andy_morris wrote: ↑Mon Jul 15, 2019 10:33 pm

John Bingham wrote:I know the area very well. St 271 was actually shored up and turned into a major dike in the early 70s, as a defense against the Khmer Rouge. Beyond that was bandit country.....

Old-timey expats love spouting this kind of shit.

Until 1973 while the battle raged around Phnom Penh's perimeters, I used to climb up at night to the flat roof of our apartment block to watch US planes drop their bombs. In the distance you could see sudden flashes of huge explosions against the night sky, and the soil churned up. Seconds later anything loose would rattle like in an earthquake, and you could feel the air displaced by the explosions literally blowing on your face. One morning on a day in August 1973 when the US Congress stopped all aerial support for their Khmer allies, I watched a Phantom F4 doing a few dive bombing passes somewhere beyond the undulating roof of the Russian hospital. At quieter times the odd AC47 gunship could be heard circling and spraying death down below with red tracing bullets. One night in late 1971 a huge explosion rocked Borei Keila to the north of our Psah, followed by hundreds of other explosions that lasted for a few days. Earlier some military genius had the bright idea of turning Borei Keila into a munitions depot not that far from the council of ministers, the US attaché’s office, the army headquarters, and the finance ministry. The whole place was so badly guarded anyway that once someone was able to fire a 107mm rocket point blank at the council of ministers from one of those remorques that you pedal from the back and which is used to transport blocks of ice from the market.