ABSTRACT
Disillusionment among anti-communist forces in Indochina was universal by the early 1970s, but there were variations. The Cambodians had their own special approach to the conflict. When it all began in Cambodia, after the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk on March 18, 1970, while he was visiting Moscow en route to Beijing, Cambodians responded as if they were going to a party or maybe a crusade. They patriotically rallied, climbed on Pepsi-Cola trucks and a mélange of other conveyances, and went down the roads in search of the enemy—at first largely Vietnamese communist forces, then, somewhat later, the Khmer Rouge, possibly less effective but far more cruel. The frivolity, the fatal gaiety of the Cambodian approach was embedded in my consciousness when I joined a Cambodian general on la guerre populaire, an upper-class effort to inspire the peasantry with a sense of loyalty.
