Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 137 - The Silmido Mutiny

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

South Korea starts an assassination squad made out of petty criminals and dudes who look kind of in shape. Hilarity does not ensue. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys sources: https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/18/asia/south-korea-failed-assassination-squad-unit-684-intl/index.html http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20050824000044 https://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/15/world/south-korean-movie-unlocks-door-on-a-once-secret-past.html

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. Hello, and welcome to yet another episode of Lions Led by Junkies podcast. I am Joe, and with me today is Sarah from It Came From the Sea podcast, and our official white Korean cultural liaison on staff. What's up? Literally the whitest person you could find who could technically speak Korean. Hello. Yeah, Scarlett Johansson was unavailable for this role.

It's unfortunate. But I mean, admittedly, I did not know this ever happened until we talked about it. What were you talking about today? So it only felt right to drag you on um not to mention you speak fluent korean and can immediately you you speak first best korean on this show uh i speak second best um because i'm sure there's a lot of people whenever we talk about history that happened in their country

or their culture or whatever they're like oh he fucking pronounced this wrong now that can happen in real time I can't correct your pronunciation I do have that down at least yeah and that's like so if there's any Koreans listening

if she fucks up that that is not my fault. No, blame him. If you blame me, it's the patriarchy. That's fair. Yeah, it's actually Nick's fault because he's not here. You made a joke last time on the show that you're slowly going to take over Nick's role. That's becoming an actual problem.

Yeah. This is what he gets for having a life. Oh, bastard. And his job. Yeah, Nick is in the middle of moving. He should be back on the show whenever he has a stable internet connection and privacy. Which, as anybody who's ever had to stay with their family for a week or two knows that's fucking impossible um especially as someone in their mid-20s um so today we are

talking if i could you know remember to put my script up like i do this for a living or something is uh this is known by a few different names i believe in korea it's known as the shilmido incident um i'm calling it the shilmido mutiny because i feel like that is more apt the word incident is just a thing that they do in korea where they throw it after a lot of times it's like a date and they'll just go with like it's the the june 23rd incident so it's not like that's how they're describing it that's just like a cultural thing. It's kind of like when the British call thing, like a vastly underestimate and like under name,

horrible, horrible things that have occurred. It's just, it's less like, I feel like the Brits do it to downplay stuff on purpose. And this is just like how they, how they refer to things in Korea. They're not like trying to say like,

oh, it was just a little bit of a mutiny, just a light mutiny, it's fine. It also makes researching kind of hard because it just refers to dates and unit numbers. Yep. Unlike my favorite Korean war film with the flag unit or whatever it was called.

Taekooki. That movie is so incredibly bad it's good um peak korean cheese you gotta give it credit for a uh i'm gonna say south korean um for sake of clarity through this but like we it's also the republic of korea or the rock uh for a rock made war film it actually covers uh rock war crimes which is new um so you gotta get like you do in fact have to hand it to whoever made that film i whose name i forget surprisingly balanced yeah which like from my understanding is is a relatively recent thing because you know they went through a very long period of dictatorship and oppression,

uh, which we will talk about a little bit during this episode. Uh, and like, uh, for instance, like the show me dough mutiny until a movie was made called show me dough.

Uh, most people had never fucking heard of it. Uh, and that was on purpose, right? Yeah. It was a little embarrassing. You know, I, when you originally described this to me i thought it sounded stupid and it is um but it's so much dumber than i ever

thought possible um people forget that in like between between the end of the korean war and the start of like i think in like the mid 80s when South Korea became a bigger economic powerhouse they were just as dumb as North Korea in a lot of ways like they were doing the same kind of weird shit as North Korea and it's just that they pulled like one the US was on their side so the US

downplayed all this bullshit but also they managed to pull themselves out of an economic slump and so everybody was just like well they're doing fine now. We could ignore all the weird dictatorships and coups. Yeah. This is one situation where they tried to do the same thing as North Korea, but

failed in every conceivable way. It's so much worse. So this is for people who have no idea what we're talking about, which is fine because again this isn't wasn't even known in South Korea until like 20

years ago we're going to talk about the time the South Korean government attempted to form an assassination squad out of criminals only for it to attempt to kill their own president yeah but in order to talk about how the fuck that happened or why anybody thought this is a good idea we have to talk about probably one of the ballsiest and also dumbest assassination

plots of all time the raid on the blue house i love this uh for people unaware the blue house is the presidential uh house of south korea yeah it is uh it looks it looks baller as fuck like if i'm picking a palace to live in white house blue house blue house wins 10 times out of 10 as straight baller status like if you're gonna despot your shit up you're gonna build something like this oh yeah i mean that's new or but like you know the white house looks plain this this is like you'd go on cribs to go inside the house it's not like a full blue building if that's what people are picturing it's just that it has the shiniest prettiest blue tiles all over the roof yeah i guess that's a weird way to come up with i mean being a puppet for a puppet for the US as it was for a very, very long time, I guess they just have to like kind of, eh, fuck it. We have to have our own White House.

A lot of countries try to come up with kitschy names for their presidential houses, which is weird. I don't get it. Maybe you don't have palaces or presidents. If you're going to have a palace, model it after the Blue House. Yeah. It's got style. Now, we have lived through increasingly weird times recently in regards to North and South Korea. war uh now that's mostly on us um to the presidents of the two countries joining hands and skipping across uh the point of no return and pamu john uh it's all very weird but you know there was also

that time a nuclear alarm went off in hawaii because they thought that the north it was an accident but it was also kind of a real threat that north korea might nuke us um that was scary for people living here yeah people always tell me about like oh god and like their eyes kind of just drop a little bit like yeah you know it's it's an event that stuck with all everybody who lived through it uh because you know it's a very real threat that like i'm about to be burnt out of existence um and there's only two other cities of people i know that's what that's like um and you know there was also that one really weird incident where a north korean soldier like fucking ran across the border while getting shot at by his

buddies um there was uh the south korean ship that was torpedoed. This is all 10 years, in the last 10 years or so, I think. There's a lot going on around 2010. And when the North shelled an island. They shelled a torpedo, yeah. Yeah, and that outright belligerent acts of war. Yeah, and that outright belligerent act of war. And for people who are young, or young adjacent like me,

when I was watching this show on the news, it was very obvious that the North sank a ship, killed tens of, I believe is what, rock sailors. I think you still can't technically say the north did it because the like results were inconclusive of the investigation it's the implication well maybe they shelled themselves is what i'm saying yeah like you know well they uh they they sank a ship they shelled an island um almost certainly so like a bunch of drones were found along the DMZ at one point which was fun yeah and like they found like very obvious signs of

infiltration across the border which is something that was supposed to end a long time ago but like you know when we see things like oh shit a war's popping off like this is absolutely gonna kick this off but this is these things are all very very I'm trying to think of a better

word to say it um not that serious yeah they're expected and they're also not that serious uh when you look at what is effectively recent history you know this is uh not in our lifetime but in our parents lifetime um when uh for starters shooting across the dmz was a daily occurrence um and that does happen now occasionally um but what i mean is like straight up ambushes uh like american and rock soldiers would be walking along and fall into an l-shaped ambush by north koreans in south korea and then like the south would infiltrate like they sent thousands of infiltrators across to ambush North Koreans and like kill guards in their posts and things like that. Yeah.

