The Bombing

CHAPTER 19 

The Bombing

 In February and March 1973, Sihanouk was finally allowed to make a trip to the liberated areas of Cambodia by his Khmer Rouge allies. In the greatest secrecy, his Peking entourage confined to a hotel outside Canton, he was driven in a jeep down the Ho Chi Minh Trail into eastern Cambodia. He and his wife, Monique, were taken to a political rally. Wearing the black pajamas and checkered scarves of the Khmer Rouge, they were photographed with Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon, and Hu Nim, Washington’s “three ghosts.” To his distress, the Prince was not allowed to meet or mix with any peasants; he was confined within a close circle of cadres. He returned to Peking with mixed feelings. He told his friends that he was depressed by what he saw as the rigors of collective life under the​​​ Khmer Rouge, but he spoke fiercely about what seemed to be Hanoi’s betrayal of the Cambodian cause.

After the Khmer Rouge refusal to negotiate with Lon Nol in February, the North Vietnamese began to restrict their supplies of arms, apparently to stop them from fighting. When the quarrel between Communist Vietnam and Cambodia became public in 1978, Phnom Penh broadcast the confession of a Vietnamese soldier who stated that in 1973 Vietnamese cadres were told that Cambodia must be forced to accept the Paris Agreement, and “whether Cambodia agrees with us or not is not the problem, because Cambodia has a small population.” He maintained that cadres were taught that “after finishing the war in Indochina, we would become the big brother in Indochina. … As the big brother we had to govern the younger brothers and not allow them to do anything at will. … We should, as a common duty, force Cambodia to accept the Paris Agreement … a great success achieved by Vietnam in the international arena.”

In the same vein a Cambodian Communist diplomat later complained that in 1973, after the Khmer Rouge refused to talk with Lon Nol, “The Vietnamese signed their own agreement with the Americans and the B-52s which bombed Vietnam were all sent to pulverize Cambodia. …”

Such historical analyses were made after the event, for their propaganda value. But they coincide exactly with what was said at the time. When Sihanouk returned from his trip to Cambodia he told Ambassador Etienne Manac’h that Khieu Samphan, the Khmer Rouge commander in chief, had said to him, “Hanoi has dropped us.” Sihanouk asserted that Khmer Rouge independence of North Vietnam was increasing, that nationalism, not just Communism drove the movement now.

The Prince was welcomed back to Peking in triumph, and on April 12 the Chinese gave him a banquet at which Chou En-lai praised him warmly. For his part, Sihanouk gave vent to his feelings in a diplomatic manner. He criticized “peace-loving” countries that sought to impose a cease-fire on Cambodia. He said American claims that North Vietnam was still fueling the war were untrue—the resistance was no longer receiving aid. He denounced American peace plans which involved the partition of the country.

During the toasts at the end of the dinner, Chou walked across the great room to the table at which Etienne Manac’h was sitting. He took Manac’h aside and told him that the longer the war in Cambodia continued, the more extreme and harsh would be the final victory. Would the French please try to persuade Kissinger of this? France, he said, was better placed than anyone else to explain the reality of the situation to Washington. They must do so.

Manac'h understood the seriousness of Chou's appeal. But, say French officials, when the French ambassador to Washington passed Chou's words and Sihanouk’s assessment on to William Sullivan at the State Department, he was visibly unimpressed. In both Washington and Phnom Penh, American officials openly scoffed at the reports of Sihanouk’s trip. The photographs had been faked, they said; Sihanouk had never left China and, whatever any superficial resemblances in the pictures, the “three ghosts” were certainly dead. Eventually Chou En-lai gave the head of the new American Liaison Office in China, David Bruce, a copy of the film of the trip, “in case you don't believe it happened.”

All American troops and POWs had left Vietnam by the end of March. In April the administration began to warn that a breakdown of the ceasefire was possible because of Communist breaches in both Vietnam and Cambodia. In Washington, officials claimed that the North Vietnamese were shipping new men and matériel into South Vietnam and publicly alleged that there were still five thousand North Vietnamese troops “operating against Cambodian forces.” As threatening gestures, the United States resumed bombing of Laos, suspended mine-clearing operations in Haiphong, and restored reconnaissance flights, banned by the Paris Agreement, over North Vietnam. Kissinger requested a new round of meetings in Paris, first between William Sullivan and Hanoi’s Vice Foreign Minister, Nguyen Co Thach, later between Le Duc Tho and himself.

The intention apparently was to wave the stick of renewed bombing of the North and to offer again the carrot of postwar reconstruction aid. But then, as Senator Ervin's investigation of Watergate gathered steam, accounts of the wiretaps caused by the secret bombing, of the illegal Huston plan that had followed the invasion, and of the activities of the Plumbers were headlined across the papers and the television news, White House's plans for increasing force in Indochina had to be shelved. Both houses of Congress, provoked by Watergate and by the continued bombing of Cambodia, began to debate a War Powers Bill designed to limit the President's right to commit troops abroad without Congressional agreement. (It was eventually approved in the fall, and Nixon's veto was overridden.) Of more immediate concern, both houses began legislation to end the bombing.

