When the War Was Over (27 page)

But Lon Nol decided to declare this offensive, named Chenla I, a success. There were victory celebrations in the capital, and Lon Nol was hailed as the commander of the Chenla I operation. The city relaxed in the illusion that the Vietnamese were checkmated. At the start of the new year, on January 21, 1971, 100 Vietnamese sappers attacked Pochentong airfield and destroyed most of the airplanes housed in the hangars, including all of the country's MiG fighter jets. Lon Nol's victory at Chenla I was betrayed for what it was, and the city was stunned. There were calls for his ouster.

Fate intervened. On February 9, Lon Nol suffered a paralyzing stroke. It was questionable whether he would survive with control over his body or his mind, and he left the country, evacuated to an American hospital in Honolulu. Sirik Matak was given temporary control over Cambodia. There were rumors of a military coup now that Lon Nol was absent, and the Americans, presumably, were open to discussing new leadership both in the government and on the battlefield.

The debate appeared to cast the modern military officers against the modern politician Sirik Matak. Then Lon Nol returned in mid-April, partially paralyzed on one side of his body but reportedly without brain damage. Everyone, including the Americans, assumed he would hand over actual power to Sirik Matak and assume a ceremonial role as chief of state. The U.S. ambassador, Emory Swank, wrote to Washington: “He is obviously still too much of an invalid to face the enormous mental and emotional demands placed upon the prime minister.”

Everyone was wrong. Lon Nol was more driven to pursue his holy war. He immediately took back complete control of the army and told his surprised officers that they were to mount a Chenla II operation in retaliation for the humiliating Vietnamese sapper attack on the airport. One of his officers reported that Lon Nol felt it time “to take an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” This time Lon Nol wanted to open a road to the north, Highway Six, which connected Phnom Penh to Kompong Thom, a provincial capital nestled in a region rich with rice the capital was beginning to need.

Lon Nol's staff objected strenuously. The officers had used the months of Lon Nol's absence to recoup from the first year's losses, repair fractured spirits, and strengthen the organization of the armed forces. Their work had barely begun, and they told Lon Nol the army was still weak from Chenla I. Their soldiers had never received the proper training to withstand the superior weapons and seasoned, skilled fighters of the North Vietnamese army.

Then they challenged the battle plan. It was indefensible as drawn. Lon Nol's orders were to spread troops up and down the length of the highway,
without sufficient logistical support to keep them supplied and without a counterplan for the obvious defense the Vietnamese would adopt—to fragment and isolate a shallow, thin column of soldiers. Lon Nol would hear no complaints. And the officers believed that the American embassy would keep him in power and consider any talk of coups or other challenges close to treason, unnecessary “destabilizing” behavior that would benefit only the communists.

Lon Nol prevailed, and Chenla II was launched at the end of August 1971. The fighting went on for more than three months and ended on December 6 with the collapse of the Chenla column along the highway The army, which now numbered some 50,000 men, was nearly destroyed as an organization. Some of its best infantry units were gone. The equivalent of ten battalions (3,000 men) were killed. Equipment for twenty battalions was destroyed, including precious armored vehicles and trucks. It was a disaster that broke the spirit of the army forever. Certain divisions and brigades would later perform heroically. Individual generals would mount sustained drives and defend their positions courageously. But the army as a whole never recovered.

Despite his defeat at Chenla II, Lon Nol's patronage and control over the army survived. The Americans, facing more defeats, were even more reluctant to entertain the idea of changing leaders. With his military and American support Lon Nol struck back against politicians who thought of challenging him. Three months after Chenla II, he took over as chief of state and dissolved the constitution and the national assembly.

Cheng Heng, the nominal head of state, had resigned three days earlier because, he said, he could no longer “cope with a worsening political situation.” Sirik Matak was harder to remove, but by June 1972, he had also left the ranks of nominal supporters of Lon Nol and had formed a new political party, the Republicans. The opposition scattered. There was no way to oust a leader who could claim the loyalty both of the Americans who were subsidizing the war and the Cambodian economy, and of the army that was fighting the war.

Lon Nol then ordered elections, certain of victory. Even so, he nearly lost to a liberal politician named In Tam who carried Phnom Penh and might have won the countryside if Lon Nol had not put the military in charge of rounding up the vote and counting it. Slightly embarrassed by the obviousness of vote-rigging in the election and under orders from Washington to keep the Phnom Penh government afloat, the U.S. embassy spent the rest of the year privately entreating In Tam to join Lon Nol's “elected” government and give the republic some semblance of unity.

In Tam refused and told U.S. Ambassador Swank exactly why. He said Lon Nol was a corrupt dictator and an inept military commander. He said it was impossible to work with Lon Nol when he surrounded himself with evil opportunists. In Tam's was one of the more frank and honest assessments of Lon Nol the Americans would hear, but it made no difference. Washington was too near a peace accord with the Vietnamese communists to risk rocking the boat.

The “Khmer Republic” was dead, for all practical purposes. The army was a wreck. But Nixon was looking forward to signing a peace treaty that would acquit him and his administration from any further responsibility for winning the Second Indochina War.

It was at this point that Saloth Sar and the Khmer Rouge prepared to take command on their side of the battlefield.

From March 29, 1970, when the North Vietnamese launched their first major attack in Cambodia, until the middle of 1972, Lon Nol's small, inexperienced army had to face and was defeated by the best fighters in Southeast Asia, the North Vietnamese army. But the Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge, and Sihanouk himself claimed regularly that it was the front of the prince that was defeating the Phnom Penh army. The Lon Nol military suffered the casualties inflicted by the North Vietnamese and grew to hate Sihanouk and his lies as much as the Khmer Rouge did.

