The Death and Life of Dith Pran
Sydney H. Schanberg
Copyright
The Death and Life of Dith Pran
Copyright © 1980, 1985, 2013 by Sydney H. Schanberg
Cover art, special contents, and Electronic Edition © 2013 by RosettaBooks LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cover jacket design by Terrence Tymon
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795334733
To my children, Jessica and Rebecca
and to Elizabeth
and to Bailey Ruth
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
The Death and Life of Dith Pran
Foreword
The story of Cambodia is a universal one—it is not a new thing that small countries and vulnerable peoples get abused by the large and powerful. But the awfulness of what happened in Cambodia should not be allowed to blur into a historical generality. This is why I am glad that this account, originally published as a long magazine article in The New York Times, is now a book. Books fade more slowly than newspaper pages.
It appears here as it was written, in 1980. Events since then have altered the details of Cambodia’s existence, but the basic fact of life for these people has remained unchanged. The Cambodians are still everyone’s pawns and are still suffering terribly.
It is my hope that this chronicle of the relationship and experiences of the two of us—an American and a Cambodian brought together by a war—will help provide a glimpse at this history.
Sydney H. Schanberg
Introduction
On that magical day in October, 1979 that Dith Pran and I reunited in that refugee camp in Thailand—after his nearly five years of captivity in Cambodia under the genocidal Khmer Rouge—we walked hand-in-hand around the compound in a daze, trying to understand our miracle.
Pran was moving on wobbly, scarred legs and some of his teeth were broken. He looked wan and seemed shrunken, the result of beatings and starvation. He also was suffering from malaria—but we didn’t know that until we landed in San Francisco and got him into a hospital. But as weak as he was on our walks through the camp, he began to brighten up and talk in an excited voice about the stories we should do right now about new developments in Cambodia. I talked him out of it, reminding him of the importance of first getting well and rediscovering his family, and preparing to meet all the people at The New York Times who wanted to applaud him. That made him smile. But it also showed that he was the same Pran, the true reporter whose untold stories were bursting inside him.
So, with the help of our embassy in Bangkok, we took a flight to San Francisco, where his wife Meoun and their four children had resettled in 1975 after their helicopter evacuation with the American Embassy as the Khmer Rouge closed in on the capital.
Pran’s escape from Cambodia had become world news. The New York Times moved into high gear to welcome him and cover the costs, just as they had done for his family. He now had many new friends to meet.
Pran quickly recovered his health and his old self, bouncy and eager to start his new life. In New York, The Times gave him training in news photography and he soon joined the paper’s photo staff. He also became immersed in spreading the story of Cambodia in America and around the world.
My next challenge was to write the story of Pran’s ordeal—a suggestion made by Arthur Gelb, a senior editor known for his creativity. The title was “The Death and Life of Dith Pran,” and it was the cover story of the paper’s Sunday Magazine on January 20, 1980. It was a long piece and later became a hardcover book and now it’s the RosettaBooks e-book you are reading.
Within a few years, our story became a feature film, directed by Roland Joffe and produced by David Puttnam. Our agreement with the film company was to take no liberties for the sake of the movie, but to tell our story as it had happened. “The Killing Fields,” starring Sam Waterston as myself, and the late Haing S. Ngor, also a Cambodian survivor, as Pran, premiered in 1984 and won three Oscars the following year.
Pran continued his work as a photographer at The New York Times. He became an American citizen in 1986. He and coauthor Kim DePaul compiled a book entitled Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs of Survivors, published in 1997 by the Yale University Press. At the United Nations, he was appointed Good Will Ambassador for refugees. He campaigned for a Cambodia war crimes trial. In his spare time, he gave lectures. Saying he was a disciple of Elie Wiesel, he funded the not-for-profit Dith Pran Holocaust Project. Pran told one interviewer: “Part of my life is saving life. I don’t consider myself a politician or a hero. I’m a messenger. If Cambodia is to survive she needs many voices.” His four grown children and seven grandchildren now keep these efforts alive.
The arc of my own life also changed considerably. At the end of 1985 I left The New York Times because its management was uncomfortable with my investigations of New York City’s power elite. I was immediately offered an Op-Ed column at New York Newsday, where investigative reporting was more welcome and I remained there for a decade. During those years, my marriage ended, my daughters Jessica and Rebecca went off to college and on to their own lives. I made return trips to Cambodia in 1989 and 1997 and wrote long pieces, one for Vanity Fair magazine. At Newsday, I met Jane Freiman, the paper’s restaurant critic, and we married shortly before the paper closed down in 1995. I then explored online journalism at the short-lived apbnews.com before moving over to The Village Voice to work for Don Forst, my editor from Newsday. At The Voice, I wrote government stories and press criticism and about the infamous Iraq War. I think that, like Pran, I am a survivor, and I believe I am a lucky man.
During those years, I saw Pran from time to time and he was thriving. Though the genocide he witnessed was in his mind much of the time, and he initially had nightmares about his years under the brutal Khmer Rouge, he was not gloomy. He was always smiling and making people laugh. When I hung out with him, my mood improved.
