The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1361: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge Pt. 4 - w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: April 26, 2026

60 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Thomas continues a series talking about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime. Radio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Buy Me a CoffeeThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas' WebsiteThomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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Head on over to the Pekignonez Show.com. You can get the show early and ad free over there. If not, here's a show. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekinjana show. Thomas is back and it's going to continue talking about the Camer Rouge today. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm doing well. something that I

I spent a lot of time with in terms of you know I'm not a regional studies guy but I'm definitely a you know my subject theory is the 20th century with a I have a strong interest in the later Cold War um

detente through a it's you know the conclusion of hostilities on November 9th 1989 and I've been that way since I was a kid and the first time I visited the Vietnam War Memorial was in 1990 on a school trip you know and I knew quite a bit about the war because of my dad and also legacy media was saturated with Vietnam War content and you know, I took a strong interest in it. You know, I'd watch TV shows on prime time, like China Beach and tour of duty. I'd read everything I could about the war, so. And I knew a bunch of older guys who I looked up to who'd been in combat and stuff.

So it was a big deal to me to visit the Vietnam War Memorial. And I think it's a dignified memorial in like a lot. but you know it's for those women have been to the Vietnam War Memorial it's organized by year that you know

it's not alphabetical it's by the the names are organized that each panel represents a year and it's it's organized by the month and day that they were KIA but

so I'm looking at the wall and I get to the final panels and I'm assuming, you know, okay, maybe, you know, maybe the final casualties count. It'll be, you know, some one-off casualty during the evacuation of Saigon or something. But as it turns out, there's a bunch of names from the Battle of Kotang. And I'm like, what is this? And I think this is a, I think this is really, awful. The Battle of Kotang was when the U.S. Marines, who were part of its ad hoc task force,

they got into this heavy, they were engaged in a very heavy combat with the Khmer Rouge on Kotang Island. And there were heavy casualties. Three men were accidentally left behind, and they suffered a horrible fate. It was really the the last truly open-ended comet operation, U.S. forces were committed to prior to the Gulf War. And it's simply called, oh, this was the last battle of the Vietnam War. That's nonsense. It had nothing to do with the Vietnam War. Why?

Because it was approximately in theater. So it's this forgotten event that had profound implications in policy terms as well as in force structural terms. This was one of the things that led to the creation of Joint Special Operations Command about a decade later. Kotang Desert One, which was the disastrous effort to rescue the U.S. embassy hostages in Iran. It was aborted because these two helicopters crashed into each other, both killing some people and giving away the position. And then in Grenada, a bunch of Navy SEALs drowned because there was these competing command elements and the right hand, proverbially didn't know what the left hand was doing. And Kotang also indicated that there needed to be some sort of standing direct action element to deal with exigencies such as that. And it also, it was a real, Henry Kissinger had stayed on from the Nixon administration.

this was post-watergate. The military was in a real crisis because South Vietnam was going down and defeat. Gerald Ford was a president who had no mandate. You know, because initially, when Spiro Agnew had resigned under cloud of indictment, because people forget that Agnew was targeted, and he was targeted by the same people who facilitated the coup against Nixon. but he was targeted for corruption basically. So Agnew resigns.

Gerald Ford's appointed as, you know, vice president. And then when Nixon resigns, Ford becomes the president. You know, he literally was like an appointed president. And he wasn't really respected within the chain of command. You had these very strong personages around him, like Kissinger, who was Secretary of State and National Security. ready advisor. You had James Schlesinger, who I think was a real snake and just a terrible human being.

But, you know, he was a very ambitious personality. You know, Rumsfeld's White House chief of staff. The media treated Ford like a buffoon, you know, and so there was already this credibility gap vis-a-vis the Warsaw Pact in the Soviet Union, despite the fact that, you know, detente was, you know, what was being floated as the status of relations in the Cold War. You know, there was all, in military terms, the Soviets were winning the Cold War on basically all fronts.

