Survival in the Killing Fields Read online

  Phnom Penh had become a city of bonjour. Nobody was immune to it. One day in 1974 my father went for a walk outside his house with his grandson, Chy Kveng. My father was wearing a faded olive-green military T-shirt, the kind Aunt Kim sold openly in the market. A military policeman drove up in a truck, leaned out the window and said, ‘Hey, you goddamn Chinese! Stop right there! How did you get that shirt? That’s for military use only!’

  My father blinked his puffy eyes and said, ‘No, it’s an old shirt. I bought it in the market a long time ago. I’m entitled to wear it.’

  ‘No you’re not, you fucking Chinese,’ the military policeman said.

  ‘Then you’ll have to close down the market. Don’t let people sell military goods. As long as the markets sell the stuff, people will buy it.’

  ‘You’re breaking the law. Get into the truck.’

  My father and his two-year-old grandson got into the truck. The military policeman drove around Phnom Penh, threatening to arrest them and throw them in jail. Eventually my father gave him eight thousand riels and was set free.

  Kim’s son Haing Seng located me at the hospital and told me the news about my father.

  My patience for the regime was at an end. After losing Samrong Yong to the communists, after bombing my family’s home, after allowing corruption to spread like an infection throughout society.

  I changed into my military uniform, which I hardly ever wore. By then I had been promoted to the rank of captain, with three bars on the shoulders. I went to the military police headquarters. The man at the desk was a lieutenant, two bars on the shoulders. He saluted and stood at attention.

  I said in a deadly calm voice, ‘I want to know who controls the area my parents live in. Someone in a truck just bonjoured my father for wearing an army T-shirt. And he insulted him for his Chinese ancestry.’

  ‘I’ll look into it, sir.’

  ‘You’re goddamn right you’ll look into it. And I’ll tell you something else. Why don’t you people stop bonjouring innocent civilians on the street? What the hell’s wrong with you? Don’t you steal enough money as it is? Why don’t you just bonjour the merchants in the market? Better yet, why don’t you stop the stealing from military warehouses and fight the communists like you’re supposed to?’

  ‘I’m sorry your father was bothered, sir.’

  ‘Listen to me, asshole!’ I shouted. ‘I don’t care about the money. But I care about the discrimination. Look at your own skin. It’s the same colour as mine. You’ve got Chinese blood too. You’re mixed-race! So why do you allow discrimination? You motherfucking idiot! How stupid can you be?’

  The lieutenant begged me with the palms of his hands together. He said he realized that his subordinate did wrong. He apologized over and over. He said he would find out who did it.

  Finally I left.

  Of course, I never learned who the driver was. Nobody was punished. Phnom Penh was like that. Lon Nol was a leader only in name. Under him, incompetence and bonjour flourished. The guilty went free and the powerless suffered. Our society had lost its moral direction. And that’s why we lost the war.

  6

  The Fall

  During the years of the civil war I didn’t know much about the Khmer Rouge. I wasn’t even curious. Like a typical Cambodian, I didn’t go to great lengths to learn about things that were beyond my horizons. There wasn’t much information available anyway, except for propaganda. The Khmer Rouge had a clandestine radio station, but its broadcasts didn’t tell us what the guerrillas were really like or what they really wanted. In Phnom Penh, the Lon Nol regime controlled most of the rest of the media – it owned the TV station and the two radio stations, and through censorship and repression it kept most of the independently owned newspapers tame and obedient. Luckily, there were still a few journalists around who would say what they thought, even though they couldn’t always write it.

  One of those journalists was my friend Sam Kwil. He was always going off to the battlefields on his motorcycle, so he had learned something about the Khmer Rouge firsthand. He told me the guerrillas were full of tricks. For example, when Khmer Rouge units were defeated, sometimes the guerrillas changed into ordinary civilian clothes, buried their uniforms and weapons and pretended to be innocent farmers. When they lost men in battles, the survivors carried the corpses away so the Lon Nol soldiers wouldn’t find any dead. The communists were masters of psychological warfare, Sam Kwil told me. Lon Nol soldiers advancing toward huge, noisy, enthusiastic Khmer Rouge meetings in the countryside would find only loudspeakers and a tape player – and land mines buried around the tree that the sound equipment hung from. Later the Lon Nol corpses would be found eviscerated, their stomach cavities stuffed with grass and leaves. Sometimes innocent civilians were killed and mutilated too, to frighten the survivors.

