Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  But that question had no answer.

  Perhaps, I thought, there were two parallel systems of punishment. A prison system, part of a bureaucracy that needed to be fed to justify its existence. And another, informal system that gave the cooperative leader freedom to hand out the punishments, though the effect on the prisoner was ultimately the same.

  In either case, the prison or the woods, the key man was the cooperative leader, since everyone on the front lines took orders from him. In our cooperative the leader, Chev, didn’t do any of the killing himself, or at least didn’t kill anyone that we saw with our own eyes. Nor did he allow his soldiers to kill anyone in public. That was another holdover from the Khmer Rouge code of the old days, when the guerrillas were still trying to gain popular support: ‘Thou shalt behave with great meekness toward the workers and peasants, and the entire population,’ the code said. Now that the Khmer Rouge had won the war and their contempt for the ‘new’ people was so obvious, it was strange that they even pretended to stick to their rules. In effect, the new rule was, ‘Do not kill anyone in plain sight.’

  And in fact Chev was a killer himself. More than once, as I recovered from my wounds, I watched Chev accompany the soldiers to the afternoon arrests. He stood around pretending to inspect the canals until the soldiers and prisoners were out of sight. Then he nonchalantly followed them with a hoe over his shoulder, stopping now and again with the pleased expression of a man who is enjoying his afternoon stroll. There were never any gunshots later. Chev used his hoe to kill. The next day he was invariably in a cheerful mood, walking around energetically without his hoe. He killed to feel good about himself. If he purged enough enemies, he satisfied his conscience. He had done his duty to Angka.

  Why? Why did they kill so many? For the Khmer Rouge in general, from the lowest-ranking soldier to the burly interrogator who had chopped off my finger to the ever-smiling Chev, the act of killing other human beings was routine. Just part of the job. Not even worth a second thought. However, there were differences in their backgrounds, and in their motivations. The low-ranking soldiers, for example, were young and uneducated. Few of them had any independent sense of right and wrong. In the civil war they had been trained to kill Lon Nol forces. When they were ordered to kill ‘new’ people on the front lines they obeyed automatically, without thinking much about the difference. For some of them, of course, and for the prison interrogators, there was an element of kum-monuss in what they did. But the prison interrogators were older and higher-ranking than the soldiers, like the two-pen rank of the burly man who chopped off my finger. Officers like that didn’t kill just to obey, or to get revenge. They enjoyed it. They were sadists: torturing others was the ultimate proof of their own power.

  But for Chev and other front-lines leaders there was a more sophisticated reason for killing, and that was political necessity. When they talked about sacrificing everything for Angka, they meant it. Whatever got in the way of Angka’s projects had to be eliminated, including people. To them, though, we weren’t quite people. We were lower forms of life, because we were enemies. Killing us was like swatting flies, a way to get rid of undesirables. We were a disappointment to them because we never finished the projects on time, because we didn’t work hard for twenty hours a day, because we were constantly wearing out and getting sick.

  The worst thing was that the killings seemed so normal. Maybe not normal, but inevitable. The way things were. To us war slaves, the old way of life was gone and everything about it half forgotten, as if it had never really existed in the first place. Buddhist monks, making their tranquil morning rounds, didn’t exist anymore. Three-generation families, where the grandparents looked after the little children, didn’t exist anymore. Shopping for food in the markets and staying to gossip. Inviting friends over to eat and drink and talk in the evening. It was all gone, and without that pattern we had nothing to hold on to. Demoralized, split apart, like atoms removed from their chemical compounds, we let the Khmer Rouge do what they wanted with us. We didn’t fight back. In the fields we were two thousand men and women with hoes, and Angka was only two or three brainwashed teenagers with rifles. Yet we let the soldiers take us away. Why? Because it was in our nature to obey leaders. Because we were weak and sick and starved. Because it was kama. We did not even know why, but we submitted to them.

