Alive in the Killing Fields

by Nawuth Keat

  The Khmer Rouge didn’t care about my wounds. They yelled at me, “You are the enemy! You let the monkeys eat the crop!” I was scared, because that usually meant they were going to kill you. But they just yelled and told me I better not let the monkeys take any more corn.

  To protect myself from the bands of monkeys, I made a little shed to hide in. If the monkeys came around, I crouched in my shed and used my slingshot to scare them away. I remembered how Dad and I made monkey traps. Now, by myself, I trapped small monkeys. I pretended Dad was watching me, and if I caught one, I never screamed. To kill the monkey, I choked it with a vine, or beat its head with a stick. I felt awful doing it, but the only other choice was to starve to death. I waited until darkness came before I started a little fire and cooked the meat. I knew I was taking a chance, but when you’re hungry, eating is all you can think about. If the Khmer Rouge had caught me, I would have probably died. But if I didn’t eat, I would have definitely died.

  Sometimes I picked some of the corn for myself. Then I hid it in the jungle. I waited weeks, and when I thought it was safe, I came for it. But early one morning I got caught. The guard yelled at me, “Hey kid, that’s not your corn! You are stealing. Come see me tonight.”

  I lived the rest of that day expecting it to be my last. I was miles away from Van Lan and Chantha, too far to go to them and ask for help, even if they could have given it. I knew that if the Khmer Rouge had to come looking for me, the punishment would be worse, maybe torture in addition to a bullet. Terrified, that evening I went to see the guard as I’d been ordered. If he killed me, my family wouldn’t even know what happened. I trembled. The Khmer Rouge had come close to killing me just a few weeks before. I had been lucky. But had my luck run out?

  When he saw me coming, he sneered. He was talking with his friends, and I think he didn’t want to be interrupted. In Cambodia, people in the countryside don’t sit on chairs. He and the other grown-ups sat cross-legged on the floor. I sat down too, acting as polite and humble as I could. I bowed my head down, staring at the ground. My heart raced. Finally he said, “I don’t want to bother with you. Get out of here.” He shoved me, and I ran as fast as I could.

  My life was spared, but in the weeks to come, people stole food and blamed me. Once I found the shell of a pumpkin and a cucumber peel near where I slept. Whoever took that food wanted to protect himself by making it look like I had taken it. The guard said, “You stupid kid. You just eat, eat, eat, don’t you!”

  I didn’t dare to reply. I lowered my eyes and bowed before him.

  “I’m not going to waste a bullet on you,” he said. Maybe he knew I hadn’t really taken that food because I wouldn’t have been so stupid as to leave the evidence close to where I slept. Maybe he didn’t think about it at all. I’ll never know except that when he might have killed me, he didn’t.

  At the end of that growing season, when I was fourteen, the Khmer Rouge let me go back to Salatrave. I looked forward to rejoining Van Lan, Chantha, baby Vibol, and my younger brothers. I went to the hut we had built, in a row next to the others. But when I got there, our family’s hut was empty. I had no idea where they were. All I could do was wait for them.

  Our hut stood at the end of the row, next to a new graveyard that had just been dug to bury all the people who had died from hunger and sickness. That night, I stayed in the hut alone. As I tried to fall asleep, reassuring myself that surely the family would be back the next day, I heard strange noises. They seemed close by. There were clawing sounds, screeches, and grunts. They got louder and more intense. What was it? I didn’t believe in demons, but that’s what they sounded like. Then, with horror, I realized what they were. Animals of the jungle had come to raid the shallow graves. Wild boars and wolves were digging up the dead bodies and eating what was left of them. They snorted and howled as they gobbled the human flesh.

  I lay awake all night, imagining the gruesome scene that I was listening to. Just before dawn, the beasts left, and I finally fell asleep. I awoke when I heard people coming. Was it the Khmer Rouge looking for me, so they could send me somewhere else? The voices got closer, and I recognized the high, sweet sound of Chantha talking. I ran out of the hut and saw my family approaching. Walking next to Chantha, Van Lan carried Vibol. Hackly and Chanty followed a little behind. I had tried hard to convince myself that they had not been buried in any of the shallow graves. And now, here they were.

