Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 104 - The Edgewood Experiments

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

During the Cold War the US dosed thousands of its soldiers with acid. Hilarity did not ensue. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys sources: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/secrets-of-edgewood https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/manufacturing-madness https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/17/operation-delirium

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now back to the show. The drug was administered in a drink of water given at the start of each day's exercise. 25 minutes later, the first effects of the drug became apparent. The men began to relax and to giggle. But this man was more seriously affected and had to be removed from the exercise. Hello, and welcome to yet another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and with me is, well, not always, but this time, Rich. Hey.

Hey, Rich. Hey, Joe. How's quarantine? It's a thing that's happening to me right now. Being an essential worker. Well, I guess I am an essential worker, but I am working from home, which is interesting and also horrible

because the army tried to set up some on the fly bullshit in two weeks and it's a completely non-functioning system. Have they thought about simply hanging a banner up that says mission accomplished? I mean, probably. That's crossed their mind. That's what, or is it your fault? Oh, it's always my fault. You see, everybody, I'm doing okay in quarantine because I'm a podcaster.

My life is already a horrible, depressing, shut-in thing. So this has just made my lifestyle socially acceptable. So shout out to the coronavirus. Actually, you know what? You don't, in fact, have to shout out to the coronavirus. Actually, you know what? You don't, in fact, have to hand it to the coronavirus. Yeah, let's not hand it to the coronavirus. I am incredibly hungover. So a lot of what I say today probably will not make sense.

I think this is the first time I've ever seen you record not drinking alcohol. Very rarely. Normally when I interview people that live in the UK or whatever because I end up recording really early in the morning, that's pretty much it. It's the only time I'm ever sober on the show. I don't see what time zone has to do with anything. Speaking of sobriety, have you ever done acid? No.

You haven't? Okay. So we're going to talk a whole lot about acid today and other hallucinogens. I've had mixed experiences, but not this much acid. I did like once and it's like really expensive. At least it was where I was growing up.

So yeah, I'm good on that. I never priced it or anything. You never Amazon that shit? No. So I actually had a different episode planned for this week. And that was one on the Spanish flu. Because I got really, really sick of people just saying that coronavirus was like the flu. But every time I open some news agency or something, they're talking about, because I got really, really sick of people just saying that coronavirus was like the flu. Uh, but, and you know,

every time I opened some news agency or something, they're talking about, well, let's talk about the plague of 1918. And I got really sick of that cause they're getting a whole bunch of shit wrong. And then I realized that people are probably pretty sick about talking and hearing about pandemics.

Um, cause you can't go anywhere without hearing that. And they don't listen to us. This is our new normal. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I don't listen to us. This is our new normal. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to help out people feel like shit. So there's other people that will do that.

We're here to make people laugh from time to time and give them a distraction. So I'm good on that. Instead, we're going to talk about the time that the U.S. Army dosed a whole bunch of soldiers with acid. That's kind of fun. Have you ever heard of Edgewood? Can I have some context? The Edgewood testing facility. The Army does not like to talk about it.

So that's where a lot of this is going to take place at. But before we get there, we have to talk about a guy named Colonel Jack Ketchum. I thought you were going to say ketchup for a second. He's actually Ash Ketchum's father. He just wants to be the very best like no one ever has.

To catch them is his real test. To train them. You've never watched Pokemon? Keep going. I lost the thread. I lost it. So Colonel Ketchum is a pretty strange guy. He grew up in New York and by all accounts was like a child prodigy.

He excelled at like every educational thing that he ever touched. His family was super religious and his father worked for a guy named Norman Vincent Peale. Now, I only bring that up because it's kind of interesting that it's the guy who wrote the book, The Power of Positive Thinking. So like all those people that like get mad whenever you're like a pessimist, it's like bad bad vibes or whatever because they think that you can like lathe of heaven bad things into existence by just thinking bad thoughts you can kind of blame him i subscribe to that in a small sense cool i don't i mean it's like um i get a lot of shit uh for like for instance saying how trump's probably going to win reelection it was, shut up.

It's not like I'm speaking fucking into existence. I'm not giving it power. It's not Pennywise. I don't believe that. I don't believe that you can speak things into existence, but I do think that having an overall negative outlook on things brings negativity into your life. I think being negative all the time will certainly make you a depressed person i don't i don't mean just being like a depressed person i

mean like having like actual negative things happen to you over and over and over again if because you just like have that negative outlook and negative attitude about everything i don't know i'm a lifelong pessimist i'm doing all right uh but yeah whenever there's there's other more extreme versions of this where it's like it like legitimately thinks it's like brain magic it's stupid uh kind of mcgregor buys in that sort of shit and uh i think it's dumb but uh anyway he ended up becoming a doctor who majored in psychology and philosophy at dartmouth and cornell um now there's a bit of a problem. He was incredibly smart, but he could not keep a schedule. He did not do well in a classroom.

He has rigid coursework and due dates. He did not handle that well. He had a hard time focusing, so he started taking dexedrine. Now, if you remember from our episode on meth in World War II, that's what they gave pilots to stay awake for hours at a time. I thought it sounded familiar. meth in World War II, that's what they gave pilots to stay awake for hours at a time. Yeah. I thought it sounded familiar. He had a lifelong dexedrine habit

and he probably just switched to meth eventually. I'm not entirely sure. But the problem was eventually when he graduated, he was always broke. Maybe from all the meth. So he decided to join the army like every other hopeless

drug addict. And he got stationed at the Walter Reed Institute of Research. These were some pretty obvious problems began to surface. He was very desperate for results. But

he wanted to... He was super desperate for results because he wanted to impress his mentor. So on Thanksgiving one year, he just opened up a cat's brain and embedded electrodes in it. Now he wanted to see, and this is the furthest explanation I could, I could find regarding this.

If he could give the animal a new way to communicate, I have no idea what his intentions were. Now remember how I said he was like a shrink and a philosopher? Well, notice how I left out surgeon and veterinarian. He did not do this well. Because he had no idea what he was doing,

he installed the wires, decided it didn't work, and then just said, fuck it, went and played a game of tennis. Yeah, so psychology and surgeon. What about psychosurgery? Two completely different specialties, I would say. Maybe I'm thinking of a different word. It's woo-based bullshit where they act like they're doing surgery on you and they're not.

Like a grifter? Well, yeah, but I don't think it's called psycho surgery i think it's something else but um yeah it's weird they'll like oh you have a problem in your stomach and they'll like put their hand on your stomach like and act like he's doing surgery it doesn't make a lot of sense it's are you sure like it's not real like i mean but like it's it's psychic bullshit but yeah yeah yeah everything that you're explaining just sounds like culty grifter shit yeah kind of yeah i mean in a long enough timeline everybody's a griffner grifter a griffner um now uh he was gone for a couple hours, and when he came back, the cat was dead.

