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Oct. 9, 2025 - The David Knight Show
48:37
The CIA Drew the Border: How America Invented South Vietnam
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And uh joining us now is um James Bradley, who is the author of Flags of Our Fathers, a great book and a great film that was done by uh Clint Eastwood.
And uh he's now got another book.
Uh not about that was about Iwo Jima of course and World War II.
This one is a nonfiction book, and it is about Vietnam.
It's called Precious Freedom.
And some of the reviews that are here, uh one person um uh Norman Solomon said, for more than 60 years, Americans have looked at Vietnam through the wrong end of a telescope.
I think that's a great way of putting it.
He said, precious freedom turns it around and brings people into sharp focus uh from Vietnamese people who lived there and died uh to the Pentagon's gun um gun sites.
And so I think it's a very important story.
And he's spent a lot of time working on this story, and this is a story that for most of us uh Vietnam is a very, very important milestone in our life.
I think it shaped as it has uh me, it shaped my view of government and war in many different ways, and I didn't even go.
I mean, I can only imagine uh the people that were there, but I did know people that went that were slightly older than I was.
I had uh two older sisters, and they knew a lot of people who had been involved in and going to Vietnam and that experience had happened, and so this is a story that is told uh with characters from both sides, Americans as well as Vietnamese.
Uh thank you for joining us, James.
Good to be here.
Thank you.
Uh now you spent a decade in Vietnam researching this.
Tell us a little bit about that and what what Vietnam is like and what um what that experience was like.
Well, I I went, you know, I had written four books up to that point.
So I thought, you know, I wrote all about the Pacific War.
So I think uh my brother uh enlisted in the Marines in in 1967.
So I was watching Walter Cronkite every night studying the Vietnam War, and I thought, you know, I'll write a book about Vietnam.
I'll just spend three years here.
But it took me over ten years because I had to unravel all the propaganda baloney told to us by Walter Cronkite into Ken Burns right now.
It's just, you know, uh last night you talked about a little thing that uh uh a few folks have fooled America about COVID, yeah, about the vaccine.
Yeah, you know, uh I mean uh Trump was a Russian spy, and America, the American government did it the same with us with Lee Harvey Oswald and the Vietnam War.
Yes, absolutely right.
You know, it is and when we look at Vietnam, I I keep going back to one of the uh I haven't read your book yet, but you know, when you go back and you look at uh the fog of war that was done by Errol Morris, I don't know if you ever saw that or not.
Yeah, that's a good documentary, and he he he just has this knack of getting people to confess to things that you normally you would not expect they confess to.
So he spent a lot of time talking to Robert McNamara, who was running this whole mess.
And uh Magnamer said uh he went back to Vietnam and they banged the the the guy who was uh his counterpart at the time stood up and said, What is the matter with you?
Don't you know anything about history?
For a thousand years we opposed the Chinese.
Uh and you're trying to tell everybody that we're Chinese puppets and it's a domino theory and all the rest of the stuff.
And McNamara said, Yeah, you know, he was right.
What is Vietnam like today?
I mean, that I I've seen uh still some border conflicts between them and China.
And uh there's a lot of competition there, but they've become highly industrialized, is that right?
Yeah, China is the forever enemy uh of Vietnam, you know.
That's right.
They a after more than a thousand years of fighting each other.
And that's how the Vietnamese learn these techniques to repel the invader.
You know, Vietnam right now, if you include reserves, has the largest army in the world.
This shocks people.
It's bigger than India, China, America, Russia.
Wow.
They are watching their borders.
They're not invading anybody.
Yeah.
And you know, they're protecting their borders.
Vietnam's for the Vietnamese, and they are growing by eight percent a year.
Vietnam is is so successful right now, and uh it would have been successful a long time ago if the French and the Americans hadn't decided to bomb it for 80 years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's amazing to think that they could get it that wrong, you know, that they think they portray Vietnam as a China puppet when actually, you know, they were they were always uh you know opposed to them and opposition there.
Now you did this as a as a fiction book.
You have done nonfiction before when you talked about Iwo Jima and the Marines that were there and flags of our father.
Um why did you go to uh a nonfiction uh approach?
I know the fiction.
Sorry.
The book is really uh history as fiction.
Everything in the book is true, but whereas Iwo Jima, you know, all the characters were concentrated on a little tiny spit of land, I had stories from all over Vietnam that I couldn't connect in in a storyline.
So I just did it.
I fictionalized it, but you know, so maybe I took a character that I have fighting somewhere where they didn't, but everything is from interviews.
