May 27, 2024 - Bannon's War Room
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| Back. | ||
| It is the 27th of May, Year of the Lord 2024. | ||
| It's our Memorial Day reminiscence on Our honored guest, I've got Patrick O'Donnell here. | ||
| We're going to get to Memorial Day, how it came about in the way we commemorate it today, over at Arlington National Cemetery in the Tomb of the Unknown. | ||
| But I've got to talk to you about Mexico, because Mexico is a fascination to me after the war. | ||
| Remember, at Appomattox, the Army of Northern Virginia surrenders. | ||
| But hey, out west, once again, they got their own way they deal with things. | ||
| And some of them are like, hey, I've surrendered, but Major, uh, it was General, Major General Joe Shelby up in, once again, Missouri, Missouri, right? | ||
| He's like, uh, well, let's think about it. | ||
| They go to, I think, Galveston. | ||
| They have a couple things, and Shreveport down there. | ||
| And the boys get together, and a lot of them think, Hey, maybe we continue on, and they talk about Mexico, which at the time the French were down to the Spanish, and they take off as a unit, I think it's 10,000 of them, and they cross the Rio Grande. | ||
| In a place that we do tremendous coverage from, Eagle Pass, Texas. | ||
| And they leave the guide on, the last guide on, I think, of the Confederate Army. | ||
| The last battle flag, I think, of the Confederate Army. | ||
| The myth is that they leave the last battle flag there at Eagle Pass in the rear grand, right in the middle of the rear grand. | ||
| In Mexico, Steve, is one of the great untold stories, in many ways, of the Civil War. | ||
| And it's the Jesse Scouts that play a huge role in this. | ||
| They're under Sheridan's command at this point. | ||
| And they're moved down towards New Orleans first and then Texas, where they have to deal with things. | ||
| And what's going on is, this is great power competition. | ||
| In 1861, France used statistics to determine that the United States would have over 300 million people by 1960. | ||
| And they were determined to blunt America's power. | ||
| And they used Mexico, a debt issue ostensibly, to just go and invade it. | ||
| And they took it over and then they installed Maximilian. | ||
| And they had tens of thousands of troops down there. | ||
| Tens of thousands? | ||
| During the Civil War and then afterwards. | ||
| And they wanted to figure out, I mean, Lincoln was concerned about trying to figure out how to deal with this. | ||
| So this is our first proxy war against the European power. | ||
| And they send the JFC scouts down there. | ||
| To basically arm the insurgency. | ||
| And they're extremely effective doing it. | ||
| And the person that's in charge... This is like the pre-Zapata, the pre-Pancho Villa. | ||
| This is the insurgency. | ||
| And they're running guns down there. | ||
| This is war res in that crowd. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And they're extremely effective. | ||
| They're doing also special operations. | ||
| They're destroying some bridges and things like that. | ||
| And they're demonstrating on the border. | ||
| They're faking that we have all kinds of troops there, more than we even have. | ||
| But these are all part of sort of demonstrations. | ||
| But the main thing is arming the resistance. | ||
| You know, a lot of things going on here that's really very interesting that involve the Jesse Scouts. | ||
| It's also the beginning of intelligence gathering in the sense that, on a grand scale, the transatlantic telegraph, you know, the cable was laid across the Atlantic. | ||
| Several years before the Civil War begins, but it was broken through tides and such. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then it gets reactivated in 1866, and Sheridan is brilliant. | ||
| He realizes that this is a potential means that Maximilian is communicating with France, and literally puts his men on to crack the codes that they're using through the transatlantic cable to know what his opponent is going to do. | ||
| And this is extraordinary stuff. | ||
| So you've got the Jesse Scouts down there for the U.S. | ||
| government. | ||
| You also have a Confederate army that's gone and going to work for Maxime. | ||
| It's a mercenary army. | ||
| You have many of these Confederates that then go down to Mexico. | ||
| It's a safe haven. | ||
| And they're looking for work. | ||
| You have the great people that the Jesse Scouts fight during the entire Civil War, like Jubal Early. | ||
| And the man that burned Chambersburg, McClauston, is down there. | ||
| Others, they're fleeing from the North because they're worried about being tried as war criminals. | ||
| And then they were working for Maximilian. | ||
| They don't really trust how this amnesty thing is going to work. | ||
| This is one of the most dramatic scenes in Gone with the Wind when they actually, when she's at Terra and they're working. | ||
| Ashley's come back from Cobb's Legion and he feels like a broken man. | ||
| There's nothing for him to do. | ||
| He's been defeated. | ||
| His regiment's been crushed. | ||
| And he's chopping wood and she goes back and they have that one scene where they actually get romantic and she says, let's run away. | ||
| They're looking for officers in Mexico. | ||
| We run away to Mexico and they're looking for officers in the Mexican army. | ||
| Right there shows you what a big deal this was when she wrote the novel, that this was a known, you know, this was a big deal in the Confederacy. | ||
| This is a huge deal. | ||
| There's actually like massive colonies down there of Confederates that are also fighting for Maximilian, but also they brought their families down there and it becomes, you know, this... A thing. | ||
| A thing. | ||
| And it's the Jesse Scouts that are arming these guys. | ||
| Arming the guys against them, the insurrection, the war res type guys. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| uh... and it you know it they're running guns these guys in this begins before | ||
| the war ends uh... that | ||
