The New York Times, by Sydney H. Schanberg

By Sydney H. Schanberg

NEAK LUONG, Cambodia Jan. 14—Every 15 minutes or so a shell screams down and explodes in this besieged town and another half‐dozen people are killed or wounded. It goes on day and night.

The tile floors of the military infirmary and civilian hospital are slippery with blood. They have long since run out of pain‐killing drugs. Bodies are everywhere —some people half conscious crying out in pain, some with gaping wounds who will not live. Some are already dead and, in the chaos, just lie there with no one to cover them or take them

Fifty yards away, behind a wall, another shell bursts. Those who are conscious jump involuntarily. The seriously wounded are too weak to react.

Inside the infirmary a 7‐year‐old girl, a filthy bandage over the wound in her stomach, lies on a wooden table. The only doctor in the town feels her pulse. It is failing.

Suddenly her father appears, a soldier. He has come from the spot where another of his children, a 5‐year‐old girl, has just been killed by a mortar shell. His wife was killed three years ago by shelling in another town.

He picks up his daughter in his shaking arms; his face bathed in a cold sweat, contorts as he tries to hold back the tears that come anyway.

“I love all my children,” is all he says as he walks away with the dying child—heading for the helicopters that are too few to carry all the wounded to Phnom Penh.

There is deep hunger in Neak Luong, too. The soldiers here are getting by, for American and Cambodian transport planes are stropping some food by, parachute for them. —but there is none for the civilians.

By today, the 30,000 or more refugees who have fled to Neak Luong from outlying areas as the Communist‐led insurgents have advanced toward the town have been reduced to subsistence on the thinnest of rice gruel. Every day it becomes thinner. Many are living in the open and it rains almost every night.

Yesterday the Catholic Relief Services, whose dogged Cambodian staff has stayed in Neak Luong to run gruel kitchens, tried to send a barge with 25 tons of rice down the Mekong River the 38 miles from Phnom Penh to the isolated town. But at the last minute, the barge was ordered to stay in Phnom. Penh. The Cambodian military said the situation was too dangerous and the barge would probably be sunk if it tried to run the insurgents’ gantlet.

“They're going to have to airdrop more food,” said one disheartened relief worker. “That's all there is to it. Otherwise people will starve.”

Already, as one walks around the shell‐marked town one hears everywhere the sound of children whimpering.

The military situation here though grave, does not seem to be deteriorating. Government reinforcements continue to pour in, by helicopter, and,. while ‐the Cambodian insurgents are right across the Mekong from Neak Luong, on the western bank of the river and also very close on most sides of the town itself, it does not appear likely at this point that they can overrun the town.

Yet until the Government troops do more than just hold on—that is, until they push the insurgents back far enough to take the town out of shelling range—the human misery here, with shells raining in indiscriminately, will continue.

The Government's determination to save Neak Luong stems from the town's importance as virtually the last Government position on tilt lower Mekong. If it fell, the Government would lose all hope of getting supplies into Phnom Penh by way of the Mekong.

With all other surface routes cut long ago in this five‐year war, the American backed Government is now dependent on the Mekong for 80 per cent or more of its supplies from the outside world.

Even now, the Mekong is temporarily blockaded. The rebels, in the annual dry season offensive that began New Year's Day, have seized control of so much of the river and its parallel road, Route 1 that the Americans have been forced to postpone indefinitely the supply convoys—which come up from Thailand. and South Vietnam.

As people went about their tasks today, many hardly seemed to hear mortars exploding, sometimes only 50 yards away, or the machinegun fire sputtering around the edges of town, Or the rockets whooshing into enemy positions from helicopter gunships overhead.

Amid all this, there was at times a preposterous normality.

In the market, where a few Chinese‐run shops were open for those who still had money, a colonel who had just flown in with his fresh troops was examining a bottle of French cologne with a discriminating air. His boots were highly polished, his uniform starched, his neck scarf just so. He squeezed the atomizer, Sniffed the spray, then put it back and walked away disdainfully.

Last night the insurgents began increasing their shelling—with mortars, recoilless cannon and rockets. Through the night, the casualties rose.

At dawn, with the explosions heaviest in the southern sector of town,. where most of the refugees had been huddled in the streets, a pagoda and a primary school, the refugees began fleeing with their sackfuls of belongings to the northern fringe of Neak Luong, which was not safe but at least safer.

There was squalor, fear and bedlam. But there was also the traditional Buddhist fatalism of the ‘Cambodian people. Some of this trapped population, which totals at least 250,000 counting the refugees seemed almost to accept that being caught here is simply their lot.

The colonel was an incongruity in Neak Luong today. The norm was bloodsoaked stretchers, the smashed bodies of infants attached to plaSma bottles, wounded soldiers being dragged or dragging themselves from every lane, and a meadow on the northern edge of town where the wounded who still had a chance were carried to await the evacuation helicopters.

By Sydney H. Schanberg

PHOM PENH, Cambodia, March 18—Five years ago, in March, 1970, enthusiastic throngs of Cambodians, rallying behind their new anti-Communist, American‐backed Government, sacked and burned the North Vietnamese and Vietcong embassies—and the smoke and ashes filled the patriotic air.

Today, with Phnom Penh largely encircled by the Communist‐led Cambodian insurgents, the United States Embassy is burning some of its files, in order to “thin itself down” to prepare for the possibility of evacuation—and the ashes drift slowly to the embassy yard.

It is not surprising on this fifth anniversary of the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk and the beginning of this war, that there are contrasts between then and now. What is surprising is the starkness and grimness of the contrasts.

A Difference in Sound

Five years ago, the loudest noise one heard in the soft Cambodian night was the shrieking of the locusts in the tamarind trees. Now mortars and artillery thump away through the hours of darkness, and the shock waves from bombs falling on nearby enemy positions rattle the windows of this fitfully sleeping capital.

Phnom Penh was an uncrowded and untroubled city of flowering trees, temple bells, wide boulevards, floating river restaurants and gentle people who smiled a lot. The smiles are rarer today.

Now rockets fired from insurgent positions a few miles outside the city fall daily, leaving twisted bodies in the streets. Food is short. Fuel is too, so to conserve it, electric power is turned on only four hours every other night, leaving the nervous city in darkness the rest of the time.

Barbed wire stretches down sidewalks, competing with the wretched cardboard and scrapwood lean‐tos of the swarming hundreds of thousands of refugees who have been driven from their homes in the countryside and now fill Phnom Penh to bursting.

