Part One: Behind the Bastards Live Show: The Ballad of Bo Gritz

Robert and Prop did a live show to raise money for the Portland Bail Fund. They discussed the life and times of Bo Gritz, a foundational right wing militia maniac.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Anybody mind if I riker with the chair here a
little bit. Welcome to Behind the Bastards Live, our first
live show.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
This is our first.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Live show in a little while, because I don't like
leaving the house and I am a deranged shut in
who's increasingly losing his connection to the world in reality,
like a lot of people presidents for example. Before we
get into the show today, I have a couple of
very special people to introduce. First off, my producer and

(00:56):
business partner, the inimitable Sophie Luctma, and then, of course

(01:27):
our guest for tonight, the host of Hood Politics, and
my good friend Jason Petty aka prop.

Speaker 1 (01:41):
A.

Speaker 4 (01:46):
I go, yeah, what's clack a massive? You know what
I'm saying, y'all feeling I've been.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
Playing that well all day? Yeah, I say I was
clack a massive. We workshopped that.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
That was like forty thousand dollars in develop meant Yeah,
Jay Leno's writers don't come cheap, but worth it obviously clearly.
So welcome everybody. Thank you for dealing with you know,
the line, the security measures and stuff. I think, for
obvious reasons, we're all a little bit extra careful these days.

Speaker 5 (02:17):
Why did something happen?

Speaker 3 (02:21):
No, not that I'm aware of.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
Oh okay, so we've got a special night planned for everybody. First,
I want to thank all of you for coming out
and supporting the Portland Defense Fund. It's a really good
cause and y'all have raised north of thirty thousand dollars

(02:42):
so far for them. Yeah, that goes a long way,
and especially considering most of the people who need help
with that. We're talking about like houseless folks. We're talking
about people who have absolutely no access to resources, and
this is the only lifeline they're going to get and
the only help they're going to get. So thank you

(03:03):
all for helping to keep that lifeline alive.

Speaker 5 (03:07):
Brownd of applause for you.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, random applause for everybody in the audience
except one of you.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
Motherfuckers. They know who they are, not you, mom.

Speaker 4 (03:20):
Also, uh, just a just a quick show of hands
because it's a gang of white people in here.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
H it is Portland. It is Portland.

Speaker 4 (03:29):
If you got like a drip of melanin in you
can you make some noise real quick?

Speaker 3 (03:33):
I just want to see, Okay.

Speaker 4 (03:35):
You've got more than a drip, make some noise. You
got a lot of it makes some noise. Okay, that's
my section right there. Okay, mak a sure. I was like,
he's gotta be uh, it's got to be at least five.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
Well, here, prop, it's good that you introduced that because
our subject for these episodes.

Speaker 3 (03:54):
Hey, look, it's not a bit. We never know, like
you never know before we start.

Speaker 5 (04:00):
Should we give them the drinking game rules?

Speaker 2 (04:02):
We do have a drinking game, Yes, there are, let
me let me yeah, we'll do so. The drinking game
rules are as follows. First off, be responsible, don't drive, okay,
don't operate heavy machinery unless it seems like it would
be really funny. So first off, take a drink. If
the subject of the podcast directly or indirectly kill somebody.

Speaker 5 (04:27):
Second of all, if goes you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
No, no, no, Sophie, we can't legally that'll the people
will die.

Speaker 5 (04:34):
I'm doing it.

Speaker 4 (04:37):
Alcohol the boyson, I'm trying to get y'll twisted. Yeah,
I'm saying that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (04:41):
Yeah, if Robert says right, take a shot. Second of all,
oh no, that I'm doing that one. Oh god, now
that counted.

Speaker 5 (04:51):
Third third is war crimes.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Yeah, when there's a war crime committed, take a drink.

Speaker 5 (04:57):
And this one might really hurt everyone. But if I
have to go Robert no.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
So, when I was a young man in about two
thousand and five or two thousand and six, I came
across a bunch of torrents from a documentary TV series
called Weird Weekends made by a British fella named Louis Theroux. Now,
one of the episodes, released in nineteen ninety eight, was
about survivalists. In it, Louis met a bunch of weirdo

(05:28):
libertarian far right and some outright Nazi weirdos who were
living off grid in rural Idaho.

Speaker 3 (05:34):
This was probably what about that doesn't scan rural Idaho? Okay?

Speaker 4 (05:42):
When you were a young boy, yeah, I was like
eighteen nineteen. Yeah, when I was a young boy, my
father took me into the city to.

Speaker 3 (05:49):
See a marching band.

Speaker 6 (05:50):
Yeah wow, but uh.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
Rural Idaho Okay?

Speaker 4 (05:56):
Uh yea, I think I know where we're going with that.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (05:58):
Oh yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:59):
So this is probably my first journalistic introduction to content
on the militia movement and the at that point still
nascent post Oklahoma City bombing. White supremacist movement. Much of
the episode took place in an intentional community for these
people named Almost Heaven, which was founded and operated by
the subject of our episodes today, a famous figure in

(06:21):
the right wing underground named Bo Grits.

Speaker 3 (06:25):
Yeah, we know, we got some Bowers. We got some
Bo some Bowers. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (06:32):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (06:33):
Now the spot was called almost Heaven, Almost Heaven. Almost.
We'll get to there at the end.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
Yeah, they were really close, Okay, just like all those
people who nearly got raptured, right.

Speaker 3 (06:43):
I mean, look almost so.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
And by the way, Bo Grits, the name is spelled Gritz,
but it's pronounced Grits.

Speaker 3 (06:55):
It is.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
It's You can tell a lot about the journalists reporting
on him because they'll either say that his name rhymes
when they're writing about him, that his name rhymes with
sights as in rifle sights, or bites, which I think
was a subtle way of expressing bias, because Bo rites
definitely bites in like the.

Speaker 3 (07:12):
Late nineties sense of the word wind to them.

Speaker 4 (07:14):
Yeah, like bit me right.

Speaker 3 (07:16):
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
So the main claim to fame that you'll find if
you read anything on Bo is that he was the
guy whose real life inspired the character John Rambo. He's
the real Rambo. Rambo was based on him. Whoa cool right?
That can't be tru Absolutely not true. It's it's a
partial true, right. If you've seen Rambo First Blood, the

(07:42):
first Rambo movie, pretty good movie. It's about like a
traumatized Vietnam veteran who gets abused by small town sheriffs,
like an hour and a half north of here. It's
about like PTSD, he's got severe. It's like not jingoistic
at all. It's not a very pro America movie. The
sequel to Rambo First Blood Rambo First Blood Part Two,

(08:06):
because we used to know how to name things in.

Speaker 3 (08:08):
This fucking country.

Speaker 4 (08:09):
It's also a very great Nintendo games.

Speaker 3 (08:12):
Yes, yes, a banger. Yes.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
The sequel, Rambo First Blood Part Two was a very
different movie. Instead of a traumatized veteran getting like abused
by police and kind of losing his mind, John Rambo
has to go fight the refight the Vietnam War. To
go rescue a bunch of POW's is part of a
secret black ops operation. And this is the thing that's
based on bow grits. Okay, right, So that's where we're.

