VIDEO HERE (56:36 minutes)
*****
So sad, especially the second half of the video.
Friday, January 14, 2022
Declassified: The CIA's Hidden War In Laos
While the United States was publicly engaged in the Vietnam War, a secret conflict was raging just next door in the country of Laos. Under the command of the CIA, a full-blown military operation engulfed Laos, with a select few of the U.S. Armed Forces participating.
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I'll watch the video after my company leaves. They should be here within the next 30 minutes or so and I'm running around like a one legged paperhanger trying to get everything ready for dinner. Steaks are marinating bread is baking, asparagus and honey garlic roasted carrots almost ready to go on. Grilling portabella mushrooms for my vegetarian granddaughter. Have to marinade them.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if this video touches on the fall of Lima Site 85. It was a Skyspot site run by the CIA to facilitate accurate bomb runs of North Vietnam. Reason I'm interested in it is because although a little before my time in service, that is what I did in the peace time Air Force...Radar Bomb Scoring. Just without the live ordinance.
Lima Site 85 was briefly mentioned around the 20 minute mark.
DeleteThis is an interesting documentary. The Hmong people did a great service to the US in the Vietnam war and basically received little to no recognition for their service.
I think it's a damn shame our government/taxpayers can't give them the benefits they so richly deserve. They're not asking for money...just health care for their wounded and mentally scarred veterans.
Just goes to show that our government is ready and willing to enlist the help of indigenous people in clandestine war efforts, but just as quick, throw them under the bus when they are no longer needed.
I think it was a little more complicated than it seems from that documentary. I've been listening to the SF guys who fought with them on the Jocko Podcast and now on their own. Thing is: the Hmong who fought with us in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam were doing it because they hated the communists and the NVA that would simply kill their families if they would not fight on their side.
DeleteNorth Vietnam, Russia and China were using their avowedly neutral territory to move troops and supplies down to South Vietnam. I was called "the secret war" because Laos and Cambodia were denying this publicly, and our CIA was over there confirming all this. So we went over there and fought the communists WITH the Hmong and Montagnards and South Vietnamese. It was every bit as much their war as it was ours.
In fact, they all hated each other, but fought together with our SF guys [MAC V SOG] to defeat the communists. Often they were just teenagers who'd lost their whole families to the communists and turned into crack troops, not for us, but to beat the enemy.
We, supposedly, were there to help THEM. We could look at it as just the fact of taking them in here as being more than enough recompense, or we could try to get some nonprofit together to help the truly needy ones, or, and this is the case, we could just continue to treat them in regular hospitals and Medicaid will keep covering it. We could also remember it was the Democrats who kept us from keeping our Geneva Accord promise to keep them in arms and equipment when we withdrew.
Your last comment line is something few know. I hold Nixon partly accountable for this as well. If he hadn't had to quit, their lives would probably have been different. Because he screwed up and had to quit, and the (Dicks) won overwhelmingly next election, dominoes started falling. Makes me sick.
DeleteSince the 1990s I have worn daily a pow wrist band. It is special in that it was given to me by a good friend who was a SF Medic and for who it represents, USASF SFC John Bischoff 4/22/1961 Laos.
ReplyDeleteThey've got their own podcast now: https://player.fm/series/sogcast-untold-stories-of-mac-v-sog
ReplyDeleteI had a math professor that was a Huey pilot back then. He told us he'd love to write about what he did, but it was so classified, he'd be dead before he was allowed to write it.
ReplyDeleteMakes me wonder if this is what he did.