A Visit to Kompong Cham

...The civilian planes, like the DC-4s owned by SAAT, brought in rice and other foodstuffs and took out tobacco or raw rubber, once shipped by truck or boat to Phnom Penh...

...The Khmer Rouge might not win immediately, but they could quickly expand their control over the countryside, capturing towns and bases that had eluded them in more than three years of fighting...

...Relatively new to the war, he did not share the anger of most pilots and contractors, not to mention CIA, State Department and military types, toward the press...

...The Governor's mansion remained as a symbol of power and security in the center of a grey-green-brownish kind of park...

...The enemy came from the highlands, like water flowing from the higher to the lower region," he remarked, as the rain poured down on the roof...

...They cannot attack us...

...I had been hearing all about the "bad guys" outside Kompong Cham from Cambodian government sources...

...anything they wanted me to do with it...

...a bunkered, bombed-out enclave at a key junction...

...We could not stop and inspect them closely because we had to reach the airstrip in time for Don and Fred's last run back to Phnom Penh...

...I don't like your nine-to-five Stateside routine...

...No bunkers were visible in the open green fields stretching beyond the road...

...When my interpreter and I finally reached Kompong Cham after a five-mile ride in the early monsoon rain, I was struck by the fact that it looked pretty much as it did during my last visit two years ago...

...The coffee shop was crowded with small tradesmen, clerks, bureaucrats, and young officers...

...They may have to hire mercenary pilots-Sign up Americans and buy some fighter planes and have them fight the war for them...

...They're not gonna get anywhere without air power...

...The suggestion indicated the precarious situation of Cambodian government forces after the United States finally ceased all bombing on August 15...

...A few mortar or rocket rounds would be enough to close the airport...

...Cambodia's propeller-driven T-28s bombed and strafed, yet they could hardly replace the American F-4s and B-52s that Army commanders had always depended upon...

...If they were in danger, you couldn't tell it from the smiles on their faces...

...I'd do Donald Kirk regularly reports in these pages from Southeast Asia...

...We don't like sitting around on the ground...

...Even then, you are likely to see soldiers lolling in hammocks a few hundred yards behind the front lines, chatting and joking as if the war were a hundred miles away...

...Compton, the captain on the DC-4, had yet to pilot a mig but was eager to learn...

...They thought the U.S...

...I'm ready...

...The Khmer Rouge, however, took an estimated 20-30 thousand civilians with them as they withdrew, and still surround the city and control the outlying regions...

...Soon the road was clear again, and my interpreter asked if I would like to see the ancient temple complex before turning down the last stretch toward the airport...

...Hey, I fly every day to Kompong Cham," he said...

...The apron by the airstrip was crowded when we landed...

...Around the airfield, there are no houses or villages," said the General, with the ease and glibness that characterize most senior Cambodian officials, nurtured on French colonialism and the post-colonial social milieu of the capital...

...No one doubts that they will return...

...I could do a lot of other things, but I like following the wars...

...The few soldiers by the entrance to the airport lethargically waved almost anyone through the gate without bothering to check credentials...

...They were still in Kompong Cham because they had no way to get out...

...The ruins, perhaps somewhat restored but never rebuilt as completely as the temples in the Angkor region, rose mysteriously beyond thatched peasant homes...

...Overwhelming the Communists by sheer weight of numbers, the Cambodian troops recaptured the southern half of the city without much resistance, though they suffered heavy casualties from shellfire...

...American military planes were being used for the job of airdropping supplies to the besieged city-It was no longer an easy milkrun for eager young pilots out to see the war...

...Don and Fred had to fly their DC-4 elsewhere...

...We go around like this because the bad guys are out there," one of them explained...

...Besides, I thought, there would always be another chance to visit the ruins...

...I asked him what he would really like to do as long as he was in Cambodia...

...It appeared to me, however, that the Khmer Rouge could walk through the defenses like a sieve...

...After rocketing and closing the airport, they overran the factory, the temple area and a nearby university campus...

...The General in charge gladly interrupted a conference with his aides to talk to me...

...Late in the afternoon, my interpreter and I found the same motorbike taxi driver who had met us at the airport and we headed out of town on the same tranquil road, weaving our way around occasional bicycles and bullock carts, grinning at peasant farmers who grinned back at us with open, typically Cambodian countenances...

...Then they closed in on Kompong Cham until the Cambodian defenders, reinforced the day we were there by two fresh battalions, controlled only the center of town?and even there they could not prevent infiltrators from exploding grenades in the market and sniping at the Governor's mansion...

...The former Massachusetts policeman, who had learned how to fly in his spare time, went on to complain, "We are paid a certain guarantee, and then we get more if we fly over a certain number of hours...

...Don could show me how...

...I want something different...

...So now I was in the jump seat, looking over their shoulders as we circled the city...

...Old French-built cars, Japanese motorscooters and American-made military vehicles still rolled leisurely along broad, tree-shaded streets...

...The driver veered onto a mud lane, following it past some crumbling, blackened walls, then under an arch and around a large pond...

