Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 126 - How World Militaries Attempted to Weaponize the Paranormal

Episode Date: October 26, 2020

Joe and Nick talk about all the times the militaries of the world attempted to weaponize the powers of woo woo bullshit. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: https://...www.history.com/news/cia-esp-espionage-soviet-union-cold-war https://taskandpurpose.com/history/5-true-stories-militarys-paranormal-activity-research https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/soldiers-vampires-ghosts Blum, William. Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since WWII https://science.howstuffworks.com/ghost-tape-no-10-haunted-mixtape-the-vietnam-war.htm

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 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
Starting point is 00:00:34 Legion of the Old Crow today.keys podcast i'm joe and i can finally say with me again is nick special guest yes special guest at this point. Yeah, it's been entirely too long. The army has stolen you into the field once again. I thought I was done, son. I signed a hand receipt and they allowed me to take
Starting point is 00:01:18 you back onto the content farm to be further milked for podcast juice. Don't picture that. It's horrible. I see an assembly line. It's a whole series of Nicks being milked.
Starting point is 00:01:35 And because of that's terrifying and scary to picture, I can point out that this is our Halloween episode for this year. But that's not it we're not we're not talking about nick being milked for for halloween um and we we do a halloween episode every year and we never actually really yeah and we never release it on halloween because we release our episodes why well we release our episodes on monday and halloween never falls on monday so it's like a vague and if someone's like actually halloween never falls on monday so it's like a vague and if someone's like actually halloween is on it was on i don't i don't know man actually i'm old
Starting point is 00:02:12 and i don't have kids therefore halloween is becoming more and more not important to me and because this is the year of the pandemic i don't even have an excuse to dress up like something and go get drunk at a party so So like this Halloween has never mattered less. Is there even, should you even buy candy? Like, um, I don't know about the mainland,
Starting point is 00:02:33 but from what I understand, uh, on a Wahoo, we are doing trick or treating, which is incredibly fucking stupid to me. That's what I'm saying. Like why, what,
Starting point is 00:02:42 what's the point? I won't be putting out candy because like i know there's like you know i don't have to touch anything i can just leave a bowl out but then you're gonna have people like fishing their fucking hands through it in the fucking bowl licking yeah and nobody's gonna be washing their hands so like i would choose my place to not be a vector for disease this year. And, you know, that's okay. I would rather my house not be a horrible vector for disease than some kids get cheap candy. You know, it's unfortunate,
Starting point is 00:03:17 but hopefully next year we'll be better. I doubt it at this rate, but who fucking knows, yeah? So, you know, normally we use the Halloween episode as an excuse to talk about weird shit. I believe actually the last two years has been rich. Every episode. Yeah, yeah. Like, we'll talk about specifically, like, spooky stuff.
Starting point is 00:03:44 Like, I believe the first Halloween episode We'll talk about specifically spooky stuff. I believe the first Halloween episode, we talked about a serial killer during World War I. Wasn't he the dill pickle guy? Yeah, he pickled all of his ex-girlfriends and stuff. I don't know if I can say dill pickle. Please don't sue me. Your pickles are actually corpses.
Starting point is 00:04:06 Then last year, we did unit 731 uh sorry rich has still not recovered from that one that's a good one too normally i i force these horrible things upon nick uh because he is my war crime emotional sieve and he walks away from all these things unaffected uh but this year is actually you know pretty chill in comparison to those two things um i will not explicitly talk about any war crime related murder i know i'm as shocked as everybody else's um but i guess i do have to start by bullshit i know i'm so sorry um anyway welcome to the eight part series on the cambodian genocide um but um i have to ask you to start off this episode um do you believe in ghosts oh no not at all do you believe in any kind of paranormal like did you ever have a moment at some point where, I swear
Starting point is 00:05:05 to God, something was peering out at me from the woods or whatever? Not that I can say, but you know what? I really like watching the shows where they really egg on something that's not there. Yeah, I feel like some people
Starting point is 00:05:21 who are listening probably maybe felt something once upon a time. I personally don't believe in ghosts either. I'm not hating on anybody who does. Have you ever felt anything? No. Not sober. So I feel like that probably has a lot to do with it.
Starting point is 00:05:37 Like a ghost trying to give you an over-the-pants handy, Jay. That was a very strange thing i i don't talk about my my ex lovers on the podcast um now there was this one weird stupid fucking thing when i was a kid where like all the middle schoolers maybe it's freshman year i don't remember um there's like a supposed haunted road in my neighborhood uh in my general city scape area and we went out to it and everybody swears to god they fucking saw something and i'm pretty sure the only thing we saw was the fact that we were all were incredibly lifted at the time um and yeah like you didn't see ghosts we smoked a lot of weed and got drunk. And then like irresponsibly burned out down a fucking like an abandoned country road.
Starting point is 00:06:30 I saw stuff too. Is that the same road where fucking kids push you up the fucking hill or some shit and leave fingerprints on your car? I'm pretty sure if you dig far enough into the mythos of that street, someone has said that's happened. That's happened in every fucking railroad crossing in America. If you believe every ghost story you find. Cause I remember I do. I heard some shit about that. And I was like,
Starting point is 00:06:52 uh, no, that's, that's, that kind of shit to me is like so widespread. There's no way it can be true. You know what I'm saying? Like every,
Starting point is 00:07:01 every shitty small town has their own story of that happening. And what, what, what kids are taking that initiative in the afterlife going like, you know i'm saying like every every shitty small town has their own story of that happening and what what what kids are taking that initiative in the afterlife going like let's push this car over yeah and you know what i'm gonna say even if they're dead like they don't have like children do not have aren't the the age group i would pick to be pushing cars you know i'm saying like how many kids died to equal the strength of what like how many child ghosts do you think you could fight at once because like like i don't carry a crucifix nor do i carry holly water i mean if they can push a car you can punch them right you can punch those ghost children anyway i might be able to get a noogie or two around
Starting point is 00:07:42 like how many kids can you fight at once uh so they don't try to kill you uh if they're already dead um this is a really bad stephen king book that i've written in my head now now i ask all this because probably like 700 and the ending is terrible um now i ask all this because we going to be talking a little bit about belief in ghosts and the afterlife in this episode for dumber reasons than you could expect. Now, I started off by asking this because the number of Americans that believe in ghosts, according to a YouGov survey whose validity I cannot attest to because i googled it i googled how many americans believe in ghosts i know this is the yahoo answers on this one it'd probably be better this is the scholarly rigor you expect from this podcast um 50 of americans yeah uh which is a number that is much higher than i would have thought yeah um now some levels
Starting point is 00:08:46 of belief are are much higher and like are deeply interwoven into cultural beliefs as americans generally don't have culture we can think of that as something completely different like there's something different into like to me there's something different into like buying into a show like ghost hunters or like ghost hunters international i can't remember which show it was but there's this one dude named zach fuck can't remember his name but in one of the zack's with a q somehow i don't know but he's kind of douchey of course he was but he's in a ghost hunting show his name's zach but uh he's fucking in this room he's like come on satan come for me and I was just like dude I hope Satan comes dude I really
Starting point is 00:09:29 Satan straight bussing like one of my favorite ones that I remember was like Ghost Hunter International because they went to some castle in Germany or whatever and they record things because they believe this is a science so they try to inject as much electronics as they possibly can into it.
