they were also you know, draft
ease or they were just like this is where it's
this is where it's happening, this is where you know,
instead of fighting the Russians, we're going to be over there.
You don't want the Russians here. We got to fight
over there. And it sounds good at the time when
you know, when it's pretty raw, raw, but man like
like you know, about Ukraine because of this that you're
doing with doctor Johnson and God, I hope every single
person listening to this listens to the to the series
of two hundred Years together, because you need to know
the history of these places before you can have any
opinion about anything else. That's why I started off with
my Putin hat, like, let's go back to before you
know the oceans drank Atlantis, Like you have to do
that when you look at any situation to be able
to have any kind of you know, commentary or anything
on it.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm glad you brought up Putin because that then
it doesn't seem like I'm doing a non sequitor here.
But the people who say, well, you know, Putin just
he just shouldn't have invaded. It's his fault. I mean,
these are the dumbest fucking people I've ever I've ever
If you're saying that as a propagandist, I have more
respect for you than someone who's saying that out of
sheer stupidity.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and that's where that's where, That's why I said,
these guys will give you mental aids Like I don't
like them, but I at least Bramffman knew what he
was doing. I don't think Alfred McCoy knows anything, but like,
at least he knew what he was doing when he
was repeating this this nonsense. He was framing something in
an advantageous fashion for his bent and the people that
he aligned with at the time, or at least the
the the position that he aligned with at the time.
At least at least be that smart instead of just
being like, well, we have to do this because that
will batch you bad. And it's like, you you totally
understand why the North Vietnamese went into Laos and Cambodia.
It totally makes sense. Of course they would. And then
when they marched west and conquered, you know, conquered the
country and installed the puppet government, you understand why they
did that too. You don't like it, but it is
what it is. And it's like, are you know, are
you going to send your kids to die to stop
that from happening? Who fucking cares? It's like, it's not,
it's it's crazy. It's crazy. And look at the money
that we spent the equipment. And I can't think of
his name. There was there was a guy, one of
the guys who was in the in the campaign in
the North working with the mong and and I think, oh,
what's his name? Food guy Anthony Bourdain when he did
a show in Laos and and he quoted this guy,
and it was so spot on, like you go in
there with the best of intentions and you end up
arming twelve year olds. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean at this point I have less contempt
for Victoria Newland and Robert Kagan and Anthony Blincoln than
I do for the Nafoga people.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, because yeah, those.
Speaker 1: Three are just doing what they're doing. Yes, they're not
useful idiots for a fucking literal Christian genocide.
Speaker 2: And they want to reduce the draft to age fourteen.
Playbook in Ukraine now playbook, same thing. Yep.
Speaker 1: You got to get these people out of our They
cannot be allowed to hold power or be anywhere near power.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna legally, uh ask my congressman to uh put
together a new law where or or some kind of
some kind of legal structure to uh have them pushed
through fine mesh screens. It only takes a couple horrible
people and make these epic disasters that destroy a country
for for centuries. If not forever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, all right, man promote.
Speaker 2: Away, uh, Carl Doll Carldall dot substack dot com. That's
where my my longer form stuff is. Once this goes public,
all put together an article with both the podcast link
to your stuff as well as links to all these
materials and books and everything. A lot of it is
free online. Now. The older stuff, I should say, I
don't thought of.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you said at the beginning, do
you want to say why this is even an interest
of yours? What's something you have planned?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Sure, okay, yeah I can do that. I'm working
on the memoirs of a person I know who is
a veteran of this of this war. He worked for
the CIA in Laos for seven years and he's it'll
be published posthumously. It won't be under good old Carl
Doll's name. It'll be his name and probably my probably
my real name, maybe maybe a pen name. I don't know.
But it's wild, wild stuff, but it's it can be
a bit much. It gets very it gets very emotional,
so it's kind of slow going, so hence all the
research that I've done. But yeah, it's it's something I've
been working on for some time, and.
Speaker 1: So there's something coming in the future.
Speaker 2: It's in the future. I don't think he's ever going
to die though. He's invincible, so it's probably it could
be another ten years. Awesome and I'm not even choking.
Speaker 1: Awesome. Just give you more time to work.
Speaker 2: On this exactly exactly, exactly what time?
Speaker 1: And yeah, well here's yes, here's the question is when
you by the time it is time to finish this
and we will mourn the dead, will Ukraine be over?
Speaker 2: Oh my god, I hope so. I hope that ends
very soon, very soon. I'm worried that it won't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, man, always good talking to you. Take
care of yourself, right, Yeah, thanks Pete.