Episode 676: My Lai Massacre Part I - Ho Money Ho Problems

Summary

Last Podcast On The Left

Episode 676: My Lai Massacre Part I – Ho Money Ho Problems
Release Date: August 7, 2026
Hosts: Marcus Parks, Henry Zebrowski, Eddie Pepitone

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Episode Overview

This episode launches a four-part series diving into the Vietnam War, centering on the infamous My Lai Massacre of 1968. The hosts set the stage for understanding this atrocity by tracing Vietnam’s complex history, from Chinese conquest to French colonialism, the rise of Ho Chi Minh, and the tangled roots of conflict that led to one of America’s darkest military moments. With their signature blend of insight, humor, and hard truths, the Last Podcast crew aims to unpack how the My Lai Massacre became possible, exploring both the historical build-up and the catastrophic failures that marked the Vietnam War.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting Up the Series: The Vietnam War and My Lai (04:37–13:02)

• The team frames My Lai as emblematic of the Vietnam War’s moral collapse, contrasting the clear-cut “good guys vs. bad guys” narrative of WWII with the murky, brutal reality of Vietnam.
• Quote (Marcus Parks, 06:38):
  “While the Americans had every opportunity to halt their offensive that day, they still attacked these civilians with all the bloodthirst and brutality that should have been reserved for their enemy...”
• The massacre is described as a turning point, shattering America's post-WWII moral high ground, especially as it echoed Nazi atrocities (09:08).
• The decision to study the Vietnam War in-depth is justified by its deep, lasting global ramifications—“the world before 1975, before the fall of Saigon, and the world after it.”
  (Marcus Parks, 07:59)

2. Questioning America's Role and the Brutal Logic of the War (13:02–18:59)

• Body counts & "war as business": The relentless push for higher enemy kill ratios is likened to putting a businessman in charge of war (12:36), a theme that will be expanded in later episodes.
• The hosts stress avoiding oversimplifications (“baby killer” accusations) and instead focus on the nuanced, often victimized role of average draftees, many of whom were poor and barely adults.
• Quote (Marcus Parks, 15:16):
  “...the role of the American soldier in Vietnam is like everything else about this war. It's fucking complicated.”

3. The Domino Theory and Cold War Paranoia (18:09–23:48)

• The hosts lay out the Domino Theory—America’s belief that losing Vietnam to communism would trigger a cascade turning Southeast Asia “red.”
• Quote (Marcus Parks, 19:18):
  “The domino theory posited that if even a seemingly inconsequential country like Vietnam were to fall...other countries would quickly fall behind it like a row of dominoes.”
• They dismantle this logic, highlighting how the theory disregarded the actual political and social realities of Vietnam.

4. Representation in Pop Culture and American Self-Perception (20:34–22:09)

• The crew riffs on Vietnam War movies, noting how even the best films (“Apocalypse Now”) pale compared to the true horror and chaos of the conflict.
• Quote (Eddie Pepitone, 20:57):
  “Rewatching them now, you’re like, oh, wait a second. We’re not heroes.”

5. Vietnam’s Historical Context: Invaders, Resistance, and Colonial Trauma (39:49–62:49)

• An extensive look at Vietnam’s experience fending off external domination, from Chinese rule (starting 111 BC), the legendary Trung Sisters, and a millennium of rebellion.
• Women’s massive and unique involvement in guerrilla and regular combat is highlighted (43:27).
  Quote (Marcus Parks, 43:27):
  “It’s estimated that 1.5 million women served in major combat roles for North Vietnam at every level of the Vietnam War.”
• The brutality of French colonial rule, rubber plantations, and the creation of a Vietnamese elite loyal to France—setting up lasting internal divisions.
• The hosts draw a direct connection from centuries of colonization and resistance to the expert guerilla tactics later used against both the French and Americans.

6. Ho Chi Minh: Revolutionary or Boogeyman? (52:32–57:37)

• The rise of Ho Chi Minh as a nationalist first and a communist second is examined—his quest for an independent Vietnam, not an ideological crusade.
• Ho’s attempts to enlist American support are detailed, showing early American disinterest or outright hostility, misunderstandings which set the stage for conflict.
• Quote (Marcus Parks, 54:51):
  “...he’s one of the most misunderstood figures of the 20th century. Because of American propaganda, we grew up thinking that Ho Chi Minh was an evil, bloodthirsty communist warlord...But...his only true goal was an independent Vietnam.”

7. America Intervenes, Misses the Point (77:46–92:11)

• Throughout WWII and its aftermath, Ho Chi Minh repeatedly seeks American sponsorship for Vietnam's independence, quoting Thomas Jefferson and appealing to anti-colonial values.
• With Cold War tensions rising, the U.S. sides instead with France to keep Vietnam out of the communist camp, ignoring nationalist sentiment in favor of a broad anti-communism.
• “No nuance, no strategy—just communist bad, not communist good.”
  (Marcus Parks, 91:45)

8. The Guerrilla War: Why It Was Unwinnable (68:26–99:29)

• Detailed explanations of "opportune moment" (toika) and guerrilla warfare—bleeding out the French (and later, Americans) through patient, decentralized hit-and-run tactics.
• Guerrilla strategy made it impossible for invaders to “win” in the classical sense; even total military superiority couldn’t overcome Vietnamese persistence and home-field advantage.
• The hosts note the tragic parallel between both the French and Americans falling into the same traps and committing atrocities in the face of strategic frustration.

9. Civil War in Vietnam: North vs South, Corruption vs Ideals (100:58–113:54)

• The collapse of peace negotiations means Vietnam is divided, with the North under Ho and the South under the corrupt and American-backed Ngo Dinh Diem.
• Cold War calculations lead America to back an unpopular, brutal regime in the south, increasing rural support for the Viet Minh (and later, Viet Cong) insurgency.
• Diem’s violent purges drive non-communists into the arms of North Vietnamese leadership, setting the stage for further escalation and civilian disasters like My Lai.

10. The Creation of the Viet Cong and Prelude to Atrocity (114:37–119:32)

• The National Liberation Front (NLF), soon labeled the “Viet Cong” by South Vietnamese elites, evolves into the main fighting force against American and South Vietnamese troops.
• Quote (Marcus Parks, 118:34):
  “Some people consider the Vietnamese Viet Cong to be among the most talented soldiers in the history of warfare.”
• The episode ends with a set-up for next week: Kennedy’s and Johnson’s roles, the Burning Monk, and the direct road to the My Lai Massacre.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On moral collapse:
  “For many, the My Lai massacre marked a point in American history in which our military lost the moral high ground...” (Marcus Parks, 09:08)
• On bombings and civilian casualties:
  “We cannot fathom how many bombs we dropped on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. There were certain weeks where we dropped more bombs on certain parts of the jungle than we dropped in the entirety of World War II.” (Marcus Parks, 30:16)
• On the futility of occupation:
  “Every war in Vietnam was unwinnable. It’s also why these wars are unwinnable in places like Afghanistan.” (Marcus Parks, 97:24)
• On war and humiliation:
  “Even the threat of humiliation can cause men to do absolutely horrific things. The highest level is like war crimes; lowest level, family annihilation.” (Marcus Parks, 93:14)
• On the tragedy of Vietnam:
  “The greatest tragedy of this war was that it was Vietnamese killing Vietnamese.” (Marcus Parks, 112:01)

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Key Timestamps

• [04:37] Series introduction: framing the My Lai Massacre and Vietnam’s legacy
• [13:02] The logic of body counts and kill ratios
• [18:09] Domino Theory and Cold War paranoia
• [39:49] Origins of Vietnamese resistance — Chinese and French colonial rule, Trung Sisters
• [52:32] The rise and complexity of Ho Chi Minh
• [68:26] Guerrilla warfare and “opportune moment” tactics
• [100:58] US backs Ngo Dinh Diem’s corrupt regime, division of Vietnam
• [114:37] Creation of the Viet Cong (NLF)
• [119:32] Teaser for part 2: Kennedy, Johnson, The Burning Monk, path to My Lai

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Tone & Style

The hosts blend historical analysis with irreverence, gallows humor, and the occasional pop culture riff. They remain empathetic to both the Vietnamese and American foot soldiers, adamant about the messiness and complexity of war, and deeply critical of political and military leadership failures on all sides.

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For Listeners: Why This Episode Matters

This deep, engaging conversation establishes essential context for understanding the My Lai Massacre—not as a random horror, but as the logical endpoint of decades of imperialism, ideological extremism, and bureaucratic indifference to the human costs of war. The hosts stress there are “no good guys” here—only victims, bad systems, and the urgent lesson that the unchecked machinery of war devours everything in its path.

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Next week: Kennedy, Johnson, and the events leading directly to My Lai.

Transcript

[Henry Zebrowski]

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[Marcus Parks]

I love my phone, but not my carrier. What do I do? Well, there are 250 reasons to join T Mobile. Like what?

[Henry Zebrowski]

You can keep your phone and your number, and T Mobile helps pay it off up to $800 per line. So I wouldn't have to buy a new phone?

[Marcus Parks]

Yep.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Plus your plan price stays the same

[Marcus Parks]

for 5 years on experience plans. Nice. Find your reason.

[Henry Zebrowski]

@t mobile. Via virtual prepaid guard car. Typically takes 15 days after rebate submission price guarantee on talk text and 5G

[Marcus Parks]

data exclusions like taxes and fees apply. There's no place to escape to.

[Henry Zebrowski]

This is the last on the left.

[Marcus Parks]

That's when the cannibalism started.

[Henry Zebrowski]

What was that? All right, let us know when we're ready. Nah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

So can you put some just gunfire up there for us?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, just so I can be. So I can feel comfortable.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. Do you have any burning children?

[Henry Zebrowski]

We'll wait till we get. Let's wait.

[Marcus Parks]

If you have constant firefights over and over again, that would be great.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I I In honor of our episode today, I. I didn't masturbate this morning. I looked at my hand and I said, nay, palm. And I didn't do it stupid. And I just didn't. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

And that is what you can come to expect, that height of intelligence. You can come to expect that throughout the rest of this series, I promise.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Saigon? How am I still in Saigon? God damn. Charlie's everywhere, man.

[Eddie Pepitone]

That's not as great as we're not on YouTube and I can just start the episode with a bunch of fucks

[Henry Zebrowski]

and it doesn't matter.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, you really can. It's fantastic.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I saw her little peeper sticking out of the elephant grass and I knew I was in Vietnam.

[Marcus Parks]

Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with Saigon Henry Zabrowski.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, I'm gonna try it, guys.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You ready?

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's time finally to see my brand new accent. Let's just say the last two weeks have really been spent that every single time my eyeballs are closed All I. I like, just hear. Just don't lie. Don't lie. And you know what? I'm getting numb to it.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's kind of fun.

[Marcus Parks]

It's what happens.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's just kind of fun to just be places, like getting your, like, you know, prescription medication. The whole time I'm like, staring at the woman. I'm not hearing her. She's going like. And all I'm hearing is, And of

[Marcus Parks]

course we also have Hanoi Ed Larson. How you doing?

[Eddie Pepitone]

And I am annoying.

[Henry Zebrowski]

God, you would be the height of humor. Height of humor. You would be such a disgusting lady boy. Oh, my God. You as the Matahari. You as a fake Vietnamese. Hey there, fellas. How you doing?

[Eddie Pepitone]

I'm a little boy. Come on in. Sex with me.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Wait a second. You're Chong Duck?

[Eddie Pepitone]

That's correct.

[Marcus Parks]

I could see you as being like the most. The most popular guy at the Hanoi Hilton.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Oh, my God. I would be a great mater d over there.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Honestly, I just be like, if you. Do you have any local restaurants you recommend or any place I could possibly go to?

[Eddie Pepitone]

Oh, my God. I've. My preparation has just been. I've been slathering my insides with bomby sandwiches.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Thank you.

[Eddie Pepitone]

And you know, because I'm trying to find the brighter side of this whole thing. And it's the bomby sandwich.

[Marcus Parks]

It's really the only one.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And Rune pear in Los Angeles, well, that's Thai food,

[Marcus Parks]

which is close. Thailand's right there.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. Wow.

[Marcus Parks]

The reason why we're talking about all this is because today starts a four week long journey into the bowels of the Vietnam War with a focus on the My Lai massacre.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Saigon. How long have I been here? Apparently, it's not like the movies.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, no.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You know, when you talk about Saigon, it really helps when you take a sip out of your iced coffee right after.

[Henry Zebrowski]

This is my war. If only they had cold brew.

[Marcus Parks]

So on the morning of March 16, 1968, as the war in Vietnam continued to climb towards a bloody and savage apex, a force of about 100American GIs stormed a village in South Vietnam expecting to fight one of the most dangerous North Vietnamese battalions in existence. Instead, these army soldiers found Vietnamese civilians, women, children, and old men cooking breakfast in anticipation of the workday to come. It was simply another rural village trying to survive in the midst of a conflict that had been dragging on in one form or another for almost 25 years. First with the French, and now with the Americans. But unlike so many other villages that were burned down throughout the Vietnam War, in Countless search and destroy missions. History would remember this one more than any of others because this one would be the site of the Me Lai massacre. See, while the Americans had every opportunity to halt their offensive that day, they still attacked these civilians with all the bloodthirst and brutality that should have been reserved for their enemy, the dreaded North Vietnamese force known as the Viet Cong. By the end of it, more than 500 Vietnamese civilians had been murdered by American soldiers in ways that can only be described as savage. And all of it had been done under orders from their captain, Earnest Mad Dog Medina. Captain Medina had told these soldiers to, quote, kill everything that moved, everything that breathed. And his men followed those orders without question. Although men might be an overstatement. These were boys, teenagers, doing what their commanders told them to do. Now, this was not the only massacre of Vietnamese civilians to happen during the Vietnam War. Far from it. Tragically, it wasn't even the only massacre to happen in Vietnam that morning. But in the end, the My Lai massacre became emblematic of everything that was wrong with the Vietnam War.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You know, I see so many memes now. They're like, my boyfriend is obsessed with the Roman Empire. And we're all like. Like, even us as people, right. We. We're World War II boys.

