Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

2. Thou shalt serve the people wherever thou goest, with all thy heart and with all thy mind.

  3. Thou shalt respect the people without injury to their interests, without touching their goods or plantations, forbidding thyself to steal so much as one pepper, and taking care never to utter a single offensive word against them.

  4. Thou shalt beg the people’s pardon if thou hast committed some error respecting them. If thou hast injured the interests of the people, to the people shalt thou make reparation.

  5. Thou shalt observe the rules of the people when speaking, sleeping, walking, standing or seated, in amusement or in laughter.

  6. Thou shalt do nothing improper respecting women.

  7. In food and drink thou shalt take nothing but revolutionary products.

  8. Thou shalt never gamble in any way.

  9. Thou shalt not touch the people’s money. Thou shalt never put out thy hand to touch so much as one tin of rice or pill of medicine belonging to the collective goods of the state or the ministry.

  10. Thou shalt behave with great meekness toward the workers and peasants, and the entire population. Toward the enemy, however, the American imperialists and their lackeys, thou shalt feed thy hatred with force and vigilance.

  11. Thou shalt continually join the people’s production and love thy work.

  12. Against any foe and against every obstacle thou shalt struggle with determination and courage, ready to make every sacrifice, including thy life, for the people, the workers and peasants, for the revolution and for Angka, without hesitation and without rest.

  Every morning, when the recitation was over, the same young Khmer Rouge soldier shuffled out of the line and walked to our vicinity of the village, to keep watch over us. He slept each night in a hammock slung from the poles of an open-sided shed behind our house. He wore an old green Chinese-made uniform with a Mao-style hat. His trousers had a hole in the seat. There were rips along the cuffs and more rips at his elbows and collar. There was no pen in his pocket, meaning he was the lowest grade of soldier, like a private.

  In spite of his shabby appearance he was full of revolutionary fervour. Several times a day when the mood struck him he fired his AK-47 into the air and began yelling slogans: ‘Long live our victory! Down with US imperialism! Long live the independent, peaceful, neutral, nonaligned, sovereign, uh, peace, uh, peaceful, neutral Cambodia!’ He usually stumbled over the longer slogans because he wasn’t very bright and he didn’t know what some of the words meant. His rifle fire made us nervous, but gradually we realized that he didn’t mean us any harm. He had a wide, round, smiling Cambodian face. Beneath the tattered uniform and the political indoctrination was an uneducated country boy.

  I never learned his name, so I just called him mit, meaning comrade. He began to hang around the house, attracted to the sight of all the young women. He was never rude or suggestive to them – the Khmer Rouge soldiers usually obeyed that part of their code.

  Still, to be on the safe side, I instructed Huoy and the nurses to be careful. They were to do nothing to suggest that I had ever been a doctor. They weren’t to talk to him at all, unless he said something to them first. When they cooked food they were to eat immediately, to avoid having to invite him to join. Instead, they were to set food aside for him. When I returned from wherever I had gone, I took the food out to the mit and he and I ate together. If there was going to be any trouble for my house, I was going to be the lightning rod.

  The strategy worked. If the mit had something to say to the household, he said it to me, as the spokesman. We never had problems. And on several occasions he brought us vegetables and pork, in the spirit of ‘serving the people.’ The nurses prepared the food, and I made sure he got generous portions.

  I tried to get closer and closer to the mit. I reasoned that if the Khmer Rouge sent us out into the country to live, he might become our supervisor. If that happened, perhaps he would give us easy work assignments. I tailored the way I spoke with him – polite but friendly, in an accent that closely matched his. Though I never asked him personal questions, I guessed he was from Svay Rieng Province, on the Vietnamese border. Many of the villages in Svay Rieng had been levelled in the fighting and bombing, just as my village had been. He had been swept into the war, like me. The only difference was that he had been swept into the other side.

  ‘What about Angka’s plan for the nation?’ I asked him one evening as we settled down to eat. He took out his spoon, wiped it on his torn trousers and reached for the rice. Next to his rifle, his spoon was his favourite possession. It was US-military issue, made of stainless steel that would last forever without rusting. Khmer Rouge soldiers, who never used forks or knives for eating, always valued the US spoons highly, which was strange considering how much they hated the United States.

