Viet Cong

The aliens fight in ways that like they're not prepared for and like that sequence, which is not our scene so we can talk about it, really rules in a way that like I find to be disconcerting on a cinematic level where they go in and you're watching like almost like a found footage horror movie because it's all their helmet cams as they're like... they're essentially saying aliens versions of, you know, they're in the trees, man.

Like they're coming out of nowhere, right? Like all these things that I think you apply to a lot of like American presidents presence in Vietnam jungles, fighting the Viet Cong, um, being totally unprepared for guerrilla warfare like this and just getting like chewed apart.

And like, you know, that I find it all to be very effective, even though I do find it's one of the examples of this movie, I think being a little overly dependent on closeups, um, There's a lot of tight in this movie.

I want a little more breathing room.

While it was indeed the turning point of a war that America lost eventually and that South Vietnam lost.

It was not a great victory on the battlefield for the NVA or for the Viet Cong, for the communists.

In fact, it was the most crushing single defeat they suffered over the course of the entire war.

So how could both of those things possibly be true at the same time? Let's talk about the facts.

And Le Xuan feels, for whatever reason, the time is ripe for a knockout blow.

So he starts to do two things.

He... begins to smuggle lots and lots of stuff down into South Vietnam and to try to secretly prepare the Viet Cong to switch over from kind of the guerrilla harassing stuff that they've been using with pretty good effect.

I mean, the Viet Cong had been taking much worse punishment than they had been giving for years.

So basically you could just step on the and break the mud and essentially you have yourself an explosive or an IED of sorts that worked in the same way that a mine did.

But no major powers security strategy actually depended upon them, right? I mean, even the Viet Cong, especially coming out of this era, they used ambush techniques and they used really low-tech weapons that are pretty awful, like objectively, if you read about them.

And some of those I did read about in the

research for this episode.

He, it was credited with the highest number of sni- sniper kills.

He very famously used to leave a white feather, and the Viet Cong had a, uh, like a bounty on his head, and he's revered as one of the greatest snipers in history.

All right, man, just I'm gonna let you have that moment of flexing just 'cause, uh, I'm very sleepy [laughs] because I don't know maybe I'm thinking of the wrong war, but something like that where basically somebody had done some insanely cool stuff, uh, during a war and nobody in his family, nobody around him knew that because he had just not, uh, mentioned it.

So, yeah.

So, yeah, it's that sort of thing.

And it turned out, wasn't this like, Vietcong weren't even fleeing there.

They were just doing that to fucking show off America's pop.

But let's get too political.

Well, you know, what's interesting about this is that you talked about founder drift.

There's also kind of decision drift because if I dig deeper like and this might be dangerous territory but when you niche down in the woke stuff right I do think there's a difference between call it Muhammad Ali taking a stance of like I don't want to fight the Viet Cong to the Jordan hey my shoes are banned by the NBA but I'm going to wear them anyway You know, it's not quite a woke kind of thing.

And then to Colin Kaepernick, you know, who was an elite football player, quarterback, right? Made it to the Super Bowl.

I do think supporting an athlete, a high-performance athlete with shoes who has a controversial stance, slightly different than a rando, non-athlete woke stance.

Yeah.

And he would have been perfectly, you would ask him like, how were your years being captured by the Viet Cong? And he'd go, it was all right.

Like that'd be it.

Yeah, that's done and done.

Changed a lot of people.

And I'm thinking about a couple of the scenes, like the boat scene when they're going down the river and they see the Viet Cong and everybody's like yelling at them.

And this was shot in the Philippines and just wondering, was that actually like what was happening? Because it could have been 1992, 1989, I have no idea when this thing was actually shot.

Could have been shot early 80s, and yeah, same thing might have happened.