Survival in the Killing Fields (61 page)

As the Vietnamese advanced the Khmer Rouge retreated toward the caches of food and ammunition they had prepared in the mountains. They burned rice fields and rice warehouses to deprive the
Vietnamese of food to eat. And as the two armies moved farther and farther west, civilians began to travel, and they saw with their own eyes the condition the country was in.

Cambodia did not exist anymore. Atomic bombs could not have destroyed more of it than civil war and communism. Everything that had been wrecked by the civil war of 1970–75 was unrepaired
and further eroded – the flattened villages, the blown-up bridges, the roads cut with trenches, the washouts caused by the rains. Mile after mile of rice paddies lay abandoned and untended,
pockmarked with bomb craters. The canals and dams the war slaves built were eroding to shallow ditches and useless mounds of clay. The towns and the cities were empty and abandoned. The temples had
been destroyed. Rubbish and piles of rusting cars lay in heaps. There were no telephones or telegraphs, no postal services. In Phnom Penh itself there was little or no water and electricity and
little functioning machinery of any kind. No typewriters. Not even pens and paper. There had been deaths in almost every family in the country. Widows and orphans wandered about the countryside,
dazed, too hurt to cry.

How many survived nobody knew. The prewar population estimates had been vague – six or seven million, maybe as high as eight million. Amnesty International cites estimates that a million
or more died in the civil war, before the communist takeover, and that between one and two million died under the Khmer Rouge. If that is true, the combination of civil war and revolution killed
somewhere between a quarter and a half of Cambodia’s population.

Among people and groups important to me, the ratio of deaths to survivors was much higher than for the country as a whole. Of 50,000 monks, less than 3,000 survived and returned to their former
temples. Of 527 graduates of the medical school in Phnom Penh (my thesis, accepted in early 1975, was number 527, so there were at least that many graduates), about 40 survived. Of the 7,000 people
living in my home village, Samrong Yong, before the war, about 550 survived, from what I have been able to discover.

Of the 41 people in my immediate family, including my parents, my brothers and sisters and their spouses and children, plus Huoy and her mother and me, only 9 survived. That is a death rate of
78 per cent and a survival rate of 22 per cent.

When the Vietnamese invaded it was time to heal the country. But communists are better at waging war than waging peace. The invaders and their ‘National United Front for the Salvation of
Kampuchea’ had no plans for reconstruction. The Front’s puppet leader, Heng Samrin, had been a Khmer Rouge until the year before. His foreign minister, a one-eyed twenty-seven-year-old
named Hun Sen, had also been a Khmer Rouge until defecting to the Vietnamese to avoid being purged. Six months after the ‘liberation’ of Phnom Penh, Hun Sen finally met with
international agencies to consider accepting emergency aid. The outside world was eager to help, but most of the aid that eventually got through to Phnom Penh was seized by the new regime and never
reached the common people.

The Vietnamese looted factories of equipment, warehouses of rice and homes of furniture. And as they pushed the Khmer Rouge farther back, they tightened their control over civilians in the
‘liberated’ territories. For example, in Siem Reap Province, near the ancient ruins of Angkor, a man named Dith Pran accepted a job as major of a small town because he wanted to help
his people. But the Vietnamese checked on his political background and found that he had once worked for an American newspaper. To them this was worse than if he had worked for the Khmer Rouge.
Dith Pran lost his job. He was afraid for his life, and later he left for Thailand.

Or take another example of tightened control, the hospital in Battambang City. At first, after the invasion, Cambodian doctors ran the hospital entirely by themselves. I joined the staff at the
end of this period. When the Heng Samrin governor called a meeting, I left for Thailand. It turned out that my suspicions were right. After the meeting Vietnamese ‘advisers’ took over
the hospital administration. Some of the remaining doctors left for Thai refugee camps. Others who were more prepared to collaborate joined the staff. One of them was Pen Tip.

In the countryside the Vietnamese tried to collectivize agriculture. They said that oxcarts and oxen, water buffalo and ploughs belonged to those who had taken care of them under the Khmer Rouge
regime, not to those who had owned them originally. They said that land belonged to the government, not to individuals. They pushed peasants to farm in ‘mutual aid teams’ of ten to
thirty families each. The peasants hated this. They wanted to farm individually, as they had for centuries, before the Khmer Rouge.