[Marcus Parks]

Sure.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Right. We find it interesting. It's an easy war to read about in many ways, because you've got clear, delineated sides.

[Marcus Parks]

Good guys, bad guys.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Good. Bad guys are fucking awesome.

[Marcus Parks]

Right.

[Henry Zebrowski]

The fucking good guys are fun.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Right.

[Henry Zebrowski]

There's lots stories of high adventure. There's intrigue. There's all these kind of things, world building. And in the end, the good guys win and everybody goes home and everything's fine. When it turns out that's not true and that this war is actually what we should be reading about.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Because we are currently still sitting in the filled diaper that this war filled. Like, we're still sitting in that diaper.

[Marcus Parks]

100%. No, there is the world before 1975, before the fall of Saigon, and there's the world after it. And in the world after the fall of Saigon is the world we are currently living in. And Vietnam explains so much of it.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. Very seldomly since then, have we been the good guys.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We really haven't been. This is the Vietnam is when everything starts to crumble.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Now, for me, I think actually last time we were all good guys is when we were all collectively making fun of that ray gun woman.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That, to me, we were finally all on the right side of history in a way.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Breakdance.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Breakdancer woman. We all attended Attack that teacher. That's what I actually felt. I was like, oh, America's back.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, yeah, that was. That was, you know. You know, that was worldwide unity.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, you're right.

[Marcus Parks]

It really was. We were even in Australia when that was happening. And it was wonderful to be an American and making fun of Australians in Australia.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It felt like how it must have been to be like, in New York during the Momani Nick stuff. Like, all like. That's how it felt being in Australia. When the Ray Gun stuff hit, I was like, oh, my God, this is my. My Lai massacre. This is something I can really get behind now.

[Marcus Parks]

For many, the My Lai massacre marked a point in American history in which our military lost the moral high ground that we'd held ever since we'd played a major part in securing victory over the Axis powers in World War II. While people have been fine with us killing hundreds of thousands of Asians by dropping bombs from planes, first, of course, in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Tokyo, and then later all up and down Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, everyone felt a little rattled when a company of American soldiers conducted themselves on the ground as if they were a squad of Nazi Einsatzgruppen. One soldier who participated in My Lai even described the event himself as a, quote, Nazi type thing.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, and I hate. That's a horrific right wing cover of that Stone Temple pilot song. Let's continue. It's kind of fun. I want you to gas me like an animal.

[Marcus Parks]

But the difference between the American soldiers in Vietnam and the Einsatzgruppen operating in the Eastern front of World War II is that the Einsatzgruppen had specific targets. Namely, they were after Jewish people, Communists, and other political enemies of the Third Reich. By contrast, American GIs in South Vietnam spent the morning of March 16, 1968, bathed in the blood of whoever was unlucky enough to find themselves in the sights of American guns and artillery, just so long as they were Vietnamese. Old men, women, children and even babies were slaughtered. Slaughtered en masse in a massacre that lasted less than two hours. In fact, that became a protest sign after Mili was exposed. Even babies. Because they asked one of the people who were there, like, they asked, like, even babies you killed? He said, even babies.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, they were going to say something about the time limit because we're all looking for a massacre to be under two hours. Odyssey is like three and a half hours long. I don't know if I can fucking take it.

[Marcus Parks]

But hey, man, I mean, you bring Up a good point. Think about that. It's all this happened in less than the time that the average feature film takes to watch.

[Eddie Pepitone]

That's insane.

[Marcus Parks]

Some of the dead have been raped before their murder, others have been tortured. And some had their deaths turned into competitions like the Japanese had done during the rape of Nanking. Everyone you know cries and and looks at those pictures of Japanese soldiers bayonetting babies. We did the same shit. Stunningly, it could have been even worse had it not been for the incredibly brave actions of other American soldiers. These men finally stopped the killing only by threatening to open fire on their fellow GIs. Because those dudes had every intention of finishing this massacre. But once it was over, the entire event was not just covered up by the army. Instead, the civilians were declared to be Viet Cong, the enemy. And the massacre was reframed as a great victory for American forces. In the press, we're news stories about it. My Lai therefore remained a secret for another two years. And had other soldiers who'd heard about the massacre not insisted the truth be brought to light, we would have never known about the My Lai massacre. Not only that, we don't know how many My Lai's there actually were.

[Henry Zebrowski]

The way it sounds like because of the way the war resulted and how our ever shifting goalposts for what constituted victory. Sound familiar? Continue to move forward.

[Marcus Parks]

Forward.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And it became into the higher body count that you got. It sounds like. Yeah. That this then turned into a gigantic murder machine.

[Marcus Parks]

It did. And then we're definitely certainly in the next episode. In the episode after that we're going to get heavily into body count, kill ratio. And what happens when you put a businessman in charge of war?

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

So what is it? Because it was like 2 million, right. In the end, something that we killed

[Marcus Parks]

how many million Vietnamese? Four. It's more like four.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. Which is bigger than any number to anything we are currently protesting.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Now the biggest question here is how. How did the war in Vietnam create the conditions for over 100American GIs to commit war crimes on a scale where a Nazi comparison is not only approachable, but valid? How did the goals of the war become so lost that officers up and down the chain of command were not only approving of massacres like My Lai, but were in some cases and actively participating? How did it get this fucking bad? Now in my opinion, the only way to answer these questions is to tell the story of the Vietnam War up until My Lai. Because for me, knowing the path towards My Lai is the only way that the massacre makes Even a modicum of sense at least getting to the point where you can possibly explain it. So over the next four weeks, we're going to cover as much of the history of the Vietnam War as we can leading up to My Lai, from the French occupation to the Tet Offensive in beyond. Every drop of history in Vietnam paired with American Cold War policies contributed to the My Lai massacre. And we can't understand My Lai without that history any more than we could understand the Einsatz Groupen without learning the history of the Nazi Party.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Cold War just kind of sounds like we were so, like happy with doing war during World War II. And everybody got so good at war and were so happy with their lives at war and they didn't have to see their families and stuff, that we're like, what if we just keep this going?

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

It almost seemed like we thought we had to be at war to be a country.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I. It's. Well, we'll get. It's a long. We get so many different grand, sweeping stuff about this which is hard to parse through, but it's, you know, we'll fight. What happens when you start a war machine? Do you shut the war machine off?

[Eddie Pepitone]

Well, then if you want to keep making money.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, exactly. Now, you might already be bristling at the comparison between Nazi and American soldiers. So I want to make it clear that we aren't going to make the same mistakes the anti Vietnam War protesters made in the 60s and 70s when. When they all called Vietnam vets baby killers and murderers upon their return to America.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Literally. I think people like that gets extremely reductive. That makes no sense. The boys were also. A lot of the soldiers were, in a way, victims too. They got pulled into the system. But we'll look, you know, we'll go into deeper.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, I mean, the role of the soldier in Vietnam, the role of the American soldier in Vietnam is like everything else about this war. It's fucking complicated. While there was plenty of bravery and honor displayed by the soldiers on the ground throughout America's occupation of Southeast Asia, because that's the only way to describe it was an occupation, it is important to note that the bravery those soldiers showed was largely a show of loyalty to each other.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And they talked about this amongst each other. That is one of those interesting things. The more Vietnam vet stuff I listen, they talked about how like every 10 foot sphere had a different experience for Vietnam and that we were left on our own out there and so they had to just depend on each other, which was both like a way to keep them loyal against each other. But it also created fear of the outsider.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And that's kind of fear because they were put out there alone to attract enemy fire. Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

A lot of these guys, they were uneducated and they not only had never left the country, some of them, most of them probably never even left like the county.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, that's 100% true. Like I, I think about, when it comes to like the fear I think about. Was it Tim o' Brien, something that he said about it? He said that walking in Vietnam was an act of extreme courage. Just putting one foot in front. He' would look down and he would think, how am I doing this? How am I walking right now? By 1968, when the my massacre occurred, a lot of the GIs and grunts on the ground, they didn't give a about the ideological goals behind the war itself. They just wanted to get themselves and their friends back to America in one piece if possible. These were guys who were only there because they'd been drafted into service and they didn't have any choice but to be there. And yeah, you might say they could have run off to Canada. But not every draftee was a middle class white kid who could just run off to a commune in Vancouver. That shit took money, resources, and social networks that most draftees didn't have. So most guys had no choice but to put their heads down and hope that they weren't one of the soldiers who were regularly sent out into mine infested rice paddies on search and destroy missions.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. And the first class of draftees like looked at it as like, oh, I can get college paid for. You know, it was like a way to like, it was almost like good until everyone started dying. Then you get terrified.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And the majority of applices would end up not even fighting. Like, you know, the majority of people that would volunteer or even get drafted, they would end up like working behind the line in various logistical places. Because it was like eight soldiers behind the line for every one soldier fighting. So they're. But then they started really ratcheting up how we can build more people that will come and die for us.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, I would have loved to have been a cook.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I don't think you would have.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I mean, well, if I had to

[Henry Zebrowski]

pick a job, yeah, sure, there was

[Marcus Parks]

plenty of them out there.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I would have been on the radio doing the same stuff I did 10 years ago.

[Marcus Parks]

But fighting right alongside the dudes who had no choice were soldiers who truly believed that they were doing the right thing by fighting in Vietnam. For them, the defeat of the North Vietnamese was a victory for freedom and democracy. The actions of these gung ho soldiers were guided by the now infamous domino theory, which had been a part of America's Post World War II foreign policy since the Eisenhower administration. In the 1950s, Richard Nixon, when he was Eisenhower's Vice president, went on TV and explained the domino theory to the American people. As with most post World War II foreign policies.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Think about, though, how fucking now we're looking at that. That's like a breath of fresh air. The fact that he sat and tried to explain why we're in this war TR to win people over, trying to say, hey, look. Look at that. Like, you know, I'm not pro Nixon, but it's kind of amazing to be like, wow, there used to be like

[Marcus Parks]

a government that would talk and know things and would be able to explain things to the American people and actually wanted to have some sort of fucking accountability with the American people. They cared about what the fuck we thought. Well, as with most Post World War II foreign policies, the domino theory was based solely on anti communist Cold War paranoia. The domino theory posited that if even a seemingly inconsequential country like Vietnam were to fall to the forces of international communism, forces whose sole purpose, as far as we were concerned, was to wipe out the American way of life, then other countries would quickly fall behind it like a row of dominoes. As far as how Vietnam came to be seen as the first domino, the Vietnamese were embroiled in a civil war that had split the country in two following their defeat of French colonial forces in the 1950s. Once the French were defeated in 1954, Vietnam was divided in half. Like North Korea and South Korea are still split today. North Vietnam was designated as the communist half and were therefore our enemies. While South Vietnam was supposedly a republic now, South Vietnam ended up being more of a corrupt dictatorship. But for America, the only thing that mattered about South Vietnam was that it wasn't communist.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That sounds familiar.

[Eddie Pepitone]

So North Vietnam, Domino, and then South Vietnam, Little Caesars.

[Henry Zebrowski]

See, this is great. This is a great series.

[Marcus Parks]

Papa John's actually.

[Henry Zebrowski]

This is a great series for Eddie. It's good for him. He spent most of his high school career drunk and dumb. Yeah, for him, I will say I

[Eddie Pepitone]

did spend a lot of my high school drunk and dumb, but I was watching movies about Vietnam the entire time, constantly.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, you and I are the same, right? Like, we're like, there's so many Vietnam movies, and both you and I were so excited. We're like, oh, yeah, we get to watch all the Vietnam movies. And then you're like. Like, oh, they were all wrong. Yeah, they're all wrong. And wow, it was way worse.

[Eddie Pepitone]

It's interesting rewatching a lot of them now, because I haven't seen a lot of them in, like, 20 years. And rewatching them now, you're like, oh, wait a second. We're not heroes.

[Marcus Parks]

No.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Nope. They're just actors. There's a little part of me of them being like, it was so hot when we filmed Apocalypse Now. I was so uncomfortable. Can you believe it? How hard this was for me?

[Marcus Parks]

I will defend them. After watching Hearts of Darkness, I will defend like. Because Apocalypse now was one of the few movies that kind of nailed it.

[Eddie Pepitone]

It did.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Well, they also were one of the first two at the gate.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, that's all.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

78. No, it's that. That great scene where they're at the bridge and, you know, he asks, who's your commanding officer? And he says, ain't you?

[Eddie Pepitone]

I was thinking about that today, man.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. That guy's awesome.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Well, the idea in the Domino Theory was that if South Vietnam fell, then the whole of Southeast Asia, that's countries like Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Indonesia, they would all become a red communist bloc controlled by the Soviet Union and. Or the People's Republic of China. After Southeast Asia fell, the Philippines were sure to fall too, followed by Japan and eventually Australia. If all that went red, then the Cold War against international communism would become unwinnable.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Why? We still have more guns than all those guys put together. We can beat the shit out of all those guys put together if we wanted to.

[Marcus Parks]

But we did, didn't. We tried and we didn't.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I'm just saying, if there was an actual, like, war, like a big old. All right, democracy and communism are showing up today at the war.

[Marcus Parks]

But we did. It's called Vietnam. We lost. It was our guns versus their guns, and their guns won.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We just should have just blew up the island. Come on, guys.

