Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  I went back to work. The first sporadic rains had fallen. The weather was hot and muggy, as it always is before the real rainy season begins.

  Chev assigned my group to create paddies for large-scale rice farming – dyked fields much longer and wider than those of the prerevolutionary peasants. It was a good idea in theory, because big paddies would allow us to put more land into cultivation than before, with proportionately less maintenance. The problem was with the plan for the dykes. Instead of just taking half of the old dykes out to create fields twice as large, which would have been a sensible plan, Chev told us to tear all of them out and then build new ones. It was an enormous job, with no practical benefit, and it had to be done in a hurry. Perhaps Chev wanted us to show how zealous we could be in proving our devotion. I worked in mud up to my shoulders. The air was hot, the mud was cool, and I went back and forth. I was exhausted. From the woods nearby came swarms of mosquitoes.

  When I came down with shivering fits twice in one day, and then with fits at the same times the next day, it seemed almost like a blessing. It was a perfect excuse for getting out of work without faking it. There was plenty of malaria around. Everyone knew the symptoms.

  Released from work, I set out to find medicines. My first choice was Western medicine, either quinine or a similar drug like chloroquine. I didn’t have any myself. I looked and asked, but there was none to be found on the black market. There were people moaning and shaking with malaria in all the long-houses – crowded, unclean places that stank of urine and buzzed with flies.

  Next I tried the regime, which had three levels of medical care. The top cadre could go to a reasonably good, Western-style hospital in Battambang City, but that was off-limits for me. Ordinary Khmer Rouge and ‘old’ people could go to a smaller regional hospital in Phum Phnom, but I couldn’t get in there either. There was only the front-lines clinic, the place where the nurses called the patients ‘war slaves’. This was an ordinary house on stilts next to a yam garden. When I went there, the clinic staff announced a meal, and the war slaves, who were pathetically thin, crowded in line and started pushing each other to get to the food table first. One patient started a fight, and a mit neary broke her serving ladle over his head getting him to stop.

  In this clinic there were only two medicines: vitamin injections and homemade malaria pills. The multivitamin solutions seem to have been made in Phnom Penh by someone with a basic knowledge of pharmacology. They were stored in old Coca-Cola bottles. Following standard medical procedure, the nurses sterilized the hypodermic needles in boiling water, but before they gave the injections they ran their dirty fingers along the length of the needles to make sure the needles were firmly attached to the syringes. As a result, almost all the patients developed abscesses at the injection site. Few of them recovered from the illnesses that brought them to the clinic in the first place.

  The malaria pills were made at the clinic from yams grown outside in the garden and sdao leaves. The mixture was ground up with a mortar and pestle, baked in sheets and stamped into pill form with M-16 shell casings. The pills were popularly known as ‘rabbit turds’ because of their circular shape and tan colour. I was given a handful of rabbit turds and walked away quickly, before the nurses could give me an injection. The sdao, I thought, would be mildly helpful against malaria; sdao was one of those folk remedies that had a basis in fact. But it was the yam in the pills that appealed to me. Yam was food.

  As the malaria infection attacked more of my red blood cells, I grew weaker. I lay on the white plastic mat in the longhouse and waited. I felt cold and unable to stop shivering. The next thing I knew, Huoy was sitting astride my waist holding my arms, and my father was holding my feet. I was drenched with sweat. They said I had been unconscious, flailing around convulsively with my arms and legs. I didn’t remember any of the fit. All I knew was that I was thirsty. I drank what seemed to be gallons of water without stopping.

  Huoy and my father took care of me together. When I had used up the rabbit turds my father gathered sdao leaves and bark. I ate the leaves, and Huoy brewed the bark into a tea for me to drink. My father roamed through the forests at dawn, looking for new, tender bamboo leaf shoots with the dew still on them. This was a traditional Cambodian cure. He also made a Chinese medicine for me with shavings from a piece of animal horn he had brought with him from Phnom Penh.

