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<text> <title> (1970s) Indochina </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1970s Highlights </history> <link 11452> <link 12085> <link 11928> <link 06820> <link 06823> <link 15357><link 15342><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Indochina </hdr> <body> [As the decade began, President Nixon's "Vietnamization" policy was apparently working; the troops were coming home and the battlefields were relatively quiet. In neighboring Cambodia,however, there was an ominous change of government: Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who had jockeyed for years to keep the fighting out of his country, was overthrown in a coup. A month later, the war came to Cambodia.] (May 11, 1970) Last week President Nixon announced that he had ordered thousands of U.S. combat troops onto Cambodian soil to knock the Communist sanctuaries out. Even as he spoke, U.S. air cavalrymen thrust into Cambodia's Kompong Cham province, located inside a Communist-infested zone. Their mission: a strike at the Communist high command hidden at several points beyond the border. Farther south, troops of the South Vietnamese army, aided by U.S. advisers, helicopters and medical teams, swept into a Communist stronghold located only 35 miles from Saigon. U.S. planes, meanwhile, began bombing three other sanctuaries. By week's end the two ground forces reported a combined enemy death toll of 398; they suffered at least eight killed, including five Americans. Nixon and his aides carefully argued that this was not an invasion of Cambodia, partly because the areas involved had long been held by the Communists, not the Cambodians. The President insisted that the U.S. move was merely a tactical extension of the Vietnam conflict. He promised to keep U.S. combat forces to a minimum and indicated that the entire operation would be concluded in six to eight weeks. Nixon promised that the nation would not be "humiliated" or "defeated." Said he: "If when the chips are down the world's most powerful nation--the United States of America--acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world." Such potent images, at a time when the nation is trying desperately to heal the wounds caused by Vietnam, were likely to deepen the divisions--as the instantaneous reaction on the campuses proved. [In the U.S., the Cambodian "incursions" caused a violent eruption of campus protest. But only at Ohio's Kent State University did it result in death.] (May 18, 1970) From their staging area near the burned-out ROTC building, officers in two Jeeps rolled across the grass to address the students with bullhorns: "Evacuate the Commons area. You have no right to assemble." Back came shouts of "Pigs off campus! We don't want your war." Students raised middle fingers. The Jeeps pulled back. Two skirmish lines of Guardsmen, wearing helmets and gas masks, stepped away from the staging area and began firing tear-gas canisters at the crowd. The Guardsmen moved about 100 yards toward the assembly and fired gas again. Then the outnumbered and partially encircled contingent of Guardsmen ran out of tear gas. Suddenly they seemed frightened. They began retreating up the hill toward Taylor Hall, most of them walking backward to keep their eyes on the threatening students below. When the compact formation reached the top of the hill, some Guardsmen knelt quickly and aimed at the students hurling rocks from below. A handful of demonstrators kept moving toward the troops. Other Guardsmen stood behind the kneeling troops, pointing their rifles down the hill. A few aimed over the students' heads. Several witnesses later claimed that an officer brought his baton down in a sweeping signal. Within seconds, a sickening staccato of rifle fire signaled the transformation of a once-placid campus into the site of an American tragedy. "They are shooting blanks--they are shooting blanks," thought Kent State Journalism Professor Charles Brill, who nevertheless crouched behind a pillar. "Then I heard a chipping sound and a ping, and I thought, "My God, this is for real." The shooting stopped--as if on signal. The campus was suddenly still. Horrified students flung themselves to the ground, ran for cover behind buildings and parked cars, or just stood stunned. Then screams broke out. "My God, they're killing us!" one girl cried. They were. A river of blood ran from the head of one boy, saturating his school books. One youth held a cloth against the abdomen of another, futilely trying to check the bleeding. Guardsmen made no move to help the victims. The troops were still both frightened and threatening. In that brief volley, four young people--none of whom was a protest leader or even a radical--were killed. Ten students were wounded, three seriously. One of them, Dean Kahler of Canton, Ohio, is paralyzed below his waist by a spinal wound. [Despite the relatively good outlook for the South Vietnamese regime of Nguyen Van Thieu, with its U.S.