The End

 CHAPTER 23

The End

THE FINAL battle for Phnom Penh began as government officials and division commanders, at a party given by John Dean, raised their glasses to the new year, the fifth year of the war. At 1 A.M. on the first of January, Communist artillery and rockets were unleashed on government positions north, east and west of the city and in the enclaves across the country. North of Phnom Penh government positions crumbled at once and artillery pieces were abandoned. The 1975 dry-season offensive was underway.

Lon Nol's troops were not well placed to meet it. The level of fighting during the previous rainy season had been much higher than in earlier years. At General Palmer's urging, the army had attempted to drive the Communists out of the "rocket belt"—their launching area in the swampy lands southeast of Phnom Penh between the Bassac and Mekong rivers. Casualties in the 1st Division were so high that other units had to be rotated in to absorb the losses. Several military attaches in the embassy urged that the offensive be broken off. Palmer refused. Instead, he says, he urged the army leadership to "whipsaw" the Khmer Rouge by exploiting FANK's superior mobility and shifting the attack quickly against the Communists' main east-west supply line north of the city once they were heavily committed in the Bassac area. This was not done. Palmer blames the army. Some American military attaches criticize him. In any case, as Palmer complained in his end-of-tour report, the failure represented “a major tactical turning point of the war.” By January 1 dozens of Lon Nol's units had been badly mauled, very few had been able to rest and refit, and no effective gains had been made.

Now, in these final three months, each side fought with extraordinary bravery and each suffered losses that would have been intolerable for most armies. In the end, differences in training, morale, discipline, and, perhaps most important of all, supplies, were crucial.

It was clear within days of the start of the offensive that Hanoi was no longer withholding arms—the Khmer Rouge had far more weapons and ammunition than ever before. It was also obvious that they had improved their communications security, that they now exercised efficient command and control over their forces; that they were able to replace the killed and wounded, and that they had devised an effective plan for pinning down government troops around Phnom Penh. On the government side, not only had nothing changed, but it was now that what Palmer called “the past sins of Lon Nol's officers” took their final, critical toll. Once more he was unable to acknowledge the extent to which he and his predecessors had tolerated, even encouraged these sins.

There was still no sense of urgency at the command level, and in the field officers still demanded money before cooperating with other units. Lon Nol still insisted on personal control, and the old pattern of late-morning attacks, heavy afternoon losses and dusk retreats continued as ever. In the past, fire power had been used to shore up incompetence. Now that Congress was cutting back aid, Palmer noted, “the only remaining option appeared to be manpower.” Often the manpower did not exist. In Siem Reap, near Angkor, one battalion commander paled when told to redeploy his full unit strength to Phnom Penh; for years he had carried four hundred phantoms on his payroll and in fact had only forty soldiers ready for combat. The defense of Battambang, where Dean's foe Sek Sam Iet had ruled, soon proved impossible for the same reason. Losses mounted. The phantom soldiers marched their comrades to defeat.

Within weeks the foxhole strengths of many units had fallen to only 30 percent of their authorized strength. The American embassy made frantic efforts to overcome the shortages. Lon Nol was encouraged to introduce general mobilization. He was even urged to end deferments of middle-class students, but that was politically impossible. All day long, army press gangs roared up and down poorer streets seizing boys. General Palmer urged FANK to transfer around 10,000 men from its headquarters staff into combat units; he later acknowledged that only a small portion of these men were reassigned to the field and that many of them, particularly officers, deserted.

And yet, those of Lon Nol's soldiers who did fight, fought on and on, often displaying such tenacity that Palmer was astonished. “Despite the flagrant absence of their officers during critical actions, the failure of top leadership to even visit them or recognize their heroic deeds, the long periods that they and their families were without pay or enough food because of their officers’ incompetence or dishonesty, and the unimaginative tactics that they were ordered to execute, Khmer foot soldiers continued to fight for their country until defeat was inevitable.”

It was not really their country that Lon Nol's troops were fighting for. Like soldiers anywhere they frequently fought for their own lives and those of their families. Many of them fought out of fear of the Khmer Rouge. They fought against atheism. They fought for their comrades, their squads and for their platoons. They fought because they had nowhere else to go.

After the war was over, the new government of Cambodia declared over Radio Phnom Penh that “the Mekong was the key to our great victory. It was also the enemy’s weakest point. Blocking the Mekong meant completely defeating the enemy and winning total victory.”

Before January 1975, all roads into Phnom Penh had been decisively cut. Ninety-two percent of all the rice, fuel and ammunition on which the government depended for survival was brought by barge sixty miles up the winding river from South Vietnam. Through December, as the rains ended and the waters receded, the banks closed in and the convoys became more and more vulnerable. One convoy managed to pass up river just after Christmas, but as soon as the New Year offensive began, the Khmer Rouge committed over 5,000 troops to the banks of the lower Mekong between the Vietnamese border and the ferry town of Neak Luong.

The government had failed to appreciate that the defense of the Mekong was far more vital to its survival than, say, that of the enclave of Takeo. Inadequate forces were committed to keep the river open. For almost all of January no convoys came through, and the capital’s stocks of rice, fuel and ammunition were diminished. Finally, at the end of the month, one small convoy did manage to reach Phnom Penh.

