9 ms·

The Incredibly Stupid One

230 points by simonebrunozzi 4y ago

DisjointedHunt 4y ago
A brave soldier, doing right by his country, which was led into fighting villagers half way around the world in incredibly tough scenarios by asshole politicians.
- beachy 4y ago
  The Vietnam war (or the American war as I was corrected in a bar in Hanoi) was the epitome of unintended escalation. One of the early escalators was JFK, who was simultaneously extremely wary of escalation, and is not someone who most people think of as an asshole politician. Your point has some heft but it's a simplistic take.
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    isn't it also a bit of a simplistic take to think that American Presidents truly have the "Commander-in-Chief" power w.r.t. war decisions that they have on paper?
    - beachy 4y ago
      From memory JFK was the prime mover in decisions on the number of Americans on the ground, their roles and even their uniforms.
    - colburnmh 4y ago
      Presidents, like leaders in business or the military, realize that they don't have the current experience, situational knowledge, or training necessary to dictate details on the ground. Therefore, they dictate high-level foreign policy, political, and strategic military goals and delegate the strategic and tactical details to the military leaders who have the appropriate knowledge to carry them out. Occasionally, they get involved in specific tactical decisions, like authorizing politically sensitive actions (e.g., the Bin Laden raid). You would not expect the CEO of a large multi-national company to manage all of the details of every department within their company. When you combine all 5 of the armed forces together, it's far more complex than any company on earth, and managing the military is not the President's only responsibility. The President's direction of the military is also bound, to some degree, by the Legislative and Judicial branches of the government. For example, they can't declare war on a country unilaterally. But those restrictions, while important, are not particularly constraintaining at a day-to-day level. The President has wide latitude to direct the military as they see fit. That includings projecting military power as deterrents against hostile foreign powers or engaging in short-term, small-scale offensive operations abroad. So, no, Presidents aren't going to the front lines and directing troops like kings of old. That went out of fashion around the time of Napoleon. But good business leaders don't micromanage their workers and departmental details, either. They realize, hopefully, that doing so would do more harm than good.
  - chasil 4y ago
    I have often wondered if, had the Watergate break-in not been discovered or reported, South Vietnam might yet exist, and if they would rival South Korea in their technological accomplishments.
    - lern_too_spel 4y ago
      South Vietnam never had a functioning government.
      - refurb 4y ago
        Not really true unless your standard is Western style democracy. And I can't think of too many developing countries who went from dictatorship to full democracy while fighting an insurgency/superpower proxy war. South Korea, Taiwan were both dictatorships for decades after the fighting ended. The peak of the Southern government was '71-72, prior to the Easter Offensive by the North. The Tet Offensive had destroyed the Viet Cong in the South (needed to be entirely back filled by the Northern troops), so at that point the RVN had full control over much of the South. The fighting had died down to the point that work on social programs like land reform, actually install competent provincial leaders, etc had an opportunity to improve the life of the average citizens in the countryside (the major cities saw little violence over the war with the exception of Tet and a few other attacks). RVN wasn't a democracy by Western standards, but it was a government that could at least provide security, development and work towards building up the country. When the Eastern Offensive happened, the US was limited to air power (all troops had left by ‘73 but the drawdowns started in ‘69), and the ARVN made a good showing at the battle of An Loc. They were capable of being an effective fighting force but needed US support to counter the USSR and Chinese support the North was getting. After '72, Congress cut off all aid, Nixon was in no position to force things otherwise (i.e. Watergate) and the writing was on the wall since the South didn't even have enough gasoline for their military vehicles. The South was a corrupt government with plenty of nepotism and stealing of US funds, but if you visit Vietnam today you’d realize not much has changed on that end.
        lern_too_spel 4y ago
  - refurb 4y ago