  ‘There were too many people in the city,’ the mit said with his mouth full. ‘Maybe Angka will have to push them to work as farmers. Angka has a new doctrine, for building a new society.’

  He wasn’t telling me anything I hadn’t heard before. I decided to prod him gently.

  ‘Who is Angka, comrade brother?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the mit. The question didn’t bother him. He didn’t seem to have thought of it before.

  ‘Did you see Angka during the years of fighting against the capitalists?’

  ‘No, I’ve never seen Angka. But I hear about Angka all the time.’ He piled more rice and pork on his spoon and put it in his mouth.

  That was as much as I ever learned from him about the leadership of the Khmer Rouge.

  A few days later the mit came around and saw us sitting underneath the house in the shade. Two more of my nurses had found their families. In preparing to leave, they had spread the medicine from the clinic on top of the oxcart and were helping themselves to their share.

  ‘So much medicine, eh?’ said the mit. ‘What sickness can you use it for?’

  The nurses told him the medicines could treat many kinds of illness. I was sitting nearby, pretending I knew nothing about the matter. The mit picked up some glass ampules with clear liquids inside – for vitamin injections, as I could tell at a glance – and asked me what they were for. With a vague wave of my hand I answered that the medicines on the oxcart could treat any disease he could think of.

  He sat down next to me. ‘Do you have any serum for transfusions?’ he asked. Serum was the general term for liquids to be injected intravenously into patients, everything from glucose and saline solutions to vitamins to blood products. A picture flashed through my mind of liquids travelling down IV tubes into the arms of unconscious patients. In the hospitals I had hooked up IV tubes countless times.

  ‘We have all kinds of medicines here,’ I said, as carelessly as I could.

  ‘Can I have some?’ the mit said. ‘Angka doesn’t have any. When we give transfusions we have to use coconut juice.’

  I tried to ignore what he said about coconut juice. I told him evenly, ‘Sure, you can have serum. I’ve got a lot of it. But I didn’t bring it here. If you come to my house in Phnom Penh I will give you as much as you want. If you have some way to get back to town I’ll give you any kind of medicine you need. No problem at all.’

  A thoughtful expression crossed the mit’s face. He asked me if I were really serious. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Friends of mine gave me lots of medicine. Plenty of it. We kept it at home for our family use. If I had a way to get back to Phnom Penh I’d give you as much as you want.’

  The mit said he would find out about the matter and walked off. I wondered if he actually had a way to get back to Phnom Penh. It was worth trying, anyway.

  Then my mind turned to thinking about coconut juice. Flowing into human veins? Coconut juice! Like something monkeys would use if they were playing at being doctors!

  Then, as I thought about it more, I realized that coconut juice might work under certain emergency conditions.

  When a green coconut is still growing on its tree, and a boy shinnies up the tru
nk and knocks it down, and then cuts off the end of its husk with a machete, he finds a watery liquid inside, a bit sweet, almost clear. This is coconut juice (as opposed to coconut milk, which comes from grinding and then straining the nut’s white flesh). Rural Cambodians drink the juice all the time. It’s a wholesome natural product and perfectly clean, except for the germs that come from the machete. If the juice were sweet and sterile there was no real reason why it couldn’t be used as a battlefield substitute for glucose solution, to give energy to a patient too weak to feed himself. But – and it was a big ‘but’ – I couldn’t imagine the Khmer Rouge sterilizing their machetes. Drinking contaminated juice is not necessarily harmful, because the stomach can cope with many kinds of bacteria. Injecting contaminated juice into the bloodstream is another matter – it could easily be lethal to a patient who was already weakened.

