Episode 387 - The Battle of Ap Bac

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Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me is Tom.
Together, we bring you the newest adventure to hit Shonen Jump, Midwestern One Piece.

Speaker 1 Join Captain Marky DeLumpy and his infamous crew known as the Juggalo Pirates as they traverse a post-apocalyptic version of Michigan in their junked-ass Buick Skylark.

Speaker 1 They'll go up against nefarious pirate crews like that of Captain Buggy Eyed and the Copperwire Clown Pirates.

Speaker 1 And not to mention, the police, all of whom are battling over the Shangri-La Line to get their hands on the true One Piece, the last known 80 milligram pill of OxyContin. How you doing, buddy?

Speaker 1 I'm very much enjoying the

Speaker 1 subtle tones of what I'm now calling lines led by donkeys after dark, aka recording after 4 p.m. in the winter.
Yep. That is correct.

Speaker 1 It is not only dark at 4 p.m., we have a horrible windstorm going on. Yeah, it's pretty windy over here, too.

Speaker 1 It's one of the few times they actually go and give us a warning ahead of time, like 125 kilometer an hour winds. And I was walking back from the gym and it nearly took me off my feet.

Speaker 1 I have no idea how people smile at myself for managing it. There's bicycles going by like tumbleweeds.

Speaker 1 You would be fucking flying through the air like a fucking javelin.

Speaker 1 I have to say, I wrote this intro because I have been reading One Piece.

Speaker 1 I have to admit, I'm coming clean. I'm not watching watching it.
There's no way I'm watching a thousand episodes of anything. I feel like I can read it on my phone while I'm taking a dump or whatever.

Speaker 1 And I was doing cardio the other day, walking on the incline treadmill at like 15 degrees elevation, or I don't know if it's 16 degrees, but it jacked up to 15 and the speed at like five.

Speaker 1 And for some reason, my mind slipped to the concept of Midwestern One Piece. And I had originally envisioned this as like a kind of radio play.

Speaker 1 And then after discussing it with you and a few other people, like, no, Shonen Jump will sue you into oblivion if you do this. Yeah, so I think this is as good as we can get.

Speaker 1 The only people who are more litigious than fucking Bandai Namco are Shona Jump. If you don't put some respect on Disney's name, they will just come and cut your hands off.

Speaker 1 Shonen Jump is going to deploy the Goku death squads.

Speaker 1 But instead of

Speaker 1 Kamehameha, they're just going to throw a grenade through your window.

Speaker 1 Goku's going to come in. He's going to eat all of your food in a thousand small plates and then roll a grenade into your bedroom as you sleep.

Speaker 1 The police are just going to see the trail of the Nimbus cloud going into the sky. You just roll over in bed.
It's like,

Speaker 1 is someone in the kitchen?

Speaker 1 I can hear the fridge. What's going on? And

Speaker 1 you just hear the clink of a grenade roll under the door. Goku does the two-finger salute as he like runs out the door to his illegally parked Nimbus clout.

Speaker 1 There's just a cop outside riding him a ticky for his cloud.

Speaker 1 The hand halving is going to find Goku.

Speaker 1 Who will win? The Goku death, the Shonen Jump Goku Death Squad or the broccoli-haired 19-year-old police officer.

Speaker 1 Oh, God. Tom, I've brought you here today because we're going to talk about the Vietnam War.
Yes. I have no good segue into that.

Speaker 1 I guess much like One Piece, the Vietnam War lasted far longer than it needed to.

Speaker 1 I'm going to Vietnam next year and I'm so excited because I'm going to North Vietnam and I was like, can't wait to do all this shit and be like, I remember what happened here.

Speaker 1 I remember what happened here. I can't wait to go to the jungle and fire two AK-47s at the same time.
Remember to climb into nearby holes and scare old American men.

Speaker 1 Making random ounks shoot poison by popping out of a tunnel

Speaker 1 in honor of North Vietnamese comrade Janet Jackson. My rap name is Flashback Old Man.

Speaker 1 Today's episode brings us to the Vietnam War.

Speaker 1 However, not in the era of your shitty, weird, racist father or grandfathers being drafted, painting peace signs on their helmets and getting addicted to heroin.

Speaker 1 Rather, we're going to go back to the very beginning of America's direct involvement, a time when the U.S.

Speaker 1 thought empowering a Catholic nationalist and sending a few advisors to oversee everything might defeat that whole specter of communism in Southeast Asia and you know, the domino effect and all that other dumb shit they were worried about.

Speaker 1 Definitely one of like the dickhead grandsons of the Sacklers got drafted for Vietnam. When he was over there, just saw all the soldiers addicted to heroin.
He's like, I have an idea.

Speaker 1 What if we did this to everyone?

Speaker 1 Instead of domestic Gladio, we're just doing domestic Vietnam War soldiers addicted to heroin. That's right.

Speaker 1 Today, we're talking about a battle that has long since been forgotten due to, you know, everything that comes after it. But it's largely to blame for America's rapid escalation in the region.

Speaker 1 the Battle of Ap Bok. I would ask if you've ever heard of this, but the answer to that for 99% of people is probably no.

Speaker 1 This is not the Battle of Way City.

Speaker 1 It's not, you know, Rolling Thunder. It's none of the shit anybody ever talks about when they talk about the Vietnam War.
Yeah, like I'm a big fan of the Vietnam War. No, not the later stuff.

Speaker 1 I'm much more of a fan of Ho Chi Minh's early work.

Speaker 1 So is my grandfather.

Speaker 1 Look, for new listeners of the show who maybe don't know that bit of Joe lore, my grandfather was in the French Foreign Legion and fought at the Battle of Dienbian Phu and was captured and regretfully survived the death march.

Speaker 1 Ho Chi Minh, my man, you missed one.

Speaker 1 Wonder if your grandfather has like very strong opinions on the appropriate condiments for bon means.

Speaker 1 He probably has more strong opinions on how exactly to decorate an ear necklace. Yeah, you're evil.
Your grandfather's the real-life Cotton Hill.

Speaker 1 He is more like, you know, have you ever seen the really, really bad version of the first Wolverine movie they made with the really, really shitty version of Deadpool in it?

Speaker 1 You know, in the beginning when it shows Wolverine running through war after war after war,

Speaker 1 that's just my grandfather, but an immortal timeline. Yeah, when your grandfather says, that's how I kill Finny Man, he really means it.

Speaker 1 The main difference between Cotton Hill and my grandfather is... Your grandfather still has his shins?

Speaker 1 Yeah, that is well. I have not spoken to my grandfather in probably 20 years, but I do remember him using a lot more slurs.

Speaker 1 He's a horrible, horrible old man.

Speaker 1 But in order to talk about the battle of At-Bok, we have to first knock over some dominoes of context.

Speaker 1 I'm not proud of that one. I had to do it.

Speaker 1 First off, American involvement in Vietnam began before the French were even finished getting their teeth kicked in. The U.S.

Speaker 1 directly supported French forces, though not quite at a level that the American military establishment who really wanted to go all in in the 50s really wanted to.

Speaker 1 There was various different shades of this. A lot of military people, government people, kind of thought that, well, that's France's problem.
That's their fuck up. Let them deal with it.

Speaker 1 There was another segment that was like, no, we absolutely need to help them. And that one kind of won out

Speaker 1 in between the two because the U.S. helped, but it wasn't as much as the French wanted.
It wasn't as much as the hardcore Americans wanted.

Speaker 1 And then there was the true psycho set that wanted to nuke Vietnam to relieve the battle of the NBN Phu. That was something that was legitimately considered.

Speaker 1 Which is an issue. Like, we'll talk about this more because we're eventually going to talk about the Battle of Diambien Phu in a long series down the road at some point.

Speaker 1 Maybe next year, maybe the Euro FF. I'm not entirely sure.
But remember, France wasn't invading Vietnam at the time.

Speaker 1 That was a colonial holding, which, of course, that means they invaded at a time before that. I understand that.
But the goal was to hold on to Vietnam.

Speaker 1 And at some point, they're like, what if we nuke it while we're still here?

Speaker 1 Yeah, just shoot yourself in the dick, like geographically, politically, militarily.

Speaker 1 I don't think the French have the capacity in the like late 50s to build a nuclear bomb. Actually, you are right.

Speaker 1 France did not have their first nuclear weapon until 1960.

Speaker 1 The first successful test, which is why they were like, hey, America, first it was like, let's deploy strategic bombers. And then America mostly did more of an airlift capacity.

Speaker 1 But it was the Americans who were like, why don't we just nuke it? Because this was the era of kind of wanting to use nukes for everything. Yeah, this is the 50s.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 There were very few problems that could not be solved with applying a little mushroom cloud to it.

Speaker 1 The thing with nuclear weapons feels like a redundant thing to say, but like part of the reason why, you know, the nuclear bomb in Japan was so effective in an actual kind of environmental way was that it was an island separated from other parts of East Asia.

Speaker 1 If you drop a bomb in Vietnam, you're creating a crater the whole way to Laos.

Speaker 1 And, you know, not to mention, not going into the ethics and the morality. Yes, obviously.

