Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 145 - Monte Melkonian Part 3: Commander Avo

Episode Date: March 8, 2021

Monte becomes one of the greatest military commanders in Armenian history. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys

Hello and welcome to yet another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. Not burping into the microphone is me, Joe. And joining me for the remainder of the series is Sarah. Hi, hi. What's up? I'm also not currently burping into the microphone. Not yet. Not yet. There's time. In the conclusion of our series, I should point out that I am

no longer drinking expired coffee creamer. And our new sponsor is Gas Station Coffee Creamer. And our new sponsor is gas station coffee creamer that won't give you diarrhea. Oh, fantastic. As opposed to the old sponsor which would in fact give you diarrhea.

Can confirm, yes. Okay, good. Maybe our next sponsor should be like nicer toilet paper. Our next sponsor is going to be the toilet paper from the mres actually just high grit sandpaper surprise have you have you ever wondered what it's like to uh wipe your ass with rocks or something well now you can with a rock or something yeah um so sarah we are on part three of our Monty Melkonian series.

How are you feeling about Monty going into part three when he's about to finally go and fight his revolutionary war that he's dreamed so much about? I just like it's been like 24 hours since we did the last one. And the whole time, all I could think is like, man, I was never that consistent with my goals as a teenager. I got to say, I wasn't either. Yeah. Like he decided this was his thing and he was gonna make it happen and yeah i did that too i was gonna be a flight attendant and then i very quickly realized that job fucking sucked i don't want to do that and he yeah i can't imagine doing

that oh man he was just like yeah this terrorism thing kind of sucks but i guess i'll keep trying he was a market disruptor of terrorism um yeah and like i do need to point out that like he's still quite young uh he's like slightly older than me um which i i understand isn't that young but for as someone who has had such an incredibly full life of globetrotting bombing um it like most people would assume that, especially going into becoming a military commander, that he's in his 40s or 50s. And if you look at a picture of him,

he looks like he might be in his 40s and 50s. Yeah. He is not. He's lived a lot of life. Yeah. Sitting in a French prison for years doesn't age you well. And also fighting in a dozen and a half wars.

It's all those baguettes they feed you in french prison it's like the only thing they that there is to do in french prison is to eat cartoonishly long bread and then learn how to be a sad clown it's like all of french humor just like a smoking clown falling off a bar stool yeah that's his. He doesn't get yard time, he gets mime time. That's so much worse. I don't have a lot of fears in this world, to include clowns, but if you put me in the same room as a mime,

I'd be deeply uncomfortable. I think that's fair. No, I don't like thinking about this. This is unrelated to anything else, but mimes are weird. They're unnatural. Which brings us to anything else, but mimes are weird. They're unnatural. Which brings us to our next sponsor, the University of Hawaii's Mime College.

This is their advertisement. Silence with aloha. Okay, I'm going to try to get back. You know who isn't a mime? Amanda Raffo. Now, when we left you last week or if you're sarah yesterday um he and his detachment of volunteers uh so like this is something that markar brings up in the book i don't exactly know what it means uh but he brings up a whole bunch uh that all these volunteer detachments have like uh very um over the top names for the most part

like they're all named after like uh tigran the magnificent and like other um like gregory the illuminator and other like very heroic parts of armenian history montes is not he just names it the patriotic detachment i assume because he's never been good with names yeah that's okay and like some of the other detachments like the commanders because these are all not really under the government umbrella like they fall technically under an arts out government ministry but it's more like warlordism right is more akin to anything and a lot of the warlord uh detachment commanders named the detachments after themselves.

Monty didn't do that either. Whatever. But yeah, he finally got to Artsak via a very rickety, shitty helicopter, which he was very uncomfortable being in. Yeah. And I can say after riding in the same era of helicopter, it is terrifying. Helicopters freak me the fuck out, man. I would never get in one. Yeah. And I can say after riding in the same era of helicopter, it is terrifying.

Helicopters freak me the fuck out, man. I would never get in one. Yeah. Even like well-maintained helicopters are uncomfortable to me. I don't like flying in general. I think people already know that. But flying in helicopters fucking sucks. At least with a fixed wing. I flew.

Part of my job for a while was being in a 60-year-old fixed wing aircraft that was built during Vietnam. But at least it a fixed wing. Like I flew like part of my job for a while was being in a like 60 year old fixed wing aircraft that was built during Vietnam. But at least it's fixed wing. Like our engines would go out and it didn't really bother you because we can glide. Helicopters can't really do that. No, you just auto rotate and die. You don't. That's a bullshit myth. You can't.

It doesn't work. You don't. That's a bullshit myth. You can't. It doesn't work. I rode in a 90s era, late 80s era, probably the same kind of Soviet helicopter that Monty rode in. And it felt like it was actively trying to kill us. Yeah, it wasn't great. And for a lot of people that like this is the only way you got into Artsakh because there was no there's no land connecting

talk about this a little bit later on but there's no land bridge connecting Republic of Armenia to Artsakh so the only way to get there is via shitty helicopter at this point and a lot of them just like fall out of the sky from time to time yeah

I hate helicopters now Monty got to a local village and he met up with some local fighters most of them either from armenia or artsak kind of no difference they all mingled together uh they numbered around 200 people uh and now monty has never been in a in a military before but he was around people who carried themselves as professional freedom fighters, revolutionaries, whatever you want to call it. These men were not that. They were mostly dressed in whatever they had.

Street clothes, wearing little more than track suits and sandals. Classic war attire. Classic former Soviet Union war attire. It's like, ah, yes, the Gopnik detachment's here. And their weapons ranged from World War II era Mosin Nagants to some AKs they had stolen from the internal ministry soldiers that they had left behind. And most of them had little to no ammunition.

It's not a great place to start. So facing them was the Azeri military, and also they had their own smattering of unprofessional militias. But they had mostly an actual military, and it was much better put together. Now, a reason for this is how the Soviet army was put together and how it fell apart. Several parts of the soviet army when

they crumpled and like the soviet union stopped existing um certain detachments of the soviet military just reverted back to like okay we're the whatever we're the army of azerbaijan now because it was mostly made out of azeris uh couple Russians. A lot of the Russians stayed behind too because they're like, well, fuck it. I'm still an officer. That happened in a lot of places. It did not happen in Armenia. Mostly because the Soviet

detachment, some motor rifle regiment, which is actually still stationed there and now it's just Russian, obviously, was overwhelmingly Russian. So they're like, like well we're just gonna stay here and not turn into the armenian military um yeah uh i mean they were like there was all sorts of weird shit that happened uh like for instance the kgb of in armenia was overwhelmingly armenian and they had actually been um chastised by the main KGB

for being too friendly. They were... They kind of weren't good at their job as being KGB, so they just reverted into being whatever the Republic of Armenia's disappearing people police force is called. Which everybody needs,

