Part One: Behind the Bastards Live Show: The Ballad of Bo Gritz

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Speaker 5 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 7 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 9 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer: The Investigation into the Most Notorious Killer in New York, since the son of Sam.

Speaker 11 Available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 Coolzone Media.

Speaker 3 Anybody mind if I Riker with the chair here a little bit?

Speaker 3 Welcome to Behind the Bastards Live, our first live show.

Speaker 3 This is our first live show in a little while,

Speaker 3 because I don't like leaving the house and am a deranged shut-in who's increasingly losing his connection to the world and reality.

Speaker 3 Like a lot of people, presidents, for example.

Speaker 3 Before we get into the show today, I have a couple of very special people to introduce. First off, my producer and business partner, the inimitable Sophie Lichterman!

Speaker 3 And then, of course, our guest for tonight, the host of Hood Politics and my good friend, Jason Petty, aka Prop.

Speaker 3 Yeah, what's clack-a-massing, you know what I'm saying? How y'all feeling? I've been planning that one all day. You know what I'm saying? What's clack-a-massin'? We workshopped that.

Speaker 3 That was like $40,000 in development.

Speaker 3 Jay Leno's writers don't come cheap. Absolutely.
But worth it, obviously. Clearly.
So welcome, everybody.

Speaker 3 Thank you for dealing with

Speaker 3 the line, the security measures and stuff. I think think for obvious reasons, we're all a little bit extra careful these days.
Why did something happen?

Speaker 3 No, not that I'm aware of. Oh, okay.

Speaker 3 So, we've got a special night planned for everybody. First, I want to thank all of you for coming out and supporting the Portland Defense Fund.

Speaker 3 It's a really good cause, and y'all have raised north of $30,000 so far for them.

Speaker 3 That goes a long way, and especially considering most of the people who need help with that, we're talking about like houseless folks, we're talking about people who have absolutely no access to resources,

Speaker 3 and this is the only lifeline they're going to get, and the only help they're going to get. So, thank you all for helping to keep that lifeline alive.

Speaker 3 Round of applause for you. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Round of applause for everybody in the audience except one of you motherfuckers. They know who they are.

Speaker 3 Not you, mom. Also,

Speaker 3 just a quick show of hands because it's a gang of white people in here.

Speaker 3 It is Portland. It is Portland.
If you got like a drip of melanin in you, can you make some noise real quick? I just want to see, okay, you've got more than a drip, make some noise.

Speaker 3 You got a lot of it, make some noise.

Speaker 3 Okay, that's my section right there. Okay, just making sure.
I was like,

Speaker 3 it's got to be at least five of y'all in here. Prop, it's good that you introduced that because our subject for these episodes

Speaker 3 is. Hey, look, it's not a bid.
We never know. Like, we never know.

Speaker 3 Wait, wait, wait, wait. Before we start, should we give them the drinking game rules? We do have a drinking game rules.
Yes, there are.

Speaker 3 So, the drinking game rules are as follows. First off, be responsible.
Don't drive. Okay? Don't operate heavy machinery unless it seems like it would be really funny.

Speaker 3 So, first off, take a drink if the subject of the podcast directly or indirectly kills somebody.

Speaker 3 Second of all, if Prof goes, you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 3 No, no, no, Sophie, we can't legally,

Speaker 3 the people will die. I'm doing it.

Speaker 3 Alcoholic poison. I'm trying to get y'all twisted.
You know what I'm saying? That's like,

Speaker 3 if Robert says right, take a shot.

Speaker 3 Second of all, what was this? No, no, I'm doing that one. Oh God.
No, that counted. Third is war crimes.
Yeah, when there's a war crime committed, take a drink. Yep.

Speaker 3 And this one might really hurt everyone, but if I have to go, Robert, no.

Speaker 3 So.

Speaker 3 When I was a young man, in about 2005 or 2006, I came across a bunch of torrents from a documentary TV series called Weird Weekends, made by a British feller named Louis Thoreau.

Speaker 3 Now, one of the episodes released in 1998 was about survivalists. In it, Louis met a bunch of weirdo, libertarian, far-right, and some outright Nazi weirdos who were living off-grid in rural Idaho.

Speaker 3 This was probably. Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.

Speaker 3 What about that doesn't scan? Rural Idaho, okay.

Speaker 3 When you were a young boy. Yeah, I was like 18, 19.
Yeah, when I was a young boy, my father took me into the city.

Speaker 3 See a marching band? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 rural Idaho. Okay, so I think I know where we're going with this.
Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 So this is probably my first journalistic introduction to content on the militia movement and the, at that point, still nascent post-Oklahoma City bombing white supremacist movement.

Speaker 3 Much of the episode took place in an intentional community for these people named Almost Heaven, which was founded and operated by the subject of our episodes today, a famous figure in the right-wing underground named Bo Greitz.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we got some Bo Knowers out there.

Speaker 3 We got some Boites out this mud. Some Boers, yeah.

Speaker 3 Now. So the spot was called Almost Heaven.
Almost Heaven. Almost.
We'll get to there at the end. Yeah, they were really close.
Okay.

Speaker 3 Just like all those people who nearly got raptured, right? I mean, look.

Speaker 3 Almost.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 3 and by the way, Bo Greites, the name is spelled G-R-I-T-Z, but it's pronounced Greites. That's irritating.
It is.

Speaker 3 You can tell a lot about the journalists reporting on him because they'll either say that his name rhymes when they're writing about him, that his name rhymes with sights, as in rifle sights, or bites, which I think was a subtle way of expressing bias because Bo Greitz definitely bites.

Speaker 3 In like the late 90s sense of the word, when did that? Yeah, like white meat. Yeah, white me, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So the main claim to fame that you'll find if you read anything on Bo is that he was the guy whose real life inspired the character John Rambo. He's the real Rambo.
Rambo was based on him.

Speaker 3 Whoa, cool, right? That can't be true. Awesome.
Absolutely not. That can't be true.
Absolutely not true.

Speaker 3 It's a partial true, right?

Speaker 3 If you've seen Rambo First Blood, the first Rambo movie, pretty good movie, it's about like a traumatized Vietnam veteran who gets abused by small-town sheriffs like an hour and a half north of here.

Speaker 3 It's about like PTSD. Yeah, it's like he's got severe PTSD in that bug.

Speaker 3 It's like not jingoistic at all. It's not a very pro-America movie.
The sequel to Rambo First Blood, Rambo First Blood Part II, because we used to know how to name things in this fucking country.

Speaker 3 It's also a very great Nintendo game, too. Yes, yes, a banger, yes.
The sequel, Rambo First Blood Part II, was a very different movie.

Speaker 3 Instead of a traumatized veteran getting abused by police and kind of losing his mind, John Rambo has to go re-fight the Vietnam War to go rescue a bunch of POWs as part of a secret black ops operation.

