Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 297 - The History of Fragging and the Case of Alberto Martinez

Episode Date: February 4, 2024

Joe and Nate explore the history of Fragging in the US military and the case of Alberto Martinez, a soldier who almost certainly killed two officers during the Iraq War and got away with it. Buy Joe's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-War-Military-Sci-Fi-Undying-ebook/dp/B0CQ6BH6BD/ref=sr_1_1?crid=KQQ88V9SZ7K1&keywords=joe+kassabian&qid=1706602108&sprefix=%2Caps%2C201&sr=8-1 Sources: George LePre. Fragging: Why US Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam https://www.recordonline.com/story/news/2017/01/27/alberto-martinez-acquitted-killing-local/22538316007/ https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/21/nyregion/21frag.html https://journalnow.com/witness-soldier-changed-before-fatal-iraq-blast/article_95ae16fb-b3e6-51b8-b445-d609e6d77e94.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/nyregion/16guard.html

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, but I guess you probably already knew that. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at www.patreon.com slash lionsledbydonkeys. Just $5 per month gets you every regular episode early, access to our community discord, a digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, as well as its audiobook read by me, and over five years of bonus content. By supporting the show, you support us and allow us to keep our show as it has always been ad-free. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy the

show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Alliance Led by Donkeys podcast. I am Joe. And with me today is Nate. What's up, buddy? You know, just the usual. It's actually been kind of a nuts week for me, but it's like one of those things where you just learn to accept that when you decide to become a parent that chaos will reign forever. And it's less like the toddler throwing shit everywhere thing, because our daughter is too young for that. But we've just determined that she... I don't know

if this is a sign of a good immune system, but she definitely gets feverish when she has her scheduled vaccines. And there's baby Tylenol equivalent you can give. They tell you to give and we do, but that reduces the symptoms. So it's still like you have a feverish baby. It's just not as scary to go to the hospital feverish. It's just upset baby. So that was the early part of the week. And then I was like, sweet. Well, I can get a bunch of shit done in the end of the week. And then my wife got a kidney stone. uh yeah she's better now she's okay now it was it was it was a mild one it's something she's dealt with in the past and she's she's got stuff to look into it but um it's just yeah you get a surprise as i refer to it as it's it's

challenge mode daddy daughter time like all right you're gonna we're speed running it we're doing everything we're doing feeding and diaper changing and burping and soothing and bath time and bedtime. And that's all stuff that I normally do. But bathing a four-month-old solo, it just brings some additional challenge. I guess people who have 18 months old are like, bro, you have no idea what the fuck you're in for. I think my daughter had a good time. I think she had a blast. She has no idea how much I was like, ah, this is taking years off my life. But yeah, so that's my week. It's cold and rainy and shitty. Today's actually sunny though. So it's Britain in January. You're in Armenia. How are you doing? Yeah. If anybody can't tell from the sound of my voice, I am kind of sick.

It could have been from travel. I was just in the united states over the holidays to see my family this is a really important time for me to be home i'm not really like a holiday guy but i haven't been back to the uh like michigan um for the holidays since it's probably 17 or 18. I'm 35 now. And it was our first Christmas since my brother has died. So I'm like, I can't possibly miss this. However, that did include a lot of flying. And I got there and I got to hang out with my niece and nephew. My brother's son is an an absolute chaotic uh uh mess of a child which is perfect it's exactly like he was um and i don't have kids i'm not

like close friends and like in my daily life with anybody who has kids where i see kids um really uh so i'm not really sure what to do around them and uh i learned that my nephew uh my brother must have uh been really into the the wrestling with him type thing um for a very very long time uh he's six years old almost seven oh wow and uh so i learned that uh he can go forever um and i learned that on christmas day uh and uh i think i'm covered in bruises like i was tired i didn't realize kids sweat that much yes they do it was it was very interesting it was very cool um i got to go to a red wings game uh which i haven't been able to do in way too long. Then I flew back to Armenia to see family for New Year's and also Armenian Christmas, which is actually tomorrow at the time of recording. I know this won't come out for a while.

Merry Christmas. Merry, merry Hayastan Christmas. And I got, I am now sick. So who knows what I'll be doing tomorrow. I am now sick, so who knows what I'll be doing tomorrow. And I had the absolute worst flight experience of my life flying from Detroit to here via Air France. I know everybody's like, oh, you flew Air France and stopped in Charles de Gaulle Airport. What did you expect? But I need people to understand there's not exactly a lot of flight paths coming to this country.

So it's either you take the shortest one or you take a much longer one and both of them suck uh so you always go with the cheapest option and air france was late um i was straight up like kind of discriminated against at charles de gaulle airport in security because our flight was originally delayed from detroit and a lot of us had connections to catch charles de gaulle and um they were telling us like don't worry we're going to open more security so you guys can get through faster they absolutely did not and then at one point the security guys on the line simply left leaving all of us standing there trying desperately to make our flights i was like like, bro, what the fuck? We all have flight.

My flight leaves in literally 10 minutes. The doors are closing and everybody in line is in the same boat as I am. So everybody is yelling at them as well. And my bags were mysteriously taken aside for more screening, despite there's nothing in them. And finally made it to the flight somehow on last call make it to armenia and they have lost my fucking bags have you gotten them back yet or yeah are you gonna okay end up making an address to like monsieur le turc they did they they ended up getting back to me two days later uh and even then um i had a fun

experience getting my bags uh because i'm staying in an airbnb um in in yervon and my my bags show up and the guy calls me like hey i'm here with your bags come get them elevator my apartment building is broken which tends to happen and with these old you know marginally safe elevators but i am on the 11th floor so i had to carry all my bags up 11 flights of stairs it's like sorry the the war in ukraine means that russia had to close down the steam-powered elevator factory that still builds the elevators for those buildings the same ones as when they build them in the 1950s through 90s yeah you're not wrong um this building is probably from the 70s or something uh the elevator probably from around the same time it's it's just something you learn to live with uh but sometimes it just doesn't work and you're stuck running up and down 11 flights of stairs. But that has been my chaotic week. I just hope I am not sick tomorrow because that would be preferable.

It's kind of refreshing to get sick with something that isn't COVID. I know, right? I mean, it's annoying, but at least you know it's not that because all of the sort of uncertainties about how your recovery is going to be, if your recovery is going to be when it comes to COVID. I was thinking about your story too, because I have a funny... And I can condense it, which I swear to God, I actually can do. Story about Air France, which is I've only had decent experiences with Air France in the sense of the actual service, but they'd lost my bags once and I had to have them delivered. I was shocked because they gave me an overnight bag, like a free overnight kit.

And it was like the best overnight kit I've ever gotten from an airline. Well, I definitely didn't get that. This was in 2005. So it may have gotten worse because France, like every other European country, has just sort of been like neoliberalizing itself to death. But in 2005, my overnight bag had a new t-shirt, like a men's t-shirt, a thing of deodorantant a thing of soap shampoo conditioner a thing of was it uh uh l'occitane on provence cologne it was unisex cologne too

i made the joke it's like the world's most bisexual cologne a condom a toothbrush toothpaste a comb i was like geez this is better than my personal travel kit. I did not get that from Air France. I got a prompt, fuck you. Yeah. And I flew absolutely like coach as hell. So yeah, I imagine stuff's just gotten worse because that's the general trend of our lifetimes. But my funny story about this, though, is that when I got to... At Charles de Gaulle, I got off the plane and I... If I remember correctly, I may have this out of order, but for some reason, I seem to recall that I waited so long for my bag that I didn't wind up getting to passport control before they basically just weren't there. Now, I may have this out of

order, but it seemed to me in my memory that I waited forever, my bag wasn't there. And then I was like, well, fuck it, I guess I just got to go. And then I went to the passport control, which seems out of order, and they just weren't there. So no one stamped my passport, which fine. I mean, I'm an American and I was on a US passport. And at the time, there was the three-month visa waiver thing. But I was there for a photography study course through my university, and my camera got stolen. And my parents had USAA insurance that I was covered under because I was still under the age limit. I was 20. I was under the age limit where you can still be covered under your parents' insurance. And they were like, well, you actually can get it reimbursed. We just need a police report, which the French police are

fucking great at doing paperwork. They will give you so much paperwork. It'll have so many stamps on it. The only thing missing for it being like a bath party thing is having logos of eagles everywhere. It's phenomenal. However, reporting the theft of the camera at the police station, they wanted to see my passport and there wasn't a visa stamp in it. So they arrested me and said they were going to deport me. And I speak French and I'm. And I have, through my dad's side, a decent amount of French extraction. And I was like, guys, there was no one at passport control. And they were like, why don't you have your return ticket on you? I'm like, why would I do that? Just travel with your return ticket everywhere.