Speaker 1 But, you know, they purposefully targeted Hiroshima and Nagasaki because they were two urban centers that had been spared a lot of the horrific bombing campaign that the US and other allies already visited upon Japan.

Speaker 1 So, where are you going to nuke in Vietnam in support of the French currently fighting Dienbian Phu? This is such a stupid fucking question.

Speaker 1 Also, a huge problem of dropping a nuke in Vietnam is, do you know who's just on the northern border of Vietnam? Right. China.
Exactly. Yeah.
Like, what are you going to do? Nuke northern Vietnam?

Speaker 1 Good idea.

Speaker 1 Remember, the U.S. and China had just fought.
Yep. In the Korean War.
There's a new guy in charge as well. His name is

Speaker 1 Mao something.

Speaker 1 I'm sure he'd be pretty chill with that. It's not like they're doing this, some sort of like magnificent jump ahead or a great leap forward, maybe.
Yeah, known for their leaping.

Speaker 1 Never has caused any issues.

Speaker 1 But, you know, spoiler alert, eventually France loses. The two Vietnams are partitioned, which was supposed to be temporary, as all partitions are meant to be.
with elections to come in 1956.

Speaker 1 In the meantime, France also just kind of gives up its footprint in South Vietnam to the United States.

Speaker 1 That's because the whole concept of Indo-China as a colonial holding becomes wildly unpopular in the French metropole, you know, due to the crippling losses that they're suffering.

Speaker 1 France is only, you know, a couple of years removed from Nazi occupation. They're not exactly geared up for a long war.
These losses hurt. It's very unpopular.
So the U.S.

Speaker 1 takes over from French advisors to train what were pro-French forces in the South. At the time, Vietnam was supposed to actually be a constitutional monarchy under Emperor Bao Dai.

Speaker 1 He was in exile during a lot of this.

Speaker 1 He never really does much, with a hypothetically, kind of sort of, but not really elected leader under him. And that was the anti-communist Catholic nationalists, No Dinh Diem.

Speaker 1 We've talked about Diem before, but he was anti-French, anti-monarchy, and and a religious and ethnic minority within Vietnam. In short, he was an absolutely terrible choice.

Speaker 1 And everyone in France and everyone in the United States really doubted his ability to be able to bring a front that could unify Vietnam.

Speaker 1 Because remember, all these groups technically support these coming elections. Diem does at first, at least he says he does.
The US does. France does, because they're hoping, well, we'll pick our guy.

Speaker 1 He'll win everybody over, of course. And then in an election, everyone's going to vote for our guy.
Now, that's not what happened. No, you can just hear the

Speaker 1 over the border. You can hear the internationale being sung in Cantonese and Mandarin.

Speaker 1 Like, fuck. Yeah, like, at some point, maybe we'll go into more of what exactly happens here,

Speaker 1 how this all plays out.

Speaker 1 But in short, the Communist Party of Vietnam, which is, of course, going to become North Vietnam, but not really, because the Communist Party of Vietnam is never split between the North and the South because that would require, you know, acknowledging the South's legal right to exist.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 it was seen as the saviors and the heroes of Vietnam. They fought the French.
They defeated the French. They were the main anti-Japanese guerrilla force.
They are heroes.

Speaker 1 So when suddenly the general populace has to choose between the liberation heroes or some fucking guy who is insane. They're going to pick the people they see as heroes.

Speaker 1 Not to mention all of the things that the communists are rolling out are obviously going to benefit your average Vietnamese person.

Speaker 1 Land reform, agrarian economic reform, job reform, equality for the first time, because obviously the French empowered Catholics who are a minority in Vietnam.

Speaker 1 And the communists are saying, we're going to get rid of that.

Speaker 1 If I'm a common Vietnamese guy who doesn't give a shit about politics, I'm still voting for that guy.

Speaker 1 This is an easy fucking mathematical equation here. Yeah, it didn't really help that No Din Diem had like hundreds of American dollars falling out of his pockets at all points.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the man is hilariously corrupt. He might be one of the most corrupt people we've ever talked about on the show.
And South Vietnam itself was one of the most corrupt nations to ever exist.

Speaker 1 in modern history. It is truly impressive, the level of corruption going on there.

Speaker 1 Now, Diem being an ethnic and religious minority ends up leading to coup plots, and then that results in brutal crackdowns by Diem against them.

Speaker 1 A lot of these coups were by pro-French elements of the South Vietnamese establishment supported by the French. Now, sometimes the U.S.

Speaker 1 knew about them and just decided not to tell Diem, and I guess kind of... Fair game to the French.
Give it your shot. Other times they warned him ahead of time.
The U.S. was not sold on this guy.

Speaker 1 Obviously, famously, JFK really liked him at first because he's Catholic. They're both Catholic.
They can bond over that.

Speaker 1 But the United States in general at the time, and arguably even now, is suspicious of Catholic leaders.

Speaker 1 The US is not a Catholic nation by any stretch of the imagination, and they always kind of see them as untrustworthy because they're going to be a Vatican puppet.

Speaker 1 Like, even when Joe Biden was president, people said the same shit, which is wild. And when JFK was president, that was one of the main arguments against him.

Speaker 1 And the American establishment is saying the same thing about Diem when his Catholicism is literally the least of his concerns. I, President Diem, do you like potatoes?

Speaker 1 At this period in time, it is a competition between Alan Dulles and Henry Kissinger of who is going to absolutely rub the foreskin raw off themselves at the thought of bombing Southeast Asia.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that is true.

Speaker 1 And, you know,

Speaker 1 there's other monsters at play early in the time on the ground who are just

Speaker 1 an absolute hall of monsters.

Speaker 1 Diem was as convinced as his handlers that he was almost certainly going to lose the elections to the communists.

Speaker 1 He was paranoid, a little nuts, insanely corrupt, but he wasn't deluded into thinking he was going to win.

Speaker 1 This was paired with the intense distrust towards people outside of his ethnic and religious group.

Speaker 1 So he began began to replace the leadership in villages, towns, cities, virtually every level of southern Vietnam with his guys.

Speaker 1 The only people he could trust, Vietnam's Catholics, which are a very small minority. This alienates virtually everyone else.

Speaker 1 People probably remember famously pictures of monks burning themselves alive. He cracks down on Buddhists hard as fuck, which is the religious majority.

Speaker 1 He cracks down on animists who are another religion. He cracks down everyone who isn't Catholic, which is like 95% of the population.

Speaker 1 Of course, the monks burning themselves and everything comes much later, but this is all same guy.

Speaker 1 And then by 1955, Diem simply refuses to take part in any ongoing talks that were supposed to lay out exactly how these elections in 1956 were going to work and how the resulting reunification would look like.

Speaker 1 When he was criticized by his supporters and his I say supporters, but I mean his handlers, like the United States or France, he simply shrugged and said, well, my government didn't sign that agreement.

Speaker 1 Yours did, so I see no point of taking part in it. Which, solid burn, honestly.
Yes, that agreement brought me to power, but I see no reason to follow it because I didn't sign it.

Speaker 1 And Diem hitting him with the fuck you mean?

Speaker 1 New corded phone, who does. Then Diem held a referendum about the future of the government.
Was South Vietnam going to be a republic or a monarchy in 1955?

Speaker 1 The referendum was insanely corrupt, something that would become a hallmark of South Vietnamese government. Diem won with 98% of the vote.
98%, always solid. You never want to go 99 or 100.

Speaker 1 That's suspicious. 98.
Good. Yeah, so I love when someone wins an election with up to five standard deviations away from the mean

Speaker 1 of a majority. This is fucking great.
Nothing happened here. I will say, normally when people...
cook up fake elections, they do try to make them look somewhat believable.

Speaker 1 DM didn't give a single solid fuck. Like some cities were reporting that, like, hundreds of thousands of people, more than their actual population, had voted.

Speaker 1 Like, by the time the final votes were tabulated in South Vietnam, if they were to be believed, their population would have grown by like a million.

Speaker 1 So, not even a single attempt to make this look at all legitimate. Yeah.

Speaker 1 After this, the Republic of South Vietnam was officially, brackets, temporarily created, breaking all attempts to peacefully unify Vietnam.

Speaker 1 Afterwards, he withdraws from the French Union, which was, you know, that thing that encompassed French colonial territories.

Speaker 1 He also breaks economic ties with France, but this is more of a performative thing because even though he says he's going to break economic ties and show that he is the Catholic, nationalist, anti-imperialist hero of the South, which that's a sentence I just said.

Speaker 1 That's just going to be the next president of America. That's JD Bons.

Speaker 1 He's not from the South. He's from Ohio.
Yeah, true. I know he tried to lie in like, did he lie? He says he's from Kentucky or something.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 His family, from my understanding, is from Appalachia, but he is not. He would go and visit them from time to time.
Yeah. Listen, Alexa, bring up

Speaker 1 that his ma should have sold him for a box of perk 30s. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Even through all of this, France would remain. South Vietnam's number one trading partner up until like the 70s, which is the end of the South Vietnam pretty much.