Yeah, you cut its fucking brain open, you dumb fuck. And plugged in a whole bunch of fucking wires. Like, nah, fuck it, time to go hit the clay. So not only is he not a surgeon, he's also just not very fucking smart. He's incredibly smart, but very stupid, if that makes sense. It does. It makes perfect does uh he got in trouble for

this but that didn't really matter nobody really seemed to care all that much uh in his defense because this is all from a new yorker series of articles where they interviewed the man himself and like they let him like okay so why'd you do that jack and he's like well i thought a veterinarian was gonna show up and um uh like take care of the cat and like well why did you think that he's like well i thought a veterinarian was gonna show up and um uh like take care of the cat and like well why did you think that he's like well a veterinarian works there like did you call the veterinarian he's like no yeah just not just not smart yeah so he also turned out to be kind of a shitty psychologist um he had a few patients at Walter Reed and to end up being a shitty psychologist at Walter Reed

is pretty impressive. It has a checkered history, to say the least. But he used this time to submit a ton of unpublished articles to New Yorker as well as an essay titled Sex in Outer Space to Playboy. It was not published.

Sex in Outer Space, the Playboy. It was not published. Sex in Outer Space? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I did not find a way to read this article. I'm assuming it's fiction. If not, I want to know how he did his research. When he did have patients,

he brought a huge fucking typewriter into the room. Not a transportable typewriter by any means. And while he was talking to his patients, he wouldn't type out like cliff notes. He would literally type everything that they were saying like a stenographer. That seems distracting. Right?

I mean, it's like a loud ass 1950s typewriter. Let me see if I can... I mean, it's like a loud ass 19 fucking 50s typewriter. Let me see if I can. So like I was saying, I feel like I have a bad relationship with my father. Sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of my giant fucking typewriter. That was just a wireless keyboard, guys. Imagine that with an actual typewriter. Yeah. He eventually, everybody he worked with kind of realized he sucked at his job.

And that's when he was in a meeting with the chief of neuropsychiatry and said that his real passion was research, not patients, not treating people. He wanted to test them. Well, yeah's that's a whole i mean branch of psychology there are many many people who go to school for psychology who don't become psychologists they've right researchers right and i'm willing to bet well we'll find out but i have a feeling that his ethics were already pretty gray because he's like i'm gonna sell open this cat's head so, maybe don't put that guy in research. Bad things might happen. Yeah.

Spoiler alert. Yep. So the chief of neuropsychiatry, pretty much a season out. He's like, he doesn't want to be here. Cool. Yeah, there's this place. He got told about Edgewood Arsenal. And that once there, he'd be able to do as much research as he wanted so ketchum was on board uh it turned out

that edgewood had one hell of a reputation already before he he even got there so edgewood had been built back in world war one um world war one is famous for a lot of things none of them good uh but mostly the the first time humans said to gas one another in war um the u.s army decided that well like everyone did that nobody really knew how to defend against it like we didn't have gas masks yet or chemical suits so you had to find out a way to make those so they uh launched a detailed program how to study the effects and combat gas with protective equipment. They did this in the worst way possible and probably the way you're already assuming that they did it. They built gas chambers and just shoved in U.S. Army conscripts and then noted to see what happened next.

Nobody's really sure how many people died during this whole thing. More than a few. I wish I could say that I was surprised, but they're talking about testing coronavirus vaccines on soldiers right now, so fuck us, I guess. First, we have to make sure that they're ill. So how do we do that? Well, you see, Nick tested positive for the coronavirus.

He's going to give you a big old open mouth kiss spit on it in there uh you're like when i was first hearing i'm like oh they at edgewood they did uh you know world war one gas testing i wonder how they did oh they just put him in a gas chamber okay should have should have seen that coming um and that not everybody there died most people did survive even if they were horribly maimed. A private wrote home in 1918 that said, quote, everyone we talked to on the way out here said they were coming to the place that God forgot.

Yeah. Imagine going to the one place worse than Western Europe in World War I. Anyway, after World War II, Allied forces discovered that Nazi scientists had developed even more deadly gas which is nerve gas they knew they needed to research it

now the USSR peeled away most of the Nazi research in the nerve gas field but the US got their hands on several scientists and immediately sent them to Edgewood to go to work it was there that the US Army spent a lot of time dabbling in sarin gas and later creating VX gas, one of the most toxic substances

ever created by man. So, yay, we did it. Seems like they're dealing with a pretty large margin of error here. Oh, huge, yeah.

Margin for error. It's going to turn out that you think that these people are like, well, if I'm going to handle like literally an apocalypse weapon to a group of people that you're going to hope that they're responsible or professional.

No, absolutely not. While much of Edgewood's research hinged on the lethality of gases that they were playing with and how to counteract them, Still more of it was on these weapons' cognitive side effects. They found out through testing that nerve agents would make subjects feel giddy, nervous, and anxious. They would have nightmares, lose sleep, and become depressed. They found out that when men were dosed with a very, very diluted version of Tobin gas, they became fatigued, apathetic, and lost interest in even the most basic things and wouldn't feed themselves for days at a time. A single drop of VX applied to the skin of a man would make them totally hopeless, unable to feed themselves, and wracked by horrible pains for days.

Also, those guys that were getting dosed with VX gas did not know they were being dosed with VX gas. What did they think was happening? So most people were told that like, we're going to give you this medicine and might make you feel a little agitated. A lot of people died. More were like horribly, horribly,

horribly scarred for life. And the worst research has not started yet. Yeah. Fuck ethics. And this is post world war two. So like people knew like the um people knew about like joseph mengele and nazi experiments and japanese experiments in like unit 731 because like they employed them uh like shiro ishii was working on the east coast during

this time uh so uh like they knew the optics of this was real, real bad. A lot of people said that we look like Joseph Mengele. We should probably stop. At any point that you're like, how Mengele-y am I getting right now? And if that's a scale that you're working with, you need to take a good long, long look. If you're anywhere even near that scale, maybe scale it back. We're going to get worse. So it was like when they found out

that testing these nerve agents gave them all these cognitive side effects, it was a lot like when they found out like when they're testing a heart medication, they found out that

it doesn't really work all that well for your heart, but it does make old man's dicks hard. They're like, Eureka, we've discovered something. There's a side effect, though. There's a pretty big downside to using Tobit and VX gas this way. They're super fucking lethal.

