for a week of city living. No need for field gear. It’ll be just like Saigon.”
“But don’t I have to go looking for this guy?”
“No problem. You’ll see. Everything’s covered. Another thing. This mission is classified at the highest level. The very highest level. Absolutely do not say anything about this to anybody. Don’t tell your maid you’re going away. Don’t even start packing until 2200 hours. As far as all of Saigon is concerned, you are going to show up at work bright and early Wednesday morning, as usual. Okay.” He reached into a desk drawer and brought out a sealed manila envelope, which he handed to me. “Take no I.D. with you, you won’t need your passport, leave it in your room. In here is your I.D. and passport for the mission, plus some expense money. Your driver will give you sealed instructions. Don’t open them until you get settled in Phnom Penh. Needless to say, these materials, like everything else concerned with this assignment, are Top Secret/Need to Know. Good. I’m confident you’re the right man for the job. Yes, you have my full confidence, Jake. Good luck.” He gave my hand a brisk shake. End of meeting. I closed the door behind me, leaving Sonarr and Dino to each other; at least they shared a common interest in boozing.
It’s good I had Sonarr’s confidence, because I sure didn’t have mine. The more I thought about it, and I thought about it all that night and the next day, the more dubious the whole proposition seemed. Maybe he was right, the Army did it differently: they told you your objective, and they issued you whatever equipment and support they you thought you needed to do the job. Everything might be SNAFU, but at least you had some clue. I especially didn’t like the MIA aspect. It meant nobody was responsible for me, and if I disappeared, who would know? Officially, they’d already listed me as missing. Still, what could happen? They were flying me into the capital city. There I’d get further instructions. Until I got them I’d be in a hotel. How much could go wrong?
It being a Top Secret assignment, I couldn’t very well go around asking people to give me the scoop on Cambodia. The next day I sifted through the Embassy library to see what I could dig up—some maps; the 1968 Area Handbook for Cambodia, full of facts and figures; various history and archeological books, many in French (given my lack of French, no use at all); and assorted State Department and USIA reports. I wasn’t even sure what I ought to be looking for. Much too late I discovered that what I really needed to know about Cambodia lay buried under security so deep that even the U.S. Congress couldn’t get their hands on it.
At least I gleaned a general idea of the terrain—flat and swampy rice country in the middle around the Mekong River, and mountainous toward the coast and along the north and east borders. Virgin jungle covered about three-quarters or so of the land, and the rest was rural and undeveloped. Thailand lay to the west and north, Vietnam to the east and south (the Mekong Delta), with a bit of northern border touching Laos. The population numbered less than ten million, the bulk of it peasant rice farmers who lived in small villages centered around Buddhist temples. Phnom Penh, the capital, was much smaller than Saigon, about 600,000. Angkor Wat, a huge stone complex of ancient Buddhist temples and monuments, was the country’s major point of interest. It all sounded pretty basic—bonzes, peasants, rice paddies, temples, water buffalo, elephants, jungle. Like Vietnam must have been, before we went in.
Officially Cambodia had stayed neutral on the war in Nam (the reason we conducted our activities there so discreetly), but everybody knew the Viet Cong had long used it as a supply route and staging area for men and material carried down through Laos along the Ho Chi Minh trail. At the Parrot’s Beak, the Cambodian border bulged to within forty miles of Saigon.
“But don’t I have to go looking for this guy?”
“No problem. You’ll see. Everything’s covered. Another thing. This mission is classified at the highest level. The very highest level. Absolutely do not say anything about this to anybody. Don’t tell your maid you’re going away. Don’t even start packing until 2200 hours. As far as all of Saigon is concerned, you are going to show up at work bright and early Wednesday morning, as usual. Okay.” He reached into a desk drawer and brought out a sealed manila envelope, which he handed to me. “Take no I.D. with you, you won’t need your passport, leave it in your room. In here is your I.D. and passport for the mission, plus some expense money. Your driver will give you sealed instructions. Don’t open them until you get settled in Phnom Penh. Needless to say, these materials, like everything else concerned with this assignment, are Top Secret/Need to Know. Good. I’m confident you’re the right man for the job. Yes, you have my full confidence, Jake. Good luck.” He gave my hand a brisk shake. End of meeting. I closed the door behind me, leaving Sonarr and Dino to each other; at least they shared a common interest in boozing.
It’s good I had Sonarr’s confidence, because I sure didn’t have mine. The more I thought about it, and I thought about it all that night and the next day, the more dubious the whole proposition seemed. Maybe he was right, the Army did it differently: they told you your objective, and they issued you whatever equipment and support they you thought you needed to do the job. Everything might be SNAFU, but at least you had some clue. I especially didn’t like the MIA aspect. It meant nobody was responsible for me, and if I disappeared, who would know? Officially, they’d already listed me as missing. Still, what could happen? They were flying me into the capital city. There I’d get further instructions. Until I got them I’d be in a hotel. How much could go wrong?
It being a Top Secret assignment, I couldn’t very well go around asking people to give me the scoop on Cambodia. The next day I sifted through the Embassy library to see what I could dig up—some maps; the 1968 Area Handbook for Cambodia, full of facts and figures; various history and archeological books, many in French (given my lack of French, no use at all); and assorted State Department and USIA reports. I wasn’t even sure what I ought to be looking for. Much too late I discovered that what I really needed to know about Cambodia lay buried under security so deep that even the U.S. Congress couldn’t get their hands on it.
At least I gleaned a general idea of the terrain—flat and swampy rice country in the middle around the Mekong River, and mountainous toward the coast and along the north and east borders. Virgin jungle covered about three-quarters or so of the land, and the rest was rural and undeveloped. Thailand lay to the west and north, Vietnam to the east and south (the Mekong Delta), with a bit of northern border touching Laos. The population numbered less than ten million, the bulk of it peasant rice farmers who lived in small villages centered around Buddhist temples. Phnom Penh, the capital, was much smaller than Saigon, about 600,000. Angkor Wat, a huge stone complex of ancient Buddhist temples and monuments, was the country’s major point of interest. It all sounded pretty basic—bonzes, peasants, rice paddies, temples, water buffalo, elephants, jungle. Like Vietnam must have been, before we went in.
Officially Cambodia had stayed neutral on the war in Nam (the reason we conducted our activities there so discreetly), but everybody knew the Viet Cong had long used it as a supply route and staging area for men and material carried down through Laos along the Ho Chi Minh trail. At the Parrot’s Beak, the Cambodian border bulged to within forty miles of Saigon.
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