Paint peels dingily from buildings that used to be whitewashed every year.

Phnom Penh's culture has peeled away too. The dulcet Malay strains of Cambodian music are never heard any more; they have been replaced by ear‐splitting rock music played by Filipino bands in sleazy Wild‐West bars, with names like Tropicana,” and “Foreigners Club,” that have opened to accommodate the influx of American Embassy personnel and civilian bush pilots.

Phnom Penh's ladies of the night, who used to speak polite French and had elegant mantantamount to mortal sin in this proud society. ners, have also been replaced—by rough bar girls and street girls who have learned to talk coarse G.I.‐style English.

On the same streets, soldiers on crutches and orphaned children with grimy stick‐thin bodies vie for space outside the better restaurants to beg a few pennies from emerging patrons.

Before the war, begging was tantamount to sin the proud society.

Prices have soared more than 1,000 per cent since the war began, which has put basic foods out of the reach of average people. Rice was fairly cheap in 1970, and even the very poor had enough to eat in this fecund, agricultural land. Now, rice is outragously expensive and five years of thinner and thinner diets have finally bent the population to a point where children by the scores are dying of malnutrition.

Cutting corners is often the only alternative to starvation. Orphaned beggar girls turn to prostitution. Sometimes married women of poor families do the same, discreetly, to feed their children. Some refugee women have offered their babies for sale to foreigners.

In 1970, there were only about 600,000 people in Phnom Penh. Now there are more than two million. As the war has brought destruction to more and more of the countryside, it has driven waves of villagers into the capital. The sidewalks, alleys and gutters are where most of the newcomers must live.

Not only the streets are crowded. The war‐wounded, civilian as well as military, long ago outnumbered the beds in hospitals here. So the wounded are put on the floors, in the corridors, even in small closets.

Hospitals Jammed

The hospitals are tableaus of maimed and broken bodies of men who will soon be on the sidewalks as beggars. The overworked hospital staffs never even get the time to clean the floors, so the filth and blood just cake there.

The best available figures show that nearly one million of Cambodia's seven million people have been killed ?? wounded in the war, and that perhaps half the population has been turned into refugees. The comparable situation in the United States would be 30 million Americans and wounded, and 100 million uprooted from their homes.

“I remember how two years ago we thought conditions here had reached bottom,” said a long‐time foreign resident, “but now we're in the sixth subbasement below the bottom and still sinking.”

When the war began, one could drive out of Phnom Penh, on the roads that radiate from the capital, to nearly all the province capitals, even to the storied temple ruins of Angkor Wet. Today, Phnom Penh is surrounded and isolated as are nearly all the province capitals, whose perimeters shrink more and more each year. They are linked only by air. And when the shelling of a town becomes too intense, planes cannot land, and even that connection is broken.

Phnom Penh has only one supply link left with the outside world, its airport. And the only thing keeping the capital alive right now is a big American airlift of food, fuel and ammunition from Thailand and South Vietnam.

One remembers how in June of 1970, with the war still an embryo, a charming Cambodian colonel in Neak Luong, a Mekong River town 38 miles southeast of Phnom Penh, invited some reporters to a superior lunch—from his foot locker—of paté, mangos and Johnny Walker Black Label, as a cool breeze blew in from the river.

Today Neak Luong is running low on food. Corpses are strewn in its streets. It is tightly encircled, taking hundreds of insurgent shells every day, a town with more than 30,000 civilian and 3,000 soldiers trapped in it, a town where the shelling usually makes it impossible for helicopters to land and fly out wounded.

Enthusiasm That Failed

Perhaps the starkest contrast between then and now is in morale.

In 1970, students, intellectuals, workers and peasants all rallied to the Lon Nol Government, enthusiastic about the overthrow of the autocratic, corrupt monarchy and the creation of a new “republic.”

Volunteers flocked to the army, including young women who took their places alongside the men in the foxholes. They had no proper uniforms or transport, but they did not seem to mind. They went to war in Pepsi ‐ Cola delivery trucks, wearing rubber sandals and carrying their food in mesh bags hooked onto a shirt button. They were full of spirit.

That spirit has evaporated. Government ineffectiveness, callousness and corruption have turned the populace sour and resentful. Some students and teachers have gone to the jungle to join the insurgents. People do not volunteer for the army any more; instead, they do everything possible to escape it. Those who can afford it buy draft exemption certificates with big bribes. Villagers and poor urban workers also try to avoid the draft, but they are often rounded up by military police and taken to training camps.

In 1970 and 1971, students and others staged big demonstrations and marches in support of the Lon Nol government. The only demonstrations now are in protest against soaring prices and corruption, and these are quickly snuffed out by the military police.

The Reason: Corruption

Corruption is a key reason for the Government's loss of public support.

In the five years of war, Washington has announced a total of nearly $2‐billion in aid to Cambodia, most of it in military aid and very little for humanitarian refugee projects.

That much of the aid money has been used improperly is evident from the condition of the troops in the field. Very few have a complete uniform or even a pair of boots. Most wear clothes that they bought themselves and have patched many times. They earn about $12 a month, which usually has to support a family of five.

Today's anniversary of the birth of this Government was not marked by a single ceremony.

“We supported this Government fully in 1970,” said a student leader at a recent meeting. “But we were fooled. These Government ministers care only about putting money in their own pockets. They don't care who suffers from the terrible prices or who gets killed on the battlefields.”

By Sydney H. Schanberg

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, April 9—To those who consider this encircled capital a sinking ship, the most potent symbol is the fact, that every foreign embassy has abandoned it but one—the American. ‐ And now even the Americans seem poised to disembark, having evacuated more than two‐thirds of their staff.

Two things have spurred the exodus of the diplomatic community over the last few weeks —the deterioration in the military situation as the Communist‐led Cambodian insurgents keep tightening their circle around the capital and the growing conviction that Congress will reject the White House appeal for emergency military aid for the Phnom Penh Government.

The same reasons have led the Americans—once the repository of the Government's hopes for survival—to start packing too.

Some Cambodian generals and ministers still talk wishfully of the possibility the American Embassy will pull off a last‐minute miracle—such as a resumption of American bombing—but few believe it. Certainly the embassy does not.

A Mood of Frustration

The embassy, a three‐story whitewashed structure, stands on the corner of one of Phnom Penh's boulevards, surrounded by a high thick wall and even higher metal screens to fend off rockets and grenades. Inside the mood is one of frustration and failure.