And despite the fact of the Sino-Sovietz split, had been realized that that didn't mean that peking was america's friend and proceeding from a position of apparent strength especially in the far east was essential so that's the context here okay um and plus too like it showed the kamiru showed how game and savage they were and tactically sophisticated you know they really they really put a herd on the u.s marines and um some real firepower was deployed there. The Air Force was dropping 15,000 pound bombs, which was the largest conventional ordinance in the U.S. Arsenal at that time.

I mean, this was real war. And undoubtedly, U.S. forces had engaged the Khmer Rouge before, you know, particularly on the Vietnamese border. order where two core was situated. But I mean, that that was mostly special operations elements and things. It wasn't at scale. You know, so this is fascinating. I'm not a military hound, but I find incidents like this to be really compelling.

And there's things to learn from them. And the Camer Rouge are an interesting phenomenon. And they were some of the hardest cadres that the communists had, in my opinion. you know um like the vietnamese and like the cubans and and like the national folks army so plus there's parallels with us as poeblos incident and i'll get into that too and what the implications were that for that

for that because that that wasn't just a humiliating uh incident for america but it it came out later as to why the pueblo was seized and it was seized at the behest of the soviet union and that the north koreans had always been a reliably dedicated proxy for the Soviets. You know, and

there was this American naval cryptologist named John Walker. And he was a spy for the Warsaw Pact for decades. And he'd been feeding cryptographical data

to the KGB and the GRIU. but they needed an encryption machine to interpret these signals. And the Pueblo was an intelligence ship. So it had the encryption machine. And Walker had relayed to the Soviets who related to Pyongyang that this ship was within striking distance of North Korean territorial water. So they captured it.

You know, it's, and that seriously compromised American, American nuclear strategy and the ability to hide intentions vis-à-vis command and control. That neutralized a lot of the advantages conferred by the SOS mechanism. That's an acronym, SOS, U.S., which were these listening cables on the ocean floor that neutralized a lot of Soviet countermeasures to detection

but if Soviet Submariners could listen in on American codes you know encrypted communication you know presumably they could react to an intended first strike before

you know weapons were deployed and essentially neutralize it, even if they have to eat a countervalue strike of substantial destructive power. So it had to give them the advantage, where, you know, particularly under conditions of parity where quite literally seconds matter. So this was a very complicated affair. And it's a sense. essential to

understanding what developed subsequently in all kinds of aspects. So, I mean, it basically breaks down into two aspects. There's the capture the Mayegas and what was happening on board there. There's actually three aspects.

What was happening on the Mayague is, what was happening on Kotang, which turned into this huge battle, and what was happening in the White House Situation Room. And George, Herbert, Walker Bush was doing the shuttle diplomacy with Peking and the Chikoms because America, America had no diplomatic relations with Democratic Campo Chia at that time. That later changed.

But the military government of La Nol, who had overthrown Sehanuk, that was the American proxy. And the Khmer Rouge overthrew Lan Nol, and they began executing everybody in any way connected to that government. You know, it was a bloodbath. And so America was done an enemy footing with Democratic Campuchia and Salafsar and the entire leadership element of the Khmer Rouge. But at that time also, America didn't know about Salafsar, Al Pot.

They had no idea who the leadership element was even. But so Kissinger, when the Mayagas was seized, Kissinger tried to go through diplomatic channels, you know, and communicate to the Chinese American demands. Chinese diplomatic representation refused to accept any memos or communications from Kissinger or from anybody in the State Department. So Bush, who had these good offices personally with the Chinese government, became the point of contact with them, which is really interesting.

