Fancy and Fact in Indochina

...Nor is it to forget Vietnam had an ancient historical interest in ruling Cambodia (a fact Becker was seemingly oblivious of before 1975), and never gaveasingle thought to voluntarily surrendering the base areas it had carved out there while fighting the Americans...

...Becker's logic is as basic as it is selective...

...He declares himself "mildly optimistic," but does not inspire much confidence when he suggests that Prince Sihanouk might "provide the leadership" Cambodia needs...

...Becker says that confessions tortured out of two of the captured killers showed the murder was a plot" possibly to embarrass and spoil [Sary's] 'liberalization' schemes...

...Was Thiounn Prasith, the sophisticated Pol Pot aide and spokesman, familiar with the torture techniques employed at Tuol Sleng...

...In her apparent zeal to make amends for being caught off guard, Becker here runs the risk of exaggerating the role of the Khmer Rouge leaders...

...While the United States propped up the resulting puppet government, Khmer peasants fled to the capital and other enclaves to escape the bombing...

...Perhaps most valuable, however, is Shaplen's effort to show Western readers how differently the Vietnamese saw the war...

...When the War Was Over reaches a climax of sorts with the author's account of a trip she took to Pol Pot's Cambodia with Richard Dudman, a fellow journalist, and Malcolm Caldwell, a British radical intellectual...

...Revolution presented an opportunity to avenge long-simmering grievances...

...She cannot be faulted for not knowing more about the motive, but she ought to have realized that the incident was one of many signs pointing to a considerable gap between the ideologues and the slaughterers...

...Again, it is the stupid Americans who were to blame...

...Everything the U.S...

...Unlike the author and some of her colleagues who were equally obsessed with the U .S...

...Without wishing to absolve Vietnam for its role in Cambodia, Shaplen concedes that the Vietnamese-installed regime there "at least furnished a feasible alternative to the dreaded return of the Khmer Rouge, with or without Pol Pot...

...If nothing else, events in the country over the past 20 years or so have demonstrated how little power Sihanouk really wields beyond the merely symbolic...

...bombing, other correspondents learned what was happening merely by talking to almost any of the thousands of refugees swarming over Phnom Penh...

...Well, not "everyone" was "surprised...

...Like the ruling elite in Phnom Penh, the Khmer peasants lived in a cocoon of false security created by French colonialism and sustained by American promises...

...did to prosecute the Cambodian war "worked to the opponent's advantage" (although it is blithely noted that American air support for Lon Nol's forces frustrated a major Khmer Rouge drive against Phnom Penh before the bombing campaign was stopped in 1973...

...Nonetheless, Shaplen believes it "is not too much to hope that the ingenious people who built the Ho Chi Minh trail to w age war w ill find ways to build similar paths for peace that will benefit the whole region...

...Reviewed by Donald Kirk Correspondent, "USA Today...

...Bitter Victory By Robert Shaplen Harper & Row...

...And in the second, what if it had...

...Would Becker have preferred that the United States mount a second Cambodian offensive, complete with the bombing that she found so abhorrent...

...Maybe—and maybe not...

...Certainly this book offers no more than circumstantial evidence for the indictment of the Khmer Rouge leaders widely held responsible...

...As government forces fell back in the face of the Communist offensive, farmers and their families retreated with them on the conviction that security lay behind, not beyond, government lines...

...That is not to deny Hanoi was motivated by selfish national considerations rather than fraternal altruism...

...On his return to the region late in 1984, Shaplen was allowed to spend five weeks in Vietnam and a week in Cambodia...

...The coup that knocked Prince Norodom Sihanouk from power in March 1970 was launched with CIA backing, as attested by the irrefutable word of "Phnom Penh circles...

...Drawing on other people's historical research, she does manage to show how the violence and class hatred endemic to Khmer society created an environment conducive to mass killing...

...But in the course of crediting herself with having written "one of the very few investigations of the Khmer Rouge during thewar" (largely culled from thework of a couple of scholars who examined the confessions elicited at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison), she tells us that she "was as surprised as everyone at the evacuation and subsequent destruction of the Khmer society...

...One cannot help being impressed by his description of the tunnels of Cu Chi, the Ho Chi Minh trail network, the defenses of Langson on the Chinese border...