  And that wasn’t all. The sugar content of the juice varies from one coconut to another. I knew from childhood that coconuts two months old aren’t ripe, that coconuts five months old are generally sweet and that at seven months the juice begins to sour, with white strands from the coconut flesh coagulating in it. Would Khmer Rouge medics test the juice before pouring it into the IV bags? Probably not. From what I’d seen, and from the way they’d been looking for doctors to kill in the hospital, they didn’t have much respect for standard medical practices. If they wanted Western-style transfusion serum now, it was because they envied it, just as they envied American-made spoons. Not to mention because their wounded soldiers were dying from coconut juice transfusions.

  In my mind I saw a lingering, awful image of medics in bloody black pajamas chopping open coconuts and pouring dirty juice down IV tubes.

  The next day the mit returned. He asked me again if I was sure that I had a lot of serum in Phnom Penh. I answered again that I had plenty and that he could take as much as he wanted if we could get back to Phnom Penh.

  He asked me how we would get there.

  I looked at him and shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Comrade, we could go together on my motor scooter, if you like,’ I said, as if it were the last thing that either of us wanted to do. My old white Vespa was parked under the house by the oxcart, with the red cross on the back of the seat carefully removed. ‘But I don’t have any gas. I’d need four or five litres, at least.’

  In truth, I did have gas, but I had drained it from the tank and kept it hidden, in case of emergencies, along with my spark plug. Huoy and I had talked it over the night before. We had decided that it was even more important to be able to drive away on a few minutes’ notice – if, say, the local Khmer Rouge started slaughtering civilians – than to go into Phnom Penh for medicine and gold. Besides, I didn’t want to seem too eager to go back to Phnom Penh.

  ‘We will go to the city tomorrow,’ the mit said flatly. Then he walked off, presumably to report to his superiors.

  When he left, I took the spark plug out of hiding, cleaned it and screwed into the Vespa’s cylinder. I examined the bike from one end to the other to make sure everything was in good working condition.

  In the morning, the mit showed up with ten litres of gasoline, twice as much as we needed. What a huge amount that seemed – to me, the former owner of gasoline delivery trucks! I poured the precious fuel into the tank before he could change his mind. With him was another cadre with a torn but neatly mended Chinese-made uniform, a belt holster with pistol and a blue-and-white checkered krama knotted around his neck like a scarf. He also wore one pen in his breast pocket, meaning that he was an officer. One-Pen looked like an ordinary Cambodian, with a face that seemed normal and happy rather than cruel.

  Without more talk I pushed the Vespa out from under the house and started the motor. I already felt good: for the first time since the communist takeover I would be riding the bike instead of pushing it. The nurses and my entire family looked on from a polite distance. By the pillars of the house, Huoy gave me a wide-eyed look that implored me to be careful. I winked at her, signalling not to worry. I tied my krama around my neck the way One-Pen did, hoping it would make me look a bit more like a Khmer Rouge. Then I got on and One-Pen behind me and then the mit on the back, all three of us jammed together. We drove off, up the dirt embankment and onto the elevated national road. As I accelerated, my krama flapped in the breeze.

  A few pedestrians were still walking toward us along the highway. Transients still camped out by the thousands on either side of the road. A truck convoy appeared in the distance, grew larger and passed us, heading toward Vietnam with its mysterious hidden cargo.

  I drove on through the morning heat. In half an hour we covered the distance that had taken me days to walk. Near the Monivong bridge, people still milled around, though fewer of them than before. At the edge of the bridge there stood a new checkpoint, a sandbagged machine-gun emplacement with a canvas top for a roof. Beyond it lay a double row of concertina-wire barricades, with space to pass first on one side and then the other.

  I stopped at the checkpoint and cut the engine. One-Pen got off. He walked into the tent, promptly returned and got back on the Vespa.

  ‘Comrade brother, they accepted our pass?’ I asked as I started the motor again.

  ‘No problem,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘When you come with me, it’s never a problem.’

  We drove past the barricades and over the arching bridge. There were no civilians on it. At the highest point there was another sandbagged machine-gun emplacement, with clear lines of fire over the bridge in both directions and over the river below. At the far end of the bridge we passed through another set of barricades and another checkpoint.

  We had entered Phnom Penh.