| their they're doing these these are really mexico is never really recover | ||
| from that still the same review later with the mexican revolutions a pot and poncho v in the car | ||
| it's very much what they fought in missouri what they fought west virginia | ||
| what they fought It's a partisan guerrilla war of which sides change all the time, people change all the time, you can't trust anybody. | ||
| This is- Mexico still has that- the roots of that problem go back to that time. | ||
| And it's Henry Young and the scouts that play- What happens to him? | ||
| This is the sad thing, Steve. | ||
| He is working for one of those warlords and He disappears along with dozens of the scouts. | ||
| And this is one of the reasons why The Unvanquished is an untold story. | ||
| Disappears and there's one theory that he dies in a Mexican jail from one of the warlords. | ||
| Others that he was ambushed, potentially by the French. | ||
| But he never comes home. | ||
| I mean, that's what Memorial Day is about. | ||
| It's about honoring the fallen. | ||
| And it's also about, you know, honoring... I wanted to honor the covert warriors that have never come home. | ||
| And Young was one of them. | ||
| The final scene in my book, Young had this very special relationship with his mother. | ||
| And he would write letters to her every week. | ||
| And the letters stopped. | ||
| And she would wait by the mailbox for the next letter. | ||
| And then she would wait, whenever the carriage came into town in Rhode Island, she would look for that outside the carriage of her son to come home. | ||
| And that's one of the final scenes in this book. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| Let's talk about today, obviously, Arlington National Cemetery, the Tomb of the Unknown. | ||
| You wrote an entire book That focus on this. | ||
| You're probably one of the living experts of this. | ||
| Walk us through, how did we get to this commemoration at Arlington National Cemetery? | ||
| How did we get to the, I would argue, the most sacred, civically sacred property in all of our country, which is the Tomb of the Unknown and around it? | ||
| How did that all come about? | ||
| It comes about in World War I, where There is, you know, a titanic clash of armies. | ||
| The United States loses tens of thousands of men. | ||
| And there's a belief in the Army that there's thousands of unknowns, but they could be brought back. | ||
| We got brought in late, and then hit, but we hit with power. | ||
| Hit with power, and we are the decisive force that changes the course of the war. | ||
| It's the reason Germans throw the towel and say the Americans are coming. | ||
| But we lose so many men. | ||
| We have so many casualties in such a short period of time. | ||
| It's probably the most intense part of combat. | ||
| Really in American history, because it's so constrained by time. | ||
| It's concentrated in the largest battle in American history, which is the Meuse-Argonne. | ||
| Talk about that. | ||
| This thing is a titanic battle that begins in September and then lasts all the way to November 11th. | ||
| And it's in the Meuse-Argonne sector. | ||
| The main goal of it is to pierce the massive belts of fortification that the Germans have built in that area and then sever a supply line, the crucial supply line near Sudan, which they're successful in doing, but it does not go well at all at the beginning. | ||
| And this is Pershing and MacArthur. | ||
| I think Ben MacArthur was awarded, was it five silver stars? | ||
| Multiple, multiple awards. | ||
| He receives the Medal of Honor. | ||
| Medal of Honor. | ||
| And for combat leadership, not for some staff job. | ||
| I mean, he always criticized Pershing, and Pershing had been a combat leader earlier, but Pershing, and particularly General Marshall, his rival, was chief of staff. | ||
| Many of the greats of World War II, including, you know, yeah, you've got You also have Wild Bill Donovan, who receives the Distinguished Service Cross and the Medal of Honor for his actions in World War I, leading in charge. | ||
| And it's that, you know, those actions that I believe... So people see the slaughter of six million French, they see the slaughter in the United States, they weren't... it wasn't celebratory. | ||
| I mean, people were glad it was over, but it wasn't like, oh... because there was always these questions of how do we get in this, and people should understand That the Zimmerman telegram that they captured was about getting Mexico into the war against the United States and, you know, we've got to get Mexico as an ally, just like kind of in the Civil War they try to do also. | ||
| That's one of the triggering events with the Lusitania, but a lot of people were not totally convinced, particularly when Wilson and these guys got the League of Nations. | ||
| They didn't know if they bought into what they were being sold. | ||
| All they knew is that they didn't want to get back in European conflicts. | ||
| The founders have said we're not going to do this. | ||
| Next thing you know, we have a massive, massive, massive army over there that's dropping hammer blows on guys. | ||
| The Marines fight so well at Belleau Wood. | ||
| I think there's a decision made by the Army that we'll never let the Marines go inland like that again because they're too good. | ||
| They've got to do the amphibious landings. | ||
| The Marines have only two regiments, the 5th and the 6th, but they have an amazing PR Corps. | ||
| So they do, they certainly do a great job because and they're also attached to the Army's | ||
| Second Division which is the most elite unit in the A. | ||
| The physical destruction by the machine gun and chemical warfare, gas, artillery, really | ||
| the biggest thing that was not banned, that what people think is really artillery shelling | ||
| was a level that you can't imagine. | ||
| The disfiguration, there's so many unknowns. | ||
| I mean, there's mass graves, and where they fought, it's like the landscape of the moon. | ||