I did over 10 years of living in Vietnam, interviewing the people, and David, you'll be shocked.
I'm the first American author to go to Vietnam and say, How did you win?
You know, I cattted I caddied for Vince Lombardi when I was a kid.
I'm a little older than you.
Bart Starr lived four four uh doors down up at Bass Lake from the Bradleys.
And for anybody who doesn't know who Vince Lombardi is, when you win the NFL trophy, I mean the Super Bowl trophy this year, you will win the Vince Lombardi trophy.
So Vince studied when he lost a game.
If he won or lost, he you know, we admitted it, and we studied how we lost, and we figured out how the winners won.
And I'm the first author to go to Vietnam and say, you guys obviously won.
How did you do it?
And the answers are this book, Precious Freedom.
Yes.
Yes.
There's actually a uh a comment that you have from uh Oliver Stone who said, James Bradley journeyed to Iwo Jima and returned with flags of our fathers.
Now of interest to Vietnam and brings the precious freedom, brings us precious freedom, where he reveals that if we had known what happened in the 1960s in Vietnam, American mothers would have never sent their children to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The truth is the best vaccination against great lies.
I think that's very important.
And so by going with the fictional uh thing, you can cover a lot of different facets uh that are still very realistic at the same time.
Uh and so tell us a little bit about some of the characters out of there.
You got both American and Vietnamese characters in your book, right?
Yes, I it's basically Chip and May.
Chip is a US uh Marine, and you know, Pete Hagseth got it wrong.
They were they were in pretty good shape in the Vietnam era, you know, our Marines.
It wasn't the fatness, it was the fatheads in the Pentagon.
That's a good way to put it, yeah.
Chip goes into May's front yard.
May is 15 years old.
Look at this little chick.
She's 15 years old, never thought about war.
Chip shoots her father in the head.
May sees this, and at 15, she says, I'm gonna kill every American I ever see.
Wow.
And conveniently the Americans came in in helmets and uniforms, and you know, you could tell what an American was.
So this May went out and snipered to death five Marines.
Those are the kills she got medals for.
And what is untold about the Vietnam War is the role of women.
Here's a photo.
This girl with the machine gun.
Can you see it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
She killed 174 Americans.
Wow.
Look at she's 22 years old.
Wow.
The number one Marine sniper killed 94.
We write books about them.
Wow.
You know, we herald them.
But this is unknown that Girls were out there killing Americans.
And it was because of that thousand years of fighting the Chinese.
And they went out and they had a plan.
We we, you know, in America, the story is how did this happen?
You can watch 18 hours of Ken Burns, and it's like, wow, this is still confusing.
But if you go to Vietnam, well, actually you can't get them to talk to you, but I did.
It took me six months of drinking tea.
And if they if they part the veil and tell you they had a plan.
They were teenagers, but they knew how to seize the initiative.
This was not happening accidental, that Vietnam beat America.
They had a plan, they knew they were going to do it, and they executed the plan.
Well, it's also the fact that they're actually defending their home.
You know, that that's a that's an important thing.
You know, that's a that's uh a big advantage for defenders when they're actually fighting for their lives and fighting for their home, as opposed to people who are going because they've been told that there's some kind of geopolitical thing, maybe uh that maybe exists or maybe doesn't exist.
I I think that is a key thing.
I think that's a real big part of why we do so poorly in all these asymmetric wars everywhere.
Yes, no, that that's if Ho Chi Minh, I'm from Wisconsin.
If Ho Chi Minh had invaded Wisconsin, that war would still be going on.
Yeah.
We would never give up.
That's right.
I mean, you know, me at 15 years old, I knew every alleyway.
I could run at night for five blocks, jump over fences.
I knew what doors were open, you know.
So they were defending their homeland.
That's the key.
And I've been to Afghanistan.
You know, I lived in Iran.
This bombing of Iran that we recently did in June, that united the Iranian people like never before.
Oh, yeah.
And we already support your leader if you a Vietnamese guy told me, he said, you know, we were trying to recruit people in this valley, this isolated valley.
And they said, What's an American?
What's the war?
What are you talking about?
And then an American jet came and dropped bombs, and he said, we didn't have to, we didn't have to recruit anymore.
You Americans got everybody in line with just a few bombs.
You know, we've seen that in movie after movie as well, haven't we?
You know, uh movies about you know the American Revolution or whatever, where somebody's like, I don't want to get involved in the civil war, whatever.
I don't want to get involved until the war comes to them and they get uh attacked by one side unnecessarily now they get galvanized and they're in it.
