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Within a week of my arrival in Saigon, I found myself in Cambodia on my first ever combat
operation.
"Hey man, pass me another joint," shouted the infantryman atop the armored personnel carrier
as it jolted along, cutting through the neat rows of rubber trees in the Chup
plantation. A soldier next to him quickly obliged.
"Shit man, I came face to face with the VC last night," another shouted.
"Yeh, this mother was seven foot tall, charging' the perimeter. Fuck man,
right through the wire into our firebase!"
I didn't know much, but I knew these young men were hallucinating.
The young American conscripts in the last several years of the war fought on full stomachs
and often with full pouches of grass or hash or something else under their
belts. Going into battle "high" eased the terror.
Not all the troops fought on a high, not all by any means. But enough so as you would notice.
These were the men of the American First Air Cavalry Division. The grunts were a year or two
younger than I was. The officers a few years older.
They had been ordered to charge across Vietnam's border into Cambodia on May 1st, 1970.
President Nixon in a famous television address dubbed it an "incursion."
The operation was to "interdict" North Vietnamese troops and supply bases in Cambodia which had
been taunting and harassing American and South Vietnamese troops for at least two years.
The fact that North Vietnamese forces could attack South Vietnam at will and retreat with
impunity into Cambodia infuriated American military planners.
Up until 1966, North Vietnam had appeared to respect the neutrality of Prince Norodom Sihanouk's
Cambodia.
By 1968, Sihanouk, desperate to keep his country out of war as it escalated next door, had
entered into some dangerous accommodations. He allowed the port of Sihanoukville to receive
Russian supplies destined for the Communist Vietnamese. The eastern parts of Cambodia soon
became extensions of Laos' "Ho Chi Minh Trail" which had long been North Vietnam's principal
supply route to the south.
While the North Vietnamese communists showed no respect for international borders, the United
States felt hamstrung by the pressures of legal restraint.
Soon after Richard Nixon assumed the Presidency in January 1969, he and his national security
adviser Henry Kissinger threw legality to the wind and authorized massive "secret" B-52 bombing
in eastern Cambodia.
In mid-March 1970, the ouster of Sihanouk in a military backed coup d'etat gave the Americans
what they wanted: a green light to launch a proper invasion of Cambodia.
The invasion was preceded by massive B-52 air strikes, artillery barrages and tactical air
strikes to take out North Vietnamese anti-aircraft positions.
About six thousand American and three thousand South Vietnamese troops were assembled for the
and offensive backed by a formidable array of tanks, APC's and of course the ubiquitous helicopters.
The combined force entered Cambodia in two areas. To the north of the Vietnamese provincial
capital of Tay Ninh troops moved into an area dubbed "fish-hook." And to the south they advanced
on the "Parrot's Beak; a Cambodian salient that appears on a map as a dagger pointed directly at
the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon.
In the southern advance, U-S forces were seeking elements of the North Vietnam's 9th
division. In April, the 9th had overrun the town of Krek and Mimot and
the North Vietnamese were believed to have set up a major base in
the Chup Plantation, a sprawling facility the French rubber firm Michelin had established in the
1920's.
As our unit inhaled deeply and plunged through the rubber trees, we saw no sign of the 9th.
We were persuaded that our efforts at least were pushing "Charlie" deeper into Cambodia and away
from the damage their infiltration was causing in South Vietnam.
Our media coverage at the time portrayed the Cambodian incursion as a failed
mission. President Nixon had unwisely boasted that the operation would wipe out "COSVN," the purported command
headquarters of the North Vietnamese/Viet Cong forces. Some reporters had dubbed it Pentagon
East.
The command in this region since 1967 had been headed by Lt. General Tran Van Tra, a southern
communist general attached to the National Liberation Front. I met Tra five years later, after
the fall of Saigon. His was a de-centralized command with numerous caches and smaller COSVN's in
Cambodia. He only laughed when in 1975 I told Tra we had been looking for his HQ in 1970.
For the Americans to boast about a huge command post had set up U-S forces and the American
public at large for disappointment.
In the end, the "incursion" did interdict North Vietnamese lines, disrupt operations-for
awhile. The elusive COSVN was never uncovered, the operation did buy a little time - about two
years for U-S troops to continue their withdrawal.
By the spring of 1972, the North Vietnamese, freshly supplied from China and the Soviet Union
were ready again. From the same enclaves, US and South Vietnamese had "cleaned out" two years
earlier, they lost a massive offensive backed by heavy artillery and Soviet T-54 tanks.
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