Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [48]
The war had already been lost at Tet.
Most of Kinnard's peers, however, placed greater faith in Vietnamization. Having no way to predict Watergate and how it would hinder Nixon's pledge of continuing support of the Republic of Vietnam, they would have agreed with Colonel Brady, who saw Operation Rockcrusher as “…the answer to a soldier's prayer as well as the end of long years of frustration and doubt: frustration at allowing a tough enemy, who struck us whenever he could, the advantage of a refuge from the retribution of our arms, and doubt of the leaders and national policy that required us to fight under such terms.”
Fast-forwarding to April 1975, it was then that the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot– who had no use for Sihanouk–drove Lon Noi into exile in Hawaii and seized Cambodia. Pol Pot, envisioning an agrarian utopia, declared it Year Zero and marched the urban population into slave labor farm collectives. There the young generation was indoctrinated and the old purged of Western contamination–to wear eyeglasses was to be condemned to death as an intellectual parasite–so that, in what one historian called “an orgy of exploding skulls,” the Khmer Rouge exterminated at least two million Cambodians, a quarter of the population. The genocide ended in 1978 when communist Vietnam, alarmed about a possible Khmer Rouge invasion of the Mekong Delta–which had once been part of the Cambodian empire–struck first with its army. Pol Pot continues to wage war with the Vietnamese occupiers.
When South Vietnamese and Cambodian units began fighting side by side against the communists, Cambodian violence against Vietnamese civilians was curtailed, but the earlier brutality sent the ARVN into Cambodia with a vengeance. Captain Raymond H. Mahoy, adviser to the 5th ARVN Cavalry, commented on the revenge he saw in the Parrot's Beak: “…the ARVN pretty well ravaged the countryside as we went. Empty homes were often looted of abandoned personal property, cattle and water buffalo herds were transported back across the border, loads of raw rubber were removed, etc. In most cases, this was done by the senior officers who must have accumulated sizeable income as a result. We advisers as a general rule did not agree with this policy, but simply looked upon the practice as a Vietnamese matter.”
The antiwar uproar was considerable. With legislators debating cutting off funds for U.S. operations in Cambodia, Nixon tried to defuse dissent by imposing a 21.7-mile/ 30-kilometer limit on the depth of U.S. attacks and promising to withdraw all U.S. troops back to South Vietnam within two months. The U.S. field commanders were bewildered and frustrated, and the pressure was intense to do as much damage as possible in the time available.
The role of the ARVN in Cambodia can only be afforded a peripheral glance in this manuscript, but it must be acknowledged that their units ranged deeper, stayed longer, and suffered and inflicted far higher casualties in Cambodia than their U.S. allies. The ARVN were eager to take the war into someone else's backyard, and eager to show what Vietnamization had done for their previously slandered fighting abilities. The Cambodian operation was great for South Vietnamese morale, and even gave them a full-blown hero in the person of Lieutenant General Tri, CG, in Corps, who was hailed as the Patton of the Parrot's Beak. Tri was a real fighting general who also had a natural, dynamic charisma with his troops and the press–he carried a swagger stick and liked to quip that he used it to spank Viet Cong. It was a sad day for his nation when General Tri was killed in a helicopter crash in 1971.
PART THREE: MAY DAY
Specialist Fifth