  There had been an evening, before I went to prison, when a few of us talked about rebellion. It was one of those rare evenings when we did not have to go back to work after the political meeting. About a dozen of us from the old elite sat around a fire. We swore an oath of secrecy and talked about an armed uprising against the Khmer Rouge. Our leader was a ‘new’ person named Thai, who had once been a Lon Nol soldier. Also there was Pen Tip, the tiny X-ray technician from Phnom Penh whose path often crossed mine. We talked about seizing weapons. We talked about heading for the border of Thailand to join the freedom fighters, the Khmer Serei, who were supposed to live there. But that’s all it was, just talk. Gradually, as the evening wore on, we stared for longer and longer periods into the flames, not saying anything. Resistance was hopeless and we knew it. The Khmer Rouge had already won. We looked into the fire and our thoughts were sad and far away. Just like every evening, at every campfire on the front lines. Gazing into the flames and feeling tired and defeated.

  But even though we were defeated, and even though we could feel ourselves slipping farther down into slavery, we didn’t lose hope. Or a lot of us didn’t, anyway. Take Huoy and me, for example. I had been to prison, but I had survived. That was something to be grateful for. And while I was away in prison something very good had happened to Huoy: she had been transferred from hauling mud baskets in the canal to preparing food in the common kitchen. The kitchen staff didn’t have to work in the evenings, or work very hard at all. Most important, they could always get enough to eat. While I was recovering from prison Huoy brought me rice twice a day, hidden in the rolled-up waist of her sarong. It was real rice, a welcome change from watery gruel – the same rice, she told me, that Chev and his soldiers ate at every meal, as much as they wanted.

  Once again, like the time when I had dysentery, Huoy proved to be a perfect nurse. Besides bringing rice and preparing meals, she mended my clothes. To cheer me up, she sang to me in her clear, soft voice. Without soap or antibiotics she couldn’t stop my infections, but she changed my bandages twice a day, and boiled them in water to sterilize them before hanging them up to dry. Since leaving Phnom Penh I had seen a new side of Huoy, and it made me respect her more and more: whenever anything needed to be done, she taught herself how to do it, without any prompting. She was good at everything she did. Except for losing her mother, which grieved her every day, she had adapted to the hardships of the new regime better than most people, and much better than me. Of the two of us, I was supposed to be the strong one, but it wasn’t turning out that way. I was the one who was always getting in trouble or getting sick.

  When I had recovered enough to walk without a cane I was sent back to work with a mobile crew of eight people, none of whom I had known before. On our first day we were summoned to the common kitchen, where Chev addressed us. Huoy was only a few yards away, pouring rice into huge vats, signalling to me with a frown that I should keep my mouth shut. She didn’t have to worry about that – I was far too afraid of Chev to say anything. But there was no way I could hide from him. He knew with a glance at my bandaged ankle, at the bandaged stump of my finger, what had happened when he sent me to Angka Leu. I kept my face blank and my eyes averted. My usual expression.

  Chev smiled and nodded at us pleasantly.

  He said the cooperative needed to build a bridge. Because we had no lumber, our task would be to go to the old temple on top of the mountain, tear it apart and bring its lumber down. ‘I’m sure you agree that this is an excellent plan. Am I wrong or right?’

  ‘Right,’ everyone in the group said.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Chev. ‘It is better to destroy the temple, which is use
less, than to have no bridge. We don’t need Buddha. What we need are bridges for the people’s transportation. The gods cannot build bridges for us. We must take our destiny firmly in hand.’

  My face registered agreement. But I thought, We don’t need Buddha at this point in history? Are you crazy? Now we need him most of all.

  Chev was still smiling at us with his wide, full lips.

  Motherfucker, I thought, did Buddha ever do anything bad to you? If you destroy Buddha’s temple, Buddha will get you back. Maybe not in this lifetime, maybe not even in your next lifetime. But someday. And I hope it’s soon. Because I want to see you suffer. I want to see you die an awful death, like the prisoners at Chhleav.

  Nobody moved.

  He looked at each of us in turn. He peered closely at me. He was testing me, to see whether I had learned my lesson in prison.

  Finally he dismissed us.