For the Vietnamese, Taiwanese and Korean crews, the voyage on the rusty barges and tugs was perilous. In the past they had usually had to brave an hour of heavy fire at a few well-known choke points along the river. This year the fire was extraordinarily heavy and almost continuous. Hour after hour, thousands of machine-gun rounds and hundreds of B-40, B-41 and 107-mm. rockets, grenades and mortars crashed into the sandbagged bridges of the boats and against the steel cages with which the ammunition barges were protected. For much of the trip many of the crew members were in panic, screaming “Back up, VC. Back up, VC.” The wheelhouse of one tug took a direct hit and collapsed on the Cambodian pilot. Even as the convoy finally struggled into Phnom Penh’s little dock, a rocket sizzled across the water, smashed into a harbor tug and killed a man.

The convoy brought just two weeks of supplies. It was the last ever to reach Phnom Penh. By the time the crews had recovered from their ordeal and set off back to Saigon, the Khmer Rouge had introduced a fatal new weapon. They stretched nylon line and wire rope, salvaged from tugs sunk in earlier operations, across the river. The lines were supported by bamboo floats and attached to them were small mines, supplied by China, that were detonated from the shore as ships passed over them. Several vessels in the empty convoy were sunk.

With American advice, the FANK leadership developed plans for coordinated army, navy, and air-force sweeps of the river. The navy was to cut the barricades, while artillery was unleashed on Khmer Rouge positions; helicopters were to leapfrog troops up the riverbanks just before convoys passed, and the ships were to run the most dangerous of the choke points at night. The scheme was, as General Palmer pointed out, "an excellent piece of staff work from a U.S. Staff College viewpoint," but it was never implemented. There were not enough men and "for the Khmer it was simply a grandiose 'joint plan' beyond their level of sophistication." Instead, the navy alone made haphazard attempts to clear the river. They were not successful, and by the end of March the navy had lost about a quarter of its ships and had 70 percent of its crewmen killed or wounded. The river was never reopened, and the city began to starve.

With the Mekong closed, Washington revived old contingency plans for a massive airlift of food and fuel to Phnom Penh. For 48 days through February, March, and early April, a shuttle of DC-8s flew into Saigon. At the same time the Pentagon began to fly in fuel and ammunition from Thailand. To abide by at least some of the spirit of the Cooper-Church amendment, the U.S. Air Force did not do this job directly. Instead, the contract was given to a firm named Bird Air. The planes were lent by the Pentagon, their official markings were painted over, and about half the pilots were U.S. Air Force reservists.

The airlift of food prevented famine, but it did not stop starvation spreading through the city. In 1973 the government’s estimate of the daily rice needed in Phnom Penh was 770 metric tons. During 1974, as thousands more refugees arrived, the daily distribution fell to about 694 metric tons. Still more refugees streamed in during the new offensive, but after the Mekong was closed the amount of rice distributed fell further almost every day. Its average for that period was 543 metric tons a day. Throughout February and March the airlift managed to bring in only about 440 metric tons a day. Dean made continual complaints. By now, according to AID, about a thousand tons a day would have been necessary to provide adequate nutrition. By the middle of February the maximum amount of rice that anyone could buy at the subsidized price (which was still far too high for most families) was 270 grams a day; the World Health Organization considers 450 grams a day to be the minimum nutritional requirement.

Reports by the various charitable relief organizations and investigations by the World Health Organization and by the Senate Refugee Subcommittee had already showed that malnutrition was a serious problem in 1974. In February 1975, the office of Inspector General of Foreign Assistance at the State Department asserted that “children are starving to death” in Cambodia. That conclusion was hard to avoid. In the camps and in the streets, in the cardboard shelters, in the Cambodian Hotel refugee center, one could see sick children everywhere. Those who suffered from kwashiorkor, extreme protein deficiency, had distended bellies and swollen hands, feet and ankles. Their hair was falling out or turning matted, brown and straw; they behaved as listlessly as one might expect.

Other children had simply far too little to eat to be able to grow properly and were suffering from marasmus. Their matchlike limbs hung over the empty skin folds of their bodies; they had almost no muscular control, and eight-year-olds looked like shriveled babies. For most of them there was no hope. The World Vision child nutrition center had to turn away 1,758 severely malnourished children between December 1974 and February 1975; they had beds for only 235 of the worst new cases. The Inspector-General’s report noted: “It requires little imagination to picture these wretchedly frail and sickly little bodies, borne away in their weak mother’s arms, carried to an alley somewhere, to die; certain to suffer, untreated, unhospitalized, unfed.”

Sydney Schanberg of The New York Times wrote from the besieged ferry town of Neak Luong,

The children gathered by the dozens around a Western newsman. . . Some have swollen bellies. Some are shrunken. A 10-year-old girl has dehydrated to the size of a 4-year-old . HHarsh bronchial coughs come from their throats, marking the beginnings of pneumonia and tuberculsis . All have dysentery. Their noses run continuosly. Their skins have turned scaly . Every scratch on their legs and arms becomes an ulcer.