Everywhere I go, I need my passport and return ticket. And finally, the guy, they called and someone at their supervisor office was just like, we're not going to deport a 20-year-old American college student just because his passport is stamped. He's got his passport. And just tell him to have his return ticket. And they're like, all right, cool. And then they gave me the paperwork. But up until that moment, basically Air France, they did give me really nice cologne and a free condom. They also almost put me in a situation to get fucking deported while i was on study abroad i actually have one extra dumb story and i promise we'll move on um yeah well you said this was kind of a shorter script so you know what we get to have some fun we get to riff we get to we get to

do see if we can come up with with arvin and the ferrets part two like that fun around here um but i was so i don't have a return ticket to the united states because of course i don't i don't have a return ticket to the United States because, of course, I don't live there. I'm traveling in my American passport. And so I was leaving Detroit to come to Armenia and I have no return ticket. And they're like, oh, well, you need a return ticket. I'm like, no, I don't. And the people at Delta Air France are like, no, sir, you do. I'm like, I assure you I don't. I'm an armenian citizen

also even if i wasn't you don't need a visa to come here an american passport could come here for six months visa free you don't have to do shit it's not even an e-visa just show up at the airport and they're cool with it um and they're like well how do how do we know that you're an armenian citizen well i have this passport right here why would i do you want to see some you want to see some squiggly ass lines take a look at this why the fuck would anybody lie about being a citizen here like also you can't become a citizen here if you're not ethically armenian so i'm just like look guys i don't know what you want from me. Oh, my God. Not only am I a citizen, I have a residency permit for the Netherlands in my passport.

I obviously do not live in the United States anymore. It was so funny to me because my last story, when my first time back in America post-COVID was October 2022. When my first time back in America post-COVID was October 2022. And I happened to be... Because the passport control is always hit or miss, but it's uniformly bad in America. It's annoying. It's like, welcome back. You dared leave. Now you get to get annoyed for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half.

And I happened to get the guy in line checking passports who was asking everyone, how long has it been that you've been out of the United States? And I thought from a little ways away, he sounded just like an old American, born and raised in America guy. But then I get closer and I'm kind of dreading it. So I'm like, fuck, I have to tell him I haven't been back. This is my first time back in three years. And so I get up there and he asked me and I was like three years he's like

oh so you live outside of America and I was like oh he's like a Russian American guy and I was like yes yeah and he looks at my passport like and I see you are back to celebrate your birthday because my birthday was the next day and I was like correct and he's like have a good visit and I was just like oh

that went better than i thought it was going to somehow boris fucking karloff is checking my passport at his school i skipped um the line uh coming into customs in detroit because uh some uh a russian woman actually just collapsed um in line and like, I'm, I mean, obviously I'm not a, a practicing paramedic anymore, but I ran over there to help. I do not speak Russian though.

Nor will I ever learn. I speak bad Armenian and worse English. And so I ended up like, you know, making sure she wasn't, you know, dying, helping and getting her some water.

She's an older woman. And, you know, like you'll call CBP so they can get a fucking fire department like ambulance over here or something. And they did promptly 35 minutes later. And this happened, mind you, within eyesight of those little booths

that they're in. Not a single cop came over. Nothing. Even though it's in their little area because I know they like to be like sticklers about that kind of thing. No one even looked over there. I had to like run over there like you guys need to fucking call 911. And it's like sir you need to get the

back of the line. I'm like that fucking woman just passed out over there. And finally one of the ushers or whatever it is you want to call them. People that like push people through the lines yeah um got the ems uh people in the airport to respond but my flight when i unloaded i would have been at the front of the line and since then like three more planes had unloaded and now i'm going to be like in customs for like three fucking hours yeah and uh they opened a line for like active duty military and i i told the usher woman i'm like i'm going through that line because you like the customs just fucked me and she's like well are you in the military like i used to be she's like yeah that's

fine hey man sometimes you take what you can get like speaking of the military yeah exactly i was gonna do the exact same segue we do a podcast here sometimes um we do this is normally the intro where i i kind of open it up i ask you like uh have you ever heard about this topic that we're talking about today and you feign ignorance so you can defer back to me and I could be the educator. But today I'm not going to do that because I'm going to be talking about something literally everyone has heard of, fragging. Ah, not a thing I ever worry about as an officer in the US military. Now, like, fragging. So maybe some people aren't aware of this term. I know we have a lot of non-native english-speaking audience members and whatnot so to make a long story short fragging is the term

given to when a soldier kills their superior normally with a frag grenade fragmentation hence the term fragging the idea being you just throw a fucking grenade into their tent and kill them. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. And of course, this is, you know, this has happened, though, mostly not with explosives for as long as men have been forced into the ranks of the military and commanded by people they don't like. The reason... Actually, it did happen in a tent with a fragmentation grenade in the opening weeks of the Iraq War. Yeah, Hassan Akbar. Yeah, we'll talk about him later.

But by and large, it's rarer than it used to be for a variety of reasons. And some of that is to do with military culture. Some of that is just to do with the forensics involved now, that it's much harder to hide it. It's a lot of reasons, in my opinion, which we'll get to, that it was a symptom of the Vietnam War and how the military was not only conscripted,

but also administered at the time. Now, the reasons for which soldiers kill their superior officers are as numerous as you can imagine from petty grievances, personal problems, racism, and probably the most popular, the idea that the officer's actions while in command would endanger the rest of the soldiers. And we're going to break all these down through categories here because you're you would be surprised about which one was the most common it's probably not the one anybody's thinking well there's always the kind of like ah the the the honorable honorable joe slaying the

dog shit lieutenant because he's getting people killed because i saw this in platoon or some hamburger hill or fucking but i mean let's just say that the things that wind up making leaders persona non grata with the soldiers can vary from absolutely justified yes in terms of like them hating them to on like unconscionably unjustified and And I think it's just, it's at the end of the day, if you look at it through the paradigm of the military is like the most definitionally authoritarian environment, like it all has to do with being subjugated,

being a subject of authority versus being the subjugator, even if you're like at a, you know, only one rung above in the hierarchy. Like that's getting into some fucking, and not disrespectfully saying this, Judith Butler shit. But I'm dead serious though.

Like it really has to do with the application of authority, with subjectivation, if you will. A hundred percent, yeah. And the fact that at the end of the day, the military structure is based on a relatively archaic class, like official, defined, enforced class structure.

Yeah. And, yeah. All of this first came into what I'll consider the American consciousness during the Vietnam War. And while there was incidents like fragging in every war throughout history, it was never a problem until Vietnam. And I'm going to focus on Americans here because that is the best and actually only case study ever done on the topic. But every allied nation that took part in the Vietnam war also had their own fragging issues

to include south korea and australia so but we're yeah we're gonna focus on the americans here because we actually have a comprehensive study and research done on that which nobody else has ever done i wonder why yeah i wonder why they don't want to dig into the weeds of this topic. Yeah. Now, for starters, the best source on this subject is also the only source on this subject, and that is fragging why US soldiers assaulted their officers in Vietnam by George Lepre. It's kind of hard to find a copy of it. I was able to, but it is, from what I could find, the only comprehensive statistical analysis and survey and research ever done on this topic. And with that still comes with problems. Because by the nature of fragging, we're never actually going to be sure how many times it happened.

