Simultaneously, Nixon began a secret bombing campaign on Cambodia’s eastern border in 1969. The Pentagon was convinced that destroying Vietnamese communist sanctuaries inside Cambodia would turn the war around, or at least buy Washington time for an honorable withdrawal. Code-named Menu, the air campaign lasted fourteen months. The US flew more than 3,500 B-52 raids over neutral Cambodia, rationalizing the escalation because North Vietnam had already broken Cambodia’s neutral status. Villages were scattered in the area, but MACV did not release figures on the numbers killed. The Cambodian government filed protests against the bombing to the United Nations but to no avail.27
THE NEW PRESSURES from Nixon’s war escalated Cambodia’s internal political crisis. Cambodia’s elite were frightened by Sihanouk’s openness to the North Vietnamese communists who were encroaching more deeply into Cambodian territory. They were shipping supplies to the Viet Cong through Cambodia’s port and then trucking the aid overland. The prince himself became more desperate in his search for a balance that eluded him.
Exhausted, Sihanouk took his first vacation in three years, leaving for a French spa in March 1970. While he was away three officials—his defense minister, a royal prince, and the head of the National Assembly—led a coup d’état and overthrew him, declaring Cambodia a republic, the Khmer Republic.
For the first time in fifteen years, Sihanouk was no longer in charge. The new leaders immediately ended the country’s neutrality. Lon Nol, the former defense minister and the leading voice of the new government, ordered the closure of the embassies of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong within forty-eight hours and the withdrawal of their troops. The US congratulated the new regime and offered generous aid. Most Cambodians presumed the United States had promised Lon Nol support before the coup.28
Fighting broke out on Cambodia’s eastern border when Vietnamese communist troops refused to retreat. Lon Nol publicly appealed to any country to help rid Cambodia of the Vietnamese communist menace. On cue, President Nixon answered and in May invaded Cambodia, without giving the Lon Nol government advance notice. In this haphazard fashion, Cambodia became the last country brought into America’s war.
Sihanouk’s worst nightmare had come to pass. Nixon pushed the American war into Cambodia and thereby opened the door to the Khmer Rouge.
DESPITE THE TURMOIL, Webb felt at home in Phnom Penh. The insistent heat, the slow smiles, and the metallic scent of insecticide spray were as familiar as the morning military briefings, where successful operations dissolved into routs from one day to the next.
By the time she arrived in late July 1970, the American military strategy had already backfired. Bombing the Vietnamese communists on the eastern border had not pushed them back into North Vietnam. Instead, they had moved deeper into Cambodia, capturing half the country. The Khmer National Armed Forces, known as FANK in its French acronym, were outclassed. Bloated with new student recruits, many inadequately trained on the capital city’s golf course, FANK soldiers fell back or were mowed down in province after province. The American forces withdrew by the end of July and returned to Vietnam, leaving FANK on its own except for American air support.
The superior North Vietnamese army remained to fight FANK, which allowed the neophyte Khmer Rouge time to train and recruit.
The resulting chaos hit journalists hard. As front lines disappeared in the relentless advance of the Vietnamese, journalists were caught in the middle. No theater of the Vietnam War proved more dangerous than the Cambodia campaign. In South Vietnam, US military helicopters ferried journalists to and from battlegrounds and US military hospitals cared for them if they were injured. The huge American presence provided the intelligence and information that kept most journalists from making fatal mistakes.
Congress mandated a small US presence in Cambodia. Lawmakers had never authorized an American expansion. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—the casus belli in Vietnam—only gave permission to fight there. Nixon countered that his role as commander in chief allowed him to send in American troops. Furious, the Senate passed the Cooper-Church Amendment, which forbade any new commitment of US troops to a wider war beyond Vietnam without the consent of the US Congress. Nixon withdrew ground forces by the end of July, making the issue moot. Then Congress passed a law forbidding US military even to advise Cambodians in the war.29
As a result, journalists were on their own. For transport they rented Mercedes sedans once used for tourists at the temples of Angkor Wat. They relied on military intelligence from the Cambodian military, delivered in French, since there was no MACV. The American and French embassies were helpful, but they could barely keep up with the rapidly moving war. One misunderstanding could send journalists down the wrong highway straight to an ambush and their deaths.