The Khmer Rouge used the three years that the North Vietnamese carried the brunt of the fighting to build up their army from 15,000 to 40,000 soldiers, and they did so methodically, promoting officers by merit and training the troops extensively. Time was the major aid given them by the Vietnamese, and they used it efficiently. They were poorly equipped; they relied as much on captured U.S. weapons as on arms or ammunition supplied by the Chinese or Vietnamese. Unlike Lon Nol, who received over $1.6 billion in American aid during the war, or the North Vietnamese, who received $1 billion each year in Soviet and Chinese aid, the Khmer Rouge had to subsist more or less on their own.

They bought medicine, gasoline, and other necessities from corrupt officers and merchants on the Lon Nol side. They paid for many of these supplies with hard currency they earned in a quasi-official rubber-selling arrangement with the Phnom Penh government itself. The Khmer Rouge had won control over the rubber plantations at the start of the war. The former French owners and overseers of the plantations brokered a deal with Phnom Penh and the
rebels whereby the rubber latex was “sold” to Phnom Penh, where it was processed and then sold on the world market with the profits shared more or less equally between both of the warring factions. The French built new processing plants in Phnom Penh and kept them operating twenty-four hours a day, the only enterprise that earned hard currency during the war. In the last two years, when Phnom Penh had to import virtually all its needs, rubber brought in at least $10 million each year. The official need of the Lon Nol government filled the Khmer Rouge coffers so that the communists could take advantage of the “illegal” greed of the merchants and military officers who sold the Khmer Rouge arms and ammunition.

Despite the crucial role of the North Vietnamese army, the Khmer Rouge congratulated themselves for their total self-reliance, their “independence and sovereignty.” Privately they considered the Vietnamese communists to be fighting for their own interest: to preserve sanctuaries in Cambodia and ensure access to roads, food supplies, and other logistic support necessary for the battle in South Vietnam. Secretly, Saloth Sar shared Lon Nol's deep concerns about Vietnamese ambitions in the region. But Sar thought he could contain the Vietnamese long enough to build up his own strength and then boot them out. During the Beijing negotiations with Sihanouk, Sar had met with Pham Van Dong and vetoed the Vietnamese suggestion to mix Vietnamese and Khmer communist military command and fighting units. He claims he also declined Vietnamese offers to send in technical and political advisers to establish “liberated zones” in Cambodia. But numerous eyewitnesses report that the Vietnamese were more or less in charge of vast tracts of territory during the first months of war.

That would be short-lived. In 1971 the Khmer Rouge felt secure enough to begin their own “purification” program, and like Lon Nol they struck first at Vietnamese nationals living in their areas in eastern Cambodia. Under the pretext that these people were suspected agents of a nebulous Vietnamese plot, the Khmer Rouge disarmed all Vietnamese civilians. Some were arrested, others killed. Many abandoned their family farms and fishing villages and fled to Vietnam. All of this was done in private. There were no international reporters on the scene, and although Hanoi knew all about it, nothing was said publicly.

The Khmer Rouge then set their sights on the hundreds of Cambodian communists who returned from a fifteen-year exile in North Vietnam to take part in the armed revolution in 1970. The party of Saloth Sar mistrusted these “comrades” and secretly referred to them as Vietnamese in Khmer bodies. But they were sent back to Cambodia to reunite the divided
movement. When they arrived in the country they were welcomed in the northeast by Ieng Sary, who personally supervised their appointments as low-ranking officers and cadre in the army. These communists, known as “returnees,” had been warned in Hanoi by no one less than Son Ngoc Minh that they would find their situation delicate. “He said that the returning compatriots would absolutely meet with difficulties because of the problem of contradictions between those inside the country and those who had been studying abroad. . . . [Son Ngoc Minh's] instructions were that on return we should not make any demands at all . . . we should be happy with whatever tasks we were given,” one surviving returnee remembered.

Saloth Sar again proved capable of using his enemies to best advantage before destroying them. The Vietnamese had trained the returnees in a number of valuable military skills. They were now sent out to build up the Khmer Rouge army. While Sar refused to accept “mixed” Vietnamese and Cambodian military units, perhaps because during the First Indochina War such mixed units were led and directed by the Vietnamese, he was willing to use Cambodians trained by the Vietnamese. Very few returnees were given positions of power; the few who were were later divested of those positions. Most felt isolated, as the survivor said, though, in fact, this was the case for all Cambodian communists. “Contacts between the upper levels and the lower levels were like contacts between heaven and earth. . . . A comrade only knew about himself and himself alone. There was no question of knowing anything about matters of the situation in which one found oneself.”

Among the returnees was Ieng Lim, the young pro-communist Cambodian who had left his country for Vietnam in 1955 on Vietnamese orders and traveled aboard the Polish ship disguised as a Vietnamese to countervail restrictions placed by the International Control Commission overseeing the Geneva Accords. He returned to Cambodia at the start of the war in 1970, leaving behind his Vietnamese wife in the north and under instructions from Son Ngoc Minh, who he believed controlled the Cambodian Communist Party, that from the time he entered Cambodia he was to follow party orders. Lim and his group of returnees walked home, down the Ho Chi Minh trail, taking three months to traverse the difficult and dangerous landscape.