Speaker 3 (08:37):
Building towards.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
So James bow grits. I don't know where the bow
came from. Don't ask me. I can't answer that for you.

Speaker 3 (08:48):
A what was that?

Speaker 4 (08:51):
She's white people, y'all.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
They don't get wider because our man. Bo was born
January eighteenth, nineteen thirty nine, and Enid, Oklahoma.

Speaker 4 (09:06):
Yeah, this dude is just hidden all the notes.

Speaker 2 (09:10):
As a white kid from Oklahoma. That Oklahoma white people different.

Speaker 4 (09:16):
I will say this about Oklahoma white people. Now we
don't have much time, but I will.

Speaker 3 (09:20):
Say it is where is this going?

Speaker 4 (09:22):
No, listen ya like Oklahoma white people know their way
around a grill.

Speaker 3 (09:26):
That's that. That is true.

Speaker 4 (09:27):
Ya can make some barbecue, yeah, baby, season in a food.

Speaker 3 (09:30):
Don't get in a car with them, though. Don't get
in a Carlo.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
So He was born January eighteenth, nineteen thirty nine, the
only child to a family who was about to be
deeply rocked by war. His father was an Army Air
Corps pilot, and once the US entered the Big Dub
Dub Dose, he flew B seventeen's and was shot down
over France in November of nineteen forty four.

Speaker 3 (09:53):
Bo was five.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
An article by Art Harris in The Washington Post describes
Bo as feeling as if his father died fighting the
right war, Bo's gonna be in Vietnam. So this is
pretty easy to understand, right, Oh, okay, I missed.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
The Good War by two wars. Just two wars. Yeah,
this craz so.

Speaker 2 (10:15):
As a child, Bo worshiped his dad and seems to
have never considered anything but a military career. And while
his father had died over Europe, Bo fantasized for whatever
reason about well, I think there's one very clear reason
about fighting Japanese soldiers. Right, his dad dies fighting the Nazis,
Bo's always going to be real interested in fighting the Japanese.

Speaker 3 (10:38):
Here's a quote from Bo.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
We had a big wheat field in front of my
house and I had hide in there. I always saw
myself in a jungle environment. There was a dirt runway,
and I had a P fifty one Mustang and lived
in a grass hut with a brown woman.

Speaker 3 (10:51):
Every morning I put on.

Speaker 2 (10:52):
My leather jacket, get into my aircraft and fly off
to do combat against the enemy all day long.

Speaker 3 (10:58):
Yeah. He just said that upro six, like.

Speaker 4 (11:05):
Littit of crass, would a brow woman first of all,
hard agree.

Speaker 3 (11:10):
But also.

Speaker 5 (11:13):
It's the hut.

Speaker 3 (11:14):
For me, it's the hut, the hut issue.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
Issue. Okay, so Bo spent a lot of time hiding
in cover in his front porch with a bb gun,
shooting at toys that he'd set up in the yard.
One day he shot a toy truck. The BBI ricocheted
and hit Bow in the eye. It was a bad
enough injury. There's a weird right wing militia guy. Think
of shooting yourself in the eye if you remember the
oath Keeper's founder Stuart Rhodes, who really blasted the eye

(11:42):
out there with a straight up real gun. But anyway,
Bo doesn't lose his eye, otherwise this would be a
very different story. But he has to explain to the
doctor what happens, and he just tells the doctor the and.

Speaker 3 (11:53):
He uses a slur for Japanese soldiers here.

Speaker 4 (11:55):
Shot back, right, so hey, but that's not what happened,
all right. You just said he shot himself. Well he
ricochet ricochet. I don't know if you want to count
that as shooting himself.

Speaker 3 (12:06):
I do. It's bad gun safety, right, can we say that? Yeah? Yeah,
it called me low key, like he kind of shot
himself it's not a pattern yet, but it's weird that
it happened twice with right wing militia leaders.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
Right, we're just waiting for one more of these guys
to get their own eye and then we uh, I
don't know, no predicting like.

Speaker 3 (12:23):
A free coffee. Okay, free coffee, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (12:28):
Bo was raised by his maternal grandparents, primarily, a fact
which most of the articles I read about him, like
in the Washington Post and stuff just said he was
raised by his grandparents.

Speaker 3 (12:37):
And I was like, but he had a mom, Where'd
she go? So I had to go digging and I
found an.

Speaker 2 (12:42):
Old Parade magazine article from nineteen eighty three by Ovid Demaris,
And this is what that article says. His mother, a
pilot with the Women's Air Force Service Pilots, would later
marry a master sergeant and remain with the occupation forces
in Germany after the war.

Speaker 3 (12:56):
That's all they say she has left.

Speaker 2 (12:59):
She has just like I'm starting a new family. I'm sorry,
your dad's dead. This is kind of a wash. Graham's
and grandma got to take care of you.

Speaker 3 (13:08):
I'm gone.

Speaker 4 (13:10):
They'll do a better job than me, kid, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:11):
Yeah, trust me.

Speaker 2 (13:14):
I intend to make that true. So yeah, aside from
being abandoned, Bo had what you might call a normal
life for a white boy in Oklahoma in the post
war period. He was in the Boy Scouts, he was
in the Explorer Scouts. He did all the different scouting
things you can do. But he also had significant behavioral issues.
We don't know exactly why, but Bo was expelled from

(13:36):
high school. It may have had something to do with
what we might classify as compulsive law breaking. The Post
called him a self styled juvenile prankster, which is a
term that people who grow up to be law and
order conservatives used to describe the crimes they committed as kids,
so that they're different from hoodlums. Right, you're at a
hooklim you're yeah, you're precociously stealing people's.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
Cars or whatever. Right, yeah. Nice. He also claims to.

Speaker 4 (14:07):
It must be nice to be to get to be precocious.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
Hey lucky, Yeah, so Bos toole cars and motorcycles. Precociousious. Yeah,
it's just an excitable boy. Since you were listening to
some war and Zevon on the way in, there we go.
He threw fireworks in school to disrupt evincent assemblies that

(14:31):
one does sound fun.

Speaker 1 (14:32):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (14:33):
He describes himself from this time as right out of
American graffiti and a tough guy. He also claims to
have run with gangs, although as best as I can
tell from the context, he means gangs in the sense
that like he and his friends committed petty crimes, not
that he was in like an organized criminal organization.

Speaker 3 (14:51):
Bruh, No, you didn't know. You and your friends drunkenly
stolen motorcycles.

Speaker 4 (14:56):
Yea eat in Oklahoma, sir? Tell me what turf you Yeah?

Speaker 3 (15:00):
You ran the one stop sign? Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
So once he was kicked out of high school, his
caregiver sent him to Fork Union Military Academy in Virginia. Hilariously,
in early interviews like the one with Parade Magazine, he
told reporters that he chose to attend military school instead
of going to high school.

Speaker 3 (15:20):
This is not true.

Speaker 4 (15:21):
I don't know why you would do that, because I'm like,
I feel like it fits the mystique of like, you know.

Speaker 3 (15:26):
Like a militia guy. I got kicked out sent to military.

Speaker 4 (15:29):
Like a little more hardcore, and I chose I wanted
to go to military.

