Word: phnom-penh
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...year ago this month, in one of the worst battles of the war, Communist-led Khmer insurgents pounded the Cambodian capital of Phnom-Penh with artillery and rocket fire for seven straight weeks. Somehow the city survived. Last week, it was once again hunkering down for another brutal assault. The insurgent forces, who now control most of Cambodia outside the major cities, are currently concentrating their attacks on Neak Luong, a small but vital Mekong River shipping channel 32 miles southeast of the capital. But there are daily rocket attacks in and around Phnom-Penh, and it is only...
Unlike the scattered fighting in South Viet Nam, the war in neighboring Cambodia was concentrated in one area: the key Mekong River city of Neak Luong, the last major government-held area on the river from a point 15 miles south of Phnom-Penh all the way to the Vietnamese border 71 miles distant. While 1,000 government troops were being helicoptered into the city-joining some 20,000 civilian refugees from the surrounding countryside-Communist forces on the opposite bank of the river kept up a terrifyingly random shelling that killed or maimed hundreds of civilians as well...
...city, there was little rice or medicine available even for people with money to buy it. In a gruesome reminder that the Cambodian war was getting not only hotter but more savage, the insurgent Khmer Rouge last week wantonly slaughtered 50 villagers in Prek Phneou ten miles northwest of Phnom-Penh; newsmen arriving on the scene only hours after the atrocity discovered that all had died from stab wounds, not, as is more usual, from being caught accidentally in a crossfire...
While the battle for Neak Luong went on, the Cambodian capital of Phnom-Penh, which normally gets 80% of its supplies from the Mekong, was cut off from its thrice-weekly convoys from South Viet Nam. Yet, even with fighting taking place on the city's outskirts, most people seemed almost unconcerned. TIME Correspondent Peter Range reported last week from Phnom-Penh...
Cambodia is in no better shape. With the arrival of the dry season in late January, the Khmer insurgents are expected to resume their attacks against Phnom-Penh and the few other major cities still controlled by the Lon Nol government. Neither side appears strong enough to deliver a knockout blow, and many more statistics will certainly be added to the already ghastly five-year toll: 600,000 Cambodians killed or wounded and one-half of the 7 million population made into homeless refugees...