Well, quite frankly, if you are successful in your mission to frag your officer, you get away with it. Exactly. And you convince hire that it was an enemy grenade or an enemy mortar or whatever it might be. But it's sort of the inverse of... Actually, hold that thought in mind for later. Okay. Hold that thought in mind for later. Okay. I was just going to say it's kind of the inverse of the Navy SEALs walking around with a captured AK that they can drop on someone and say,

Hey, this guy was a combatant when, in fact, he was just an unarmed person that they killed. It's like finding a way to convince people that this was an enemy action and not deliberate on your part. Actually, okay. Or am I wrong on that? Because I mean, that was always my impression. We'll explain why in a second. I should start off the subject by saying that the popular perception of some idiot gung-ho officer making bad decisions in the field, trying to win medals, all that, leading soldiers deciding that he needed to die so they could live is almost never what happened as far as documented cases go. As Lepre points out, we'll never know the true extent of fragging by the very nature of it. But from documented evidence we have, it was almost never frontline soldiers killing their officers.

What we do know is that there are several hundred cases of confirmed fraggings during the Vietnam War, virtually all of which happened in rear echelon support units far away from the front line as much as a front line existed in Vietnam and were committed by soldiers who would rarely, if ever, see combat. Really? Yes. soldiers who would rarely, if ever, see combat. Really? Yes. Now that is, you're, I'm, you know, it's funny because you're right. That's a concept I'm familiar with.

But yeah, I'm completely receiving an education on this. Now, I was thinking about the concept of the whole, we'll talk about it later. But like being spit on, you know, the Vietnam veterans getting spit on. Like, I've actually been spit on, but it wasn't in the context of what people would normally think of yeah same i just had to pay for it it was me yeah no for me it was uh it was doing rotc ruck marches on campus and a drunk hippie chick spit on us at like four in the morning and like it wasn't a protest we were just out training and she was just like could see fucking 4d time because she was that drunk and just decided to do it and it's like that you know it's like that's not a that's that that's not a an indictment of any mentality or political viewpoint beyond some fucking idiot college kid spitting on people you know what i mean like it's similar because we would like to

think that fragging was directly connected to those kinds of decisions happening in the field yeah like oh the effort like the platoon leader can't stop calling for fire on his own guys they have to kill him to save the platoon kind of shit yeah or he's trying to win medals order it you know volunteering for too many patrols also the the popular perception is born from media and that is how media shows it like you already named Platoon. We've done a bonus episode on Apocalypse Now where that kind of thing comes up. People like to think that's where it comes from. And it's just not. But we will talk a little bit about the frontline stuff in a little bit. Because a lot of that is born from the fear of it happening. Because everybody knew fragging was happening.

But people believed it was much more likely to happen where the metal meets the meat and not like with your supply guy. So these fears and perceptions wove their way into the reality of how units worked, even if it wasn't actually happening. officer training. It's not like, oh, your soldiers are going to frag you, but rather that the notion of that kind of straw man, dog shit, glory hound officer is always presented to you as a thing you must never be. And I feel like there's a thread running through that that implies that if you do and you don't feel shame for your arrogance, you will be made to feel pain when they kill you. And it's like, I got to be real with you, dude. I had insanely aggressively stupid, incompetent superiors. And believe me, the soldiers wanted to fucking frag him. But did they?

Did anyone ever shoot? No. And there's a good examination as to why there's a difference of attitude that we could get into in a little bit. But 100%, I agree. I'm not going to say I ever dreamed about killing any officers that I had. NCOs, 100%. I mean, I had a ranger instructor that I discovered later on, burned in on a jump and probably

broke every bone in his body, although surviving. And I don't feel bad at all because that guy was a fucking piece of shit. And we didn't learn a goddamn thing from him. And I just think about that. I'm like, if that guy had... I don't think he would have acted that way as a regular line NCO. But had he, I can't imagine his soldiers would fucking care either way. You know what I mean? Now, again, before we move on, I should point out that we only know this from documented cases

or attempts. The military documents at least 800 fragging incidents during the Vietnam War, with 86 people dying from them. but it's thought that there could have been up to as many as 5,000 and only 71 people were ever convicted for their roles in these attacks most of them were sentenced to short terms only a few

years and most of the ones who got longer terms had their sentences shortened minus one guy who was murdered in prison before he could have his sentence shortened um so when it comes to the documented cases what we do have is statistics that tell us let's call them fraggers um that sounds like a that sounds like a either an old-timey slur or like like a team of action heroes on an 80s animated cartoon, like a Saturday morning cartoon. Yeah, it's a racial slur towards hand grenades.

Fighting crime in a future time. It's the Fraggers. 56% of these Fraggers were white, 36% were black, and 8% were considered Hispanic. It won't surprise you to know that the vast majority were between 19 and 20 years old, which yep, no shit. Most of them were drafted and they were draft age. Most were high school dropouts. All of them had criminal records,

a fucked up family life, as well as a history of drug or alcohol abuse. That last part is probably more important than any other statistic I just talked about. Because if there's pretty much anything anyone knows about the Vietnam War is that it was an immoral, illegal, and a crime against humanity. But if there's a second thing anybody knows about the Vietnam War, it's that drugs are fucking everywhere. Yeah. And that the military didn't have the administrative or even technological things to catch and penalize

drug use the way that they do now. And there's still tons and tons and tons of drug abuse in the military, both in garrison and in combat. I mean, obviously, we're not in a situation anymore where there's mass deployments. But when there were, I know you can attest to it. I can fucking attest to it. I can attest to the, like, 75 people in our brigade support battalion get pissing hot for weed

because they decided instead of doing, you know, trickling 10%, they just did 100% all at once. Yeah, I mean... Good boy. Because you could get hash really easily in Afghanistan,

and you could also get, like, pharmaceutical drugs that are banned or that are prescription only in America over the counter. You could buy steroids at the pharmacy. You could buy steroids. You could pay your... Give an interpreter 10 bucks to go down to the bazaar and buy you Valium. Yeah. I never did.

I found out later when my soldiers, when we were all civilians, they told me stories. But we had... I plead the fifth. I found out later when my soldiers, when we were all civilians, they told me stories, but we had a guy get busted. We had a guy get busted who was a gunner in a vehicle in the battalion commander's tactical headquarters for smoking a joint in the turret on patrol.

The fucking rules. And I don't, I fucking hate this term. I fucking hate this term, but I gotta say it just so you understand. His team leader was suspicious and he caught him afterwards. But when the incident happened, his team leader was like, bro, is that fucking weed? And the guy in the gun was like, nah, that was just a hodge in the car that just passed us.

Yeah. Yeah. I could see someone saying that. Now, I've never seen Afghans hotbox a car. No. Never. But I'm from the Midwest and I fucking know a lot about hotboxing cars. Yeah, I would argue there's a lot of reasons why the US military couldn't crack down on drug use. One of them was, I don't know if the United States has ever had a more drugged up military

since or before, and they had not nearly the amount of manpower necessary to both crack down on drug use and also keep their military functioning so um now drugs were everywhere not only were the drugs of literally every kind constantly available to soldiers who were bored depressed and wanted to be literally anywhere other than fucking vietnam they were exceedingly cheap but probably the most popular and cheapest one even cheaper than weed was heroin heroin well because i mean it's the golden triangle i mean that what the french called indo-china that area was and still is one of the primary areas where opium is cultivated. It's just that obviously in Afghanistan, because of the political situation... It was a lot easier.