Speaker 3 And this is the thing that's based on Bo Greites. Right?

Speaker 3 So that's where we're building towards.

Speaker 3 So, James Bo Greitz, I don't know where the Bo came from, don't ask me. I can't answer that for you.

Speaker 3 What was that? It's like white people.

Speaker 3 Y'all just be throwing names willy-nilly, you know what I'm saying? They don't get whiter because our man Bo was born January 18th, 1939, in Enid, Oklahoma.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 This dude is just hitting all the notes.

Speaker 3 As a white kid from Oklahoma, that Oklahoma white people hit different.

Speaker 3 I will say this about Oklahoma white people now. We don't have much time, but I will say this.

Speaker 3 Where is this going? No, listen, y'all, like, Oklahoma white people know their way around a grill. That's Beth.
That is true. Y'all can make some barbecue.
They be seasoning their food.

Speaker 3 Don't get in a car with them, though. Don't get in a car with them.

Speaker 3 So he was born January 18th, 1939, the only child to a family who was about to be deeply rocked by war. His father was an Army Air Corps pilot, and once the U.S.

Speaker 3 entered the big WW dose, he flew B-17s and was shot down over France in November of 1944. Bo was five.

Speaker 3 An article by Art Harris in the Washington Post describes Bo as feeling as if his father died fighting the right war. Bo's going to be in Vietnam, so this is pretty easy to understand, right?

Speaker 3 Okay, I was like, I missed the good war by two wars. Just two wars.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Jesus Christ. So, as a child, Bo worshipped his dad and seems to have never considered anything but a military career.

Speaker 3 And while his father had died over Europe, Bo fantasized for whatever reason about, well, I think there's one very clear reason, about fighting Japanese soldiers, right?

Speaker 3 His dad dies fighting the Nazis. Bo's always going to be real interested in fighting the Japanese.

Speaker 3 Here's a quote from Bo.

Speaker 3 We had a big wheat field in front of my house, and I'd hide in there. I always saw myself in a jungle environment.

Speaker 3 There was a dirt runway, and I had a P-51 Mustang and lived in a grass hut with a brown woman.

Speaker 3 Every morning, I'd put on my leather jacket, get into my aircraft, and fly off to do combat against the enemy all day long. Yeah, he just said that.

Speaker 3 First time you're six. Like, wait.

Speaker 3 Living a grass hut with a brown woman. First of all, hard agree, but also.

Speaker 3 It's the hut for me. It's the hut.

Speaker 3 You're hard agreeing on the hut. The hut is the issue.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the hut is the issue. Okay.

Speaker 3 So, Bo spent a lot of time hiding in cover in his front porch with a BB gun, shooting at toys that he'd set up in the yard. One day he shot a toy truck.
The BB ricocheted and hit Bo in the eye.

Speaker 3 It was a bad enough injury. There's a weird right-wing militia guy thing of shooting yourself in the eye.

Speaker 3 If you remember the Oath Keepers founder, Stuart Rhodes, who really blasted the eye out there with a straight-up real gun. But anyway, Bo doesn't lose his eye.

Speaker 3 Otherwise, this would be a very different story. But he has to explain to the doctor what happens, and he just tells the doctor the, and he uses a slur for Japanese soldiers here, shot back, right?

Speaker 3 Wait, wait, wait, but that's not what happened, all right? You just said he shot himself. Well,

Speaker 3 it ricocheted. It ricocheted.
It ricocheted. I don't know if you want to count that as shooting himself.
I do. It's bad gun safety, right? Can we say that?

Speaker 3 That kind of, yeah,

Speaker 3 I mean, low-key, like, he kind of shot himself. It's not a pattern yet, but it's weird that it happened twice with right-wing militia leaders, right?

Speaker 3 We're just waiting for one more of these guys to get their own eye, and then we, I don't know. No predicting.
Get like a free coffee? Okay.

Speaker 3 Free coffee. I don't know.

Speaker 3 Bo was raised by his maternal grandparents, primarily. A fact which most of the articles I read about him, like in the Washington Post and stuff, just said he was raised by his grandparents.

Speaker 3 And I was like, but he had a mom. Where'd she go? So I had to go digging, and I found an old Parade magazine article article from 1983 by Ovid Damaris.

Speaker 3 And this is what that article says. His mother, a pilot with the women's Air Force service pilots, would later marry a master sergeant and remain with the occupation forces in Germany after the war.

Speaker 3 That's all they say. She has left?

Speaker 3 She is just like, I'm starting a new family. I'm sorry.
Your dad's dead. This is kind of a wash.

Speaker 3 Gramps and grandma are going to take care of you. I'm gone.

Speaker 3 They'll do a better job than me, Katie. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Trust me, I intend to make that true.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, aside from being abandoned, Bo had what you might call a normal life for a white boy in Oklahoma in the post-war period.

Speaker 3 He was in the Boy Scouts, he was in the Explorer Scouts, he did all the different scouting things you can do. But he also had significant behavioral issues.

Speaker 3 We don't know exactly why, but Bo was expelled from high school. It may have had something to do with what we might classify as compulsive lawbreaking.
The Post called him a

Speaker 3 self-styled juvenile prankster, which is a term that people who grow up to be law and order conservatives use to describe the crimes they committed as kids. So that they're different from hoodlums.

Speaker 3 You're not the hoodlums.

Speaker 3 You're a

Speaker 3 precocious. Yeah, you're precociously stealing people's cars or whatever.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Must be nice.

Speaker 3 He also claims to.

Speaker 3 It must be nice to be precocious. I'll tell you what.
To get to be precocious. Hey.

Speaker 3 Lucky.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So, Bose stole cars and motorcycles. Precocious.
Precocious.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 3 He's just an excitable boy. Since you were listening to some Warren Zvon on the way in.

Speaker 3 There we go. He threw fireworks in school to disrupt events and assemblies.
That one does sound fun.

Speaker 3 He describes himself from this time as right out of American graffiti and a tough guy. He also claims to have run with gangs.

Speaker 3 Although, as best as I can tell from the context, he means gangs in the sense that like he and his friends committed petty crimes. Not that he was in like an organized criminal organization.

Speaker 3 Brad, no, you didn't. No.
You know what I'm saying? You and your friends drunkenly stole a motorcycle. Yes.
In Enid, Oklahoma, sir. Tell me what turf you were.

Speaker 3 You ran the one-stop sign. Yes.

Speaker 3 So once he was kicked out of high school, his caregivers sent him to Fork Union Military Academy in Virginia.

Speaker 3 Hilariously, in early interviews, like the one with Parade magazine, he told reporters that he chose to attend military school instead of going to high school. This is not true.

Speaker 3 I don't know why he would do that because I'm like, I feel like it fits the mystique of like, you know, like a militia guy. I got kicked out, sent to military.

Speaker 3 Like, I had a little more hardcore than I chose. I wanted to.

