We are the last ones out of the building, running. The Red Cross has abandoned several vehicles in the hotel yard after removing the keys. We have too much to carry, so we throw our gear in the back of one of their Toyota vans, put it in neutral, and start pushing it up Monivong Boulevard toward the French Embassy. The broad avenue is awash with refugees, bent under sacks of belongings, marching into the unknown, their eyes hurt with the knowledge that, being soft city people, the trek into the interior will certainly kill many of them.
In the tidal crush, people have lost shoes and sandals, and footwear litters the street. Cars with flat tires stand abandoned in the middle of the road. Clouds of smoke from the final battles wreathe the city. Coming from the north along Monivong is a fresh, heavily armed battalion, marching in single file. As we pass, we eye one another like people from different universes.
At the French Embassy, there is pandemonium. The gates are shut and locked to prevent the mob from surging in, but people by the dozens, including Cambodians, are coming in anyway—passing their children over the tall iron-spiked fence, then hurling their belongings over and finally climbing over themselves. We do the same.
Entering the compound, we are immediately segregated racially by the French officials. Westerners are allowed inside the embassy’s four buildings. (About eight hundred eventually gather in the compound.) Cambodians and other Asians must camp on the grass outside. A French Embassy official with a guard dog bars me from taking Pran and our two drivers, Hea and Sarun, and their families inside our building, the Salle de Reception; we sneak them in after dark. At about 9 p.m., a report sweeps the compound that the Khmer Rouge are ordering all Cambodians out of the embassy and into the countryside. The five hundred Cambodians outside the embassy buildings sit up all night in anxiety, ready to run and hide, afraid to go to sleep. In a few days, this report will become a reality, and the Cambodians will indeed be pushed out.
Talks are begun between the Khmer Rouge and our side (embassy officials and representatives of the United Nations and other international agencies), but our basic requests—for delivery of food from the outside world, for an air evacuation of everyone in the compound—are curtly rejected. The Khmer Rouge make it clear that we and our requests are not merely unimportant but irrelevant. At one point they say that the “indispensable” evacuation of Phnom Penh “does not concern you.” More disquieting, even though France has recognized their government, they reject the international convention that the embassy is foreign territory and therefore a place of asylum, inviolate and protected. They enter the compound at will, taking away people they consider “high enemies,” including Sirik Matak, a Cambodian general and former prime minister. In a funereal drizzle he walks out the gate into Khmer Rouge custody. “I am not afraid,” he says, as he is led to the back of a flatbed garbage truck, his back straight and his head high. “I am ready to account for my actions.” He is executed soon after.
From our small window on their revolution—the embassy’s front gate—we can see glimpses of their “peasant revolution.” There is no doubt that the Khmer Rouge are turning Cambodian society upside down, remaking it in the image of some earlier agrarian time, casting aside everything that belongs to the old system, which has been dominated by the consumer society of the cities and towns. Some of the Khmer Rouge soldiers we talk to speak of destroying the colonial heritage and use phrases like “purification of the people” and “returning the country to the peasant.”
“They haven’t a humanitarian thought in their heads,” says Murray Carmichael, a doctor on a Red Cross surgical team, as he describes the emptying of the hospital where he worked. They threw everyone out—paralytics, critical cases, people on plasma. Most will die. It was just horrible.”
On the second day in the embassy—April 18—the French ask us to be ready to turn in our passports the next day so they can catalog who is in the compound. This means that what we feared is true: the Cambodians with us cannot be protected. I discuss the situation with the drivers, Hea and Sarun. They agree that their chances are better if they leave the embassy now on their own rather than later in a conspicuous group of hundreds of Cambodians. I give each of them a thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills for potential bribe money. We have a hard time looking at each other as our parting nears. At 2:25 p.m., Hea and Sarun and their families, loaded with sacks of food and other needs, slip out a rear gate that a French guard quietly opens for them, and head north out of the city.
