You Don't Belong Here

by Elizabeth Becker

  After the bombing ended, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho returned to Paris, and the Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27, 1973. They were essentially the same as those negotiated in October, before the Christmas bombing, with a few minor changes.

  President Nixon announced the agreement from the White House: “We today have concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia.”

  President Thieu told his public: “The signing of the agreement means the beginning of peace, but it does not mean peace.”

  WHEN I ARRIVED in Cambodia in January 1973, other reporters warned me that I was too late. The peace accords were about to be signed, and the war was effectively over. For a few weeks, I believed them and worried I had made the biggest mistake of my life.

  My first sight of battle suggested otherwise. Neil Davis, a much-admired Australian cameraman who had covered Vietnam and Cambodia since 1964, took me down Highway 4 to the headquarters of Gen. Dien Del, one of Cambodia’s best officers. We left as the city was waking up. Men in sarongs were pulling up metal grills to open their shops or drinking coffee on sidewalk stools. Monks in saffron robes were walking single file down the street, begging bowls in hand. We rolled down the windows to catch the still-cool morning breezes.

  The city’s boulevards merged into the highway, which led to the countryside. Sugar palms defined the horizon with silhouettes of farmers’ thatched homes on stilts. We passed newly harvested rice fields that looked like an old man’s stubble and thick knots of neem trees. On a small road, as we climbed out of the car, I heard the whipping sound of bullets. We ran away from the noise until Neil motioned me to fall on my stomach immediately. The danger had caught up with us. We waited “safely” behind teenage Cambodian soldiers firing M16 automatic rifles at the Khmer Rouge forward line. During a lull, we backed out and headed in the car closer to the general’s base camp, where his aide waited for us.

  We all walked single file down a path lined with dusty bamboo trees toward the headquarters. The bamboo disappeared, replaced by a row of wooden poles. The aide stood still. My brain stopped, refusing to register what was in front of me.

  At the top of each pole was the severed head of a young man. Each seemed to have had his dark hair combed. Some had their eyes slightly open. I muffled a silent scream. Neil thought they were the heads of Khmer Rouge soldiers killed the day before.

  When we met Gen. Dien Del, he assured us his men were not savages and that beheading was practiced by both sides, as if that was any consolation. As far as peace was concerned, he saw only more war. Vietnam and Laos may have signed the Paris Accords, but Cambodia had not.

  Soon after, I began having irregular nightmares of beheadings. Judy, my oldest sister, had been beheaded in a car accident when she was twenty years old. Her death had plunged our family into years of despair. Now her face appeared in my dark dreams with those of the young Khmer Rouge soldiers.

  I told myself that if the rumors of peace came true, I could leave Cambodia in a few months with enough experience to find a job back home in Seattle. I just had to survive until then.

  IN FEBRUARY, THE news out of Vietnam was joyful: 591 American prisoners of war were released over sixty days. In parallel, American troops withdrew from Vietnam.

  Reporters jockeyed for the assignment to fly to Hanoi and cover the return of the soldiers and airmen who had survived sometimes years of imprisonment, torture, poor nutrition, and insufferable conditions in North Vietnam. Back home, President Nixon invited them all to the White House for a dinner with Bob Hope as master of ceremony.

  Before long, all of America’s soldiers in Vietnam would be coming home. The killing of Americans there was over, and for the American public, the Vietnam War was done, just as President Nixon had promised.

  Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, although Le Duc Tho became the only person in history to refuse it: the North Vietnamese negotiator declined the honor, saying there was no peace in Vietnam and accusing the US of breaking the truce.10

  DURING MY FIRST three months in Cambodia, I lost fifteen pounds living on soup, coffee, and cigarettes.

  The men in the resident and visiting foreign press corps were a mixed bag. At first, everyone wanted to take me to dinner—but too many felt the need to make a pass at me, and I was frightened by the attention. I looked and acted like a Seattle provincial far from home. Besides, I was stumped trying to read a French menu. It took me some time to figure out which colleagues I could trust, especially after Sylvana Foa was expelled.

