The Phnom Penh Post
The footage also captures the chaotic combat of the civil war. One striking scene, from August 1973, was filmed from an armoured personnel carrier that was carrying a FANK colonel with whom Dale had just shared a glass of cognac after lunch.
As the film shows the vehicle advancing down a narrow bitumen track, the colonel was shot in the head. From this point on, the footage unfolds in eerie silence: the colonel’s men remove his helmet, dripping with blood. When the vehicle stops, the officer is carried out by his men, a gold chain hanging limply from his wrist, and laid on a stretcher. The film then shows the blood-filled cognac glass being picked out of the vehicle. Rarely has the civil war been captured so vividly and with such gory immediacy.
Dale says he has been sitting on the footage for years, and hopes it might one day be picked up and used as the basis for a documentary or feature film about the civil war.
“It warrants a movie,” he said of his death-defying time in Cambodia. “It’s just unheard of. But it did happen.”
Prince Norodom Chantaraingsey was born in Phnom Penh in 1924, a son of Prince Norodom Chanthalekha, and was from the very first an iconoclastic figure.
In the 1940s, he served in the Japanese-raised green shirt militia that sought to oust the French, later joining the Khmer Issarak, an anti-colonial movement then based in Thailand. By 1951, Chantaraingsey had established himself in rural Kampong Speu – his future base of operations – and developed into what historian Ben Kiernan has described as a “comprador warlord”, maintaining about 500 men under arms.
Many details of Chantaraingsey’s life in this period remain obscure. Julio A. Jeldres, Sihanouk’s official biographer, said royal records show he was married at some point to Princess Sisowath Samanvoraphong, a daughter of King Sisowath Monivong. He said that Minh Chin, the woman claiming to be the Prince’s wife, did not appear in the royal archives.
“It was common for princes and other aristocrats to have mistresses [that] were not necessarily recognised by the Royal Court and would, therefore, not appear in the records,” he said.
But Jeldres said there were many examples of Cambodians falsely claiming to be royals or married to royals, and questioned Minh Chin’s claim that she was Chantaraingsey’s wife. (He said there was no birth date recorded for Princess Samanvoraphong, and cited refugee reports that she died with the prince in the hills of Battambang, where they had been hiding and leading an unsuccessful struggle against the Khmer Rouge).
But Prince Sisowath Thomico, an adviser to King Norodom Sihamoni, said he “would not be surprised” if the secretive Chantaraingsey had taken a second wife.
“He always behaved as a warrior, which he really was, and would stay apart from the rest of the Royal Family,” he said. “Few people really knew him.”
Thomico said polygamy was once common in Cambodia, both for royals and commoners, and was not expressly outlawed until the passage of the 1976 Khmer Rouge Constitution.
Dale added that Minh Chin – who he knew as Madame Chantaraingsey – “was the only one I ever saw” in the prince’s company, providing photos of the two together at a dinner party in the early 1970s.
Minh Chin – born into a middle-class family in Kampong Speu in 1933 – claims she was married to Chantaraingsey at just 15 years of age, after he arrived in her village to distribute Issarak propaganda.
She said she resisted his advances at first, assuming he was already married – something he later denied. In the early 1950s, she spent a lot of time in the field with Issarak units, learning to handle firearms and ride horses. After the country gained its independence from France in November 1953, Chantaraingsey rallied to the side of then-King Sihanouk, and the couple traded the difficulties of life in the maquis for a more comfortable life in Phnom Penh.
Chantaraingsey shared the baby-faced look and good-natured grin of his cousin Sihanouk, as well as his iconoclastic nature, but the relationship between the two ran hot and cold. In 1957, after his return from a military academy in France, Chantaraingsey was accused of disloyalty and jailed on lèse majesté charges. After a year in prison – a time in which he reportedly penned a series of poems – he was released and slowly rehabilitated by Sihanouk’s government. He was eventually appointed director of the Phnom Penh Casino and went on to amass a large personal fortune.
When Sihanouk was overthrown by Lon Nol in March 1970, Minh Chin said, Chantaraingsey was asked to raise a brigade to fight the communists and eagerly rose to the challenge, displaying a degree of competency that bucked the trend in the graft-ridden Khmer Republic. As he went about assembling the 13th Brigade, based in Kampong Speu, many of the troops were drawn from the families of the Issarak rebels he led in the early 1950s. The uniforms of his men bore a roaring tiger insignia in honour of Chantaraingsey’s birth year.