obviously. By saying that that means I'm going to have a hell of a time going through the airport next time I go home now now so there wasn't a lot of professional soldiers to

dive back in now obviously at this point there's a lot of Soviet war veterans from Afghanistan and a lot of those guys came from uh satellite republics so like we talked a little bit this uh during our soviet afghan war but one of the main reasons that uh soldiers were very unhappy with the war was that was very obviously discriminatory that like the the saying was you'll never find a soviet conscript from saint petersburg or moscow and afghanistan um oh yeah yeah so they just forced a bunch of people from there like well like you said from the satellite nations to do their dirty right right so like they there's a lot of veterans

that came back like most of the armenian leadership during the war outside of monty is uh soviet war veterans um but this and a of soldiers, but there's no organization. They weren't part of any unit anymore. A lot of them are missing legs and shit from Afghanistan. Yeah, it wasn't exactly a good war. No, no. And to the point that we still have no idea

how many people died there. So there wasn't this vast military resource to draw from in Armenia. Azerbaijan was much different. Large remnants of several motor rifle divisions simply switched to become the new Azeri Republic's military. And on the Armenian side, you had some dudes in tracksuits digging trenches by hand

and were badly mismatched. At this point, the warfare looked something akin to world war one mixed with like the congolese war where there was like small militias fighting one another without really any command and control um but with very modern weapon systems uh because they you know pilfered soviet stocks uh and these guys don't really know how to use them yet uh it's all bad um but they also knew that where this village was the azeris had the high ground and uh there's three different hills that they had to take in order to uh take these villages that lay just beyond there which were armenian yeah it wasn't exactly a good war they knew that they had to assault uphill against these much better armed and i assume better trained azari troops so you have

this much more modern force with modern artillery machine guns all this other stuff and then mani uh needs to assault these hills um the the elevated azari positions in order to take three villages the problem is when the key parts of an infantry attack is fire support uh normally this is by you know modern artillery mortars airstrikes obviously there's no airstrikes going on here um i mean there would be a couple helicopters into him i guess i mean eventually that would occur but not quite um and so monty dug around um for something and one of the one of the things in the area was an old soviet uh like farm institute and he found a world war ii smoothbore cannon uh that had been yeah that had been modified to fire silver iodide rounds into the sky to seed clouds for rain. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. And I was not aware that was something that, like, worked. Sort of. I'm a scientist. I'm barely a scientist. You're the most scientific person currently on the show. The bar is low, and I have met the requirements, yeah. currently on the show the bar is low and i have met the requirements yeah yeah i guess that this the the the communes would just use this to fire shit into the air and make it rain

um but the problem was obviously that like they had to modify the cannon to do that and which made it militarily incapable they couldn't fire silver iodine rounds at the azaries which admittedly would be kind of funny. Could I guess. It would just make them all sparkly. I mean I guess if you hit someone directly. You'd kill them. Which I mean that's not artillery.

It's kind of like the ultimate glitter bomb. So he decided. I mean and. To be clear. Monty had no idea what he was doing either. Monty was not a farmer nor an engineer. But he did have a hammer, and he beat the inside of the cannon up

until he broke the silver iodine part out. What? Yeah. And then he had some stolen artillery rounds, which were forced to fit. Oh, my God. With more hammers. And it worked.

Nobody was killed by Monty's suicide cannon. Yeah, how did it not just blow up you know i really like uh makar in in the book says that like monty probably used it himself first to make sure it wouldn't kill anybody i would like to believe that but i have no idea okay i could see not not because it was like purely of noble heart, more because nobody else wanted to fucking do it. Yeah, he wasn't a lieutenant colonel like he will be later on. He's in charge of barely 200 dudes, and nobody likes him. I should point out that nobody really likes him yet. Remember, he barely speaks Armenian, and he went to Artsakh, which is a much different place than mainland Armenia.

Artsakh is very regional, very factional. There's clan politics and things like that. And Monty is none of those things. He's a dude from California. So a lot of people were very suspicious of him um and even about leading him so like the idea that someone's like yeah i'll fire your fucking suicide cannon i don't give a shit i believe he probably used it first yeah and like people pretty openly tell monty to go fuck himself from time to time and don't listen to him

like this is not a disciplined military so like it's not like you will fire this cannon no um so yeah that that was their fire support um and then he began firing it at azaria lines and then over the next seven hours armenian forces backed by a single cloud seating cannon and armed with mostly bolt-action rifles slowly retook each village in human wave attacks because they didn't know what else to do. If it's stupid, it works, right? Yeah, if it's dumb, it works. It's not dumb. And one of Mani's things

was he knew that, and this is something that will come up time and time again, almost at every point in this war, the Armenians are outnumbered and outgunned, but they do not lack motivation. So he knew that if he got up close and

fought the Azeris, they wouldn't have the guts to stick it out and fight. And more importantly, they would not be able to bring fire support on them. This is something that's actually pretty common amongst underarm forces throughout history, like the Viet Cong and the NVA did it to the united states as well they call it like holding on by the belt um because it was too close to call an artillery and airstrikes and you'd have to fight

them hand to hand which right you know you have yeah it's hard and it requires a very good commander and very good troops in order to like hold them together during something like that which the Azeris lacked for most of the war um so you have a whole bunch of dudes in flip flops and adidas track pants running at you with bolt action rifles you're like fuck this I'm out yeah right

because it's not like it's not like any of the Azeris like have an attachment to that land either I would say no they would probably disagree um well um i would say that their their attachment is not valid uh but i'm biased uh moving on at the very least it's not as personal as they're like because the art sock forces a lot of them are either from that area or they had family from that area like they had a personal like attachment to these

villages yeah most these uh especially later on the war uh you know money would move around to different parts but most of the fighting forces are village and regional based and uh you have to think of how the armenians saw this conflict and how ar Armenians saw this conflict and how Armenians saw the conflict in 2020 and the one in 2016 that nobody likes to think about is that this is just another step in the genocide. Like you either win or you die. For the Azeris, it's a war of conquest.

I know like they'll, in 2020, they frame it as taking back their homeland or whatever. But for Armenians, it's like, we need to win or we're all going to die. So it's considered a war of survival. So obviously, people are going to fight much more desperately. Right. Though, after this victory over the three villages they took, they were not able to savor it. It's at the Karin Charkar front,

around 15 miles away, the Azeri forces were advancing. So instead of being able to sit around like, hey, look at these villages, look what we did, they immediately had to stop what they were doing and began making the trek over that way. Like I said before, this is not an organized force. They couldn't just be like, hey, can we get some trucks?

