Survival in the Killing Fields Read online

  With my Vespa and Thoeun’s Yamaha with the supply cart, it was impossible to move. Impatient as always, I put the scooter on its kickstand, told Thoeun and the nurses to take care of it and took off, slipping through the crowd, working to one side of the boulevard and then the other, climbing up fences and trees to get a better view.

  I didn’t find Huoy or my parents. What I found was rice. A sudden pushing and shouting developed in the crowd, and by following the surge of running men I found myself in a side street, at a warehouse with wide-open doors. Hundreds of men were already inside, grabbing whatever they could. It was a scene of wild greed. Rice bags stacked high on a wooden pallet had fallen over on one man, killing him outright. His feet were sticking out from the bottom of the jumbled pile, and nobody paid any mind.

  I threw a sack of rice on my shoulder with ‘Donated by the US Government printed on the label and staggered back to the nurses. Then Thoeun and I went to the warehouse to get more.

  In the warehouse and on the streets a new code of behaviour had evolved. The new ‘law’ was that it was forgivable to steal as long as we didn’t take anything by force or hurt anyone physically. Property left unguarded was property for the taking. At night Thoeun went off and came back to us, grinning, with two live chickens in his hands. We promptly killed, plucked and cooked them and didn’t ask him where he had gotten them.

  By the fourth day, April 20, the soldiers had given up on telling us to leave for three hours or three days, and now they were ordering us to go into the countryside. ‘Angka will provide everything for you,’ they announced through their bullhorns. ‘Angka will see to it that the people have everything they need.’

  If we had to leave the city, National Route 2 was the road for us to take. Route 2 would take us to my father’s sawmill, where my family and Huoy had probably gathered. If they weren’t there, we could follow the road farther, into Takeo Province and right to Samrong Yong. Surely Huoy and my family would go to Samrong Yong if all else failed, I reasoned. And whether or not they did, Route 2 was also the right road for my nurses, who were all from Takeo Province too, from villages farther south of Samrong Yong.

  I made my way on foot to the traffic circle at the southern end of Monivong Boulevard, where several roads led out of Phnom Penh in different directions. At the circle, the Khmer Rouge were waving people onto a road that led onto a bridge across the river and onto National Route 1, which was the wrong direction for us. But the other turnoff to National Route 2 was still open and a few people were still taking it.

  So we waited. Took a step forward and waited some more. Listened to the sonic booms overhead. Stood in the hot sun and wished we could bathe and change into clean clothes.

  The next morning, when we got to the traffic circle at the foot of Monivong Boulevard, there was a barricade across the road to National Route 2. We were too late. ‘Keep moving,’ said the bullhorns. ‘Angka will provide for you on the other side of the bridge.’ Armed soldiers were watching. There was nothing to do but move on with the sluggish flow of the crowd, even though it took us in the wrong direction.

  At the base of the bridge were several sprawling corpses; most, by their uniforms, were Lon Nol soldiers; one, by his shoulder-length hair, a well-known Phuom Penh nightclub singer who had displeased the new authorities. We tried to ignore the bodies and stepped onto the bridge, which formed a shallow arc, sloping upward from the riverbank to a high point in the middle and then back down to the other side.

  At the top of the bridge, a bit out of breath from the exertion of pushing the Vespa up the grade, I heard a sudden murmur from the crowd and glanced over their heads. It was one of those events that happens faster than its meaning can be absorbed: a shiny new Peugeot on the far side of the river, driving down the riverbank. It drove into the water with a splash and floated forward slowly, until the river current spun it around and took it slowly downstream.

  There were people inside the car. A man in the driver’s seat, a woman beside him and children looking out the back with their hands pressed against the windows. All the doors and windows stayed closed. Nobody got out.

  Gradually the car sank lower and lower until only the roof was above the water. We just stared, as the car settled lower and the waters closed over the roof.

  A rich family committing suicide.

  On the other side of the bridge there were, of course, no supplies. Just more Khmer Rouge in black uniforms, shouting at us to keep hurrying. It was noon, the hottest part of the day. Thousands had quietly disobeyed them and had sat down to rest. I led my group under the awning of a locked storefront, in the shade.