Um, and it was all just like both sides would constantly bicker about where the DMZ borders actually were. Right. That's a lot of why none of this stuff ever like ended up escalating this because there's this constant fighting over like what, what borders are. And so anytime one of one side like attacks the other they just say well no technically they were in our land because we decided that it's wednesday and our border was

three miles farther south than it normally is right it's almost like borders are arbitrary and pointless and that brings us back to the blue house raid which occurred in 1968 and this also happened to be right in the middle of one of the worst upticks in violence since the end of open hostilities of the korean war um and it's almost certainly only because america was balls deep in the vietnam war by then that it did not spiral into something much much worse because to be clear Park wanted to go back to war Park Chung-hee of South Korea

yeah but I don't mean to say in his defense because he's a soulless bastard I don't blame him some people call this period the second Korean War because it kind of was. This is like before when I was talking about ambushes on the DMZ.

Those are isolated incidents. They weren't offensives. But during the Second Korean War period, full formations of North, South, and American soldiers were attacking one another with artillery and air support. This escalation of violence is directly connected to the Vietnam War in some ways. The U.S. and South Korea had large amounts of soldiers committed

to the war. This led to the North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung to believe that now was the time that irregular warfare could drive a wedge between the U.S. and South Korea. For instance, if he kept raiding across the border, South Korea would pull its soldiers out of Vietnam and then lead to them not being like friendship canceled between South Korea and the U.S. or whatever. This would lead to the U.S. countering that move by pulling out of South Korea.

And that would put North in a position to finally force reunification on South Korea. Also, South Korea is undergoing some pretty considerable civil unrest at the time because dictators will do that to people. So he believed that in a regular war

campaign would be able to foment some kind of insurgency in South Korea as well as fuck with the american and south korean relationship obviously this didn't happen um but it wasn't from a lack of trying people so that's another thing too is like up until up until like 70s 80s there were there was a real thought uh that people in south korea would want to defect to North Korea and that they could build this underground Friends of North Korea alliance

in South Korea and try to get support within the ROK. Which sounds ridiculous now, but at the time, North Korea was doing way better economically. Mostly because they had a bunch of support from China and the USSR. But that wasn't impossible as much as we like all make fun of north korea now like that plan wasn't the worst at the it was the most realistic plan for a reunification north korea's ever had

after losing the war oh yeah um and the friends of north korea i believe is what's good the friendship association of north korea is is probably one of the funniest things. They have a website that looks like it's out of GeoCities from the 90s. Yeah. Is it still up? I haven't looked at it in a while. I think it is. And it's ran by a single Venezuelan guy or Colombian guy.

One of the two. I got to look it up now. Yeah. I know that's the story is that people williggle about, like, oh, Kim Il-sung doesn't have a butthole. That website is where those came from. Okay, yep, it's the Korean Friendship Association, USA!

Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's got the whole, like, they were all born on Mount Paektu under a double rainbow. Yep. Yeah, it's fantastic. And it has that banner is currently Kim Jong-un and his, I, it's fantastic. And it has that banner is currently Kim Jong-un and his sister, right? The next one in charge

probably. And it just runs what is I get you could almost certainly call propaganda on the front page. Despite the fact American citizens cannot currently travel to North Korea, there is a travel button. Well, you know, you can dream. Visit the website. don't give it money

it has not been updated since august of 2019 um so there's that um nothing big's happened in the last year it's fine yeah don't give don't give north korea money uh but yeah i think it's safe to say that that plan was the closest and most realistic they had to reunification. But it didn't work. But part of this campaign of irregular warfare was hit and run attacks across the DMZ, as well as artillery strikes, ambushes. You know,

this is also around the same time they captured the Pueblo. Yeah. It was in January. Yeah. Actually, I think it happened right after the Blue House raid, which is why the Blue House raid hardly even made the news in the U.S. Well, it didn't affect Americans, is the thing. Yeah.

Which we talked about that in a previous episode. Go listen to it. But before, single casualties were pretty common across the DMZ. But during the same time, hundreds of South Korean and North Korean troops were killed, but as well as 150 American casualties. If you think of

any other time where 150 Americans could get killed and we wouldn't start a war over it, I guess the Beirut bombing comes to mind, but that's pretty much it. But yeah, there was a fair amount of casualties. In comparison to the Vietnam War, these casualties were nothing. uh i like i guess the beirut bombing comes to mind but that's pretty much it but yeah like there was a fair amount of i mean in comparison to the vietnam war these casualties were nothing but also i reading over this it's it's kind of astounding that we didn't start a war over it

uh obviously the idea that we'd have to fight china at the same time you know never had to fight china and vietnam though it It's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Vietnam took care of that. But another part of this was a decapitation strike at the assassination of South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee, who seized power in 1961 and been running the country in kind of a form of military dictatorship ever since. Strangling the Second Republic of korea in its womb before it could even really exist weird how that keeps happening um now in order to do this uh north korea had to put it together a specific team i'd call the juche version of the a team known as unit 124 uh because and you know so i think i talked about this before on the pueblo

episode we're talking about north korea so a lot of what i'm saying is secondhand um we don't know anything for sure um so there is one member of the team that stayed in the south korea and was captured pretty much everything we know about 124 comes from him. And he could be making himself sound way cooler than he actually is. Or way worse. We don't know. We legitimately have no fucking idea. And from my understanding, that's pretty much

on par for bits on North Korea in general. Yeah, usually the best you can do is if you can get two defectors that are talking about a similar thing and then compare their stories. That's how we know so much about that really awful prison camp. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Unfortunately, two people did survive 124. One is in North Korea, one is in South Korea. They have much different stories. Weird, that. Yeah. So nobody really knows when this unit was formed because, again, North Korea. They have much different stories. Weird, that. Yeah. So nobody really knows when this unit was formed because, again, North Korea.

But thanks to one of the soldiers in it, we do know some things. It was formed at least two years before the mission took place and the people in it had to be handpicked by the highest levels of the North Korean military and political leadership. Because they were going across the border, they had to be

considered politically pure and well educated uh there's a very good chance that kim ol-sung interviewed these people uh himself uh which you know props if you would survive how many people could say that right wild um and they went through almost two years of unbroken training and it sounds pretty fucking nightmarish. They were forced to sprint straight up mountainsides wearing heavy packs that weighed at least 60 to 80 pounds throughout the year, including winter. Korean winters. As anybody who's been to Korea can testify, the Korean winter is fucking awful. And this caused several candidates to lose toes and entire feet to frostbite

yep that's not surprising yeah um now in order to break them in a fear that they'd almost certainly face when you know infiltrating an enemy country uh they were forced to go to the local cemetery and dig into graves to sleep for the night i I feel like that would only work the first couple of times, and after a while, you're just like, okay, I don't know. Just another dead body. There was also a practical part of it. One of their escape plans was to hide in cemeteries because after they killed the president,

which honestly, I think this is mostly just wishful thinking because I think they all assumed they were going to die in the effort um that they would hide in the cemeteries in south korea because nobody would bother to look there this sounds like like they're doing their orientation and someone's like all right so that's the plan that's how we're going to get up to kill the president and then one of the recruits raises his hand and goes how do we get back though the teacher is just like i I don't fucking know. Bury yourself in a cemetery for a few weeks. We'll come for you.