We have one last hope for Pran: Jon Swain happens to have a second British passport. It is in Swain’s name, but we think we can doctor it and alter the name skillfully enough to give Pran a foreign identity. Al Rockoff sets to work with a pen, a razor blade and some glue, Swain has a hyphenated middle name, so by erasing “Jon” and “Swain” and the hyphen, Pran has a new name. But it’s an upper-class English tongue twister—Ancketill Brewer—and Pran spends hours trying to learn how to pronounce it and make it his own. We substitute Pran’s photo for Swain’s, and the next day—April 19—we turn the passport in to the French with our own. A day later, the French come to Swain and tell him the ploy won’t work; they say that the Khmer Rouge will spot the forgery as quickly as they did and that it could compromise the entire compound. They will kill him on the spot, the French say, and maybe us, too. They insist Pran has to leave.
I do not tell Pran right away. I want time to think about other possible subterfuges. I am also trying to get up the courage. My mind is a blank. I talk to Swain and others and we can think of no way to hide him. Finally I tell him.
I ask him if he understands—we have tried everything we can think of but we are stymied. He says yes, he understands. But it is I who do not understand, who cannot cope with this terrible thing. He saved my life and now I cannot protect him. I hate myself.
It does not ease my conscience or my feeling of responsibility that on the morning Pran and I have this talk, members of the embassy staff are moving through the compound, telling all the Cambodians they must leave. “We’d like to help you,” one French official says, “but there’s no way. If you stay here, there will be trouble. You’re better off out there. It’s a good moment to leave now because later the Khmer Rouge will come into the embassy to search.”
Pran packs his essential belongings in a small bag. He destroys any piece of identification that might link him to foreigners or make him anything but a simple member of the working class. All the other Cambodian journalists in the embassy—most of them freelance photographers—do the same, although a few do not jettison their cameras. Some have families with them.
We give them all of our “private” food and cigarettes and Cambodian money. I also give Pran twenty-six hundred dollars for bribe money. At 10:15 a.m. on April 20, Pran and his group—twenty-one persons in all—gather at the embassy’s front gate, their belongings in the back of a gasless Toyota wagon, which they will push up the road.
I put my arms around Pran and try to say something that will have meaning. But I am wordless and he is too.
I watch him pass through the gate and out of sight, and then I put my head against a building and start banging my fist on it.
Jon Swain comes over to comfort me. “There was nothing you could do,” he says. “Nothing you could do. It will be all right, you’ll see. He’ll make his way to the border and escape. You know how resourceful he is.”
In the months and years to come, that scene—Pran passing through the gate—becomes a recurring nightmare for me. I will awake, thinking of elaborate stratagems I might have used to keep him safe and with me. I am a survivor who often cannot cope with surviving.
The night of Pran’s departure, Jean Dyrac, vice-consul and senior official in the embassy, comes to our quarters to brief us on his latest negotiations with the Khmer Rouge. He is a decent man who had suffered cruelties as a prisoner of war during World War II. He is now overwhelmed and drained by the demands on him, by the appeals to save lives, appeals he has been powerless to respond to.
He talks small talk at us first—he has made no headway with the Communists—and then his feelings begin to show. He is suffering remorse and heartache over the expulsion of the Cambodians from the compound. “We are not policemen,” he says, “but we had to turn them out. They could have been shot on the spot, and those believed responsible would be compromised.” His eyes well up now and his voice falters, the words coming out so painfully soft we have to strain to hear. “It is a very sad thing to say. When we do such things, we are no longer men.” Unable to continue, he walks swiftly from the room, looking at no one. I feel very close to Jean Dyrac at that moment.
The next day, April 21, the rest of the Cambodians in the embassy—there are several hundred left—are forced to leave. It is a time of mass grief. Cambodian husbands are separated from European wives. Wailing rends the compound.
Louisette Praet, a Belgian woman whose Cambodian husband, an engineer, is being taken from her, is crying softly into her handkerchief. He embraces her and whispers: “Courage, ma cherie. Courage.” But she cannot control herself, and her small body shakes with her sobs as their two little daughters look on, uncomprehending.
