Alive in the Killing Fields

by Nawuth Keat

  I was horrified to step onto that ground because that’s where cremations occurred. Human bones and ashes covered the soil. We walked really slowly, and the Khmer Rouge yelled again, “Hurry up, you spoiled kids. I’m not going to wait around here forever while you take your own sweet time.”

  I knew we had no choice. We lay down on our backs, side by side. I made sure not to look around much because it’s hard to fall asleep when skulls are staring at you. My brothers were really scared. I told them, “There’s an old story that lapwings, those tall wading birds, have a special way of sleeping.”

  “What is it?” asked Hackly.

  “They lie on their backs and stick their legs straight up. It’s important that they do that.”

  “Why?”

  “People say that their legs hold the sky up all night long. The sky hasn’t fallen, so they must be nearby, keeping us safe. Let’s dream about lapwings.”

  When we were moved to work in other fields, there was even less high, dry ground. The Khmer Rouge slept there, and they made us sleep where everything was wet. Tender skin develops a rash when it is exposed to water every day and every night, never having a chance to dry. My thighs and shins turned red, and the skin felt as if it was burning up. We didn’t have towels, cream, or anything that could help. If I touched my legs, the skin seemed to burn even more. There was no relief until the wet season ended.

  The Khmer Rouge never let us stay in one spot for long. We had no place that felt like a home. Every now and then we were moved to fields near where Chantha and Van Lan were working. We stayed together at night, sleeping in small huts we made of tall grass. It felt good to be with my family—we were all we had. Everybody’s huts were close together, so it was impossible for us to have a private conversation. Two old men talked late one night about how they could resist the Khmer Rouge. Somebody overheard them. The next day, they were taken away from the camp. They were killed. After that, nobody dared to talk about anything with anybody. We kept quiet and tried not to be noticed. We avoided talking about our past because if a Khmer Rouge overheard us and happened to know and dislike one of our old friends, he might decide he didn’t like us, either. I did not try to make friends with other boys my age. What if one of them, for whatever reason, said something bad about me to the Khmer Rouge?

  I could barely remember when I used to play games with my friends, laughing at fish swimming in flooded back yards, running just for the fun of it, or joking with my schoolmates. My old childhood seemed to be part of another life—someone else’s, not mine.

  Chapter Five

  HUNGER

  “We have to stretch the rice as much as we can. Let’s boil these grains,” said Chantha. “We’ll make rice soup.” She poured a few grains into the water, and let it simmer.

  We drank the broth, but there wasn’t much nutrition. It was rice-flavored water. We still felt hungry. It was the rainy season in 1976, and food had become even scarcer.

  “Mop, see if any chaff is left in the bag. Some residue from the rice might still cling to it,” said Van Lan.

  I scooped out a handful of the chaff, the part people normally don’t eat. We tried it. The chaff was so small that it caught in our digestive tracts. During the night, we woke up with cramps in our gut. The chaff was not edible, and we had nothing else to eat.

  That year, more people died of starvation than from bullets. Most days when I left the rice fields and went to the group shack for my one meal of the day, I was told, “The food is all gone.” Instead of having a dream of three meals a day, my dream was reduced to having just one meal a day.

  Some of the grown-ups said the Khmer Rouge traded a lot of the rice to China in exchange for guns and ammunition. Some said they sold rice on the black market to Vietnam, the country east of Cambodia, and then used the money to buy American guns. I didn’t know what the truth was. All I understood was that for the first time in my life, I was always hungry.

  Before the Khmer Rouge took over, I ate well. Even the poorest people had enough food. But after the Khmer Rouge gained power, everybody was hungry. If we saw a snake in the water of the rice paddies, it didn’t live long. We ate it.

  The Khmer Rouge caught one old woman taking rice for her family. The guards tied her on a mound covered with big red ants. The ants crawled all over her face and body. She screamed all day long as they bit her everywhere. No one could help her. If they did, they’d suffer the same torture or worse.

  When I woke up one morning, Van Lan was gone. When the other families were getting up and making some noise, Chantha whispered to me, “Van Lan has gone to see his parents. Don’t worry, he’ll come back.”