And it's like a couple months from it. Like, I can't believe we're actually training to do this. But after two years of training, the unit was decided... The whole plan for the unit was known before this, but they decided to finally be told what they were actually going to do. Now that the unit was down to 31 men they were brought to a briefing room and told that their mission was in fact raiding the blue house and killing pak chung he

and what was almost certainly a suicide mission like man i trained all this time just to fucking die this sucks what would they just what do you think you're training for we went through all of this like what what did you think you were gonna do huh and then they were brought to a top secret area uh where a complete by the spec recreation of the blue house had been built hell yeah i don't know how the man to keep that one secret they made the tiles a different color it was green not blue none of the like none of the photos of it from overhead. They would never suspect it. Some North Korean laborers had the bill.

It was like, this looks kind of familiar, doesn't it? Kill him. Work can't get out. Oh, for sure. They didn't survive. Almost certainly not. Like, thank you for your service to our dear leader. Now, if you follow this man with a machine gun,

he'll bring you to where we're keeping your Christmas bonuses. And then the next day, all the recruits had to go dig up their corpses so they could sleep with them. After that, the 31 men of the team trained almost consistently. You would think that this would be for like for another like year or so right like right and you already have these guys as a captive audience they only trained with the recreation of the blue house for 15 days what the after two years of running up mountains and shit they only get 15 days of practical training i mean i guess because they have to like soul's

pretty close to the border but it's not that close to the border. So it would definitely take them a lot more time and effort just to get to the blue house. Yeah, like maybe train, I don't know, ninja shit. Like how to get to the blue house without getting caught. No, no, no. Gotta run up more hills and then sleep with another corpse. Just like they show up to the blue house and just like when you cram for a test and then you immediately forget everything you just can't get anywhere inside

so one of them pulls a corpse out of a backpack and just starts snuggling it on the floor um so yeah then in uh january 17th 1968 they were dispatched toward the dmz where they cut a hole in the fence near where the u.s army sector was i believe was the second infantry division good job guys yeah way to go boys uh you did it um and uh they i mean to be fair i have i have shirked my way through many of guard duties uh but i don't think I've ever let some North Korean commandos slip through at least you can say that yeah take that grandpa now they slipped through the fence and they went up to the Simbong Mountains

I'm sure I'm not probably Shinbong actually S-I-M-Bong it's definitely bong it's fine I'm sure. It's probably actually probably S. I. M. Bong. It's definitely it's fine. Go on.

But they made it up to the mountains in about two days of nonstop marching there. They set up a camp. Unfortunately, this is where it turns out that their training was kind of garbage because for all of their skill and guile, four brothers who are out cutting firewood ran directly into the commandos. They didn't account for people. Fuck!

Why didn't anybody teach us how to hide our trails? Instead, we've just been sleeping with corpses and doing ninja shit in the mountains. The dead people never noticed us. The cemeteries never saw us coming. And there, a debate started amongst the commandos if they should just execute the four. Which, I mean, from a pure practicality case, yes, you kill those four brothers. You're going to execute the president yeah why is killing these like you're in and the mountains are incredibly remote just knife them and throw

them into a ditch um i mean i'm not saying this is a good plan but you're also on a suicide mission to execute a president your balls deep in this assassination attempt in january don't fuck it up yeah it turns out they were actually only just the tip-in because they decided to just, instead of killing them, to teach them about the glories of Kim Il-sung and communism. See, this is the problem

with people who are ideologically pure. They just want to go on about theory all the fucking time. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to hear about it. Sarahah this went on for hours like five or six hours five or six hours of these of these commandos preaching theory to them um after that they allowed the brothers to leave the tenants of juche one more time they'll get it just just one more time it'll make sense yeah

and they're like okay obviously you guys are good communists now you're free to go but please pinky promise that you can't go to the cops so the brother's like yeah for sure dude we won't go to the cops and then immediately went to the first cops they saw

they could have just like left them tied up too like you didn't have to kill them. You're a good little North Korean communist, whatever. You don't want to murder these people that might be your brethren. You can tie them up and leave them alone. I don't know. I feel like tying up someone and leaving them

in the mountains in January in Korea is just murdering them with extra steps. Well, yeah, but then they don't have to think about it. That's what the extra steps are for. I mean, look, I might be sympathetic to your cause, but if you sit me down and preach theory at me for six hours, I might call the cops too. Like, look, man, I was on your side,

like blowing up the president and stuff. But like, this shit sucks, bro. That's a good point too. Like you could have just told them, hey, we're going to go murder that dictator. There's a good point too like you could have just told them hey we're gonna go murder that dictator there's a decent chance they would have been okay with it yeah or be like you know what i did before i came here i got like my free state grain um that you don't have because you're out here like chopping up firewood in the middle of winter we just got that given to us and now now we're going to go kill your dictator. You down? People are like, yeah, man.

Word. Might be a little more effective than just reciting Kim Il-sung's tenets at them. It's almost like telling people about the fundamental material changes an ideology can have on their life is much more important than that ideology itself. That doesn't make any sense. Where's that written down? Yeah. Anyway, I'm just just gonna read bookchin for the next three hours um oh no but yeah anyway uh the brothers immediately ran off and called the

cops um yeah the cops yeah like dude there is some fucking commandos up in the mountains and they are boring as shit um the cops then called the army who dispatched uh thousands of people to find the infiltrators um and you know to their credit the infiltrators did break camp they realized that they should probably move um and then once they saw large formations of troops gathering in towns and stuff they realized that they were kind of fucked um and there's only a matter of time before they were found and they had to speed up their mission timeline um so they split up into small groups and infiltrated seoul uh more and more army and police units were set out to secure the surrounding mountains uh but you know they were gone but as well as the city that's when the commandos decided to change their tactics.

They did have a backup plan and it wasn't just to like... Well, let me rephrase that. Their original plan was to be able to get up, it seems, to the checkpoints, kill the people in the checkpoints and then get into the Blue House before anybody could react. The checkpoints like the military border around the Blue House, right? Yeah, it's about 100 meters away from the house itself i've seen it synced it yeah the the the checkpoint itself uh that this all occurred on is still there and you can see the

bullet holes where all this happened at which is pretty rad um but the problem was this this plan is now fucked because there is literally thousands of soldiers and cops flooding the city uh probably assuming like why are these communist insurgents so close to the capital this can't be good they're probably going for the president um at least that's like if i if i was i don't know the kcia at the time i would be like hmm this is probably an assassination attempt of some kind considering half of them are planning assassination attempts, they know what one looks like. Yeah, exactly. You know, to beat a hustler, you gotta be a hustler. They can't kill him.

I'm trying to kill him. Nobody's gonna kill a president except me. Unfortunately, someone's definitely gonna edit that part out and use it for bad things I've been trying for months I've said kill the president so many times during this episode that you could make a highlight reel of it but so obviously they weren't going to be able to get to the outer ring or the inner ring obviously I'm pretty sure

that is the last obviously I've never been given entrance to the blue ring. I'm pretty sure that is the last... Obviously, I've never been given entrance to the Blue House, but I'm pretty sure the outer ring that is garrisoned by, I believe, the police is the last line of defense before the personal security detachment of the president within the Blue House itself.

