Cambodian lessons

Rick Gunn
For the Appeal
May 13, 2007

By the time I'd entered Cambodia, I'd passed through a doorway.

Not of the physical type, nor the gateway to another country.

But a doorway of perception, where just beyond its threshold lay a new way of seeing.

I'd moved quickly across the landscape - 50 miles in three hours, nonstop.

A gathering of clouds whispered above the palms, and a light rain

began to fall. As it did, I tilted my head back, andwelcomed each cooling drop like silvery liquid trinkets from the sky.

That's when they'd made themselves known.

"Sok sa dai! Sok sa dai! (Hello! Hello!)," came the initial shouts from Cambodia's children. It was the first of a flood of many tiny greetings.

As I cycled through a succession of villages, they fled to the road by the hundreds. All of them seemingly waiting to greet the random cyclist. All of them running from simple huts, to the edge of the roadway, if just to hold out their hands or shout out welcoming calls of glee.

It was a scene I'd witnessed a thousand times throughout Southeast Asia. A scene, I might add, that I never tired of.
These tiny voices brought a kind of settling to my mind, and I welcomed them into my heart, as I did the falling rain.

Despite the rain, it was Cambodia's dry season, a time when the harvested rice fields gave way to a tannish-brown stubble. Near their edges stood simple stilted huts that were surrounded by a patchwork of small garden plots.

I'd cycled 105 miles that first day. And did so with a certain ease. This is how I spent my time. Pedaling through the hours, then days, until the days had turned into months. This for nearly two years. I no longer questioned it. It was simply what I did.

By midday next, I'd cycled upon the traffic-choked fringes of Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh. Before I would navigate a tangle of intersections in the heart of the city, I would cross the Mekong one last time.

This before it flowed east, and branched like a watery sea fan through the delta lands of Vietnam.

I stopped for a moment on a small bridge to gaze out over its tea-colored waters.

When I did, my vision was hijacked by a riverside slum: a gathering of tin dwellings, and impossibly ill-constructed shacks. Catching a speck of movement from the corner of the scene, my eyes landed upon a young boy crouching above a small dirt drainage. He was evacuating his bowels into an open ditch. When he'd finished, he descended the garbage-filled slopes into the astoundingly polluted waters. There, he took his morning bath.

What I was observing was "extreme poverty," a termed coined by Jeffrey Sachs, (economic advisor to the secretary general of the United Nations).

During a recent interview about Cambodia on PBS, Sachs stated that this "extreme poverty" was "not the poverty of inconvenience, not the poverty of jealousy, not the poverty of wanting to catch up with one's neighbor. But the kind of poverty that threatens to take life. And not just threatens ... takes millions of lives (around the globe) from those too impoverished for an adequate diet, that are too impoverished to see a doctor, that are too impoverished to gain access to clean water that they need for survival."In short, he was talking about much the of poverty I'd observed for the last seven months.

Only this time I was done observing. This time, I'd come up with a plan.

Obviously I couldn't do everything for everyone, but I could do something, for someone. For me, that something meant spending a week volunteering to teach English to a group of impoverished rural children near Siem Reap.

Shortly thereafter, I stashed my bike, hopped on a bus, and made for the north-central city of Siem Reap, a city made famous by its proximity to the temples at Angkor Wat.

The volunteer program I would take part in was the brain child of Andy Booth.

Booth, a successful businessman who'd retired at age 37, was the founder of SAGE Insights, a full-service travel company whose proceeds are dedicated entirely to growing sustainable business in the region, and helping Cambodia's neediest children through educational and social projects.

Andy believes that "a lasting solution to poverty lies in providing the tools and knowledge to a population to help themselves."

I couldn't have agreed with him more.

A day later, I arrived at the Prey Chrouck School, 40 kilometers outside of Siem Reap.

The school consisted of 637 pupils, four toilets, no running water and no electricity. Most of the students were the impoverished children of subsistence farmers.

As I ducked beneath the 6-foot door frame into the classroom, all eyes widened.

"Goot monning teechaah!" they shouted in unison, after they'd jumped to their feet.

"Sok sa dai!" I bowed, greeting them with palms pressed together. This released a cascade of giggles. Their eyes began to race, setting off mumbles and murmurs around the room. My intuition told me that this was speculation. Speculation of whether the new teacher's-assistant was born of a giraffe, or more likely, about which of them was going to have to cut a hole in the ceiling to accommodate him.