[Marcus Parks]

No, that is. That. That is what some soldiers ended up saying. The only way to win this war is if we took every. And is incredibly racist. But they would say, you'd have to take all the South South Vietnamese, put them on a boat, nuke the entire country, kill every Vietnamese person left.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Cover and then sink the boat. That was the only. That would be the only way to win.

[Eddie Pepitone]

And the. The North Vietnam kind of said the same thing.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Well, North Vietnam said, you'll have to kill every single one of us. And that's the only way you're going to win. Well, the people who subscribed to the domino theory came to believe that we had no choice but to fight against the communists in Vietnam's civil war. That is, unless you fucking wanted the communists to SAP and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. And thus you have the reasoning for our involvement in Vietnam.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I just don't. I just, you know, that's my belief, is that, like, if we had just let it all play out and then watch it all fail, like, then we would not have to fight all these crazy wars.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, it's not even that it failed. It's just let it play out. Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Like, it's like another country. Like, it doesn't involve us.

[Marcus Parks]

Because the thing is, they won't. And then it played out. And now Vietnam is a tourist destination.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Like, it's an incredible place. Now you can go and, like, crawl in the fucking tunnels and take a picture with it.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You know, it's really fun. The booby trap. Like, I love the booby trap. Escape rooms. Some of my favorite stuff. And I love going in there and being like, is that my Uncle Kevin? Is he still here?

[Marcus Parks]

I can't wait to go to Vietnam. It's been our vacation list for a decade now.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Oh, my God, I'm very excited. Ever since that Anthony Bourde, no reservations. I've been wanting to go. It looks so delicious. Delicious and cheap.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It does.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, when you listen to interviews with Vietnam vets who went into the war believing that their cause was just. The most heartbreaking thing is that many of them truly believed that they were fulfilling their duty to the cause of freedom, just as their fathers had done in World War II. These men were raised in an America that we today can't imagine. It's an America where most of the white population couldn't even entertain the thought that their own government might lie to them for any reason. Of course, the black guys and, you know, the Latinos and the Asians, they had a much different view.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But if you were white, slightly less rosy view. Yeah, yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

But if you're white. No, if the president says it's necessary, it's necessary. And that's all people needed to know. But as we'll learn over the course of the next month, president after president did indeed lie to the American people. And the Vietnam War was anything but necessary. Instead, to use a term I learned as a young boy from the Vietnam classic Full Metal Jacket, second the war in Vietnam. Skull America as a country and it remains to be seen over 50 years after Vietnam's end, if we will ever fully recover.

[Henry Zebrowski]

What are you talking about? We hanged Saddam Hussein. That's easy. And then Osama bin Laden. We don't know where his corpse is. We got him. And then, then we did the thing with Slobadon Melo Savage. So we got some W's in there.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah, we. We kidnapped the president in South America and Venezuela.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Look at his split.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I heard with Iran. The boys are going to be home by Christmas.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, wow. Great.

[Henry Zebrowski]

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is an all in one website platform that helps you stand out online. Yes, that's right. You don't have to smash your face with a hammer. You can just start a business. It's got everything you need on Squarespace, from securing your domain to building a professional site and showcasing your work all in one place. Say you want to show everybody how you can carve your ribs out of your lower abdomen so that you look more like a Ken doll. That's amazing. You can bring your vision to life with AI powered design or curated templates. Plus flexible editing tools that helps you create something that truly reflects your style. Especially if you are somebody that is trying to corrupt the young men of America. That's what Squarespace is really going to help you. Squarespace makes it easy. It makes it easy for you to put all that together other and you just go to Squarespace and do it all. Thanks, Braden. Head to squarespace.com left for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use offer code left to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain. Most of us picked a bank at 16 and never looked back. Sound familiar? That's where Chime comes in. They're not like traditional old banks who charge fees and gatekeep perks and rewards. Chime offers the most rewards. Hoarding fee free banking all with no overdraft fees, no monthly fees, no minimum balance fees. You get 5% cash back on Chime card in a category of choice like gas or groceries. All while building credit through regular everyday spending with no credit check. And you can also grow your money faster with a savings rate that's nine times the national average. Join the millions who are already banking fee free with America's number one choice for banking. Head to chime.com left that is chime.com left Sign up now. It only takes a few minutes. Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services and Chime card provided by Chimes bank partners qualifying direct deposits. Required terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com disclosures for details. If I think about where we were 20 years ago, and I think what we would use to protect our space, it would mostly involve bayonets, weed whackers, and assorted diesel fueled dune buggies that we'd use to spread pollution so thick it kept the other improv comedians from stealing our material. But now Simplisafe has made all that so much easier. Using Simplisafe here at the office has revolutionized our ability to use diesel powered dune buggies. Buggies for good and not for chaos. Think about what your home security system does. An intruder approaches your house. Sits. Waits. Not much. Just waits until the window breaks. And then it goes, oh, oh no. But then you get some kind of alarm and a notification. What if the whole point was to stop the chain events before it even happened? Unlike traditional security systems that will only alert you after a break in is already underway, Simplisafe is designed to to help stop intruders before they get inside. It helps. It goes into their mind. It makes them think of why they're doing this. I remember when we didn't have real security and all the podcasters were outside begging for our takes. Begging and scratching like a bunch of weasels. Now I can see them 25ft away and I could spray them with fire extinguisher liquid and stink gas. Not that it would make them smell any worse. Worse than they already did. Simply Safe helps me lord over them all. Simply Safe has been protecting your world for 20 years. Celebrate their anniversary with us and save 60 on your new SimpliSafe system at simplysafe.com lpotl get 60% off at simplisafe.com opl plus when you order, write in our show name in the how'd you hear about us? Search survey in order to let them know we sent you. Don't forget, there's no safe like simply

[Marcus Parks]

safe from your grave. Now, an estimated 4 million Vietnamese were killed as a result of America's Cold War paranoia. And while plenty of soldiers, both north and South Vietnamese, were killed, the majority of Vietnamese dead were civilians. Most of those were killed by American bombs. We really, really cannot fathom how many bombs we dropped on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. There were certain, like there were certain weeks when we dropped more bombs on certain parts of the jungle than we dropped in the entirety of World War II.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And then just strafing it all night with artillery shells and gunfire. All night.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, and that's not Even account napalm and Agent Orange.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I don't think there's no way to actually know how many people we kill.

[Marcus Parks]

They say it's between 3.2 and 4 million. 4 million is the highest estimate.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, yeah. Which is, you know, which is crazy when 800,000 is the fucking in the middle.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Is the.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

But while most were killed by bombs, many were killed point blank by American soldiers looking them in the eye and pulling the trigger. Now the mealy mouthed admission some former officials in the armed forces have given is that the killing of Vietnamese civilians was not policy, but neither was it an aberration. That's a fucking cowardly way of saying it was common. And since it happened so often, the armed forces had to cover it up again and again. And there's evidence for all of this.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It definitely is a perverse care for the soldiers in a way because they hung them out to dry. So they put the soldiers out to dry to go do all of this dirty work for them. So in a way what they thought, in my mind, this is the validation of the COVID up, is this protection of the dudes. But they don't understand that what they did was damn their very souls. Right? And it goes past like whether or not they go to jail, hell or not. You know what I mean? It's like you damn the soul of a. A million people and they were never correct and they had to come back and live in the United States of America and then bring that vibe.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, and not only did they live in the United States of America, but they had to deal with nobody in America wanting to even talk about it. Or like, do you know how many

[Henry Zebrowski]

times that's how we got over it?

[Marcus Parks]

Do you know how many times mental health care for Vietnam vets was struck down in Congress? Dozens, like going throughout the 70s and 80s and 90s. Dozens of times. They said like, no, we don't need to deal with that. All while these vets are on the street like trying to deal with the. That they did that their government told them to do.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, Lieutenant Dan was supposed to die out there. Lieutenant Dan was supposed to die in the patties, just like his father and his father before him.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I'm also supposed to die in the patties from a heart attack from too many hamburgers.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, it's dying of the patties.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, the journalist who exposed My Lai, Seymour Hersh, looked at dozens of cases where soldiers were charged with murder during active duty in Vietnam. And he found that in every case the charges were either dropped or reduced to manslaughter. And even the manslaughter cases were eventually exonerated. And you want to talk about, like, if you want to remove the soul of your soldiers, remove accountability from the battlefield. And that's what we did, because that's what the Nazis. Yeah. As such, Hirsch wrote that the real conspiracy was that as far as the US army was concerned, there was no such thing as the murder of a Vietnamese civilian. And this was very much by design, as we'll show over the course of this series, the way the war was fought and the policies enacted by the people in charge. They may not have explicitly encouraged the killing of civilians, but it certainly incentivized it. In fact, the man who became the scapegoat for My Lai, Lt. William Calley, argued in his trial that on the day of the massacre, he was simply doing what he'd been trained to do since boot camp.

[Eddie Pepitone]

He sucks, but I can't disagree with him.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, he does suck.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Though

[Henry Zebrowski]

I will say he does suck, because I'm reading my Life for right now, and let's just say he was the scapegoat, but he also was very guilty.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Also a goat. Yeah, yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Incredibly guilty. Incredibly guilty. But that's the thing.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He killed many people at his own hands, and he was an extremely enthusiastic about it and had to be stopped.

[Marcus Parks]

When I say scapegoat, I mean that he was.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He was the one that got the bill.

[Marcus Parks]

He was the one that got the bill. Yeah. There were many men who should have got the bill. Oh, yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

They all should have went to jail for life.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Ernest Medina, fuck me. Should have gone to jail forever.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But it sees an interesting policy, which is, if you don't call it a crime, then it's not one. So then no crimes happened, because you just don't call it these crimes. You don't give it the severity, because then you're not guilty of it. It's like not testing for Covid.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, it's literally.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's like. It's the same thing. It's just, what if we just don't charge them?

[Marcus Parks]

Well, it's all very Nixonian. You know, it's the idea of, you know, if the Amer. If the president does it, it can't be illegal. It's the idea that if America does it, it can't be wrong in the name of democracy.

[Henry Zebrowski]

How dare you think that we made a mistake.

[Marcus Parks]

Exactly. Now, if America had taken off their Cold War glasses and looked at what was happening in Vietnam, objectively, we would have known that Vietnam's civil war was not a fight over whether or not communism was the right system of governance for the Vietnamese people. That was certainly a part of it, but this was more about the end of European colonialism and the right of people the world over to choose their own destiny. We were the invaders here. And as we'll soon see, Vietnam had a long and successful history of turning invaders into corpses. Now, that's not to say that the North Vietnamese were the good guys here. We're not going full Hanoi Jane on this series. North and South Vietnamese soldiers also committed plenty of war crimes all on their own. We're definitely going to be covering the massacre at Hu, but in the end, distinctions of good or bad, they don't really apply. Ultimately, this was not America's fight, but nor was it the Soviet's fight, nor was it China's. Vietnam should have only mattered to the Vietnamese, but because the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China made it a part of our Cold War, the conflict in Vietnam was far deadlier, far longer, and far more brutal than it ever would have been without us.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Stupid for going over there. We couldn't even flip Cuba.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Seriously, like, what are we doing going. Cuba has barely has running water. It has, like, no electricity. And even they're like, we like communism. We're not. They're just culturally not into it. They're not into it. And even this, as we'll get into, the communist part of it was never even really the very main thrust of the og the, like, build there. The whole point was to just, like, we just want to be Vietnam.

[Marcus Parks]

What we missed the forest for the trees completely. Like. Like, we saw communism as the point, but for the Vietnamese, communism was like a means to an end. The only thing.

[Henry Zebrowski]

How.

[Marcus Parks]

Because the only thing they cared about was an independent Vietnam.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Communism and. And democracy and all these political philosophies, when it comes down to it, are just a way for statehoods to lay claim on other fucking people. Like, it just gets to a point where, like, I just don't, you know, whatever. Whatever, man. Oh, yeah, whatever, bro.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You shouldn't discuss it.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, no, that's not what I'm saying. That's not what I'm saying. It's more just like. It's this funny thing of, like, all of these little people, all these smaller countries are just. Are just, you know, pieces on chessboard for all these people that have bigger plans for them.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Now the Vietnam War is, spoiler alert, incredibly complicated.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, but what about what we've said so far is complicated, but that's why

[Marcus Parks]

there were so many misunderstandings and bad decisions made by no less than four consecutive presidents concerning Vietnam. Everyone likes to pretend like Vietnam started with Johnson and ended with Nixon. No, it started with fucking Truman. But that's also why our extremely long source list is going to wait until the end. But to be fair to those policymakers, and I think this is very important to remember when it comes to Vietnam, no one, one could have predicted how complicated the world was going to become in the 20th century. It was the first time in human history that the whole world became interconnected and we didn't know how to handle it. One could argue we still don't know how to handle it. But the point is, the Vietnam War was the culmination of those 20th century complications. It's damn near as complicated as World War I because almost everything leads to Vietnam in one way or another other, including World War I. So we have to be very judicious about what we include here, lest we give a complete history of Europe, Asia and America throughout the 19th and 20th century.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, Marcus, no, no. It's gotta be an animal to some of the context. We're gonna be explaining how light is

[Eddie Pepitone]

made context is Henry's Vietnam.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We have to stop sometimes we gotta just. So you go read a textbook, then come back.

[Marcus Parks]

I will say Vietnam is the ultimate context. Black hole.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, I know it just because it's every direction. It's just you keep going.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. But to the point of information. It's also important to remember that our common knowledge about the Vietnam War, just what we take for granted. It actually gives us more information about the inner workings of the conflict than 99% of the people who were actually involved in it at the time. Which gives us a lot of hindsight. I mean, it's incredible to think that up until 1967, 68, we didn't even know that Ho Chi Minh wasn't really the guy in charge. It's fucking insane.