  “Mop!” said Van Lan, smiling and speeding up his pace.

  “Oh, dear brother,” said Chantha.

  If I had not forgotten how to cry, I would have shed tears of joy. Vibol stretched his arms out to me, and I took him into mine. I hugged him and stared with relief at Chantha and Van Lan. Hackly and Chanty seemed even smaller than when we had last been together, their skinny little bodies looking like sticks. Seeing my family made me feel wonderful, but seeing them look so weak and thin made me feel awful. Then Van Lan told me the news.

  He said, “Mop, I am so sorry to tell you what we have just found out. Your father’s luck has run out.”

  I knew what that meant.

  Chantha said, “He was so smart that for three whole years he managed to stay safe even though the Khmer Rouge wanted to kill him. But in September, he disappeared.”

  Van Lan said, “Nobody knows for sure what happened, but we have pieced this story together. The Khmer Rouge made one of the men who worked for your father tell him that he had to come out of the jungle. If he didn’t, they probably threatened to kill all of us. So, he came out and talked to the Khmer Rouge. They told him they wanted him to cut bamboo for them. He went on their errand, but he never returned. I think he knew what was going to happen, but he sacrificed himself for the family.”

  It’s terrible not knowing what really happened. I heard that Zhen, the fired worker, later bragged that he killed Dad. I don’t know if that’s true. What I do know is that I loved my father.

  I will never forget the months we spent together in the jungle. But I don’t like popcorn any more, because every time I see it, I think of Dad. And when I see the dawn break and hear birds sing, my chest hurts, because I miss my father. I learned many things in my young life, and one of them was that cruel, greedy people with guns will slaughter good, innocent people. The ones they didn’t kill, they starved, tortured, and bullied. There was nothing I could do about it. I had learned that talking was dangerous, so I grieved in silence, alone.

  Before the Khmer Rouge came, when I was still a student, learning lessons in school was easy for me. But learning about life’s injustice was not.

  If my father had evaded the Khmer Rouge for only a few more months, he would likely have been safe.

  Vietnam is the country next to Cambodia. A few Cambodian men who had joined the Khmer Rouge were horrifed by the murders they saw. They did not want to continue to be part of the Khmer Rouge, but knew they would be killed if they said so. They went to Vietnam and asked its government to fight against the Khmer Rouge. The Vietnamese government saw an opportunity to extend their power, and they took it. In early 1979, Vietnamese soldiers gained control of Battambang and Phnom Penh. But it was too late for Dad.

  Chapter Seven

  CROSS FIRE

  “The Vietnamese are entering the cities!” Van Lan told me in a low voice as I was just about to fall asleep one night. “They will save Cambodia from the ‘saviors.’”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “The freedom news reported it,” he said, and I knew what he meant. We got the news from the radio. Of course, the Khmer Rouge did not permit anybody to have a radio. But some of the adults had one anyway. Without a battery, it was of no use, and nobody had batteries. But someone managed to rig a battery out of salt, dried charcoal and a piece of metal. This makeshift battery worked for about an hour. The adults listened in the evenings, taking turns to make sure no Khmer Rouge could hear them. The Khmer Rouge usually camped at night in the jungle, away from us. Even though having a radio was risky, Van Lan craved infor
mation. Without it, we were totally isolated. We had no idea what was happening anywhere else in the country. In whispers, the adults called the program “freedom news.” It was broadcast in the Cambodian language from Washington D.C., a place that somebody said was in America. When Van Lan told me the Vietnamese were coming into the cities, I was happy. Even though I had never heard good things about Vietnam, it seemed to me having the Vietnamese in charge—anybody but the Khmer Rouge—would be an improvement. Maybe things would change for us, too. But right now, we were far from the cities. In the countryside, the Khmer Rouge still controlled everything.

