Chuck Bryant

calls together the Washington Special Action Group, which was a task force that was formed in 69 out of Vietnam to deal with like sort of any emergencies like this that came up.

And it's Henry Kissinger.

So he's like, we should bomb the barracks.

Like he wants to flatten the barracks of the guards that attack them and react really strongly and send a, you know, a big message that this will not stand.

Yeah, I mean, I can kind of understand that impulse.

He was apparently the only one in the special action group that wanted to respond with a violent action.

And the reason why was because this is such a flashpoint still today.

But at this time, I mean, it was like we were still in the middle of the Cold War.

So to us, not only was this North Korea, this is also China and the USSR right behind them, right?

So if you sent a missile into the JSA against the North Koreans, there was a better than even chance probably that you might spark a nuclear war, World War III.

Yeah.

And luckily, cooler heads prevail.

But Kissinger had a he was probably a little paranoid, I would guess.

He was he's very widely reviled, including by me.

So I'm pretty sure he was at least a little paranoid.

I mean, he started out in the Nixon administration, for goodness sake.

But his position was also that this was a provocation by the North to test America's resolve because it was an election year.

They were trying to interfere with the election to make the point of Gerald Ford's opponent, Jimmy Carter, who was saying, we need to get troops out of Korea.

We don't have any business being there anymore.

So Kissinger thought this was North Korea doing this to basically show that the Americans didn't belong here anymore.