It was only now, under extreme pressure from Congress and the relief agencies, that the White House finally agreed to ship free rice to Cambodia under Title II of the Public Law 480 program. Previously only Title I rice had been used—which had to be bought by the Cambodian government and resold to those who could afford to buy. Supplies were now increased to 700 metric tons a day. Administration policy was still limited; Lieutenant General H. M. Fish, Director of the Pentagon’s Defense Security Assistance Agency, told Congress, “We seek only to keep them alive and fighting through the remainder of this fiscal year.”

No one knows how many thousands of children died in Cambodia in those final months before the end of the war. Their suffering was perhaps the most poignant demonstration of the government’s inability to sustain its population, but in these final weeks the majority of the population collapsed into the sort of half life that the refugees had always endured. The U.S. AID Termination Report commented later that although more and more people were still pushing desperately into the enclaves and thus exacerbating the refugee crisis, “paradoxically, as the refugee situation became more and more critical, it was at the same time less and less readily identifiable as a distinct problem . . . [and] became inseparable from the larger social economic collapse of the country.” By now, “There was little or no food to be had by anybody—refugee, civilian or soldier. Malnutrition became rampant, especially in Phnom Penh, and spread to all classes of the Khmer society.”

At the beginning of February Etienne Manac'h left Peking, his tour completed, to retire to his house in Brittany. Before he departed, he saw Sihanouk one last time; the Prince was extremely dispirited. At the beginning of January the Khmer Rouge had told him that they did not expect to take Phnom Penh this year. But in the last month they had moved so.

far so fast that an imminent victory seemed likely. He said he would have to reject any further attempts the Americans made to reach him; it was too late. He knew now that he could never expect any authority in new Cambodia; the Khmer Rouge would rule the country harshly.

Publicly, however, Sihanouk was still not prepared to break with the Khmer Rouge. Throughout February and March he issued a stream of statements discounting fears of a blood bath, insisting that only Lon Nol and certain “traitors” in his “clique” need fear execution. In one telegram to Congressional Democrats, he claimed that the new government would have “no intention of making Cambodia a socialist or popular republic, but a Swedish type of kingdom.” It was nonsense and he knew it, but many of his admirers in the West were deceived.

The U.S. Congress had, in a sense, been radicalized (temporarily) by the lies it had been fed—not least about Cambodia—during the long Watergate investigations. Until now, American military and economic aid to Lon Nol had totaled $1.85 billion. (On top of that, the cost of bombing Cambodia had been around $7 billion.) In December 1974 strict restrictions had been placed on aid to Cambodia, and now a large number of new and assertive members, elected in the fall of 1974, were moving into both Houses. Several conservative committee chairmen, in particular Edward Hebert, leader of the House Armed Services Committee, were removed, and it was evident that requests for vast new aid for Indochina would have slight chance of success. Nonetheless, the White House sent Congress a request for an additional $300 million emergency military aid for Vietnam and $222 million for Cambodia. At the same time it began expending considerable energy advising Congress and warning that the “loss” of Cambodia would be a “foreign policy disaster” for the United States.

That Congress bore a measure of responsibility for the last five years of Cambodian history is beyond dispute; the legislature had constantly intervened to alter the relationship but, until December 1974, had always provided the funds adequate for White House ends. It was true, as Assistant Secretary of State Philip Habib now put it, that “year by year we built up a historical relationship and a historical dependency.”

But Kissinger once again saw the Cambodian problem only in a wider context. He said that unless Congress acted “within the next few weeks, it is certain that Cambodia must fall, because it will run out of ammunition. I know that it is fashionable to sneer at the words ‘domino theory,’ but unless the Congress provided the aid that the administration demanded, there would be “the most serious consequences” for American credibility. The validity of American commitments around the world.

would be called into question. "I don't believe we can escape the problem by condemning those who have dealt with us to a certain destruction," Kissinger said.

Kissinger's warnings were repeated by President Ford, who posed the "moral question" of whether the United States would "deliberately abandon a small country in the midst of its life-and-death struggle." He declared that it was American policy to aid "allies" so long as they were "willing and able to carry the burden of their own self-defense." Cambodia, he asserted, "has been such an ally."

The administration now maintained that it sought merely to give Phnom Penh enough ammunition to survive until the May rains checked the Khmer Rouge offensive. Then perhaps the Communists would finally negotiate. But neither Kissinger's own previous attempts at negotiation, nor the Khmer Rouge's declared policies gave any reason for such optimism. Anthony Lewis of The New York Times commented that just as the "Kissinger Doctrine" demanded that the United States conspire against another country's legal government if it feared that country might slip out of its orbit (he had Chile in mind), so it also required that if any regime takes its country into the United States sphere of interest, Washington would do everything to sustain it, no matter how little support it had from its own people or how terrible the cost to them.

What Kissinger was, in fact, trying to do was to pin the blame for the failure of the “Nixon Doctrine in its purest form” on that branch of government that had always been most skeptical of the venture. When Cambodia fell, as the administration knew it would, the “catastrophe” could be laid entirely on Congress, and in the resultant furor, the legislature might then accede to the executive’s demands over Vietnam. Even at this late stage, there were performances to be given in the sideshow. One problem, however, was that by insisting on linking American “credibility” to a cause that was already lost, Kissinger actually helped to manufacture the very crisis of confidence that he ostensibly sought to avoid.

