the Vietnam War was one of the first truly televised Wars but even the violence projected into living rooms via TV screens couldn't capture the brutality of it all from generals collecting body parts to undercover Viet Kong infiltrating embassies here is some of what wasn't covered some of the scariest secrets of the the Vietnam [Music] War Robert Ro might have been Francis for cop's inspiration for Colonel Curts but Tony Poe might have been closer to the fix derange General the stuff po did during the war would have made randle's character set up a bit straighter and
say really man that's a bit much Anthony petney commonly known as Tony Poe was a CIA operative who was involved in covert operations from the Vietnam War and the leosan Civil War a lesser known war that lasted from 1959 to 1975 in Lao right on the border of Vietnam he worked in Lao as part of the CIA special activities Division and conducted shadowy paramilitary and counterinsurgency activities against the communist regime pet Lao and their North Vietnamese allies it's been said that Tony Poe engaged in some pretty brutal tactics during his operations in Lao some reports
suggest that he paid bounties for the bodess heads and ears of the members of the pet Lao the Communist Guerilla force that was fighting to overthrow the leosan government these tactics were part of a broader strategy to intimidate and demoralize the enemy according to a biography of Po written by a guy named John Pros he even took these sever body parts and stapled some of them to his intelligence reports that he then sent back to the US Embassy in vienen the capital of Lao did he want the higher ups to be all ears it's unclear
what effect Po's Grizzly messages had but it's clear that PO was a little unhinged po also allegedly dropped a few heads on a village that was accused of firing on his air America aircraft air America was a CIA owned airline that provided logistical support for covert operations in Southeast Asia the air mail of the severed head was yet another shocking act aimed at punishing the village and deterring further attacks post time in the Le oan jungle was on paper supposed to only include training Le oian troops to fight against their communist enemies but po went
rogue a few times and led missions with unauthorized Personnel against the pet La forces Po's secret army was totally off the books and it's unclear the extent to which they fought po was eventually extracted from Lao by then he had w a leosan woman they would live in Thailand with their kids until 1990 while not one single person there was some lesson Savory Dynamics between soldiers and Vietnamese women during the war some of these women were called Hooch Maids women who would be busted from Villages into American camps to clean their Barracks which were nicknamed
hooches after a loose pronunciation of the Vietnamese word for house being a hooch ma was actually quite lucrative relative to the income earned by an average Vietnamese person in the 60s and 70s Hooch Maids were considered upper middle class and a lot of them earned around $60 a month close to the monthly salary of a captain in the the South Vietnamese Army but not everything about the job was above board there were plenty of stories of these Maids being exploited and coerced by the soldiers and a lot of them were known to keep the plumbing
clean for the men during the war then there were the mamasans or bar girls mamasans were local Vietnamese women who worked in bars and entertainment establishments near military bases they were kind of like the short-term concubines of US soldiers in Vietnam they served drinks to American soldiers and offered companionship some of these mamons entered into these Rel relationships willingly but others not so much the relationships between these women and the gis were complex and often built on unequal power dynamics the soldiers had access to financial resources and material Comforts while the mamasans were dependent on
their clients for income and support some soldiers took advantage of this power in Balance to exert control over the women leading to exploitive and abusive situations the soldiers might offer gifts and financial assistance as a way to control and manipulate these women and then there were the more obvious forms of exploitation it's estimated that by the end of the war there were as many as half a million women of the night across Vietnam the next Vietnam era doctor was less concerned with helping his patient's health and more concerned with how far he could push their
minds towards Insanity imagine going to a psychiatrist because you're depressed and instead of therapy he gives you a magic pill that has you permanently seen Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds James Ketchum was a US Army Officer and psychiatrist known for his involvement in the military's top secret psychemon as a US Army chemical corpes Edgewood Arsenal program was started in order to research and develop chemical agents that could be used to incapacitate the minds of adversaries without causing permanent physical harm Ketchum kicked off his military career as a medical officer in the US Army and
later became a psychiatrist in the early 1960s he was assigned to work at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland where he became one of the key figures in the program researching psychoemotional of non-lethal chemical agents for use in military operations these agents often referred to in more PR friendly terms as comma lives or incapacitating agents were intended to cause temporary disruptions in an enemy's cognitive and psychological functioning leading to confusion and impaired decision-making sounds nice on paper with all the fancy lingo but in reality Ketchum and his team were basically just feeding drugs to unsuspected VI
victims and seeing what would happen Ketchum carried out lots and lots of experiments on both military volunteers and unwitting subjects to test the effects of different psyco chemical agents soldiers often unaware of the true nature of the experiments were exposed to substances such as LSD bz and other hallucinogenic and mind-altering chemicals Ketchum and his team evaluated the efforts of these substances on things like cognition and behavior trying to understand their potentially military applications the program also explored the possibility using these chemicals for crowd control in other non-lethal military scenarios bz for example was developed as
