The fix was in long before the first goddamn Marine set foot in Da Nang. By the time President Lyndon B. Johnson put his greasy Texan signature on America’s full-scale Vietnam intervention in 1964, the whole goddamn game had already been played. A two-decade-long con job, carefully rigged by a coalition of high-dollar arms dealers, shadowy CIA spooks, war-hungry generals, and the bloodsucking leeches of the military-industrial complex—all working in lockstep to keep the U.S. permanently entangled in war, fear, and profitable destruction.
This wasn’t some grand ideological battle against communism—it was a business deal, pure and simple. Domino Theory was the nice, palatable horseshit they spoon-fed the public—“If Vietnam falls, so will Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and then suddenly there are Russian tanks in fucking Fresno!”—but that was just marketing. The reality? A greasy backroom racket designed to keep the cash flowing, the bombs dropping, and the body bags filled.
THE CHINA LOBBY: OLD MONEY, OLD CRIMES, NEW WARS
The entire Southeast Asia fiasco didn’t start in Hanoi—it started in the mahogany-and-leather boardrooms of Washington D.C., among cigar-chomping psychopaths who had been eyeing Asia like a cash cow since the 19th goddamn century. The China Lobby—a rat’s nest of tycoons, missionaries, and Cold War lunatics—had spent decades selling the fantasy of a westernized, Christianized, capitalist China, a compliant puppet-state in the image of the good ol’ USA.
For years, they funneled money into the corrupt-as-hell Kuomintang (KMT), Chiang Kai-shek’s barely-functional dictatorship that was less a government and more a heroin cartel draped in nationalist flags. Chiang and his cronies weren’t just fighting the communists, they were running the biggest drug racket in Asia—shipping heroin out of Shanghai, cutting deals with the mob, and stuffing their Swiss bank accounts while American taxpayers footed the bill.
One of the biggest China Lobby fixers was Henry Luce, media mogul and all-American sonofabitch, who used his Time-Life empire to paint Chiang as a heroic freedom fighter instead of the gangland pimp he really was. Luce had deep ties to Skull and Bones, the Ivy League secret society founded by old-money opium smugglers. These were the kind of people who built their dynasties on Chinese heroin and American bullets, and the Vietnam War was just their next big investment.
THE CIA’S HEROIN HIGHWAY: FUNDING WAR WITH DRUG MONEY
By the time Mao’s communists wiped the floor with the KMT in 1949, Chiang and his gang fled to Taiwan, taking their heroin connections with them. The U.S. government had lost its favorite Asian dictator, but the CIA—always ready to turn a defeat into a business opportunity—stepped in and turned the entire Southeast Asian drug trade into their own personal slush fund.
Enter Civil Air Transport (CAT)—the CIA’s very own airline, a “private” company that just so happened to be entirely run by spooks, moving guns, cash, and dope across Asia like a flying goddamn mafia. CAT’s planes were packed with weapons for anti-communist guerrillas one day and heroin shipments bound for the global market the next. It was a beautiful operation—clean, deniable, and profitable as hell.
The CIA didn’t just tolerate the heroin trade—they facilitated it. Every corrupt warlord, every gangster, every Thai and Laotian politician who could keep the drugs flowing was put on the payroll. And the junk? That ended up on the streets of Saigon, Bangkok, and New York, making addicts out of U.S. troops and American teenagers alike. If you ever wondered why heroin exploded in American cities in the ‘60s and ‘70s, look no further than the Pentagon’s war machine.
WAR KEYNESIANISM: BUILD BOMBS, GET RICH, REPEAT
But drugs were just one piece of the puzzle. The real money was in war itself.
World War II had made it clear—war wasn’t just about survival, it was a goddamn economic model. The arms industry, the aerospace firms, the shipbuilders—they all needed the military-industrial complex to keep humming, and that meant America had to stay at war. If it wasn’t Hitler, it was Stalin. If it wasn’t Stalin, it was Mao. If it wasn’t Mao, it was Ho Chi Minh. If it wasn’t Ho, it was Castro. And so on and so fucking forth.
This was Military Keynesianism—the idea that the U.S. economy should be permanently propped up by government war spending. Instead of fixing schools or roads, the money went to Lockheed, Boeing, Hughes Aircraft, McDonnell Douglas—all the fine institutions dedicated to building machines that turned human beings into red mist.
Eisenhower knew it. He saw the beast growing, which is why he made that famous speech warning about the military-industrial complex. But it was already too late. The wheels were turning, the contracts were signed, and once the Korean War ended, the war machine needed a new target.
Enter Vietnam.
HOW LBJ SOLD THE BIG FUCKING LIE
When JFK got his brains blown out in Dallas, the war hawks in Washington saw their golden opportunity. Lyndon B. Johnson, a backroom deal-making, favor-trading political shark, had been waiting for his moment to do something big. And in 1964, he got it: the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
The whole thing was a goddamn farce—some North Vietnamese boats allegedly fired on a U.S. destroyer, but the truth was murky at best. Didn’t matter. The important thing was that it gave LBJ the excuse he needed to sell an all-out war to the American public. Within months, thousands of troops were shipping out, and the Pentagon was ordering bombs like they were goddamn cheeseburgers.
From that moment on, Vietnam wasn’t a war—it was a profit center. The bombers, the helicopters, the napalm, the Agent Orange—it was all made in America, bought with taxpayer money, and dumped wholesale onto some of the poorest people in the world. Defense contractors made billions. Politicians got campaign cash. CIA heroin dealers got richer. And 58,000 American boys got sent home in body bags.
THE WAR MACHINE NEVER STOPS
By 1975, the whole operation collapsed under its own weight. Nixon pulled the last U.S. forces out, Vietnam went communist, and the war profiteers took their money and ran. But did the war machine stop? Fuck no.
It just moved down the road—to Central America, to the Middle East, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Syria. The playbook hasn’t changed in seventy goddamn years. The intelligence agencies, the defense contractors, the media, and the politicians still run the same scam, over and over again.
The war machine never stops. It just changes ZIP codes.
And the American taxpayer? The working-class kid getting sent off to die? The poor bastard who just wants to live his life without getting drafted or bombed or hooked on heroin?
Well, they’re just collateral damage in the biggest, longest-running con job in American history.
And as long as there’s money to be made, the motherfuckers in charge will keep the bullets flying.
Because war is America’s real business.
And business is fucking booming.
