As Shawcross noted in Sideshow, US President Ford was quick to describe the Mayaguez mission as a success in that "...it did not only ignite confidence in the White House ... it had an electrifying reaction as far as the American people were concerned. It was a spark that set off a whole new sense of confidence for them, too."
Calculating the costs of the battle -- 41 dead servicemen in return for the safe return of 39 American seamen and the loss of life and property of Cambodians unaware of their position in American foreign and domestic policy objectives, Shawcross is unequivocal in his condemnation of Ford's upbeat assessment of the results of the Mayageuz Incident.
"In the attacks on [Sihanoukville] the railroad yard, the port, the oil refinery and the airfield were virtually destroyed. At Ream naval base, 364 buildings were flattened. Nine Cambodian vessels were sunk at sea. In order to rescue the Marines on Koh Tang, the island was heavily bombarded ... [ignoring] the August 1973 ban on bombing Indochina as well as the 1973 War Powers Act. The principal purpose of the bombing seem to have been to punish the Cambodians and to reassert a concept of American bellicosity, which the collapse of Phnom Penh and Saigon was seen to have damaged."
Even more disturbingly, the battalion commander of the Khmer Rouge forces on Koh Tang admitted during an interview with the Taipei Times last week that, contrary to long held Pentagon assertions to the contrary, American servicemen had been abandoned on Koh Tang during the confusion of their withdrawal.
"Ten days after the American soldiers left Koh Tang, a tree-cutting detail sighted a figure taking water from a well," Mao Run told the Taipei Times. "When they investigated, they found boot marks which we knew had to belong to an American soldier because our men only wore sandals."
According to Run, the abandoned American Marine was found and executed shortly after.
Run's admission 25 years after the fact adds credence to the belief held by many Marines who participated in the Koh Tang operation of a "lost machine-gun team" inadvertently left behind on the island.?
"We were told on the US Coral Sea that a machine-gun team was killed by the KR as we withdrew from the island, but years later I suspect that they were left behind," Koh Tang marine veteran Dale L. Clark told the Taipei Times. "I believe the US government knew the team was alive on the island because I heard and saw preparations made on the USS Coral Sea to return to the island, [but] no attempts were made to travel back to the island for their recovery ... I suspect the US government canceled the plans not wanting to have any more Marines killed during the recovery."
Lieutenant Colonel Franklin Childress, Public Affairs Officer of the Joint Task Force for Full Accounting for MIAs in Hawaii was unaware of Run's allegations, but assured the Taipei Times that MIA investigators were still pursuing rumors that US Marines had been left behind on Koh Tang.
"The case of the three-man machine-gun team is still under investigation," Childress said.? "There are still places to investigate and places to be excavated [for MIA remains on Koh Tang]."
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