It's a lot easier and it's become a much bigger supplier to the world. But I mean, the events that were dramatized in the movie American Gangster, that's not made up. No, that actually happened multiple times. They were bringing heroin straight in from Vietnam in caskets of dead american soldiers more than one guy did that which is kind of amazing see yeah the soviets were like see this is why we seal up the zinc coffin so you can't open them also we have crocodiles so we don't need heroin that's right now heroin abuse was such a rampant problem throughout the US military that it accounted for more casualties than actual

war in many units. And by 1971, pretty much the end of American involvement, more soldiers were hospitalized for heroin abuse than combat injuries, theater-wide. In that same year by 1971 the military had around 156 000 soldiers remaining in vietnam of those the military believed with good evidence that at least 60 000 of them were physically addicted to heroin so basically closing in on a third of all troops in vietnam were were on heroin yes it's basically the the real life version of that meme the the edited meme about you know city girls be like we took the wrong road country girls be like slide over i'm on heroin except it's like i've never fucking seen oh it's the mud it's like it's like the car is stuck in the mud and the girl's in like a nice

dress and shoes and she doesn't want to step in the mud that's the city girls and then the the bottom panel is like a truck mudding and it's supposed to be like you know country girls be like slide over it's my turn but someone's just edited say i'm on here that's just the entire u.s military vietnam well i was gonna say this is like being from a rust belt state like the edited version makes more sense that tracks from my my known childhood for sure this could be why a study found that a lot of the people hurt or killed in fragging attacks weren't even the intended targets as the fraggers were so ripped to the gills in that sweet junk that didn't even plan their attacks or check to see if their target was alone at the time

in fact of the 71 people uh arrested prosecuted for this, several of them were caught while still off their fucking gills, like out of their brain on heroin that they still had the grenade pin around, like hanging around their finger hours later. Grenade pin is actually a really useful thing to attach your cooking kit to. Exactly. It's like a key ring for your fucking all your shit. So even gacked out of their minds, why would people suddenly turn to murderers? I mean, after all, if you've ever met a heroin

addict or someone high on heroin, they're not exactly the most motivated people on earth. Yeah, I mean, they tend to be very, very... Sleepy, mostly. Sleepy, motivated to, hopefully motivated to be very, very... Sleepy, mostly. Sleepy, motivated to... Hopefully motivated to breathe, but often not. Like, I had a soldier who turned out to be addicted to heroin.

And yeah, he wasn't... I'm not going to call him energetic. Yeah, exactly. Well, in the rear support areas, what would motivate these soldiers to snap and plan to murder someone was almost always a sudden increase in disciplinary measures. sent to the other side of the world. And in doing so, they found comfort in drugs. And I'll let anybody other than me debate the ethics involved in that, but it was pretty much the only thing getting them through the day.

They would still work. They would do whatever their job was. And then in their downtime, they'd be banging heroin into their arms. And in general, officers just look the other way, accepting that this was how the military would have to work in Vietnam. Then a new officer would come in, which happened frequently, as enlisted men were there for a year-long deployment, while officers were only there for six months.

And they would try cracking down on these miserable, depressed, and drug-addicted bastards. They would be threatened with demotions, a change of duty to something more dangerous, threaten their pay, or a dishonorable discharge. So the soldiers would decide, fuck them. And officers were aware of this, especially the ones known for cracking down on drug abuse and other kinds of crime within the ranks. One was Colin Powell, who said that he would move his cot every single night, so he would be hard to track down.

And another one was, I to god roy moore do you remember roy moore yeah i remember roy moore yeah he's the guy who ran for congress in alabama and nearly won despite everybody knowing he creeped on little girls in the local mall senator yeah i mean he was he was yeah he was he big he his claim to prominence was sort of strong-arming 10 commandmentsments displays on courthouses in Alabama. Yeah. And then, yeah, it turns out the people knew that he was like, basically, when he was a lawyer post his military service in Alabama, it was just like, oh, yeah, if your daughter is like 14, Roy Moore is going to hit on her in the mall. Yeah.

I think he was banned from the mall. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. mall yeah i think he was banned from the mall yeah yeah yeah yeah and then they're still like you know but he's he's we're gonna vote for him to be the senator because he he knows the ways of jesus right yeah a whole different story you know it's funny as a side note my my parents were in the military not quite at this time a little later but in the mid 70s and into the early 80s and it

wasn't until i want to say the mid 80s or onward where basically the way that urinalysis is done for drug testing for weed became a common enough thing that they would institutionalize it and have regular urinalysis tests done on their formation. And so in the olden days, you could get away with smoking weed if people didn't catch you. And so the way they would catch people was either to catch them in the act or to find paraphernalia and stuff like that. And my dad was a company commander in Germany in the early 80s. Side note that I won't go down a digression. I think one of the soldiers in his battalion was Jeffrey Dahmer. Because one of my... My dad, unfortunately, has Parkinson's and he's not super communicative anymore.

But he told a story about something. And I realized now, in retrospect, it lines up with some incidents that happened in Baumholder in the early 80s. But my dad told me the story that the way that people basically... It was sort of the same thing. Most people would look the other way as long as it wasn't so painfully obvious. And similarly with speed pills and stuff but some people were like oh no like i'm gonna fucking catch these guys smoking weed and my dad said that they had a lieutenant in their battalion when he was on battalion uh staff duty who was making his rounds basically kind of like snooping and

pooping trying to fucking catch uh people smoking weed and he did. And he burst in and the soldiers grabbed him, wrapped him in blankets, like, like OD green blankets, stuffed him in a wall locker and threw him off a third story building. Oh my God. And he survived, but he was mentally and physically destroyed from it.

My God. And it's like, that was in 1980. So imagine what it was like in the war 10 years prior. Yeah. And I'm not gonna defend roy moore uh but you know they roy moore and others said that you know there was rumors that several soldiers were planning on killing him because he was i believe in command of like a

military police unit and like they were actually going to not let soldiers just do heroin all the time after work um and so he would like stack sandbags all around him when he slept just to be safe um and now we come to the fragging that most people are probably familiar with from popular culture that of the glory hound gung-ho dips shit that put his men's lives in danger now they would you know volunteer their units go on dangerous missions order them to do stupid shit in the field and just all around make surviving the war just a little bit harder for a soldier who'd have to be there six months longer than they would now if you've ever watched ken burns vietnam documentary then you've've seen Lieutenant Vincent Akamoto describe this as, quote, he wants to make contact. He goes crazy and says, I want to volunteer for this. I'll commit you to this. And that new gung-ho officer is a clear and present danger to the life and the limb of the grunts. grunts. The men would give him subtle hints, like a little note saying, we're going to kill your ass if you keep this up. Or instead of a fragmentation grenade, they might throw a smoke grenade into the

officer's hooch or a bunker as a warning. If he didn't correct his behavior and outlook, yeah, they'd frag his ass. So that is the classical fragging, but they wouldn't use grenades. Unlike murders committed by support soldiers, these fraggings were group efforts. They were well-planned. In reality, just premeditated murder. In the support units, it was generally agreed that virtually all of them acted on their own. agreed that virtually all of them acted on their own. In these frontline situations, it really seemed like a team, a squad, or sometimes an entire platoon of soldiers would be like,

no, we have to kill them. Let me ask you a quick question. Just your perspective as someone who reviews all the historical sources, do you think that the over-representation of rear echelon soldiers in this story has to do with the fact that they were sloppier about how and that it was harder to explain it away when like you're in you know you drop a fucking American made frag grenade on a guy at like Da Nang Airfield or whatever yeah

almost certainly I think the numbers on this are artificially skewed by the the pool of data they're drawing from because you know if you're in a support the numbers on this are artificially skewed by the pool of data they're drawing from. Because if you're in a support FOB, forward operation base, whatever, and someone throws a frag grenade into a bunker, fucking everyone's going to notice. It's not going to matter if you came up with a plan with you and your squad to murder your platoon leader or whatever, because you didn't like him. There's going to be witnesses immediately meanwhile out in the out in the the jungle or whatever even

in a more rural outposts it's only a squad or a platoon of dudes you're not going to have any witnesses and everybody's going to be in on it you're so just keep your fucking mouth shut and that seems to be what happened um that's why we have no idea how many times this kind of fragging happened um we'll never have a clue and the only reason we have any evidence at all is there has been quite a few soldiers later that admitted that they fucking did it yeah i was thinking about that that the when you do a kind of survey historical study and study, and unless you're going about it in the kind of like oral history route, if you can only go off of documentary evidence, then yeah, you would imagine that it would be overrepresented when you have the kind of open and shut cases.

Yeah. And I would be more surprised if it... The military says that could have happened up to 5,000 times, and they're only accounting for around 800. So, it tells me that the vast majority of fraggings could have happened in situations like Lieutenant Akimoto was talking about, or

the overwhelming representation of the understanding of fragging was the fear that that could happen in that situation to younger officers. So it could be both. Yeah. And I'd also say too, just analyzing it just off the cuff, that frontline units, formations that are going out and doing what they did in Vietnam, where they'd often have a relatively remote centralized base and then out in smaller patrols, or sometimes a company outpost and then platoon-sized patrol bases going and moving day by day.