Vong Sarin, a Cambodian friend who had held a senior job in the former government’s communications system, is turning his seven-month-old boy over to a Frenchwoman to care for. He gives me some money to put in a bank for the boy. “Do you think they will punish people like me?” he asks. I cannot tell him what I really think. “I doubt it,” I say. “You were not a soldier or politician.” He and I both know the truth is elsewhere, and his face remains fixed in gloom. His wife is hysterical at having to give up her child and about what awaits them. She grabs my arm and pleads: “My first baby, my only baby! We’ll never see him again. Save us, save us! Get papers for us, sir. You can do it.” It was a time of not being able to look into people’s eyes.
Nine days later, April 30, the final evacuation of the embassy begins. The first of two truck convoys sets out at dawn for the border with Thailand, carrying about five hundred of the eight hundred foreigners in the compound. I am on it. We awake to pack at 2 a.m., and as I am leaving our building an hour later to walk to the trucks, I see in the foyer a huge vinyl suitcase that someone has discarded. It is large enough for Pran to have crawled into; I could have cut air holes in it for him. I stand frozen for a minute to breathe, looking at it, and then someone is calling me, telling me if I don’t hurry, I’ll miss the convoy. I move on woodenly.
***
Three and a half days later—after a monsoon-soaked journey whose metronome had swung crazily between petty fights among the evacuees over food and the awe and fear stirred in us by the sight of the grim Khmer Rouge work gangs, under guard, building roads and dikes with their hands—we arrived at the border. As I crossed the rickety frontier bridge, the first person to greet me was Chhay Born Lay, a Cambodian reporter for the Associated Press, who had left Phnom Penh on a press-evacuation flight on April 12, the day the American Embassy personnel pulled out. As Lay and I embraced, he asked me where Pran was. I was able to get out the words “He couldn’t come” before I started crying. Lay looked at me and understood everything and cried with me.
I went to Bangkok to write my long chronicle of the fall of Phnom Penh and our captivity for The Times. Then I returned to Singapore and my wife and children. I was supposed to be getting a new foreign assignment, and they were packed and ready to return to the United States for our home leave. But I was not yet prepared to face “normal” life again, and I took a long time getting myself together for the trip.
It was mid-July before we arrived in the States. My wife sensed my dropout mood and decided to stay in Los Angeles, where her family lives, until I made up my mind about what I wanted to do next. After a week there, I left for New York to see my editors, stopping first in San Francisco to look after Pran’s wife, Ser Moeun, and their four children. They had settled in that city, with its large Asian population, with the help of The Times and a refugee-relief agency it had enlisted. The Times and I were sharing her living expenses.
Since her evacuation from Phnom Penh in April, Ser Moeun, then thirty, had naturally been frightened and uncertain about her future; she was in a strange country and did not speak anything but Khmer. Through interpreters, I had tried to reassure her, by telephone and letter, but without Pran she remained disoriented. I had told her, in a letter, that “it might take some time before he can reach the border,” but “I know he will be out before long.” This rosy optimism had been a mistake, as I was to learn when I visited her in the cramped railroad flat that was the family’s first quarters.
The children were excited to see me, but Ser Moeun was distraught and trying not to show it. We were sitting beside each other on a sofa when she broke down and ran into the bathroom. It was some time before she emerged, her eyes red, a damp washcloth in her hand. I begged her to tell me what was wrong—though certainly I knew. She hesitated a long time. Finally she said, her words falling on me like a verdict: “I thought when you come you bring Pran with you.” And her tears began again. I then told her the whole story of our taking refuge at the embassy and why Pran and the other Cambodians were not allowed to stay.
Over the next few days, I kept talking to Ser Moeun—to myself, really—about the need to be strong and to keep our faith alive, that his courage, intelligence, and determination would see him through. In the ensuing years, as we followed the reports of massacres and starvation brought out by escapees, both of us wavered in that faith many times. We had nothing else to go on; Cambodia was closed to the outside world in all the normal senses—no mail, no telephone or cable system, no government an outsider could communicate with, and no possible legal entry.