| How did they come up with the fact that we have to, like other nations, because it wasn't something we did, we had, the Civil War was self-organizing, the commemorations there were self-organized, you had Gettysburg, individual states would build monuments, but as a nation, Outside of maybe the Gettysburg, where Lincoln went to dedicate the cemetery, we hadn't come together to do it as a nation. | ||
| England and France were very upfront about this. | ||
| What happens is, as you mentioned, it's England and France that begin this tradition of an unknown soldier, of honoring an unknown soldier. | ||
| There's tens of thousands of soldiers that are in graves in France at this time. | ||
| And you know the artillery is so intense that it it turns bodies you know it just it disintegrates bodies and trying to determine who they were those individuals were it was you know first it was France and England that come up with the idea of honoring an unknown soldier to honor all of those veterans. | ||
| One soldier, one body that commemorate the millions that they can't identify. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's here in the United States. | ||
| And you need that. | ||
| I want to go back. | ||
| You need that because of the trauma of the folks back home. | ||
| They've been traumatized. | ||
| In France, I think it was five million troops they lost in World War I. The numbers are horrific. | ||
| In England, they lost almost an entire generation that hadn't prepared for this. | ||
| It's the trauma of the folks back home. | ||
| Civic society, the leaders have to figure out What do we need to do in the civic religion here to basically start to allow some healing to begin? | ||
| It's an organic, it bubbles up organically. | ||
| What happens is the War Department is convinced that they can bring back all the bodies of these men, of these unknowns. | ||
| You've got to tell the story. | ||
| This is very important because the American, it's not isolationist, but the concept of having our war dead, Buried on foreign battlefields is incomprehensible to people. | ||
| This is the United States of America. | ||
| The first thing they try to work through is we want to bring everybody home. | ||
| We want to bring everybody home and bury them here, right? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That was the plan. | ||
| And then, well, actually, the War Department did not, for cost purposes, did not want to bring everybody home at first. | ||
| But it gets down to money. | ||
| But then there's a popular uprising to bring the men home. | ||
| This is the United States of America, our Memorial Day. | ||
| Not for our veterans, which I'm honored to be one, but for the honored dead. | ||
| In May of 2024, we will be back with Patrick K O'Donnell in a moment. | ||
|
unidentified
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Welcome back. | |
| Um... | ||
| There is a... For cost reasons, they determined pretty quickly, this is going to cost us a fortune if we have to bring back all the war dead. | ||
| And how many are they talking about at the time? | ||
| And they estimate that. | ||
| How many do they think they have? | ||
| Over 100,000. | ||
| The numbers vary. | ||
| And then there's individuals that die of influenza. | ||
| Folks, you've got to understand something. | ||
| There's a massive pandemic. | ||
| The combat here is a couple of months. | ||
| That's the intensity of it. | ||
| That's 100,000 dead. | ||
| That's not even the wounded. | ||
| And you had gas. | ||
| You had horrible, horrible, horrible. | ||
| And then the Spanish flu hit. | ||
| So 100,000, they quickly calculated. | ||
| Well over 100,000. | ||
| We don't even have the shipping capacity to bring those back. | ||
| This will cost us a fortune. | ||
| So what happens? | ||
| What happens is there's a popular uprising to bring the boys home, but also they see what's going on in France. | ||
| Did they announce that they can't bring them back? | ||
| I mean, how does the popular uprising start? | ||
| People just go, where's our war dead? | ||
| It really, a lot of it comes from An extraordinary woman, again. | ||
| Marie Maloney, who's got this very popular paper called The Delineator. | ||
| And she helps, like, stoke this popular uprising. | ||
| She's an amazing figure. | ||
| One of the great women. | ||
| Another amazing woman figure that believes that we need to do what France and England have done, and that is to have a Tomb of the Unknown to honor all of our dead. | ||
| And this, um, this gathers, it garners support from Hamilton Fish, for instance, who's a congressman up in New York, who was an officer with the Harlem Hellfighters, who, this is an African-American unit that fought very valiantly in the... And these, in France and England, are main events. | ||
| It's like the centre of, it's the right, it's the centre of, it's the centre of We're, I mean, right near Whitehall and 10 Downing. | ||
| I mean, it's a beautiful monument in Arc de Triomphe in Paris with the Eternal Flame. | ||
| I mean, when France and England did it, it was top drawer, center of the nation to get the nation to focus on it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And she wants the same thing? | ||
| She wants the same thing, and she gets it. | ||
| Along with, you know, fish is pushing hard. | ||
| How does she fight it? | ||
| Because I'm sure there's a lot of resistance to this. | ||
| It's through her paper. | ||
| And through, you know, the power of the media. | ||
| And it sways people in the population. | ||
| And there is now a belief that we need to have a Tomb of the Unknown. | ||
| And the book that I wrote is, is about the process and this, and the, you know, how they found, you know, they, they looked at all the different, uh, major battlefields. | ||
| Give me, give me the titles because we want to get up on the screen. | ||
| It's the unknowns. | ||
| Yeah, unknowns. | ||
| I love this. | ||
| I want to refer to what you did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The unknowns. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Tell me about it. | ||
| It's one of the most powerful books I wrote. | ||