...Bombing, strafing, it's a lot of fun," he said...

...Douglass and Compton belong to what might be called the hard-hat faction of the American expatriate set...

...The 2,000 battle-tested veterans made an amphibious landing from the river behind enemy lines, while the main defense force pressed down from the north...

...Do you think the enemy will attack...

...We don't think there are enough soldiers to defend us...

...It was the end of the working day at the textile factory, and we were caught for a while in a wave of small vehicles of varying descriptions...

...Kompong Cham, population 100,000 or so, swollen with refugees, lay like a ripe melon, ready to fall at the slightest pull...

...The military planes, notably a C-123 that the United States had turned over to the Cambodian Air Force, were hauling reinforcements for the town's defenses...

...Despite the fact that much of the southern part of Kompong Cham was destroyed in the fighting, it was a decisive moral victory for Lon Nol...

...But that's the way it is in Cambodia...

...We can't come in straight and low or they might take a shot at us...

...They overran three positions two miles from here last night," said a merchant sipping thick coffee in a little cafe near the center of the city...

...Afew days later the Khmer Rouge did what everyone except the General had anticipated...

...I think it'd be a real kick...

...Alarmed by this setback, the government sent up its elite 80th Brigade...

...Thus, besides its strategic importance, the battle took on significant psychological-and propagandistic-Implications...

...I want to help these people," Douglass told me...

...But we have stopped them in many places...

...By this time, we could see, they were no more than a few miles away...

...If they keep on attacking, the enemy will easily get into town and we will have to run away...

...I had met Douglass in the bar of the Monorom Hotel the day before...

...What if they hit the airfield-the only entry for all the necessities of war and daily life now that both the road and river routes are closed...

...By the first week of September, so few supplies were getting through by air that the government had to send a convoy of 15 river boats up the Mekong from Phnom Penh...

...Come out to the airport and take a ride in my plane...

...I ran into the general of the Cambodian Air Force the other night-told him I'd be glad to fly it once they got it into shape...

...bombing was a good thing, and they had joined SAAT not only for the pay, which was high, but for the cause...

...Though they did not explicitly say so, it was obvious that they believe in fighting Communists...

...CAMBODIA HANGS ON A Visit to Kompong Cham by donald kirk Phnom Penh Two American adventurers, Don Douglass and Fred Compton, came to Cambodia in search of a war and signed on as pilots for an odd little company named Southeast Asian Air Transport (SAAT...

...The rebels launched their major attack on September 6. occupying the southern half of the city and capturing six 105-mm...

...Cambodia's President Lon Nol vowed that the town would not fall under any circumstances...

...The Khmer Rouge began shelling the town nightly with heavy mortar fire It became apparent that the Communists wanted to capture Kompong Cham in time for the opening of the conference of nonaligned nations in Algiers, to be attended by Prince Sihanouk, who nominally commands the insurgent forces...

...The Khmer Rouge rebels had long since captured the road to Phnom Penh and just a couple of days earlier had seized the town of Skoun...

...When you encounter troops in the field, for example, you never know if they feel they are under pressure or not unless the bullets and shells are actually flying...

...The Russians were madder than hell about it, but there was nothing they could do...

...It took me five days to learn how to fly it -three days on the ground and two in the air...

...Godammit, tomorrow we want to make five flights," Douglass growled as we stood waiting with him at the airfield...

...Our men are out there to stop them," he replied...

...They bought it from the Egyptian government...

...I asked one of the soldiers through my interpreter, who had flown up with us...

...They'd need another guy to fly it," he said...

...For the moment, Cambodian forces have proven they can hold their own without the benefit of American air power, but that may change when the monsoon waters recede at the end of the year, enabling the rebels to marshall troops they have dispersed throughout the countryside...

...It is as old as Angkor Wat," he told me...

...The General's unfailingly courteous briefing was pathetically similar to dozens of conversations I have had with Cambodian officers over the past few years...

...I flew a Mio in Nigeria in 1971...

...Even so, one had difficulty conjuring up a feeling of crisis...

...Should the enemy come close, we can use our air strikes"-as delivered by the Cambodian Air Force's newly acquired T-28s...

...They can't hold it without bombing," one of the American pilots told me...

...Both sides, each numbering about 5,000 troops, dug in on parallel lines cutting diagonally across the town, a position that changed little in the next four days...

...They've still got one old mig-17 in their hangar over there," he confided...

...There was, it seemed, nothing Douglass would not do with the mig, the last of a squadron or so that the Soviet Union bequeathed to Prince Norodom Sihanouk before his downfall in 1970...

...And as I talked to the people around the town, my initial impression of military weakness and ineptitude was confirmed...

...They made only four flights a day because the ground crews took their time about loading and unloading the plane...

...howitzers, which were then used to shell positions around the Governor's mansion...

...The engine's out, but they're repairing it...

...Until recently, they flew a lumbering old DC-4 about four times a day to Kompong Cham, the nation's third-largest city, 45 miles northeast of here on the Mekong River...