I made up scenarios to help us believe: the reason Pran had not crossed into Thailand was that he had reunited with his parents and they were too elderly and infirm to make the arduous escape attempt; or that Pran was simply being cautious and ingenious, as he had always been, and would make his move to the border only when he thought the odds of success were very good. The latter turned out to be the truth.
In New York, I finally said what I knew I had to—that I wanted a leave of absence to write a book about Cambodia. Everyone at The Times understood, and the answer was yes. I returned to my family in Los Angeles, feeling relieved, even buoyed at times. But I was unable to put Pran out of my mind and every time I thought of him, I was blocked and the book would not come.
Instead, I wrote letters, searching for Pran or the tiniest glimmer of news of him, to everyone I could think of. To the government of Thailand, to the American embassies in Bangkok and Singapore, to private refugee and relief agencies working in Thailand near the border with Cambodia, to the International Red Cross, to the World Health Organization, to the United Nations’ refugee organization, to journalists and other friends in Southeast Asia, and to intelligence officials and other sources operating near the border who I thought might help in some special and even extralegal way.
To some, I wrote many times, even though I knew that the odds of their being able to do anything to help Pran escape were hopeless. I had fifty prints made of each of two photographs of Pran and had them distributed along the Thai border with Cambodia. This filled my days and made me feel—sometimes—that I was doing something useful. In my mind, as long as I kept up this activity, Pran would not disappear, would not die.
One relief-official contact in Thailand who joined in the search for Pran wrote back about his own frustrations and those of other Westerners who had left Cambodian friends behind. “Everyone who came out of Cambodia,” he said gloomily, “has gone through a period of almost psychotic depression at what has happened.”
I used the telephone as I did the mails, making call after call to official and unofficial contacts. But for long periods of time, I did not want to see anyone face to face, not even my own family. I would closet myself in my corner of the house, and, when there were no more letters to write or calls to make, I would read every page of the
local newspaper or watch television.
I could not bring myself even to visit Pran’s family; I couldn’t endure again Ser Moeun’s “I thought when you come you bring Pran with you.”
So I kept in touch with her by telephone and with letters. I also wrote persistently to the relief agency assigned to the family to discuss Ser Moeun’s adjustment problems. She was and is a strong woman, but her anxiety about Pran was constant, and she, too, was not sleeping well. She had frequent dreams about Pran. Some were good; most were bad. She kept remembering an incident that had occurred just before the collapse of Phnom Penh. A picture of Pran had inexplicably fallen off the wall in their living room, smashing the glass in the frame; she had cried and cried because she interpreted this to mean he would be separated from her. Every time she recalled it, she wept again.
Ser Moeun and the children—and I—were shored up by two new friends, William and Trudy Drypolcher, he a real-estate entrepreneur who had been a reconnaissance platoon leader in Vietnam and she a business executive who had volunteered for refugee work during the collapse of Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975. They had, in effect, adopted Ser Moeun and her family in every respect but the legal one, guiding them through supermarkets, through the bus system, and through the thickets of American bureaucracy. They also became surrogate parents at report-card time, when the youngest, Titonel, showed up with top marks in everything but deportment—in which the imp regularly got “U’s,” for “Unsatisfactory.” His teachers explained that he was a fine student but never stopped chattering in class.
Ser Moeun was learning English, but it was much more difficult for her than for the children, who were doing well in special classes. She had chosen San Francisco as their home because a small community of Cambodians had already settled there, and it was a wise decision. As the gateway for Oriental immigration into America, San Francisco has over generations built up a special system of social services for resettling people like her. Her adjustment, however, was complicated by her social worker, who believed Ser Moeun should get accustomed to living in Spartan conditions and being regarded as a member of the welfare class. The Drypolchers and I tried to convince the woman that Ser Moeun’s financial support was substantial and guaranteed. But nothing we said or did made a dent in her perverse attitude.
The Death and Life of Dith Pran Page 4