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In military terms, said U.S. State Department spokesmen, the damage was "minimal." Psychologically, it was a mini-TV? Hospitals were filled with wounded; the dead were so numerous that their charred bodies were simply carted away from the airport in trucks. The official toll, admittedly incomplete, stood at 39 dead (including 26 civilians) and 170 injured (150 civilians). The military side of the airport, where the Cambodians had massed their vintage MIGS, American T-28s. French Magisteres and borrowed South Vietnamese and American helicopters, was reduced to "a junkyard," as one U.S. eyewitness described it. American and South Vietnamese aircraft were also hit.
Terrorism has been on the rise in Phnom-Penh for some time; at week's end bombs blasted a government office and the South Vietnamese ambassador's home. Said a U.S. intelligence officer: "They are going to strangle that city, and it could be done easily." Phnom-Penh's electrical power generators and waterworks are now figured to be high on the Communists' list of targets.
The strangulation process is already under way. Route 4, Phnom-Penh's link to the refinery at Kompong Som, was severed in November by 1,000 North Vietnamese entrenched in the rugged Elephant Mountains. It took more than 13,000 South Vietnamese and Cambodian troops, and considerable U.S. airpower, to dislodge them. The Communists' next highway target, it is speculated, may be Route 5. the capital's access to the rich Cambodian rice bowl.
Stealing Headlines. Despite the fireworks at Phnom-Penh. State Department and Pentagon analysts remain convinced that the Communists have no intention of seizing the capital. Rather, they see the raid as a high point in a campaign of harassment aimed at cutting off Lon Nol's contact with the countryside, disrupting vital highway traffic and undermining the authority of the Phnom-Penh regime. An attack in force on the capital, writes Lieut. Colonel Vincent R. Tocci, a Pentagon Asian expert, in the current Armed Forces Journal, "would quite possibly succeed. Yet it would be costly in manpower and material. And then who would rule the country?"
Coming so soon after the allies' Route 4 victory, the Phnom-Penh raid was also a public relations triumph for the Communists. "They stole every headline in the world," said a Pentagon expert on Southeast Asia. "They didn't leave one for Pich Nil Pass." At the same time, however, the Communists took some heat off the Administration as a new controversy erupted over just how the Nixon Doctrine is being applied in Cambodia.
The flap began when newsmen reported that Cobra helicopter gunships. flown by U.S. pilots, had been supporting Cambodian and South Vietnamese troops on the Route 4 operation. Soon it was discovered that many of the Cobras came from an Army unit encamped on Phu Quoc Island, twelve miles off the Cambodian coast. To support the Cobras and supply other helicopters, if necessary, two Navy amphibious ships, the Cleveland and the Iwo Jima, have been steaming in lazy circles offshore. On top of that, an Army major was spotted by news photographers as he was running to board a helicopter near Route 4.