In the summer of 2007, when we saw Pran at the wedding of his eldest son Titony, in Virginia, he complained about pain he was having in his stomach. By January 2008, when we visited him at home in New Jersey, he was very sick. It was pancreatic cancer and it was in the late stages. Surgery was not an option. The staff at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Jersey was superior, but there was no remedy.
Pran’s family hurried to his side, including the grandchildren. Everyone was sad. But Pran wouldn’t stand for a solemn atmosphere. Even when he was in bed, having pain, the talk was not dark.
Every day, his fellow photographers and other friends from The Times, and even Sam Waterston, came to visit Pran. My wife Jane and I came to the hospital every other day. Everyone was taking pictures of Pran with the visitors.
Pran had said several times at the hospital that he was not afraid of dying. I believed him. He was a true Buddhist, always doing good deeds for those in need. All through the war he had done things for people who were hurting. He made me a better person and a better journalist.
During the last week of his life, at his hospital bedside, I asked Pran, in a light moment, “how can we communicate once you’re gone”? He became serious and thought about it for a few minutes, and then he said in a positive tone: “I’ll send you my dreams.” Then it was my turn: “And I’ll send you mine.” He died in the hours before dawn on March 30, 2008. He was 65.
Some of his ashes were scattered in New York Harbor, next to the Sta
tue of Liberty, and the remainder are at rest at Chestnut Grove Cemetery in Herndon, Virginia alongside a memorial his family erected. He did not live long enough to testify before the Cambodia War Crimes Tribunal, sponsored by the United Nations, but I was able to do that for both of us in June 2013. He was a great man and he was my brother. I miss him all the time.
Sydney H. Schanberg
New Paltz, New York, July 2013
The Death and Life of Dith Pran
I began the search for my friend Dith Pran in April 1975. Unable to protect him when the Khmer Rouge troops ordered Cambodians to evacuate their cities, I had watched him disappear into the interior of Cambodia, which was to become a death camp for millions. Dith Pran had saved my life the day of the occupation, and the shadow of my failure to keep him safe—to do what he had done for me—was to follow me for four and a half years.
Then, on October 3, 1979, Dith Pran crossed the border to Thailand and freedom. This is a story of war and friendship, of the anguish of a ruined country, and of one man’s will to live.
In July 1975—a few months after Pran and I had been forced apart on April 20—an American diplomat who had known Pran wrote me a consoling letter. The diplomat, who had served in Phnom Penh, knew the odds of anyone emerging safely from a country that was being transformed into a society of terror and purges and “killing fields.” But he wrote: “Pran, I believe, is a survivor—in the Darwinian sense—and I think it only a matter of time before he seizes an available opportunity to slip across the border.”
Pran is indeed a survivor. When he slipped across the border into Thailand, he was very thin, his teeth were rotting, and his hands shook from malnutrition—but he had not succumbed.
Pran’s strength is returning and he wants the story told of what has happened, and is still happening, to his people. He wants to talk about the unthinkable statistic that Cambodia has become: an estimated two million or more people, out of a population of seven million in 1975, have been massacred or have died of starvation or disease.
***
I met Pran for the first time in 1972, two years after the war between the Khmer Rouge and the American-supported Lon Nol government had begun. I went to Cambodia that year after several months of helping cover a major offensive by Hanoi in South Vietnam for The New York Times. For some time, Pran had worked with Craig Whitney, our Saigon bureau chief, as his assistant on his occasional trips to Phnom Penh. When my plane touched down at Pochentong Airport on that September day, Pran had received my cable and was there to meet me.
His notebook was full of the things that had been happening since The Times’s last visit. A spacious suite with balcony was waiting for me at the Hotel Le Phnom, my press card and cable-filing permission had already been arranged for, and he had a list of valuable suggestions about what I should see and whom I should talk to. I felt immediately easy with him.
It is difficult to describe how a friendship grows, for it often grows from seemingly contradictory roots—mutual needs, overlapping dependencies, intense shared experiences, and even the inequality of status, with one serving the other.
Our bond grew in all these ways. Other reporters and television crews also vied for Pran’s services, but more and more he politely turned them down and worked only for me. By the middle of 1973, his value to the paper now apparent, the foreign desk, at my urging, took Pran on as an official stringer with a monthly retainer. This took him completely out of circulation for other journalists, some of whom expressed their disappointment openly.
Pran and I realized early on that our ideas about the war were much the same. We both cared little about local or international politics or about military strategy. I had been drawn to the story by my perception of Cambodia as a nation pushed into the war by other powers, not in control of its destiny, being used callously as battle fodder, its agonies largely ignored as the world focused its attention on neighboring Vietnam. But what propelled both of us was the human impact—the ten-year-old orphans in uniforms, carrying rifles almost as tall as themselves; the amputees lying traumatized in filthy, overcrowded hospitals; the skeletal infants rasping and spitting as they died while you watched in the all-too-few malnutrition clinics; and the sleepless, unpaid soldiers taking heavy fire at the front lines, depending on the “magic” amulets they wore around their necks while their generals took siestas after long lunches several miles behind the fighting. And then, always, the refugees. While White House policy-makers were recommending only a few million dollars for relief aid, as compared with somewhere around one billion dollars in military aid, on the ground that there was really no major refugee problem in Cambodia, Pran was taking me to the jammed and underfed refugee camps and to the dirt roads not far from Phnom Penh where villagers were streaming away from the fighting, leaving their homes and rice fields behind.