I mean, that's significant, too, because this further solidified his role as somebody who, the Chai Coms and particularly Deng Xiaoping himself, who's the most significant Chinese personage, other than Mao, I believe. So there's a lot here. It's almost, uh, it's almost,

like a Frederick Forsyth story or something. But that this ensued the Mayagas was captured on May 12th, 1975. It was a merchant ship. It wasn't on, and I mean it actually

was. It wasn't under some kind of cover or anything or it wasn't deployed as part of some sort of ruse. It was a merchant ship carrying standard commercial cargo. And it got seized and boarded and contested waters. It was approached by

Camer Rouge gunboats. The same kinds of brown water. I mean, they're conventionally brown water craft with a mounted 50-Cal. You know, like the boat, like the boat in apocalypse now, you know, but they can still function in territorial and littoral waters, you know. By territorial waters, I mean, you know, some distance out from the coast, say like 100 nautical miles or something, you know, but ironically, these were American boats that had been furnished to the Navy under the military hoon of L'Anall. and you know for little boats like a 50 caliber that's that's heavy firepower you know and um a merchant ship that it doesn't have any mounted armaments i mean a couple of 50 cals you can you can tear that boat apart

and turn everybody on it to hamburger you know um so uh the commier rouge being constitutionally paranoid and being convinced too that they were eminently going to be attacked by the vietnam You know, they were happy on the trigger. So this was a very volatile situation. The Camero Rouge, I believe, didn't, they didn't know what the Maygas was. I think they assumed it was a listening ship. You know, that's why they boarded it. And I'm sure that they were acting under orders to seize any ship.

wasn't, you know, flagged as friendly. You know, in other words, like, any, anything that wasn't Chinese or Thai or La Ocean. But even in the case of Laos, I might have been dubious. Oh, I don't, I don't think Laos had a Navy to speak of. But it was a 40-man crew. Highly experienced sailors. a couple who were ex-military, one of whom had been in the Marine Corps infantry in heavy combat in Vietnam.

And that added to the potential volatility situation to, like, the third mate, his last name was English, the Vietnam vet. him and the ship's mechanic were both ex-military and they were convinced that Cameroos were going to slaughter them. Thirdmate English relayed that

in the wake of the Tet Offensive when he and the marine element he was attached to liberated a village near the DMZ they found

19 Americans with their hands bound behind their backs who'd been beheaded and English relayed that him and his squad had to untie them and you know and

properly see to it that these mutilated bodies are Medevac and English relayed to his crewmates that I'm not I'm not gonna I'm not gonna go to my slaughter you know if these gooks trying to take us off this ship,

I'm going to go down killing as many of them as I can. So the captain, his name was Miller. He had experience in the World War II Navy, and he was a man in his mid-50s. He was quite a bit older than the crew. He seemed to realize that these Cameroos fighters were young guys, and they were not remotely afraid of violence, but they were obviously scared.

So Miller took the tack of trying to show them some kind of hospitality. You know, and so he started giving them fresh fruit. And apparently he had the mess cook make up a big thing of Kool-Aid. And at first the Kameer Rouge didn't trust it. But then Miller started drinking in and is like, like, see, like, I'm not trying to poison you. So then the Kermu's tried the Kool-Aid and they became obsessed with it. and like asked them to make more. They thought it was like the greatest thing.

I mean, there's nothing funny about that situation. But the thing about these like a hard commie roose fighters like slurping up Kool-Aid and thinking it's, you know, like the greatest thing is kind of funny. And to be fair, people make fun of me, especially youngsters who, yeah, man, and there's, there's nothing wrong with this. They're kind of put off by processed food, which is actually a positive. But I love Sunny D and I love Tang. like tang is awesome and they'll die in that hill so i i understand when they come here ruge

we're like digging on kool-ate especially if they'd never had it in you know i would do on the same thing but um you know it uh and to set the uh to set the uh the tone um of the other strategic situation um by the time uh president ford got news of what was underway. You know, this was, U.S. forces in theater were very scattered. You know, having to, they'd obviously, they'd had to redeploy from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam,

you know, owing to the, you know, the fact that, you know, Saigon was going down in flames, literally, the path that Laos had, had conquered Laos. Cambodia, obviously, had fallen to the country. Khmer Rouge, the military was drawing down across the board and such that any command was given a priority.

