by Orr Kelly
We were trying to build housing and shelter before the rainy season. We asked for rice to feed the people but AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] sent some minuscule amount of rice, maybe a couple of tons.
Khy Hak led another operation out into an area where the Khmer Rouge had been stockpiling rice they had taken from the farmers. One night, I got a radio call from Khy Hak. He says, “I need some wagons, some carts. Send about fifty out.”
I went to Teap Ben and told him we needed these carts because they had discovered this rice and thought they had a major cache. The word spread among the refugees. Instead of getting fifty ox carts, five hundred ox carts gathered and went out in a single file, in this huge wagon train. I was sending out rice bags and taking photographs.
As the last ox cart went out, I hopped on the back and rode through the night ten miles out into Khmer Rouge territory and joined Khy Hak in the morning. They had something like a thousand tons of rice. Some was in silos. They would punch a hole in the bottom of the silo and the rice would pour out like water. They would back the ox carts up, just like little mice on a cartoon show, fill up one, he would pull out and the next would pull in.
As we were pulling out, some mortar rounds started falling. Khy Hak got on the radio—the Khmer Rouge had the same radios we had—and issued a challenge: “This is Col. Khy Hak. Here is my precise position. I will wait here for one hour. There is no need for you to shoot at unarmed civilians who can’t defend themselves. If you want to fight somebody, fight me. I will wait. If you are not here in an hour, I figure you are too afraid to do it.”
They didn’t come.
Teap Ben and Khy Hak had a project to divert part of the river that went by Kompong Thom and flood vast areas of the terrain for rice crops. They built a tremendous berm or wall around the southern portion. This was not only a means of survival—long-range survival—but it would also provide a natural barrier to ground attack.
First, you had to plow up the ground to get it ready for planting. It was during this period, when part of it was getting plowed up, that the Khmer Rouge launched a two-regiment attack. This was April of 1974.
How big was a Khmer Rouge regiment?
Khmer Rouge regiments were 1,000 to 1,500 men. So they had roughly between 2,500 to 3,000 fresh troops, in addition to what had been around Kompong Thom all along. These were troops that had overrun a couple of cities to the south. They had captured some American artillery pieces from the Cambodian army.
How many defenders were there?
The 11th Brigade had just under 2,000 men. They didn’t use them in the actual defense. They were holding them in reserve in case the Khmer Rouge broke through. They were on the northern part of the city near the old airport. There were about 500 soldiers, in the 10th Brigade, under Teap Ben. They became the major frontline defenders. They also incorporated as many refugees as they could and they became citizen soldiers. The refugees also worked building defenses.
As the Khmer Rouge attacked, they would have a battalion on line and they would build spider holes. The next night that battalion would move back. A fresh battalion would crawl up a little bit further, dig spider holes, attack, and fire. They were trying to come as close as they could to the final perimeter. Defenses were out about two miles from the city. There were daily battles and fights and they were growing more intense each day.
Teap Ben had two of his own helicopter crews. I asked what altitude they were flying at. He said they were flying about three thousand feet. That’s out of range of small-arms fire and we hadn’t any reports they had antiaircraft at the time.
I flew out with them. It was just an incredible sight. I could see spider holes and I estimated there were about four hundred people down below. All four hundred of them started shooting at the chopper I was in.
Sure enough, we flew out at three thousand feet. But then the pilot went down to about ten feet above the ground. He made eleven passes along the front lines. I had not been expecting this. We were like the duck in an arcade shooting gallery.
I could literally see the faces of the Khmer Rouge as they were shooting at us. Thank God they were poor shots because they were not leading us properly. I was shooting back at them with a grenade launcher.
The pilots each had reinforced steel plates welded into the cockpit to deflect shells. I had open air between me and the Khmer Rouge. We finally went back up. Then we discovered the Khmer Rouge had brought in some 12.7mm machine guns, equivalent to the .50 cal. Somebody shooting that got a little more accurate and hit our chopper pretty heavily. I was kind of worried I’d end up like a friend of mine who had been shot from down below up through the rear end. I was sitting on my helmet, not that that would have helped much.
One round hit a hard point in the chopper—a couple of them, actually—and sent a bunch of shrapnel through the passenger compartment. The guy next to me got hit in the head. I got hit in the back and the arm. Fortunately, when the round broke apart it lost some of the velocity. It was just kind of minor shrapnel. Stung like a bee and bled a little bit. But it didn’t incapacitate either one of us. The pilots, with their armor, came out of it just fine.
Finally, we ran out of fuel and we had to go back.
Why were they doing this low-level flying?
They were strafing the enemy and providing morale for the troops—the Cambodian ground troops. On one side you would see the defenders just cheering like mad because this chopper was flying back and forth getting shot at and shooting back at the enemy. The enemy was all pissed off. There was probably not more than two hundred or three hundred feet between the lines at that point. We were the center of attention and I didn’t really want to be that. We finally ran out of fuel, which pleased me. We landed at an LZ near the general’s house, got picked up by a jeep, and went back to the compound.
As we walked through the gate into the compound, the first artillery round fired from the captured American guns landed in the compound.