They're going to be making contact with the enemy. Enemy is going to be making contact with them. It was common enough for Viet Cong infiltrators to get in their patrol bases at night to break through the line and kill people, shoot them, throw grenades, stab them, all sorts of things. Also, they are going to be making contact with the enemy and they're going to be seizing weapons off of dead or incapacitated enemy soldiers.

So they're going to have access to the types of fragmentation grenades or the types of the Soviet-made weapons, Chinese-made weapons that they had to hand. It's just much easier to... I mean... And it's really easy just to drop someone in the middle of a firefight if you all agree that you're going to do it next time you get a chance. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And it's like, as far as evidence goes, if someone... and this is a much earlier era in terms of forensics, guy got shot with what is obviously a 7.62 round from an AK-47 or a similar weapon. How is it any different if it's fired by

an American behind his back versus if it's fired by a Vietnamese fighter soldier in the tree line? It's literally the same. So yeah, if there is that kind of wall of silence, then you would imagine they could get away with it i mean and it's kind of the reason why i think that they would work in a group because if you helped plan it you're really not likely to open your mouth about it because now you're admitting to being the party of a murder also it's there's a pretty strong disincentive for anybody who was part of that group to open their mouth, both incriminating themselves, but also knowing that everybody else in that group was totally fine with fucking murdering a guy on their side. Exactly. So what's going to stop them from murdering you? And not to mention the dynamics of these units are much different than what people envision when it comes to the military.

people envision when it comes to the military. There was no years-long friendships or quote-unquote brotherhood going on. These units in Vietnam are constantly being replaced with new conscripts. Other ones were going home. At best, you were cycling out every year while other people were coming in. So you probably only knew these guys for a couple weeks to a couple months, and the officers were, remember, coming and going every six months. So there's no loyalty. It's halfway between doing community service and halfway between being a cop. Something similar. Sure. Yeah. So all of that, how could someone possibly kill someone they're so close to? I mean, the easy answer is that they fucking weren't.

Yeah. I think that that's also a thing that without going too far into detail, that I experienced this, not the fragging part, but the rotating formation thing in Korea. Because when we were in Korea, and they may still do this, I don't know how it works now. But 10 years ago when I was there, they still had the system where you basically rotated out 10% of your formation every month. Guys, year would end, new people would show up. And it was just an endless cycle of this. And it was bad enough.

I mean, obviously, when you have to do gunnery certification for Bradley and Tank Crews, it's a nightmare. But yeah, in terms of cohesion, in terms of just people knowing each other, it's very detrimental. And I can imagine that what it really sounds like is that being deployed to Vietnam as a combat soldier was sort of like the experience of

all the stuff you go through in any army training school of just being thrown together and having to make it work over a couple of weeks, months, whatever. Yeah, pretty much. But that was basically it. Like you said, it wasn't the model that we have nowadays where the brigade trains together and then deploys together and comes home together. Right. Yep.

And we'll never know how many of these actually happened, but the fear of them was enough that it spread through the ranks of officers. And officers began to police one another about how to save your own life because your men might fucking kill you. Which is like, let them get away with drug use. Let them get away with shirking duty as long as they do the bare minimum. That's fine. Be safe. All this other stuff.

And the military itself took actions to try to curb fragging. And especially later in the war when the highest number of fraggings began which was the end and like the vast majority of them happened there and probably for a good reason the lowering of draft standards for example go listen to our episode on project 100 000 the hopelessness and pointlessness of the war, the impersonal relationships between constantly rotating men and officers, all that mixed together to quite possibly a lot of dead officers. It probably isn't that shocking to hear that armies reflect the societies they represent. And America, at this point of history, was not exactly at a great

place. Sending that society to war and arming it was not going to make anything better. One officer remarked, quote, our army that now remains in Vietnam is a state approaching collapse with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers, drug ridden and dispirited. We're not near mutinous. You know, what's funny is I think there's a point that I made years and years and years ago on Hell of a Way, which is that if the army collapses, it's not like everyone just goes home. People are still doing stuff, but everything that's supposed to work doesn't work the way we convince ourselves it does. And that's when you start to see these consequences.

And I would make the argument that to a lesser degree in terms of severity, because just of the way so many things have changed, I would make the argument that between the manning, the recruiting, the training, and the deployment system was so overtaxed. It was pretty grim, I remember. Because the war was massively unpopular. People were dying in large numbers in Iraq. And at the time, not as many in Afghanistan, but relative to the number of brigades in Afghanistan, it was quite high. And the economy hadn't yet mega fallen through the floor. So you can probably... I know it's not going to be comparable to the stuff that we talked about in Project 100,000, but some of the experiences that I had as an officer with the soldiers that we were getting passed on to us from basic training and was like, oh, I see that we've actually,

we formally scraped the bottom of the barrel and we've now gotten a chisel and we're just chiseling the barrel out. Yeah. Like, I mean, and I'm not even saying this is disrespect in the sense that these guys were mentally, emotionally, physically unable to do the most basic stuff

you need to do in the military. They shouldn't have been there. They were very much preyed upon and victimized by recruiters, in my opinion. And everyone in the process knew that this would not work. But they were like, well, once they're no longer my problem, I don't have to care. Pretty much. And so it's like, I don't know, I could see that happening. But I mean, bringing it back to the topic of the episode, we didn't, to my knowledge, have fraggings, except in some very highly publicized, prosecuted, etc. incidents. Well, actually, let's talk about that. So kind of, we did talk about Hassan Akbar, uh, in 2003, which happened

in Kuwait. Um, now if this can be considered a fragging or not, I actually lean toward it not being one. It seemed to be more of just a good old fashioned American mass shooting. Um, so he did go on a grenade flinging shooting rampage in the camp that he was in in Kuwait, awaiting the invasion of Iraq. And he was influenced by it seemed he was to kind of self radicalize himself in his religion to, you know, want to kill as many soldiers as he could to stop the invasion or whatever. But he didn't really target anyone. He did end up killing officers, but

he's firing blindly and throwing grenades in the middle of the night. It's hard to say that he could actually target them on purpose. I believe this falls into more of a mass shooting terror attack than a fragging. Maybe there'll be

some disagreement on that. That's okay. I guess it's not okay if you're akbar because he's sitting at leavenworth awaiting an execution date but you know what i'm saying but we do have one undisputed fragging case that happened during the iraq war and probably the weirdest and that is the case of alberto martinez um alberto i am completely unfamiliar with this one so so I'm listening. I was too until I stumbled upon this story. I can't exactly remember why I did.

I actually started with this story and decided to turn this into more of an overall episode on fragging as a whole. Now, Alberto Martinez was a staff sergeant in the New York National Guard, deployed to forward operating base danger and to crit Iraq in 2005. I love being deployed to forward operating base danger. Yeah, it was also known as the Water Palace because it was like one of the Saddam Palace places. Martinez was originally born in Puerto Rico, but relocated to New York for work and joined the Guard in 1990, becoming a supply specialist. And just like all guys in the National Guard, he had to spend 10 years getting the same promotion an active duty guy would have gotten in three. So by 2005, he was still only a staff sergeant. And Martinez was not a good supply sergeant. By all accounts within the Guard, he was kind of a prick who hated to do his

job. He constantly showed up late for work, missed weekend drills, and had showed up on so many people's shit lists that by the time the unit was gearing up for deployment to Iraq in 2004, he was left off the deployment order, which is kind of impressive. So he was a full-time guardsman. And for people who don't know, the National Guard have the nickname, the weekend warriors, because they're supposed to only work like two weekends a month. But there are people within the Guard who have full-time positions. And in those positions, which are coveted, they make full military salary. And they're hard to get.