Or whatever. They had to walk uh they they could only bring what they could carry on their backs and uh the fact that most of the like they did loot a lot of good weapons from these areas but a lot of them they actually had to leave behind like you can't tote artillery uh like you can't drag it along without anything you couldn't like they didn't take any um trucks or or apcs quite yet uh so everything they took like people were like leaving medical supplies behind so they could take more ammo and things like that um and not to mention that remember like even if they did loot a ton of, a lot of the shit that they were using was like that silver iodide canid, which is homemade. And one of the things that they still were very, very short of were mortars, some short-range fire support indirect weapons.

So they tried to make them himself. Now, this wasn't Mani. This was a few other people. And Mani actually sat through a class and how to do something like this in a plo camp years before and he knew what one looked like that would work and one that didn't and he told people like you should fucking not use that it will kill you uh so they try it's a very valuable skill set and yeah uh like at least the the ability to point something i'd be like that looks like a blow up my face.

Yeah, they did not listen to him. And when someone dropped a mortar on it to test fire, it blew up and it fucked up quite a few people. And now Manny was nothing if not pragmatic. And remember, he always thought of things in the form of optics. So this ended up being something of like a propaganda coup for money uh he took the twisted up homemade mortar that had exploded and a jacket off the dead soul one of the dead soldiers that was still covered in his blood then he made a video uh which you know is much harder to do because he had to like actually use one of the giant old

like 80s era video cameras um to pop a VHS into it yeah and he made a video saying like this is what our sons are fighting with like they're like the brave sons of Armenia are dying because their weapons are killing them and he sent it out now that's a bold move

it worked it 100% worked because at this point Armenia itself is having a hard time funding their own military Artsakh has no fucking money at all so like the detachment leaders are having to fundraise themselves and a lot of detachment leaders did this by looting

Mani refused to do that and he did not let anybody do that in his detachment so he sent this video out through his brother back to California where there's more Armenians living. There's those connections. Yeah.

I mean, this is how things always work. I mean, the IRA did the same thing. Shox loves to tell me about in Boston, you would see jars on businesses' tables that would just say, for the cause. That's pretty cool. Yeah. You fundraise through the diaspora and so like he made he didn't make like a killing doing this but he made like tens of thousands of dollars which went a long way yeah to buy yeah and the funniest thing is like money couldn't buy these weapons right he's in a war zone so his partner

had to buy them set the man she's badass she's fucking awesome she's still alive i think she lives in california uh and she wrote a book about her and monty's life together which mostly turned it to me reads a lot like monty's off fighting a war again i don't know where but uh yeah like i mean you have to think at one point she made connections with the future president of armenia knew enough fucking uh weapons dealers to smuggle shit into a war zone i'm just gonna say i don't want to hear fuck all from any of the military spouses in the u.s yeah exactly um and uh amani did get some stuff in person and like because there were still some russian soldiers around in armenia and they like agents of uh that worked for him would just like go up to russian soldiers and offer them money

for weapons like even their their personal arms and it worked this happened a lot um like we made this joke during i keep talking about the lord of war bonus episode but uh when like you know the detachments of the former red army just opened up their stocks for people with a lot of money. And that happened at a personal level, too. There was no accountability for anything at this point. But then he returned back to the front with all of these new weapons, ammo, and even boots. They didn't have boots.

So he was going big. I could use some mortars but also shoes shoes are always a thing people forget to buy yeah nobody ever like like any like any conflict zone like there's always like oh our shoes we don't have any yeah you'd be surprised how how important a good pair of boots are now that obviously doesn't matter depending on where you're fighting because the u.s has gotten their ass kicked by dudes in pajamas and flip-flops on numerous occasions now but yeah yeah i'm just saying they probably would have preferred to have boots if they'd had 100 yeah um now when he returned back to art sock monty had a little bit

more confidence because like he just had this huge success getting all these weapons um and he also realized that no matter how many weapons he had, there was a pretty serious weakness. And that was the fact that he did not have soldiers. He had largely untrained local militia. So he began to treat them like soldiers, hoping they would act like it. one that didn't have a weapon which pretty uh impressive for the time uh a lot of these local militias and warlords were 100 out for vengeance and war crimes did occur i will talk a little bit about a couple of those later on but uh like it wasn't uncommon for them to take a village and they're just uh like some of the detachments take a village and then just start shooting anybody who wasn't armenian and the same goes for the Zeri side as well. But Monty threatened anybody who did in his detachment, he'd

fucking shoot them themselves. He never did, from what I can find, but it tells me that people believed him enough that he would do it that it was enough to scare them. Yeah, that's a lot of restraint, too, considering his first assassination attempt was kind of the opposite of that.

Yeah. 100% difference. Growth. Character growth. Yeah. And he would go down. Whenever they took over villages, he told the Azeris they did not have to leave. But if they wanted to leave, he would make sure they left unmolested.

Right. if they wanted to leave, he would make sure they left, um, unmolested, right? Um, to the point that,

uh, like there was a joint attack on a village with another detachment. And, um, the other detachment was not as disciplined and wanted to kill, uh, Azari men, uh, like military aged men to make sure they couldn't come back and fight.

Uh, Monty did not let them and protect and protected the people as they left. And when the Azeris left and were interviewed by a Russian journalist, they were like, if it wasn't for Monty Melconian, we'd all be fucking dead. So like, character growth.

Yeah, yeah. Quite a glow up. God, I hate it when you call it that. Also within his detachment, he outlawed drinking and smoking. Monty did not smoke, and he hardly drank at all. There was a huge problem with smoking at night, which is a tactical fuck up, and also people casually drinking while on duty. So he figured the only way he could fix that was by getting rid of it entirely now this might shock you Sarah

and anybody listening Armenians love to drink it's a thing that we do so a lot of fighters in his detachment had a fucking problem with this because rather than like going on the honor system A lot of fighters in his detachment had a fucking problem with this. Yeah, I imagine. Because rather than going on the honor system,

Monty went through and snatched up all their vodka and dumped it out. And when they demanded to know where all the vodka was, he's like, I dumped it over there by the tree and I fucking pissed on it. Now they confronted him saying they always drink at their meals, just as their forefathers had done. And Monty caught her with quote, then your forefathers were jackasses, too. And like, damn. Remember, all these guys are like Armenians from Armenia or Artsakh.

And this guy's just like coming through like, no, you're not going to fucking do that anymore. And it worked. Well, like, yeah. Our forefathers did that. Your forefathers are dead. I don't know what to tell you. If you want to keep doing that, you can meet them. So and slowly, like some people left his detachment

and joined other ones. But like he got his detachment under his control. some people left his detachment and joined other ones but like he got his detachment under his control uh most of them began to listen to him mostly out of respect because he didn't do anything he he told them not to do uh which is you know a quality that people look for in a leader is that they're not giving you orders they can't follow themselves um yeah and it wasn't that like the people weren't allowed to drink at all it was that if you're on the front you cannot drink if you're like back in stefanikert or armenia itself then you know drink your ass off but like if you're out here you are sober uh which yeah oh shit makes sense yeah it's not like no fucking shit yeah um yeah um now the same kind of discipline could not

be said for other detachments uh now monty was eventually given overall command of the martuni front and uh he was ordered to take a nearby village now this village had repulsed an attack by two other detachments at the time and And now given overall command over the operation, his attack went off smoothly. It was him and two other detachments that took it. And he asked the village to surrender.