Starting point is 00:09:47 And he's asking questions. Yeah, yeah. Like electromagnetic pulse or something like that. I don't fucking know. That's probably not what it stands for. No. Electric voice phenomena is one of them. But anyway, he's asking questions in this castle in Germany but he's asking in English
Starting point is 00:10:06 and he's like holding this tape recorder out hoping to get answers like I just hope it's a very confused German ghost like please I only speak yeah um now they're ukrainian ghosts oh uh fuck now i i say i bring up that because like the idea of like american ghost belief and like watching stupid reality shows is much different than like some cultures who legitimately believe if you don't do something correctly your ancestors will come back to haunt you or whatever um which is what are your ancestors belief uh i'm not none that i'm aware of uh drink alcohol and beat your children oh fuck that sucks yeah which means worse i only have the worst ghost hauntings um uh i mean some of these things are laid into the foundations of local folklore that go back generations in some
Starting point is 00:11:06 cultures like that of like China and some areas of China because China is not a monoculture and Southeast Asia these are combined with a vast array of supernatural beliefs that may or may not have something to do with religion such as belief in cryptids and celestial monsters which
Starting point is 00:11:21 could be a rad bad name I'm not entirely sure. Now, I'm bringing up supernatural beliefs. We talked about ghosts a little bit. Because on more than one occasion, the militaries of the world have attempted to weaponize them in both hilarious and horrible ways. I think you're going to toss the military into this one, to be honest.
Starting point is 00:11:46 Yeah, everyone's... Last week, I had to shoehorn in real hard because technically we're a military history podcast. But this one, 100%, we're talking about militaries. Now, I should point out, a lot of this is Western militaries playing developing nation superstitions
Starting point is 00:12:04 against them because they believe them to be dumb backwards or simple a simple clue here is racism uh but that does not mean that some of these militaries did not at one point put some pretty big fucking stock to some woo-woo shit of their own uh mostly during the cold war because before the global war on terror if you want a blank check to do whatever the hell you wanted you had to tie it into defeating communism into some way all the enemy would really need is a crack team of teenagers and a dog i would have got away with it too if it wasn't for you meddling kids in your communism. Now, before,
Starting point is 00:12:46 during, and after World War II, there was obviously a lot of Nazi science that various world powers divvied up among themselves. Because Nazi occult shit was pretty big, and there was a huge interest of nerds and
Starting point is 00:13:02 mass murderers like Heinrich Himmler. These things had their own department within the SS and like high ranking Nazi leaders were obsessed with the occult. On Himmler's orders, the SS officers raided Germany's occupied territories for artifacts related to magic. Even ransacking museums in Poland, Ukraine and the Crimea for mystical texts that they thought might be able to grant them power to defeat the Allies. Or in some ways, sometimes it was to further their really stupid race science. Nazi scientists scoured the globe for items like the Holy Grail. And the Lance of...
Starting point is 00:13:39 Indiana Jones shit? Yeah, and the Lance of Destiny or Longinus, which is the spear that stabbed Jesus Christ, if you believe in that. Though, I do need to be completely clear. How badass if you had that spear hanging in your room right now? I think I'd get really sick of Harrison Ford
Starting point is 00:13:58 attempting to kick open my door and steal it back. It belongs in the museum. I do need to be completely clear here though this wasn't a huge thing in nazi circles like this esoteric occultism was pretty widespread but like the actual practice of expending material resources to go track this shit down was pretty small scale and most people outside this very specific department within the SS thought it was all completely bullshit
Starting point is 00:14:29 how much do you think that department got made fun of by other departments probably not a lot because Heinrich Himmler was involved and he was behind his back probably a lot because I mean have you seen Heinrich Himmler he looks like a fucking nerd he was a I really wish that more people beat the shit out of heinrich himmler growing up and steal his lunch
Starting point is 00:14:50 money because he looks the way he looks that like imagine thinking that you're the master race descended from god or like the afterlife or whatever weird occultism they believed in and you look like heinrich Himmler. Like, imagine looking yourself... I think you still had a 12-year-old nemesis. Like, he looks like Dexter from Dexter's Lab. Dexter had some cool shit, though.
Starting point is 00:15:16 Yeah, and unlike Dexter, or unlike Heinrich Himmler, I don't think Dexter killed himself with a hidden cyanide pill. I'm not sure that might be canon now. Nazi scientist? No, he just has a very strange German accent.
Starting point is 00:15:33 Sus. I'll say it's fucking sus, okay? Heinrich Himmler survived and ended up becoming a Cartoon Network original series. I guess that is what we're trying to say here. But the Nazis never actually discovered anything. But as the US and the Soviets got their hand on Nazi research,
Starting point is 00:15:52 research can't speak because I apparently did not pray to my occult temple today. They opened like they started reading about more of this research regarding things and they expanded it into their own research now most of the reason for this research was fear of the other one having it like the soviets and the americans didn't really buy into this shit like there wasn't any widespread belief that they're like you're gonna be able to field like a army of psychics or whatever but most like they were mostly afraid that, well, what if the Soviets have it? So we need to look into this too.
Starting point is 00:16:28 So this led to an incredibly stupid psychic arms race. And I need to point out that nobody really bought into. Now, one of the earliest forms of this was a so-called Soviet mind control program that failed hilariously and uh the soviets dropped it pretty quickly like like well this obviously isn't working moving on um but this is because in the 1950s there was a video there was videos um of american pows reciting a communist propaganda after being captured by the north koreans during the korean
Starting point is 00:17:03 war the u.s believed that there was a possibility that Stalin somehow slid his unknown mind control abilities, the way of the North Koreans. And that is why that these all American boys are suddenly reciting communist stuff. Um, yeah, obviously very,
Starting point is 00:17:21 very stupid. Uh, the POWs had just been horribly tortured. Um, not under the spell of some communist wizard or whatever um which honestly sounds metal as fuck like redistribute the wealth i'll say whatever you want me to say yeah yeah exactly like people will pretty much do whatever the fuck you want them to do as long as you stop torturing them. Maybe torture doesn't work. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:17:50 Or work something to whatever you want it to work towards. The CIA has entered the chat. I really wish that'd be the last time we're talking about the CIA today. But, Nick, we're going to be talking about the CIA a whole lot. All-star cast. Yeah. be talking about the cia a whole lot um all-star cast yeah um now the american response to this fear of a soviet mind control program was their own mind control program mk ultra goats that comes up i'm not gonna get into the into like too deep into the weeds on project names because they both kind of weave in and out. There's MKUltra, which everybody has heard about.
Starting point is 00:18:28 Oh, yeah. Honestly, the depths of MKUltra are still not entirely known because some of that shit is still not unclassified. Then there's also Project Stargate, which was the military side of that. There's a lot of shit
Starting point is 00:18:44 that kind of goes into both, um, projects. And there's actually a reasonable belief to have that it blurred the lines on purpose. So you really couldn't pin down who, where it was going to what, um, uh,
Starting point is 00:18:59 no, a lot of Stargate was the remote viewing project. Uh, have you ever heard of remote viewers? Uh, I'm not a big fan of Stargate was the remote viewing project. Have you ever heard of remote viewers? I'm not a big fan of Stargate. I never watched Stargate. I'm assuming that it was all as dumb as these fucking projects. So the remote viewing project was led by the USSR and the US.
