Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
But as promised, we go to the Project hotline right now.
Very excited to welcome to the show author James Bradley,
the guy behind behind the writing of Flags of Our Fathers,
because what an epic story that was. Thank you so
much for taking the time to come on to the show, sir.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Good to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
So I'm trying to understand. You got a new book out,
Precious Freedom, and this time we're heading to Vietnam with
James Bradley. So but this is fiction versus Flags of
Our Fathers, which was based on a true story.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Correct, they're both true stories. This Precious Freedom is history
is fiction. I had to just create a couple characters
to round some corners. But it's based on ten years
of research. I wrote Trags of Our Fathers about how
my dad and the Marines won on Iwo Jima and
then my brother went into the Marines in Vietnam and
(00:59):
they lost, and I went back to Vietnam to figure
out why. And incredibly, I'm the only American author who's
gone to Vietnam and asked the winners, how did you win?
Speaker 1 (01:11):
I can't imagine what the answer was. I would imagine
that's what the book is all about you're going to say, too,
you got to get the book to find out, or
was there could there possibly be a succinct answer to
such a question.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
You know, if you look at the back end of
the Vietnam War, we said it was immoral, and we
had all these protests and we said we have to stop.
So the title of the book is Precious Freedom, because
Uncle Ho Ho Chi Minh made it a moral case
from the beginning. He said to his people, there's nothing
more precious than freedom. The Americans might kill your father, mother, brother, sister, uncle,
(01:50):
you know, burn your house down, but you've got to
stand up. So he made it the same case that
George Washington did that this is about freedom, This is
about establishing the country. You can't give up. And it's
precious freedom. And you know it. In the first paragraph
of the book. You see the whole thing. A marine
(02:14):
from Minnesota, Chip is nineteen. He shoots the guy in
the head. Well, the guy's a father, and his daughter
May sees the shot. She sees an American killer father,
and she's a farm girl and she has no idea
she's going to fight, but she sees this killing, and
immediately she's like that's an American. I'm going to kill
(02:37):
every American I ever see. She goes to the forest,
and you know, the American narrative is that, you know,
the Vietnamese somehow got it together. No, no, no, she
went to the forest at fifteen, and she was trained
how to beat the American They had a plan. Ho
Chi Minh in the nineteen thirties told his followers, we
(02:58):
will beat America in America, that the Americans will give
up because they don't have a moral case. He said,
it's americans watching TV in their living rooms who will
end the war. And he was right. So I caddied
for Vince Lombardi. You know, and if the Packers played
a team that said this is how we're going to win,
(03:21):
and then that's how they won, they were winners. And
the Vietnamese said this is how we're going to win,
and then they won. So you know, they're winners, and
this book studies how the winners won.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
I mean, then you also caddied for Vince Lombardi. Sounds
like your next book shoot might might have to be
an autobiography, sir, But in the meantime, let's stay focused
on precious freedom. I see here where it says the
US military reports are comparing Ho Chi Minh to George Washington.
(03:57):
Did such documents actually exist? Were there really US military
reports that did that.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
This is what's shocking. I want to say to the
veterans this book. All the Vietnamese praised the American veterans,
but Ho Chi Minh said to his people, don't hate
the American shooting at you, because they're victims of their
line government, just like you're a victim out in the field.
And yes, the American who was saying that US Commandant
(04:27):
David Shoop he won the Medal of Honor at Tarawa.
If you read my books Likes of our Fathers, you
know what a battle Tarawa was. Well, David Shuope resigns
when LBJ wants to go into Vietnam, all the Joint
chiefs of Staff says Vietnam's a loser, and Shoop starts
crisscrossing the country saying, Ho Chi Min's the George Washington
(04:50):
of Vietnam. They just beat the French. They're winners. They
have plans, he said. The American military never faced anything.
See Dad won on Iwo Jima. My brother lost in Vietnam.
My brother wasn't less of a man, less of a fighter,
less of a marine than my father. We didn't Americans
(05:11):
didn't change. What changed was the military. My dad, on
Iwo Jima, had colonels leading him in Vietnam. My brother
had colonels behind him in a clean room, you know,
on a walkie talking do this, do that?
Speaker 1 (05:27):
You know my perception always was and I certainly wouldn't
want to minimize. But you know, I had an uncle
who served. He served in three He served World War two,
Korea and Vietnam, and his purple hearts still hang in
my childhood home. But it always looked. It's interesting to
me too, because the book begins, it's nineteen sixty seven.
