Cambodian memoir

Bombs away-but what now?

Bill Manson

Spare a thought for the diplomats, do-gooders and journalists in Phnom Penh. It is easy `Ater, you're on the outside looking in to rationalise the latest scare as yet another threat in a long line of unfulfilled threats. Rut only when you're there can you really know how it feels to stay when everyone with his head SCrewed on has flown off and away. When you're there, even if it is the fourth re-enactment of the same ritual, all the blase rationalisings have gone. As you sit at your caf4 table on the grand boulevards with your :11,.nrning soup, you jow ' they' are on the out'Nirts of town, You know that in the afternnon the mortars will start flying in, that People will be blown up and that by the time !light falls, skyrockets of death will be flying 1,t1 and out. And you'll be counting the days. tV the end of the American bombing. And k en, if you're like me, you'll be on your nees, asking Buddha a few questions, like e,n? Where? If. ? One more chance ? he fact that champagne has still been getthrough to the capital shows that the timers, by tradition lotus-eaters, are deterstill not to let circumstances get in the n-nal of essentials. Still, the atmosphere is like its original post-Sihanouk euPhoria, noMy first landing in Cambodia was in a field arNeak Luong. The Vietnamese army heti .0

w,Pter pilot dumped us in the middle of no

Shouted "Neak Luong!" pointed west, and took off. There we were, a Japanese Pnotographer friend and myself, stuck in the nillnid,ctie of the Cambodian countryside, with t"` ule slightest idea of where to go, or how O5 get there. Evening, when the action starts, Oits Corning on, and I was just the slightest w worried. We walked over the paddies until found a red dirt road. Half a mile later, the wooden shops and houses of Neak Luong apPea red The main street, the only real street the one that has been razed by the Americans — chattered with market stalls. Tall Ornbodian women with bundles on their ads walked statuesquely down towards the river.

Two of the three ferries across the Mekong I.,tad been mined and sunk by the communists. tn,2A:e,sn't until four o'clock that the one re0,ickens 7`ning boat loaded men, women, children, e, vegetable baskets, carts, oxen, sollers. guns, jeeps, trucks, Peugeot cars and us "-.211 hoping to reach the capital by nightfall. rhe road took up the other side, and pas the 'engers crammed into the line of 404 taxis for anp,,sixtY-kilometre ride. We had to take an ri7ng 403, which broke down at the first n. er ford — circling a bridge blown up the ight before. thRot as we came closer to town, buzzing e rnugh the flame flower trees — through a 004untryside that reminded me of Tahiti — so err sense of security increased. Even the two joNe robed monks aboard were cracking dj'hes as we crossed the great bridge. Stunewly turned soldiers between lessons, th `cited our papers, and as we drove across Yet sandbagged bridge — sandbagged and as no sags—the city relaxed around us. The with was alive, the girl soldiers marched p, giggles and smiles at their first public t,, tr :rade, the technicolor posters showed how ,70k

ample VC to death, the students keenly

their place at their own sentry box out4'7 the faculty of medicine, French tourists An' swam in the Royal's pool, in default of hogkor, the station was still staffed in the hope of more trains, there was no frisking at

cinema entrances — no hand grenades had as yet bloodied their walls — the curfew was late enough to ignore, and you didn't yet have to worry that half the journalists you mixed with were CIA plants. The contrast when next I arrived, on the eve of Tet '71, was complete. Ours was the first plane in after communist sappers had blown up every plane on the tarmac, as well as the terminal. Aboard the chartered Air Vietnam Boeing were two Japanese civilians, five journalists, including the intrepid grizzled shiny-pated Jack Foisey of the Los Angeles Times, and one or two others whose identity was never clear. "My, we've quite a welcome," said Foisey as we taxied up. At first the airport was just a series of blackened wrecks, Migs, T28s and hulks you could not identify. But the minute we pulled up, a stream of bundle-carrying families, Indian, Khmer, Vietnamese, came sweating and straggling towards our plane. We felt a bit stupid going the other way. Our visas were checked at the still-standing terminal, fresher without windows, which had all been blown out by a mortar thirty-six hours ago. As we left the thronging deserters at the blasted terminal, as the town closed around us with the odd signs of explosions, and as we heard the plane taking off again — outward tickets would be well nigh impossible — then that feeling of claustrophobia, of being closed in started to envelop me. It was the first of Phnom Penh's sieges, and I felt like Davy Crockett arriving at the Alamo. Especially when the American journalist at the' Royal ' — flow' e Phnom' Hotel — said, " D'ya hear Peking radio has put out a broadcast saying the communists are gonna take Phnom Penh for Ted in a '68 style exercise?" "No." " Rye or Dubonnet?" " But surely they wouldn't be talking about it before if they really intended to attack? What about the surprise?"" Rye or Dubonnet?" " Du-dubon-Dubonnet," said I in an accidental mimic of the ad.

