Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [44]
The original ARVN raid, having drawn little antiwar protest in the U.S., was followed by more raids, but without U.S. advisers. The border was vanishing.
On 15 April, the bodies of Vietnamese males, bloated, black, and stinking, began floating down the Mekong River in Cambodia in full view of the world press. These were civilians who'd previously been rounded up by the Cambodian army, then executed–some shot, some beheaded–and dumped in the river. It ran dark and foul for days as eight hundred bodies roped together in groups of five or ten or fifty were slowly carried past the banks.2
On 17 April, Nixon authorized a covert shipment of all captured AK47 rifles to the embattled Cambodian army.
On 19 April, General Abrams, COMUSMACV, helicoptered to the II FFV compound at Long Binh, nicknamed the Plantation, to instruct Lt. Gen. Michael S. Davison, who had succeeded Ewell as corps commander on April Fools' Day, to prepare contingency plans for a possible drive into the Fishhook. General Abrams, USMA 1936, a blunt, brilliant field soldier with the build of a football guard, was, of course, the final authority on the shape of the coming operations in Cambodia, but, as was proper, it was General Davison who was to tailor the specifics. Davison had neither the charisma nor stance generally associated with successful combat commanders, but what he lacked in fire he made up for in calm, deliberate, intellectual professionalism. General Davison was himself on his first tour in Vietnam but was now finally free to do what his five predecessors at II FFV had all wanted to do in Cambodia. He was the man for the job.
Davison was a commander who rarely raised his voice and who was committed not to body count but to Vietnamization. He stood back even when the ARVN decided to do things he disagreed with and proved to be a diplomat in dealing with his counterpart, General Tri of III Corps, an unusually aggressive, effective ARVN commander more in the mold of Ewell. Major Thomas J. Kerver, assistant G-3, II FFV, commented:
Davison changed things and he changed them dramatically. First of all, he cut the briefing back to once a day and, second, he said, 'Let's get rid of this body count stuff. We're not going to go into that anymore. We need to know who's doing what and why they're doing it and what kind of resistance they're running into–and let's talk about the important stuff and not the nonsense.” Davison was the direct opposite of the gung-ho type of individuals that form the stereotype, the sad stereotype, of the military person. He was a man for whom I had an enormous amount of respect. I would regard him as the finest general officer I have ever met, not just because he was a gentleman in every sense of the word, but because he was an unflappable kind of person who could get to the heart of things and react decisively.
After meeting with General Abrams on 19 April, Lieutenant General Davison called his chief of staff, Brigadier General Kinnard, into his office, and said, “Have you ever talked much about going across the border?”
“ Well, historically, yes”–during his previous tour with MACV, Kinnard had made studies on the casualties they suffered because of enemy forays from Cambodia with which Westmoreland had hoped to impress Johnson into action–”but if you mean in real terms, no.”
“ Well, I just had this rather interesting conversation with Abrams, and this has got to be held on a very close hold–in fact, you will keep a list personally with who knows this conversation; it's just the two of us right now–that we may well be conducting operations over there, and will have to begin planning.”
On 20 April, the important plantation town of Snoul, north of the Fishhook, fell to the NVA after battle with the Royal Cambodian Army.
On 22 April, while dissent raged in his administration and senators on Capitol Hill began drafting legislation