Speaker 3 (15:34):
No, it was like, na, bro, like get kicked out.
I thought you ran with a gang.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
A gang you feel me like, So the academy does
kind of turn bow around. He ends his time there
as the core Commander during his senior year, which is
the child who's in charge of the other children. Basically, yeah, awesome,
good idea. Depending on the interview, Bo claims he was
either invited to attend West Point or he passed an

(16:05):
entrance exam and was offered admission. I don't think either
of these stories are true because West Point doesn't work
that way. Applying to West Point isn't at all like
applying to a normal university back then, and I think
things are a little bit different today, but they're mostly
that work the same way. You get in because you
have to get a nomination from a member of Congress.

(16:26):
Right now, you can also be appointed by the president
or vice president, but basically everyone who gets into West
Point gets nominated by a member of Congress. So for
Bou's story to be true, he would have had to
write a member of Congress and convince them of his
worth and then get accepted and then say, nah, actually
I don't want free admission to the most prestigious military
university and a guaranteed fast track in my career as
an officer.

Speaker 3 (16:47):
No, thank you. I think he's just lying about this.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
Yeah, At any rate, Bo doesn't bum around long after graduation.
This is also why I'm sure he's lying, because he
immediately joins the military. In nineteen five fifty seven, he
walks into an army recruiter's office. He is eighteen. He
claims that when he's in there, he sees a poster
of a Green Beret on the wall, and the poster read,
the Green Berets Special Forces are the world's toughest troopers.

(17:15):
Now that doesn't sound true none, it cannot in no way, absolutely,
it can't be true. So the Green Berets were founded
in nineteen fifty two is US Army Special Forces. By
nineteen fifty seven, some of these guys had started wearing
green berets in order to differentiate themselves from normal soldiers.
But they weren't actually supposed to do that, and sometimes

(17:36):
they got in trouble for it, and no official Army
recruitment ad would have called the unit the Green Berets
because they weren't called that yet.

Speaker 5 (17:45):
Now it's a good thing we didn't make lying part
of the drinking.

Speaker 3 (17:53):
No, no, no again.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
Legally, we can't kill the audience yet again, to give
two more years of legislation.

Speaker 3 (18:00):
I think we'll have that right.

Speaker 2 (18:01):
But so, US Army Special Forces were founded as part
of a general recognition brought on by certain events in
World War Two that the nature of conflict was changing.
Military history has always had elite units who carried out

(18:21):
special operations behind the lines, or you could look at
like the Greek soldiers in the Trojan Horses like an
early reference to special forces kind of activity. And World
War II featured commando units on both sides that carried
out high profile clandestine operations. So the US Special Forces
began as an attempt to systematize the training and deployment
of such commando teams for the first time. The idea

(18:44):
initially with these guys was that they would They're not
like Navy seals are today, right. The idea with the
special Forces that become Green Berets is that they would
be stay behind guerrilla units and the event of a
hot war with the Soviet Union. At that point in time,
the discrepancy conventional forces in Europe. The Soviets had a
shitload of tanks. Yeah, NATO had somewhat less tanks, meant

(19:06):
that everyone's best assumption was that Soviet forces would steamroll
through large portions of Western Europe before there could be
any hope of NATO stopping them, And thus you wanted
to have a bunch of Special Forces guys behind the
line to train resistance cells, organize and execute attacks to
just rough the enemy's rear.

Speaker 3 (19:23):
Right, that's the idea with which.

Speaker 4 (19:24):
These were found mixes post World War Two.

Speaker 3 (19:27):
Yes, yes, we're talking the fifties fifty seven as well. Yeah,
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (19:31):
Yeah, unless you're like a history nerd, I don't I
don't think we and in our era appreciate just how
badass like Russia was. Oh yes, I mean like they
was a mass kick.

Speaker 3 (19:42):
They had a lot of tanks at the end in
that war. There was some mass kickers. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
So in nineteen fifty seven, when bo first claims to
have seen that poster, he definitely didn't see. That was
the first year that Green Berets were deployed to Vietnam.
So again there wasn't like anything to brag about them
doing yet, Like they have a reputation now for doing
all sorts of crazy shit. But they had just started
going to Vietnam, which I think was their first official

(20:08):
combat deployment. If you've ever heard that US involvement in
Vietnam started with US advisors going over to train the
South Vietnamese Army. That's at least like a big chunk
of what they're talking about are what becomes the Green Berets.
So Bow's version of the story, which definitely isn't true,
is that he asks the army recruiter.

Speaker 3 (20:25):
What did the Green Berets do, and that guy answers.

Speaker 2 (20:27):
They go out in the woods, live off bark and lizards,
snoop around, blow up bridges and garrett people. They live
in huts, and bo immediately responds, that's for me again,
They've only ever been deployed before Vietnam to Europe. They're
not eating lizards in fucking Italy. Like, I'm sorry, that's

(20:50):
not what They weren't famous for anything at this point
of time, certainly not this. I kind of out he
was thinking at all about the Green Berets when he enlisted.
The unit didn't even officially start wearing Green Berets until
nineteen sixty one, when President Kennedy made it a part
of their uniform in nineteen fifty seven, US Special Forces
hadn't really done anything special yet their first Oh yeah,

(21:12):
I already said that. Anyway, That interview with Parade goes
on quote. Although they only accepted sergeants and above, Bo
was admitted contingent on his passing all the schools. These
included regular basic training, Advanced individual training, parachute and special
Forces courses that teach unconventional warfare. And again, I mean
that's true about the things you have to do to

(21:32):
be a Green Beret. But I don't think Bow entered
with any special deal because he doesn't. He has a
normal military career for years before he gets into the
Green Berets, and in fact he gets this is wild
court martialed twice in basic training.

Speaker 4 (21:46):
See yeah, I was going to say twice twice. I
was going to say he was thinking what most recruits think,
which is poverty.

Speaker 2 (21:56):
Like I want some money or all pay for school.

Speaker 4 (22:01):
You gonna give me somewhere to live. Basically, you're gonna
give me socialism.

Speaker 3 (22:04):
I don't.

Speaker 4 (22:05):
I'm gonna go into the army. You're gonna give me socialism.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
Yeah, I certainly don't think he was planning on eating lizards. Yeah,
so uh yeah, he doesn't. He gets court martial twice
in basic training. I wish I knew what for. I
just don't have that information.

Speaker 5 (22:22):
After because he was trying to start a gang, because
he's just like he might have.

Speaker 3 (22:26):
Been horse stealing, stealing chick start a gang after what
I mean?

Speaker 2 (22:35):
Ironically, US special Forces today off and operate exactly like
running illegal drugs and murdering other Special Forces guys who
find them running illegal drugs. Who knew that, Actually, a
Green Beret got murdered buy some Navy seals a couple
of years ago as a result of a bunch of
drug shit.

Speaker 3 (22:53):
Fun story anyway, merrit, we'll talk about that.

Speaker 2 (22:58):
After basic training, bo is recommended to go to Officer
Candidate school, and this is interesting.

Speaker 3 (23:04):
I don't know why he got picked out.