They refused. Like Armenian villages, the Sazeri village was mostly defended by locals. And it had some military detachments in it. But they surrendered, and 48 people were taken prisoner. Now, most of the offensive was taken over by Monty's detachment. But once the offensive was over, the two other detachments came into the village.

The two other ones stole from the prisoners and then pushed them into a ditch before murdering them with a machine gun. This is what's known as the Gargandali Massacre. It's one of the things that the Azeris will point to, that Armenians committed a genocide in Artsakh.

They did not. It does not meet the definitions of a genocide. That's not what that is. it is one hell of a war crime yeah yeah then the two detachments just moved through the town and completely looted it all again

and remember Monty is the overall commander and he gave orders that no prisoners were to be harmed you'll see people that discount Monty Melkonian as a war criminal um and you know it's hard because technically they were under his command he gave explicit orders from not to do it and it occurred anyway um but after that he reported the master the massacre to stepanakert and nobody seemed to care um when monty heard of another massacre, this time in Koljali

or Koljali, I'm not sure how to pronounce that. Sorry to any Armenians listening. He kept hearing about more and more war crimes being committed by Armenian militias and he was disgusted by the fact that nobody in government did anything to

stop it or hold anybody accountable. So he stormed into the president of Artstock's office himself and demanded the detachments that are at fault for these massacres be removed from his command and moved somewhere else. And that's the best he could do because the government

was not going to disband them or hold anybody accountable. But he at least got them kicked out of Martuni. It's hard like because like obviously war crimes are going to take place war is awful and killing civilians is indefensible and i wish monty would have fucking shot them but you know uh yeah the government the government of art sock itself was largely powerless at the time. And at this point, it's kind of like if these detachments actually wanted to, they could have just killed the government too.

It was, it was pretty much 100% warlordism, which is never a good way to run anything. It's what, what happened is completely indefensible. It's not a genocide, but anybody who tries to defend it or uh revise that bit of armenian history is no better than turks so stop um yeah yeah it happened and like

just like especially in a system like that where it is just the government giving random people power right like monty anybody who was anybody who had the like that kind of moral fortitude like monty did was was an anomaly he absolutely was expect yeah i mean when you think about it monty had no business being this good of a person he was like no he was he was given the command of attachment while everybody knew he was in the country on a false passport because he's a fucking wanted terrorist and he ended up being like and he'd already botched a bunch of these like actions when he was

doing the terrorism like when that was what he was up to yeah exactly I mean it's like to a much lesser extent the same like career arc of like Abdallah and the PKK he went from like supporting blowing up

civilians and being like, I fucked up. We shouldn't do this. Yeah. He Mr. Beaned himself into success. Hey, he persisted, okay? Nevertheless. Nevertheless.

It's going to make a t-shirt that only about 100 people are going to get. I love it. Oh, you know, it's more important than his failures as a commander, which is what they are. He did not let this shit go. He wouldn't shut up about it. He reported it to everybody who would listen. But he also made sure that it wouldn't happen in his own uh because it's the only thing he could directly

control because the government's powerless to to reel in these warlords uh monty compared these other detachments to a virus like the the the longer they are around his soldiers um the the more their attitude bleed bleed into them. Their indiscipline would spread to other units in Martuni even after they were gone. Fighters were skipping duty, not manning the trenches, stealing, ignoring orders. Others were just running protection rackets like militias. That's something that he found. He's commander of this entire front

and he found members of other detachments that you know technically were under his control we're running like protection rackets for villages to like squeeze out other villages and like one of the things he did was go yeah it's one of the things that he did is go through and get rid of them the best he could um and instead of you know discipline at this point is virtually and now in other detachments i mean discipline it boils down to physical beatings some detachment leaders reported to shoot people that they were unhappy with um monty didn't do any of that instead he uh he did something that he learned from the pkk and that is when someone did something wrong,

he forced them to stand in front of the rest of the fighters and announced to them what they did that was wrong and how it hurt the unit as a whole. If people refused to take part, they were kicked out of the unit. It's like a struggle session. It's a struggle session, but it's also like all those dog shaming pictures.

Yeah. It's just like an Armenian fighter with a sign around his neck saying like i'd shoot on the couch i ate the turkey off the counter yeah and like it worked he effectively mother hen them into becoming a soldier uh and like that's something i mean to a lesser extent the u.s does that as well. If you do something wrong, you're publicly shamed in front of your comrades. How it hurts the cohesive unity of whatever unit you're in. You as an independent person are significantly less important than the body. Especially when it comes to the military. For a unit to function

the navy has perfected this in that they do public NJPs oh I've heard about those oh yeah it's not every time you go to cap so in the navy if you get article 15 non-judicial punishment it's called a captain's mast

which is some nautical bullshit I love it so it's not everybody goes to public mass. It is definitely like if the CO sees somebody they can make an example of, they'll decide to make it public. And even then, there's degrees of it. Sometimes it's public, but you're not forced to show up. And other times, it's all hands.

Everybody at the command has to come and watch some asshole get yelled at. That's incredible. It doesn't work. At least in the Navy now. I'm glad it worked for Monty. It's different because none of these guys are drafted. These guys are all here voluntarily.

They can leave whenever they want. Unlike some semen or whatever. Yeah. I mean, technically they can leave whenever they want to uh this is not gonna go very well yeah uh now in one incident um because like like i said a lot of commanders would talk to talk but would not be an example for their men there's a lot of old boyism cronyism straight up you know uh fucking gangster shit and monty wanted to

prove that he was not one of those people so when he found out one of his closest friends and somebody he'd known for years and a member of his attachment uh had stolen a jeep um he put himself on half rations for failing to control his own sub commander. Oh, and he willingly told everybody, uh, that like, you know, if, if you see me not doing this or not following the rules,

remember we're a unit, it's your job to hold me accountable as well. Like I can't catch everything. So, and also obviously he punished his friend for stealing a Jeep. Another thing, cause like he's effectively an occupying commander right like they're taking over a lot of these villages who had never had

um armenian security forces there i mean there's you know under the control of the soviets maybe the azaries came through but now like he also has to win the trust of all these villagers right um so he not only held villagers accountable under the same rules but also his men accountable to the villagers now it's it's also important important to point out that the villages hardly understood him when he spoke due to his bad armenian right um but they didn't love and he's armenian with a californian accent yeah bar ev bro uh like but they did learn to deeply deeply respect him um because nobody was above the law when money was around because like it's it for the first time in a lot of these villagers lives a representative of the government did not play favorites um because you know because

like even during the soviet times that was not the case uh like at one point an older village woman dubbed him quote our holy son and kept giving him jars of buffalo yogurt what yeah it's uh so yogurt drinks are are super common armenian food um and it's like he didn't drink uh alcohol but he would like drink yogurt, which just sounds like it would destroy my fucking stomach. It's got the good gut flora, though. His gut flora was about as thick as his beard, I guess. So gross.