  Thoeun and I went off to explore. Upriver, out of sight of the soldiers, boats were carrying passengers back across the river to Phnom Penh. In the dry season the river had shrunk to a narrow channel of water between the banks. A few who couldn’t afford to pay the boatmen were swimming to the other side. We looked around for soldiers, didn’t see any and decided to join them. If we could find more food it would be good, but in any case a plunge into the water was exactly what we needed. It had been days since we had bathed.

  When we got to the Phnom Penh side, we walked back to the rice warehouses in our dripping clothes. Most of them had been cleaned out. But in one we found a fifty-kilogram sack of dried beans, too heavy for a single person to carry. We swam back across the river with it.

  At the top of the riverbank, other city exiles rushed toward us, offering to buy the beans with bundles of Lon Nol regime rids. I turned them down. We didn’t want money from a regime that no longer existed. But when someone offered a bag of sugar in trade for half the beans, I agreed. The nurses cooked rice and green beans that night, and it tasted especially good. Stolen food always does, as I was to discover.

  The next morning we left along National Route 1, walking faster than before but not hurrying. The road led eastward across a triangle of land bordered by the Bassac and Mekong rivers. In the crowd, grocers travelled with grocers, jewellers with jewellers, peasants from one province with peasants of the same province. Our group stopped whenever we met medical colleagues from Phnom Penh. We greeted other doctors with traditional courtesy, palms together in the sompeah, and exchanged news. I warned them not to tell anyone they were doctors and explained what had happened in the operating room of the hospital. Some of the doctors agreed with me about the danger and others thought I was exaggerating, though they didn’t tell me so directly, because they didn’t want me to lose face.

  The next morning we continued walking. Soon we came to Boeng Snor, Phnom Penh’s red-light district, on the banks of the Mekong. The road was up above the level of the land, on a broad dyke, but the main brothels and nightclubs were on stilts, to keep even with the road. Lower than the road, on what was land in the dry season, were the floating houses, built on rafts of fifty-five-gallon drums, or sometimes on bamboo. Before the revolution men used to spend time here with their mistresses or prostitutes. They gambled and drank with their friends. It had been a place where everything was permitted for those who had money, a place where the sensuous side of the normally prudish Cambodian character was free to emerge. But not anymore. No painted ladies. Only squatters, and landlords trying to keep squatters out. As a red-light district, Boeng Snor had ceased to exist. Whoring, drinking, gambling, bribery – for better or worse, all these were forbidden under the new regime.

  Beyond Boeng Snor, both lanes of the road were still filled with city exiles, pushing their cars or carrying their possessions on springy shoulderboards, all of them headed in the same direction. Yet for the first time there was room enough to move freely among them.

  Here and there beside the road lay corpses of Lon Nol soldiers. By now we hardly noticed them. A more surprising sight were the roadside merchants, who were doing a busy trade. From makeshift stalls and from tarps spread on the ground, they were selling cakes, cigarettes, chicken barbecued on skewers, eggs, live poultry, fresh and dried fish, meats, fruits and fresh vegetables of all kinds, books
and tape cassettes. The Khmer Rouge might have destroyed the markets but not the market sellers, and it was encouraging to see the merchants making the best of their new situation.

  By the end of the afternoon we had travelled three or four more miles, to the edge of a large, crowded settlement of Phnom Penh refugees. It was called Wat Kien Svay Krao, after an enormous walled temple compound of the same name, which sat on the riverbank overlooking the Mekong. Farther inland was a second, smaller wat. There were monks in these temples, picking their way through courtyards packed with people, cars, makeshift tents and canopies. People had camped everywhere – in the village between the temples, under every tree, in the fields nearby, and even on the islands and sandbars of the shrunken river. We decided to stay there too. It was a major node of relocation, outside the city but not too far away for those who hoped to return.