  What Sam Kwil told me about grisly Khmer Rouge practices agreed with rumours that began to circulate around Phnom Penh in 1974. In the markets, it was said that the guerrillas killed people by sawing back and forth across their necks with the spiny edges of sugar palm leaf stems. But this was exactly the sort of gossip that I expected to hear in the markets, repeated and exaggerated from one credulous person to the next.

  If I didn’t worry about the Khmer Rouge, it was because I didn’t believe they could be any worse than the Lon Nol regime. Even Sam Kwil agreed with that. For every story we heard about Khmer Rouge atrocities there were several about the Lon Nol regime – mostly massacres of ethnic Vietnamese civilians, whom the Lon Nol soldiers seemed to hate even more than they did the ethnic Chinese. Every day we heard accounts of government soldiers stealing chickens and livestock from civilians in the countryside, or setting up roadblocks to collect bonjour. But we never heard of the Khmer Rouge stealing anything, even a piece of paper or a grain of rice. It was said that the guerrillas kept to a strict and honourable code of behaviour – no gambling, no abuse of peasants and, above all, no corruption. After the stench of the Lon Nol regime, the communists seemed like a fresh, clean breeze.

  Besides, I knew people in the Khmer Rouge, even if I didn’t know them well: my secondary-school teacher Chea Huon, who after being released from prison vanished into the jungle; Aunt Kim’s son Haing Meng (Haing Seng’s older brother), who had gone off into the jungle in 1967; a few medical colleagues who had vanished after the coup. Huoy had a cousin from Kampot who was an officer in the Khmer Rouge, though she hadn’t seen him in years. Almost everybody in Phnom Penh had a friend or relative on the other side.

  And then there was Sihanouk. Compared to Lon Nol, who was despised even by those who worked for him, Sihanouk was highly respected. Even if Sihanouk was only a figurehead for the Khmer Rouge, it was hard to believe that the cause he represented was cruel or bad. Sihanouk returned to the ‘liberated’ zones in Cambodia in 1973. He still talked to us over the radio, from Peking. The prime minister in his government-in-exile was Penn Nouth, the lawyer who had obtained my brother’s release after the lumber mill incident. Admittedly, there were reports that Sihanouk, Penn Nouth and their entire circle were losing influence in the Khmer Rouge. The real leader was supposed to be a man named Khieu Samphan. That didn’t bother me. Khieu Samphan had been a newspaper editor, a member of the legislature and for a time a cabinet minister. He lived a simple life and hated corruption. In the old days I had seen him riding around Phnom Penh on his bicycle.

  In 1973 the United States stopped its bombing flights over Cambodia, and after that supplied only weapons and money. By 1974 the Khmer Rouge had almost completely taken over the communist side of the fighting from the North Vietnamese. Most of the Khmer Rouge attacks were small-scale, a dozen killed here, two dozen there, but as they encircled Phnom Penh they ran into entire Lon Nol divisions and attacked in human waves. There were enormous casualties on both sides.

  More and more frequently, as part of their psychological war, the Khmer Rouge attacked Phnom Penh itself. They used Chinese or US-made artillery. We could hear the artillery firing in the di
stance and then the explosions as the shells landed. They also used rockets, which were even more frightening because of the sound they made in the air, a c/ukclukcluk-c/uk-cluk c/uk c/uk, c/uk, c/uk, slowing down as it made its descent, and then pakkum! When the shells and rockets landed we ran outside to see what was hit; sometimes it would be a house in the next block, the neighbours already struggling to rescue the victims from the wreckage. Then, typically, the air force sent up its T-28s to stop the shelling, and we would see the little planes across the river diving toward treetop level and releasing bombs, then pulling up sharply and the string of explosions and the palm trees and houses highlighted in the flames and the black smoke billowing up. The government fought back, and its lower-level troops fought well, but each time the Khmer Rouge squeezed in a little closer. Takhmau, the town where my father had his lumber mill, fell to the guerrillas, and my father’s business closed forever.