Hairy-ass gut flora. As an Armenian, I have to point out, my insides I assume are also mostly hair. Gotta be at this point, right? Now, after this, Monty was promoted to district commander. And he was one of six in Artsakh. And now, you remember his small detachment of around 200 dudes was now several thousand people.

Now, while this was happening, the war turned dramatically in Artsakh's favors. As Armenian soldiers won massive victory one after another. This led to the collapse of the Azeri government and the rise of a ruling national council in its place, which would also then eventually collapse, leading to a

more vigorous nationalist coming into charge. One of the reasons they came to power was because they wanted to commit. Everything Azerbaijan had. Into an offensive to the war. Which included tanks. APCs jets things like that.

Which led to counter gains. It did not take long. For. Monty's district and Martuni. To become completely surrounded by Azeri soldiers. And. He was kind of fucked. Monty had around in Martuni to become completely surrounded by Azeri soldiers. And he was kind of fucked. Monty had around 4,000 people. And the Azeris had 15,000.

Oh. The Azeris also brought hundreds of tanks and APCs, while the Armenians were happy just to have boots at this point. Yeah. Gotta protect those toes, though. Yeah, I mean, it's cold you know mountains suck i'm glad they have boots i'd rather have a tank in the situation but whatever you take what you can get what are boots if not tanks for your feet deep thoughts um god damn it i'm not gonna stop laughing

at that now uh so you gotta have like tank slippers out there that you can buy. They have to. Why don't you have slippers that look like tanks? I need to find those now. So if that means if your boots fall apart or you lose a foot, is that just like losing a track? Basically, yeah. You need to get new treads.

That means you have to routinely maintenance your feet by injecting them full of grease. Yeah, you gotta lube them feet. Thanks, I hate it. So the Azeris were not alone. They were also joined by Russian regular army units, as well as irregulars from the Turkish

fascist organization known as the Grey Wolves. And there's also rumors of fighters from pakistan afghanistan and chechnya thankfully it'd be the last time badger by john did that that doesn't sound familiar at all yeah yeah they they certainly have a history of paying terrorists to to do war crimes on their behalf and also fuck the gray wolves eat my ass moving on um the gray wolves are have been um uh like pretty much they're turkish proud boys um they fight people in the streets they've killed people they assassinated a journalist that uh was researching the armenian genocide in turkey

um they're really big in france both the Turks and the Armenians have huge diaspora populations there and running fistfights in the street are not uncommon. Yeah, it's, they suck. It's just two of my least favorite things. Yeah.

Now, now that Martuni was surrounded, the Azeri settled in for a siege and they blindly began to shell Martuni was surrounded, the Azeri settled in for a siege, and they blindly began to shell Martuni. Monty took a page out of Stalin's book here, unfortunately. Now, he knew holding Martuni was incredibly tactically important. If it fell, it would open up a pretty easy path for the Azeri forces to advance through. He knew he had to hold it no matter what. forces to advance through. He knew he had to hold it no matter what.

And he knew that since most of his fighters were locals, he had to keep their families in the town to keep them fighting. So he refused to allow civilians to leave the city while they were being shot. Oh yeah, I just connected those dots. He was afraid that if the civilians

left, his fighters would leave too, and there would be nothing left to defend. He also seized all diesel from everyone in the area uh so it could be used to the very few tanks they had at their disposal um and to be fair artsak was desperately low on fuel everywhere and there was no yeah there was no government logistic system it was all stolen so he you know harvested every bit of the martini countryside to fund his war now his his reason for that was uh you could die in martini or you could run and you'll eventually die anyway so you might as well die in the trenches yeah which you know not a great war tactic except it almost always

works um yeah the siege went on for 10 months before the Azeris launched their assault. By now, everyone who could hold a weapon in Martuni was in the trenches. Men, women, and children. Even some who couldn't. In one case, a 12-year-old boy used an RPG that was too big for him to fire at incoming tanks.

Though that did not stop the 12-year-old from crawling between fighting positions and using the rocket launcher to disable two different tanks to destroy a BMP fighting vehicle. Jesus. That kid's fucking awesome. That kid's rad as well. Child soldiers bad. Bad.

Hot take. I need to frame this in a way that people understand that I'm not cheering child soldiers here. Hot take. I need to frame this in a way that people understand that I'm not cheering child soldiers here. Resistance and things like this are common for oppressed peoples or people at threat. This is not the first time Armenians have done this either. During the Battle of Van during World War I, they realized that if the Ottomans came into the city, they were all going to die. So at that point, are you really above giving a gun to your 10-year-old son? I think it's the difference between going out to recruit children and saying,

hey, for the child, their town is getting attacked. Yes. Right? There's nowhere to run. Now, granted, Monty did create this, but he created it. And you're the reason why I don't have another Armenian on this episode, because we will talk our way out of this being bad. It's bad.

It's bad. It's bad. The way of thinking was, why retreat? They're coming to kill us all. We need to fight them. And so it's quite literally total war at a village level. It doesn't make it morally right. It makes it

the tactically correct choice to make which there's no room for morals there um and like to be to be clear he said that there can be no child soldiers in his detachment and he was commanding 4 000 people he probably didn't see them all but there was child soldiers fighting his detachment. And they killed a hell of a lot of tanks, apparently. That 12-year-old's got a hell of a body count. And a lot of the Armenians held on in their trench line. And a lot of this is because

the Azeris were simply bad at war. It was kind of like a really shitty action movie where they attack one part at a time, even though they had them tactically surrounded. Like, not everywhere around Martuni could be assaulted. Artsakh is a very mountainous place,

very hard to travel through. But instead of committing all of their forces to battle at one point, they kind of just, like, sent in probing attacks, but large ones in one specific area of the Martuni line at a time. So instead of overwhelming all of their defenses,

they just kind of like poked and prodded one place at a time. Huh. It's dumb. Sounds dumb as hell. Yeah. The fighting went on for days, and every time the Azeris returned back, but they didn't like stop their assault into the area. As the fighting went on for days and every time the azaries returned back but they didn't like stop their assault into the area as the fighting wore on the hardly equipped and dressed armenians

