True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 321: Dude Where’s My Dad: POW/MIAs (Part One)
Aired: 2023-09-22
Duration: 01:11:39


=== Missing In Action (14:31) ===

[00:00:04]  Good morning!
[00:00:07]  True Anon!
[00:00:30]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to what might possibly be the final episode of True Anon, although it is the first episode in a little loose miniseries we're doing.
[00:00:40]  My name is Brace Belden, and you know what?
[00:00:43]  I'll say it.
[00:00:43]  I have COVID.
[00:00:46]  I'm Liz.
[00:00:47]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:00:50]  And just for the record, we are not all in the same place, so you don't have to worry about any kind of super spreading recording adventure.
[00:00:57]  No, I know Wi-Fi is super short.
[00:00:59]  We usually record a super-really, really quickly, Brace.
[00:01:01]  Hold on.
[00:01:02]  This is True Anon.
[00:01:03]  Hello, everyone.
[00:01:04]  Hello.
[00:01:04]  It's Truan.
[00:01:06]  I know.
[00:01:06]  Sorry.
[00:01:06]  I'm just distracted because, you know, we usually record in person.
[00:01:09]  And then if we record remote, usually, obviously we're all at home.
[00:01:12]  My Wi-Fi wasn't doing so good.
[00:01:14]  So I'm at this like senior center thing down the street because they have like a like a just really, you know, they have wireless or whatever.
[00:01:20]  The hospice center near near you, right?
[00:01:21]  Well, no, not, I mean, it's kind of funny you say that.
[00:01:24]  It kind of, you know, the labels might be changing the near future.
[00:01:29]  No, this is for like just generally healthy, but much older people.
[00:01:33]  And, you know, obviously, like, you know, I've done this, done the research and stuff.
[00:01:38]  It seems fine.
[00:01:40]  But I am, I do have COVID.
[00:01:43]  And I know, I know I got it in Chinatown at that, at a, at a punk show.
[00:01:49]  I'm just saying.
[00:01:50]  I know.
[00:01:51]  You were in a small enclosed area, bobbing and weaving and hip-hopping.
[00:01:58]  Yeah.
[00:01:58]  So shout out Project Reach for letting me touch people, which I did.
[00:02:05]  I just kind of go around and I touch people's hair.
[00:02:07]  Yeah, looking them.
[00:02:08]  Also, people who were there at that show, maybe should go get COVID toast.
[00:02:11]  That's all good.
[00:02:12]  If you don't, and listen, out of sight, out of mind.
[00:02:14]  Out of sight out of mind.
[00:02:17]  You know who else has been out of sight out of mind for quite a long time?
[00:02:21]  Or actually out of sight, but on the mind for quite a long time, Liz.
[00:02:26]  Our nation's POWs and MIAs.
[00:02:30]  Beautiful transition, Brace.
[00:02:32]  Do I sound really nasally right now?
[00:02:35]  Not really, but a little.
[00:02:37]  So, Liz.
[00:02:38]  Yes.
[00:02:39]  Starting back in 2019, whenever I would go to the post office to pick up another round of tabby shoes that I could pour milk down the side of and suck on like a ripe sow's teeth, I would find myself looking at the flagpole.
[00:02:53]  Ew.
[00:02:54]  What?
[00:02:54]  I mean, it's not hurting anybody, but interesting.
[00:02:57]  Noted that that was your reaction to that.
[00:03:00]  So, you know, every post office has like a flag outside of it, right?
[00:03:03]  Find the stars and bars.
[00:03:05]  We love it.
[00:03:05]  Stars and bars, beautiful flag, red, white, blue, very reminiscent of France, very hip, very chic.
[00:03:11]  Also calling it stars and bars.
[00:03:13]  Very cool.
[00:03:14]  Very classic.
[00:03:14]  Yeah.
[00:03:15]  But underneath that flag, Liz, what do I see but the black flag of falsehood?
[00:03:23]  Upon that flag, emblazoned upon it, a guard tower, a little man with a hang dog look and a massive motherfucking dome, big old head, barbed wire.
[00:03:37]  Beneath this graven image is written, you are not forgotten.
[00:03:43]  And above it, those six letters, P-O-W-M-I-A.
[00:03:50]  And I think to myself, what is this doing on our post office right now?
[00:03:53]  There are no POWs.
[00:03:55]  There's some people that are missing in action, technically, meaning dead, vaporized.
[00:03:59]  But why is there a P-O-W-M-I-A flag hanging outside the post office?
[00:04:03]  And then as I would continue my world, or excuse me, rather, countrywide search for the biggest tabby that I can find with the largest crease that I can do, you know what to.
[00:04:13]  I keep seeing these flags above every post office.
[00:04:16]  And then I realize it's now a law for every post office as of 2019 to have the POW-MIA flags.
[00:04:24]  And we are here to talk to you kind of about that and about a few other things.
[00:04:27]  Yeah, not just the post office.
[00:04:29]  It's actually all federal buildings.
[00:04:31]  And did you know that it's, it's on the White House too?
[00:04:33]  Underneath the American flag that flies on top of the White House is the POW/slash M-I-A, you are not forgotten flag, which when you're like really just walking past it real fast, I've got to say it looks like the ISIS flag.
[00:04:49]  Well, like if you're just getting it out of the peripheral, you're like, that, you know what I mean?
[00:04:54]  That's my first association.
[00:04:55]  And I get it.
[00:04:56]  It's kind of like a morning thing.
[00:04:57]  Like, oh, we're so sad.
[00:04:59]  We miss them.
[00:04:59]  But the black flag, I feel like once ISIS came out, they should have changed the POW-MIA flag to like a neutral one, like a blue background, or maybe like a teal.
[00:05:09]  It's not a lot of teal flags.
[00:05:10]  Maybe put like a salmon flag.
[00:05:14]  So, no, we are talking about the, like you said, POW.
[00:05:18]  I'm going to keep saying POW slash MIA to really drive home that it's like one thing, right?
[00:05:23]  Yeah.
[00:05:23]  This idea, the POW/slash MIA.
[00:05:25]  And we had talked about doing this, not even as a series, but as an episode a while back, because I remember you were like, I really want to talk about the legend of, and I'm going to say his name one way and then correct myself.
[00:05:39]  So don't worry about it.
[00:05:40]  Yeah.
[00:05:40]  The legend of Bo Gritz, which I was like, great name.
[00:05:43]  Turns out that's not how you pronounce his name.
[00:05:45]  Bo Greites.
[00:05:46]  I think we're going to talk about that later.
[00:05:48]  I'll say this right now.
[00:05:48]  Trudon style guide.
[00:05:50]  First of all, any name, any way you want, except Liz.
[00:05:53]  You really, it's pronounced Ng.
[00:05:55]  But Trudon style guide, you can pronounce a name any way you like.
[00:05:59]  It's Bogrites, but we're calling it Bogritz.
[00:06:03]  And so we kind of start, I'm just giving everyone a little background.
[00:06:06]  We kind of started looking into how to tell that story and then realized there's actually kind of a bigger story here, which is this phenomenon of this flag, right?
[00:06:15]  That like Bryce was talking about, this POW slash, POW slash M-I-A.
[00:06:20]  you are not forgotten flag.
[00:06:22]  And then as we looked into it even more, it was like, well, wait a second, where the fuck did this even this idea, this POW slash MIA come from?
[00:06:32]  And what we kind of discovered, and I'm going to say this kind of ironically, is that basically the idea of the POW slash MIA is a construct, right?
[00:06:43]  And I know that sounds kind of like, oh, that sounds a little POMO, but like, hang with me for a second.
[00:06:51]  What I mean is the POW slash MIA is a construct in the sense that our way of conceptualizing the POW-MIA came into being at a specific moment and then continued as an idea to evolve thereafter.
[00:07:08]  And therefore, I think as an object, it is a product of a highly contingent social and political history and one that I would say, and I think we're going to argue, emerges at the moment of what we could best describe as like a national mental breakdown.
[00:07:27]  Yes.
[00:07:30]  Which is to say that the figure, or as H. Bruce Franklin, who we're going to talk about a lot on this episode or reference a lot on this episode, what he calls the myth of the POW-MIA, it comes into being as a way not only to cope with the destruction of American identity in the wake of the defeat of Vietnam, the chaos of 68, the ensuing revelations and concomitant paranoia about all of the illegal activities as our government was doing,
[00:07:59]  which everyone knows about, right?
[00:08:01]  But also as a way to kind of reconstruct that collective identity in the aftermath of that national psychological collapse.
[00:08:10]  Yeah, the POW-MIA myth, I think, is really useful as a, I don't want to sound POMO here either, but I don't know.
[00:08:17]  We can do whatever we want.
[00:08:18]  As a kind of lens to view a lot of the, like you said, American psyche throughout the 1960s, 1970s, 80s, 90s, and even today.
[00:08:27]  You know, it helps us kind of understand the American warrior legend, the sort of the cudgels that were used by the U.S. State Department, especially against Vietnam, but against all of Indochina.
[00:08:37]  Well, kind of excepting Cambodia.
[00:08:40]  The story of mercenaries throughout the 1980s, which was kind of the decade of the Merck, well, the 70s throughout the 1980s, and Clean Eastwood.
[00:08:51]  Yeah, the idea of the POW-MIA, it shows up, like you say, in the late 60s.
[00:08:57]  It then gets politically supercharged through the 70s.
[00:09:01]  And then I think, as we'll see, it twists back into itself, metastasizing into the 80s and 90s.
[00:09:08]  And it provides that exact archetype for that, you know, that new American action hero.
[00:09:13]  And I think nostalgia for which persists in our collective psyche to this day.
[00:09:18]  It's basically a story of how America remade itself.
[00:09:22]  And it's that fucking flag that we see everywhere.
[00:09:24]  Stupid fucking flag.
[00:09:25]  So Liz, let's start off by defining our terms here.
[00:09:29]  What is the category POW-M-I-A?
[00:09:33]  Okay.
[00:09:35]  Let's get into the weeds about this for a little bit.
[00:09:37]  It is a fact of war that combatants will die without their bodies getting recovered, right?
[00:09:43]  Planes explode, bodies just fly into the ocean, guys get left on the battlefield.
[00:09:50]  And that's not just a fact of modern warfare, right?
[00:09:52]  I mean, remains of soldiers killed during the Battle of Little Bighorn, they were discovered in like 1985, over 100 years after the guys died.
[00:10:00]  This happens all the time.
[00:10:01]  I mean, a month ago, archaeologists in Virginia discovered a few bodies of Confederate soldiers that had been there since 1862.
[00:10:09]  From World War II, nearly 79,000 Americans out of the 400,000 that died are unaccounted for.
[00:10:15]  Like they don't know where their bodies are.
[00:10:16]  They're just like kind of gone into the, well, probably into the earth rather than the wind.
[00:10:21]  For Korea, the number is 8,000.
[00:10:22]  And in Vietnam, the number is actually pretty surprisingly low.
[00:10:26]  It's a little over 1,000.
[00:10:27]  That is bodies that have not been recovered.
[00:10:29]  We don't know what's up with them.
[00:10:30]  We don't know where they are.
[00:10:32]  So as a matter of record keeping, any American serviceman who doesn't come back or whose remains can't be discovered or identified is legally categorized as, quote, unaccounted for.
[00:10:44]  So as soon as an American is lost, DOD begins an internal investigation in order to figure out what happened.
[00:10:51]  And then through that investigation, they end up slotting the guy, the person, the woman, the whoever, into one of these three categories.
[00:11:00]  KIA, BNR, meaning killed in action, body not recovered.
[00:11:05]  The second category, MIA, missing in action.
[00:11:08]  And then a third category, POW, prisoner of war, you know, person being held prisoner by the enemy.
[00:11:15]  Okay.
[00:11:15]  So those are three categories.
[00:11:16]  You'll notice MIA and POW are separate categories, right?
[00:11:19]  We're going to get a little pedantic here, but I promise you it's worth it.
[00:11:22]  So right off the bat, you'll notice that this does not include the category deserter.
[00:11:28]  Yes.
[00:11:29]  And I got to tell you, Vietnam is a war that is known for its assertions.
[00:11:34]  The DOD itself admits that there were about 503,926 incidents of desertion between July 66 and December 73.
[00:11:44]  People thought the military was underreporting this problem, as you can imagine.
[00:11:48]  Obviously, 500,000 people did not just disappear from Vietnam or from, you know, their wherever other, wherever else they were posted.
[00:11:55]  People would oftentimes desert and then, like, you know, either be found or just come back to base, whatever.
[00:12:00]  But that's a lot of them.
[00:12:01]  Some people did not come back.
[00:12:03]  I mean, this also includes draft dodging, evading, resisting arrest.
[00:12:07]  And I got to tell you, in Vietnam, famously, there is the trope of a guy maybe taking up with a little mama sand somewhere in Saigon, going having a couple kids with her.
[00:12:16]  He splits from the motherfucking base and just starts his new life in old Saigon there.
[00:12:21]  That's also included in that.
[00:12:23]  There's also my favorite category.
[00:12:26]  And, you know, to talk about the Vietnam War is to talk about legends and rumors and myth.
[00:12:31]  It's a very, it's a war that a lot of the soldiers fighting it were very confused pretty much all of the time, I think, even in comparison to a lot of other wars we fought.
[00:12:42]  But all these legends grew up around these people who were turncoasts, who were traitors.
[00:12:47]  Doc Laporte, Salt and Pepper, which was a black and a guy and a white guy who would, I believe their specialty was stealing South Vietnamese military vehicles.
[00:12:58]  And the famous one, the most famous one, I would say, the grenade launcher toting Phantom Blooper.
[00:13:04]  Incredible names.
[00:13:06]  Incredible.
[00:13:06]  Which they thought had to be an American because the Vietnamese wouldn't be able to figure out grenade launchers, which I don't understand.
[00:13:13]  I've never used a grenade launcher, but they seem pretty, you kind of just pop them in.
[00:13:17]  Right there.
[00:13:18]  Yeah, form fall is function.
[00:13:19]  You know what I mean?
[00:13:19]  Maybe the Amy, I don't know.
[00:13:22]  So those three categories, back to the categories, KIA, BNR, MIA, and POW.
[00:13:27]  Those three categories, DOD does an internal investigation after some period of time, whatever.
[00:13:33]  And they say, okay, we cannot find proof that this American is alive.
[00:13:38]  The Air Force requires conclusive evidence in the absence of a body that indicates beyond a reasonable doubt that a missing person could not have survived.
[00:13:49]  We have to kind of get into how crazy and difficult this is.
[00:13:51]  So you have to understand that this is actually a pretty difficult legal claim to make, right?
[00:13:58]  This is a quote from the Air Force.
[00:13:59]  The facts must be such that a death is the only plausible alternative under the circumstances.
[00:14:05]  So right off the bat, you can already see how that alone, that kind of that burden of proof, is going to lead to more MIAs being created than KIAs, right?
[00:14:17]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:14:18]  I mean, take, for instance, this example, right?
[00:14:22]  A six-man plane crashes into the jungle and explodes on impact.
[00:14:26]  Witnesses, like maybe someone else on the flight mission in another plane, report that there are no survivors.
[00:14:31]  They exploded in the air and a huge fireball blew up on the ground.
[00:14:34]  Nobody could have survived that.