Speaker 3 It was that

Speaker 3 he was a head ass. Like, nah, bro, like, get kicked out.

Speaker 3 I thought you ran with a gang, homie. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 3 You in a gang. You feel me? Like, yeah.
So the academy does kind of turn Bo around.

Speaker 3 He ends his time there as the core commander during his senior year, which is the child who's in charge of the other children, basically.

Speaker 3 Cool. Yeah, awesome.
Good idea. Depending on the interview, Bo claims he was either invited to attend West Point or he passed an entrance exam and was offered admission.

Speaker 3 I don't think either of these stories are true because West Point doesn't work that way.

Speaker 3 Applying to West Point isn't at all like applying to a normal university. Back then, and I think things are a little bit different today, but they're mostly that work the same way.

Speaker 3 You get in because you have to get a nomination from a member of Congress, right?

Speaker 3 Now, you can also be appointed by the president or vice president, but basically everyone who gets into West Point gets nominated by a member of Congress.

Speaker 3 So for Beau's story to be true, he would have had to write a member of Congress and convince them of his worth and then get accepted and then say, nah, actually, I don't want free admission to the most prestigious military university and a guaranteed fast track in my career as an officer.

Speaker 3 No, thank you.

Speaker 3 I think he's just lying about this. Yeah.

Speaker 3 At any rate, Bo doesn't bum around long after graduation. This is also why I'm sure he's lying, because he immediately joins the military.
In 1957, he walks into an Army recruiter's office. He is 18.

Speaker 3 He claims that when he's in there, he sees a poster of a green beret on the wall, and the poster read, The Green Beret Special Forces are the world's toughest troopers. Now, that doesn't sound true.

Speaker 3 None, it cannot be true. In no way shape,

Speaker 3 absolutely can't be true. So, the Green Berets were founded in 1952 as U.S.
Army Special Forces.

Speaker 3 By 1957, some of these guys had started wearing green berets in order to differentiate themselves from normal soldiers.

Speaker 3 But they weren't actually supposed to do that, and sometimes they got in trouble for it.

Speaker 3 And no official Army recruitment ad would have called the unit the Green Berets because they weren't called that yet.

Speaker 3 Now,

Speaker 3 it's a good thing we didn't make lying part of the drinking. No, no, no.
Again, legally, we can't kill the audience yet.

Speaker 3 Again, give two more years of legislation, and I think we'll have that right.

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Speaker 11 Available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 So, U.S. Army Special Forces were founded as part of a general recognition brought on by certain events in World War II that the nature of conflict was changing.

Speaker 3 Military history has always had elite units who carried out special operations behind the lines, or you could look at like the Greek soldiers and the Trojan horse as like an early reference to special forces kind of activity.

Speaker 3 And World War II featured commando units on both sides that carried out high-profile clandestine operations. So the U.S.

Speaker 3 Special Forces began as an attempt to systematize the training and deployment of such commando teams for the first time.

Speaker 3 The idea initially with these guys was that they would, they're not like Navy SEALs are today, right?

Speaker 3 The idea with the special forces that become Green Berets is that they would be stay behind guerrilla units in the event of a hot war with the Soviet Union.

Speaker 3 At that point in time, the discrepancy in conventional forces in Europe, the Soviets had a shitload of tanks, NATO had somewhat less tanks, tanks.

Speaker 3 Meant that everyone's best assumption was that Soviet forces would steamroll through large portions of Western Europe before there could be any hope of NATO stopping them.

Speaker 3 And thus, you wanted to have a bunch of special forces guys behind the line to train resistance cells, organize, and execute attacks to disrupt the enemy's rear, right?

Speaker 3 That's the idea with which these were founded.

Speaker 3 This is post-World War II.

Speaker 3 Yes, we're talking the 50s, 57 is one word. Yeah, I don't know, yeah, unless you're like a history nerd.

Speaker 3 I don't think we in our era appreciate just how badass like Russia was. Oh, yeah.
I mean,

Speaker 3 they were some ass kickers. They had a lot of tanks at the end of that war.
They were some ass kickers, yeah.

Speaker 3 So in 1957, when Bo first claims to have seen that poster, he definitely didn't see.

Speaker 3 That was the first year that Green Berets were deployed to Vietnam. So again, there wasn't like anything to brag about them doing yet.

Speaker 3 Like they have a reputation now for doing all sorts of crazy shit, but they had just started going to Vietnam, which I think was their first official combat deployment. If you've ever heard that U.S.

Speaker 3 involvement in Vietnam started with U.S. advisors going over to train the South Vietnamese Army, that's at least like a big chunk of what they're talking about are what becomes the Green Berets.

Speaker 3 So, Bo's version of the story, which definitely isn't true, is that he asks the Army recruiter, what do the Green Berets do?

Speaker 3 And that guy answers, they go out in the woods, live off bark and lizards, snoop around, blow up bridges, and garret people. They live in huts with breads.
They live in huts with breads. yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 And Bo immediately responds, that's for me. Again,

Speaker 3 they've only ever been deployed before Vietnam to Europe. They're not eating lizards

Speaker 3 in fucking Italy. Like, I'm sorry, that's not what they, they weren't famous for anything at this point of time.
Certainly not this.

Speaker 3 I kind of doubt he was thinking at all about the Green Berets when he enlisted.

Speaker 3 The unit didn't even officially start wearing Green Berets until 1961 when President Kennedy made it a part of their uniform. In 1957, U.S.
Special Forces hadn't really done anything special yet.

Speaker 3 Their first, oh yeah, I already said that. Anyway, that interview with Parade goes on.

Speaker 3 Quote, although they only accepted sergeants and above, Bo was admitted contingent on his passing all the schools.

Speaker 3 These included regular basic training, advanced individual training, parachute and special forces courses that teach unconventional warfare.

Speaker 3 And again, I mean, that's true about the things you have to do to be a Green Beret, but I don't think Bo entered with any special deal because he doesn't, he has a normal military career for years before he gets into the Green Berets.

Speaker 3 And in fact, he gets, this is wild, court-martialed twice in basic training. See, yeah.
I was going to say, listen, I was going to say. Twice.
Twice.

Speaker 3 I was going to say he was thinking what most recruits think, which is poverty. Right.
Like, you know, I want some money or

Speaker 3 you're going to pay for school. You're going to give me somewhere to live.

Speaker 3 Basically, you're going to give me socialism. I don't.
I'm going to go into the army. You're going to give me socialism.
Yeah. I certainly don't think he was planning on eating lizards.
I did at all.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 3 yeah, he doesn't. He gets court-martialed twice in basic training.
I wish I knew what for. I just don't have that information.

Speaker 3 Because he was trying to start a gang because he's just like he might have been

Speaker 3 stealing jacks. He's going to steal.

Speaker 3 Start a gang. After jackets.
Westside eat it. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 3 What, bro? I mean, ironically, U.S. Special Forces today often operate exactly like they're gay.