You know, it was in the Bundes Republic because that was the main line of resistance, you know, the Cold War, despite the relative stability, you know, compared to the Far East. But there wasn't, you know, so it was presumed. that any military operation would have to be staged from Thailand. Thailand had been a major base of air operations during the Vietnam War. But as Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos fell to the communists, Thailand found itself in a very difficult position. And those good offices began to dissipate.

you know, because the ties weren't going to avail their air bases to American elements that were then going to strike, you know, their neighbors on three sides, obviously. So there was the challenge of where it even deploy from and how to base forces, once forces are identified and, you know, that are mission appropriate and corralled and constituted, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to affect this deployment. And, you know, there's tremendous confusion as well over command and control. And especially in those days, Nixon and Creighton Abrams and the Joint Chiefs that somewhat mitigated this. But, you know, the Johnson administration was notorious for micromanagement. And Johnson said a lot of stupid things, but this actually had some merit, not merit in terms

of any sort of correctness or or inherent value but in terms of its accuracy of the situation you know he bragged around the time of uh the first operation linebacker i think that uh you know i like not a single bomb you know is deployed over vietnam without my say so you know and that that's a that's a disaster situation i mean mission oriented attacks that could carry the day anyway whether you're talking about air combat, ground combat, or naval warfare, you know, the Vermeck and the Kriegsmarine and the Luftafah taught us that, if we didn't already know. But there was all these, there's this, even a president who wasn't prone to that kind of micromanagement,

there was this long and confused chain of command originating with the White House down to the joint chiefs of staff, which can almost be considered as a single entity by virtue of what was designated the National Command Authority. You know, then there was Commander-in-Chief Pacific region, you know, and from the days of MacArthur, you know, the Commander-in-Chief Pacific

acted sort of as Lord of his own fief. you know you had the Marine Corps who as much as Marine brass consumes themselves support it to anybody it was Sync Pack and the presidents they did not coordinate well with the Air Force and increasingly the Air Force based on its heavy strike capability and its diverse litany of platforms was edging out out the Navy in some ways in the Pacific. You know, and then on the scene, you had defense intelligence, which I make this point a lot,

had really edged out CIA as sort of the spear point of U.S. intelligence, you know, and then you had Navy intelligence, and you had these, this molded of layers of the Department of State and the NSA. And then you had President's cabinet of these guys like Schlesinger and, Kissinger. I mean, Kissinger is a great man. I'm not suggesting that he was the Creighton that Schlesinger was, but he had a tremendous ego, and Kissinger believed he should be giving orders as the most qualified man on deck. Schlesinger, who's secretary of defense, resented the national security advisor in the Department of State anyway. He personally hated Kissinger, and he viewed his president, Ford, as a moron. You know, he had Ford was totally out of his element. and realized that he wasn't being respected like he felt he should be.

So, you know, he was operating with an eye to proceed with a show of force, you know, not just because there was tremendous pressure in the wake of American defeats in theater, but also just as a matter of masculine pride and things. You know, the whole thing was a mess. it was a convergence of kind of the worst possible circumstances for something like that. But back to my ag, as it had been commissioned 31 years before, it was what you'd think of as sort of like a rusted Hulk,

like not quite a tramp steamer, but, you know, it shipped as kind of at the end of its active service life. it had around 275 shipping containers filled a general cargo bound for Thailand um it's when it was captured it was traveling at 12 and a half knots

um about 60 miles in the Cambodian coast and it's a little farther from Thailand um And Vietnam was to its east. And again, the Cambodians were patrolling these avenues of maritime ingress because they were anticipating an assault by the Vietnamese. It was at that point, as they were rounding an adolph an adolph an adolphing.

or probably like this, this compared to a tiny atoll or land spit called Polo Y. As they rounded it, the first Camer Rouge boat emerged. And several crewmates began like squeezing off rounds and their clashnikovs. And then one man trained an RPG on the Mayegas. and then the second boat, both of which were PCF designated, or that was their designation, which is an acronym for patrol crap fast,

co-coly swift boats. You know, and again, they were designed basically for river patrol duty, but they were seaworthy. And the, several of these boats had fallen in the community-roo's hands as the law and all government went down. And again,

I, the, generally these, these PCF boats are mounted with 50 cals. And as the second boat emerged, the 50 cal was, was trained on the meagas. You know, so the Miller was the captain immediately, you know, raised his hands, made it clear that this was a civilian vessel. The Cameroos commander was the first aboard. as is generally the case with communist navies. The implication being the captain goes first. He doesn't send enlisted men.