And even when they diluted it, they routinely nearly killed people and threw them into cardiac arrest. Like, well, we don't want that. We got to think something else. him into cardiac arrest. Like, well, we don't want that. We got to think something else. In 1949, Wilson Green, which is Edgewood's scientific director at the time, thought there must be a new way to go about this. He wanted to search for a compound that would contain none of the lethal effects of all these gases, but they would have all of the debilitating mental side effects. He wanted to create a weapon that would end war without death and without the total destruction of a nation. Because remember, this is

five years removed from World War II and half the world has been destroyed. So they're like, what if we didn't have to do that anymore? So like, eh, it's cool. He called it Psychochemical Warfare, which pretty cool band name. It's up there. Psychochemical Warfare. I could see Psychochemical

Warfare opening up for Corpse Road for sure. Now, this actually tracks pretty well with the invention of chemical weapons in the first place. They were thought of as a humane way of killing because normally you're blowing people apart or shooting them. And people thought, well, they'll just kind of drown on their own lung juices juices like that's fine i think i'd rather be blown up yeah definitely for sure because at least i'll die then i won't live to be like horrible and blind uh like or drown on my own fucking lung juice yeah it's a horrible way to go um the the guy who created what we know now is modern chemical warfare is a guy named fritz Haber. He called it another level of killing. Uh,

so it's kind of another evolution of that. Also, uh, Fritz Haber got what was coming to him because he was a Jewish man and he, uh, helped invent a Zyklon B. So like he was, was totally fine making chemical weapons,

which would then go on to kill his entire family, uh, in the, in death camp. So it he was, was totally fine making chemical weapons, which would then go on to kill his entire family, uh, in the, in death camp. So it's like, oof. Oof. Yeah.

It's like, it's like the guy who invented, uh, dynamite, uh, uh, uh, Nobel ended up,

um, realizing that he made something horrible. So he came up with the peace prize to make up for it, except for its hopper just killed fucking 6 million people. Good job, buddy. Uh, that he made something horrible, so he came up with the Peace Prize to make up for it. Except Fritz Hopper just killed fucking six million people. Good job, buddy. Yeah, they quickly saw that, like, I mean, after World War II,

when, you know, however many people were gassed to death, they realized, like, wow, chemical weapons are fucking terrible. We need to think of a new way to fight a war, hence psychochemical warfare. Instead of making soldiers choke to death or melting them with nuclear hellfire, they would now simply make them temporarily unable to fight. Though, to be fair, Green was not an altruistic person, and he didn't really care too much about saving lives uh he wanted he one of the things that he wanted to find out about was if he could throw soldiers into what he called a suicidal mania uh and just make them spontaneously kill themselves in large numbers so like you wouldn't have to fight a war so instead of us killing the

enemy the enemy just kills themselves that's the same fucking thing right right green's a fucking bastard so like he's less of a bastard than the guy who invented VX gas. So, like, low bar here. We're talking real low bar. By the mid-1950s, psychochemical warfare was added to the research at the Arsenal, and thousands of soldiers were recruited into the Medical Research Volunteer Program. Now, you're probably wondering, just who in the fuck would volunteer to be a human test subject? Well, there's a very good chance that, like I said earlier, they didn't actually know

what the fuck they were signing up for. Recruiters, who were not doctors, showed up at units and sold the experiments as simply behavioral research. They'd get extra pay, fewer responsibilities other than showing up for tests, and they'd get three or four day weekends every single weekend. Furthermore, as the experiments crept further and further into the 1960s, it was a free ticket to get away from the Vietnam War. Actually, it's kind of funny. So I saw this personally in 2006 when I graduated at OSIT. So when we graduated,

we already had our orders, which is like the last week, I believe, uh, we got, uh, a huge presentation problem by the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, uh, like an NCO from there. Uh, and they were like, if you want, if you volunteer, you do, I think it was six months to a year. Uh, your orders are canceled no matter where you're going. So you don't have to worry about going to Iraq or Afghanistan. You get three or four day weekends every weekend. Oh, and there's an Xbox in every single barracks room. Xbox? Yeah. And at the time, I should point out the Xbox 360s were new.

Xboxes were old as shit. But like, yeah, I totally saw this. I don't think we got extra pay. But like, and they did not really talk about what you were going to do. Other than like, yeah, you're going to test new uniforms. You might drive a new vehicle around. It'll be cool. I'm like, that is, I was 17 years old. I'm like, yeah, you're going to test new uniforms. You might drive a new vehicle around. It'll be cool. I'm like,

that is, I was 17 years old. I'm like, that seems like a lie. Now, when volunteers first showed up to the arsenal, also,

I should point out that it seems like a lot of people were kind of sort of voluntold. Probably testing the fucking fire retardant chemicals

that are on the uniforms. Yep. The ones that they won't allow you to cut up and put over your face as masks right now. Yep. You're going to get a fucking rainbow of cancer. And I should point out that a lot of people in Edgewood did not really seem like they were fully volunteered. It was like, it was trees like, hey, you got orders to report to this place. Okay.

Like nobody told them that they could say no at any point. And once you were there, you got orders to report to this place. Okay. Like, nobody told them that they could say no at any point. And once you were there, you're in the army, now it's your job. You have to follow orders. Go to the cash chamber. Volunteers showed up. Only the most healthy would be chosen for chemical testing. Everybody else would be shoved off to test equipment

because they wanted a baseline healthy population to attempt to murder with psychochemical agents. Soldiers would then be asked to sign a consent form, though the consent form would not tell what they are consenting to because they would not know what drugs are going to be tested on. Even at the time of testing, they were not told. So that is, in case you're wondering, that is not legal.

No. That is not consent. I actually just took a class on this. The consent process for these fucking psychological studies and shit is extremely extensive. And if at any point you don't think that the person that you're talking to understands what's going on or doesn't have all of the information, you're supposed to read every single thing to them that's going to happen to them, and then they have to consent in person, with a signature, fully minded, all of those things.

There's an asterisk next to that. Unless you're in the military. And then when those drugs were used on them, like before, for instance, a test subject was injected with somin. Somin is a highly lethal nerve agent. He was told he might just experience a runny nose. He nearly died. He immediately went into cardiac arrest.

Jesus. Yeah. Hell of a runny nose. Now, for a long time now, I have to point out that these were not large scale tests yet. Congress was pretty hesitant to green light this kind of thing. But at the height of the cold war, all hesitation was gone. The doctors of Edgewood were allowed to do pretty much whatever they wanted

with absolutely zero oversight. Always have oversight. Especially in the fucking military. Yeah. I mean, they were all colonels and like, they had a,

something resembling a rank structure, but like, nobody paid attention to it. Nobody gave a shit. A lot of this had to do with the fact that they had intelligence

that the Soviet Union was doing their own psychochemical research, which is true. They did. But they also almost immediately dropped it because they realized that this shit doesn't work. It's pointless after a very short amount of time.