The worst problem was a shortage of food. The Vietnamese controlled all the rice mills. They sent some rice to Vietnam, kept some for themselves and gave the rest to the Heng Samrin troops. By
the middle of 1979 civilians couldn’t get enough to eat. It was hard to raise crops. In some parts of the country there were no ploughs or oxen to plough with; in others there was no rice
seed. A drought killed many of the fields that had been planted. For many Cambodians it was back to watery rice again.

Steadily, throughout 1979, the Vietnamese pushed the Khmer Rouge farther and farther west. Every time Pol Pot’s forces planted food, the Vietnamese attacked before it could be harvested.
Here was
kama:
the Khmer Rouge, the cause of so much hunger and starvation, now had nothing to eat except the leaves of the forests. Khmer Rouge units fought each other for food and
medicine. Cadre deserted, and some died from starvation.

Meanwhile, the faint trails I had followed to Thailand became highways. Thousands and tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of feet walked along the paths. With the increased numbers
came safety from robbers and rapists. With rumours of free rice on the Thai border, soon confirmed by broadcasts over the Voice of America, the masses began the march to the west. The people were
hungry, and they were tired of communism. They wanted freedom. They wanted rice. And all of Cambodia was on the move, fleeing, marching, stumbling, spilling over the border into Thailand.

The van pulled up to the Lumpini gate and I climbed in, my heart beating fast. Except for the Thai driver there was only one person inside, and he was American. There was no
way to avoid him. Nowhere to hide.

You might think that after being tortured three times and walking out of Cambodia I had nothing left to fear. Not true. From earliest childhood I had learned to be shy toward white people. I
wasn’t really afraid of them, but I deferred to them automatically. Most Cambodians did. We called them long-noses. Even as a medical student I had never talked with a long-nose unless there
was a reason. I could communicate well enough in French, but I always felt more comfortable when the conversations were over.

On the Thai-Cambodian border and in the Lumpini processing centre in 1979, Cambodian refugees were shy toward Westerners. We were shy and passive because it was part of our culture and because
we had come from a regime where saying the wrong thing meant death. Why take risks? Why talk to Americans when everyone knows they all work for the CIA? If we say the wrong thing, word will reach
the top and then we will be in trouble. That was what Cambodians said, on the border and in the refugee camps.

We were also afraid of losing face. It was one thing to be able to speak French well, another to speak English badly. We were afraid the foreigners would look down on us for making mistakes in
their language. Many Cambodians put off learning English, or didn’t try out the few words of English they had reluctantly learned.

For me it was different. I had learned a bit of English under the Khmer Rouge regime. In Lumpini a kindly Burmese lady volunteer named Chhoi Hah Muul taught me a bit more. I knew how to count. I
knew the pronouns, some basic nouns and verbs and common phrases, in all probably five hundred words. It was enough to understand what the man in the van was saying. His name was John Crowley. He
worked for the Joint Voluntary Agency, or JVA, which handled refugee resettlement matters for the US embassy. Together we were going to Sakeo, a refugee camp for Cambodians that had just opened
within Thailand, away from the border. I was going to be his interpreter.

The van drove through the crowded streets of Bangkok. John Crowley noticed that I was nervous. He asked if I was okay, if I wanted to stop for something to eat or drink. I told him no thanks,
but I was encouraged, and looked at him out of the corner of my eye. He was about my age. Moustache, reddish-brown hair, big nose, white skin. His courteous tone of voice and his relaxed body
posture all signalled that he wasn’t going to order me around. By the time we got to the outskirts of the city, I felt better. John Crowley didn’t care about race one way or the other.
He was treating me like a fellow human being.

He asked me about my family.

‘My wife she got died,’ I told him in English. ‘My, my
père,
he got died. Dey killing too many.’

‘You lost most of your family.’

‘Too many. Too many,’ I assured him. John Crowley was actually listening to me. He worked with the American government. If I could make him understand what had happened, then maybe
he could help other foreigners understand. But squeezing the meaning of four years into a conversation in a language I barely knew was impossible. I just couldn’t . . .

I lifted my right hand to show him the stump of my little finger. ‘Dey . . .’ and I made a chopping motion.