| I mean, it's a book that found me. | ||
| And what I mean by that is, when I was in Fallujah, it was a 3-1 Lima company. | ||
| We all went through that. | ||
| And then the commander of that unit, Willie Buell, was given command of the 5th Marines. | ||
| A great character. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| He was in your movie. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And Willie invited me to give a tour of his Marines in the 5th to Normandy, which I Was so thrilled to do. | ||
| But part of the tour was also to go to the hallowed ground of the Marine Corps, which is Belleau Wood. | ||
| And we walked around Belleau Wood and I'll never forget, we're walking on Hill 142 and Our guide, and I was there with him, he said to me and the group that Ernest A. Jansen was the first recipient of the Medal of Honor for the Marine Corps, but he was also | ||
| A body bearer for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. | ||
| And that was, I mean, I'm like here with all of our guys. | ||
| And body bearer was a term of our official term. | ||
| It's a term that, it's an honored term to bring the pallbearer, to bring back the casket of the remains. | ||
| And I immediately was like, that's a fascinating story and nobody had ever told it. | ||
| And then I wanted to know who the other body bearers were. | ||
| And it turns out that they were selected by General Pershing himself. | ||
| But they were selected for what they did. | ||
| They were some of the most decorated heroes of World War I, Distinguished Service Cross, Medals of Honor. | ||
| But each one was part of each branch of service at the time for the American Expeditionary Forces. | ||
| And they told a segment of the story. | ||
| And it's like Jansen Is incredible. | ||
| I mean, he helps save Hill 142 from the Germans. | ||
| They capture the hill quickly. | ||
| They go through the wheat field. | ||
| They go through the Maxim machine guns, which cut down many members of the 49th Company. | ||
| You know, these Marines are in their green uniforms, and they're advancing through the wheat. | ||
| They take 142. | ||
| But what do Germans always do? | ||
| They immediately counterattack. | ||
| And they counterattack and the Germans are setting up their light, their Maxim machine guns and Jansen, you know, lets out this war cry and literally bayonets people and kills several of the Germans as they're setting up and saves the hill. | ||
| And it's a fascinating story because he's got two medals of honor, for one. | ||
| They give him the Army Medal of Honor and the Navy Medal of Honor. | ||
| But he also has two names. | ||
| It's Ernest A. Jansen and Charles Hoffman. | ||
| He was originally a member of the U.S. | ||
| Army that we think he went AWOL for a girlfriend. | ||
| And, you know, had disciplinary actions and everything else, but then joins the Marine Corps under another name. | ||
| And he becomes this hero of the Marine Corps. | ||
| Let's go back for a second. | ||
| How do we even get to the body? | ||
| You've got a, in England and France, they do it formally. | ||
| You have this amazing woman that makes it up that, hey, we're not going to leave our Young men there, we've got to do something special. | ||
| You get going with a Tomb of the Unknown. | ||
| How does it get, how does Pershing then execute it? | ||
| How do you actually, one of the questions I've always get asked is, how do they know they're unknown? | ||
| How's the whole process of finding these? | ||
| What they do then is they have a special unit, graves registration unit. | ||
| The guy's name is Quackenbush. | ||
| Goes out to the major cemeteries in France where the AEF fought. | ||
| And they specifically select graves of soldiers that are unknown. | ||
| And they then disintern the grave and bring out the body. | ||
| And then they make sure that there is no dog tags or diaries or pieces of information or letter, anything that could identify who this person was. | ||
| They go through and do due diligence on the body itself to make sure there's no way... There's no way to determine it. | ||
| And then they literally burn the burial cart of the gravesite that, you know, Quackenbush unearthed that person. | ||
| So it could be they don't have any idea where in the cemetery it was. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| And how many of those did they take? | ||
| And then they bring... And how many of those do they, how many of those, how many of those | ||
| do they take? They take a number, a handful of these men, and then they bring the bodies | ||
| back to Chalon, France, and they're all flag-draped caskets. | ||
| And it's in the middle of the city hall. | ||
| And they initially planned to have the American Expeditionary Force plans, Pershing plans to have a general officer make the selection. | ||
| But at the last minute, the French say to them, you know, it's the enlisted man that does the fighting in your wars, in our wars, too. | ||
| He should be the one that is given the honor of selecting the unknown. | ||
| And the book is about his story, too. | ||
| He was a member of the 2nd Infantry Division. | ||
| He was with the Marines. | ||
| How was he selected? | ||
| He was selected basically for his service. | ||
| He had been there the longest. | ||
| He had also been combat wounded twice, you know, severely. | ||
| This is now 1920, 21. | ||
| And there's still occupation forces in Europe at the time. | ||
| So they took the man that was the most senior enlisted man and allowed him to... That had fought the most. | ||
| That had fought the most. | ||
|
unidentified
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And his record is... How does he... | |
| What is his memory of selecting, actually choosing the body he chose? | ||
| The remains he chose? | ||
| He's given a bouquet of flowers and he's told to select the unknown. | ||
| And it's at that point that he literally... By placing the bouquet of flowers onto the flag-draped coffin? | ||
| Of a series of flag-draped coffins in this room. | ||
