“We must move. Now!” Eng was emphatic.
“No!” Nang was more so.
“To knock off a few yuons behind their attackers won’t stop their drive.”
“To rush head-on into the attack won’t stop it either. Move them to the canal.”
“That’ll put our backs to the water. We won’t be able to move.”
“Exactly, Eng,” Nang whispered, soothing, smooth, insane. “Exactly. On desperate ground their only hope to live will be to fight more savagely than you and I ever conceived.”
The fighting was now very close. Viet Namese and Khmer riflemen exchanged shots point-blank. On the canal levee two dozen men were battling hand to hand. Still, two hundred meters north of the canal, Sullivan, Suong and a small, hardened, tired core covered their section, increasing their deliberate rifle fire, shooting only on semiautomatic to conserve their nearly exhausted ammunition. Despite constant attempts Sullivan had been unable to make radio contact with the ever-changing aircraft and he’d given up. Perhaps, he thought in a momentary lull, it’s the battery.
“You are a brave man,” Suong said to Sullivan as the Khmer reloaded. He smiled, too emotionally spent to hide the warmth.
“You too, my friend.” Sullivan grabbed Suong’s arm and squeezed, then let go and raised his head back above the dike.
“But you, Captain. You are braver. After all, this is my country. Only you few Americans who are here and fight for Cambodia understand. Only you care. Where’s the rest of the free world?”
“Whoa! Look! Another!”
Suong poked up. The murk of the dark paddy below was broken by a dozen floating corpses. “Where?”
“South. There. We’ve got a hole.”
“Eh!” Suong undipped a grenade from his belt. He and Sullivan crept-sprinted below the berm. Suong pulled the pin, cocked his arm. An NVA rifleman fired a burst. Suong threw. Rounds tinked at Suong’s waist. Sullivan fired at the flash. Suong dropped, collapsed beside him. The thrown grenade exploded. “You hit?” Sullivan spit the words.
“No.” Then Suong jerked, grasped at his belt. His last grenade had been armed by the rifle bullet. He ripped frantically. Sullivan fired on more enemy. Suong leaped over the dike. He crashed, sloshed screaming toward the NVA. The grenade stuck on his belt blew. The cell of NVA attackers stood, stunned. Sullivan fired a long burst, swept back and forth. The last mortar flare died. There was no more fire from the FANK position.
In the first predawn lightening of sky the NVA 209th began its mop-up operation. Hash skirmishes erupted along the roadway. Hans Mitterschmidt, securely surrounded by a full squad of NVA reserves plus his porter and two escort officers, proceeded methodically toward the twisted carriage of the bridge. Behind him; emerging from the 209th’s rear like dark pincers, two companies of armed black-clad boys advanced, enveloping the slower-moving Viets with their white foreign observer, advisor, strategist.
“Who are they?” Mitterschmidt demanded.
“Khmers, eh?” Lieutenant Thay shrugged.
“Didn’t they attack?”
“These browns”—Nam Thay spat disgustedly—“are cowards. You saw that.”
“It’s on film.”
Under the oil-slicked water of the last paddy before the wrecked bridge, John L. Sullivan sucked air through a reed, testing his ability to stay submerged. The water/rice surface was dark. The sky grayed from charcoal to ash. All about him he could hear the NVA mop-up, Viet Namese voices, light chatter. Soon, he thought, They’ll bomb this place to hell and back and blow these cocksuckers to shit. Me too. If the bastards don’t get me first.
Sullivan periscoped his head up for a look then ducked back under. The twenty-three-pound M-60 was an adequate anchor, yet again he popped up. In the several days he’d been in and out of the paddies the water had dropped six inches, to three and a half feet. How long could he hide? More voices. French! He dove, tried to raise only an ear, but it filled with water and he couldn’t hear.
“Now!” The scream was hysterical, incoherent Khmer. Every yothea fired. In the midst of 400 NVA riflemen and porters the surprise fire by 180 Krahom soldiers was devastating. Each yothea had prepicked targets. Before any Viet could react, a hundred died. Then rifle fire enmeshed all, all firing at all, all ducking, diving for cover, dying, suicide attack by black-clad boys storming up from the bridgehead and canal, down from paddies two hundred meters north, killing everything in their path, being killed by NVA troops on the highway firing from old, FANK-prepared positions.