On May 10, 1973, the House of Representatives took an unprecedented step: it blocked any use of funds from the Supplemental Appropriations Bill for the bombing of Cambodia. This was the first time in the war that The House voted to undercut a military action on which the President was insisting. The conservatives summoned traditional arguments: the President's hands should not be tied; this was not the time; the United States was bombing for peace. Representative George Mahon of Texas rose to entreat, "Give him a little more time. Join not the multitude to do evil." When the votes were counted, the majority (219–188) was against the President.

Immediately the White House asserted that peace in Cambodia, now close at hand, would recede if the House persisted in such folly. A loud campaign was begun to assure Congressmen, Senators and journalists that all would be well in Cambodia if only Kissinger were given a little more time. Nonetheless, the Senate broadened the amendment to block the use of any funds, from no matter what source, to bomb Cambodia.

Cambodia was certainly a major subject of discussion in the new round of Paris talks. The Americans tried again to tie reconstruction aid to North Vietnam to a Cambodian cease-fire. Le Duc Tho, according to American participants in talks, protested once more that Hanoi was in no position to deliver the Khmer Rouge. In fact, as he knew, the Khmer Rouge had responded to Hanoi’s restriction on arms supplies not by retreating but by pressing an all-out assault toward Phnom Penh.

In the meantime, Sihanouk had left Peking for his first foreign tour since 1970. He visited eleven countries in North Africa and Eastern Europe, using the freedom the trip gave him to try again to establish his own contact with Washington. From Mauritania and from Guinea, he sent messages asking for direct talks with Kissinger. A few days later, he said publicly that he had been refused. This was confirmed by the State Department.

Within a fortnight after his last meeting with Le Duc Tho, Kissinger appears finally to have realized that Hanoi could not deliver the Khmer Rouge. He announced that the future of Cambodia "depends not only on decisions taken by Hanoi and Washington but also on decisions taken by other sovereign parties." (Le Duc Tho pointedly denied rumors that he and Kissinger had reached any secret agreement on Cambodia.) To selected journalists, Kissinger began to offer a revised opinion of Sihanouk.

Bernard Gwertzman of The New York Times, who had previously noted that the administration dismissed Sihanouk's role, now reported that the Prince "seems to represent the insurgent forces." Kissinger let it be known that he would be delighted to meet Sihanouk on a trip he was planning to Peking in July. Gwertzman called this "a major shift," but its importance remains a matter of speculation. William Steerman, one of Kissinger's NSC aides dealing with Cambodia, and whose attitude toward the Khmers is described by some of those in the embassy as unconcerned, claims now that Kissinger never really thought Sihanouk could offer anything at all. David Bruce said later that Kissinger's instructions to him in Peking were to "talk to anyone except Sihanouk" about Cambodia. (Among others, Bruce talked to Manac'h; he found his views on Cambodia persuasive.)

One year earlier, veiled promises of peace from Kissinger would have been enough to turn the Congress around. Now his hints were submerged by the intensity of the bombing and by the flood of "White House horrors" that poured daily from Senator Ervin's hearings. Despite Kissinger's entreaties, both houses enacted an amendment to stop the bombing at the end of June. It was sent to Nixon on June 26. The President vetoed it, claiming that it would "cripple or destroy" any chance of a negotiated settlement in Cambodia, would jeopardize the future of the Lon Nol government, and would call into question America's international credibility. The House attempted to override the veto by mustering a two-thirds majority. It failed, and the measure died.

But the President's demands were no longer accepted so obediently as in the spring. Mike Mansfield, the Senate Majority Leader, warned that the amendment would be attached to other bills "again and again and again, until the will of the people prevails." Both houses added the language to financial bills whose enactment by the end of June was essential to keep the federal government funded. The prospect of the government actually being halted was real enough for talk of compromise to begin. Melvin Laird, who had resigned as Secretary of Defense at the end of Nixon's first term, and who was now back in the White House to offer Nixon advice (which Nixon did not take) on how to handle Watergate, announced that the President would veto every bill that contained an immediate ban on the bombing, whatever happened to the government. But he suggested that Nixon might accept a fixed date in the future by which the bombing should end.

The unacknowledged implication was that the President had assumed the power to wage war, not only without Congressional approval, but in the face of express disapproval of the majority. Since it was clear to the Democrats that the votes to override another veto did not exist, such a compromise was made. When the President publicly agreed to respect a deadline of August 15, and not to increase the intensity of the bombing in the interim, the Congress gave him another month and a half to bomb Cambodia and to produce the cease-fire that he and Kissinger claimed was within grasp.

