Crazy in Cambodia.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)

To the Editors:

The article by Keith Windschuttle in the June issue, "The journalism of warfare," repeats my somewhat emotional claim, made in 1976, that the U.S. bombing of Cambodia in 1969-71 and 1973 drove at least some Cambodians out of their minds. I based this comment on written reports and oral testimony that were widely available at the time. I never claimed that the U.S. bombing (heartless and inexcusable though it was) accelerated the Khmer Rouge victory. Windschuttle goes on to state that I was in no position to make this statement, because I was a graduate student at the time and had never been in Cambodia.

As a dual U.S.-Australian citizen who has lived in Melbourne since 1972, I have followed Windschuttle's trajectory from left to right and also his virulent attacks on historians who are careless with sources and assertions. To hoist him on his own petard, I should inform him and your readers that in 1976 I was a senior lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, a position I had held since 1972 (i.e., before the carpet bombing of Cambodia began) and that my Ph.D. thesis on nineteenth-century Cambodian history benefited greatly from the twenty-six months I had spent in Cambodia in 1960-62 as a language officer in the U.S. Embassy. I returned to Cambodia for research in 1970 and 1971 and have devoted my professional life to studying and writing about its history, literature, and politics.

David Chandler

Emeritus Professor of History

Monash University

Melbourne, Australia