I I think that's the key thing.
You know, we lose our wars before they even begin because we don't talk about why we should be there.
And if we go to war for an unjust cause, uh we are going to lose that war eventually because the people who have a just cause in terms of defending themselves are going to have the determination to finish it and whatever it takes.
That is the most important thing, I think, is that determination.
We know you talk about the morality of whether we have a just war or not.
You know, have we been attacked?
Uh and and how are we going to fight this?
But when we ignore that and we start acting as the world's policeman, then what we've done is we've sown the seeds of a shaky foundation that isn't going to be able to sustain us.
And and and on the other side, they have a strong foundation to fight back, as you point out.
If they had invaded us, we would still be fighting them.
I think that's a key thing.
I think we're going to be able to do that.
But David, can I interrupt here?
Sure.
I'd like to say to your viewers and listeners, if if you could just back up and listen again to what David just said, that is the key to this book, Precious Freedom.
They were defending mom and dad.
Yeah.
And they had a plan.
And the Americans went and they were fighting communists.
You know, how do you find a communist?
And what is a communist?
The Vietnamese I interviewed who were 15, 16, 17 years old back in the 1960s, the one guy told me, he said, I didn't know democracy or communism.
He said, they shot my mother and killed her.
He said, that's all I had to know.
Yeah.
That's right.
And that's uh that's how we lose these wars.
We don't we don't understand what we're really fighting for.
So you you talk about a distorted revisionism that we've seen here in the U.S. uh uh define that a little bit.
When we talk about uh the Walter Cronkite version of the war, when you talk about the Ken Burns version of the war, uh how has your vision of the war changed?
You said it took you a while to come to terms with that.
Well, here is a real mind teaser, and I hope you don't mind if I use visuals.
It'll it'll save uh me blabbering on.
But the American view of the war, if you turn on Ken Burns, Walter Cronkite, look at any documentary, starts with this.
There was a North Vietnam and a South Vietnam.
Can you see it?
Yeah, yeah.
And there was a border between two countries, and we came to rescue South Vietnam against North Vietnam.
So I go into this 85-year-old guy's house, and he said, Mr. Bradley, he said, this was all imaginary.
The New York Times drew a line across my country.
He said, I never thought I needed a visa to visit my uncle.
There was one Vietnam.
This is how they viewed it.
There was one Vietnam, and we invaded the whole thing.
So my brother was told, you know, you go train in the Marines, you go to the South Vietnam, and you fight for freedom against these terrible commies.
But the Vietnamese never saw it that way.
They saw one country.
And if you read the speeches, everybody's giving, I mean, all the Vietnamese, they start with, there's only one Vietnam, there will only be one Vietnam.
And they were right.
If I drew a line across Texas, David, you know, I'm Canadian, and I come down there with the Canadian army, and I say there's a West Texas, East Texas, there's a border, you're bad on the West side, the good is on the like, what are you talking about?
We're Texan.
There's one Texas, and you would, you know, down to your grandkids you would fight to have that reality come back.
We what you said earlier about seven minutes ago, the key was not our veterans.
They did a good job.
Yeah.
The key was our leaders set up a false uh a false situation right from the start.
We lost that war before we started.
What is uh now the um the politicians that were there, okay?
So you got Ho Chi Minh in the in the North, and you got um the South uh Vietnamese government.
Was that something that uh Americans created?
Was that a CIA creation, or was that something that the uh didn't start with the French?
Yeah.
So CIA creation.
What happened?
If I could, you know, the French were there for 80 years.
Roman Catholic Church, by the way.
And you know, for the church, the French went in 1880s, they they couldn't control, just like us in Afghanistan, they had the cities, they couldn't control the country.
Ho Chi Minh goes overseas to study the Western media for 30 years, and then figures out how how to beat the Americans.
He comes back.
First, they push the French out.
Well, in 1954, when they pushed the French out, they agreed we'll have a temporary line at the 17th parallel, temporary.
And they wrote in the Geneva language.
This is not two countries, this is not a border.
The French have been here for 80 years, and we're just gonna let them withdraw to the South, and then you know, to get the French on ships to let them go.
But the Alan Dulles, the CIA, Dwight Eisenhower, Cardinal Spellman, Pope Pius came in and said, hocus pocus, CBS New York Times, make that a border.
And hocuspole, look at there's this country, South Vietnam, North Vietnam.
Well, we weren't paying attention.
What was an Indochina?
So I grew up thinking there's a North Vietnam, South Vietnam.
I saw it every day.
