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The Road To Pinkville (My Lai Massacre) · DEADBUG SAYS

• 0:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the following podcast, dialogue has been condensed from a military trial's transcripts.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: The story was a recreation of an actual criminal case that occurred in North Vietnam.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Has been adapted to a podcast from one of my films.
• 0:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this is a dead bug podcast.
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it may not be suited for those of a sensitive nature.
• 0:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now you've said it, not me, Pussies, so proceed at your own peril.
• 0:43
  [SPEAKER_05]: Earlier this year, a top US leader's vow that the US Marine outposted case on, then under a 77 days enemy siege would be defended at all costs.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to North Vietnam and it was late in 1967 that the name Pinkville came to be known.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now you'd be excused with such a name like that, digging it with some sort of homosexual paradise.
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Where the hand-and-out blow jobs, like by sexual elves, I hand-and-out candy games.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, Mary Poppins, because what being felt was, was something far much worse, a roadside to the abyss, a grim repus, so-for-letting paradise.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah
• 2:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, back in 1940, there was a member of the British Latte.
• 2:07
  [SPEAKER_04]: We were on the Lughals in Louisiana, one night by July as a moon.
• 2:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: But Captain, you told us to pour a river.
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_04]: That's how it all began.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_08]: We were unique when the big, modern, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new,
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: On this dead bug joint, I will take a look at the village, known as Pinkville.
• 2:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: By 1969, the American people had sowered with the thought of the conflict in Vietnam.
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it seemed that the country was ripping apart at the seams.
• 3:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because in this one, no one will get in the go.
• 3:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: If we get none of the things or a bad case of the climb, that's in the generations, could we create a normal right or wrong?
• 3:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Many brave men die, is this country to make it free?
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: I believe that's so much fun.
• 3:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: You should let you have everything.
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chancellor Fulgrides had some months ago that if the Vietnam War went on much longer, the best of our young people would be in Canada.
• 3:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: lead as these desertors, malcontent, radical cendiaries, the civil, and the unciviled disobedience among our young, STS, PLP, what a man one, what a man two, the revolutionary action movement, Panthers, lions, hippies, hippies, tigers alike.
• 3:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'd rather swap the whole damn zoo for a single puttune of the county, young Americans I saw in Vietnam.
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it was only a year earlier that things were different and there were those who still died that they were fighting a noble war.
• 4:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Against a brown devil who ate his meals where he shithead, but anyone entered it thinking it were your typical conflict, like the ones you'd seen in newsreels.
• 4:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were thrown by an elusive enemy.
• 4:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Vietnam War exposed the fundamental mismatch and how wars were fought.
• 4:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: The United States entered Vietnam with overwhelming firepower, advanced technology, and a doctrine built around large scale conventional warfare.
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the enemy, the vehicle, well, I guess they didn't get the memo.
• 4:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Instead, they relied on guerilla tactics that meant small mobile units, ambushes, and a deep knowledge of the terrain, dense jungles, rice paddies, and tunnel systems allowed them to appear, strike quickly, and then disappear like cockroaches before the American forces could respond effectively.
• 5:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: There were no clear front lines in Vietnam, no obvious targets, and often no way to distinguish fighters from civilians.
• 5:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: I guess they really did.
• 5:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'll look alike.
• 5:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that was one of the biggest challenges to be a con blended into local population.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: By day, someone might be a farmer.
• 5:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: By night, they could be part of the insurgent network.
• 5:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: This made it incredibly difficult for American soldiers to identify the enemy, leading to constant uncertainty and psychological strain.
• 5:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then there were the tactics themselves, booby traps, bunch ice-takes, and improvised explosives that we use not just a kill, but the main and slow down the U.S. troops.
• 5:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: The jungle and fireman amplified this, heat, disease, insects, limited visibility, made even the basic movement exhausting and dangerous.
• 6:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Meanwhile, the Americans often relied on search and destroy missions, large sweeps through the countryside, intended to locate and eliminate enemy forces.
• 6:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the Gook, well, they didn't stand a fight.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: They avoided direct confrontation until it suited them.
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Meanwhile, US forces could clear a whole area one day, only to find the enemy had returned the next.
• 6:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: At its core, the difficulty came down to this.
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: The US were fighting a conventional war against an unconventional enemy.
• 6:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Superior weapons and numbers mattered less when the opponent controlled the terrain, dictated the terms of engagement, and go to effectively disappear and reappear whenever they wanted.