The paradox was clear. Senator J. William Fulbright remarked, “I don’t think it is legal or constitutional. But whether it is right or not, he has done it. He has the power to do it because under our system there is not an easy way to stop him.” That was an accurate political assessment but it did not satisfy all of his colleagues. Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri complained that bombing was “not an issue that yields to compromise. Congress cannot sanction an unconstitutional and illegal endeavor for just a little while.” There is no way of just being a little bit unconstitutional or just a little bit illegal.” Senator Edward Kennedy called it an “infamous” agreement, totally careless of Cambodian lives. Another view was expressed by House Majority Leader Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill. He said the bombing should stop because “Cambodia is not worth one American life.”

Kissinger and Nixon have ever since claimed that the bombing halt immediately killed all possibility of peace talks, because the United States was no longer negotiating from strength. In his memoirs, Nixon asserts that after the vote “I had only words with which to threaten,” and he relates that when Kissinger discussed “Communist violations of the cease-fire in Cambodia” with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, the latter “scornfully asked what we had expected, now that we had no negotiating leverage because of the bombing cut-off imposed by Congress. Kissinger tried to be as menacing as he could, even though he knew that Dobrynin was right.”

Nixon evidently believed in 1973 (and still in 1978) that the Khmer Rouge were controlled by Hanoi and were amenable to Moscow. Neither was true.* At the same time, neither he nor Kissinger appears to have considered the possibility that it was the continuation of the bombing through the summer, not its eventual ending, that hindered negotiations by placing Sihanouk in an impossible position and rendering the Khmer Rouge more intransigent.

Kissinger was still assuring the diplomatic press corps that he was anxious to see Sihanouk in Peking in July. But early in the month Sihanouk himself told Etienne Manac'h that he could not possibly talk to Kissinger now that the bombing had been turned into such a clear form of duress. On July 5 he announced publicly that he had made three attempts to see Kissinger and had been rebuffed. This time, he would not be in Peking when Kissinger arrived.

.In his memoirs Nixon recounts that in one conversation with Brezhnev in June 1973, “I turned the conversation to Cambodia, a subject I had already raised several times during our meetings. I pointed out that the renewed North Vietnamese activity there was a major threat to world peace.”

The Chinese clearly supported his position. The next day Chou En-lai complained about the bombing to a group of American Congressmen. When their leader, Senator Warren G. Magnuson of Washington, suggested that the Cambodians "be patient," Chou asked with obvious anger, "How can a man be patient when bombs are falling on his head?" He warned that although Sihanouk was a "peace-loving Buddhist," Washington was "forcing him to put himself into the battle." China's own patience, he said, "is not unlimited." A few days later David Bruce was informed by the Chinese Foreign Ministry that a visit by Kissinger would not be "convenient" just now. Then, in Cambodia itself, the first Congress of the United National Front of Kampuchea met and announced that it would never negotiate but would fight on until total victory.

It is almost impossible to assess now the extent to which Cambodian and Chinese policies were influenced by the U.S. Congress. The fact that the Khmer Rouge pressed an almost suicidal attack upon Phnom Penh throughout July, despite the promise of an imminent end to the bombing, suggests that other factors were more important in determining their strategy.

Kissinger has never revealed details of the “delicate negotiations” that the Congress had undercut. They must have been very closely held. Dennis Doolin, then Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, says “I never saw any negotiations”; Tom Enders says he was unaware of any. Brent Scowcroft says there was “nothing more than a generalized hope that China would do something—no specific negotiations.” David Bruce said later that in Peking he saw no sign of any talks. In Washington Um Sim, the new Cambodian ambassador, was unable even to get an appointment with Kissinger before the bombing ended— “What could he say to me? They were pretending to help us and in fact they were using us,” he says. Emory Swank comments that “the only possibility of peace then would have been if we had taken the dramatic step of drastically reducing our support for the Phnom Penh government. It was one of the possibilities I suggested. The Chinese and North Vietnamese might have taken it as a step toward a negotiated settlement. But to Kissinger it would have been leading from weakness.”

The reality of the administration’s position was probably best expressed publicly by Doolin, testifying to Congress in June. “Cambodia became an integral part of the battlefield in the continuing conflict for South Vietnam. It remains so today.” Many American officials, including Nixon, believed that the survival of Lon Nol was essential to that of Thieu, and the thrust of Doolin’s message was repeated many times to

Congress. Thieu himself constantly agreed. This priority clearly restricted the administration's quest for peace in Cambodia. By the middle of July Kissinger began to modify his assertion that "delicate negotiations" were under way.

It was now, as Senator Sam Ervin delved further and further into the White House, and as the countryside around Phnom Penh was punished as never before, that the origins of Watergate emerged. In December 1972, Major Hal Knight, the radar operator who had had to burn the records of the Menu bombing and substitute false poststrike reports, had written to complain to Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin. Knight was no longer in the Air Force. His misgivings about the falsifications had soured his relations with his commanding officer, Colonel David Patterson, who had given him bad efficiency ratings. Knight had one bad rating overturned on appeal, but his career was jeopardized. In October 1972, he was told that he would be discharged, and two months later he wrote Proxmire to say that he felt the American people "have the right to know how the war has been conducted."