These positions are not easy to get. Martinez had one. AGR jobs, right? Active Guard Reserve? Yeah, something like that. Yeah. And Martinez had one. He stayed on all the time as the unit supply guy. But even then,

they still elected to not bring him to Iraq with them. However, he was able to get a waiver at the last minute because he didn't want to miss out on that sweet deployment pay. And that isn't me joking around either. He admitted that. From anyone who could tell, Martinez had constant money issues. And for people who aren't aware of it, I mean, obviously, if you were a regular National Guardsman and only got monthly drill pay and then annual training pay, a year of active duty, year plus deployment of active duty is a lot more money. But then also, many people aren't aware of this. When we were in the military, when we deployed,

I don't know what it's like now. Not only did you get a monthly bonus for hostile fire, imminent danger pay, but you didn't pay federal income taxes. Yeah, it's a lot of money. And so it winds up being quite a large amount of money. And obviously, especially for single guys, I don't know if Martinez was married or not. He was married with two kids, I believe. Gotcha. Yeah. For single guys, it winds up being like a lot of times guys would come home with 30 grand in the bank or something like that because they just simply hadn't spent any of

it or hardly any. I mean, you can only spend so much on dip and Red Bull and there is a PX. And so this was a huge incentive for a lot of people was just the sheer volume of money you make relative to how much you would make back home and you know and the fact that like when you're deployed uh you i mean it depends on if you have a mortgage obviously if you don't but if you don't like you're you're you basically don't have any expenses as a single guy and as a family person you know if you're it depends and we don't go into much detail on that. But like, even if you fucking hate the military and clearly your unit hates you, like it is an incentive. Yeah. And now a shitty soldier suddenly thrust into a war zone doesn't suddenly make a good one. And as soon as Martinez took his role as his unit supply sergeant overseas, his commander, Philip Esposito, immediately began to realize he was really,

really, really not good at his job. And also, as a connection to what we were just talking about, Philip Esposito did not previously know Martinez at all. He was actually from a different guard unit and rotated into that one to deploy. So they did not know one another. Within months, hundreds of thousands of dollars of gear had gone missing under martinez's watch the thing is outside of a few pieces of this namely like a couple like office printers he sold to iraqis which you're not allowed to do for like for like 800 a piece uh nobody knows what happened to all the stuff that went missing. Even after all the investigations we're going to talk about, nobody knows if he just didn't account for shit or was stealing and selling it.

It's just gone. I mean, look, I had a supply sergeant who one time made the joke to me about another company's supply sergeant. He's like, sorry, he was a black American guy and this other supply sergeant was a white dude and he was like look sorry you can never trust a white supply sergeant they just they just don't understand how to be crooked and look i mean if you want to be a boy scout army property is not where you want to fucking be but also if you're gonna be shady be smart you can't be shady as a supply guy and stupid. I think we all knew our supply guys were stealing stuff. We just couldn't prove it.

I mean, yeah. And I'll be honest with you. Sometimes they could steal stuff because the army property system just let them. Yeah. It's an easy system to game when you know the system. And supply guys know the system. They're the only ones who know the system and supply guys know the system they're the only ones who know the system yeah and they know whatever nightmare fucking like defense contractor sold it to the army in the 90s and we still use that software system they're using to keep track of

stuff and like what is important and what isn't yep now anyway martinez is becoming such a problem within the unit that eventually esposito took away his keys to the supply room and wouldn't allow him to go in it unescorted by an officer. This effectively made him unemployed. He was given multiple bad performance reviews, and Martinez was telling other people he thought Esposito was going to remove him from his position as a full-time guardsman when they got home, or discharge him from the Guard as a whole, which is actually much easier to do than active duty soldiers. This is his full-time job. He doesn't have a career outside the

National Guard. And he was starting to tell anybody that, listen, that he was going to fucking kill him. This included using the literal words, quote, I'm going to frag that fucker on multiple occasions to several different people, as well as pointing at him at the chow

hall line and making explosion noises with his mouth. You know, what's funny is I think the most, the most dire, one of these sorts of warnings I ever heard about was guys like mad at their company commander, basically drawing like sort of fanfic art in the port of shitter of like the, the commander's humvee

getting hit by an ied but pointing to the guy where he can see you and making explosion noises is like i much i may or may not have drawn one of my least favorite ncos being blown up on a foot patrol in the porter potty however i was not insinuating i'd do it myself i just hope that the taliban would you know do their thing i mean, given the averages in terms of all of southern Afghanistan basically being a low density minefield when you were there, it's a fair assumption. Exactly. I wasn't pointing at him and going. Shadowing enough, Esposito officially began the process to investigate Martinez's mishandling of the supply room, which would, regardless of the outcome, whether he was stealing it or just shit at his job, it would end with Martinez getting kicked out of the National Guard at a minimum. Because if he was stealing it, obviously he'd be prosecuted.

Yeah. Then, while all of this is happening, Martinez went to a friend, another supply sergeant, and managed to talk her into giving him a Claymore landmine. Oh my god. For no apparent reason. Now, everybody is aware of what a Claymore is, and I'm sure most of our listeners are at least familiar. Front Towards Enemy, that whole thing. Looks like a bent plate. It's got a thing that says Front Towards Enemy on it. And it's basically, correct basically correct me from wrong joe

it is a bunch of plastic explosives with a ton of steel ball bearings inside it and when it explodes it's it's explicitly an anti-personnel mine when we trained in infantry stuff ranger school etc to use it basically it was meant to be at the center of like a on an ambush like the goal was to get the largest formation of the enemy in a position to get killed or injured by it. But it basically explodes outward in a direction with steel ball bearings to cause holes to form in human bodies.

Yeah, it can be triggered with a trip wire or a hand trigger as well. Yeah. But also they're almost never used in the context of the War of Nairaq. I remember this very clearly that there was a... CJ Chivers, the New York Times correspondent, wrote a story about a Marine lieutenant or an Army lieutenant doing an ambush. They wound up

successfully executing a hasty ambush in Afghanistan. And he made the point, he's like, they initiated with a claymore even. And he was just like, this is a thing that every lieutenant trains on and almost none ever do. And this guy just like, they were in a situation to do it. And then three days later, they got ambushed by the Taliban in almost the exact same way. So yeah, taking one out is suspicious. And one other side point, one of the things that I dealt with when I was an XO in Afghanistan was that there was so much ammo that was off the books. Yeah. This one was also off the books. Afghanistan was that there was so much ammo that was off the books.

Yeah. This one was also off the books. Ah, gotcha. So really quick explanation for that. You're supposed to... In garrison, in America, and in your home station, they're very, very, very thorough on how much you have to show proof of when stuff was used and turn in the dunnage and all that stuff. And there's almost no exceptions to it. Whereas in combat, in combat less so and we think about a combat zone where people are rotating in and out for you know almost 20 years when it ended there was so much shit that was just basically oh yeah we use that in a firefight or whatever and like not accounted for but still unused they that my my unit replaced the unit that had a shipping container right in front of their battalion talk that was full of hand grenades and c4 and fucking white phosphorus mortars, small Ds, AT4s, Carl Gustav rounds.

Great, except it was held together with a fucking AliExpress padlock. Yeah, this sounds very familiar to my experience. Great idea. And we always made sure, if we went on a patrol, if you're going to carry an AT4, make sure you carry the ones that's off the book

so if you use it, you don't have to request a new one because we still have the other ones. It's not so like nobody knows that we used it. It's literally just for paperwork purposes. It's annoying. It's not for crimes. It's because we're lazy. And also, notionally speaking, you're supposed to keep the

dunnage and bring it back and turn it in. You're supposed to keep the empty tube with you. I don't want to fucking carry that shit once it's been fired exactly throw that shit in a ditch carry out of your day now um so yeah he managed to talk his friend into giving him a claim or mine for no apparent reason um and you know no he had no reason to have it nothing no rationale he just said to her that oh don't worry i'll find a good use for it doing some hip pocket training yeah and it'd be really funny as if this guy the last time he had fucking done a dummy practice claim or wasn't like in b knock in 1993 or some shit and so like absolutely forgot about front towards enemy or whatever i can't remember himself up blew himself up or like yeah it wasn't they used the wrong clicker his his beak spins around his head like you know he's

donald duck um but yeah he got this mind from her uh and everybody is aware of the process that he's going through the army is like high school everybody gossips everybody knows that the captain is going to kick him out. Everybody knows that he's threatening to kill the captain to include her. And then literally laughing like a maniac tells her, oh, I'll put it to good use. I mean, listen, all I'm going to say is you want the real brotherhood in the army, the brotherhood of supply sergeants. Exactly. No question.

