SOUTHEAST ASIA The Prince & the Dragon (See Cover) It was a great party. After the French champagne and the Viennese waltzes came Bopha Devi, prima ballerina of the Royal Cambodian Ballet. Sinuous and shimmering, dressed in green and gold, she danced a ritual dance in bare feet. When she accidentally dropped her ring, a woman servant slithered across the parquet floor on her belly to pick it up lest Bopha bruise herself.
Bopha is the daughter of Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk, who was the proud host. Graciously he explained the theme of the dance to the spectators: it concerned the encounter of Moni Mekhala, Goddess of Waters, with Ream Eyso, the Storm Spirit. If the mythology was a little confusing, that was only what the world had come to expect of His Royal Highness Norodom Sihanouk Varman, Cambodia's Retired King, Commander in Chief, Supreme National Leader of Buddhism — and known to some unkind Western detractors as "Snookie."
The reference to the Storm Spirit was appropriate enough. Even as the party honoring the visiting French ambassador to Laos was in progress, Sihanouk's government was whipping up a propa ganda campaign against the U.S., built around the preceding week's incident along the frontier between Cambodia and South Viet Nam.
Pursuing some Communist Viet Cong guerrillas who had fled across the ill-patrolled and ill-marked border, South Vietnamese T-28s had bombed the village of Chantrea, four miles inside Cambodia; the planes were followed on the ground by South Viet Nam troops accompanied by U.S. observers. Seventeen Cambodians were killed. Both the U.S. and South Viet Nam apologized for the unfortunate incident, a part of the even more unfortunate, long and deadly war in Viet Nam. But Sihanouk plastered horror pictures on every available wall and took to the radio in his terrier's tenor, accusing the U.S. of masterminding the attack. The Prince demanded that Washington pay reparations, including "one bulldozer or a powerful tractor for each of our dead."
Upstaging the Cold War. To demonstrate Cambodian neutrality, 13 of the Viet Cong fighters who had taken refuge in Cambodia were sentenced to one year of "rest" in prison. Then Sihanouk took off in his French helicopter to go village-hopping, make speeches, and shower bolts of cloth and other gifts from his chopper upon the amazed peasants below. Sihanouk also continued a shrill diplomatic campaign that seems to assume that Cambodia, with its 5,500,000 people—a country known to many Westerners only vaguely as the locale of the magnificent, slumbering old temples of Angkor Wat—is somehow at the heart of the international scene and the center of the cold war.