EARLY EPISODE: The Battle of Ap Bac
Early during the US War in Vietnam, incompetent American advisors to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), who is also incompetent, get incredibly mad as they attempt to get them to fight the Viet Cong, despite the fact the Americans never bothered to tell the ARVN about the battle plan, and every ARVN commander on the ground has to ask for permission to do any command position in a game of telephone that goes all of the way up to the President of South Vietnam.
Sources:
David Elliot. The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Change in the Mekong Delta 1930-1975
David Halberstam. The Making of a Quagmire: American and Vietnam During the Kennedy Era.
Neil Sheehan. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/educational-services/staff-rides/VSR/Ap-Bac-Vietnam/Material/Ap-Bac%20Preliminary%20Study%20Guide%20V1.0.pdf
https://www.historynet.com/the-battle-at-ap-bac-changed-americas-view-of-the-vietnam-war/
Comments (35)
An awesome subject for a video would be all the hijinx that went on in the A Shau Valley during the war in Vietnam. Tons of battles and skirmishes and misadventures in that neck of the woods. A whole-ass special forces came getting overrun, companies sent into the valley to act as diversionary bait during the Cambodian incursion. All sorts of stuff. I've always wanted to write a book just about that one valley during the war.
i went to high school and was in the band with william westmoreland’s grandson
ARVN fly into the fog and come out as monsters [ARVN]
ARVN comes in metal bawkses! The cowards! The fools!
I remember Ap Bac from Bright Shining Lie and the image of John Paul Vann freaking out and yelling from his observation plane flying over the ARVN forces is seared into my brain
Thomas Jane is in the Mist 😉
Hell yeah, my question got answered!
Well, I can cross one off my list of “battles to pitch Joe if we ever met”, bravo and well done. Also Vietnam is a blast, I’m trying to get back myself to see more. Also Hoi A was also the hottest place I’ve ever been as well.
Tom, you’re going to have a blast in Vietnam. I was there last year and it was the best vacation I’ve ever been on. Bring lots of linen clothing or have some made for you in Hoi An (it’s crazy cheap and only takes a couple days). It is also the hottest place I’ve ever been in.
I want a Panjadrum that goes through several pyrotechnic stages like a fireworks fountain and explodes in a cloud of smoke at the end to reveal the gender of the baby (whose?). As a rube to most apects of the Vietnam War I had always wondered why the Mekong was such a hotspot but had no idea it was like this from the very start. I always assumed the Ho Chi Minh Trail ended much further north.
Even for a LLBD episode this is an exceptional clusterfuck. I’ve heard of a lot of terrible jobs and being an “advisor” in this situation is near the top of the list. And this is just the start of the Vietnam War. Spoiler, it doesn’t get any better.
Regarding Pete Hegseth's group chat, this talk explains how Pete sharing war plans with random journalists is actually the least of the security issues that occurred (the fork of Signal used by Pete apparently was Israeli spyware logging all communications and user credentials in easily accessible plain text): https://youtu.be/5VlhsT5Kbsk?si=TVjuEk1VPgDuJyK5
We love fucking up the early stages of conflicts, and it invariably gets worse from there.
case of mistaken milf
Tom, Ivy from Soul Calibur has the whip
Many of these same problems would also happen in Hue and the related operations. Commanders at Hue would call back to base to say 'hey we need help' and their superiors at base would imply they were shit at their jobs or cowards, and they better stop dicking around and beat the VC. There was also at least one instance of a tank commander refusing to help infantry do something, to which an infantryman responded with, 'Do it or I will fucking shoot you'.
Vietnam was what made us lose what good standing we had left Post-WW2. The fact people where calling for Vietnam to be nuked shows exactly why developing the bomb was not only a huge a mistake but I also believe it started to make the military lazy. There is a reason why we haven't won a war since WW2. We know what's in our back pocket and it makes everything feel like a really bad written play. No, I take all that back. It makes us like Hulk Hogan. We believe our own hype, we have 3 moves (play victim, kill the brown people and drop the leg just so the shit show is over) and we believe everyone owes us everything.
We've won multiple wars since WW2, like the various invasions in Latin America and the First Gulf War.
If anyone wants a good primer on the Vietnam war, I'd recommend reading Street Without Joy, then Hell In A Very Small Place, followed by Hue 1968. Street Without Joy covers some of the same information that Hell does, but it is very much worth reading by itself. Having read Hell before Street, I know it's be better the other way around. Those two books would give a good look at the war from a political ( foreign and domestic ) view, a strategic view, and a tactical one, particularly around the French. Hue 1968 does a fantastic job of more of the same, later in the conflict. You get a good look at how tangled and fucked command structures were, Vietnamese POVs, civilian and otherwise, how American and AVRN forces interacted, etc.
I will always upvote Bernard Fall! I went to a college with a very large ROTC program. When I found out the library didn't have a copy of "Street Without Joy," I bought two copies and donated them.
Wasn't Joe's grandfather also as a part of the Foreign Legion that tried to kill DeGaulle?
He needs to either do an episode about it or include it in his memoir. Joe! We must know the tale of your grandfather!
Oh God, the bombers at Dien Bien Phu were a whole thing. So the French wanted Americans to help. Americans wanted to get involved, but wanted to do it deniably so as not to provoke China. One problem at Dien Bien Phu is that France, due to complex NATO doctrines, didn't have any heavy bombers or pilots trained to fly them. So if America wasn't willing to bomb North Vietnam, they asked if they could use American B-29s. Akerica reluctantly agreed, but only after training French pilots and painting all the B-29s in French colors. The battle ended before any of this really mattered at all.
It's also worth noting that American pilots were all over Dien Bien Phu, largely flying logistics planes because heavy lift was another area in which France was lacking- again, partially due to NATO doctrine ( I think ) and partially due to their logistics being stretched to the bleeding edge in Vietnam. For more information, read Hell In A Very Small Place.
In Tom's defense, Ohio is spiritually Southern. Combination of Great Migration black culture, general hickdom, and the love of the confederate flag (baffling to me personally)
Same could also be said for Indiana. I remember having a college history professor showing us lynching pictures from Indiana because they were a midwestern state outside of the traditional south with heavy influence from the south because of migration of southern whites or something along those lines. It was nearly a decade ago so I could be misremembering the details.
Dying at Midwestern One Piece...
Incredible opening bit
You wanna talk litigious companies, you best mention the IWGP sniper squads that take you out when you upload one (1) NJPW match onto YouTube
They send Minoru Suzuki to you as you sleep.
I think the stereotypes of the North Vietnamese came about to try and make everyone forget the US lost.
Please talk about Long Tan so people might understand how battles in Vietnam could have been WON. Not because I'm proud of the Australian Army because we had no reason being there, but because it makes the US Army look even worse.
Col David Hackworth said the Australians, with their "checkerboard" tactics, were the only people other than the VC/NVA who knew how to fight the war. He sent young officers from his unit to train with the Aussies, against orders.
I knew this would be an episode one day purely for how much of a chaotic shitshow this Battle was
John Paul “pedo” Vann! My man!