Pran had heard about Enders’s remarks, but we had not discussed them. Finally, fed up, I asked Pran one day what he would reply to Enders if the diplomat asked him, “Do Khmers care less about the death of their loved ones than other people do?”
Pran lowered his head for several minutes. Then softly he said: “It’s not true. You have seen for yourself the suffering. The only difference, maybe, is that with Cambodians the grief leaves the face quickly, but it goes inside and stays there for a long time.”
In 1975, the Khmer Rouge rockets began falling on the neighborhood where Pran lived with his wife and children. One morning he was late coming to work. He explained that just as he was leaving the house, a rocket crashed into the house of a neighbor. A six-year-old girl was severely wounded. Her stomach was hanging out. Pran raced her to the hospital in his car, her mother screaming all the way. The child did not survive.
Another visit to Neak Luong, in 1975, is also part of the mosaic. By this time, the strategic river port is surrounded by the Khmer Rouge, who are bombarding it with rockets and mortars. Thirty thousand refugees are trapped there. Food is short. The gravely wounded are so numerous and the medivac helicopters so few that some of the victims are asking to be killed quickly rather than be allowed to lie there and die slowly in pain. Pran and I fly in by helicopter on January 14; the meadow where we land is filled with the dead and dying. Every fifteen minutes or so, another shell screams down and another half-dozen or so are killed or wounded. Inside the tiny military infirmary, an eleven-year-old boy has just expired on the blood-slick floor. In the bedlam, no one has time to cover him or even to close his staring eyes.
When we arrive back in Phnom Penh, I am frantic to get my film to Saigon, where it can be radiophotoed to New York. There’s only one more flight today, an American Embassy plane, leaving in half an hour. While I run to the airline terminal building to call the embassy for permission to send film on the plane, I send Pran to the tarmac with the film, in case the plane comes early, so he can try to wheedle it aboard. When I return, having got permission, Pran has disappeared. None of the Americans on the tarmac—military men in civilian clothes responsible for supervising the delivery of United States military supplies to Phnom Penh—will tell me what has happened to him. With five minutes to go before takeoff, I spot Pran waving at me from behind a warehouse a couple hundred yards away. I recover the film from him, just manage to get it on the plane, and then walk back to ask him what in the world happened.
He tells me that an American colonel ordered him off the airport, citing security reasons. Washington contends that it has no advisers here and that the Cambodians are running their own war, yet an American officer orders a Cambodian off a Cambodian airport.
“The Americans are king here now,” Pran says dejectedly. “It’s his land, not mine anymore.”
I ask the embassy for an explanation and for an apology to Pran. We get neither.
Our lives proceeded in this fashion—from one intense experience to another, an unnatural existence by the standards of normal life, but perfectly natural when living inside a continuous crisis. We broke our tension—we had to, for psychic survival, to push away the bloody images—with good food, laughter that was often too loud, and occasionally an evening of carousing and smoking pot, which was plentiful and cheap in the central market. (Pran abstained after his howling at the stars in Battambang.)
My trips to Cambodia from Singapore, where I was based, became more frequent and my stays longer. I was becoming part of the war, and it was placing bad strains on my wife, Janice, and my two young daughters, Jessica and Rebecca, and on my relationships with each of them.
Once, returning to Singapore after a three-month tour in Cambodia, I noticed that Jessica, then only five, was very shy and distant with me. I tried to draw her out, asking if there was something wrong. “No, Daddy,” she said uncomfortably, having difficulty finding the words without offending me, “I love you. But I keep losing you. Just when I’m getting to know you again, I lose you.”
But I kept going back to Phnom Penh; my obsession with the story was filling my life. Pran, too, was hooked, for some of my reasons but also for some very personal ones of his own. He had no background in journalism when the war began, but as his skills improved and his interest in the craft grew, he began to see in journalism a way to reveal his people’s plight.