Speaker 1 And it was only the United States, really.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is for anyone who's interested, a lot of post-colonial history, if you look at when countries say like that were under the control of France or in the British Commonwealth post-independence, quite often they rely on trade with the original colonizer because though that like trade infrastructure already exists and it's easy.

Speaker 1 to rely on as you transition into more independent trade with your neighbors, etc. Yeah, there's really not much you have have to do to keep that pipeline open, obviously, by design.

Speaker 1 It's in everybody's best interest, but most importantly, the colonial, former colonial powers' best interest to keep that going, because most of those trade deals are obviously quite unfair.

Speaker 1 It's all bad.

Speaker 1 Diem's total victory and the consolidation of power was seen as a complete rejection of France as the dominant power in the country and for the U.S., even if they hated the guy, again, generally distrusted Catholics and at first supported the 1956 elections.

Speaker 1 But when Diem was like, I'm not fucking doing it, the U.S. really didn't push back too hard.
They're like, okay, fine. This is still a dub for us.

Speaker 1 You know, our guys in charge of the South, we're good.

Speaker 1 With the Independence Declaration and total rejection of the unification plan by the South, that left the North under Ho Chi Minh to figure out what they were going to do to move forward.

Speaker 1 Or as I like to call him, Big Hoach.

Speaker 1 Big Hoach. That's what his friends say.
South Vietnamese are fucking around with Big Hoach up in the north. And let me tell you one thing, brother.
You don't want to fuck around with Big Hoach.

Speaker 1 Randy Chi Minh. Yeah.

Speaker 1 No, North Vietnam. I'm suffering from Hoachamania.

Speaker 1 Hochamania is going to run wild down the trail. I am a real

Speaker 1 Vietnamese man.

Speaker 1 He literally fought for the right of every man. So, you know.
He did. Ho Chi Minh did.
And famously, well, infamously, I should say, the U.S.

Speaker 1 fumbled the bag harder than anybody in the situation because ho chi min only became a communist when the u.s told him to go fuck himself

Speaker 1 i mean listen ho chi min has a better uh war record than the u.s post-world war ii so uncle ho didn't want to plan a full invasion of the south for entirely practical reasons he was surprised that the north's friends namely china and the soviet union Obviously, China and Vietnam were, for lack of a better term, friends of convenience.

Speaker 1 They fucking hated each other. But he thought it was kind of weird that they seemed kind of okay with Vietnam being split in half because they told them that they would never let it happen.

Speaker 1 But then they did. He was worried about the ability of the North to go to war once again.
After all, the war against France had just ended and the North had taken a serious kicking in it.

Speaker 1 Despite the fact that they won, they obviously lost a lot of guys, a lot of damage had been done, and not all of it had been repaired yet. They were worried about provoking the U.S.

Speaker 1 into getting fully involved with the South directly if he ordered a conventional invasion.

Speaker 1 However, the Vietnamese Communist Party, which again, like I said, not split between the North and the South, had cadres in the South. And they said, what the fuck are we supposed to do?

Speaker 1 What do you want us to do? They were chilling with the plan of, we'll hang out until 1956. The elections are going to be held.
Obviously, we're going to win. And then all of this is going to be over.

Speaker 1 But now they were kind of in limbo. Amongst the southern communists, there were veterans of the Viet Minh, the soldiers who had fought France.

Speaker 1 And they were not strangers to being fucked over by an imperial power.

Speaker 1 They had a backup plan, and they had stashed weapons and ammo all over the south, with the plan to launch a guerrilla campaign against the southerners if reunification failed.

Speaker 1 Now they're just kind of waiting for the green light from the north.

Speaker 1 Lei Zuan, one of the top southern communists, went to Hanoi and begged them to authorize an armed campaign in the south, owing to the fact that, according to Zuan, that the south fucking hated hated Diem.

Speaker 1 Anti-Diem sentiment was insanely high. There were riots, protests, coup attempts.

Speaker 1 The South was not stable by any stretch of the imagination, so Lei Zhuan was like, we can just kind of like kick the whole kick in the front door and the whole rotten structure comes down, but you need to let us do it.

Speaker 1 So that's exactly what Ho Chi Minh did. Soon afterwards, the Viet Minh grabbed their weapons and began their guerrilla campaign.

Speaker 1 Diem in turn triggered a massive anti-communist purge across the rural areas against anyone who might look a little communist-y.

Speaker 1 Much of this happened in the Mekong Delta region, and this purge was brutal.

Speaker 1 Despite these horrible acts of violence and the fact that the South had an entire infantry division stationed there, virtually the entire Delta was run by a shadow government made up of different Viet Minh cells who are now calling themselves the National Salvation Movement, more commonly known as the Viet Cong.

Speaker 1 But the Delta was perfect for the VC to survive and thrive. The train was harsh.
It was was rice paddies, swamps, jungles.

Speaker 1 But the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the South, otherwise known as the Arvin, who, yes, Nate and I did a whole bit about Arvin and the Chipmunk. Sounds like a fucking team who ass bootleg.

Speaker 1 We get it.

Speaker 1 We've done this before. We remember.
Yeah, yeah. Everybody remembers Arvin and the Ferrets, except me, I guess, because Marvin and the Chipmunks.

Speaker 1 Now, Arvin, the South's military, was scoring victory after victory in the Delta region.

Speaker 1 The Arvin 7th Division under the command of Colonel Hue Van Cao was winning every fight they had against the Viet Cong.

Speaker 1 Oftentimes, Cao's victories were so lopsided and made the Vietnamese and the American planners think that the Viet Cong's uprising was not long for this world.

Speaker 1 A lot of these victories are thanks to new weapons brought into the conflict by the United States and given over to their Arvin counterparts.

Speaker 1 namely armored personnel carriers like the M113 and helicopters, which were piloted by Americans while southern crews underwent training.

Speaker 1 Two things that the Viet Cong were not equipped to deal with this early in the conflict.

Speaker 1 By 1962, the 7th was earning one hell of a reputation and Cao was a favorite of Diem for giving him the victories he needed.

Speaker 1 Or, that's what Colonel Cow would want you to believe because all of that is complete bullshit.

Speaker 1 In reality, the 7th and Cow were a perfect representation of all of the problems that South Vietnam and the U.S. would have in the years to come.

Speaker 1 For starters, Cao was not given command in the seventh because he was actually qualified. Diem was paranoid and worried about more coups, which, to be honest, he probably should have been.

Speaker 1 He was pissing everyone off. There's a

Speaker 1 small group of maybe about 20 Americans in southern Vietnam belonging to a group called the OSS he should have really paid attention to.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's gonna bite him in the ass in about a couple months.

Speaker 1 Like I said, there's constant protests. There's already been military coups against him.
He might be paranoid, but he's not entirely wrong at this part.

Speaker 1 However, his reaction to it ends up being a bit of a problem. So, instead of appointing someone who was good at his job, he appointed Cao, who, like Diem, was a Catholic from Hui City.

Speaker 1 And as American military planners in the Military Assistance Command Vietnam, or MAC-V, were discovering, Diem didn't see the Delta as a strategic military region or a key to ending the uprising, a place that needed to be controlled.

Speaker 1 Rather, he saw it as a little more of a military posting that was only 40 miles away from Saigon, therefore a threat to his rule should the commanders there not be one of his men.

Speaker 1 Like, if he's not my guy, he could turn that whole division and march on Saigon. So he's more worried about his own division than the VC.
Yep. I mean, justifiably self, to be honest.

Speaker 1 I mean, yeah, I mean, sometimes the paranoid dictator isn't entirely wrong, unfortunately. Another side effect of Diem's paranoia was the constant hamstringing of military command.

Speaker 1 The 7th commanders did not answer to Cao. Not directly, anyway.
Because this is a counter-insurgency, command was province-based. Each of these province commanders commanded battalions.

Speaker 1 They would answer and report directly to Diem in Saigon, rather than Cao, their direct divisional commander. And Cao could not give them direct orders.

Speaker 1 Instead, for any combat command, the head of of state would have to act as a middleman in a game of political and military telephone.

Speaker 1 I have legitimately never seen a more fucked up command structure in all of my years of researching military history. Yeah, it's like really stupid.

Speaker 1 And it's also as well, like, you know, the conflict with the Viet Cong, both in terms of like the Americans conflict and the South Vietnamese, is, you know, the defining moment of like kind of 20th century guerrilla warfare, but also like the foundations for like insurgency and every single person is about to make the worst decision possible yes i've rarely seen because this is early in the war right i have rarely seen a entire military institution start off with one hp you know

Speaker 1 yeah they got the magic pixel and it's just gonna mean like ho chi min just breathes in their direction and they just fall over Multiple different, you know,

Speaker 1 multi-billion dollar American arms manufacturers trying desperately to invent the Phoenix down.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you're just like posting the coughing baby versus nuclear bomb meme instead of the fucking coughing baby. It's just 200 North Vietnamese guys in the jungle.

Speaker 1 I don't want to get into how that is inaccurate, but I'll let it stand. Okay.
People don't give enough credit to the VC or the North Vietnamese.

