Mayaguez Incident

MAYAGUEZ INCIDENT

MAYAGUEZ INCIDENT. On 12 May 1975, Cambodian gunboats acting on the orders of a local Khmer Rouge commander seized the American cargo ship Mayaguez while it cruised in the Gulf of Thailand some sixty miles south of Cambodia. Forty American sailors were captured and taken to Koh Tang, a small island about seven miles away. The United States regarded this region of the Gulf as international waters, but the new Khmer Rouge government claimed a ninety-mile zone from the mainland and had been detaining foreign ships for the past ten days. The administration of President Gerald Ford saw the incident as a deliberate challenge to American credibility, badly weakened after the collapse of the pro-U.S. regimes in South Vietnam and Cambodia less than one month earlier. On 15 May a force of 175 marines assaulted Koh Tang to rescue the Mayaguez hostages, while the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea launched air strikes against the Cambodian airfield at Ream and the port of Kompong Som. In the ensuing battle for Koh Tang, fifteen Americans died, three were reported missing (later declared dead), and fifty were wounded. The marines claimed to have killed fifty-five Khmer soldiers. Several hours after the battle began, the U.S. destroyer Wilson found and rescued the Mayaguez crew aboard a fishing vessel, which had been set adrift by the Cambodians earlier in the day. The Ford administration defended the use of military force as a necessary step to deter communist aggression.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Guilmartin, John F., Jr. A Very Short War: The Mayaguez and the Battle of Koh Tang. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995.

Hersh, Seymour M. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. New York: Summit Books, 1983.

Isaacson, Walter. Kissinger: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

Erik B. Villard