PARIS (AP) – Twelve helicopters, bristling with guns and U.S. Marines, breached the morning horizon and began a daring descent toward Cambodia’s besieged capital. The Americans were rushing in to save them, residents watching the aerial armada believed. But at the U.S. Embassy, in a bleeding city about to die, the ambassador wept.
Forty years later and 6,000 miles away, John Gunther Dean recalls what he describes as one of the most tragic days of his life – April 12, 1975, the day the United States “abandoned Cambodia and handed it over to the butcher.”
Time has not blunted the former ambassador’s anger, crushing shame and feelings of guilt over what also proved a milestone in modern American history – the first of several U.S. interventions in foreign countries climaxed by withdrawals before goals were accomplished and followed by often disastrous consequences.
“We’d accepted responsibility for Cambodia and then walked out without fulfilling our promise. That’s the worst thing a country can do,” he says in an interview in Paris. “And I cried because I knew what was going to happen.”
Five days after Operation Eagle Pull, the dramatic evacuation of Americans, the U.S.-backed government fell as communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas stormed into Phnom Penh. They drove its 2 million inhabitants into the countryside at gunpoint, launching one of the bloodiest revolutions of modern times. Nearly 2 million Cambodians – one in every four – would die from executions, starvation and hideous torture.