You Don't Belong Here

by Elizabeth Becker

  MEY KOMPHOT, A wise banker and good friend, was reading a Khmer-language paperback with a striking cover: a drawing of Cambodia shaped like a heart broken by the coursing Mekong River. The hotel’s desk clerk was reading it, too, and so were Cambodian bureaucrats, teachers, politicians, and one of the fruit sellers at the Central Market. It was so popular I thought it had to be an escapist novel. Instead, it was a fiercely dark exposé of the Khmer Rouge.

  Regrets for the Khmer Soul (in Khmer, Sranaoh Pralung Khmer) was the only firsthand account of the Khmer Rouge written during the war. The author was Ith Sarin, a school inspector who had grown alarmed by the corruption and incompetence of the Lon Nol government and had defected to the Khmer Rouge.23 When he got to know the mysterious Cambodian communists, how they operated and what they hoped to accomplish, Sarin realized they were an existential danger to his country. He escaped and wrote the book to urge his fellow citizens to change their ways and fight back, to “bring light to some of the secrecy of the Khmer problems and to expose the great danger from the communists inside the country.”

  His testimony was lifesaving. The Khmer Rouge were highly secretive and refused to allow foreign reporters into their zones. Any reporter who had tried had been killed, one of the reasons the death rate among journalists in Cambodia was so high. Prince Sihanouk frequently warned journalists he could not assure their security should they attempt to visit the Khmer Rouge zones.

  This book helped answer the question: Who were the Khmer Rouge? They were winning the war, yet we foreign reporters had yet to even publish the name of their leader or describe their organization or their vision for a communist Cambodia.

  I was working on this story with Ishiyama Koki, the Kyodo news correspondent and one of my closest colleagues. Koki was my shield, a colleague who was happily married and treated me like a friend and nothing more. He had translated several of George Orwell’s books into Japanese and considered Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia a blueprint for analyzing Cambodia’s war. We paid his assistant to translate Regrets of the Khmer Soul into English.

  Sarin’s account was thorough. On the positive side, farmers saw the Khmer Rouge as “very tough and strong in nature,” providing basic services like building dams, dikes, ponds, and houses with a “modest and simple” demeanor. Their rule was highly organized and required communal living, which was often resented.

  But the Khmer Rouge also exhibited an “iron discipline.” They hid their communist party, calling it the organization; they demanded strict adherence and ruled by fear. The Khmer Rouge cultivated that fear by saying their organization was omnipotent and “has as many eyes as a pineapple and cannot make mistakes.”

  Sarin also demolished the belief that the Khmer Rouge were loyal allies of the North Vietnamese or anyone else. At meetings he attended, the Khmer Rouge “encouraged hatred” of North Vietnam and Prince Sihanouk. The farmers were heartbroken at the insults against the prince. All of this led to Sarin’s change of heart and his escape back to Phnom Penh.

  The Lon Nol government eventually banned the book and jailed Sarin. But Regrets remained in circulation, passed from hand to hand.

  I spent weeks that turned into months chasing down confirmations and additional information about the Khmer Rouge. The most difficult aspect of the task was confirming that Saloth Sar was the secret leader of the Khmer Rouge. He would be known later as Pol Pot.

  As this research was underway, Ishiyama Koki was ordered back to Tokyo in late October. Our Khmer language class, which included the Japanese photographers Ichinose Taizo and Mabuchi Naoki and me, held a going-away party for him. We drank tea and gave Koki a piece of antique silk. He surprised us with gifts. Mine was a new automatic Japanese camera that he called Beth’s baka-chong, or idiot camera.

  A few weeks after Koki left, Taizo disappeared while trying to photograph the Khmer Rouge at the temples of Angkor. We were stunned and sickened. His death was confirmed several months later.