[Eddie Pepitone]

We didn't know what the country was before we went there. Most of us.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, most of us. Well, for so many people involved on every side of the conflict, Vietnam was the definition of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. So to try to make all of that this as easy to understand as possible for everyone, we're going to take this in sections explaining each part of this world individually. Therefore, the natural place to start is the Vietnamese people themselves. Because had we bothered to learn their history back then, we would have known the last thing anybody in the world should ever do is with the Vietnamese.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, man, they are. Are good at fighting in their backyards.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes.

[Eddie Pepitone]

They don't give a.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Man, they don't give a. Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

One thing I learned, though, is no matter what color our skin is, we all pink.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, you're right. We all pink, man.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Once we explode.

[Marcus Parks]

Yep.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yep. Then we're pure fuchsias. Lots of fuchsias in there.

[Marcus Parks]

I'm pretty much the only country to get a real handle on Vietnam for any significant length of time. Time was China. And they did it a very long time ago. They conquered the area known as Vietnam in 111 BC. I think it's the farthest back we've ever gone.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Wow. I'm sorry, guys. We almost got to. Jesus Christ. I am just. Oh, wow. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, the Chinese held on to.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And all of this.

[Marcus Parks]

Trust me. Yeah, The Chinese held on to it for about a thousand years, but the Chinese still had to deal with constant bloody revolts led by a cast of increasingly unorthodox leaders. Unorthodox would, of course, become Vietnam's style in warfare from this point forward in the year 40. 40 AD Jesus Christ.

[Henry Zebrowski]

So they did war like Madonna does clothes. Nobody. Oh, they just always trying to figure out how she does it.

[Marcus Parks]

Year 40, two sisters named Chung Chak.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You were fucking 40?

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. This is great. Two sisters named Chung Chak and Chung Ni led a rebellion that established an independent Viet kingdom. Chung Chak's husband was a Vietnamese lord who'd been assassinated by a Chinese general. So in response, these two sisters led forces that captured 65 Chinese fortresses in North Vietnam. The Chung sisters ruled for three years before a Chinese general retook their lands. But. But after the Chungs were unable to accept defeat, they drowned themselves rather than surrender. Or so the story goes.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Difficult women. No.

[Marcus Parks]

Besides being an example of Vietnamese tenacity, the Chung sisters played an important role in integrating Vietnamese forces when it came to gender. And that's why I'm mentioning this, because this tells you how long this has been going on. The Chung sisters became long standing martyrs for Vietnamese independence, later becoming popular communist propaganda figures in what the Vietnamese would call the American war. Just as we call it the Vietnam War. But because of tradition started by the Chung sisters, the Vietnam War was one of the few modern wars in which women played a sustained, organized and militarily significant role from beginning to end, which would cause a lot of confusion for American forces.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And you're talking from little kids to old ladies.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. And like the few soldiers, not the Few, but like the soldiers with morality didn't want to kill women.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

And they would no problem killing them?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh no.

[Marcus Parks]

Whatsoever. Well, it's estimated that 1.5 million women served in major combat roles for North Vietnam at every level of the Vietnam War. They served as guerrilla fighters, commanders, engineers and artillery gunners. Hell, one female Viet Cong soldier who led an all women squad called the Long Hair Army. She became general and eventually Vice President of Vietnam.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Do you think the Chung sisters could be played by Emma Watson in a dual role where she plays both sisters?

[Marcus Parks]

In other words, the Vietnamese had a reputation for using any and every resource at their disposal in service of expelling any invader who might decide that Vietnam was theirs to do as they pleased. And they'd been doing it for almost 2000 years by the time the first American even heard the word Vietnam. After a thousand years of Chinese rule, the Vietnamese finally took.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Is that crazy? Like is just the idea of just like very casually just been like that was like just a temporary spot for China.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And they were there for like a thousand years.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, they've been around for a while.

[Henry Zebrowski]

They really been around the block.

[Marcus Parks]

They really have been. Now after a thousand years, we're open for purchase.

[Henry Zebrowski]

China. They know, they listen.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, they know, they oh yeah. Now after a thousand years of Chinese rule, the Vietnamese finally took advantage of a weak and corrupt Chinese dynasty. And in 939 A.D. the Vietnamese army destroyed a massive Chinese army using one of their favorite tactics, ambush. That led to the creation of their own nation. David Daviet expanded and after their first civil war between the north and south raged from the 17th until the 19th century, the Vietnamese people had fully established the long thin S shaped country we now know know as Vietnam. Marked by 800 miles of coast from the Chinese border to the Gulf of Thailand, the Vietnamese now had a country that's roughly twice the size of Florida. Most of the American fighting, however, would occur in the bottom half of the country, South Vietnam. So remember that from here on out, all of the that's going to happen within the borders of South Vietnam is happening in an area that is no larger than the state in which Ed and Henry here were raised.

[Henry Zebrowski]

They also got the same animals.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And the same snakes and alligators of swamps, big bugs and stuff.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Well they got, aren't they more caymans than gators?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they got those Jamaican crabs and all that shrimp. Do you think there should be a Disney there? That's what they should have done. Walt Disney should got a hold of them. He tried make them all Oompa Loompas.

[Marcus Parks]

It took us a really long time to figure out that America's greatest imperial power was our culture. Yeah, really long. It took way too long for us to remember that.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's definitely the most boring way to win and sieve though.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah. Cultural victory is the best way to win though.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You can get in there.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Speaking of which, another brighter side of the whole war. Go to the public playlist on Spotify. Funky Vietnam, back and forth, man.

[Marcus Parks]

Awesome.

[Henry Zebrowski]

All the music that we brought over to kill them to, they liked. And so they then incorporated it into their sound. And it's great.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. Cuz they listen to it. Cuz we took over their radio. Yep.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. South be Vietnam now. Vietnam didn't enjoy a long period of peace following the end of their long and bloody civil war. In the mid 19th century, Europe's industrial revolution inspired a new wave of colonization. And into China, which included Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam itself, came into the sights of the French. This is the second way, like the first wave of colonization. If you want to know about that, listen to our series on Holy. I forgot its name. The boat. The big boat. The Dutch East Indies. The Batavia. Yeah, yeah, the Batavia.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Well, everything is connecting, huh? Yeah, every single series connects, huh?

[Eddie Pepitone]

It really is.

[Marcus Parks]

By the time we're done with this thing. Yeah. We're going to have like a history of humanity going.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Wow.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Well, the French imperial forces claimed that they were on a so called civilizing mission to bring material advancement to the Indochinese people. That they're, of course they're doing them a favor, of course. But they were really after Vietnamese rice and more importantly for the industrial revolution, Vietnamese rubber.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Because it is the way to have a sex without putting a baby inside of the hero.

[Marcus Parks]

The French, however, were one of the most powerful militaries in the world in the 1850s. So because France's military technology was vastly superior, the Vietnamese courts accepted French rule in exchange for a shared power structure. A small number of Vietnamese elites would therefore greatly benefit from serving French colonial authorities. But French rule profoundly changed life in Vietnam for everyone else else for the worse. And the Vietnamese never forgot what happened when they handed control to outsiders.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And also how it felt to be sort of turned out from the inside. Yeah, yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

No, because that is in this, this relationship between the French and the Vietnamese elites like this, it creates a sort of rift that lasts all the way up until the Americans. The creation of South Vietnam is this like collaborator thing.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, of course. Because it's the idea of they are because it's. Which will version of it will also not work.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Well, France quickly remade Vietnam in its own image. It's why bon me sandwiches are on baguettes. But this created a wealthy.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And that was honestly if all the violence, all the degradation. I know if there was one thing, they made it all worth it. It's a bon me. If that's how all this shakes out because of the pate and roast pork and then a beautiful piece of. When you get a really good baguette and the fresh cilantro and the pickle, like that's like my favorite things on the face of the planet. Carrots on a sandwich. Thought I didn't know.

[Marcus Parks]

I will. I will admit my favorite sandwich in Manhattan is a banh mi down in Soho. See, it works.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Colonialism works.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, but this. But this also created a wealthy Vietnamese middle class who were loyal to the French instead of their own people. These westernized Vietnamese began living an opulent European lifestyle by exploiting the vast majority of their countrymen. See, 90% of Vietnam were peasants who saw no benefits whatsoever from French colonial rule. Instead, the life of the peasant got far worse after many were converted from landowners or farmers into basically slaves for the French. The working conditions of the French rubber plantations were so horrendous that managers began recruiting workers from outside Vietnam because outsiders were less likely to know about the cruelty, disease, and malnutrition that awaited them on the plantation. One in four rubber plantation workers died on the job. But once you were in, you were stuck. Anyone?

[Henry Zebrowski]

So like the glue factory?

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Cuz I don't think things stick to rubber. They stick to glue, stick together.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You figure they would have been able to bounce out of there. Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Marcus, why are you wrong? Why are you wrong?

[Marcus Parks]

Well, anyone who ran away from service was executed by the French through torture, hanging, or stabbing. And the treatment only got worse with each decade of French rule.

[Henry Zebrowski]

God, and so hard to get hung over there because you just bounce, you know. I mean the rubber factory. Boingy boing, boingy boing.

[Eddie Pepitone]

But you know, the brighter side is it's where we got the bungee cord.

[Marcus Parks]

This really is turning out to be a sunshiny episode.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Is really nice.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, as a result of French rule, there was a gap forming between the Vietnamese people. 1. Once again, those loyal to the French were making out like bandits. But the majority of the country was wondering what the ever happened to an independent Vietnam. Which brings us in the timeline to World War I. We're actually in the 20th century.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We're moving. Good news. We're moving.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, but it just keeps getting thicker and thicker from here.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It does though. But we didn't start before. Jesus Christ.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, since the French were pretty busy During World War I, some Vietnamese began advocating for violent revolution against the French.

[Henry Zebrowski]

When you're busy doing something else, everybody shows up. So fucking.

[Marcus Parks]

But the movement was mostly centered around the intellectuals in the cities. The revolutionaries completely ignored Vietnam's massive rural population. So the revolution went nowhere. But the Vietnamese would not make that mistake twice. On the next go go round, they would be taking inspiration from the man who realized that the peasants were the key to everything. This man would eventually lead North Vietnam. How he would found North Vietnam and his name, Ho Chi Minh, would be cursed by millions of Americans throughout the 1960s, the 1970s and beyond.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He had that good old fashioned comic book guy beard, man, they loved him,

[Eddie Pepitone]

that's for damn sure.

[Marcus Parks]

Ho Chi Minh. Yeah, they called him, they called him Uncle Ho.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He definitely got that. He's got them long ass, fucking pussy ass whiskers, man. He looks good.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, he does.

[Eddie Pepitone]

As far as horrible dictators go. He's horrible.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He's in there.

[Marcus Parks]

I mean, I mean, one could make the argument that he wasn't a horrible dictator. I mean, it's, there's, that's the thing is that he's one of the most misunderstood figures of the 20th century. Century. So because of American propaganda, we grew up thinking that Ho Chi Minh was an evil, bloodthirsty communist warlord whose only desires were the slaughtering of Americans and the torture of POWs. But while Uncle Ho, as his people called him, did indeed oversee atrocities and the mistreatment of prisoners of war, no, ain't nobody saying the Hanoi Hilton was a good time. He was also an incredibly complicated character whose only true goal was an independent Vietnam. The Ho Chi Minh had a deep understanding of both his own country's history and of his own people. Ho therefore had a deep understanding of what the Vietnamese were truly capable of. He knew how to appeal to urban radicals while also mobilizing the peasantry for warfare with the ultimate goal of ridding Vietnam of the French.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I'm put this out there for my zoomers. Just. He's the Taylor Swift of South Asian communism. He was a broad spectrum appeal used cross genre. And he would definitely. He loved pageantry.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, and his wife was a tight end.

[Marcus Parks]

Actually, Ho Chi Minh never took a wife. He never had a family. That was one of the reasons why they called him Uncle Ho is because he in Vietnam having a Family is a big deal. And choosing to not have a family is considered a massive sacrifice. So people would love him for that. They would say, like, oh, Uncle Ho Ho has sacrificed his family for the good of Vietnam. He will sacrifice everything. Therefore, I will sacrifice everything for Ho Chi Minh.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Just.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Oh, my.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Eddie, you just reopened that wound. Oh, you just reopened that wound. I can't even think about how he must. Him and Ho Chi Minh, because what do you think? You don't think Ho Chi Minh then? I mean, like, do you think maybe he's just shooting blanks or something?

[Marcus Parks]

No, I. I actually truly want. Maybe Ho Chi Minh was gay. I mean, there are many confirmed bachelors, quote unquote, throughout history. Alexander the yeah, and it is Hoover.

[Eddie Pepitone]

How is being gay? Is being gay okay over there? I don't even know.

[Marcus Parks]

I couldn't. Honestly, I could not tell you one way or another. I don't know.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Stories lp otl gmail.com.

