Swimming to Cambodia Read Online Free Page A

ate them up like chocolate-covered cherries. And the same thing was happening to the Cambodians.
    The Samoans, on the other hand, have a very pleasurable culture but they’ve made sure to initiate their children into pain through certain tattoo rituals, so that they have a realistic association with pain.
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    I couldn’t get a clear vision of Cambodia in my mind. I had a map in my head, but I couldn’t quite place it among the other countries—so I looked at a map and there it was, about the size of the state of Missouri. In 1965 there were about seven million people in the entire
country, six hundred thousand in the capital of Phnom Penh. There’s a big freshwater lake right in the middle for all sorts of recreational activities, fishing along the coast, seaports along the Gulf of Siam. And in 1966 that happy, sexy Prince Sihanouk—perhaps because of his Buddhist tolerance and open-mindednessallowed the Vietnamese a few “sanctuaries” along the border.
    The American Air Force got very upset about this, one general in particular, who was sure that there was a Central Headquarters up there about the size of the Pentagon from which the Vietnamese sent out orders. Maybe it was even a replica of the Pentgon—I think the Air Force thought that.
    And if they could just bump off that Central Headquarters by flying in a few B-52s from Bangkok . . . they wouldn’t even have to tell the American public about it. “Who needs to know about it? We can do it in one raid and we’d be done with that Central Headquarters.” So the general called a secret meeting at the Pentagon, named, of course, Operation Breakfast. At Operation Breakfast they came up with the menu.
    It was kind of a weird diet, as you can imagine. The bombers came up from Bangkok like big flying motels, dropping their bombs according to some computer program on all the sanctuaries, then up to where they thought the headquarters might be and all along the Ho Chi Minh supply line.
    But instead of driving the Vietcong back, Operation Breakfast had the opposite effect. It drove them further into the Cambodian jungles where they hitched up with this weird bunch of rednecks called the Khmer Rouge,
run by Pol Pot along with Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary. They had been educated in Paris in the strict Maoist doctrine, except someone threw a perverse little bit of Rousseau into the soup.
    This made for a strange bunch of bandits, hanging out in the jungle living on bark, bugs, leaves and lizards, being trained by the Vietcong. They had a back-to-the-land, racist consciousness beyond anything Hitler had ever dreamed of. But they had no scapegoat other than the city-dwellers of Phnom Penh. They were like a hundred thousand rednecks rallying in New Paltz, New York, ninety miles above the City, about to march in.
    Now, around the time that the VC were up there training the Khmer Rouge, Sihanouk-who was out of town for a day—was deposed, maybe by a CIA plot. No one really knows about that. And Lon Nol was put in his place, General Lon Nol, formerly Prince Sihanouk’s prime minister. No one knew anything about Lon Nol in the United States. As one political cartoonist noted at the time, the only thing we knew was that “Lon Nol” spelled backwards was “Lon Nol.”
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    Well, leave it to a Brit to tell you your own history; the next thing that Roland told me was that, at that time, President Nixon was developing this madman theory on the banks of Key Biscayne. He said to Bob Haldeman, “Listen Bob, just let it be known that I’ve gone mad, see, and then the Vietcong will think that I’m going to press the button—you know how trigger-happy I am—and they’ll stop all of their bombing.”
    In order to develop this madman theory he was
watching reruns of Patton in his bedroom every night, over and over again, and taking military advice from Bebe Rebozo and John Mitchell.
    The