With some difficulty the administration persuaded a group of members of Congress to visit Saigon and Phnom Penh. In Phnom Penh they were greeted by hostile newspaper editorials. One urged, “Congressmen, don’t misunderstand. Cambodia helps America, not America helps Cambodia.” They spent eight hours in Phnom Penh and were visibly shocked by what they saw of the suffering on the government side and, in most cases, by what they heard of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge. From both Lon Nol and Dean they gathered that Lon Nol was finally prepared to step aside if that were a precondition of aid or peace talks. Dean told them that 2,400 government soldiers had been killed in January and 1,857 in the first twenty days of February. These figures, he pointed out, were “staggering.” The army, he felt, was fighting with great courage but could not continue without further aid. Should it collapse,

all indications are that an uncontrolled solution will lead to an effort by the communists to impose their will rapidly, with brutality, in order to establish a new system in Cambodia. . . . This is the way they have been operating in the zones which they presently control. . . . It will be the first time since 1948 in China that an uncontrolled solution will occur, except that in this case, unlike China, there is not even a Formosa to which those who have been fighting the communists can escape.

Many of the legislators were genuinely unable to decide how best American moral responsibilities for the human disaster that Cambodia now constituted should be exercised. The dilemma was best summed up by Representative Pete McCloskey, a liberal Republican from California, who had consistently opposed both the war and Nixon, and who went to Phnom Penh determined to vote against emergency aid. After the trip he changed his mind and offered a compromise: the government should be helped through the rest of the dry season in the hope that this would force the Khmer Rouge to negotiate. “But then,” McCloskey said, “after June 1, I don’t believe the United States ought to have one man, one dollar, or one ambassador in Cambodia.”

The compromise had considerable support, but in the end the Congress took no definite action either way on the administration’s request. It was allowed to lapse, despite administration demands. McCloskey summarized his feelings with some bitterness: “I can only tell you my emotional reaction, getting into that country,” he said. “If I could have found the military or State Department leader who has been the architect of this policy, my instinct would be to string him up. Why they are there and what they have done to the country is greater evil than we have done to any country in the world, and wholly without reason, except for our own benefit to fight against the Vietnamese.”

By now the appalling casualties and the lack of food and pay were reducing the spirit of Lon Nol’s forces. There is no doubt that Congress’ long deliberations also had a debilitating effect. By juggling with supplies.

Palmer and the Pentagon managed to keep some ammunition flying into Phnom Penh but the stocks were diminishing.

Lon Nol’s troops had always expended ammunition at an extravagant rate, firing off twenty 105-mm. artillery shells when one stray mortar crumpled nearby. Had FANK units been properly led, a cut in the flow of ammunition could have been sustained at no very serious military cost. But because ammunition had always been provided in lieu of leadership it was the only form of protection on which many units could draw. To have supplies cut by almost 40 percent at the height of the most serious attack they had ever faced was a shock many found impossible to bear.

The 36th Brigade, the 72nd Brigade, the 38th Brigade, the 12th Brigade, the 4th Brigade, the 20th Brigade fell away one by one from the defense of Phnom Penh’s perimeter. When troops on the 13th Brigade, 3rd Division, defending Route 4, finally received some of the pay they had been owed for months, about fifty of the men took their families and walked away from the war. The brigade was unable to withstand the next enemy assault and ran away. By early March every company commander in the division had been either killed or wounded. From almost every unit more and more men followed the ghosts into the mists.

There was no consensus, either in the embassy or among United States government agencies, as to how the Khmer Rouge would behave after victory. Dean was a pessimist. He warned visitors that he now feared an “uncontrolled and uncontrollable solution” in which “the entire infrastructure ... the army, navy, air force, government and Buddhist monks were killed.” He would retell the story of Sarsar Sdam, a village near Siem Reap which had been captured by the Khmer Rouge in August 1974. The whole village had been burned down and, according to Catholic Relief Services workers, over sixty peasants had been brutally killed: old women had been nailed to the walls of their houses before they were burned alive, children had been torn apart by hand. In another incident in January, about forty civilians were reported to have been massacred and mutilated at Ang Snoul on Route 4. As he told the Congressional delegation, he believed that the Communists would impose a brutal revolution if they won.

But the blood-bath theory had been invoked so often, and over so many years, that it did not now arouse much interest. Even members of the embassy were divided on what the Khmer Rouge would do; some shared Dean’s gloom, others considered that he was exaggerating in order to obtain more aid. The Cambodians themselves seemed uncertain of the future. Many refugees were terrified of the Khmer Rouge. Other people appeared confident that, once the fighting ended, old friendships would be restored, enmities forgotten. Officers began to reminisce about days spent in cold Paris flats with boys now on the other side. Everyone quoted Sihanouk's constant, soothing assurances that only a handful of "traitors" would die, and some noted that in a recent radio broadcast Khieu Samphan himself had declared, "Every Cambodian has his role in national society regardless of his past." Many foreign journalists in the city, disgusted by the present horror, hoped that all would be well; the embassy Cassandras were hawks who wished to prolong the war, they decided. Drinking whiskey in their rooms in the Hotel Phnom they sang a little ditty to the tune of "She was poor but she was honest":

Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath

When the Khmer Rouge come to town?