And there is some evidence saying that they knew that we knew. So they're just like, yeah, we're still doing that. Knowing that we were like, fuck it. We have to keep... I mean, that happened with literally psychics. I heard the Soviets soviets have psychics we need to work on psychics and the soviets like dude we did that like a day like 10 years ago like yep yeah yeah we have psychics and we did the same thing uh but so we so each set of waste resources doing shit i mean that's what they made the men who stare at goats about uh like they there was legitimately a guy who tricked the United States government into believing he could stare at something until it died. That's amazing. They spent tens of millions of dollars researching this. We spend our money well. But that is not my most favorite Cold War dumb idea.

If people were unaware, Congress and the military had become possessed by the ghost of Wile E. Coyote during the Cold War. They became a strange mix of supervillain and insane people that turned almost nothing down. But my personal favorite, and this is true, was a plan that would make the U.S. nuke the moon for no reason other than to show the Soviets they could do it.

The fucking moon? The moon. Nuke the moon! It's like some fucking absolute mind-blowing cartoon villain type shit that's a completely irreversible decision it was called project a119 if you want to guess why it was canceled why do you think because don't nuke the fucking moon that's why you would think they're sitting around like a circle circular table and someone is like

hey maybe don't nuke the moon everybody's like yeah you're right we shouldn't come up with these plans and we're tripping balls yeah that was a bad idea that was not it they were simply worried about public relations with the rest of america if they nuke the moon yeah i'd be pretty fucking pissed off uh also like it should be pointed out that people i'm pretty sure people knew that like the moon controlled the tides and shit back then like this isn't this isn't the 1800s this is the 1960s uh but yeah they cancel it because they were worried about negative public reaction to again nuking the moon it's amazing uh and this is why like a lot of like uh the considered like the best pulp sci-fi novels of all time were written around this period because the crazy ass ideas

they were coming up with was literally being spitballed in fucking government were they all fucking high on lsd uh i'm going to say possibly uh i mean they also wanted to use like nukes for like infrastructure projects like we're gonna we're gonna build a a canal nuke it is the plowshare program yeah uh that did not i believe that one got to actual testing and they realized like oh fuck We forgot about the radiation. Nobody can go near it. Uh, so in the late 1950s, Edgewood began its tests in earnest.

Uh, the chief medical director at the time was a guy named Doug Lindsay. He was a Korean war veteran and he walked around at the aid of a walking stick that was made out of a human leg bone. Where the fuck did he get a fucking leg bone? Uh, probably from all the VX. That seems really problematic.

Good to meet you, sir. Oh, I'm sorry, is that a fucking tibia? Ah, hello, yes, it is. This is the last person who said no to my experience. Leg bones aren't that long. It was a whole leg. Whoa. That is a whole leg. Whoa.

Yeah. That is a power play. Yeah, I mean, big dick energy for sure. Because like, it's like having a chair

that's slightly higher than somebody else's or something that's like, now I'm looming over you. But if somebody is being uppity in your meetings,

you're just like, ah, excuse me, I need a drink of water. And you purposely walk over with your fucking leg bone cane. Also, sometimes in the middle of conversations or lunch, he would simply jump out the second floor window just for fun to get a reaction out of people. What? Yep.

I've known some dumb fuck soldiers that would just randomly jump off of the balcony at the barracks just for fun. You're sitting at a table with one. I have repelled out of many a barracks building. No, not repelled, just randomly jump off of the balcony at the barracks just for fun. You're sitting at a table with one. I have repelled out of many a barracks building. No, not repelled, just straight jumped off. I have not done that. I did watch somebody do that. I do not think it was for funsies though. Yeah, that one wasn't for fun.

Also my uncle, but he was the dumb fuck soldier at one point. He jumped out of a bar. Dumb fuck soldiers are eternal. I'm pretty sure if you took a soldier, you changed up boots for sandals and like chucked him into a Roman legion. He was like, you know, I can't understand

what anybody's saying, but we're all drawing dicks on the wall. So like I'm right at home. Yeah, he was, imagine being in the conversation, like a conversation with like your superior and he's like, fucking yeets himself out the window. Doug's jumping out the window again.

That fucking Doug. He began to look for drugs that would induce debilitating side effects that his boss wanted. The first of those drugs was PCP. I don't know if you know a lot about PCP. Angel dust. It doesn't necessarily debilitate I don't know if you know a lot about PCP Angel Dust

It doesn't necessarily debilitate people as much as it turns them into crazed berserkers who will kick through walls It was first given to a soldier in a glass of whiskey A week after that same soldier had been dosed with sarin gas Just to see what would happen

The guy being dosed had no idea that anything was in his drink I mean, to be fair, putting drugs in people's drinks without them knowing is something of a military Just to see what would happen. The guy being dosed had no idea that anything was in his drink. I mean, to be fair, putting drugs in people's drinks without them knowing is something of a military tradition. Yeah. Not all the jokes land. It's because it's not a joke. It's just a fact. Hey, you know what?

If you look at life too hard you just never get out of line uh uh i say that as someone who has definitely been blackout drunk in the barracks uh now like i said it was given to him without them knowing uh what it was in it uh and as soon as like within a few minutes of drinking it which by the way you't eat PCP, so it probably also hit real fucking hard. He turned manic and attempted to attack every single person in the room with his bare hands and trying to bite them. He then passed out and nearly had a heart

attack because it's PCP. And also he's probably still recovering from the whole sarin gas thing. Yeah, he's had a rough couple weeks. Another soldier ended up in the hospital for six weeks because when the PCP wore off, he was still manic and paranoid

and kept trying to kill himself. Like, oh, Pete's trying to kill himself again like every day. If he was not tied down,

he'd immediately attempt suicide. So like, I guess they found the suicidal mania drug. PCP was quickly dropped as a test agent. Okay.

I mean, I guess that's something. Yeah. After that, 1960, when Ketchum turned up at the facility, he was given a tour by Lindsay. He met a guy named Van Murray Sim, a doctor who was in charge of the volunteer

program, and he was well known for, I guess a nice way of putting it would be testing all of the drugs on himself. He was addicted to drugs. He was debilitatingly addicted to dozens of drugs. Getting high on the research supply. Yeah, and even drugs that you donitatingly addicted to like dozens of drugs. Getting high on the research supply.