With little time to waste, I went straight to it, driving home the hard work of spelling words like, "cat" and "pig." These were funkified foreign words to the native Khmer child, and they wobbled off their tongues like a row of stumbling ducks.

No sooner had we mastered those words, then we began busting out with a rendition of "Ol' MacDonald Had a Farm."

Although I'm sure they all wondered what an "Ol' MacDonald" was, when it came to the "meow, meow" here, and an "oink, oink" there part, there was instant recognition. And with this, the crowd went wild.

I finished out my short time at the school, assisting students, or performing simple tasks that included sharpening pencils, passing out papers or pinning the letters of the alphabet to the wall.

As dull as it sounds, I took pride in each tiny task.

All of it culminating into a small collection of memories of immeasurable pleasure.

When the students finally gathered to say goodbye, I reached out my hand.

Reluctant at first, they began reaching back. Before long, a small stampede moved in and began grasping, as if only to claim that they'd touched the freakishly tall stranger before he left.

• • •

Only a madman left Siem Reap without seeing the temples.

Though I'd have a hard time proving to anyone that I was actually sane, the next morning, just before sunrise, I grabbed my camera and jumped in a tuk-tuk bound for Angkor Wat.

Upon arrival, I witnessed my first spectacle.

It was not a temple, but the vision of my iPod music player after it had slid from my pocket, flew from the tuk-tuk, and skipped across the pavement at more than 20 mph. (The beginning of the end for iPod number 3.)

Scooping it from the road, I stepped into the first temple of Bayon. When I put on the headphones, I found the music player to be oddly stuck on Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of The Moon."

And thus began the other-worldly soundtrack that matched Angkor's mind-melting imagery with a type of immaculate seamlessness.

Racing the rising sun up a set of stairs, I was delivered to the foot of Bayon's 216 mammoth stone faces. I lifted my camera, and fired it like a submachine gun.

All of these temples (I'd learn later) began with King Jayavarman VII. Back in the day, he was literally "the man with the plan," who'd initiated the glory days of the former capital in about 1100 A.D.

Dedicated to the Hindu God Vishnu, then Buddha, Angkor Wat's name implies a virtual "Temple City." During its height, it was the largest city in the world, with over a million inhabitants.

Jayavarman got his architectural groove on by employing huge armies of Classic Khmer architects, all of whom became adept at utilizing sandstone as their three-dimensional canvas. Carefully carving this sandstone into countless structures, statues, murals and relics, these Khmer architects created such works of beauty that the thought of their original magnificence seemed fully capable of blowing a man's head clean off his shoulders.

In fact, had Jayavarman been alive today, surely he'd have a qualifications heading on his resume that read something like: "Building temples that have continuously blown minds for over 800 years." (Millions and millions served).

I finished my day, traipsing through the tree-enshrouded temples of Ta Prohm, and Prah Keah, then the main temple of Angkor Wat. By the end of the day, I had gazed upon such an extensive array of axial galleries, terraces, and towers that it left my feet achy and eyes crossed.

Through all of it came the crowds.

Hundreds of tourists pouring from buses, and marching throughout the temple grounds like battalions of army ants wearing matching shirts and shorts. They were joined by small roving platoons of children, who continuously pedaled postcards, trinkets or magically appeared to charge modeling fees at those picture perfect spots.

According to the Ministry of Tourism, Angkor Wat received a paltry 586 visitors in 1986. Today, that number is likely to exceed 700,000. Despite its crowds, Jayavarman's Angkor will be a multisensual experience that will forever be burned into my brain.

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Siv encourages graduates to adapt

By Matt Clower, The Messenger

A former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations gave a lesson in adaptation to a group of Troy University graduates during the first of two commencement ceremonies on Friday.

Sichan Siv, a native of Cambodia, was nominated by President George W. Bush in October 2001 and was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the 28th ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. From 2001 until recently, he represented the United States at the U.N. General Assembly and the U.N. Security Council.

From 1989 to 1993, Siv served as deputy assistant to the president for public liaison and deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia affairs in the George H.W. Bush administration.

“The key to success is your ability to adapt,” Siv said to graduates during his keynote address. Siv learned about the need for adaptation as he fled Khmer Rouge rule of Cambodia in 1976, eventually starting a new life in America.

Siv said he escaped a forced labor camp by jumping off the back of a truck and fleeing to Thailand. In time, he made his way to Wallingford, Conn., where he was faced with trying to find his way in a country he knew little about.

Initially, Siv took odd jobs to get by - picking apples, working at an ice cream shop and flipping burgers, despite the fact he'd never seen a hamburger before.