Starting point is 00:19:19 Though the US's project would fall under the CIA and cia and the department of defense at various times as like it would fail and then like one agency would just give up on it and then like oh well we'll resurrect it and mostly what it seems to be is like they're just pushing around the price like if it's under the department of defense the department of defense has to pay for it if it's under the cia somebody else has to pay for it awkward uh at the table and nobody wants to pay for it. At the table and nobody wants to pay the bill. Yeah. And mostly what it came up to is like, well, the Soviets are still working on the remote viewing project, so clearly we need to. Now, for anybody
Starting point is 00:19:54 asking like, what the fuck does this mean? Clearly, you didn't watch as much of the History Channel in the early 2000s as I did, because they talked about it all the time. Now, remote viewing is essentially the idea that somebody can visualize details of distant people or places or objects through telekinesis.
Starting point is 00:20:13 Psychic shit, you know, shit that doesn't exist. Now, the budget for the program was pretty small compared to most Cold War insanity. Not because it was cheap, but because everybody thought it was fucking nuts, but it just kept going anyway. All right, we got you guys a packet of sugar. Fuck.
Starting point is 00:20:36 We have to keep the lights on. Well, we're going to cut that, and instead, we're going to use one of your psychic test dummies to just pedal this bike really fast so people were like claim people claim to be psychic were chosen for it and locked in a blacked out room
Starting point is 00:20:55 and once they were in this blackout room they would say that they could see soviet air bases or like planes or bombs and then they'd have to draw them out in detail despite being locked in a room at Fort Meade, Maryland. Like these things would just supposedly pop up in their head. In order to not impact the confidence
Starting point is 00:21:16 of the supposed psychics, they were never told if they were right or wrong. They didn't want to hurt their feelings. So the project went on for decades despite no proof or evidence ever being shown that they were anything other than just guessing random shit at random now the the history channel did interview some of these remote viewers who still swear that they were right because they were never told that they were wrong wouldn't that be some shit like
Starting point is 00:21:45 imagine you in a fucking room what the fuck are you seeing like I'm seeing imagine having a job you know that if you did it bad or good nobody would ever tell you like imagine every day you go into work you have no idea if you're
Starting point is 00:22:02 doing the right thing or the wrong thing because nobody tells you but you still go into work, you have no idea if you're doing the right thing or the wrong thing. Because nobody tells you. But you still go into work every day. So the only thing that could possibly happen is you feeding your own feedback loop. It's like, well, clearly I did good. That sounds like a good day. Yeah. No wonder why these guys stay with the project for fucking decades.
Starting point is 00:22:21 I'm doing great stuff. Now, I do have to point out because this is the one thing that people always point out when it says remote viewing is bullshit there was an incident where a psychic kind of did something um but i'll tell you the full details now generally when you read the stories i what is said is that a psychic working for remote viewing pinpointed a downed soviet bomber in africa and then the u.s was able to go and scavenge it before the soviets could go get it uh but when you look into it that's not actually what happened no uh he fucking guessed kind of yeah so the u.s
Starting point is 00:22:59 had intelligence that a bomber went down a very specific patch of jungle in a very specific part of a very specific country they then gave a psychic specific part of a very specific country. They then gave a psychic of a map of a small area and told him to find the bomber. So the person pointed at something and then people were dispatched to the area to find a bomber. And they did.
Starting point is 00:23:18 Dozens of miles away from where the psychic said it would be. This is generally what we call being wrong. Like imagine that you're given a grid square to find something in you're generally going to be within a dozen miles or so or whatever right like you're going to be within the parameters of that grid square right uh and that's kind of what happened you know like if you were were if you're doing land navigation and you were like a half of a grid square off, you would be wrong. That that only counts if you're dropping nuclear weapons for being close. Now, the Soviets in the US also attempted to find actual psychics that could use their actual magical brain power to kill people.
Starting point is 00:24:03 Because, of course, they did. The u.s had very so like you already brought up the men who stare at goats that was a real thing yeah uh the movie was a real thing but so was the project uh it was stargate uh the army didn't want to spend too much money on it however because it sounded and was ridiculous so they picked random people already in the army and attempted to make them walk through walls and murder goats by staring at them. None of it ever worked. There's also another part
Starting point is 00:24:32 where there's a fake martial arts instructor named Guy Savilly? Savani? I think I know who you're talking about, because I'm really big into the fake martial arts thing, because it's fucking hilarious. Yes. This guy managed to trick the government
Starting point is 00:24:45 into thinking he could use his chi to knock out and kill people like he was Goku or some shit. He was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars despite never actually being able to do any of this. This research lasted four years. Somehow the Soviet version of this is dumber for very Soviet reasons uh they had their
Starting point is 00:25:08 own military psychic research and theirs lasted a lot longer by the looks of it they had one specific military psychic that they studied for over 20 years named nina kalugina i might be pronouncing that wrong and honestly honestly, I don't care. They did this despite her handlers knowing from day one that she had been cheating on every single test they'd given her, and she had no psychic powers at all.
Starting point is 00:25:36 Hey, I like the cheating part, though. Yeah, you gotta respect the hustle. But remember when I gave those dates? Starting in the 1950s. Do you think failure of a project was taken very well in mid-1950s Soviet Union? Because it wasn't.
Starting point is 00:25:54 So they simply reported them all as being good. And that she was, in fact, a psychic warrior. That's an awesome title, too. Yeah. that's an awesome title too yeah um now because of this that means it was established government fact that she had psychic abilities so when the soviet paper pravda wrote that she had actually been cheating for decades and interviewed some of the original scientists she sued them for defamation of character wow using government resources to prove that she was a psychic, the court had no choice but to award her a partial victory
Starting point is 00:26:28 in what had to be the dumbest fucking court case in Soviet history. That's fucking awesome. This might be the first and only time in modern history that psychic abilities were begrudgingly accepted as fact in a courtroom. As you can see here, I named off how many and what style of tracksuits Stalin had in his closet yeah and how deep his squat was it was the deepest um i so some of the shit that she did like remote viewing um like spoon bending uh moved stuff yeah which like of course like
Starting point is 00:27:01 shit like that and like there's also stories that she stopped an animal's heart uh no evidence of that ever taking place because i imagine if the soviets could just use somebody's mind powers to murder people by stopping their heart they'd stop dosing people with radiation to murder them uh yeah yeah now you notice we've picked out the U.S. and the Soviet Union a lot. I'm sorry, but she'd be the worst fucking avatar in the world. The wheat nation has appeared. Now, we've been picking on the U.S. and the USSR an awful lot. So if there's any British people listening and laughing at the stupidity of these two nations, calm down.