Aye, there’ll be a dreadful bloodbath

When the Khmer Rouge come to town.

"Out there" the same problems were being discussed. It was now evident to the Khmer Rouge leadership that total military victory was almost within their grasp. If Lon Nol's troops continued to fall away as they were now doing, Phnom Penh would be in their hands within weeks. According to Sihanouk's chef du cabinet, they had not expected this. At the end of February, delegates were summoned to the Second National Congress of the Front, under the auspices of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. They considered the implications of imminent success and, in particular, the problems of feeding and governing the three and a half million people crowded into the enclaves on the losing side. In total secrecy, they decided that as soon as victory was theirs, the cities would immediately be emptied of their populations.

The people of Phnom Penh had little way of judging the effects of the bombs, shells and rockets the FANK had rained on Communist positions and ordinary villages, but one criterion was their own fear and the destruction caused by the Communists' random shellings of Phnom Penh. These had taken place throughout the war, whenever the Khmer Rouge had managed to push within range. Now the fire was much more frequent and the principal target was the airport. Over these first three months of 1975, more than 2,500 rockets and shells were fired at Pochentong in an attempt to halt the airlift. Hardly a day went by when a plane or a runway was not damaged. All civilian airlines except Air Cambodge suspended their flights. (On the Air Cambodge’s Caravelle from Bangkok glasses had to be gripped and seat belts fastened well as the plane dove at an extraordinary angle or corkscrewed tightly down to avoid the rocket launchers in the normal approaches and then jolted across the pocked runway to the sandbagged terminal, where ground crews in flak jackets tended the flight.)

The city itself suffered rather worse from the bombardment. One day in early February, a rocket landed just outside Le Collège de Phnom Watt and shot shrapnel and flying glass into a classroom. Eight children were killed and thirty-five wounded, many terribly, by that one missile. By the middle of February, over 700 rockets had skewered across the river into the city, killing over one hundred people. On March 10 a single 107-mm. rocket struck just outside the door of the Monorom Hotel in the international section of the city. Eleven people were killed and twenty wounded. The security guard on duty at the door died in the arms of an American television correspondent.

The army’s paper strength was 230,000. By the middle of March there were about 60,000 men in the foxholes. Over 8,000 soldiers had deserted since the offensive began and around 15,000 had been killed or wounded. The seriously wounded rarely returned to fight, for the hospitals were unable to help them. There were only 1,394 beds in the city, and soldiers wounded in the 1974 Bassac campaign were already lying two or three on a bed when the New Year offensive began. Now the wounded were being carried into town like bunches of broken flowers—600 or so a week. Their families struggled after them, camping where they could, and within weeks the hospitals had degenerated into stagnant slums, where boys with open, untreated wounds lay with only their extraordinary patience to sustain them. In the entire army there were only 66 doctors and of these only 18 were qualified surgeons. Almost all were in Phnom Penh. There, the blood bank began to run dry and although drugs were plentiful on the black market or in ordinary pharmacies, government supplies were soon exhausted. Conditions were worse in the enclaves. In their request for the additional $222 million aid, Ford and Kissinger had made no mention of such needs.

Khmer Rouge casualties throughout these final weeks were even higher than FANK's. A squad leader of the Communists’ 1st Division, captured on March 21, said that his regiment had lost 800 of its original 1,200 men in the fighting. Three wounded soldiers from the Khmer Rouge 3rd Division fighting southwest of the city claimed that their battalion strength had fallen from 700 to around 200. They said that morale was low, desertions were increasing, malaria was widespread, and medical supplies were insufficient. Dean, who had now adopted the White House's policy of attempting to keep the government alive until the rainy season, cabled Kissinger: "This is not intended as a light at the end of the tunnel message." However, he thought it "possible, perhaps even probable" that the Khmer Rouge were already fully committed. "In short, making allowances for the well-known and widely publicized deficiencies and problem areas of FANK, one arrives at the picture of the proverbial two punch-drunk fighters staggering around the ring, neither of which appears to have enough power left to push the other over on his face."

Major Alan Armstrong, an able soldier known to his friends as "Red Dog," was the military attaché to the 7th Division, which was defending the northwest sector of Phnom Penh. Already by the end of January, the division was fielding only about 130 men per battalion, the logistics and engineer battalions were no longer functioning, nearly all officers and NCOs had been killed or wounded, the squadron commander had typhoid, and one of the finest officers in the division was taking a training course in Taiwan. There had not been a single staff meeting during the month, and the command structure was falling apart. The divisional commander had devoted much of his energy to giving frequent parties for which the division had to pay; he rarely left the security of his bunker, giving all his orders by radio. Armstrong recommended to Palmer and Dean that the man be replaced. He was not.

