Podbit · The Shawn Ryan Show
Big Red fired relentlessly as 400+ NVA stormed Troy Bridge, keeping machine gun positions alive while the bridge was blown up beneath him. He was killed May 20, 1968. He received nothing. Thirty years later, readers of Guns Up! triggered a congressional inquiry that resulted in a posthumous Bronze Star — a medal Clark says wasn't nearly enough.
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At 56:10 · chapter starts 48:00
The arrival sequence at Da Nang is immediately disorienting: the wall of Vietnamese heat, Phantom jets screaming down the runway, and artillery audible in the distance. Every Marine filing through is stamped for the 5th Marines — the unit swallowing the Hue City casualties. In a staging tent at Phu Bai, Clark and Chan encounter Big Red, a massive red-headed man who looks like the Marlboro Man and carries the bearing of someone raised to fight. The old Marine who raised him had served under Admiral Halsey in World War II. Big Red briefs the two new boots on the basics of staying alive — bend your grenade pins, pull two rounds from every magazine, wrap everything in plastic — and delivers the welcome brief that resets Clark's sense of adventure: as far as anyone knows, there are no machine gunners left in the 5th Marines [1] — Johnnie Clark "Tracer rounds — one in every five bullets fired from an M60 — created a visible laser beam pointing straight back to the gunner. Every enem…" 1:03:08 .
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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