Yeah. And like even drugs that you don't get addicted to, like acid, he took those daily. And like, I have to point out, this isn't like acid. Like if you and me went out and found, like if we knew an acid guy and we went and bought acid, we're not getting this acid. We'd get like less than a microgram of acid. They're doing literally hundreds of times that every single day. You shouldn't do acid daily. No.

Like, at all. And definitely not, like, pure government-grade fucking LSD. Just banging it into your fucking skull. No. Like, he would show up to work in the middle of vicious drug trips and have to be sent home. up to work in the middle of vicious drug trips and have to be sent home. Other times, he was at work and he attempted to

eat a pillow and it'd be physically restrained. That seems less harmful. I mean, I don't think you can digest a pillow. To be fair, his insides are probably ripped from all the drugs. I don't know. In other times, he would just walk

around the work site without pants on because he didn't realize he wasn't wearing pants because he was so high. Yeah. I mean, we've all had that morning where we forgot to put our pants on. Yeah. And Murray was like, yeah, I'll show you. I'll show you a test. And it was like, we dosed this guy with something. He's just smashing his head against the wall and nobody's stopping him. And Ketchum's like, I'm in. Edgewood was thought of as something of a mini Manhattan project.

Everything was considered top secret to everybody else, no matter what the rank was, even to other people who worked there. According to Ketchum, it is very possible for you to be best friends with someone and not ever knowing what they did at the site if they didn't work in your department because you weren't allowed to talk about it. not ever knowing what they did at the site. If they didn't work in your department.

Because you weren't allowed to talk about it. It was also kind of a shithole. The barracks had been built in World War I. And never been refurbished. As another military tradition. That we were all very familiar with. Someone gave Ketchum an office. But never told him anything that was in it. It was already fully furnished.

For instance. There was a mysterious black barrel. In the back of the room. Ketchum wasn't sure what was in it, so when he popped it open, he discovered it was literally full of acid. Like the Bernie kind or the LSD kind? The drug kind.

Oh, okay. According to Ketchum, it was enough LSD to get the entire population of the United States high, and it was worth around a billion dollars. It then mysteriously vanished, and nobody ever talked about it. What? Yep. It's a good chance that most LSD came from that barrel.

For like decades. Ketchum also learned that the rest of the staff at the facility were completely nuts. We already talked a little bit about Sim showing up to work high and having to be sent home or not with clothes on um but sim also had a something of a routine of spiking people's morning coffee with acid or

mixing it in a cocktail parties and watching everybody freak out as they as their brain began to melt and another point he walked so like you know i told you about the volunteer program these are these are the drug testing people so he went to a completely different unit on the base because it's a full functioning military base and just dumped a ton of acid into their water supply and then watched everybody run into the woods stripping naked as they fucking began to freak out. I mean, as anybody's aware of the scientific method,

this is not research. No. This is just literally throwing shit to a wall. Yeah. Literally the only difference between him and a date rapist is he's just not trying to rape people that we're aware of. It's funny that you said earlier that nobody knew what each other was doing because they weren't allowed to talk about it. Like, oh, on that we're going to follow rules? Yeah.

Well, I think it's because nobody wanted to incriminate themselves so what'd you do today oh i drugged an entire platoon what about you same cool i uh i'm not wearing pants uh i can see that you fuck ketchum did not have a high opinion of sim and the army uh kind of agreed because they fired him because he had crossed the line on ethics. And in the late 1950s, impressive. It seems like that's kind of their thing. Yeah, he stepped over the line of ethics, but like they're all habitual light steppers. That's what they do.

Like that's their whole job is like, I'm going to probably permanently disable this person with mind-melting drugs. Yeah, nothing that you've said so far this episode has seemed ethical in the least bit. No, no. This is where I get to say, wait, it gets worse. Lindsay was given the position instead of Sim, who rewarded the army's promotion by also being nuts. He would dip his fingers in VX gas, rub it all over a rabbit's face, watch it die, and then wash his finger off in a martini

and then drink it. What? I have no idea how he didn't die. He did that a lot. He deserves to die. What did the bunnies do? It was something of a party trick of his. He also took a vial of nerve agent,

it doesn't say which one, to New York to do a demonstration to a bunch of eggheads by transporting it unprotected in his pocket without any safety precautions. He could have like whoopsie doodle killed the whole city,

but he didn't, so that's good. That's good. That would have changed history a little. I'll probably just blame him on the communists. I don't know. Lindsey promoted Ketchum to his old job, and Ketchum immediately went about trying to get the volunteer program in order. Now, if you remember, the last people who were running it

were probably too busy doing acid to actually run an office correctly. Virtually no medical records had been kept the whole time, and research subjects were dosed at random with no controls. So they weren't doing research. They were just getting people high and giggling about it. Yeah, this isn't research if you're not even fucking taking notes. Yeah, there's no medical records for like the first 30 years of this place. Like what the fuck?

How would you even track anything? I think it was just like, so did the PCP work as like some guy named Frank is gnawing on your calf? Nope, PCP's a no-go. I need to know what your actual definition of work is to be able to tell you if it did. That would require them to have that definition in mind, which they did not.

Under Ketchum's leadership, the program developed a kind of super weed dubbed EA-2233 with the help of a chemist from known mass murdering company from hell, Dow Chemical. Now they managed to synthesize a strain that could make you high for

30 hours. No, thank you. Which sounds horrible. But because Ketchum is getting on board with the crazy train here, he's like, okay, getting high for 30 hours is okay. But what happens if we inject it into somebody? Which means that he had to transfer it into a concentrate, like a liquid, because THC isn't normally a liquid, and then inject it into somebody. So he did a dab into somebody's vein he almost killed him like almost immediately it caused a fatal uh drop in blood pressure within

minutes because like huh so you're not supposed to like that's like some fucking nerd uh like ketchum is a guy that like my brother sold-ass weed to from the suburbs for like 30 bucks a dime bag. Because he's like, ah, thank you, sir. Or remember in Always Sunny where he's like, I'll have one crack rock, please. Or one crack, please. Yeah, that's him because he's like, wait, you're not supposed to inject marijuana?