The casualty rate rose astronomically. Twenty-two foreign journalists were killed or were missing and presumed dead in the first four months of the Cambodian campaign. That nearly matched the casualty rate of twenty-four journalists killed for the entire six years of the Vietnam War. Cambodia became known as the shooting gallery.30
In a single week, nine journalists working for American television networks were killed, including Welles Hangen and Yoshihiko Waku of NBC News, who were captured and killed by the Khmer Rouge, and George Syvertsen and Tomoharu Iishi of CBS News, who were captured and killed after their jeep hit a mine.31 Among the photographers who went missing and were presumed dead were Sean Flynn, the photographer son of Errol Flynn, Dana Stone, and the Frenchman Gilles Caron, all of whom had worked with Catherine Leroy in Vietnam.
Journalists took the obvious precautions: they traveled with buddies, gathered as much intelligence as possible, drove only during daylight, checked with villagers along the highways, and turned back at the first sign of a newly emptied village. But in the hothouse of the Hotel Royale, ghoulish rituals prevailed. Journalists took one another’s photographs in case they were needed for an obituary. They counted off in the morning before they left and counted again when everyone had returned.
Webb became a fanatic about preparations. She hired the best translators—always the French speakers. She had the car packed early, before the ground mist had evaporated. Maps in hand, she stuck to her plans, resisting suspicious gossip, reported what she could, and returned to the bungalow to write her day story. By dark, she was sitting around the hotel pool with her colleagues—drink and cigarette in hand.
Webb’s boss was as careful as she was. Jesse Frank Frosch arrived in Cambodia from UPI’s Atlanta bureau. He had served as an army intelligence officer in Vietnam, studying and appraising the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong military. As an officer, he had raised red flags about the initial army reports out of My Lai, warning his superiors that the body count was far too high for a village that was home to mostly women and old men.32
As a journalist, Frosch had similar instincts as Webb. They were almost the same age, with deep if different war experiences and an appreciation for the tactical details of military operations. They also loved the region.
One time the two were stuck on the perimeter of a rice paddy near the Mekong River, waiting for a boat to ferry them across to report on an ongoing battle. American jets streaked across the sky toward the fighting.
They watched as the planes struck targets hidden in dense scrub jungle. Several planes swung back west to their bases in Thailand, and one plane began dropping napalm. Webb and Frosch heard shrieks and giggles coming toward them. Small children had jumped off their water buffalo and were running across the rice paddies toward the bright colors of billowing clouds of fire and smoke from the napalm explosion. “They are running, laughing at that pretty napalm,” Webb said with alarm. The two of them chased the children, racing to stop them. Frosch didn’t want to frighten them so he laughed when tackling them to the ground, turning the rescue into a game of rice-paddy rugby. Webb did the same and the children returned to their buffalo, Webb shaking her head at “the terrible innocence of those children running towards the napalm, laughing
with joy at the pretty colors.”33
Lon Nol launched his first major offensive against the North Vietnamese in August 1970. Named Chenla I after one of Cambodia’s former empires, the offensive’s goal was to recover a vast region east and north of Phnom Penh. FANK troops pushing down Highway 6 were successful until the North Vietnamese retaliated with their heavy guns. FANK then turned north on Highway 7 toward the provincial town of Kompong Thom.
Both sides knew this first offensive could determine how the war would be fought and won.
With such pressure on the outcome, Webb and Frosch took turns writing the main story in Phnom Penh, while the other reported from the front line. On September 19, they reported that some four thousand Cambodian troops were pitted against six hundred North Vietnamese in a match clearly weighted in FANK’s favor. Yet the Cambodian commander was quoted saying he delayed the fighting because “we wanted American warplanes to bomb the VC a little longer.” FANK made only incremental gains.34
Cambodia had become the dominant regional news story. The wire services—UPI, AP, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse—were under intense pressure to cover the news well and quickly. Whenever they failed to be the first with a headline, they received a “rocket” from headquarters, asking them why a rival wire service had beat them and to match the scoop. To be more competitive, UPI had temporarily assigned Kyoichi Sawada, their best photographer, to cover Chenla. A Japanese citizen, Sawada had won a Pulitzer for his photograph of a Vietnamese mother desperately swimming across a river with her children to save them from a firefight.