  One afternoon as I walked with some other kids from one rice field to another, I heard the roar of loud engines coming up the road. I hadn’t heard the sound of a motor vehicle for years. I actually had been missing the smell of gasoline. Would it be the Vietnamese who might protect us, or the Khmer Rouge who would threaten us? Gunfire opened up. The Khmer Rouge were shooting at Vietnamese tanks. Caught in the cross fire, I hid behind a banana tree and then jumped into a rice paddy. I knew that if I ran, the Vietnamese would think I was a retreating Khmer Rouge and shoot at me. I stayed under water behind a levee until the gunfire stopped. When it was quiet, I cautiously looked up. A lot of people were injured. When I joined my family at the end of the day, I didn’t say anything about what happened. I knew that Chantha would be really scared to know that I had almost been shot, so I just kept quiet about it.

  We still slept in temporary camps. One day another camp of about a hundred people was set up across the road from ours. The next morning, as usual, I went to work in the rice fields. So did the adults from the new camp. Only old people and very young children stayed behind at the camps.

  While I was working in the field, I saw two jets flying low in the sky. They seemed to be heading right at me.

  Some other boys yelled, “In the water, get in the water!”

  I jumped into the rice paddy and held my breath as long as I could. But I had to come up for air, and then I heard a huge explosion. I ran back to our camp to see what had happened. Vietnamese bombers were probably trying to hit a Khmer Rouge truck parked in the road, but they missed their target. They hit the camp across the road from mine. It was on fire. I saw a girl about my age carrying her younger brother. I asked her, “What happened?” She just pointed to her brother, who had a hole blown through his chest. He was not dead yet, but I knew he did not have long to live.

  When the workers from the new camp ran back to their families, I heard their sobs and screams. Almost everybody left in the camp was killed in the bombing—the youngest children, the oldest relatives. Each bomb contained extra explosives that went off after the main bomb exploded. Some workers ran into the camp to see if their families were all right, and the delayed bombs killed them. I heard the screams and smelled the smoke. The next day, nobody wanted to bury the bodies because people were afraid that more of the delayed bombs might go off if the bodies were moved.

  As the Vietnamese gained more control in the cities and surrounding areas, the Khmer Rouge chased people like me, and our families, further into the countryside. They did not want their workers to run to the city. They made us march day after day, always away from Battambang. I had no other choice than to move with the group.

  The Khmer Rouge planted land mines along the larger roads. They wanted the mines to kill the invading Vietnamese, as well as any Cambodians trying to flee the countryside to head for the cities. One time when the Khmer Rouge made us move, one of them yelled, “Follow us exactly, one behind the other. We know where the mines are, so we know where it’s safe. If you step anywhere else, you will be blown up.”

  My brother Chanty had trouble keeping up. At one point he cried, “Wait for me, wait for me! I have to go to the bathroom.” He stepped out of the line, and I was terrified he might put his feet on a land mine. Nothing happened, so I stepped off next to him to see why he was crying. He was bent over in pain. A huge tapeworm was coming out of his body. With my knife, I cut it into pieces as it came out. It was disgusting, and he kept crying. Some of the tapeworm would come out, and then it would slip back in. Chanty would walk a few more yards, and then it would happen again. I don’t know how such a big worm could survive in such a small, skinny boy. Somehow he managed to keep moving forward.

  I was about to find out that while my thoughts were filled with worries about my brother, Van Lan and some of the other grown-ups were worrying about something else—a huge decision that would affect all of us forever.

  Chapter Eight

  ESCAPING THE KHMER ROUGE

  Late one afternoon, when we came back from the rice fields to our hut, Van Lan whispered to me, “Go get anything extra to eat that you can, and eat it. Tonight we are leaving!”

  Leaving? I hadn’t seen any Khmer Rouge order us to move, yelling and waving their rifles at us like they usually did. How could we be leaving? Where were we going? But I held my questions back.

  In the darkness that night, about thirty people left with my family. My older brother Bunna had been sent away the year before by the Khmer Rouge. We had seen him only once or twice that year. But now we were together. When we left, he carried a big bag of rice. I don’t know how he got it. Van Lan handed me two chickens. “Carry these,” he said, so I did.