-trained and -equipped army, the Nixon Administration still sought a diplomatic settlement for the region, one that would bring the U.S. out of the war with "peace with honor." The quest seemed futile: each side continued to insist on conditions it knew the other would not meet. So, while the official negotiators postured and mouthed around a Paris table, other avenues were also pursued.] (February 7, 1972) Assigning Henry Kissinger the role of secret agent seems about as plausible as expecting Raquel Welch to stroll down Fifth Avenue in a bikini unrecognized. One of the most photographed men in public life, ostentatious companion of beautiful women, encumbered everywhere with a bodyguard and dogged by some of the nation's ablest reporters, President Nixon's national security chief by all odds ought to have difficulty even escaping to the men's room unnoticed. Yet in the latest of his TV spectaculars, Nixon revealed last week that Henry has been at it again. In pursuit of peace in Vietnam, Nixon disclosed Kissinger had made twelve furtive trips to Paris to meet with representatives of North Vietnam over the past 30 months. In baring the clandestine diplomacy, Nixon admitted the failure to settle anything. By making it public, he hoped, he said, to force Hanoi to take it more seriously. He also sought to prove to critics that the U.S. had "gone the extra mile" in seeking an agreement and that the failure could be blamed solely on Communist transigence. [The North Vietnamese next decided to test Vietnamization. It was found wanting.] (April 17, 1972) Despite the intelligence forecasts, the location and timing of the attack caught the military men in Saigon and Washington off guard. Not until the eve of Easter Sunday, four days after the beginning of the massive artillery barrage, was it clear that a major assault was under way. By then, some 10,000 North Vietnamese regulars were driving straight through the DMZ into Quang Tri province to join another 20,000 troops already in the area. One column drove south along the beaches of the Tonkin Gulf, despite a heavy barrage laid down by U.S. destroyers offshore. Taking advantage of heavy rains and low clouds, which limited air strikes, other units rolled down French-built Highway 1 aboard Soviet-built tanks and trucks towing anti-aircraft or artillery pieces. The one option available was air power. Nixon, in effect, ordered a resumption of the unconditional bombing of the North. The invasion across the DMZ, he charged, had shattered the so-called "understanding" under which Lyndon Johnson had ordered the 1968 bombing halt. (The North has never admitted acceding to it.) (May 15, 1972) Singly and in small groups at first, then in gun-waving mobs, the retreating South Vietnamese troops streamed out of shelltorn Quang Tri city. For four days their procession down sun-baked Highway 1 continued to swell. There were soldiers on foot wearing only mud-caked underwear and with rags wrapped around their feet in place of boots. Some rode on the fenders of cars commandeered at rifle point; others clung to army trucks that careered through South Vietnam's northern countryside with lights ablaze at midday and horns blaring. The line stretched to the horizon, and so did its litter: helmets, full ammunition pouches, combat boots, web belts and packs. At the refugee- jammed city of Hue, 24 miles south of Quang Tri, the headlong retreat turned into a rampage. Soldiers who had not eaten in two days looted stores in broad daylight. By night, gangs of deserters started first and fought drunken skirmishes in the streets. Quang Tri city, deserted by practically all of its 15,000 inhabitants as well as by its defenders, fell to the Communists within minutes after the last U.S. advisers had been helicoptered out. Immediately, the Communists set up a "revolutionary administration" in the city. (May 22, 1972) It was the most momentous military decision Richard Nixon had yet made in his presidency: to mine the harbors of North Vietnam and cut off the flow of all military supplies to Hanoi from any other nation, by almost any means. He had acted because his whole Vietnamization policy and his hope for an honorable U.S. withdrawal from the war seemed threatened by a massive, two-month old North Vietnamese offensive, armed and fueled by the Soviet Union. His decision, made virtually alone and in the face of grave dissension within his Administration, also grew