Speaker 2 (23:05):
It's fairly rare for that to happen because he didn't
have any college experience.

Speaker 3 (23:10):
But he passes.

Speaker 2 (23:11):
He gets commissioned as a second lieutenant, and somewhere around
this time, also in nineteen fifty seven, he marries his
first wife, Dolores Benediti, and while he was starting his
military career, the couple has two children. They're not really
that important to talk about because he is going to
abandon them at the first possible is that this is
a last family abandoner. I'm sorry you hear a man's

(23:33):
name is Bogue Rights. The first thing you know is
that that man has abandoned at least one family.

Speaker 5 (23:38):
Yeah, like his mom, like his mom.

Speaker 4 (23:41):
Yeah, generational day.

Speaker 3 (23:45):
I learned it from you, Ma, you.

Speaker 5 (23:50):
Generational Trump.

Speaker 2 (23:51):
That's his smoking pot is abandoning his family.

Speaker 5 (23:55):
Exactly past down from general.

Speaker 4 (23:58):
I'll get that reference though, from watching No, No, Yeah, yeah,
I don't get there.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
Oh those were anti drug ads from back in the day.
So after OCS, Bow goes to Ranger School and he
does well enough in Ranger School that he gets promoted
steadily throughout the early nineteen sixties, reaching the rank of
captain by nineteen sixty three. In nineteen sixty five, he
joins the Green Berets. So again he claims in fifty seven,

(24:23):
I knew what I wanted to be. I think the
reality is his career just went along and eventually this
became an option for him, and whatever whatever reason he
decided to lie about that later he gets deployed to
Vietnam in nineteen sixty five, and he recalls being excited
for the opportunity to quote go out and hit something.

Speaker 4 (24:41):
Other than his own eye, right, other than his.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
Own eye with a bb Yeah, hit is interesting, like
not shoot like so you and he actually he does
hit people to death, so I know he knew what
he wanted. Bo was not among the very first Green
Berets deployed to the country, but by the time he
got over there, the mission that the US was involved
in had expanded beyond training the South Vietnamese Army to

(25:04):
I mean a bunch of shit. But the Green Berets
were operating mobile gorilla forces of different local fighters in
dark zones of Vietnam and the surrounding countries where US
forces were not.

Speaker 3 (25:15):
Supposed to be.

Speaker 2 (25:16):
Right, A lot of these guys wind up in Lao.
They're not supposed to be in Lao, but they they're there.
So he splits up with his wife somewhere around this point,
and he hooks up with a woman that he describes
most often in interviews as quote an ethnic Chinese former prostitute.

Speaker 3 (25:35):
Those words.

Speaker 4 (25:37):
This man I figured out as soon as you say
a first wife. I was like, uh huh. That man
went down to the Jung. Yeah, and he was like, yo,
they come like this, like yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
He's always really specific about the ethnic Chinese part. I
think just because he didn't want anyone to think he
had married a Vietnamese woman like that was very important
to Bow for reasons that I probably don't need to
get into. Also, I'm guessing she wasn't a former prostitute
when they met. That's just my theory here, But given
that he's a soldier in Vietnam in nineteen sixty five.

Speaker 5 (26:11):
But at least he was supporting sex workers.

Speaker 3 (26:13):
He was yeah, oh yeah, we stand, we stand stand. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (26:18):
Listen, man, there's always some sort of redeeming qualities there.

Speaker 3 (26:21):
You go. There, you go, low bar for this one. O,
we are low bar, low bar for Bo. Yeah, this
will be Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:29):
So one thing you got to give Bo other than
that is that he was very good at being a
Green Beret.

Speaker 3 (26:34):
He's, in fact, one of the best to ever do it.

Speaker 2 (26:37):
He claims to be the most highly decorated Green Beret
commander of the entire war, and this is probably true.
He ultimately received more than sixty citations for valor, including
both Silver and Bronze stars. Bose descriptions of his time
in Vietnam are harrowing reading. At one point, a Vietcong
fighter rises up out of a tunnel and tries to

(26:58):
shoot him at point blank, reigns and Greis only survives
because the ammunition in the man's weapon was bad and
failed to fire. One of the stories we get of
Bo comes from General William west Moreland's memoirs, And if
you know west Moreland, he was like, he's if you've
gotta blame Vietnam on a military leader in the US,
wes Moreland's the guy you blame, right. I think there's

(27:20):
a couple of guys ahead of him, like LBJ and whatnot.
But west Moreland is responsible for a lot of why
Vietnam is the fucking nightmare that it is, right, and
it says a lot about both Bo and west Moreland
that west Moreland like signaled like singles bow out as
like an example of this guy was one of our best.
This is like one of the absolute like the dudes

(27:40):
who was really doing it right.

Speaker 3 (27:42):
And again maybe that's why we lost the war. I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
So west Moreland writes in detail about one of Bo's missions,
which is this US spy plane has crashed in the
Cambodian jungle right now. Writing for the Washington Post, Art
Harris summarizes Washington was desperate to retrieve the black box,
containing top secret codes. It had failed to self destruct.
If it got into VC hands, Moscow might be the

(28:08):
next step. There was only one hang up. Nobody knew
exactly where the plane was. Choppers dropped off Grits and
his team, and they fanned out on foot, hacking their
way through vines, snaking along elephant trails, setting booby traps
to protect their rear, ambushing and getting ambushed. On the
fourth day out, around Christmas of nineteen sixty six, they
stumbled on the utube wreckage. The black box was gone.

(28:30):
VC sandal tracks led off into the bush. He set
up an ambush, kill every man except the first two.
He ordered Grits in another sergeant would take care of
them and hand to hand with zappers. Or CIA issue
spring steel billy clubs.

Speaker 4 (28:44):
Now, how that actually would kind of sounds epic.

Speaker 2 (28:50):
Look, it's a good scene in a movie that I
have some questions. First off, why did the CIA have
to issue them billy clubs? Why did the CIA need
to make clubs to hit people with? I mean, I'm
not questioning, like, why would the CIA what people beaten
to death? I'm questioning why did they have to make
the Like I feel like I could make a steal.

Speaker 3 (29:12):
You can.

Speaker 4 (29:13):
You're in the jungle, you can make whatever you want.

Speaker 5 (29:16):
I have question, why is your chair backwards?

Speaker 3 (29:19):
I'm rikering, Sophie, thank you.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yeah, let's give it up, Commander William Rager. Come on,
there we go, There we go.

Speaker 3 (29:30):
You're really.

Speaker 4 (29:34):
So, you're really quick with that answer. I get super impressive.

Speaker 5 (29:38):
We've been doing this a long time.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
Yeah, it's like my back tattoo says a br baby,
always be riker around.

Speaker 5 (29:46):
So Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 (29:49):
Trying to get out.

Speaker 4 (29:51):
Yeah, okay, mmm.

Speaker 2 (29:54):
So other questions I have why were they called sappers?
They're just clubs to hit people with. Also, so did
the Special Forces need the CIA to give him the
idea to beat men with metal clubs? These are the
questions that keep me up at night. Anyway, that patrol
shows up and Bo's men shoot them to pieces. Grits
rushes his target and hits him, but he kills him immediately.