Speaker 3 Running illegal drugs and murdering other Special Forces guys who find them running illegal drugs.

Speaker 3 Who knew? Then actually, a Green Beret got murdered by some Navy SEALs a couple years ago as a result of a bunch of drug shit. Fun story.
Anyway. America.
We'll talk about them later.

Speaker 3 After basic training, Bo was recommended to go to officer candidate school. And this is interesting.
I don't know why he got picked out.

Speaker 3 It's fairly rare for that to happen because he didn't have any college experience, but he passes. He gets commissioned as a second lieutenant.

Speaker 3 And somewhere around this time, also in 1957, he marries his first wife, Dolores Beneditti. And while he was starting his military career, the couple has two children.

Speaker 3 They're not really that important to talk about because he is going to abandon them at the first possible. He is this is a class family abandoner.
I'm sorry. You hear a man's name is Bogue Reitz.

Speaker 3 First thing you know is that that man has abandoned at least one family. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Like his mom. Like his mom.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Generational. Damn.

Speaker 3 I learned it from you, mom. I learned it by watching you.

Speaker 3 Generational trauma. That's his smoking pot is abandoning his family.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 3 Passed down from generational. Maybe y'all get that reference, though.
I learned it from watching. No, no, no, yeah.
Y'all don't get that.

Speaker 3 Those were anti-drug ads from back in the day.

Speaker 3 So, after OCS, Bo goes to Ranger school, and he does well enough in Ranger school that he gets promoted steadily throughout the early 1960s, reaching the rank of captain by 1963.

Speaker 3 In 1965, he joins the Green Berets. So, again, he claims in 57 I knew what I wanted to be.
I think the reality is his career just went along, and eventually this became an option for him.

Speaker 3 And for whatever reason, he decided to lie about that later.

Speaker 3 He gets deployed to Vietnam in 1965, and he recalls being excited for the opportunity to, quote, go out and hit something.

Speaker 3 Other than his own eye, right? Other than his own eye with a BB, yeah.

Speaker 3 Hit is interesting, like not shoot, like, so you, and he actually does hit people to death, so I don't know. He knew what he wanted.

Speaker 3 Bo was not among the very first Green Berets deployed to the country, but by the time he got over there, the mission that the U.S.

Speaker 3 was involved in had expanded beyond training the South Vietnamese Army to, I mean, a bunch of shit.

Speaker 3 But the Green Berets were operating mobile guerrilla forces of different local fighters in dark zones of Vietnam and the surrounding countries where U.S. forces were not supposed to be, right?

Speaker 3 A lot of these guys wind up in Laos. They're not supposed to be in Laos, but they're there.

Speaker 3 So he splits up with his wife somewhere around this point, and he hooks up with a woman that he describes most often in interviews as, quote, an ethnic Chinese former prostitute.

Speaker 3 This surprised words.

Speaker 3 This man, I figured out as soon as you said first wife, I was like, uh-huh. That man went down to the jungle.
Yep.

Speaker 3 And he was like, yo, they come like this? Like, yeah.

Speaker 3 And he's always really specific about the ethnic Chinese part, I think, just because he didn't want anyone to think he had married a Vietnamese woman.

Speaker 3 Like, that was very important to Bo for reasons that I probably don't need to get into. Also, I'm guessing she wasn't a former prostitute when they met.
That's just my theory here.

Speaker 3 But given that he's a soldier in Vietnam in 1965.

Speaker 3 But at least he was supporting sex workers. He was.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
We stand. We stand.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Listen, man, there's always some sort of redeeming quality. There you go.
There you go. Low bar for this one.
Low be all low bar. Low bar for Bo here.

Speaker 3 Yeah, this will be.

Speaker 3 So one thing you got to give Bo, other than that, is that he was very good at being a Green Beret. He's, in fact, one of the best to ever do it.

Speaker 3 He claims to be the most highly decorated Green Beret commander of the entire war, and this is probably true.

Speaker 3 He ultimately received more than 60 citations for valor, including both silver and bronze stars. Bo's descriptions of his time in Vietnam are harrowing reading.

Speaker 3 At one point, a Viet Cong fighter rises up out of a tunnel and tries to shoot him at point-blank

Speaker 3 range, and Greich only survives because the ammunition in the man's weapon was bad and failed to fire. One of the stories we get of Bo comes from General William Westmoreland's memoirs.

Speaker 3 And if you know Westmoreland, he was like,

Speaker 3 if you're going to blame Vietnam on a military leader in the U.S., Westmoreland's the guy you blame, right?

Speaker 3 I think there's a couple of guys ahead of him, like LBJ and whatnot, but Westmoreland is responsible for a lot of why Vietnam is the fucking nightmare that it is, right?

Speaker 3 And it says a lot about both Bo and Westmoreland, that Westmoreland, like, signal, like, singles Bo out as like an example of this guy was one of our best.

Speaker 3 This is like one of the absolute, like, the dudes who was really doing it right. And again, maybe that's why we lost the war.
I don't know.

Speaker 3 Is this your kid? So,

Speaker 3 Westmoreland writes in detail about one of Bo's missions, which is this U.S. spy plane has crashed in the Cambodian jungle, right?

Speaker 3 Now, writing for the Washington Post, Art Harris summarizes, Washington was desperate to retrieve the black box containing top secret codes. It had failed to self-destruct.

Speaker 3 If it got into VC hands, Moscow might be the next step. There was only one hang-up.
Nobody knew exactly where the plane was.

Speaker 3 Choppers dropped off Greitz and his team, and they fanned out on foot, hacking their way through vines, snaking along elephant trails, setting booby traps to protect their rear, ambushing and getting ambushed.

Speaker 3 On the fourth day out, around Christmas of 1966, they stumbled on the U-2 wreckage. The black box was gone.
VC's sandal tracks led off into the bush. He set up an ambush.

Speaker 3 Kill every man except the first two, he ordered. Greitz and another sergeant would take care of them in hand-to-hand with zappers or CIA-issue spring-steel billy clubs.
Now,

Speaker 3 that actually would kind of sound epic. I ain't going to be able to do that.
Oh, do you have to be a dope?

Speaker 3 Look, it's a good scene in a movie.

Speaker 3 Nobody's denying that. I have some questions.
First off,

Speaker 3 why did the CIA have to issue them billy clubs?

Speaker 3 Why did the CIA need to make clubs to hit people with?

Speaker 3 I mean, I'm not questioning, like, why would the CIA CIA want people beaten to death. I'm questioning why did they have to make the club?

Speaker 3 I feel like I could make a steel club.

Speaker 3 You're in the jungle. You can make whatever you want.

Speaker 3 I have a question: why is your chair backwards? I'm Rikering, Sophie.

Speaker 3 Thank you. Yeah.
Let's give it up, Commander William Riker. Come on.
There we go. There we go.