  Dith Pran, the top Cambodian journalist and fixer, noticed I relied on slow pedicabs to get around the city and had to beg for rides to the front. One day he saw me in the hotel’s parking lot and handed me the keys to his green Volkswagen bug. “Bek Kar,” he said. “Take my car. You’re not a hippie. You’re serious.” Even better, Pran regularly checked to make sure I didn’t blunder down the wrong highway for my sake and the car’s.11

  With the car I was golden, and within a month I could afford to rent Pran’s car in time to chase the biggest story of the war that year.

  At the open-air daily briefings, Am Rong, the military spokesman, certified that the North Vietnamese troops had withdrawn from Cambodia as required under the peace accords. That changed the whole character of the war. Cambodians were no longer fighting their traditional enemy. They were fighting each other: the Lon Nol government’s FANK against the Khmer Rouge insurgents. To everyone’s surprise, the Khmer Rouge were strong even without the Vietnamese.

  Since the warring parties of Cambodia were not part of the Paris Peace Accords, the United State could focus all of its air power on the Cambodian front to aid the Lon Nol government. The US launched a massive new air campaign without publicly announcing this dramatic change in policy. The US command had been restrained in its official response to our questions about its military plans in Cambodia. The evidence, though, was everywhere. US bombs were saving the government of Lon Nol.

  In the March 19, 1973, edition of Far Eastern Economic Review, I wrote that the extent and expanse of American bombing had increased at “unprecedented proportions” throughout the country and was no longer restricted to border regions.

  “Villages barely scarred in three years of conflict were leveled. The fighting continues to plague densely populated regions and the tactical air support has become more lethal. Refugees are pouring into Phnom Penh, leaving their homes in the lush Mekong River region to escape the raids.”12

  Part of me worried that I was overstating the extent of the bombing. But you could hear the bombing from the capital. Kate Webb congratulated me, saying the article was strong.

  Decades later, the secret government data on the bombing was made public, and the analysis showed the uptick began in March 1973. “During [July] an incredible 51,900 tons of bombs were dropped or eleven percent of the total of all bombs dropped on Cambodia during the ten years recorded.”13

  Those cold figures don’t begin to describe the horror that enveloped Cambodia, once the focus of the war moved from the ground to the air. Bombing was a danger most Cambodians could not comprehend. Deadly fire bolts from the sky, with no discernible earthly origins, could only be explained by texts from their Buddhist faith, the clash of demons and gods. Fighter jets high in the air piloted by foreign men dropping bombs were as fantastic in their world as Garuda, the magical eagle-like bird that carries Vishnu, the Hindu-Buddhist god, across the heavens. Their fear was contagious. Their lives were ruined.

  Phnom Penh became crowded with foreign journalists. Cambodia was the new front line. By April 1973, I was writing stories of the city under siege, with all highways and the Mekong River blocked by the Khmer Rouge and supplies of food and gasoline dwindling. Black-market prices of rice doubled in a week. The dry season heat was intolerable—it was like living under a sunlamp. I interviewed captains of the few tankers and cargo ships that successfully ran the blockade on the Mekong. Foreign famili
es who were able to were leaving Cambodia.

  Some days I was filled with resolve and excitement that I was reporting the story and giving voice to Cambodians. Other days I was near suicidal with the enormity of the destruction and feelings of loss that I couldn’t describe. I stopped believing reporters who said they could push their emotions aside.

  What saved me was the relentless pace of the news. Overwhelmed and understaffed, the Washington Post hired me in May as their Cambodia stringer. Lee Lescaze, the foreign editor, made it official in a letter, where he suggested I not overestimate my good fortune. “Our rates are $7.00 per hundred words and, I am afraid, no Post stringer grows rich writing for us. However, you will find, I hope, that we edit and display your stories intelligently.”14

  That was all true. In order to make a living and squirrel away savings, I also was the stringer for Newsweek magazine and NBC radio.

