Thai Soldier Killed in Battle With Vietnamese

Vietnamese troops fought a brief battle with Thai forces Friday as Hanoi’s current offensive against Cambodian guerrillas spilled across the Thai-Cambodian border, Thai military officials said Saturday.

At least one Thai soldier was killed, and nine were wounded when Vietnamese troops crossed the border near the Cambodian resistance settlement of O Bok in northwestern Cambodia and were intercepted by a Thai patrol about a mile inside Thailand, the officials said.

Guerrilla sources said one body was recovered but 10 to 12 Thai soldiers may have died in the three-hour battle. The clash was so intense that Thai troops called for air strikes, military sources said.

It was the second Vietnamese-Thai clash in a week. Thailand protested to the United Nations over a Vietnamese incursion in the same district that left four Thai paramilitary rangers dead.

In a separate operation on the northern Cambodian border Saturday, Vietnamese gunners poured heavy artillery fire into a resistance base opposite Thailand’s Nam Yuen district, according to a Thai army spokesman, Maj. Gen. Naruedol Detpradiyuth. The shelling sent a number of Cambodian refugees fleeing across the border into Thailand and forced hundreds of Thais to evacuate nearby border villages, he said. Information on casualties was not immediately available.

The Vietnamese attacks, the latest in a dry-season offensive against Cambodian guerrillas battling Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia, were seen here as part of a new strategy.

“It looks like the Vietnamese strategy is to try to control the important passes” along the Thai-Cambodian border and to remain near the resistance settlements, perhaps even after the rainy season begins in June, a Western diplomat said. The idea would be to put a stop to guerrilla incursions into interior provinces controlled by the Vietnamese-backed government in Phnom Penh.

Two key passes are near camps run by the anti-Communist Khmer People’s National Liberation Front--O Bok, 12 miles north of the front’s military headquarters at Ampil, and Nam Yuen, about 120 miles to the east.

About 2,000 Cambodian civilians have already been evacuated from O Bok in anticipation of more Vietnamese attacks there, Western relief officials said.

On Friday, about 23,000 Cambodian refugees moved from the outskirts of the Ampil camp to a site about two miles inside Thailand because of fears the Vietnamese will attack the camp Monday, the sixth anniversary of Vietnam’s capture of Phnom Penh.

According to Western diplomatic sources, 5,000 to 6,000 Vietnamese troops backed by armor, artillery and MI-24 helicopter gunships and 800 to 1,000 Cambodian government soldiers are now poised opposite Ampil. Thai military officers said the Vietnamese have about a dozen Soviet-built T-54 tanks in position to spearhead an assault.

Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in December, 1978, and ousted the Khmer Rouge Communist government the following month, replacing Pol Pot with Heng Samrin, a Khmer Rouge defector.

The Vietnamese, according to Western estimates, have about 160,000 troops posted in Cambodia. The rightist Khmer Front has an estimated 12,000 guerrillas, forces loyal to Prince Norodom Sihanouk about 5,000 and the Khmer Rouge more than 30,000.