And once you engage those dudes in open warfare, I'm going to roll the dice and say that the North Koreans would probably win that in a surprise attack. Um, but that plan is now gone. Uh, so now they have to figure out another way to get close to the blue house. Thankfully, they had a backup plan, which was pulling out a total, uh, recreation of a South Korean army uniform. Yes. Along with current and accurate patches for who was patrolling around the Blue House, which... Just casually act like a South Korean.

It'll be fine. No one will notice. Yeah, and the funny part is part of these guys' training was they had to learn how to speak like a South Korean because there is a difference in accent

and dialect, correct? Well, now it's really bad just because there's been so much time passed. They've had access to different technologies. North Korea refused to use some of the Western words for things. In South Korea, if you're talking about an elevator, they just say elevator. It's like elevator, but in Korean. And in North Korea, they won're talking about an elevator, they just say elevator. It's like elevator, but in Korean.

And in North Korea, they won't use the word elevator. So they have a different word that's like up-down machine. I gotta say, I like that better. I'm calling all elevators up-down machines from now on. Same thing with ice cream, apparently. In South Korea, it's just ice cream. And then I don't remember what the word is in North korean but it is just like cold milk treat rad give me one of them cold milk treats please reject modernity embrace uptown machine um but you know they did

go through apparently a lot of training uh to their distinctive North Korean accent. They failed miserably. Yeah, it'd be like a bunch of people showing up and talking like they're from the literally like they're from the 1950s. You're gonna let me know that president, you see. But this did work to an extent. They changed into the uniforms and simply walked out the street

towards the blue house um because there were so many military units moving around they just said that they were uh returning anti-infiltration patrol and this worked through several different checkpoints um and then they got to one checkpoint the last checkpoint 100 meters away from the blue house where they finally met a cop who was apparently good at his job um the the there was actually a police chief who was talking to the head of the north korean team and realized like he sounds kind of funny like you sound kind of north korean bud like are you north korean you can't lie to me. I'm a cop. I don't know. They also ask them questions like why would an anti-infiltration

team be coming this way? Soldiers don't protect the president. He led a military coup. He knows to keep the army away from him. Kind of a flaw in their whole system, isn't it? Yeah. It's the thing about despots who ride military power uh right ride the military to power they know to keep the military at arm's length because

the same thing can happen to them so yeah he had a personal security attachment that was all kcia as well as local cops how did that go like the army wasn't involved um and that's when like the cop started getting pretty suspicious and then he noticed the commando team was becoming very uncomfortable so he went for his gun and the commandos opened fire on him and killed him and I believe that that cop is like his

the checkpoints named after him now I believe or at least there's a memorial named after him because if he didn't Or at least there's a memorial named after him. Because if he didn't do his job... That's kind of insulting. Hey, you fucked up and died. I'm gonna name it after you. To be fair, if it wasn't for this one guy's job, his shitty dictator probably would have been killed.

That's true. So, thanks? Yeah, I guess. I mean, the KCIA would clean up this mess in like a decade. Yeah, give it 12 years. After this, they're all pretense of this operation going well was fucked. It turned into

an open firefight at the checkpoint, but also there's thousands of cops and soldiers all throughout the city. I feel like you need to emphasize that this is like the middle of Seoul. It isn't like it's not like the white house is kind of like in its own little area and there's like fields and shit around it like there's a national mall no this is one of the most crowded areas in downtown seoul

it's surrounded by cops who are cops and soldiers who are all looking for them yeah so like when people hear gunfire it would be like if this happened in Central Park in New York City where like yeah there is like a park area but then around it is just the rest of the fucking city yeah uh and like so like when people hear gunfire they would 100% know

what's going on like oh we found them we have to go towards the gunfire uh it's not like oh surprise gunfire it's like oh we found them. We have to go towards the gunfire. It's not like, oh, surprise, gunfire. It's like, oh, we found them. Right, right. So this turns into a completely wild 360 degree firefight where nobody is aiming. All of the commandos are armed with submachine guns. And all of the cops and soldiers are armed with M16s.

And everybody is firing in fully automatic in every direction. Because remember, they're dressed like South Korean soldiers. Oh my God, yeah. It's a Spider-Man meme. They're all pointing at each other. I wonder how many people just rounded the corner

and were pointing guns at one another and had no idea. Like it just fucking gunned each other down. Oh, if they redid Shilmido, though, this should be done as some shitty spaghetti western, and that would be fucking amazing. Nobody's sure how many South Koreans were killed, because the government isn't talking,

probably for the reason we just talked about. There's a rough estimate. That happened, like World War II is a good example. During the Battle of the bulge uh the the germans sent infiltration teams of um people who spoke very fluent unaccented english across the lines uh and it didn't work great but it didn't end with like a couple people getting shot for sounding kind of funny which you know america in the 40s a lot of people have accents yeah yeah thankfully this doesn't happen in america in the 40s a lot of people have accents yeah yeah thankfully doesn't happen in america anymore but i shoot somebody for sounding different than me or in

belgium um whoops um but eventually so the gun the gunfight uh which at one point a civilian bus just kind of pulled up into the middle of it and got machine gunned as well oh god which I mean that's gonna be negligence on the part of the bus driver right like ah firefight I'm gonna go that way as I'm toting around like a dozen civilians in this fucking bus I mean this the buses in Seoul

will get where they want to be yeah that's fair no no driver in in Seoul even slowed down in the middle of this like fuck this shit i have a place to be um i had a similar uh situation occur in uh in kandahar when we got a gunfight and people were just driving around it like get out of here i gotta i got a fucking appointment yeah um but uh yeah the most of unit 124 were killed almost immediately but some escaped uh one was captured but managed to kill himself with a concealed hand grenade which will become a common occurrence in this episode um wow others ran off into the mountains and had to be rooted

out in small groups uh by uh south American soldiers. And by the end, 29 of the 31 men were killed. One was captured in South Korea, where he still lives. And I believe he became some kind of pastor. Pak Jae Jong. That was so bad.

I'm incredibly wrong. I'm sorry. It's been a while. My accent is not good. You're not ordering beer you don't know how to say it it's fine he made it back across the DMZ somehow it's one of those situations

I don't have to outrun the thousands of soldiers I just have to outrun the stupid people in my team who decide to stay in the mountains and fight when he got back to North Korea he very rightfully kind of became a hero um he became a general and then had a various different departments of the government and he is uh reportedly a one of a one of several people who are close friends with the entire kim

family which explains why he's managed to survive for as long as he says. And why his recollection of what Unit 124 was like might be a little bit skewed, perhaps. Yeah, yeah. Now, obviously, having an enemy nation raid your capital while they're spraying automatic gunfire and grenades in every direction and killing civilians, soldiers, and cops alike after a botched attempt to kill you did not make Pac very happy.

So he ordered the South Korean military to start developing a retaliation plan. Oh my god, we haven't even gotten to show BDO yet. Yeah, this was under the direct command of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, or the KCIA, who took some time

out of their busy schedule, disappearing labor activists and college students to put together a hit squad and the only thing they hated more than college students was North Koreans so you know how I said North Korea put their heads together like we need to find the best of the best the best soldiers

we have no matter what like we have to put them in this squad because this job is gonna be very very difficult yeah south korea did not do that they did the opposite yeah instead of dipping into the best of the korean military or the rock military they did this they decided to do something else which is very very stupid and that is recruit civilians uh which tells me they knew this group's entire mission was not only a death sentence but completely unattainable and didn't want to waste any good soldiers oh yeah they didn't want them coming back yeah now they didn't just find any civilians um they thought

they would recreate something of the rock version of the suicide squad also starring jared leto surprisingly enough jared leto and Scarlett Johansson are Korean prisoners he did play a Japanese member of the Yakuza once in a terrible film oh he was American in it but he was Yakuza which would never happen he was an

American POW who stayed in Japan after the end of the war and became Yakuza okay sure and I believe he became head of became Yakuza. Okay, sure. And I believe he became head of a Yakuza family. Yeah. So you know what?