| But to select one and put the flowers on one, and that one will be the designated unknown. | ||
| And he is in the room by himself. | ||
| And he prays, and I literally found his handwritten notes about what he remembers that day. | ||
| And he prays, and he said that his hand guided itself to the casket. | ||
| His hand guided itself. | ||
| Something was working through him. | ||
| He didn't consciously choose this. | ||
| It was something of power greater than him. | ||
| He also felt that it was somebody that he had fought with. | ||
| That, you know, in some manner had been an unknown soldier. | ||
| How did they, to go from the city hall to get to Arlington, walk us through, then what happened? | ||
| What happens next is they have a procession that goes from Shalom to Lahar, to the docks of Lahar. | ||
| And the French know how to do this? | ||
| Yeah, it's quite solemn. | ||
| It's solemn, it's dignified, and they bring the casket back, the remains, back on a warship. | ||
| And the ship itself, the casket's so large that they can't actually put it under deck. | ||
| So it's on deck. | ||
| And it goes through a series of climactic storms. | ||
| Almost goes overboard, but some of these guys that are there literally help strap themselves towards on the casket to prevent it from going overboard in one scene. | ||
| And they bring it back to the Washington Navy Yard, and it's there that the men that I have in my book And how are they selected again? | ||
| They're selected by General Pershing for their service, but also to tell the story of the AEF through their eyes. | ||
| And it's like Ernest Janssen, but it's also, you have an amazing American sailor that saves his ship from going down, that was torpedoed, and literally closes the watertight door, is scalded by the boiler, you know, the splashes from the boiler, but saves his ship from going down. | ||
| And these are to represent all the people that fought in the war. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And these are the body bearers. | ||
| The body bearers. | ||
| The body bearers. | ||
| The unknowns is about their stories. | ||
| And they meet the body on the warship at the Washington Navy Yard. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| And then they bring it to Arlington. | ||
| Does it go to the Capitol first? | ||
| It first goes to the Capitol Rotunda. | ||
| It lies in state? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And people can come in and say, I'll tell you what, let's take a short break and we'll continue The details of this story from the unknowns on Memorial Day, May of 2024. | ||
| I talk about this trauma. | ||
| Our country has trauma from World War I and obviously nothing like England and France and Germany and others. | ||
| But there's also still trauma from the Civil War. | ||
| The Civil War has not totally been healed. | ||
| Some people say that we fought together in the Spanish-American War. | ||
| It still had, I think under Roosevelt in 1933, the 150th commemoration of Gettysburg, or 50th anniversary of Gettysburg. | ||
| That's how Ken Burns starts the Civil War. | ||
| Had this woman brought everybody together and have buy-in from the elites in the country and the country itself in this thing called An Unknown Soldier, the Tomb of the Unknown? | ||
| Yeah, the who's who of American society shows up for this event. | ||
| And it's a healing event. | ||
| You've got like the NAACP comes. | ||
| You also have, you know, Daughters of the American Revolution. | ||
| But there's Medals of Honor recipients from the Civil War, from the Spanish-American War. | ||
| And just, you know, different walks of society are present at this event, and it's a magnificent affair. | ||
| And the body lays in state, lies in state in the Capitol Rotunda, and then it's removed on a caisson in a very formal ceremony to go across the bridge to Arlington National Cemetery. | ||
| And there's a film of these men that are next to the caisson. | ||
| As they walk it towards Arlington. | ||
| And they follow it down. | ||
| They follow the caisson all the way down. | ||
| No, it doesn't. | ||
| President Kennedy. Now, and that is in turn, and that's the, does the, does the, the soldier | ||
| from the old guard that stands ready 24 hours a day in all weather, 365 days a year, is | ||
| that commence immediately? No, it doesn't. What happens is they, they have an amazing | ||
| ceremony at the tomb and many world leaders are there. | ||
| I think, but one of the most interesting person that presides over the final aspect of the ceremony is Chief Plenty Clues, who's a Sioux war chief. | ||
| that provides, you know, his war hammer is there, and he provides a ceremony over the remains. | ||
| It's also kind of a healing between Native Americans and Americans in the great conflict | ||
| that occurred in the West. | ||
| But what happens is the tomb, you know, has this amazing fanfare, and then it just becomes a tomb. | ||
| And what happens is people come there and they picnic, and they... Oh, there's no structure afterwards about the specialness? | ||
| There's no guard or anything, and people come and picnic, and there's some defacing of the tomb, and it's at that point that there is a, you know, a tomb guard takes place, and it's part of the old guard, and they've been guarding it ever since, 24-7, no matter what the weather is. | ||
| World War II, then Korea, And then Vietnam gets to be controversial because DNA, the ability to, for DNA technology. | ||
| How does this, what happens in World War II and what happens in Korea? | ||
| They bring a, in both of those conflicts, they have an unknown soldier that is brought back. | ||
| And they have a, you know, an incredible ceremony. | ||
| They go through the same process of selection. | ||
| They do. | ||
| Very serious. | ||
| It's very serious. | ||
| And they make a thing that it can never be, they really go out of the way to make sure this thing can, the remains can never be identified. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But what happens is with Vietnam, they select an aviator in a crash, and that family believes, or the family of that individual believes ardently that that's their son. | ||