"Yeah," said• the American, "Probably right. Still, they said it. And tonight's the night." He raised his glass. " Here's to Nero and Pompeii." And as if in answer, the first thud of the evening sounded across the Mekong river.

Lian, a Cambodian-Vietnamese girl refug

ing in — of all places — Saigon, had told me of all the raping and murder and pillage against the Vietnamese by the Cambodian government soldiers. " Go and look at the convent by the river," she said.

" Ah, monsieur, you cannot imagine the difficulties. In our little garden, 6,000 refugees. All to be fed, nursed, housed and all waiting, waiting to get out. To have somewhere to go." The little nun, French, delicate and old, stood beside me in the midst of thousands of families squatting under canvas. A whole city sprawled under the trees of the small convent. Inside were the sick ones. The garden was wrecked. At the end of it, above the shambles of ready-made tents, and even shops setting out goods on the ground, overlooked the figure of Christ, stone hands outstretched over all this suffering. Somehow it reminded me of a photo I had seen. Taken on the set of the movie Lord Jim in Angkor Wat with Peter °Toole striding around the makeshift huts, still in his Lawrence of Arabia robes.

But the withered old nun, Mother MarieTherese, and her endless problems, were real enough. "You see this place now, but you imagine what it is like when it rains. It is a duckpond, 6,000 people in a duckpond, children crying, grandmothers suffering, all trying to keep out of the mud, the fear of epidemics ah, monsieur!" And she threw up her hands. It happened that a baby had died in the makeshift hospital clinic as we talked. So, as she was telling the mother I made my way out of the gate in the front wall, and re-entered the world of wires and barbs and grand boulevards. In the river, the Kirirom, a Cambodian ship, shone with a great sun-shaped blast on her side. She was lucky to arrive intact. Soldiers hustled me away from the river front. Already puffs were rising from the other side, half a mile across.

In the distilling atmosphere of fear, it was interesting to see the sort of outsiders that had been caught in this net of circumstances. Mother Marie-Therese was the do-gooder whom nothing would move. She would carry on as she had for twenty years there, even in these circumstances.

In the journalists' camp there were the hawks and the doves and the bold and the sensible, and the withdrawn. When at a morning conference held by the once-famous Colonel Am Rong, a film company newscameraman, Derek Wilson, said, "I'm off to the south-west for a morning's shooting — any takers?" There were none. They knew he didn't just mean shooting film. He had been in Vietnam since 1964, and seen and done and survived it all. Yesterday he had gone out before lunch and found himself with Cambodian soldiers in a town not far south of Phnom Penh. Suddenly he was alone. The Cambodian army had melted and the North Vietnamese taken their place. It was only by a series of miracles that he managed to make a back exit through a temple and crawl with camera along the deep ditches to the edge of town — and make it back to P.P. in time for lunch at the Royal, and afternoon in the pool.

Then there was the Frenchman, lived in Laos and Cambodia all his life. He shot film for visiting journalists. Very confident and knew all the right people in the government since Lon Nol took over. But now, with the net tight around the town, he is not willing to shoot for anyone except in the central area, Does he know too many people? Is he known

to too many people 9 Nervous Jean-Paul's receipts are declining,

And the reckless groovers, the adventurers: like the friends of Sean Flynn, son of Errol, last seen taxiing right into a pocket of Khmer Rouge. They were waiting it out here to see if he'd make it back. The last adventure they had before Cambodia was to tow a bargeful of champagne from Singapore to the mercenaries fighting in Nigeria, They didn't make it. They were arrested just after they'd slipped past Port Harcourt." I'm just sitting it t,ma.1, If he comes back, we'll celebrate, if don't, I think I'll get me down to writing a ek about it all." This was a football-starAmerican you'd find sitting in the Au roaisir café behind the central market reading