This was Armstrong’s second tour in Cambodia. He found the contrast between now and 1971 depressing. Early in March, as Kissinger and Ford were demanding more military aid, Armstrong gave vent to his frustrations in a report on the army for Palmer and Dean. “FANK is tired and uneasy,” he wrote. A general mood of resignation was interrupted by outbreaks of naïve confidence that Washington would find a solution. No one talked of victory, only of peace. The soldiers were now so badly fed that they could no longer fight properly; their families lived worse than refugees. There were reports of cannibalism in the besieged town of Kompong Seila. These were documented. If soldiers were posted where they could not fish, morale collapsed. Many units looked like pirate bands with men fighting in rubber shower clogs, blue jeans, sarongs, nothing but a sweatband around their heads. Commanders rarely now inspired any loyalty in their men, and soldiers simply wandered away from the field. At the same time "a silent but desperate sauve-qui-peut sentiment is spreading among the officers."

Armstrong complained to his superiors that the corruption of the Republic had produced "a constant pus of disaffection and disillusion." Decent officers could not understand why the United States had not purged the thieves. The American position that the government must clean its own house was "absurd." United States aid to Cambodia was like a heart or lung machine. "Once the patient has reached that stage, it is folly to expect him to operate on himself."

Armstrong then asked what the United States was really doing now in Cambodia. "Is the U.S. Government here as a result of using [Cambodia] to disengage from Vietnam or is [it] here to help Cambodia? If the former, the mission is terminated. If the latter, the U.S. Government has been 90 percent unsuccessful." His own view was that "the Khmer Republic is unworthy of the supreme sacrifice by any of its citizens." The only hope of improving the situation was for more aid to be provided conditional on a real clean-up of corruption. "The Cambodians have just about given up on Americans as a redresser of wrongs." To survive at the negotiating table with options, the Khmer needs a new revolutionary spirit within the Republic; one that matches the quixotic, touching and deeply emotional spirit which existed here in 1970." Armstrong knew that was gone forever.

In the middle of March Lon Nol's commander in chief, Sosthene Fernandez, was finally removed in an attempt to regenerate the morale and the tactics of the army. Next it was Lon Nol's turn. While Dean hovered by encouragingly, the Japanese and other Asian ambassadors in Phnom Penh began to try to persuade him and other senior politicians that if only he left the country the U.S. Congress might finally authorize the additional aid that would allow the republic to survive until the rainy season.

On March 23, a group that included Long Boret, the Prime Minister, General Sak Sutsakhan, Sosthene Fernandez's successor, Saukharn Khoy, the President of the Senate and Lon Nol's brother, Lon Non, wrote Lon Nol a memorandum in which they advised a "tactical" visit to Hawaii while peace talks were explored. Faced with this ultimatum, Lon Nol demanded written assurances that a Communist government would not be accepted in his absence and that he would be allowed to return if his absence did not result in more aid to Cambodia. On March 28, long Boret sent him a memorandum that stated :

1 .Our American friends are not working for our surrender;

2. Our friends need the provisional departure of the Marshal to obtain (a) aid from Congress, (b) a margin of maneuverability for negotiations for peace between Khmers...

As a further incentive, Lon Nol was given half a million dollars and his Socio-Republican Party "baptized [him] a national hero who has made a brilliant contribution to the nation and to all of us." On April 1, 1975, the Marshal finally left the ruins. His departure and calls by Prime Minister Long Boret (one of the seven "traitors") and by the new acting President, Saukham Khoy, for peace talks were dismissed with contempt by both Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge.

That afternoon the Khmer Rouge finally broke through the government’s last defenses on the Mekong, the strategic ferry town of Neak Luong. After a three-month siege, in which the population of 70,000 suffered terribly, the town fell that evening in bloody hand-to-hand street fighting. Six thousand more Communist troops and their artillery were freed for the final assault on the southern perimeter of Phnom Penh.

In its final assessment of the war the defense attaché's office in the embassy was straightforward about the campaign along the Mekong river. "Suffice it to say that FANK was outfought, outmaneuvered, outgunned and outdesired [sic] — in a word, outclassed — every step of the way." The fall of Neak Luong was fatal, psychologically and strategically. The Communists now had control of the lower Mekong and could now redeploy two divisions and a separate brigade. But, in the words of the military attaché's office, "The most terrifying aspect of the situation lay in the realization of what these forces were bringing with them in terms of FANK munitions captured ... 10-14 operational howitzers with thousands of unexpended rounds and literally hundreds of crew served weapons with associated ammo..." Soldiers in FANK's 1st and 2nd divisions guarding the southern approaches of the city threw away their weapons and uniforms, and gathered their families for a last flight to the capital.

The government's ammunition stocks were constantly diminishing Ambassador Dean began to agitate to leave Phnom Penh. Plans for evacuation of the embassy had been brought up to date by his deputy, Robert Keeley. The first of the staff were flown out through the rocket fire at Pochentong on April 3. Dean wanted to evacuate the rest on April 5, but Kissinger refused. Dean warned that, given the speed with which the Khmer Rouge were now closing on the airport from the north and the town from the south, the final exodus would almost certainly have to be made by helicopter from near the embassy in the center of Phnom Penh.