Born on September 27, 1942, Pran was raised in a middle-class family with three brothers and two sisters in the township of Siem Reap, in the northwestern part of the country, near the famed Angkor temples. His father was a senior public-works official, who supervised the building of roads in the area. Pran went through high school there, learning French in the classroom and English on his own at home. After high school, in 1960, he got a job as an interpreter in Khmer, the Cambodian language, for the United States Military Assistance Group then in Cambodia. When Cambodia broke relations with Washington in 1965, charging that American troops had launched attacks from South Vietnam on Cambodian border villages, the Americans left and Pran got a job as an interpreter for the British film crew that was producing Lord Jim.
After that, he became a receptionist at Cambodia’s best-known tourist hotel, Auberge Royale des Temples, situated just opposite the main entrance to the Angkor complex. Tourism ended with the beginning of the war in 1970, and Pran went to Phnom Penh with his wife, Ser Moeun, and their children to find work as a guide and interpreter for foreign journalists.
As the war dragged on and conditions deteriorated, I drove Pran very hard. I was driven, so I drove him. As always, I pushed him to go a little faster, get a little more done, interview a few more people. When, for example, the cable line out of Phnom Penh would go down, as it did frequently, I would send him over to the cable office to try to coax and bribe the operators into doing something special for us to get it working again. I would raise my voice every time some obstacle arose that could impede my getting a story out, telling him to get the problem resolved, even when I knew that in a country whose communications system was as primitive as Cambodia’s, there was often little he could do.
He almost never complained or demurred. He says he never got angry at me, although I’m convinced there were times when he dearly wanted to bounce a chair off my head. He insists he accepted my relentless behavior as merely an attempt to teach him how to succeed as a journalist. “I never got angry,” he says, “because I understand your heart. I also understand that you are a man who wants everything to succeed.”
Pran was a survivor even then. He also tended to give me heroic qualities, to make me bigger than life—as I am perhaps doing to him now.
There was one day, however, when he did eventually reveal his annoyance. We had interviewed the prime minister, In Tam. Pran’s translation of his remarks, which were in Khmer, was literal, and I was looking for the subtleties that would reveal the prime minister’s intent. Pran first gave one meaning and then a different one, and we began to have a royal argument. I demanded to know what Pran thought In Tam’s meaning had really been; I wanted the whole truth. Finally he retaliated. “I can’t tell you the whole truth—I can only tell you eighty percent,” he snapped. “Twenty percent I have to keep for myself.”
My persona came to have a wider audience. I was dubbed “Ankalimir” by other Cambodian assistants in the press corps and employees at the Hotel Le Phnom, who had become accustomed to my outbursts. Ankalimir, in Khmer legend, was an ogre who went around cutting off the fingers of people who annoyed him. Until he got to his hundredth finger, which was his mother’s. She was having none of this. She told him he’d been a bad man and it was time for him to reform. And he did. So dramatically did he change that he eventually was transformed into an enlightened disciple of Buddha’s.
I was the man, my Cambodian friends explained, who made a lot of bad noises in the beginning but at bottom was a good person. I liked the ending and accepted the nickname as comradely, if critical, flattery.
On the day of the U
nited States Embassy evacuation—April 12, 1975—all the Americans at the hotel, mostly newsmen, left the premises early in the morning. The employees thought all of us had left the city on Marine helicopters and, feeling abandoned with the Communists closing in on the city, became desolate. A few of us had decided to stay, however, and I was the first to walk back into the hotel at noontime. The receptionists and room boys came to life, jumping to their feet. “Ankalimir is still here,” one shouted. Perhaps these gracious men took heart from my presence, as if I had some special information that we would all be safe when the Khmer Rouge came.
That evacuation day remains, paradoxically, both clear and muddled in my mind. What I do remember is Joe Lelyveld, then The Times’s Hong Kong bureau chief, who has come in to help with the coverage in the final weeks, banging on my door at 7 that morning.
