Exodus on the Mekong

THE informal alliance between Saigon and Phnom-Penh has not tempered the bitter hostilities that have divided Cambodians and Vietnamese for centuries. Stung by the recent atrocities inflicted on the 500,000 ethnic Vietnamese living in Cambodia, the Saigon government has launched an effort to evacuate some of its vulnerable kinsmen. TIME Correspondent James Willwerth was aboard the Vung Tau, the lead LST in a fleet of 20 ships and small craft that last week carried 10,000 "refugees from their detention camps in Phnom-Penh 80 miles down the Mekong River to safety. His report:

All morning long, they clambered on board--crippled old men, bony women chewing betel nuts, young mothers with arms full of babies, pots, pans and blankets. The 4,000-ton LST soon became a teeming refugee city of 2,000, a squalid campground with children everywhere and the smells of densely packed human life filling the air. Blankets and wicker mats were tied to a thick cable stretched across the main deck, making a city of half shelters. It all fell apart in the first breeze, but the Vietnamese carefully set about tying the shelters together again, just as they were reworking the fabric of their lives now that war had come to Cambodia.

There was something both tragic and hopeful about the exodus. Vietnamese whose relatives had lived in Cambodia for hundreds of years had been kicked out of their homeland, where they were now considered a potential Communist fifth column. Many had lost property and money along the way. Worst of all, they had been robbed of any chance to live out their lives in peace. But they were happy at the chance to visit Viet Nam, in many cases for the first time in their lives.

A group of monks waved goodbye, and Phnom-Penh slipped into the distance as the ship passed Sihanouk's gold-roofed royal palace--now nearly deserted--and churned past homes and stores that once belonged to the city's hard-working Vietnamese. On deck, rain squalls washed over squealing, fussing groups of children who clutched boxes of C-rations or dipped dirty fingers into bowls of rice and fish.

At night, as the ship hissed down the Mekong at twelve knots, there was lightning to the east, and friendly soldiers on shore occasionally shot flares into the darkness over the boat. By five the next morning, a pink sunrise was poking over the treetops at Hong Ngu, a small river town in South Viet Nam. It was a big occasion, but the refugees took note of it only by doing what Asians do every day at sunrise. Husbands packed up the night's bedding. A woman washed clothes with a UPI naked, screaming baby clutching at her blouse. Two children had been born during the 20-hour trip.

The LST nosed into the riverbank, opened its bow doors and disgorged its human cargo at Hong Ngu. The Vietnamese were greeted by a white-shirted bureaucrat who shouted instructions over a bullhorn. There were tables stacked with forms to fill out and, near by, a tent city to shelter the refugees for the two weeks or so that will be needed to screen and begin relocating them.

Though the U.S. is footing some of the bill, Saigon figures it will cost the Vietnamese taxpayer 50 cents a day to supply each refugee with 50 grams of rice, dried fish and cooking oil, as well as medical assistance. "This is an essential humanitarian operation," said John Paul Vann, chief American pacification adviser in the Delta region. Noting that the refugees seem quite loyal to the Saigon government, Vann added that it "should have fantastically good results for my pacification program." One of the refugees, an old, half-blind widow named Nguyen Thi Mai, put it more simply. "I am very, very happy to go back to Viet Nam," she said. "And I am very happy not to be killed."

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