“I remember once I stood there holding the lettuce because someone told me ‘hold the lettuce,'” Siv said.

In time, Siv made his way to New York City, where he continued working odd jobs until he earned a scholarship to Columbia University.

“I adapted myself to America,” Siv said.

Troy University Chancellor Jack Hawkins Jr. praised Siv's accomplishments in the face of adversity.

“He did not always enjoy the freedoms that come from being called an American ... but he has lived the American dream,” Hawkins said.

More than 500 students from 20 U.S. states and 12 nations received diplomas on Friday, which marked the first time the university has held separate commencement ceremonies for undergraduate and graduate students.

Hawkins said the dual commencements are a sign of the university's growth.

“We simply have too many graduates to place in this building at the same time,” Hawkins said.

The ceremony for students receiving undergraduate degrees started at 10:30 a.m., and the ceremony for graduate students began at 2 p.m. Both ceremonies were held in Sartain Hall.

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New Light on U.S. Air War in Cambodia

[Analysis] Campaign fallout with Khmer Rouge may parallel dynamics in Iraq

United States bombings in Afghanistan have "given a propaganda windfall to the Taliban." [1] Is history repeating itself? In 1975, Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge forces took power in Cambodia after a massive U.S. bombing campaign there. New information reveals that Cambodia was bombed far more heavily during the Vietnam War than previously believed -- and that the bombing began not under Richard Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson.

In the fall of 2000, 25 years after the end of the war in Indochina, Bill Clinton became the first U.S. president since Richard Nixon to visit Vietnam. While media coverage of the trip was dominated by talk of some 2,000 U.S. soldiers still classified as missing in action, a small act of great historical importance went almost unnoticed. As a humanitarian gesture, Clinton released extensive Air Force data on all American bombings of Indochina between 1964 and 1975. Recorded using a groundbreaking IBM-designed system, the database provided extensive information on sorties conducted over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Clinton's gift was intended to assist in the search for unexploded ordnance left behind during the carpet bombing of the region. Littering the countryside, often submerged under farmland, this ordnance remains a significant humanitarian concern. It has maimed and killed farmers, and rendered valuable land all but unusable. Development and de-mining organizations have put the Air Force data to good use over the past six years, but have done so without noting its full implications, which turn out to be staggering.

The Bombing Database

The still-incomplete database (it has several "dark" periods) reveals that from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons' worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having "unknown" targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all. Even if the latter may arguably be oversights, the former suggest explicit knowledge of indiscretion. The database also shows that the bombing began four years earlier than is widely believed -- not under Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson. The impact of this bombing, the subject of much debate for the past three decades, is now clearer than ever. Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d'etat in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide. The data demonstrates that the way a country chooses to exit a conflict can have disastrous consequences. It therefore speaks to contemporary warfare as well, including U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite many differences, a critical similarity links the war in Iraq with the Cambodian conflict: an increasing reliance on air power to battle a heterogeneous, volatile insurgency.
"We heard a terrifying noise which shook the ground; it was as if the earth trembled, rose up and opened beneath our feet. Enormous explosions lit up the sky like huge bolts of lightning; it was the American B-52s."
--Cambodian bombing survivor, Kampong Thom

The Kampong Thom Bombings

On December 9, 1970, U.S. President Richard Nixon telephoned his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to discuss the ongoing bombing of Cambodia. This sideshow to the war in Vietnam, begun in 1965 under the Johnson administration, had already seen 475,515 tons of ordnance dropped on Cambodia, which had been a neutral kingdom until nine months before the phone call, when pro-U.S. General Lon Nol seized power. The first intense series of bombings, the Menu campaign on Vietnamese targets in Cambodia's border areas -- which American commanders labeled Breakfast, Lunch, Supper, Dinner, Dessert, and Snack -- had concluded in May, 1970 shortly after the coup.

Nixon was facing growing congressional opposition to his Indochina policy. A joint U.S.-South Vietnam ground invasion of Cambodia in May and June of 1970 had failed to root out Vietnamese Communists, and Nixon now wanted to covertly escalate the air attacks, which were aimed at destroying the mobile headquarters of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army (vc/nva) in the Cambodian jungle. After telling Kissinger that the U.S. Air Force was being unimaginative, Nixon demanded more bombing, deeper into the country: "They have got to go in there and I mean really go in ... I want everything that can fly to go in there and crack the hell out of them. There is no limitation on mileage and there is no limitation on budget. Is that clear?"

