Was still up at Quang Tri, getting very short when this happened. Never knew about this incident as with much of anything happening in the real world.
I should read up on it as you did. Nixon was never someone I liked, and my dislike urged me to vote against him in my first election in 1972. Only democrat vote, ever.
I'm only a few chapters in, but I really appreciate the enormous amount of work the author did to go through the literal tons of material released in 2013. Here are a few excerpted paragraphs... they are supplemented with lots of personal statements by the actors.
* * * * *
Haldeman stayed on the plane, making sure that Nixon’s orders were executed. Even Haldeman, who knew Nixon’s taste for intrigue as well as anyone, was amazed. The plans Kissinger carried out that day were “so secret at the time that I was afraid to say anything,” Haldeman wrote in his personal diary. He felt he was “entering an entire new world.”
The flight records for the B-52 bombers carrying out the attacks would be falsified by the top American commander in Saigon, Gen. Creighton Abrams. His accomplice would be the commander of American forces in the Pacific, Adm. John McCain, whose son, later a senator, was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.“In order to set the stage for a possible covert attack, and clear the books on this matter within the Bureaucracy, we should send a message to General Abrams authorizing him to bomb right up to the Cambodian border,” Kissinger told Nixon in writing before the plans were executed. A routine request for a B-52 strike on a Communist target in South Vietnam would serve as a cover for a Menu strike in Cambodia.
The B-52 pilots and navigators (not the rest of the crew) would receive secret orders from ground controllers directing them to strike targets inside Cambodia. On the bombers’ return, two sets of flight reports would be filed, one true, one false.The full scope of the destruction the United States unleashed on Cambodia remained unrevealed for three decades, due to the deliberate falsification of the bombing records, authorized by Nixon and executed by Kissinger, Haig, and General Abrams.
The falsification violated the military laws of the United States. The bombing of a neutral nation arguably violated the laws of war.
Between March 1969 and August 1973, America dropped 2,756,727 tons of bombs
on Cambodia. That figure was nearly five times greater than previously known,
exceeding the tonnage of all Allied bombing during World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one knows how many Cambodian civilians were killed, perhaps one hundred fifty thousand.