The staff is down from 285 to fewer than 100, and nerves are so frayed that conversations sometimes ramble and people miss the punchline of jokes.

Files are being burned, rugs rolled up, paintings taken down, belongings packed and final purchases made of Cambodian silver ornaments and temple rubbings.

Even the embassy's 300 Cambodian employes, who the Americans fear might become special targets when the insurgents take over, are being evacuated if they request it. Every day some gather at the building with their suitcases, saying tearful farewells as they prepare to go to the airport and board the embassy planes to Bangkok,

Other Cambodians watch these departures nervously, believing that the Americans have information about when the end will come. What they are really watching for is the day when the embassy presses the final alarm button and flies its last staff members out.

The dwindling embassy staff says privately that Ambassador John Gunther Dean, whom some Cambodians for a time regarded as a potential savior, has told everyone he wants the embassy “to go out in style, with dignity—not in panic like losers.”

The embassy tries to put up a brave front of normality as its offices empty and workmen hammer the lids onto packing crates. The Ambassador gives a dinner for some foreign journalists—there are no diplomats left to give parties for — at which he serves his best wine. Members of the embassy's military attaché staff brave machine‐gun fire on the roads to visit Cambodian frontline headquarters every day, simply to show the flag and try to keep up the morale of the troops. The military attachés fear that once they stop doing this, demoralization could quickly spread through the ranks.

The embassy exists close to a state of siege these days—rockets occasionally fall nearby, causing a siren to wail and the staff to descend quickly to the thick‐walled lobby to make nervous small talk until the risk is considered over. But it has been under virtual siege for a long time.

Faced with the impossible task of molding the Phnom Penh regime into a government clean and popular and strong enough to force the other side to accept a compromise negotiated settlement, the Dean embassy has struggled against the odds and against pressures from Washington that have reduced many of its officials to exhaustion and worse.

Senior Aide Dies

One senior official, Thomas F. Olmsted, the embassy's economic chief, collapsed under the pressures and died two months ago of pancreatitis. Another senior official, Robert V. Keeley, the deputy chief of mission, a poised diplomat whom many regard as the balance wheel of the embassy, had to be evacuated to the States with a bleeding ulcer; he has returned but is still not fully recovered.

Another official had a heart attack and has been reassigned to a quiet desk job in Washington. Others, including Ambassador Dean have fallen victim to attacks of extreme fatigue and are under a doctor's care.

In the Ambassador's case, the strain sometimes shows in sudden rages over inconsequential matters, sometimes over news reports that he feels may have tarnished his image.

The cable traffic from the State Department is said to be enormous, with Secretary of State Kissinger hovering telegraphically over the mission's every move.

Even before the thinning of the staff increased the workload, senior officials were chained to their desks. They almost never had—or made—the time for an ordinary experience with Cambodians on an ordinary street in Phnom Penh.

“This place is a purple mausoleum,” said a weary official a couple of weeks ago. “This is the first assignment I've ever had where I saw so little of the country and so much of the embassy.”

The pressures have multiplied sharply although the tasks remain the same—supervision of the airlift that is keeping the Phnom Penh Government alive and responsibility for the feeding of hundreds of thousands of refugees—because they must be performed by a third or fewer of those who used to do them.

All this is compounded by the fact that most of the office secretaries are gone. It is not unusual these days to call the Ambassador's office and have Mr. Dean himself answer the phone.

It is a year since Mr. Dean arrived in Cambodia from Laos. His style has been vastly different from that of his predecessor, Thomas O. Enders, now Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, who enthusiastically played key targeting role in the American bombing of 1973 and talked with elation about “wasting bad guys.”

What has emerged froth the Dean stewardship is a picture of an embassy often forced to be mere of a military mission than a diplomatic one and one trapped in the confines of a policy that the embassy leadership regards as having already failed.

Sometimes senior embassy officials, dutifully trying to justify this policy to newsmen, found themselves, wittingly or otherwise, repeating phrases that are old to the Indochina war: “It will be a disgrace to our honor and our credibility if we just pull out; “If the insurgents take over, we'll have one of the bloodiest massacres the world has ever seen;” and “Now that we've gotten them into this mess, we can't abandon them.”

An Inherited Situation

But most of the time, officials here seem to be putting some distance between themselves and Washington. “We inherited a rotten situation, remember that,” one embassy staffer said the other day. “No one here is married to this situation. Sometimes people make it sound as though we were there at the wedding.”

Ambassador Dean, who has lost 21 pounds in the year he has been here, is a strong‐willed man, who has seemed compulsively driven in his search for peace negotiations — a search that has failed.

When asked about his views and about possible differences with Washington and Secretary Kissinger, Mr. Dean will not be drawn. “I'm a disciplined Foreign Service officer,” he says. “My dialogue is with my superiors.”

By Sydney H. Schanberg

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, April 14—This capital was full of strange scenes today—the inevitable contrasts between the confusion and fear at the front and the blissful oblivion of those a few miles away.

With insurgents only three miles down the road, a driver leaned on the fender of his Land-Rover, a mirror in one hand and tweezers In the other, pulling stray hairs from his chin.

Government employes laughed and joked as they went through their regular morning marching exercises on the grassy mall outside their building—part of a national preparedness program.

An elderly French woman, a teacher who is a legendary figure at the Hotel Le Phnom, sat in her regular chair at poolside this morning, wearing a white dress as always, with a white shawl over her shoulders. She was waiting for the Cambodian children for whom she is now the governess and tutor. The only difference was that she was the only person at the pool, the other foreign and Cambodian habitues having been distracted by events. The children also did not cone, but the teacher sat there unperturbed, her face a mask of calm.

Later a grimacing beggar entered the hotel lobby and began to assail all the foreigners in sight in a loud. whining voice. He rattled everyone's already frayed nerves at badly that they paid him handsomely just to go away. He probably got more in that five minutes than he normally does in a month. At the front desk the receptionists were listening to the radio spew forth patriotic speeches and assurances that the armed forces would defend the capital against all assaults. As they listened they were making out bills for guests who wanted to be ready to depart at a moment's notice—if departure was possible.

The Government radio station was a source of odd and incongruous programs. Occasionally the New Year's music and folk theater would be Interrupted by a reminder of the need to obey the law in these difficult times.