He tells me that this is it, the embassy is leaving, we have to be there with our bags by 8:30, the gates close at 9:30. My first thought, utterly irrational, is that I can’t possibly pack in time. My next thought is an equally irrational wish that it’s only a test run, because I don’t really want to leave.
Eventually I have a lucid thought. I have to talk to Pran. We had worked until 3 in the morning and he’s probably still sleeping. First, I speed to the embassy to convince myself it’s the real thing. It is, so I race back to the hotel, send a messenger for Pran, and, as a contingency, I pack. I guess this means that I am not going to make a final decision until I can look into his face.
When he arrives, I tell him quickly about the evacuation and ask him if he wants to leave. Knowing this day was coming, we had discussed the options several times before and agreed that if we felt in no direct danger, we would stay. Though we have little time, his face is calm. He knows I want to stay, and he says he doesn’t see any immediate risk and therefore no reason we should leave now. He says he wants to stay to cover the story. We reinforce each other’s compulsions and desires. He is as obsessed as I am with seeing the story to the end.
But he adds that with rockets falling on his neighborhood, he wants to evacuate his wife and children. I had already taken the precaution of getting the approval of a sympathetic senior embassy official, Robert Keeley, to accept any Cambodian friends I might bring to the embassy on the day of the evacuation. I send Pran rushing home to collect his family in his aging green Renault, and I go to wait for them at the embassy, now surrounded and secured by Marines in full battle dress.
In the sky, the helicopters swarm like wasps, heading in and out of the landing zone nearby, taking evacuees to the aircraft carrier USS Okinawa in the Gulf of Siam, which will then head for Thailand. A steady stream of foreigners, Cambodians, and embassy officials arrive at the building and pass through a special metal door. Brown tags with their names on them are placed around their necks, and they are then moved to the flatbed trucks that will take them to the landing zone. Some have tears in their eyes, but most mask their feelings. Some Cambodians who try to get into the embassy have no authorization and are turned away. One distraught man slips a note in English through a crack in the metal door. It reads: “Will you please bring me and my family out of the country?” But the man has no connections at the embassy. “Give it back,” growls a nervous American colonel, “give it back.” The note is passed back through the slit. No one inside ever sees the face of the man making the appeal.
At 9:20—with only ten minutes to spare—Pran drives up with his family. As his wife and their four children are loaded onto the last truck, an Army military attaché who is going out on the same truck tries to persuade us to come with them. When he realizes our decision to stay is final, he holds out his automatic rifle and asks, “Don’t you want something for protection?” I tell him that I am touched by his offer, but that I’m all thumbs and I’d probably blow off a toe if I tried to use it. He keeps holding out the rifle to me, even as the truck goes out the embassy’s back gate.
At 11:13, the last helicopter takes off. The dust on the landing zone, a soccer field, settles. The skies are silent.
Very suddenly the city takes on a strange, new atmosphere—a feeling of emptiness, if that’s possible in a refugee-crowded capital of two and a half million. The Americans were the last power base. Now, it’s like having the city to ourselves; we’re on our own for everything. We don’t admit it to each other, but it’s more than a little eerie. We begin to feel a heightened kinship with the Westerners who have stayed—more than seven hundred French colonials, a score of mostly French and Swedish journalists, and another score of international relief officials. There are also five other Americans, ranging from a freelance photographer to an alcoholic airline mechanic who has drunkenly slept through the evacuation calls.
***
Much of what happened over the next five days—until the Khmer Rouge came—was reported at that time in The New York Times. Pran and I sped around the city and its perimeter every day in our two rented Mercedes-Benzes, trying to visit every front line, every hospital, every possible government official—to put together as clear a picture as possible of the increasingly chaotic situation. One thing was certain: the enemy circle around Phnom Penh was tightening.