I mean Oh, me too, yeah.
You know, but we we we know people that think that there was a COVID uh thing that hit the United States, right?
That's right.
And that there's a vaccine that makes you if you take poison, you get healthy.
Yeah.
So what they Did with us, Lee Harby Oswald killed JFK, and there's these two countries.
But the Vietnamese, the people there, tens of millions, didn't you know what are you talking about, two countries?
The South Vietnamese leaders had been in the French Air Force.
They were traitors to the country.
When McNamara stood with the South Vietnamese leaders, the Vietnamese looked at it and like, wow, we beat the French, and now here's the American enemy also.
So it this is why it took me ten years.
I had to unravel everything I knew about the Vietnam War.
Yeah, and of course, that happened not that long, I guess, after really, uh maybe a decade or so after what we had done in Iran.
You know, that's the other thing.
Americans look at Iran and they remember the hostage situation in the Ayatoa.
Well, they don't remember what's what happened with uh the the Shah that we put in power and the Savak that the CIA trained.
And I've talked about that many times.
Uh I I was exposed to that because I had the in the engineering school, there was a lot of uh uh Iranian students who came there and they were protesting, and I was asking them why they were wearing masks, and they started telling me about the Savak, and it's like, what?
You know?
So we our history and our perception is so distorted by the media and so distorted by a selective starting point and the narrative that it is really hard to get to the truth.
That's why you know books like this are very important uh to open up people's minds to understand how they've been controlled, I think.
So you really kind of see this as a David and Goliath story, right?
Well, the day the uh I don't know David and Goliath, uh, but it's a story of the Vietnamese, they're like if you if you poke a uh uh Japanese, they have a certain history.
They have no ability, they've never been invaded, you know.
They don't know, they don't they haven't practiced those arts.
If you talk to an American, our history is not how we were invaded by Mexico, and then the Germans invaded us, and then we don't have those skills.
But the Vietnamese, that's their only history.
If you're Vietnamese, you grow up with that history of, you know, great-grandfather fought the uh Chinese here, and then your great-great-grandfather fought the Mongols in that river.
I mean, I have a picture of a guy who was 16 years old, about this tall, and he came and he sunk five Navy ships on a river using techniques that were a thousand years old.
The battle of the Bakdong River from 932.
And I said, you were 16, and you recreated a battle that was a thousand years old.
And he said, Yes, Vietnam has a proud military history.
Wow.
So that's what they know.
So if you want to lose a war, invade Vietnam tomorrow.
Use nuclear arms, use whatever you want.
You're gonna lose.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
And I guess we probably could say the same thing about Afghanistan as well.
They have taken down one empire after the other, uh, taking them on and taking them down in their country.
So I guess they've got a long history of guerrilla warfare as well.
And they but David, why do we choose because they wear sandals?
I mean, Pete Hegseth wants, you know, short hair and no beards.
Well, geez, you know, they call these girls.
I mean, look at this.
This is Ho Chi Minh.
Okay, that's Ho Chi Minh with Geno Zia.
Yeah.
Ho Chi Minh is the military genius of the Vietnam War, beat the French and the Americans.
Look at this tiny guy's with General Ziah.
General Ziap is the winningest general of the 20th century.
David, we talk about Eisenhower MacArthur.
Ziap beat the French.
He beat the Japanese, he beat the Americans, he beat the Chinese.
Vietnam is the only country in the world to have defeated three members of the United Nations Security Council.
That's their history, is how to get rid of the invader.
And we wouldn't listen To that.
But can I just say something?
Oh, yeah.
That there was a United States Marine Commandant, General Shoop, General David Schu, Medal of Honor, Tarawa, Medal of Honor, one of the worst Marine battles.
This guy knew battles.
And he resigned when Johnson wanted to go in Vietnam.
And General Shu put on a suit and tie and crisscrossed the countries in the 60s, saying there's no way we can win.
Ho Chi Minh's the George Washington.
So there was a David Knight understanding that the media was, you know, fooling the American public back in the 1960s.
And it was being broadcast by a United States Marine commandant, not some, you know, crazy Pinko, you know, demonstrating, but a command was saying the Vietnamese are never going to give up.
We're going to lose.
He said the Vietnam War is not worth one of our deaths.
Yes.
This was coming from a military man.
And he was right.
But Washington wouldn't listen because Brown and Root, which became Halliburton, Lockheed, you know, they uh they made out.
Vietnam wasn't a tragedy for them.
It was a profit center.
