Chapter 49
Chapter 49: My Whole World Ended - The War in Cambodia Truly Begins
Above: Lt. John Kerry, U.S. Navy; Major Colin Powell, U.S. Army; and Pvt. Al Gore, Jr., U.S. Army; each of these brave Americans lived very different lives but had one thing in common: they served their country in Cambodia.
Following President Romney’s announcement that 100,000 Americans would be sent to Cambodia to join the Air Force in quelling the Khmer Rouge once and for all, the situation there escalated rapidly. Pol Pot, the bulk of his army already pushed back to its jungle bases by the Kennedy airstrikes from the B-52s, did not, as Kissinger and Nixon hoped, grow afraid, nor did his soldiers’ morale waver. As JFK and RFK had understood, the conflict in Southeast Asia was about more than capitalism against communism, in fact, to many of the people actually fighting for the fate of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos, communism hardly entered into the equation at all. These were freedom fighters, in their own eyes. Men and women who were tired of colonialism, fed up with the betrayals of the West, were eminently willing to accept the support of Castro’s Cuba and Baio’s China, both seeming beacons of unity against the neo-imperialism being practiced by Washington and Moscow both. Thus, when word reached Pol Pot that President Romney was sending troops to secure Phnom Penh and its surrounding villages, then move north against his position, he smiled. “Let them come.” He laughed to his messenger. “They will break upon our united front like waves upon the shore.” The would-be dictator was not without reason for his confidence. The moment the U.S. Air Force had begun to rain bombs on the Communist Party of Kampuchea, their allies in Hanoi, Havana, and Beijing redoubled their efforts to aid and resupply the growing Khmer Rouge.
To Võ Nguyên Giáp, the new leader of North Vietnam in the wake of Ho Chi Minh’s passing, the United States was and always would be his nation’s true enemy. During the Kennedy years, the Americans had skillfully withdrawn their forces and replaced them with a highly competent, well paid and well trained South Vietnamese army. Worse, American economic aid and restructuring of the Saigon government with oversight by Secretary of State McNamara led to the dissipation of much of the civil unrest in the country that Ho Chi Minh had been using to spread propaganda and recruit soldiers for his cause. With help from the Peace Corps and the foreign aid budget, Saigon and their U.S. allies built new schools, hospitals, roads, railways, and municipal centers to provide food and clean drinking water to remote villages across South Vietnam, even far from the capital. President Kennedy understood that if he could win the hearts and minds of the people of South Vietnam, they would be much more capable of defending themselves from Northern infiltration and conquest. If they saw the possibilities that freedom and democracy could bring, they would be less likely to turn to communism as an alternative. These beliefs became known as "the Kennedy Doctrine" of foreign policy, and JFK’s efforts paid massive dividends.
When free, open elections were held in South Vietnam in 1968, overseen by extensive United Nation monitoring, General Nguyen Khanh, an ally of the Kennedy administration and provisional Premier who had overseen the writing of Saigon’s new constitution, was elected officially to his position, with widespread public support. Khanh thanked the Vietnamese people for their faith in him, vowed to end discrimination and violence against the Buddhist majority in the country, and promised that despite their continued alliance with the United States, that South Vietnam would be “free at last to pursue its own destiny, free of masters, free of foreign control.” Finally, Khanh echoed Ho Chi Minh, his old enemy, and concluded his inaugural address by pleading with the people of North Vietnam to abandon their “authoritarian overlords” and seek a better life in the south. Unfortunately, this mass migration to the south never materialized. Like their leader, Giap, the people of the North were hesitant to trust the United States. The foreign aid seemed more a bribe than a genuine attempt to make amends, and after all, the Americans under Eisenhower had aided the imperialist French until the very last possible moment before their defeat. To the people of Hanoi, the U.S. was no friend, merely a proxy imperialist, who must be kept out. For the time being at least, North and South Vietnam would remain separate nations, with an increasingly militarized DMZ reminiscent of Korea between them.