became rich with captured azari weapons and vehicles they went from having one tank to dozens uh yeah and they kind of had to train themselves how to use them nobody had any idea how to use these fucking things never once did Monty receive a single armored vehicle from the Artsakh Armenian government. But at this point, he was commanding what had about to be two companies worth of armor. Jeez. At one point, a journalist actually went to Artsakh to interview Monty. And you actually can find these interviews on YouTube. And he said that he felt very bad

for the Azeris when the journalist asked why he said quote they're struggling to arm two armies theirs and ours look at everything that we have now laughing laughing fucking burn

yeah like imagine being surrounded by tens of thousands of soldiers it's still like sneaking in a burn just like this is fine bring me more tanks yeah right now using these new weapons monty kind of took in a guerrilla offensive against the azaries uh and a reason for this was uh it's it's like i said it's very hard to move large units of anything through Artsak there's very few roads the ones that

exist are very small like single track now what he did learn is if you're say the Azeris and you put a whole column of tanks in one of these roads it's very easy to ambush from a high spot so that's what he started doing that's like yes yeah that's how you lose things like he

yeah he sent small groups out into the mountains to scope out all the roads and then as the azeris were building up an offensive to go towards like the main line he would just ambush them for miles at a time so by the time they got to the actual main trench defenses, there was nothing left. Now, despite forcing the civilians to stay under withering artillery fire and stripping every drop of fuel and food from them to keep the fight up against the Azeris,

the villagers loved him. A common phrase in Martuni was, quote, as long as Avo is with us, we will have victory. And he, like I said, he had a routinely... He had a routinely turn away children who would volunteer to fight. I assume either 12 years old was the low limit

or that one slipped through the cracks. Yeah. That kid just looked particularly badass. Yeah, I mean he was Armenian. He was 12. He probably had a beard. He had a full beard. Yeah. He was already balding. It was wild. Now you're just

describing me and I feel attacked. One of the reasons for this adulation was obviously all the military victories but also because Monty was kind of above local politics and I don't mean that because like he didn't care he simply

didn't understand Artsak was and is a very old place very old problems like I said before his like inner clan and inner village drama and politics like like blood debt is a thing or was a thing. And Monty didn't really know about any of this,

so he ignored it. And because he wasn't part of the local scenes and had local problems with local beefs, he was permanently neutral. This led to him being brought in to mediate local problems between local people. And he couldn't have favorites because he didn't fucking know anybody. Yeah.

Which is a weird way to be above everything. Yeah. And so people began to think of him as incorruptible, which is one way for that to work. More Mr. Bean shit. He's like, your problems aren't important. Have you tried shutting up? Yeah. They're like, huh, you're right.

Oh. One person called it a naive simplicity, which is fair. But as a lot of state functions had not been set up or have been completely destroyed in the war, nothing was reliable. However, Monty's naive simplicity became the most reliable institution in the entire district he became so good at his job he was eventually promoted out of it um mostly because like wow he's so good we need to spread this everywhere which i guess is is not a bad thing

now he left martuni and he put it in charge of his sub-commander and was put in charge of a plan he had been arguing since the war began now like i talked about before artsak and armenia are not connected in any way right but he thought in order for this war to exist and for artsak to exist as a independent nation or as part of Armenia they needed to be connected by a land bridge because like this whole time supplies no matter what it was men material

whatever had to be airlifted there via helicopter Armenia didn't have much of an air force and Artsakh didn't have an airport so it does now it does kind of now but you still can't course and art sock didn't have an airport so yeah so you're just like helicopter loads yeah it does kind of now but you still can't take like you know a passenger plane there um yeah and not

to mention pilots spare parts all those things um and lack thereof made helicopters incredibly unreliable and in short supply. So it was bad. Um, Monty's plan was for the first time lead Armenian forces in an invasion of traditionally Azeri territory into the Kalbajar region, the region separating Artsakh from Armenia and joined the two forcefully. Now, um, it's bold and it sounds like it shouldn't have worked.

Uh, but Monty made his intentions very obvious and soon civilians began fleeing the region. He held his attack throughout most of the month until all of the civilians were gone because he didn't want them caught in the crossfire. But unfortunately for Monty, this being a war that is hardly being held together

at the seams of warlordism, the best intentions still lead to violence happening. While his forces were watching the refugees leave the area, a green military truck appeared, flooring it down the road. Monty and his soldiers assumed it was a military transport

because it was a military truck, and they opened fire on it. It finally broke down on the side of the road, riddled with bullets. Monty was horrified to find 25 civilians inside, many of them dead, some of them wounded, and he postponed his offensive

in order to make sure the wounded get transported to a nearby hospital. Now, this is something that I need to kind of explain a bit, because this is something that, like, kind of has a direct correlation to my experience in the military. We talk a lot about war crimes on the show,

and I feel like I should point out what this is. This sounds terrible. And it was, but it's not actually a war crime. Montaigne has been fired on what they thought was a military transport. They discovered it when they discovered it wasn't. They followed the Geneva conventions, which they were not even signatories of and fighting for a nation that does not technically exist by getting civilians to the highest level of health care that could be reasonably provided in the region.

Now, this is why I always strive to make sure people understand that war is not black and white. And while some war crimes absolutely are, Robert Bales comes to mind, but intention is important. And sometimes war is war and bad because war is a bad idea. But that is another thing that is pointed out that Monty is a war criminal or a murderer by his areas. And I don't know if Monty himself actually fired on it, but his soldiers did and under his orders. So if it's bad, it's certainly not good. It's regrettable.

And he felt awful about it. But he made sure his men were not feeling awful because they shouldn't have been hiding in a military vehicle but right shit happens unfortunately sometimes it's just a horrible accident yeah uh like something similar has happened um quite a few times in iraq and afghanistan when like soldiers are manning checkpoints and uh someone blows through a checkpoint, ignoring signs that they should stop, and they get shot. It's not technically a war crime. It is regrettable, and it's awful, but it's not technically a war crime.

And I'm saying technically a lot because you are shooting civilians. At this point, you really are splitting hairs. Right. Now, moving on. Now, moving on. When Monty moved forward, what he always would do is post outside of a village and order the town to surrender to hopefully avoid fighting. And when he did this outside the town of Kelbajar, the mayor, who was also the commander of the local defense forces, refused to surrender. So Armenian forces moved in and took it in short order and only a few only

four days an architecture student turned terrorist turned military commander from California had done something nobody had ever done for over a hundred years four days four days holy shit he had united Artsakh and Armenia via a land bridge

I understand the statues now oh yeah we'll talk a little bit more about those later because there's probably more than you think um now one person monty had not talked about his little plan was was the president of armenia who was pissed hey i got you a land bridge oh you didn't ask for a land bridge oh now. Now, like, the president was, you know, pissing on razor blades here, like, trying to split hairs about how he wasn't technically fighting a war against Azerbaijan. He was worried that the offensive would lead to Armenia's international isolation, which it did. This is when Turkey slapped a trade embargo on Armenia, which still exists to this day. But, I mean, Turkey was supplying Azerbaijan the whole time, too.