Jeldres said US diplomatic reports from 1973 and 1974 paint Chantaraingsey as one of the “most efficient” officers in the Khmer Republic, to the extent that Lon Nol – fearing a potential rival – forced him to renounce his royal title.
Under his command, the 13th Brigade managed, in 1973, to recover the Kirirom plateau, which had been under communist control since 1970. Jeldres said FANK’s commander in chief, Sosthene Fernandez, trusted him so much that put him in sole charge, in early September 1974, of dealing with Khmer Rouge leaders thought to be open to negotiation.
In April 1973, the New York Times reported that Chantaraingsey was a “virtually independent warlord”, straddling National Road 4 in Kampong Speu. As the head of Brigade 13, Chantaraingsey reportedly controlled a 200-square mile “fief” encompassing 60 villages and an estimated 100,000 people.
Times journalist Sydney Schanberg described tours arranged by Chantaraingsey for foreign officials and journalists as “models of public-relations expertise”, often capped off by boozy lunches in the field.
It was undoubtedly on one such occasion that Chantaraingsey first met journalist and poet James Fenton. Fenton later immortalised the prince in his poem ‘Dead Soldiers’, the title of which was a sardonic reference to the empty brandy bottles that amassed during a battlefield banquet:
They lived well, the mad Norodoms, they had style.
The brandy and the soda arrived in crates.
Bricks of ice, tied around with raffia,
Dripped from the orderlies’ handlebars
For Fenton, Chantaraingsey – a Norodom battling his cousin, Sihanouk – embodied the familial nature of the civil war, which eventually consumed most of the princes and revolutionaries that made up its cast. (Saloth Chhay, Pol Pot’s elder brother, at that time served as an orderly to Chantaraingsey, further confusing the war’s tangled web of familial relations).
As the noose tightened on the Khmer Republic, and as Chantaraingsey came under pressure from the regime’s powerbrokers, the Prince reportedly used his own fortune to purchase American weapons from other Cambodian generals.
“He sold everything he had in the end,” Dale said. “He got bucket loads of cash, and went around to the Cambodian commanders and bought weapons and ammunition from them, so his men would have the best equipment. That’s the sort of man he was.”
AS Dale spent more time with Chantaraingsey facing the rigours of combat, the line between observation and personal involvement began to blur. After seeing the horrors of the war up close – the “innocent people being blown apart” – he said he drew closer to Chantaraingsey’s men, resolving to help them any way he could.
He also started arming himself before patrols, ready to defend himself if the situation turned sour. Miraculously, he avoided any serious injury, only sustaining two minor wounds from M79 grenade shrapnel.
In late 1971, Dale’s involvement in the Cambodian war caught the attention of the US government, and he soon started passing information to the Central Intelligence Agency. Regular briefings took place in Honolulu, he said, and the CIA’s agents were hungry for any information about the Khmer Republic’s cloak-and-dagger intrigues.
The US connection soon led Dale into more involved intrigues of his own. In August 1973, with tacit approval from then-deputy US air force attaché Robert Krim, Dale claims he had a midnight meeting with Chantaraingsey to discuss getting rid of the ailing Lon Nol in a bloodless coup.
he Prince pulled up in his Citroen outside his late father’s villa on Suramarit Boulevard, Dale recalled; orderlies handed out ice-cold, cologne-scented towels.
The plan, he said, would have allowed Sihanouk to return from his exile in Beijing, where he was acting as titular head of the communist resistance, but would have barred him from taking any active part in politics.
Chantaraingsey was also confident several Khmer Rouge commanders in Kampong Speu were willing to “come across” to the government for a sweetener of between US$5 million and $10 million each.
“We wanted to change the whole direction of the war, and it was the only way we could stop the slaughter,” Dale said. “And if the US had seen fit to do it and seen the light, this whole bloody mess could have been avoided. We’ll never know, but there was a hell of a chance.”
In the end, the US Embassy in Phnom Penh rejected the coup plan; Dale said they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to keep the increasingly popular Chantaraingsey on a short leash. (Dien Del, another brigadier general during the Lon Nol regime, confirmed Chantaraingsey had aired secret plans to overthrow Lon Nol, though the plot was quashed before any specifics reached him).
Four weeks before the fall, as the ailing republic entered its death throes, Dale took one of the last commercial flights out of the country. Through his connection with the CIA, he said he tried to procure more covert support for Chantaraingsey, one of the few men he thought capable of reversing the regime’s slide into the abyss.