It's part of the egalitarian sensibility. Technically, the Khmer Rouge elected their officers, like the early People's Republic, the People's Liberation Army did. In actual fact, you know, these decisions came from above, but this was the mythology that reign. The Cameroge Battalion Commander,

who was, you know, the officer in command, who boarded was a man by the name of Samien. He was in his mid-30s, which was somewhat old for a Cameroge combat commander. The rank and file tended to be teenagers. platoon leaders and company commanders and battalion commanders tended to be men in their mid-20s. Samin didn't speak English or French. So when they get into the movie, the killing fields, even Cameroos troopers who did speak French would claim they didn't because that could get you shot.

You know, because that could potentially get you categorize as one of the old people who couldn't be reeducated in the the new ways, you know, and whose mind had been corrupted by the, by the colonial element. So Miller had taken to basically communicating with Sam Yen by, you know, pantomime, adding to the tension. When Samian inspected the radar, the telemotor, the gyropilot, and then the engine room, you know, he has to see the chart room. He had his manifesto search of the ship. And once he looked at the navigation chart and the manifest, he became convinced there was a civilian ship.

But he was under orders to hold it until, you know, it was clear what its true mission orientation was. So Samien took. took the navigation shirt and he pointed to Polo Y which was that atoll I just mentioned and um it became to Miller that that's where they were going um and uh

one of the gunboats was tethered to the Mayagas and uh they were instructed to follow to proloombo polo white um third made David English at this point point, David C. English, he was the Marine veteran that I mentioned. He was 28 years old. He'd been wounded twice, so being shot in Vietnam. He was a muscular 250 pounds, like just a, you know, a real badass. He managed to get off an SOS because the radio man by a sailover name of Sparrow. suggested that he sent out an SOS by way of the telegraph unit.

So it's not to alert the Cambodians. English pressed his luck, went down to the radio shack, and sent out an SOS in as a subtle voce as he could. and the May Day went out and it was it was received by um first by a a Philippine tugboat which was then relayed to an Australian vessel um when the Australians responded um English replied call the American authorities call anywhere you can you know we've been hijacked and um English said, you may be the last English voice I hear for a long time.

Apparently, the Australian said, things can't be that bad, mate. And English, like, said, like, look, you know, a pair of thing, look, motherfucker, Ruby captured by the Camero Rouge. I'm probably going to be dead within hours, you know, fuck you. But, um, ultimately the, the, uh, the, the message was relayed, um, it bounced around until it finally reached an outpost, had a direct line, the Commander-in-Chief Pacific, which was then relayed to the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon.

And the NMCC, for those that don't know, it took on more important during the Carter administration as continuity of government measures were implemented and we talked about what those entailed before. But the NMCC obviously its primary role was always nuclear command and control of strategic forces and event of general war with the Soviet Union. But crisis response was part of the. of its core mission and um the uh the red phone of myth and lore you see in the movies the line between you know washington and moscow that was in the nmcc compound in the pentagon and um so the message that mayag is being hijed was relayed to the nmcc which was appropriate and then you know the the president and the joint chiefs of staff who for

Well, for ethical purposes are one command element in terms of, you know, the designated national command authority, and that becomes important, whether it meets the road, under conditions like this. The, as the, as the Camer Rouge and the Mayague is, Tetherdudum made their way, You know, again, the Cameroos didn't realize that an SOS had gone out. They had no idea. Anybody knew that the Magas had been captured. And presumably, too, you know, again, the Camer Rouge really weren't sophisticated on their understanding of how American commanding control worked.