| They bring him home, they put him in the tomb, and then they protest. | ||
| And literally, they are correct. | ||
| They do a DNA test. | ||
| They do a DNA test and then they determine who it is and he is then removed. | ||
| Disinterred. | ||
| Disinterred and buried again. | ||
| In Vietnam we have no, because they're so concerned about the DNA testing, we have no Remains of the unknown of Vietnam. | ||
| There will never be another unknown soldier because of DNA testing. | ||
| So, the ones that are there are... And in Vietnam, they think, since the DNA testing is so advanced, regardless of when the remains... There's never been a call to... Even have a call, because there's... Yes. | ||
| I was actually... Was... It was 1957, was Korea? | ||
| That would have been the Korean... Yeah, so I was four. | ||
| It's really my first memory of life. | ||
| I remember my dad and older brother, we went to the whole thing. | ||
| We were outside the Capitol. | ||
| Two things I remember is, one, they had the howitzers. | ||
| The entire time, as I remember as a kid, the entire time, it came down and marched down from the Capitol and the body bearers brought it, put it in the case and it went. | ||
| They had these howitzers going off, I guess every 30 seconds, or every second. | ||
| It was so loud. | ||
| I mean, it just, boom! | ||
| Silence. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Silence. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| As a kid, you're just sitting there going, man, this is the thing. | ||
| And then we went over to, we actually got in our car and went over and made it over to Arlington, and I just remember, I think it's the main, Memorial there for the USS Maine. | ||
| It's got that huge anchor, and it's way off. | ||
| We did not have VIP seating. | ||
| We got there. | ||
| I remember my dad helped me. | ||
| We got up a little bit on the main. | ||
| I couldn't see because you're so far away, but it crowds like you couldn't believe. | ||
| I mean, just the crowds were just enormous. | ||
| You were there when they... I interviewed the body bearer, the last surviving body bearer of that ceremony. | ||
| His name was Ron Rozier, and he was a Medal of Honor recipient from Korea. | ||
| And Ron was extraordinary. | ||
| He... | ||
| He took out several machine gun positions and he had a Thompson. | ||
| I mean, this guy was amazing. | ||
| When this book came out, he was the, um, I was supposed to be the keynote speaker for the tomb guard, but they said, we've got somebody we might outrank you a little bit. | ||
| And he was the keynote. | ||
|
unidentified
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And it's like, wow, no problem. | |
| And he, and I interviewed him and he was extraordinary. | ||
| I mean, this guy, I got his interview on my Twitter account, that combat historian. | ||
| The salinity of the thing, the heat and the noise. | ||
| But it was not, it was dead silent. | ||
| The city, as a little kid, there was not a word or a peep, except for the power of these | ||
| guns, right? | ||
| And then that drama of the K-7, so it was, you got the last of it, just very moving. | ||
| And today, every Memorial Day, the President, the Commander-in-Chief goes up there. | ||
| In our current situation, it is what it is. | ||
| Just, if people have not been to Arlington National Cemetery, if you have not been to the Tomb of the Unknown, you definitely owe it to yourself and to your children to go see it because it's absolutely extraordinary. | ||
| It's one of the most moving ceremonies you can ever experience as American. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| Hallowed ground. | ||
| Where do you... You've put your life into these books to bring the stories of These individuals that time would have just forgotten. | ||
| And you go back and you read these stories, whether it's about the Revolutionary War or about World War II or the Civil War now. | ||
| And you're just so blown away about your fellow citizens. | ||
| Every one of your books, although it deals with obviously the catastrophe of war, you feel ennobled at the end of it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Because you're not, you don't do books on Grant or on Sherman. | ||
| I mean, their participants, Sheridan, has a huge role in the Unvanquished, but you're not doing the stories that people know of these figures, and they're going to learn more about them what they already know. | ||
| You're taking people you've never heard of, and if it had not been for the events That you go through in the documentation, they would have never risen to an occasion. | ||
| They would have been essentially ordinary Americans in every war you look at. | ||
| They were just led ordinary, fulfilling, good, but ordinary lives. | ||
| It's being in these moments. | ||
| That some step up and step into the moment and use their agency and become extraordinary figures, right? | ||
| And others you see are, you know, you've got some people in your books that are quite distasteful, right? | ||
| Because you're in wars and you do a lot of special operations stuff here where, you know, there's a lot of subterfuge. | ||
| Yeah, the books are filled with ordinary people that do extraordinary things, but you also have Villains, people that are just scoundrels in some cases. | ||
| I try to, with this history, it's the camera and it tells the story of what it was like. | ||
| I don't try to sugarcoat it. | ||
| And within that, you have different, various strands of people that are sometimes traitors. | ||
| I mean, one of the individuals in The Unvanquished was one of Mosby's greatest rangers, was a member of the 5th New York Cavalry. | ||
| His nickname was Big Yankee Ames, and that was his nickname, Big Yankee, because he was this six-foot guy that was this massive from Maine that literally deserts the Fifth New York out of Centerville and decides to join Mosby. | ||
| What was his decision based upon? | ||
| His decision was based upon the Emancipation Proclamation. | ||