Proxmire forwarded the letter to Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa, who had taken a more aggressively skeptical attitude toward the conduct of the war than any other member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. For various reasons, including the mugging of the Committee’s chairman, Senator John Stennis, Hughes did not immediately act upon it. But on March 28, 1973, he asked Elliot Richardson, the Secretary of Defense, to provide a complete record of all United States bombing in Indochina since the war began in 1965. Though Richardson was aware of Menu, the classified print-out that he sent the committee showed that no bombing had taken place in Cambodia until May 1970. A declassified version was then requested of the Pentagon. It too was false.

On July 12, General George Brown came before the committee for confirmation as Air Force Chief of Staff. Brown had been Commander of the Seventh Air Force and General Abrams’ Deputy for Air Operations from August 1968 to August 1970. Hughes asked him, “Did the United States in fact conduct air strikes in Cambodia prior to May 1970, utilizing B-52s or tactical aircraft or both?” The question was to lead to hearings and a public response of excuses and lies that were perhaps more alarming than anything that was coming from the Ervin Committee. They raised fundamental questions of military discipline and honesty, of civilian control over the military and of Congressional effectiveness. Many of the questions still remain unanswered, many of the conflicts of testimony are still unresolved, and many of the crucial documents are still classified.

In some confusion, Brown asked the committee to go into secret session. There he admitted that B-52 bombing had taken place in Cambodia before the invasion. In this spontaneous testimony the General agreed that reports had been falsified. But after he returned to the Pentagon he withdrew this admission in a letter that argued that, "so long as the reports met in every detail the requirements imposed, they were not intended to deceive those with a security ‘need to know.’”

The committee immediately scheduled public hearings. Knight appeared to explain the complicated way in which he had burned the records. Randolph Harrison, the Special Forces lieutenant, came to tell of the secret Salem House and Daniel Boone missions, and of the first, disastrous B-52 strike in Cambodia. Gerald Greven, the pilot who had been told “with a smile” that his maps were in error when he had reported seeing bomb craters in Cambodia in 1969, came to confess that he had been involved in bombing an enemy hospital there. Other junior officers came to say that that was commonplace and described how they had tortured enemy suspects.

But the senior military and civilian officials who were called to testify were not so forthcoming, and the hearings were disappointing for the two Senators—Hughes and Symington—who took them most seriously. These two considered that the fundamental questions were: who exactly had ordered that the Constitution be ignored and the Congress not be informed of an act of war against a neutral country; and who had instructed that military reports and procedures be corrupted. They were continually frustrated in their attempts to find the answers. Both inside and outside the hearing room, the administration mounted a successful campaign to divert attention from those inquiries by insisting that the bombing had been essential to protect American lives and that the secrecy had been crucial to protect Sihanouk.

The Sihanouk factor dominated all the justifications, even though little or no documentary evidence of his complicity in the bombing was produced. As has been noted, Chester Bowles's visit in January 1968 was cited, and so was Senator Mansfield's in August 1969. Admiral Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said that Kissinger had told him Sihanouk would tolerate secret bombing. Later Kissinger referred the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to a May 1969 press conference in which Sihanouk had said he had no control over what the Americans did in those parts of his country occupied by the North Vietnamese. He also secretly send the Senate Foreign Relations Committee copies of the letters and cables between Nixon and Sihanouk in 1969 , to prove that the Prince had not objected.

Even if diplomatic concerns were, in 1969, the most vital, no one explained why Sihanouk had still to be protected, and the Congress decided, into the summer of 1973. When the Pentagon's press spokesman, Jerry Friedheim, was asked why the Pentagon had so recently submitted false statistics to Congress, he at first replied, "Obviously it was a blunder of some magnitude. . . . We weren't smart enough to foresee" the testimony of Hal Knight. He said he knew at the time it was wrong and regretted it. But this was not the answer required of him, and five hours later he issued a "clarification," stating that on further recall he had not known that the B-52 statistics were incomplete until after they were sent to the Committee in June. He claimed that the Pentagon had been in a "state of flux," with Elliot Richardson moving to the Justice Department and James Schlesinger not yet confirmed as Secretary of Defense.

Friedheim first blamed the Strategic Air Command for the falsification of reports, but the Pentagon then stated, in its name, that the dual reporting procedures "were fully authorized and directed by senior military and civilian officials here in Washington." Laird and General Wheeler then denied that they knew anything about it, and Kissinger claimed he thought the practice "deplorable." Wheeler, however, pointed out that it was the President who insisted continually on the need for total secrecy. Later in sworn testimony to the Foreign Relations Committee, Kissinger initially claimed that "we" in the White House had no knowledge of the double bookkeeping system. But then he inserted into the witness record a statement that suggested that either he or members of his staff certainly did. Kissinger said "The President did not know of the dual reporting channels. The President and the NSC unanimously did agree on the need for secrecy, however, for the reasons which explained. It was in fact known that special double accounting procedures were developed within the Department of Defense."