  No matter what she said, she looked worried. My eyes opened wide in fear. What would happen to us without him?

  Chantha whispered again, “He has a friend in the Khmer Rouge. Van Lan promised that he’ll bring him something good if he lets Van Lan go away for a few days.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Van Lan was friends with a Khmer Rouge?

  “Van Lan knows how to be safe. I am sure he’ll come back okay.”

  With Van Lan gone, I felt even more scared, and even more responsible for my brothers and sister.

  For several months I had been working in the vegetable garden that was supposed to provide food for us children. But the Khmer Rouge took the best for themselves. Once a day they gave us a bowl of watered down vegetable stew. It wasn’t enough. In the evening, I asked the Khmer Rouge to give us rice chaff to use for fertilizer. Because people cannot eat the chaff, the Khmer Rouge would not think it was important to keep. I brought another kid who worked in the garden with me to the rice storage barn. There was no electricity, so the building was dark. After I took the sacks they gave me for the chaff, I noticed piles of rice in the corner. When the Khmer Rouge were paying attention to the other kid, I quickly stuffed fistfuls of rice into the bottom of my sacks. When I left the building, the guards only glanced at the top of the bags and didn’t discover my trick. We had enough food for the next few days.

  The Khmer Rouge had guns, they had food, they had everything. But I still had my brain and the courage to use it. One trick I learned was to sneak to the vegetable garden and pick squash when no one else was around. If I was caught carrying it back to our shack, I might be shot for stealing food. So, I didn’t carry it. I tied one end of a long vine around my knee and the other around the squash. Then, I dragged the squash along. Whenever I stopped, the vine drooped, and the squash stayed far enough behind me that nobody could see I was pulling it.

  In the swamps next to the fields, I watched fish and eels glide into snake and crab holes, and then I reached into the holes and grabbed them. Sometimes I made fish traps out of bamboo. I arranged the sticks into a loose bundle that was narrow at one end, wide at the other. Fish would swim into the wide end and not be able to figure out how to find their way back out. The next morning when it was still dark, I’d get up early to check my traps. I hid the fish I caught inside my waistband so that the Khmer Rouge would not see what I had.

  After I got a fish back to our shack, it was hard to hide, because it would get smelly and go bad. We needed salt to preserve it, but salt was rare and precious. If anybody had salt, they hid it as carefully as they hid gold jewelry. I believed salt was more valuable than jewelry. Gold might be worth money, but what was there to buy? Besides, you can’t eat gold. People who ate nothing but fish and rice died from malnutrition. In a tropical jungle climate, people need salt.

  My youngest brother, Chanty, had a bloated belly and constant diarrhea, signs of malnutrition. One day when I returned from the field, I discovered that he had eaten most of a raw fish that my family had been saving. We were trying to stretch the food over time. But he was so hungry, and he was so small, he simply ate it. We could not blame him.

  About a week after Van Lan left, I woke up to see a wonderful sight. He was back! What a relief. I don’t know what he gave to the Khmer Rouge, but I saw what he brought us—fresh oranges. These w
ere treasures. My brothers and I each ate one, as slowly as we could make ourselves, in order to extend the pleasure. We savored the sweetness, inhaled the fresh aroma, and our tongues explored the texture of each orange section. We licked the inside and the outside of the peel to get every bit of taste. We would have more of them that night, and the next morning, too. I remembered before the Khmer Rouge came when I used to pick fruit from a tree whenever I wanted a snack. In those days, I didn’t think twice about it. Now, these precious oranges helped keep us alive. My sister especially needed the food, because she was pregnant. She and Van Lan did not talk with excitement about the baby that was on the way. Instead, everyone focused on getting enough to eat.

  The Khmer Rouge said we could not have any of the rice from the fields we worked in. “That would be stealing!” they said. “We kill thieves.” But we saw people die from starvation, so we “stole” rice whenever we could.

  Late one evening, Van Lan said, “Mop, will you help me get some rice?”

  “Of course, but how?” I said.