out of an almost obsessive fear of national and personal humiliation in Vietnam. [The invasion had not defeated Thieu or his army, and the Communist troops had taken 100,000 casualties, mostly as a result of U.S. air attacks. At last, in August 1972, the North Vietnamese decided to compromise at the negotiating table. The proposals of Chief Delegate Le Duc Tho amounted to a cease-fire in place for all parties, with the political arrangements between the Thieu regime and the Viet Cong to be worked out between them--somehow. Despite the fact that it left the main issue the U.S. had been fighting about--the political future of South Vietnam--unresolved, Kissinger bought the deal, and proceeded to tell America, "Peace is at hand."] (November 6, 1972) "We believe that we can restore both peace and unity to America very soon." With those words, Presidential Negotiator Henry Kissinger concluded last week his consummate one-hour briefing on the imminent prospects for a settlement in Vietnam. After so many false starts and unfulfilled promises for so long, Kissinger's revelation of the secret dealings with Hanoi implied a new U.S. commitment, one that would inevitably gain a momentum of its own, much as other commitments have. Probably unconsciously, Kissinger described Washington's determination to resolve the unwinnable, inconclusive and finally intolerable war in terms oddly similar to those in which three Administrations had committed themselves to staying the course. "Having come this far," he said, "we cannot fail, we will not fail." The hard bargaining was far from over. President Nguyen Van Thieu was resisting the terms of the settlement with all his might--publicly, at least. Hanoi was complaining that the U.S. was trying to slip out of a promise to sign the agreement by Oct. 31, a date that seemed too soon to be realistic. Nor was the fighting yet at an end. Indeed the heaviest ground action in months flared up in Viet Nam as both sides jockeyed for eleventh-hour gains in advance of a cease-fire in place. [At hand, maybe; in hand, no. Thieu understandably balked at the idea of being left to fight several hundred thousand Communist troops on South Vietnamese soil without U.S. support. Weeks passed, while the Nixon Administration brought brutal pressures to bear on Thieu. Still no settlement, no cease-fire. Then it was North Vietnam's turn to come under pressure.] (January 1, 1973) The President's message to the enemy was as unmistakable as it was brutal. First he ordered a new seeding of North Vietnamese harbors with mines. Then he launched the biggest, bloodies air strikes ever aimed at the North. Nixon seemed determined to bomb Hanoi into a settlement that he is willing to accept. The order, in Air Force lingo, was "five by five" (loud and clear) to clobber the enemy's homeland as never before. The military was invited to hit targets previously off limits around Hanoi and Haiphong. From Guam and Thailand they came, wave after wave of green-and-brown aerial dreadnoughts. About 100 B-52s, flying in "cells" of three, were being used round the clock, supplemented by F-4 Phantoms, F-111s, and naval fighter-bombers from aircraft carriers. Both within the Administration and on Capitol Hill it is universally accepted that the terror bombing has only one purpose: to bludgeon the Vietnamese into giving concessions that Henry Kissinger could not win at the conference table. Nixon obviously felt that the Communists were stalling. On Dec. 14, after Kissinger left Paris, Nixon sent a cable to Hanoi. He warned that unless serious bargaining began within 72 hours, he would renew bombing north of the 20th parallel. When no reply came, he kept his word. [The U.S. having bombed all parties back to the negotiating table, the final details were worked out and the guns (momentarily) silenced.] (February 5, 1973) At last, a truce. At last, after a season of false moves and false dawns, the papers were signed. At last, after years of death and destruction, the war that four U.S. Presidents had considered a necessary act of resistance against international Communism was ending in an ambiguous stalemate. For the U.S., at least, it was over. In Vietnam, fighting may well resume--or never entirely stop. Yet for the moment, those on all sides who had once sought victory now felt an exhausted sense of relief. When President Thieu announced the settlement last week, Saigon burst out in a blaze of color. South Vietnam's red-striped flag suddenly appeared everywhere. Banners strung from lamp-posts proclaimed a great victory. But the mood of the people did not match the display. There was no dancing in the streets, or anywhere else. There were no cheers, not even any more smiles