Speaker 1 It's oftentimes they're framed as like, you know, farmers in sandals with older rest-to-day.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they were regulars. And then the North Vietnamese had artillery support.
They had an Air Force. They had a Navy.
Your average group of VC, your experience may vary.

Speaker 1 Some of those dudes were quite desperate, but they were all trained. They had basic training.
They had decent weapon systems.

Speaker 1 Many times those weapon systems were better than their American counterparts, especially in the early times when the U.S. was given the first batches of M16s.
We did an episode on that.

Speaker 1 Go listen to it. It's from a few years ago.
I think people need to give North Vietnam more respect. That's my take.
They whooped the U.S.'s asses in a straight-up fight.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I said there were 200 guys in the jungle. I didn't say how well trained they were.

Speaker 1 That's just me reading out a fucking direct report said to Alan Dulles.

Speaker 1 Obviously, this whole system sets up everyone in the South for failure. Cow, even if he was competent, would not be able to command effectively like that.

Speaker 1 And since Cow was a political loyalist and was, in fact, not competent, he needed to keep Diem happy, making the situation worse.

Speaker 1 So to do that, he reported battles that never happened, numbers of dead Viet Cong that were just mathematically impossible, and virtually no casualties of his own.

Speaker 1 The last part was because of a previous coup attempt led by Vietnamese paratroopers. They were pissed off that Diem's stupid battle plans before this were leading to insanely high casualties.

Speaker 1 Diem, to remedy this, began to punish commanders who suffered anything he personally considered a high amount of losses, which was pretty much anything.

Speaker 1 To protect themselves, Arvind commanders simply stopped fighting, worried that one wrong move would lead to incoming casualties, and therefore ending their career.

Speaker 1 Or sometimes worse, sometimes they weren't just fired. They'd go to prison or just be executed.

Speaker 1 Another problem was, again, Thanks to paranoia, any military commander who wasn't necessarily a DM loyalist, by his definition, mind you, that managed to overperform would get headlines in the South Vietnamese media.

Speaker 1 Diem would see this as a threat. So Diem created the strangest feedback loop in military history.

Speaker 1 Commanders who couldn't command promoted things to loyalty, and commanders who could command, but were too scared to do their job and thought that if they did do their job, it'd be a threat to their boss.

Speaker 1 But both of these men were also too afraid to command to take losses. These two strands looped back around together to mean Diem create a military that could not function.

Speaker 1 But what about the common Arvin soldier? They get a horrible reputation. And I'm always here on the show talking about this shit is not the soldier's fault.
And this is another case of that.

Speaker 1 Your regular Arvin guy, not political. It's just a normal, everyday South Vietnamese dude, right? By all accounts, they're motivated to fight.

Speaker 1 Being a soldier in any branch of the South's military brought a huge amount of benefits. It brought social prestige.
It created promotions in everyday life.

Speaker 1 It was a good way for a very poor person without any, you know, possibility of climbing up the social ladder to do it. Thankfully, that doesn't happen anymore.

Speaker 1 It's like South Vietnam rarely needed to do conscription because so many people people would volunteer. That's how appealing this was.
So these people wanted this job.

Speaker 1 They were committed to, if you want to call it, the South Vietnamese project, though that meant very little to them, honestly.

Speaker 1 Economic privation is an incredible recruiting tactic. It sure is, Tom.

Speaker 1 But again, their commanders failed them because this system was one that ran on failure.

Speaker 1 Cow was so worried about putting his men into U.S.-led training programs, which was the whole reason Americans were even there at this point, because of two reasons.

Speaker 1 One, it would make him look weak to give his men over to American command if he had political enemies, which of course, all of these very political officers within Diem's inner circle are constantly backstabbing and fighting with each other.

Speaker 1 You could not show your ass to them, even if... Showing your ass means teaching your soldiers how to fire a rifle.
Teaching your soldiers how to show their ass. That's right.

Speaker 1 That's also very important from personal experience. And then another part was casualties can occur in training.
They are unfortunately commonplace.

Speaker 1 If you get a couple hundred dudes together with loaded weapons and have them run through the woods, someone's going to get hurt. It's a sad fact.
It still is to this day.

Speaker 1 No matter how safe your training is, someone is going to get hurt. But that meant that he just did not take part in any of this.
So despite the U.S.

Speaker 1 dumping tons of money and weapons on the seventh, they were almost entirely untrained with soldiers not even being able to use their rifles and in many cases, just leaving them out to rust.

Speaker 1 The American advisor tasked with working with Cow was a guy named Colonel John Paul Vann.

Speaker 1 He was being driven mad trying to get the fucker to do anything other than using his forces to attack Viet Cong formations that were tiny.

Speaker 1 Like he would deploy battalions to fight 10 guys because he knew he would win with very little fighting. Yeah.
And then, of course, he would report that he killed 100 men, not 10.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? Like that, this was very commonplace. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Van tried to warn Cow that while his soldiers were winning these lopsided victories against small bands of VC, it was only because they were catching him by surprise.

Speaker 1 They had more weapons and better weapons than them at this point.

Speaker 1 And if his soldiers didn't train, get better, And if he didn't launch bigger attacks to really root out this guerrilla campaign in the region, and this is a side note here, this wouldn't have worked.

Speaker 1 Counterinsurgency never works.

Speaker 1 But hypothetically, if it was going to work, they would need to train to be able to do these things because it was only a matter of time before the VC learned how to counter their weapon systems.

Speaker 1 Vann was not a dumb guy. He may have been kind of evil, but as far as American leaders in Vietnam goes, John Paul Vann is about as good as it gets.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 he's not stupid and he realizes that like you're kind of trying to fight this asymmetrical war with a kind of like formal army against people who like essentially aren't playing by the rules. Right.

Speaker 1 And not to mention, there's other problems that they're going to have as well. Van warned Cow that the way that the Arvin fought was a problem in itself.

Speaker 1 Cow and other Arvin commanders, remember, constantly feared any losses, but they needed to rack up body counts and look like they were doing something.

Speaker 1 So when they got intelligence, normally from the United States, that there was communists operating in a village, they would simply carpet bomb it using the Air Force or artillery.

Speaker 1 They would wipe the village off the fucking map and then they would say, Look at all those dead bodies. Every single one of them is in the VC.

Speaker 1 Oh, Joe, that's not politically or relevant anymore at all. There's not a current country doing that to a captive population.
Can't think of anything. Uh, not at all.

Speaker 1 Yes. Nope.
We've somehow found in an exploded tower block an AK-47 designed for children to fire. Yeah.

Speaker 1 An Arvin commander kicking over like a burned-down school that you just dropped 600 tons of napalm on. Like, look, I found this perfectly preserved version of Mein Kampf.

Speaker 1 Oh, and little did we know the owner of that Mein Kampf was a man who would later become known as Yasser Arafat.

Speaker 1 Now, Van advised, again, his job, despite the fact that he was listening to him, that instead of doing that, you need to send infantry in to root out fighter and civilian, to not kill any civilians if you can help it.

Speaker 1 You know, you should really try to help that, you know, because the more civilians you kill, the more people you're going to lose who are going to back the communist cause.

Speaker 1 And I know how insane and ironic it is to hear an American military advisor in South Vietnam say, stop killing civilians, but that's what Van said. He was promptly ignored.

Speaker 1 So as Cao murdered whole villages via airstrike and artillery barrage, claimed everybody inside was Viet Cong, and said he had killed 10,000 guerrillas in the Mekon Delta region.

Speaker 1 This is despite the fact that all U.S. intelligence said there was not even half that actually operating there.
And it was actually, in reality, as later learned, even less than that.

Speaker 1 He was just slaughtering civilians in calling it a day. And because he's doing all this indirectly, he's controlling nothing.

Speaker 1 Wiping out a village, saying the job's good, and then going back to their base, leaving the VC to come in and help people rebuild and feed them and get them medical care, and ceding actual control of the Mekong Delta region.

Speaker 1 Again, thankfully something that will never happen again. This had the exact result that Van warned about.
The VC did lose thousands of men in the first four months of 1963 fighting in the Delta.

Speaker 1 But the losses were easily replaced owing to the fact that southerners were very, very supportive of the Viet Cong.

Speaker 1 And failing that, the Ho Chi Minh Trail was a thing, and people from the north, namely regular soldiers and volunteers, were streaming south.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like that old saying is like you can burn down someone's house, but someone still has to live in the ashes.

Speaker 1 It's like, yeah, if you come along and say, like, here is a bowl of food to the ash-covered man, he'll be like, yeah, I'm going to support you people.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a tale as old as the concept of guerrilla warfare. Kill one civilian, you've created 10 insurgents.

Speaker 1 And I mean, this ends up being, we'll talk about this again in maybe a series or another episode at this point.

Speaker 1 This leads to the strategic Hamlet program or this idea of, well, we can't control the countryside, so we'll simply move the entire population into government-controlled villages with, you know, it was effectively a military base.

Speaker 1 That way the Viet Cong can't get inside, which also did not work and had horrific ramifications for every level of society. And also the VC still got inside.
Yep. It's absolutely insane.