Speaker 3 You're really. Support the troops.

Speaker 3 So, you're really quick with with that answer. Thank you.
I was super impressed.

Speaker 3 We've been doing this a long time.

Speaker 3 It's like my back tattoo says, ABR, baby, always be right.

Speaker 3 So.

Speaker 3 Jesus Christ. That was the sort of like

Speaker 3 school counselor. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 3 So, other questions I have, why were they called zappers? They're just clubs to hit people with. Also, did the Special Forces need the CIA to give them the idea to beat men with metal clubs?

Speaker 3 These are the questions that keep me up at night. Anyway, that patrol shows up, and Bozemen shoot them to pieces.
Greites rushes his target and hits him, but he kills him immediately.

Speaker 3 He just kills the guy with a club. There is a prisoner that they've taken, but he's defiant, and so he had to be executed.
And here's where you can drink your first war crime drink.

Speaker 3 Because you are not supposed to execute prisoners. Because they're defiant?

Speaker 3 Defiant, yes. Pissed that you killed his friends and captured him? That's pretty natural.
He ain't gonna tell us. No, you're not gonna kill him.

Speaker 3 Now, get ready for another war crimes drink because Greitz was forced.

Speaker 3 Both the guys they tried to take alive, they have now killed. But one of the wounded Vietnam, one of the Viet Cong fighters that they had thought they'd killed was just wounded, right?

Speaker 3 And so they decided to convince this guy to help them. And they do that by they show him, they use a mirror to show him the shrapnel embedded in the back of his skull.

Speaker 3 And they're like, hey, man, you need medical attention right away. And we can't give it to you unless you help us out.
So if you don't help us, you're dead, right?

Speaker 3 So this guy agrees to lead them to the base where the black box had been taken.

Speaker 3 And to make sure that he abided by the terms of the deal, Bo attaches C4 to the prisoner's neck and uses a detonation cord and uses a detonation cord as a leash to walk him around.

Speaker 3 Let's have another war crime drink. Yeah, that's you're.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 3 Again, you're not supposed to do this. I was finna...

Speaker 3 One of my questions, as soon as he said, kill everybody but two of them. I was like, okay, so how do you know which two?

Speaker 3 Because

Speaker 3 you might have killed the one that was ready to snitch. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 3 But you don't know that if you just walk up and be like, I'm just going to pick the two. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 3 Part of Green Beret training is learning, like, what guy looks like he's best at talking? Don't shoot him as much. Which one of y'all look like snitches? Just grenade that guy a little bit.

Speaker 3 He looks like he's got a talking mouth. Yeah.
So.

Speaker 3 Hey, hey, hey, homie, you got somebody back home you love? Okay, cool. Keep him alive.
He's going to snitch.

Speaker 3 That guy looks like he's got a family. You got a family.
You finna snitch. You don't know nobody.
You can kill him. So, again, several war crimes down here, but the mission is successful.

Speaker 3 I'm sorry for the.

Speaker 3 I don't know why I know stuff like that.

Speaker 3 I'm sorry. Anyway, go ahead.
So the mission succeeds, which is why Westmoreland writes proudly about it in his memoir, even though I might be like, maybe, maybe you don't highlight all the war crimes.

Speaker 3 I don't know.

Speaker 3 If I'm given notes, right? Which I'm not.

Speaker 3 So the whole thing highlights an important fact, right? Which is that modern American worship of special forces operators begins as a distraction, right?

Speaker 3 That's why Westmoreland is talking about this, devotees so much time to it. And that's why Bo is going to get it.
That's why the Rambo movies are such a big deal, right? It's because...

Speaker 3 After Vietnam, the U.S., Americans are pretty clear, oh, we're not getting into good wars anymore. Like that one time, like that was pretty fun, and it seems like a lot less fun these days.

Speaker 3 But we have these guys who are really well trained to do all this cool stuff, and they look awesome, and like they can do really impressive things.

Speaker 3 They're not winning us wars, like him finding this black box, didn't know Vietnam. Like, the war still didn't go very well.

Speaker 3 It was also very pretty, the last one we had was a pretty clear, like, good versus evil type vibe. Right? The whole World War II thing.
We're not doing that anymore.

Speaker 3 This one, you're like, why is we there again? again? So

Speaker 3 the Warriors are doing over here.

Speaker 3 And we're not winning. So people are like, so it becomes a lot easier, like, well, let's celebrate how cool these guys are, right?

Speaker 3 In lieu of celebrating, you know, the good cause that we're doing or like the fact that the war has gone very well, you know?

Speaker 3 And so Bo is kind of at the very first wave of special forces obsession in the United States, which is something that has really like come to a head during the global war on terror, right?

Speaker 3 If you look at like movies set in that period of time, they're they're a lot likelier to focus on like a special forces unit because you can have them do some kind of rad, cool-looking mission and sort of ignore that like, well, everything else was a lot messier and didn't work quite as well.

Speaker 3 But Zero Dark 30, hey. Yeah.
There's also like a...

Speaker 3 I don't want to belabor this point too long, but I think that there's a good way as like, as far as like some of the science I use for like social commentary or even, you know, when I did teach high school,

Speaker 3 was like, you always know what's going on. If you want to understand what was going on in a time period, just look at who the villain was in a movie.
You know what I'm saying? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 And, like, this one. So, right now, like, every show, streaming show, every action movie right now, what's the villain?

Speaker 3 A tech billionaire. Yeah, oh, yeah.
You see what I'm saying? Right, right. You know what I'm saying? But before that, you know, during.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah. Before that, it was like some sort of terror, some sort of Middle Eastern terrorist, you know what I'm saying? So, like, you always know what's going on in the world.

Speaker 3 You had a lot of late 90s, right before 9-11, a lot of like militia, Nazi kind of guys. Yeah, after okay.

Speaker 3 You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 3 Every time.

Speaker 3 So, anyway,

Speaker 3 I'm bringing up the special forces stuff just to kind of set the zeitgeist, right?

Speaker 3 Which is that America Bo is going to really benefit personally and his celebrity from the idea that Americans have kind of switched gears to like, so what if we don't win wars anymore?

Speaker 3 We look really cool while we're losing, you know?

Speaker 3 So, Bo himself later stated of his time in Vietnam, we got paid for bringing him back, dead or alive. We laid minds like sowing seeds.

Speaker 3 Among my greatest satisfactions in life, other than sex, was hearing the boom in the night. I'd turn over in my hammock after a boom and chuckle, got another one.

Speaker 3 Bull guy.

Speaker 3 Cool, God and sex. I'm glad he let us know that, you know?

Speaker 3 That's a bar, Bo. Thanks.
Thanks, Bo.

Speaker 3 So, no.

Speaker 3 When I make the joke that men used to go to war, I didn't mean this guy.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 3 unfortunately.

Speaker 3 Sophie, we've always been this. That's right.
Oh, I'm sorry. I mean, look.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Would I set landmines if I had landmines and the legal...

