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Indochina. On March 18, Sihanouk was overthrown in “an upper-class coup, not a revolution,” carried out for “interests of domestic and political expedience,” and with at least “indirect U.S. support,” if not more.51 Two days later, ARVN ground and air operations began in Svay Rieng Province, at the Vietnamese border, continuing through April and leading to the U.S.-ARVN invasion on April 29, conducted with an extreme brutality sometimes vividly depicted in the media, which were particularly appalled by the behavior of the ARVN forces. Much of the enormous civilian toll, however, resulted from air power, including U.S. bombing strikes that leveled or severely damaged towns and villages.52 One effect of the invasion was to drive the Vietnamese forces away from the border and deeper into Cambodia, where they began to support the growing peasant resistance against the coup leaders. A second effect, as described by U.S. correspondent Richard Dudman, who witnessed these events at first hand after his capture by the Cambodian resistance, was that “the bombing and shooting was radicalizing the people of rural Cambodia and was turning the countryside into a massive, dedicated, and effective revolutionary base.”53 Cambodia was now plunged into civil war, with increasing savagery on both sides.

U.S. bombing continued at a high level after the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Cambodia. By late 1971, an investigating team of the General Accounting Office concluded that U.S. and Saigon army bombing is “a very significant cause of refugees and civilian casualties,” estimating that almost a third of the seven-million population may be refugees. U.S. intelligence reported that “what the villagers feared most was the possibility of indiscriminate artillery and air strikes,” and refugee reports and other sources confirm that these were the major cause of civilian casualties and the flight of refugees.54

Information about what was happening in the peasant society of Cambodia in the early 1970s was limited but not unavailable. There were, first of all, many refugees with stories to tell, although the media were not interested. There was also an eyewitness account by French Southeast Asia specialist Serge Thion, who spent two weeks in regions controlled by the Cambodian guerrillas. His reports were offered to the Washington Post, but rejected.55 They were of no more interest than the reports of life under the bombing in Laos, or similar questions regarding Vietnam throughout the war and in the retrospectives.

As in Laos, the escalating war remained largely “invisible” in the media. Surveying a five-month period in early 1972 in the national press, Elterman found that “In terms of war casualties, the focus in The New York Times and Time was on military-related deaths and almost always only those that occurred in Vietnam, ignoring also the civilian deaths and refugees in that country too . . . During the winter and spring of 1972, the war in Cambodia and Laos was ignored more than usually with most of the Indo-China news coverage given to the North Vietnamese offensive into South Vietnam and the United States bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong . . . Time, in fact, had more coverage on civilian casualties in Northern Ireland during the first half of 1972 than it did on the Indo-China War.”56

Meanwhile, Cambodia was being systematically demolished, and the Khmer Rouge, hitherto a marginal element, were becoming a significant force with substantial peasant support in inner Cambodia, increasingly victimized by U.S. terror. As for the U.S.-backed Lon Nol regime, Michael Vickery points out that their “client mentality” and subsequent “dependency led them to acquiesce in, or even encourage, the devastation of their own country by one of the worst aggressive onslaughts in modern warfare, and therefore to appear as traitors to a victorious peasant army which had broken with old patron-client relationships and had been self-consciously organized and indoctrinated for individual, group, and national self-reliance.”57

In early 1973, U.S. bombing increased to