    As a history nerd I’ve read a ton of books on the Vietnam war and pretty much this. There is a great book on LBJ’s decision to escalate - I can’t remember the title, but it’s 300 pages long and only covers a few months in ‘65 when the decision to escalate was made. People like to think the decision was made in a vacuum but it was influenced by everything going on at the time and geopolitical risk going forward. LBJ made a decision (there were members of the inner circle who wanted to pull out) based on what he knew at the time. It turned out to be the wrong one.
  - andrewclunn 4y ago
    What a bay-of-pigheaded comment.
  - tasty_freeze 4y ago
    The Errol Morris documentary "The Fog Of War" about Robert McNamara is amazing. Even though McNamara was in his 80s when it was filmed, his mind was still razor sharp. McNamara was highly self-reflective and was not someone to whitewash history, even his own. The documentary covers various phases of McNamara's career, including his contribution to the Tokyo firebombing raids in WWII, and a short bit about his work at Ford Motor Company between the wars, but the Vietnam war part was the biggest section.
    - beachy 4y ago
      It's amazing how brutally honest McNamara was about his own failings in bringing an MBA type approach to a foreign war.
  - D_Alex 4y ago
    >the epitome of unintended escalation And right about now we are witnessing another. Against an opponent with nukes.
- pdonis 4y ago
  You should also include high ranking military officers, many with political ambitions, who put their own aggrandizement or telling their civilian superiors what they wanted to hear ahead of their military duties. I recommend H. R. McMaster's book Dereliction of Duty, which goes into this in great detail.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
gwbas1c 4y ago
For TLDR: >Rather than give up information to his captors, Douglas pretended to be an illiterate fool. > Using the nursery rhyme “Old McDonald Had a Farm” as a mnemonic device, he memorized over 250 prisoners’ names. > His global impact came when he confronted the Vietnamese at the Paris Peace Talks in 1970. The information Douglas provided, including the locations and horrible conditions of the prison camps, as well as the torture practices used by the Vietnamese
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- registeredcorn 4y ago
  It would be worth including the final line >Exposing the Vietnamese this way led them to keep POWs alive until the war was over, saving hundreds of prisoners.
silentsea90 4y ago
This is movie script material right here.
- lqet 4y ago
  It would be a completely plausible additional plot line in Forrest Gump.
  - silentsea90 4y ago
    Ha! This fits so well there that people would refuse to believe it actually happened
- hackitup7 4y ago
  Part of this story was adapted as part of the Vietnam war documentary Tropic Thunder, although they took some artistic license
smegsicle 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20220715174007/https://www.lowellmilkencenter.org/programs/projects/view/douglas-hegdahl-the-incredibly-stupid-one/hero https://web.archive.org/web/20220715174007/https://www.lowel...
franzsmith 4y ago
How would the Vietnamese' face be at Paris Peace Conference? After knowing he gave all the information.
- refurb 4y ago
  Not sure it mattered much in terms of the big picture. The North had plenty of highly placed spies in the South. Both sides were running espionage operations throughout the war. And the North had a “fighting while talking” strategy which meant if they made advances on the battlefield they exploited them during negotiations and when they took loses they just delayed until better opportunities arose.
tedheath123 4y ago
Irrelevant to the content of the article, but worth pointing out that this project is funded by the proceeds of crimes committed at Drexel Burnham in the 80s. Michael Milken and his brother Lowell undoubtedly do good through their philanthrophy, but the cynic in me suspects that it is primarily an attempt to rehabilate their image and is treated as a business expense. Maybe it doesn't matter if you do good for the wrong reasons though.
- myko 4y ago
  > Maybe it doesn't matter if you do good for the wrong reasons though. There was an interesting discussion around this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094798 (TikTok'er doing random acts of kindness for clout upset someone he used for his videos)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    Intent is everything.
- HoraceSchemer 4y ago
