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By Root 939 0

military power controlled by MACV could have been most appropriately applied to Cambodia (and to Laos and North Vietnam) immediately following the 1968 Tet Offensive. At that time the VC guerrillas, having finally emerged from the jungle to open battle only to be decimated–and unsupported by the people they had hoped to inspire to mass uprising–virtually disappeared as a fighting force and were replaced by NVA regulars who, not of the local villages, survived because of their sanctuary base camps. General Westmoreland suggested that the time had come, with the enemy reeling from their Tet debacle, to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and to clean out the NVA bases above the DMZ and in Laos and Cambodia. However, President Johnson, finding no consensus for further military commitment from a hostile press–which had misrepresented the allied victory as a defeat–or from a thoroughly confused nation, chose not to act. The bombing of North Vietnam was reduced to a trickle, and then only near the DMZ. The enemy agreed to come to the negotiating table–which allowed them the opportunity to rebuild while making agreements they had no intention of or reason for honoring–and led Westmoreland to complain in his memoirs that the Johnson administration had “… ignored the maxim that when the enemy is hurting, you don't dismiss the pressure, you increase it.”

President Nixon would have agreed.

True, Nixon was more decisive than Johnson, less a slave to shifting public opinion, but the aggressive policies the new president applied to Cambodia were more easily pursued thanks to the Western drift of Siha-nouk.

His goal always and simply being to keep his nation out of the war, Prince Sihanouk had acquiesced to, not encouraged, the NVA/VC base camps in Cambodia, especially after Tet, when they increased threefold. Fearing Hanoi's military prowess, he had muffled his anger–and the Cambodian army–when the occupation troops began taxing the locals, counterfeiting money, and manipulating the economy. Sihanouk's concern was that despite his courtship with Peking, China had not curtailed the expansion of its NVA allies and, in fact, had encouraged rebellion by the Khmer Rouge, or Cambodian communists. Feeling betrayed, Sihanouk began reestablishing diplomatic ties with the United States.

Not yet willing to risk ground operations in Cambodia, Nixon did, however, accept the advice of Gen. Creighton W. Abrams, the new COMUSMACV, to “quarantine” the sanctuaries through the use of a stopgap measure, and on 18 March 1969 U.S. Air Force B52 Stratofor-tresses from Guam conducted the first bombing mission on Cambodia. The target was the Fishhook, where the Communist Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), the U.S. label for their foe's tactical headquarters, was thought to be ensconced. Sihanouk, maintaining his public stance as a neutral, wanted the bombings concealed, and Nixon, wanting no domestic uproar, was eager to oblige. Military records were even falsified to trick the U.S. Congress and the American people, and Hanoi's propaganda machine could say nothing of it. North Vietnam still maintained that none of its troops were in Laos or Cambodia.

The secret bombings continued.

Even while maintaining military pressure so as to twist Hanoi's arm at the negotiations in Paris, Nixon began deescalating the U.S. combat commitment. The nation, although not antiwar in the fashion of the activists, was sick of a war whose purpose was vague, whose strategy was incomprehensible, and which ground up an endless procession of husbands and fathers and sons. On 8 June 1969 Nixon announced the new policy of Withdrawal, its correlation being Vietnamization, or the upgrading of the ARVN, so that they could carry on the fight after the last U.S. infantryman had packed his duffel bag.

For America, the hot war was over.

For North Vietnam, where the commitment had never been anything but total, the bombing in Cambodia signaled to them a complete reversal of Sihanouk's previous considerations for them and was met with typical ruthlessness. Not only did General Abrams fear a