Word: som
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...short, was all but lost. In scattered areas of the country the fighting continued at a furious pace, most notably in Kompong Som (once Sihanoukville, named for Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was hospitalized in New York City with fatigue from participating in the U.N. debate on Hanoi's takeover). In Kompong Som the two sides were fighting street to street and hand to hand for control of Cambodia's sole deep-water port, 136 miles southwest of Phnom-Penh (see map). Vicious fighting continued in the Mondolkiri forest as well, and at Siem Reap...
Peking was plainly embarrassed by the events, particularly since the capture of Cambodia's three major airports and lone seaport at Kompong Som ruled out any possibility of resupplying the tattered Kampuchean fighters. The Chinese contented themselves with beefing up their own forces along the Vietnamese border and hurling insults, mainly at the Soviets for supporting the invasion. "An aggressor's day of ascendancy," proclaimed an enigmatic statement released in Peking, "is the beginning of his defeat...
Those were also the years when the volatile Sihanouk brilliantly maintained his balancing act of keeping Cambodia neutral. "He got the U.S. to build a four-lane highway, to the port of Kompong Som," recalls Wilde, "and when the monsoons washed parts of it away, he got the Russians to repair it. He delighted in inviting the diplomatic corps to help build irrigation projects. Every time he dug up a bit of earth at one of those ceremonies, the peasants would catch it, for he was sacred and so was everything he touched...
...sidelight of the industry is movie-poster art. In Bangkok, block-long billboards picturing grotesque snake-entwined monsters hovering over eviscerated women may cost $40,000 and take 36 artists to paint. These gargantuan murals, which used to be thrown away, are suddenly being bought up by European museums. Som-boonsuk Niyomsiri, one of Bangkok's foremost poster painters, has gone on to become Thailand's biggest film producer−under the name of Piak Poster. His latest movie, American Surplus, deals with the discrimination suffered by the bastard offspring of black American GIs stationed in Thailand during...
...most depressing moment came when we were taken into Kompong Som. I looked up and saw all those armed people on the dock and I thought, this is it, the old North Viet Nam prison stunt. I figured they'd march us down the street and into some jail and nobody would hear from us for years...