  Our group walked without escort from the common kitchen to the road and from there to Phum Phnom. A path near the Khmer Rouge headquarters led into the forest to the base of the mountain ridge.

  We climbed up the switchbacks in the trail. As the land flattened at the edge of the plateau, we saw some concrete monks’ quarters on stilts, still intact. Farther on we passed the remains of wooden quarters already torn down by scavengers like us. Above we heard the faint, tinkling sounds of wind chimes.

  It was a clear day toward the end of the dry season. The landscape was bright with yellow flowers. Pigeons and brown-speckled turtle-doves flew from branch to branch in the nearly leafless trees. Over the treetops on the lower slopes we could see the alluvial plain spread out far below. A steam train whistled in the distance. It came along the tracks, the miniature locomotive belching a cloud of black smoke, the long line of cars moving through the curves like a snake. A train like that had brought us to Battambang, a long time ago.

  We rested. It was an odd sensation not to have anyone supervising us, to sit down when we wanted. We listened to the train as it chuffed along, the clicking of its wheels and the hooting of its steam whistle growing fainter and fainter. And then above us we heard the tinkling of wind chimes again.

  We walked up to the wat. To the side of the wat and perhaps two thirds its height was the large stupa, or funeral monument, that had appeared as the smaller of two white dots when I was ploughing in Phum Chhleav. Seen close it was a graceful example of its type, two square layers at the base, then a large bell shape with convex and concave circular bands, and finally a tapering spire on top. Within the large stupa lay the ashes of some prominent person, perhaps the person who had given the money for the wat to be built.

  The wat itself was ten or twenty years old, with walls of concrete and wooden beams, and planks supporting a roof with faded coloured tiles. The building was not so much ruined as purposely destroyed, a sight that swelled my heart with grief. Outside, Buddha statues lay toppled over, their parts scattered. The grounds were grown up with weeds and vines and littered with scraps of saffron cloth, the kind the monks had used for their robes, and also the kind tied around the trunks of holy bodhi trees.

  Most of one wall was missing, the concrete broken up for the metal reinforcement rods inside, which the Khmer Rouge used for making nails. The thick, intricately carved wooden doors found in all temples were missing. So were the door frames, the windows and the window frames, leaving ugly, gaping holes. The ornamental railing leading up the stairs from the terrace in the shape of a holy naga or snake had been smashed, also for the reinforcement rods. The scavengers had wrecked the lower part of the roof, taken the wood away for the lumber and left the coloured roof tiles in broken heaps on the terrace.

  We went inside. Debris and bird shit covered the floor. Pigeons flew in and out of the holes in the roof. At the far wall, once filled with Buddha statues in ascending rows, all the statues were gone, except for the largest Buddha at the top. The vandals had cut off the statue’s head and right arm, but they had been too lazy to destroy the rest.

  To my ears came the polytonal tinkling of the wind chimes, from the eaves outside.

  We stood there, eight ragged, barefoot men.

  Without a word, we dropped to our knees and prayed.

  Lord Buddha, I said silently, forgive us for what we are about to do. We do not wish to tear down your temple. Our hearts are not in the work. Our hearts belong to you. We obey only to save our lives, because we are weak and afraid. Please do not punish us. Please protect us. Punish those who give us these orders. Punish those who do not let us come here to worship or to clean the grounds to make merit.

  There was nobody else around the temple, nobody watching. The previous scavengers had left bamboo ladders outside. Slowly, reluctantly, gesturing apologetically to the headless Buddha, we climbed the ladders to a part of the lower roof where the tiles were already broken and the wood exposed. We pried rafters loose with our axes, as few of them as possible. Then we left the temple quickly and slid the rafters down the steep mountain slope.

  Fortunately we didn’t have to go back to the temple the next day. Or ever. The authorities were always changing their minds.

  Instead we were sent back to canal work. It was the same dreary routine as before. Bells day and night. Walking out to the site before dawn in single file, enduring the taped music from the loudspeakers, working until the lunch bell rang, walking back to the common kitchen in single file, on and on. Too much work, not enough sleep, not enough food. No real friendships. I was luckier than most. For me, the lack of friends was no problem, as long as I had Huoy. We shared everything. There was a bond between us as instinctive as the bond between animal mates.

