Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  This was torture enough.

  When the afternoon sun sank low enough to shine under the branches and onto me, a sturdily built man with curly hair walked into the mango grove. He wore new black clothes, black rubber-tyre sandals, a wristwatch. Under his black shirt I glimpsed a flash of blue. A Montagut shirt, I guessed. In Phnom Penh before the revolution Montagut shirts had been a status symbol, like wearing an alligator shirt. They were French-made, cool and comfortable in tropical weather. And now Montagut shirts were status symbols for the Khmer Rouge, like the silk kramas they stole from the ‘new’ people. Emblems of an old society that they hated but also envied.

  The curly-haired man carried a hatchet and pair of pliers in his hands.

  He walked down the row. He sat on the wooden bench by the spreadeagled woman.

  ‘Where is your husband?’ he asked her, the sound of his voice carrying to me. ‘You have to tell Angka the truth. What rank was he under Lon Nol? A captain? A lieutenant? Tell the truth.’

  The woman slurred her words together. ‘I still don’t know where he is,’ she said. ‘And he was not a soldier. He wasn’t a captain. He wasn’t a lieutenant. He wasn’t anything like that.’

  ‘You still lie to Angka?’

  The burly man stepped up on the bench, put a foot down on her hand, bent down with the pliers, pulled hard and came up with something in the pliers’ jaws.

  ‘AAAEEEEIIIIIIIIII!!! AAEEIII!!! AAAAEEEIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!’ the woman screamed, but he paid no attention.

  ‘If you don’t tell me the truth, I’ll take another fingernail tomorrow,’ he said. ‘If you tell the truth now, Angka will release you.’

  The woman writhed on the bench, her sampot up around her hips. ‘AAAAEEEIIIIIIIII!!! Kill me soon! Now! Why do you do this to me? I have nothing to say. I am telling the truth. Oh, Mother, Mother, Mother, save my life!’

  When we Cambodians are in danger, we call out to our mothers to save our lives. We believe their spirits watch over us protectively.

  The burly man came over to me. I was right: it was a blue Montagut shirt under his black tunic. In his tunic pocket two pens showed.

  He stood over me and said, ‘Tell me the truth. Who gave you permission to go out and find something to eat?’

  ‘I went on my own, comrade. I was hungry.’

  ‘Angka doesn’t provide you with enough food?’

  ‘Yes, enough food, but I was still hungry.’

  ‘Then why did you go out, when other people don’t go out? You’re supposed to work. If you don’t work you do an injustice to others.’

  I began to say something but he paid no attention and broke in, demanding to know whether I was Vietnamese or Chinese. I said I was neither.

  ‘What did you do before? Were you a soldier? A teacher? High-ranking job? What did you do in the Lon Nol regime?’

  ‘Taxi driver.’

  ‘What kind? What model car did you drive?’

  ‘404. A Peugeot model 404.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Mostly long-distance drives. From Phnom Penh to Takeo, or to Battambang. Wherever they wanted to go, until the roads were closed because of the war. Then just around Phnom Penh.’

  ‘NO!!!’ he roared. ‘You were not a taxi driver! I can tell you are lying!’

  ‘I was a taxi driver, comrade. Really. Not a high-class person.

  My wife sold vegetables in the market. If there were no vegetables she baked little cakes and sweets and sold them.’

  ‘NO! You’re not that kind of person! You’ve got to tell Angka the truth! If you tell Angka the truth you can go back to your wife right now.’

  ‘I am telling you the truth, comrade,’ I insisted.

  He called out for someone else, who arrived quickly. They tightened the rope around my elbows and pushed me over on my side. While the second one held my neck down in the dirt, the burly one put my right hand on top of a mango tree root and then stepped on my wrist with his foot. He dropped down and swung the hatchet. There was an excruciating pain in my little finger, and the shock of it spread throughout my body. Automatically I gasped and stiffened, but no matter how hard I clenched, the pain was there, from the tip of my finger up my arm exploding into my brain.