Sullivan popped up. The fighting, to him, meant FANK reinforcements, FANK counterattack. What else could it be? He tried to determine the lines but sensed he was in the middle. He ducked under, excited, sucking air through the reed. He duck-walked underwater, under cover of thin mist, shattered stalks and shadowy earth.
Nam Thay dropped to his knees. The pain in his abdomen was horrible, odd, not severe but horrible in its fearsomeness. Things had crunched, blown in, out. He dared not look. His head fell forward. His eyes saw red, saw slick whitish tubes, split, spewing shit. He looked up. The was no sound. No pain. Nam Thay saw Mitterschmidt’s ankle protruding from the German’s boot, but saw no more of him. Nam Thay fell to his side. His knees drew up. Five meters away Mitterschmidt knelt on the leg without a foot. He screamed unintelligible, orders, then collapsed into the paddy.
Sullivan poked up. Twenty meters from him a man crashed into the water. Sullivan ducked. In his mind he shook his head. He’d seen a Caucasian with a camera. Fucking reporter, he thought. Fucking reporter. Have to stay under. He poked up. A boy dressed in a black uniform had the reporter by the hair. With a bayonet held in a bloody hand with but two fingers the boy stabbed the Caucasian’s throat then ripped out. Sullivan swallowed. He sank till his eyes were half below water. Names flashed. Sean Flynn. Dana Stone. The deserter McKinley Nolan. Who? Other black-uniformed children severed the head. Then with it they ran for the canal.
CAMBODIA: Factions, Influences and Military Disposition
HISTORICAL SUMMATION
Part 3 (1972-1974)
Prepared for
The Washington News-Times
J. L. Sullivan
April 1985
HOW DID THE REPUBLIC of Cambodia fall? What changes, what political events and tactical decisions, brought the rise of the Khmer Krahom?
The Battle of Chenla II was the Antietam, Gettysburg and Shenandoah of the Cambodian “civil” war. It marked the end of Lon Nol’s “Popular Crusade,” which had seen over 80,000 Khmer youths volunteer, in just the first months, to fight the Viet Namese Communists. Never again did FANK seriously attempt to dislodge any major opposing force. Nor did FANK ever mount a sustained counter-offensive, even though intelligence reports indicated dramatic tactical changes, changes which meant the national military could have retaken vast tracts of land virtually unopposed. Still, like the Confederate States in America 109 years earlier, the Khmer Republic held on, sometimes via the most heroic military actions, for three more torturous years.
The Battle of Chenla II—the military ramification of the storm set off by Hanoi’s early 1970 decision to accelerate its Campaign X to conquer Cambodia—raged until late December 1971. Then the fighting abruptly stopped, gave way to an unexpected lull, an eye in the storm, because North Viet Nam’s Communist leadership suddenly shifted its short-term political aims and thus its tactical disposition. With Free World public attention concentrating on Phnom Penh as if the city were all of Cambodia, Hanoi decided to temporarily drain its military forces from the Khmer countryside. Why, when the North Viet Namese Army was on the verge of toppling Phnom Penh, did Hanoi’s Politburo order this sudden abort? What did the ensuing drain-off of NVA troops, and the subsequent NVA disaster of the Easter offensive in South Viet Nam, mean for Cambodia and the Krahom movement? What effect did the Paris peace talks and the signed agreement have on the Cambodian nation?
And what events and pressures in the United States, France, South Viet Nam and China influenced a
ll the Khmer factions?
The behavior of the Khmer Krahom in the late months of 1971 deserves special attention. Its actions were omens foreshadowing not only the immediate future but a future beyond the second eye of the storm.
CHENLA II—BATTLEFIELD ACTIVITIES
The Battle of Chenla II raged until year’s end. On 2 November FANK forces counterattacked about Phum Pa Kham lifting the siege and driving the attacking North Viet Namese back into their plantation bases. In the counterattack, 291 Viet Namese were killed.
Five days later the NVA launched a new series of attacks west of Phnom Penh. On 10 November elements of these units shelled Pochentong Airport at Phnom Penh killing 25 civilians and soldiers, wounding 30, and destroying 9 aircraft. Cambodia’s main international radio transmitter west of the airport was hit by Communist sappers, leaving 19 Khmer dead and the nation radio-silent for hours.