[Henry Zebrowski]

yeah, I'd love to know.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, Ho Chi Minh was exiled from Vietnam like a lot of other nationalist troublemakers during the early 20th century. But even though he would be gone from Vietnam for decades, Uncle Ho still became the leader, leading voice in the Vietnamese independent movement. But since the Western powers were uninterested in helping out Vietnam, Ho instead looked towards Russia. See, only a few years earlier, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia had overthrown a cruel and indifferent ruling class in a bloodbath that had ended only when the entire Russian imperial family were turned into corpses in a dank basement.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Little Anastasia down there with a hole in her head.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Get her again. She didn't live. Kitty feeling anything, though. Nah, it's all the Anastasia. That was good that I liked what

[Marcus Parks]

the Bolsheviks had done to the Russian royal family. That wasn't too far off from what the Vietnamese wanted to do to the French. So Ho Chi Minh became a dedicated communist. And from that point forward, the Vietnamese independence movement became inextricably linked to communism as well. And that's incredibly important to understand that it is. Communism is a means to answer an end. But the end is independence.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Because he also trained in. He went to school in America.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, he traveled through America after. Through his exile, like he. Yeah, he lived in Boston, New York for a time. He was a pastry chef in London for a bit. He traveled all over the world. It wasn't. He ended up back in France in like 1919. He started calling himself Nguyen the Patriot. But, yeah, he. He had traveled all over the world. You know who come back to Vietnam

[Henry Zebrowski]

reminds me me of oh, man. Very similar. No, and in terms of the. Obviously you can't really compare the two because one's a terrorist and one's like a revolutionary leader. I don't know what you like. I feel like there's a lot of people that's. Side stories. LPOTL gmail.com please.

[Marcus Parks]

I would say you can't make the. The only comparison you could make is that they did both travel a lot.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And they trained him too, in the us. Trained him as well.

[Marcus Parks]

Ho Chi Minh. Yeah, kind of.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Kind of.

[Marcus Parks]

Of sort of like it's.

[Henry Zebrowski]

They did it all.

[Marcus Parks]

We'll get to that later.

[Henry Zebrowski]

A lot of stuff, man.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, cuz I. I'm kind of extending like I'm not getting into America just yet with Hoim. Because there is a lot of stuff with America and Ho Chi Minh, but I wouldn't say we.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He liked a Boston lady, though. You see him with a big old broad out there going like, oh, gee, what you doing? Just like laughing at him, you know, just going to a Bruins game.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, Ho soon attracted the attention of the Soviets. He soon attracted the attention to the Soviets, who invited him to Moscow in 1923. And even though Ho disliked how the Soviets treated peasants as disposable, he still stayed in Moscow long enough to work out how communist ideas could be applied to his home country of Vietnam. Because the only thing that mattered to Ho Chi Minh was Vietnam. Vietnam. As I mentioned earlier, fucking everything leads to Vietnam in one way or another. And the next phase of Vietnam's story involves the fucking Great Depression, which plunged the world into economic chaos after the stock market crash in 1929. See, the great Depression was indeed a global crisis. Remember, we talked about how badly it affected Germany in the lead up to World War II. And it affected Vietnam just as much as everyone else. Starvation due to the economic turmoil led to Vietnamese rioting in 1930. And while the Vietnamese Revolution led by Vietnamese Communists seemed to be on the brink of success, the French quickly put the rebellion to bed. Thousands of Vietnamese rebels were killed in the process, while tens of thousands of Vietnamese peasants were also murdered by the French as dozens of battles between colonial and communist forces raged on. This was in essence, the opening act of a conflict between the Vietnamese and a revolving cast of outsiders, riders throughout the 20th century that would last for over four decades. And it had been sparked by things that had happened all the way over in America. But While the first 20 years of this conflict would be taken on by the French, the last 20 would be America's fight to Win or lose. Spoiler alert. We fucking lost, Marcus.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Why will anyone listen to the rest of the series? How will they know what happened end? Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Because the journey is knowing how we lost and why we lost and what we lost.

[Eddie Pepitone]

And we're actually not even gonna get to us officially losing.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, we're not gonna get there.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. We're actually gonna end, like, five years before we lose. Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's great.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Then we're still winners. Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

As long as we. As long as our series ends directly after the Me Lai massacre.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Then everything's fine. Because he didn't come a crime until, like, 10 years later.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, one of the men fighting during the first real conflict between the French and the Vietnamese was a man from the old Vietnamese imperial capital of Hu. His name was Vo Nguyen Zapp. Zap was another important figure in Vietnamese history because while he was from the south, his tactical brilliance on behalf of North Vietnam would one day drive the American military to the point of pure insanity. Like Uncle Ho Von Win, Zap knew the history of Vietnam and therefore knew that his people had a knack for resisting occupation by foreign powers. In fact, before becoming one of the architects of Vietnam's war for independence, Zop was a history teacher. This, in case you haven't noticed, is a lesson. The guys who knew their history, they were the victors in Vietnam. The guys who didn't were the ones who lost.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, yeah. And the French. It's kind of interesting because each time you go back and you listen to them complain about their situation in Vietnam, they all have the same exact back complaints.

[Marcus Parks]

The French, Yo. God.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, they all have the same complaints, being like they come out of nowhere, they never stop, and they keep telling us we have to kill all of them.

[Marcus Parks]

And that is all by design, as we'll get into later.

[Eddie Pepitone]

They didn't have a chance with all that cream.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's what's so hard, man. They eat snails. You know how slow you have to be to choose to eat a snail?

[Eddie Pepitone]

They probably got so distracted all the extra snails sitting around Vietnam.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. And they don't spend enough time preparing, shaving their armpits, wearing deodorant. God knows these French are lazy.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yep. See, we can make fun of them, of course.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, them. The French.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, they're fine or whatever, man.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. Vietnamese turn them into toast. Yeah, French toast.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Cut it out. That's the one that's gonna fall. That's gonna bring it down. It's gonna bring morale.

[Eddie Pepitone]

We're already.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I'm about to shoot myself in the head. I feel like I'm like in Pinkville. I'm like in here waiting to be. I'm. I'm an old Vietnamese woman waiting to get shot in the head.

[Eddie Pepitone]

No, they kissed him.

[Marcus Parks]

French kissed them.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I make. None of this is good. This is not great. It's not helping the history.

[Marcus Parks]

Surprisingly, I'm enjoying it.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You got to someone's a word Smith.

[Marcus Parks]

Now. By the mid-1919s, Vo Nguyen Zap had learned about the brutality the French had been inflicting upon the Vietnamese people for almost 70 years. And after reading a pamphlet written by Ho Chi Minh about Vietnamese independence, Zopp joined the revolution.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Pamphlets have changed the world.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes, they have.

[Henry Zebrowski]

There's so many things about pamphlets and how you just drop them and it changes so much. It's so crazy.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, it's crazy because you also look at how the Vietnamese started. It is quite similar to how America started and very similar and going to get into that now. The Vietnamese were so used to fighting stronger enemies that they had a term for this situation. They called it toy cop, which roughly translates in English to opportune moment. And also apologies for all the butchering I've been doing with the Vietnamese pronunciation. It is a incredibly difficult language.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But that's why I'm going to take this toy car to ask if I can go to the bathroom. Do it Last Podcast on the Left is excited to collaborate with Audible. Audible has a massive range of ad free crime fiction, non fiction and true crime podcasts. You know, there's so many things you could do while you're listening to an audiobook. You can clean up your own personal crime scene and that's easy to do. And you can learn it all from books. Some people also listen to audiobooks to go to sleep. But you could check out the podcasts like this American Life, titles from true crime greats like Michael Connelly and Agatha Christie, and audible originals like Dr. Death, the Cowboy. You can find whatever you're looking for on Audible. Plus you can multitask while you do it. Find your next mystery on Audible. Audible stories that speak to you. New members can start listening with a 30 day free trial at audible.com left. Is there anything better than a summer evening out outdoors? Enjoy your space to the fullest with new greenery from fast Growing trees. I love a big thick bush. Fast Growing Trees is America's largest, most trusted online nursery. And they can send me a big thick bush anytime of the day. It arrives at work, it arrives at my car. I can pinpoint on a Google map where it is send me a big thick brown bush. And they say send it immediately when they have it because sometimes the shaver comes to town. I remember one time I ordered a cherry wood tree from Fast Growing Trees and my God, I couldn't cut it down no matter what my father told me to do. I had a lie to him about it and next thing you know, I became the first President of the United States of America. And even you can become the first President of the United States of America with fast growing trees. Right now. Get up to half off select summer planning essentials. Plus get an additional 20% off your first purchase with code left at checkout. That's an additional 20% off@fastgrowing trees.com with code left at checkout. Offer is valid for a limited time only. Terms and conditions apply. This is a paid ad by BetterHelp. It's so important to remember with the busyness of the holidays, every holiday, Arbor Day, that day about the planet, President's Day. There's so many things to adapt to in this life, you know, because. And it doesn't follow a perfect plan. Gah. Ruins the whole weekend. But therapy with BetterHelp, the world's largest online therapy platform, it can be a space to pause, reevaluate and adjust to any unexpected changes. With over 30,000 therapists worldwide, BetterHelp is one of the leading online therapy platforms. Having served millions of people globally, BetterHelp makes it easier to fit therapy into your routine. They're in good hands too. Better Help therapists have at least three years and 1,000 hours of hands on experience. Hands on experience and hold all required education, training and certifications. It's easy to do and the help is better over there. You don't have to navigate life's changes alone. Sign up and get 10% [e-mail] LastPod that's better. HP.com LastPod Rise from your grave. Back in Saigon. We're back in the Vietnam. I thought I got out, but I'm back in.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You're going to be in for a while.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, I bet.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

We're hot till you rotate back to the world.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's humid.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You should have brought an extra pair of socks.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's not enough. This is enough. I got my ankle socks.

[Marcus Parks]

Let's get back to the concept of Toy ka or, you know, Operations Opportune Moment. The concept of Toika was simple. Prepare for war constantly, but wait for the so called opportune moment to strike. The Vietnamese were and still are an incredibly patient people. But to Take down the French. The Vietnamese combined the ancient concept of toika with a type of warfare that had been written about extensively by Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist leader. After studying Mao's writings on bao battle tactics extensively, the Vietnamese would use Mao's instructions to defeat both the French and American militaries. Mao called it guerrilla warfare. Put simply, guerrilla warfare is a strategy used by smaller countries to win wars against powerful imperialist regimes. Wars in which the home team would be trained to engage in conflicts that could last decades.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I'm definitely not what we're currently in right now, and I'm pretty certain that we're gonna nip this current guerrilla war we're in in the bud, though not unlike the other one.

[Marcus Parks]

Definitely not the type of war that we fought in. I don't know every war that we fought since Vietnam.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Can't one of these guys just come out and fight us like men? Organized, set up, lined up, want us to dig trenches. And we set the day, and we break for Christmas. They left the drums at home. What the fuck? Why are there no whistles? Where's the guy with the flag?

[Marcus Parks]

Well, the thing is, the guerrilla warfare is the only warfare left because it's either at this point, either guerrilla warfare or nuclear warfare. Because any other military that could field a military that would go against ours is a nuclear power.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Unless. Hey, you're discounting autonomous robot warfare. Yes. Which could also very much happen.

[Marcus Parks]

I forget about that. Which is already happening. Yeah, no, that's Ukraine.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Soon everyone. Soon everyone will not even be there. Won't even be people there.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I love how we blindsided us when guerrilla warfare is how we beat the British to get our own country.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, partly.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But we didn't call it that. We called it, God damn the formation of a goddamn America. Have to be. We were red, white, blue.

[Marcus Parks]

I mean, but, you know, the Revolutionary War, that was still a pretty conventional war by. By those standards. Like, you know, the Battle of Bunker Hill. There. There were engagements, there was fronts, there was engagement.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Mel Gibson's boys.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, I remember them. They were. They took it to the fucking hilt, man. That was a great, great documentary.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, rather than fighting massive battles in fields between soldiers in uniform, battles that colonized countries could never hope to win, guerrilla warfare was defined by countless small conflicts meant to bleed out the invading nation using death by a thousand cuts. The idea was that the colonized nation could outlast the colonizers, because while the colonizers were usually fighting and dying for economic or ideological reasons, the gorillas were fighting and Dying for their home. And they were doing it on their own turf. Now, the Vietnamese had already been fighting wars using guerrilla warfare tactics all the way back to the earliest conflicts with the Chinese. They used it against the Mongols. They knew how to do this. But after reading Mao ironically, they could expand on the concept, codify it, and when the time was right, national rationalize it to an extreme effect. Now, at this point in the story, we're in the 1930s and small resistance movements have been fighting the French and the Vietnamese elite who supported the French for decades. They hadn't made much headway. But when Vo Nguyen Zap took charge at the end of the 1930s, the Vietnamese forces became more focused. Then another so called opportune moment came with World War II, especially after Germany shocked the world by whipping the out of France with lightning speed in 1940. It's all the cream de blitzkrieg.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. They were all. Again, it was all the cream. They're not shaving. We're talking about this lazy French, sticky French.

[Marcus Parks]

I don't feel like it.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I do not want to fight the world. I don't have to go. I don't want to have an empire no more. Why does the world come to fight us? Why do they come to fight us?

[Marcus Parks]

Well, from a Vietnamese perspective, France's defeat weakened its grip on its colonies. But instead of the Vietnamese taking over, another cruel colonial power stepped in, albeit briefly. That cruel colonial power was the last people you wanted to show up, the fucking Japanese.

[Henry Zebrowski]

The crimes of the Japanese, they always begins.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, the Japanese era in Vietnam is extremely complex. But to put it very simply, the Japanese were mostly interested in Vietnam as a staging ground for larger operations during World War II. Vietnam is in an extremely strategic location right there on, you know, right on the Gulf. But since the.

[Henry Zebrowski]

In the vermicelli fields. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

But since the French government had been replaced with Nazi collaborators after Germany's victory, the Vietnamese people had to deal with both Japanese and French occupiers throughout World War II.

[Eddie Pepitone]

So they were like a third. I hate everybody.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You know, there was just like, we're.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We're our own group. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But honestly, God, what great food must have come out of this.

[Marcus Parks]

Japanese, French, Vietnamese fusion Japanese.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

I don't think there was much cooking going on. It was a pretty brutal occupation.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I wish they had stopped making war.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I wish they had focused on. On food. That'd be fun if it was just snacks.

[Marcus Parks]

Snack wars.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, it be cute as. And then all of a sudden, snack wars has gone hot. It's gone hot.

