The War: Immediate, Palpable, Personal

One year ago this month, in one of the worst battles of the war, Communist-led Khmer insurgents pounded the Cambodian capital of Phnom-Penh with artillery and rocket fire for seven straight weeks. Somehow the city survived. Last week, it was once again hunkering down for another brutal assault. The insurgent forces, who now control most of Cambodia outside the major cities, are currently concentrating their attacks on Neak Luong, a small but vital Mekong River shipping channel 32 miles southeast of the capital. But there are daily rocket attacks in and around Phnom-Penh, and it is only a matter of time, perhaps days, before the full-fledged siege gets under way. All river traffic has been cut off. Rice supplies are running extremely low, and starvation could begin in a matter of weeks. Last week TIME Correspondent Peter Range visited Phnom-Penh and sent this report:

If Viet Nam's war is an endless litany of abstract events that one believes but never sees, Cambodia's five-year war is an immediate, palpable, personal experience. Take a left Urn at the airport, and five kilometers later you are right at the front lines, where government T-28s drop cluster bombs, gunships fire rockets, and miniguns and 105s endlessly pound away at Communist positions just northwest of the city.

At the airport, which is hit almost daily, American-owned DC-8s scream down the runway hourly and trundle up in front of the small passenger terminal, where they disgorge up to 45 tons of ammunition each. Across the field, camouflaged American C-130s buzz in and out every 20 minutes with loads of ammunition, while little Cambodian air force two-seater T-28s dart in and out from their bombing runs.

In the city itself, the daily terror is the constant expectation of a rocket attack. The Chinese-built 107-mm. missiles are wobbly, unguided weapons at best, which the insurgents fire from metal tubes propped up by two sticks or the fork of a small tree. They are a barbarous form of warfare, because when they hit the ground or touch a treetop they turn into thousands of jagged, 2-in. shrapnel fragments. Innocent women and children going about their daily chores seem to be their most common victims.

Soft Hats. Widespread corruption has squelched whatever hope there may have once been among the people to control their own destinies. Foreign diplomats speak openly of the "military Mafia"--high-ranking officers who sell deferments to rich Sino-Khmer fathers and draw the pay of thousands of phantom troops on their rolls. Out on Route 5 and Highway 7, and down in besieged Neak Luong, government soldiers are fighting the war in rubber sandals and soft hats. One corporal complained about the lack of boots and fatigues and how corrupt officers tried to make his wife pay 5,000 riels ($3.25) to come to visit him. What he did not know is that many military experts say there is only a three-week reserve of ammunition left to keep the government forces going.

Many families follow their men right into battle. Little thatched tents straddle the trenches along the perimeter defense line, which is close enough to take short-range AK-47 fire. Outside one tent, a girl of about 18 squats before a smoky wood fire, boils rice for her soldier-husband in a blackened government-issue mess pot. Without their wives along the soldiers might starve, for the army provides no mess. More than anything else, the incredible nearness of the war to the people seems to sum up Cambodia's particular agony. At the basketball gym at Phnom-Penh's old Olympic village, now ton-verted into a field hospital, a little girl of three with wide, unsmiling eyes is brought in with a machine-gun wound on her head. Near by, a 19-year-old mother with an eight-month-old infant on her hip learns that her soldier-husband, struck that morning while she was cooking breakfast three feet away, has died. It is a country of innocents suffering from the accident of geography. And each side, dependent on an outside supplier to keep it going, seems to be caught in a no-win, no-lose war of attrition.

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