I was walking between these two pilots. One pilot got his head blown off and the other got a big chunk of shrapnel through his leg and I came off unscathed. These guys had escaped all that fire in the chopper and thought they were safe and as we were walking in, it blew them apart.
After we took care of them, we went inside. The Khmer Rouge must have had a forward observer someplace. They were shooting at the general’s house. We could hear them on the artillery net. I used to be an artillery FO [forward observer] myself in Vietnam. I didn’t understand the Khmer language but I could understand the cadence, hear the guns go off in the distance when the guy gave the command to shoot. You would wait five or six seconds and the round lands.
Teap Ben said they were adjusting fire and shooting at his house. I said I’d better go back to my house and make a call and report back to Phnom Penh.
He said, “No, sit here and have a cognac with me.”
I said, “No, General, I better get back over to my house.”
He said, “No, mon ami, stay and have a cognac.”
I said, “General, why do you want me to stay? I’ve got to get back and make my report to Phnom Penh.”
He said, “They’ve decided to stop shooting at my house. They’ve decided to start shooting at the American’s house. Since you’re the only American in the city, that’s you.”
I said, “Give me a cognac.”
Then they started shooting at my house. They obviously had people in town who knew where I lived.
The next morning, I was writing up some reports. I had a field telephone that linked my house to the general’s house. My houseboy and his wife were cleaning the upstairs. I picked up the phone and the general was telling me in French, “Allez en bas”—go downstairs.
I didn’t even ask why. I just scooped up these two little kids, called to their parents to run with me. We all hid under this concrete part under the stairs. And we heard these shells come whistling in. They missed my house but unfortunately landed near the bridge and killed about eleven
people. They were trying to get me directly.
I think it was about two days later, I woke up in the morning and the entire town was abandoned. I couldn’t see anybody.
I went over to the general’s headquarters. There was only a lone operator there. He told me the general had gotten up and driven out to the final outpost that was under attack. The fighting had concentrated down to this lone outpost. Teap Ben had driven down across the plains. I got him on the radio and he said, yeah, they were there fighting. You could hear the shooting in the background.
So I asked if the road was open. He said it was open so I said I’d be down. He neglected to tell me that, although the road was open, it was surrounded on both sides by combatants. The road kind of circled around the southern part of the city. It was about four miles. As I went along I passed some checkpoints and saw some officers I knew. I picked these guys up. I had about four or five people riding in the jeep with me.
As you approach the outpost, there was this huge berm he had built as part of the dike system. It wasn’t flooded yet but it was the only way you could get down there. On one side of the dike were the friendly troops and on the other side were the Khmer Rouge.
There were dead bodies lying on top of the dike. I couldn’t go around them. I could only drive over some of them. In order to get into the outpost I literally had to drive through the front lines of the Khmer Rouge. I was going as fast as that jeep would go. The Khmer Rouge didn’t see us until we were actually past them. They started shooting and there were artillery explosions. We called ahead on the radio and asked for the gate to be opened.
We went careening in and literally jumped out of the jeep and let it go on its own steam into a bunker. As we jumped out, about six artillery rounds landed. We were in the bursting radius. How it missed us I don’t know.
We ran over to where the general was in the trenches directing the combat. The rest of the afternoon, this horrendous hand-to-hand combat took place. I was watching them; a hundred feet out, crawl through the grass, jump into a spider hole with the Khmer Rouge. They were stabbing people with knives and throwing hand grenades from one pit to another.
In the midst of all this, there were guys replenishing other guys with ammunition. And they were just walking through the field of fire with ammunition on their shoulders, standing full upright, almost as though they were expecting Buddha to protect them.
Guys on either side of me were getting shot, trying to go from one point to another around the perimeter. They had these rinky dink pits, trenches built for people shorter than I was. There was water in the lower half of the trenches. They were just slit trenches where you had to crawl on your belly. Because of the water, you kind of had to raise up a little bit. I was sure my butt was going to be shot off.
Finally this one captain, or was he a major then? His name was Chai. He led this patrol, of about a squad, around and came up behind some of the main Khmer Rouge fighters. He just went berserk, screaming and shouting. He made such a commotion I think it scared the hell out of the Khmer Rouge, who were already pretty well bloodied.
That broke the back of the assault and that was the day the siege of Kompong Thom was broken. When the battle was over and the Khmer Rouge had withdrawn—they didn’t even have a chance to carry away their dead and wounded—I counted something like 320 Khmer Rouge dead just around our outpost.
We later found mass graves with hundreds of bodies in them. We estimated the Khmer Rouge may have lost as many as a thousand killed during that several week battle. We tried to get some journalists up from Phnom Penh to witness what had happened—not only the influx of refugees but the defense of the city. But no one was interested in this little outpost.
The day the siege of Kompong Thom was broken, with three hundred Khmer Rouge left dead on the battlefield, the headlines in the world press, one major newspaper—I can’t remember which one—said: “Rebel Rockets Hit Phnom Penh; Three Killed.”
These defenders had killed three hundred to one thousand enemy soldiers in bloody combat but there was never a story told about this.
For the rest of the dry season, things were pretty calm there. Khy Hak was promoted to general the final year, in 1975, in the final months in Phnom Penh.