At one point an announcer reported that the Government had denied all the rumors about Battambang, province capital under attack about 180 miles northwest of Phnom Penh. The announcer did not say what the rumors re: he simply said that they were untrue and that all the people in Battambang, Cambodia's second largest city, "are unified in their determination to continue the struggle."

The rumors, which have been making the rounds for a couple of days, were that Battambang had surrendered to the Communist-led insurgents.

The Battambang story was only one of many rumors that coursed through the capital today. One said that a squad of workers was cleaning or the former royal palace in preparation for the return of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Another said that officers at the high command's head-quarters who were ordered to the front had refused to go. Still another said that some Government units had stopped fighting and were making their own accommodations with the advancing insurgents.

The insurgents' successes and the absence of American support elicited a message from an American to the Cambodian military leaders. It read: “I apologize for my country's total lack of consideration for the Khmer people who fight so courageously for their freedom. My shame is deep.” It was from Lieut. Col. Mark Berent, former assistant air attache at the embassy here, who is retired and living in Metairie, La.

By Sydney H. Schanberg

The writer of the following dispatch remained in Cambodia after the American evacuation and was among the foreigners who arrived in Thailand last Saturday. His dispatches were withheld, under an agreement among all the confined correspondents, until the remaining foreigners were transported to safety yesterday.

BANGKOK, Thailand — The victorious Cambodian Communists, who marched into Phnom Penh on April 17 and ended five years of war in Cambodia, are carrying out a peasant revolution that has thrown the entire country into upheaval. Perhaps as many as three or four million people, most of them on foot, have been forced out of the cities and sent on a mammoth and grueling exodus into areas deep in the countryside where, the Communists say, they will have to become peasants and till the soil.

No one has been excluded — even the very old, the very young, the sick and the wounded have been forced out onto the roads — and some will clearly not be strong enough to survive. The old economy of the cities has been abandoned, and for the moment money means nothing and cannot be spent. Barter has replaced it.

All shops have either been looted by Communist soldiers for such things as watches and transistor radios, or their goods have been taken away in an organized manner to be stored as communal property. Even the roads that radiate out of the capital and that carried the nation’s commerce have been virtually abandoned, and the population living along the roads, as well as that in all cities and towns that remained under the control of the American-backed Government, has been pushed into the interior. Apparently the areas into which the evacuees are being herded are at least 65 miles from Phnom Penh.

In sum the new rulers — before their overwhelming victory they were known as the Khmer Rouge — appear to be remaking Cambodian society in the peasant image, casting aside everything that belonged to the old system, which was generally dominated by the cities and towns and by the elite and merchants who lived there.

Foreigners and foreign aid are not wanted — at least not for now. It is even unclear how much influence the Chinese and North Vietnamese will have, despite their considerable aid to the Cambodian insurgents against the Government of Marshal Lon Nol. The new authorities seem determined to do things themselves in their own way. Despite the propaganda terminology and other trappings, such as Mao caps and Ho Chi Minh rubber-tire sandals, which remind one of Peking and Hanoi, the Communists seem fiercely independent and very Cambodian.

Judging from their present actions, it seems possible that they may largely isolate their country of perhaps seven million people from the rest of the world for a considerable time — at least until the period of upheaval is over, the agrarian revolution takes concrete shape and they are ready to show their accomplishments to foreigners. Some of the party officials in Phnom Penh also talked about changing the capital to a more traditional and rural town like Siem Reap, in the northwest.

For those foreigners, including this correspondent, who stayed behind to observe the takeover, the events were an astonishing spectacle. In Phnom Penh two million people suddenly moved out of the city en masse in stunned silence — walking, bicycling, pushing cars that had run out of fuel, covering the roads like a human carpet, bent under sacks of belongings hastily thrown together when the heavily armed peasant soldiers came and told them to leave immediately, everyone dispirited and frightened by the unknown that awaited them and many plainly terrified because they were soft city people and were sure the trip would kill them. Hospitals jammed with wounded were emptied, right down to the last patient. They went — limping, crawling, on crutches, carried on relatives’ backs, wheeled on their hospital beds.

The Communists have few doctors and meager medical supplies, so many of these patients had little chance of surviving. On April 17, the day this happened, Phnom Penh's biggest hospital had over 2,000 patients and there were several thousand more in other hospitals; many of the wounded were dying for lack of care. A once-throbbing city became an echo chamber of silent streets lined with abandoned cars and gaping, empty shops. Streetlights burned eerily for a population that was no longer there. 

The end of the old and the start of the new began early in the morning of the 17th. At the cable office the line went dead for mechanical reasons at 6 a.m. On the previous day, amid heavy fighting, the Communist-led forces had taken the airport a few miles west of the city, and during the night they had pressed to the capital’s edges, throwing in rockets and shells at will.

Thousands of new refugees and fleeing soldiers were filling the heart of the capital, wandering aimlessly, looking for shelter, as they awaited the city’s imminent collapse. Everyone — Cambodians and foreigners alike — thought this had to be Phnom Penh’s most miserable hour after long days of fear and privation as the Communist forces drew closer. They looked ahead with hopeful relief to the collapse of the city, for they felt that when the Communists came and the war finally ended, at least the suffering would largely be over. All of us were wrong.

That view of the future of Cambodia—as a possibly flexible place even under Communism, where changes would not be extreme and ordinary folk would be left alone — turned out to be a myth. American officials had described the Communists as indecisive and often ill-coordinated, but they turned out to be firm, determined, well-trained, tough and disciplined. The Americans had also said that the rebel army was badly riddled by casualties, forced to fill its ranks by hastily impressing young recruits from the countryside and throwing them into the front lines with only a few days’ training. The thousands of troops we saw both in the countryside and in Phnom Penh, while they included women soldiers and boy militia, some of whom seemed no more than 10 years old, looked healthy, well organized, heavily armed and well trained.

Another prediction made by the Americans was that the Communists would carry out a bloodbath once they took over-massacring as many as 20,000 high officials and intellectuals. There have been unconfirmed reports of executions of senior military and civilian officials, and no one who witnessed the take-over doubts that top people of the old regime will be or have been punished and perhaps killed or that a large number of people will die of hardships on the march into the countryside. But none of this will apparently bear any resemblance to the mass executions that had been predicted by Westerners. In a news conference Tuesday President Ford reiterated reports — he termed them "hard intelligence" — that 80 to 90 Cambodian officials and their wives had been executed.

