Marines hit wrong place

Press, Issue 33846, 19 May 1975, Page 15

Marines hit wrong place

(By

ARNOLD ZEITLIN.

of the Associated Press, through N.Z.P.A.)

United States Marines invaded the wrong Cambodian island trying to rescue the crew of the seized container freighter Mayaguez, the captain and crew member's said today. “They hit the wrong island,” said Mr Bill Bellinger, aged 52, a mess attendant. “We were 25 miles away from the island the Marines landed on.

SINGAPORE, May 18.

“They went where they thought we were. They probably were aware we had left the island,” said a puzzled Captain Charles Miller, aged 62.

“I guess the Marines from the destroyer escorts were not informed. They were coming from Subic in the Philippines, and the surveillance planes were from someplace else,” Captain Miller said..

According to Pentagon accounts, almost 200 Marines remained on the beach at Koh Tang under heavy Cambodian fire for about .10 hours after the freed Mayaguez crew reached the destroyer U.S.S. Wilson. Speculation about the Marines’ landing point came during a shipboard postmortem while 20 new crew members flown from the United States signed aboard the vessel. Twenty-one of the former captive crew will leave for home, Captain Mil- : ler said.

Captain Miller said he and his men were taken in a fishing boat from Koh Tang to a fishing village on stilts in a protected cove on an island further south toward Kompong Som. On the captain’s charts, the island was identified as Koh Rong San Lem.

United States surveillance planes flew over them during the night the men spent sleeping on a fishing boat off Koh Tang.

He said there would have been a chance to secure release a day earlier and head off the Marine invasion if Cambodian authorities in Phnom Penh had made up their minds in time. He said he had a “deal” the night before the invasion began, to return to the Mayaguez and call on the radio to request an end to United States jet attacks. “It was the jets they were afraid of,” said Captain Miller. “That’s all they talked about.”

He displayed, written on a piece of small lined notebook paper, an agreement the Cambodian interpreter named Samkol had dictated to him before letting the crew leave for the Mayaguez. “The people of Cambodia no like war and want peace in the international (sic) and have 40 friends in the crew,” read one clause. Others read:

“The crew respect the country of Cambodia and the 40 crew are responsible for the people and no more damage to the country and bombs shooting no. airplanes flying over Cambodia.” “Cambodian people treated the crew very good and no harm was done to the crew of 40 people.” The silver-haired skipper broke into tears as he said: “People were being killed to have us.” He said he knew of seven bodies “on ice” in the Wilson — a figure at variance with

the Pentagon total of one dead and 13 missing. But Captain Miller said: “If it had not been for the Marines, we would not have been here.”' Yet his remarks about a negotiated release after convincing the Khmer Rouge that his ship had no military equipment on board revived questions in Washington and elsewhere on whether the air strikes and Marine landings were necessary. In his negotiations, which

came after a nightmare journey in a Thai fishing boat as American planes strafed and dropped tear-gas, Captain Miller repeatedly stressed that the Mayaguez was involved only in shifting general freight. between Hong Kong, Thailand, and Singapore. The ship’s assistant engineer, Mr Vernon Greenland, said the Khmer Rouge troops who seized the ship were “baby-faced teen-agers of 13 or 14 — but they sure had man-sized weapons.” The 10,465-ton container vessel is due to sail tomorrow for Hong Kong. There, almost all the remaining crewmen will be replaced.

Cambodia claimed in a radio broadcast today that its forces killed or wounded more than 30 United States Marines and shot down five helicopters in the battle for Koh Tang.