“I pushed for everything they could get to him,” Dale said. “I arranged to see him again just before the end, but when things collapsed they collapsed very quickly and I couldn’t get back there.” “It was probably for the best,” he added, “because if I had have got up there, I wouldn’t have got back.”
ON April 17, 1975, Minh Chin joined the mass exodus out of Phnom Penh, and boarded a ship bound for Battambang. Earlier that morning, she said, she had sent her adopted son to school; a few hours later, after black-clad Khmer Rouge cadres had fanned out across the city, she was barred from entering the school building. She never saw him again.
En route to Battambang, the cadres in charge of the boat killed several of the passengers, and she recalled spending the trip trying to erase her old identity as a general’s wife and socialite. She readopted her maiden name and passed the Khmer Rouge years on a collective farm in Battambang’s Phnom Sruok district. She survived, like many others, by burying her past and severing her ties with the vanished pre-war world.
“They monitored me every day because they didn’t believe my husband was a farmer,” Minh Chin said. She said she even pretended to fear handling guns – a staple of her time with the Issarak – out of fear it would prompt suspicion. After the fall of the regime in early 1979, Minh Chin spent a year in Siem Reap before returning to Kampong Speu to try to track down her husband and relatives. “I didn’t see any of my relatives,” she said. “My neighbour said all of my family and my mother were killed by Pol Pot soldiers.”
After the fall, Dale says he tried to procure additional arms for Chantaraingsey through his intelligence contacts, in the hope he would reach the Thai border and establish a base of resistance there. Due to the 1970 Cooper-Church Amendment, which barred US military assistance to Cambodia and Laos, all procurements had to be undertaken covertly, and were to be funneled to the border with the aid of Thai military intelligence.
Before the fall, a shipment of tens of thousands of inexpensive Sten submachine guns arrived from Europe, but the attempts came to naught when Chantaraingsey failed to resurface.
“We thought he would be able to bring many thousands of people,” he said. “It was all pretty hopeless… No one made it from the 13th Brigade.”
Dale claims that according to research he has conducted over the past year, which involved interviews with former Khmer Rouge and FANK officers, Chantaraingsey was on the outskirts of Phnom Penh at the time of the Khmer Republic’s surrender.
Due to the speed of the fall, Chantaraingsey’s original plan – to make a final stand at a FANK base at Doh Kanchor, about 56 kilometres south of Kampong Speu town – was foiled. The base was unprepared for the Khmer Rouge assault that hit it shortly after the regime’s surrender. It ran up the white flag on the first day, forcing Chantaraingsey to attempt an escape to Thailand.
Citing an eyewitness account given by a former Khmer Rouge soldier in Pailin, Dale said Chantaraingsey was eventually captured in Kirirom National Park after his convoy of armoured personnel carriers ran out of gas. The soldier reported seeing Chantaraingsey – stripped naked except for a krama around his waist – handed over to men under the command of Ta Mok, then in charge of the Khmer Rouge’s Southwest Zone.
Dale says the handover took place at an old ammunition factory off National Road 4, a few kilometres south of the Kirirom plateau. He puts the date at between April 20 and 22. “He saw Chantaraingsey being led away with the soldiers… and that’s the last anybody knows.” At some point afterwards, Chantaraingsey was presumed killed, along with his remaining men.
Dale summed up Chantaraingsey as a “romantic” figure, whose fatal indecisions in the final days of the Khmer Republic prevented him from taking a proud stand with his men at Doh Kanchor. “It just all fell apart at the end like a house of cards – it just collapsed – and it shouldn’t have,” Dale said.
In the end, the 4,500 inhabitants of the base – which included soldiers, their wives and their children – surrendered and were butchered methodically by the Khmer Rouge. Dale said just 18 survived.
It is impossible to determine Chantaraingsey’s precise fate, since the key figures who spoke with Dale did not wish to be interviewed for this article. But Dale says he believes his version of events to be the “honest-to-God truth”, and after investing thousands of dollars and countless hours in finding it out, he says he will return to Australia content, perhaps to write up an account of his years in Cambodia.
“It’s been worth it. Every dollar I’ve given away… has been money well spent to find and escape from the horror that’s haunted me all these years,” he said. “The whole thing is just a hell of a story.” ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY MAY TITTHARA