The administration refused to declassify the crucial documents on the bombing (none of the cables quoted in Chapter One of this book was released), but the Pentagon did provide the November 1969 memorandum from Wheeler to Laird in which the Chairman asked the Secretary to authorize more Menu strikes. The memorandum explained the cover procedure: simultaneous strikes in South Vietnam "will provide a resemblance to normal operations thereby providing a credible story for replies to press inquiries." And, "All sorties against targets in Cambodia will be  programmed against preplanned alternate targets in [South Vietnam] and strike request messages will so indicate."

Harold Hughes was delighted to have the memo. "This is a direct order to enter targets in the record that are not the targets bombed?" he asked William Clements, the Deputy Secretary of Defense.

"Yes, sir, it is part of the cover. That is what we said a while ago," replied Clements.

"There is an order?"

"That is exactly right."

"It is signed by Secretary Laird, isn't it?"

"That is exactly right," repeated Clements.

Hughes was satisfied. It was, he said, the first solid written evidence of instructions to misrepresent the actual bombing positions, to enter false coordinates.

Laird was displeased by Clements' admission. At a press conference the next day he refused to have parts of the memo read out to him, and claimed that although he had approved a separate reporting procedure he had not sanctioned any falsification of records. Asked whether Kissinger or Nixon had seen the Wheeler memo, Laird replied, "I can assure you that I did not approve the strikes without total and complete discussion at the highest level of government."

In an interview for this book, Laird repeated that in 1969 he had wanted to bomb the sanctuaries publicly, that it was Nixon, Kissinger and Rogers who insisted that it be done in secret. In 1977, Nixon told David Frost that Sihanouk's position was

Nixon then cited in defense of the procedure the way in which the Allies attempted to mislead the Germans about the site of the Normandy landings.*

*Nixon appears to have confused Laird with Kissinger. It has never been suggested elsewhere that it was Laird who was concerned to "protect" Sihanouk. This statement, recorded by Frost, was edited out of the broadcast interviews. It is reproduced direct from the transcript.

The Congress never was able to discover precisely who had initiated the false-reporting procedures, nor who had approved them. The characteristic response was that all the Menu procedures "were devised by the highest military authorities on the basis of requirements imposed by the senior civilian authorities."

Donald Dawson was a young Air Force captain, a Christian Scientist, serving as a B-52 copilot at Utapao, Thailand. He had been flying B-52s since the end of 1971, but throughout 1972 he found it impossible to ignore the consequences of his work. When he returned home at the end of his first tour he found himself obsessed with the deaths he had inflicted. Watching West Side Story on television one night, he could see nothing but falling bombs and screaming people. In the spring of 1973 he was sent on a second tour to bomb Cambodia; he found each of the twenty-five missions he flew more difficult to reconcile with his conscience. He became particularly upset by a report that a Cambodian wedding party had been "boxed" by B-52s. This made him think constantly of the "reverence" in which he held his own wedding—he considered it the most important event in his life, and "having the actual ceremony devastated by a B-52 attack is beyond comprehension." It forced him, he said, to realize that the Cambodians were human beings and to recognize that nonmilitary targets were being hit.

Then he read Solzhenitsyn's 1914 and appreciated more fully the impact that iron missiles have upon human flesh. On June 19, 1973, he refused to fly. He talked to the chaplain and the flight surgeon about the chances of applying for conscientious-objector status. The doctor advised that he be taken off flying duties, but his commanding officer Colonel Bill V. Brown gave him a direct order to fly. Dawson disobeyed it and court-martial proceedings were begun.

With the help of a competent young military counsel, he then joined three other B-52 officers and a first-term member of Congress from New York, Elizabeth Holtzman, in a lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union was conducting to have the United States courts declare the bombing of Cambodia illegal. Since the courts have traditionally refused to become involved in the conduct of foreign affairs, the case was of some judicial importance. Throughout the summer of 1973, its legal journey paralleled Congress' attempt to end the bombing.

The first judgment was given on July 25; a Republican judge, Orin Judd, of the Federal District Court in New York, found in favor of the plaintiffs.

He decided it was evident that, since 1970, the Congress had made clear that aid to Cambodia was approved only for the protection of American lives in Vietnam. Since there were no Americans left to protect, the continued bombing had no basis in law. Congress' acceptance of the August 15 compromise reflected only an admission of the President's power to bomb, not approval of his doing so. The judge stressed that "it cannot be the rule that the President needs a vote of only one third plus one of either House in order to conduct a war, but this would be the consequence of holding that Congress must override a Presidential veto in order to terminate hostilities which it has not authorized." He issued an injunction to stop the bombing within forty-eight hours.

The administration appealed, and a stay was granted by the Second Circuit Court. The plaintiffs then appealed to the Supreme Court to have the stay lifted. The Court was in recess, and so Mr. Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had supervisory jurisdiction over New York, heard the case alone. He was sympathetic and said that he "might well conclude on the merits that continued American operations in Cambodia are unconstitutional." But since the Supreme Court as a whole had not considered the issue, he did not feel that he could alone reinstate the injunction.