Speaker 1 But Cao was fighting the war that DM wanted. High reward, low risk, low casualty, even if that high reward was not real.

Speaker 1 So he is promoted to general, moving up in the world and leaving Command of the 7th into the hands of Diem's hand-picked successor, Boi Dinh Dam.

Speaker 1 During this time, American military commanders all the way up to the president believed, as they always would, that if they could just get the Viet Cong to commit to fight in an open battle, they could win.

Speaker 1 Now, that was generally true regarding US forces in Vietnam. However, remember, this is before that.
Yep. The forces fighting the VC in open war would be Arvin.

Speaker 1 But most military commanders in the United States thought, well, well, even Arvin can beat them.

Speaker 1 Van didn't think that.

Speaker 1 He was like, probably not.

Speaker 1 But he got orders to make it happen. And realistically, he knew he needed to try.
I mean, even though he generally believed that this was all a very stupid mission and was never going to work.

Speaker 1 He still got orders that he had to follow. So he got orders to draw the VC into an open battle.
So he went into it.

Speaker 1 Van narrowed this down to the western Dinh Tong province, where intelligence indicated that a large body of Viet Cong were gathering.

Speaker 1 The Arvin had all but abandoned the province after they lost the platoon there a while before, and by a while I mean like a year ago.

Speaker 1 And in the meantime, the VC had fortified villages, built shelters, supply depots, you name it. But the idea wasn't to conduct some kind of province-wide, large-scale offensive.

Speaker 1 Nobody in the American military thought that Arvin was capable of doing that.

Speaker 1 Rather, they believed that narrowing the approach and targeting a single village with a known VC military presence, which brought them to Ap Bok, home to about a hundred men of the VC's 514th Battalion.

Speaker 1 This was discovered thanks to American radio intercepts, because

Speaker 1 the U.S. is again not as directly involved as they would be in a short amount of time now.
They're constantly running monitoring aircraft and intercepting radio broadcasts.

Speaker 1 Now, the Viet Cong didn't necessarily have signals intelligence flying overhead, but again, people do not give them enough credit. They had their own interception capabilities.

Speaker 1 They had long since been tapping Arvin phone lines. They had Arvin radios that the Arvin didn't know they had.

Speaker 1 They also had huge amounts of spies in the south to gather information. So they knew that someone was listening to them.
Yeah, they had loads of their like 7-inch records.

Speaker 1 It was weird. They couldn't figure out.
It was like, oh, it shouldn't sound this high-pitched, but when I slow it down, it sounds like it's worshiping Satan. What's going on?

Speaker 1 Ho Chi-Min getting an intelligence report about something about Arvin and the ferrets worship Satan. Someone fire this guy.

Speaker 1 This guy's fucking stupid.

Speaker 1 So the intercepts that the US got and then passed to Arvin were purposefully misleading. When the VC commander at Bach said he had 100 men over the radio, he actually had 350.

Speaker 1 And when the Arvin and Mac V began talking to each other, the VC commander, Vo Van Dieu, was listening to the entire conversation.

Speaker 1 Now, he was never clued in to the whole plan, and that was kind of by design.

Speaker 1 So he knows something is coming to Atbach. His men begin digging in into the tree lines because it's cover, it protects them from helicopters,

Speaker 1 it keeps them from being charged at by the armored personnel carriers that they're still learning to deal with.

Speaker 1 But the reason why Diu never quite learns about the full details of the operation is because Americans did not trust Arvin.

Speaker 1 The plan of attack was drawn up by van with dam the arvin commander of the seventh left out of the loop this was standard because the arvin was kind of like a wholesaler of information to the enemy seem it really seems like their uh their info sec is just not great it's yeah it's it's about as secure as pete hegseth's group chat

Speaker 1 no pete hegseth like definitely writes texts and you know the in the treehouse of horror episode of the simpsons where they're in the shining is like marge you got a butt that won't quit and it just kind of trails off at the end getting military intelligence saying it's the shining do you want to get sued

Speaker 1 um so what would happen is like arvin would learn something and arvin officer whatever it might be say it's a high commander he would brag that he knew something important and he would kind of let bits slip to his subordinates to kind of show them how important he was he was doing the drunk general bragging thing.

Speaker 1 So it's nice to know that like this is actually a real thing. Oh, for sure.
It's a problem. Ask Stanley McChrystal.

Speaker 1 And actually several other people. But he would, you know, some guys would brag.
Other guys would just be compromised.

Speaker 1 It was very, very common for the North to have sympathizers and spies operating in bars and brothels, wherever, and honeypot dudes. Super common.

Speaker 1 And not to mention, they would talk about it openly in in bars. So like you didn't even have to honeypot a motherfucker.
You could just be sitting there. Other times they were just bribed.

Speaker 1 Now you're just being honeypotted in VC on Discord. It's great.

Speaker 1 There's like a never-ending endemic problem of everything leaking out of the Arvin and the South Vietnamese government in general.

Speaker 1 That the only way the Americans could secure working with them was just to not tell them about anything until the last second.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like, you know, this is great, you know, era of information gathering where like you just essentially have to go and like just do your normal job in order to gather information.

Speaker 1 Now there's just like a training camp of like

Speaker 1 Russian intelligence agents in the Urals learning to say oohoo properly.

Speaker 1 Are you a spy for North Vietnam? No, I'm just a waiter. You guys just won't stop telling me shit.

Speaker 1 I was like, bro, like, do you want the pho with, you know, pork or chicken? Like, I don't care about your strategic movements. Just fucking tell me.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I asked if you wanted another beer, and you answered the 10-digit grid of your upcoming offensive. I didn't need this.

Speaker 1 You don't need to speak to me in code. Tell me, do you want a Ting Tao or do you want a Saigon? Tell me.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay, I understand that you have 500 men in your unit and you're marching tomorrow. But

Speaker 1 you know, these guys tip like shit. So of course I'm going to rat on you guys.
Yeah, yeah, whatever. Okay, you got 500 men in your unit.
Seems pretty gay, dude. Do you want a beer?

Speaker 1 The plan Ven came up with was threefold. A helicopter assault to the north, paired with an armored carrier-borne attack to the west, which would carry infantry through the village itself.

Speaker 1 The rice paddies to the east of the village were left wide open. Now, the whole point of this was actually, Asterix here, if it would have worked, quite a good plan.

Speaker 1 The idea was to hit the village hard and fast.

Speaker 1 The VC, obviously seeing helicopters and armored personnel carriers, would run to the one part that wasn't open, flooding towards the east, at which point they'd hit them with airstrikes and artillery when they're in the open.

Speaker 1 Solid plan. Rice baddies is definitely like a really offensive name for the North Vietnamese that, like, definitely like a British consultant had.

Speaker 1 Almost certainly. Actually, I can think of a few other worse things that I've heard said.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, in the south of the village, the South Vietnamese popular force, sometimes known as the Civil Guard, kind of a militia.

Speaker 1 I would say like it was like the National Guard, but that kind of belies some kind of standardization of anything. These were just some dudes.
These were unks with guns.

Speaker 1 They would move in under the same command of the guy to the west that was also commanding the armored assault force, Major Lam Kwan To.

Speaker 1 So on January 2nd, 1963, at 7 in the morning, the Arvin soldiers began loading themselves into their helicopters. These were H-21s.
Really strange-looking aircraft nicknamed the Flying Banana.

Speaker 1 Because it does, in fact, look like a helicopter banana i know which well helicopter this is

Speaker 1 however because the banana could only carry so many men at once the helicopter assault force would require three different airlifts onto the target and this is where the operation immediately starts going wrong after the first helicopter lifts took off morning fog became too thick for the other helicopters to do their job so they were delayed and rather than launch the operation with only a quarter of their force arvin waited previously the vc knew the target of the operation but not the details.

Speaker 1 They didn't know helicopters were coming in, for example. But now they see helicopters taking off in the nearby Arvin base.
They know what's happening.

Speaker 1 Yeah, losing a battle because you're distracted by thick-ass fog, but the fog is spelled F-A-W-G.

Speaker 1 Fuck me.

Speaker 1 This is what Tom brings to this podcast because I was going to go with it's like the fog where they the Arvin fly into the fog and they come out as monsters or you know Tom Jane is still there for some reason and still shoots himself.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Thank you for keeping me on my toes.

Speaker 1 I went with, what if a meteorological event was cheeked up?

Speaker 1 Yeah, everybody knows the Arvin had

Speaker 1 an endemic problem with fog play.

Speaker 1 So now with the helicopters taking off and, you know, hovering in the air, the VC realizes helicopters are coming. Now, the village of Atbok isn't a massive village by any stretch of the imagination.

Speaker 1 It is also covered with rice patties on a few sides. It's got rolling hills on another.

Speaker 1 It's got trees, meaning there's only one specific place that is clear enough and large enough for the banana to land.

Speaker 1 So the VC displace, they move into the tree line that's right next to the clearing, and they wait for them. As soon as the Arvin troops begin jumping off their helicopters, the VC tear into them.

Speaker 1 Like Van had warned about, the Viet Cong had learned how to counter their airborne threat.