These were long, frenetic, sweaty days. Our lives—and our options—had been reduced to necessities. We carried basic needs with us—typewriters and typing paper in the cars, survival kits (passport, money, change of shirt and underwear, camera, film, extra notebooks, soap, toothbrush) over our shoulders, Pran’s in a knapsack, mine in a blue Pan Am bag.
Although I kept my room at the hotel, we rarely stopped there. We spent most of our nights at the cable office, filing stories—or trying to. The main transmission tower, in a suburb called Kambol, was eventually overrun, and the last remaining transmitter was an ancient Chinese-made contraption that kept overheating and going dead. We caught only a couple of hours of sleep each night, on straw mats on the cable office floor. There was little time to bathe or change clothes, but since we all smelled alike, no one took offense.
There was also little time to reflect on what might happen when the Khmer Rouge took the city. Our decision to stay was founded on our belief—perhaps, looking back, it was more a devout wish or hope—that when they won their victory, they would have what they wanted and would end the terrorism and brutal behavior we had written so often about. We all wanted to believe that, since both sides were Khmers, they would find a route to reconciliation. Most of the high officials in the government put their lives on this belief and stayed behind too. Those who were caught were executed.
***
On April 14, the Khmer Rouge begin their final push, driving on the airport, one of the city’s last lines of defense.
Inside the capital, there remains a strange disconnection from the reality that is such a short distance away. Some of the Frenchmen who have stayed behind, believing that as old residents and relics of the colonial past their lives will not be disrupted, are playing chess by the hotel pool. In a nearby street, a driver leans on the fender of his Land Rover, a mirror in one hand and tweezers in the other, pulling stray hairs from his chin. Government employees laugh and joke as they go through their regular morning marching exercises on the grass outside their buildings—part of a national preparedness program. For two days, the government news agency carries nothing on the evacuation of the Americans, but it has a long story on the death of the entertainer Josephine Baker. The government radio announces the appointment of a new Minister of State for Industry, Mines and Tourism. A delicious petit poussin is served in the hotel restaurant, but an American patron complains because the hotel has run out of ice and he objects to drinking his Pepsi warm.
This surrealism is to come to an end on the morning of April 17, a Thursday, when the new rulers march into the anxious city. On the night of April 16 it is clear that the collapse of Phnom Penh is only hours away. Enormous fires from the battles that ring the very edge of the city turn the night sky orange. The last government planes—single-engine propeller craft divin
g low over the treetops—futilely try to halt the Communist advance with their final bombs. Refugees by the thousands swarm into the heart of the capital, bringing their oxcarts, their meager belongings, and their frightened bedlam. Deserting government soldiers are among them.
Pran turns to me and says: “It’s finished, it’s finished.” And as we look at each other, we see on each other’s faces for the first time the nagging anxiety about what is going to happen to us.
We spend that final night filing stories from the cable office, as artillery shells crash down periodically a few hundred yards away. The line goes dead just before 6 a.m. on April 17; two of my pages still have not been sent. I am annoyed and complain edgily to the morning crew chief, badgering him to do something to get the line restored. Within a moment, I feel as foolish and contrite as it is possible for a man to feel. The telephone rings. It is a message for the crew chief. One of his children has been killed and his wife critically wounded by an artillery shell that has fallen on his home in the southern section of Phnom Penh. As his colleagues offer words of solace, he holds his face under control, his lips pressed tightly together. He puts on his tie and his jacket and he leaves, without ever saying a word, for the hospital where his wife is dying.
We leave the cable office and take a short swing by car to the northern edge of the city. The sun is rising but it offers no comfort. Soldiers and refugees are trudging in from the northern defense line, which has collapsed. Fires are burning along the line of retreat.
By the time we reach the hotel, the retreat can be clearly seen from my third-floor balcony, and small-arms fire can be heard. Soldiers are stripping off their uniforms and changing into civilian clothes. At 6:30 a.m., I write in my notebook: “The city is falling.”
The Death and Life of Dith Pran Page 2