Starting point is 00:27:44 Because the British Ministry of Defense had their own psychic experiments in 2002 simmer down go ahead and take a seat yeah uh pull up to the big old dumb kids table uh now the original plan for this experiment was to use psychics who advertise themselves on the internet uh always a solid source for information you know internet psychics but when so what they did is they just pulled up all the ads that people were like these psychics are putting out and then called
Starting point is 00:28:15 them and said like we'd like you to come in for you know scientific experiments literally all of them refused because they knew under the rigors of research they would be proven to be full of shit. Yeah. So the Brits instead just turned to some random people and picked 12 of them. Yep.
Starting point is 00:28:34 They blindfolded them and made them guess the contents of an envelope. The envelopes would contain pictures of weapons, people, and because this is the United Kingdom, different races. of weapons, people, and because this is the United Kingdom, different races. And then they would have to be able to pick them apart by looking through the envelope without actually seeing the contents. I'm actually quite shocked they didn't
Starting point is 00:28:54 make them have a bathroom-related question about people choosing what bathroom to use because the UK is a lot like Alabama in some ways. Zero percent of people managed to prove to the British government they had psychic powers.
Starting point is 00:29:10 Though 28% apparently quote, got close. That's an awesome. I believe that is about the same number as random guessing. Got close. Yeah. The British government dropped the testing because i assume they realized
Starting point is 00:29:27 it was 2002 they're still attempting to test psychic powers now uh this is where i again have to point out that the u.s claims the title being the dumbest people in the fucking world and especially this group because in 2014 the office of naval research is still pumping millions of dollars every year into researching precognition from Minority Report to be able to figure out things are coming before they happen also
Starting point is 00:29:55 I still like that movie I never saw it and I plan on keeping it that way I have enough Tom Cruise in my life you really need a lot does our whole podcast revolve around Tom Cruise? that way you need to watch it i have enough tom cruise in my life you really need because tom crew i think we does our whole podcast revolve around tom cruise i think at this point we own royalties nice um i assume that the office of naval research intends on using this new power
Starting point is 00:30:16 of precognition to seeing which navy seals are going to commit war crimes ahead of time and then still not doing anything about it um okay so we haven't picked on the french yet but they get a mention too you remember louis napoleon you know napoleon the third the big dumb idiot from the second french empire there's so many napoleons i can only remember two main ones well he's the guy who started the second Mexican empire with his boy from Austria. Oh, okay. Okay. This one's on him. So the French were doing what they do best, oppressing local people in Algeria while trying to get them to force under their colonial boot.
Starting point is 00:30:55 This time is 1856. The French are having a hard time controlling tribal religious groups known as the Maribou. They believe that the Marabou were using magic to turn locals away from colonial authorities because clearly only magic could make people in africa hate the french that's fucking mind-boggling yeah imagine like you're a literal emperor and like why don't these people across the ocean that I'm forcing under my flag not like me? It must be the wizards.
Starting point is 00:31:32 Now, rather than become introspective about their terrible imperialism, they decided the only thing that could stop a bad magician is a good magician. So they went and found their own. Enter Jean-Eugène Robert Houdin. Oh, fuck. Yeah, one of the more well-known magicians of France
Starting point is 00:31:51 and someone who Napoleon III picked because he once saw him at a court show and thought he was kind of cool. He's like quite literally a court jester. This guy, get this, guys. This guy, he fucking guessed the card i had yeah i he pulled a fucking bird stride of his sleeve bro it was fucking crazy shit uh so he decided that he would deploy this magician to show the algerians that french magic was stronger than algerian magic So, he went on... Did they have a showdown?
Starting point is 00:32:25 Kind of. I hope so. Yeah, he went on a tour of tribal areas showing off his sick skills. Now, really what it was, was... So, he rigged up a chest
Starting point is 00:32:35 that if anybody tried to pick it up other than him, it had electrical current running through it, you see. And it'll electrocute the fucking shit out of you
Starting point is 00:32:45 if you tried to pick it up because he knew that there was a safety switch to turn it off so he could pick up the chest so it's quite literally that joke fucking handshake thing that when you shake someone's hand it shocks you or the fake cigarette yeah yeah gum yeah it sounds a whole lot more like being an asshole than being a magician but i guess those two things are the same i bought those at the ice cream truck of course this didn't actually do anything uh but houdin credits the continued french imperial control over algeria algeria solely to the powers of his super sweet magic they just boosted his ego yeah and he claims that like a tribal warlord had no choice but to throw himself in subservience to the french because
Starting point is 00:33:34 he watched houdin catch a bullet with his teeth a pretty well-known magic trick now that's been debunked quite a few times uh but there's no actual secondhand accounts of that happening so he quite possibly just made it up he's a magician he's not an honest person um in reality the french occupation of alturia did go on but it was pretty much a constant state of war until the french finally took the fucking hit and left in the 1960s um because but you know like i feel like defeat in a war is kind of a for sure thing when your idiot inbred emperor deploys a wizard out of desperation. But whatever. That's definitely my talk of deployment.
Starting point is 00:34:17 Yeah. Deployed the wizard core. Yeah. And 50 years when we're still in Afghanistan, we're going to deploy, like, TikTok teens. David Blaine. He's going to make the Taliban disappear!
Starting point is 00:34:33 He's going to do some crazy shit, because you know how he's been doing the fucking... He's going to be in ice, and he went underwater for so much this amount of time. He's going to do some weird shit like that over there, and that's it. He's going to, like, attempt like that over there and that's it. He's going to attempt to make a cabool disappear.
Starting point is 00:34:50 Didn't he try to make an illusion where he made the Statue of Liberty disappear? Something like that. Was that him? I think so. I don't know. They're all the same to me. Wasn't it Houdini? No, he's been dead for a long time. I saw this on TV. Yeah, but I'm pretty sure Houdini did it a while ago. I don't know. Houdini got punched in the stomach and died all the same so yeah they're
Starting point is 00:35:09 it's all one wizard moving back and forth very quickly so it looks like two i think uh david blaine would beat chris angel's ass you know the only true way to figure this out is to deploy both chris angel and david blaine toaine to Afghanistan just to see what happens. He's in a mind freak so hard he's going to lose a leg to an IED. They're going to end up starting some type of turf war. And then David Blaine's like,
Starting point is 00:35:35 I'm going to make your leg reappear. And he just pulls it out of a trash bag. It's not even his leg. It's somebody else's. Sir, that's a different skin color. Now, after dabbling in all these dumb experiments, the U.S. did what it does best. That is, get stuck in an illegal war with no way out
Starting point is 00:35:54 or a way to win or a way to withdraw from. Sorry, I suppose I should be more specific. I'm talking about the time we tried to help the Philippine government commit war crimes against its own people in the 1950s. Now, the first half of that i almost had to be even more specific because we've done that a couple times um it turns out uh after world war ii a lot of the communists who would help fight the japanese in the philippines uh were not welcome into the new u.s backed republic of philippines that had been formed afterwards.