Speaker 1 Lines of crew-serve machine guns waited until the helicopters were close and ripped into them with belt-fed guns.

Speaker 1 As the soldiers ran for cover, the helicopters began exploding and crashing all around them. In just three minutes, the US lost more helicopters in Vietnam than they had entirely so far.

Speaker 1 Three of the bananas out of 10 were lost completely, but all of them were heavily damaged.

Speaker 1 And if that wasn't bad enough, the escorting Huey gunship meant to give soldiers cover also got punched full of speed holes and crashed.

Speaker 1 Yeah, my question though, Joe, is like, is this the most helicopters like downed

Speaker 1 in combat for the U.S. Air Force or the U.S.
Army or whatever? Does that count in the ones that they have crashed themselves?

Speaker 1 No, no. The U.S.
has to own that one. And Rotary Wing, aviation, helicopters, things like that, are always the Army.
They're not, the Air Forces indeed, Rotary Wing.

Speaker 1 There's also Marines and shit that have helicopters, but yeah.

Speaker 1 Soldiers freaking out and under way more fire than they ever thought possible dove into the rice paddies for cover and refused to advance.

Speaker 1 Then in the south, the civil guard ran into the same problem. A torrent of fire and soldiers quickly became pinned down.

Speaker 1 And Major Toe gave them orders to remain in place, just kind of sitting there and exchanging gunfire with the VC. They're kind of out in the open, too.
There's really no cover.

Speaker 1 But Toe doesn't know this because he doesn't actually really understand the topography of where they're stuck. He's distracted by that thick fog.
Yeah, yeah. Wouldn't we all be, you know?

Speaker 1 He sees an advance being far more dangerous than remaining in place, thinking they have some kind of defensible position when they absolutely do not.

Speaker 1 So they're just kind of chilling, getting ripped to pieces.

Speaker 1 Now, some commanders on the ground demanded they be allowed to advance because they correctly surmise that it's actually better to just run at them and fight in advance rather than sit out here and do nothing.

Speaker 1 But Toe refused, worried about taking casualties.

Speaker 1 When other commanders bypassed To and asked damn for orders, he couldn't give them to them because even though he was commander of the seventh, remember, those orders have to come from the president of South Vietnam.

Speaker 1 Ah, yes, that chain of command has come back yet again. Now, Van is orbiting the battlefield in like an observer aircraft that's so high up that they can't take gunfire.

Speaker 1 And he is watching this whole thing go down. He's trying to figure out some way to encourage forward movement.

Speaker 1 He orders the South Air Force and artillery to bomb the tree lines where the VC were dug in. And, you know, they were harvesting way more meat than you think would come out of a Bryce Patty normally.

Speaker 1 So jets took off and cannons opened fire.

Speaker 1 But somehow between Van passing orders to his artillery and air traffic control advisor that's overseeing and advising the South Vietnamese, that order gets switched from bombing the tree line to just bombing the village of At Bok.

Speaker 1 So he's just kind of sitting there, mouth open, watching the village explode for no fucking reason.

Speaker 1 So he's screaming in confusion at this point, trying to figure out why this is happening.

Speaker 1 And after watching everything other than what he needed to be blown up get blown up, he radios his advisor that's with the armored carriers in the west, a guy named James Scanlon, telling him to do anything he could to get them fucking moving.

Speaker 1 Still, Toe refused to give an order to his command. So Scanlan just started lying.

Speaker 1 He ran up and down the line, telling company commanders that Toe had in fact given them orders to go forward and out of the tree lines. This worked, kind of.
Fake it till you make it, baby.

Speaker 1 Just lying. Some company commanders believed Scanlon, and others didn't.

Speaker 1 So the Arvin Armored Carriers began moving forward, but they did so at their own will, without any kind of general organization. Kind of like a shitty action movie.

Speaker 1 Arvin carriers were just moving forward to fight one at a time. This allowed the VC to target the carriers in a new, a bit not exactly a revolutionary way.

Speaker 1 For example, okay, M113s, Tom, they just look like a shoebox on tracks, effectively. Yeah, I know what they look like.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 They don't have turret shields or anything to protect their gunners.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the gunner just kind of sticking out the top with nothing but a machine gun in front of him.

Speaker 1 And it was common for drivers of N113s to have their heads sticking out because it's easier for them to see.

Speaker 1 And as a former armored loser, I can attest to the fact that looking out of armored vision blocks in a driver's compartment really sucks. You're pretty much blind.

Speaker 1 Though, I would say being temporarily blind because your vision blocks suck is preferable to getting shot in the face. I would argue so.
Normally, the carriers would advance together.

Speaker 1 Their cover for their gunners and their driver's heads would be the massive curtain of fire all these machine guns put out.

Speaker 1 It's hard to take an aimed shot at a guy if there's a thousand of them coming at you. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 If there's a thousand bullets stinging past your head, you're not going to take aim. Yeah.
But that wasn't happening this time.

Speaker 1 So as the carriers move forward in a piecemeal fashion, VC gunners just started shooting gunners and drivers in the goddamn face.

Speaker 1 Creating a roadblock of M113 is because they move forward, you shoot the driver, then another one tries to go past it, and you shoot that one, it just creates a perfect blockade. Exactly.

Speaker 1 Seeing the 113 just kind of stall out and die, the rest of the commanders who had listened to to Scanlon then called off their attacks. This brings us back to the helicopters.

Speaker 1 Four of the damaged helicopters, their American crews included, had to bring down their helicopters on the battlefield because they were too damaged to make it back to base.

Speaker 1 Van worried that the VC would launch a counterattack to capture or kill them. And they obviously, Van is worried about American lives far more than he's worried about Vietnamese lives.
This is...

Speaker 1 not an uncommon critique of, well, just American military policy in general, but specifically this battle.

Speaker 1 And he was worried about the bad PR it would have to, you know, pictures of dead American helicopter pilots in VC custody. Not to mention, helicopter pilots take a long time to train.

Speaker 1 Bad for business, admittedly. Pretty valuable.
We need those guys alive.

Speaker 1 Van told Scanlon to ignore Toe, go above him, and to the commander of the Arvin 4th Mechanized Squadron, a guy named Captain Lee Tong Ba, and order him to get the carriers moving in the direction of the helicopters to secure the downed crews.

Speaker 1 Ba refused. Not only did these orders not come from his commander, Ba refused to take orders from any Americans, which is interesting because, you know, they are advisors.
It's kind of their job.

Speaker 1 But again, it's a pride thing. Understandably, taking orders from a foreign power probably doesn't make you feel great.
It would also make him look weak. Yep.

Speaker 1 Nothing about this works out for Ba to listen to this guy other than, you know, maybe winning a battle or whatever, but that doesn't seem to be that big of a deal. Grand scheme of things, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Van in turn told a different advisor who was with Dam to get orders from him so he could legitimately pass them to Ba. Dam in turn had to call Saigon and talk to the president, who agreed.

Speaker 1 Then back down the line of telephone, the order went to Ba, who finally agreed that, yeah, these orders are legit. Now, M113s were suited for Vietnam because they had limited water crossing ability.

Speaker 1 So all these rice patties, these streams, whatever, things you think of when you think of Vietnamese topography, wouldn't affect them. They could easily cross them sometimes.
Not this time.

Speaker 1 It turned out it had rained a lot in the days before, so they would need to ford across the stream to get to the areas where the downed helicopters are.

Speaker 1 And as soon as the 113s get into the stream, the water level's a bit too high, and the stream bed itself is super sticky. Like it's that kind of mud that you get fucking stuck in.

Speaker 1 And that's exactly what happens. Yeah, track-based vehicles, when they like freshly

Speaker 1 agitated mud in streams and stuff.

Speaker 1 Essentially what happens is like the actual track will like churn up the top layer of like agitated mud and it will just yeah get stuck in the ground like concrete yep i've seen my vehicles do it it sucks uh there's a few ways to get them pulled out of course towing helps if you have tow bars for your vehicles

Speaker 1 and for some reason the south vietnamese carriers at this point of the war did not bring tow bars with them on missions for fear they would lose them when they're out driving around or have them blown off so they have no way to tow them out scanlin comes up with a different idea obviously there's a lot of brush around from tree lines and, you know, bushes, whatever.

Speaker 1 Cut it down, stuff it under the tracks, give them traction. This is something you can do.
I mean, I do shit like this when my car used to get stuck in snow growing up.

Speaker 1 Punch it under the tires, give it traction. So Scanlon tells him to do this.
Bo's like, fuck you. I don't take orders from Americans.
So he's just kind of sitting there.

Speaker 1 He's doing nothing to pull his guys out of the stream, which it helps. They're not in direct combat at the time.
So he doesn't think he's in a bad position.

Speaker 1 He's not getting shot at, which admittedly, hard to argue with that. In the the middle of a battle, not getting shot at, you're in the right place, in my opinion.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You're one of the few guys not getting shot by VC, like in the tree line. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, Scanlon followed the same game of telephone all the way back up and all the way back down for him to get orders again and to get the job done. And he did.
So now the carriers are unstuck.