Speaker 3 (30:17):
He just kills the guy with a club.

Speaker 2 (30:19):
There is a prisoner that they've taken, but he's defiant,
and so he had to be executed. And here's where
you can drink your first war crime drink, because you
are not supposed to execute prisoners.

Speaker 3 (30:29):
Because they're defiant.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
Defiant, yes, pissed that you killed his friends and captured him.

Speaker 3 (30:35):
That's pretty natural.

Speaker 4 (30:36):
You all.

Speaker 2 (30:39):
Now get ready for another war crimes drink. Because Grits
was forced that they both the guys they tried to take.

Speaker 3 (30:46):
A live they have now killed.

Speaker 2 (30:48):
But one of the wounded Vieticle, one of the Viet
Cong fighters that they had thought they'd killed, was just wounded, right,
And so they decided to convince this guy to help them.
And they do that by they show him. They use
a mirror to show him the shrapnel embedded in the
back of his skull, and they're like, hey, man, you
need medical attention right away, and we can't give it
to you unless you help us out.

Speaker 3 (31:07):
So if you don't help us, you're dead, right.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
So this guy agrees to lead them to the base
where the black Box had been taken, and to make
sure that he abided by the terms of the deal,
bo attaches C four to the prisoner's neck and uses
a detonation and uses a detonation cord as a leash
to walk him around.

Speaker 3 (31:26):
Let's have another war crime drinking.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
Yeah that's your Wow again, you're not supposed to do this.

Speaker 3 (31:34):
One of my questions.

Speaker 4 (31:35):
As soon as he said kill everybody but two of them,
I was like, okay, so how do you know which two?
Because you might have killed the one that was ready
to snitch, you know what I'm saying. But you don't
know that if you just walk just to be like,
I'm just gonna pick the two, you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
Part of Green Beret training is learning like what guy
looks like he's best talking, don't shoot him as much?

Speaker 4 (31:56):
Which one of y'all looked like snitches?

Speaker 2 (31:58):
Just cret made that guy alone a little bit. He
looks like he's got a talking mouth.

Speaker 3 (32:02):
Yeah, so.

Speaker 4 (32:05):
Helme. You got somebody back home you love? Okay, cool,
keep him alive.

Speaker 3 (32:12):
Looks like he's got a family. You got a family.

Speaker 4 (32:13):
You finished snitch, You don't know nobody you can kill him.

Speaker 2 (32:16):
So again, several war crimes down here. But the mission
is successful.

Speaker 4 (32:21):
I'm sorry, I know stuff like that.

Speaker 3 (32:27):
I'm sorry anyway.

Speaker 2 (32:28):
Go ahead, So the mission succeeds, which is why West
Moreland writes proudly about it in his memoir. Even though
I might be like, maybe maybe you don't highlight all
the war crimes. I don't know if i'm if I'm
if I'm given notes, right, which I'm not. So the
whole thing highlights an important fact, right, which is that
modern American worship of Special Forces operators.

Speaker 3 (32:47):
Begins as a distraction. Right.

Speaker 2 (32:49):
That's why west Moreland is talking about this to vote
so much time to it, and that's why Bo is
going to get That's why the Rambo movies are such
a big deal, right, is because after Vietnam, the US
Americans are pretty clear, oh, we're not getting into good
wars anymore, like that one time, like that was that
was pretty fun, and it seems like a lot less
fun these days.

Speaker 3 (33:09):
But we have these.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
Guys who are really well trained to do all this
cool stuff, and they look awesome and like they can
do really impressive things. They're not winning US wars like
him finding this black box in Vietnam, Like the war
still didn't go very well.

Speaker 3 (33:23):
It was, it was also very pretty.

Speaker 4 (33:25):
The last one we had was a pretty clear, like
good versus evil type vibe.

Speaker 3 (33:30):
Right, The whole world War two, you're not doing that
anymore this one. You like, why why is we Derek yet?
So the wars.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
And we're not winning, so people are like so that
it becomes a lot easier, like, well, let's celebrate how
cool these guys are, right in lieu of celebrating, you know,
the good cause that we're doing, or like the fact
that the war has gone very well, you know. And
so BO was kind of at the very first wave
of special forces obsession in the United States, which is
something that has really like come to a head during

(34:01):
the Global War on Terror. Right, if you look at
like movies set in that period of time, they're a
lot likely to focus on like a special Forces unit
because you can have them do some kind of rad,
cool looking mission and sort of ignore that like, well
everything else was a lot messier, it didn't work quite
as well.

Speaker 3 (34:19):
Also Zero Dark thirty.

Speaker 4 (34:20):
Hey, yeah, there's also like a I don't want to
belabor this point too too long, but I think that
there's a good way as like as far as like
some of the science I use for like social commentary
or or even you know, when I did teach high
school was like you always know what's going on if
you want to understand what was going on in a
time period, just look at who the villain was in
a movie.

Speaker 3 (34:41):
You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 4 (34:41):
Oh yeah, and like this and so right now, like
every show streaming show, every action movie. Right now, what's
the villain a tech billionaire?

Speaker 1 (34:50):
Yah?

Speaker 4 (34:51):
Oh yeah, you know what I'm saying, right right, you
know what I'm saying. But before that, you know, during
during YEA, it was like some terror some sort of
Middle Eastern terrorists, you know what I'm saying. So, like
you always know what's going on in the world.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
You had a lot of late nineties right before nine
to eleven, a lot of like militia guys. Yeah after Okay,
So anyway, I'm bringing up the Special Forces stuff just
to just kind of set the zeitgeist right, which is
that a merit Bo is going to really benefit personally

(35:22):
in his celebrity from the idea that Americans have kind
of switched gears to, like, so what if we don't
win wars anymore?

Speaker 3 (35:28):
We look really cool while we're losing, you know. Ah hah.

Speaker 2 (35:33):
So Bo himself later stated of his time in Vietnam,
we got paid for bringing him back dead or alive.
We laid minds like sowing seeds. Among my greatest satisfactions
in life other than sex, was hearing the boom in
the night I turn over in my hands after a
home and chuckle got another one.

Speaker 3 (35:52):
Bully, I'm glad you let us know that. You know
that's a bar bow. Thanks bo.

Speaker 5 (36:00):
So when I make the joke that men used to
go to war, I didn't mean this.

Speaker 4 (36:06):
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, Sophie, we've always been this.

Speaker 3 (36:12):
That's oh yeah, I'm sorry. I mean.

Speaker 2 (36:14):
Look, would I set land mines if I had land
mines and the legal bit?

Speaker 3 (36:19):
Sure of course. Who wouldn't want a couple of landmines?

Speaker 2 (36:23):
You know, listen, keep the raccoons out of your yard, right, oh,
keep the chickens out.

Speaker 3 (36:29):
Of your yard. Keep the dogs, keep yourself out of
your yard.

Speaker 5 (36:32):
You know, I draw the line at the dogs.

Speaker 3 (36:37):
Look. The great thing about land minds is they don't discriminate.

Speaker 4 (36:40):
And the thing is what you would only need just
one dog after that, the rest of dogs are smart.

