Read Online Cambodia's Curse by Joel Brinkley - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Joel Brinkley
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Penh. After that no one in Washington professed to know what was going on inside Cambodia. So the State Department assigned Twining to be America’s “Cambodia watcher,” as they called the position, and sent him to Bangkok.
When he arrived at the end of June 1975, he was quite familiar with the debate. “With the fall of Cambodia, we all knew the accounts about the evacuation of Phnom Penh, and I believed them,” he said. “But did anyone have a good grasp on the situation in the other cities at the time? Hardly.”
So Twining set out to find the truth. He drove out to Aranyaprathet, the tiny, primitive Thai town that sat right on the Cambodian border. He was a careful young man, not given to quick flights of judgment. He knew his audience for what they were: hidebound bureaucrats in Washington. Nixon had resigned from office, and, in theory, the State Department no longer had to tailor its policy judgments so that they conformed to Washington’s convoluted explanations for its policies in Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia. The Vietnam War was over; the American troops were gone. But even so, the men who had made those judgments about the war and staked their careers on them still sat in the big chairs at the department. President Gerald Ford had been Nixon’s vice president, after all. Ford was not making wholesale changes in staffing at State or anywhere
else. Kissinger was still secretary of state. Twining also knew that the general public in the United States wanted nothing to do with Southeast Asia. Whatever he found, whatever he wrote, he knew he would face a tough audience.
At the border he found a few like-minded investigators. “I and a few other diplomats and journalists who had left Phnom Penh had gathered in Bangkok. During the summer of 1975, we were all trying to figure out what was happening, with no one having very much hard information. There was a lot of comparing of notes, almost a case of the blind leading the blind.”
In one of his first airgrams back to Washington that summer, he simply summarized the reigning points of view, since he was not ready to form his own. The journalists and others “can be divided roughly into hardliners and softliners. The hardliners believe Cambodia has been going through a considerable bloodbath whose end is not yet in sight. The softliners reject this theory, stating that, although there are undeniable reports of atrocities being committed in some parts of the country, these should not be permitted to form” a conclusion. Later, when Twining heard his first atrocity accounts, he too didn’t know what to make of them. The killing and mayhem were “so tinged with chaos that the reality was hard to decipher.”
In Washington, meanwhile, the State Department had another problem—eighty-one Cambodian military officers were studying in the United States under the Pentagon’s Military Assistance Program. On April 17, 1975, the department’s consular division canceled their student visas. The Lon Nol government had sent them to the United States for training. But that government no longer existed. Suddenly, all of these men were classified as refugees.
Almost to a man, they wanted to go home. “Everyone wanted to go back,” said Bay Sarit, who was a lieutenant colonel in Lon Nol’s army, stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, for fourteen months of training. He and his colleagues had heard the rumors of mass killings. “But we kept saying, ‘Cambodians are not going to kill other Cambodians.’ We just couldn’t believe that. The government had just fallen. Maybe
they’d kill a couple of high-ranking people. But that’s all. The others were saying. ‘We need to go back and fight!’ I asked them, ‘Fight who?’ We were confused. We didn’t know what to do.”
In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge quickly assigned Bay Sarit’s wife, Bay Sophany, to a work detail, “breaking rocks for a road.” She knew where her husband was, but she also realized that
When he arrived at the end of June 1975, he was quite familiar with the debate. “With the fall of Cambodia, we all knew the accounts about the evacuation of Phnom Penh, and I believed them,” he said. “But did anyone have a good grasp on the situation in the other cities at the time? Hardly.”
So Twining set out to find the truth. He drove out to Aranyaprathet, the tiny, primitive Thai town that sat right on the Cambodian border. He was a careful young man, not given to quick flights of judgment. He knew his audience for what they were: hidebound bureaucrats in Washington. Nixon had resigned from office, and, in theory, the State Department no longer had to tailor its policy judgments so that they conformed to Washington’s convoluted explanations for its policies in Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia. The Vietnam War was over; the American troops were gone. But even so, the men who had made those judgments about the war and staked their careers on them still sat in the big chairs at the department. President Gerald Ford had been Nixon’s vice president, after all. Ford was not making wholesale changes in staffing at State or anywhere
else. Kissinger was still secretary of state. Twining also knew that the general public in the United States wanted nothing to do with Southeast Asia. Whatever he found, whatever he wrote, he knew he would face a tough audience.
At the border he found a few like-minded investigators. “I and a few other diplomats and journalists who had left Phnom Penh had gathered in Bangkok. During the summer of 1975, we were all trying to figure out what was happening, with no one having very much hard information. There was a lot of comparing of notes, almost a case of the blind leading the blind.”
In one of his first airgrams back to Washington that summer, he simply summarized the reigning points of view, since he was not ready to form his own. The journalists and others “can be divided roughly into hardliners and softliners. The hardliners believe Cambodia has been going through a considerable bloodbath whose end is not yet in sight. The softliners reject this theory, stating that, although there are undeniable reports of atrocities being committed in some parts of the country, these should not be permitted to form” a conclusion. Later, when Twining heard his first atrocity accounts, he too didn’t know what to make of them. The killing and mayhem were “so tinged with chaos that the reality was hard to decipher.”
In Washington, meanwhile, the State Department had another problem—eighty-one Cambodian military officers were studying in the United States under the Pentagon’s Military Assistance Program. On April 17, 1975, the department’s consular division canceled their student visas. The Lon Nol government had sent them to the United States for training. But that government no longer existed. Suddenly, all of these men were classified as refugees.
Almost to a man, they wanted to go home. “Everyone wanted to go back,” said Bay Sarit, who was a lieutenant colonel in Lon Nol’s army, stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, for fourteen months of training. He and his colleagues had heard the rumors of mass killings. “But we kept saying, ‘Cambodians are not going to kill other Cambodians.’ We just couldn’t believe that. The government had just fallen. Maybe
they’d kill a couple of high-ranking people. But that’s all. The others were saying. ‘We need to go back and fight!’ I asked them, ‘Fight who?’ We were confused. We didn’t know what to do.”
In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge quickly assigned Bay Sarit’s wife, Bay Sophany, to a work detail, “breaking rocks for a road.” She knew where her husband was, but she also realized that
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