Speaker 3 Sure. Of course.
Who wouldn't want a couple of landmines, you know? Listen. Keep the raccoons out of your yard.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 Keep the chickens out of your yard. Keep the dogs.
Keep yourself out of your yard, you know? I draw the line at the dogs.

Speaker 3 Look, the great thing about landmines is they don't discriminate.

Speaker 3 And the thing is, you would only need just one dog. After that, the rest of the dogs are smart.

Speaker 3 The rest of them would know. See? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. This has been a paid sponsorship for the Coalition for Civilian Landmine Ownership.
You can find a donation bin up at the front. Also, spade a new to your dogs.
Yeah, spay a new to your dogs.

Speaker 3 Or let the landmine do it, you know?

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 we got so many more pages.

Speaker 3 Keep going.

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Speaker 3 The U.S. pulls out of Vietnam in 1973, and Bo transitions to commanding all U.S.

Speaker 3 all U.S. sports.
Bo transitions to commanding all U.S. Special Forces in Latin America, a job he held from 1975 to 1977.
And that's not like quite the peak of U.S.

Speaker 3 war crimes in Latin America, but it's not at like the low point, right? Like it's like the upper third of U.S. war crimes in Latin America, periods, I think we can say.

Speaker 3 So maybe take a drink there. We'll just assume, right? This is also flashy.
Assumed some fuckery in Costa Rica.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 He retired.

Speaker 3 He retires in 1979, although that was not quite the end of his time working for the U.S. government.
And this is a rare case where Bo is telling the truth and someone else is lying because the U.S.

Speaker 3 government says that was the end of him working for us. And Bo says, no, it wasn't.

Speaker 3 Because after the USSR invaded Afghanistan at the end of 1979, the State Department hired Bo to help train the Mujahideen. They flew Afghan fighters to Sandy Valley.
This is too close, man.

Speaker 3 Like,

Speaker 3 it's too close.

Speaker 3 They flew Afghan fighters to Sandy Valley, Nevada, where Bo taught them to use armor-piercing ammunition against Soviet vehicles carrying VIPs. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Speaker 3 If I'm getting, if I'm from Afghanistan,

Speaker 3 you better not fly me to Nevada.

Speaker 3 Come on.

Speaker 3 There has to have been one night where Bo and the Mujahideen all hit Fremont Street. You're right.
There has to have been one night where they're at the five hours. What is the lucky horseshoe?

Speaker 3 I land in Nevada and be like, this?

Speaker 3 They look like home. What did we?

Speaker 3 This? Yeah.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 3 the U.S. government denies that this happened, but Bo has footage of himself training a bunch of Afghan guys.
They're setting off explosives in the desert.

Speaker 3 So, I'm going to go with the government's lying here.

Speaker 3 Government would never lie. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Oh, Oh, Sophie. I have some bad news.
We'll talk about that behind stage.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 decades later, for a 2021 Mystery Wire interview, Bo would insist that the specific men he trained were among the very last holdouts

Speaker 3 resisting Taliban control after the Taliban,

Speaker 3 you know, won and stuff.

Speaker 3 And there's no way for me to know if that's true. I don't think he knows.
I don't think he kept track of names.

Speaker 3 He's certainly not emailing with, hey, you still doing okay up there? I think he just needed to tell himself that, or wanted to tell the news that, to sound cool.

Speaker 3 Anyway, another thing Bo needed to tell himself was that the U.S. government had left behind a huge number of his comrades in Vietnam.

Speaker 3 He would later claim, without any evidence that I've seen, that he was tasked by the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, with searching for POWs left behind after the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

Speaker 3 Now, if you've driven past a VA hall or a post office or some other government building or just a shitload of rural homes, you've probably seen at some point under a U.S.

Speaker 3 flag a weird black flag with a silhouette of a dude's face in front of a guard tower and the words POW/slash M-I-A, you are not forgotten on it, right?

Speaker 3 Most people you've seen, you're aware of these. We're about to talk about where this fucking flag comes from, right? Because this is our most conspiratorial flag in the United States.

Speaker 3 If that is a silhouette of Bo,

Speaker 3 I'm knocking this table over. There's a funny story for who silhouette that is.
I'm knocking all your drinks out of your hands

Speaker 3 if it's both.

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 the idea behind this flag is that there's a, and to this day, the people who fly it tend to believe that there's a shitload of U.S. servicemen still being held captive somewhere.
Right?

Speaker 3 Whereas less, they'd be like 80 now if they were

Speaker 3 from the Vietnam War, right?

Speaker 3 This is not true, and it wasn't true by the late 1970s, right?

Speaker 3 But belief in this conspiracy theory, that we'd left a bunch of guys behind and they were still in camps in Vietnam and we got to go rescue them, that became a widespread conspiratorial belief, largely due to Bogue Wrights.

Speaker 3 He is a huge, he's not the only one, but he is a major, major reason for that. Now, the flag itself that I just described was designed by a guy named Jeff Heisley in 1970.

Speaker 3 And when Jeff designs the flag, to be fair to Jeff, there were a bunch of U.S. POWs in North Vietnam.
We were still fighting a war, right? Of course there were POWs. That's how war works.

Speaker 3 The silhouette was based on a real guy, his son, who was 22 years old at the time and not a soldier.

Speaker 3 Now, he had tried to be a soldier, Jeff. Jerry, what? Jeff's son.
This is very funny.

Speaker 3 Jeff's son had been in officer candidate school for the Marine Corps, but he'd had to drop out because he caught hepatitis.

Speaker 3 So he was like sick and he lost like 40 pounds, so he looked like he was starving that.

Speaker 3 And Dan was like, hey, buddy, get on over here. I think your silhouette looks perfect for something.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 It's big, like, it's pretty big. It's big, like Michelangelo, like, Jesus statue energy.
It's giving like.

Speaker 3 And that's all over our country. It's all over.
Everywhere. Now, every time you see one of those flags, you'll know where they came from.

Speaker 3 So great. Fucking hepatitis awareness.

Speaker 3 so

Speaker 3 before nixons got elected we didn't use the terms pow slash mia right i mean the pow existed as a term but that was not what the military used officially the terms used were kia slash b and r which meant killed in action body not recovered right and these and this was the term for this was not the term for if we knew someone was a pow you'd call them a pow yeah this was the term for guys who disappeared and we don't know that they died

Speaker 3 we don't know what happened and most of these guys had, they'd just been, you know, they'd been blown up or something. There was not enough left to do a positive identity.

Speaker 3 Some small number probably just like went AWOL. Like every day.
You get a couple of weirdos who like just like there were a couple of guys in Korea who just like went to North Korea.

Speaker 3 Like that kind of stuff happened every now and then. And then some number of them, you assume, were captured and were, and this was happening at points in the Vietnam War and were being held, right?