Kissinger knew that this order ignored Nixon's promise to Congress that U.S. planes would remain within thirty kilometres of the Vietnamese border, his own assurances to the public that bombing would not take place within a kilometre of any village, and military assessments stating that air strikes were like poking a beehive with a stick. He responded hesitantly: "The problem is, Mr. President, the Air Force is designed to fight an air battle against the Soviet Union. They are not designed for this war ... in fact, they are not designed for any war we are likely to have to fight."
.
"Anything that flies, on anything that moves"

Five minutes after his conversation with Nixon ended, Kissinger called General Alexander Haig to relay the new orders from the president: "He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything. It's an order, it's to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that?" The response from Haig, barely audible on tape, sounds like laughter.

The U.S. bombing of Cambodia remains a divisive and iconic topic. It was a mobilizing issue for the antiwar movement and is still cited regularly as an example of American war crimes. Writers such as Noam Chomsky, Christopher Hitchens, and William Shawcross condemned the bombing and the foreign policy it symbolized.

In the years since the Vietnam War, something of a consensus has emerged on the extent of U.S. involvement in Cambodia. The details are controversial, but the narrative begins on March 18, 1969, when the United States launched the Menu campaign. The joint U.S.-South Vietnam ground offensive followed. For the next three years, the United States continued with air strikes under Nixon's orders, hitting deep inside Cambodia's borders, first to root out the Viet Cong (VC)/North Vietnam Army (NVA) and later to protect the Lon Nol regime from growing numbers of Cambodian Communist forces. Congress cut funding for the war and imposed an end to the bombing on August 15, 1973, amid calls for Nixon's impeachment for his deceit in escalating the campaign.

The Secret Bombing of 1965

Thanks to the Air Force database, we now know that the U.S. bombardment started three-and-a-half years earlier, in 1965, under the Johnson administration. What happened in 1969 was not the start of bombings in Cambodia but the escalation into carpetbombing. From 1965 to 1968, 2,565 sorties took place over Cambodia, with 214 tons of bombs dropped. These early strikes were likely designed to support the nearly 2,000 secret ground incursions conducted by the CIA and U.S. Special Forces during that period. B-52s -- long range bombers capable of carrying very heavy loads -- were not deployed, whether out of concern for Cambodian lives or the country's neutrality, or because carpet bombing was believed to be of limited strategic value.

Nixon decided on a different course, and beginning in 1969 the Air Force deployed B-52s over Cambodia. The new rationale for the bombings was that they would keep enemy forces at bay long enough to allow the United States to withdraw from Vietnam. Former U.S. General Theodore Mataxis depicted the move as "a holding action ... The troika's going down the road and the wolves are closing in, and so you throw them something off and let them chew it." The result was that Cambodians essentially became cannon fodder to protect American lives.

The last phase of the bombing, from February to August 1973, was designed to stop the Khmer Rouge's advance on the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. The United States, fearing that the first Southeast Asian domino was about to fall, began a massive escalation of the air war -- an unprecedented B-52 bombardment that focused on the heavily populated area around Phnom Penh but left few regions of the country untouched. The extent of this bombardment has only now come to light.

Exceeding the World War II Payload

The data released by Clinton shows the total payload dropped during these years to be nearly five times greater than the generally accepted figure. To put the revised total of 2,756,941 tons into perspective, the Allies dropped just over 2 million tons of bombs during all of World War II, including the bombs that struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 15,000 and 20,000 tons, respectively. Cambodia may well be the most heavily bombed country in history.

A single B-52d "Big Belly" payload consists of up to 108 225-kilogram or 42 340-kilogram bombs, which are dropped on a target area of approximately 500 by 1,500 metres. In many cases, Cambodian villages were hit with dozens of payloads over the course of several hours. The result was near-total destruction. One U.S. official stated at the time, "We had been told, as had everybody ... that those carpetbombing attacks by B-52s were totally devastating, that nothing could survive." Previously, it was estimated that between 50,000 and 150,000 Cambodian civilians were killed by the bombing. Given the fivefold increase in tonnage revealed by the database, the number of casualties is surely higher.

The Cambodian bombing campaign had two unintended side effects that ultimately combined to produce the very domino effect that the Vietnam War was supposed to prevent. First, the bombing forced the Vietnamese Communists deeper and deeper into Cambodia, bringing them into greater contact with Khmer Rouge insurgents. Second, the bombs drove ordinary Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, a group that seemed initially to have slim prospects of revolutionary success.

