Word: phnom-penh
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...President must decide how much military aid, if any, and what kind, the U.S. should provide in response to Lon Nol's personal appeal for help. If Phnom-Penh were to fall, so would the non-Communist government of Cambodia. The North Vietnamese troops would then have even safer sanctuaries and supply routes from which to harass South Viet Nam. But any widening of U.S. involvement would raise political protests at home. The President's televised report to the nation only underscored the dilemma. He bluntly warned Hanoi's leaders that they would be taking "grave risks...
Surging out of the border jungles that had served them as sanctuaries for years while Prince Norodom Sihanouk was in power, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese bands seemed to be all over a broad swath of southern and eastern Cambodia, and heading for the national capital of Phnom-Penh. In Takeo province, 50 miles south of the capital, they battled Cambodian soldiers at Ang Tasom and Takeo, the provincial capital, closing two key highways linking Phnom-Penh with southern ports. Roughly 100 miles northeast of Phnom-Penh, Communist troops blew up a bridge and occupied a town in Kratie province...
...Communists seemed to be able to move with impunity. The attack that really lent urgency to Lon Nol's requests for outside military aid (see THE NATION) was a show of Communist power and Cambodian impotence at Saang, a handsome French provincial town only 15 miles south of Phnom-Penh on the west bank of the Bassac River. For five days, a Viet Cong and North Vietnamese force of undetermined size-perhaps only 100 men-held the town against a force of 4,000 Cambodian troops, who arrived in a fleet of commandeered buses and trucks. Only after...
...against Vietnamese nationals has not abated. At one point, the Cambodians marched a column of 100 Vietnamese Catholics into Saang in order to expose Communist positions; several were cut down in the expected hail of enemy fire. As similar atrocities continued last week, the Saigon government dispatched officials to Phnom-Penh to negotiate possible repatriation of the 500,000 Vietnamese living in Cambodia...
Unreality. Saang is only a fast 20-minute drive from Phnom-Penh, but a curious air of unreality prevailed in the Cambodian capital. Even as Lon Nol was desperately dickering for arms, his brother Lon Non, a member of the government, was telling newsmen, "We are not worried. The Vietnamese attacks amuse us. We can hold out for years...