  We parked the motorbikes off the road in the shade of a large mango tree. Above our heads were green mangoes, hanging by their stems. In Cambodia we eat green mangoes as a sort of crunchy vegetable (though they do not taste as good as ripe mangoes, which develop later in the year). So if we wanted green mangoes we could just pick them. There were coconut palms and a grove of banana trees nearby. Farther off there were farmers’ fields to forage. If we wanted fish, Thoeun and I could make fishing poles and try our luck in the Mekong. We could also use our beans and rice for bartering. So food and shelter didn’t worry us.

  What worried us was finding our families. I had met some distant cousins on the road, and some of Huoy’s cousins, but none of them knew where Huoy and my family were.

  In roaming around every day looking for Huoy and my family I ran into many people I knew. One of them was my old friend Sam Kwil, the newspaper reporter and photographer. Like a lot of journalists, Kwil basically disliked authority. He had never been happy with the Lon Nol regime because of the corruption and the heavy-handed censorship. He was even unhappier with the Khmer Rouge regime, which didn’t allow any newspapers at all. Kwil’s greatest pleasure had always been finding out what was going on and telling other people. He told me what I had already suspected, that the dull thunder-like sounds from the sky came from US reconnaissance planes flying at incredible altitudes. And he told me what I hadn’t known, that next door in South Vietnam province after province was falling to the North Vietnamese. ‘Soon everywhere will be communist,’ he told me glumly.

  Kwil still had the habits of a journalist even though he didn’t have a paper to work for. Wherever he went in Wat Kien Svay Krao he took his duffel bag of cameras, film and notebooks. When he and I walked together to the grove of banana trees by Route I, he strapped the duffel bag to the luggage rack of his motorcycle and pushed the bike along.

  As we were picking bunches of ripe bananas, a convoy of covered trucks came out of the distance on the highway, from the direction of Phnom Penh. I had seen convoys like that before, and I had always wondered where they were going. Sam Kwil had wondered about that too. Along Route 1 there were few settlements of any importance from here to the Vietnamese border.

  Between the torn fronds of the banana trees we could make out the front escort jeep and then the long line of Chinese-made trucks behind it. Kwil got his cameras out and stepped forward to get a better view, although he was still hidden.

  ‘Be careful, will you?’ I told him, but he didn’t answer.

  The escort jeep went past us and then the first trucks. As the trucks passed we noticed that some of the tarps covering the cargo on the back were untied and flapping in the wind. When they flapped open we saw what was underneath – chairs, refrigerators, air conditioners, fans, television sets and various sacks and bags. More trucks went past and their cargo was the same. Obviously the Khmer Rouge had taken the furniture and appliances from Phnom Penh. The only question was whether they were giving it or selling it to the Vietnamese.

  Kwil moved farther forward among the trees. He had raised his camera to take pictures of the backs of the trucks, and as he turned he didn’t see the jeep bringing up the rear, until it stopped suddenly on the pavement beside him.

  I ran far back into the banana grove. Sam Kwil was slower to react. Three Khmer Rouge jumped out of the jeep and ran toward him, one to his left, one right at him and one to his right. In a few seconds they had him surrounded.

  I could hear their voices through the trees. ‘Who ordered you to take pictures?’ they demanded. ‘Anyone who takes pictures without permission is the enemy! You are CIA!’ Before he could argue, they wrenched his arms behind him in a hammerlock and one of them swung his rifle stock and hit Kwil in the ribs. Kwil collapsed. They half-marched, half-dragged him to the jeep, tied his hands behind him and began beating him with their rifle butts and kicking him. Then the jeep drove off with Sam Kwil inside, accelerating to catch up with the rest of the convoy.

  It was quiet when they had gone, except for the chirping of crickets and the loud, irrelevant chittering of birds.

  It had been so quick. One minute he had been talking with me, the next he was gone. I stood in the grove of banana trees, trying not to believe my eyes. There was nothing I could have done. Or was there? The jeep got smaller and smaller in the distance until it vanished down National Route 1.

  9

  Wat Kien Svay Krao

  I do not know how many miles I walked that day. My fret had taken control of my body. My body had taken over my brain.

