Word: lon
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...sweep seemed only to push the Communist forces deeper into Cambodia. Roving forces of Communist troops kept pressure on three provincial capitals, including Siem Reap. the gateway to Angkor, and Kompong Speu, only 24 miles southwest of the capital, Phnom-Penh. The widening Communist attacks spread Premier Lon Nol's forces so thin that his strategists were seriously discussing a kind of grand enclave plan for the country. The Cambodian army would pull back to a corridor stretching from the seaport of Kompong Som (formerly Sihanouk-ville) to Phnom-Penh and northwest to the Thai border, tacitly ceding...
This plan would leave the government of Lon Nol with roughly half the country to defend, including the fish-and rice-producing region around the Tonle Sap and the Angkor area. The regions given over to the Communists would include the northeast, where they already dominate, the eastern border regions and the rugged Cardamom Mountains in the southwest...
...admission that Phnom-Penh does not control much of the rest of the country would be a severe psychological blow to Lon Nol's government but would probably constitute a wise military move. As it is, says one Western military analyst, the Cambodian army's desperate holding action resembles "a skater gliding over a lake of rotten ice. No matter how fast he tries, the ice keeps breaking up, and pretty soon there is nowhere left to skate...
...anti-Communist regime of Premier Lon Nol announced that it had invited Thailand to send several thousand troops to help defend it against attack from the increasingly wide-ranging Communist troops. South Viet Nam, besides moving ARVN regulars into Cambodia to clean out the sanctuaries, has ordered all available troops from its own Khmer minority to take up the defense of their ancestral home, and about 2,000 are in Cambodia...
...monuments or an attack if they were taken. One rumor had it that the deposed chief of state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, might try to move his exile government to Siem Reap. Most observers figured, however, that the Communists picked the temple area as a target to embarrass Lon Nol's government and would not try to hold...