than usual. The reaction in the U.S. was similarly subdued. At the time the cease-fire was actually to go into effect, Richard Nixon led the nation in prayer. It was an extraordinary hour for him personally. Regardless of the questions that would haunt the U.S. for years--whether this kind of peace could have been achieved earlier, whether all the violence, the death, the deviousness of the last four years were ultimately worth it--he had accomplished the American exit from Vietnam. He had not achieved the terms he had originally proclaimed, but the U.S. was out and Thieu was still in office in Saigon. The President mentioned achieving "peace with honor," but it is a dubious and troubling phrase to apply to Vietnam. No matter what honor the U.S. could still extract from that cruel battleground, honor must now be sought at home as much as abroad. As Kissinger put it in his briefing: "Together with healing the wounds in Indochina, we can begin to heal the wounds in America." [Later that year, a new Nixon Administration cover-up was revealed, this one concerning a secret campaign to bomb Cambodia long before the admitted 1970 invasion.] (July 30, 1973) President Nixon, in his April 30, 1970, television speech to the nation justifying the U.S. and South Vietnamese incursion into the Parrot's Beak of Cambodia, denied any previous American military action in the officially neutral kingdom of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. In fact, as a result of testimony by a former Air Force officer before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, it was revealed that the President had for the previous 14 months personally authorized the secret bombing of Cambodia, a clandestine campaign by B-52s that poured over 100,000 tons of explosives in 3,630 missions onto suspected North Vietnamese sanctuaries just across the border. The U.S. command hoped that the heavy bombing would disrupt otherwise safe staging areas used by the Communists for damaging attacks on American outposts in South Vietnam. A secret "double entry" reporting technique was used to hide the raids from the American people and Congress. [By the end of 1973, all American combat troops were out of Viet Nam. But the U.S. was only beginning to cope with the trauma of the Vietnam involvement. One response was attempting to prevent it from happening again. The 1964 Tonkin Gulf resolution justifying the huge American buildup had been repealed in 1971; now Congress tried to forestall other war-making activities.] (November 19, 1973) The nation's profound and still unfinished soul-searching for the lessons of Vietnam last week produced one historic result. In a vote that overrode Richard Nixon's angry veto of the measure last month, both houses of Congress passed severe limitations on the power of U.S. Presidents to wage war without congressional assent. Barring any Supreme Court decision that it is unconstitutional, the new law will force future Commanders in Chief to win specific authorization from the Legislative Branch to engage U.S. troops in foreign combat for more than 90 days. In theory, at least the war-powers resolution of 1973 reclaims for Congress some of the authority to commit the nation to battle that has been pre-empted by the Executive Branch almost since the beginning of the republic. [By early 1975, Phnom Penh, the besieged, refugee-swollen capital of Cambodia that comprised just about all of that country's territory that had not already fallen under the control of the Communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas, was tottering. In South Vietnam, the Communists in March began fierce, well-planned attacks on provincial capitals in the Central Highlands and again swept down from the north. This time, however, the U.S. was not there to respond with air power and advisers. In fact, Congress was preparing to disallow a request for aid to Cambodia and Vietnam--aid which had been a premise of the 1973 accords. South Vietnam and Cambodia, and soon afterward Laos, were doomed.] (March 24, 1975) The debate in Washington was remarkably calm and reasoned, even though it revived the nation's receding emotions over its most distressing military entanglement. At issue were the Ford Administration's request to send $222 million in additional military aid to President Lon Nol's shaky Cambodian government and, less urgently, $300 million in more arms to the less immediately endangered government of South Vietnam's Nguyen Van Thieu. Only a few years ago, any such relatively trifling request for military funds in Indochina would have speeded through Congress with barely a whimper of protest. Now, while prospects for approval of some limited aid varied day by day, they