Despite this divide in Vietnam, Giap never gave up on his predecessor’s dreams of a united country. Because the shared border to the south was too heavily defended however, and the newly contented people of the South were becoming resistant to his propaganda, Giap decided that he needed to strike at the Capitalists more indirectly. Thus, he began to reposition divisions of his own militia, the Vietcong, into northern Cambodia through the jungles of Laos. Happy to receive these reinforcements, Pol Pot then asked Giap’s commanders to assist his own troops in constructing a system of tunnels which would allow them to infiltrate further south, capture and hold villages without being as open to direct U.S. air attacks. Meanwhile, their allies in Biao’s government in Beijing increased shipments of material and supplies to the Khmer Rouge’s headquarters near the border with Laos. Large artillery and anti-air guns, tasked with neutralizing or at least harrying American air power, were positioned throughout the countryside, hidden in dense thickets and underbrush. Over the long term, Giap and Pol Pot hoped to entangle the United States in a protracted war of attrition across Cambodia. The Americans would eventually lose their stomach for continued conflict, retreat, and leave Kampuchea completely Communist. Then South Vietnam would be surrounded on all sides by revolutionaries and could be more easily reconquered. This was a simple, but dangerously effective plan, as unlike the people of South Vietnam, the Cambodian peasants grew ever more frustrated with the increasingly erratic behavior of their Prince.
Though the Kennedy administration left office by leaving behind a track record of success and peace through diplomacy in Vietnam, Greece, and elsewhere, the slow, often tedious process of nation building did not make for compelling campaign material, nor did it match the new administration’s conservative sensibilities. Before leaving office at the Pentagon, Robert Kennedy left behind a memo to the incoming President that recommended a similar course of action be taken in Cambodia: find a political leader in the country who could create stability, invest heavily in the infrastructure and well being of the nation, and make an effort to prove that the United States supported self-determination for the country in the future. Kennedy and his brother had hoped that President Romney would groom Prince Sihanouk to be his administration’s Khanh, and then increase foreign aid to the country. This was, to the Kennedys’ dismay replaced by a foreign policy of, in Richard Nixon’s words, “peace through strength”. President Romney, in his first 100 days in office, heeded the advice of House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford (R - MI) and placated paleoconservatives in his party by slashing “frivolous spending”, including the hefty Kennedy foreign aid budget, with the bipartisan help of Senate Minority Leader Dirksen (R - IL) and Senator Henry M. Jackson (D - WA) who both favored this “big stick” Republican policy on national defense. In Phnom Penh, the Prince responded by denouncing the reversal in American position and demanding that the U.S. Air Force cease its bombing campaign in the north of his country, and the troops on their way to the capital “get back on their ships and go home”. On March 17th, Prince Sihanouk announced his intentions to reach out to Pol Pot and the Communists and arrange for peace talks with the goal of reaching a settlement, part of which would undoubtedly include new elections with the Communists being allowed to run. To the developing Romney doctrine, with its harder, more militant stance on anti-communism, this was unacceptable and it quickly became apparent to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger that something had to be done.
Kissinger immediately reached out to Cambodian Prime Minister Lon Nol, a right winger with authoritarian and anti-communist tendencies, and asked him to enter talks with his nation’s military to “see if they were in agreement with his majesty about the potential benefits of negotiation with the rebels in the north.” Lon, a former Defense Minister with many friends in the Cambodian high command, wasted no time in setting forth a plan to prevent any peace talks from taking place. He first introduced a motion in Parliament which would strip the Prince of any ability or power to represent the nation in matters of war and state. This was quickly deemed unconstitutional and struck down, however. Next, Lon Nol tried to convince the Prince personally to change his mind, saying “there is no honor in seeking peace with traitors”. Sihanouk ignored this, and questioned Lon’s loyalty to his government. The following day, April 11th, the Prince asked for another, more loyal MP to introduce a vote of no confidence against the Prime Minister, so that he could be removed and replaced with someone who would encourage the peace negotiations, which Pol Pot seemed increasingly likely to agree to, as it would buy he and his movement additional time to grow their strength. When word reached Lon that a vote against him was imminent, he, with Kissinger’s implicit (if not overt) approval, organized his friends in the high command and orchestrated a military coup against Sihanouk’s government on April 12th, 1969.