  Finally, in March 1974, “Who Are the Khmer Rouge?” was published in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook section. Quoting liberally from Sarin’s book, I described the Khmer Rouge organization and its leaders, why they refused to negotiate for peace, and why they were in a position to win the war.24

  The reaction was awful. The CIA at the embassy in Phnom Penh called it black propaganda because I described a split between the Vietnamese and Cambodian communists. Officials in other embassies called it CIA propaganda because I was so critical of the Khmer Rouge. My journalist colleagues ignored it as too hypothetical since I hadn’t interviewed the Khmer Rouge myself.

  Three days later, I followed up with a front-page article in the Washington Post that described in detail how an American military attaché was illegally advising the Cambodian army. US Army Maj. Lawrence W. Ondecker had taken command of the Cambodian troops in the besieged riverport of Kampot, eighty miles south of Phnom Penh during a Khmer Rouge offensive. He ordered a counterattack that saved the garrison and many lives, including mine.25 I was standing near Ondecker and taking notes through the whole ordeal, the only journalist foolish enough to have traveled by helicopter to report on this critical battle. Members of Congress, including two dozen senators, demanded an investigation since “Congress had passed a law banning direct American U.S. military involvement in Indochina.”26 Ondecker was removed, and the US embassy prohibited the staff from speaking to me unless accompanied by the press officer. When the newly arrived US ambassador John Gunther Dean gave his first press conference in Phnom Penh, he went out of his way to humiliate me.

  Then, two days after those articles appeared, my father died in Seattle. I had made an emergency trip to see him in January, using up my savings to buy the airplane ticket to spend two weeks with him while he was alive. When we said good-bye, he promised he would make it through his third open-heart surgery. When I received the cable confirming that he hadn’t made it, I couldn’t go home so I went to the rocky beaches off Vung Tau, Vietnam, for the weekend. It was one of the few peaceful places left in Indochina.

  THE FOREIGN EDITOR of Kyodo News Service was waiting for me one night before dinner. It was April, and he had flown from Tokyo to Phnom Penh with bad news. Koki had lied about his transfer back to Japan. He had not gone home. Instead, he had crossed over to the Khmer Rouge zone months ago, about the same time as Taizo, and then disappeared. The editor knew I was a close colleague and asked if I could help find him. I felt walls closing in. I was angry with Koki for trusting the Khmer Rouge and angry at Tokyo for waiting so long before making his disappearance public so that we could all look for him.

  Methodically, I talked to the intelligence officers at various embassies, French planters, and priests, as well as Cambodian officials and businessmen; all were discouraging.

  That Sunday I attended mass at the cathedral, as I often did, and sat in the back pew. It was the only sanctuary where I was able to grieve for my father, Koki, and the country that was being destroyed by war.

  My community of journalist friends was disappearing. James Fenton, the precocious British poet who had become my buddy after Koki left, was going back to London for the summer. The most literate foreigner in the city, Fenton wrote news articles for the New Statesman that read like polished essays. His poems—the few he showed me—were crystalline. He saw everything and was very funny. He had a tailor sew matching jeans for us out of the USAID flour sacks. Around Phnom Penh, he fit in easily, befriending simple shopkeepers and top diplomats alike. Renji Sathiah, the Malaysian charge d’affairs, threw him a farewell party in May, where we were required to wear white in honor of James’s love for his swinging-London white suit.

  Françoise Demulder, the French photographer who had moved to Phnom Penh right after the bombing ended, was one of my only journalist friends still living in Cambodia. She had arrived with Yves Billy, a photographer and her boyfriend since her teens. A model in Paris, she had little to do in Cambodia, so she followed Yves to the battlefield and eventually started taking photogr
aphs herself. When she turned professional, her photographs outsold Yves’s and their relationship fell apart.

  Françoise shied away from the press crowd and the daily briefings. We routinely met at the home of the French diplomat Louis Bardollet, who fed us good meals, played the piano, and took us waterskiing on the Mekong when the war permitted. She felt protected in the French community and had no intention of leaving.

