When the War Was Over (80 page)

It is hard to exaggerate our confusion and incomprehension at the time of our visit to Democratic Kampuchea. We were the original three blind men trying to figure out the elephant. At that time no one understood the inner workings of the regime—how the zones operated; how the party controlled the country; how the secret police worked; that torture and extermination centers like Tuol Sleng even existed; the depth of the misery and death. Like most of the people who tried to follow events in Cambodia we were at a loss to explain the “Black Paper,” understand why it condemned those it did, or decipher the validity of the charges against Vietnam.

The refugee stories had been collected in news stories and a few books, and had been condemned by some, including Caldwell. Our guides for this visit were determined that we see nothing that would confirm those stories. Their solution was to keep us surrounded by cadre, imprisoned in guest houses and in automobiles, peering out at their revolution.

On the morning we were to leave for the countryside, foreign radio broadcasts highlighted news from Phnom Penh; Pol Pot had said he would abandon the capital if necessary in the upcoming war he took for granted.

The news punctured the serenity our hosts had created. We packed our essentials in fear that we would never return to Phnom Penh. Prasith said it was unnecessary, but we stood our ground and loaded our heavy suitcases into the trunk of our Mercedes.

The air was crystal-blue. We boarded a boat to journey up the Mekong River to Kompong Cham, in the Eastern Zone. Although we understood, however vaguely, that there had been a crisis, at the least, in the east, neither we nor the rest of the world knew then how bloody the purge of the east had been, how that purge had forced into exile the men the Vietnamese now produced as the leaders of the Cambodian “front” that would mask the upcoming Vietnamese invasion. We had the tail, the ears, the feet of the monster but no idea of its overall shape or how it would soon turn rogue.

We motored up the Mekong with Prasith; the inevitable staff of stewards, helpers, and bodyguards; and a new companion, Ok Sakun, an intellectual well known in European circles and a man presumed dead by his friends in Paris. Prasith proudly introduced him to us and said he must be a “ghost,” since some French journals had said he had been killed. Proof, Prasith said, of the blatant propaganda the regime was forced to live with.

Unfortunately, Ok Sakun resembled a skeleton, if not a ghost. His eyes were sunken, his frame so slight he might have just recovered from malnutrition. He was not allowed to talk to us without an interpreter, usually Prasith, at hand. He showed more interest in our cameras than in us. He smiled
more than he spoke. The one time I was alone with him, later in the journey, he talked only of flowers, how beautiful they looked, how much one could miss them. At that time I was puzzled by the conversation. Now I believe he was responding, cautiously, to being freed from some labor camp.

The last time I had been in this part of Cambodia had been at the height of the 1973 war for Kompong Cham. Then the Mekong was stiff with soldiers of both sides of the war, the fighting had been costly for both sides, and the riverbanks were openly menacing. My photographer and I had been caught under a hail of mortars when our helicopter tried to land near Kompong Cham city and we had been happy to have survived the experience.

Now, in Democratic Kampuchea, the menace was hidden. There was silence all along the route. As in Phnom Penh, we saw no signs of ordinary life, no women wading on the shoreline bent over their laundry, no fishermen throwing out their lines, no children splashing in the water. As we approached the city of Kompong Cham the scene changed briefly. For the first time we did see children playing, from a distance, jumping off a boat tied to the docks, swimming and squealing in the water. The scene was probably staged for us.

Once onshore the emptiness returned. We were housed in the former provincial mansion used during the war as a military headquarters for Lon Nol's army. There was no one on the streets, no commerce in the markets, no traffic on the roadways. As in Phnom Penh, we were escorted on various tours of revolutionary institutions: a boatyard, an institute for herbal medicines, and a factory for modern medicines. We were locked up in our guest house and told to get a good night's rest. The next morning we would visit the battlefront.

We left at dawn, the sky streaked with gold rays and white clouds. Our caravan was large: We filled two Peugeot station wagons, our Mercedes sedan, and two jeeps. Our party consisted of five soldiers carrying semiautomatic rifles, four foreign ministry people, and seven members from the Eastern Zone committee. We traveled down the east bank of the Mekong, what had been the mysterious “other side” during the war, the area long controlled by the Khmer Rouge. Every once in a while we caught a glimpse of a scrawny child, but otherwise the roadside was deserted. Prasith had a ready answer: “The people are already in the fields,” he said.

In fact, tens of thousands of people had been executed in this area at midyear and the rest had been deported to other parts of Cambodia where at that moment they were being tracked down and killed like earlier waves of deportees.

We passed a newly constructed concrete granary. Later more children with skinny limbs and extended bellies appeared. Then we saw a single village scene from our car, and those people looked well fed. But we could not stop. We pushed on until we reached military headquarters for National Route Seven, not knowing it was the site where So Phim and his people had been cornered and the Center had tried to wipe out most of the leaders of the supposedly treasonous Eastern Zone forces.

We were let out at headquarters and introduced to our host for the tour of the battlefield—Comrade Pin, an old veteran of a Khmer Rouge division that had fought around Phnom Penh. Much later I learned that Pin had been closely associated with the security police, headquartered in Tuol Sleng. After 1975, a large number of his troops had been transferred to the security police force and Pin had designated as “traitors” many of his own soldiers who were to be killed or “smashed,” in the party parlance, by the police. Pin himself was soon to be accused of being part of a “traitorous network” whose crimes included having one of us killed. To this day, it is a question whether that accusation was fact or fantasy.