Un-fucking-breakable. What's that? You want to land mine and you're threatening to kill someone here you go when you've been in the trenches breaking perfectly good tow bars in half so they count as two on a change of command inventory the morning of the change of command ceremony it forms a brotherhood that will never be broken on the night of june 7 2005 while esposito was in his room playing risk with his friend the Lewis Allen a claymore exploded outside of their window ripping the room apart and killing the two men inside. Then as if that wasn't enough several grenade explosions were heard immediately afterwards.

It seemed to be that Martinez hoped to cover up the attack by trying to make it look like an insurgent mortar or rocket attack which which anybody knows is very, very common in any forward operation base in Iraq or Afghanistan. And that worked, at least at first. The military originally reported that, because they show up like, yeah, this person was blown to shit, must have been hit by a mortar.

And that was until they actually looked closer at it, and the doctors did surgery on the men, because they didn't die immediately. And like, these dudes are full of Claymore balls. What the fuck? And that's when they realized that something else had happened. Like I said before, it's a very particular munition with a very familiar thing. It's got like 200 or 400, I can't remember how many, steel balls in it.

Now, insurgent mortars, lots of things, rockets, lots of things. But 252 millimeter Katyushas or whatever the fucking type of rocket it was they used to use in Iraq, they aren't full of perfectly round steel balls. No. But there is one munition that is. Yeah. And we happen to have it right here. Weird. Attention pretty much fell immediately on martinez due to you know all the death threats of the personal hatred the fucking custom shirt he has wearing that i'm mr

claymore yeah oh there he goes frag it again yeah he's like no this is my for my rap career i'm gonna be the next pitbull he was mr worldwide i'm mr claymore i'm gonna do an army version of pitbull now it was quickly determined that alan was killed just because he happened to be there. He had just gotten to Iraq a few days before and didn't even know Martinez. The proceedings are moved to Kuwait so that the Deadman's families and also Martinez's family could travel there for the Article 32 hearing. And for people who don't know an Article 32 hearing, it's pretty much the military version of a grand jury coming together to decide if what in front of them should proceed to trial it took two days and uh the general in charge of the article 32 hearing recommended that it proceed to courts martial with martinez facing two counts of premeditated murder and if he was found guilty

he would almost certainly be sentenced to death. Because the military does absolutely have capital punishment. It's very rarely used, but in fact, I don't believe it's been used in decades. The last one was under George W. Bush. He signed off on a death warrant, I believe. But this kind of thing is like, in terms of

the Uniform Code of Military Justice, this is the kind of thing it's reserved for. Put it that way. When Martinez saw the evidence array of military justice, this is the kind of thing it's reserved for. Put it that way. When Martinez saw the evidence arrayed against him, namely the other supply clerk saying that, yeah, I gave him a Claymore mind, and also 20 people were like,

yeah, he told me he wanted to kill Esposito, he moved to plead guilty in order to escape the death penalty. Now, what happened next is, for the lack of a better term, dumb as hell. During a courts-martial proceeding, like in civilian trials, the judge, in this case, General John Vines, had to accept the plea deal to end the trial. Now, normally, this is a non-factor. Everybody wants a plea deal so you can avoid a trial, but not in this case.

Normally, for this acceptance process, the person pleading guilty just has to sign a letter saying exactly what they're pleading guilty to, and they've made the decision on their own. So Martinez did that. that. In the army, the plea deal must also be signed by his lawyer, in this case he had two of them, who could only legally sign that paperwork if they believe their client was guilty. So they did. General Vines had rejected the plea immediately. He's never explained exactly why he rejected the plea, and nobody really knows, but he did, and the case went to trial. Martinez's military lawyers now had to suddenly pivot from admitting their client was guilty as all hell to defending him in a death penalty case. His entire defense was simple. There was no direct evidence linking Martinez to the

murder. No DNA, no fingerprints, no physical evidence. The only evidence the army had was circumstantial at best and rumors at worse they argued that he couldn't have been throwing grenades into esposito's room because he was busy taking a shit in a nearby border body i mean like it's it's a it's a method i mean it's certainly an alibi like and also it's like i couldn't have killed him. I was jerking off in the port-a-potty. Does the general also hate the now fallen company commander so much that he's like, I'm doing a speed run on a military mistrial? Well, no idea. Vines literally never has talked about it ever since.

Okay. So... The thing was, is his lawyers were right. Despite literally having 20 people come and stand and swear under oath that they heard Martinez threaten Esposito's life, someone say they had literally armed him with the murder tool, and all of that, they didn't have any actual physical evidence. So, in December 2008,

because this took fucking years, Martinez was acquitted on both counts of premeditated murder and walked away a free man, despite admitting to do the fucking deed a few years before. And, obviously, the plea deal, the attempted plea deal, couldn't be used against him in trial, but the main reason, according to the prosecutor, was that there were simply too many people sitting on the

court's marshal panel that opposed the death penalty and therefore voted to acquit, which I'm not going to lie here. The most surprising thing about this entire saga is they got a panel of military officers at NCO together, and a majority of them were opposed to capital punishment. But also, I'd say, too, that the threshold for death penalty cases is supposed to be incredibly high. Obviously, the way that it's done in America, when you look at it, in civilian justice stuff, is basically just the logical extension of all of our racist police state fucking genocide shit that made America what it is. But the threshold is supposed to be high.

And the thing about the military is that, like it or not, and I mean, we mostly don't like it at all, they really are into creating the kind of people who are like, oh no, but the rules say this thing, we have to obey the rule. And it's like, this is the kind of the danger of overcharging someone. Yeah. But the system is such that, as I understand it, you can't do the sort of like, throw it against the wall and hope it sticks kind of charging that some prosecutors get away with in America.

They charged him with what they said they wanted to charge him with. And that was the trial. And then if he's acquitted, I don't think they can retry him. It's just the system works differently. Yeah. I mean, the military also has double jeopardy. Sometimes what they will use to get around that is if, let's say, someone is charged with something and gets away with it in a civilian court, the military will then also

charge them because they have sovereignty of prosecution. So if, if you're tried in a military court, it does not count as double jeopardy. If you're already charged for it in a different court. However, if you're charged for in a military court and then acquitted, you're fine.

The military can't touch you again. And since he committed the crime and a military base, that's the only jurisdiction. And as far as overcharging or attempting to overreach on the sentencing, that could be the case. Now, obviously, the surviving widows and children of the two men that he almost certainly murdered

were furious at the army for botching the case. When it was clear as day, Martinez had done it. But it actually wasn't until 2009 that it became publicly known furious at the army for botching the case when it was clear as day martinez had done it but it actually wasn't until 2009 that it became publicly known that he was willing to plead guilty and the army rejected it to which barbara allen said quote they had a conviction handed to them and they chose not to take it now after all this martinez simply took his honorable discharge since everybody seemed to forget about the rampant theft that he was doing the supply room that led to all this in the fucking first place uh he never did any interviews never made any public comments about the case and then died a few years later and again nobody even

knows how or why he died he was still pretty i think he's like 49 i mean i thought you were gonna say that they then turned around and charged him. Like, what's the maximum penalty you can get for mishandling a Claymore? Like, they were going to alcohol his ass? They could have still charged because he was originally, like, all the theft and everything was originally part of his charges. But his lawyers successfully argued for those cases to be dropped. And the army agreed, but probably only because, like, whatever, it doesn't matter. He's going to be found guilty on two charges of murder. The of the film a few bad men how in the fuck like that like i'm sorry but like your average jag just doesn't have this goddamn level of enthusiasm these these this

apparently is a story about military lawyers going above and beyond yeah you know they need to get a they need to get an archon for this trial Even the army doesn't want to talk about this shit. When the New York Times reached out to them back in 2009 regarding why they didn't take the plea deal, they just said no comment. And as for why it was rejected, the New York Times interviewed one of the prosecutors on the case who had nothing to do with the rejection, so he can't speak to it. But this is what he said. This is from the New York Times piece. Quote, Major John C. Benson, a prosecutor of the Martinez case who was not involved in the decision to reject the plea offer, said that there was concern within the army that Sergeant Martinez might have been eligible for parole after 10 years, despite

acknowledging two senior officers. Quote, the horrible nature of the crime create a lot of conflict about whether to take the plea, he said in the interview. But given the outcome of the trial, Major Benson said, I wish that guilty plea would have been accepted. I don't think there could be