When I was looking at it as uh as a young uh as a young teen and then on into high school, it looked to me like you know, the military industrial complex was using it to practice and develop develop weapons.
I mean, I could see that even when I was in high school.
These guys are making a killing from this stuff, and they're using it to uh uh as a testing ground for their military hardware that they want to sell.
Yes, sir.
And and that seemed like all it was to me, you know, when I looked at that.
It's absolutely insane how we have been manipulated, controlled, and uh and uh misguided by these people who are the leaders that are there, and and they still keep doing the same thing over and over again.
Now you got a fictional character, I think it's the mother of the main American character, the Marine, and she kind of goes through this transformation that I think a lot of people in America did.
I remember when it first started, uh, you know, my family's conservative, so they would, yeah, this is you know, you're gonna make the world safe for democracy type of thing.
And then gradually started to understand what this war was really about.
And I think uh you've got a character that represents that in the mother, is that correct?
Betty.
Betty is the mother of Chip.
And she, you know, is college educated, she's from Minnesota, and uh wonderful woman, gives her son to the United States Marine Corps, and then a guy, a funny guy by the name of Mohammed Ali says, I'm not going to kill Brown people.
You know, this is an immoral war.
And what she's shocked by is that the media doesn't report his words, and she finds his words from a friend, and she's like, why isn't Walter Cronkite saying why Mohammed Ali won't go?
And then a guy by the name of Dr. Martin Luther King stands up in Riverside Church and says the United States government is the biggest purveyor of violence in the world.
This we are supporting a dictatorship.
Ho Chi Minh is the George Washington.
We cannot win.
153 newspapers criticize Dr. King.
But the key is nobody read Dr. King's speech because the Washington Post, New York Times, AP, nobody would reprint it because it was the truth.
And guess what?
Dr. King got a bullet in the head one year to the day of that anti-Vietnam speech.
Well, no, this wakes up.
They really don't not too concerned about killing people, are they?
I mean, you know, it can be one-on-one or it can be tens of thousands of people.
Yeah.
And this wakes Betty up.
And Betty slowly begins with a friend of hers who's a librarian to see that oh my God, she's she's supporting this violence unconsciously.
She doesn't know that she gave her son to this wrong cause.
And of course, her son comes back damaged, like so many uh of all of the, you know, my father, he's a symbol Of uh heroism.
Donald Trump uh has got my dad right behind him.
If you look at a uh shot of Trump in the Oval Office, the the Iwo Jima statues right behind him.
My father cried in his sleep for the first four years of his marriage.
I learned that after he died.
My mom told me.
You know, this is war.
We we have got to stop talking about heroism and start to own up to if you want to go to war, let's have the Trump kids go first.
That's right.
And then, you know, the grandkids of Marco Rubio and Pete Hagseth must have somebody, yeah, you know, send them all first.
My dad was on Iwo Jima, and there were colonels in front of him.
There were colonels getting shot.
Come on, boys.
They were leading from the front.
In Vietnam, the colonels were in helicopters and in the back.
Boys, you go out there.
The military changed after World War II, and we still have not righted it.
Yeah, leading from the rear, except that you know, Trump put out that picture of him as the Robert Duval character in apocalypse now.
It's like if that isn't disturbing, uh, I don't know what is if he sees himself that way, a guy who has never been to war and he's gonna be the guy quarterbacking this from uh the back.
And and when you look at just the disconnect that is there and and the lack of depth uh as he talked to these generals that he summoned in there.
Well, it's um truly is amazing, and it really is something I think the people need to pull back and take a look at what a just war is, and they need to look at our history of uh idiotic aggression.
I mean, we're about to do this again in several different places.
I mean, they want to go into Venezuela, they would like to get involved, I think, in Iran.
Boy, talk about a quagmire in Iran, as large as that country is, and the history that um that we've had with them, uh a lot of um uh pent-up anger because of uh what the uh CIA has done in Iran for a very long time.
We just don't seem to learn those lessons, and it's a very important lesson to learn, isn't it?
Well, why can't we learn those lessons?
You know, you should be broadcast, you know, prime time, but you're telling the truth.
So I mean, it you know, what you say about Iran.
I lived in Iran.
Iranians saved my life.
I learned that Iran is Persia.
Iran is not bomb, you know, Iran is not in uh bombing Baltimore.
You know, China's not in San Francisco Bay.
We could we have I'm out here in Mauritius in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and at night I can almost hear all the billions of dollars of equipment that America is pre-positioning here to bomb Iran.
Like why?
Yeah, why?
Let's stop it.