He might be perfect for this role. Yeah. Now, KCI agents combed South Korea's prisons looking for desperate men who would accept the mission. Their original plan was to find people who were facing the death sentence which in South Korea at the time was a lot of people and in return if they came back from the mission which they wouldn't, they'd be given a pardon

the problem was that South Korean prisons were horrible I don't know if they still are, or not at least this bad but torture and not a lot of food was very common so most of these men were badly emaciated unfit for military duty so they ran out of suitable prisoners pretty quickly. So

recruiters had to look elsewhere. They started throwing enough shit to the wall to see what stuck because they assumed they would find enough cold-blooded killers itching to get out of prison. Instead, they found a lot of labor rights activists. Yeah, I'm

a history major. That's a death sentence. And also like you you can't have so effectively is like the consequences of my own actions like the prison system just churned people up uh and there wasn't enough people that could actually fit the bare minimum

of standards they had which were very very low uh one of them was you had to look fit not that you had to be fit you had just had to pass an eye test eyeball it yeah so the the rest of the recruiters just decided to go out into the street and start looking for dudes who kind of look stronger and

so there is a movie based on this we've talked about already called show me dough and it says that it posits that all of the members of the team were death row inmates yeah um that's not true uh they were pretty much all just petty criminals and uh like one of the the trainers who survived the mutiny said they were pretty much just drunk people who enjoyed getting in street fights. Yeah. Now, if I was making the movie, I would also make it sound

like they're all facing death row because that's way cooler. Not like this guy shoplifted something. Walked around Itaewon and they were in a fight. Grab them both. Right. Which is just the natural state of being when you're in Itaewon drunk. That's really everybody in Itaewon. So, yeah. They went through the streets and just kind of picked out

dudes they kind of thought were hot. We've all been there. Yeah, I mean, who hasn't gone trolling for an assassination squad before? And if you're thinking that's a really bad way to recruit a highly trained assassination squad, you'd be right.

Now, the men who volunteered for the gig had no idea what they're volunteering for but they were pretty excited volunteering is really like maybe not the worst coerced certainly they weren't drafted um though that will become some of them absolutely did volunteer because they were promised effectively a golden ticket for the rest of their life should they actually succeed. Not that they knew what they were succeeding in. They're not going to be like, hey, we're going to kill

Kim Il-sung. You son of a bitch. I'm in. None of that. It was like, hey, recruiting you for something very, very dangerous. It's very stressful to serve your country. If you succeed, we'll give you an incredible promotion within the military. You'll get to be one of the dudes that doesn't have to do anything anymore.

Huge amounts of money, dream jobs, all this stuff. And most of the people that they're recruiting are petty criminals who were shoplifting for food and money or just dudes who happen to look decent so you know they weren't rich people by any means they this was 100 something that they wanted to do until they knew what they were doing like they had no idea what they what the reality of the situation was which of course is part of the hook you know i mean yeah like you told a bunch of enlisted ass is part of the hook. You know what I mean? You told a bunch of enlisted assholes in the US that they were like,

we'll promote you to automatic E7. You never have to work another day in your life. You can get in with any defense contractor you want. You just have to do this top secret mission. They'd volunteer. Yeah, and no, we're not going to tell you what the mission is until you agree to do it. And you're on this island and cannot escape. Yeah, it's fine. Word.

Yeah. So, first they had to find a training spot for this top secret mission and they figured they had to pick a place that was so top secret North Korean agents would never find it. So, they kicked these criminals and himbos off to a barren, uninhabited island called

Shilmido out in the Yellow Sea. It's a pretty small island and from my understanding, it's actually accessible over land on certain parts of the tide. But it's in the middle of nowhere. Nobody's going to accidentally find the

training group on Shilmido Island. Now it is apparently a tourist destination because of the movie, which is weird. Weird. And if you look it up they hung up like pictures of the actors from the film and not the actual people that's very korean yeah um i think it's because the very record of those people's existence simply doesn't exist anymore and we'll talk a little bit about that um now once they're in the unit uh they were not under the command of the kca anymore the training and guarding of these people because they were pretty much in a prison fell under the south korean air force and the training would go on

almost unimpeded for three years the training is not really well known um but we do know it's very hard and if we understand what happened next we can assume that it involved horrible physical abuse um and uh you know other military type things like shooting marching hand-to-hand combat uh remember these weren't crack rock marines or whatever their commando forces going in for even harder training. They were just some dudes. They just had to light the fucking ground up. Yeah, and they had not served their conscription period within the Rock Army. None of them had.

Which will become kind of ironic later. They did not have any basic understanding of military discipline or how a military functions. So they were pretty raw so in order to instill this fear and discipline into them and recruits had a hard time following directions or hesitated when giving orders they had to think of the most horrible way to grind that into them that is simply to shoot at them with a machine gun. Now in the movie, this shows them being like they're shot at their feet while on a boat. And that's not actually what happened. They were just shot at people's feet,

right? They just got gunned down. Oh my God. Just got shot in the fucking chest. How many people were they working with originally? The original group size is unknown, just got shot in the fucking chest how many people were they working with originally uh the original group size is unknown um but we do know it would eventually be whittled down to 31 for most of the time because they wanted the exact same number that the north koreans sent after

a pack so okay all right fine sure the aesthetic it would not yeah it would not end with 31 though on the first day alone two men were killed because they got shot by an angry guard Jesus they did not seem to have a problem following orders after that because you know they're afraid of getting shot at again it's a motivator yeah

it would certainly make me shut up if that wasn't bad enough they were fed pretty much nothing but a thin rice gruel and contaminated water. Cool. I know I'm laughing, but I'm laughing at like...

It all looks the same coming out as it didn't go on it. It's so bad because one of the things that the North Korean survivor who resides in south korea is if they said that once they were in um unit 124 they were treated way better outside of really hard training because north korea realized if we're gonna beat the shit out

of these guys day in and day out we have to feed them very well right otherwise we're not gonna be able to continue to be able to beat the shit out of them. Almost immediately, South Korea's attempt of coming up with their own unit, I think they called it 684, was worse. They didn't even bother to feed them correctly. And then after three months, they stopped paying them. It's just, like, you say what you want about North Korea, they didn't entirely half-ass their assassination squad whereas South Korea is just like ah fuck it if North Korea can do it

how hard could it be yeah um we don't need to pay these guys by any means we don't even need to feed them um shoot at them a little bit yeah and then at one point a small group of men depending on what you read was it be

two to four snuck off the island during low tide because you could walk back into Korea apparently and they gang raped the local woman when they returned they were all executed which fair enough I'm fine with that

yeah that scene's in the movie that scene is too long in the movie just in case anybody's going to go watch it. Yeah. It's not great. A small side note here. A lot of these stories on the Shilmido Assassination Squad come from surviving guards.