Speaker 3 (36:46):
The rest of them would know see yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
This has been a paid sponsorship for the Coalition for
Civilian Landmine Ownership. You can find a donation bent up
at the front also stayed and new of your dogs,
span new to your ducks, or let the landmine?

Speaker 7 (37:02):
Do you know? So?

Speaker 4 (37:09):
We got so many more pages, you're going.

Speaker 2 (37:21):
The US pulls out of Vietnam in nineteen seventy three,
and Bo transitions to commanding.

Speaker 3 (37:27):
All US sporses all US sporsches. Bo transitions to commanding
all US.

Speaker 2 (37:32):
Special Forces in Latin America, a job he held from
nineteen seventy five to nineteen seventy seven. And that's not
like quite the peak of US War crimes in Latin America,
but it's not at like the low point, like it's
like the upper third of the US War crimes in
Latin America periods.

Speaker 3 (37:48):
I think we can say, so maybe take a drink there.

Speaker 4 (37:52):
We'll just assume, right, this is also classic some fuckery
in Costa Rica salor On.

Speaker 3 (37:59):
Yeah, he retired.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
He retires in nineteen seventy nine, although that was not
quite the end of his time working for the US government.
And this is a rare case where BO is telling
the truth and someone else is lying because the US
government says that was the end of him working for US,
and BO says, no.

Speaker 3 (38:19):
It wasn't.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
Because after the USSR invaded Afghanistan. At the end of
nineteen seventy nine, the State Department hired Bo to help
train the muja Hadeen. They flew Afghan fighters to Sandy Is.

Speaker 4 (38:31):
Too close, man Like, it's too close.

Speaker 2 (38:36):
They flew Afghan fighters to Sandy Valley, Nevada, well, where
Bo taught them to use armor piercing ammunition against Soviet
vehicles carrying VIPs.

Speaker 3 (38:46):
Wait wait, wait, wait wait wait wait.

Speaker 4 (38:48):
If I'm getting if I'm from Afghanistan, you better not
fly me to Nevada.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
Oh, there has to have been one night where Bo
and the Mujahideen all hit Fremont Street right one night
where they're.

Speaker 3 (39:07):
At the fire. Let it be like this, lull like home.

Speaker 5 (39:16):
This.

Speaker 3 (39:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:17):
So the US government denies that this happened, but Bo
has footage of himself training a bunch of Afghan guys.
They're setting off explosives in the desert. So I'm gonna
go with the governments lying here.

Speaker 5 (39:31):
Like would never lie.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
Yeah, Oh, Sophie, I have some bad news.

Speaker 3 (39:38):
We'll talk about that behind stage.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
So decades later, for a twenty twenty one Mystery Wire interview,
Bo would insist that the specific men he trained were
among the very last holdouts resisting Taliban control after the
Taliban you know one and stuff. Uh, And there's no
way for me to know if that's true. I don't
think he knows. I'm I think he kept tracking names.

(40:01):
I don't you certainly not emailing with hey, you still
doing okay up there? I think he just needed to
tell himself that, or wanted to tell the news that
to sound cool.

Speaker 3 (40:09):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (40:10):
Another thing Bow needed to tell himself was that the
US government had left behind a huge number of his
comrades in Vietnam. He would later claim, without any evidence
that I've seen that he was tasked by the DA,
the Defense Intelligence Agency, with searching for POW's left behind
after the withdrawal of US forces. Now, if you've driven

(40:31):
past a VA hall or a post office or some
other government building, or just a shitload of rural homes,
you've probably seen at some point under a US flag,
a weird black flag with a silhouette of a dude's
face in front of a guard tower and the words
Pow slash mi Ia.

Speaker 3 (40:46):
You are not forgotten on it, right, most people you see,
you're aware of these stuff. We're about to talk about.

Speaker 2 (40:52):
Where this fucking flag comes from right, because this is
our most conspiratorial flag in the United States.

Speaker 3 (40:58):
If that is a silhouette of bow it is on
his table over, there's a funny story for who that is.

Speaker 4 (41:05):
I'm not getting all your drinks out of your hand.

Speaker 3 (41:08):
If it's bone. No.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
So the idea behind this flag is that there's a
and to this day, the people who fly it tend
to believe that there's a shitload of US servicemen still
being held captive somewhere right where is less.

Speaker 3 (41:24):
They'd be like eighty now if.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
They were from the Vietnam War. Right, This is not true,
and it wasn't true by the late nineteen seventies. Right,
But belief in this conspiracy theory thought we'd left a
bunch of guys behind and they were still in camps
in Vietnam, and we gotta go rescue him. That became
a widespread conspiratorial belief, largely due to Bogue rights.

Speaker 3 (41:46):
He is a hue.

Speaker 2 (41:47):
He's not the only one, but he is a major
major reason for that. Now, the flag itself that I
just described was designed by a guy named Jeff Heisley
in nineteen seventy. And when Jeff designs the flag. To
be fair to Jeff, were a bunch of US POWs
in North Vietnam. We were still fighting a war, right,
of course there were bows. That's how war works. The
silhouette was based on a real guy, his son, who

(42:10):
was twenty two years old at the time and not
a soldier.

Speaker 3 (42:13):
Dude. Now, he had tried to be a soldier, Jerry, Jeff,
this is very funny.

Speaker 2 (42:21):
Jeff's son had been an officer candidate school for the
Marine Corps, but he'd had to drop out because he
caught hepatitis. So he was like sick and he lost
like forty pounds, so he was starting was like, hey, buddy,
get on over here. I think your silouette looks perfect

(42:41):
for something.

Speaker 4 (42:46):
It's big, like, it's pretty, like Michaelangelo, like Jesus statute energy,
it's giving.

Speaker 5 (42:53):
Like, and that's all over our country.

Speaker 2 (42:56):
It's all over now time you see one of those
flags where they came from.

Speaker 3 (43:01):
So fucking hepatitis awareness.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
So so Nixon's got elected. We didn't use the terms
pow slash m I a right. I mean, the pow
existed as a term, but that was not what the
military used officially. The terms used were KIA, slash B
and R, which meant killed an action body.

Speaker 3 (43:22):
Not recovered, right.

Speaker 2 (43:23):
And this was the term for this is not the
term for if we knew someone was a pow, you'd
call them a pow. This was the term for guys
who disappeared and we don't know that they died, We
don't know what happened. And most of these guys had
they'd just been you know, they've been blown up or something.
There was not enough left to do a positive identity.
Some small number probably just like when a wall, like

(43:44):
you get a couple of weirdos who like just like,
there were a couple of guys in Korea who just
like went to North Korea like that kind of stuff
happened every now and then, right, And then some number
of them you assumed were captured and were and this
was happening at points in the Vietnam War and were
being held, right, and the government just was not away
of their specific name.

Speaker 3 (44:01):
Right. So that's what we used to call it.

Speaker 2 (44:04):
And it's worth emphasizing that prior to nineteen sixty nine,
the US government, and specifically the Department of Defense, wanted
to discourage any talk about US servicemen being imprisoned by
the enemy. This was not just a Vietnam thing. This
existed beforehand, but it really became heightened in Vietnam. And
so when like the military would tell someone that, like, hey,

(44:27):
your kid or whatever is missing, they would also tell
them keep quiet about it. They might still be alive.
Don't tell anybody, right.