Starting point is 00:36:25 I'm sure for totally fine and not bad reasons, this of course led to a civil war. At the time, we blamed Soviet involvement, which was never really a thing, outside of meager propaganda support. But this, being the 1950s and the Red Scare being all over the place, this led to our active and full support of their country's government to wage a terror campaign against its own people. Weird how we keep doing that. The man that the U.S. sent to take charge of action there
Starting point is 00:36:54 was a CIA spook named Edward Lansdale. Lansdale was backed by teams of other spooks and special forces types. And their group together took to the mountains and hills to meet with the locals and hilariously enough while he was there and visiting these areas that were kind of under communist sway uh he was shocked to find out that the government that the u.s supporting was bad actually now the book I sourced for this is a book called
Starting point is 00:37:27 Killing Hope the US military and CIA intervention since World War II a catchy fucking title I know imagine being so terrible that your personal history is titled Killing Hope incredible
Starting point is 00:37:42 imagine if you die, right? And someone writes your biography and it's called Nick Casanova, Killing Hope. Like, what fucked up shit do you have to do to earn that title of your personal history? Be the CIA, I guess. Anyway. Lansdale is noted as to have said that the communists were right and the philippine
Starting point is 00:38:07 government was quote rotten to the core and that quote violence is the only way that these people are ever going to get a government of their own uh but despite all of that he shrugged and just kept on working with the government and the c in general. Nobody ever said introspection always leads to good things. It's just maybe he didn't sleep so good at night, which, like, whatever. Now, he did develop something that has been rightfully mocked ever since
Starting point is 00:38:36 and something we're both probably very familiar with, at least in passing. The ideas of hearts and minds. Yeah. The idea that even the most corrupt government on earth could still win people over if they were total dicks about it and maybe provided some basic services
Starting point is 00:38:52 to the people they wish to control that whole thing um but unfortunately he went about attempting to make this idea a reality and maybe the most super villain way I've ever fucking seen um now he and his team poured over research a reality in maybe the most supervillain way I've ever fucking seen. Now, he and his team poured over research material about the customs and traditions
Starting point is 00:39:09 of these villages that the communists were around, held sway over. This included their lore, their taboos, and their mythology. This is not because he was curious and wanted to know more about them. It's because he wanted to weaponize it. This is actually not that uncommon
Starting point is 00:39:25 when it comes to supervillains of history. There's numerous stories of Nazis learning Hebrew and Jewish culture and customs so they could put themselves in the minds of the people that they saw as the enemy. Not exactly a good group of classmates there. That's pretty fucked. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:39:42 So, I mean, I think it was Him I think I think it was Himmler or maybe one of the other big Nazis that like eventually learned bad Hebrew or something. I can't quite remember. So after doing this for quite some time, he found a small plane, rigged
Starting point is 00:40:00 it up with speakers and then had a translator record a message. And while being rigged it up with speakers and then had a translator record a message and while being this cloud the plane was hidden by cloud cover the plane flew above the clouds and broadcast
Starting point is 00:40:16 the message in the local language to Golik promising a curse that would befall anyone who helped the communists by giving them food or water and yeah how powerful are these fucking speakers that would befall anyone who helped the communists by giving them food or water. How powerful are these fucking speakers? Pretty loud, I think.
Starting point is 00:40:32 Yeah, especially like a shitty small prop plane. Now, it sounds pretty crazy because it is, but there's a little bit of evidence that this actually worked. After Lansdale's Fly-By-Night Witch Ghost Plane Express but there's a little bit of evidence that this actually worked. Um, after lands, yeah. After Lansdale's fly by night, which ghost plane express or something,
Starting point is 00:40:50 whatever you want to call it. Uh, thousands of communist rebels eventually surrendered to government forces in the area, suffering from hunger and thirst. Fuck. Yeah. Now this had an unfortunate, uh,
Starting point is 00:41:02 twofold unfortunate things. One, a whole bunch of people said starving to death and having a lack of water. But this also told Lansdale there's a very good possibility that threatening civilians with otherworldly powers, while horrible and probably unethical, may have actually worked, and he should expand upon this further. So, with his big old brain filled the idea of scaring the local rebels of supernatural insanity Lansdale went deeper and this led him
Starting point is 00:41:31 to the local mythos of the Aswang deeper this is a term that covers all kinds of zombies and ghouls and vampires but for the purpose we're talking specifically about vampires which is a sentence i didn't think i was ever going to say on this show no i don't know how
Starting point is 00:41:52 exactly to rank the fear level of people when it comes to paranormal shit but this is like the top if you thought like your most local mythology is bullshit you would probably still be afraid of like this one like the aswang you would still like be kind of upset that someone told you there's a vampire nearby um especially these are super rural communities so like the idea that they believe in a lot of traditional superstitions and stuff like that very very common i mean um if they had a hot topic in the area they'd be fine it'd be normal everybody would just look like a shitty hot topic vampire exactly it's a mall vampire but instead of drinking your blood he writes really sad poetry that also sucks
Starting point is 00:42:36 um the vampire took its form as a woman who like western vampires needs blood to survive but rather than like using fangs and living in a castle like dracula it used a proboscis tongue like like a neck straw so like he's a giant woman-shaped mosquito and it lives in the woods it sounds kind of gross you just need a can of offspring you're good she won't Yeah, get off. It keeps the vampires at bay. So after learning about this fun and scary local fact, Lansdale and his team scattered off into the local villages to spread the rumors that the woods were just fucking lousy with vampires.
Starting point is 00:43:19 So would you rather have a vampire with teeth or a vampire that just tongues you? I don't know. I feel like the tongue would be much better just tongues you? I don't know. I feel like the tongue would be much better at sucking blood. I don't know. I mean, mosquitoes suck blood with their face needles. I'm still leaning towards
Starting point is 00:43:33 fucking teeth. What if it was just like a giant, it was just like a guy named Pete who had like a giant syringe and just had a I'm actually like a dollar general vampire i don't have the proboscis tongue like my cousin the ass long and i lost all my teeth because i had a lousy meth habit so what i'm gonna do here is i'm gonna stick you with this needle which by the way i did not
Starting point is 00:44:00 clean and i'm just gonna to pull out your blood and, and then I'm going to drink it. Uh, like, Oh, Oh, I don't like that at all, sir. Maybe I'll add a little mixer to it.
Starting point is 00:44:11 Maybe I'll drink it on the rocks. It's got to pour back out, you know, add some kale to it. My doctor said that my, my, my heart, my blood pressure is too goddamn high,
Starting point is 00:44:21 probably from all the sodium in this fucking blood. Um, fucking idiot fucking dumbass vampire we've created the worst vampire in human history some guy named pete from apparently like i don't know jersey who drinks blood out of dirty needles it's the new state flag of jersey um so this spreading of the vampire rumor did a little bit of what they wanted which was so terror into the hearts of civilian population but didn't scare the rebels quite yet maybe because like they were literally killing people
Starting point is 00:45:00 and at war so like the idea of a scary bedtime story didn't really appeal to them. So that's when Lansdale knew it was time to crank that insanity dial to 11. So he and his spooks stalked off into the jungle to make the Aswang a real thing. And so they
Starting point is 00:45:19 were set up and ambushed a rebel patrol, but not the way that you would think. They laid in wait for a rebel patrol, and as it walked by, they waited for the last man to fall behind. Now, I don't know how many patrols they had to wait for this to happen.