Speaker 1 Scanlon's like, all right, let's get to the helicopters. Bob looks at him.
He's like, fuck you. I don't take orders from Americans.

Speaker 1 Once again, back up the telephone line, but this time Van loses his fucking mind because it gets to Dam. Dam doesn't want to do it.
He's worried about losing the carriers.

Speaker 1 So Dam's just like, no, it's too dangerous. Nobody's captured your pilots yet.
They'll probably be fine. Or why don't you send your men in to do it? Mind you, Van doesn't have any men to send in.

Speaker 1 He has a couple advisors. There's like maybe 30 advisors on the ground total.
Yeah, they got clipboard guys. They're not really good in a

Speaker 1 they're not really useful in this situation. Yeah.

Speaker 1 he's screaming at dam over the radio still up in his plane when that doesn't work he lands the fucking plane that's observing the entire battlefield at the arvin base gets out and personally threatens to shoot dam in the face unless he gives the orders

Speaker 1 this works

Speaker 1 but again like we already talked about when the arvin carriers finally start get moving The VC do exactly what they did before. Start shooting the gunners and the drivers in the face.

Speaker 1 As this happens, the attack gets worse and worse. And the reason for this, why the carrier force attack gets worse, is because of how carrier crews worked.

Speaker 1 The gunners of the carriers were the commanders.

Speaker 1 So after the first commander gets shot in the fucking face, he has to be replaced by like some infantry guy in the back that has no business and no knowledge and no training of how to command an armored carrier.

Speaker 1 That guy gets shot in the face and so on and so forth down the ranks until it's just some terrified 18-year-old sunling command of an m113. Getting executed lemming style.

Speaker 1 Guys, I have a revolutionary tactic of how to defeat the VC. You've played whack-a-mole, right? We're gonna do that.
Except we're the moles. Just keep popping up out of the hole.

Speaker 1 When the man in front of you gets shot in the face, pull his body aside, man the turret, you get shot in the face, so on, so forth.

Speaker 1 That guy you know, he just got hit in the head with a giant cartoonish red-painted hammer. It's now your turn to get up through the hole.
Now, finally, eventually, this happens so many times.

Speaker 1 Bob calls off the attack. He's like, nope, I'm done.
A couple carriers are left out in the open because the crews just abandoned them.

Speaker 1 They don't want to be the next guy to stick their head out of the hole, which is a bit short-sighted because now you have to run through the open. But,

Speaker 1 you know, don't blame him. One final attempt was made to ride forward and shatter the VC line in the form of flamethrower-equipped armored personnel carriers, which, admittedly, metal as fuck.

Speaker 1 But as they attempted to put the torch to the whole line of VC, the gunners pulled the trigger on the flamethrower and nothing fucking happened.

Speaker 1 It turned out that the crews mixed the fuel for the weapons incorrectly. Whoops.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Like, it's difficult enough, I would assume, to have the confidence to wield a flamethrower and then

Speaker 1 a whole other step of confidence to be like, yeah, look, I'll just eyeball the mix. It'll be fine.
It's like, yeah, this thing is going to explode at worst.

Speaker 1 At best, you just won't fire and then you'll get shot in the face. Yeah, and I know exactly what the scene probably looked like back at the base.

Speaker 1 Like, it's being mixed together by a guy who will never be promoted to sergeant, cigarette in his mouth, shirt off, flip-flops on, eye fucking the fuel as it's going into the tank.

Speaker 1 And you're like, you sure that's right? He's like, yeah.

Speaker 1 Fine. Don't worry about it.
He's not measuring anything. He's got one eye closed to stop the smoke going into it so he can keep smoking while mixing flammable fluids.
Yep. Yep.

Speaker 1 I have seen this happen, but not with flamethrowers. So, but the flamethrowers failed.
The attack altogether was culled off.

Speaker 1 Finally, Van just gave up and sent in another flight of helicopters to haul ass through

Speaker 1 an absolute storm of bullets, damaging four more helicopters badly in the process and wounding several people to pull the pilots out of that shit. It's now 4 p.m.
and the Arvin has not moved.

Speaker 1 Van had gotten back up in his plane and was now back above the battlefield again.

Speaker 1 And he's probably throwing a clot from how much he's screaming over his radio, but he still cannot think of anything to get the Arvin commanders to get their fucking men moving.

Speaker 1 But this entire process is made much worse by the fact that the Arvin commanders above company level.

Speaker 1 So the guys we're talking about, the guys that the advisors are arguing with on the ground, their commanders are not on the ground.

Speaker 1 As was Arvin policy, tradition, whatever you want to call it, they were miles away back at the base where this whole mission began.

Speaker 1 Because of this, they have no idea what's going on on the ground, how bad is everything going,

Speaker 1 and they don't even know where their men are anymore. And the reason for that is their subordinates were all lying to them.

Speaker 1 fearing that telling Dam or their other commanders that, for example, we are getting shot to shit, shit.

Speaker 1 Our flamethrowers won't work because Frank doesn't know fucking fluid conversions, whatever it might be.

Speaker 1 And they, in turn, their superiors, like Dam and others, were not too keen to bother their subordinates for updates.

Speaker 1 This is because if they didn't know how bad everything was going, they wouldn't get blamed for it by the president. They could blame their men.
This created even more problems.

Speaker 1 As remember, no company-level commander was allowed to move without authorization from senior commanders, who in turn couldn't pass any orders unless approved by the president of Vietnam.

Speaker 1 And everybody involved is lying to each other.

Speaker 1 This is insane. I mean, lying is the best case scenario.
Sometimes the superiors just ghosted their subordinates over the radio. It's fucking mental.
It is actually fucking mental.

Speaker 1 Like getting a radio call in my, in my bunker, you know, you just hear machine guns in the background, armored carriers exploding, people running for their lives.

Speaker 1 It's like, oh, putting that back down. That seems bad.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'll fuck it. I'll deal with that tomorrow, man.
I don't fucking know. This seems like a problem for the president of the entire country.

Speaker 1 Exactly. So Arvin's still stuck, slowly getting picked off by the VC until the sun begins to go down.

Speaker 1 Fans worry that the VC would use this as an opening because remember, they left the exfiltration route to the east open. Now the sun's going down.
They can escape in the middle of the darkness.

Speaker 1 So he's like, we have to stop this from happening. We need to light up that corridor.
So if they do bust out that way, we can roll out our plan anyway.

Speaker 1 We can still salvage a victory from the middle of all of this. We need to fire illumination rounds over that area.

Speaker 1 Now, this has to go up to General Cao, the newly promoted commander of all of the Mekong Delta region. And he doesn't.

Speaker 1 He decides that an illumination is simply too dangerous because you'll illuminate our own men. Despite the fact that, remember, that whole flank was left open.
There's nobody there.

Speaker 1 I guess he forgot that or something. Then Van's like, okay, that's fine.
We need a backup plan. Send in the paratroopers.
We'll drop them to the east and we'll close off the exfiltration route.

Speaker 1 To Van's complete surprise, Cow agrees immediately. And then Van waits for the paratroopers to be deployed.
And then he waits, and then he waits, and then he waits.

Speaker 1 And then finally, 300 paratroopers riding in a flight of C-123s take flight.

Speaker 1 As soon as they enter the bed, because, okay, for people who are not aware, paratrooper operations, you have to drop pretty close to the ground.

Speaker 1 That means that these planes are immediately within effective gunfire range of the VC. They start taking fire.
They jump out of the plane. They start taking machine gun fire on the ground.

Speaker 1 And then to Van's horror, As he's watching the paratroopers drift out of the plane, nobody is entirely sure why, but the paratroopers do not jump to the east. Instead, they jump to the west.
Oh no.

Speaker 1 And then, due to either pilot fuck up or jump master on board fuck up to tell them in when to jump, they jump too late to even do this wrong.

Speaker 1 And instead of landing behind the line of armored personnel carriers, where Bao wanted them to, instead, they land in a clearing directly in front of the VC line. Oh,

Speaker 1 you're getting turned into mulch.

Speaker 1 They did like a swan dive directly into a blender. The paratroopers get shot to absolute pieces.
Not to mention jumping in darkness is very hard to do. Generally, a bad idea.

Speaker 1 A lot of the guys are injured upon landing because, again, they're missed dropped. A lot of them just fall into the trees.
above the VC, who then just shoot them while they're hanging there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So then the elite of the Arvin military, the paratroopers, are now, again, stuck like everybody else is. This goes on for hours.
The VC then do exactly what Van thought they would.

Speaker 1 Using the open eastern approach, they begin pulling out. Van, up in his plane, sees this.

Speaker 1 He, again, demands an illumination strike to light up the VC so then they can turn call in artillery accurately or the Air Force. But again, it's refused.

Speaker 1 He does not want to illuminate his paratroopers, who are, again, somewhere entirely else, but he does not know that.

Speaker 1 Nobody knows where anybody anybody is at this point other than Van because he's in the plane above them all.

Speaker 1 Then Van's like, okay, fuck it. Fuck illumination.
Just hit the goddamn eastern flank with artillery.

Speaker 1 Dam agrees, but for some reason, only agrees to drop artillery at a rate of four shells per hour, which is nothing.