So it's really the Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man thing here. During the last two years, Tur Petrosian had been trying to cozy up to the West. What he was really trying to do, much like Pashinyan had tried to do, was cozy up to NATO, join NATO, and they would be able to flex with NATO telling Turkey to cut their shit.

As always, it doesn't work. Turkey's already in NATO. Yes. It does not work, and it never will work. Right. So, yeah, Armenia became slightly internationally isolated and then dependent on Russia, which still is the case today.

Right. Now, Turpetrosian was pretty shocked by the fact that his plan did not work. But Mani was not at all. Just before the offensive, he told a reporter, quote, United States has an extremely tight relations with Turkey. They count on Turkey for a lot of things and is sort of their puppet in the region. Turkey does what they want to do. They have a strong army. The U.S. wants to use that army to police Arab states, to police Iran,

and to enforce U.S. policy in the region. To do that, the U.S. is willing to totally ignore the rights of an awful lot of people, including the Kurds and Armenians. Yup. Still tracks. This is true. That's the, like, you want to cozy up to the West and you don't want to piss off like Turkey any more than you already are. But in order to do that, you have to let your entire country basically get overwhelmed.

Yes. Yeah. Cool. Well, I'm glad you curried favor with the West to the point that you no longer exist. curried favor with the West to the point that you no longer exist. And I should point out that Ter Petrosian, while technically the father of modern Armenia, was also

a horribly corrupt bastard and was forced out of politics for it. So, you know, fuck him. Though, if it wasn't for him doing what he did while he was the Supreme Soviet, Mani wouldn't have been able to be there and the history would look a lot different. Now, the Artsakh offensives would not end with the Union of Mother Armenia.

Instead, Mani would invade Azerbaijan again, this time capturing the Aghdam Plains. Now, this is not quite what he ever had in mind, but he wasn't comfortable. Not quite what he ever had in mind, but he wasn't comfortable because even with the Kalbajar offensive, it could be argued by some Armenians to be part of the historic Armenian homeland that he was always talking about, Greater Armenia. And I'm sure my comments are going to look like a Balkans YouTube comment section after this. I don't know if i completely agree with that um myself uh but sure what i that was how mani rationalized it in his head right but agdam was never part of greater armenia and he felt very uncomfortable being ordered to invade it uh but he did i mean it's not like he was like no i can't do that he He was like, all right, fuck it, let's roll. Sure, why not? Though his reason for that, though,

was because he thought if they captured it, Azerbaijan would have little hope of continuing the war. As Armenian troops, or Artsakh troops, would only be a few hundred kilometers away from the capital of Baku and have a pretty easy time marching there if they captured it. Not that they ever did. But, you know.

Dream big. The idea was you capture Ogdom. The Azeris have no choice but to be like, okay, fuck you. Almost like a North and South Korea thing. There's not going to be any peace, but at least the war will end. Now,

Monty and his staff advance with the main units as he always did. People had constantly warned him to stop doing that, but he thought being at the front was where he needed to be. And this was not what he was used to. The Artsock

roads were normally paved, or at the very least, they weren't used to dusty roads that he had no way of maneuvering on. And they were so dusty and dry that it was very easy for soldiers to get randomly lost or vehicles that just run into one another yeah that's kind of what happened uh things became so confusing that monty's car got lost um and they decided they would simply have to return to the nearby town of mizuli uh to link up with what he thought were

his tanks uh and they would be able to guide them better. And as they were driving, they got caught in traffic behind a BMP-1 armored personnel carrier. Very old one. Not so out of date then as it is today. Now, Monty kind of realized like, huh, I don't really remember us having a BMP-1

when we began this offensive. But vehicle stocks are pretty fluid. Armenian forces would capture stuff from the Azeris, and they'd be immediately turned around and put back into use an hour later. Yeah, so then it becomes an issue that all of your armor looks exactly like your enemy's armor. Yeah, and they wouldn't even get a new paint job.

The most they would do is just spray paint over the Azeri flag on the side. Now, the BMP stopped in the middle of the road and some soldiers jumped out to take a piss and started smoking monty's driver a guy named gomitas uh pulled the car over to talk to them to find out where the fuck they were uh so they he approached the soldier and asked them which way the town was the soldiers hearing him speak in the Armenian language, panicked. As did Gomita's. Because it seems their car and this APC had both been lost

and accidentally ran into one another and the APC was Azeri. The soldiers who were smoking grabbed their rifles and started shooting at them. Gomita's yelled out, boys! At the rest of the people in the car. They're fucking Turks.

And both sides started shooting at one another. Now, Gomita's only had a handgun and Monty was still in the car. Monty grabbed his weapon and ran out to join the fight, but they were badly outnumbered. And there was a BMP there

who quickly started using its crew guns against them and nobody nobody's entirely sure what happened next but gomita says when he ran for cover behind uh a tree to get a better firing position on the vehicle he turned around saw monty laying dead in the street just a few feet behind him shit yeah Reinforcements eventually showed up chasing off the Azaris. Monty's body was moved to a church in Martuni when his partner Seta had arrived, and she saw throngs of men, women, and children crying over him, screaming for Avojan, or my dear Avo.

They begged Seta not to take the body back to Yerevan, but to be buried instead in the town of Martuni for everything he had done for them. Now, one of Seta's last things she said to them is like she wishes she could, but Monty's last wishes were to be buried at the capital of Mother Armenia. So his body was loaded into a helicopter and flown back home. His body

was led in a procession through the streets of Yurovan and was greeted by over 200,000 people. People screamed for Zulvar Avo, or General Avo, despite the fact he'd only recently been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, and the rank never really mattered to him anyway. In attendance were the President of Armenia,

every member of Parliament, every Minister of the Cabinet, and even the U.S. Ambassador, despite the fact that Monty died a wanted man in the country of his birth. Monty was buried in the Europe or cemetery overlooking the, uh, Mount Ararat,

a highly sacred place for Armenians. And he was eventually awarded the order of the combat cross in the first degree, the nationally hero of the, of Armenia award, the national hero of art sock award and the town of Martuni was named in his honor becoming Monty pert or Fort Monty. Uh, and there is

so many fucking uh statues of him around the country um like for instance uh uh when you swear in to become an officer in the armenian military you do it in front of a statue of monty um and strangely enough the uh

a man who never once attended a military university has a military college in Yurovan named after him. Why not? Yeah. And I know I said I wasn't going to talk about Markar much, but after this happened, a member of the Azeri detachment believed to have killed Monty was captured and brought to Markar. Because, like I said, there was something of a blood vengeance tradition in the region.