  What was hard was the terror. I had already been to prison once. Every morning I wondered if I would make it through the day. Every night I wondered if I would make it until morning, or whether a shrill child’s voice would bring a circle of accusers. It was the same for all the ‘new’ people. We never got used to the terror, we just kept it inside, in our hearts. Our arms and legs could be as thin as bamboo. Our hair could be turning brown or white, but we didn’t show the terror on the outside. Inside, we were thinking all the time, maybe the next hour. Maybe tonight. It was always on our minds that the soldiers would take us away.

  ‘Be careful – bodies disappear’. That was one of the sayings that sprung up among the ‘new’ people as a warning not to attract attention. Another saying was Dam doeum kor, which literally means ‘Plant a kapok tree’. The word kor, however, also means ‘mute’, as in ‘Keep your mouth shut’. Stay quiet. Plant a kapok tree. Bodies disappear. The warnings were muttered and indirect, but the meaning was clear: avoid the soldiers completely. Don’t give them a reason to single you out from the crowd. Whenever my work group walked anywhere, we changed directions if there was any chance of crossing paths with soldiers.

  Except to answer questions, I hadn’t spoken a word to soldiers since the ride to Phnom Penh and back on my Vespa. On the front lines the low-ranking soldiers seemed very much like the mit of that trip: dark-skinned, illiterate, not very clean, unfamiliar with modern objects like engines and toilets and televisions. They spoke in the accent of the Battambang hill people, with a singsong intonation. They could walk forever. Their feet were too wide for their rubber-tyre sandals, but they were proud to be wearing them, and their uniforms, and their silk kramas and Montagut shirts, because most of them had never been fully dressed until joining the Khmer Rouge.

  On the canal site we ‘new’ people moved with a feebleness that made us seem old. No wasted movements, no spring to our step, no playing around. Here and there were those of us who had lost their minds. They sang snatches of old songs and then broke into tears. Or sat down on the clay when it wasn’t break time. The soldiers took them away, six one day, two the next, none the day after, three the day after that, culling the insane and the politically suspect from the ranks in the late afternoons. Bodies disappear.

  I worked harder than ever, because Huoy asked me to. She said our best chance lay in being
model workers. If I worked hard, she pointed out, it might prove to Chev that I had reformed my ways after being sent to prison. At her suggestion, I cut back on food-foraging too. Now that she had her job in the kitchen we didn’t need wild foods as much anyway. I only continued foraging at all to keep my fellow workers from suspecting how much food Huoy was bringing home.

  Because of my energy on the job (made possible by the food Huoy stole from the kitchen), I was promoted to group leader, a supervisor of nine other workers. There were no extra rations or privileges that went with the position. Now I was the one who got blamed for being unfair when I spooned the portions of watery rice into the bowl. I went to meetings with other group leaders to listen to our bosses, the section leaders. Invariably I agreed with whatever the section leaders said, even when it didn’t make sense.

  The other group leaders were also ‘new’ people who inwardly opposed the revolution but who obeyed to stay alive. There was only one group leader I wasn’t sure about, and that was Pen Tip, who had been promoted just like me.

  Pen Tip was an odd-looking man, with a duckfooted walk like Charlie Chaplin. He liked to hang around with ‘old’ people and Khmer Rouge. He joked with them and flattered them, and somehow he got away with it – other people who got close to the soldiers were taken to the woods. Pen Tip knew how to manipulate people, how to make them feel obligated. He conveyed the impression that since he was well connected to Angka we other group leaders needed to stay on his good side. I began to avoid him whenever possible.

  I knew Pen Tip couldn’t tell Angka about the clandestine evening meeting about joining the resistance. He had been part of that too. However, he could conceivably tell Angka about my background. Pen Tip had seen me in hospitals in Phnom Penh. He knew I was a doctor. But he didn’t know any details. He didn’t know my real name.