Starting point is 00:45:38 Like, dude, we've been out here three days, and they're all keeping proper distance. This sucks. But eventually it happened the last man the patrol fell behind they've been waiting that long because one of them doesn't have the courage to tongue the other guy yeah they have to be as
Starting point is 00:45:54 realistic as possible you only you only can use your tongue tongue that throat private also like I'll talk a little bit more in a second so they they they tackled the last guy in the patrol and drug him off into the jungle there they stabbed him in the neck with a small knife and hung him up from a tree to bleed him out uh get it like like a vampire like
Starting point is 00:46:17 i don't know of any vampire stories of hanging like they hung them up upside down to bleed them out like kind of like what you do to an animal um all right yeah uh and then once the corpse was rendered sufficiently bloodless they chucked it back out in the trail to be discovered by other rebels um when they did find the dead body it scared them shitless and they packed up their bags and apparently left uh because you know the region is infested with vampires or whatever I would chalk that down as a coincidence
Starting point is 00:46:52 at that point or that you're in the middle of a war and this man was stabbed in the neck exactly imagine like you get tasked out for this like so Mr. Lansdale i have to do what now you know you want me to kidnap a man murder him bleed him out on the side of the trail
Starting point is 00:47:12 and then just chuck him into the woods do you think they got confused and asking questions and they're like so when do we kiss them when does pete come in? So this apparently worked. It's like anecdotal, but they said there was less rebels in the region after that. I have no way but to, I have nothing but to take their word for it. But also you do not in fact have to trust the CIA. But this would not be the last time the U.S.
Starting point is 00:47:46 military would attempt to weaponize the ghosts of dead people to scare away their enemies. Which, of course, brings me to that thing earlier about Illegal Forever Wars the U.S. loves to find itself in, but this time it's Vietnam. Oh, okay. While Lansdowne
Starting point is 00:48:02 went to Vietnam, he ended up kind of starting another operation, but he was busy doing other stuff as well. Like this wasn't 100% Lansdale anymore, but it started Operation Wandering Soul. And it was kind of born from the successes in the Philippines because he quite literally wrote the book on psychological operations after that. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:48:30 So the Operation Wandering Soul took his first idea of recordings and decided to quite literally make it widespread. He did it once or twice with planes, very small planes. And then someone in Vietnam was like, yes, but what if we did this, but all over the place, all the time? So PSYOP's teams hit the ground running, attempting to learn about the superstitions of local people in Vietnam when they stumbled upon one thing. How they feel about the importance of spirits and the correct burial of their dead. In particular, Vietnam has a local belief that if someone is killed or dies, how they feel about the importance of spirits and the correct burial of their dead in particular Vietnam has a local belief that if someone is killed or dies they need to be buried in their home
Starting point is 00:49:10 village or their soul will wander aimlessly in pain and suffering for all eternity if someone is buried correctly it is believed they can be contacted at the anniversary of their death by their family but if they're not they're doomed forever to instead haunt you for failing
Starting point is 00:49:26 them. Oh, fuck that. I don't know exactly how widespread this is still, but there's these very specific holiday named Trong Nguyen, or the Wandering Souls Day, where people go to pagodas to offer food for the spirits of those who are not buried correctly, hoping to appease
Starting point is 00:49:42 them. So it's... Bury me by a taco truck? Yeah, but you have to be buried in your local place, which, what if there is no taco truck? Fuck, there has to be. Like, come on. They're going to bury you in the gentrified part of LA? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:50:03 Oh, no, I got buried next to a vegetarian restaurant called like just kale it oh fuck the server's name is toast oh shit oh no um it's like it's it's vegan vegetarian fusion because you know when you put fusion in the name the food's always bad oh for yes now I don't know like I said I don't know how widespread this belief is I think they bury you by a fucking near a post or near a Chili's I'll take that at least I can get drunk in the
Starting point is 00:50:37 afterlife everybody has to go to Chili's and mourn my death yeah everybody pour out your too large but economically priced beer for Joe. Now, like I said, I don't know exactly how widespread this is, but people still celebrate it.
Starting point is 00:50:56 I don't know if that's a grudging acceptance because your parents make you or not, but whatever. So, I don't know. A small side note here. I don't know how much this is true or how widely believed any of this is uh this is according to a u.s mac v sog document published in the 1960s for the sole purpose of local of studying local beliefs to use against them and the vietcong and their sympathizers sympathizers and we all know how dumb the US government is, but I want
Starting point is 00:51:26 to lay the groundwork for just how the hell they end up thinking their psychological operation was going to work. The US began these operations by dropping leaflets onto areas they thought the VC might be hiding on Wandering Souls Day. The leaflets pointed out that the people of South Vietnam
Starting point is 00:51:42 were honoring the dead, while the godless communists didn't care about the souls of the dead. Therefore, they should bail on Ho Chi Minh and join Team Saigon, because otherwise the dead are going to be restless and going to haunt you. Remember, comrades, if you love your dead grandma, you will embrace the free markets. So, remember, members of the PSY psyops units um and the army sound engineers took lansdale's first recordings and built on them an entire operation that was much larger than even lansdale even wanted or could dream of because remember lansdale did his loudspeaker
Starting point is 00:52:20 thing and then immediately went on to like vampiring motherfuckers off into the woods right he didn't go we need more planes I guess because like maybe everybody's like well we can't kidnap people in the woods and turn them into vampires in Vietnam because they don't they don't believe that shit so like
Starting point is 00:52:39 we'll have to stick to the sound speakers this included so their recording included screams of supposed ghosts, messages from the dead, and screams of pain and suffering. Who the fuck did these recordings? Translators, like a lot of Arvin soldiers. And of course, the ghostly disembodied voice pretending to be a VC fighter's parents saying that if they die,
Starting point is 00:53:04 they'll wander the earth forever because they wouldn't be buried right this became give me a little bit more emotion on this one alright you're a dead guy in the jungle go good news Nick in case you wanted to listen to this it still exists today
Starting point is 00:53:19 it's called Ghost Tape 10 oh fuck and I will play it in its entirety at the end of this episode. Just a heads up, it is pretty fucking long. It's like eight minutes long. And if you were to hear me, it's like screaming.
Starting point is 00:53:36 There's like Buddhist funeral chimes and it's all around. It's a spooky aesthetic. I'll give it that much. If I was stalking through the woods or something, and I heard this blared out of the darkness, I would be deeply unsettled. Though I think a lot of this is because I have no idea what they're saying.
Starting point is 00:53:56 But I also wouldn't be in the woods, so I'd be fine. Yeah, I would not be stalking through the woods at night. Thankfully, someone translated a lot of this for me, and the results are kind of lame. Can I get a number two fubble? Yeah. This is like, mom, dad, I'm dead. Actually, that's not even that far off.
Starting point is 00:54:22 Here are some choice lines in English. Quote, my friends, I have come back to let you know that I am dead. I'm dead. Are you scared yet? That's so fucking lame. It's like going to a fucking haunted house and it's just like spaghetti in a bowl. It's like, it's intestines. Here's another one. Quote, it's just like spaghetti in a bowl. It's like, it's intestines. Here's another one.