Let's make Chicago great, you know, put the money in St. Louis rather than out here in Diego Garcia.
But this is what the book is about.
That's why Oliver Stone said, if we knew what I found out in Precious Freedom, mothers would have never given their kids to go to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yes.
We need to be skeptical of what the government is telling us when it gets us into these wars.
And now uh I'm afraid they were probably gonna say, and if you know people had known this, we wouldn't have gotten involved in Venezuela and Iran and start, you know, a war with China and Ukraine and all these other things that were trying to escalate.
Look at how many different theaters we're in right now, and these are big fights.
And uh I think it was uh Colonel Douglas McGregor said uh we're really picking fights that you know, we can't cash these checks, essentially, to paraphrase what he had to say.
We're still doing that everywhere.
It's incredibly bad leadership that we have, civilian as well as military.
That's the story of precious freedom.
Yes.
That what uh the the reason I'm I'm talking about the book, and I'm so grateful that you're getting it out there, is it's not just it's not a book about the Vietnam War.
It's a book about America, American media, how we are being fooled, military industrial complex, you know, uh and how the world sees us and how we're taking our innocent sons and daughters and whipping them into these froths of what we call patriotism and sending them over to situations that they cannot win in.
So, you know, but again, it took me 10 years to figure it out.
Vietnam, you know, I thought of Vietnam as some dark place, you know, the jungles, and they're growing by 8% a year.
The Vietnamese are confident they will welcome you if you go there.
And I realized Vietnam War was a tragedy for them, but it was a victory.
They won.
They have the confidence of winners.
And, you know, I tip my hat to all the American Vietnam veterans.
They did a, they did what they were trained to do.
The problem was our leaders put them in a jar that was impossible to break out of a situation, and we lied and lied and lied.
I believed all, you know, I'm 71 now.
I believed many of these lies till I was you know, 53 and went to Vietnam.
Mm-hmm.
Let me ask you about Walter Cronkite, because you mentioned him a couple of times, and you know, Operation Mockingbird was very prevalent then.
We know that he was uh very friendly to the CIA narratives and stuff like that.
But at the same time, uh, as that was happening, I heard criticism from the right saying, you know, he's gonna cause us to lose the war because he's reading the names of the men every night that are killed in this war.
What is your take on uh uh how that was that part of the propaganda?
The Cronkite CBS.
Just like all our prestitutes right now.
They successfully, you know, uh go down the line so that the CIA will keep them, you know, in the chair, and they appear to be, you know, oh, this war, you know, people are dying.
Walter Cronkite was uh went to Vietnam a number of times.
He knew William Colby of the CIA, who was running the CIA operations.
William Colby later admitted that the United States secretly, the CIA kidnapped 80,000 innocent civilians, tortured them, tortured them, killed them.
80,000.
Wow.
He said admitted this to Congress.
Wow.
Walter Cronkite, David Hulberson, all these guys knew what was happening.
It was a torture program.
We had torture centers all over South Vietnam.
They knew, you know, but they they didn't admit that.
We bombed Laos, the there was an airport in Laos that was the busiest airport in the world in the middle 60s.
Where was Walter Cronkite?
Yeah.
William Westmoreland, General Westmoreland was probably the biggest opium dealer of the 1960s, running opium through the Saigon Airport out to uh that was the French Connection, out to the Mediterranean, washing the money in the Vatican Bank.
This was all William West.
What did what happened to William Westmoreland after Johnson kicked him upstairs?
He went to be chief of staff of the army and he started to work on uh on uh Gladio in fighting the communists in Italy.
This was a worldwide opium network that started, you know, in the Golden Triangle.
They they shipped it out of Vietnam because we controlled it militarily.
You're talking about billions of dollars of CIA money.
So Walter Cronkite didn't know this, our top newsman, morally safer, couldn't figure this out.
It wasn't on the script they were given.
Uh yeah, when you look at Afghanistan and uh what's happened, what happened there with opium uh stuff.
Uh you know, it's it's amazing that we keep seeing uh you know all of these different um that how they've used the war on drugs to fund their military operations.
I'm thinking of Ron Contra and uh other things like that.
Um the CIA is uh a whole nother story.
Maybe maybe we'll do a book on them one day as well.
Um so you know, when we look at this uh moving forward, um the um uh there's a lot of a lot of different characters that you're able to with a fiction thing, a lot of different people stories that you're able to pull into a fictional account that'd be difficult, as you said, to do otherwise.
Uh tell us a little bit more about the book and your approach to that.
Well, you know, Mr. Son was a V was a 21 year old Viet Cong leader.
