Debate is back: Was U.S. really in Cambodia?

Existence, nature of operations resurface in dispute over Kerry

TOM INFIELD

WASHINGTON - Vietnam War veterans critical of Sen. John Kerry’s claims about his military service in Southeast Asia have reopened one of that era’s most controversial chapters with claims that Kerry lied when he said he’d spent Christmas Eve 1968 in Cambodia.

In a 1986 Senate speech, Kerry said that, as the skipper of a Swift boat in the Mekong Delta, he’d crossed the Vietnamese border into Cambodia, which was then a neutral country. His commanding officer and two others above him in the chain of command said Thursday that his boat probably wasn’t any closer than 50 miles from the border at the time.

The campaign issue may be whether Kerry was telling the truth and how that could reflects on his character.

But for many Americans, the dispute reawakens one of the bitterest moments in the political conflict over the war: whether the government lied about American military involvement in Cambodia.

For Vietnam War opponents, the Cambodia issue was about fear that President Lyndon Johnson and, later, President Richard Nixon were widening an unpopular war into a conflagration that would engulf all of Southeast Asia. When Nixon began a secret Cambodia bombing campaign in spring 1969, U.S. officials denied that it was taking place.

For Vietnam War supporters, the Cambodia issue was about common sense. It was stated policy that U.S. forces were not to violate Cambodia’s neutrality, but the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong guerrilla allies were using the border area of Cambodia to pile up weapons and mount attacks. Why maintain a fiction of neutrality?

The issue was only beginning to build when Kerry served in Vietnam from November 1968 to March 1969.

It exploded April 30, 1970, when Nixon announced a full-scale invasion of Cambodia. College campuses throughout the United States seethed with protests, and on May 4, Ohio National Guard troops fired into a crowd at Kent State University, killing four students and injuring nine. A nationwide student strike shut down hundreds of campuses.

The invasion turned what had been a small-scale, clandestine campaign to root out Vietnamese troops in Cambodia into a major battle that, besides ground forces, included carpet-bombing by B-52 aircraft.

The campaign was a military success, at least initially, but a political disaster. In the end, it helped create the climate that made America’s withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975 almost inevitable. Many blame it for the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, whose genocidal rule killed millions.

Kerry, as a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War in the early ’70s, was active in the Cambodia protest movement.

But in 1968-69 he was an unknown Yale University graduate, a lieutenant junior grade in charge of a 50-foot boat manned by a crew of six sailors.

"I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia," he recalled in his 1986 Senate speech. "I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the people of the United States that I was not there — the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory, which is seared — seared — in me."

"Tour of Duty," a recent Kerry biography by historian Douglas Brinkley, to whom the Massachusetts senator opened his wartime diaries, says Kerry and his crew sailed as far as a river bend "approaching the Cambodian border." They came under mortar fire and left as quickly as they could.

At the time, Kerry was assigned to Coastal Division 13 at Cat Lo, near the mouth of the Saigon River. The division’s prescribed patrol area ended 50 miles from the border.

Retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, who as a Navy captain was in command of all river patrols at that time, said Thursday that although he had no personal knowledge of Kerry’s whereabouts, he couldn’t believe he’d gone anywhere near Cambodia.

The Kerry campaign now concedes he probably wasn’t in Cambodia that Christmas, but it says he was there at some point during his tour of duty.

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/9527280.htm?1c