  ‘The next time,’ the burly man said, ‘don’t steal food. If you do it again, Angka will show you no mercy. Angka will not allow you to do it again.’

  They let go of my neck and hand and shoved me upright, but I pulled against the ropes and fell partway over until the rope restrained me and my back landed against the tree.

  ‘Why don’t we cut off a toe?’ said the second man. ‘We shouldn’t let him walk. He’s too greedy.’

  ‘Right,’ said the man with the two pens. ‘Good thinking. Hold his leg here, will you?’

  The burly man aimed at my right ankle and swung the hatchet, not as hard as he could have, because that would have severed the joint, but hard enough to lay bare the bone underneath.

  His face swam into focus near mine. ‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘Don’t call your wife “sweetheart.” Call her “comrade woman.” She can call you “comrade brother.” ’

  Then they left.

  I could see my ankle, the white bone exposed in the middle of the wound, the flesh red and bleeding around the edges. I couldn’t see my hand, which was tied behind me. I tried to wiggle my little finger and, even with the pain being so general, knew that the fingertip wasn’t there anymore. Drawn to the blood, red ants swarmed over my hand and bit like hot, stinging needles, but that didn’t matter.

  The thought occurred that the wounds were going to get infected and I had to stop the bleeding. I rubbed the heel of my good foot in the dirt and coated my ankle wound with dust and did the same thing with my good hand and my finger wound even though the nerve ending in my finger was naked and raw.

  Of the late afternoon and sunset I remember little. My ankle hurt. My finger throbbed. When the darkness came I dozed until red ants bit me around the eyes. I got the ants off by turning my face to the side and rubbing my eye sockets against my shoulders.

  It was a long, long night. The woman on the bench moaned and whimpered. She had defecated and urinated, and the smell drifted to me.

  The next morning, the burly interrogator came out, untied my hands and gave me a bowl of watery rice.

  For the first time, I could see what he had done to the little finger on my right hand. He had chopped it off halfway. One and a half joints were still there, the stub coated with dust, the bone showing white in the middle. The other one and a half joints with the fingernail were gone.

  He told me to stay there. I did. I didn’t have the strength to run away, and besides it seemed as though they might release me. When he left I turned around in a sitting position to look behind me and saw my missing fingertip with ants crawling over it. It wasn’t part of my body anymore and it didn’t frighten me. Then I turned back to my original position, sat and thought.

  With my good hand, my left hand, I felt the lymph nodes in the inguinal crease, between the top of my thigh and the trunk of my body. The lymph glands were bumpy and swollen from fighting the infections. I tore strips of cloth from my shirt and tied the bandages around my finger and my ankle.

  In the afternoon the guards retied my ropes but not too tightly. Then they brought a new prisoner down the line of mango trees, a pregnant woman. As they walked past the woman I heard her saying that her husband wasn’t a soldier. It seemed to be the most common offence in the prison, being the wife of someone in the Lon Nol military. She begged them to spare her life. They told her she was still lying. They tied her wrists around a tree not far away from me, then tied her ankles and left.

  Later a new interrogator, one I had not seen before, walked down the row of trees holding a long, sharp knife. I could not make out their words, but he spoke to the pregnant woman and she answered. What happened next makes me nauseous to think about. I can only describe it in the briefest of terms: he cut the clothes off her body, slit he
r stomach, and took the baby out. I turned away but there was no escaping the sound of her agony, the screams that slowly subsided into whimpers and after far too long lapsed into the merciful silence of death. The killer walked calmly past me holding the fetus by its neck. When he got to the prison, just within my range of vision, he tied a string around the fetus and hung it from the eaves with the others, which were dried and black and shrunken.

  Each tree in the orchard had its prisoner, and each prisoner had a different means of punishment or death. The sturdy man who chopped off my finger and the other who disembowelled the pregnant woman were only two of the specialists on the prison staff.

