Word: cambodians
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...pleasure of presenting a special leather-bound copy of our Bicentennial issue to our highest ranking reader, Gerald Ford. Our appointment was delayed by a strategy session of the National Security Council. That meeting, we later discovered, had focused on ways to respond to the Cambodian seizure of the merchant ship Mayaguez (see cover story). Unruffled by the developing crisis, the President greeted us warmly and leafed through the special edition. He paused at the People section, laughing over colonial Dr. Benjamin Rush's prognosis of ten extra years of life for anyone taking up a newly imported game...
...Have been fired on and boarded by Cambodian armed forces. Vessel being escorted to unknown Cambodian port...
...freighter and not quite twoscore 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...
...sign of danger for the Mayaguez was the sudden appearance at 2:20 p.m. (3:20 a.m. in Washington) of a Cambodian gunboat. It fired machine gun bullets and a rocket across the freighter's bow and forced her to stop. Radio Operator Wilbert Bock got off a last distress call. Then the Cambodians apparently located the radio shack and the radio fell silent. But the last message was picked up in Indonesia by agents of the ship's owner and relayed to the State Department in Washington...
...President Ford was told the sketchy details of the seizure in his early morning briefing. The U.S. had no information on why the ship had been seized; indeed, that remained unclear throughout the week. Some officials speculated that, flushed with their conquest of the country, the Cambodian Communists were simply kicking sand in American faces. Others suggested that the Cambodians were reinforcing their claim to the Wai Islands, where geologists believe oil may lie under the sea bottom. Still other U.S. officials feared that the Cambodians had taken the ship in order to use it as a chip in future...