This is an excerpt from "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" by Christopher
Hitchens , Chap. 2, "Indochina", pages 25-26. [Pub: Verso/2001
, ISBN 1-85984-631-9]
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"On 12 May 1975, Cambodian gunboats detained an American merchant
vessel named the Mayaguez. In the immediate aftermath of the Khmer
Rouge seizure of power, the situation was a distraught one. The ship
had been stopped in international waters claimed by Cambodia and then
taken to the Cambodian island of Koh Tang. In spite of reports that
the crew had been released, Kissinger pressed for an immediate
face-saving and "credibility"-enhancing strike. He persuaded
President Gerald Ford, the untried and undistinguished successor to
his deposed former boss, to send in the Marines and the Air Force.
Out of a Marine force of 110, 18 were killed and 50 wounded. Some 23
Air Force men died in a crash. The United States used a 15,000-pound
bomb on the island, the most powerful non-nuclear device that it
possessed. Nobody has the figures for Cambodian deaths. The
casualties were pointless because the ship's company of the Mayaguez
were nowhere on Koh Tang, having been released some hours earlier. A
subsequent congressional inquiry found that Kissinger could have
known of this by listening to Cambodian Broadcasting* or by paying
attention to a third-party government which had been negotiating a
deal for the restitution of the crew and the ship. It was not as if
any Cambodians doubted, by that month of 1975, the willingness of the
US government to employ deadly force.
In Washington, DC, there is a famous and hallowed memorial to the
American dead of the Vietnam War. Known as the Vietnam Veterans'
Memorial, it bears a name that is slightly misleading. I was present
for the extremely affecting moment of its dedication in 1982, and
noticed that the list of nearly 60,000 names is incised in the wall
not by alphabet but by date. The first few names appear in 1954, and
the last few in 1975. The more historically minded visitors can
sometimes be heard to say that they didn't know the United States was
engaged in Vietnam as early or as late as that. Nor were the public
supposed to know. The first names are of the covert operatives sent
in by Colonel Lansdale without congressional approval to support the
French colonialism before Dien Bien Phu. The last names are of those
thrown away in the Mayaguez fiasco. It took Henry Kissinger to ensure
that a war of atrocity, which he had helped prolong, should end as
furtively and ignominiously as it had begun."
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[* translations of CB intercepts were available to Kissinger in
regular ELINT summary reports from the NSA. --ddt]