• H. Lawrence and doodling with drawings. „At the evening press conference the jourists lingered after popping questions and heelving the same vague answers, that they ("4 become so used to hearing that they initscrPret by the tone with which Am Rong says ern. It no 's a sign of the times that there were r both French-speaking and EnglishIneaking

interpreters for the journalists' ben interpreters for the journalists' ben efit.A s they sat around the bar in the evening

a bang shook the city. "Christ, it's hi6Inning," said someone. Everyone was on i,13 feet electrically; except the completely litTihe bangs brought the feeling of tension a higher, the reality of the possibilities a su"le more disturbingly in focus. So it wasn't rPrising that as the eve of Tet drew on, and de RsPite an earlier curfew announced by Am ,°ag, there were a lot of people unwilling to ,?.to bed. The fat Russian, Boris Turkhovsky ing for the BangkoftWorld, and American haveller and his bird, thought by some to dve been planted, and several others spent three . hours discussing the possibility of ininstall. as bangs and thuds dotted the evenwg• Much as a political science seminar here— I kept asking myself, could it be us, rhow? No one had the courage to ask the stion I longed to ask: "Well what do we 0 when these guys appear in the streets in 4,,"Ireets?" s evur street was dead quiet when we five hed warily out into it. We were timing it re"Leen army patrols. At my hotel when I ' r1,;,,tneti it was the Vietnamese manager, for bed. I've been hearing about your is r,atrY." he said with a tentative smile. 'Er, n•I's easY to emigrate there . ?" He handed • the key. "You see these days it is not so ,i1sY for us Vietnamese in Cambodia. I have 4eY• • . ?" I left him telling him I'd try and 1-ie,.°11t, if we were all here in the morning,

,

etired into his mosquito-netted camp ed up the stone stairs. staitIrsI it wasn't all over. At the top of the tie,/ was a man who in the tension of the wa„eath hour felt the need for confessing. He he' a soldier from the Cambodian army; a s:tenant, like the Ancient Mariner who guiPPeth one of one; "There was a tourist ty de in Angkor Wat, and happy and rich hoas he, but now since good Prince Sihaartr,iit's gone he's condemned to the damned • " When the war began and jobs of —2,eet.. • to LI, in) e vanished, he joined the army. And Irie°rne an officer he recruited thirty of his Lot's at his native village by the Tonle Sap Thenceforce he was sent out into the f„.ntrysi ,n,d his adreeanear Neak Luong, and told to deside Well I soon found that the whole countryso it Was sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge, out wasn't long before I had a deal worked st,a„'_arld we were left alone, as long as we in our area. I haven't lost a man in one lea;:.1m Proud of that because . . . " and he he'eu closer so other phantoms couldn't ht;r. I smelled the local whisky heavy on his ho ath. 6 We are waiting for the Prince SihaloftU' to return. Look! Life was good till he sa,. There is no great democracy which has thoved our country. If only he would return, ih titsands would flock to him. Even if he hid

the jungle. And monsieur " — he was talk

Fr I would be the first of them." Thead so alone in my bed, locked in my room. 3w mumblings of families, the odd cries thuries, the close buzz of mosquitoes. Many ' on bs' any prayers — go on you dog, down iop0th knees — the sounds of warfare driftre'aciin, suddenly waking, piercing electricflat ears, before, God be thanked, the eu misty muggy Oriental morning. S urvi vThat was two years ago. The other side

didn't attack, and everything in Phnom Penh went on its eye-of-storm crazy-calm way. I am happy that it was then that I was there, and not now. There are far more factors in favour of serious incursions into the city than in 1971: the continued corruption within the army, the incompetence of five-sixths of the Cambodian units (it is reckoned 12,000 of the 75,000 are at a level of fighting efficiency to compare with the enemy), the fact that so much of the rest of Cambodia, 80 per cent by most reckonings, has been eaten away by the communists, and above all this week's stoppage of the American air support. As in Vietnam, the air support has, despite awful mistakes, been invaluable to the local forces. Suddenly you realise that all the offensives depended primarily upon them. It is just possible that air support will be sufficient in forms still available; the Cambodian Air Force is there, in limited numbers, but without the enormous backlog of skills and technology the Americans could call on. It is possible that the town could be beaten into submission. My guess is that it will be another, more severe squeeze, in which major installations are attacked, government offices blown up, and the population put into a state of panicky readiness to accept any solution, that may be imposed on them. There is no doubt that everything from the market upwards has been infiltrated, and cells organised.

The remaining question is: what would be the American reaction in the face of a serious threat to the capital? Would Congress and the court rescind their bombing no-no to ' save ' Phnom Penh? Or will they stand firm on a hold-off — and thus perhaps allow the stage to remain empty for the ubiquitous Prince who left just after Jacqueline Kennedy, and might be ready to accept again the star role in an exotic Asian movie which has faltered without his guiding if meretricious hand? Who knows — he has altered the constitution before — perhaps the Prince, this time, would condescend again to rule a Cambodian republic?

But between now and then is this torturous bridging period of destruction. Phnom Penh is not the place for your holiday this year.

Bill Manson, a New Zealander, was the New Zealand Broadcasting Company's correspondent in South-East Asia. He is now in England completing his book, South-East Asia Casebook,