On the first day, as the sun was rising, a short swing by automobile to the northern edge of the city showed soldiers and refugees pouring in. The northern defense line had obviously collapsed. By the time I reached Hotel Le Phnom and climbed the two flights of stairs to my room, the retreat could be clearly seen from my window and small-arms fire could be heard in the city. At 6:30 A.M. I wrote in my notebook: "The city is falling." Over the next couple of hours there were periodic exchanges of fire as the Communists encountered pockets of resistance. But most Government soldiers were busy preparing to surrender and welcome the Communists, as were civilians. White flags suddenly sprouted from housetops and from armored personnel carriers, which resemble tanks. Some soldiers were taking the clips out of their rifles; others were changing into civilian clothes. Some Government office workers were hastily donning the black pajama-like clothes worn by Indochinese Communists.

Shortly before 9 a.m. the first rebel troops approached the hotel, coming from the north down Monivong Boulevard. A crowd of soldiers and civilians, including newsmen, churned forth to greet them — cheering and applauding and embracing and linking arms to form a phalanx as they came along. The next few hours saw quite a bit of this celebrating, though shooting continued here and there, some of it only a few hundred yards from the hotel. Civilians and Buddhist monks and troops on both sides rode around town — in jeeps, atop personnel carriers and in cars — shouting happily. Most civilians stayed nervously indoors, however, not yet sure what was going on or who was who. What was the fighting inside the city all about? they wondered; was it between diehard Government troops and the Communists or between rival Communist factions fighting over the spoils? Or was it mostly exuberance? Some of these questions, including the nature of the factionalism, have still not been answered satisfactorily, but on that first day such mysteries quickly became academic, for within a few hours, the mood changed.

The cheerful and pleasant troops we first encountered — we came to call them the soft troops, and we learned later that they were discredited and disarmed, with their leader declared a traitor; they may not even have been authentic — were swiftly displaced by battle-hardened soldiers. While some of these were occasionally friendly, or at least not hostile, they were also all business. Dripping with arms like overladen fruit trees — grenades, pistols, rifles, rockets — they immediately began to clear the city of civilians. Using loudspeakers, or simply shouting and brandishing weapons, they swept through the streets, ordering people out of their houses. At first we thought the order applied only to the rich in villas, but we quickly saw that it was for everyone as the streets became clogged with a sorrowful exodus. Cars stalled or their tires went flat, and they were abandoned. People lost their sandals in the jostling and pushing, so they lay as a reminder of the throng that had passed.

In the days to follow, during the foreign colony's confinement in the French Embassy compound, we heard reports on international news broadcasts that the Communists had evacuated the city by telling people the United States was about to bomb it. However, all the departing civilians I talked with said they had been given no reason except that the city had been reorganized. They were told they had to go far from Phnom Penh. In almost every situation we encountered during the more than two weeks we were under Communist control, there was a sense of split vision — whether to look at events through Western eyes or what we thought might be Cambodian revolutionary eyes. Was this just cold brutality, a cruel and sadistic imposition of the law of the jungle, in which only the fittest will survive? Or is it possible that, seen through the eyes of the peasant soldiers and revolutionaries, the forced evacuation of the cities is a harsh necessity? Perhaps they are convinced that there is no way to build a new society for the benefit of the ordinary man, hitherto exploited, without literally starting from the beginning; in such an unbending view people who represent the old ways and those considered weak or unfit would be expendable and would be weeded out. Or was the policy both cruel and ideological?

A foreign doctor offered this explanation for the expulsion of the sick and wounded from the hospital: "They could not cope with all the patients — they do not have the doctors — so they apparently decided to throw them all out and blame any deaths on the old regime. This way they could start from scratch medically." Some Western observers considered that the exodus approached genocide. One of them, watching from his refuge in the French Embassy compound, said: "They are crazy! This is pure and simple genocide. They will kill more people this way than if there had been hand-to-hand fighting in the city." Another foreign doctor, who had been forced at gunpoint to abandon a seriously wounded patient in mid-operation, added in a dark voice: “They have not got a humanitarian thought in their heads!" Whatever the Communists' purpose, the exodus did not grow heavy until dusk, and even then onlookers were slow to realize that the people were being forcibly evacuated. For my own part, I had a problem that preoccupied me that afternoon: I, with others, was held captive and threatened with execution.

After our release, we went to the Information Ministry, because we had heard about a broadcast directing high officials of the old regime to report there. When we arrived, about 50 prisoners were standing outside the building, among them Lon Non, the younger brother of President Lon Nol, who went into exile on April 1, and Brig. Gen. Chim Chhuon, who was close to the former President. Other generals and Cabinet ministers were also there — very nervous but trying to appear untroubled. Premier Long Boret, who the day before had made an offer of surrender with certain conditions only to have it immediately rejected, arrived at the ministry an hour later. He is one of the seven traitors the Communists had marked for execution. The others had fled except for Lieut. Gen. Sisowath Sirik Matak, a former Premier, who some days later was removed from the French Embassy where he had taken refuge.

Mr. Long Boret's eyes were puffy and red, almost down to slits. He had probably been up all night and perhaps he had been weeping. His wife and two children were also still in the country; later they sought refuge at the French Embassy, only to be rejected as persons who might "compromise" the rest of the refugees. Mr. Long Boret, who had talked volubly and articulately on the telephone the night before, had difficulty speaking coherently. He could only mumble yes, no, and thank you, so conversation was impossible. There is still no hard information on what has happened to him. Most people who have talked with the Communists believe it a certainty that he will be executed, if indeed the execution has not already taken place.

One of the Communist leaders at the Information Ministry — probably a general, though his uniform bore no markings and he declined to give his name — talked soothingly to the 50 prisoners. He assured them that there were only seven traitors and that other officials of the old regime would be dealt with equitably. "There will be no reprisals," he said. Their strained faces suggested that they would like to believe him but they did not. As he talked, a squad crouched in combat-ready positions around him, almost as it was guarding him against harm. The officer, who appeared no more than age 35, agreed to chat with foreign newsmen. His tone was polite and sometimes he smiled, but everything he said suggested that we, as foreigners, meant nothing to him and that our interests were alien to his.