...She seems to think the invasion was a regrettable accident that might have been avoided, or at the minimum would have been less ferocious, if the United States had negotiated more skillfully with the Vietnamese—if Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had not been so keen o n playing the " China card...

...A more objective and reliable account of these events can be had by turning to Robert Shaplen, one of the most distinguished correspondents ever to cover Southeast Asia...

...Indeed, Becker's is a strangely distorted book...

...In the first place, it is doubtful that the opening of diplomatic relations between Washington and Hanoi would have had the slightest effect on Vietnam's plans vis-a-vis Cambodia...

...Not too much to hope, one agrees, yet still too much to predict with any degree of certainty—to judge by the evidence in Bitter Victory...

...Long before Becker arrived in the capital armed with her preconceptions about the war, the peasants knew the reality: The Khmer Rouge was a murderous force and their lives were in jeopardy if they failed to move...

...The trip ended in tragedy—and a journalistic break for Becker—when Caldwell was shot and killed in the guest house where the three were staying...

...Yet despite all these failures, Shaplen writes with a measure of awe for the basic guts of the Vietnamese people...

...There are several serious flaws in the author's reasoning...

...Forinstance, Americans might claim the 1965 battle of Iadrang Valley asavictory.but Shaplen quotes a lengthy disquisition by General Hoang Phuong, a military historian, on the weaknesses the encounter revealed among the newly arrived U.S...

...In Bitter Victory Shaplen puts together something of a report card on Hanoi's performance in the decade following the "fall" of Saigon (which, typically, he witnessed firsthand...

...16.95...

...Becker suggests that reports of the Khmer Rouge slaughter in the countryside came as a bolt from the blue when they began to spread in 1974...

...troops...

...Becker's attitude is not much changed today, judging from her attempt in When the War Was Over to explain why the Khmer Rouge behaved as they did after driving the Lon Nol regime from the Cambodian capital in April 1975...

...Shaplen dwells finally on the possibilities for a solution to Cambodia and the emergence of a genuine peace in the area...

...author, "Wider War: The Struggle for Cambodia, Thailand and Laos" As a reporter in Phnom Penh in the early 1970s, Elizabeth Becker was openly contemptuous of those who did not fully share her intellectually fashionable view of the war, the American role, the bombing, whatever...

...Becker s analysis sinks to its nadir on the topic of the Vietnamese invasion that came just a few days after she and Dudman departed...

...With her disdainful dogmatism she gave the impression of seeing herself as the repository of the inner truth of the Khmer soul...

...During the time Pol Pot was acquiring the trappings of Marxism-Leninism in Paris, they were building up a personal, visceral hatred toward anyone with a bare modicum of money and education...

...Had the author briefly departed from her "Phnom Penh circles" she might have grasped the connection between the atrocities and the peasant flight...

...How much did, say, Chairman of the State Presidium Khieu Samphan or Deputy Prime Minister in Charge of Foreign Affairs Ieng Sary know about the slaughter...

...Few observers (except possibly Becker) would dispute his contention that "much of the population" viewed the government of Heng Samrin, the one-time Khmer Rouge commander who shifted his allegiance to Hanoi, as the "lesser of two evils...

...Mostly, the Americans were not prepared for this kind of close fighting," said Phuong...

...But regardless of the reasons for the Vietnamese invasion, anyone who has been to Cambodia in the past seven years knows that it arrested the random killing and instilled a sense of order...

...He reports dispassionately on Vietnam's re-education camps, on its economic reverses, and on the rigidity of Hanoi's aging rulers, who have been unable to winthepeaceafterwinningthewar...

...Their tactics were too conventional...

...309 pp...

...The actual killers were remote, anonymous figures who had been totally denied the riches and comforts of the colonial and postcolonial periods...

...My own view is that Pol Pot and his close associates were out of touch with the movement they unleashed...

...The only difference is that she now blames the Khmer Rouge along with the United States for the country's suffering...

...The American air campaign was only a secondary factor in the flight, as evidenced by the fact that the pace of retreat quickened drastically once the bombing ceased...

...She neglects to mention the earlier killings of Western journalists who had strayed down innocent-looking roads...

...Who, then, would have put a halt to the slaughter...