You know, considering that they've been fighting in theater. But, I mean, Cambodia was a backwater, frankly. and they didn't have the experience of fighting the Americans that Hanoi did and the NLF did. So they would have been ignorant about the immediacy of a response, even in those days. The initial message that the NMCC got was, you know, May I guess have been fired upon and bordered by Cambodian forces at 9 degrees. degrees 48 minutes north, 102 degrees, 53 minutes east. Ship is being towed when I own Cambodian port.

When the Situation Room at the White House convened what amounted to an emergency war cabinet, the first briefing was by Brent Skowcroft, who was then the acting Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs. but Skowcroft, he had outsides clout because he was a very serious guy. You know, and he, that remained in national security circles until the Bush 41 administration. So essentially, Skowcroft had first crack at the president to steer decisionism in terms of the response. Scowcroft, he'd been an Air Force lieutenant general.

He came through West Point and then came up in his actual career through the Army Air Force. Because there was no Air Force Academy then. You know, the Air Forces were part of the Army. Scowcroft had a very up-to-the-minute conceptual horizon of a strategic situation, pretty much always. he ran out before that there'd been recent Cambodian incidents at sea before the present situation that this was becoming a pattern in assessing the mood of the Cambodians. Skokroft said that he couldn't comment conclusively for various reasons, including fact that, again, the identities that Cameroos leaders weren't even, hadn't even been verified.

but what was clear was that the Khmer Rouge were killing huge numbers of people. They'd expelled Westerners from Phnom Pen immediately. A huge percentage of the population, the Khmer population was being forced out of the city into the countryside, and pretty much everybody who'd been in any way affiliated with the law and all government, including their families, were being shot. you know um so skullcroft said you know we can we can assume that these men are going to be murdered you know um and it's imperative uh especially considering the state of american credibility in theater that we we not let this stand even if even if these men are already dead we've got to retaliate

and we've got to retaliate with with with with extreme force um kissinger over at department of state here out of the office at 8 a.m. on grounds that there was a twice weekly staff meeting kissinger hadn't yet been advised of what was underway because pretty much nobody had been outside of the um you know national military command center Um, so Kissinger arrives. Um, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia, Jay Owen, Zerlin Jr.

advises them that an American ship has been captured, about 100 miles off the coast. It's proceeding into Sahanukville under Cameroo's Guard. Uh, Kissinger was astonished. Apparently, he exclaimed, how can that be? You know, and why isn't anything being done about it? You know, and, um,

Zerlund said that he, this is one of the few times you saw Kinsinger seem genuinely frazzled, like almost panicked. He started to excoriate Zerhellen, and he was informed that, you know, he himself had only been advised of what was going on, you know, two minutes previously. Kissinger immediately called Skowcroft and closed the meeting that he was providing over. He told Skokroft, you damn well cannot leave Cambodia capture a ship 100 miles at sea and do nothing.

Kisendra is emphatic from jump that, like, there needed to be a general assault on Cambodia with maximum forces available to impose as much attrition as possible. And frankly, I think that was the correct call. What happened was disastrous, but the forces deployed, although they should have been far more overwhelming, even though that wasn't possible vis-à-vis force structure and basing options in theater, I mean, thankfully, a lot of hurt was put on the Camero Rouge, but Kissinger was absolutely right.

And one of the many things that people burn Kissinger and effigy over is, I found out lately because in the very early 2000s, the number of books got written about the Kotang incident. And some guy claims incredibly that it's Kissinger's fault that these men were left behind because he ordered them be left behind. because I guess Kissinger just does mean things in his spare time and like rubs his hands together. Like I, you know, um, well, I'm pretty sure he probably rubbed his hands together a few times. Considering his heritage, but you know. And like, look, I'm not going to say that like Kissinger was like was a nice guy or that, you know, people should, you know, consider him some great humanitarian. But, you know, he was, um, he was a brilliant Cold War strategist. He was a great national security advisor.