The rules of the Supreme Court allow plaintiffs in such a situation to appeal to another Justice, and so the ACLU sent one of its lawyers, Burt Neuborn, across the country to find William O. Douglas, then the oldest and most liberal member of the Court, in his home in the mountains of Washington State.

Neuborn flew to Seattle, drove five hours to the town of Goose Prairie, and walked for an hour up through the woods to deliver the appeal to Douglas' cabin. Douglas agreed to hear the arguments, and on August 3 the post office in the river-valley town of Yakima opened as a hearing room. Several hundred local people crowded in, and Douglas came down from the hills in an ill-fitting suit, listened, and then retired to his cabin to write a judgment that was moving if not entirely convincing in terms of law.

Douglas argued that the appeal "'involves the grim consequences of a capital case'" and would decide "'whether Mr. X (an unknown person of persons) should die. No one knows who they are. They may be Cambodian farmers whose only 'sin' is a desire for socialized medicine to alleviate the sufferings of their families and neighbors. Mr. X may be the American pilot or navigator who drops a ton of bombs on a Cambodian village. The upshot is that we know that someone is about to die.' That, he considered, was far more important than any possible harm that might be done to foreign policy by ending the bombing.

Recalling the Court's decision that President Truman had no power to seize the steel mills during the Korean war he observed

property is important, but if Truman could not seize it in violation of the Constitution I do not see how any President can take "life" in violation of the Constitution ..

When a stay in a capital case is before us, we do not rule on guilt or innocence. A decision on the merits follows and does not precede the stay . if there is any doubt whether due process has been followed in the procedures, the stay is granted because death is irrevocable.

Denial of the application before  me would catapult our airmen as well as Cambodia peasants into the death zone. I do what i think Court of Appeals.

It was now only eleven days before the bombing had to end anyway. The White House was no longer pretending that it was necessary to help the United States "negotiate from strength," and the Khmer Rouge offensive had slackened. But to Nixon the bombing of Cambodia had evidently become an important symbol of his embattled presidency. Under the procedures of the Supreme Court only the Court in a proper meeting could now overturn the stay imposed by Douglas. So, the Justice Department argued that he had not, in fact, issued a stay at all, but had simply vacated the order of the Second Circuit Court, and that the government therefore had the right to seek its own stay on the original ruling. The Department went back to Thurgood Marshall. He accepted the argument and telephoned his colleagues across the country to find a consensus. All but Douglas—who protested that such a telephone poll was alien to the court's procedures—agreed that he should reimpose a stay on the first injunction. The bombing continued.

By the time the original stay—rather than the appeals—reached the Supreme Court early in 1974, the lower courts had decided that the only plaintiff who had arguable standing was Donald Dawson, since he was the only one of the five whose interests were directly affected by the bombing. The ACLU lawyers were confident that they would win the case in the Supreme Court and that the bombing of Cambodia would be declared, retrospectively at least, unconstitutional. That would have been a historic judgment, but it was not one that Nixon, more decayed than ever, could risk. A few weeks before the Court was due to hear the arguments, the government suddenly dropped the court-martial proceedings against Dawson, and conscientious-objector status was granted to him. His standing now gone , the High Court never heard the case. There was to be no final judgment on the bombing .

Neak Luong was a strategic ferry town on the Mekong between Phnom Penh and the Vietnam border, vital to the Lon Nol government's control of the river. In the middle of the town was one of the radar beacons essential to the B-52 bombing of Cambodia. Unlike in Vietnam, there were no ground radar sites to help planes to their targets in the country. Some missions came under the control of a guide plane flying out of Thailand; this program was known as "Pave Phantom Lead." On other missions the navigator himself plotted the plane's final bomb run, calculating the coordinates from fixes taken off the nearest radar beacon on the ground. That done, the navigator had to flip an offset switch on his radar scope, otherwise the plane would home in on the coordinates of the beacon instead of those of the target. Early in 1973 one beacon was placed on top of the American embassy in Phnom Penh. Despite the fact that embassy officials constantly praised the accuracy of bombing, it caused a certain nervousness among them, and in April it was removed. At the same time more and more beacons were installed in Cambodian towns to cope with the expansion of the bombing. On August 7 one navigator who was using the Neak Luong beacon forgot to flip his switch. Six miles above the town the plane's belly opened and the long thirty-ton string of bombs "boxed" without warning onto the people below.

Rumors of the accident quickly reached Phnom Penh, where dozens of journalists had gathered to await what everyone expected to be the Khmer Rouge “kill” after the bombing ended on August 15. Colonel David Opfer, the United States embassy’s air attaché, told them the accident was “no great disaster. The destruction was minimal.” Nonetheless, he and other embassy officials did everything they could to prevent reporters from traveling to Neak Luong. Sydney S. Schanberg of The New York Times managed to do so. He found that one string of bombs had marched right down the main street, the hospital was destroyed, 137 people had been killed and 268 wounded.

The accident inevitably raised the question of how often such errors occurred in parts of the country where reporters could never penetrate.

