War and Politics by Other Means: A Journalist's Memoir

Cambodia and Us

CAMBODIA AND US " H AV E YOU THE BUD D H A ?" asked our guide before we moved across a dry gully in the heavy morning heat and into the noman 's land separating guerrillas of the Khmer People's National Liberation Front (KPNLF) and regulars of the Vietnamese army-the ant and the elephant of Southeast Asia, warring in the scrub forest of northwestern Cambodia. Despite my initial chuckle, this was not a joke. We were heading into mortal combat against the 8th Regiment of the 5th Vietnamese Division occupying the village of Talei about 13 miles from the Thai border. Our guide, Soeung Sak, an English-speaking intelligence officer, meant did we carry the protection of a good luck charm, the magic to stop bullets. We did not. We did have our wits, although skeptics might have brought these into question. With Bill Sumner, companion on three mountain climbing expeditions, I had made a deliberate decision to join the jungle guerrillas, and to go with them into combat, to photograph and write about their fight to drive the Vietnamese from their country. This was March 1984, tag end of the rainy season. Getting to this point of departure for the climax of my mission had been a challenge greater than filing news stories to New York from 18,500 feet on K2. The lure was to give an account of a cause and a war virtually ignored outside Southeast Asia, especially by Americans who played a role in the creation of this political chaos. The chaos was incidental fallout from our war in Vietnam, a kind of global road-kill. 160 CAMBODIA AND US / I6I In March, I969, President Nixon, in secret, launched B-S2 bombers against Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia, a neutral in the war. Whatever it did for our military effort in Vietnam, the bombing had an invigorating effect on Communist insurgents, led by Pol Pot, a Stalinist fanatic. Their ranks swelled. So did their arms, sometimes snatched from our own troops, and soon Communists took over the country, scattering our friends in Phnom Penh, reeducating about two million of their countrymen by killing them. Only invasion and occupation of Cambodia by Vietnam quelled the mass slaughter. It was this occupation, however, against which the non-Communist Cambodian factions joined with Pol Pot's Communists to fight. If there has been a stranger alliance in modern warfare it has yet to be uncovered: officers and men of the KPNLF allied with Pol Pot, the murderer of their kith and kin. I had only a vague awareness of this sordid piece of international politics when Son Sann, the tall, elegant, Mandarin prime minister of Cambodia under the neutralist ruler Prince Norodom Sihanouk , came to Seattle to address a gathering of refugees, survivors of the Asian holocaust, now settled around Puget Sound. Son Sann invited me to come and observe his fighters in Cambodia. I mulled the offer for a week. It meant getting close again to war, and, worse, war in an environment of extreme heat and poisonous snakes. Growing up around river bottoms, I had cultivated a deadly fear of reptiles, and consequently never met a water moccasin or a rattlesnake that I did not kill. But if successful, the trip also meant first reports on a war otherwise ignored. I weighed risk against opportunity and said yes. So did the Post-Intelligencer. So did Sumner, the physicist, mountaineer, and photographer who had just quit his plans for a winter ascent of Mount McKinley, but retained a yen for dangerous adventure. Given his skill with a camera and calm under duress, Sumner was an ideal choice. Under auspices of the KPNLF president, Son Sann, who had promised safe passage through one of the world's most fortified borders , we reached Bangkok in mid-March, held a clandestine meeting with four of the organization's representatives, and stalled. The Thai government was tolerating the presence of KPNLF, but only if r62 / CAMBODIA AND US it stayed semiunderground and away from the Cambodian border, where a six-foot, one-inch white man would stick out like a coal pile on a snowfield. In other words, these furtive gents were saying they could not provide transportation or papers for a border crossing into the KPNLF's military base in Ampil. We would be welcomed there if we could make it on our own. My heart sank...