  The situation with the resident male press corps was getting rough, and some of their arguments were physical. Reporters openly brought prostitutes to the hotel and press parties; the young Cambodian women resembled others I had interviewed in brothels after being sold by their destitute families. Steve Heder, the American freelancer who became an academic, had recently married a Cambodian woman and was staying in Phnom Penh. He saw the atmosphere among journalists become one of “anything goes. The more you went off the rails, the better. It was cool—whoring, drinking, drugs. I didn’t understand it then as a right or wrong thing—just crazy.”27

  The behavior of the press corps was a reflection of the disintegration of Cambodia. Clinics treated children wrapped in dirty bandages with nothing more than aspirin in sugar water. Sadism abounded. A five-year-old boy who sold wine bottles full of a gasoline and oil mixture for motorcyclists was burned alive outside the Central Market when a passerby threw a flaming towel at his merchandise.

  After the 1974 dry season offensive, Phnom Penh was no longer safe. The Khmer Rouge regularly shelled the city. A group of us covering an attack heard cries from a burning building and carried out the wounded one night—an improvised, desperate rescue that was caught on film. The next day I received a cable from my top boss at the Washington Post saying: “No More Florence Nightingales. Will not repeat not pay hospital.”

  Even the French ordered all of their nonessentials out: men and any wives still in the country.

  The smell of death was not restricted to battlefields. In refugee camps, the overcrowded hospitals, and the city streets, I grew accustomed to the stench of blood, urine, and decay. The rational part of me knew there was no good end. I believed my own reporting. It was clear that soon I had to leave, and I wrote my family that if I waited until the end I would be carried out in a straitjacket or a body bag.

  It still took months before I could bring myself to leave this country of horrors that seemed so beautiful to me. One of my last articles was a tribute to the Cambodian journalists who were at the core of the reporting of the war. From my first weeks they had supported me and become my friends. Most had never seen their name in print until they appeared in my article called “Cambodia’s Hero-Journalists.”

  After nearly two years, I left in August 1974, feeling I was abandoning the country. I’m sure Kate Webb felt the same when UPI told her to move to Hong Kong in 1972. What I could barely comprehend was how Kate had survived nearly six years of the war and still lobbied to return to cover the end.

  FRANCES FITZGERALD PUBLISHED a three-part series on the Viet Cong about the same time my article on the Khmer Rouge appeared. Rather than move on to another subject, FitzGerald had continued watching Vietnam and had returned to report on the other side. In theory, reporters were permitted to cross into Viet Cong territory after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, but the Saigon government considered such visits illegal. FitzGerald walked across the invisible border without any invitation and with no idea what she would find. She entered near Can Tho in the Delta, an area she knew well.

  She and David Greenway of the Washington Post walked across a flat plain of unkempt wild grasses and bamboo toward a hamlet of small clay homes that led to bunkers deep underground: the “liberated zone” of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG), formerly known as the Viet Cong. Young girls guided the journalists to the edge of a tree line where PRG soldiers appeared. By accident, the two Americans had walked into a zone at the edge of a military base.

  “Strangely,” FitzGerald said, “I never felt in danger.”

  It was still an active war zone: the promised cease-fire had never held. Once US troops withdrew in exchange for the release of American prisoners, all bets were off. “The accords did not settle the central question over which the war had been fought: the question of who controlled South Vietnam,” FitzGerald wrote in the Atlantic Monthly.28

  Once inside the VC zone, the top political officer shook their hands. “We welcome you and it does not matter if you are journalists or CIA because we have won the war.”

  Over meals of rice, fish, and tea, the political officers spent hours explaining why they believed they were winning the war, that the American withdrawal was an admission of defeat and a victory for them. Their lectures concluded with a description of peace under the communists, “where everyone had a house and enough clothes and no one took bribes.” At times these officials reminded FitzGerald of the American colonels who had given military briefings back in Saigon.29

  She made one more trip to the other side and pretended to have been captured by the PRG to avoid any trouble with the Saigon authorities.