Why didn't anybody tell me? And it turns out it was just oregano all along. This guy's blood tastes like Italian seasoning. One of the things he immediately began to research on was a chemical known as BZ. Now, it has a much longer chemical name that I am not even going to attempt to pronounce, but we'll call it BZ. It had the effect of reducing exposed soldiers to mumbling idiots who are too busy picking at their skin and running from bugs that don't actually exist to do anything else. The drug lasted for days. They hallucinated vividly and lost control of their own body. They pissed and shit on themselves, and when soldiers came down from it, they could hardly remember the trip. Their memories of the last

few hours would be a mix of reality and fantasy and would be completely and utter useless. Things did not always go well. Sometimes it'd make soldiers fly into bizarre manic episodes as they started destroying everything around them. Due to other experiments, I'm going to assume the PCP related ones, the facility had soldiers get dosed and place them in a padded room so they didn't hurt themselves. They just would have a chair to sit on. Though that didn't always work either. One man kicked the door open, breaking a lock off its its hinges and went running through the facility naked screaming that he was covered in blood and monsters were chasing him i feel like they waited way too long to bring the padded room

into this whole thing also i think they used like a five dollar bike lock on the door or something because that guy kicked it right open uh another soldier destroyed the chair with his bare hands and used it to attempt to dig out of the room, destroying seven feet of padding and then orderlies had to come and force him into restraints. And another incident, in my personal favor and I have to add, a soldier had to be restrained because he thought the air conditioner was threatening him. I get that. What did you say, you frosty cold bitch? After that point, when the guy was restrained, Ketchum decided to see if the guy could hold a conversation with him.

So he asked him what he thought about taxes. It was a simple question. They're not good. I don't know. To which the soldier responded, quote, you see, it would be hard for me to answer that question because I don't like rice. What? Ah,

okay. Uh, the soldier then began to have another conversation with an imaginary person and then tried to bite himself. It's pretty easy to bite yourself. Well, he was restrained. So it was more just like a zombie movie where the zombies are like on the

ground. Their teeth are just clicking together. Yeah. By 1962, Ketchum had really hit his stride in testing. An entire Hollywood style set constructed that would act as a makeshift command post. There was also hilariously added a giant red button that said, Danger, do not touch for added effect. I'm already want to touch that button.

Are you going to get me hot and tell me not to touch it? I'm going to hit that button so fucking hard. Until now, he had largely just been dosing people and seeing what would happen. What he really wanted to do to really sell the concept of BZ was to make people high as shit and force them to conduct simulated

military operations. His plan was to lock four soldiers inside. He was to dose three of them the fourth being the control subject to see if they could operate the outpost for three days each the other three were dosed uh progressively heavier to one guy who was just like doused and busy to the point that he was on his fucking gourd oh is this still to see if they can end war with psychoactive drugs i think he lost the thread a little while ago. Hypothetically, I guess I see this.

So if you're, say, a brigade talk or division talk or whatever, how well can you organize the defense of your area if everybody's trying to rip their fucking skin off because they have ants in their eyes or whatever? He's trying to see if he can make everybody so high they can't do their job why reasons government grants i mean like i just i don't see the benefit here i should point out either did the department of defense they just let them keep going because they thought the soviets were doing the same thing uh the The people inside the command post

would be radioed various messages and commands and expect them to react according to like follow orders, do this, do that, react as soldiers would act. Cameras were installed everywhere so they could watch them and as their brains melted. To Ketchum's credit,

he probably already kind of knew how this experiment was going to go because he rubberized the floor and put padding on every sharp corner because he knew people would just be sprinting around screaming. After the soldiers were dosed, Ketchum immediately triggered a siren

inside the outpost that indicated a chemical attack. The soldiers were supposed to react, you know, put their gas mask on, whatever. Most of the soldiers were able to fight through the drug haze and get to their masks, but the one that was the worst off that got dosed the heaviest immediately entered into another plane

of existence. He stumbled around, saluted imaginary officers, ran away from a curtain thinking it was an enemy, and constantly tried to escape. Unfortunately for this guy, escape would be impossible because he's attempting to escape via the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. If this wasn't like a completely unethical experience holy shit this wasn't a completely unethical experiment rich with bz before we started it sounds just like a fun night out.

Yeah, it's, uh, this is, this is really, really funny until you realize that like all of these people were debilitated for life because nobody knew what would happen to their brain later, but it's still funny now. Um,

over 200 orders were given to the outpost over the course of a few days, including some that were complete and total nonsense. You see, they're trying to inflict the sober soldiers with the less high soldiers with the placebo effect and make them think that they were high so like they were giving them orders that were complete gibberish and they knew they were dosed with something because they're like oh the walls are bleeding weird but like they could still kind of function and they're like oh fuck am i that high and also they wanted to see what the high people,

like the debilitatingly high ones, would think, like how they would interpret the complete bullshit that was being spouted at them. It pretty much devolved into each one of them trying to take a swing at one another because that's probably going to happen. But somehow this was the test that sold the US Army that the drug for weaponization that they had been looking for this whole time was BZ.

Yeah, somehow, I don't know. Again, I ask that they've been looking for fucking what? What is our purpose here? So Colonel Ketchum, do you think that this drug would debilitate an entire division of infantry? Uh, no.

But, that guy ate his pants. That's gotta be worth something. Fuck it, give him money. Where are we gonna get the money from? Take it away from the moon nuking program. See, I disagree there. Nuke the moon with BZ.

No, I mean with that guy ate his pants. Now that guy's got to replace a uniform. And that's a big deal. Also, he's going to die from eating pants. If they're treated with the fucking fire-retardant chemicals. It's probably just 100% deet. I don't know. Now, they did want one more test

because one important thing here is all this has been inside. Hypothetically, BZ is going to be deployed like a bomb. It's going to go off, airburst, and it's going to rain fucking dream magic down in formations or whatever. So we got to try to do this outside. They would have to leave the confines of their lab

and go to Utah. Why Utah? Because all bad things happen in Utah. So Ketchum came up with a plan called the Project Dork. That was really what it was called. The whale's penis? Thank you.

I'm thinking like this guy obviously doesn't think that his project is a dork. Like he's got to be angling for whale penis. I don't know. Whale's penises are pretty large. Yeah, we learned that in Iceland. So he wants his project to have big dick energy. Literally, yeah. Jack Ketchum is a huge fan of the Reykjavik dick energy. Literally, yeah. Jack Ketchum is a huge fan of

the Reykjavik Dick Museum. So, a huge cloud of BZU is released over soldiers, causing them to immediately get lost in their own minds. Soldiers saw enemies that weren't there. They were attacked by imaginary bugs and got lost despite actually not moving anywhere.

Now, in case you're wondering or thinking to yourself i'd really like to watch that good news you can uh he filmed it all and released it as a movie called clouds of confusion which you can watch on youtube for free holy shit uh he did this why didn't we watch it before this episode he did uh he did it with a lot of stuff like he doubt he dosed uh soldiers with acid and then had them march around and try to keep a formation. And then I think one guy

attempts to kick one of the ones in front of him and everybody thinks it's the funniest thing on earth. I kind of want to march in a formation on acid now. The Brits did the same thing. I believe they dosed the Royal Marines or something with acid, gave them weapons and had them run through the woods. That seems like a really bad idea.