=== Six Missing, MIA Reporting (03:00) ===

[00:14:36]  In this case, the Department of Defense would report that six Americans were KIA in this incident.
[00:14:42]  Killed in action.
[00:14:43]  Killed in action.
[00:14:44]  They're dead.
[00:14:45]  Now, imagine that that six-man plane crashes into the jungle, explodes on impact, et cetera, blah, blah, same exact scenario, but one American is seen parachuting out of the plane prior to it crashing.
[00:14:59]  Nobody can say definitively who that American is, which member of the flight crew he is, but that they do see one, just one of those six, the other five, presumably dead KIA.
[00:15:08]  In this case, the DOD would be forced to classify all six as missing in action.
[00:15:14]  Even if that one guy didn't survive after parachuting in the jungle, not too kind to the white man out there, there's no definitive proof of death.
[00:15:20]  And because he couldn't be definitively identified, and because there is no way to recover the bodies of the five other men in order to identify the six, all six are then reported as MIA.
[00:15:32]  So immediately, even though we know at least five people are dead, really there's six missing in action.
[00:15:39]  Yeah.
[00:15:40]  See, additionally to this, there's other tricky stuff about reporting who died and when with Vietnam.
[00:15:47]  Because of the scale of the war and the politics at home, there was a tendency for soldiers or, you know, crewmen or whatever to be pretty protective, especially of like families at home.
[00:16:01]  So they would be a little bit more over-optimistic in their reporting by saying, you know, thinking basically that you're protecting someone by being like, oh, they're missing in action.
[00:16:10]  Because, you know, either some people didn't want to have that burden of like knowing that they're the one telling their buddy's wife that they're dead, you know, stuff like that.
[00:16:20]  Or in a lot of the cases, I mean, they wanted their, their buddies' families to continue getting salaries as opposed to death benefits because it was a greater, you know, it was like a lot easier for them to live off of that.
[00:16:33]  All of this works in tandem to basically really muddy up how many people are actually killed in action versus missing in action, right?
[00:16:55]  So there's a lot of complications in the actual reporting of it, but there's another sort of more political angle, which is that during the Vietnam War, the DOD began to publicly lump together MIAs and POWs into one category.
[00:17:09]  the POW slash MIA that we all know and love today.
[00:17:14]  So up until 1969, prisoners of war and missing in action were two separate categories of people.
[00:17:20]  So what changed in 69?
[00:17:24]  Well, to talk about that and why and when those two categories became one, we kind of sort of have to talk about the Vietnam War, right?
[00:17:35]  Which actually, it's funny.