an aerosol that could potentially be sprayed or dropped as artillery shells or grenades over Rowdy crowds or riots in order to confuse and disorient the participants known chemically as three quinal benzilate bz can have people seeing intense incapacitating visions that last for days oh I bet that was a lot of fun Ketchum psycho Warfare program at Edgewood Arsenal remain highly classified hidden from the public and even from many high ranking military officials but in the 1970s as details of the program's experiments and ethical concerns came to light investigations were launched and hearings were held to
examine what Ketchum and his psychosis inducing team were up to critics raised serious ethical questions about the use of actual people in the experiments people who were exposed to pretty heavyduty chemicals that had long- lasting effects and could absolutely induce psychosis the psycho chemical warfare program at Edgewood Arsenal was eventually discontinued in the early 1970s Ketchum continued his career as a psychiatrist but without his fun chemical toys I wonder what he prescribed instead maybe inhaling paint fumes to cure anxiety on the morning of March 16th 1968 Lieutenant William CI and his men dropped from helicopters
into mili a village near South Vietnam's East Coast CI and his commanding officer Captain Ernest Medina had been told the landing Zone in a village would be hot packed with Viet Kong ready and waiting to attack in instead there was silence and a village filled only with women and children what happened next was one of the worst atrocities of the war C Splatoon proceeded to launcher brutal assaults on the unarmed villagers including people of all ages and gender more than 500 civilians lost their lives and many were subjected to horrific acts of violence and abuse
before being killed the incident was initially covered up by the military but reports eventually surface leading to public outrage and condemnation in November 1969 journalist seem more hirs broke the story of what happened in mili exposing the atrocities committed by US soldiers the Revelation sparked widespread outrage and led to yet More protest against the war protest that had picked up steam since the debacle of the Ted offensive a year earlier as the news of what happened in myi spread investigations were launched and CI was charged with taking out 109 South Vietnamese civilians also charged was
his commanding officer Captain Ernest Medina who reportedly ordered his men to destroy everything in the village charges against Medina were eventually dropped but cie nah he wasn't that lucky during C's trial which began in November 1970 he claimed that he was following orders and believed the civilians of myi were enemy combatants his defense team argued that he wasn't the only one responsible for the actions of his platoon and that he was acting under pressure in a chaotic and confusing situation but in March 1971 C was found guilty of taking the lives of 22 civilians and
was sentenced to life in prison his sentence was controversial though some saw c as a scapegoat for the larger failures of the military command structure and question the fairness of singling him out for prosecution in reality CI was definitely responsible for a lot of the Carnage in myi but so were about 20 others who were basically let off the hook including Captain Medina as a result of the public outcry and political pressures Cali sentence was reduced to 20 years by President Nixon he served only three and a half years under house arrest before being paroled
in 1974 so now we got a guy who was a perpetrator of one of the most gruesome images captured during the Vietnam war and a guy responsible for the brutal suppression of what's known as the Buddhist uprising of 1966 despite the peaceful image a lot of us have of Buddhist the uprising in South Vietnam in the midst of the war was anything but peaceful in 1966 General WN KN loan was serving as a chief of the South Vietnamese National Police and was a close Ally of prime minister W CI during his time South Vietnam was
facing internal political and Social Challenges including tensions between different military factions and religious groups when chanti another high-ranking military officer who was part of prime minister Key's Inner Circle became Jaded by certain decisions that were being made and wasn't too pleased with Key's government T was eventually booted from the inner circle and from January 21st to March 2nd he led an armed Uprising in huie which was part of the broader political and military power struggle within South Vietnam the uprising in Hui was disastrous an estimated 5 to 10% of the city's entire population perished in
a month of fighting many of those were civilians all told some 10,000 people lost their lives making the events at huie some of the bloodiest of the entire War General lean was responsible for suppressing the uprising in huie his forces successfully qu the Revolt leading to the death of win Chang T's faction in further solidifying kei's control however loan's actions during the Revolt weren't so Savory particularly in how he dealt with the Buddhist Community the suppression of Buddhist protests and demonstrations raised concerns about human rights abuses and political repression in South Vietnam then came the
Ted offensive in 1968 in a series of attacks during the Vietnamese New Year celebration or tet vion soldiers disguised as civilians and South Vietnamese soldiers infiltrated army bases and strategic points across the South including a brief takeover of the US Embassy in Saigon the offensive was ultimately unsuccessful but it was a major turning point in terms of public opinion it had become clear that the US and South Vietnamese were not winning the war in the photo of Lan doing out his personal form of Justice didn't help Lan was captured on film executing a handcuffed and
unarmed Viet Kong suspect named wi van Lim on a street in Saigon Lim himself was reportedly no Peach he was accused of taking out the entire family of a South Vietnamese Lieutenant including his mother and six children still the photograph of the execution taken by photographer Eddie Adams became one of the most horrifying and iconic of the entire Vietnam War the Vietnam War was a debacle in many ways and these men that we've talked about while they were just cogs in a machine still acting in ways that only made the W that much worse thanks
for watching what other creepy men from another time period do you want to know about let us know in the comments and don't forget to like And subscribe for more nutty history