(05:47):
That's a year I'm born, Okay, And yet somehow I
have childhood memories of newspaper headlines, you know, landing on
the front stoop and saying Vietnam. You know, for what
that's worth, I'm four or five, I'm six years old
as it lingered on, But I always viewed it through
a lens of we had under our government, had underestimated
(06:10):
this enemy. It was very rocky to me, And I
don't know if that reference is lost on you, sir,
in that, you know, apologist just didn't really cocky and
just thought this is going to be over very quickly
and had underestimated what he was up against.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Well, was shocking to me is the Vietnamese one with
a strategy called People's War. And I just thought, oh, yeah,
that means, you know, get the people going no, no, no.
It's a very detailed strategy, and the Vietnamese were writing
about it, producing films about it. This is what we're
going to do, This is our strategy. This is how
we're going to beat the Americans. And then if you
(06:49):
look at the seven thousand pages of the Pentagon papers,
the Americans never once discussed People's War. So you know
you're in Islombardi. The opponent has got his plan out
there in uh you know, in books, and you won't
even look at it because you're just gonna win. I mean,
(07:10):
it was hubris, like, you can't believe, you know, we
were going for the Domino theory. Oh if Vietnam falls,
then the whole thing's going to go to hell. Well
mac Namara at the end of his life said, oh gee,
you know that Domino theory. We never just debated it.
Nobody ever debated is this true? It was just a
(07:33):
bunch of words. We're Americans, so they were all going
on the fumes of World War Two. You know, our
fathers won World War Two. I guess we can win.
You know these these little short Asian people, well, the
little short Asian people in Vietnam. It turned out to
be the winningest army in the world. If you who's
(07:56):
the number one twentieth century uh Jet winningness General of
the twentieth century. His name is General Zapp Giap. But
Americans don't know that Vietnam today has the largest army
in the world if you include reserves. Americans don't know
that they are a military country. But they don't go
(08:19):
outside looking for places to invade. They guard their own borders,
their Vietnam first. Vietnam is a dead safe country. Women
can walk around in short skirts at twelve o'clock at
night and nobody's gonna whistle at them or give them
a hard time. You know, it's safe. They're growing at
(08:39):
eight percent of years. So we were told, oh, we
gotta fight communism. So I went to Vietnam expecting to
learn about communism, and the Vietnamese said communism democracy. We
didn't know anything about that. That's politics. All we knew
was that an American shot my father. That's all I
had to know.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
And the Vietnamese culture is exploding too. I mean there's
Vietnamese restaurants opening up all over New York City, even
here in Connecticut, which has been something for this gen
x or to see. You know, somebody born in nineteen
sixty seven that come, you know, the year twenty twenty,
there'd be so much fascination with Vietnamese culture. It'd be
(09:24):
Vietnamme cook, I've got a cookbook sent to me. It's
very interesting. Would you like to see Precious Freedom get
the big screen treatment? Because I know flags of our fathers, Clinty,
no less than Clint Eastwood took that on.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Well, yeah, Steven Spielberg bought it, and Clint Eastwood was
the director. That's above my head, busy, but yeah, Oliver Stone,
the great filmmaker and the Vietnam Vet. Oliver Stone. He
says on the back of the book that if Americans
had known what Bradley reveals, and this was known in
(10:02):
the late sixties, he said, if Americans knew what Bradley
has revealed in this book, American mothers would not have
sent their children to Iraq and Afghanistan. That's the point
what I wanted out. It's not just the story about Vietnam.
It's the story of how we didn't face up to
what we did in Vietnam, so then we went on
(10:24):
and made the same mistakes. You know, we've got to
take some of these general failures to the task. The
military is just doing things that. I mean, the United
States military has not won anything in eighty years. Man,
The last victory was Okinawa in nineteen forty five. We've
(10:48):
got to change that. You know, the military changed after
World War Two, and Vietnam was the first symptom of it.
And you can see in Precious Freedom that again, the
Vets fought well, all those Connecticut Vets. I salute you,
but your leaders did not have a plan. And if
(11:09):
you don't have the strategy, it doesn't matter how well
trained the troops are.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
This is just great stuff. I can't wait to check
out the book again. It is Precious Freedom a novel.
But I'm telling you that autobiography too. I mean, the
son of Ewojim, of Doc Bradley, dancing with Tina Turner
and Tokyo Jailed and solitary confinement in an underground US
(11:34):
military sellar, West Germany. Never mind the work you did
with with Bob Hope, Ela Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett. You've
got a story yourself, your own story to write too.
But this is an amazing I hesitate to say follow
up to Flags of our fathers, but thank you so
much for taking the time to come on and share
your views as well as exactly what people can expect
(11:59):
from the book. Precious Freedom by James Bradley
But as promised, we go to the Project hotline right now.