He and I had worked out a plan where I would take his wife and children and set them up on an escape route I had put up in northern Cambodia for the civilians.
I didn’t know when Operation Eagle Pull [the American evacuation] was going to go. When I found out, I was several hundred miles away from his family. I couldn’t get to them directly. I had somebody else go over to the house to ask Mrs. Khy Hak to leave with them. She refused. She didn’t know her husband wanted her to leave.
By the time he was able to get back to Phnom Penh, to the center of town as the perimeter was falling, there was no way to get her out. He put his wife and his five children—beautiful little children, from four years old to eight—in a jeep. The Khmer Rouge caught them approaching the airport and took them over to a pagoda.
One of my Cambodian soldiers who went back in and talked to witnesses said they killed the little kids. They executed the children, then they shot his wife. After making him witness that, they executed him. So they got their revenge on him.
We then started hearing of many atrocities being committed. [After Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge on 16 April 1975, as many as four million Cambodians were slain by the victors over the next two years.] The Khmer Rouge would get on the single sideband radios that had been part of the military network. After the Americans had made the evacuation in Eagle Pull, the Khmer Rouge would get on the radio and hold the key so you could hear the office people being tortured and murdered on the air.
Where were you when you heard these broadcasts?
By that time I was in Thailand. I had already left Cambodia, went to Saigon and was there when Saigon started falling. [The North Vietnamese took Saigon on 30 April 1975.] I left Saigon and went to Bangkok and then directed some of the early escapes from Cambodia of civilians and some military families.
Unlike Vietnam, the Cambodians could have held out. We, the advisers, were told we could supply the Cambodian army as long as they could fight. That’s what we told them. After we evacuated the country, that order was rescinded.
The French died at Dien Bien Phu. They were soundly defeated but they fought and we just went out the back door.
We, the advisers who had lived with these people, sometimes for years, had to sit there and listen to them on the radio calling to us, saying, “Where are our supplies? We’re still fighting. We’re holding out.”
Finally they ran out of ammunition. That’s the only thing that made many of these people surrender and then they were executed by the Khmer Rouge.
One of the last transmissions—the last transmission I ever heard out of Cambodia—was a Cambodian colonel, just before they killed him. You could hear them breaking down the door. You could hear him say, “Vous les Américains sont pires que les Français”—you Americans are worse than the French.
PART FIVE
SEALs UNDER THE SEAS
CHAPTER
28
“Dead Before Sunrise”
In the mid-1970s, then-Lt. Comdr. Thomas Hawkins became one of the navy’s most enthusiastic supporters of the use of small boats designed to carry SEALs to their targets underwater. These SDVs (swimmer, later SEAL, delivery vehicles) were sometimes called minisubmarines, but that was a misnomer since the occupants are not protected from the sea. Instead, the craft is free flooding and the crew must rely on bottled air or oxygen to breathe.
Hawkins, now retired from the navy, recalled a frightening incident when his career—and his life—almost came to an abrupt end:
In 1975 I was at the navy’s operational test and evaluation force testing new hardware for the SEAL teams. We had these newly formed SDV teams.
The commanding officer of SDV Team TWO was Jack Schropp, a bright and funny guy, and I was the prospective CO to relieve
Jack. He had taken the team to Puerto Rico for winter training and testing hardware. I was with the team and running test operations on a new SDV radio system.
One night we were going to do a night op in the SDV. The purpose of the op was to take the SDV out into Vieques Channel [east of the naval base at Roosevelt Roads] and raise the antenna. We had a standard PRC-104 UHF [ultra high frequency] radio in a waterproof can. We were going to try to talk to the Mark 3 patrol boats over in St. Thomas [Virgin Islands], a distance of about twenty-four miles.
The pilot was PO Rick Brown, who was an excellent SDV pilot. And the navigator was PO Frank Fetzko. These guys were the cream of the crop of SDV pilots in the navy. Back then, they didn’t know me that well. But I have come to know and love these guys since then.
[The Mark 8 SDV is designed to carry six men, sitting two by two. In this case, the pilot and navigator sat in the two front seats and Hawkins sat just behind, leaning forward between them. The occupants are exposed to the sea and must wear protective suits and breathing gear.]
We were going to dive the Mark 15 UBA [underwater breathing apparatus], a closed-circuit mixed-gas system with a six-hour capability. That was part of the test.
It was a fairly routine operation. We were to launch, proceed a couple or three miles to the middle of the channel, surface the SDV, raise the antenna, and try to talk to the boat over in St. Thomas. We had these lists, a series of rhyming words: cow, now, how. They have to record what you say and it indicates the quality of your communication.
We went out in the channel as planned. When we came to the surface for the test, it was really rough. The SDV was being slogged around a good bit. The first thing that happened when the guys opened up the canopy, because you had to open the canopy to raise the antenna, I saw my swim fin float out into the middle of Vieques Channel. The seat belt had come loose.
We put up the antenna and tried to raise the boat. We couldn’t do it. I was the test director and the sea conditions were very extreme so I declared it a no-test and told them, “Let’s go back to the pier and regroup.”