  I'm not religious, but a particular legend has stuck with me: > A philanthropist once came to Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi to complain that he felt he was giving charity without sincerity. “Without sincerity? Nonsense!” replied the Rebbe. “There is plenty of sincerity. Perhaps you are not sincere in giving charity, but the poor are very sincere in receiving your charity. Even if you don't mean it, they do!” [source](https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1885183/jewish/Can-I-Bribe-G-d-with-Charity.htm https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1885183/jewis...)
- dvt 4y ago
  I live in Santa Monica and often walk past the Lowell Milken Family Foundation (which is close to the posh downtown). I always kind of smile and think about the story of how the Milken Family completely reinvented itself. Michael Milken, for context, was paid the highest yearly salary in the history of the world (~250M in one of his highest years if I remember correctly). He served 2 years in prison, his fine was 600M and the guy is still a billionaire (he also got pardoned by Trump in 2020). He's a self-admitted crook and liar[1]. How many lives were destroyed (or at least harmed) by hustling junk bonds? Is that okay now that he is donating money to cancer research? Forbes and CNN certainly think so[2] (even in 2004, for that matter). William K. Black put it well: "the best way to rob a bank is to own one." [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220428215122/https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/26/opinion/michael-milken-s-guilt.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220428215122/https://www.nytim... [2] https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/11/29/8192713/index.htm https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004...
thriftwy 4y ago
- _gabe_ 4y ago
  > And half of the stuff we read further is probably just his legend, i.e. not true. Do you have any evidence of this, or are you just saying this? And what stuff are you saying is untrue? None of this sounded unbelievable to me. This man is someone who helped save the lives of several other soldiers who were being tortured at the time. If you're insinuating that his efforts are all fabricated based on no evidence, then it just seems like a weird thing to insinuate imo. And here's something from 2005 with all the same details[0]. Everything else I've found seems to tell the same story, so I'm not sure why they would all be wrong (unless you're trying to say this is all some weird conspiracy or propaganda, which doesn't seem likely). [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20050825035929/http://www.usni.org/proceedings/Articles03/PROlwf12.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20050825035929/http://www.usni.o...
  - thriftwy 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Stratoscope 4y ago
This reminds me of Jeremiah Denton, a POW in that same war who was interviewed on TV to explain that the prisoners were being treated humanely. As he gave the verbal answers his captors expected, he blinked his eyes in Morse Code: – ––– •–• – ••– •–• • T O R T U R E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rufnWLVQcKg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rufnWLVQcKg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Denton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Denton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code Epilog: A few years ago, someone gave me a Fourth of July T-shirt. Made in Vietnam. It made me think how so few of us in each country really wanted to fight these wars.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  > It made me think how so few of us in each country really wanted to fight these wars. Well, counterpoint: it really shows how China’s ascent has made for strange bedfellows.
  - lupire 4y ago
- gedy 4y ago
  > It made me think how so few of us in each country really wanted to fight these wars. I don't know about that, I do think it shows that the lives lost to fight 'American Imperialism' were mostly a waste, as Vietnam today is largely indistinguishable from if South Vietnam had won/continued. There's no US bases there I suppose, but USSR did have bases after the war. They also lost hundreds of thousands afterwards as boat people.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    We probably should count Viet Namese soldiers and civilians killed, on both sides, and Cambodians and Laotians, and probably even victims of Khner Rouge. Then, all the forests wiped out with Agent Orange, and the long-lasting dioxin contamination. I have not seen any accounting of species driven to extinction by this treatment. Probably many were not even catalogued first.
polishdude20 4y ago
Simple Jack!
- hackitup7 4y ago
  I'm a lead farmer!
einpoklum 4y ago
Well, Hegdahl was somewhat stupid in at least one way: He fought on the side of the evil, genocidal, occupiers of Vietnam. Less stupid people dodged the draft or outright refused.