By October, thick monsoon rains were interrupting the offensive. During a lull in the northern push, Frosch and Sawada decided to check out reports of new fighting south of Phnom Penh. They drove down Highway 2 on the morning of October 28 toward Takeo and the Kirirom Pass. By evening they had not returned. By morning there was little hope.
Webb refused to join the search party. Khauv Bun Kheang, UPI’s office manager and right-hand man, went by himself, steering through the rain. He saw the abandoned car first, badly shot up and crashed on the highway. He climbed out, waded into the flooded paddy field, and found the bodies of Sawada and Frosch, lying facedown. He turned them over and saw their chests riddled with bullets. They had been killed execution style.35
At the teletype machine, Webb could barely pound the letters: R-e-g-r-e-t t-o i-n-f-o-r-m y-o-u.”36
She sent more details to UPI headquarters. Then raided ice from the local Coca-Cola factory to preserve the bodies in Phnom Penh’s morgue.
A woman in Indiana and a woman in Tokyo were awakened with the news that they were now widows. Two children in Indiana had lost their father.
Webb was named the new bureau chief in Phnom Penh, automatically vaulting her to the status as a senior reporter of the Cambodian War. She was now one of the most influential voices on the war. Her UPI dispatches set the news agenda. As far as anyone knew, she was also the first woman to ever head a news bureau in a war zone, but that went unmentioned.
Instead, Webb, unmoored by the death of her colleague, lamented that her promotion had required Frosch’s death, that she had “stepped into the shoes of a dead man.”
FANK eventually lost the Chenla offensive, although the government considered it a draw. The North Vietnamese largely repulsed the advance in the north and east and then, to emphasize their prowess, infiltrated the capital and blew up most of the fleet of aircraft of the Cambodian Air Force. That didn’t stop Lon Nol from holding a lavish parade in Phnom Penh to celebrate his troops’ “victory” and plotting a second offensive to be named Chenla II.
EACH NIGHT, LIKE clockwork, birds announced sunset with singing and squawking as they roosted in the city’s thick canopy of trees. Streetlights lit the main boulevards and strings of electric bulbs went on for the last customers at the open-air markets. Families ate their evening meals around oil lamps during the coolest hours of the day. Skinny dogs and scrawny cats scratched in the dirt for scraps.
Then at nine o’clock, the city was shut down under the decree of a permanent military curfew. All the streets emptied. Armed soldiers and police took up positions behind nighttime barricades.
This was the bewitching hour when Phnom Penh belonged solely to Cambodia’s elite and the foreign community. The curfew didn’t apply to them. They traveled freely, and their official credentials saw them waved through roadblocks. The magic wand for journalists was their carte special pour les journalists de passage, or press card.37
More nights than she would have wished, Kate Webb was out past curfew to attend an official event. Embassies around town sent her embossed cards inviting her to dinners and buffets where she would be the rare attractive unmarried young woman who knew more about the state of the battlefield and some of the politics than the diplomats. As UPI’s representative, Webb did her duty even though she wrote in her diary she felt like Alice in Wonderland walking through the looking glass when she stepped out of her filthy fatigues, showered, and slipped into a custom-tailored dress made from Cambodian silk: her tenue de ville, as requested on the invitations.38
Webb balanced the foreign embassy evenings of wine and cognac with occasional visits to the local opium den, Chantal’s. She had been a founding patron, along with two British journalists, Jon Swain, who left for Saigon, and Kent Potter, who would be killed in a helicopter crash over Laos in early 1971.