As government positions tumbled, the mood in the embassy became distraught. Military and diplomatic officers were forced by the circumstances to review their experience in Phnom Penh and the ends they were pursuing. Some blamed Congress for its restrictions, others blamed the administration for its tolerance of the corruption that drained the Republic. Many were somewhat disgusted by the spectacle of General Matanxis, the first head of the Military Equipment Delivery Team. He was now working for an arms dealer in Singapore, and had suddenly reappeared in Phnom Penh. He was offering to buy from Cambodian officers, matériel that had previously been handed to them under the American military aid program.

For almost all embassy officials the strain of attempting to implement Kissinger's policy was immense. In recent weeks the head of the AID program, Thomas Olmsted, had died at his post, Robert Keeley had had a heart attack; one military attaché was drinking heavily. Dean himself was suffering from high blood pressure and the effects of extreme fatigue. When a British journalist asked him rather roughly just what he thought he was doing in Cambodia, Dean burst out, "You guys think you know everything, but I've got orders to fight to the last Cambodian."

In those days, indeed, Dean was not always very diplomatic; and sometimes he made his contempt for Kissinger and his policies obvious. It was clear to his colleagues that after it all was over, Dean would not go quietly as Swank had done. Everyone knew that he had kept a complete file of all his cables to and from Kissinger, and that he would use them as he saw best. Some of his colleagues believed that unless he was treated carefully he would resign from the State Department and write a book.

On April 6, Dean gave a dinner for the American journalists who were still in Phnom Penh. One of his purposes was to persuade the press to leave with him when the time came. He served a good wine and told his guests that they were so lucky only because he did not want to abandon it to the Communists. When one reporter asked him what he expected to do after Cambodia, Dean looked at him and said slowly, "We would hope our efforts to negotiate a sensible solution would be rewarded with a suitable European embassy." In reply to a question of whether things might have been better had Kissinger accepted his advice about a "controlled solution," Dean replied, "You said it, I didn't."

At the other end of the table, Robert Keeley was openly even more morose and explicit. Keeley, never a man to accept policies and orders without question, had jeopardized his career while in Greece by criticizing the Nixon administration's close support for the Colonels. He had become even angrier in Cambodia. "One day," he said slowly, "Henry Kissinger will write his memoirs. And we will all go out and buy them. And there will be a chapter on Cambodia. And I will write a footnote on every page."

Dean's departure was further delayed by an extraordinary last-minute ploy by Kissinger. Throughout March and early April Sihanouk had conducted a daily public propaganda war, promising reconciliation with the United States if only his government were recognized and the "lackeys," "puppets," "bandits" and "traitors" left Phnom Penh. But at the end of March he had also, in despair, reestablished a secret link with the United States through the French embassy in Peking. On his request his chef du cabinet, Pung Peng Cheng, met with John Holdridge, the deputy to George Bush, the man who had replaced David Bruce in the U.S. Liaison Office, at the French embassy. Pung said that Sihanouk had a favor to ask of President Ford: in his old home in Phnom Penh were copies of the films of Cambodia he had made in the sixties when he had been an enthusiastic cinéaste. They constituted a unique cultural record of a Cambodia that was gone forever: would the Americans please rescue them? Kissinger ordered Dean to find the films and also instructed Bush to seek a meeting with Sihanouk. The Prince refused, and during the first ten days of April, as the noose around Phnom Penh tightened, he continued his public tirades.

By April 11, the Khmer Rouge had moved all their forces up from Neak Luong and were about to launch a full-scale attack on the capital’s southeast sector. FANK troops on the east bank of the Mekong had now been forced into little pockets dependent on tenuous water-borne supplies and with no land route of escape. To the northwest the Khmer Rouge had moved through FANK’s 7th Division defenses—FANK did not have enough ammunition to drive them back, and the Communists were about to cut the division off from the rear as they swept on to Pochentong airport. Only in the southwest was FANK holding. President Ford's declaration that day that any aid voted for Cambodia now would be "too late" was very discouraging in Phnom Penh, but it was accurate enough.

It was now, on April 11, 1975, as Dean was telling government leaders he might soon be leaving, that Kissinger decided that Sihanouk should be brought back to Cambodia. In Peking, George Bush was ordered to seek another meeting; that afternoon John Holdridge met once more with Pung Peng Cheng at the French embassy. The American diplomat explained that Dr. Kissinger and President Ford were now convinced that only the Prince could end the crisis. Would he please ask the Chinese for an aircraft to fly him straight back to Phnom Penh? The United States would pose no conditions. Monsieur Pung smiled behind his dark glasses, shook Holdridge's hand and said he would talk to the Prince.

As Holdridge was meeting with Pung, the Khmer Rouge had moved to within a mile of the airport. It was now under constant fire, and a chartered DC-3 had gone up in flames. The airlift of rice and ammunition had been suspended. Dean was anxious to evacuate his remaining staff by helicopter to a carrier that was waiting in the Gulf of Thailand. On April 12 at 5 A.M., Peking time, Holdridge met again with Pung. He told him that the Phnom Penh perimeter was degenerating so fast that the Americans were pulling out once. Sihanouk had already issued a statement rejecting and denouncing Kissinger's invitation.