They weren't loaded, but they did have bayonets on them. Even worse, I would probably try to stab something before I would pull a trigger. I don't know what my brain does on acid. Never done it. Not good stuff. I know not a whole lot of good stuff happened from it because they're like,

look as the lads get lost in the drug haze. And like one guy just rolling around the grass, like this troop is combat ineffective. And what one soldier attempts to cut down a tree by smacking it with his rifle. And the, the Lieutenant in charge of them, I believe was sober.

And he was like, God damn it. Why is nobody listening to me? So Ketchum thought his experiment was a success, but it actually had shown how useless all of his studies and work had been. So just to dose eight guys, which are out in that field, it required a huge amount of BZ, like almost all of the BZ that they had in stock at the time.

And it required it to be used at a certain time of day BZ like almost all of the BZ that they had in stock at the time. Um, and it required it to be used at a certain time of day and certain temperature. So the cloud would air slice and form. Otherwise it would just rain to the ground, like a liquid and not do anything. Um, so yeah,

he, he proved his own concept false. Ketchum's idea for another experiment when it involved hundreds of soldiers engage in simulated combat with tanks and armored vehicles while clouds of drugs were dumped on them. It was rejected by the army for cost reasons, but also because they were starting to be worried about Ketchum's sanity. As time went on, new doctors came into the arsenal and Ketchum stayed. He was the guy there for the longest time because he really did enjoy his work. The new doctors took one look at Ketchum's work

that he'd been doing for years now and thought at best he was crazy and at worst he was fucking evil. They thought his work was unethical, probably because of how unethical it was, and they went over his dosage charts to check his work. They found that all of them were way off and inconsistent. They found that when they followed his dosage charts to check his work. They found that all of them were way off and inconsistent. They found that when they followed his dosage directions,

they were routinely causing people to have overdoses. So, like, all those times people were, like, flying in a cardiac arrest and blood pressure, it's because Ketchum couldn't give people drugs correctly. You think that they would, like, if nothing else, fucking have that part down, just the dosing.

Yeah, I mean, fucking EMTs do that. Ketchum continued to toy with BZ, but most of the doctors that he worked with thought he was only doing it because continued research would continue to secure funds from the Pentagon for his research. He was just perpetuating his own job with no purpose. Because they think that because he really only changed BZ for the worst. In one case, it caused people to piss blood. That's not good. How'd you do that? I aimed for the dick.

When the doctors objected to his tests for not having any real purpose, because they didn't, he accused them all of being Russian spies. That's healthy. They didn't. He accused them all of being Russian spies. That's healthy. I mean, that is the natural response. It is now. To being rejected.

Yeah. He's a Russian asset. This may have been because Ketchum had been diving into his own supply. He had long been addicted to his own drugs, was taking acid every day, was still taking dexedrine, was drinking every single day, was smoking weed, and also got addicted to sex just for funsies. Just for funsies. Actually, I'm taking a substance abuse class right now, and one of the reasons why it's so hard to become dependent on acid is because of how exhausting an acid trip is.

So to take it every single day, dude has to to have like fucking balls of steel or some shit. His brain is just gravy sloshing back and forth. I mean, all of that probably couldn't have helped his sciencing all that well. Like just ripped, at best, he's just high on weed. That's like the best case scenario. But also he might be smoking his fucking super weed that he made.

So maybe not that either. It's bad when you have to hope like, man, I hope the boss is only drunk when he comes to work today. Like his wife left him too because of all the hookers. Seems like a good enough reason. You know, being addicted to dozens of drugs

was not the straw that broke the camel's back. It was the parade of sex workers that you brought to the house every single day. I mean, those things kind of go hand in hand sometimes. I mean, I've heard getting high on meth and fucking is great, but it doesn't mean I want to try it. No. Yeah. I'm good on that.

Now, I have heard getting high on ecstasy and fucking is great, but that's not worth nearly dying of dehydration. You just got to make sure you have a buddy that's sober and can hydrate you. Got an idea. Hook up the IV, do ecstasy while you're rolling, and try not to tear the IVs out while you have sex.

I don't like that. Some people are into it. Saline play. I feel like I would just tear the IVs out, and then there would just be blood all over the sex. On the bright side, if you're ever going to be covered in your own blood, it probably only feels good when you're on ecstasy. And then you wake up and you're like, oh, God, did I murder somebody? Ooh, need another new pair of sheets.

So doctors could not stop Ketchum because he like outranked them most of the time but also he couldn't control the doctors because nobody really gave a shit about what ketchum said so they began leaking information to the press uh mostly in attempt to get him shut down other doctors demanded transfers fully knowing that they'd be sent to vietnam instead like fuck it kill me I don't care. Eventually, Ketchum left the facility. He wanted to continue to pursue his education at Harvard, even though he was a doctor already, but whatever.

But that quickly went off the rails because he did not stop doing drugs, went back to college, and failed. And his brain was probably mostly liquid by then. At this point, he was forced to live in a Holiday Inn. What? His wife won their house in the divorce, and there was nowhere for a colonel to live, so he went and lived in a Holiday Inn,

and he was broke again because all the drugs and hookers. No tells aren't cheap, man. No. Eventually, the army asked him to come back to Edgewood though. Cause they, they took one look at the near homeless guy living in the holiday in and like acid coming out of his pores. Like we'll take them because the army loves things that are bad for it.

It's fair. Yeah. It's on brand. When he returned, he was greeted by new doctors. Ketchum claimed he couldn't get anything done because of the rampant insubordination, which really seems like they wouldn't do the same

testing that they were doing before because it was illegal. One of those doctors named Mark Needle, one of Ketchum's experiments, he said of one of Ketchum's experiments, quote, there's nobody qualified and that they the fact that they were allowed to do it without people who knew what they were doing is very, very scary. There's no humanity in it.

There's no morality in it. If anything happened to the volunteers, they would just say, well, you're a volunteer. You're offering out. But we were also telling him, listen, this is the army and we're at war. Our view was that this was a terrible thing to do. These kids because who the hell knew what could happen to them? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, this is 1968.