Speaker 3 (44:35):
Which is kind of a fucked up thing about, like.

Speaker 2 (44:39):
What, that's really fucking crazy. Per an article in Time
by Heath Lee quote, if the women dared to discuss it,
their government warned them the men might be badly treated
or even executed. With this heavy burden to Barrat, the
women were supposed to go about their daily existence telling
no one what they were up against. Supposedly this would
help bring the men back home safely.

Speaker 3 (45:01):
The policy, yeah, what is the how?

Speaker 2 (45:04):
This policy had been applied to prisoners and missing troops
in previous wars, and was one President Lyndon B. Johnson
would adhere to. During the Vietnam War, the US government
tried to use its well worn templative quiet diplomacy to
reason with the North Vietnamese. Now, this is very fucked up,
and you might think that it's a good thing that
the Nixon administration changed course, and like, well, at least

(45:25):
now we're admitting, like these guys are captured or missing, right,
Like that's an improvement over telling their families to lie.

Speaker 3 (45:31):
Right. But this is Dick Nixon we're talking about.

Speaker 2 (45:35):
And yeah, this change was not made out of compassion.
It was made for it even more fucked up reason.

Speaker 3 (45:41):
As H.

Speaker 2 (45:41):
Bruce Franklin outlines in his book Mia myth Making in America,
which is a great book about this exact subject, the
Knixon administration changed courses because this was they wanted to
get Americans to back a disastrous war, right, they wanted
to build support for Vietnam, which was fading. And in
May teen sixty nine, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird admitted for

(46:02):
the first time that some thirteen hundred Americans were MIA,
and as many as half might be POW's. And this
is when the use of the term really changed. As
Nathan Smith summarized in an article for The Outline, this
transformed the war from a political issue into a humanitarian one,
trading public support for sympathy. It didn't matter why we
were there in the first place. Our boys were there,

(46:24):
and by God, we were going to do anything to
get our boys home, right, so people, why we're there?

Speaker 4 (46:31):
I feel like, Okay, far be it for me to
try to tell the US government how to do their
branded in marketing cases. I just feel like for you
to tell me in a war I already didn't want
to be in. Now you admitting what we already knew,
which is Earl's son ain't came home yet. Why everybody

(46:51):
else's son came So now you want to admit it,
and you're telling me that's a justification for your I
would be like, my g has sound to me like
we shouldn't have never.

Speaker 3 (46:59):
Fucked been there. No, no, well be home. I'm sorry.
I know you're angry.

Speaker 2 (47:05):
I know you're angry that all these people are dying
and that we're fighting this war.

Speaker 3 (47:09):
But look, we have to keep fighting the war.

Speaker 2 (47:11):
Otherwise the guys that we sent to the war might
not come home from the war.

Speaker 3 (47:17):
No damn sinse, there's a lot of logic there.

Speaker 4 (47:20):
Don't make no damn sense. I'm just saying, maybe you
should stop fighting the war.

Speaker 3 (47:24):
We shouldn't be.

Speaker 4 (47:26):
A prisoner of a ward. It ain't happening, sir.

Speaker 3 (47:28):
I bet if we left, they'd give the guys.

Speaker 4 (47:30):
But I bet you if we left anyway, because.

Speaker 3 (47:34):
They probably don't want to keep them, look and winning
them at this point. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
So the first group to prove how much money there
is in this newly created conspiracy theory was a student
organization VIVA or Voices in vital America. One of the
worst acronyms I remember encounter just as a heads up,
just fucking dog show.

Speaker 3 (47:57):
Now.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
VIVA started out selling whole bracelets in the early nineteen
seventies with the names of missing servicemen engraved in them.
Celebrities would buy one to be spotted supporting the troops
and giving something back.

Speaker 3 (48:10):
Strong.

Speaker 4 (48:11):
Yes, this strong, right, yes, this strong only pro war?

Speaker 3 (48:15):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:17):
Now, then the war ended, right, and Vietnam returned the
prisoners they had, because you know, why wouldn't why would
they keep these guys past a certain point. You know,
there were negotiations, there were things they wanted. It doesn't
happen immediately, but there's a congressional inquiry in nineteen seventy
six to try and make sure did we.

Speaker 3 (48:34):
Get everybody there? There's some guys left or not right, So.

Speaker 5 (48:37):
This is nice of them to check, right.

Speaker 2 (48:39):
You should double check that did we leave a guy
or two behind. It's like looking for your keys after
you set up at the bar, you know. But like
with seven hundred guys who got shot down for bombing Hanoi.

Speaker 4 (48:49):
You know, I'm pretty sure Vietnam would know though. It
was like, y'all see any white people.

Speaker 2 (48:55):
Look, do my friends always notice if I lose my
wallet in their couch?

Speaker 3 (48:58):
Yeah, pilots are a lot like that. Listen.

Speaker 4 (49:03):
I'm just saying, go back into the prison and be like, hello, hey,
anybody here I here, ain't nobody here?

Speaker 3 (49:10):
Yeah, I think we're good. I think we're good.

Speaker 4 (49:13):
I don't know after they left here. I'm just saying,
they not here.

Speaker 3 (49:17):
Right.

Speaker 2 (49:17):
So there's this inquiry in nineteen seventy six and Congress
concludes we they're all there's not any guys still over there, right,
there's no more US POWs in Southeast Asia. But a
certain number of Americans could not get over their rage
at losing a war and refuse to accept that the
hundreds of men who were still missing in action were
just dead, right and not being kept in a secret

(49:38):
prison camp. And when it comes to like the families, obviously,
I don't blame like someone for like not wanting to
believe their dad's dead or whatever.

Speaker 3 (49:45):
But on a societal level, this is just a delusion.
You know.

Speaker 2 (49:50):
It's an open question as to whether or not bog
Rights ever believed there were hundreds, some said thousands of
Americans still being held prisoner in Vietnam, or if he
just saw it as fertile soil for a grift. Now
I am inclined to believe the latter explains some of
his logic that it's a grift, right, because in the
early nineteen eighties he starts traveling around and giving speeches

(50:12):
about how there's all these guys left over there. We
are my brothers are still behind the line being held
by the North Vietnamese, and we've got to free them,
right and you know, since the government's not gonna do it,
you know, they're they're corrupt, they're laid, you know. And
then the cowardly media is convinced everybody keeping troops in
Vietnam is a bad idea.

Speaker 3 (50:31):
I'm gonna bring them back.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
I'm gonna put together a squad, a hard nosed, badass.

Speaker 3 (50:38):
You might say.

Speaker 4 (50:39):
So that's the rambo, right, Please connect these dots.

Speaker 3 (50:45):
So got it? If you just give me some money.

Speaker 2 (50:47):
I'm totally gonna put together a volunteer force of American
veteran commandos and we're going to return to Southeast Asia
and we'll find proof that Americans are still being held
captive there and that'll force the government to I guess
reinvade Vietnam.

Speaker 5 (51:02):
Right, he just wants to commit more worker.

