Captian Miller’s situation was actually much worse than it looked on the surface. That’s because the Mayaguez wasn’t carrying normal cargo. The ship had put in at Saigon just days before the city fell and picked up sensitive military cargo for the US Government. If the Khmer Rouge found out that he was working for the military, the chance of his crew surviving would drop dramatically. Fortunately, the Khmer Rouge soldiers hadn’t bothered to inspect his cargo… yet. And Miller immediately destroyed a letter he was carrying from the military with his instructions.
Knowing that sailing to Ream would make any chance at rescue even more remote, Miller told the Khmer Rouge that his radar was broken. And with crude sign language, he made it clear that sailing to Ream would probably end up with the ship striking the rocks and sinking. The Cambodian commander radioed back to his superiors and told them about the broken radar. They ordered him to drop the anchor immediately and stay put. For the crew of the Mayaguez, Poulo Wai was going to be their prison for the time being. It was a huge stroke of luck. And though they didn’t know it at the time, it might have saved their lives.
Back in the United States, President Gerald Ford was getting the first word that an American ship had been captured by the Khmer Rouge. After the humiliating fall of Saigon, the US was about to take another blow to its military reputation if they couldn’t rescue the Mayaguez. The military leadership called for swift and decisive action. But Ford first tried diplomacy. The US made several attempts to pass a message through the Chinese to the Cambodians demanding the ship’s release, but the Chinese refused to help. Diplomacy had failed. The time had come to use force.
This wasn’t the first time an American ship had been seized by a rogue communist state. In 1968, the USS Pueblo, a Navy intelligence vessel was sailing in international waters off the coast of North Korea when it was approached by several North Korean patrol ships. The North Koreans boarded the Pueblo and took it back to the city Wonson. The ship’s crew was then blindfolded and taken to the capital. The US government decided it was too late to respond with force and 11 months of negotiation followed. Finally, the US was forced to make a humiliating admission that the ship had illegally entered North Korean waters, apologize, and promise not to do it again.
The situation shared some eerie parallels to the Mayaguez Incident. Both ships had claimed to be in international waters and been seized by a communist government with a different idea about where their maritime borders were. But so far, the Mayaguez crew had managed to avoid being taken back to the mainland, where they could be imprisoned. The US had one chance to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, and President Ford decided that they would take it. This time, there would be no negotiations. The US was going in with overwhelming force.