| He did not want to fight the war for slavery, and he was That was a big concern at the time, Lincoln and those guys talking about it. | ||
| He did not like that, and he said, I'm not doing it. | ||
| And he literally joins Mosby, and he shows up and they're like, who the heck is this guy? | ||
| But they felt, Mosby felt the sincerity about him and trust, and his first mission was to go to Centerville and steal a horse. | ||
| This is the power of Lincoln, because Lincoln, when they had the debate about doing it, when he first, after Antietam, Because he was waiting for a, he had actually talked about it before, Antietam was the victory he felt he needed to actually make the announcement. | ||
| When he did it, when he drafted up and pitched the concept... | ||
| of what he's going to do to his cabinet. | ||
| There were some pretty savvy guys in there go, hang on for a second, what are we doing here? | ||
| Isn't this to bring the union back together? | ||
| And Lincoln was saying, you can't have all this killing and all this bloodshed just for us to unite as a country. | ||
| It's got to be, we got to break, we got to break the bondage, you know, we got to break the chattel slavery. | ||
| We have to do it. | ||
| That was not, you know, Lincoln got some blowback for that. | ||
| A lot of it. | ||
| And it's the Republican Party that pushes through that and makes it happen. | ||
| People should remember, though, that in 1864, Lincoln does not run as a Republican. | ||
| No. | ||
| People forget this. | ||
| The war was so—and this is the greatness of Lincoln—the war was so controversial, and even with Gettysburg, Being a year in the rearview mirror, even with Gettysburg being in the rearview mirror, they determined they could not win on a Republican ticket. | ||
| He gets rid of his vice president, Hamby, of the governor of Maine, or the senator from Maine, and goes back to the territory where your book's kind of about, he goes to East Tennessee, which folks know, the East Tennessee folks, the hardcore Scotch-Irish down there and that whole Appalachian Mountain thing, They ain't a big name in the plantation aristocracy. | ||
| They never really bought into it. | ||
| They still have a senator, a Democrat senator. | ||
| Johnson, he picks his running mate. | ||
| They run as what's called the National Union Party. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Right? | ||
| He's the Republican, the Democrat, but they run in the National Union Party. | ||
| And if it had not been for the fall of Atlanta. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And as well as the third battle with Winchester, which also makes a huge difference, which the Jesse Scouts allow to happen in the book. | ||
| You've got to get this. | ||
| I don't know if I should say to this audience, mail-in ballots. | ||
| Well, we can go to that, too. | ||
| The first use of mail-in ballots. | ||
| First use of mail-in ballots. | ||
| Civil War. | ||
| Because they say, well, what's going to happen? | ||
| All the guys have left Ohio and Wisconsin. | ||
| What are we going to do here? | ||
| They go, well, they got to vote. | ||
| It was mail-in ballots, and it was the Army. | ||
| That overwhelmingly, I think like 90%, but who's counting, right? | ||
| Well, in the Unvanquished, I've got a great article in Breitbart on this. | ||
| Mail-in ballots were the first time they were used. | ||
| Civil War. | ||
| We've got to talk about this. | ||
| Maybe get the Breitbart article up. | ||
| No, it's the mail-in ballots. | ||
| The army, they come in 90-10. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| The history of this country. | ||
| The history of the people of this country. | ||
| Remember, it's America first, but American citizens first. | ||
| You will get to know your fellow citizens, and you will be honored to know them if you read Patrick K. O'Donnell's books. | ||
| We're going to take a short break. | ||
| I want to thank Birch Gold. | ||
| It's been our sponsor here for years. | ||
| Sponsor all of our specials. | ||
| Go to Birch Gold. | ||
| We don't have... We had Phillip Patrick on Saturday. | ||
| We don't have him on these specials, so make sure you go to birchgold.com. | ||
| Hello, I'm Steve Stern, CEO of FlagShirt.com, a third-generation, veteran-owned small business. | ||
| break we're in return to wrap up Memorial Day here our annual Memorial | ||
| Day special the world next hello I'm Steve Stern CEO of flagship.com a third-generation | ||
| veteran owned small business I believe that the American way of life is for all | ||
| of us I'm asking you today to visit flagship.com | ||
| Help keep the American dream alive. | ||
| Be a flag waver. | ||
| Carry a nation's heritage. | ||
| Use coupon code ACTION10 for 10% off site wide and buy a flag shirt today. | ||
| Action, action, action. | ||
| Steve Stern joins us. | ||
| Steve, it's Memorial Day. | ||
| We always do a Memorial Day special. | ||
| We want to wrap up. | ||
| We've got Patrick Hayden down here. | ||
| A couple more stories to tell, but I want to make sure everybody gets access to get to the flag shirt company and get to honor our American flag. | ||
| Well, I was with the 324th General Hospital during the Vietnam era, so I'm a veteran. | ||
| We're a veteran-owned business. | ||
| Memorial Day is for our fallen soldiers. | ||
| The flag is half-mast till noon. | ||
| Full staff after that for their sacrifice. | ||
| When Americans fall in battle, others continue their mission. | ||
| We live in a land of the free because of our soldiers. | ||
| Let us not forget them today on Memorial Day. | ||
| We put flowers on their graves. | ||
| We use red poppy as a tradition on Memorial Day. | ||
| Ways to honor our fallen soldiers are visit a military memorial, fly the American flag, sponsor a person that has passed, provide support, donate a grave for a fellow soldier, and many, many other things. | ||
| We don't want to forget our fallen soldiers. | ||
| You know, when I was in the General Hospital, many of our friends had relatives that passed during the war and the Vietnam and many other wars. | ||