Asked about the fate of the 20 or so foreign journalists missing in Cambodia since the early days of the war, he said that he had heard nothing. Asked if we would be permitted to file from the cable office, he smiled sympathetically and said, "We will resolve all problems in their proper order." Clearly an educated man, he almost certainly speaks French, the language of the nation that ruled Cambodia for nearly a century until the nineteen-fifties, but he gave no hint of this colonial vestige, speaking only in Khmer through an interpreter. In the middle of the conversation he volunteered quite unexpectedly: "We would like you to give our thanks to the American people who have helped us and supported us from the beginning, and to all people of the world who love peace and justice. Please give this message to the world." Noting that Congress had halted aid to the Phnom Penh government, he said, "The purpose was to stop the war," but he quickly added: "Our struggle would not have stopped even if they had given more aid."

Attempts to find out more about political and military organization led only to imprecision. The officer said: "I represent the armed forces. There are many divisions. I am one of the many." Asked if there were factions, he said there was only one political organization and one government. Some top political and governmental leaders are not far from the city, he added, but they let the military enter first "to organize things." Most military units, he said, are called "rumdos," which means "liberation forces." Neither this commander nor any of the soldiers we talked with ever called Communists or Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians). They always said they were liberation troops or nationalist troops and called one another brother or the Khmer equivalent of comrade. The nomenclature at least is confusing, for Western intelligence had described the Khmer Rumdos as a faction loyal to Prince Norodom Sihanouk that was being downgraded by Hanoi-trained Cambodians and losing power. The Communists named the Cambodian leader, who was deposed by Marshal Lon Nol in 1970 and had been living in exile in Peking, as their figurehead chief of state, but none of the soldiers we talked with brought up his name.

One over-all impression emerged from our talk with the commander at the Information Ministry: The military will be largely in charge of the early stages of the upheaval, carrying out the evacuation, organizing the new agrarian program, searching for hidden arms and resisters, repairing damaged bridges. The politicians — or so it seemed from all the evidence during our stay — have for the moment taken a rear seat. No significant political or administrative apparatus was yet visible; it did not seem to be a government yet, but an army. The radio announced April 28 that a special national congress attended by over 300 delegates was held in Phnom Penh from April 25 to 27. It was said to have been chaired by the Deputy Premier and military commander, Khieu Samphan, who has emerged — at least in public announcements — as the top leader. Despite that meeting the military still seemed to be running things as we emerged from Cambodia on Saturday. One apparent reason is that politicians and bureaucrats are not equipped to do the dirty work and arduous tasks of the early phases of reorganization. Another is that the military, as indicated in conversations with Khmer-speaking foreigners they trusted somewhat, seemed worried that politicians or soft-living outsiders in their movement might steal the victory and dilute it. There could be severe power struggles ahead.

After leaving the prisoners and the military commander at the ministry, we headed for the Hotel Le Phnom, where another surprise was waiting. The day before, the Red Cross turned the hotel into a protected international zone and draped it with huge Red Cross flags. But the Communists were not interested. At 4:55 P.M. troops waving guns and rockets had forced their way into the grounds and ordered the hotel emptied within 30 minutes. By the time we arrived 25 minutes had elapsed. The fastest packing job in history ensued. I even had time to "liberate" a typewriter someone had abandoned since the troops had "liberated" mine earlier. We were the last ones out, running. The Red Cross had abandoned several vehicles in the yard after removing the keys, so several of us threw our gear on the back of a Red Cross Honda pickup truck and started pushing it up the boulevard toward the French Embassy. Several days before, word was passed to those foreigners who stayed behind when the Americans pulled out on April 12 that, as a last resort, one could take, the new Cambodian leaders would respect the embassy.

France had recognized the new government, and it was thought that the new Cambodian leaders would respect the embassy compound as a sanctuary. As we plodded up the road, big fires were burning on the city's outskirts, sending smoke clouds into the evening sky like a giant funeral wreath encircling the capital. The embassy was only several hundred yards away, but what was happening on the road made it seem much farther. All around us people were fleeing, for there was no refuge for them. And coming into the city from the other direction was a fresh battalion marching in single file. They looked curiously at us; we looked nervously at them.

In the 13 days of confinement that followed, until our evacuation by military truck to the Thai border, we had only a peephole onto what was going on outside, but there were still many things that could be seen and many clues to the revolution that was going on. We could hear shooting, sometimes nearby but mostly in other parts of the city. Often it sounded like shooting in the air, but at other times it seemed like small battles. As on the day of the city's fall we were never able to pierce together a satisfactory account of the shooting, which died down after about a week. We could see smoke from the huge fires from time to time, and there were reports from foreigners who trickled into the embassy that certain quarters were badly burned and that the water purification plant was heavily damaged.

The following dispatch by Sydney H. Schanberg accompanied his account of the upheaval in Cambodia.

BANGKOK, Thailand, May 8 —For the 800 foreigners, including this correspondent, who spent two weeks in the French Embassy in Phnom Penh after the Communists took over, the time seemed like a chaotically compressed generation of life.

A baby was born, another died. A dozen marriages were performed—all marriages of convenience to enable Cambodians to get French passports so that they could escape the country and its peasant revolution.

There were days of deep sorrow. Cambodians without foreign papers had to go on the trek into the countryside. Friends were torn apart. Families broke up as Cambodian husbands were separated from their European wives. On those days sobbing could be heard in every corner of the compound.

And there were days when hopes rose, days when the rumors said that evacuation was imminent.

Heroes and knaves emerged —more of the latter than the former. There was no running water and food was limited, and out of this grew tensions and rivalries between groups.

Between French officials living well in the embassy and French civilians living in the driveways and gardens outside. Between the outside French and the French staff of Calmette Hospital, who were also living fairly well. And between the non‐French foreigners, including the favorite targets — Americans and journalists — lnd everyelse.

There was more selfishness than sharing. A minor example: Put a pack of cigarettes on a table for 10 seconds and turn around, and it would be gone.

The first convoy of foreigners who had taken refuge in the embassy for 13 days, including this correspondent, arrived in Thailand Saturday after three and a half days on the road. Hundreds of other refugees remained In the embassy even longer and arrived in Thailand today.

To describe what life was like in the compound is to describe sheer incongruity. A French doctor walked the hospital’s pet sheep around the gardens. (The hospital's pet gibbon was taken by the Communists and led around the street outside in a pink dress.) Some of the Frenchmen in the compound fed their dogs better than other people were able to feed their children.

