|
Very early on the morning of April 12th, 1975, reporter Steve Heder (in 2001, a leading authority
on the Khmer Rouge) appeared on his motorcycle beneath my sand bagged window at the Monorom Hotel
on Boulevard Monivong, "This is it," he shouted up at me, "the evacuation is on."
I raced around like a mad man. I had to get Sinan. She had to go with me in the evacuation. But
April 11th was one night she had not spent with me.
I raced to her apartment. It was locked. She was nowhere to be found. I asked her neighbors.
They had not seen her. She had not come home last night.
What was I going to do? NBC expected me to be on the U-S evacuation helicopters. I was their
only reporter covering the story. But what about Sinan?
It was seven am. I had an hour to get to the Embassy.
Hastily, I wrote a note. "There are still some military helicopters leaving from the Phnom Penh
Olympic Stadium. Get on one." I implored. "Get to Bangkok. I'll be waiting for you." I left my
business card. "You've got to get out." I wrote on the back of the card.
I shoved the note and card under her apartment door.
I was in shock. The military situation as of yesterday was no better or no worse than it had
been for the last couple of weeks. Why were the Americans cutting and running? "The decision
was Washington's," an aid to Ambassador Dean shouted to me.
President Ford had made a speech describing the Cambodian situation as untenable.
What was about to happen next to the country I loved, to the woman I loved
proved nearly unbearable to me.
As a reporter, I went through
the motions. My mind on Sinan.
In the rear countryyard of
the US Embassy, Riley, my NBC Los Angeles based cameraman, urged me
to do a stand-upper to camera, as frantic fellow correspondents and Embassy
personnel scrambled
behind me to get on an open back truck.
I muttered something into the camera about the withdrawal being a political decision and that the
military situation was no better or no worse than it had been yesterday.
I jumped on the back of the truck. It drove us less than a mile to a schoolyard where 30 CH-53 U-S
Marine helicopters were putting down to take out U-S personnel and their Khmer dependents. Watching
the evacuation, I stood mechanically recording observations into an old tape recorder. I realized
later that I had forgot to plug in the microphone.
I spotted my friend Neil Davis, cradling his CP-16 film camera under his arm. He was not
shooting a frame. Riley from Los Angeles could do it. Davis had the look of a man at
the funeral of his best friend.
I boarded the helicopter with nausea in the pit of the stomach.
I later filed this dispatch for NBC Nightly news.
Click
here for NBC TV report video clip
After a miserable night on the USS Okinawa, I was by the next day in Bangkok. I wanted to return
to Phnom Penh. I had to find Sinan. I heard that my colleague Jon Swain of the Sunday Times had
just found a flight an Air Cambodge flight in. But I was too late. There was no way back. So I
waited for Sinan in Bangkok. Emotionally drained, I knew Sinan would never arrive.
The Far Eastern Economic Review then as now was a serious publication. Often dry and scholarly
in its tone. Yet, Derek Davies, editor in the days before Dow Jones took control of the magazine,
was not averse to letting anti-war, sometimes anti-American sentiment show through. Opinion, he
believed, could not easily be divorced from journalism. I wrote the following emotional dispatch:
Thoughts I couldn't express on the NBC Nightly News.
|