Word: cambodians
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...days last week, it looked as if Cambodia might become another South Viet Nam. Communist insurgent forces, armed and led by the North Vietnamese, were besieging the Cambodian capital, Phnom-Penh. U.S. B-52s bombed through the night around Phnom-Penh, hoping to hold off the enemy and prop up the shaky, dictatorial regime of President Lon Nol. General Alexander Haig Jr., U.S. Army Vice Chief of Staff and former deputy to Henry Kissinger, was sent on a fast fact-finding tour of Indochina. While high Washington officials called the situation "abysmal" and "awful," President Nixon went off to ponder...
...last week, the White House remained in direct contact by cable with Peking and Moscow. The President urged Chinese and Soviet leaders to pressure Hanoi to end the Cambodian offensive. But they can only do so much. They are competing for influence in postwar North Viet Nam, and they do not want to alienate Hanoi. On the other hand, they do not want to damage their improving relations with the U.S. by encouraging the North Vietnamese. It is a delicate diplomatic balancing act that could easily collapse, but for the moment all parties were still teetering on the high wire...
Both the U.S. and the dictatorship of President Lon Nol claimed the crackling Cambodian war was being pressed by North Vietnamese regular army units, but several observers at the scene disagreed...
Phnom-Penh, the Cambodian capital, lay encircled by Communist forces. All five highways leading to the city were under siege, and three outposts along the road to the provincial capital of Takeo had been lost. More important, the Communists had severed, for the moment at least, the vital Mekong River supply route from South Viet Nam. A convoy of about a dozen ships, already ten days overdue in the Cambodian capital, was delayed in the Vietnamese port of Vung Tau while the Cambodian armed forces and U.S. bombers tried to clear the riverbanks of enemy rocket launchers...
...South Vietnamese government outpost near the Cambodian border, Tong Le Chan, some 400 ARVN troops were surrounded by an entire Communist regiment, and large-scale fighting there seemed to be imminent. Some intelligence experts predict a general surge of Communist military activity later this month...