  Never had I seen deliberate killings before, carried out by professionals, in front of terrified spectators who knew that their own turns to die would come soon. Never, never, never. There had been cruelty in the Cambodia of Sihanouk and Lon Nol. There had been torture in their prisons. Lon Nol troops had done barbarous things to civilians of Vietnamese descent, and also to captured Khmer Rouge. But I knew of nothing like this, no coldblooded pleasure in such a broad range of torture and murder techniques.

  I stayed awake that night, ants biting me as they wished. The faint light of an oil lamp filtered through the thatch wall of the prison. The tree trunks with the prisoners tied to them were black outlines in the silvery moonlight. Owls hooted. Crickets sung in their chorus, and from one place and then another in the mango orchard prisoners moaned.

  In the depths of the night, a pack of chhke char-chark, similar to wolves but smaller, drifted into the mango grove and sniffed the air. They trotted toward the corpse of the pregnant woman and began tearing at her flesh, eating it noisily and greedily. I could see them in the moonlight, three or four of them, tugging at her, pulling backward, snarling and growling at each other in warning. If the wolves wanted to attack me there was nothing I could do. I let go – pissed in my pants and shat, surrendering all control.

  The burly torturer came again the next morning and tore another fingernail from the woman on the bench, but he left me alone. In the afternoon two new guards came. They asked what I had done before the revolution, and when I told them I had been a taxi driver they seemed satisfied. They untied me from the tree and told me to get up. I tried and I fell over. I tried again and got to my knees and then they jerked me up to my feet.

  We left the prison by the same footpath I had entered. My right foot was swollen from my toes up to my calf. Every time I stepped on it the pain flashed all the way up to my hip. To walk I put all my weight on my left foot, brought my right foot a little ahead of my left foot, set my right foot lightly on the ground, then hopped onto my left foot again.

  We were out of sight of the prison, in a mixture of woods and uncultivated rice fields.

  ‘Up there at that next hillock,’ said one of my escorts, ‘you will tell us the truth. Or else you will sleep there for a long, long time.’

  If they wanted to kill me by that hillock, it was okay by me. As long as they got it over with quickly.

  I hobbled to the hillock, a long mound with trees and brush on top, and then past it. They didn’t tell me to stop.

  ‘We’ll stop at the next hillock on,’ they said after a while. We passed that hillock and then they said the same thing about the next one.

  The three of us walked very slowly on dykes between rice paddies. Our course lay at an angle to the dykes. They told me when to turn right and when to turn left on the dykes, and we made slow progress across the fields.

  I knew they weren’t going to let me go. This was part of the torture, to let me think I was going to get away. But I really didn’t care. One hillock was as good as another.

  I concentrated on walking, one short step and then a hop, one short step and a hop. The guards were behind me. They were going to do whatever they were going to do, and I couldn’t prevent it.

  ‘Stop here!’

  I stopped.

  We were next to a hillock.

  They kicked me from behind and I fell on top of the dyke.

  They stood over me, looking down. ‘Why don’t you tell the truth? Hurry up! We will kill you now!’

  I said slowly, ‘I was a taxi driver. That is the truth.’

  They said I was still lying and they kicked me in the side. I fell down the dyke onto the dry stubble of the rice field and lay there with rice stalks poking me in the face until they hauled me on top of the dyke again. One of them put his foot on my neck and twisted his foot back and forth like stubbing out a cigarette. Then they took turns kicking me in the ribs.

  ‘Do you want to die or to live? You’ll die in the next minute if you don’t tell the truth!’

  I lay there without saying anything, breathing hoarsely.

  They squatted a short distance away with their rifle butts on the ground.

  ‘“If he lives there is no gain,” ’ one of them muttered to the other, quoting a common Khmer Rouge expression. ‘“If he dies there is no loss.” ’

  When they had rested they pulled me to my feet and I limped a few more yards to the next hillock.

  ‘Stop.’

  I stopped again.

  ‘Do you want to go home, or what? Do you want to be reunited with your wife?’

  I turned around to face them but kept my eyes lowered, like a servant does to his master. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If you allow me to go, I will. But if you don’t allow me, if you kill me, it’s up to you.’