Very excited to welcome to the show author James Bradley,
the guy behind behind the writing of Flags of Our Fathers,
because what an epic story that was. Thank you so
much for taking the time to come on to the show, sir.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Good to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
So I'm trying to understand. You got a new book out,
Precious Freedom, and this time we're heading to Vietnam with
James Bradley. So but this is fiction versus Flags of
Our Fathers, which was based on a true story.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Correct, they're both true stories. This Precious Freedom is history
is fiction. I had to just create a couple characters
to round some corners. But it's based on ten years
of research. I wrote Trags of Our Fathers about how
my dad and the Marines won on Iwo Jima and
then my brother went into the Marines in Vietnam and
(00:59):
they lost, and I went back to Vietnam to figure
out why. And incredibly, I'm the only American author who's
gone to Vietnam and asked the winners, how did you win?
Speaker 1 (01:11):
I can't imagine what the answer was. I would imagine
that's what the book is all about you're going to say, too,
you got to get the book to find out, or
was there could there possibly be a succinct answer to
such a question.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
You know, if you look at the back end of
the Vietnam War, we said it was immoral, and we
had all these protests and we said we have to stop.
So the title of the book is Precious Freedom, because
Uncle Ho Ho Chi Minh made it a moral case
from the beginning. He said to his people, there's nothing
more precious than freedom. The Americans might kill your father, mother, brother, sister, uncle,
(01:50):
you know, burn your house down, but you've got to
stand up. So he made it the same case that
George Washington did that this is about freedom, This is
about establishing the country. You can't give up. And it's
precious freedom. And you know it. In the first paragraph
of the book. You see the whole thing. A marine
(02:14):
from Minnesota, Chip is nineteen. He shoots the guy in
the head. Well, the guy's a father, and his daughter
May sees the shot. She sees an American killer father,
and she's a farm girl and she has no idea
she's going to fight, but she sees this killing, and
immediately she's like that's an American. I'm going to kill
(02:37):
every American I ever see. She goes to the forest,
and you know, the American narrative is that, you know,
the Vietnamese somehow got it together. No, no, no, she
went to the forest at fifteen, and she was trained
how to beat the American They had a plan. Ho
Chi Minh in the nineteen thirties told his followers, we
(02:58):
will beat America in America, that the Americans will give
up because they don't have a moral case. He said,
it's americans watching TV in their living rooms who will
end the war. And he was right. So I caddied
for Vince Lombardi. You know, and if the Packers played
a team that said this is how we're going to win,
(03:21):
and then that's how they won, they were winners. And
the Vietnamese said this is how we're going to win,
and then they won. So you know, they're winners, and
this book studies how the winners won.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
I mean, then you also caddied for Vince Lombardi. Sounds
like your next book shoot might might have to be
an autobiography, sir, But in the meantime, let's stay focused
on precious freedom. I see here where it says the
US military reports are comparing Ho Chi Minh to George Washington.
(03:57):
Did such documents actually exist? Were there really US military
reports that did that.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
This is what's shocking. I want to say to the
veterans this book. All the Vietnamese praised the American veterans,
but Ho Chi Minh said to his people, don't hate
the American shooting at you, because they're victims of their
line government, just like you're a victim out in the field.
And yes, the American who was saying that US Commandant
(04:27):
David Shoop he won the Medal of Honor at Tarawa.
If you read my books Likes of our Fathers, you
know what a battle Tarawa was. Well, David Shuope resigns
when LBJ wants to go into Vietnam, all the Joint
chiefs of Staff says Vietnam's a loser, and Shoop starts
crisscrossing the country saying, Ho Chi Min's the George Washington
(04:50):
of Vietnam. They just beat the French. They're winners. They
have plans, he said. The American military never faced anything.
See Dad won on Iwo Jima. My brother lost in Vietnam.
My brother wasn't less of a man, less of a fighter,
less of a marine than my father. We didn't Americans
(05:11):
didn't change. What changed was the military. My dad, on
Iwo Jima, had colonels leading him in Vietnam. My brother
had colonels behind him in a clean room, you know,
on a walkie talking do this, do that?
Speaker 1 (05:27):
You know my perception always was and I certainly wouldn't
want to minimize. But you know, I had an uncle
who served. He served in three He served World War two,
Korea and Vietnam, and his purple hearts still hang in
my childhood home. But it always looked. It's interesting to
me too, because the book begins, it's nineteen sixty seven.