appeared forlorn by week's end. The House, in particular, seemed adamantly opposed. (March 31, 1975) "Pleiku fini. Kontum fini. Ban Me Thuot fini. Hue fini. Everything fini." -- Immigration official at Tan Son Nhut airport Suddenly, unexpectedly, the endless war in South Vietnam took a dramatic new turn last week. Abandoning a 20-year government policy of fighting for every inch of South Vietnamese territory, President Nguyen Van Thieu surrendered fully one-fourth of his country--seven provinces with an estimated population of more than 1.7 million people--to the attacking Communists. Dusty district roads and coastal highways were choked with frightened civilians clutching their possessions and fleeing their homes in the largest exodus since Viet Nam was divided in 1954. Meanwhile, reinforced North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces mobilized what appeared to be their most devastating offensive since the Easter attacks of 1972. Thieu's decision to give up the apparently indefensible provinces caught almost everyone, including U.S. intelligence officials, by surprise. So too did the quickness and effectiveness of Communist military moves. Two weeks ago, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger was still insisting that there would be no major Communist offensive until 1976, when it would neatly coincide with the U.S. presidential elections. (April 7, 1975) What was astonishing was the speed and suddenness of the South Vietnamese collapse. The country that had fought the Communists to a stand-off since the Paris Accords of January 1973 now seemed to have lost the ability and will to resist;its defenses simply melted away before North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces. By the end of last week, estimates of the number of refugees in South Vietnam ranged up to one million (in a population of 19.5 million). In Danang, the day before the city fell, some 400 Vietnamese air force men firing pistols and grenades forced their way past women and children onto a World Airways 727 chartered to fly refugees from the city. Several people were crushed as the plane took off; others fell to their deaths after trying to cling to the still open stairs and wheel wells. The incident and the unruly mobs at the airport caused the U.S. to suspend its program of evacuating refugees by air. (May 5, 1975) Day and night last week the black buses rolled into Tan Son Nhut. Every half-hour the silver C-141 Starlifters and C-130 Hercules transports of the U.S. Air Force flew out another 100 or so Americans, their Vietnamese dependents and other Vietnamese whose lives might be endangered by the imminent Communist takeover of South Vietnam. Before the week was out, some 30,000 refugees had been deposited in diverse havens. Practically everybody in Saigon seemed to be involved in the scramble to get aboard the airlift. Americans accustomed to being hounded by beggars, prostitutes and money changers suddenly found that they were also being buttonholed by members of the intelligentsia and upper class frantically looking for a way out of the country. Businessmen, scholars and retired officers waved letters postmarked from America, missionary school diplomas and U.S. Army discharges--any document proving some slender connection with the States. "I know Col-o-nel Hub-bard," announced a well-dressed woman outside the American embassy as she handed a letter to TIME correspondent Roy Rowan. "Are you Col-o-nel Hub-bard?" (May 12, 1975) The last images of the war: U.S. Marines with rifle butts pounding the fingers of Vietnamese who tried to claw their way into the embassy compound to escape from their homeland. An apocalyptic carnival air--some looters wildly driving abandoned embassy cars around the city until they ran out of gas; others ransacking Saigon's Newport PX, that transplanted dream of American suburbia, with one woman bearing off two cases of maraschino cherries on her head and another a case of Wrigley's Spearmint gum. Out in the South China Sea, millions of dollars worth of helicopters profligately tossed overboard from U.S. rescue ships, discarded like pop-top beer cans to make room for later-arriving choppers. In the end, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese poured into Saigon, raised the flag of the Provisional Revolutionary Government and took into custody South Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh and Premier Vu Van Mao. For many Americans, it was like a death that had long been expected, but was shocking when it finally happened. So the century's longest war was over, in an efficient but ignominious evacuation. It was nightmarish enough, but it could have been worse; only a few South