• 7:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's what made Vietnam such a frustrating and ultimately unwindable conflict for the
• 7:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: But despite most of the South Vietnamese, seeing the Americans as unwanted guests, by 1968, they'd become reliant on them.
• 7:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Since the US began its big build-up in the mid-60s, millions of dollars worth of goods have entered the country each month.
• 7:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Some economists say 10% or more of the cargo is diverted into black market channels.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because although they didn't care too much for the American soldier, they had no problem with the goods that came along with them.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: With the South Vietnamese civilians playing up, one for you, two for me game.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: The South Vietnamese economy had now become dependent on the swinging decks that they liked to call behind their backs, invaders, but it was a false economy.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as we know, more good things come to an end.
• 8:10
  [SPEAKER_07]: The great silent majority of my fellow Americans, I ask for your support.
• 8:16
  [SPEAKER_07]: I pledged in my campaign for the presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace.
• 8:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Filling public sentiment slip in, next in silence, showing up on everyone's living room to convince them otherwise.
• 8:29
  [SPEAKER_07]: The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed.
• 8:35
  [SPEAKER_07]: For the more divided we are at home.
• 8:38
  [SPEAKER_07]: The less light the enemy is to negotiate and balance.
• 8:43
  [SPEAKER_07]: Let us be united for peace.
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: As the body bags kept returning home, the war became less and less popular with the American public.
• 8:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Many historians and analysts now agree that America lost the war because they base success on a kill ratio.
• 9:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: They lost three men and killed a hundred cooks while they were a good day.
• 9:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: But North Vietnam had more than just a military.
• 9:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Their entire people will fe see the kids, the women.
• 9:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: The old man has seen that all of them were planting booby traps and acting as a lookout.
• 9:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: You'll see the vehicle on one finite traditional war.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And for all the Americans know, even a local farmer might have had a clay more stuff up his eyes.
• 9:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: If they wanted to win, well they were going to have to start thinking like the dink, or at least have the balls to cut the head off the dog.
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was some time in March, 1968, the Charlie Company first battalion of infantry had been assigned to task for us in Barker.
• 9:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: To assist on a such a destroy mission under the Taramian Peninsula.
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: There had been one village that had turned into a particular ball-like, because Recon reported that it had a gook infestation, that was now mine, laying for the traps wherever you put your foot down.
• 10:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: That would be trapped to wouldn't kill you, but a blow-up with your legs, and the men in task for us barker.
• 10:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: had a special name for the area, Pinkville, and why they call it that?
• 10:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, but in a point of the story.
• 10:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: For one thing's for sure, they all know if you were bashing through Pinkville.
• 10:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: You'd be leaving without a limb, or was still your life.
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And his reputation was spread and quicker than the Sepulis that the Goot Crocus were given to soldiers for five bucks a pop.
• 10:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And no one wanted to receive orders saying they were going to Pinkville.
• 10:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was only in the morning in March, the Task Force Barker had it out, who a Hamlet called me lie, known to the Americans as pink fell.
• 11:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: My name that would prepare in any soldiers' heart, would them joke in that even the chickens to see the big gooks, and be hostile towards them, with all of them being told that the mission was to go into pink fell, and eradicate the problem.
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Any villages who ran from Charlie Company,
• 11:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: were ordered by the encirclean companies to execute them.
• 11:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: When Charlie Company arrived at the outskirts of the village, as if to set the tone.
• 11:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: A small boy, maybe three or four, approached him, curious, a radio operator raised his M16, blew the kids out off.
• 11:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: What the Lieutenant bark and hout?
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are no innocent civilians.
• 11:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are only cooks.
• 11:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then one of the company's offices, a second lieutenant, Cali, gathered up several groups of the villages, mostly women, children, and old men.
• 12:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then they executed them on the spot.
• 12:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And anyone who tried to run, they would cut down.
• 12:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if they were good enough to get by as that, they were taken out by the company in circle in the village.
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then they were ordered to burn the village down to the ground.
• 12:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the soldiers would later report they slaughtered villages, like they were sheep and livestock.
• 12:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: With the females, even the children, not getting off so lightly, because they were raped before they got to taste the bullet, enough to that, no one won big party.
• 12:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: It didn't take long before world had starts spreading, neither units and civilians, but a massacre and a place that they called Pinkville,
• 12:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: One private men are all house indulging after night-heavy drinking, broke down and cried when the hawker's arms, saying he couldn't get the image of the women and children that he murdered at his head.
• 13:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Me dream about them, but I'm staring at them, but the wounds in the head.
