A Town Dies In 10 Days

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32312, 2 June 1970, Page 7

A Town Dies In 10 Days

gv.z. Press Assn — copyright) THMT F PFT Zn a-Tm oa (Camodia), May 30.

Ten days of war, a rain of shells, and the town of Tonle Bet was dead.

The last pockets of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong resistance had been crushed by Cambodian troops recruited and trained by the United States Special Forces in Vietnam.

They had been thrown into the battle five days before, when Cambodian Army Regulars were in danger of being driven off or destroyed. A Cambodian officer standing amid the rubble that had once been a lovely, treeshaded Mekong River ferry town said with a sigh: “It was an unfortunate necessity. We had to retake this place."

They had retaken a corpse. Generations of sweat, hope, building and planning died under the rain of artillery shells from the Cambodians, and from the Communist forces’ heavy mortars. 'Many buildings were destroyed: most of the others are shells. No structure was unmarked by war. . When the fighting began, Tonle Bet’s several thousand civilians fled. But there were many signs of the absent living: a smashed and partlyburned family altar: a child’s school books ridged with shrapnel: the erumpled portrait of an ancestor lying near the right arm of a plastic doll.

Wisps of smoke rose from the blackened remains of bedrooms, a crib, the kitchen i table. All these died with the! town. Had it been necessary? Militarily, the answer had to be yes. Tonle Bet sits just across the river from Kompong Cham, Cambodia’s thirdlargest city, and from their observation post in a Bhuddist tower, the North Vietnamese artillerymen had ■ directed the firing of round after round into Kompong Cham. So Tonle Bet died to save the city across half a mile of water. A small handful of civilians returned next day to save • what they could, then left quickly. A battalion of Cambodian,

, troops dug in and prepared for a Possible counter-attack. a few were half-drunk on whiskey found in smashed

shops. After five days of heavy fighting, the men were glad

of a rest. None doubted that soon they would be in action again. Several rode bicycles over the littered, shell-pocked streets. Some of the tyres were flat from shrapnel. One soldier put on a bright green straw hat festooned with plastic flowers. Across his back was a child's popgun. He had left his weapon with his pack. One frowning soldier had taken care of one need for the night and was hard at work on another. A chicken was tied to his pack by a length of plastic recording tape. He swung his shovel with vigour, digging out a fighting hole that would give him a good line of fire across the market square. Others poked through the rubble looking for canned food, drinks—soft or hard, and trinkets. It was not really looting, it was exploring a massive trash heap. What the few refugees found to take back with them to Kompong Chara showed how little there was to be bad in Tonle Bet.

One woman had only a cheap vacuum bottle, a pair of rubber sandals and a few sprays of artificial flowers.

One girl’s treasure was part of an ornate, gold-painted British sewing-machine that might make her a living if she could find the lower half of it.

One small girl of eight went away with only tears. But thanks to a quirk of war, Tonle Bet’s eventual rebirth seems assured. The only damage to the open-air, two-storey concrete central market place were bullet and shrapnel holes, and a big gap in its pagoda-style roof. In this part of Asia, markets are the reasons for towns, not just a part of them. The women doubtless will return again from the countryside with their fruits and vegetables. Trussed pigs and baskets of fresh fish will appear again in the shaded corner of the building. But the rebuilding of Tonle Bet will take decades and generations, rather than mere years.