=== 1954 Turning Point (15:39) ===

[00:17:36]  We were talking about this earlier.
[00:17:38]  We've really never talked about Vietnam extensively on this show.
[00:17:42]  You've kind of always said that, like, you didn't want to.
[00:17:44]  It brings up a lot of bad memories for you.
[00:17:46]  Like, you saw things there you would never forget.
[00:17:48]  And then you made just like vague references to having been at a couple of sort of notorious events.
[00:17:53]  So I figured it was kind of just a moot subject on here.
[00:17:56]  No, I think we've talked about it.
[00:17:58]  And I mean, I know that we've done the Good Morning Vietnam intro at some point.
[00:18:02]  I don't know when I'm like assuming that was an episode where we talked about Vietnam.
[00:18:06]  But I mean, we talked about like different angles, but we've never like, I don't know.
[00:18:11]  Well, basically, what I'm saying is we've never talked through the war.
[00:18:15]  And I think we're going to do that right about now.
[00:18:17]  Or try to, at least, as much as we can within our time allotted.
[00:18:23]  So the first U.S. military members captured during the Vietnam War happened in 1954.
[00:18:32]  There are five Air Force members taken by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the DRB, and then released to the French.
[00:18:39]  And you might be at home listening, wait a minute, 1954.
[00:18:42]  Isn't that a little early for POWs, for the Vietnam War?
[00:18:47]  And you would be right, except that's why we all have to stop calling it the Vietnam War and go back to calling it the war in Indochina, which I'm really sad that we're not in the studio right now because that would have been a perfect moment for the Gong.
[00:19:02]  I know.
[00:19:03]  Believe me, there's a lot that I could do with that Gong in this episode.
[00:19:09]  So the U.S. was aiding the French in their war against the DRV since at least 1950.
[00:19:14]  Yeah.
[00:19:15]  So the thing is, Vietnam had been a French colony, along with most of the rest of Indochina, and I think a little bit of China as well, since the 1800s.
[00:19:23]  Of course, the French famously get defeated by basically everybody who attacks them, which is almost every single country.
[00:19:30]  In fact, I mean, if you're including America, which we did fight them, obviously, in North Africa and the Middle East.
[00:19:35]  Yeah, they were defeated by literally everybody.
[00:19:37]  The Japanese defeated them in Vietnam and in Indochina.
[00:19:42]  They lose their colony there temporarily.
[00:19:44]  The Japanese set up a puppet state.
[00:19:45]  Ho Chi Minh and the communists start fighting the Japanese and they declare independence in 1945.
[00:19:53]  The French, who were newly invigorated after everybody else kind of won the war for them, immediately declare war on Ho Chi Minh and the, well, the Viet Cong, the Communist Party of Vietnam, who had a lot of the country in their hands.
[00:20:07]  Not only did the French want to retain their territory, but the French military intelligent political apparatus was also engaged in a classic subject of the show, which is heroin selling.
[00:20:18]  There's a fantastic, very famous book called The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, who I hopefully the author will come on the show as I have tried to contact him a couple of times, which links this to the Corsican mafia in France, which shows you a little bit of the picture of how these things were all connected, right?
[00:20:35]  Because the U.S. was using the Corsican mafia for a lot of our post-war intelligence service.
[00:20:40]  all kind of connected.
[00:20:42]  This continued to escalate throughout 192 until 1954 rather, when the French were mightily and famously and humiliatingly defeated in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu by Ho Chi Minh and sort of ended the French presence in Vietnam.
[00:20:58]  Many French themselves did stay behind, especially in Laos, and became just full-time straight-up heroin dealers.
[00:21:05]  An early Air America counterpart, Air Laos, was a joint venture between intelligence agents in the Corsican mafia and members of the Lao elite that basically trafficked heroin.
[00:21:17]  So this all ends with basically an agreed-upon temporary division of Vietnam with elections to be held within two years, after which then Vietnam would be theoretically united under one government.
[00:21:28]  That was the agreement.
[00:21:29]  Look, everybody knew that Ho Chi Minh was going to win those elections.
[00:21:32]  I think it was like he had like 80 or 90% of the vote.
[00:21:37]  I mean, it was just absurd.
[00:21:38]  It was like absurd how popular he was.
[00:21:40]  And so the U.S. was like, well, that's not going to work for us.
[00:21:45]  And so they go in and install a brutal dictatorship in the South to basically prevent the Southern Vietnamese population from voting for Ho Chi Minh.
[00:21:53]  This is all in full violation of the Geneva Agreement, you know, obviously.
[00:21:58]  So Diem was a brutal dictator.
[00:22:00]  He cancels the elections.
[00:22:02]  He returns all this land to the rich landlords.
[00:22:04]  He jails and beats detractors in the South.
[00:22:06]  And this sparks almost every part of the population in the South to rise up against what the West is now calling Southern Vietnam, and which is just an illegally installed regime in the South, right?
[00:22:19]  There are also these burgeoning left-wing nationalist and communist movements elsewhere in Indochina.
[00:22:24]  At first, you know, so Laos and Cambodia are right next to Vietnam.
[00:22:28]  They sort of, along with Thailand, you know, form sort of a big chunk of South Asia.
[00:22:35]  At first, all the different parties for those countries were gathered under one Indo-Chinese Communist Party, but the Laotian, Vietnamese, and Cambodian elements all split off in the early 1950s.
[00:22:45]  All were engaged in political and guerrilla war against the weak royal or puppet regimes that dominated their countries.
[00:22:51]  Except in the case of Laos, it's a little different because the communists were led by a prince, but that's neither here nor there.
[00:22:58]  And keep in mind, though, that Cambodia and Laos are officially neutral.
[00:23:02]  That is the stances Of these countries.
[00:23:04]  They are neutral.
[00:23:06]  You know, they're non-combatants.
[00:23:09]  They're the Swiss or whatever, which is completely disregarded by the West.
[00:23:14]  Yeah, all this is going on, which explains why between 1954 and 1965, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, even the CIA, they all report guys missing in action throughout Southeast Asia, even though we are still officially like 100% not at war anywhere in the region and continuing to deny that we have any kind of presence there whatsoever.
[00:23:39]  So under the three presidents during those years, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, we take an increasingly active role in trying to put down the Southern Vietnamese revolt against our illegally installed puppet regime.
[00:23:53]  That, of course, includes the assassination of Diem and then a succession of American-backed generals who are all just trying to kind of keep control of the situation.
[00:24:02]  Yeah, I mean, keep in mind, too, that we're also really trying to get as much heroin and money out of Laos as possible.
[00:24:08]  That seems to be something that like kind of flows as a through line throughout this, well, I guess this series, but this episode especially, is that we're trying to keep that dope money safe too.
[00:24:18]  Absolutely.
[00:24:19]  Now, all this culminates in the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident, or I guess incidents, which was used to legitimate U.S. air attacks on the North Vietnamese and get Congress to just sign a blank check for war.
[00:24:31]  Now, the key point is that it's not just that those incidents were fake.
[00:24:35]  I mean, literally ships just firing into the empty sea and claiming to be attacked.
[00:24:38]  It's that they helped reframe what was going on in Vietnam as a war between the so-called North and the so-called South, right?
[00:24:46]  Or a war of Northern aggression.
[00:24:49]  And at this point, the U.S. just had to intervene.
[00:24:52]  Yeah, we should keep in mind, too, that the commander during the Gulf of Tonkin incident was Jim Morrison's father.
[00:24:59]  Yes, son, I want to kill you.
[00:25:02]  The famous Door singer.
[00:25:04]  So this actually starts off the first air campaign against North Vietnam, because that's the one big advantage that the U.S. has against the North Vietnamese.
[00:25:13]  I think a lot of people think of the Vietnamese or the communists during the Vietnam War as like all people in rice patties with like, you know, ancient, you know, bolt action rifles.
[00:25:23]  They actually had like a real military with tanks, airplanes, helicopters, et cetera.