Our group of foreigners lived in the building that used to be the ambassador's residence, one of three buildings on the grounds; the others are a chancellery and a large cultural center. Eighteen of us, using sofa cushions and pillows as mattresses and linen tablecloths for blankets, slept on the floor of a large living room surrounded by humming air conditioners, an elegant upright piano, a crystal chandelier and some of the embassy’s best silver, except for the silver teapots, which were used to boil water over wood fires outside.

For a few days it might have been fun - a curious experience to dine on when you got home. But as time wore on, nerves frayed more and more and hardly an hour went by without an argument somewhere in the compound, usually over something petty.

The water supply ended a few days after our arrival, after which we had to rely on water tapped from our air-conditioners and that delivered periodically in barrels by the new Government. There was never enough for bathing, and the odor of unwashed people was ripe.

With food limited and with no running water, sanitation deteriorated and there were scores of cases of diarrhea - the evidence of which filled every walkway and garden in the compound.

The compound was difficult at times, but never as difficult as was suggested by the radio news reports we kept listening to, which said our situation was "more and more precarious." Sometimes when we were hearing those bulletins we were swilling Scotch and smoking long cigars.

Though some people managed not to fare too badly, for most of those in the compound the situation was far more than a series of annoyances; there was nothing funny about it.

There was nothing funny for Mrs. Nha, an Air France employee who sat sobbing under a tree on the morning of April 19. Her mother and father were missing, and in two days she would be forced to take her young son and go into the countryside herself.

"I was an optimist," she said as the tears coursed down her cheeks. "Not only me. All Cambodians here thought that when the Khmer Rouge came it would be all welcomes and cheering and bravo and the war would be over and we would become normal again. Now we are stunned, stunned."

There was nothing funny for Mrs. Praet, a Belgian whose Cambodian husband was being forced to leave her and join the march. As she wept into her handkerchief he embraced her gently.

"Courage, ma cherie. Courage, ma cherie," he whispered. She could not control herself and her small body shook with her weeping as their two little girls looked on uncomprehending.

Some Cambodian women, realizing that their infants could not survive the long trek, tearfully gave theirs to French families for foster care adoption.

"My first baby, my only baby!' a mother in shock shrieked. "Save him! Save him! You can do it."

It was raining as the Cambodians left. The hospital's sheep, tethered to a truck, was bleating mournfully; no one paid any attention.

At one time, about 1,300 people were living in the attractively landscaped compound, which is 200 yards by 250 yards or so. Then the Communists ordered out all Cambodians without foreign passports or papers, which forced about 500 people to take to the road.

Family or not, we all lost someone close to us, and when the Cambodians trudged through the gate we foreigners stood in the front yard, weeping unashamedly.

The forced evacuation was part of an apparent campaign to make it clear to Jean Dyrac, the consul and senior French official at the embassy, and to everyone else in the compound that the new Government, not foreigners, was in charge - and under its own rules.

The first thing the Communists did was declare that they did not recognize the compound as an embassy, simply as a regroupment center for foreigners under their control. This shattered the possibility of asylum for high officials of the ousted regime who had sought sanctuary. On the afternoon of April 20, in a gloomy drizzle, Lieut. Gen. Sirjk Matak, who was among those marked for execution, and a few other leading figures were taken away in the back of a sanitation truck.

Throughout our stay the Communists continued their campaign of proving their primacy - refusing to let a French plane land with food and medical supplies, refusing to allow us to be evacuated in comfort by air instead of by rutted road in the back of military trucks, and, finally, shutting down the embassy radio transmitter, our only contact with the outside world.

At the same time they did not physically harass or abuse us - the only time our baggage was searched was by Thai customs officials when we crossed the border - and they did eventually provide us with food and water. The food was usually live pigs, which we had to butcher.

Though the new rulers were obviously trying to inflict a certain amount of discomfort - they kept emphasizing that they had told us in radio broadcasts to get out of the city before the final assault and that by staying we had deliberately gone against their wishes - but there was another way to look at it. From their point of view we were being fed and housed much better than their foot soldiers were and should not complain.

But complain we did - about the food, about each other, about the fact that embassy officials were dining on chicken and white wine while we were eating plain rice and washing it down with heavily chlorinated water.

Among the embassy denizens, even in the midst of the tears and heartache, a search for the appearance of normalty [sic] went on.

A Frenchwoman picked orange-colored blossoms from a bush and twined them in her laughing child's hair.

Gosta Streijffert, a former Swedish Army officer from a patrician family who is a Red Cross official, sat erect in a straight-backed chair he had carried outside and read a British news magazine with his monocle fixed.

At a table nearby, a United Nations official and a Scottish Red Cross medical team played bridge and drank whisky; someone carped loudly about the way his partner conducted the bidding.

In the midst of all this an American airplane mechanic who did not leave Cambodia on the day the United States Embassy staff was evacuated because he was too drunk had an epileptic seizure. The Red Cross doctors carried him on the run to the building where the hospital staff was quartered with their equipment.

The American recovered slowly. His case interrupted the staff's dinner-steak. We were envious, and they seemed embarrassed and angry when journalists made notes about their full larder.

Why was there not more sharing, more of a community spirit? What made us into such acquisitive, self-protective beings?

Why did all the Asians live outside, in the heat and rain, while many of the Caucasians, like my group, lived inside, with air conditioning? We explained it by saying the living arrangements were up to the embassy, but this was clearly not an answer. Was our behavior and our segregation a verdict on our way of life?

Amid the generally disappointing behavior of the Westerners there were exceptions - people who rose above the squabbling and managed to hold things together.

There was Francois Bizot, a Frenchman who worked for many years in the countryside restoring ancient temples and ruins. He lost his Cambodian wife and mother-in-law, who were forced on the march. Yet his relationship with the Communists was strong and they trusted him, for he had met some in his work in the interior and he speaks Khmer fluently.

It was Mr. Bizot who, in the early days of our confinement, was allowed to scout for food and water. And it was he who successfully argued the cases of some Asians whose papers were not in perfect order. A number of people who were in the compound probably owe their futures to him.

There were others who performed constructive roles, among them Douglas A. Sapper 3d, an American with a Special Forces background who was involved in a private airline company.

Sapper, as everyone calls him organized our group's kitchen and food rationing to make sure supplies would last. His ranger training - and his colorful language, none of which can be reproduced here - kept us eating regularly and kept pilferers out of the larder.

These special people notwithstanding, the general level of behavior remained disappointing throughout our stay. We held constant group meetings and made endless lists of who was supposed to perform what chores, and we were constantly going through the movements of organizing, but we never really got organized.