A brave soldier, doing right by his country, which was led into fighting villagers half way around the world in incredibly tough scenarios by asshole politicians.

beachy 4y ago
The Vietnam war (or the American war as I was corrected in a bar in Hanoi) was the epitome of unintended escalation. One of the early escalators was JFK, who was simultaneously extremely wary of escalation, and is not someone who most people think of as an asshole politician. Your point has some heft but it's a simplistic take.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  isn't it also a bit of a simplistic take to think that American Presidents truly have the "Commander-in-Chief" power w.r.t. war decisions that they have on paper?
  - beachy 4y ago
    From memory JFK was the prime mover in decisions on the number of Americans on the ground, their roles and even their uniforms.
  - colburnmh 4y ago
    Presidents, like leaders in business or the military, realize that they don't have the current experience, situational knowledge, or training necessary to dictate details on the ground. Therefore, they dictate high-level foreign policy, political, and strategic military goals and delegate the strategic and tactical details to the military leaders who have the appropriate knowledge to carry them out. Occasionally, they get involved in specific tactical decisions, like authorizing politically sensitive actions (e.g., the Bin Laden raid). You would not expect the CEO of a large multi-national company to manage all of the details of every department within their company. When you combine all 5 of the armed forces together, it's far more complex than any company on earth, and managing the military is not the President's only responsibility. The President's direction of the military is also bound, to some degree, by the Legislative and Judicial branches of the government. For example, they can't declare war on a country unilaterally. But those restrictions, while important, are not particularly constraintaining at a day-to-day level. The President has wide latitude to direct the military as they see fit. That includings projecting military power as deterrents against hostile foreign powers or engaging in short-term, small-scale offensive operations abroad. So, no, Presidents aren't going to the front lines and directing troops like kings of old. That went out of fashion around the time of Napoleon. But good business leaders don't micromanage their workers and departmental details, either. They realize, hopefully, that doing so would do more harm than good.
- chasil 4y ago
  I have often wondered if, had the Watergate break-in not been discovered or reported, South Vietnam might yet exist, and if they would rival South Korea in their technological accomplishments.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    South Vietnam never had a functioning government.
    - refurb 4y ago
      Not really true unless your standard is Western style democracy. And I can't think of too many developing countries who went from dictatorship to full democracy while fighting an insurgency/superpower proxy war. South Korea, Taiwan were both dictatorships for decades after the fighting ended. The peak of the Southern government was '71-72, prior to the Easter Offensive by the North. The Tet Offensive had destroyed the Viet Cong in the South (needed to be entirely back filled by the Northern troops), so at that point the RVN had full control over much of the South. The fighting had died down to the point that work on social programs like land reform, actually install competent provincial leaders, etc had an opportunity to improve the life of the average citizens in the countryside (the major cities saw little violence over the war with the exception of Tet and a few other attacks). RVN wasn't a democracy by Western standards, but it was a government that could at least provide security, development and work towards building up the country. When the Eastern Offensive happened, the US was limited to air power (all troops had left by ‘73 but the drawdowns started in ‘69), and the ARVN made a good showing at the battle of An Loc. They were capable of being an effective fighting force but needed US support to counter the USSR and Chinese support the North was getting. After '72, Congress cut off all aid, Nixon was in no position to force things otherwise (i.e. Watergate) and the writing was on the wall since the South didn't even have enough gasoline for their military vehicles. The South was a corrupt government with plenty of nepotism and stealing of US funds, but if you visit Vietnam today you’d realize not much has changed on that end.
      - lern_too_spel 4y ago
- refurb 4y ago
  As a history nerd I’ve read a ton of books on the Vietnam war and pretty much this. There is a great book on LBJ’s decision to escalate - I can’t remember the title, but it’s 300 pages long and only covers a few months in ‘65 when the decision to escalate was made. People like to think the decision was made in a vacuum but it was influenced by everything going on at the time and geopolitical risk going forward. LBJ made a decision (there were members of the inner circle who wanted to pull out) based on what he knew at the time. It turned out to be the wrong one.
- andrewclunn 4y ago
  What a bay-of-pigheaded comment.
- tasty_freeze 4y ago
  The Errol Morris documentary "The Fog Of War" about Robert McNamara is amazing. Even though McNamara was in his 80s when it was filmed, his mind was still razor sharp. McNamara was highly self-reflective and was not someone to whitewash history, even his own. The documentary covers various phases of McNamara's career, including his contribution to the Tokyo firebombing raids in WWII, and a short bit about his work at Ford Motor Company between the wars, but the Vietnam war part was the biggest section.
  - beachy 4y ago
    It's amazing how brutally honest McNamara was about his own failings in bringing an MBA type approach to a foreign war.
- D_Alex 4y ago
  >the epitome of unintended escalation And right about now we are witnessing another. Against an opponent with nukes.
pdonis 4y ago
You should also include high ranking military officers, many with political ambitions, who put their own aggrandizement or telling their civilian superiors what they wanted to hear ahead of their military duties. I recommend H. R. McMaster's book Dereliction of Duty, which goes into this in great detail.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

gwbas1c 4y ago

For TLDR: >Rather than give up information to his captors, Douglas pretended to be an illiterate fool. > Using the nursery rhyme “Old McDonald Had a Farm” as a mnemonic device, he memorized over 250 prisoners’ names. > His global impact came when he confronted the Vietnamese at the Paris Peace Talks in 1970. The information Douglas provided, including the locations and horrible conditions of the prison camps, as well as the torture practices used by the Vietnamese

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
registeredcorn 4y ago
It would be worth including the final line >Exposing the Vietnamese this way led them to keep POWs alive until the war was over, saving hundreds of prisoners.

silentsea90 4y ago

This is movie script material right here.

lqet 4y ago
It would be a completely plausible additional plot line in Forrest Gump.
- silentsea90 4y ago
  Ha! This fits so well there that people would refuse to believe it actually happened
hackitup7 4y ago
Part of this story was adapted as part of the Vietnam war documentary Tropic Thunder, although they took some artistic license

smegsicle 4y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220715174007/https://www.lowellmilkencenter.org/programs/projects/view/douglas-hegdahl-the-incredibly-stupid-one/hero https://web.archive.org/web/20220715174007/https://www.lowel...

franzsmith 4y ago

How would the Vietnamese' face be at Paris Peace Conference? After knowing he gave all the information.

refurb 4y ago
Not sure it mattered much in terms of the big picture. The North had plenty of highly placed spies in the South. Both sides were running espionage operations throughout the war. And the North had a “fighting while talking” strategy which meant if they made advances on the battlefield they exploited them during negotiations and when they took loses they just delayed until better opportunities arose.