[Marcus Parks]

They're.

[Henry Zebrowski]

They just blew up the Reese's factory. Oh my God. All the flaming Cheetos go

[Marcus Parks]

now. By 1941, the Vietnamese were really starting to get their together. After three decades in exile, H. Ho Chi Minh finally returned to his home country to form a new organization called the League of Independence of Vietnam. This group came to be known better as the Viet Minh. The Viet Minh would become an incredibly deadly fighting force of guerrilla soldiers. And eventually they would evolve into America's deadliest enemies in the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong. But the thing about the evolution of the Viet Minh into the Vietnamese Viet Cong is that it showed America's extreme arrogance concerning this war. See, America showed up in Vietnam with ground troops in 1965, swinging our big military industrial complex dick thinking we got this in the back.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We kicked the Nazis ass, man. And that was a. They were hard. That was a hard team.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, we. We kicked the Nazis ass. We blew the Japanese into oblivion. We could do anything. Oh yeah. But we were ignoring the fact that we were entering a war that had already been going on for 20 years. And the veterans of that 20 year war, men like Von Wins up, they knew how to fight this war and they knew how to win it long before the first marine even fucking showed up.

[Eddie Pepitone]

They know fighting more than they know not fighting.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, you know we get it a lot here on the show about how we're very American centric because we are. We're up in order. We're in the waters. We're in physically there.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Americans, every, everyone has a bias when it comes to their home country.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But I do think it's interesting that that it really was this. That's kind of the main thing was our deep, deep ignorance.

[Marcus Parks]

The show arrogance to arrogance and ignorance.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Just assuming we knew better that we were automatically just going to crush this.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I love our confidence. I don't. I love American confidence. Don't get me wrong.

[Marcus Parks]

Sure.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It just misplaced again when it's Michael J. Jackson, that's a big win for America. Well, culturally not what he did and not all the stuff.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Music.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I'm talking about the music.

[Marcus Parks]

Music.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Bill Cosby.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Great example. The humor that brought everywhere. Vietnam loves the films of.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Woody Allen as well. They love that. Cuz they. Their favorite. You ever see that? Besides the. The toy Ka. They also said I'll have what she's having. Yeah, man. Oh wait, no, I'm sorry.

[Eddie Pepitone]

That's.

[Henry Zebrowski]

They're still mourning Rob Reiner's death currently to this day in Vietnam.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

But, you know, now that they're doing so well, they got more money, more problems.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Ho, money.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. That's the name of the episode.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, one thing that is extremely important to remember about Ho Chi Minh is that he was an idea idealist. And Ho Chi Minh's idealism brings us to the next section of involvement when it comes to this conflict. It is time to talk about our part in all this, America's part. See when the worldwide stage shifted once again during World War II, after the Japanese attacked Pearl harbor, because the Japanese went into Vietnam before they attacked us, the Vietnamese were filled with hope that the Americans might help them in their ongoing struggle against the occupying Japanese forces. Beyond that, America had also explicitly said that we wanted to help places like Vietnam. When America joined the war, we didn't just say that we're out for revenge against the Japanese for attacking Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt also explicitly said that we were defending the world for the purposes of, quote, self determination and anti colonialism. And the Vietnamese independence movement took us at our word. And so Uncle Ho reached out to the United States. This was not the first, first time that Ho Chi Minh had tried contacting a president. Back in 1919, Ho Chi Minh had actually tried contacting President Woodrow Wilson for assistance in Vietnam based on Wilson's statements about self determination after World War I. Think about that. 1919. That's how long these guys have been thinking about how to win this fight.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, yes, and then you also think about that was also probably the first time that the will of Ho Chi Minh to get to someone that would care inside the United States government would be controlled by forces right outside the President. So what you have is like, you know, the OSS and stuff like this that would intercept these messages and the people inside the pentagon.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, in 1990, the OSS didn't exist.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But you know what I mean? Like at the time when they were sending through, through trusted sources to get to Woodrow Wilson, it depended on that person to show the letter to Woodrow Wilson.

[Marcus Parks]

There's. There's actually no, there's no evidence either way as to whether Wilson ever even got the letters.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's what they're saying that we don't know whether or not that was, even if they decided whether. But even by then they were like, well, you know, you don't need to bother the President with us.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, well, Lord knows if you would have helped them, the world would have been a better place.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing that we have we had so many chances. Like, we're about to get into it. We had so many chances. See, while Wilson's administration had ignored Ho Chi Minh, the oss, that's the precursor to the CIA, they formed a partnership with Uncle Ho during World War II, focused on fighting the Japanese. Now, it wasn't as big of a thing as us, you know, arming Afghanistan. Afghanistan and all that. Against. Against Afghanistan's or against Russia's Vietnam. Afghanistan.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But it definitely don't not sound like it when you got OSS guys in there talking with Ho Chi Minh and doing all this stuff and giving them

[Marcus Parks]

all the slip service, giving them radios and guns.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

And saying, you know, yeah, we're here.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We're with you, buddy.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Oh, we're with it.

[Marcus Parks]

Exactly. We're with you.

[Eddie Pepitone]

And if we give you guns, know that down the road we're gonna have to kill you.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You're gonna have to shoot us with those guns. Every time we drop off guns, those guns are then used to shoot at us. Yeah. Every single time.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Well, America actually worked very well with the Vietnamese during World War II. And eventually the Vietnamese's efforts were brought to the attention of President Franklin Roosevelt. President Roosevelt had repeatedly offered assistance to Vietnam, and he told the Vietnamese that when the war was over, America was interested in a sort of trusteeship. The Allies would have temporary control over Vietnam with the goal of preparing Vietnam for eventual independence. Now, sounds like bullshit, but this was Roosevelt's goal.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He did a lot of shit, too.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. And I believe that he was going to at least try to follow through, because Roosevelt was fucking brilliant. He was smart enough to know that Vietnam's global position. Right south of China, it would make Vietnam a far better friend than an enemy in the global order to come. But before the war ended, Roosevelt died in office from a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Almost as if God himself wanted life on Earth to suck even harder.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We learn our lessons, Marcus. See, God has to make it hard for us so that we learn.

[Marcus Parks]

That's right. Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

He has to kill our fucking leaders. Go.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, he made it hard on fdr, too.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, he did.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

And one could argue that the polio made him the man, that he was

[Henry Zebrowski]

a professional liar.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, when Roosevelt died, any chance we had of a relatively peaceful second half of the 20th century died with him. Just as I said in the Manhattan Project series. I cannot stress how greatly Roosevelt's premature death changed history for the worse. And you, you can throw Vietnam into that mix along with everything else. See, while Franklin Roosevelt might have meant what he said about anti colonialism. That sort of thing didn't mean shit to his successor, President Harry S. Truman. Although Ho Chi Minh did still try to break through to Truman after World War II.

[Henry Zebrowski]

There's no reasoning with a man with that kind of bow tie. Like his bow tie was always tied too tight. It was too big. He was a mean faced little man.

[Marcus Parks]

He was. Ho wrote multiple letters to President Truman in which Ho Chi Minh literally quoted Thomas Jefferson asking for any support the US could offer in Vietnam's fight for some of that fucking self determination America was always talking about. Ho Chi Minh was actually. He was massively inspired by the United States. In fact, when the communists later took power in Vietnam for the first time. First time. Ho Chi Minh quoted the Declaration of Independence at length during his victory speech.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Plagiarism.

[Marcus Parks]

In other words, the Vietnamese were taking America at our word concerning self determination. And they believed that America would be sympathetic towards Vietnam because we were also a former colony.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I understand you becoming some new comp. You becoming some new country, man. That's competition, brother.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Man, Thomas Jefferson would have loved to his way up and down Vietnam. Oh my God.

[Henry Zebrowski]

If Thomas Jefferson had gotten a taste, a taste of Thailand, a taste of Vietnam, oh man, we'd be using chopsticks. I tell you that, man.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, in Ho Chi Minh's faith in America, he proved that it wasn't just the Americans who had misunderstood their enemy. See, Ho Chi Minh didn't know enough about American history to understand that the United States. United States was arguably the most successful colonial power of the age. While we were a former colony, one of the first things we did after forming our own country was to colonize the rest of the North American continent. We did this happily, brutally and proudly. And we actively tried to wipe out an entire race of people while we did it.

[Henry Zebrowski]

God told us to.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

I mean, we not only did it, we celebrated it.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Named it New Mexico.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, bro, it's not old ass Mexico. New Mexico. Mexico. It's great. California. We named it. They named it something we don't like. Kifa. So we changed it. All right.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

No, we celebrate York Blue. No, we celebrated this. We named it and we taught it to each and every one of our children as Manifest Destiny.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We were just born to be that awesome.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. And by the time of World War II, we'd already won our colonial battles so thoroughly that most people had forgotten that it had ever been any other way. Now Roosevelt was making moves to turn this attitude around. But President Truman saw the Vietnamese, the Same way colonials looked at all non white people. They were the natives. They were at best a resource to be used. But at worst, there was always the option we chose with the Native Americans that of wholesale slaughter.

[Henry Zebrowski]

So what you want to choose? Which do you want to choose?

[Marcus Parks]

Or do you want to be Vietnam?

[Henry Zebrowski]

What would you like?

[Eddie Pepitone]

So Ho Chi Minh did not remember the Alamo.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No. He did not know.

[Marcus Parks]

No.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Do you think that also this is where the specific anti Asian kind of racist part? Because, like.

[Marcus Parks]

No, no, we're going to get to that more in the next episode. That should start in the 1890s.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's what I'm saying. I just find it because, like, you know, every type of racism has its sort of, like beginnings in a way, and there's specific types of racism because that was like our view of Asian people, like, essentially really was like their unfeeling monsters.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, our, our view. We'll get into it much more in the next episode, but our view really began with the Philippines. Yeah, yeah. Which came long before, which was. Yeah, yeah. 1880s, 1890s, 90s, long, long before Japan.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Like all the stuff like we don't. They don't believe in family, that they delete their babies and all that kind of a lot of shit.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. At this point in the story where it's after the internment camps, you're right.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've already imprisoned many, many, many Japanese people and Asian people throughout this entire country.

[Henry Zebrowski]

My family's still in Poland.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, that's all to say that President Truman had absolutely no interest in any anti colonial goals, and he therefore had no interest in helping the Vietnamese. All Truman cared about was keeping a good relationship with France, fought after World War II. France, like most of the European colonial nations, they wanted to do everything they could to hold on to their colonies. Which brings us to the next section of this episode. The French. Well, colonialism provided cheap labor and trade which would be helpful in rebuilding Europe after the war. And France with a colonial empire that spanned 6 million square miles worldwide. I mean, remember how many people out there speak fucking French? They were loathed.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Too many.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

They were loathed to give up a colony as profitable as Vietnam. But during the chaos of World War II, II's end, the Vietnamese saw their opportune moment against the French. At long last, in August 1945, Vietnamese forces led by Von Nguyen Zop marched into Hanoi, marking the first time the city was under Vietnamese control since 1873. Another thing that Vietnam did not understand about the Americans was just how goddamn terrified we were going to be by the Soviet Union after world World War II. See, after Germany was defeated, America and the USSR were immediately at odds. And that conflict would of course, come to be known as the Cold War. France, however, decided to take almost immediate advantage of the hostilities between America and Russia. They hinted that if America didn't support their efforts in holding colonies like Vietnam. I don't know, maybe the Soviet Union would be interested in being friends with France. I don't know. America, what do you think?

[Eddie Pepitone]

Don't fuck yourself.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Whatever, go to them. I just don't understand. Just fucking go to them.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Fuck em.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We can't go. They'll all fail. They'll all fail. You're gonna be hungry. You're gonna be so angry. When they come and they put all the Soviet block styling in the middle of Paris, you're gonna be angry and you're gonna be mad. You're gonna want. You're gonna kick them out.

[Marcus Parks]

I mean, we really do forget, and that's part of the American propaganda, is that, you know, the French are cowards and they surrendered. Surrender cheese, Eaton, surrender monkeys, all that shit. The French are fucking vicious.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Like they were incredibly vicious fighters because

[Henry Zebrowski]

they were old world power. That's an old World power.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Napoleon took over a whole shit ton of the world.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes. So America stood aside while France dove back into Vietnam to try and retake their colony. The colonial battle between France and Vietnam therefore became the first proxy conflict of the Cold War.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Congrats. That's amazing. Wow. 1945.

[Marcus Parks]

Immediately right on the heels of the of World War II, the Cold War proxy war started. Boom. Right there.

[Eddie Pepitone]

France definitely took a break.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Why? Everybody should have took a break. Everybody should have. Why didn't everybody? Like, okay, let's start The Cold War. 1951.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Okay.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Let's just give ourselves some time. Maybe we can make some movies, we can hang out, have some vacations. Holy.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, the sides taken by world powers in the immediate aftermath of world World War II would form deadly alliances that would last decades today.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Till today.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. So the French war in Vietnam, or as historians call it, the first Indochina War that began in September of 1945 when French took troops retook Saigon in South Vietnam.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Indochina is a good new old fashioned racist term for the area too. You know what I mean? Like, it's like all like you. You don't hear it anymore unless it's a guy at a bus stop. I've only heard the words Indochina, like right now, like from some like Canadian homeless man going I'll kick your ass back to India. Indochina. Yeah, yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

The last time I heard, it was Marcellus Wallace.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yes. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

I think Indochina is still. I think it's still accepted, you know, Indo, Indian, China, Chinese. It's like, between India and China. Indochina.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I'm sure we'll hear about it. Yeah, we'll find out gmail dot com. What else can't we say?