As mysteriously, no official paperwork or reports survive regarding this scene within the South Korean government. Though the government has acknowledged what their mission was, what exactly happened on the Island is kind of up for debate. Um, but it is common knowledge that corporal punishment is common within the rock military, even today.

Uh, so back then you can assume on what they were doing, not to mention, uh, the casual brutality of the government at the time as a whole. So the guards have no reason to make themselves sound worse when they talk about hitting people. Yeah, it was at least this bad. Yeah. Though you can assume whatever they're willingly admitting to, it was worse than that.

And you can also... The guards willingly admitting to it was worse than that um and you can also the guards rotated through the unit did not um so it also it could have something to do with like one group of guards was much harsher than the from the next uh it's hard to tell um and now you're probably wondering like or assuming rather that because you're coming up with an assassination squad, much like the North Koreans, they're going to go through the best training in the ROK Army or the ROK Air Force. Not even fucking remotely. These trainers and guards were conscripts themselves and had very little training. One instance, one of the survivors, he was off the island when the mutiny occurred. When he did a rotation through, he was,

he said he was 18 or 19. And they just threw Sergeant rank at him and send them to the island to train people. And he's like, who the fuck was I to be training people? I had hardly been trained myself. These are the people that are training the highly sophisticated assassination squad.

Yeah. It's a Stanford prison experiment, but we're going to send the results of it off into North Korea to assassinate a president. I have no doubt these guys would have stepped on landmines and immediately died while trying to infiltrate the border. Now, the missions also began to just change randomly. The whole reason for the unit's existence

was for the assassination of Kim Il Sung but that began to fluctuate wildly as the KCIA tried to come up with new missions for them to justify their existence such as blowing up water stations that would flood entire cities

so the unit would also start training for those missions on top of the possible assassination of Kim Il-sung, though none of these missions would ever take place. A good reason for that is in the 1970s, relations between the two Koreas began to improve. So suddenly, it was a really bad

idea to send an assassination squad turned mass urban area flood team out into the country. That's bad for business. You can't be buds with the government or try to make relations

better. Also, we have a dedicated team of people to kill you. Don't worry, we won't use it unless you fuck up again. Yeah. It's a bad thing to be hanging over someone's head um and you know there's also another reason for it um the reason for this was the kca director who had been managing the entire plan from the very beginning was fired and replaced um and the new guy had very little desire to carry out his predecessor's plans.

One, if they failed, it fell on him. And if they succeeded, well, he doesn't get to take any credit for that because he didn't come up with the plan. Also, the plan is bug-fucking-sane. So he kind of is like, yeah, let's go ahead and hit the pause button on this murder squad we've built on this island. Keep training them and stuff, but we're never going to use them. It's fine. Yeah, and this happened

within, I believe, about a year and a half of being out on this island. So they just kept them there for another year and a half. Just didn't tell them either, I'm sure. No, of course not. There's actually a very good chance that none of these guys knew their mission

was to kill Kim Il-sung. At any point? Probably not. It's hard to tell because they're all dead. Yeah, I mean, the trainers probably didn't know either because these are just normal dudes. They're not KCI agents training these guys. It's just some Air Force private or whatever.

At some point, somebody at 3 a.m pulled you off the street when you were drunk and fighting a person was like here i promise you you're gonna have a great job you're gonna have career like career stability it's gonna be fine and then three years later you're eating the same gruel and you still have the shits from the contaminated water and nobody's told you what you're supposed to be doing right uh like because remember the the north korean unit had been training for two years before they ever figured out what they were doing right so there's a good chance they were in that phase where they haven't pulled the trigger on killing kim il-sung uh so there's no reason to tell them yet right they would just be like a an intelligence problem

at that point yeah and i know i i have a feeling they knew they were some kind of hit squad because like the aesthetic of the whole unit was like they had they had a signs that apparently are still on the island of just like skulls and crossbones everywhere and one of the guards insisted they are actual human bones they don't look like they look much bigger oh there was that part where they kept like having them aim at like dummies that had Kim Il-sung's face taped over it. Yeah, it was a very good chance these guys had no idea what their actual mission was. Oh my god. But there's some obvious problems with this whole pause button that the government pressed.

Can we pause? I really need to stop. Yeah, you can't just cancel a unit's existence. And then you say, don't let them go home because remember they're not in the military but that's kind of what happened these guys had been I guess highly trained for years now during this time they were unable to contact the outside world in

any way even through censored mail which is fucking rough it's not like they could take leave they weren't gonna go home they if now here's the here's the huge bitch of it if they just had said no and then got conscripted they would have been home years ago yeah because i believe the the korean conscription time's two years for men right now it depends on the branch you join like it can be as little as 14 months yeah these guys have been on this island for

fucking three years yeah what the fuck without pay or benefits or even being able to send a letter home yeah um was there like were there any reports of like self-harm not that i could see i mean there's no reports at all yeah that's fair's fair. I mean, if there was suicides, I would not be shocked. Right. Because, I mean, it seems like they have loaded weapons a lot. Yeah. Not to mention they could just throw themselves off of cliffs into the ocean. That's a problem in regular militaries when you're allowed to talk to your family.

And what's crazy is even the Rock Army has problems with people snapping and gunning people down because of the harsh treatment that they are given. I mean, this eventually happened as well, but it didn't for three years. They're being fed dog shit. They're not being paid.

And they know that their only ticket home is a big mission. They don't know what the big mission is probably. Um, and they realize that now it's not happening. Uh, they haven't been told in exact terms that like, Hey,

it's all off, but they're not getting a mission. Uh, they're not being told emissions canceled. They're just being kept perpetually on this island they might as well be back in prison but they slowly realize that their home is now gone and this is where history gets kind of muddy on what happened next in the movie show me though uh it frames it as the recruits of the commando team overhearing guards talking about how they now have to execute the assassination

squad because they know too much or maybe because they train a highly talented team of petty criminals and just unleashing them back into Seoul sounded like a supremely bad idea the other story is told by a surviving guard

who was shot in the neck during the uprising. They simply had become depressed and thought the Air Force or the KCA was never going to let them leave the island. That sounds way more likely. That sounds very likely. And to be totally clear, nobody has any

idea which it was. The only word that we have is from guards who probably aren't going to admit they were going to execute people. And like I said, no records exist of what decision was actually made. Though, we do have confirmation from one guard that he may have openly talked about executing people. One guard named Kim Ye-Tai, who I'm sure I'm butchering that name as well may have caused everything now