  We walked all night long. I was exhausted. Chantha, Van Lan, and I took turns carrying baby Vibol and helping my younger brothers. Just before dawn, Bunna stepped away from the trail and into the dense jungle. I wondered where he was going. I stopped to wait for him, and then he re-appeared, pushing a bicycle!

  “How did you get that?” I asked.

  “I saw it out of the corner of my eye,” he said. “It was just lying at the base of a tree.”

  Who knows if the bike had belonged to someone the Khmer Rouge had killed. But no, they would have taken the bike for themselves. Maybe somebody else trying to escape had heard the Khmer Rouge get close, left the bicycle, and run into the jungle.

  I would never find out who abandoned that bike, but now, we used it. It was rusty, and one pedal was missing. Bunna tied the bag of rice he had been carrying to the handlebars. The weight made the bike unsteady.

  “Help me push it,” he said. With my left hand I carried the two chickens, and with my right I pushed the bike seat. Bunna also pushed and guided the handlebars.

  I had no idea how long we would be walking, but I knew that if we ran out of rice, we would starve. Bunna and I carried the food that we all needed to survive. We trailed at the back of the group because we were weighted down with the heaviest supplies. I was scared the Khmer Rouge would come up on us from behind, and Bunna and I would be the first ones they would kill.

  When morning broke, we finally rested. We were hidden in the jungle, out of sight. I later realized there was no plan, no plotted out route to the city. Our goal was just to stay away from the Khmer Rouge. Every night, we walked again, zigzagging to confuse any Khmer Rouge who might be tracking us. Van Lan decided which direction we should go. I did not ask, “Why are we walking this way? How much farther do we have to go? What is going to happen?” It was as if I had blinders on. I just focused on placing one foot in front of another, again and again and again.

  We never walked on a road where we would be easy to spot. Open, grassy fields—even if the grass was tall enough to hide us—were not safe either. The Khmer Rouge had put land mines in them to scare people from trying to run away. Instead, we criss-crossed the jungle on narrow, bumpy trails that had been made by small animals. Van Lan studied each path carefully to see if there was any hint of a land mine. He looked for disturbed roots, uneven ground, or anything that might show a mine had been buried there. Barefoot, we stepped as lightly as we could, hour after hour. We took short rests, but we traveled every night, and sometimes during part of the day, too. We were always listening for any Khmer Rouge that might be in the area. To keep the babies in the group quiet, mothers gave them tree bark to suck. It contained a chemical that caused the babies
to sleep.

  It was the summer dry season, and we were thirsty. I fantasized about the soothing, satisfying taste of water. Then I saw a rise ahead of us. Cambodia is mostly flat, so any ridge really stands out. I knew that during the rainy season, people stay in high and dry spots above the flood plain. They usually dig a well so they can have clear, fresh water to drink. When we got to the high ground, I was thrilled to discover a well there. I looked down into it, and I saw water. My tongue felt even drier than before. My family stopped to drink. Bunna lowered me into the narrow darkness. I let go with one hand and filled a bucket with water. He pulled me back up, and we drank. But the rest of the group had not waited for our family. We were alone.

  When we came out of the jungle, we found ourselves with no clear way to go other than across an open area with high grass, much taller than we were. We had no choice other than to risk the land mines that might be set there. The high grass would hide us from the Khmer Rouge, but we could not see them, either. As usual, Van Lan led the way. I guess he looked at the sun to decide what direction to go. The soil was hot and sandy. My feet burned so much from walking on it that I wrapped rags around them. As the hours passed, the rags shredded. I just trudged along, pushing the bike and thinking about nothing except the miserable discovery I had made—that I could move when I was too tired to move. Then, I snapped out of my thoughts. I spotted what looked like a mound of something, but I could not see clearly what it was. Could this be as valuable a find as the bike? I was still carrying chickens in my hand, so with my foot I tapped the mound. The “mound” leaped up at me! It was a dog. It attacked me and bit my leg. Blood poured out from the wound.