Word: phnom-penh
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...clarify and advance U.S. policy in Viet Nam, the situation was made even murkier by events in neighboring Cambodia. There the menacing movements of 40,000 Communist troops threatened the poorly equipped army of the new Premier, General Lon Nol, and there was even a danger that the capital, Phnom-Penh, might fall (see THE WORLD). The new Communist challenge posed another, potentially fateful series of questions...
...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...
...crammed four kids into the bucket seat in the front of one car. Three men got into the back seat, one of them terribly wounded in his stomach, chest and limbs. Another, for whom there was simply no more room, told us solemnly: "Please rent a truck in Phnom-Penh to take us out. We will pay you for all your trouble." His two sons had been killed the night before and his brother was lying badly wounded on the cement...