  Huoy was worried too. Every day she went off looking for Western medicines. Finally she found eight 300-mg quinine tablets and bought them for a damleung, or 1.2 ounces, of gold. I took half a pill in the morning and half at night, along with the sdao leaves and the sdao tea and my father’s traditional cures. With the medicine and with the devoted attention of Huoy and my father, I recovered.

  Then it was back to work. The rains arrived. Water flowing down from the hills filled the canals and poured across as if no obstacle were there. The paddies were submerged except for a few of the higher dykes, which protruded like the lines on a chequerboard, and the hillocks, which were like chequers, some of them in the middle of the squares and the rest out of position on the dykes between squares. Chev came to inspect, carrying his hoe. He was muddy from head to foot. Under the water surface, invisible from sight, were the delicate green shoots of the rice seedbeds.

  ‘The seedlings will die in a few hours if the water does not go down,’ Chev remarked. He spoke calmly, but as I followed his gaze to the flooded fields I felt weak. It wasn’t our fault! The canal hadn’t been deep enough to contain the water. We didn’t have the manpower to build dykes to protect the seedbeds. We had only four in our group – two out with malaria, another two taken away to the woods.

  ‘You must take your destiny firmly in hand,’ Chev told us as he began to walk away. ‘If you lose this battle, you will be responsible.’

  We went back to rebuilding dykes with a desperation made worse by knowing that whatever we did would not be enough. I prayed while I worked. The others did too. And that afternoon, by the kindness of the gods, the rain stopped. The runoff water ceased flowing. The water level in the paddies subsided and the green shoots of the rice seedlings reappeared.

  But the next day the rains fell again. Every day the work was urgent. Dykes washed out, patches of rice were swept away. I put everything in my work. It was a matter of saving my own life and also raising rice, so the cooperative would have food to eat.

  Chev decided to reorganize the cooperative with two common kitchens a mile apart. My father and brother were assigned to the new kitchen, but I still saw them often. A major purge began. The soldiers took captives morning and afternoon. Instead of marching them away immediately, the soldiers made public examples of them, tying them to trees and shouting to anyone who would listen what they had done wrong. I tried not to look or listen. I had enough on my mind just getting through each day.

  So I wasn’t really paying attention when I trudged back toward the longhouse at the end of an afternoon early in the rainy season of 1976. There were puddles on the footpath. I walked around the puddles half-noticing how they reflected the sky. ‘See the enemies here! See the enemies!’ a teenage soldier was shouting, like an announcer at a carnival. ‘Angka caught them for stealing food! They stole food from all of us! See them now, while you have a chance! Learn from their example!’ Near the soldier’s feet sat several captives with their hands tied around a tree trunk. Their faces were angled away. I was wondering how much the dinner rations were going to be when something caught my eye: one of the captives was my father.

  I froze.

  My father turned his face and looked sadly into mine. His lips moved. He wanted to explain something to me. He wanted my help.

  ‘Why have you stopped?’ the soldier yelled at me. ‘Go on!’

  The people behind me had almost collided into my back. They turned to look at the prisoners and their muttered comments came to me from far away. ‘They are already old. Why make them suffer?’ said one voice. Said another, ‘That’s a nice old man there, the skinny one. Why kill
him?’

  ‘Go!’ roared the soldier.

  It was like looking into a tunnel, seeing my father’s eyes widened in sorrow and fear and not being able to see anything else. He signalled me to go. Numbly, I obeyed.

  Huoy’s face was already swollen from weeping. She knew. She had heard that a high-ranking official visiting the new kitchen had seen my father scoop rice from the sides of a fifty-five-gallon drum. He had asked Chev why the ‘new’ people were scavenging for food while they should be working. Chev arrested Papa on the spot.

  Around sunset the procession walked slowly past our long-house. Papa was roped to two other prisoners. A soldier walking behind them held the end of the rope in his hand. As they came close, my father lifted his head and looked at me. There was no accusation, merely an immense sadness. From where he was going there was no coming back.

  Plant a kapok tree, he had told me.

  I went outside the longhouse and sat on the ground. There was a lump in my throat and the tears rolled down my cheeks, but I didn’t say anything. Plant a kapok tree.