Speaker 3 And the government just was not aware of their specific name, right?

Speaker 3 So that's what we used to call it. And it's worth emphasizing that prior to 1969, the U.S.
government, and specifically the Department of Defense, wanted to discourage any talk about U.S.

Speaker 3 servicemen being imprisoned by the enemy. This was not just a Vietnam thing.
This existed beforehand, but it really became heightened in Vietnam. And so when

Speaker 3 the military would tell someone that, like, hey, your kid or whatever is missing, they would also tell them, keep quiet about it. They might still be alive.
Don't tell anybody, right?

Speaker 3 Which is kind of a fucked up thing to do.

Speaker 3 Absolutely not, man. Like, what? That's really fucking crazy.

Speaker 3 Per an article in Time by Heath Lee, quote: If the women dared to discuss it, their government warned them the men might be badly treated or even executed.

Speaker 3 With this heavy burden to bear it, the women were supposed to go about their daily existence, telling no one what they were up against. Supposedly, this would help bring the men back home safely.

Speaker 3 The policy. Yeah, what is the how?

Speaker 3 This policy had been applied to prisoners and missing troops in previous wars and was one President Lyndon B. Johnson would adhere to during the Vietnam War.
The U.S.

Speaker 3 government tried to use its well-worn template of quiet diplomacy to reason with the North Vietnamese.

Speaker 3 Now, this is very fucked up, and you might think that it's a good thing that the Nixon administration changed course and like, well, at least now we're admitting like these guys are captured or missing, right?

Speaker 3 Like, that's an improvement over telling their families to lie, right?

Speaker 3 But this is Dick Nixon we're talking about. Oh, and hold on.

Speaker 3 This change was not made out of compassion. It was made for an even more fucked up reason.
As H.

Speaker 3 Bruce Franklin outlines in his book, MIA, Mythmaking in America, which is a great book about this exact subject, the Nixon administration changed courses because they wanted to get Americans to back a disastrous war, right?

Speaker 3 They wanted to build support for Vietnam, which was fading.

Speaker 3 And in May of 1969, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird admitted for the first time that some 1,300 Americans were MIA and as many as half might be POWs.

Speaker 3 And this is when the use of the term really changed.

Speaker 3 As Nathan Smith summarized in an article for The Outline, this transformed the war from a political issue into a humanitarian one, trading public support for sympathy.

Speaker 3 It didn't matter why we were there in the first place. Our boys were there.
And by God, we were going to do anything to get our boys home, right?

Speaker 3 So people are wondering why we're there.

Speaker 3 I feel like the,

Speaker 3 okay, far be it from me to try to tell the U.S. government how to do their branding and marketing pitches.

Speaker 3 I just feel like for you to tell me in a war I already didn't want to be in, now you admitting what we already knew, which is

Speaker 3 Earl's son ain't came home yet, while everybody else's son came home. So now you want to admit it, and you telling me that's a justification for yourself.

Speaker 3 I would be like, my gee, it sounded to me like we shouldn't have never fucking been there. Maybe my son would be home.
I'm sorry. No, problem.
I know you're angry.

Speaker 3 I know you're angry that all these people are dying and that we're fighting this war. But look, we have to keep fighting the war.

Speaker 3 Otherwise, the guys that we sent to the war might not come home from the war.

Speaker 3 Make no damn sense. See the logic.
There's a lot of logic there.

Speaker 3 Don't make no damn sense. I'm just saying maybe you should stop fighting the war.
We should have stopped. You can't be a prisoner of a war that ain't happening, sir.

Speaker 3 I bet if we left, they'd give the guys back. I bet you if we left

Speaker 3 anyway. Because they probably don't want to keep them.
I bet look at

Speaker 3 that winning them. And at this point, you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 the first group to prove how much money there is in this newly created conspiracy theory was a student organization, Viva, or Voices in Vital America, one of the worst acronyms I've ever encountered.

Speaker 3 Just as a heads up. Just fucking dog shit.

Speaker 3 Now, Viva started out selling nickel bracelets in the early 1970s with the names of missing servicemen engraved in them.

Speaker 3 Celebrities would buy one to be spotted supporting the troops and giving something back. Like Liam's Armstrong.
Yes, Liam Strong. Right, yes.
Liam Strong only pro-war. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Now, then the war ended, right? And Vietnam returned the prisoners they had because, you know,

Speaker 3 why would they keep these guys past a certain point? You know, there were negotiations, there were things they wanted.

Speaker 3 It doesn't happen immediately, but there's a congressional inquiry in 1976 to try and make sure, did we get everybody? Are there some guys left or not? Right? So this is nice of them to check.

Speaker 3 Right, you should double-check that. Did we leave a guy or two behind? It's like looking for your keys after you set up at the bar, you know.

Speaker 3 But like with 700 guys who got shot down for bombing Hanoi, you know? I'm pretty sure Vietnam would know, though. It was like, y'all see any white people?

Speaker 3 Look, do my friends always notice if I lose my wallet in their couch? Yeah. Pilots are a lot like that.
Listen.

Speaker 3 I'm just saying, go back into the prison and be like, hello. Hey, anybody here?

Speaker 12 Anybody here?

Speaker 3 Ain't nobody here, G? Like, I think we're good. I think we're good.
I don't know where they went after they left here. I'm just saying they're not here.
Right.

Speaker 3 So there's this inquiry in 1976, and Congress concludes

Speaker 3 there's not any guys still over there, right? There's no more U.S. POWs in Southeast Asia.

Speaker 3 But a certain number of Americans could not get over their rage at losing a war and refused to accept that the hundreds of men who were still missing in action were just dead, right?

Speaker 3 And not being kept in a secret prison camp. And when it comes to like the families, obviously, I don't blame like someone for like not wanting to believe their dad's dead or whatever.

Speaker 3 But on a societal level, this is just a delusion, you know?

Speaker 3 It's an open question as to whether or not Bogue Reitz ever believed there were hundreds, some said thousands of Americans still being held prisoner in Vietnam, or if he just saw it as fertile soil for a grift.

Speaker 3 Now, I'm inclined to believe the latter explains some of his logic that it's a grift, right?

Speaker 3 Because in the early 1980s, he starts traveling around and giving speeches about how there's all these guys left over there.

Speaker 3 My brothers are still behind the line being held by the North Vietnamese, and we've got to free them, right?

Speaker 3 And, you know, since the government's not going to do it, you know, they're corrupt, they're lazy, you know, and then the cowardly media has convinced everybody keeping troops in Vietnam is a bad idea.

Speaker 3 I'm going to bring them back. I'm going to put together a squad, a hard-nosed badass.
A gang, you might say. A gang, you might say.

Speaker 3 So that's the Rambo.

Speaker 3 That's the Rambo. I was like, please connect these dots.
So you got it.