  It was better to walk than think. Better to do almost anything than think. Poor Kwil. How they had grabbed him and dragged him away. I had done nothing. Don’t think about it, I told myself. Just stay on the move and keep scanning faces of the crowd. If he is not dead now he will be soon. Stay detached, I told myself. Save the emotions for later. Concentrate on staying alive and finding the family. They took him and I did nothing. Nothing to do. Just keep walking and scan the faces. Clubbing him with their rifles. Before him, the suicide of the family in their Peugeot. Before the suicide, the man shot dead for trying to cross the intersection in Phnom Penh. The patient I left on the operating table. We are helpless, helpless, helpless. We cannot struggle against them. We can only evade them and hope someone else dies in our place. Don’t think about it. Hide the emotions inside, and keep walking. To survive.

  I went back to the mango tree and counted: everyone in my group was there, nine people stretched out on their mats in the shade, relaxed. No sense upsetting them. They are my responsibility. Back to wandering. National Route 1 was choked with traffic again. Thousands and thousands of faces. Too many on the road and too many in Wat Kien Svay Krao. Too many faces to see.

  I walked and walked. In the back lanes of the village late that afternoon, a family was leaving from its camping place, on the ground level between the stilts of a house. Quickly I moved my group there from the mango tree, for better protection from the rains. The nurses chose benches to sleep on and rigged their mosquito nets on strings. I chose an oxcart as a bed, its narrow platform wedged between the pair of tall wooden-spoked wheels. And went back to walking.

  I wandered among the barbers who had set up shop with a chair and a mirror nailed to a tree, with the vendors of fish and pork with the flies swarming around, with the fruit sellers. Restaurateurs offered Chinese noodle soup, one bowl for 5,000 riels. The price of the soup was a gauge of the merchants’ faith in the currency of the Lon Nol regime: a few months before, a bowl of that same soup would have cost 500 to 600 riels, and a few years before, in 1972, it would have cost 150 riels. But the Khmer Rouge hadn’t introduced any currency to take its place.

  On the side of the wat, the Khmer Rouge had put up a military recruitment centre. They had written a message in chalk, reading: ‘If you were a Lon Nol soldier before, register your name here and go back to work for Angka. Angka needs soldiers on all levels. Also register if you were a military administrator. Angka will put you back to work. Professors, teachers and students will register later.’ Lon Nol soldiers in civilian clothing lined up to be interviewed. They looked glad. They hadn’t
liked leaving the city without their possessions, not knowing where they were going. Now they had a purpose, a direction. Once more they would be serving their country and making a living. When they reached the head of the line, they gave their histories to interviewers holding clipboards. Former lieutenants pretended to be captains, and captains pretended to be majors, to get higher-ranking jobs with the Khmer Rouge. As the trucks arrived to take them off, the men climbed in, happy and smiling. They shouted, ‘Give the news to my parents! I go back to work for Angka!’

  I watched the trucks drive away and it made me suspicious. Why didn’t the Khmer Rouge want teachers or students? Or doctors or engineers? Surely they needed all those professions if they were going to rebuild the country. Though I was technically a Lon Nol officer myself, I hung back at the edge of the crowd. So did another former soldier whose friends saw him from the trucks and beckoned him to come on. The Khmer Rouge recruiters quickly closed in on this man and took him by the arm. He insisted he was merely a friend of the soldiers in the truck, but it did him no good. The Khmer Rouge placed him in the line, to be interviewed. He stood there with the expression of a man who was trapped and had no hope of escaping.5

  I walked away from the recruitment centre, stopping when a Khmer Rouge soldier came up to me. ‘Let me have a look at your glasses,’ he said.

  I handed him my glasses.

  He held them in his palm. ‘Can you give them to me?’ It was as much a statement as a question.

  ‘Comrade, the glasses are not fitted to your eyes,’ I said. ‘I am nearsighted. If you take them I won’t be able to see anything.’

  He tried them on, and opened and shut his eyes several times in surprise. ‘They hurt me!’ he said. ‘Why can’t I see?’

  ‘Comrade, they don’t fit your eyes,’ I said. ‘If they did I would give them to you. Believe me.’