  When three days had passed, Huoy and I brought our evening rations back to the longhouse with some candles. Our neighbours knew what we were doing and left us alone. Late at night, Pheng Huor and Nay Chhun arrived. We lit the candles. My brother and his wife went first, because they were older. They sompeahed to the improvised altar, put their palms on the ground three times, bowed down until their foreheads touched the backs of their hands another three times and prayed. Huoy and I sat behind them until they had finished and it was our turn.

  I prayed that my father be reborn away from Cambodia.

  Day after day the purge grew worse. Some were taken away for complaining, most for stealing food to stay alive. We tried to learn why the Khmer Route were killing so many but found no real reason. It was just something they did, a craving they could not satisfy. They created enemies to devour, which increased their appetite for enemies.

  Shock, horror, grief – with the death of my father, part of us died too. Under control of an alien force we responded, but without energy to spare. We were beings so imperfect and fragile in manufacture that we wore out constantly, or were destroyed for being defective by those who did not care. Everything was gone. Society was destroyed and monks and temples destroyed and markets and families and the bonds between humans destroyed. There was no hope.

  Two weeks later, my brother and his wife were taken away with their hands tied. I never learned why. They never came back. Huoy and I had a service, the same as we did for my father, sompeahing, bowing, praying. We lit the same candles, which were already burned down to stubs. There were only two of us to pray for their souls. We wondered who would light candles for us.

  23

  The Rains

  The sky was clear at dawn.

  By midmorning the first clouds had sailed in from the west, puffy and white, like the cottony fibres of the kapok tree.

  The clouds billowed and grew and spread out until they blocked the sun.

  From far away came the sound of thunder, a low rumbling, like bombs from a B-52. The air turned cold. The wind rose, the rice flattened in the fields and the trees bent over on the hillocks with their leaves flying off horizontally.

  Small tornadoes of dust and rice stalks spun through the fields and onto the bare ground by the longhouses. Clothes flew off clotheslines. Thatch panels flapped on the roofs and wood frames creaked. The people tied their kramas tightly around their heads, and clapped their hands over their faces to protect themselves from the dust.

  For a minute or two, the wind paused and the trees and the rice straightened. It was as dark as twilight. In the stillness the birds chirped with unusual loudness and clarity. Swallows dipped and rose through the air, hunting for insects.

  Then the sky closed in. The wind blew and the trees leaned over and the rain fell diagonally from the black undersides of the clouds, stinging my face. I ducked my head but the wind pushed my hat brim against my cheek, and when I raised my head the brim flew up and the rain stung me again. The droplets made a tinkling noise when they struck the water in the rice paddies, and splashed upward again like tiny fountains. I could see the man next to me swinging his hoe, and beyond him there was another one less distinctly. Beyond that there was nobody at all, no people and no landscape, only a veil of water.

  I loved the rains. They made the greens in the landscape brighter, the clay redder. The coolness they brought was like the answer to a prayer. Leaves sprouted on the trees, rice paddies turned green, insects and fish and crabs multiplied. Life was better. On the front lines we were given more food. We didn’t have to work at night. There were fewer evening meetings, because the leaders didn’t like getting wet. The water dripped from the eaves of the longhouse with a sound like the softest music. It splashed from roofs and trees onto the ground, flowed down the paths, cut snaking, twisting channels where it chose. In the longhouse Huoy and I put the white plastic tarp above us, but that didn’t keep us dry. Lightning flashed, as bright as day. Thunder boomed like artillery, and Huoy wrapped her arms around me and buried her head in my chest for protection. It rained for days and then turned foggy, with a shower so fine and thin it was nearly invisible.

  During the rainy season of 1976, from about July through September, I worked with a mobile crew, filling in wherever help was needed. We built more dykes. We ploughed fields, planted and transplanted rice. Sometimes we tended oxen and water buffalo. But our biggest job was road repair. On the road leading toward the Khmer Rouge headquarters at Phum Phnom, the runoff water had carved a gully thirty yards long. Brown, muddy water poured through like a river, and the rice fields beyond were like a lake.