We were not always depressed by the war, however, because the opposite side of depression is exhilaration—the highs of staying alive and of getting big stories. And he and I covered many big stories. Like the time in 1973 when an American B-52 bomber, through an error by the crew in activating its computerized homing system, dropped twenty or more tons of bombs on the heavily populated Mekong town of Neak Luong, thirty-eight miles southeast of Phnom Penh. About 150 people were killed and more than 250 wounded. The mortified American Embassy played down the destruction (“I saw one stick of bombs through the town,” said the air attaché, “but it was no great disaster”) and then tried to keep reporters from getting there. They succeeded the first day, barring us from helicopters and river patrol boats, but on the second, Pran, his competitiveness boiling as keenly as mine, managed, through bribes and cajoling, to sneak us aboard a patrol boat. We brought back the first full story of the tragedy.
But first we were put under house arrest for one night by the military in Neak Luong—we always believed the orders came from the Americans. We spent the night in a house with some of the survivors. They stayed up all night, listening for the sound of airplanes, in dread that another “friendly” plane would rain death on them again.
On our way back up the river, on another patrol boat, the crew was less interested in getting us back to Phnom Penh in time to file before the cable office shut down for the night than in scouring the riverbanks for Communist machine-gun and rocket nests. Every time they thought they spotted something—be it driftwood or the real thing—they turned the craft toward the shore and opened up with their .50-caliber machine gun.
We were going to be too late if this continued, so Pran told them—on my frantic instructions—that he would double the bribes if only they would ignore their military targets and move at full speed to Phnom Penh. They understood our motives not at all—I’m sure they regarded me as deranged—but their official salary was a pittance, and they did as they were asked.
Days and nights spent like this were what drew Pran and me together.
***
I pause here to say that this chronicle, of all the stories I have written as a journalist, has become the hardest for me to pull out of my insides. To describe a relationship such as Pran’s and mine demands candor and frankness about self, not romantic memories. I feel exposed and vulnerable. I also wonder nervously what he will think when he reads this. As I write, there is a tension pain under my right shoulder blade, the same pain I felt in April 1975, in the final days before the fall of Phnom Penh, after the American Embassy had been evacuated. We ran chaotically around the city and its perimeter every day, trying to piece together what was happening and how close the Communists were. Our nights were spent at the cable office—I typed while Pran urged the Teletype operators to keep going and push the copy out. Our two drivers, Hea and Sarun, were there, too, bringing me wet washcloths and glasses of weak tea to keep me awake. The city’s power was off and there was no air-conditioning. When I would begin to slump, Sarun would bring me back by rubbing my shoulders and pulling on my ears, a traditional Cambodian massage.
Among the papers strewn about me now
is a picture of Sarun, shirtless and sweating, pulling on my ears. It is not easy for me to look at that picture. Sarun is dead now, killed in 1977 when the Khmer Rouge, for some unknown reason, decided to execute all the men in his village. Sarun’s wife later met Pran in Siem Reap province and told him that Sarun had cried out horribly, pleading for mercy as they dragged him off, his hands bound tightly behind him.
My mind searches for happier times. I remember our visit to Battambang in 1974, when, over a tasty fish dinner, Pran and I smoked pot, he for the first time, and then went gamboling through the unlighted streets of the town, astonishing soldiers at checkpoints as we bayed at the moon. I remember the time in late 1973 when, frayed and needing a breather, we flew to the seaport resort of Kompong Som and played on the beaches for three days. I can see Pran in the water, giggling as he groped among the rocks, looking for the sweet crabs that lived in abundance there.
But as I wander mentally over the landscape of those war years, starker memories swarm, disjointed, out of sequence, clamoring for precedence.
In 1973, Thomas O. Enders, an arrogant protégé of Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, became acting ambassador in Phnom Penh, taking over from Emory Swank, who had refused to supervise the heavy American bombing, and who was relegated by Kissinger to a State Department dustbin because he no longer had any stomach for this futile war. Enders, who made no secret of the low regard in which he held the Cambodians for their inability to defeat the Communist army, had no such reservations. According to participants, he ran the morning bombing meetings at the embassy, where targets were chosen for the daily carpet bombing by the giant B-52s, with spirit and relish.
Enders also became known around Phnom Penh for remarks that some listeners considered openly callous and racist. He would ask, rhetorically, at cocktail parties, diplomatic dinners, and press briefings why the Cambodians did not seem to care as much about human life as we Westerners. If they did care, he posited, they would rise up in anger over the terrorist rocket attacks that were killing innocent victims daily in the capital, and march out into the countryside to smite the Communist army.
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