This has been going on for 18 years. Doctors repeatedly wrote in dissent whenever he came up with something new to do with BZ. As they had discovered from testing while he was gone that his miracle weapon that just made people a little high

was actually incredibly unsafe. Using his own dosage charts, they found dangerous spikes in blood pressure and heart rate. Even Richard Nixon eventually announced that he would not deploy the weapon to Vietnam because it was unsafe. I'm impressed that he had charts. I'm impressed that Richard Nixon saw something

that was so unsafe he wouldn't use it on Vietnamese people. I mean, they're dumping like millions of gallons of Agent Orange on people and dropping more bombs on North Vietnam than they had literally all of World War II. But Richard fucking Nixon, of all people, is like, BZ is just a step too far. Even though we've been testing it on our own soldiers. Yeah. Yeah. Like my, as like, like to this day, uh, kids in Vietnam are more like horrific,

uh, birth defects from agent orange and shit. Uh, but like Richard Nixon took one look at BZ. He's like, I can't do that to the Vietnamese people. Fucking mind blowing. Meanwhile,

uh, catch him was like, no, it's perfectly fine. Fucking mind blowing. Meanwhile, Ketchum was like, no, it's perfectly fine. As he's seeing colors while he's ranting. Tell that gorilla to stop yelling at me.

Colonel Ketchum, you're in your office alone. Shut up. After that, Ketchum removed himself from the facility. I think you did dose me everybody sees colors I meant hearing colors they had a was it symphophagia or something like that

where they can hear sounds or they can see sounds and hear colors yeah which just sounds awesome if I could turn that on and off. Like, imagine every time somebody farted, you could see it. Like, I don't like to go to Walmart anymore. I'm just picturing Aria when she looks at her butt after she farts.

Every dog is just terrified of their own ass now. I wonder if they can see their farts. Nope, that's why they run away. They can smell them. So Ketchum asked to be demoted so he could be sent elsewhere, which is kind of amazing that the army's like, sure, whatever. They demoted him, sent him to Fort Sam Houston, and the facility moved

on without him. Hey, Fort Sam. In his place, Sam was brought back on board and was immediately thrown in front of Congress to explain why so many soldiers were claiming systemic abuse and maltreatment. Do they only know two doctors? This was in 1975.

I mean, but doctors exist. Maybe don't hire someone that was giving people coffee full of PCP. He was brought back in. Most people think he was brought back in just so that they would have a fall guy. Because he very obviously was a troubled individual and they could just pin it on him and not the army as a whole. At the time, Sim was under investigation for his own rampant drug abuse.

And by his own admission, he was high on Demerol during congressional questioning, which is impressive that he was even able to function. Nothing ever happened to any of the doctors other than like Sim was like just shuffled. He was given the Catholic priest treatment and just sent somewhere else. Holy shit. Yeah. In the years since, a class action lawsuit by the veterans of Edgewood had been opened up and finally aftercare is being offered to people who can prove that they were there. Small problem with that, though.

How exactly do you prove you're part of a top-secret government chemical testing? There is no records! Ding, ding, ding! Holy shit! Yep. It has been proven nearly impossible for people to get care. Some people have proved it. Most have not. As for Ketchum, he is

completely unapologetic for what he did. In fact, he blames the government for his experiments failing, even though he was doing them with no government oversight. But yeah, it's the government's fault. Yeah, that sounds like a drug-induced way of thinking. I guess the nicest thing I could say about him is that he really thinks that weed should be legal and used to treat PTSD.

So good for him and that one good thing that he did in his entire fucking life, I guess. Not even did, that one good thing that he said? Yeah. Yeah. Now I have to point out though, he was an unrepentant bastard that supported all of his own work until the day he died, even when it was proven to be absolutely bug shit insane. Have you ever heard of the Moscow theater hostage crisis? No. So back in 2002, Chechen terrorists took about 150 people hostage in a theater in Moscow. The Russian authorities

ended the situation by pumping it full of a still unknown chemical into the building via the ventilation system to render the terrorists unable to fight. They killed around 244 people doing that. People think that it was a derivative of fentanyl

or something like that and they just overdosed everybody and killed them. Now I bring this incident up because pretty much everybody considers this a massive fuck up on the part of the Russian government. Ketchums think that actually worked great. Hey

that's what I was trying to do all along. The reason why he says it was great is like, well, the terrorists died. Well, the thing he's forgetting is a lot of the terrorists had fucking gas masks and didn't work. And the Russian soldiers still had to bust in and get in a gunfight and kill people. So it didn't fucking work. Ketchum. Fucking Colonel Ketchup. Yeah.

So yeah, he died a completely horrible giant piece of shit. So how do you feel about the army and acid? Well. Not great. I feel like. And this is completely separate

from like Project MK Ultra that the CIA was doing, which is even crazier. But like, yeah. I feel like we all need a nice long ethics lesson. Please explain to me what is all of US military history? We forgot the ethics lesson. I mean, we have.

See the last fucking 80 episodes of our podcast. We have fucking biannual Eo sharp fucking and how do those work like how those go someone's like so wait are you saying if i'm drunk i i can't have sex with a drunk person says like a 35 year old person who's supposed to be a professional nco yeah like no robert you can't do that my favorite my favorite is um this girl drank a whole lot of vodka and passes out and the guy uh and the guy rapes her and half the people raise their hands to say well she shouldn't have drank so much now you see why they don't even bother with real ethics lessons because like it's not gonna stick everybody here's a fucking mouth-breathing idiot.

As every single fucking woman in the room's like, locking my door. Yes, always lock your doors, ladies. Rig a shotgun up on the other side. Do like a Kevin McCallister, put fucking nails in front of it, like Nick did that one time. Yeah, home alone, your fucking house. Yeah, yeah.

Now to lighten the mood a bit, a question from the Legion. Woo! Rich, you haven't done one of these in a while. It has been a while. So I got a good one, which we talked about earlier today. What is some of your most guilty pleasure

when it comes to music? I have to say, virtually my entire taste in music. It's not good. I self-admit that I listen to horrible, early to late 2000s emo music. Yeah, I'm right there with you. Like lots of old emo,

fucking love brand new still. It's a band. I listened to Paramore today while I was lifting weights. So much Taylor Swift. Like, oh my God, the amount of Taylor Swift that I listen to. I'm in the gym. I remember when I worked

out in a military gym and everybody has iPods or whatever to put on. I was like, yeah, bro, lift angry. Fuck yeah. I click over my iPod and it's secondhand serenade. Like, yeah! As the piano cues up.

So, yep. So I guess, thank Rich. Rich, thank you for joining me. Everybody else. Thank you for not.

I mean, maybe this episode is better if you listen to an acid, but if you, if you try it, let us know maybe this episode is better if you listen to an acid, but if you, if you try it, let us know. Yeah. But be safe and hydrate. Tether yourself to something comfortable.

Have a, always have a sober buddy guys. So thank you everybody for tuning in. Please rate and review us on iTunes. If you are interested in some military sci-fi, non-military history, my book, the great trader is now available for pre-order.

Whoop, whoop. Plug zone. So, until next time, don't do acid in the army. Also, I have no plugs or nothing of value to add here, but bye.