Chantal’s became the equivalent of a high-end speakeasy, where visitors imbibed opium and quietly let their hair down. When they knocked at the door of the wooden house on stilts, they were met by Chantal, an outgoing, softly plump Sino-Cambodian woman trained by Madame Chum, who had operated the city’s oldest fumerie. Chantal’s welcomed all foreigners if they passed her personal test of respectability. No Cambodians.
Once inside, everyone changed into sarongs: French rubber plantation owners, conservationists of Angkor-era temples, officials of European embassies, Asian diplomats, writers, and foreign journalists. Lying on bamboo mats with their heads on pillows, the normal social pecking order abandoned, guests spent the night gossiping about the war and temporarily erasing the craziness locked in their heads. An assistant knelt beside each mat with a pipe, carefully cooking a plug of opium over a small oil lamp and pushing it, bubbling, into the pipe for smoking. No fan of opium, Webb usually drank whiskey. She came to listen to the conversation, which at times was salacious, such as a discussion about a French diplomatic wife who had a female lover, and often silly, such as the rumor that the Khmer Rouge tied grenades to roosters and let them loose in the marketplace. The French could be counted on to explain away the war with their old colonial tropes. “The Vietnamese are the fierce ones, like vin rouge: the Cambodians are vin rose and the Lao—obviously vin blanc.”
Chantal would poke her head around the corner and shush the laughter in French: Silence ici la. Too much noise and the neighbors might complain, and the police would arrive asking for big bribes, since opium was illegal in wartime.
One night, Webb brought along a new friend: Sylvana Foa, a graduate of Barnard College who dropped out of Columbia University graduate school. Foa had made a detour to Cambodia after being denied entry to Hong Kong for her research and had shown up at the UPI office looking for work in November 1970. Webb liked the smart young woman and gave her a hand around town. After Foa published a respectable piece in the Christian Science Monitor, Webb gave her advice that jump-started Foa’s career. She told Foa to leave Phnom Penh and go to Saigon where she would find work immediately. With Webb’s recommendation, Foa was hired as a stringer for Newsweek the day after arriving in Saigon at the end of 1970. Later, she would be back in Phnom Penh and return the favor to Webb.39
PRESIDENT NIXON AND Henry Kissinger had planned the invasion of Cambodia with one overriding concern: to withdraw American troops and exit Vietnam in an honorable fashion.
With the North Vietnamese fighting the enlarged war, Kissinger believed that the Cambodian communists would fall in line when the time c
ame and accept whatever peace was reached with North Vietnam with the approval of China. He did not consider the possibility that Cambodia would act independently and dangerously upset his calculations for Indochina.
The first surprise came from Prince Sihanouk. After years of neutrality, he took sides and joined the communists, becoming the titular head of the Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk, who considered himself a descendant of the great Angkor emperor Jayavarman VII, could not separate his destiny from his country’s. China offered him a chance to fight back against those who had overthrown him and return to power as head of his former enemies, the Khmer Rouge.40 The two were joined in an unholy alliance called the National United Front of Kampuchea or FUNK in its French acronym. FUNK brought together royalists and democrats loyal to the prince and the Khmer Rouge who despised him. Dark jokes were made about FUNK versus FANK.
By giving Sihanouk pride of place in the alliance, the Khmer Rouge used his name and prestige in a recruitment campaign across Cambodia’s villages, calling on the farmers to join the prince against his usurpers. In a single stroke, the relatively unknown Khmer Rouge became the strongest opposition army under the patronage of Sihanouk. The prince held court from his Beijing villa, welcoming diplomats searching for peace and answering questions from reporters who were told Sihanouk’s was the only voice to speak for the Khmer Rouge. The prince remained where he felt most comfortable, as a potent figure on the world stage.
It’s unclear what Nixon and Kissinger thought Sihanouk would do: Go into gilded retirement in France? Kissinger largely ignored the prince since he considered China the puppet master pulling the strings of the Cambodian communists and because the North Vietnamese military controlled the Cambodian battlefield. When the Chinese advised him to cultivate the prince as leverage in peace efforts with the Khmer Rouge, Kissinger dismissed the idea. He learned too late that China alone could not bring the Khmer Rouge to the peace table.
You Don't Belong Here Page 20