[00:25:28]  A lot of people sort of mistake the Viet Cong who were guerrillas for the North Vietnamese, which was an actual army.
[00:25:35]  Anyways, we have the advantage of air power and start a bombing campaign, which leads to the first official POW in Vietnam when a pilot was shot down but survived.
[00:25:48]  The U.S. also starts aerial campaigns, CIA, and regular operations in Cambodia and in Laos, although these are not obviously publicized and they're technically secret, although most people know they're going on.
[00:25:59]  This is also the start of the infamous Operation Rolling Thunder.
[00:26:03]  Do you want to talk about that for a little bit?
[00:26:05]  Yeah, so that is a three-year intensive bombing campaign on North Vietnam that was less about actually defeating Ho Chi Minh and his communists militarily than it was about destroying the morale and infrastructure of the nation, right?
[00:26:17]  And boosting the morale in the South.
[00:26:19]  So essentially, it was kind of a strategy of terror bombing, right?
[00:26:24]  Which actually ramps up and becomes like a real strategy of like actual carpet terror bombing.
[00:26:29]  But we consistently bomb the North throughout much of the Vietnam War.
[00:26:34]  Millions of people die.
[00:26:35]  I mean, not necessarily all from bombing, but millions of people die.
[00:26:38]  Infrastructure is totally ruined.
[00:26:40]  Landscape is destroyed by bombing or chemical warfare.
[00:26:43]  I mean, we do a huge, huge, huge amount of damage on the landscape of all of Vietnam.
[00:26:49]  So back at home between 1965 and 1968, Americans are watching this all unfold on TV nightly for basically the first time in history, right?
[00:26:58]  The media coverage of this, all consuming, unprecedented at the time.
[00:27:03]  And to counter that, kind of like trying to, you know, counter that coverage, the military itself goes on a full-throated media blitz, trying to convince Americans at home that it's going to win.
[00:27:15]  But as we know, because we live in the future, right?
[00:27:17]  Obviously, that was not true.
[00:27:19]  And months later, the Tet Offensive kicks off 1968 with a bang.
[00:27:24]  We, I mean, I would be remiss if I didn't ask Brace to talk about the Tet Offensive because I know it gives him such great pleasure.
[00:27:31]  I know.
[00:27:32]  I almost, I, you know, it's times like this that make me wish I didn't have COVID right now because I could sum up usually a lot of energy to talk about this because it is, it's just a fantastic maneuver.
[00:27:43]  So at this point, the U.S., well, you know, if you're actually looking at the war, you're like, oh, I don't know if these guys are going to win.
[00:27:49]  But there's a lot of kind of bravado.
[00:27:50]  It's like, you know, we're kicking the fucking communists' asses.
[00:27:53]  We've got them on the run.
[00:27:54]  You know, we're going to take this motherfucking thing home, boys home by Christmas.
[00:27:59]  So the Tet Offensive is essentially where everything really turns for the Americans.
[00:28:04]  And I think a lot of people mark that as the moment when America started officially losing.
[00:28:10]  America had sort of been presenting itself as we know we have the communists on the run.
[00:28:13]  We're going to win this thing, boys home by Christmas, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:28:16]  And then one night, or over a period of about a week, insurgent fighters from the North, but also throughout the South simultaneously attack both U.S. and ARVN, which is the South Vietnamese Army forces, in basically every Vietnamese city, every military base.
[00:28:33]  I mean, it is like one of the most impressively coordinated attacks I can think of in military history.
[00:28:39]  And the general that did it, General Jap, who is the Vietnamese is probably, or Vietnam's probably most famous military man of the 20th century, probably ever, actually died fairly recently, which is cool that he, you know, get to live so long.
[00:28:52]  They took over a ton of U.S. airfields, supply centers.
[00:28:55]  They get a shit ton of weapons and ammunition, wipe out a bunch of rural programs that the U.S. is running, and really just put America on the back foot.
[00:29:04]  They put, I mean, they take over Punch to Saigon.
[00:29:07]  You know, they get into like all of these like really secure installations.
[00:29:12]  They lose militarily, right?
[00:29:13]  Like, this was not a, this was not them trying to like take over these bases and then hold them.
[00:29:17]  I mean, that's not how you conduct a guerrilla war in the first place.
[00:29:20]  But the blow that it does to American and to the South Vietnamese regime's morale is just indescribable.
[00:29:28]  I mean, it was really like the paranoia, the rumors, the fear that a lot of American soldiers, and you know, even above, you know, the military in general, the political apparatus in general, felt after Tet just cannot be overstated.
[00:29:41]  It was really, it was insanely, it was a masterful military move.
[00:29:45]  And so it's like increasingly difficult for the U.S. to maintain control of the narrative that they're winning in the face of all of this, right?
[00:29:53]  Like even the media is like, you guys, like, this is pretty crazy what's happening.
[00:29:57]  Like, I don't know, you know, if I really believe you, like, Westmoreland goes on TV and is kind of like, don't worry about it.
[00:30:02]  It's we're, we've really got control of the situation.
[00:30:05]  All good.
[00:30:05]  This is all good.
[00:30:06]  Actually, what's happening?
[00:30:07]  This was really a diversion for their real plan, which actually we, you know, we stopped them from doing what they really wanted to do.
[00:30:14]  So don't even worry about it.
[00:30:15]  Like none of it made any sense.
[00:30:17]  And the American media is like not really buying it.
[00:30:20]  The people at home, Americans at home, are increasingly angry about the war.
[00:30:27]  Anti-war sentiment is increasing in popularity.
[00:30:30]  More and more American atrocities are being published at this time.
[00:30:34]  You have the first kind of documentation coming out of the Maile massacre.
[00:30:38]  There's the infamous Saigon execution photo series that gets published.
[00:30:42]  There's the discovery of Khan San and the Phoenix program Tiger Cages that comes out.
[00:30:47]  You know, all of this is coming out also with revelations about how much the American public was deceived about the lead up to the war and how long America was actually involved in Indochina.
[00:31:00]  Yeah, I mean, anti-war sentiment is so popular at this time that Eugene McCarthy almost beats LBJ in the New Hampshire primary, prompting RFK to enter the race.
[00:31:09]  Now, Liz, I know that you've been volunteering for RFK Jr. or RFK's son for quite a while.
[00:31:16]  So Johnson, thoroughly humiliated, announces that he will not seek reelection.
[00:31:22]  He also announces that the U.S. should begin peace negotiations and end the bombing in Vietnam.
[00:31:28]  And that decision was made in part of the reality that the American position after the TED offensive was not good, but also because of the increasingly hostile attitudes of Americans towards the draft.
[00:31:40]  Now, this is a very famous Pentagon analysis that came out much later, a couple years later, via the Pentagon Papers.
[00:31:46]  But it's important to read because it really just paints the perfect picture of what's going on.
[00:31:50]  This is what the Pentagon says.
[00:31:52]  It will be difficult to convince critics that we are not simply destroying South Vietnam in order to save it and that we genuinely want peace talks.
[00:32:00]  This growing disaffection, accompanied as it certainly will be by increased defiance of the draft and growing unrest in the cities because of the belief that we are neglecting domestic problems, runs great risks of provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions.
[00:32:17]  And that's literally what happened.
[00:32:19]  There was a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions in 1968.
[00:32:25]  So as I'm sure a lot of people know, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April of 68, which prompted a huge number of riots and rebellions all throughout cities in the United States.
[00:32:35]  A bunch of troops are deployed domestically to support overwhelmed police forces.
[00:32:40]  This gets broadcast all over live TV, which sparks further protests across, you know, especially college campuses, a lot of which included Vietnam veterans and some active GIs.
[00:32:52]  And this was a really new thing for the American military is that we had not had on any scale a lot of veterans of a war that was ongoing actually actively protesting this war.
[00:33:04]  And they became, you know, Vietnam veteran against the war, which we talked about actually in our previous episode, were a pretty potent and big force in American politics at this time.