• 13:21
  [SPEAKER_09]: What kind of people, men, women, children, men, women, children, babies, babies?
• 13:26
  [SPEAKER_09]: uh... lieutenant cali came over and said you know what do you know and uh... i said yes or i took for granted that uh... he just wanted to wear a fortune and uh... he left and came back about the internet uh... ten or fifteen minutes later and uh... said i couldn't get uh... killed him yet you killed how many that well i found them on all the medics or uh... you can uh... you just pray the area in the common where you've got to kill them how many killed
• 13:55
  [SPEAKER_09]: So I might have killed about 10 or 15 of them.
• 14:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: Men, women, and children.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: Men, women, and children.
• 14:04
  [SPEAKER_09]: And babies.
• 14:04
  [SPEAKER_09]: And babies.
• 14:07
  [SPEAKER_09]: Why did I do it?
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_09]: Because I felt like I was ordered to do it.
• 14:12
  [SPEAKER_09]: And they've seen like, you know, at the time, I felt like I was doing the right thing right there.
• 14:25
  [SPEAKER_09]: I lost Bernie, I lost the good, damn good, Bernie.
• 14:30
  [SPEAKER_09]: Bobby Wilson.
• 14:32
  [SPEAKER_09]: And it was on my consciousness.
• 14:35
  [SPEAKER_09]: It was on, so after I'd done it, I felt good to play on that day, you're getting to me.
• 14:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's a hiding, I think, for many Americans, to understand that young, capable, brave, American boys could line up.
• 14:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: old men, women, children, and babies, and shoot them down and call a lot.
• 15:06
  [SPEAKER_09]: How do you explain that?
• 15:08
  [SPEAKER_09]: I won't know.
• 15:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: The killing of enemy civilians, and wars and conflicts, now that ain't no.
• 15:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: But many observers were to note Is that it had never been so intimate And of course, there's a pink film
• 15:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: using bayonets, grenades, guns, bashing babies to death with the butts of their M-16s.
• 15:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: With the final death count being 407, all people, ladies, and babies.
• 15:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: When experts in scholars look back and analyze me lie, in the massacre that occurred there, they uncomfortable truth is that the soldiers involved.
• 16:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: They want monsters in most cases.
• 16:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: but it was after they arrived.
• 16:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: What happened to him is better explained by a set of powerful psychological pressures that can push ordinary people into extraordinary violence.
• 16:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: First is that the humanization in Vietnam.
• 16:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: The enemy was often invisible, no uniforms, no clear front lines, over time, soldiers were trained implicitly or explicitly
• 16:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: but has potential threats.
• 16:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Unlanguage played a role here.
• 16:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Ragatory names like Gook, Slope, Charlie, Dink, Zipaz, and General Laza, Trasworth, the locals.
• 16:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: He wrote it on the empathy.
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: When you stop seeing someone full of human, the barrier, to harming them with drops, and they just become fucking animals at the end of a barrel.
• 17:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Second, there's fear and frustration.
• 17:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: The U.S. troops will fight in a guerrilla war against an enemy like the Via calm, who could strike and disappear, who would be traps, ambushes, and constant uncertainty created a sense of danger, there was everywhere.
• 17:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: When soldiers took casualties without ever seeing a clear enemy, that frustration could build into anger.
• 17:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes redirected towards civilians, because they didn't even know what they were civilians.
• 17:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then there's obedience to authority and group pressure.
• 17:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: In high stress combat situations, soldiers rely heavily on orders and on each other.
• 17:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: if a commanding officer signals directly or indirectly that extreme measures are acceptable.
• 17:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Individuals are far more likely to go along.
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Psychological studies have shown that ordinary people will carry out harmful actions if they believe authority justifies it.
• 18:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Another factor is moral disengagement in war, the usual rules of society are already suspended.
• 18:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Violence becomes normalized over time, actions that would be unthinkable in civilian life can start to feel permissible, especially when framed as necessary for survival or mission success.
• 18:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then finally, there's the group think, the group dynamics.
• 18:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: No one wants to be an outsider and a tight-knit unit.
• 18:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: If others are participating or no one's objecting, it becomes much harder for an individual to step in and say no.
• 18:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Silence can become complicity.
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: None of this excuses what happened.
• 18:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it does explain how environments like norm could push ordinary people into committing acts that outside of that context.
• 18:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: They ended up doing things that once upon a time were to seem unimaginable.
• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: But still, there were those in Pinkville who disobeyed orders, and they risked their lives doing it.
