Word: cambodia
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Fighting raged once again in Indochina last week, and troops surged into Cambodia's Parrot's Beak region, where American forces in 1970 had made their highly controversial incursion. This time, however, the foes were two Communist nations that had survived and triumphed over U.S. might. Viet Nam and Cambodia (which now calls itself Democratic Kampuchea) challenged each other not only with deadly gunfire but with blasts of bitter propaganda, while their sponsoring powers, the Soviet Union and China, watched uneasily from the sidelines...
...week's end, Vietnamese spearheads had penetrated some 65 miles into Cambodia along Route 1 only 36 miles from the capital of Phnom-Penh. Supporting them were elements of eight Vietnamese divisions, armed with captured American tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery. Neither side disclosed its casualties...
...propaganda war was just as intense. Phnom-Penh accused its neighbors in Viet Nam of destroying Cambodian rubber plantations, burning forests, seizing cattle and poultry, even "raping and killing our women in crueler manner than the Thieu-Ky and South Korean mercenary troops of the past." Hanoi charged that Cambodia's Khmer Rouge guerrillas had made incursions into Viet Nam and had looted and sacked its pagodas, schools and hospitals. Far worse, it accused the guerrillas of "raping, tearing fetuses from mothers' wombs, disemboweling adults and burning children alive." Were it not for the fact that thousands...
...rivalry between Cambodia and Viet Nam started centuries ago, fueled by religious differences and by economic competition over the Mekong River basin, and has never ceased. Common cause against the South Viet Nam regime and the U.S. merely dampened mutual hatreds; even in the midst of war, there were incidents between them. In 1973 the Khmer Rouge attacked North Vietnamese who were maintaining a wartime supply line through the Parrot's Beak, where Cambodian territory protrudes into Viet Nam. The Cambodians suspected-justifiably, as it turned out-that the Vietnamese were holding Chinese arms meant for Khmer Rouge fighters...
...Parrot's Beak, Giap's troops were traveling in the area where American forces had invaded Cambodia to cut Viet Cong supply lines from the north. Route 1, the highway that Giap's soldiers used for their forays into Cambodia, was the same road along which Richard Nixon had sent U.S. troops in the eight-week U.S. invasion. It was also the route that the battle-tough North Vietnamese 9th Division, one of the units deployed last week, had traveled to enter Saigon...