and I mean, look, like, if the if the criticisms of his character and of his policy dispositions, particularly in his crisis, if they were grounded in reasonable in metrics, okay, fine, you can criticize it if you want,

you know, as long as you make the argument correctly, but there there's a, there's really a derangement syndrome around Kissinger, you know, and that's, and like I said, when I met the guy, you know, I didn't know him. My dad did, but you know, I met him. I don't know. I had a lot of respect for him because

he was on the warpath in 1999, you know, against the Clinton administration and the unprovoked assault in Serbia. You know, he, um, he was a, and he was a voice in the wilderness then because nobody listened to people like us who had a sensible view of these things, you know, so I had respect for him anyway, because I, I, I, I, had respect for him anyway, because I, I, I, read his books and stuff, but I developed, you know, even more respect for him on account of that. And he, I mean, by that point, he had plenty of money. And, you know, he wasn't doing that for cloud. He already had clout.

You know, he was doing it out of principle. You know, like I said, it's like, okay, it's like a big deal. You know, he was criticizing an unprovoked war. But it's like, but 26 years ago, people didn't. do that. You know, it was, you were, you were looked at at some sort of crank or, you know, some, or, or somebody who wasn't with the program or, you know, you were shouted down and called names, you know, that wasn't something that was acceptable. So I, I mean, not, not that I ever weighed my own conclusions against what the consensus was, but I, I did feel validated

when guys like Kizinger started coming out and saying like, no, this is, this is not just ethically indefensible, but it's strategically irrational and it's going to result in a disaster because, you know, and that was the moment at which all of the goodwill that had been accrued by Bush and Baker was destroyed then. you know that's when that that's that's that's that's when um america totally completely pissed away its victory dividend in the cold war it was indefensible you know so i'll i'll die in that periburial hill um you know kissinger did a lot of good things and even if he was a total son of a bitch okay fine but he you know he was a um he was a great um he was a great um he was a strategic thinker and the son of soviet split which was absolutely critical um was uh would not

have been possible without kissinger i mean kitchensger and nixon um collaboratively facilitated debt but you know kisinger was an essential um was an essential element um but uh yeah moving on the uh And at the same time, the National Military Command Center, as soon as, you know, like I said, they were the first point of contact, really, as was part of the course in those days in a crisis. They weren't resting on their laurels. Admiral Norrell Gaylor, he was commander-in-chief, he was Pacific Command based in Hawaii. He immediately began launching reconnaissance flights in order to locate. the Mayegas, the planes deployed with these with these surveillance

turboprop planes that I believe were unarmed. I think they might have had some kind of strikes that could divert heat-seeking Sam's and some type of air-air missiles, but it was but they were you know a surveillance aircraft. and this is at the same time Ford he convened an emergency meeting of the National Security Council at 12.5 p.m.

with kind of this was the entire sort of A-team on deck of the Ford cabinet. It was Kissinger, Skowcroft, Nelson Rockefeller, who was vice president, Schlesinger, his secretary, Defense Deputy Defense Secretary William Clements William Colby who was CIA director assistant secretary of state ingersoll and um the nsci staff member who was the east Asia expert was at w richard smicer and of course um rumsfeld was sort of presiding with things because he was the white house chief of staff at the time And they had an Air Force General in deck, too, whose name alludes me. Because the understanding was, you know, again, that Air Force firepower needed to be brought to bear.

And the Air Force had a lot more cloud in those days. And the Air Force had a huge cloud because of strategic air command and things. But, you know, they had... The truly heavy conventional capability remained in the hands of the Air Force, you know, and air operations generally. You know, you wouldn't, naval aviation always had a say in a combined arms operation, but, you know, Air Force, the Air Force brass was king in terms of devising. air operations, especially in those days. Kissinger and Schlesinger began

budding heads with what to, what should be done to free the crew. You know, Kissinger said, look, we need to make a strong statement as possible. You know, and it was Kissinger's idea to go through the Chinese.