The when I was 13 years old, I watched CBS News, and they said, here we are on Route 9.
Route 9 is the key artery that cuts across the uh parallel to the DMZ, and the Marines are out on Route 9.
And I looked and I thought, wow, my brothers' Marines control Route 9.
So I go out to Route 9 years later with Mr. Son, and he I said, Oh yeah, this is Route 9.
I remember seeing this in newsreels back when I was a kid.
He said, You didn't see us in those, he said you didn't see me in those newsreels.
And I said, What do you mean?
Your nickname is the Tiger of Route 9.
What it why didn't I see you?
He said, Because Americans shot all the newsreels during the day.
He said we were sleeping during the day.
Ho Chi Minh said, America has eyes in the sky.
Don't fight during the day.
He said, I didn't fight in the day, I fought at night.
It's easy to be courageous at night.
So what I didn't realize is America never dominated Vietnam for a 24-hour period.
I'll repeat that.
America was never winning, not even for 24 hours, because every day at 4 p.m., what did the Marines do?
They retreated and they dug a hole.
They went back in, they put wire around, they put mines, and they tried to get some sleep.
And that's when the Viet Cong came out.
They had specialists trained to walk like spiders through these minefields and disconnect them all and then attack the Marines at night.
So after the sleepless Marines woke up, the survivors, they couldn't go out on Route 9.
They had to have minesweepers.
There are all sorts of mines out there.
The Vietnamese were fighting at night.
You need night goggles, night film to see the Vietnam War from the view of the Vietnamese.
Wow.
And the other thing is, you know, President Obama told a group of Vietnam veterans, you won every battle.
Well, what are you talking about?
Ho Chi Minh trained his people.
He said, don't win a battle.
He said, we're just going to ambush.
If you knock off the pinky of a Marine, they'll report that home.
There'll be doctors.
There'll be, you know, tourniquets.
He said, you know, you just you ambush, quick in, quick out.
The three quicks and the one slow.
The three quicks, you know, uh get ready, attack, withdraw.
What's the one slow?
Prepare.
He said, never attack unless you have the advantage.
So if I was 15 in Wisconsin, David, I could figure that out.
I'm going to see this Canadian army moving in a bunch with helmets.
I'm not going to attack them.
They could kill me.
But I'm going to get them, you know, when they turn the corner, they're not looking, you know, slingshots, get them in the knee, run away, hide in the bush.
They were ambushing us.
We never controlled Vietnam for a 24-hour period.
Wow.
Yeah, that's very different from what I've heard.
I've always heard the line, like you point out with Obama.
He's not the first or only one who said that.
I've heard that from a lot of people.
He won every battle, uh, but then they would turn away and leave it.
You know, so that was their best case example of trying to explain what was happening there.
And even when they put that spin on it, it's like we had leadership that could win every battle and lose the war.
What's what's the matter with this?
But that puts a whole new spin on it, the fact that they're um they're pulling back constantly.
And and of course, the the Vietnamese understood that they were fighting a war of attrition.
And um, you know, they that's uh because he understood uh America, and uh he understood that um, as you point out, because they had a lot of experience with other invaders, it's that war of attrition, and that's how we always lose these wars, these asymmetric wars.
We go in and try to occupy a country and uh turn it into what we want it to be, then it turns into a war of attrition.
And uh that that truly is an amazing insight.
That's uh very different from what we heard.
That's why it's important for people to see this book, I think.
You know, and I'm a Wisconsinite talking to somebody in Texas.
If I could bring up, of course, the number one game in the history of football, the Ice Bowl, 1967, Dallas Cowboys, Lambeau Field, Vince Lombardi, Bart Star.
If you look at the stats, the Dallas Cowboys rushed for more yards.
They had more sacks.
You could look at the stats.
And that's like the Vietnam War.
It's as if the Texas news uh media said, hey, look, we won that game in Lambeau Field, that ice bowl for the NFL championship.
Look, we ran for more yards.
Look, we had more sacks.
Look at this stat.
Look at that stat.
But in the end, the Green Bay Packers, Bard Star, Vince Lombardi won.
And Ho Chi Minh was the Vince Lombardi.
General Zia was the winningest general of the 20th century.
And I'm not saying this to rub it in.
I'm saying it to if we had realized these things, and even if we would realize what happened in Vietnam.
That's the source.
You know, folks, there's a David Knight gold.
And David, you and I don't know each other.
We didn't talk about this in advance.
I would, you know, recommend everybody right now, take your dollars, go to David Knight Gold, get it, get some gold.