  We hadn’t seen the sun in a week. With new members there were eight men in our crew, each with a hatchet and hoe. We cut saplings near the roadside and put the trunks vertically in the ground as a stockade against the water flow. We laid logs and branches behind to buttress it, and packed it full of mud entangled with roots and plants. The rain was falling steadily, neither hard nor soft.

  I told the others which trees to chop, where to get the mud, even though I was not the official leader. My father used to say, ‘Think like a boss, not like a worker.’ He meant that it is better to use your brain and be active than to be sullen and passive, as most workers are. I worked harder than anyone in the crew because it kept my mind sharp and because it kept me from thinking about other things. For hours at a time, if I was lucky, I would not have a mental picture of my father’s face when he was tied up, or my brother and his wife when they were being marched away.

  I chopped down a sapling and threw it like a spear across a small canal, where the others were building the vertical stockade. They moved in slow motion, their tiredness a form of protest. Only one worked as hard as me. His name was Seng, and he was overseeing us that day. He was short and muscular, maybe fifty years old, with Buddhist tattoos on his chest. He was a village chief on the back lines and one of Chev’s assistant chiefs on the front lines.

  From farther up the road, out of sight, came a noise interrupting the quiet of the rain. It sounded like an engine whining at high rpm and tyres spinning in the mud. Seng raised his head to listen, then walked off to investigate.

  I chopped another sapling down without slowing my pace. It was funny about Seng – ‘Uncle’ Seng, as he liked to be called. He was the only one of the Khmer Rouge who seemed fully human. The last time he supervised us, we had been tending livestock. While I sneaked off to cook a meal in a hillock, a pair of oxen wandered off into the forest. I looked for them all night and didn’t find them until morning. Chev would have killed me for carelessness if he had known, but Uncle Seng only warned me not to do it again. He had never ordered anybody killed.

  That wasn’t to say I trusted him. If he thought I was a model worker, fine. If he liked me as a person, even better. Neither he nor anyone else knew that I led a double life. They didn’t know that almost every night I crept out of the longhouse to steal. I t
ook vegetables from a nearby village. I carried my hatchet as a weapon, ready to attack anyone who caught me. I was willing to die. They had already taken everything else away from me except for Huoy, and Huoy and I had decided that if the time came we would commit suicide together.

  ‘Hey! All of you!’ Uncle Seng’s reappearance broke my train of thought. He was waving for us to follow him. I plunged into the canal and swam across it with my hoe and hatchet. When I climbed out I was no wetter than I had been before.

  I trotted down the road with a few others just behind me and the rest hurrying to catch up. When we got close to Seng we saw a low, wide, model B-1 jeep with a cloth roof.

  Only one jeep looked like that in the Phnom Tippeday region, and that was the one belonging to the highest-ranking civilian Khmer Rouge. I had often seen it driving around, the leader’s right arm sticking out of the passenger window, his hand on the roof.

  One of the jeep’s wheels had become stuck between logs lain across the road below the surface. The motor roared, the tyres spun and a plume of slippery mud shot to the rear. The driver, a soldier with a green Mao cap, sat blankly behind the steering wheel and revved the accelerator while two other soldiers pushed the jeep from behind. Nothing happened. The tyres spun and the wheel sank even farther between the logs, tilting the jeep at a crazy angle.

  ‘Stop, please,’ a voice said mildly, and the driver lifted his foot from the accelerator. I walked behind and saw a man bending down to examine the wheel. He wore the same black pajama uniform and Mao cap as the soldiers, but there was something about him that suggested authority. He was good-natured, with narrow Chinese eyes and a wart on his cheek. It’s Chea Huon, I said to myself. Then I thought: No, it can’t be.

  ‘What should we do?’ he asked the driver, but the driver was too shy to answer. Better to act stupid than risk contradicting a superior – that was the driver’s attitude. Typically Cambodian. If Chea Huon said the best way to get the jeep out was to spit on the tyres, the driver would have started spitting. But I was not sure it was Chea Huon. He had the same slight build, hunched shoulders and bad posture. The same wart. If it was not Chea Huon it was his twin. What was he doing here?