  They untied me and removed the rope. Apparently I had given them the right answer. I had told them they had power of life and death over me. Hearing me admit this gave them almost as much satisfaction as killing me.

  ‘Don’t look back,’ they said. ‘Just keep on walking. Go home.’

  I looked above the treetops and saw the mountain ridge with the two white dots below the summit. From them I took my compass bearing.

  ‘Home,’ the most recent location of the front lines cooperative, was in a southerly direction, about a mile away. I was in no condition to hurry. It hurt to breathe. The stump of my finger was swollen to three times normal size. But now that my hands were untied I could bend my right arm at the elbow and elevate my hand so it wouldn’t throb so much. I found a stick of bamboo and picked it up. I hobbled slowly along, using the bamboo as a staff in my left hand to help support my weight.

  I came to a canal with muddy water in the bottom. I took my clothes off and sat down heavily with a splash. With my good hand I washed myself and cleaned the dirt from the wounds as best I could. Blood still seeped from what was left of my finger. There were large bruises on my ribs but nothing broken. Shit and piss stained my trousers. I rinsed my clothes with one hand, but there was no way to get them really clean. I put them on wet and rolled the waistband of my trousers so they wouldn’t slip down.

  I walked. Left foot; then a short, light step with the right foot and most of the weight on the bamboo staff; then the left foot again.

  Right foot. Left foot. Right foot, left foot.

  I stopped to rest. Then started again. My body was stiffening from the bruises. The sun was setting.

  When I came into camp it was dusk. Work had finished for the day. On the hillocks, other ‘new’ people saw me but weren’t sure whether to help, and I didn’t ask them to. Huoy was in our hammock, gazing at something far away, thinking. When the neighbours told her I was coming she jumped out of the hammock and ran to me. She took the bamboo stick away and draped my left arm around her shoulders and helped me walk the rest of the distance.

  Everybody from our hillock crowded around asking questions, until they saw me up close. Then they fell silent. They knew the answers to their questions just by looking.

  Huoy brought me to the hammock, but I didn’t want to sit in it because I wasn’t clean. Someone brought a pallet of split bamboo and I lay down on that. The neighbours had gathered around, everyone silent except for Huoy, who was crying.

  They boiled water, and Huoy and the other women used their kramas like washcloths to clean me. By th
en most of them were crying, because they knew what happened when people disappeared and there could be no more pretending. What had happened to me could happen to them. They brought gifts of medicine, a capsule of ampicillin from one, a capsule of tetracycline from another and from the rest a couple of aspirin and some herbs. I opened the antibiotic capsules and sprinkled half of each directly on my wounds, saving the rest for later.

  One of the older ladies who had brought herbal medicine finally said what had been on everyone’s mind.

  ‘Samnang,’ she said, ‘maybe you did something bad in a previous lifetime. Perhaps you are being punished for it today.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think my kama is not so good.’

  20

  The Wat

  Chev gave me time off from work to recover from my injuries. I lay in the hammock, suspended from two trees on a hillock, resting and watching.

  I tried not to think too much about my experiences in prison. The pregnant woman, the wolves, the burly man with the Montagut shirt – I tried to suppress them all from my memory. But the bruises on my body, the infected cuts and the stump of my little finger were reminders of something that could not be ignored. I began to analyse what I knew of the Khmer Rouge system of justice. Or rather, injustice.

  I had not known that the prison existed until I was taken there. I had never heard of it. The reason was perfectly simple. Few who went there ever returned. Why they had let me off so easily I did not know. Nor did I know why they had gone to the trouble of taking me there at all instead of simply taking me out to the woods and killing me, which is what the soldiers usually did with their victims in the late afternoons. Why were some taken to prison and the rest to the woods?

  Maybe, I thought, prison was the punishment for political crimes, and death in the woods was the punishment for breaking simpler rules, like loitering at the work site. But that couldn’t be true. Why was gathering wild food a political crime instead of a minor infraction? Why was being married to a Lon Nol officer a political crime? More to the point, why was either of them any kind of crime at all?