And he's like, and Kissinger, realized the political implications. He's like, look, we got to do this now. And he said even if it's a fool's errand, it needs to be on record that we communicated to the Chinese, that there'll be dire consequences of the crew's not released. And then he's like, you know,

the Chinese totally snub us. It'll be on record that this communication was issued. And then we can get some credit, even if, you know, they're released, you know, completely spontaneously and the message isn't even delivered. and Kisinger further said like we need some kind of show of force he's like even if the crew has already been

released you know he's like he's like maybe we can we can seize the Cambodian ship on the high seas and like we got to punish them somehow Schlesinger's retort was I didn't even think that they came home he's have any high seas ships um

Kistinger then said well we at least got to you know mine the harbor at Kumpong Somme um finally Schlesinger realized he was going to be upstage if he didn't push for a military solution of equal severity. So then Schlesinger began pulling metaphorical rank in the secret defense role and said, I can get, I can get, you know, I can get mines in the harbor within 24 hours. The, then the Navy in the Air Force started budding heads because, uh, the Navy.

nearest Navy aircraft carrier wouldn't be near the scene of Kampong Somme for 24 hours. Air Force General Jones then weighed in and said, yeah, well, B-52s can deliver mines just as well, and there's B-52s in Thailand. You know, and they've retorted, yeah, well, the mines were in Subic. And this went on. and the inner service rivalry and the confusion over command and control and integration of operations became a huge shit show. But Kaczynser correctly pegged Schlesinger, among other things, in addition to being a weasel, Schlesinger was kind of a pussy.

Schlesinger was repulsed politically at the idea of re-engaging in Indochina in a substantial military capacity. so soon after the Vietnam disaster. Kissinger was disturbed by this because now, like the second defense, obviously in those they set the tenor for the pace of operations at command authority level. And on top of it at the Pentagon at this time was a mess. And the entire military is a mess.

like Kissinger feared that the Pentagon being less than enthusiastic anyway, he was going to drag their feet. And Kissinger also, Kissinger had been in the army during World War II in an intelligence role, in part because of his linguistic fluency in German, but also because of his Jewish heritage. That's who they favored. But he was not, he was a very unmilitary. military person. You know, the best of times they didn't have great offices with the military.

You know, so this was aside from the intrinsic hazards of the hostage situation and the volatility in theater

if America found itself in a general war with the Khmer Rouge and God forbid, you know, finding itself engaged once again with, you know, the people's army of Vietnam. There was also this in-house hostility within the presidential cabinet itself. And if a real executive, like a Nixon or an Eisenhower or a Kennedy, who whatever is false, like proved to have brass balls in a crisis, an executive like that would have been able to quash these tensions.

and generate a quorum and build confidence they're in. But, I mean, Ford was not the man to do that. You know, he was the worst, he was kind of the worst possible man to having the role. You know, I mean, I, I said, I'm that stupid aircraft carrier being named after Ford. Like, Ford's real legacy is, you know, how, like, I said at live Chevy Chase would play Gerald Ford. And you always be doing, like, dumb slapstick shit. Yeah, just falling down the stairs. Yeah, like, and, like, Ford actually did, like, trip down the stairs at Air Force One.

And, like, he'd mispronounce words. And, like, he, and Chevy Chase kind of looked like him. Something like that doesn't, that, that didn't help, man. You know, like, my earliest memories as a little kid, you know, like, very early 80s. Remember, Saturday, like, reruns. And in my mind, like, like, Ford's associated with Chevy Chase. And, like, that's about it. I mean, obviously, I don't really remember.

as a president, but the point being, that's not, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, speaks for itself, but, um, but yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, and part two, we'll deal with the battle of Kotang. And then we'll, we'll, we'll wrap on our, our Cambodia series with that.

All right, man. Everyone, go over to Thomas's substack, Real Thomas 777.7.com. Check out his website, Thomas 7777. dot com. The T is a 7. You can connect with Thomas there and think Thomas drops all of everything he does, everything he appears on is on the website. So go check that out. Yeah. And I've, I've been uploading about to stuff to my YouTube channel too. And I'm making use of the Rumble platform. And I'm home to, it's a mirror basically of my YouTube. But I'm going to start dropping fresh stuff there too.

So yeah, that's what I got. Yeah, thank you, man. Awesome. Thank you, Thomas.