At Rumlong on 13 November a task force of 400 FANK troops was mauled (370 killed) by advancing NVA units. A reinforcing column of 400 was slaughtered when it was fed piecemeal into the maw of Communist fire. Circumventing FANK’s column, NVA units from the Northern Corridor headed for Phnom Penh. On 16 November the NVA vanguard was temporarily halted ten miles from the capital by heavy U.S. and South Viet Namese bombings. Three days later Lon Nol, reversing his order of August, issued an urgent plea to South Viet Nam for ARVN assistance. On 22 November 25,000 South Viet Namese ground troops entered Cambodia. Meanwhile, the NVA attacked and overran a FANK column and garrisons about Baray on 1 and 2 December setting off the largest stampede of Khmer national troops of the war. Parts of Baray had been lost to the NVA in 1970. FANK had recaptured Baray early during Chenla II only to lose it all to the NVA division-size force. During this attack 10,000 FANK soldiers fled unrelenting NVA artillery fire. Within a week Radio Hanoi was claiming 12,000 FANK “soldiers” killed in this battle alone.
By 7 December, North Viet Namese artillery units on the front west of Phnom Penh, dug in in an arc about the capital, began renewed shelling of the city.
From the Northern Corridor the NVA advanced seven more miles. Refugees from the entire northern region deluged the already swamped capital. For a week the battle seesawed. FANK, its back to the wall, fought hard and gained small victories. On 11 December FANK abandoned Phnom Penh’s major defensive position, at Phnom Baset, only eight miles from the capital’s heart.
Then, only days later, the ARVN column with FANK reinforcements rolled into the capital zone under cover of U.S. air support. They found the NVA had withdrawn. Scattered fighting continued until 20 December.
The meaning of Chenla II for Lon Nol, his government and FANK can be found in 600 years of fatalism. Throughout the campaign Lon Nol slowly transformed the national battle into a mystical Buddhist-Brahmin campaign. Like the leaders of nearly all Khmer factions, he became swept up in the concepts of Khmer purity, the Khmer patriot and fanatical racial pride. Chenla II was the high point and then the breaking point. A new pessimism grabbed the nationals and this manifested itself in FANK’s never again seriously attempting to dislodge a major opposing force, in FANK’s not even gathering the intelligence which would have told the national military leaders that the NVA had pulled out and that FANK could have retaken many areas nearly unopposed. FANK’s force of 130,000 to 150,000 had not improved substantially since 1970. What it had gained in experience and better equipment, it had lost in morale. From the day the column at Baray broke, FANK’s offensive spirit, like that of the American Confederacy after Gettysburg, was destroyed.
Pessimism became depression. Without spirit, without hope, internal chaos became rampant. Eighty percent of Cambodia’s primary schools were closed. On 16 and 18 December 1971, anti-Lon Nol and antigovernment riots broke out in Phnom Penh. Though the capital was on the verge of collapse the government found the energy to ban all protests, political meetings and public demonstrations. As living conditions deteriorated, the need for external support increased, but the will of the main source of that support, the United States, continued to crumble.
Government authority existed only in scattered enclaves. In January 1971, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency reported that the North Viet Namese Army (in reality, all Communist factions) “controlled” 65 percent of the land and 35 percent of the people. The same report indicated that the Viet Namese had recruited 10,000 Khmers into their army and had induced an additional 35,000 to 50,000 to join their political infrastructure (the KVM) in the “liberated” areas. By mid-1971 NVA control had spread over 75 percent of the land, and the population of Phnom Penh had more than doubled to 1.5 million. By January 1972 the percentage of land and people controlled by Communist factions was at an all-time high.
And yet disclosures about FANK during Chenla II—not about its pathetic maneuverings or its corruption, but about its strength—are astounding. Had it been better led, what might have been the results for Southeast Asia? Was Chenla II the nail, for want of which the battle, the war, was lost? And what other ramifications did the lack of that nail have? Did it lead the United States to back into appeasement? Calling it a decent interval? Did that loss set up the Kampuchean genocide?