  As the roads were cut off for the last time, as the last armed convoy made its way up the river, as the merchants sent their gold and their daughters out of the country and as the planes made tight, spiralling takeoffs and landings at the airport, those of us who stayed tried to adjust. It surprises me now, but most of us pretended that life was almost normal. We made ourselves believe that Phnom Penh was a little island of peace and that it was going to stay that way. Even in March and early April 1975 there were afternoons when barefoot soldiers drank rice wine and fell asleep in the shade. Almost every night, Huoy and I went out to restaurants in the Mercedes. The food was still excellent. There was plenty of cognac. I fully believed that there would be negotiations, that at the last minute the two opposing sides would somehow soften and compromise. Compromise, avoiding conflict, the sompeah with the palms together – that gentleness had always dominated the Cambodian way of life. The nasty, violent underside of our culture was something I didn’t like to think about.

  ‘Sweet,’ Huoy said to me over dinner, ‘why don’t you just sell the gasoline trucks and leave now, while you still have a chance? You can buy an airline ticket and go anywhere in the world.’

  I gave her an exasperated glance. ‘Because Phnom Penh isn’t going to fall,’ I told her crossly. I had stayed up every night for a week, operating on wounded soldiers in the military hospital. ‘Look, I’m tired. Do you mind not talking about it? Let’s just enjoy the meal, all right?’

  Even when the Khmer Rouge ringed the outskirts of the city and the shelling was daily, some mental barrier kept me from accepting the inevitable. On April 12, 1975, the Americans evacuated the city in helicopters. A friend of mine, a pilot in the Lon Nol air force, offered to arrange for me, Huoy and Ma to leave on the American helicopters, but I said no. I watched the helicopters take off in the distance, like oversized dragonflies, hovering and then speeding off with their loud, clattering roar.

  On the evening of April 16 I went to the house of an old friend for dinner. He told me, ‘Tonight is the last night for all of us, and for happiness in our families. It may be the last time we are ever together.’ We could hear artillery outside, but I still didn’t believe him. It was my old stubbornness. Somebody told me one thing and I had to believe that the opposite was true.

  After dinner I drove to Huoy’s house, arriving around ten o’clock. Huoy was upset. There was heavy shelling in all directions, explosions lighting up the night sky. She begged me over and over again to stay the night. Her mother asked me to stay too. I told them I had some visits to make and said not to worry.

  I drove my white 150 cc. Vespa from Huoy’s house, near the central market, westward toward my parents’ house, near the Olympic Stadium. Ever since the big feud in my family in 1972 I had been on good terms with my parents. I drove them wherever they wanted to go in my Mercedes. I treated them for their high blood pressure and their other health problems. They had gained face by having a son who was a doctor and who looked after them as well as I did. Yes, I was a full doctor now. In February 1975 I had finally been awarded my medical degree. With the new professional status came a softening in my father’s attitudes. I had reason to think he was going to let me marry Huoy.

  ‘Stay here tonight,’ Papa said when I came in, ‘so we don’t get separated.’ I told him I had to go to the clinic to check on my patients. I repeated what I had said a thousand times, that if the Khmer Rouge got in the city they would never harm doctors. There was nothing to worry about. I had even taped a red cross on the back of my Vespa. Everybody would know I was in the medical profession. Nobody would hurt me.

  My older brother Pheng Huor came in from his house next door. ‘Well, if you have to go,’ he said, ‘at least be careful. The rest of us will wait for you here. If something happens, my advice is to get rid of the Vespa. In situations like this, it’s safer to make your way on foot.’

  In situations like what? I wondered irritatedly as I drove to my bachelor apartment to get fresh clothes. Some friends of mine were staying at the apartment, sleeping on the floor.

  ‘It doesn’t look good,’ one of my friends said, leaning up on one elbow. ‘The government cannot last.’