=== Vietnam Veterans Protests (11:41) ===

[00:33:16]  Now, all throughout this, there's ongoing Democratic primary elections, right?
[00:33:21]  Hubert Humphrey, who's the VP, Johnson's VP, and he's kind of repping the like establishment, not completely, totally anti-war administration.
[00:33:29]  He's not doing well.
[00:33:30]  RFK and McCarthy together, they basically sweep all of the primaries.
[00:33:35]  And prior to RFK's assassination in June, Humphrey has just like a little over 2% of the delegates.
[00:33:41]  Like he's got nothing, right?
[00:33:43]  But then somehow after RFK's assassination, a majority of the delegates are now pledged to Humphrey.
[00:33:51]  And as you could imagine, people who lived through the Bernie Sanders, I mean, it's like, imagine that on like a crazy, much bigger scale, right?
[00:34:02]  For our Zoomer listeners at home.
[00:34:04]  People do not respond to this well at all.
[00:34:08]  There are thousands and thousands and thousands of anti-war protesters that show up to support McCarthy at the DNC.
[00:34:15]  And then the U.S. government shows up in kind.
[00:34:18]  They send thousands of federal troops and assorted cops to just tear gas and beat the shit out of protesters all on live television.
[00:34:27]  And it's in this moment that tricky Dick Nixon is able to position himself as the peace candidate.
[00:34:37]  Which literally sounds crazy.
[00:34:38]  I'm sorry.
[00:34:39]  It's fucking insane to say that.
[00:34:41]  Jiao gentleman is the peace candidate.
[00:34:43]  It is.
[00:34:44]  It's crazy.
[00:34:45]  And here in the future, where we live, and we have the benefit of knowing what happens next, it's a completely, totally insane thing to think that fucking Dick Nixon would be the peace candidate and that people would vote for him thinking that that is how they would get peace in Vietnam and end the war.
[00:35:01]  But they do think that.
[00:35:02]  And you might be like, well, why?
[00:35:04]  Well, because fucking Nixon said so.
[00:35:06]  And I pledge to you tonight that the first priority foreign policy objective of our next administration will bring an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.
[00:35:19]  However, Tricky Dick's got another little tricky trick up his sleeve.
[00:35:25]  Five days after he's inaugurated, Nixon introduces a new item of contention into the ongoing Paris peace talks, which are the negotiations between the U.S. and the Vietnamese.
[00:35:36]  That is the issue of American POW/slash MIA.
[00:35:41]  So this issue allows Nixon to not only continue the war in Indochina, but also deploy an effective ideological counterforce to the extremely large and constantly growing anti-war movement at home, which effectively neuters it, well, to an extent and provides covers to stall peace talks for as long as possible.
[00:35:59]  So I think we've got to actually talk about some American POWs in Vietnam.
[00:36:03]  And I got to tell, right off the bat, I agree with Trump here.
[00:36:07]  He's a war hero.
[00:36:08]  He's a war hero because he was captured.
[00:36:10]  I like people that weren't captured, okay?
[00:36:12]  I hate to tell you.
[00:36:14]  I love that quote so much.
[00:36:16]  It's one of the craziest things that anyone's ever.
[00:36:18]  My God, what an incredible quote.
[00:36:24]  So most, which is around 80% of American POWs held in North Vietnam were airmen.
[00:36:31]  Some, you know, people were captured in the South and they would kind of be scurried up the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which goes through Laos, and which the U.S. was never actually able to close despite dropping an insane amount of ordinance on it.
[00:36:44]  But most of them were pilots that were shot down, whether in North Vietnam or in South Vietnam and brought up, which means there's a lot of officers.
[00:36:53]  Wait, real quick, I have to mention that recently there was a photo op done at what was what they were trying to call the John McCain Memorial in Vietnam, which a statue where they were honoring John McCain or some shit.
[00:37:08]  But it was actually a statue that was put up to commemorate the shooting down of American pilots by the Vietnamese.
[00:37:17]  And yet the American press was still trying to say that it was like a pro-John McCain memorial moment.
[00:37:22]  It's so funny, too.
[00:37:23]  Like, you know, I was saying earlier, like, you know, Vietnam is sort of presented as this really backwards country.
[00:37:28]  They're like, oh, farmers and rice patty is just were able to defeat the Americans, which is, you know, there was a lot of farmers and rice patties with rifles.
[00:37:37]  Which, by the way, you'd think that people would think that that would say something more about the Americans than it would about the Vietnamese.
[00:37:44]  But yeah, Vietnam had a really impressive collection, sort of lattice work of anti-air defenses in the North, which were mostly people, as I said earlier, not on their lunch break, obviously.
[00:37:56]  That's exaggerated a little bit, but they were workers' militias who in their time off would go out to the fields and in these sort of anti-air batteries that were set up, shoot down these million-dollar machines that people like John McCain were flying.
[00:38:11]  Although, I got to tell you this.
[00:38:12]  They shouldn't pat themselves in the back too hard for shooting down John McCain because John McCain has downed just as many aircraft of John McCain's as they have.
[00:38:22]  Yeah, yeah, John McCain could take a little responsibility for that.
[00:38:25]  He was a very bad pilot.
[00:38:28]  So in 1969, the New York Times publishes this editorial called Inhuman Stance on Prisoners.
[00:38:34]  And this is a quote from it, which is going to help us get into this next little bit.
[00:38:39]  A serious obstacle to progress in the Paris peace talks has been the callous disregard by the communist side for the 1949 conventions on prisoners of war.
[00:38:49]  At least half of the 1,300 Americans missing in action in Vietnam are believed to be alive.
[00:38:56]  1,300 Americans.
[00:38:58]  Brace, where does this number come from?
[00:39:02]  Well, it kind of seems like it's just made up.
[00:39:06]  Okay.
[00:39:08]  I mean, all right, remember like the whole thing about POW slash MIA?
[00:39:13]  Yeah, you mean the category, the category of those two things, but now it's one.
[00:39:18]  It's now it's one thing, sort of merging them in the head.
[00:39:20]  Because I think a lot of people would kind of rightfully assume that if somebody is missing in action, they're almost certainly dead.
[00:39:26]  But the attaching it to the POW part sort of implies that they're, you know, possibly taken prisoner by the Vietnamese.
[00:39:35]  It essentially massages the two categories into one kind of super category.
[00:39:40]  Yeah, inflating the numbers.
[00:39:42]  So behind the scenes, within various government agencies, were multiple lists of POWs.
[00:39:48]  All kept, I mean, there's some master lists, there's some that, you know, the DID might have, the CIA might have, the DOD might have.
[00:39:56]  These are all supplemented by returning prisoners' memories.
[00:40:00]  One example of this is Doug Hegdahl, who was a four POW kept in North Vietnam, who was released early because he pretended to be.
[00:40:10]  Let's see if I can get away with it because I have to.
[00:40:12]  No, he pretended to be mentally slow.
[00:40:17]  He's like Hegdoll.
[00:40:18]  Hegdoll.
[00:40:19]  He's a real Hegdoll.
[00:40:21]  I mean, I got to tell you, this actually seems to be a pretty good tactic.
[00:40:24]  So if I was ever captured by anybody, I would pretty much immediately pretend to be like, I can't do the voice.
[00:40:31]  People get too mad at me.
[00:40:32]  But you guys know what I'm saying.
[00:40:33]  Like, I would be like, me talk pretty someday?
[00:40:36]  Like, it would be a flower.
[00:40:38]  I would try to get it.
[00:40:39]  I love that you still do not know what that story is about.
[00:40:43]  It's not about what you think it is.
[00:40:45]  All right.
[00:40:46]  In my head, I'm telling this guy, I feel like you told me when I had me talk pretty someday.
[00:40:50]  And it's like powers for Algernon.
[00:40:52]  It's not being smart.
[00:40:54]  He's trying to do.
[00:40:55]  It's smart.
[00:40:55]  Well, anyways, if I was captured, if I was in a Hanoi Hilton and I was chained up and they were like, repent!
[00:41:03]  And there's a, the, all the, the captives would be like, yeah, there was a, there was a Cuban torturer named Fidel, which I'm going to tell you, it sounds made up.
[00:41:11]  But they would say like they were these like Soviet or Cuban torturers that were brought in by the Vietnamese to beat the fuck out of.
[00:41:16]  They'd have me chained up there whipping me and I have the stick in my mouth and I'd be like, me, talk pretty someday.
[00:41:23]  And like, I didn't mean to hurt the mouse, Lenny.
[00:41:26]  I didn't, or the rabbit.
[00:41:28]  I touched the rabbit, Lenny.
[00:41:29]  And he's just like, what rabbit are you talking about?
[00:41:33]  No, but for real, though, the U.S. Army did draft like 100,000 mentally retarded people into world, excuse me, into the Vietnam War.
[00:41:40]  They are known as McNamara's morons, and they suffered extraordinarily high casualty rates.
[00:41:46]  It's a horrible story.
[00:41:48]  Anyways, Hagdahl was normal.
[00:41:49]  He was just pretending.
[00:41:51]  And they used his memory.
[00:41:53]  And I'm not talking about just his memory of the guys he saw, but of names that he saw Estend DeSelles, of rumors that he got from other people.
[00:41:59]  I mean, a lot of this is apocryphal.
[00:42:01]  It's rumors.
[00:42:02]  It's myths that Hagdahl is reporting to these government agencies and they're adding these names to the POW list.
[00:42:08]  And there's so many examples of that.
[00:42:10]  So in December of 69, in the midst of these Paris peace talks, the Nixon admin goes to Vietnam and presents them with this list that the U.S. says is called U.S. Military Personnel Missing in Southeast Asia, including personnel classified internally by the services as either missing or captured.
[00:42:29]  That's a tough one.
[00:42:30]  Missing or captured.
[00:42:32]  It's really hard to overstate how unprecedented this is in warfare history, right?
[00:42:38]  Imagine like a country having to be responsible for accounting for every single individual missing in combat, including people lost at sea, exploded in planes, dying after wandering too much in the jungle, like having to account for all of those names.
[00:42:55]  It's an impossible task.
[00:42:58]  I mean, imagine the Vietnamese asking for the Americans to account for every single Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Liaoxian person that we exploded.
[00:43:07]  I mean, that's the thing too.
[00:43:08]  Like, say you're cruising down, you know, at Khe Song and a fucking shell comes in and it blows you to smithereens.
[00:43:16]  Like, there's nothing to recover sometimes.
[00:43:18]  You know, sometimes you're just out.
[00:43:20]  Those molars are like 50 feet away at this point.
[00:43:23]  You were on 50 pounds of crystal meth and you're on patrol to take a mountain and some guy smokes you from the jungle and all your guys get see shadow people and run back to base.
[00:43:32]  Your body is just disintegrating to that fucking jungle out there.
[00:43:35]  They're never going to get you back.
[00:43:36]  But now you're a POW slash MIA.
[00:43:41]  Now, funny enough, some anti-war activists, a lot of them acting as official liaisons with the Vietnamese because the Vietnamese were like, first of all, this guy Kissinger, this guy Nixon, we don't like him.
[00:43:51]  Yeah.
[00:43:51]  They're very smart.
[00:43:52]  They're like, we don't like him.
[00:43:53]  We're not working for him.
[00:43:54]  We're not buying what you're trying to do.
[00:43:56]  We see what you're trying to do here with these peace talks, how you're trying to sabotage them.
[00:43:59]  We're not working with you.
[00:44:00]  But we will work with these kind of anti-war groups and these activist groups and kind of liaise with them, right?
[00:44:07]  So we have our own accounting and our own lists.
[00:44:10]  And in 1970, they could account for 335 American prisoners in Vietnam, which included like actual serial numbers and hometowns.
[00:44:20]  Like they were like proper, really like accurate accounting, surprisingly.
[00:44:25]  And anti-war groups had asked like a bunch of newspapers, including, of course, naturally the New York Times.
[00:44:31]  And of course, naturally, they all refused to print them.
[00:44:37]  So a month later, the House and the Senate passed a unanimous resolution stating that there are over 1,500 American servantsmen imprisoned by communist forces in Southeast Asia.
[00:44:48]  You might be wondering, well, how did everybody come to believe these numbers were true?
[00:44:52]  For that, we need to talk about the National League of Families, aka the League.
[00:44:56]  The League.