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: because although the body count was high, it could have been much higher.
• 19:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Never one for individuals like helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson, who brought his helicopter down between the soldiers and their intended victims.
• 19:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: In order to his crew to fire upon any of his fellow Americans that didn't stop firing upon civilians.
• 19:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Not knowing that less than a mile away, another company had killed 97 innocent women and children.
• 19:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was later reported that not every soldier took part in the massacre that day.
• 19:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And some of them, despite orders, led women and children away to safety.
• 19:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hugh Thompson was the first to break the cold of silence and report what he saw, but no one is as chain of command did anything about it.
• 19:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: and it turned out to be one of the Vietnam war's biggest cover-ups.
• 20:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was only later, when an ex-corporal named Ronald right now, who had heard about it from several other soldiers while on leave, he wrote several letters to the president, as well as 12 other high rank and individuals in the military, in the government.
• 20:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because he said he couldn't get out of his head, with the soldiers that told him, and he wouldn't be able to live with himself unless he said something.
• 20:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: The first thing that President Nixon did when he heard about it was infestigate those who'd reported the slaughter telling his aid that it was those dirty run Jews from New York who were behind it and he'd get them.
• 20:43
  [SPEAKER_06]: Now I understand that there has been and continues to be opposition to the war and Vietnam on the campuses and also in the nation.
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_06]: We expected, however,
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_06]: under no circumstances will I be affected, whatever, by it.
• 20:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: When news of the massacre reached the American public, even the most fervent of war supporters, we're now having their doubts.
• 21:08
  [SPEAKER_08]: Challenges have been made that troops of the America all divisions, killed as many as 567 South Vietnamese civilians, during a sweep in March 1968.
• 21:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: I guess they didn't consider Goeks,
• 21:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Eventually, Lieutenant General William R. Piers was put in charge of the investigation.
• 21:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Man who was a hero, they knew he couldn't be corrupted.
• 21:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Piers' investigation concluded that 30 American soldiers, including that the vision commander, had either committed the atrocities or conspired to cover up.
• 21:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: When Piers had concluded his investigation,
• 21:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: but as a parius made him change it and eventually describe what had happened and pink fell as a tragedy of major proportions and the end the army indicted 25 offices and men including the platoon leader Lieutenant William Kelly who had been on the ground ordering the men as he also put the trigger
• 22:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Historically, medsawed the cataparise, what happened to me lie, when measuring it up against other tragedies, and a war that now seems to have no point.
• 22:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And most likely, it'll be forgotten in history as generations come and go.
• 22:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what happened in me lying isn't just a story about war, it's a warning about people.
• 22:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because the most unsettling lesson isn't that evil exists.
• 22:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: It said it doesn't always arrive looking like a monster.
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like following orders, one step too far.
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Me and I force us to confront something uncomfortable, that under the right or the wrong conditions, ordinary people can cross lines, they once believed, wrong-breakable.
• 23:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Not because they set out to become killers, but because those lines are road slowly,
• 23:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: quietly, until they're gone, but there's another lesson though, because even there, in that moment, not everyone complied a few shows to resist, to intervene, to say no.
• 23:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that matters, because it reminds us that, well, the capacity for darkness exists.
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: So does the responsibility to stand up against it, even when it's unpopular, even when it's dangerous.
• 24:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Me lie, misinjust history.
• 24:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: I miss a question.
• 24:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: What would you do if you were there?
• 24:37
  [SPEAKER_10]: Tell me to run Tell me to leave this city and move on And get gone Tell me to fly Tell me that it's gonna be alright I can leave for a while
• 25:07
  [SPEAKER_10]: Don't you crack a smile, don't look into my eyes or I might stay Because I can't see it coming I think I might be full for a genuine love The timing is tragic
• 25:37
  [SPEAKER_10]: But this winter has a magic Makes my heart come undone And I guess I don't mind And you will
• 26:08
  [SPEAKER_10]: Tell me a lie, tell me it's just gonna end like the other times When I stay behind, call me a fool Tell me I'm better off without you To forget you
• 26:38
  [SPEAKER_10]: But don't you crack a smile, don't look into my eyes Don't you make me fall, don't ruin it all But I may never leave Because I can't see it coming I think I might be falling
• 27:13
  [SPEAKER_10]: The timing is tragic This winter has a magic Makes my heart come undone And I guess I don't mind I guess I don't mind And January love
• 27:48
  [SPEAKER_10]: Tell me to run, tell me to leave this city