Hey, in 1975 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Barry Lyndon, Jaws, Nashville and Dog Day Afternoon hit theatres. A great year for cinema. Not so much for the US military. Two weeks after ignominiously letting its South-Vietnamese ally be overrun the US tried to save face with a spectacular rescue operation and Cambodian forces gave them another nosebleed. The Mayaguez debacle.

Remember those images of US personnel pushing expensive materiel off of carriers? Evacuation helicopters are trying to get as many South Vietnamese out as possible. It’s the 30th of April and Saigon is falling into North-Vietnamese hands. Exactly the thing the US has spent enormous amounts of money in an attempt to prevent. 58,000 American lives have been lost. Back home society is in turmoil. And estimates of Vietnamese dead range between 1.5 million and 3 million. The US dropped more bombs across Indochina than Allied forces dropped in the whole of the Second World War. The war in Vietnam is lost. Of course in Vietnam they call it ‘the American war.’ The Americans under Lyndon Johnson had upped their presence in Vietnam after the controversial Gulf of Tonkin incidents. The first North Vietnamese attack on a US ship happened, but the alleged second attack did not. Robert McNamara later admitted on camera that the second attack never occurred. US involvement in Vietnam was an epic debacle for which especially the Vietnamese paid the ultimate price. While some American companies cashed in and scored a big win in the accounting department.

Two weeks after Vietnam comes a ‘cool’ opportunity to boost the frazzled reputation of the US military. The Khmer Rouge under the particularly deranged Pol Pot seize a US merchant ship, the SS Mayaguez and its 40 crew members, claiming it had been in Cambodian waters, which the US disputes.

President Ford and Henry Kissinger – who seem involved in just about anything the US undertook past 1945 – want to make it clear the US military is still ballsy and will use overwhelming force when the US is challenged.

The US Air Force’s official history admits that restoring prestige after Vietnam motivated the scale of the response.

15 May: US Marines board the Mayaguez while other Marines assault the Cambodian island of Koh Tang, believing the hostages are there. American aircraft also bomb military facilities on the Cambodian mainland.

Oops.

The crew isn’t on the island. The ship is empty.

Cambodian troops are far more numerous and better entrenched than expected.

American helicopters come under devastating fire.

Now things get painfully farcical.

The Cambodians release all 40 crew members, who are picked up from a fishing boat by the USS Henry B. Wilson.

Their liberation is not the result of the assault on Koh Tang, though US military pressure may have influenced their release.

The cost: 41 American servicemen die in the operation and its preparations: 18 in combat and associated fighting, and 23 in an accidental helicopter crash in Thailand.

Three Marines left behind on Koh Tang are subsequently killed by Cambodian forces. Their deaths are included in the 41.

Ford presents the recovery of the ship and crew as a sterling victory.

His approval rating reportedly rises 11 percentage points, even though the military operation has been disastrously executed.

Cause that’s what those who are most attracted to power are remarkably good at:

gambling away the lives of people who are mere pawns in their game to look masterful, untouchable and never to be messed with.