[Marcus Parks]

Well, I know that, you know, historians call the French war the First Indochina War. And our. What we call the Vietnam War is known to historians as the Second Indochina War. And they call it Indochina because technically our war didn't involve just Vietnam. It also involved Cambodia and Laos as well. So it's all. These countries were all involved. Great.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Good.

[Marcus Parks]

When the French retook Saigon, they terrorized, raped and murdered hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in the process. They focused on the communists in multiple gory public spectacles. Because don't forget, the French use the fucking guillotine liberally. They used it until the same year Star wars came out. They only stopped using it in 1977.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I could just see the President of France just watching Star wars. And as the credits go up, he's like, this insanity must stop. We must not do this anymore. Darth Vader would be so embarrassed

[Eddie Pepitone]

to get past it. They invented the. The toilet flush from upstairs.

[Marcus Parks]

That's nice. That's nice.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I love that. I love a chain.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, but here. Yeah, but in Saigon, you know, piles of Vietnamese heads. But four days after the French took Saigon. Hey, I'm staying on track here.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Piles, piles.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I'm with you.

[Marcus Parks]

Good.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Piles.

[Marcus Parks]

Piles of heads.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Heaps.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, I'd say heaps of heads.

[Marcus Parks]

Heaps of heads. Yeah, yeah. Pyramids. For four days after the French took Saigon, Hoi Men's army retook the city and committed their own war crimes by massacring French men, women and children with their own rifles. Rifles, pistols and machetes. The French answered that with a force of 25,000 ground troops. And they were, of course, aided by their allies, the British. Then, after the Truman Doctrine was established, in which America pledged to support any and all foreigners who were actively fighting the Commies, we officially sided with France in 1950. As far as we were concerned, Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh were now armed enemies simply because they were communist and for no other reason beyond that. No nuance, no strategy, just communist bad. Not communist good.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I just don't find them as compelling of a villain. When you look at the Indian and Indiana Jones movie with Cate Blanchett playing the communist, that was stupid.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And it was really a bad villain. I've never really understood the whole, like communists are extremely evil when they're. We just had the Nazis. The Nazis were obviously very evil.

[Marcus Parks]

Communists were. I mean the.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I know, they did horrible stuff.

[Marcus Parks]

Soviets were pretty evil too.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

What they did was d. Was pretty bad.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

We got into Vietnam cuz we're too big of to fight Russia

[Henry Zebrowski]

down the street. Send Ronnie Rudy Piper to the Kremlin. I'll fight it myself. I'll play Vood Mike Putin myself.

[Marcus Parks]

You will. And I bet you'd win at this point.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He's very sick now.

[Marcus Parks]

The French war in Vietnam would last for nine years. And over that period, Von Nguyen Zap would develop strategies for winning a war against a great world power, knowing the whole time that it might take decades to claim victory. But the reason why we're talking about Zap strategies is because while these strategies would be used to defeat the French, the Vietnamese would also use these extreme exact same strategies to defeat America. When we showed up a few years after.

[Henry Zebrowski]

When you look at diaries from the French soldiers to the American soldiers, they are literally saying the same exact thing.

[Marcus Parks]

The same thing. I mean, there's, there's a reason why the first episode of the Ken Burns Vietnam series is called Deja Vu.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, we were just as helpless against these strategies as the French were the first time around. And both of us would commit multiple atrocities in our efforts to win. Like us, the French would be humiliated by a defeat in Southeast Asia. And even the threat of humiliation can cause men to do absolutely horrific things. I mean, it's like on the, like that the highest level is like war crimes. Lowest level, family annihilation. Oh, yeah, it's just about. And it's just about avoiding the, the threat of humiliation. The possibility of it never.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Family annihilation is the lowest level. Lowest level.

[Marcus Parks]

When murder's invol my report card. I'm talking about doing like horrific, horrible things. Yeah. Like men, men will do anything.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Being embarrassed.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Men will do anything to avoid being embarrassed.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

I mean, well, that's, that's the whole. That's the.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Some men start doing jiu jitsu.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Even in their 40s.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Well, that's the, you know, the old joke that, you know, women make is that, you know, men are afraid that, you know, women will embarrass them and women are afraid that men will kill them.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Because we embarrassed.

[Marcus Parks]

Because we're embarrassed.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We'll kill them ourselves. Our bare hands. Let's choke them to death.

[Marcus Parks]

You're emotional.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You're. I mean, I'm not me. Not me.

[Marcus Parks]

Think about Gary Ridgeway.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You're thinking about my penis. You're talking about my penis.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I am now

[Henry Zebrowski]

gotta kill a woman. I gotta kill a woman.

[Marcus Parks]

Remember with Gary Ridgeway, every person who got away with him said that he started choking them after he couldn't get hard. Yeah, that happens over and that happens on a global scale every day. So let's get into the tactics of the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese would allow the French, and later the Americans to reach their peak military strength in consolidating their hold over the cities and the towns. Just fill them up with soldiers as much as they want to put in. And at the same time, the Viet Minh and later the Viet Cong, they would gradually shift from defensive to offensive operations operations. These operations, however, would be in the places and times of the Viet Minh's and later the Vietcongs. Choosing this would grind down the French and later American strength by creating a protracted conflict that was completely outside of the invading forces control.

[Henry Zebrowski]

So the only thing that you could. That's what they say, the only thing you can control in war is when you attack.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. And the Viet and the Vietnamese were always in control of when the attack attack was going to happen. See, the Viet Minh were not trying to gain and hold territory when they attacked. They were instead forcing the French, as they would later force the Americans to spread their forces thin into small units who could only conduct static defense. Once the invading forces were spread thin. The Viet Minh and later the Viet Cong would conduct hit and run attacks over and over on these defenses. The Vietnamese therefore became incredibly adept at ambushing forces before disappearing into the jungle because they had spent nine years doing it to the French. By the time we showed up with ground troops in 1965, we quickly became frustrated and enraged at these terrifying hit run ambushes. Just as the French had been terrified and enraged back in the 40s and the 50s. But our range, rage and fear would lead directly to the My Lai massacre. By 1948, the Viet Minh's hit and run attacks had caused a stalemate in the French war, which would be the exact same stalemate we would reach 20 years later. While the French controlled the cities, the Viet Minh controlled everything else. The French could extend their forces outside a city, fight a battle, and they might even win against the Viet Minh. But the French would immediately lose that territory as soon as they returned to the city because the French could not hold the country side. And this is yet another reason why any war in Vietnam was unwinnable. It's also why these wars are unwinnable in places like Afghanistan. See, the wars in Vietnam were not fought like World War II, where armies were defeated when opposing forces took and held territory.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Because that was, like, organized. You get to a certain point, and then all of the parties would agree it's gone too far. And now we'll sit and have our peace treaty. And they used to trade back and forth, and it would almost be by percentages. Kind of like it was a organized way. Like, oh, we hate. We got this amount of territory. The war is now over.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah, we take and hold territory and. Or until. Or you just do. Had to do it like we did it with the Germans, that you keep taking and holding territory until you hold all of their territory.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Territory. That's risk.

[Eddie Pepitone]

And the thing with the jungle is it's really hard to just keep. To stay out there.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

After you win, you're like, ah, let's

[Eddie Pepitone]

get back to the city.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I want to go to a hotel. This place sucks.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, exactly. And they love it out there.

[Marcus Parks]

They live out there.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

They know. They know what? How the fuck to live out there. And the thing is, in Vietnam, taking and holding territory was impossible because so much of it was jungle. Furthermore, the North Vietnamese forces, they not only knew the territory, they had been preparing the territory for decades by the time we showed up. The infamous tunnels and underground bunkers used by the Viet Cong to seemingly disappear after ambushing American forces again and again. They had actually built those during the French war. Consequently, throughout both wars, an invading force couldn't step out outside of a Vietnamese city in the north or the south without possibly running into a force taking orders from Ho Chi Minh. And that force was more than happy to blow your ass away before disappearing back into the jungle.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And this is in the French section when it's even. Even slightly less complicated as it will get when you're like. Also there's like three other groups too, that are trying to kill you as well. Not even just the main army. There's like, split off armies and there's all this other.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, it's. You know, there's. There's the Viet. I mean, it's pretty simple. It's like the Viet Cong is the gorilla force, the man in the black pajamas, as they put it. And then there's the nva.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

And the NVA is just like. That's the main. North Vietnam's like, army.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Army. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

That's pretty. I mean, that's bas. And then you have all the civilians who also want to kill you because you know. Because you're killing them and you're in their home. Yes.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And you're burning your home to the ground.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes. Now, France was in over its head on this war financially and militarily by 1949. So they reached out to their allies. Allies for help. The United States gamely agreed to send aid. So the Viet Minh began reaching out to America's enemies to balance the scales. By 1950, both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China had decided that they had a responsibility to intervene in Vietnam as well, which introduced the final reason why this war was always unwinnable.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Ain't good.

[Marcus Parks]

As long as China and the Soviet Union were supplying weapons to the Vietnamese, the only way to win would be to nuke the entirety of the country and wipe it off the face of the earth. Otherwise, the Vietnamese were not going to stop until every invader was gone. But just as China promised unlimited support to Vietnam, the United States promised unlimited support for France. And so American aid gave the French army the ability to wage war in ways that were both increasingly bloody and destructive. This, however, only produced more bodies with no real breakthrough on either side.

[Eddie Pepitone]

And we learned our lesson and never did it again.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And we decided to keep to ourselves. And that's why we now have hotels on Mars. And we are, I want to say last podcast and left first live podcast on Mars. And it's been amazing. I got four tits. I'm a man and a woman at once. Things are good.

[Marcus Parks]

Actually, it kind of is the concept between the behind the TV show for all mankind, which I fucking love. But it is just sort of like, what if we spent the money on space instead of Vietnam?

[Eddie Pepitone]

Oh my God.

[Marcus Parks]

I mean, what would that have been like?

[Eddie Pepitone]

I always think about like Germany and Japan after we won the war and took away their armies. They just became great places.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah, they were. They're Germany.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Welcome.

[Eddie Pepitone]

It's almost like if you stop trying to keep kill everyone, you can take a few moments and make your own home. Nice.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Germany and Japan are both incredible countries.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. But they don't got the bomb. Not like we do, man. Wow. We that things are great here, just

[Marcus Parks]

as it would be in America. During the 1960s, popular support for the French war in Vietnam dropped dramatically when the French Death toll reached 50,000 soldiers.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Soldiers.

[Marcus Parks]

French critics in fact, began calling it the Dirty War. But with America's direct involvement in the so called Dirty War, the Viet Minh now counted America amongst its sworn enemies. Because by 1953, the United States was already paying for 80% of the cost for France's war to keep their colony. We are footing 80% of that bill. I'll get to a second. I'll get it in a second. To exactly how much money that translated to. But that meant the sunk cost was already in full effect before a single American even set foot on Vietnamese soil. Now, both sides of the Cold War were encouraging both the French and the Vietnamese towards peace. By 1953, I mean, things that, you know, we'd are, the Korean War had already started, started and ended while the Vietnamese were fighting the French.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, we're like, this is expensive.

[Marcus Parks]

But before peace talks could take place, the Vietnamese ended the war all on their own. In March of 1954, Viet Minh forces led by Vo Nguyen Zop launched an offensive at a place called Jim Bin Fu. It's a man, sir. It's a hard one. That's a hard one. Yeah. In preparation. In preparation for this offensive, a quarter of a million Viet Minh, half of them women, lugged artillery provided by the Soviets through the mountains from the north to the south, inch by inch, preparing for their final opportune moment. Once the Vietnamese were in position, they had an entire garrison of 25,000 French soldiers completely surrounded. French had no clue it was coming. And the Viet Minh began a constant attack that would last seven weeks. The siege became world news for many people. This was the first time they had ever heard of Vietnam. And the French commander was so ashamed over his role in letting it all happen that he shot himself in the head on the battlefield. But by May, the French finally, finally surrendered, thus ending the first Indochina war in victory for the Vietnamese in 1954.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Wow. Now, did they have a lot of POWs left behind like we, like we did?

[Marcus Parks]

No, I don't, but I don't. I don't believe so because with. Because with us and POWs, the vast majority of our POWs were pilots who were bombing North Vietnam. And the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese were shooting down our pilots with, you know, Soviet artillery. And they were really fucking good at it. Yeah, but I don't think the French were quite as in to bombing as we were. They definitely did it. Of course they did it.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, but no one had the full court press like we did.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. No, nobody.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Nobody.

[Marcus Parks]

Full court press air attacks like America did in Vietnam.

[Eddie Pepitone]

That's what he won.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Now, by this point, both China and the Soviet Union, they wanted better relations with Europe and America, but America was fully in the Eisenhower era. And you can't have President Eisenhower without the notorious Director of the CIA, Alan Dulles.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No. God. Oh, God, no.

[Marcus Parks]

And you can't have Alan Dulles without his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, no, not again. Because these guys are bad to bed.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. The Dulles brothers were committed cold warriors who tried truly believed that it was not only America's right, but its duty to do anything and everything within our power to overthrow any foreign regime worldwide that might introduce even the slightest foothold for international communism. Someone elects a socialist president, kill em.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And if they could do it, they will put whoever is willing to suck our dick in place. It doesn't matter what they then believe in. And they don't. Don't give a. They don't give a. Because they think just because, oh, he's telling us he's on our team that this guy will now be in our pocket. And guess what? They never are. No, they're never on our team. Because they lied to you.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

They lied to you. Dulles brothers. Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

And then they go kill them and they find another guy and they kill

[Henry Zebrowski]

their guy and they lie.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. The only thing that mattered at the Dulles brothers if as long if they were not communist or anything even close to communist, it was of kind considered a W. And by the mid-1950s, the Dulles brothers had already helped to depose democratically elected leaders in Guatemala and Iran. And having gone 2 for 2 without consequence, or at least no consequence that the fucking Dulles brothers would live to see. The Dulles brothers set their sights on Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh. This was despite the fact that America had already spent $3 billion total. 3 billion in 1953 money.