=== Why The League Was Set Up (04:02) ===

[00:44:58]  So Nixon went ham on the POW slash MIA shit.
[00:45:02]  He brought in all of these new organizations on board and basically started doing a full court press on the press.
[00:45:09]  This included an organization called United We Stand by Freak Fave Eccentric Texas millionaire.
[00:45:17]  You know him, you love him.
[00:45:18]  Ross Perot.
[00:45:19]  Ross Perot, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:45:22]  Perot was crazy about POWs.
[00:45:25]  The only thing that he loved more than fucking his weird wife was a goddamn guy in a North Vietnamese prison in Hanoi Hilton, which is, I mean, let me tell you, while Ross Perot was taking his real wife to fuck in a real Hilton, these American servicemen were being tortured in the Hanoi Hilton.
[00:45:44]  Pretend that sentence made, I have COVID.
[00:45:46]  One thing I'll say is that when I was reading about this, Perot is such a fucking freak about POWs that, I mean, he was very close to the Nixon admin.
[00:45:57]  He was like head of the Richard Nixon Foundation or some shit.
[00:46:00]  I mean, it's not crazy that he was involved with this stuff.
[00:46:02]  But years and years later, people were kind of looking into this stuff and they're like, was it Perot that was really on this shit?
[00:46:08]  And the Nixon admin was like, you know, he was just really into it.
[00:46:11]  We really didn't ask him to do that much of this stuff.
[00:46:15]  Like he kind of just was like went his own way on this.
[00:46:18]  It's funny, like Perot is a guy that even like other guys who we would think would like Perot are like, oh, I'm good on that.
[00:46:26]  You're weird.
[00:46:27]  His whole thing was the media stunt, which is, I got to say, classic freak guy move.
[00:46:32]  He would take out ads in the paper, in the Sunday papers that would have these like really like these girls, like just portraits of young girls crying with these big headlines that said, bring our daddies home.
[00:46:45]  That would be great on TikTok.
[00:46:46]  Yeah, he flew.
[00:46:48]  There was like one stat where he flew, he like chartered a plane and flew a bunch of wives and children to Paris to basically stage a protest during like ongoing peace negotiations.
[00:47:00]  And then at one point, he had planned to fly a bunch of reporters on a jet full of Christmas presents to Laos, where he was going to stage some sort of like, we're bringing a bunch of Christmas presents to all of our prisoners.
[00:47:13]  Please let us deliver these like for our dads or whatever.
[00:47:16]  But that ultimately ended up getting canceled.
[00:47:19]  Yeah.
[00:47:20]  Reporting of the Times says that it was a plane full of watches for the POWs to shove up their asses for the next several years.
[00:47:28]  Up his ass.
[00:47:29]  He even, he actually set up, this is pretty funny, a POW slash MIA exhibit in the Capitol building in Washington.
[00:47:38]  And the way to bet the best way to describe this was like a Madame Toussaud-esque exhibit featuring American POWs in actual bamboo cages, looking like miserable and tortured while like eating rats and having cockroaches climb all over them.
[00:47:54]  That exhibit, which I guess was very popular, like I don't know what the fuck is wrong with American exhibitions.
[00:48:00]  What are you talking about, Liz?
[00:48:01]  Like you wouldn't go see that?
[00:48:03]  No, I don't want to see that.
[00:48:04]  It's weird.
[00:48:05]  Yeah, right.
[00:48:06]  I would say when I'm there.
[00:48:09]  Anyway, that exhibit then gets set up in basically every statehouse in the country.
[00:48:15]  People talk about the 60s, like, oh, I wish I lived in the 60s because I would have smoked Keefe with Jerry or whatever.
[00:48:23]  I wish I lived in the 60s so I could have seen Ross Perot's POW-MIA wax museum in the fucking, I don't know, Louisiana Statehouse.
[00:48:30]  Sounds great to me.
[00:48:32]  The key organization for all this stuff, though, was the National League of Families of American Prisoners in Southeast Asia, also called the League, led by a woman named Sybil Stockdale.
[00:48:45]  So the reason that this group was set up, it was actually a collection of sort of like wives groups on different bases.
[00:48:50]  But the reason the group was set up was because the women of these POWs, in many cases, had essentially been sworn to silence in terms of talking about their husbands and family situations.

=== Women's Silence Broken (06:25) ===

[00:49:00]  There was a sense that the government did not want them to talk about their experience because it would bring the vibe down about the Vietnam War.
[00:49:07]  It was kind of like a thing where it's like, okay, I get you're not having a great time with this party.
[00:49:10]  Maybe chill out a little bit.
[00:49:12]  And it's funny.
[00:49:14]  That is like sort of the genesis of the weird relationship that this organization and its successor and sort of, I don't know, co-organizations had with the American government is that they were fiercely patriotic or whatever.
[00:49:29]  Their ideals aligned with the American government's ideals.
[00:49:32]  You know, they supported the war, et cetera.
[00:49:36]  But they also thought the government was lying to them or said the government was lying to them or kind of oppressing them in this way.
[00:49:41]  And it is, I mean, it must be difficult, you know, to have a husband who had just engaged in terror bombing of Hanoi and who is being now held in a prison there for the crime of blowing up a bunch of people's fucking houses and factories and shit like that.
[00:49:53]  And to not be able to talk about it.
[00:49:55]  But a lot of these women weren't even allowed to know where their husbands were held captive, whether in Cambodia, Vietnam, or Laos, or where their husbands went, like what country their husbands went down over, because we legally and officially were not supposed to be flying air missions over Cambodia or Laos.
[00:50:10]  For some reason, the DIA, which is the Defense Intelligence Agency, were in charge of interfacing with the MIA families.
[00:50:17]  And many of the agents, and this is, I've read several books on this topic at this point.
[00:50:23]  All of them basically have to say that the DIA agents hated the families.
[00:50:27]  They were like, we fucking, these crying fucking females going crazy.
[00:50:31]  Oh, your husband, my husband is in praise.
[00:50:33]  My husband, shut the fuck up.
[00:50:35]  And this leads to a decades-long kind of rivalry frontemies sort of situation that the league and a lot of these families have with the DIA in particular.
[00:50:45]  I got to say, I feel very much two ways about this whole thing, right?
[00:50:49]  We were talking about this because, on the one hand, I mean, the League is a very wild group and does some crazy ass shit, especially in the coming decades, as you'll see in these next episodes of the podcast.
[00:51:03]  But there, and they also get, I mean, at the heart of it, right, a bunch of women that just want to get their husbands and the fathers of their kids home, you know, and want answers about what the fuck happened.
[00:51:14]  And it's, you know, within the like backdrop of this insane, illegal war that's been going on for almost a decade at this point, right?
[00:51:24]  And all of this kind of, you know, the paranoia that is coming with all of these revelations about the, you know, secret missions coming out and, you know, what our government is doing overseas, all this stuff.
[00:51:37]  I understand it completely, right?
[00:51:40]  This, this anger and this frustration that they feel.
[00:51:44]  And it's, it's really gross to then watch how the government then latches onto them and uses them as a kind of political pawn throughout the next coming decades to basically gum up peace talks and extend the war.
[00:52:02]  Yeah, I mean, I joke, but like, you know, obviously these, these women's husbands were engaged in something that was not very nice to do.
[00:52:10]  But I do feel at a human level, you know, the sort of anguish and fear that they must have felt, not knowing what was the fuck their, if their husbands were alive or dead, the confusion, the sort of stonewalling coming from the military.
[00:52:24]  I mean, I can't imagine trying to figure out, you know, if your husband is, you know, has been disintegrated over the jungle in North Vietnam or is being held in a prison and you may see him alive one day.
[00:52:35]  That kind of confusion and paranoia eventually induces even further, I guess, confusion and paranoia.
[00:52:44]  But by late 1969, it's now politically expedient for these groups of women to become political pawns.
[00:52:53]  The Nixon White House carefully arranges these meetings with Sybil Stockdale and a handful of hand-picked wives by her and the Nixon administration.
[00:53:02]  This ensured that they would be like politically on side, right?
[00:53:05]  Because they're obviously, they were anti-war, you know, wives of POWs and MIA that would not have made good allies for the White House.
[00:53:13]  No, and those were pretty much all put on the chopping block.
[00:53:18]  They were not allowed to be included in this.
[00:53:20]  In fact, almost every member, and especially the media-facing members of the group, were wives of career officers, not anyone drafted into service.
[00:53:30]  So the league makes its giant public debut on May 1st, 1970, at the behest of the one and only Bob Dole.
[00:53:40]  God, it's crazy.
[00:53:41]  The same fucking guys just show up all the goddamn time.
[00:53:45]  So according to friend of the show, Matt Farwell's book on Bo Bergdahl, which is the, I believe, the last American POW that we've had, POWs were honored with a week of remembrance, a day of prayer, a commemorative postage stamp, and an Air Force flyby over the Super Bowl.
[00:54:01]  Letter writing and petition campaigns were launched by the American Legion, the American Red Cross, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and local chapters of the JCs, Rotarians, Rotarians, the Rotary Club, and the Elks.
[00:54:12]  The league was here to stay.
[00:54:14]  This was like their big debut on the national stage.
[00:54:17]  And this is like the Nixon White House and sort of the pro-war right in the country being like, there's this group of women that we can essentially use as sort of our versions of like Vietnam veterans against the war, right?
[00:54:28]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:54:29]  It was like a find and replace.
[00:54:31]  It was like, let's get these anti-war veterans off the stage and let's get these like sad crying wives on the stage.
[00:54:39]  So Sybil Stockdale's husband, Jim, was actually in the Hanoi Hilton at the time and who later became Ross Perot's running mate in 1992, but we'll get to that later.
[00:54:48]  Well, in another episode.
[00:54:50]  And Stockdale was joined in her effort by the sister of a POW, a woman or a POW-MIA, rather, a woman named Anne Mills Griffith, whose husband's remains were found in 2018 and he died basically where he disappeared.
[00:55:04]  Many of these women, I got to say, that's sort of the kind of most sad part about it is that a lot of these women just had straight up dead husbands.
[00:55:14]  Like they were dead.
[00:55:15]  They had been dead the entire time.
[00:55:17]  And that kind of like fear and sadness and not knowing was getting prolonged and used for basically political purposes by the U.S. government.