Starting point is 00:54:47 Quote, it's hell. I'm in hell. Don't end up like me, friends. Go home before it's too late. I'm distinctly not scared by this. This is then followed by a chorus of Buddhist funeral music, banging gongs, like the sobbing
Starting point is 00:55:07 of an old woman and then like a voice screaming out for her father this was played on a plane well it's played among various things and we'll we'll tell you uh we'll talk about that imagine like somebody accidentally puts in like their fucking workout mix just like five finger death punch or something and so somewhere vc out in the woods like dude change this song they fucking suck the only part of this that's kind of scary to me is the child calling out for her father but that's personal because i find children terrifying um i was about to say do you have a kid now i do not um and that idea scares me more than being haunted so americans knew that they got the recipe just right when they could use it to scare their comrades in the arvin or
Starting point is 00:56:01 the army of the republic of vietnam south vietnam um and then randomly one of the arvin soldiers told a psyops guy that he heard rumors that tigers were hunting people in the jungles and tigers are scary and they should add tiger sounds and incredibly they did just that so like ghost tigers are thrown in there for a good mix that's fucking awesome like imagine being like the lower enlisted sound guy who's mixing all this together you think you got it just right and some lieutenant's like bro add tiger sounds yeah you think you're done for the day add tiger sounds bro uh and like they added it by going to the saigon zoo and then like recording it screaming at them do you think like the tiger hasn't done anything all day and they're just poking it like do something make a roaring noise stop sleeping like it's like whenever you go to the zoo and just there's laying
Starting point is 00:56:51 all over the place like just sleeping all day but you're just sitting there with like a boom mic like come on i have a 40 weekend once and uh a lot of butterflies there's more butterflies at the woodland zoo in seattle than i expected i'll give it that much yeah now rather than just piping these songs through uh or these songs play that new beat um play the one with the tiger song um uh through through like planes and stuff which they did um but they took the wild ghost sound game pro and they put this shit everywhere. This included loudspeakers, bolted the outposts,
Starting point is 00:57:33 helicopters, and man portable speakers to be brought out on patrol. Fuck that. That would be annoying. Like imagine you're like, okay, we got the machine gunner guy we got the
Starting point is 00:57:48 radio guy who wants to be the guy carrying the speaker full of screaming children and tigers or that guy's always forgotten he's in the back like what about my accountability right here right yeah me yeah
Starting point is 00:58:03 well I carried the the ghost backpack last time um so yeah your book would be so much better if you carry that around afghanistan yeah it's just instead of having to carry around a fucking uh mind detector it's like you have to carry the uh spooky afghan backpack but it's like outdated so have to carry the spooky Afghan backpack. But it's, like, outdated, so it's actually the one that they use in Vietnam. It's just the... The Afghans are like, we don't speak this language! Jesus Christ, you guys suck at this!
Starting point is 00:58:35 Get some new material! The shit's stale! You're already here, stuck in a war forever, burning through a generation that nobody cares about, now you're gonna roll out the vmd speakers real cool um now uh the last one is dumb as hell
Starting point is 00:58:51 but um okay this is mostly used for night patrols right like because it's supposed to be spooky it's like mtv's old reality show fear like things don't look haunted if you shine a whole bunch of sunlight at it so you're in a night patrol right the last fucking thing i want is a bow sound system strapped to
Starting point is 00:59:10 my ass making ghost baby sounds right and like so fucking loud uh but that was somebody's job and then like imagine like going to the va and saying that like so how'd you lose your hearing well i had to carry the ghost speakers on patrol. You know that shit isn't service-related now. No. One thing is, before I would ever go out on a patrol, that thing's becoming non-mission capable
Starting point is 00:59:36 immediately. Yeah, I'm immediately going to shoot it. Just whoops, dropped it. Whoops, fired off a burst weird how that happens um so remember how i said that this tactic kind of sort of worked in an anecdotal sort of way in the philippines did it work this time i was gonna say how do you think it worked in vietnam clearly we won the vietnam war so it worked right right? I'm going to say no,
Starting point is 01:00:05 I didn't work at all. Not even a little bit. In fact, it actually had the opposite effect. Um, any helicopter playing these ghost sounds immediately found themselves under incredible, incredible amounts of gunfire to the extent pilots refused to play it for fear
Starting point is 01:00:22 of being shot down. Mostly because like, Hey, look, I can hear the helicopter coming even more than i normally can because remember how loud these things have to fucking be yeah now there is some mixed reports of success at various parts of the war however the most famous one comes from a description printed in the tropic lightning news uh showing the success of no tropic lightning uh because it's the 25th infantry division's official publication the tropic lightning yeah um which i believe they're actually stationed hawaii somewhere but um fucking down the street from you probably i think i think they're in scofield
Starting point is 01:01:05 which is 30 minutes away from me i don't know anything on this island's 30 minutes away from me um so in the tropic lightning news it claims that uh by playing these things it scared the the vc into surrendering to them a couple things here zero evidence as to this is the reason why they were captured. And in fact, only three people who were captured tells me that they were just like, they only captured three people. So this tells me that they actually just captured a scouting party who knew they were fucked if they tried to fight. So they just gave up instead, which is actually pretty common. A lot of VC scouting parties were actually unarmed, so they could run faster. is actually pretty common a lot of vc scouting parties were actually unarmed so they could run faster uh good incidents of the a good um example of this is we were soldiers they captured that
Starting point is 01:01:51 one scout by himself unarmed in the woods right that happened a lot um also like i said tropic lightning news is the official publication of the 25th Infantry Division and they're reporting about themselves. Not exactly reliable reporting. Another such account says a platoon or so worth of soldiers abandoned their position after being subject to the ghost tape throughout the night. Now, some possibilities, I
Starting point is 01:02:17 think, are common sense. They're blaring these tapes at night, constantly. I think if we follow Occam's razor here, that the most likely reason for people abandoning their positions is because they're being subjected to hours of loud noises when they were trying to sleep, leaving them to become sleep deprived.
Starting point is 01:02:36 Yeah. And that they just left their posts because it was annoying. Uh, we know this is how people respond to loud, continuous noise because this is a method of torture used for people at Guantanamo Bay. It works to break people, like torture does
Starting point is 01:02:53 because it's torture. I think that's what babies do when they first come out. That's actually why babies cry at certain volumes and pitches because they know it annoys humans. Sounds have purpose. Those goddamn creatures.