Lassitude and depression set in as the days dragged on. People lay dozing on their makeshift beds throughout the day, waiting only for the next feeding. One journalist slipped into a torpor in which he had energy only to lift his aerosol insecticide can and spray away flies.

Occasionally, however, there was an occurrence dramatic enough to break this morphic aura - such as the sighting of a Chinese plane on April 24 coming in for a landing at the airport, possibly carrying high Cambodian and Chinese officials from Peking.

There was also the unexpected arrival the day before of the seven Russians who had been holding out at the Soviet Embassy. They had been desperately trying to make friendly contact with the new Cambodian leaders to counterbalance Chinese influence.

But it was the Chinese and not the Russians who had been supplying the Khmer Rouge with arms. The Cambodian Communists rebuffed the Soviet overtures, fired a rocket through the second floor of their embassy, looted the building and ordered the Russians to the French compound.

This phase came to an end for us in the early hours on April 30 when - after an evening of sipping champagne "borrowed" from embassy stocks and singing determinedly hardy traveling songs such as "It's a Long Way to Tipperary,'' we were awakened as scheduled, after a few hours' sleep, and told to board the trucks.

As we stepped into the pleasantly cool air with our sacks and suitcases, we could see in the night sky the lights of many planes coming from the direction of South Vietnam and heading west. Saigon was falling, and South Vietnamese pilots, carrying their families and other refugees, were making their own evacuation journey to Thailand.

The following dispatch was also written by Sydney H. Schanberg after he left Cambodia.

BANGKOK, Thailand,  May 8—The evacuation journey by truck to Thailand from Phnom Penh, were hundreds of foreigners had been confined In the French Embassy compound for nearly two weeks, gave a brief but revealing glimpse into the covert spy system and communally organized countryside of the Cambodian Communists—a glimpse that as far as is known no Westerners had ever had before. 

We traveled on some of the well-defended dirt roads that had been built by hand and used as clandestine supply routes during the five years of the war that ended with the seizure of the Cambodian capital on April 17. 

None of these roads show on maps of Cambodia, yet some were only half a mile or so from the main highways. 

On the 250-mile trip we saw reservoirs, dikes, bridges — all built with hand tools. No new machines or earth-moving equipment were visible.

We also saw boy militia units on patrol everywhere and male-female work crews repairing roads.

For those in the truck convoy the trip was arduous. It was especially difficult for the very young and the very old, and some fell ill. On our second day out, as we stopped in Kompong Chhnang for the night, a 9-month-old retarded child died in the bedlam of the governor's residence where we spent the night. French doctors who accompanied us said they knew before we started that the child could never survive such a trip. But the parents had no alternatives — they could either take the child with them and pray for miracle or leave him behind in Phnom Penh to die.

For the strong and healthy, the trip was tolerable. During rest stops we were able to forage for coconuts, mangoes and other fruit. And as every stop there were a few abandoned houses withere big clay urns filled with rainwater, which we poured over our steaming heads. 

The petty squabbling between various groups that often dominated our lives in the French Embassy compound followed us on the journey to the border. A group of Soviet diplomats refused to share their food with anyone. They even complained that they were not getting their proper convoy ration of rice. 

At one pornt, in pique, the Russians threatened to expose stowaways on our truck. We in turn, advised them that if they persisted with their threats we would write a long story about their behavior, which, we suggested, would not go down very well in Moscow. They eased up a bit after that and offered us some vodka and tinned meat.

The French and the Vietnamese with French passports also continued to act like badly behaved zoo denizens, whenever the Communists brought us food. 

If the Communists were looking for reasons to expel us as unfit and unsuited to live in a simple Asian society, we gave them ample demonstration on this journey. 

The trip from the French Embassy began early on April 30 in virtually the same welter of chaos in which we had entered the embassy as refugees 13 days earner. 

In the darkness before dawn there was utter confusion in the embassy yard as more than 500 of us clambered into the 26 Soviet, Chinese and American-made military trucks for the journey. 

There were supposed to be exactly 20 persons to each truck. But in the darkness and confusion some stowaways managed to ak aboard. Five were on our truck — three Asian wives of Westerners whose papers were incomplete but who were fiercely determined to get out, a child of one of these women, and a German television correspondent.

The German sat upright, but the other stowaways slipped under our legs and we covered them with towels, hush hats and other oddments. Somehow, the officials who checked the convoy never noticed them.

At 6 A.M., with the sun just coming up, the convoy moved out. As it did, we saw a fresh battalion of troops marching single file into the city from the north.

Then the scenes changed and we met new images. The street lights burned, casting their artificial ray along the boulevards of a deserted city. Abandoned cars and assorted trash marked the trail of the departed population.

Every shop had been broken open and looted. Not a single civilian was visible — only the many soldiers camping in the shops and on the sidewalks. We suddenly turned right — that is, west — down the road to the airport, and this was punting because we were supposed to be heading north and northwest toward Thailand.

We did not know it yet, but this was to be the detour that kept us from seeing that early stretch of Route 5 north of Phnom Penh that had been clogged with refugees forced out of Phnom Penh and may now be dotted with bodies.

Our convoy started southwest out of the capital down Route 4, then cut north along a rutted secondary road until we picked up Route 5 near Kompang Chhnang.

From there to the border. along Route 5, we encountered a wasteland of broken bridges, abandoned fields and forcibly evacuated highway towns.

The trip was a grueling one — with our trucks often lost or broken down for long hours, either in the blistering sun or torrential downpours.

Some of these areas we passed through had been badly bombed by the United States Air Farce in the early years of the war. Fields were gouged with bomb craters the size of swimming pools. But our American group and the other Westerners encountered almost no hostility from the local people.

While some sections we passed through were battered, others showed that they had been developed and organized over a long period of time and that they had remained untouched sanctuaries throughout the war.

Finally, at 11:20 A.M., I crossed over the rickety frontier bridge into Thailand. The fleet person to greet me was Chhay Born Lay, a Cambodian reporter for The Associated Press who left his country with his family on a press-evacuation flight. 

As we walked forward to embrace each other, the back of my right hand caught on a roll of barbed wire marking the border and the scratch began to bleed. Lay instantly bent his head, grabbed the hand and began sucking the blood from the cut. I tried to pull my hand away, but he held tight. 

This is what it is like to have a Cambodian friend. We both had left many Cambodian friends behind. We were both crying.