tedheath123 4y ago

Irrelevant to the content of the article, but worth pointing out that this project is funded by the proceeds of crimes committed at Drexel Burnham in the 80s. Michael Milken and his brother Lowell undoubtedly do good through their philanthrophy, but the cynic in me suspects that it is primarily an attempt to rehabilate their image and is treated as a business expense. Maybe it doesn't matter if you do good for the wrong reasons though.

myko 4y ago
> Maybe it doesn't matter if you do good for the wrong reasons though. There was an interesting discussion around this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094798 (TikTok'er doing random acts of kindness for clout upset someone he used for his videos)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Intent is everything.
HoraceSchemer 4y ago
I'm not religious, but a particular legend has stuck with me: > A philanthropist once came to Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi to complain that he felt he was giving charity without sincerity. “Without sincerity? Nonsense!” replied the Rebbe. “There is plenty of sincerity. Perhaps you are not sincere in giving charity, but the poor are very sincere in receiving your charity. Even if you don't mean it, they do!” [source](https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1885183/jewish/Can-I-Bribe-G-d-with-Charity.htm https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1885183/jewis...)
dvt 4y ago
I live in Santa Monica and often walk past the Lowell Milken Family Foundation (which is close to the posh downtown). I always kind of smile and think about the story of how the Milken Family completely reinvented itself. Michael Milken, for context, was paid the highest yearly salary in the history of the world (~250M in one of his highest years if I remember correctly). He served 2 years in prison, his fine was 600M and the guy is still a billionaire (he also got pardoned by Trump in 2020). He's a self-admitted crook and liar[1]. How many lives were destroyed (or at least harmed) by hustling junk bonds? Is that okay now that he is donating money to cancer research? Forbes and CNN certainly think so[2] (even in 2004, for that matter). William K. Black put it well: "the best way to rob a bank is to own one." [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220428215122/https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/26/opinion/michael-milken-s-guilt.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220428215122/https://www.nytim... [2] https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/11/29/8192713/index.htm https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004...

thriftwy 4y ago

_gabe_ 4y ago
> And half of the stuff we read further is probably just his legend, i.e. not true. Do you have any evidence of this, or are you just saying this? And what stuff are you saying is untrue? None of this sounded unbelievable to me. This man is someone who helped save the lives of several other soldiers who were being tortured at the time. If you're insinuating that his efforts are all fabricated based on no evidence, then it just seems like a weird thing to insinuate imo. And here's something from 2005 with all the same details[0]. Everything else I've found seems to tell the same story, so I'm not sure why they would all be wrong (unless you're trying to say this is all some weird conspiracy or propaganda, which doesn't seem likely). [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20050825035929/http://www.usni.org/proceedings/Articles03/PROlwf12.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20050825035929/http://www.usni.o...
- thriftwy 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Stratoscope 4y ago

This reminds me of Jeremiah Denton, a POW in that same war who was interviewed on TV to explain that the prisoners were being treated humanely. As he gave the verbal answers his captors expected, he blinked his eyes in Morse Code: – ––– •–• – ••– •–• • T O R T U R E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rufnWLVQcKg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rufnWLVQcKg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Denton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Denton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code Epilog: A few years ago, someone gave me a Fourth of July T-shirt. Made in Vietnam. It made me think how so few of us in each country really wanted to fight these wars.

RC_ITR 4y ago
> It made me think how so few of us in each country really wanted to fight these wars. Well, counterpoint: it really shows how China’s ascent has made for strange bedfellows.
- lupire 4y ago
gedy 4y ago
> It made me think how so few of us in each country really wanted to fight these wars. I don't know about that, I do think it shows that the lives lost to fight 'American Imperialism' were mostly a waste, as Vietnam today is largely indistinguishable from if South Vietnam had won/continued. There's no US bases there I suppose, but USSR did have bases after the war. They also lost hundreds of thousands afterwards as boat people.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  We probably should count Viet Namese soldiers and civilians killed, on both sides, and Cambodians and Laotians, and probably even victims of Khner Rouge. Then, all the forests wiped out with Agent Orange, and the long-lasting dioxin contamination. I have not seen any accounting of species driven to extinction by this treatment. Probably many were not even catalogued first.

polishdude20 4y ago

Simple Jack!

hackitup7 4y ago
I'm a lead farmer!

einpoklum 4y ago

Well, Hegdahl was somewhat stupid in at least one way: He fought on the side of the evil, genocidal, occupiers of Vietnam. Less stupid people dodged the draft or outright refused.