Declaring the “Khmer Republic” with himself as its first President and de-facto dictator, Lon Nol quickly worked to cement his authority in and around the capital. The Prince, the only other major political figure in the nation, was the primary target of Lon’s wrath, but was lucky enough to be on a foreign goodwill tour of Europe when the coup occurred. In a sternly worded telegram to French President Charles de Gaulle, Lon requested that Sihanouk be extradited to his native country immediately, to face charges of “treason against the people of Cambodia”. De Gaulle in one of his last and possibly bravest actions as President, refused, granting Sihanouk asylum in Paris, and joining with several leaders throughout the world, most prominently President Nasser of Egypt, in condemning the coup. However, even without managing to capture the Prince, it seemed that Nol’s coup had otherwise been a resounding success. Parliament was disbanded and Lon declared martial law over the country as American troops landed on the coast and made their way from the harbor of Botum Sakor to Phnom Penh. Even this transfer of soldiers toward the interior of the country was not without its difficulties, as a young soon to be hero named Lt. John Kerry discovered.
In a later memoir published about his experiences serving on coastal patrol boats first in Vietnam, where he won his first Purple Heart medal, and then in Cambodia where he won his second, Kerry wrote of the first deployment of American soldiers:
“I remember the water being warm, warmer than this Massachusetts boy thought it had any right to be in April. Late, under the stars, when we didn’t have anything better to do and our commanders told us we could have the night, we’d kick off our shoes, dip our feet in the water and listen to the sounds all around us. The buzzing of insects, the distant thrum of people in the paper-town cities. I distinctly recall the air, too. The atmosphere in the tropics is so different from what we have here. It’s thick, almost like molasses, dripping all over you and getting into places you didn’t know existed. We talked, of course, but nothing magical or remarkable. Some of us had girls waiting back home, though fewer had the pictures to prove it. Others were waiting on careers, said they wished that Jack Kennedy could have stayed in office just a little bit longer, then they could have gone home. Others still argued those boys down, said that Jack Kennedy was a damn shame, that all he wanted to do was talk to the reds, when we should be shooting them. I always agreed with the Kennedy-supporters, but tended to keep that to myself. I was just trying to make it back when this was all said and done.
That first day of “go time”, my fellow sailors and I were working the boats, carrying boys from all over to the harbor, then back to our ships to pick up more. We’d been told that the enemy hadn’t ever been further south than Krong Stueng Saen, and we had no reason to worry about anything other than sailing straight and keeping the boys from the other branches in line. We Navy guys always joked that Army guys fidgeted and got seasick too easy; the Marines were jarheads and couldn’t be expected to find their way without our help. The faces on all of them, so fresh, so innocent, so young. They stood beneath the stars and stripes in their olive drab, M-16’s slung over their shoulders and a romantic ideal of soldiering locked in their heads, just behind the eyes. All it took to shatter that confidence, all this camaraderie and capering was a few bursts of small arms fire from a thicket not far from the coast…”
As it turned out, Cambodian intelligence on the ground had not been thoroughly vetted by the CIA, and over the last several months of posturing for peace talks, Pol Pot and his commanders managed to place disguised, covert detachments of their militias along the southern coast, far from the watchful eye of the capital, but close enough to harry and harass landing American soldiers. Kerry and several hundred other young men were wounded that first day, though serious casualties were kept to a minimum as the Kampuchean Communists were swiftly forced to retreat once the Americans found their footing and began to return fire. These hit and run, guerilla-style tactics would become trademarks of the Khmer Rouge, as would their horrifying treatment of the prisoners they captured on later excursions out of the jungle. To wide eyed Americans on the ground and at home expecting an easy victory over the locals, they were setting themselves up to be sorely disappointed.
Next Time on Blue Skies in Camelot: Canada, Conservatives, and the Commonwealth
Even with JFK's success at avoiding war in Vietnam, there are many interests, ideologically and otherwise in the United States that prefer to use military strength over diplomacy and negotiation. From Kissinger's point of view, any discussions with Pol Pot would have been doomed from the start, and thus were a waste of time. The only thing left to see is show much damage, political, personal, and more, will be wrought by the decision to go to war.