  We drove up Norodom Boulevard, where Phnom Penh’s wealthiest families once lived. In a few of the houses, Khmer Rouge soldiers relaxed on upper-floor balconies. Others strolled on the streets, sidestepping the piles of trash and rubble. Debris was everywhere – bottles, books, discarded clothing, mounds of garbage, broken glass, everything imaginable. Motorcycles had been overturned and abandoned for lack of gasoline, or because nobody knew how to use them. In nearly every block we saw burned car bodies and trucks with flat tyres and smashed windshields.

  I reminded myself to concentrate on the mission. But the sight of the ruined boulevard made me ache with sadness. For all its faults, for all its corruption, Phnom Penh had been a lovely city. And now to empty it, to leave it to the flies – I downshifted to steer around an overturned truck, and tried again not to think about it.

  The city was very quiet.

  We came to another pair of concertina-wire barricades in front of Lon Nol’s former residence. I slowed down, manoeuvred through the gap in the first barricade and headed for the second. As I did, the mit on the back of the bike merrily shouted ‘Hello, comrade!’ at a soldier on the sidewalk. The next thing I knew, the soldier had pulled his pistol out and was firing it in the air and shouting for me to stop. I braked to a halt by the second barricade.

  The new soldier stalked angrily to us. I stood there facing straight ahead, my feet on the ground, my hands on the handlebars. I was only the driver. ‘What unit do you belong to?’ he demanded.

  ‘The 207th,’ One-Pen answered.

  ‘You do, huh? Well, next time don’t call out to me,’ the soldier said to the mit. ‘This area is under my control. I don’t want any yelling from the 207th or any other unit. Do you understand?’

  The mit said he understood. I took a deep breath and drove off. Behind me, I could hear One-Pen cursing about the units occupying Phnom Penh and how stupid and backward they were compared to his own.

  One-Pen ordered me to turn down another street and I did. In the middle of the street, near the abandoned US embassy, a half-dozen civilians were pushing an old car. One-Pen told me to drive up to them and I did. He got off. While the civilians stood there with their heads bowed, he yelled at them to get out of the city, that they were late, that they had to go out into the countryside, and so on. When he finished taking out his anger
on these innocent people he got back on the bike. ‘That’s better,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Now go back the way we were going before and show me the city.’

  So began our tour of Phnom Penh, with me as chauffeur and guide. It was like a ghost city, with its buildings in place but its people missing. In the empty streets my Vespa’s engine reverberated like the buzzing of a fly in a closed and empty room. There were no other vehicles on the streets except for the burned and overturned cars. There were no other people on the sidewalks except for the occasional Khmer Rouge walking silently in rubber-tyre sandals.

  I drove back up Norodom Boulevard, past the Royal Palace and then the old stadium. We came to the French embassy. Here was an unexpected sight – white-skinned Westerners on the embassy grounds, a lot of them. But there were guards outside, and I didn’t dare stop to find out what was going on.

  I drove past the medical school, to the Central Market and up Charles De Gaulle Boulevard. Finally I stopped the Vespa in front of Huoy’s house and turned off the motor.

  The street was deserted except for the three of us.

  In the ground-floor cafe the tables and chairs were still neatly arranged. Nobody there either.

  The city was silent except for the faint sound of gunshots in the far distance.

  I locked the Vespa and beckoned the others to come along. To my surprise, I wanted them along, for protection. I unlocked the front door and we climbed the stairs, talking quietly.

  As I arrived on the third floor ahead of the others, the door of the apartment across from Huoy’s opened a crack. The wrinkled face of an old woman peered through. I knew her. She was the mother of a commercial pilot who had lived there.

  She shut the door suddenly when she saw the two soldiers behind me. The old lady must have been hiding there since the takeover.

  The Khmer Rouge heard the door shut, but they didn’t investigate. They were probably as scared as I was. I unlocked Huoy’s apartment, showed them inside and brought them to the glass-fronted display case I had given to Huoy long ago. ‘The medicine’s in here,’ I said. ‘I’ll get you something to carry it in.’