At 6 A.M. on April 12, Dean sent letters to members of the government and to other politicians offering them places on his helicopters in two and a half hours' time. To his astonishment, the only senior official to arrive at the embassy was Saukham Khoy, the acting President. The day before, Saukham Khoy had sat, weeping for Cambodia, and told some journalists, "The United States led Cambodia into this war. But when the war became difficult the United States pulled out." Dabbing his eyes, he had speculated on the future: "There are some Cambodians who say that if the United States stops aiding Cambodia then we should turn to some other great power. Who? Russia. We could change our policies and become socialists. Then they would help us." When Saukham Khoy arrived at the embassy gate the next morning, the guards ordered him out of his official car. He was bundled into a jeep and driven to the helicopter landing zone just like any embassy employee. The Preme Minister, Long 

Boret, who was on the Khmer Rouge's public "death list," declined Dean's invitation along with all but one of his cabinet. So did Lon Nol's brother Lon Non. So did Prince Sirik Matak, another "traitor," and the only leader of the 1970 coup still in Phnom Penh. He sent Dean a letter:

Dear Excellency and friend. I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion.

As for you and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection and we can do nothing about it. You leave and it is my wish that you and your country will find happiness under the sky.

But mark it well that, if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad because we all are born and must die one day. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans.

Please accept, Excellency, my dear friend, my faithful and friendly sentiments. Sirik Matak.

At about 9 A.M. that morning the first of the huge transport helicopters swooped down onto "Landing Zone Hotel," a football ground several hundred yards from the embassy. Three hundred and sixty heavily armed Marines, equipped with M-16 rifles and grenade launchers, leaped out to secure the area in a dramatic show of force. Some American officials had feared there would be riots in the city and a rush for the landing zone—as there had been in Danang in South Vietnam—when the people finally realized the Americans were abandoning them. There was nothing of the sort. The gap between Khmer and American perception remained as large as ever.

About one hundred Cambodians gathered outside the embassy and the landing zone, watching curiously this final spasm of American effort. Some of them actually seemed to believe that the helicopters were bringing in reinforcements and they offered to help control the traffic. When Major Alan Armstrong arrived at the landing zone he saw in the crowd his personal driver, a young soldier who was immensely proud to be working for the Americans, and who had for months driven Armstrong with courage and skill through countless rocket barrages along the scarred roads to the war. He and Armstrong liked each other very much, and he smiled at the major now. Armstrong could not smile; he realized that the boy had no idea what was happening.

By just after 10 A.M. the full complement—82 Americans, 159 Cambodians and 35 "third-country nationals"—had been loaded without incident into the relays of helicopters. They were given leaflets that read "Welcome Aboard, Marine Helicopter Inc. (Flight 462) Non-Stop to the Gulf of Thailand. . . . The Pilots and Crew of this aircraft are the most professional and highly trained known to man. We hope you enjoy your flight." Dean sent a last message to Washington. "A.M. Embassy Phnom Penh is closing down its communication facilities. . . ." and, dressed in a dark suit with a striped tie and matching striped handkerchief in his breast pocket, the last American representative was driven to the landing zone. He carried under his arm the Stars and Stripes. When he strode toward his helicopter, Cambodian children behind the Marines waved and called out "O.K., bye-bye. O.K., bye-bye." As the last machine lifted out the last load of Marines, the Khmer Rouge began to fire on the landing zone from across the river. A mortar round killed one of the bystanders who had stood patiently watching the caravan disappear.

The blow that was dealt to morale by the flight of the Americans can be imagined. Nonetheless, with remarkable courage, the army continued to fight, and Prime Minister Long Boret tried to devise an orderly surrender. He received no response to his overtures. The Communists moved steadily in on Phnom Penh. In Washington, Lon Nol's ambassador, Um Sim, expressed his emotions: "Let's face it," he said, "you took advantage of us, of our inexperience. As you are much cleverer than we are, you could induce us into this fighting... If the United States had respected our neutrality then the fighting, the killing and things might not have happened." Kissinger, asked to comment on this accusation, replied:

What has happened in Cambodia is heartbreaking. Our political opponents speak of our intervention in Cambodia as if we had not had enough war on our hands and involved a neutral country for the fun of it. In fact, we went into Cambodia because there were 60,000 North Vietnamese soldiers in the sanctuaries all along the frontier. We captured 15,000 of them and we seized 20,000 tons of material. After that our losses in Vietnam fell from 100 to 50 a week and finally to 10. Our operations in Cambodia prevented the North Vietnamese from launching planned offensives in regions 3 and 4, against Saigon and in the Delta. We did it to protect the evacuation of our troops from Vietnam and, from this point of view, Cambodia was a success.

Moreover, from the beginning, from 1970, we abstained from all activities in Cambodia apart from those helping the withdrawal of our troops. We fixed a limit of 21 miles for our penetration and we avoided operations which could have been interpreted as support for the government in Phnom Penh. I must say that I have great admiration for the Cambodian government, which stayed in place after our departure, and I am sad that, in these final days, we were not able to provide it with ammunition. I am not proud of that.