I’m reading a book titled: Never Fight Fair, a book about Navy SEALs written by Orr Kelly.

Chapter 27 is titled: Vous les Americains Sont Pires que les Francais

The chapter is William G “Chip” Beck’s account of his service as an advisor to the Cambodian army:

“This is his story of the heroic defense of one small city and the eventual collapse of the Cambodian resistance:

…The day the siege of Kompong Thom was broken… the headlines in the world press, one major newspaper – I can’t remember which one – said: “Rebel rockets hit Phnom Penh; Three Killed.”

These defenders had killed three hundred to one thousand enemy soldiers in bloody combat but there was never a story told about this…

I didn’t know when Operation Eagle Pull [the American evacuation] was going to go. When I found out, I was several hundred miles away…

One of my Cambodian soldiers who went back in and talked to witnesses said they killed the little kids. They executed the children, then they shot his wife. After making him witness that, they executed him. So they got their revenge on him.

We then started hearing of many atrocities being committed. [After Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge on 16 April 1975, as many as four million Cambodians were slain by the victors over the next two years.] The Khmer Rouge would get on the single sideband radios that had been part of the military network. After the Americans had made the evacuation in Eagle Pull, The Khmer Rouge would get on the radio and hold the key so you could hear the office people being tortured and murdered on the air…

Unlike Vietnam, the Cambodians could have held out. We, the advisors, were told we could supply the Cambodian army as long as they could fight. That’s what we told them. After we evacuated the country, that order was rescinded.

The French died at Dien Bien Phu. They were soundly defeated but they fought and we just went out the back door.

We, the advisors who had lived with these people, sometimes for years, had to sit there and listen to them on the radio calling to us, saying, “Where are our supplies? We’re still fighting. We’re holding out.”

Finally, they ran out of ammunition. That’s the only thing that made many of these people surrender and then they were executed by the Khmer Rouge.

One of the last transmissions – the last transmission I ever heard out of Cambodia – was a Cambodian colonel, just before they killed him. You could hear them breaking down the door. You could hear him say, “Vous les Americains Sont Pires que les Francais” – You Americans are worse than the French.”

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And I just got done reading - Night Letters: Inside Wartime Afghanistan, by Rob Schultheis (An absolutely fantastic book – highly recommended.)

The book is Schultheis’s remembrances of his time as a war correspondent in Afghanistan during the Afghan – Soviet war. I’ll pick up towards the end of the book at the beginning of Chapter 15:

“1989, this is supposed to be the climactic, the penultimate battle of the war. The Soviets have completed their withdrawal, and the Kabul regime totters as the mujahedeen close in on the government-controlled cities and towns. Rumors say the CIA and the Pakistanis are pressuring the muj to finish the conflict quickly, no matter what the cost in casualties, but whoever or whatever is behind it, the mujahidin are preparing for an all-out assault on Jalalabad…

Joe and I try to cross the border into Afghanistan, but with no luck. For some reason, the Pakistanis are trying to keep journalists away from Jalalabad, and they have the infiltration routs across the Khyber sealed up tight as a drum… We try sneaking across the border… We get caught, busted, sent back, time after time. After three weeks of futile effort… I decide to try Jalalabad one more time, and this time, wonder of wonders, I succeed…

Two days later I’m on my way to the front… Something is wrong. The mujahedin are supposed to win this battle, but something is wrong. There are no Stinger antiaircraft missiles… the Americans were supposed to replace them, but they haven’t… there were rumors the attacking guerrillas would be supplied with Hawk antiaircraft missile batteries too, but there are no Hawks either. The mujahedin are wide open to air attack… You can see a tragedy, a disaster coming.

Still the muj are brave, and they stream toward Jalalabad to attack the enemy… The MIGs are everywhere, dropping cluster bombs… The assault on Jalalabad is being pounded to pieces… Some of the guerrillas around me mutter angrily that the Americans and Pakistanis planned it this way, that they sent the mujahedin into battle without proper weapons in order to kill them off…

The battle of Jalalabad degenerates into an ugly, inconclusive quagmire, the stalemated slaughter of bombardment and trench warfare… The war should be over by now, not dragging on into new campaigns, forever and ever… It just goes on and on, on and on, and it never stops.”

And so it goes. Time after time after time - China, Poland, Hungary, Cuba, Cambodia, Afghanistan and who knows how many other places (and let’s not forget our handing the whole of eastern Europe to the communists) – America / the “free democracies” pledge their support to those fighting the communists only to see that pledge rescinded and the result is the freedom fighters get slaughtered by the communists and those that aren’t murdered are enslaved. When will they learn?

When will Americans learn?