  “Rice is ready to harvest in a field I saw about a mile north of here. If we wait until dark, we might be able to snatch a bag full.”

  “OK, I’m ready,” I said as bravely as I could.

  When we got to the field, Van Lan walked ahead of me. I stayed close behind him because it was hard to see in the darkness. The birds were quiet, and we did not speak. We moved slowly, looking around to be sure we were alone.

  “Hey, you!” A man’s voice rang out, angry and loud. A Khmer Rouge was guarding the field, and he had heard us. He yelled again, and another guard joined him. They ran toward us.

  Van Lan and I took off as fast as we could. We got separated. I tried to hide in a termite mound. My foot sank down and I felt something hard. I’d stepped into a shallow human grave. A bone with smelly, rotting human flesh clung to my bare foot. I made myself hold still, and the guards didn’t see me. They ran past me and chased Van Lan.

  My heart pounded. What should I do? Where was Van Lan? Did the Khmer Rouge catch him? If they did, I stopped myself from thinking about what could happen next.

  I listened as hard as I could. When it was quiet, I sneaked away. I decided not to walk on the road, because if the Khmer Rouge came back, they would easily see me there. So, I crouched low and walked off the road in the flooded jungle. I sloshed through the water, stopping every few seconds to listen.

  After what felt like hours of terrified wading, I made it back to our family’s shack. There was Van Lan! We had both been lucky. With relief, I collapsed into a deep sleep. In the morning, I tore off a huge, engorged leech that clung to my leg.

  Most days the Khmer Rouge let us each have a handful of rice, but that was not enough to live on. When I was hungry, my body craved food so much that I could not relax and sleep. But what good was food if I could not cook it and make it edible? The Khmer Rouge had taken all our cooking utensils. So, I used all I had—a thin rag that the Khmer Rouge had not bothered to confiscate. I put the handful of rice in it. Then I dug a small hole and buried the little rice-filled sack in the ground. In the evening, I started a small fire on the ground above it. If any Khmer Rouge questioned me, I could say I made the fire just to watch it burn. There was nothing else around. The rice, buried in the dirt below, cooked from the heat of the fire. How did I learn this trick? I simply thought of it. The alternative was starvation, and I wanted to live.

  Like everybody else, if I had a tiny bit of food, I ate it. There were no family meals together. Even if there had been enough food for all of us to eat as a family, the Khmer Rouge would have thought that our having so much food would be proof that it was “stolen.” They shot thieves.

  Chantha’s belly never bulged out big like the healthy pregnant women I used to see, but the baby grew, and she finally gave birth. She had a healthy boy, and they named him Vibol. No one felt much joy about bringing a child into that terrible life.

  One night when Van Lan was sent away to harvest a distant crop, Chantha asked me to sneak over to a rice field and grab some rice for her so she could have the strength to feed the baby. My brothers and I were hungry, too.

  Carrying a pillowcase to gather the rice, I sneaked out. My brother Chanty said, “I want to come along.” I let him, but I should have known better.

  A Khmer Rouge spotted us as we neared the rice field. Chanty hid in a termite mound. I ran and ran through the darkness and the flooded fields. Then I was jolted to a painful halt. My foot had sunk into a knee-deep hole. My leg almost broke. A Khmer Rouge jumped on me, put his foot on my neck, and held me under the water. I thought I was going to drown, but then he pulled me up. I gasped for air, he yelled at me, and pushed me under again. I knew I was being killed. It was all over.

  He and his buddies kicked me in the legs. Using their fists, they punched my stomach, arms and head. When they got sick of beating me up, they tied my hands behind my back, and told me to call my brother. I did, and he came.

  The gang marched us hour after hour to another town. Chanty and I did not dare say anything to each other. We just walked with the Khmer Rouge shoving us every now and then. They locked us in an old shed filled with scratchy sacks. My clothes were wet, I was cold, and I was terrified. Chanty was so exhausted he fell asleep, but I could not. What if this was my last night to be alive? I’d already been tortured and beaten up. Would they do more awful things to me, just to watch me suffer? Would they kill my brother? I imagined horrible possibilities all night long. I shook from fear.