Why am I saying that?
In 1966, the Prime Minister of Vietnam told the New York Times, you're gonna go off the gold standard.
This war is gonna ruin the dollar.
He told that to the Times.
The Times readers in 66 couldn't figure it out.
71 Nixon goes on.
It's because of Vietnam.
The reason we lost in Iraq and Afghanistan is we didn't look at the lessons of Vietnam.
The the economy, the debt, the uh riots that we have right now, the government lying.
These are all stories that came, you know, the seed of them is in the Vietnam War, and they're in this book, Precious Freedom.
Yes.
We keep making those same types of decisions.
You know, when you talk about the the general who uh went around uh telling everybody that Ho Chi Minh was uh like George Washington, and that really is the way that they uh we won the revolutionary war.
Again, defending your home, and uh it wasn't like they won any battles.
I mean, they won Yorktown.
That was like basically the first uh battle that they really won.
But they were all wars of attrition, and it was it was like you know, the British could say, yeah, we got those guns and conquered in Lexington, but then they got hammered the entire time they were coming back.
And and uh we need to uh think in those terms, and we need to stop thinking like the world's policemen.
And uh it it it we just can't get that through to people.
Maybe you know, your book can get that into people's minds, that perspective, and and how we have just the wrong approach in terms of doing this.
But again, I think it comes back to the fact that uh, and it and things are only getting worse in this regard, that uh we don't have the proper kind of determination whether we're gonna get involved in a war.
I mean, we look at the wars that we've had since um World War II, it's pr predominantly been because there hasn't been a real consideration or discussion of what's happening.
We've been uh lied into it and pushed into it by the executive branch in a uh uh supine uh Pentagon that is there.
Um it's interesting that you mentioned Westmoreland.
I didn't know about his involvement with Gladio.
I mean I've I've looked at Gladio quite a bit, but I I didn't notice that that he was there.
And um and we should think about that part of it as well.
I mean, NATO has got a an unbelievable history when you go back and look at uh NATO, not just the things that are happening in uh eastern Europe, but a long, long history of uh false flags and things like that.
Um the book is precious freedom, and I tell you, freedom is precious, and so is life.
And we have allowed our government to put them on uh a very low uh priority.
They've got a different priority, and we need to start uh waking up as a people, and I think the important thing is that we have to uh and you know, when you've got a uh a fictional narrative like this, uh it's very powerful because you can get into people's feelings in a way that's difficult to do in a nonfiction book.
And um I think that um uh that that that ability to tell a narrative story like that can really affect people's hearts and minds.
And that's what this is all truly about.
That was something that was a big part of the Vietnamese uh the North the uh Vietnam War was the hearts and minds that they were losing.
And uh we need to make sure that they uh don't have control of our hearts and minds again, and I think the best anecdote is to have uh the truth presented to them in a very effective way, and I think your book uh is is uh one of those uh ways that people can get that message out to people.
Uh thank you, David.
And thank you for giving me the chance to talk about it.
Well, thank you for what you're doing.
I I think it's very important work, and I think it's important for people to uh see this, and we all grew up in Vietnam, and I think it's also important for people to go back and to question what they were told.
And once you do that, that's a real eye-opening experience.
And um, so many of us have uh uh had that experience with Vietnam.
I know a lot of people who went to Vietnam and they had that same kind of experience and were severely harmed by that, but uh our country was severely harmed by the Vietnam War.
So again, the book is Precious Freedom, and people can find it on Amazon.
Is that the best place for people to find your book?
Do you have a website that you're selling it?
Okay.
Jump to no jump to Amazon.
It it it will be you'll get it uh delivered November 11th.
It's being, you know, officially published, but pre-orders, you know, really help a lot.
And uh it's you know, this is gonna have a lot of readership in Asia.
Vietnam was not a small American story, it was global.
Yes.
It should be made into a movie, like your other book was.
Uh I think it would probably yeah, I think it'd be a great movie.
It's a story that really needs to be told.
Uh who knows, maybe Clint Eastwood will do it.
He's he's still game for doing movies.
He's not uh not giving up yet on that.
But uh maybe they'll find a good director if there's any left in uh Hollywood.
I don't know.
But uh it'd be a great movie, I'm sure.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Um uh thank you, James Bradley.
And again, the book is Precious Freedom.
Precious Freedom The common man.
They created common core to dumb down our children.
They created common past to track and control us.
Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future.
They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
That is what we have in common.
That is what they want to take away.
Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
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Thank you for sharing.
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