And they were pretty much offering, like, you can take him and kill him over your brother's grave, if you'd like. And Markar refused, because he's not insane. He said, if you respect Monty, you'll let this person go unharmed. And they did. Yeah, I i mean his whole thing was like once once whatever soldiers they were up against surrender and they weren't like combatives anymore he didn't he didn't kill them he made sure that they they weren't murdered if he could help it why would he want this yeah uh and like you know um mark har is still alive. I believe he's a professor in California somewhere.

He wrote the book My Brothers Wrote. I highly recommend it. I had to leave a lot out because a lot of it's just about his, what he believed Monty's motivations and beliefs were, which didn't really flow great with the story. Like a lot of it is ignored by some people who like to change his memory around a bit in Armenia, making it more religious. It's common to call him Saint Monty in some places.

But he was absolutely a Marxist. He's obviously an Armenian nationalist, but his beliefs evolved over time. But it's definitely one of the more strange arcs of someone's personality in life going from a bloodthirsty terrorist who was like totally OK killing kids to being like the beacon of morality in the middle of a fucking horrible war. Wild. It's crazy, too, that he was able to adjust his morals as he sort of grew as a person, but never really changed his overall desires. He still wanted to fight for Armenia. He just decided that it kind of meant different things at different stages in his life.

Yeah, I believe he did the normal and honestly logical thing that a lot of you know pie in the sky ideologues don't really have is that he started with like this um like huge dream of uniting greater armenia until he realized like that's incredibly unrealistic and you know instead you know we need just to fight for survival you know because he has numerous quotes saying that the only people who care about us is us and we have to fight or we're all gonna die yeah um and you know i was always very interested in him for obvious reasons as being an american armenian myself um that you know it's it's such a weird like and it's it's a weird connection um for the diaspora because you know americans love to point out their ancestry no matter what if they're they're

a quarter fucking irish or whatever but it's always a lot different when you are armenian um when like you know i think i've joked out before the second you meet anybody and they find out you're armenian you you're immediately connected whether you want to be or not. And this is like happened to me on countless occasions, even through the Internet. Yeah. And it's like people will offer you like when you travel there and your diaspora, people will offer you their fucking guest rooms to sleep in free of charge, free food. They'll show you around.

It's just like a very weird connection to Armenia itself. Obviously, I'm not a nationalist. I'm a bit of not even much of a statist. No, you are. But it's always strange how deep the connection to the culture is uh even if you're not steeped in it like uh like that's one of the reasons why i've always been very attracted to the mythos of monty is we both had very similar upbringings when it comes to our armenianness it was almost all self-taught right um yeah like it's all very weird that like things like that are always connected.

But yeah, that's Monty. I hope you hope you enjoyed our series, Sarah. I know this is a very niche topic for you. No, I liked it. He's an interesting guy with like a really, really unique story arc. Yeah, yeah. I don't think I've ever done a series that I'm 100% like, I just want to do this for me.

And that's what this series was. And after the Khmer Rouge series, I felt like we all kind of needed a palate cleanser. A series that isn't overly sad all the time. Obviously, Monty malconian

died and that sucks he'd still be alive today um maybe but uh you know that's but it wasn't a waste like no absolutely not demanded more in his short life than anybody most other people can ever dream of yeah yeah uh so we do a thing on this show Sarah called questions from the Legion do we we do if you'd like to ask a question from the Legion you can donate a dollar slide into my DMs on discord or patreon or

my email and ask me super furious bullshit that has absolutely nothing to do with the show at hand my favorite it's honestly some of my favorite things and like normally during series we we wait until the last one um and that's you know it's the last episode so um today's allegiant question is one that was asked actually a very long time ago and i'm just now getting to it is uh what is a band that you liked growing up that

you still absolutely stan and mine is very easy it's a nirvana it's still my favorite band it's been my favorite bands have been probably eight years old that's pretty it's pretty dedicated it's it hit me at just the right time you know um you know i was very into grunge because i was a i was a little sad boy growing up and like you know i came from a broken family and have like incredibly untreated mental illness uh much so like you know the incredible like the angry disaffectedness spoke to me and i'm not much more mature now than i was then i don't so growing up like i didn't have access to my own music any music that i was able to listen to

was either like whatever my parents put on in the car which was always country or whatever my older brothers had like illegally burned onto cdrs and then left around the family computer hell yeah yeah but like this is really dumb one of the bands that like i still go back and listen to every once while i still get stuck in my head is the decemberist which is just like dumb it's a dumb hipster band from portland it is like full portlandia level of like obnoxious hipster and every once in a while that's just what i want to listen to it's like it's weird because like even though like i was an emotional teen and like got really into uh nirvana it's, now if I listen to them, it's comforting. Not to mention, Kurt Cobain is probably one of the only rock stars from the time that aged well.

I mean, it probably helped he died when he was 27. But in the early 90s, he was campaigning for gay rights and played at... It was like no on Prop 9 or something like that in Oregon. That would force people, like the schools in Oregon, to teach people that homosexuality was an abnormality and bad. And this is in the 90s. Yeah. Not a popular stance at the time

no of course not and like he was what else was it he wrote like liner notes on I believe it was in utero or incesticide that told people like if you hate gay people or you're a misogynist fuck off we don't want

your money don't buy our records and leave us the fuck alone and stuff like that. Man, like Twitter would have ruined him, but he would have been great on Twitter. I mean, he was just like sad and strung out all the time. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the worst parts is like, he would be making so much good music now,

but also he'd probably do something awful because you know he was a neglectful junkie yeah yeah well Sarah thank you for joining me on only our second series ever with a guest so yeah long time

ago during our Yemeni Civil War episode that's now badly out of date but yeah thank you very much I hope you enjoyed it Yemeni Civil War episode. That's now badly out of date. But yeah, thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope everybody listening enjoyed it. And now, since we neglected to do this during our last two episodes, this is the plug zone.

Plug your pluggables. It's just been a build up into the plug. Yeah, I also have a podcast that is quite a bit different than this one where i talk about ocean science and ocean um ocean policy and kind of the environment in general i'm not a marine biologist it is not a fish-based podcast though occasionally we talk about fish so just gonna preemptively disappoint everybody it's not it's not about fish most of the time. But you can find us. I was under the impression that it's a whole

pod of whales. I do talk about whales. I just like them though. I'm not an expert. I just think they're neat. I just think they're neat. But you can find us wherever your pods are cast at

It Came From The Sea. And you can also find us on Twitter and pods are cast at um it came from the sea and you can also find us on twitter and patreon we're there thank you yeah uh that was a good plug for the plug zone uh i feel plugged i feel very plugged um and until next time uh this is normally where i have a cute quip about what not to do. We won't buy a cannon and shoot silver iodide into the atmosphere. Is that bad? It can be. Cloud seeding can be. Okay, well, until next time, don't spend your

money on cloud seeding, I guess.