  Many evenings I went to the military briefings, had a gin and tonic with the other journalists, and returned to work in my room at the Hotel Royale, now renamed Hotel le Phnom. I did not need to dine out with colleagues and was happy to hide in my room. One night in July, a knock on my door was followed by a soft, smoky voice saying: “Beth—open the door—it’s Kate.”

  AFTER THE PUBLICATION of her book On the Other Side, Kate Webb’s byline had almost disappeared. She wrote one major article predicting that Cambodia would be left out of any peace accord: “perhaps because the big powers are willing to let the usually-forgotten Cambodia fall whichever way it falls.”15

  She had been falling apart, personally, laid low by the accumulation of all she had endured. By her own account, she had become “a paralytic drunk” who had to be scraped off the ladies’ room floor. “I suppose the medics would call it battle fatigue, whatever it was I was pretty worn out.” In later years it would be called a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder.16

  She took time off, traveling to western United States for “a couple of good weeks gentling, or idling my motors around Big Sur.”17

  UPI relocated her to Hong Kong with the hope that her crippling obsession with Cambodia and Vietnam would fade. It didn’t work. Her life and her thoughts were “still very much entangled with Indochina.” Until the knock at my door, I hadn’t seen her since she met me at the airport as I was on my way to my new life as a war reporter.

  “Kate!” I gave her a hug and asked her to wait while I finished a letter to my mother. She said, bleakly: “At least you have a mother to write to.” I stopped typing, turned off the weak 1960s desk lamp, and pulled out a precious bottle of Scotch whiskey. Kate then told me in her cautious mumble the story of the car crash that killed her parents while she was at university. She was off her stride—she hadn’t been around bombing for months and was skittish.

  I pulled my two chairs onto the room’s balcony, next to the large ceramic pots planted with vines. Mine was the smallest room in the hotel, but the twenty-foot ceiling gave an illusion of grandeur, and from the balcony I had a view of sunsets and the stars. It was my bastion. Kate put her feet on the railing and smiled. She loved the crumbling hotel and the city, even or maybe especially at wartime.

  After finishing the Scotch, we slipped away to Café le Paradis for Chinese noodles. The Chinese quarter was quiet, the red- and yellow-tiled sidewalks slippery from evening showers. We were greeted with a smile and a request to order immediately. The owner wanted to close early. Kate asked whether the war would end after the bombing, and I said I thought it would go on and be more miserable. Since the Vietnamese communists had withdrawn to their own country, the atrocities on both sides had become even more extreme. The government soldiers displayed the heads of Khmer Rouge soldiers on pikes, while the Khmer Rouge disemboweled the corpses of government soldiers. The Khmer Rouge had told the French archaeologist Bernard-Philippe Groslier he could no longer maintain the temples of Angkor. Now that they were winning, neither Sihanouk nor the Khmer Rouge were willing to even talk to Lon Nol.

  I knew better than to discuss my personal matters with Kate. I’d learned which subjects would set off her temper or her melancholy. One was women’s liberation. I had come directly from university where I was a feminist who volunteered at a phone bank to help women find birth control, and I had joined a divorce cooperative when my brief marriage had fallen apart. She considered women with my views part of the problem, not the solution. And I considered her willfully blind to the obstacles women faced. So we stuck to the easy subject of whether Cambodia would be destroyed by the war.

  “Doucement en peu ici la,” the owner said, suggesting not only that we quiet down but also leave so he could close up.

  The next day, Webb and I drove south, deep into Takeo Province. The American bombing was the biggest story of the war, and Webb had to survey the bomb craters. From a distance, craters looked like polka dots. Webb jumped into one and used the toe-to-heel measuring system to determine whether a B-52 had dropped the ordnance. Every detail was news that summer as Congress passed legislation to force President Nixon to end the air war in Cambodia. Nixon vetoed the bill, saying continued pressure was necessary since Kissinger was at a delicate stage of negotiating for peace in Cambodia, which was a lie. There were no negotiations.