The bombing of Cambodia was now so intense that the Seventh Air Force was faced with serious logistical problems. At one stage B-52 sortie rates were as high as eighty-one per day. In Vietnam the maximum had been sixty per day. The Seventh Air Force history Commisserating with the townspeople, Ambassador Swank pointed out that "in war one learns to suffer, but it is especially disheartening to receive death and destruction from your friends." The United States government promised funds to rebuild the hospital and pay compensation of about $100 per casualty. A survivor thanked Swank for his generosity. The navigator was later fined $700 for his carelessness.

In 1973 the war did not slacken when the onset of the monsoon in May turned the red earth to mud and brought the waters of the Mekong tumbling over the land. Despite the ferocious and ever-increasing bombardment to which they were subjected, the Khmer Rouge fought throughout the summer more fiercely than ever before—even through July, when the bombing was in its final spasm. The North Vietnamese, like the Americans, had sought a stalemate war in Cambodia. But the Khmer Rouge were seeking victory. After attempting to cut the government's supply lines they now closed in on Phnom Penh. The airplanes moved above them.

Their principal motive, it is apparent, was fear that the North Vietnamese might betray them completely. In Cambodian terms that betrayal had already begun. Sihanouk complained to The New York Times in July that the North Vietnamese were now far more interested in American aid than in helping Cambodia. “Suddenly you see Dr. Kissinger smile and Mr. Le Duc Tho smile at Dr. Kissinger. They shake hands, and they go arm in arm and leave us alone.” He later told another journalist, T.D. Allman:

We do not have enough ammunition, I look back to the Treaty we signed with the Pathet Lao, with the North Vietnamese and with the (Viet Cong) at the South China Conference in 1970. We promised to fight to the end. Now the North Vietnamese sign agreements with Kissinger. No matter, we will fight on alone. . . . The North Vietnamese want American aid so they do not help as much as they

for the period notes that, with the Cambodian sky so crowded, the problems of air-traffic congestion were considerable; sorties were so frequent that it was impossible to give adequate "Air Strike Warnings" to other aircraft. Errors were made. In late May a mistake was made in transcribing the coordinates of a proposed B-52 strike which needed the approval of FANK. (After the Moose and Lowenstein investigation in April, control of the bombing was shifted from the United States embassy to FANK headquarters.) "The incorrect target card was then used as the reference for drafting the validation request message which was submitted for FANK validation. The requested area was cleared for Arc Light strike although it was, unknown to the FANK, sixty miles from the desired strike area ... The strike took place, but the history does not record its results. Could The Chinese play the big power game with America, Brezhnev and Nixon are friends. But we will not play the big power game. We will fight for the unity of our country. Nixon continues to pour arms into Phnom Penh. We get very little from our Communist allies. Still we will fight for Cambodia.

On several occasions he said that he feared that Washington and Hanoi might agree to the partition of Cambodia. Certainly that idea had occurred to some American officials—indeed it was the basis of what passed for one peace proposal. In these matters Sihanouk expressed ageless Cambodian fears, and there was no reason to suppose that he did not represent the feelings of the Khmer Rouge as well. Later the Khmer Communists claimed that the North Vietnamese "entered into negotiations in 1973 in an attempt to swallow us, but they did not succeed." Pol Pot, the Party leader and Prime Minister after the war, commented: "If we had agreed to have a cease-fire in 1973 in accordance with the maneuvers of the U.S. and Vietnamese enemies, we should have suffered a heavy loss. First of all, we should have lost to U.S. imperialism and its lackeys; and secondly, we should have become slaves of the Vietnamese, and the Cambodian race would have entirely lost its identity." The Khmer Communists also asserted, "During the U.S. imperialists' air war in 1973, during which Cambodia was the only country to hold high the offensive banner of attacking the U.S. imperialists, the U.S. imperialists mobilized all types of aircraft from Southeast Asia and the Pacific to bomb Cambodia in a most barbaric and cruel manner. . . ."

The Khmer Rouge numbered now some 60,000 men organized into about 175 battalions. They were well disciplined and excelled at infantry assaults and at quickly digging in and holding ground against superior fire power. Through June and July they rolled up vital government outposts on the roads leading to Kompong Cham and to Phnom Penh, but they failed to take the capital. This was in part because they had not yet developed an effective command and control structure, full strategic mobility or communications security. As a result they tended to commit units in an uncoordinated, piecemeal fashion. These shortcomings, together with a scarcity of munitions, helped Lon Nol's troops to resist their assaults around the capital during July. So did the final, frenzied use of American air power.

The White House ignored its agreement with Congress that the intensity of the bombing during the last forty-five days not be increased. In June, 5,064 tactical sorties were flown over Cambodia; in July this was raised to 5,818; and in the first half of August, 3,072 raids were flown. In those forty-five days, the tactical bombing increased by 21 percent. The B-52 bombing also increased, though those planes were already almost fully committed. By August 15, when the last American planes dropped their cargoes, the total tonnage dropped since Operation Breakfast was 539,129. Almost half of these bombs, 257,465 tons, had fallen in the last six months. (During the Second World War 160,000 tons were dropped on Japan.) On Air Force maps of Cambodia thousands of square miles of densely populated, fertile areas are marked black from the inundation.