THE KRAHOM
Just before and during the multi-battle Chenla II campaign, the Krahom, for the first time on a massive scale, evacuated all the inhabitants from a region and then, in actions they labeled “pure flame,” scorched the earth to deny all others the “natural and population resources” of the area. From north of Kompong Thom down through Phum Chamkar to Tang Kouk, Krahom yotheas torched some 400 hamlets. By force they evacuated at least 50,000 villagers and forced a nearly equal number of elderly and very young to become refugees. Though “pure flame” had been used earlier, this policy of transferring the population as a means of control, of forcing “unproductive elements” to flee and become a burden upon the government, of annihilation of resisters, and of rendering the land barren, was elevated to a new level during Chenla II.
Some historians have said American bombing both killed hundreds of thousands of people and caused the turmoil within Cambodia that created the Krahom and the ensuing holocaust. These historians cite refugee reports and bombing maps to support their theories. The KK (and to some extent the NVA and KVM) used the threat of U.S. bombings throughout the Northern Corridor to induce the rice farmers to quit their lands. When the North Viet Namese Army advanced across this deserted and charred “pure flame” region, Americans did heavily bomb the area. To the peasants who’d been evacuated, the bombings (the NVA went unseen) confirmed to them the words of Krahom yotheas.
The often strained and mended relationship between the North Viet Namese, with its Hanoi-led Khmer Viet Minh, and the nationalist Maoist Krahom was now destroyed. With strength gained through conscription of FANK deserters and the relatively nonpolitical, Sihanouk-supporting peasants (the Khmer Rumdoah, which remained unorganized, fragmented, and under the influence or control of the KVM or KK), the Krahom attacked the rear of the NVA. Unlike June 1970, which saw a small number of skirmishes, or the heavier ambushes of November 1970, which widened the KK-NVA rift (on the surface ameliorated in May 1971), the Chenla II attacks were devastating. For the first time the Krahom attacked in battalion-sized units. They so terrorized the rear of the NVA 5th and 91st divisions that the pathetic FANK column escaped total annihilation.
Of the sixteen Krahom battalions (5,400 troops) fielded as the battle commenced, a quarter were destroyed in early suicide attacks against FANK positions when the North Viet Namese pulled back without notifying the indigenous Communist force. Another quarter never saw battle but were used for evacuee control. How many were lost to Allied bombings is unknown. Upwards of 2,000, in units from squads to battalions, attacked the NVA.
To the outside world Norodom Sihanouk remained the official head of the seemingly monolithic resistance, yet within Krahom-controlled areas, political cadre increased the frequency and severity of their denunciations of the Prince. Krahom leaders continued to maintain ghostlike public
profiles while they consolidated their powers, Ieng Sary became chief emissary to Mao, often snubbing Sihanouk. Khieu Samphan, Hou Youn and Hou Nim—known as the “three ghosts” because in spite of their reported deaths three and a half years earlier their presence continued to be felt—rose to hold administrative, organizational and ideological power in the Krahom block. Rising to head the Krahom military (and covertly to hold the office of secretary-general of the Khmer Communist Party) was Saloth Sar (Pol Pot).
THE NVA DRAIN-OFF
The North Viet Namese suffered a strange fate during Chenla II. Essentially they won a great military victory. On 10 December the Associated Press reported that U.S. officials estimated Communist forces (no breakdown by factions) controlled “as much as 80 percent of Cambodia and can do anything they want.... They could take Cambodia in a week, if they cut loose everything they had.”
But they didn’t. Why? Was it an awakening to the desires of the Khmer people? Chenla II had set off a deeper “true” Khmer revolution than had yet occurred. Concurrent with the NVA offensive, a new concept of Khmer Patriot spread amongst all segments of society. This new sense of nationalism and racial integrity permeated all zones, whether controlled by the KVM/NVA, the KK or FANK. Though the concept held varying nuances in different regions, it helped bind the disparate zones and, by giving the people a common cause, preparing them for a single, unified takeover.
Or was it NVA political savvy—the realization that if Phnom Penh, and thus Cambodia, fell, the waning American commitment to Southeast Asia might be rekindled? Gallup polls in late 1971 showed that a majority (50 to 55 percent) of Americans approved of President Nixon’s war policies. Would a toppling of Phnom Penh have been used to reverse American withdrawals? Or was the North Viet Namese leadership responding to military factors that outweighed these reasons?
For the Sake of All Living Things Page 57