  ‘Of course it can. Go back to sleep. Everything’s going to be fine.’

  I changed clothes and drove toward the clinic. In the streets, quiet except for occasional gunfire, my Vespa engine sputtered but kept on going. Bad fuel, contaminated with kerosene. The entire staff was at the clinic, four nurses and four midwives and the guard, but none of the other doctors had showed. ‘Maybe they were scared of the shelling,’ said the smallest nurse, whose name was Srei. ‘I’m scared too, Doctor. If you go someplace, let me go with you.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’ I said angrily. ‘Nobody’s going anyplace! We’re all going to go on working here as always.’

  A half-dozen wounded and a few women in labour were waiting for me in the clinic that night. I got to work. As I examined and probed, cut and sewed, my hands seemed to be working automatically. I began thinking. Why was it that everyone I had talked to said the same thing? What instinct did they have that I lacked? What did they know that I didn’t? Maybe the city would fall tomorrow. But no. That was impossible.

  I spent the night on a cot in the clinic. A little after sunrise on April 17, 1975, I drove my Vespa to my parents’ house, where I paid brief respects. Then I drove to Huoy’s.

  Huoy had dressed for work in a neat white blouse and sampot. Her face was pale and tense. We went to the little cafe on the ground floor of her building. We had our normal breakfast, tea and a bowl of Chinese noodles with slices of beef and savoury vegetables. ‘Don’t leave school today,’ I told her, ‘except to go home. We don’t want to be separated. If something happens, come back early so your mother won’t worry. But don’t worry about me. They won’t kill doctors, either side. I’m safe.’

  By now even I didn’t fully believe what I was saying about being safe.

  I started my Vespa. Huoy sat sidesaddle on the back seat, the hem of her sampot decorously below her knees, her ankles crossed, one foot on the footrest. I drove her to Lycée Sisowath and dropped her off. Then I drove toward my clinic. On the way, artillery shells exploded at random in the residential blocks. All but a few Westerners had already evacuated Phnom Penh. The Cambodian population of the city was up to three or four million. Some were getting ready to welcome the Khmer Rouge; others were afraid; the rest, like me, still hoped to go on living normally.

  Because of the rubble spilling into the streets from the shelling it was necessary to make detours, but I got to my clinic at about 7.30 a.m. A crowd of people milled around nearby, watching the market stalls burn and the smoke filling the air. Some of the women with vegetables or meat stalls in the market carried wounded relatives and neighbours into my clinic. I had about a dozen to treat in all, few of them seriously injured.

  I had taken care of the worst cases when there was an urgent phone call from a doctor with the rank of army general. He told me to get to the hospital to operate on some soldiers who had been injured in fighting near the airport. Quickl
y I finished the rest of my patients, and then a military driver came to the front of the clinic with a low, wide, all-terrain-model B-1 jeep. At the military hospital I asked a secretary to telephone the guard at my clinic to ask him to bring the Vespa to the hospital. Then I went to Block A, for major surgery, and glanced through the window into the operating room. The patient was already on the table.

  I went to the scrub room and began washing my hands at the sink. An orderly whose name I could never remember helped me into the operating gown and tied the strings for me at the back of the blouse. I went back to washing. ‘Boss?’ he said. ‘What do you think? The situation isn’t too good, is it? Have you heard about the government negotiations with the communists?’

  ‘No, I haven’t heard anything about it. I just came in from my clinic.’

  ‘Well, the situation isn’t good,’ said the orderly. As if that was news.

  I put on gloves. We went together to the operating room. The patient was on the table, unconscious, with intravenous tubes running into his arm, one for blood and another for glucose. The operating staff had already assembled: the anaesthesiologist, the nurses and another doctor, whose name was Pok Saradath. The X-ray film was already clipped into place on the translucent glass above the operating table. I went over to look at the film. The patient had been hit by a grenade. There were burns on his face and shoulder and puncture holes as big around as a finger on his abdomen where the shrapnel had entered. His belly was distended from the wounds and the internal bleeding. He was groaning in a low voice. I ordered some more anaesthetic injected in the rubber valve in the IV tube.