[Eddie Pepitone]

That's a fucking lot.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yes, that literally is. That was our Mars money.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes. 3 billion helping the French fight their failed war. And we'd come away with nothing to show for it but an enemy who had desperately tried over and over again to be our ally. When the French war ended, international negotiations split Vietnam along the 17th century parallel into the communist north and the ostensibly democratic south.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's done. I always think that that's great. I always love that when they do that with these things, we're like, we'll cut them in half. It's gonna be fine. They do this. How many times have we done this?

[Marcus Parks]

Twice?

[Henry Zebrowski]

This is the like, don't worry. We'll just. Right down the middle and everything's gonna go according to plan. Everybody gets a little bit of something they like. Yeah, I don't think it works like that. I don't think. Think I don't think country building works like a Sizzler buffet.

[Eddie Pepitone]

When did North Korea. When did Korea end the war?

[Marcus Parks]

53.

[Eddie Pepitone]

53.

[Marcus Parks]

All right. Yeah. Well, the Vietnamese were told that elections were going to come in which they would be free to choose whatever leader they please. And after they chose that leader, the country would be reunified afterward.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Wow.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. And. But the problem was, is that it was very, very obvious that the guy who was going to win was going to be Ho Chi Minh. We didn't like that.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I don't like him.

[Marcus Parks]

America didn't like.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I don't like him. I'm Donny Fever.

[Marcus Parks]

But in the meantime, Ho Chi Minh and the north didn't do themselves any favors when it came to settling America's fears about the Reds. The North Vietnamese government enacted multiple Soviet style communist policies, which only confirmed the suspicions of the Eisenhower administration. After famine struck, the North, Ho Chi Minh instituted a land reform plan, very Soviet style that took private land and made it state owned to alleviate food shortages. Many people refused to comply and some 15,000 people were executed by the North Vietnamese government as a result.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I knew we'd get one, they'd get one. I knew they'd do bad too, man. I knew that they were going, yeah, yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

This is what you were talking about the other. The day. There's no good side.

[Henry Zebrowski]

There is no good side in this entire story. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

The Communists were also taking over all media in the north while also launching indoctrination programs to maintain order. The south, meanwhile, was a republic with far more freedoms, but it was also far more chaotic and far more corrupt. The puppet leader who eventually took power was a devout Catholic named Ngo Din Jim, who was staunchly against communism and the Viet Minh. Additionally, his Catholicism was attractive to the Americans because we equated any type of Christianity as the opposite of communism.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No. He'll be a servant of the Pope.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, I mean, at the time, and that's the thing, we loved him because even though Vietnam is, I think, 90% Buddhist, 10% Catholic, if you're Catholic, that kind of means you lean towards the French a little bit. And we liked anybody who liked. Who kind of leaned more into continuing that imperialist power structure that the French had established.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's almost like if you believe in the Catholic, like, ideologies, you'd also be much easier to manipulate as a human being.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, that's what we thought, but the.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Not this guy. No. Because he's in charge. I'm talking about everybody else.

[Marcus Parks]

No. Yeah. Leaders in South Vietnam realized very quickly that they had America by the fucking balls and they could do anything they wanted. Unless, of course, we had them killed. But Prime Minister.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And we tried. We tried.

[Marcus Parks]

But Prime Minister Jim's republic was closer to a dictatorship run by Jim and his family. They rewarded loyalty above everything. We know how well that works. It really does work out great when a leader rewards loyalty above everything else. Always. Always. Yeah. Corruption ran rampant in South Vietnam. Vietnam for the very beginning. And this corruption would ensure sure that the south would never match the dedication of the North. The Prime Minister also didn't care about getting support from the peasants in the countryside, which, of course, made up the majority of the population. Ho Chi Minh, however, did care about the peasants. See, splitting the country in two on an imaginary line. It didn't just magically send every communist to the north and every capitalist to the South. I mean, anyone who was even close to capitalists did leave the north immediately. But even after the country was. Was split in two, the countryside in South Vietnam was still filled with communist Viet Minh supporters. And this mixture of loyalties would also directly contribute to the massacre at My Lai.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Brother versus brother, Blue versus gray.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's what this is over again. I always think it, man.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. No, when you've listened to the Vietnamese talk, they. That, that is, they say, even like North Vietnamese, Vietnamese veterans will say the greatest tragedy of this war was that it was Vietnamese killing Vietnamese.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, of course.

[Marcus Parks]

But even though the South Vietnamese prime minister was a corrupt son of a bitch, America stepped in almost immediately as his ally. After France withdrew their army for good. None other than John F. Kennedy himself, speaking as a senator in 1957, would declare South Vietnam to be, quote the

[Henry Zebrowski]

court, cornerstone of the free world and Southeast Asia.

[Marcus Parks]

But it wouldn't be long before even soldiers on the ground were realizing that communist or not, America had chosen the wrong side. Now, Prime Minister Jim immediately cracked down on Communists by executing 25,000 of them in 1955 alone, in addition to torturing anyone who's even friendly towards communists. And when I say like executing 25,000 communists, I mean both confirmed and suspected communists. But every time Jim executed communists en masse, all he did was drive more Vietnamese people towards Ho Chi Minh. Whether those people actually believed in communism or not.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You just got to kill one non communist. And then everyone's like, oh, well, fuck, we got to run.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah. Fuck, no, this isn't. I have to do anything I can to overthrow this government. I don't give a fuck who it is.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's almost like mass purges aren't great.

[Marcus Parks]

Not great.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And that they don't always help policy.

[Marcus Parks]

Not really.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Because seems to make people upset. Yeah. And then policy doesn't seem to matter as much anymore.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, that's what they say is that you like especially once we started doing the search and destroy on these villages looking for communists. As they said that if you killed one communist, they would be replaced by one communist. If you killed one non communist, they would be replaced by 10 Communists. 10 new commun who were now out to get your ass.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And they all have to share the one toothbrush,

[Marcus Parks]

which is that no one talks about that side of communism.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No one brings it up.

[Marcus Parks]

Neighborhood toothbrush.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I hate my neighborhood toothbrush. It's coarse.

[Marcus Parks]

But perhaps the biggest black mark against Prime Minister Jim and his government was that they were increasingly being seen as a puppet government controlled by outsiders, control by the Americans, while Uncle Ho and his people represented independence for Vietnam. As such, by 1958, North Vietnamese communists were launching small scale raids, fighting under a slogan that roughly translated to extermination of traitors.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I actually found this set of plans for their plan. It seems that they're saying extermination of traitors. What do you think that means? What do you think they're going to do with that? You think they mean better the traitors?

[Marcus Parks]

Send it back to the Pentagon?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, better send it to Woodrow Wilson at home.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh my God, he's been dead for 30 years.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You can go visit him in Arlington.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, you can dig it up his bones and set him on fire.

[Marcus Parks]

But to pull off these raids, the Viet Minh still had to cross the north south border and they had to do a it in secret. So the north began building a massive network of trails through the jungle leading from the north to the south to give themselves multiple arteries to send troops and supplies. This network, which would eventually extend into neighboring countries like Laos and Cambodia, would soon be known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Ho Chi Minh trail would ensure that nothing would ever keep the North Vietnamese from establishing and holding a constant presence in the South. And even our own NSA would have to admit that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was one of the greatest achievements of 20th century military engineering. Damn, it is incredible what they managed to achieve. Like, it's like, how do you move all this Soviet stuff? All these know, artillery, jeeps, food, people, everything. It was a constant. Like there was just it. It never stopped between the north and the South.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Every day was fitzgeraldo.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes, it was. That's the great way to put it.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And they also would then have like hidey hole spots so they could put stuff places and leave it there and surprise you with it all. Every single factor that they needed. They had total mastery of the, the war arena.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. And they had it before we even showed up.

[Eddie Pepitone]

It must be so, so hard to put together a surprise party in North Vietnam.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh my God. You know, especially you got to get all the bamboo like spears covered in. You gotta get the little girl who's willing to explode. That's the hardest part.

[Marcus Parks]

Using the Ho Chi Minh Trail, several thousand North Vietnamese fighters cross the border at the 17th parallel. And using 31 tons of, of Soviet weapons, they began assassinating South Vietnamese government officials at the rate of 150 per month in 1960. By the end of that year, the North Vietnamese had begun putting together a plan to challenge Prime Minister Jim for control of Saigon. In December, they essentially rebranded the Viet Minh by changing the name to the National Liberation Front. This new guerrilla group was more nationalist than communication. Communists. So it could attract a broader following. Their goal was to launch a new war against whoever was preventing Vietnam from being ruled by the Vietnamese. And it was becoming more and more apparent that this role was going to be played by the United States. Now they called themselves the National Liberation Front. But we would come to know them better by the insulting name that was given to them by South Vietnamese Prime Minister Minister Zhem. The full name translated to communist traders to the Vietnamese nation. But when you contracted the name in its original Vietnamese, the Viet Minh became the Viet Cong. These fighters would be not only the deadliest enemies America faced in Vietnam, but some of the deadliest fighters we have ever faced before or since. Some people consider the Vietnamese Viet Cong to be among the most talented soldiers in the history of warfare. Cool. And it is there.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I'm a fan. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, I mean that's, it's insane to watch. Even interviews with soldiers on the ground in Vietnam in 1965, 1966. They'll talk to a commander and he'll just be like, these are the finest soldiers in the history of the world. I, I, if I had a, if I had four battalions of these men, I could take over the entire globe, the entire planet. I love that they, they, and they just had this. It's such extreme, utmost respect for just how incredible these guys were. And not just guys, but guys and women. Like, it was a fully integrated force.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I mean, they could take over the whole planet. If they had gotten in there 20 years earlier and built a bunch of

[Henry Zebrowski]

tunnels that would be obviously super crucial. But Again, we don't need to get in all that, but it is there

[Marcus Parks]

that we will pick back up next week with Kennedy's fuckups, Johnson's Gigantic.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

The Burning Monk and all the rest of the events, large and small, that would lead directly to the massacre at Mei.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And that's how it's going to be for the next three weeks of my life. Every day just different Vietnam vets going. And I was in the brush and I saw his eyes leave his head. He picked up the canister, blew his face off. And that was my best friend.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, there's a guy that I always think of. He was a German journalist and he said, I reached down to pick up this man's. He said, grab his feet and get him out of here. And so I put my hands around his ankles and my hands, it was so burnt that my hands just went through the flesh. And all I could feel was bone. I can still feel it now.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We knew there was a cubby hole. We knew that there was a cubby hole. And the old man kept waving and saying, we knew you was trying. Trying to attack us. I threw a grenade in the cubby hole. He was trying to say his family was in there. I exploded his wife, his two children. My God, I love Donald Trump. My God, I love this new war. So welcome. Going. Talking about new war. The war rages on in the world. The darkness. World of darkness here at LPN. Go and see Bloodbath 77. Yeah. Which is after the events of Me Lai, the war begins. So it's like, don't worry, but go and see Vampire. We are. Go and watch. We have an incredible cast. Barcus is leading them out.

[Marcus Parks]

I'm very happy with it.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Go and check out. We cannot wait for you to see this over on LPN TV. Go and check out Bloodbath 77. Also this weekend, Midsummer Scream. We are there Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Go see our panel August 9th on it's n. It's called last panel on the Left. That Midsummer Scream. And you can buy tickets@midsummer scream.org that's right.

[Eddie Pepitone]

And next weekend I'm going to be over at Dynasty Typewriter. That's on. Going to be on August 16 for dead men Tell Some Tales. It's my Dark Disney history show. And Henry's be joining me as well. It's going to be a blast. Come and check us out. What else is going on? We got YouTube.

[Henry Zebrowski]

YouTubes.

[Marcus Parks]

Go look up YouTubes. No, I'm just like. I'm just staring off into space at this point.

[Eddie Pepitone]

YouTube.com place under underneath at LPN Romantic. Who's the bee at the four go

[Henry Zebrowski]

no dogs in space.

[Eddie Pepitone]

LPN TV. The brighter side. LPN page seven. All kinds of we're all connected. Go subscribe to those channels and watch our pretty faces. Do the shows you've been listening to forever.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And go check out our brand new song from the enigmatic band Mass for Trash.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It is our single off our Halloween album called Gods in Leather.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, Go check it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like I got a whole lot of creative stuff. Acting, singing. All you really are. You're.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You're right now.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You're a regular Sydney Sweeney.

[Marcus Parks]

If people enjoy it.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Hey, weirdos. I'm Elena.

[Marcus Parks]

And I'm Ash. And we are the host of Morbid Podcast.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Each week we dive into the dark and fascinating world of true crime, spooky

[Marcus Parks]

history, and the unexplained. From infamous killers and unsolved mysteries to haunted places and strange legends. We cover it all with research, empathy, humor, and a few creative expletives. It's smart, it's spooky, and it's just

[Henry Zebrowski]

the right amount of weird.

[Marcus Parks]

Two new episodes drop every week and there's even a bonus once a month.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yay. Woo.

[Marcus Parks]

Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co founder of angie. When you use Angie for your home

[Henry Zebrowski]

projects, you know all your jobs will be done well.

[Marcus Parks]

Roof repair, done well. Kitchen sink install, done well. Deck upgrades, done well. Electrical Upgrade, done well. Angie's been connecting homeowners with skilled pros and for nearly 30 years. So we know the difference between done and done well.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Angie, the one you trust to find

[Marcus Parks]

the ones you trust.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Find a pro for your [e-mail].