  There, she assessed the varying strengths of the two sides. North Vietnam and the PRG controlled two-thirds of the territory of South Vietnam, while the Saigon government controlled the vast majority of the population. The ARVN had grown to one million soldiers, and the United States had resupplied Saigon with massive military shipments before the peace accord was signed.30

  She summed up the state of what she called the “cease-fire war” in the New York Times in early 1974. Since peace had been declared, fifty thousand troops had been killed, the same annual rate of casualties since 1965, except none were American. For the first time in twelve years, there was no bombing of North Vietnam. The United States still paid $3 billion or 80 percent of South Vietnam’s budget. China and the Soviet Union still supplied North Vietnam. President Nixon had held historic summits in Peking and Moscow to begin a thaw in the Cold War, negating much of the earlier ideological motivation for fighting the war.

  “Mr. Nixon’s measures have not insured a stable situation,” Frankie concluded. The cease-fire “stalemate” was artificial and would require American intervention to continue. She hoped the American public wouldn’t allow the US to resume fighting. The price was already too high, she wrote, even higher than the cost of President Johnson’s war.31

  But it would not be Nixon’s war for long. President Richard M. Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, rather than face impeachment over the Watergate scandal.

  FRANKIE FITZGERALD SPENT Christmas 1974 in Hanoi and stayed on through the New Year of 1975, becoming one of the very few journalists who reported from all three sides of the war.

  North Vietnam surprised her, for its unexpected similarities to the South and its contrasts. In the countryside, the poverty and lack of development was a shock. It seemed nearly feudal. She wrote that the landscape hadn’t change since the “the nineteen-twenties or the seventeen-twenties.”

  In Hanoi, the surprise was the similarities. The city looked like a French provincial town, although ill kempt, just as Saigon had been before the American buildup. On Christmas Eve, she walked to the old French cathedral, the night air scented with orchids, passed throngs of young Vietnamese walking around the square in an old-fashioned paseo, and entered the church that, like in Saigon, was “filled to overflowing even at ten o’clock for the midnight mass.” Children slept in the aisles.

  Her hotel, the once grand Metropole, was the dilapidated cousin of the Continental in Saigon, down to the off-yellow paint and the bathtubs that had lost much of their enamel. Renamed the Thong Nhat, or Reunification, the Hanoi hotel’s public spaces were gloomy. Guests invited one another to their rooms for drinks. Outside, the sidewalks were filled with pedestrians and bicyclists, as lively a street scene as in Saigon, but the people of the North were wearing “green military jackets and pith helmets… a monochrome procession.”32

  FitzGerald’s twenty-three-page New Yorker article on her journey to North Vietnam describ
ed the real-life conditions and aspirations, the humor and the subterfuge. The often-rote propaganda, she wrote, proceeded “like some ideological freight train over all the old tracks, from the independence of North Vietnamese policy to American imperialism in the South.”

  The most important propaganda message, “indeed the only one,” was the familiar statement of Ho Chi Minh that “there is nothing more precious than freedom and independence.”

  Missing during the three-week visit was any meeting with the military. The North Vietnamese denied FitzGerald any military briefings. “They steered us away from military affairs (we met no high military officers, and, doubtless because of all the convoys on the roads, we did not travel south).”

  FitzGerald left Hanoi as the North Vietnamese launched their final offensive, although she only learned the details after she returned to New York on January 11.

  Phuoc Binh, the capital of Phuoc Long Province in South Vietnam, fell to a North Vietnamese tank assault on January 7, 1975. It was the first provincial capital to fall to the North since 1972, but the North Vietnamese said nothing to the group that this might become the final offensive of the war.

  The new American president, Gerald Ford, responded to the new offensive by saying the US would not supply air support to South Vietnam during the fighting.

  KATE WEBB WAS stuck in Hong Kong on the UPI desk, reading the wire stories as the North Vietnamese tanks pushed east and then south. The Thieu government in Saigon had expected a dry season offensive but not one aimed at the cities.

  Hanoi was following a strategy of “escalation and improvisation.” The army would proceed south as long as they could defeat the ARVN and pull back when they met stiff resistance. Just before leaving Hanoi to lead his troops in the South, North Vietnamese general Van Tien Dung met with Le Duan and told him he was optimistic that “if we win great victories we might be able to liberate the south this year.”