Starting point is 01:03:11 Now, when soldiers weren't greeted with gunfire when they played the ghost tape, they were greeted by pissed off villagers, probably rightfully mad that the US is attempting to weaponize their own culture and beliefs against them. Nobody believed this shit. In one case, a swift boat that
Starting point is 01:03:26 was playing the shit had rocks thrown at them until they finally drove away. For further evidence that the locals were pissed when the boat changed the music to Aretha Franklin, nobody threw rocks at them. Yeah. And if the tapes weren't bad enough,
Starting point is 01:03:42 they were part of the larger Phoenix program, something that will almost certainly be its own episode or series at some point in the future but long story short we did a lot of terrorism against the people of Vietnam in the end the PSYOP soldiers
Starting point is 01:03:58 considered a success despite no measurable way to call it a success which I guess is a perfect example of the Vietnam War as a whole um but yeah that's Halloween is everybody ready to go
Starting point is 01:04:16 trick-or-treating for Vietnamese ghosts I am are you gonna play that guy for Halloween is that your costume I'm gonna dress up like the VC So I can So I can beat the US military
Starting point is 01:04:32 Um It's gonna be real awkward tunnel ratting in your own house Just barely like Why is that guy in black pajamas digging a hole In his backyard in Honolulu I don't know but he uh He's pointing an AK at me. Now, Nick,
Starting point is 01:04:48 we do a thing here on Questions from the Legion. Called Questions from the Legion. Also, we do a thing here called Joe Can't Speak. Today's question is have you ever heard or seen anything that made you really feel like, no, really, I saw it happen?
Starting point is 01:05:08 Like, you know, I have a friend in another unit who said this. You know, no, bro, I have a friend who totally said this happened. Like, what is your, no, this totally happened story in the military? Mine has to be stress cards. Yeah, I've heard of that uh maybe that's that's an older thing i know maybe people don't spread that rumor anymore i still hear about it like when uh some i know one of my buddies asked me like well if you ever do go back into the military at least they won't they'll give you a stress card like I was like, dude, that's not fucking real. I actually know.
Starting point is 01:05:45 I've had to look into this before. Like the origin of... One origin, I should say, because this thing has built a myth onto its own, right? Of the stress card idea. One, they never existed. I need to be completely forthright with that. The concept of you're being yelled at by a drill sergeant you can held up a card never existed uh the origin of the stress card from what i can tell
Starting point is 01:06:11 actually is the air force when they had they um they handed out cards to new airmen their version of privates recruits whatever i don't know what the fuck they're called uh um that was a kind of like an ace card or the uh the the suicide prevention card or whatever of like how to handle stress because like you know most teenagers don't handle any real stress in their life until they get yelled at by grown men for a couple weeks um and the cards told them like how to how to like stress coping techniques um it was not something they could hold up and be like,
Starting point is 01:06:46 I'm good here. People may act like the card was the wrap it up box from Dave Chappelle. And it was not. It was never a thing. Second one, I actually have two of these, is the guy who killed himself with a floor buffer.
Starting point is 01:07:03 What? You've never heard this one? No. Actually, that one isn't as good. It's the basketball story. What are you talking about? The story goes, in basic training, that a guy wanted to get out, right?
Starting point is 01:07:20 And for people who are unaware, at least in the United States, you can't just quit. You can't be like, I'm done. I don't want to be a soldier anymore. I'm going home. It doesn't happen. So you have to figure out creative ways to trick the system into, I don't know, getting it to believe that you're crazy or whatever and getting it discharged that way. Don't recommend doing that because it's not an honorable discharge.
Starting point is 01:07:41 And it does, in fact, impact your life but um the story goes and i've heard this from at least three different people who all went to basic training in different places um that someone decided that they wanted to get out so they're gonna play crazy and they did this by pretending to dribble a basketball wherever they went they dribbled a basketball um like they'd just be when they were walking in formation they'd pretend to be dribbling it's an invisible basketball. It's not real. And then they do this forever,
Starting point is 01:08:09 you know, weeks, weeks, months, months, whatever. And finally, the drill sergeant sent him to the doctor where he's,
Starting point is 01:08:14 you know, prescribed with some unknown mental illness and therefore discharged. At that point, the commander signs his discharge paperwork and hands it to him. At that point, the guy takes the invisible basketball and shoots it and stops shriveling the basketball. And the commander says, why'd you do that? And he said, well, game's over. Never has fucking happened.
Starting point is 01:08:36 There's no fucking way that happened. I have heard that one so many fucking times. And because I already brought up, I'll talk about the floor buffer one and that is somebody hung themselves with a floor buffer I actually fully believe that that happened once upon a time because you know people commit suicide at a frightening rate
Starting point is 01:08:55 in the US military oh yeah and the odds that someone used a floor buffer cord to do so seems likely at some point, but the idea that it happened at literally every fucking basic training, uh, base or trade doc post.
Starting point is 01:09:11 No, if that was the case, privates would not have floor buffers anymore. No. Um, but yeah, those are the ones I can think of. I don't know if there's any new urban legends in the military anymore.
Starting point is 01:09:23 I've been out since 2013. No, you, you definitely got new urban legends in the military anymore. I've been out since 2013. No, you, you definitely got me on the debt, the stress card. That's the one I know for sure. I think that's the one that everybody knows. Cause like I,
Starting point is 01:09:34 I still hear people talk about it. Yeah. It's not fucking real. It never happened. Shut up. I mean, a lot of these are born into the idea that, you know, when this guy who's almost almost
Starting point is 01:09:47 always someone my age or boomer or something who got out a long time ago joined a long time ago like i enlisted in 2005 so like you know the military was a little bit different from when i joined to when you joined but the idea that it was like so much harder is fucking not true. And people really just want to be better than the generation that came after them. Everybody's the, oh my, the cycle before you, we were fucking hard. Yeah. Like, no, you weren't. You were not.
Starting point is 01:10:18 Nobody's basic training was marketably harder than anybody else's. Like even the idea that like basic training was harder back in the day, though that day is never specified, is also not true. It was almost always easier because you had to learn less skills. Like if you enlist tomorrow, say an 18 year old is listening to this
Starting point is 01:10:37 and enlist tomorrow. For one, don't. But say you do and you go to 10 weeks of basic combat training because it's 10 weeks long now, which is something I just learned the other day.
Starting point is 01:10:45 They extended it. Yes, it is. You're going to learn so much more and be tested on so much more than literally any soldier that fought in World War II. So your basic training is harder than the greatest generations. The only difference is
Starting point is 01:11:01 maybe someone doesn't punch you in the face or whatever, which does not make a better soldier it makes a dumber one but yeah um so tell your grandpa to shut up because that's probably the person spreading this um but yeah those are the ones i can think of yeah mine are too and the world's better off yeah yours kind of sucked yeah yikes but that is our episode Nick it's great to have you back
Starting point is 01:11:31 and you're just in time for the worst election in human history that's hyperbole in American history but you know you're back from the woods for that so that's good and to everybody listening until next time
Starting point is 01:11:46 don't record ghosts and play them from a backpack that's all I got later Terima kasih telah menonton. Субтитры создавал DimaTorzok మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మాన్ని పారు మ� Cậu tôi, vợ tôi, vợ tôi, tôi đã... Ba đang vào viết thông tin. Tôi đã về giữa mình đây. Nhưng tôi còn đâu có mảnh hình hàng nữa. Ba đã về với con người, tôi đã về với mình đây. Nhưng tôi còn đôi mảnh hình hàng nữa.
Starting point is 01:13:49 Tôi đã trách lời má con bà ơi. Tôi đã hãm thương, tháng gian mất mình nào. Các bạn của tôi, tôi phải ngờ, để nói cho các bạn biết rằng con đã chết. Hãy subscribe cho kênh Ghiền Mì Gõ Để không bỏ lỡ những video hấp dẫn

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.