Word: takeo
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...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. Another force, attacking...
Delicate Ground. When two newsmen stumbled on to the massacre at Takeo (TIME, April 27) their immediate response was not how to file a story but how to help the survivors. Later, other newsmen stood for several hours as a human shield between the wounded and several hundred nervous Cambodian troops. Finally the correspondents became nervous themselves. When they left, one correspondent's car carried away seven of the wounded...
Next day most of the reporters who had been at Takeo became more deeply involved. Some went off to talk privately with Cambodian authorities; some made the rounds of Western embassies; some returned to the scene of the massacre. The mission in all cases was partly to gather more information, but it was also to try to prevent more killing. Some embassy officials chided newsmen for involving themselves in Cambodian affairs...
...They were dumped into nearby woods. It was afternoon before we reached the school and found the survivors and the bodies of three men who had died since. The Vietnamese had had nothing to eat or drink and no medical treatment, even though there is a hospital in Takeo. Both of us had just one thought: to save at least some of the survivors. "Please stay with us," an old man wearing a Catholic cross pleaded. "They say we are Viet Cong, but we are not. They will kill us all unless you stay...
Next to the suffering, the most horrible thing in Takeo was the hope that our presence created. We naively assumed that other people would be carrying these victims out. We could not have been more wrong. Nobody gave a damn. We know that even now, if the Vietnamese haven't all been shot, they are sitting there in the dark, alone, with the Cambodians all around them, hoping against hope that we'll show up again...