Speaker 3 (51:05):
He just he just didn't get enough Vietnam.

Speaker 2 (51:08):
You know, It's it's the again like sometimes you know,
you go to the buffet, you don't get enough plates,
you know, it's like that.

Speaker 5 (51:14):
But with I've been with you, you get enough plates, get.

Speaker 2 (51:17):
Enough plates, right, And I would argue the United States
had more than enough Vietnam.

Speaker 3 (51:22):
And plenty of plates. Should have cut them off a.

Speaker 2 (51:24):
While Ben shouldn't shouldn't have even gone into that buffet.

Speaker 3 (51:28):
Gold mo, right, don't both starts to Rick gold here?

Speaker 2 (51:38):
Are there?

Speaker 3 (51:39):
No? No, no, no, no couple.

Speaker 2 (51:41):
Although if you ever want to, I did this when
I was like twenty two years old and fucking coming
down from a shitload of acid like you and your
equally young equally coming down on acid friends coming into
a Golden Crawl at six in the morning because you
haven't slept the night before the looks you get from
the Golden Corral, right, Guiler's beautiful, beautiful experience.

Speaker 3 (52:03):
I recommend it to everyone.

Speaker 5 (52:05):
The show is not sponsored by Golden Corral, but maybe
it should be.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
So Bo starts touring the country. He starts guesting on
different TV shows. He starts speaking at churches and at
veterans organizations.

Speaker 3 (52:18):
He starts taking donators.

Speaker 5 (52:19):
Wh should we let them do this?

Speaker 3 (52:21):
How did he stop him?

Speaker 7 (52:24):
Thoughous He's a famous, he's one of he's a great
parade and it's it sells right on TV, the like
there's a bunch of men trapped.

Speaker 2 (52:36):
You know, you're fellow citizens trapped, you know. And he's
Bo is charismatic?

Speaker 5 (52:41):
Was he handsome?

Speaker 2 (52:42):
I would not say so, But that's an opinion that
people can have or not have on their own.

Speaker 3 (52:48):
You know.

Speaker 2 (52:49):
It's not my job to tell you which war criminals
are hot.

Speaker 5 (52:52):
Yes, it is, well, I beg to different.

Speaker 3 (52:56):
Literally, do have a short list of really hot work
from listen.

Speaker 4 (53:00):
At this point, were we at home, you would have
pulled up some sort of picture, you.

Speaker 5 (53:06):
Know that we would try.

Speaker 3 (53:08):
You cut that.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
You you forced me to cut that twenty eight minute
digression out of the polepot episodes.

Speaker 3 (53:14):
So I don't know what to do. I'm sorry. I
should have called a pole hot am I right? That's
all folks, Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (53:26):
Man.

Speaker 3 (53:31):
Wow, so such low hanging fruit, Like how I never.

Speaker 4 (53:37):
Thought of that?

Speaker 2 (53:38):
Yeah again I did they cut it around?

Speaker 5 (53:41):
Why? I don't know. It's been bothering the.

Speaker 2 (53:45):
Sorry some of us remember again the troops just one?
Well because one part one one version of Riker was
left behind after a transporter accident, which is how his
transporter clone came to be.

Speaker 3 (53:57):
Yes, some people know they're history.

Speaker 4 (54:00):
Thank you.

Speaker 5 (54:03):
Flat for him.

Speaker 3 (54:05):
Yeah, yeah, let's give it.

Speaker 2 (54:06):
Let's give a real big round of applause for the
Riker that joined the McKee. There we go, yeah, big rife.
Oh okay, all right, sel Madness both starts touring.

Speaker 3 (54:21):
He goes all around.

Speaker 2 (54:22):
He's taken donations, he's given lots of interviews, he's getting
on TV all the time, and he's telling stories about
his time in Vietnam to get like the saddest stories
he has, right, because the more emotional people are, the
more willing they are to give him money for this
stupid shit. And his favorite go to story is the
tale of a real guy Sergeant George Hogland. George was
a Green Beret, a comrade who Grits said had been

(54:44):
wounded during an ambush. And so grit says, you know,
Hogland gets wounded, and me and some other guys we
have to run back, and we're trying to rescue him, right,
And Hogland, being such a hero, realizes that his teammates
are going to die in this ambush if they try
to save him, and so, in an act of utter selflessness,
Hogland puts his own AR fifteen to his head and

(55:04):
quote pulled the trigger, eliminating the need for us to
be there.

Speaker 3 (55:08):
That's what Bo says.

Speaker 2 (55:09):
Now, this would happened certainly be a shocking and sobering
story of sacrifice if any of it were even slightly true. Now,
the problem is Bo has chosen to lie about a
real dude who really died and who he had not
served with, but other guys had most of the press
when for a long time he gets away with this

(55:30):
because most journals are like, well, he's a Green Bray,
I must be telling the truth. He wouldn't lie about
another Green Beret. That'd be fucked up. Thankfully, the Washington
Post was still the real newspaper back in the eighties,
and Art Harris. Art Harris reached out to Chuck Heiner,
who was one of two members of Hogland's squad who
survived the actual ambush that killed Hogland, and Heiner claimed, quote,

(55:54):
Grits wasn't even on that goddamn team. I was with
George when he died. He just got blown away. Must
have taken one hundred and fifty rounds.

Speaker 3 (56:03):
Very dead, damn.

Speaker 2 (56:04):
Yeah, that's a lot of dead. They were not they
were not taking chance. Yeah, right, that's pretty pretty bad.

Speaker 3 (56:11):
Now.

Speaker 2 (56:12):
This is the kind of lie that shouldn't have even
taken an interview to bus. My first thing would have
been like, wait, so this guy got wounded and then
he shot himself in the head with an AR fifteen,
like for one thing.

Speaker 3 (56:24):
They usually have like pistols. Right, just so seems a
little over, you know.

Speaker 2 (56:29):
It's just it's just weird that he'd lie about this specifically, right,
And I think the weirdest.

Speaker 6 (56:35):
I think why you have such staun well Yeah, and
bo and Bo is a compulsive liar, right, Like he's
someone who absolutely cannot control it.

Speaker 3 (56:48):
And what matters most of him isn't the truth. It's
continuing to live as if he were.

Speaker 2 (56:52):
A movie protagonist, long after he'd gotten too old and
slow to continue shooting people for the government. Now, folks,
we're going to continue this story, don't you worry. And
we're going to continue and conclude with a Q and
a to let you guys ask some questions and whatnot.
But we're going to take an intermission because that's a thing.

Speaker 3 (57:10):
That we do here.

Speaker 2 (57:11):
So go get yourself a drink, use the restaurant, buy
some T shirts.

Speaker 3 (57:15):
There's merch t shirts, stickers, merch.

Speaker 2 (57:18):
To support the Portland Defense Fund, and then in a
couple of minutes we will come back and we will
learn more about bo right, who I think is going
to become a good guy by the end of this.

Speaker 3 (57:28):
I don't remember the remainings five pages.

Speaker 8 (57:30):
Of the script, but Christmas episode Yeah Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:45):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 5 (57:58):
Behind the Bastards is now available on new episodes every
Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com.
Slash at behind the bastards