Speaker 3 If you just give me some money, I'm totally going to put together a volunteer force of American veteran commandos, and we're going to return to Southeast Asia, and we'll find proof that Americans are still being held captive there.

Speaker 3 And that'll force the government to, I guess, reinvade Vietnam. Right?

Speaker 3 He just wants to commit more war.

Speaker 3 He just didn't get enough Vietnam, you know?

Speaker 3 It's the, again, like sometimes, you know, you go to the buffet, you don't get enough plates. You know, it's like that.
But with

Speaker 3 a buffet with you, you get enough plates. I didn't get enough plates.
Right.

Speaker 3 And I would argue the United States had more than enough Vietnam. Plenty of plates.

Speaker 3 Should have cut them off a while back.

Speaker 3 Shouldn't have even gone into that buffet.

Speaker 3 Golden morale at it. Right.

Speaker 3 Don't even go in.

Speaker 3 Bostarts touring. Some golden.
Is there golden corrals up here?

Speaker 3 Are there? No, no, no, no.

Speaker 3 Although, if you ever want to, I did this when I was like 22 years old and fucking coming down from a shitload of acid.

Speaker 3 Like, you and your equally young, equally coming down on acid friends coming to a Golden Corral at 6 in the morning because you haven't slept the night before, the looks you get from the Golden Corral regulars,

Speaker 3 beautiful, beautiful experience. I recommend it to everyone.
The show is not sponsored by Golden Corral, but maybe it should be. Yet.

Speaker 3 So, Bo starts touring the country. He starts guesting on different TV shows.
He starts speaking at churches and at veterans' organizations. He starts taking donations.
Why do we let them do this?

Speaker 3 How did he get to the TV? Stop him.

Speaker 3 But how did he get to the TV, though? Oh, because he's famous. Oh, because he's a famous TV.
He's a famous. He's won a bunch of awards.
He's a great Green Beret. Bo's like, yo.
And

Speaker 3 it sells, right, on TV. They're like, there's a bunch of men trapped, you know, your fellow citizens trapped, you know, and he's Bo is charismatic.
Was he a babe? Was he handsome?

Speaker 3 I would not say so, but that's an opinion that people can have or not have on their own. You know, it's not my job to tell you which war criminals are hot.
Yes, it is.

Speaker 3 I beg to differ.

Speaker 3 Literally, you're joking. Do I have a short list of really hot war criminals? Listen, at this point, were we at home, you would have pulled up some sort of picture

Speaker 3 that we would try to unspot.

Speaker 3 You cut that, you forced me to cut that 28-minute digression out of the pole pot episodes. So

Speaker 3 I don't know what to do. I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 Should have called it Pole Hot, am I right? Pole Hot.

Speaker 3 That's all, folks. Thank you so much, man.
Let's be there.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 3 So such low-hanging fruit. Like, how I never thought of that.
Yeah, after that, again, I did, though, kind of. I just stare around.

Speaker 3 Why? I don't know. It's been bothering me the entire time.

Speaker 3 Sorry, some of us remember, again, the troops.

Speaker 3 Just one.

Speaker 3 Well, because one part, one version of Riker was left behind after a transporter accident, which is how his transporter clone came to be. Yes.

Speaker 3 Some people know their history. Thank you.

Speaker 3 Oh, man. Clap for him.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 let's give a real big round of applause for the Riker that joined the McKee. There we go.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Big Reich.

Speaker 3 Oh.

Speaker 3 Okay. All right.
So

Speaker 3 Bo starts touring. He goes all around.
He's taking donations. He's given lots of interviews.
He's getting on TV all the time.

Speaker 3 And he's telling stories about his time in Vietnam to get like the saddest stories he has, right?

Speaker 3 Because the more emotional people are, the more willing they are to give him money for this stupid shit. And his favorite go-to story is the tale of a real guy, Sergeant George Hoagland.

Speaker 3 George was a Green Beret, a comrade, who Greitz said had been wounded during an ambush.

Speaker 3 And so Greit says, you know, Hoagland gets wounded, and me and some other guys, we have to run back and we're trying to rescue him, right?

Speaker 3 And Hoagland, being such a hero, realizes that his teammates are going to die in this ambush if they try to save him.

Speaker 3 And so, in an act of utter selflessness, Hoagland puts his own AR-15 to his head and, quote, pulled the trigger, eliminating the need for us to be there. That's what Bo says.
Now, this would

Speaker 3 certainly be a shocking and sobering story of sacrifice, if any of it were even slightly true.

Speaker 3 Now, the problem is, Bo has chosen to lie about a real dude who really died and who he had not served with, but other guys had.

Speaker 3 Most of the press,

Speaker 3 for a long time, he gets away with this, because most journalists are like, well, he's a Green Beret. I must be telling the truth.
He wouldn't lie about another Green Beret. That'd be fucked up.

Speaker 3 Thankfully, the Washington Post was still the real newspaper back in the 80s. And Art Harris,

Speaker 3 Art Harris, reached out to Chuck Heiner, who was one of two members of Hoagland's squad who survived the actual ambush that killed Hoagland.

Speaker 3 And Heiner claimed,

Speaker 3 Greites wasn't even on that goddamn team. I was with George when he died.
He just got blown away. Must have taken 150 rounds.

Speaker 3 Very dead. Damn.
Yeah, that's a lot of dead.

Speaker 3 They were not. Not even that shit at all.
They were not taking chance. Yeah, right.
That's pretty bad. Now, this is the kind of lie that shouldn't have even taken an interview to bust.

Speaker 3 My first thing would have been like, wait, so this guy got wounded and then he shot himself in the head with an AR-15?

Speaker 3 Like, for one thing, they usually have like pistols, right?

Speaker 3 Seems a little overdose.

Speaker 3 It's just weird that he'd lie about this specifically, right?

Speaker 3 And I think the weird thing is... Because like, why? You have to...
That's a real story.

Speaker 3 That's such good stories already. Because men lie.
Men lie. Well, yeah,

Speaker 3 and Bo is a compulsive liar, right? Like, he's someone who absolutely cannot control it. And what matters most to him isn't the truth.

Speaker 3 It's continuing to live as if he were a movie protagonist long after he'd gotten too old and slow to continue shooting people for the government. Now, folks, we're going to continue this story.

Speaker 3 Don't you worry. And we're going to continue and conclude with a Q ⁇ A to let you guys ask some questions and whatnot.
But we're going to take an intermission because that's a thing that we do here.

Speaker 3 So go get yourself a drink, use the restroom, buy some t-shirts. There's merch, t-shirts, stickers, merch to support the Portland Defense Fund.

Speaker 3 And then in a couple of minutes, we will come back and we will learn more about Bog Reitz, who I think is going to become a good guy by the end of this.

Speaker 3 I don't remember the remaining five pages of the script, but I think it's a good thing. I think that it's a Christmas episode.
Who knew? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 1 For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/slash youtube.com/slash at behind the bastards.

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