On that December morning, however, Pin presented himself as a wise, ironic commander who wanted nothing more than to serve the people. First he gave Cambodia's version of the war with Vietnam. The Vietnamese, he said, had begun the offensive in July and continued the fighting into August. They were the aggressors. In September, he continued, the Vietnamese crossed the border and came four kilometers inside the nearby Memot rubber plantation before his soldiers drove them back. In October and again in November the Vietnamese initiated smaller attacks, Pin said, backing up their army with tanks and bombers.

“We carry out guerrilla war,” he said proudly. “We rely on the people. The Vietnamese use regular warfare, they rely on airplanes, bombs, and tanks.”

In the propaganda used by the Vietnamese and Cambodian communists during the war, the Americans and their local allies were considered politically if not morally wrong because they depended on heavy firepower for victory. The Cambodians carried that idea to its most illogical extreme and believed that simply using airplanes and bombs marked an army as the eventual loser in the battlefield. Moreover, they enjoyed pointing out how the Vietnamese communists had condemned the United States for bombing the countryside but Hanoi, in its new war with Cambodia, showed no compunction about bombing the Cambodian countryside to achieve victory.

After this briefing we were off to the actual battlefield. We were the first and last journalists to see the Cambodians squared off for the war with Vietnam. Our stopping point was Krek, a town that various foreign military experts had already given to the Vietnamese. We passed the dark green forest of the Chup rubber plantation and arrived at Krek, to the north, in the late morning.

Before we took one step outside the car, Pin had his soldiers fan out on all sides, their rifles ready, to form a large circle around us. Pin was not going to have a dead foreign journalist on his watch, not today, at least.

The front was quiet, especially considering reports from U.S. intelligence sources that it had already been captured by the Vietnamese. The thunder of cannons could be heard in the distance. Far off in the direction of the border we could see clouds of smoke rise from an exchange of artillery fire. We had no more than thirty minutes at this front, taking photographs and standing next to the roadmark stating we were at Krek.

Pin made a few comparisons between this war and the five-year war. “There was no efficiency to the American bombing,” he said. The Vietnamese, at least, understood which were the important targets. “When there was heavy American bombing, we moved closer to the enemy troops. The more bombs they dropped, the closer we got. Only the common people suffered, and they grew to hate the Americans.”

Pin's analysis echoed that of many of Lon Nol's best generals, who disapproved of how America was aiding their war effort.

I asked if he could tell us what had happened to the former officers in Lon Nol's army, if the refugees had been correct when they said the officers had all been killed shortly after the war's end. He said he had no idea. In fact, he had personally signed many of their death warrants in April 1975. He volunteered information, however, on the fate of “agents” infiltrated by the Vietnamese into the Eastern Zone army. “We have eliminated them,” he said.

Two weeks after our visit the Vietnamese were in Krek. And Pin himself had been eliminated.

We returned to Kompong Cham city in time for lunch and to pack our bags for the next leg of the journey—a visit to a rubber plantation named Chamcar Dong, to the north and west. We arrived before nightfall. A few miles away, in his cooperative, my former banker Mey Komphot was listening to the government radio and heard that I was in Cambodia. The announcer did not say we were in his area until we had left—a precaution for
our safety. But Komphot would not have believed him. He thought the regime would never have allowed me back to Cambodia. He thought the story was propaganda to take everyone's mind off the threat closing in from Vietnam.

There were no details in this new Cambodia. Before, life was lived on the streets, in the open in the countryside, and along the road. Children played games with sticks, balls, or simply their imagination. They gnawed on fresh pineapple stuck to sticks like a lollipop. Hawkers sold drinks from gaudy stalls, some on wheels: Coca-Cola, or evaporated milk poured over crushed ice filling half a plastic sack and tied tight with a rubber band. Any crowd or small group of Cambodians had the beauty of a procession; the women and men in the countryside wore sarongs and walked with the flatfooted grace of an elephant, swaying with their often bare feet solidly but lightly planted to the ground. The colors woven and worn by the people rivaled the hot true colors of the landscape. The sky was often turquoise, the sun a blinding white (when it was setting, a shocking, variegated pink straight from a religious calendar), the trees ranged from the yellow-green of the palm to the dark emerald of the jungle's canopy. The sarongs were usually yellows, greens, and red—in all shades—with black for details. The monk's robes were more orange than yellow. The colonial buildings were ocher with redtiled roofs. The Cambodian wooden houses were plain—the pagodas were painted, sometimes with such gaudy trim they seemed more Hindu than Buddhist. The skyline was a delight—bushy-headed palms, pointed arched roofs of the pagodas, soft hills, and an enormous blue sky.

What was left now? I first peered into faces hoping to find someone I had known before 1975. Most of the faces were too young even if the features looked familiar from afar. My mind was becoming numb, in fact, lost without the signposts of the Cambodia I had known and forbidden by our keepers from understanding the Cambodia hiding in front of our eyes.

Something must have jarred me at the front. Perhaps it was the disappointment of finding the countryside as hidden from us as the city. That night we were put up in the great house of a plantation. One of the large parlors had been transformed into a dormitory. Rows of wooden beds with mosquito nets attached overhead filled the room. I was put at one end, the men in the farthest corner from me. The former owner had planted an orchard around the great house, and it perfumed the night air. We ate and retired to bed early.

That night my subconscious broke through. All the fears and doubts I had tried to ignore, the obvious implication of all that I had not seen so far
on the trip, burst into my dreams. I had terrible nightmares that ended when I dreamed that North Korean agents had crept inside the plantation guest house and were trying to kill the three of us. My moans and screams woke up the household. Dudman and Caldwell first thought they came from outside. The next morning we all tried to laugh off my terrible dreams. I was the only woman, and remarks could be made about emotional females.