World Perspective : CAMBODIA : Hand Outstretched, Army Tries to Reform : Phnom Penh seeks foreign aid as it struggles with ill-equipped troops and the Khmer Rouge rebels.

Capt. Jeb Stewart, a U.S. Army officer from Walnut Creek, Calif., smiled at the soldiers arrayed before him and noted sardonically, “You get a lot of diversity in the Cambodian army.”

One of the recruits was barely 16 years old; two others were in their late 60s. They were among 45 Cambodians being trained by a contingent from the U.S. Special Forces in the arcane art of detecting land mines and disposing of them safely.

Stewart and his 13-member contingent, among the first U.S. servicemen sent to Indochina since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, are here on a mission restricted to “humanitarian assistance.”

The ghosts of the Vietnam conflict, a quagmire that the United States initially entered by dispatching “advisers” in the early 1960s, have caused Washington to proceed with maximum caution--this despite urgent appeals for help from the Phnom Penh government, which is fighting a seemingly endless war with Khmer Rouge insurgents.

Diplomats said the Clinton Administration is considering a larger package of assistance to Cambodia’s armed forces but has tied the aid to the government’s progress in reforming the army and its bloated command structure.

So far, the biggest allotment of Western help for Cambodia’s army has come from Australia, which announced last month that it will provide $6 million, double the previous year’s military assistance.

Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans said the aid is mainly in the form of training in counterinsurgency tactics and does not include any “lethal material” such as weapons or ammunition. “This is not a full-scale war,” Evans maintained. “This is a comparatively small-scale insurgency situation in which the government needs to be assisted.”

China, France, Indonesia and Thailand have also provided small amounts of aid. But no country has yet offered the Cambodians what they most desperately need: advanced weaponry.

The country’s navy consists of a few withered craft on the Tonle Sap River, and the air force has been grounded for years because of the lack of spare parts for aging MIG-17s.

Cambodia perplexed some of its aid donors recently by announcing the purchase of 90 surplus tanks from Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Although they picked up the tanks for a bargain price of $33,000 each, they will contribute almost nothing to the effort aimed at controlling the Khmer Rouge because the guerrillas stay concealed in the country’s dense jungle or hide in the mountains.

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Although the Cambodian army has an official roster of 130,000 troops, at least 10 times the size of the Khmer Rouge guerrilla force, it was given a bloody nose by the insurgents earlier this year when government troops briefly occupied the gem-mining center of Pailin in western Cambodia, only to be driven out a few days later.

Equally annoying, the Khmer Rouge now roams the countryside almost at will, embarrassing the government with brazen attacks such as the kidnaping in August of three backpackers from Britain, Australia and France. The three were subsequently killed.

Because of its relative weakness, the Cambodian government has dropped the idea of launching an offensive against the insurgents early next year, as it has every year for more than a decade.

Now, according to Tea Chamrath, one of two defense ministers in Cambodia’s shaky coalition government, the army intends to switch its focus to rural development needs such as building roads and schools in hopes of persuading the nation’s peasants to change their loyalty from the Khmer Rouge to the government.

Tea said the Defense Ministry has already demoted all of the army’s officers by one grade, reducing the number of generals from 2,000 to 500, a number he hopes to cut to 110 by early January. Many generals bought their stars in the previous army because of the lucrative spoils available to men of high rank.

Similarly, he said there are plans to cut the army from 130,000 to a fighting force of about 70,000. “Before we can let them go, we have to find them a job,” he said in an interview.

Tea is appealing for aid to help provide vocational training to demobilized soldiers. Government soldiers now account for a sizable part of the crime in Cambodia because many have not been paid for months.

“I can’t say Cambodian army troops are 100% good,” said Tea, who spent much of the 1980s in Torrance, Calif., and whose mother and father still live in Long Beach. “There are worrying things. There are bad people. But we can correct them.”

Tea also defended the government’s policy of giving amnesty to Khmer Rouge insurgents, although some are known to be murderers. A six-month amnesty granted earlier this year has proved popular with the guerrillas. More than 1,000 have surrendered and joined the Cambodian army, he said.

“They are like wild animals,” Tea said. “It is better to keep them in a cage, where you know they will be safe, than letting them bite the people.”