Hello and welcome to conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network, and as always, I'm your host, Zach Cornwell.

Today's show is a bonus episode, part of an ongoing series I've been calling epilogues.

And as I've said before, the main purpose of these bonus shows is to expand upon the themes of a previous

full-length episode or just to explore issues or anecdotes that I had to leave on

the cutting room floor in today's epilogue is a companion to episode 12 the good guys

which cataloged the shocking, systemic pattern

of atrocity and criminal negligence by the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.

In that episode, our center of gravity, narratively, was the Mili Massacre, in which American

soldiers murdered, upwards of 500 innocent men, women, and children over the course of

four hours on March 16, 1968.

We also explored the flawed government policies and institutional arrogance that made a war crime

like Milai, and many others like it, basically inevitable.

Well, today, we're going to turn our focus

towards something very closely related,

but altogether unique,

because the civilians of South Vietnam

were not the only innocent victims

of the U.S. government's feckless war in Vietnam.

Today, we're going to be talking about the victims

that were much closer to home.

During the late 1960s, the Johnson administration, in a well-intentioned but foolishly conceived

...