Kim admitted one day in a fit of frustration while talking with other guards that he thought was in privacy that they should just kill all the recruits and start over well now he thought this is in complete privacy but i mean on a tiny island with only other like only the prisoners around him now this is two months before the uprising began and don't worry kim was safely off the island in a different place of duty when it took place that's one of

those like i feel like we've all had that moment where we were off duty or we had like changed commands or whatever in pcs and then we heard about some really shitty thing that happened and we had that like oh was i did i do that i probably didn't do that it's probably fine i'm not responsible i had uh so i have a different kind of similar circumstance um i was stationed at fort Fort Hood for entirely too long. But also during my first deployment to Afghanistan was in 2009 to 2010. And so before you deploy to Fort Hood, you have to go through a certain center, processing center, where you get shots, do all your paperwork, whatever uh finalize all that shit uh before you go uh and then three months later another unit because like they just smash units into this

place because they're just rotating so many people through another unit was going through the same thing when another guy that was processing through there uh named malik hassan opened fired with handguns uh and killed a dozen people or so. So like that's when I was like, man, I dodged that bullet. I'm really glad that my duty brought me to Afghanistan to escape a mass murder. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure Kim was really happy that he like

fucking rotated out before the mutiny. Yeah, that's what it seems like is he like got duty somewhere else instead. And he's like, whoo, that was a close one because the vast majority of guards die uh and it sounds like they would have made sure he was one of them sounds like it yeah if he was openly talking about killing them um i mean i'm willing to bet that maybe it's a little bit of both maybe someone overheard kim maybe they didn't soldiers also

have a tendency to start rumors that quickly spread like wildfire yeah I can imagine that a rumor that all the guards might kill us in a country in a time where that sort of thing was actually very common combined with a hopeless situation made that kind of rumor very believable oh yeah and if they're already trapped there they have

no information about what the fuck's going on. Nobody's training them to attack fake Kim Il-sung's anymore. Yeah, they're just existing. Yeah. Why not latch on to the rumor that they're all going to get murdered? Yeah, I mean, and it's like I don't think they thought their plan was going to work,

but, I mean, their other option was sit on this island until we die. At least that's what they thought they didn't think they had a way out it doesn't sound like they did no probably not either way on the morning of August 23rd 1971

the 24 remaining recruits who had not died in training or otherwise killed used their commando train to raid the armory and then turned on their trainers and guards shooting stabbing and beating them to raid the armory and then turned on their trainers and guards, shooting, stabbing, and beating them to death. The commander of the unit very clearly had pissed off a lot of people because he got brained

repeatedly with a hammer. Oof. Oof. Yeah, claw-side up. Yeah, that's personal. You're probably wondering, like, you know, these guys didn't get, like, the greatest commando training. So how the fuck did they sneak up on a cadre of guards who had trained them

at least equal in ability? The entire training staff had spent the rest of the night beforehand getting shit faced. And so most of them were still drunk or hung over and did not defend themselves really. That's all you need. Yeah. I mean and one of the people

I believe it was the same guy who said that he was like 19 what the fuck am I doing training people said that there was a very obvious tension between the two sides where the new guards rotating in quickly realized that their charges

were much more highly trained than they were. And at any given time, they could just get fucking annihilated. Because the guards didn't stay there the entire three years. They rotated in and out. So these people having to live in the most adversity that anybody has in the Rock Army at the

time, or Air Force for that matter, who have been constantly getting the shit kicked out. I'm like, imagine you're fresh out of basic training and a school or whatever like guard these highly dangerous prisoners automatic weapons it's that fucking bane line from the dark night rises right where it's like i was born in the darkness i was born in Shilmido. You've only adopted it. So there's a good chance that even if the guards were completely sober and armed, they would still be fucked.

It would also be terrifying if they're a bunch of 19-year-olds and the guys that they've recruited were just the only people they could find out in the streets who looked kind of tough. And then they've spent the last three years getting the like the shit beat out of them like yeah you're a little 17 year old

very tough or dying yeah it would be scary oh I'd be fucking terrified yeah bunch of high school graduates getting like their shit rocked by these like essentially prisoners even if they weren't like originally prisoners they've been kept as prisoners for three years

yeah that's like let's take these high school graduates with eight weeks of training and make them guard like san quentin prison also all of the prisoners have handguns great good good luck good idea also you have to train them to be better with those guns yeah you have to be on the range with them every day um one of the survivors um a guy named yang dong su thought that um the the island had come under attack by north koreans and before he could react or grab a weapon he got shot in the neck uh in order to escape the the training the recruits who are now in a war path he to throw himself off of a cliff and play dead under some rocks. Quick thinking.

Now most of what we know from the actual events of the mutiny come from Yang, who claims that the unit wanted to go to the capital to address their grievances with President Pak directly. So to me, this means they wanted to kill the president.

No, no, no, no, no no no no it's like barton luther they're gonna nail up all their issues they have they're just gonna nail uh one of their trainers to the door of the blue house like fuck this guy um this meant that in only a few years after north korea sent an assassination team after president pack his own assassination team after President Pak, his own assassination team was also now coming for him too. Hell yeah. It's efficiency. Kim Il-sung hits him with the Uno reverse card. And

so this mutiny was perfectly timed. Apparently they got monthly resupplies using a boat. So the boat was already pulled up because that's what Yang was out there doing was directing the resupply efforts. So these heavily armed men who have assault rifles, submachine guns and, and, uh, grenades and stuff, um, hijack the boat and float back towards the mainland of Seoul. Um, no undercover agents like the North Koreans.

These guys were not, um, not. They were wearing full uniforms strapped to the gills with weaponry and stormed the beach in broad daylight in full uniform and hijacked a civilian bus. I can see why the movie Shilmito took this in a different direction.

Yeah, these guys were very obviously desperate. They didn't like i think they planned this like it seems like there it wasn't a spur of the moment thing but they also probably didn't expect to get off the island right you know i mean it's like the dog caught the car tire now doesn't know what to do well they've also like they've been off the peninsula like off the main peninsula for three years things change yeah they had not set foot back at well with the exception of the people who escaped and you know victimize a local woman

nobody and those guys are all dead now so like nobody had made it back to the mainland and so like these guys actually stole a boat and they're like oh oh fuck what now fuck it let's steal a bus because we're not going to be able to march over land into

Seoul right we can't split up, obviously. We need one vehicle big enough for our entire school trip. Yeah, also, to their credit, they didn't purposely target any innocent civilians. They let the bus driver go, who immediately went and told the cops, like, a whole bunch of people in uniform just stole my fucking bus. I would have kept him with us. He's a South Korean bus driver.

He's got the skills. Yeah, I mean, they figured out how to drive the bus, so I guess one of them maybe did that as a civilian or something. That's possible. Or maybe their highly specialized training involved learning how to drive a civilian bus

wildly through the streets of Seoul. You know, just in case they need to, like, hijack a North Korean bus. Yeah. So now in the bus uh they started driving towards the blue house themselves uh and i assume the guards around the blue house are now highly sick of this shit happening like fuck again um but they did not get as far as the north koreans uh word traveled quickly that a heavily armed bus full of people speeding towards the

president's house was a bad thing. And soon the entire Ministry of Defense is on alert. The defenders of the Blue House were warned of another attack. And now, once again, hundreds and thousands of cops and soldiers

flood the streets of the capital again. Nobody had any idea who this these guys were this is probably the weird part uh besides of all the other weird shit that's happened so far remember unit uh the unit on show me dough was

top fucking secret only the people that rotated onto the island and the kca even knew they existed yeah so all the island and the KCAA even knew they existed. Yeah. So all the cops and soldiers responding to this just assumed there was another armed group of North Korean insurgents or assassination squad or whatever. Yeah. So nobody had any idea who they were. And the thing that crosses my mind is even if they succeeded, say they meddled their way through the city of Seoul and actually got into the blue house

it's been three years there's a like a 99% chance the president has no fucking idea who they are right yeah he probably doesn't know what's going on it was just a papery signed three years ago approving it I'd never heard anything about it again like sir you're who now i would honestly