=== Sad Bracelets (02:23) ===

[00:55:26]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:55:27]  Because they knew the actual list, and we'll get to that later, but they knew the actual list of real POWs was much, much smaller than the numbers that were being bandied about.
[00:55:45]  There was also this organization called Viva, which I've got to say sounds like a dollar store tampon company.
[00:55:53]  It does.
[00:55:54]  Yes.
[00:55:54]  It does.
[00:55:55]  It does, doesn't it?
[00:55:56]  Why do you pod?
[00:55:57]  You should get a real job.
[00:56:00]  Why do you do this?
[00:56:01]  You can see that there'd be like a purple kind of like a little bit of a like abstract wave and then be like, Viva.
[00:56:09]  And it's dollar store tampons.
[00:56:11]  Like you would, I don't, I'm just like, you should just work for like a giant company or something.
[00:56:17]  Who says I don't?
[00:56:18]  That's true.
[00:56:18]  Well, it's the company.
[00:56:20]  The company.
[00:56:20]  You know what?
[00:56:21]  As you always say, big facts.
[00:56:24]  So they, Viva was actually bankrolled by literally the military industrial complex, like executives at like, you know, the giant weapons manufacturers in the defense industry in Southern California.
[00:56:36]  Originally, Viva stood for the Victory in Vietnam Association.
[00:56:40]  In 1970, along with future California congressman and then TV host Robert Nornan, put on a huge gala with two of the finest, foxiest fucking guys from the 1970s, Ronald Reagan and Ross Perot.
[00:56:57]  And they produced the POW MIA bracelet with Ross Perot's beautiful wife accepting the first one.
[00:57:05]  Now, many of our listeners, I know we actually have, and listen, we get lots of, we get messages and stuff.
[00:57:12]  We have older listeners, okay?
[00:57:13]  So they will remember these.
[00:57:15]  And also, shouts to our older listeners.
[00:57:18]  Absolutely.
[00:57:19]  We love that.
[00:57:20]  Thank you.
[00:57:21]  I appreciate you more because I vibe with you better.
[00:57:25]  But these guys, Viva, was like, listen, we got to do this merch thing.
[00:57:29]  And let me tell you, we went over this in our Spotify episode.
[00:57:32]  If you want to make some dough, merchandise is the way to do it.
[00:57:36]  You know, I didn't look into this, but my suspicion is that this is one of the, this is like the Ur activist bracelet movement.
[00:57:45]  Wow.
[00:57:46]  This is the original Live Strong.
[00:57:48]  You know what I'm saying?

=== Why We Left POW-MIA Bracelets (09:00) ===

[00:57:49]  It is.
[00:57:52]  I mean, well, kind of more like died in jungle, but yeah, Live Strong bracelet.
[00:57:56]  Yeah, died weak.
[00:57:58]  So these were basically, but that is exactly it.
[00:58:00]  These were basically POW-MIA LiveStrong bracelets.
[00:58:03]  They often had the individual names of people on the POW-MIA list on them.
[00:58:08]  They sold millions of these motherfuckers.
[00:58:10]  Everyone from Nixon, which I cannot picture him really wearing a bracelet.
[00:58:14]  I'm sure he did, but Lee Trevino wore them.
[00:58:17]  I could see him wearing a bracelet, but not this one.
[00:58:20]  Could you see him wearing an anklet?
[00:58:21]  No.
[00:58:22]  Could you imagine you're in a cabinet meeting?
[00:58:24]  I would love to have seen him in a real fucking solid kind of anklet.
[00:58:28]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:58:29]  Yeah, like a really cool, like, I would love to see Nixon in a choker, like a lace choker or something and cat ears, like whatever the Zoomers like to do.
[00:58:39]  That's what AI is for, baby.
[00:58:41]  Oh my God.
[00:58:43]  Someone please do an AI, Reagan cat boy.
[00:58:45]  Need that.
[00:58:46]  So this worked super well for Nixon as a political wedge because who's like, hey, listen, who can argue with, we just want our boys home?
[00:58:55]  That's such a good idea.
[00:58:56]  So what?
[00:58:56]  Look, we just want peace.
[00:58:58]  We just want our boys home.
[00:59:00]  This isn't about, I mean, who can argue with us?
[00:59:03]  We just want our boys home.
[00:59:05]  Look, we just, we're not crazy.
[00:59:07]  We just want our boys home.
[00:59:08]  We just want our boys home.
[00:59:10]  We just want our boys.
[00:59:11]  So in 1971, basically, Nixon was able to come out and be like, listen, the U.S., we can't leave Vietnam.
[00:59:21]  You know, not as long as there's at least one single American prisoner still there.
[00:59:26]  We can't leave.
[00:59:26]  And everyone's like, well, it's hard to argue with that.
[00:59:29]  I mean, it makes sense, right?
[00:59:31]  And since the Vietnamese were like, well, look, we look like every other war, our position is the prisoners will get released once you leave.
[00:59:42]  I mean, again, the normal position to take.
[00:59:45]  It all allowed Nixon and Brilliant Kissinger to keep U.S. troops there and logically indefinitely.
[00:59:53]  Right.
[00:59:53]  I mean, and the thing is, too, you got to remember, like, 80% of these prisoners were airmen.
[00:59:57]  It's actually hard to find experienced, trained airmen, or it's not hard to find, but it takes a long time, a lot of money to train them.
[01:00:04]  So this is like actually would be the Vietnamese releasing specialists, specialists at killing Vietnamese people back to America to be unleashed on them once again.
[01:00:15]  It's a stupid fucking thing to do.
[01:00:16]  Some U.S. troops or some U.S. POWs rather were allowed to leave with anti-war delegations.
[01:00:22]  And some POWs were allowed to leave once they signed statements being like, this is an illegal war.
[01:00:26]  I committed war crimes.
[01:00:27]  But there was a big sense of camaraderie and defiance against a lot of these officers that were, or between a lot of these officers that were locked up.
[01:00:35]  I mean, John McCain kind of always talked about it.
[01:00:38]  But there was a real resistance to that.
[01:00:42]  I mean, the Vietnamese on some level viewed these guys as essentially criminals, right?
[01:00:46]  They're people who really broke into their house and just started blowing a bunch of shit up.
[01:00:49]  And they weren't wrong too.
[01:00:50]  I mean, but you could see how Nixon was able to twist that logic back to the Americans and make it make sense for them, right?
[01:00:58]  And so, I mean, I really want to hammer this home because it's like at this point in the war that an almost complete inversion of reality has occurred, right?
[01:01:07]  Now, a lot of Americans believe that we were still in Vietnam because they were holding Americans as hostages, essentially as ransom, which is what was preventing us from declaring peace.
[01:01:20]  And versions of that myth, that myth about why and how America was in Vietnam for so long persist to this day.
[01:01:28]  So the eventual 1973 Paris peace agreements were basically the same terms that the Vietnamese had offered the U.S. back in 1968, which is the year before POW/slash MIA claim became a national obsession, right?
[01:01:42]  Which is just like, it's really hard to, it's impossible to quantify the amount of lives that would have been saved if those agreements had been made in 1968 rather than 1973.
[01:01:55]  Yeah, and I want to add one other point here is that I encourage people, readers out there among you, to read the Phoenix program by Douglas Valentine to get a real sense of what the U.S. was getting up to at the prisoners we captured.
[01:02:09]  I mean, it is some of the worst torture and violence and thuggery that one occupying force has ever inflicted upon a population.
[01:02:20]  I mean, it will really, it starts to let you see that a lot of these special forces, these CIA guys, were essentially like the SS in Eastern Europe.
[01:02:28]  I mean, they were fucking brutal in ways that like, you know, there's a lot made about Hanoi Hill and then, you know, North Vietnam and all this stuff.
[01:02:36]  Like this was just to the point where like you're walking down the street in Saigon, some fucking white fuck from Indiana puts a bag over your head.
[01:02:43]  And then, I mean, I want to get into what they did, but they did a lot of unspeakable things to people.
[01:02:50]  So the war is over.
[01:02:51]  Well, the war is not actually over.
[01:02:53]  American troops are starting to withdraw.
[01:02:54]  We leave some advisors, we leave the CIA.
[01:02:57]  You know, the war does take the CIA.
[01:02:59]  We leave the CIA.
[01:03:00]  We leave the CIA.
[01:03:00]  Well, I didn't win.
[01:03:02]  But, you know, we leave some guys, but we withdraw a lot of our ground troops.
[01:03:06]  The land forces come home.
[01:03:08]  They're all out of there.
[01:03:10]  And with that, we have something called Operation Homecoming, which sees the release of 591 American POWs.
[01:03:18]  Now, this is almost exactly the amount that were thought to be kept by the Vietnamese by the most reliable list that the government kept.
[01:03:27]  Yeah, we were talking about this.
[01:03:28]  And I have to say, one of the most astonishing facts that we learned when we were reading about all this was how accurate it seemed when you got into the weeds of like what the actual records were that people were keeping.
[01:03:40]  They had a pretty good list going.
[01:03:42]  They really did know how many they had, which is really shocking because it's very difficult to keep these kind of records, kind of hopefully, as we've shown.
[01:03:52]  So basically, as soon as the agreement was signed, DOD and the American government in general did its best to make the American people believe that they were still American prisoners being held, not just by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which is kind of, we've just been calling Vietnam this episode, but the Viet Colony of the South, the PRG, the Patit Lao, and the Khmer Rouge, which were the two communist groups that were fighting in their respective countries of Laos and Cambodia.
[01:04:20]  So the U.S.'s position on the Laotian guerrillas and the Cambodian guerrillas is that they are puppets of the Vietnamese.
[01:04:29]  I mean, Kissinger himself outright says this.
[01:04:31]  Like they are just stooges for Hanoi.
[01:04:34]  Now, I have read a very long biography of Pol Pot before, who was, I got to tell you, really just genuinely not that smart of a guy.
[01:04:44]  He was kind of like.
[01:04:45]  He was onto something about the academies, we got to say.
[01:04:48]  I mean, he was, he definitely had some new ideas.
[01:04:50]  I won't say that.
[01:04:51]  He repackaged some old ideas in some kind of new ways.
[01:04:55]  But he was not very well versed in a lot of subjects.
[01:05:02]  So the U.S. government's position was that any American troops that were taken hostage, or not hostage, rather, that were POWs of the Patit Lao or the Khmer Rouge were actually like kind of included in this umbrella thing of Vietnamese POWs, right?
[01:05:20]  That were POWs that were taken by Vietnam because they viewed these groups as merely extensions of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the VC.
[01:05:31]  Keep in mind, too, that the Khmer Rouge and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam did actually not get along very well.
[01:05:40]  They did it for a little while and then there was a big, big, big split and relations were cut off.
[01:05:47]  And it's actually the 1979 invasion of Cambodia, which, by the way, the U.S. supported Cambodia, excuse me, the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese in this context that really shows all this to be just like a total fucking like false.
[01:06:00]  It's like a hoax, basically.
[01:06:01]  Yeah, it's totally, it's fucking craziness.
[01:06:05]  And then keep in mind, too, through all of this, that the U.S. and the South Vietnamese government brutally kidnapped, disappeared, murdered, tortured, raped, and deported an unknown but brutally high, which is in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, amount of Vietnamese civilians and soldiers.
[01:06:21]  Like this was, we did this on a scale that the Hanoi government couldn't even dream of.
[01:06:26]  Yeah, and I mean, and I don't think that that has something to do with there was a kind of secret agreement that was made between the U.S. and the DRV, which was that we were going to give them, I think it was $2 billion, maybe $4 billion, somewhere between $2 and $4 billion in what seemed to be reparations for the war, which Kissinger promptly reneged on after going to Vietnam.

