Podbit · The Shawn Ryan Show
Tracer rounds — one in every five bullets fired from an M60 — created a visible laser beam pointing straight back to the gunner. Every enemy army was trained to knock out the machine gun first, meaning you had roughly 7 to 10 seconds of sustained fire before you were dead. Clark arrived to learn every gunner in the 5th Marines had already been killed or wounded.
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At 1:03:08 · chapter starts 58:00
Troy Bridge is Clark's first real taste of sustained combat. The bridge, a former rail trestle on Highway 1, was the lifeline of North-South supply movement and a perpetual NVA target. The night attack comes with over 400 enemy soldiers; doped-up suicide sappers strap themselves to the structure and blow it, killing the machine gun team on the center span while the men below are still alive. Big Red fires without ceasing throughout the assault, drawing every enemy weapon onto his position. Corporals Tedesco and Rosalie — who had come only to say farewell before their flight home the next day — are killed trying to reach the men trapped on the broken bridge. None of them receive recognition. It takes readers of Guns Up!, a congressman, and a 30-year wait before Big Red gets a posthumous Bronze Star — a medal Clark calls far beneath what he deserved [1] — Johnnie Clark "Big Red fired relentlessly as 400+ NVA stormed Troy Bridge, keeping machine gun positions alive while the bridge was blown up beneath him. …" 56:10 .
Factories that replaced coal engines with electric ones in the early 1900s got only 6% efficiency gains. Those that redesigned their entire factory around electricity got a 3x productivity improvement. Swapping AI tools into your existing structure will give you 6%. Rebuilding around AI will give you 10x.
Lebanese terrorists backed by Iran were holding American hostages throughout the Reagan presidency. Reagan had loudly campaigned against negotiating with terrorists — putting him in an impossible position that his team quietly decided to ignore.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the US openly supplied Iraq with weapons, training, and intelligence. At the same time, Oliver North was secretly funneling missiles to Iran. The US was playing both sides of a shooting war.
Oliver North traveled to Iran under the alias 'William P. Goode' with a fake passport. CIA Director William Casey allegedly gave him cyanide pills so he could kill himself rather than be tortured if captured. He returned safely and the deal moved forward.
The Pentagon sold missiles to the CIA for $3,700 each. The CIA sold them to Richard Secord at cost. Secord sold them to Iranian middleman Ghorbanifar for $10,000 each. Ghorbanifar charged Iran even more. The profit — including $3 million in interest in one Swiss account — was diverted directly to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.
America secretly transferred 2,000 missiles and missile parts to Iran in 8 shipments over more than a year. Only 3 of 7 hostages were released. Three more were taken. The net result was zero freed hostages and a full-blown constitutional scandal.
On October 5, 1986, a CIA Contra supply plane flew a weapons drop at 2,500 feet in broad daylight. A Sandinista soldier shot it down. The only survivor, Eugene Hasenfuss, had borrowed a parachute from his skydiving brother. He was captured, paraded in front of cameras, and told the Sandinistas everything he knew.
The CIA supply operation used a front company called Southern Air Transport, widely known to be a CIA cover. Crew members of the downed plane carried their Southern Air Transport employee IDs in their wallets. One also had a business card directly linking him to Oliver North's office in Washington.
When the scandal broke, Oliver North and his secretary Fawn Hall conducted what became known as a 'shredding party,' destroying a day's worth of documents. The full truth of Iran-Contra may never be known because of what was fed through that shredder.
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