like i would i imagine most of the people guarding the area especially if they were the same people who had to deal with the first assassination attempt we're just like oh the north koreans have gotten a lot better at accents yeah except they didn't even attempt to do any like down low slick shit like slipping through they literally just like pedal pedal to the metal and Florida in a bus through the city this of course once again turned into a running gun battle between the bus of various army

units and cops effectively just firing wildly at a speeding bus with civilians getting caught in the midst of it all eventually their battle bus was ground to a halt by machine gun fire as their tires exploded off of it. But it's like you say battle bus,

but also all of the buses have like doilies over all of the seats, and they're the most like fucking grandma buses ever. No, this bus meant business. They had to remove all... No doilies. They had to remove all the doilies first. Comrades, we mean business. Remove the doilies. See, that's how the KCAA knew they meant business

is like all the doilies get thrown out the window. Just doilies streaming out. Doilies and bullets. They ran up the colors of war. And I mean, not to make the Shilmido mutineers sound great or anything, but they're absolutely blasting machine gun fire out the out the windows of this bus as they go sounds kind of rad

it's rad it's fucking baller as fuck but also they killed so yeah it's not good uh but their bus is ground to a halt and i think most of them probably assumed it was going to happen next to them so they blew themselves up with hand grenades. What? Yeah. All of them? So they tried. They didn't have enough hand grenades to go around at this point because they had thrown so many out the window wildly.

Gotta hug your battle buddy. Yeah, that's probably what happened. But when cops and soldiers stormed the bus, they found four wounded men still alive and quickly made them vanish. Their names were never published. Oh, they definitely just like everybody attacking this bus. 100% thought it was North Koreans up to the very end. Yeah, they did. And they thought it was like weird.

They're wearing Air Force uniforms, but whatever. They're wearing army uniforms last time. Yeah. And official reports ruled with that. They said that they are sold. The, the show me dope mutant ears were simply armed communist agents and never spoke of the four men who survived or the team at all.

None of the dead families were notified of what happened. And most of them probably had no fucking idea that their loved ones were ever involved in the military. Yeah. Yeah. They probably thought they just got disappeared by like the KCIA at some point. Officially everyone involved disappeared from existence.

Like it's literally the Stalin picture where the guy vanishes next to him. Except it's like one of those like bootcamp graduation photos, but the only people, only things left are the guidons floating in the air. What really happened next to the four wounded men is that they were tried in a secret military tribunal and executed within the year. The remains of all

men involved were then yeeted into the sea, never to be spoken of again. Just like, the cartoon's like, well, that solves that problem. According to the son, after um the the democratization of of the of the republic of korea came with a uh truth commission when it came to um investigating a lot of shit that happened like this and to to include most of the kca's existence in their

vast quantities of crimes against humanity. But the Defense Ministry Truth Commission acknowledged in the early 2000s that the reason why we don't know enough about this is because the Defense Ministry burned all of the paperwork immediately afterwards. It's a classic Cold War move. Yeah, so we're literally just trying

to piece together what happened from the two people, or the four people that still are alive because you know the people who immediately responded to this thought they were saving their country from North Koreans again right it's remarkable that there's like as

much as it's hearsay in oral history like it's remarkable that there's this much out about it at all yeah and it almost is entirely dude because of this movie yeah which is incredible like i can't think i cannot imagine a movie that's had such a positive impact on um you know transparency and governance um now like the the the defense ministry truth commission um happened before the movie came out but it was you know very layer stuff. Though a small side note here

if it makes anybody feel better. Eight years later, someone would finally succeed in killing Pak Chung-hee, and that person was none other than the director of the KCIA himself, who shot him in the face a bunch of times.

Yeah. And then he himself was also shot in the face. Within a year. Oh, yeah. Wild time. The mutiny story does not end there, however.

South Korea has undergone a lot of changes since the 70s and in 2003 the film Shilmido was released which dramatized the events of the mutiny though it is also one of the best sources of information on it it is both inaccurate but also

one of the only sources on this incident because again the government destroyed all the paperwork it is mostly correct though for the vast majority of South Korea this is the first time they've ever heard of the events and the film the film's popularity actually forced the government

to not only admit the whole thing happened but by 2006 they informed the families of those involved what had really happened to their loved ones. That's incredible. I see you requested the remains. Bad news. Well, been to the beach lately.

By 2010, the Iraq government admitted that they lied and had violated the men's most basic human rights and paid out over 300 million dollars in damages to the surviving families of the men involved though they still have not published who they were um yeah yeah that's uh the shilmido mutiny uh or incident if you will it's it's it's a thing the busker fuffle yeah so I've seen the movie

it's been a while but I've watched it and it it definitely highlights how poorly they were treated and how ridiculous the whole thing was but it makes you know obviously it's a movie right so it makes them seem a lot more heroic it definitely paints them as all like oh they're death row inmates and

whatever and i think it i think it makes it seem like they knew what they were getting recruited for so like oh see they're on death row but they're still good because they want to kill kim il-sung and that's noble and then i want to say it ends with them getting on the boat and implies that they might have gotten away or that the boat sank or something i don't think it ends with the bus chase but i could be misremembering. Really? That's a really interesting part to leave out. I could be wrong.

It's been a long time. I tried to watch it before we recorded this, but it's not available on any streaming platform. So if you want to watch it, you can pay a lot of money for a copy of it on the internet, which I'm not going to do, or you can pirate it, which I will probably do.

Now, Sarah, we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion. Now, if you'd like to ask a question from the Legion, donate a dollar, get access to our Patreon or Discord, and ask us random questions, which we can answer at the end of episodes. Now, this will be the second episode that comes out in the year of probably equal shit, 2021.

The first one will be part four of our Khmer Rouge series. So this will be the first question from the Legion that we have answered the new year. So that's something that you get to be a part of. Congratulations. I'm sorry. Oh, thanks. Now, this one is going gonna be kind of rough can you tell us a bright spot from 2020 literally anything uh that was personally cool for you

or something that made you feel hopeful for the future in general oh boy um wow they're really trying to make us feel better with these questions, aren't they? I mean, I try not to make them heavy. I try to pick out the chillest ones. We did just talk about four people being executed. So you got to bring some levity to the situation. Back before it was really bad, I graduated from college. And there was right up until I spilled wine all over my laptop during the virtual graduation ceremony. I did feel like things were looking up.

That's solid. Yeah, that was June. There was a lot of the year left. You know, actually going with that theme, my third book came out this year in August. I'm very proud of it. It's the longest book i've ever written um i i i was very very i felt very very good about my book and then a couple months later my publisher yeah yeah uh but you know uh it's uh it's bittersweet i love those guys a lot

uh but i do have another publishing agreement so So that's another good thing I'm looking forward to. It makes me look forward to 2021 because I love writing. So shout out to my new coworker, Lou Diamond Phillips. What a year. Right? It's been fucking weird. Yeah, that is our episode. Sarah, thank you for joining us as always. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Yeah, that is our episode. Sarah, thank you for joining us, as always. Thanks for having me. Yeah, and until next time, don't start an assassination squad to infiltrate North Korea. Or if you do, don't make it last for three years before they murder everybody. Yeah. Short-term assassination squads. Short-term consensual assassination squads.

There we go. Later. Bye.