The immediate and the lasting effects of that massive, concentrated bombardment will probably never accurately be known. At the time, Tom Enders defended the policy vigorously as essential to Lon Nol’s survival. Now, he claims that it took hardly any lives and that its purpose was essentially diplomatic, based on Kissinger’s belief that Hanoi controlled the Khmer Rouge.

The Air Force does not undervalue its contribution thus. The history of the activity of B-52s in the 43rd Strategic Wing, based in Guam, summarizes those months:

FANK units failed to contain the insurgents in many areas of the country. The enemy succeeded in partially isolating the Cambodian capital from the main lines of communications. . . . Some foreign observers were virtually convinced that the fall of Phnom Penh was expected to occur within a matter of days.

Steady pounding by ARC LIGHT crews perhaps saved the day for Cambodia. . . . ferocious B-52 bombing rained upon the enemy and kept the insurgents from amassing reinforcements and staging resupply activities. . . . [Then] the insurgents after achieving sizeable gains near the Cambodian capital, were beginning to disperse in mass numbers as ARC LIGHT strikes continually flushed them out.

The Chief of the Targets Division, based in Thailand, described the situation in his end-of-tour report:

For the first time since the defense of An Loc in South Vietnam during the 1972 Communist offensive, B-52s were used close in with ARC LIGHT boxes within [deleted] of besieged friendly positions. With its greater accuracy, the F111 was targeted even closer, to [deleted]. This tactic countered the enemy tendency to move close to the friendlies when under bombing attack on the presumption we will not risk bombs on friendly forces. . . . By saturating the banks

[of the Mekong] at vulnerable points with pre-planned airstrikes in advance of river convoys and maintaining F4s and A7s overhead during the ships’ passage, the command effectively reopened the Mekong to Phnom Penh. . . . The enemy shifted to a direct assault upon Phnom Penh. . . . Although he drove the FANK back, the assault exposed his concentrated troops to air attack. As a second tactical error, he began a “scorched earth” policy, burning villages as they overran them, possibly with a view toward increasing Phnom Penh’s refugee problem. Initially it was very difficult to target the enemy’s forces with B-52s and F111s close enough to the fighting to be effective: the area is almost suburban in character with close-spaced villages throughout. However, by driving the inhabitants out and destroying the villages, the enemy developed areas that the command could legitimately target without hazard to noncombatants. In defiance of the “conventional wisdom that air cannot take ground or hold it,” we have done it. . . . The Cambodian army is as hapless and helpless as could be imagined. The application of sound principles in the use of U.S. air by a determined Commander, skillful staff, and well-trained and disciplined air crews took and held ground, making it untenable for the enemy. The FANK did not fight its way to the positions it held at the end of the air campaign. It walked to them standing up.

General John Vogt, the Seventh Air Force Commander, also speaks with pride today of 1973. The bombing, he says, saved Phnom Penh by killing about 16,000 of the enemy. It is important to consider the implications of this figure, even if, as is probable, it is exaggerated. About 75 of the Khmer Rouge’s 175 battalions were put into the battle for Phnom Penh, and each battalion numbered some 340 men. This meant a force of about 25,500 attacking the capital. If most of Vogt’s casualties were where the bombing was heaviest, on the city’s approaches, then the Khmer Rouge would have lost well over half of its assault force. Even if one spreads the loss across the entire army, this means 25 percent killed.

There is a military rule of thumb, generally accepted by battle commanders, that units cannot sustain losses of more than 10 percent without suffering often irreversible psychological damage.

That summer’s war provides a lasting image of peasant boys and girls, clad in black, moving slowly through the mud, half-crazed with terror, as fighter bombers tore down at them by day, and night after night whole seas of 750-pound bombs smashed all around. Week after week they edged forward, forever digging in, forever clambering slippery road banks to assault government outposts, forever losing comrades and going on in thinner ranks through a landscape that would have seemed lunar had it not been under water. They pushed toward the enemy’s capital, urged on by their commanders, a small group of hardened zealous men who had lived up to ten years in the isolation of the jungles, whose only experience of alliance was betrayal, whose only knowledge of war was massive retaliation.

For those men, 1973 confirmed a historic conviction that survival, let alone victory, could be guaranteed only by absolute independence and an astonishing fixity of purpose. They faced an enemy who at least appeared to have enormous support from his sponsor, while they themselves could not trust even their own leader, let alone their friends. Their attack upon Phnom Penh was a madness born of desperate isolation, which bred a dreadful hatred of their enemy and a contempt for the attitudes of the outside world. But for the bombing and their shortages of munitions, they might have won the war that summer. As it was, the indifference of their allies and the assault upon them by the supporters of their enemy stamped out thousands upon thousands of them, and the survivors had neither the men nor the firepower for a final assault upon the capital when, after August 15, 1973, the rains reinhabited the skies.