  When the morning came, a Khmer Rouge yanked us out of the shed.

  “We’ll see what the boss wants to do with you,” he said. “Follow me.”

  He took Chanty and me back to our settlement to deliver us to the local leader, who would decide our punishment. The leader happened to be away. But what would the guard do? He waited around but seemed to be getting bored. He was annoyed. Finally, he yelled at us and left.

  I couldn’t believe it. I was alive. Chanty was alive. I felt the terror drain from my body.

  We hurried back to Chantha. She had feared the worst. But once again, we had been lucky.

  Chapter Six

  SURVIVAL

  “Am I going crazy?” I asked myself. I was walking along the trail that bordered the rice field where I was working, and I noticed something odd in the shrubs. It looked like a clump of cooked rice, still formed in the shape of a cooking pot. That’s exactly what it was! Ants swarmed on it, but I rinsed them off and devoured the rice, the biggest meal I’d had in months.

  But one large serving of rice was not enough to keep me alive day after day, week after week, month after month. By winter, my legs and arms were skinny, but my belly looked bloated. I was starving, and I had almost no strength or energy. I felt like a ghost. And then, I got an infection. I was sick with fever. One of my testicles swelled up so large I could not put my pants on. I had seen that happen to other people. They all died.

  One morning it was swollen so much that I could not move at all. I felt like I was going to explode. “I’m going to die!” I screamed to Chantha.

  Chantha quietly said to Van Lan, but I could hear her, “I think we’re losing Mop.”

  Van Lan turned and said to me in his calm, certain voice, “We’re going to get you well.” He was weak too, but somehow he managed to pick me up. He carried me to what we called the hospital, but there was no medicine or doctor. It was just a sagging thatched roof with makeshift beds beneath it. There, a small, white-haired old man tried to take care of the sick people.

  He had seen many people just like me. He said, “Eat this. It should help.” He fed me something that looked like rabbit droppings. It was probably some kind of scraping from tree bark, some old-fashioned herbal remedy. It did not make me better. I lay there in agony. My whole mid-section throbbed. The person in the bed on my left died. The person in the bed on my right died. I knew my life was about to end, too. The old man said to me, “You are sick because you have eaten nothing but rice ch
aff for so long.”

  “I couldn’t help it!” I said. “There was nothing else.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s not your fault. But the chaff is not edible, and it’s stuck in your intestine. Now it’s infected.”

  He filled a pouch with water and said, “You must promise me you will hold still.”

  “I will,” I said.

  Using a stick, he poked the pouch up my rectum. The pouch broke and flooded my intestine. I felt as if that water rinsed out my whole body. My stomach, my intestine, even my testicle, seemed to drain and drain. I fell asleep, and the next morning, I was surprised to discover that I was not dead. The old man looked as startled as I was when I blinked my eyes and smiled at him. I felt better.

  “Thank you for keeping me alive,” I said simply.

  “You’re welcome,” he answered.

  As far as the Khmer Rouge were concerned, every person who was alive needed to work. They didn’t care if I had just been really sick. They sent me away from my family, by myself, to work about ten miles from Salatrave. They said a Khmer Rouge would be waiting for me to show up. I knew that if I tried to run away, my family might be killed as punishment. So, I showed up.

  When I got there, a Khmer Rouge, holding a rifle, said, “I don’t care what you do as long as you guard the corn crop. Don’t let the birds eat it. Don’t let any animals eat it—and that includes you!”

  While I watched for the animals, I sat in a tree so I could be out of the hot sun. Then I heard the rustling of branches close by. A band of about twenty monkeys jumped from a tree into the tree I was in. Dozens of them screamed at me, shook the branches, and charged toward me. Some of them weighed almost as much as I did. Terrified, I leaped to the ground, and they chased me. I ran across the field, which was filled with stumps, remnants of trees that had been burned to clear the land for farming. The stumps scraped against my legs, but I kept going. I must have had a hundred bloody gashes by the time I crossed the field and the monkeys gave up their chase.