=== Secret Agreements Revealed (04:48) ===

[01:06:50]  He made that clear.
[01:06:51]  That payment was not going to happen.
[01:06:53]  And it was because he had a list of about 60 American servicemen who were still missing in action.
[01:07:02]  So in 1972, a year before the POWs were returned home, the National League released the flag, the famous one described at the beginning, which you've seen.
[01:07:10]  I mean, if you're in America, you've seen on the back of trucks, you know, flying from capitals on t-shirts.
[01:07:16]  It's the gaunt man in front of a guard tower, his head hanging in shame, big squidward ass head on this motherfucker.
[01:07:22]  Yeah, he does have a squidward ass head.
[01:07:24]  With the words, you are not forgotten underneath.
[01:07:28]  Now, almost 20 years later, Americans were still demanding the return of their boys, who they believed were still being held hostage in the jungles of Vietnam.
[01:07:40]  And the reason they believed this was because the official U.S. position on that matter, as published in the 1991 edition of the POW/slash MIA fact book, is the Indo-Chinese hold the answers.
[01:07:56]  We really got to get that gong for this.
[01:08:10]  So we've got some more episodes coming that are going to walk us through some pretty crazy characters and some interesting history that I don't think a lot of people are aware of.
[01:08:23]  I'm excited.
[01:08:24]  We finally, finally, finally get to tell the story of Bo Greites and talk about fucking Rambo.
[01:08:31]  A God.
[01:08:32]  I want to, we should fucking interview him, but that's a conversation for now.
[01:08:36]  I'm going to tell him to his face that he needs to change the way he says his name.
[01:08:40]  Here's the thing.
[01:08:42]  When he was David Duke's running mate in 1992, I think it was.
[01:08:46]  When he was David Duke's running mate.
[01:08:48]  Oh, God.
[01:08:50]  He, I mean, well, his, his whole presidential thing, his slogan was God, guns, and I always thought it was grits because that was his God, guns, and grits.
[01:08:59]  So you're talking about guns and grits?
[01:09:01]  I'm like, if it's pronounced God, guns, and grits, well, then it's like, well, then what the fuck are we even doing here, man?
[01:09:06]  It sounds too much like God's guns and gripes.
[01:09:09]  Like he's got God guns and grits.
[01:09:11]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:09:13]  There is a lot of freaks and lies that are coming in the next couple episodes.
[01:09:19]  And we are very excited to bring, I hopefully we'll not have COVID by then.
[01:09:22]  Yeah, hopefully not.
[01:09:23]  And hopefully we can get that gong back because I think we kind of need it.
[01:09:28]  We really, we really, really need it for this.
[01:09:30]  I think just to kind of like get into the mindset here, I'm going to come, well, if we will record in person next time, sleeveless kind of army shirt, high out of my mind on heroin.
[01:09:42]  Sure.
[01:09:43]  And just clutching a knife between my teeth that I had to talk around.
[01:09:47]  Yeah.
[01:09:47]  And you need like a kind of leather vest over it.
[01:09:51]  Yeah.
[01:09:52]  Oh, yeah.
[01:09:53]  Yeah.
[01:09:53]  That's the thing is, these guys, these, these, these, these like Beau Gray type of veteran guys, they love to have like a vest with a button.
[01:10:00]  They kind of, it's like a sort of biker thing they have.
[01:10:02]  Yeah.
[01:10:03]  I'm excited too because I think we have a flag that we're debuting.
[01:10:07]  We do.
[01:10:07]  That we have come up with our own version of the POW flag.
[01:10:13]  I will see when we release.
[01:10:14]  I don't know.
[01:10:14]  What should we release?
[01:10:15]  Maybe we'll release that outside this.
[01:10:17]  I think so.
[01:10:17]  I think the people will really like it.
[01:10:18]  And it's time that we have our own.
[01:10:21]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:10:22]  Exactly.
[01:10:22]  That we do.
[01:10:24]  I don't want to give too much away, but yeah, I think that it's time we have our own.
[01:10:28]  Well, listen, I'm going to do the thing that I hate doing, but I think it's important to say here, which is that if you want to listen to the next few episodes about this in this series, you know, it's going to be on Patreon.
[01:10:39]  And did you know that you can sign up for a free trial, a week trial, and then you can listen to the episodes and check them out.
[01:10:48]  And we're going to talk about a lot of cool stuff.
[01:10:49]  And some, you know, I got to say, this whole story goes into some weird places.
[01:10:55]  And you might be saying, oh, week trial, that sounds difficult.
[01:10:58]  Well, think about the trials that our boys went through.
[01:11:00]  Think about that for a second.
[01:11:02]  And you know what?
[01:11:02]  Those lasted longer than weeks.
[01:11:05]  Those lasted decades.
[01:11:07]  If Ho Chi Minh had the power of Patreon, that war would have been over in days.
[01:11:11]  Oh my God.
[01:11:13]  All right.
[01:11:14]  I got to go take a, I got to go to sleep now.
[01:11:16]  You got to go take your eyes.
[01:11:18]  My name is Liz.
[01:11:19]  My name, of course, is, although possibly was, by the time you're hearing this, depending on how the COVID goes, Brace Belden.
[01:11:26]  We are joined, as always, by Chopper Pilot Young Chomsky.
[01:11:35]  And this has been Dronon.
[01:11:37]  We'll see you next time.
[01:11:38]  Bye bye.