Vietnamese soldiers fired at the departing Americans, and none were on target. At least the U.S. was spared the last awful spectacle of its people fighting a pitched battle with its late friends and allies. In fact, the Americans managed to bring about 120,000 South Vietnamese refugees out with them. [Looking for an opportunity to show continued U.S. resolve after the Vietnam bugout, President Ford found an early and unexpected opportunity when the Cambodians seized a U.S. freighter in the Gulf of Siam.] (May 26, 1975) "Have been fired on and boarded by Cambodian armed forces. Vessel being escorted to unknown Cambodian port." When that last distress call crackled over the air from the beleaguered U.S. merchant ship Mayaguez in the Gulf of Siam last week, it set in motion a dramatic, controversial train of events that significantly changed the image of U.S. power in the world--and the stature of President Gerald Ford. By calling up U.S. military might and successfully forcing the Cambodians to surrender the ship and free the 39-man crew, Ford acted more firmly and decisively than at any other in his presidency. That action reassured some discouraged and mistrustful allies that the U.S. intends to defend vigorously its over seas interests. Ford showed that in a confrontation he was not only willing to risk using military force but also that once committed, he would use plenty of it. Thus, to free one freighter and not quite two-score crewmen, the President called out the Marines, the Air Force and the Navy. He ordered assault troops--supported by warships, fighter-bombers and helicopters--to invade a tiny island of disputed nationality where the crewmen were thought (erroneously) to be held. To prevent a Cambodian counterstrike, he ordered two much disputed bombing raids of the Cambodian mainland. At home and abroad, some political experts thought that the show of force, which had many of the gung-ho elements of a John Wayne movie, was excessive. The Tokyo newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun asked, "Why did (the U.S.) have to use a cannon to shoot a chicken?" [It was not long before everyone who had predicated a "bloodbath" in Communist-dominated Indochina was screaming, "I told you so!" Brutal repression in the southern part of newly reunited Vietnam caused hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese to risk death or piracy on the high seas and prison camp upon recapture in order to escape in small boats to an uncertain life as refugees. In Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, things were far worse than that.] (April 19, 1976) There is now little doubt that the Cambodian government is one of the most brutal, backward and xenophobic regimes in the world. Cambodians themselves refer to the Khmer Rouge simply as "the Organization." Refugees who have managed to flee to Thailand--often after days and weeks of walking through thick forests and jungles along the border--describe the revolution as a chilling form of mindless terror. In sharp contrast to Laos and Vietnam, where party cadres have subtly tried to win popular support for social change, there are no revolutionary songs, slogans, poetry, party newspapers or "re-education" centers to explain the purpose and ideology of the revolution. Instead, there has been a grim, silent round of purges, mass evacuations that have swept up the innocent along with the guilty. Since the Communist victory last year, an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 people--one-tenth of Cambodia's population--have died from political reprisals, disease or starvation. The populations of every city have been evacuated--young, old, sick, well--and forced, at rifle point, to work in the rice fields. All shops, schools and hospitals have been closed. Cambodia's new rulers have systematically killed former civil servants and soldiers in the Lon Nol army. In recent months the pogrom has been extended to include anyone with an education, such as schoolteachers and students. Whole families--and sometimes entire villages--have been massacred. To escape the bloodbath, at least 20,000 Cambodians have fled across the border into Thailand. They tell tales of people being clubbed to death "to save ammunition." Says one former military policeman who escaped to Thailand: "If some worker made a mistake or criticized a project, he was taken away and we never saw him again. They were sometimes flogged to death, other times shot at night. The bodies were left unburied. (December 4, 1978) The frail fishing boat, packed with some 250 men, women and children fleeing Vietnam, arrived off the east coast of Malaysia early last week. When it tried to dock at Pulau Bidong, an island