Marjorie Robertson
Ottawa, Ontario
Bombing Cambodia
I was interested in your article on the bombings in Cambodia (“Bombs Over Cambodia,” October). Between 1968 and 1969, I lived in Saigon with my husband, Richard, who was serving as the Canadian commissioner with the Delegation to the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam. Every night, we turned out the light around eleven o’clock, and immediately the windows in our bedroom would begin to rattle and the bed would vibrate. It was B-52 bombers on their way to Cambodia. We could hear the thunder of their engines as they passed overhead.
The Americans also bombed the Mekong delta south of Saigon. The resulting craters were a quarter of a mile across and soon filled with water that stagnated, creating a serious environmental hazard for the Vietnamese. “Destroying a country in order to save it” was a desperate strategy born of a false ideology.
Janice Tait
Toronto, Ontario
The aerial photographs and maps showing the extent of bombing in Cambodia are multihued and compelling, but Kiernan and Owen’s argument is not. Carpet bombing is ineffective. But to assert the corollary, that dragons were spawned by the carnage, is another thing entirely. Vast areas of rural Cambodia are sparsely inhabited, if not unpopulated. The Ho Chi Minh trail runs through largely empty forests and highlands, and one can still see the craters of bombs that fell nearby. It does not necessarily follow that the increased tonnage revealed by Kiernan and Owen killed significantly more Cambodians or that it “drove [them] into the arms of the Khmer Rouge.”
Even if it did, how would it possibly make Kissinger and Nixon culpable for murderous policies that were first dreamed up during the Paris university years of the Pol Pot “clique” ? The bombing drove many people to take refuge in Phnom Penh, where the Khmer Rouge, their fellow peasants, ironically mistook them for city dwellers and removed them. We know the rest. Kiernan and Owen are aware that it would be a simple matter to ask surviving members of the Khmer Rouge whether their troop strength grew to 200,000 as a result of the bombing, as the writers claim. Some of the principal actors, such as Khieu Samphan, can be reached by telephone today and will be providing evidence at the upcoming United Nations tribunal. That Kiernan and Owen apparently did not ask them is a telling omission, one worthy of the ongoing attempt to blame Kissinger and Nixon rather than the true inspiration behind Pol Pot: Mao.
J.K . Halligan
Toronto, Ontario
Esperanto Power
I read the excellent article about Esperanto by Alison Gillmor (“Tongues of the World, Unite!,” September) and want to congratulate her. It is reassuring that there are journalists like Gillmor who write articles based on facts and not on prejudices.
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