(05:47):
That's a year I'm born, Okay, And yet somehow I
have childhood memories of newspaper headlines, you know, landing on
the front stoop and saying Vietnam. You know, for what
that's worth, I'm four or five, I'm six years old
as it lingered on, But I always viewed it through
a lens of we had under our government, had underestimated
(06:10):
this enemy. It was very rocky to me, And I
don't know if that reference is lost on you, sir,
in that, you know, apologist just didn't really cocky and
just thought this is going to be over very quickly
and had underestimated what he was up against.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Well, was shocking to me is the Vietnamese one with
a strategy called People's War. And I just thought, oh, yeah,
that means, you know, get the people going no, no, no.
It's a very detailed strategy, and the Vietnamese were writing
about it, producing films about it. This is what we're
going to do, This is our strategy. This is how
we're going to beat the Americans. And then if you
(06:49):
look at the seven thousand pages of the Pentagon papers,
the Americans never once discussed People's War. So you know
you're in Islombardi. The opponent has got his plan out
there in uh you know, in books, and you won't
even look at it because you're just gonna win. I mean,
(07:10):
it was hubris, like, you can't believe, you know, we
were going for the Domino theory. Oh if Vietnam falls,
then the whole thing's going to go to hell. Well
mac Namara at the end of his life said, oh gee,
you know that Domino theory. We never just debated it.
Nobody ever debated is this true? It was just a
(07:33):
bunch of words. We're Americans, so they were all going
on the fumes of World War Two. You know, our
fathers won World War Two. I guess we can win.
You know these these little short Asian people, well, the
little short Asian people in Vietnam. It turned out to
be the winningest army in the world. If you who's
(07:56):
the number one twentieth century uh Jet winningness General of
the twentieth century. His name is General Zapp Giap. But
Americans don't know that Vietnam today has the largest army
in the world if you include reserves. Americans don't know
that they are a military country. But they don't go
(08:19):
outside looking for places to invade. They guard their own borders,
their Vietnam first. Vietnam is a dead safe country. Women
can walk around in short skirts at twelve o'clock at
night and nobody's gonna whistle at them or give them
a hard time. You know, it's safe. They're growing at
(08:39):
eight percent of years. So we were told, oh, we
gotta fight communism. So I went to Vietnam expecting to
learn about communism, and the Vietnamese said communism democracy. We
didn't know anything about that. That's politics. All we knew
was that an American shot my father. That's all I
had to know.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
And the Vietnamese culture is exploding too. I mean there's
Vietnamese restaurants opening up all over New York City, even
here in Connecticut, which has been something for this gen
x or to see. You know, somebody born in nineteen
sixty seven that come, you know, the year twenty twenty,
there'd be so much fascination with Vietnamese culture. It'd be
(09:24):
Vietnamme cook, I've got a cookbook sent to me. It's
very interesting. Would you like to see Precious Freedom get
the big screen treatment? Because I know flags of our fathers, Clinty,
no less than Clint Eastwood took that on.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Well, yeah, Steven Spielberg bought it, and Clint Eastwood was
the director. That's above my head, busy, but yeah, Oliver Stone,
the great filmmaker and the Vietnam Vet. Oliver Stone. He
says on the back of the book that if Americans
had known what Bradley reveals, and this was known in
(10:02):
the late sixties, he said, if Americans knew what Bradley
has revealed in this book, American mothers would not have
sent their children to Iraq and Afghanistan. That's the point
what I wanted out. It's not just the story about Vietnam.
It's the story of how we didn't face up to
what we did in Vietnam, so then we went on
(10:24):
and made the same mistakes. You know, we've got to
take some of these general failures to the task. The
military is just doing things that. I mean, the United
States military has not won anything in eighty years. Man,
The last victory was Okinawa in nineteen forty five. We've
(10:48):
got to change that. You know, the military changed after
World War Two, and Vietnam was the first symptom of it.
And you can see in Precious Freedom that again, the
Vets fought well, all those Connecticut Vets. I salute you,
but your leaders did not have a plan. And if
(11:09):
you don't have the strategy, it doesn't matter how well
trained the troops are.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
This is just great stuff. I can't wait to check
out the book again. It is Precious Freedom a novel.
But I'm telling you that autobiography too. I mean, the
son of Ewojim, of Doc Bradley, dancing with Tina Turner
and Tokyo Jailed and solitary confinement in an underground US
(11:34):
military sellar, West Germany. Never mind the work you did
with with Bob Hope, Ela Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett. You've
got a story yourself, your own story to write too.
But this is an amazing I hesitate to say follow
up to Flags of our fathers, but thank you so
much for taking the time to come on and share
your views as well as exactly what people can expect
(11:59):
from the book. Precious Freedom by James Bradley
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