any doubt whatsoever to his guilt. Yeah, no shit, buddy. This is also one of the reasons why the Nisour Square massacre, the case fell apart in court, which was because the evidence supplied was a bunch of sworn statements from the army, which worked under UCMJ. I mean, it wasn't the only evidence, but it was nowhere near as thorough as what it needed to be. And so these kinds of things, you see them happen all the time where like- The army is not good at investigation,

police work, or the kind of rigor that goes into an actual criminal prosecution. No, because it has to clear the threshold for the army. And it's like, you try to put that up. It's basically like... The best way I could describe it is taking an army prosecution, the typical one, not every single example, and putting it up against like a federal prosecution on the civilian side is like when a dude from the 82nd is like i'm gonna be an mma cage fighter because i do army combatives and gets fucking knocked out for eternity in the first 10 seconds yeah i'm pretty much i even this case was so bad that it couldn't even meet the army's low

threshold which is insane um i mean like martinez again has never spoke publicly about any of this um and uh he actually died because he didn't do it he saved the claymore and he was this was all a misunderstanding and he was going to use the claymore for an elaborate fireworks display but as we said before it had been so long since he attended b knock he just forgot yeah it went off in his face like an acne cartoon for an elaborate fireworks display. But as we said before, it had been so long since he had attended BNOC, he just forgot. Yeah, it went off in his face like an acne cartoon. Yeah, drat.

And so, yeah, with that, the last fragging case in U.S. military history ended and the man walked free. And to be fair, this happened a few times during Vietnam as well. There was one case where a guy was accused of fragging an officer um and he the the man who was accused was black and the man that he was accused of fragging was white and they had

multiple run-ins because the white guy was racist as shit surprise surprise so there's plenty of like you know circumstantial evidence and then they also found a grenade pin inside of his pocket. And it went to trial. And like his defense was like, I was framed. You can't prove that grenade pin went to that grenade. And like the army, the courts rush was like, he's got a fucking point. And they acquitted him. I mean, I knew a guy who managed to beat a positive urinalysis for cocaine because

a soldier in in the line to hand in the piss sample had a seizure and the urinalysis guy the the unit prevention leader jumped up from the table to help this soldier with his medical emergency and thus the chain of custody was broken instantaneously. I mean, that tracks. They dismissed the charges. Shout out to that guy for having a seizure at the most

convenient time possible for a guy to pop out in a drug test. We do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, you can support the show on Patreon and you can ask us on our discord. You can ask us on a Patreon via DMS or comments. You can attach the note to a grenade and roll into Nate's tent and we will answer it on the show.

Now, if you'd like to chat with one historical figure, living or dead, for an hour, who would it be? After the hour is up, they go feral and you must either escape or subdue them. Huh. I mean, those additional qualifiers make it a slightly more complicated one. Do you go for an easy escape or fight at the end or do you go for something challenging? Do you go for an easy escape or fight at the end, or do you go for something challenging? Well, I mean, I'm kind of a huge baby at this point,

so I don't really think I want to go hand-to-hand with the warrior monks of history. But, I mean, assuming there would be an appropriate translator present. Yeah, you can assume that. That's fair. I think I would like to... I was going to say it's a toss-up between Cesare Borgia and Saladin. And I bring this up because I am fascinated by guys who manage to get to where they are both by insane amounts of good luck and also just sort of like being precise in their insane

ballsy moves and they work. That's not really a thing I typically do. You know what I mean? I don't really like tend to take huge, huge, huge risks. And I don't know, Salah ad-Din Ayyub or Saladin as we know him, the Kurdish military figure who wound up being the sort of arch nemesis of the crusader states in the 12th century and more or less ruled egypt and then is celebrated throughout the the middle east uh you know there's a province in iraq named after

him things along that those lines fascinating guy and also just sort of like was able to play the game of both like doing combat like being on the battlefield, and also really, really intricate things involving ceremony and bureaucracy and tax collection and stuff. Just a fascinating guy. And similarly, Cesare Borgia, kind of like... Back when popes were allowed to fuck a lot,

he was the bastard son of Rodrigo Borgia, a Spanish cardinal who became the pope, and was a really critical figure in helping to start the process of unifying Italy, but also was just famous for being a sneaky bastard. I think Saladin, if he was going to go feral, he wouldn't attack me. He would just go play polo, hammered on wine and break his neck. So I would say I'm going to pick Saladin because no matter the timeframe or state of mind, Cesare Borgia would kill me. Okay. I got one. I'm going to go for something really hard. I'm pretty sure I'm losing this

fight at the end of the day because I can't beat them and I certainly can't outrun them. Yukio Mishima. Can't beat them and I certainly can't outrun them. Yukio Mishima. Oh, man. I saw a thing shared online about an anecdote about Yukio Mishima's sex life and it just made me... It was just like, this is very, very funny. I can share it if we have time. Sure. Apparently, there was a guy who recounted when he was 20, he used to go to this gay sex club in Tokyo and he wound up hooking up... Well, he thought he was going to hook up with Yukio Mishima, but on three separate instances,

he wound up not having any sex. He just had to play the samurai assistant in a big cosplay with fake blood and organs for Yukio Mishima to pretend to commit seppuku. And each time, each time Yukio Mishima hands free cummed from doing his fake death, but never, the guy was like, well,

I just got bored because i actually wasn't having sex that is the most mishima anecdote of mishima i've ever heard i i know i when i saw that i was like man joe joe joe needs to know this like he's an incredibly interesting character to me not because i agree with anything to do with him i think he is politically an odious person to say the least his ideas are incredibly fucked up he's misogynist he even hates men like when you read his when you read his writing he thought very little of the men he had sex with like he purposefully wanted stupid attractive men because he didn't want to engage with he didn't want a relationship with

them he thought he wanted someone to be lower than him he saw everyone other than him to be human garbage um he also saw himself to kind of be human garbage in that he also wanted to fuck the human garbage man and that's definitional yeah like he's that's in the prose of confessions of a mask the fucking night soil guy is the first person he wants to fuck. Listen. Read the book. It's really good. It's a good book and it's all there. And it's very short. It also helps you understand him much more and his

actions later in life, certainly. But as an author and as someone who impacted history, and we've done an episode about him, I'm intensely interested by him. His prose is incredible. He's a a great author he's just a shit person uh and i would i think it would be really interesting to talk to him for an hour um and then absolutely be murdered by him because i'm not beating that man in the fight

i'm not outrunning him his cardio is flawless dozens and dozens of photos of himself pretending to be uh saint sebastian except jacked as fuck because the man was shredded absolutely shredded the all the only thing the man did was write fuck and work out for hours and hours a day listen i'm just saying we all want to aspire to be a better version of ourselves. Just don't be a fascist. Yeah, exactly. Nate, thank you so much for joining me again on the show. You can take this point to plug your other shows.

Yeah, well, please listen to What a Hell of a Way to Die, Trash Future, and Kill James Bond. They are all shows that I either co-host or produce. And I'm back. They are all shows that I either co-host or produce. And I'm back. Now I'm back from parental leave and extended mental health post-parental leave because of some health crises. It's all good. I'm doing great.

I got a kid. My wife's good. I'm good. Kid's good. And I'm not going to live in Britain forever. So I'm fucking great. So hopefully you'll be hearing from me more. Yeah, hopefully.

Assuming Feral Mishima doesn't get to you exactly exactly yukio yukio mishima is like i heard my name invoked on a podcast so i'm gonna come back and i'm gonna force you to watch me hands free come he's gonna come bursting out the eurovan metro fucking samurai swords akimbo um this is the only show that i host so thank you for listening to it if you enjoy it consider supporting us on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you almost six years of bonus content now, gets you access to our Discord every episode early, all sorts of bonus series we do,

and it gets you first dibs on merch and live show tickets when we do them. And if you don't want to do that, that's cool. It's your money. Do with it what you want. But leave us a review on wherever it is that you listen to podcasts, because it helps us a lot, actually. I can't exactly explain how, but it does.

It somehow does. With the algorithm or whatever. And until next time. If you're going to do a fragging, do one so big they somehow manage to overcharge you and you walk. Yeah, exactly. And make sure you keep your cardio up to outrun Feral Yukio Mishima. He's out there.