  Our articles from the front line would be scrutinized carefully, so we found witnesses to the bombing and fighting in the tired cavalcade of refugees on the road back to Phnom Penh. Cheng Hem, a middle-aged farmer, told me her home was bombed when government soldiers camped nearby and the Khmer Rouge came up behind them. “I saw a flame—a big flame—and my whole body shook. Houses were burning, and so was mine. My 12-year old daughter was inside.”18

  Hem pulled her dusty krama scarf across her face and turned away.

  Kate and I knew the displaced would be at a loss when they arrived in the capital. Phnom Penh was overwhelmed by the 346,000 new refugees who had arrived since the bombing began. There was no room for them in the city, which in peacetime was home to just half a million people. The new camps were already full. These country people would be robbed by soldiers manning checkpoints on the highway and once in the city would be pushed to fetid holding areas near the river where they would live in squalor, cutting down trees along the city’s boulevards to use for firewood and drawing their drinking water from the Mekong where they also bathed. They were also in danger of going hungry. US food aid meant for them was sold under the table to private merchants who hoarded the grain and then resold it for profit. The situation was a catastrophe.

  Kate took me to a warehouse in Phnom Penh where she bought a 20-kilogram sack of rice, which Mr. Khauv from the UPI office then delivered anonymously to the people we had interviewed. It was an honest way to get around the rule forbidding journalists to pay for interviews.

  On her last night before returning to Hong Kong, we had a couscous dinner at La Taverne opposite the PTT in the post office square with half a dozen other journalists who wanted to hear Kate’s war stories. She obliged and for two hours enthralled the table. The next day she was waiting for her flight out of Pochentong Airport when Kishore Mahbubani, the young head of the Singapore mission, saw she was carrying a book he had lent her—The ABC of Relativity by Bertrand Russell. He gave her a friendly wave and asked for his book. She smiled, waved back, and boarded her plane. She kept the Bertrand Russell.

  Kishore did not let me forget that my friend Kate had walked off with his favorite philosophy book.19

  Kate also took with her what little sense of female camraderie I had. I felt very dreary after she left. Although I had become accustomed to being without a close friend, her visit had reminded me how lonely I was.

  I couldn’t know then that I would never see Kate again.

  BY THE SUMMER of 1973, Nixon had become preoccupied with the congressional Watergate hearings and his fear that they were heading toward his possible impeachment. Wanting to avoid a separate fight over the bombing of Cambodia, he reached a compromise with Congress and agreed to end the American bombing on Augu
st 15, 1973.

  The Washington Post showcased the end of the bombing with three articles. David Greenway came from Hong Kong to write the main story from Phnom Penh about the strategic shift, which could determine the fate of Cambodia.20 Tom Lippman flew from Saigon to the Korat Air Base in Thailand to report the last American plane to bomb Cambodia, which put an end to active American military involvement in the wider Vietnam War. The pilot of that plane played “Turkey in the Straw” on his harmonica.21 I wrote from Battambang, the elegant Cambodian river city near Thailand that, like border towns in other wars, offered a quick exit for wealthier Cambodians, dissidents, and artists when the time came.22

  Despite everyone’s fears, Phnom Penh was still standing after August 15. The Khmer Rouge retreated, and I took my sole vacation from the war. I flew to Kashmir to be with Peter Gill, a British journalist who lived in India and whom I had met when he covered the bombing. The nights on Dal Lake in Srinagar were so quiet my ears vibrated. I read English-language novels and feasted on pulao and lamb curries. It was a relief to have a romantic escape with a kind and intelligent boyfriend, but after ten days I felt the same compulsive pull that had called Cathy Leroy and Kate Webb: I couldn’t stand to be away from the war.

  Nothing in my short life had ever mattered as much as witnessing Cambodia’s war as a reporter. Every part of every day had meaning. I had never felt more involved, more alive, or more vulnerable. I had crossed a line and made a commitment to Cambodia that would be costly.