that holds Malaysia's largest camp of Vietnamese refugees, police prevented the landing. The craft headed for the mainland, but villagers waded into the water and pushed the vessel away from the shore. In desperation, the refugees attempted to negotiate turbulent waters into the mouth of the Trengganu River. Catastrophe struck. The boat hit a sand bar and capsized. A few dozen aboard managed to swim ashore. More than 200 lost their lives. The deaths dramatized the perils facing a growing flood of seaborne refugees trying to escape from Vietnam. A few weeks ago, one group was attacked seven times by pirates, who took even food and water before the Vietnamese landed in Thailand. Several other boatloads were so desperate for safety that they forcibly boarded an oilrig tugboat about 170 miles east of Malaysia. Still other Vietnamese scuttled their craft just off the Malaysian shore, swimming the remaining distance so that authorities could not tow them back out to sea. Despite the hazards of escape, never since the massive exodus following the fall of Saigon in 1975 has the South China Sea been so strewn with refugees seeking safe harbor. "The flow is so great," reports TIME Correspondent Richard Bernstein, "that countries in the area are becoming increasingly reluctant to accept new arrivals, even temporarily. And as the tide of refugees rises, it is straining the ability--and the willingness--of more distant nations to grant them permanent asylum." [The Hanoi regime found the Khmer Rouge as repellent as non-Communists did; it also found them a threat to their hegemony over all of Indochina.] (January 22, 1979) Not since the disintegration of South Vietnam and the fall of Saigon four years ago had Southeast Asia witnessed such a swift and stunning shift in political power. Faced with the invasion of Cambodia by twelve Vietnamese divisions totaling 100,000 men, the Democratic Kampuchean government of Premier Pol Pot hunkered down in Phnom-Penh and pledged itself to annihilate the oncoming "Vietnamese clique." Within hours after that brave statement, Phnom-Penh had fallen, the Pol Pot government and many of its soldiers were in flight; foreign diplomats and nearly 700 Chinese and North Korean advisers were beating a hasty exodus from the deserted city toward the Thailand border town of Aranyaprathet. (October 22, 1979) They came by the thousands, eyes downcast, silently edging through the high grass near the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet. Men without legs, hobbling on crutches. Women in rags, staggering beneath the weight of wooden poles hung with pots and pans, clothing and bedrolls, hatchets and rubber sandals. Children, some covered with sores, many of them naked, stumbling along at the heels of their parents. "It was like a parade of zombies," TIME Hong Kong Bureau Chief Marsh Clark reported from Bangkok last week. "For those who witnessed the macabre march into Thailand, it was an unforgettable reminder that a nation is in its death throes. All of the refugees were clad in black, appropriately, for they are the walking dead. There was no imagining what horrors they had witnessed and survived." In the 4 1/2 years since Phnom-Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, more than a third of the population of Cambodia, once estimated at 8 million, has perished from war, disease and the genocidal policies of the murderous Pol Pot regime. Last week, as the Vietnamese prepared for a final onslaught on sanctuaries near the Thai border used by the Pol Pot forces, Cambodia faced yet another horror: a famine. At least 2 million people are believed to be on the verge of death by starvation or disease. Many have been reduced to eating the leaves off trees, peeling the bark and boiling it, digging for tubers and roots. Malaria is commonplace, as is a severe form of bleeding dysentery. International relief agencies, along with the European Community, Japan, Australia, Britain and the U.S. are mounting a substantial rescue operation expected to cost $110 million over the next six months. State Department officials in Washington said last week that the U.S. will give $7 million in emergency food and money as an initial contribution. Two bills are pending in the House of Representatives, one authorizing $20 million in Cambodian relief for fiscal 1980, the other providing for $30 million. Says Republican Representative John B. Anderson of Illinois, co-sponsor of the latter measure: "If we fail to mobilize the resources of the world, we will be guilty of the crime of silence as we stand by and watch the condemned people of Cambodia march through what has been termed the Auschwitz of Asia on the road to death." </body> </article> </text>