‘The Khmer Rouge cut off your finger,’ John Crowley guessed.

‘T’ree time,’ I said, nodding. ‘T’ree time. Vun, de finger. Two’ – I had to think for the right word – ‘fire’ – and pointed to
the underside of my feet. ‘T’ree’ – but I had forgotten the English word for water. Why couldn’t I remember it when I needed it? It was very important to get him to
understand.

‘You were tortured three times,’ he said.

I nodded.

‘Jesus,’ he said.

We were driving through the flat countryside east of Bangkok. John Crowley gazed out the window, sighing heavily. I looked out the window too, trying to see what he was looking at. In the rice
fields, farmers were harvesting with tractors. The Thais were far ahead of us Cambodians in agriculture. They were ahead of us in everything.

‘Sakeo more far?’ I asked him.

‘Sorry?’

‘
Combien de kilometres d’ici à Sakeo?’

John Crowley shook his head; he didn’t understand French. I tried English again. ‘How far more Sakeo?’

This time he leaned forward and asked the driver in fluent Thai, then leaned back and told me in English that it was another hour and a half. He didn’t look down on me for not speaking
good English. Still, I had asked him the distance to Sakeo and he had given me the travelling time.

‘My English not too good,’ I said.

‘Hey, I can understand you perfectly,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. Look at it this way: your English is better than my Khmer. I don’t speak any Khmer at all.’

‘I teach you.’

The tiny shock of surprise showed as he reconsidered the refugee sitting next to him. ‘
You
want to teach me Khmer?’ he asked. ‘Well, okay, I could use it. When do you
want to start?’

‘I ready.’

He shrugged and smiled. ‘I’m ready too.’

I turned around to face him on the seat.

‘ “
Muoy
,” ’ I said to him, holding up one finger. ‘ “
Muoy
.” Dat mean “vun” in language Khmer.’

‘
Muoy
,’ he repeated.

‘“
Bpee
,” ’ I said. ‘Dat mean “two.” ’

‘
Bpee
,’ he said. ‘
Bpee.
’

‘“
Bei
.” Dat mean “t’ree.” ’

‘
Bei
.’ His intonation was nearly perfect; he already knew how to make similar sounds in Thai. When he had learned the numbers he pointed out the window at things he saw, a
water buffalo, an ox, a tree, and asked me for the Khmer words. The Thai driver looked back at us in the rearview mirror, too polite to say anything. Thais do not like to learn Khmer; they think it
is below them. But John Crowley seemed as though he had always wanted to learn Khmer and was glad to have the chance.

When the gate lifted and we drove into the Sakeo camp, I got out of the comfortable, air-conditioned van and back into the world I had left a few short months before. The camp
was dominated by Khmer Rouge who had been driven over the Thai border by hunger and the Vietnamese. They had surrendered their weapons to Thai soldiers and allowed themselves to be trucked to this
resting place, this dumping ground, administered by the Thai government and the UNHCR – the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

About two thirds of the camp population were Khmer Rouge and their families. The rest were ‘new’ and ‘old’ people unable to escape from their control. Behind us the camp
gate lifted to admit a truck carrying fresh arrivals from the border. Dazed, weak civilians climbed down from the back of the truck. Among them was an old man I recognized from Tonle Batí.
He supported himself with one hand on a bamboo staff and the other on the shoulder of his daughter-in-law, whom I also remembered. When I greeted them they looked at me with astonishment. There I
was, well fed, well dressed, wearing glasses and a watch, accompanying this tall American. They poured out their story. Except for the two of them, everyone in the family had died. Time after time
they had almost lost their own lives too. I translated for John Crowley as well as I could, then reached in my wallet and gave them a few hundred Thai
baht,
worth five dollars. They looked
at me as if I were a god.

This was John Crowley’s first visit to a Cambodian refugee camp. He had been sent there to see the refugees’ condition firsthand, since he would be working in refugee resettlement.
Other Westerners crowded into the camp, worried-looking UN officials, doctors and nurses, more than a dozen journalists with their cameras and television cameras. Around them was a sea of sick and
dying Cambodians, and a few dirty but healthy children who followed the Westerners everywhere, repeating the only English words they knew: ‘Okay, bye-bye. Okay, bye-bye.’