| So, we're coming up to Flag Day, and we want to celebrate that also. | ||
| We're going to have a four-hour call on that, if you'd like to get on there. | ||
| Give me an email. | ||
| sstern1024 at gmail. | ||
| You're welcome to come on. | ||
| Last year we had a million people on it. | ||
| This year it's a little different. | ||
| We're going to have 24 speakers. | ||
| Rogues, rascals, and ruffians. | ||
| We're going to do the history of the flag. | ||
| The first person is going to speak to the history. | ||
| Second person for that era is going to talk about what it means today in that history. | ||
| We have some famous people coming on. | ||
| Jerome Corsi, John Rich, the famous singer. | ||
| Dave Brat, Donna Feduccia, Errol Robertson. | ||
| Emerald Robinson, Jeff Kooner, Chris Widener, Tom Rents, Colonel John Mills, Joni Bryant, and many, many other people. | ||
| And they're going to tell you... And what time, what day is that going to be, Steve? | ||
| 14th, President Trump's birthday. | ||
| We're going to have... All day. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| This morning, I asked Mike if he'll put it on his network. | ||
| He said he would. | ||
| I'm sure we'll get it on Getter. | ||
| We'll get it in front of people. | ||
| So get your flag shirt for that. | ||
| Get your flag shirt for the 4th of July. | ||
| Go to theflagshirt.com. | ||
| You know, I just celebrated my 83rd birthday and my 70th year in business. | ||
| And, you know, I'm working hard to keep our people going. | ||
| So remember all your fellow people on Memorial Day. | ||
| And thank you very much for having me on. | ||
| Steve, always an honor in the way you honor the flag and the way you honor our fallen and our veterans. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Steve Stern, one of the best of the best. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Two things I want to get to before we go. | ||
| Number one is mail-in ballots. | ||
| Mail-in ballots. | ||
| By the Union Army. | ||
| Please tell me, Lincoln couldn't have been McClellan, although he kind of went that at the end. | ||
| It was a close vote, Steve. | ||
| It was the battles. | ||
| They needed all the soldiers' votes. | ||
| Yes, they did. | ||
| And I mean, they also needed all the wins that the Jesse Scouts helped with and the Army in Atlanta. | ||
| But yeah, the mail-in ballots, this is the first time they come into being. | ||
| It's 1864 for the election, and they need a way to allow the soldiers who are in the field to vote. | ||
| Because McClellan thought they were going to vote on his side. | ||
| That was his army he had built. | ||
| Those were his boys. | ||
| They had loved him at the time. | ||
| What happens is the Democrats in the North They don't like this at all, and they fight it tooth and nail in the court system. | ||
| They lose. | ||
| Mail-in ballots are a thing. | ||
| And I wrote in the Unvanquished, I uncovered an entire fraud scheme by the Democrats that's really quite interesting. | ||
| This guy Orville Wood from upstate New York, who's just an election official, wants to go to near Fort McHenry, where his soldiers are based, and make sure that they're voting the right way, you know, that their votes count and it's legitimate. | ||
| So he gets there and then he finds out, his quote is, there's checker playing with the ballots and he finds out that almost all of his soldiers are voting for McClellan. | ||
| I mean, overwhelmingly. | ||
| And then he pretends that he is a McClellan man. | ||
| And he gets in on the scheme and they're forging the signatures of the soldiers. | ||
| They're doing all kinds of things where it's 90% McClellan instead of Lincoln. | ||
| And then they turn over all the evidence to the army authorities and they have a court trial. | ||
| And remarkably, this Confederate sympathizer is literally, admits to the fraud. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| And there were tens of thousands that were changed. | ||
| Mail-in ballots, problem then, bigger problem now. | ||
| Real quickly, you've just got the Unvanquished. | ||
| Where do they go to your site to get all your writings, everything? | ||
| PatrickKODonald.com and then at Combat Historian, at Getterit, as well as Twitter. | ||
| It's at the front of the store at Barnes and Noble, it's on Amazon, it's the book of the month for Amazon. | ||
| It's a huge bestseller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a massive bestseller because it's a fabulous book and it's always There's all the reviews are up there on Amazon, too. | |
| You can look at them. | ||
| Are you now working on the third volume of the Revolutionary War? | ||
| I broke my leg in February and I was like a madman writing my 14th book. | ||
| I already got a third of it done and turned it in, those chapters, and I'm going back to the Revolutionary War. | ||
| And that'll be out in a couple of years? | ||
| It'll be out for the 250th. | ||
|
unidentified
|
250th. | |
| Yes. | ||
| I'm very excited about that. | ||
| President Trump will be the... Who we are as Americans. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Love doing it. | ||
| Love doing it. | ||
| Fourth of July still. | ||
| We've got Veterans Day and the combat history of Christmas. | ||
| We're going to leave you with this very powerful song. | ||
| Make sure you remember throughout the rest of the day what Memorial Day is about. | ||
| It's not just to kick off a summer. | ||
| We did a little bit of that. | ||
| On Saturday, on our weekend special, right? | ||
| It's obviously the kickoff for summer, but this day is the highest holy day in American civic religion. | ||
| Memorial Day. | ||
| May 19, 2024. | ||
| We'll see you here, go out with a song, and we'll see you back. | ||
| We're going to have a replay today. | ||
| We've got to take the rest of Memorial Day off. | ||
| We'll be back here at 10 a.m. | ||
| Eastern Daylight Time. | ||
|
unidentified
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you'll be back in the world tomorrow morning. |
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