Mayhem: The 1970s You Never Knew, Episode 7
The Preamble
Sharon McMahon
4.9 • 15.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Draft dodging. When did the draft lottery begin for the war in Vietnam, and who among America’s youth was hit the hardest? It was an unwinnable war, and thousands of high school graduates and college students refused to comply. What sparked these explosive protests nationwide? What role was marijuana and heroin playing back in Vietnam? And how did two decades of the costly, divisive conflict finally come to an end?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. In October 1967, 24-year-old Captain Rodney Archastant, a U.S. soldier from Alabama who'd been fighting in Vietnam for over a year, wrote a letter home saying this. |
| 0:35.6 | Mom and dad, I appreciate all your letters. I appreciate your concern that some of the |
| 0:40.2 | things you write about are trivial, but they aren't trivial than me. I'm eager to read anything |
| 0:45.5 | about what you and the family are doing. You can't understand the importance that these trivial |
| 0:50.0 | events take on here. It helps keep me civilized. For a while, as I read your letter, I am a |
| 0:56.5 | normal person. I'm not killing people or worried about being killed. While I read your letters, |
| 1:02.9 | I'm not carrying guns or grenades. Instead, I'm going ice skating with David or walking through a |
| 1:08.9 | department store to exchange a lampshade. |
| 1:11.4 | It's great to know your family is safe, living in a secure country, a country made secure |
| 1:17.6 | by thousands upon thousands of men who have died for that country. |
| 1:23.4 | Your son, Rod. |
| 1:26.7 | One year later, on October 22nd, 1968, Rod Chastent was killed in action. |
| 1:37.0 | I'm Sharon McMahon, and this is the Preamble podcast. |
| 1:42.0 | The Vietnam War started long before many of us realize. When the last French troops |
| 1:48.3 | left Vietnam on September 14, 1956, President Eisenhower was very concerned that the communist |
| 1:56.3 | governments of Asia would spread. They called this the domino theory because they felt that if one country |
| 2:01.5 | or government fell to the communist, it was very likely that surrounding countries would also fall, |
| 2:06.7 | meaning that the U.S. would have more enemies than just the initial country that turned communist. |
| 2:13.4 | The Cold War and the Red Scare began in earnest in 1950s America, and the propaganda was everywhere, |
| 2:19.0 | from pamphlets to comics to film and television, metaphors showing scary aliens as stand-ins for |
| 2:25.8 | communist infiltration came through in films like The Blob and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. |
| 2:33.2 | TV shows like Leave It to Beaver and Father |
... |
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