Speaker 1 That doesn't really seem that effective. I'm not going to lie.

Speaker 1 Nobody's entirely sure why he does this, other than trying to make himself look better by not expending a huge amount of artillery shells. Okay.
I don't know. Nobody knows.

Speaker 1 But by the time he finally agrees to that, it's too late. The VC are gone.

Speaker 1 When the Arvin troops finally move into the village of Atbok, or the remains of the village, I should say, the next morning, they found the VC had withdrawn so completely, they not only took all of their dead and wounded, but even their empty brass shell casings so they could be repressed and reused.

Speaker 1 Which, moi, perfect. How the fuck do you let hundreds of dudes have so much time to withdraw, they literally pick up their trash before they leave?

Speaker 1 Listen, you know, once again, the Viet Kong on

Speaker 1 the right side of history, they're environmentalists. They don't want to pollute the land.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. Yep.

Speaker 1 That same morning, journalists from multiple different news outlets were allowed to fly to the outskirts of At Bak, where they were regaled with stories about just how well the operation went by the commander of MAC V, General Paul Harkins.

Speaker 1 Harkins told a journalist that they had trapped the VC and forced them from the field thanks to a perfect combined arms attack.

Speaker 1 Then, as the journalists were standing there and watching, Arvin artillery opens fire on the village of Atbok. Nobody is sure why.
The battle has been over for 18 hours at this point.

Speaker 1 And to make matters worse, there were hundreds of Arvin soldiers inside the village.

Speaker 1 So the Arvin shelled their own men to impress some dudes from the New York Times. Dozens were killed.

Speaker 1 Yes, I must impress Vietnam-era Barry Weiss with shelling all these journalists. The intellectual dark web has taken command of an artillery commander.

Speaker 1 Yes, we have used artillery to kill Curtis Arvin.

Speaker 1 I should point out here, to the credit of the journalists present, namely the New York Times man guy there, David Halberstam, They all knew Harkins was lying to their face.

Speaker 1 He had a reputation for this. Haberstam famously hated Harkins to the point that at a meeting at the U.S.

Speaker 1 Embassy in Saigon, when someone offered a toast to Harkins and everybody was like, huzzah, or whatever the fuck they were saying, Haberstam loudly shouted, quote, Harkins should be court-martialed and shot.

Speaker 1 Got a little hater. The dude got heckled in the embassy by a New York Times journalist.

Speaker 1 Neil Sheehan, another journalist that was there, wrote about how Harkins was either willingly lying to the press or he was being lied to by his own staff and was simply too stupid to know about it.

Speaker 1 Now, he correctly pointed out that if Harkins was lying to them, he was also probably lying to the president, JFK, at the time. This ended up being true.

Speaker 1 Harkins ended up becoming well known for punishing officers and threatening other government civilian employees who dared to report the truth of the catastrophe that was South Vietnam and Arvin back to DC.

Speaker 1 You ruined multiple people's careers about this. Yeah, meanwhile, JFK is off of perk 30 with Marlon Monroe saying, I love those rodents.

Speaker 1 Put on the new Ferrets album. I love that they sing very high.

Speaker 1 That's what most people don't understand about the U.S.

Speaker 1 encroachment into Vietnam. It was about securing the strategic Arvin and the Ferrets supply.

Speaker 1 Saigon is the only place it was made.

Speaker 1 Harkins even lied his ass off to his eventual replacement, General William Westmoreland, to the point that Westmoreland had no idea what was really going on in Vietnam when he took command.

Speaker 1 This is not a defense of William Westmoreland. He's a monster.
Fuck William Westmoreland. All my homies hate William Westmoreland.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Horrible monster. Evil code.
He was just a very confused monster when he got there.

Speaker 1 It should not surprise you to know that Harkins retired after being relieved of command in 1964 and then went on to work for a think tank in DC.

Speaker 1 Of course.

Speaker 1 Ironically, after Harkins is done lying to the gathered journalists, they ran into Van who openly told them how bad everything went.

Speaker 1 Now, he publicly blamed Arvin and the South's government for all of the fuck-ups, which is only partially true. The U.S.

Speaker 1 had planned the operation and all the intelligence that they used was gathered by Americans. Virtually all of it was wrong.

Speaker 1 There is a lot of shared blame here, and you could also argue that it was the U.S.'s fault as the main advisor to Arvin that allowed them to be as fucked up as they were.

Speaker 1 Van, to his credit, I guess, was attempting to air dirty laundry in public in an attempt to kind of shame DM and Arvin into allowing change and reform and to get the U.S. government and the U.S.

Speaker 1 military to pay closer attention to what was really going on.

Speaker 1 He failed, but that was his goal. Now, stop me if you've heard this one before.

Speaker 1 Harkins and Mac V made sure to never never blame the Arvin or Diem's government for anything, painting everything as rosy as they possibly could. And this includes within the military and the U.S.

Speaker 1 government.

Speaker 1 This meant that Diem and the South Vietnamese government could walk away from a battle which they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and blame the US for everything, saying obviously Arvin and Diem did nothing wrong.

Speaker 1 Even though 86 Arvin soldiers were killed and another 108 were wounded, and we don't actually know how many of those were by friendly fire at the very end there, but it's thought to be 20 of them.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It stopped any understanding of failure or shortcomings so they could maybe improve themselves to learn from their defeat so it didn't happen again.

Speaker 1 And this went for the United States as much as it did South Vietnam. This is not me blaming South Vietnam more than the United States, trust me.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, for the VC, it proved to them that they could go toe-to-toe with Arvin and their American advisors and win, even when they had everything thrown at them.

Speaker 1 It was a massive political and motivational victory for them. And soon afterwards, they were able to retool their plans and step up their attacks accordingly.

Speaker 1 In turn, it showed the northern government that the southern government was much, much weaker militarily than they originally thought.

Speaker 1 The Ho Chi Minh had already declared a so-called people's war to unify Vietnam a couple years before. He invaded Laos to support the Pathet Lao.

Speaker 1 He built what would become known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which we've already talked about, and began infiltration of the south that way to resupply the VC and standard North Vietnamese military formations.

Speaker 1 In the aftermath of the Battle of Ap Bok, it became clear to the North that an open military struggle was almost certainly going to succeed. More weapons, men, ammo, more everything

Speaker 1 soon flooded into the South.

Speaker 1 And to the American government, it was further proof that Diem and the Arvin were incapable of stopping the communist threat on their own, made worse by the fact that this time it had an American body count.

Speaker 1 Three advisors were killed, eight were wounded, and five helicopters were destroyed. This, among other reasons, namely brutal crackdowns and civil unrest in South Vietnam, by Diem, led to the U.S.

Speaker 1 greenlighting a regime change operation, leading to Diem to get clapped in the back of an M113 a few months later in November.

Speaker 1 In the aftermath, 16,000 more military advisors are sent to Vietnam to bolster the new government. And at this point, the definition advisor was really starting to creep.

Speaker 1 A few weeks after that, Kennedy himself was shot, guilty of the crime of visiting Texas. LBJ becomes president, and one faked attack on the U.S.
Navy later, the U.S.

Speaker 1 would be fully involved in a war that would last a decade, kill millions. The end!

Speaker 1 Welcome to Hochi Mania, brother.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Jim Morrison's dad caused the Vietnam War. Welcome to Hochi Mania.

Speaker 1 JFK was killed by

Speaker 1 whoever you want, really.

Speaker 1 He wasn't killed by anyone. His head just did that.

Speaker 1 We went from the thick air fog to a Jackie O. Look, much like Charlie Kirk, everybody leans left in the end, right?

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 Tom, we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question, support the show on Patreon.

Speaker 1 You can ask us through the Patreon messages or in our Discord, where we have a dedicated channel for this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 You know, you'll have access to that too if you donate to the show, and we'll answer it on air. Today's question is: Acme becomes the world's sole arms manufacturer.

Speaker 1 How do they make your favorite stupid weapon even dumber? Okay. Oh, they put a spring in the handle of a sword so you can't like actually swing it properly in a arc.

Speaker 1 Also, you get like a wacky, waving, inflatable arm, flailing tube med sword. Yes.
Perfect. Or it's essentially Nina's whipsword from Solo Calibur.
I don't know. Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1 I got, what's my favorite stupid weapon? I guess I'll go with one that we've...

Speaker 1 talked about on the show in this fair gustaf and that would be this fair gustav firing a coyote i suppose you know because he's trying to catch the Roadrunner.

Speaker 1 Except now every day, you know, the Schwer Gustav can only fire like one coyote a day.

Speaker 1 You have to change out the coyote barrel.

Speaker 1 But Tom, I believe that's an episode of this podcast. But you host and are involved with other podcasts.
Plug those other podcasts in the plug zone.

Speaker 1 Welcome to the Plug Zone. Listen to Blood Work, a show about the economy of violence.
We're in the middle of where we have finished a series on the history of the car bomb

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Helps us immensely. And until next time, load a coyote into a cannon and fire it at a Roadrunner.

Speaker 1 Pay attention to the thick eye fog.