Pol Pot himself described the Khmer Rouge during that period as "fewer than five thousand poorly armed guerrillas ... scattered across the Cambodian landscape, uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty, and leaders."

Years after the war ended, journalist Bruce Palling asked Chhit Do, a former Khmer Rouge officer, if his forces had used the bombing as anti-American propaganda. Chhit Do replied:

"Every time after there had been bombing, they would take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been gouged out and scorched ... The ordinary people sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came. Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told. It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on co-operating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them ... Sometimes the bombs fell and hit little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge."
A Cambodian witness responded to an earlier publication of this article by writing:
"I could not agree with you more based on my experiences during the bombing in Takeo around 1972. The bombings were [spreading] further into towns and villages. My parents' house was hit by the bombs, and we had to move to the opposite side of the country. We had known [that] almost the entire village that survived from the bombings had joined forces with the Khmer Rouge."

The Nixon administration knew that the Khmer Rouge was winning over peasants. The CIA's Directorate of Operations, after investigations south of Phnom Penh, reported in May 1973 that the Communists were "using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda," and that such propaganda was "effective." But this does not seem to have registered as a primary strategic U.S. concern.

"They are murderous thugs, but we won't let that stand in our way"

The Nixon administration kept the air war secret for so long that debate over its impact came far too late. It wasn't until 1973 that Congress, angered by the destruction the campaign had caused and the systematic deception that had masked it, legislated a halt to the bombing of Cambodia. By then, the political as well as the social damage was already done. Having grown to more than two hundred thousand troops and militia forces by 1973, the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh two years later. They went on to subject Cambodia to a Maoist agrarian revolution and a genocide in which 1.7 million people perished. Now the burgeoning U.S.-China alliance led Washington to quietly support the Khmer Rouge regime. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told Thailand's foreign minister on November 26, 1975, "You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won't let that stand in our way."

The Nixon Doctrine had relied on the notion that the United States could supply an allied regime with the resources needed to withstand internal or external challenges while the U.S. withdrew its ground troops or, in some cases, simply remained at arm's length. In Vietnam, this meant building up the ground-fighting capability of South Vietnamese forces while American units slowly disengaged. In Cambodia, Washington gave military aid to prop up Lon Nol's regime from 1970 to 1975 while the U.S. Air Force conducted its massive aerial bombardment.
Bombing Iraq

U.S. policy in Iraq may yet undergo a similar shift. Bombing is likely to play a key role in a continued U.S. occupation. Moreover, as Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker in December 2005, a key element of any drawdown of American troops will be their replacement with air power. "We just want to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting -- Iraqi infantry with American support and greater use of air power," said Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. [2]

Critics argue that a shift to air power will cause even greater numbers of civilian casualties, which in turn will benefit the insurgency in Iraq. Andrew Brookes, the former director of air power studies at the Royal Air Force's advanced staff college, told Hersh, "Don't believe that air power is a solution to the problems inside Iraq at all. Replacing boots on the ground with air power didn't work in Vietnam, did it? "

It's true that air strikes are generally more accurate now than they were during the war in Indochina, so in theory, at least, unidentified targets should be hit less frequently and civilian casualties should be lower. In addition, many of the indiscriminate bombardment tactics used in the past, such as those that destroyed much of Tokyo and killed 100,000 of its citizens in a single night, are no longer deemed morally acceptable. Yet lessons from Cambodia's agony remain unlearned. Civilian deaths have been the norm during the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, as they were during the bombing of Lebanon by Israeli forces over the summer. As in Cambodia, insurgencies are the likely beneficiaries. To cite one example, on January 13, 2006, an aerial strike by a U.S. Predator drone on a village in a border area of Pakistan killed 18 civilians, including five women and five children. The deaths undermined the positive sentiments that may have been created by the billions of dollars in aid that had flowed into that part of Pakistan after the massive earthquake months earlier. A key question remains: along with its humanitarian and moral hazards, is bombing worth the strategic risk?

If the Cambodian experience teaches us anything, it is that miscalculation of the consequences of civilian casualties stems partly from a failure to understand how insurgencies thrive. The motives that lead locals to help such movements don't fit into strategic rationales like the ones set forth by Kissinger and Nixon. Those whose lives have been ruined don't care about the geopolitics behind bomb attacks; they tend to blame the attackers. The failure of the American campaign in Cambodia lay not only in the civilian death toll during the unprecedented bombing, but also in its aftermath, when the Khmer Rouge regime rose up from the bomb craters, with tragic results. The dynamics in Iraq, or even Afghanistan, could be similar.

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