Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  ‘We’ll do it for you, comrade,’ Seng said deferentially to him. ‘We’re already muddy. No need for you to be muddy too. Come on,’ he said to our group. While Chea Huon watched, the rest of us and the two bodyguards started pushing the jeep. If he noticed me glancing at him, then away, then at him again, he didn’t react. He looked as if he wanted to oblige Seng, to cooperate with what was asked of him.

  The rest of us pushed, but the tyres spun and the jeep sank even lower. We weren’t getting any traction.

  ‘Uncle Seng,’ I said, ‘maybe we could try putting tree branches under the tyres. It might give them something to catch hold of.’

  Chea Huon had started walking slowly down the road. ‘Good idea,’ he said over his shoulder.

  At Seng’s nod, we picked up our hatchets. ‘Get long tree trunks if you can,’ I called to the others in the group. ‘Branches too, and rocks if you find any.’ Two of them immediately started hacking at a tree by the side of the road. I followed Chea Huon and passed him. He was pointing at a sapling farther on. I started to hack at its branches. He came even with me.

  There was nobody else in earshot.

  I spoke in a low voice, without looking at him. ‘Excuse me, luk teacher. I may be wrong, but your name is Chea Huon. You were a teacher in Takeo. I recognize the mark on your cheek.’

  ‘You know me?’

  ‘You taught me in 1962 and 1963.’

  I removed the last of the branches, bent down, and attacked the trunk.

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said after a moment. ‘And I now know who you are too. You got your doctor’s degree, right?’

  ‘Yes, luk teacher.’

  The rain fell. He stood with his hands on his hips, nodding his head up and down to show he understood. Then he came closer, patted me on the shoulder and said in a kind and friendly voice, ‘Just keep working and stay quiet.’

  The two bodyguards came up before he could say more. They walked within earshot and then stood a respectful distance away. I bent over, chopping at the trunk of the sapling. Only a few more blows to go. It was up to Chea Huon, to keep on talking or not.

  ‘. . . And how is the rice coming along?’ he asked me, as if we were continuing our conversation. ‘Is the irrigation under control?’

  ‘It goes very well, comrade,’ I answered, a little louder than necessary. ‘Right now we have a heavy flow of water coming down from the hills and cutting the road, but under Uncle Seng’s leadership we have launched a road-repairing offensive. We have already repaired many washed-out spots.’

  ‘We must fight on all battlefields,’ Chea Huon replied piously. ‘We must struggle to control nature.’

  With that he walked farther down the road to inspect the rice fields, followed by the bodyguards. I carried the pieces of the sapling back to the jeep.

  I got on my hands and knees in the mud and jammed the branches underneath the tyre. Then I directed the others to bring the branches and the rocks, while making sure that Uncle Seng approved of the way things were proceeding so he would appear to be the one in charge. The driver wasn’t very bright and didn’t understand that he had to rock his jeep forward and back so we could work the branches in. I had to be polite about telling him what to do, because his rank was much higher than mine and I didn’t want him to lose face.

  Covered in mud from head to toe, I thought about those long-ago days when I went to Chea Huon for free tutoring in mathematics. He lived a simple, spartan life. In his house on stilts outside Takeo he wore a sarong, like a farmer. When we students were thirsty we dipped a bowl into the earthern water jar. He was very pure and intellectual and treated everybody the same. I never suspected he was communist until later, in 1967, when I visited him in jail in Phnom Penh. Yet when I looked back, it all made sense. He was typical of the idealists who joined the communists in the 1960s and then vanished into the forests. Yes, he was about the right age and background to be at his level of the Khmer Rouge hierarchy.

  I pushed more branches in the tyre’s hole. When the driver rocked forward and back we wedged the poles farther and farther in.

  Chea Huon knew I was a doctor. Somehow I was certain he wouldn’t turn me in. But everything else about him left me confused. ‘Just keep working and stay quiet,’ he had told me. And that was all. What was that supposed to mean – that he wasn’t going to help me? He had a brain, he had eyes! He saw the unhealed sores on my arms and legs and face. He knew I was a doctor. It was in his power to order me to set up a real clinic, to treat the sick on the front lines. He had a higher rank than Chev. He could save even me from being a war slave, if he wanted. He could take me off the front lines!

  Why didn’t he?

  We rocked the jeep forward and back, wedging more and more brush underneath. Finally the jeep popped out of the hole and onto the level road surface.

  Chea Huon returned from inspecting the flooded fields. He was soaking wet, but unlike the rest of us he was not muddy. He thanked everybody and looked at each of us briefly in turn, nodding and smiling. He turned to Uncle Seng. ‘That one there,’ he said, pointing at me, ‘is a good worker. He shows initiative. Take good care of him.’

  Then he climbed in his jeep and drove off, disappearing in the drizzle.

  We stood there, holding our hatchets and hoes. The road was emptier than before. The rain was cold on our skins.

  The rest of that day, and the next day, and for many to come, questions and attempts at answers crowded my brain:

  Chea Huon is educated. He is smart. He is not like the rest. Why then does he allow those like Chev to kill people like my father and brother? Does he know about it, or not?

  If he does know, why doesn’t he stop the killing? He is smart enough to realize that the revolution will fail if it doesn’t have the support of the people.

  If he doesn’t know of the killings directly, he must have heard about them. If he hasn’t heard, how could he be so stupid? But I know he isn’t stupid, so he must have heard of them.

  He is the head man in the entire region! Doesn’t he have enough power to stop the killing? And if he doesn’t have enough power, why doesn’t he go to someone higher up who does?

  I must go to his headquarters to talk to him and ask why there is so much killing. He would receive me. He knows me from the past. If I could get through to him, it could change the entire situation on the front lines. The upper-level Khmer Rouge just need to realize what a disaster they have created. Then they would change it.

  No, they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t do that at all.

  I must think this over carefully.

  Dam doeum kor.

  I don’t want to go to Khmer Rouge headquarters. It is too dangerous. I cannot trust Chea Huon, because he has killed many, many people. He must have. He is one of them! The last thing the Khmer Rouge want is suggestions for change. They would call it complaining or having a capitalist mentality. They would kill me for sure.

  I am afraid.

  And – I think – Chea Huon is afraid too.

  24

  Rice Farming

  When the heaviest of the rains was over and the roads were fixed, my group went back to rice farming.

  Farming was our reason for being on the front lines. Directly or indirectly, everything centred around it. We dug canals to have irrigation water for the dry season and to prevent flooding in the rainy season. We built paddy dykes to grow rice on a huge scale. We tended oxen and water buffalo so they could pull our ploughs. We guided the ploughs and harrows around and around the fields. We went to propaganda meetings so the Khmer Rouge could tell us how glorious farming was.

  For anyone whose mind had been sharpened by education, farming was easy to learn. When another man in my group broke a wooden plough tip, I walked into the forest, chopped a tree down and made a replacement part. In an hour he was ploughing again. When someone stole the reins for my oxen, probably to eat the leather, a common practice on the front lines, I didn’t get upset. I went into the forest again, cut vines, q
uartered them and braided the outer strips. The new reins were as tightly woven and strong as anything the old peasants could make. And I cursed the Khmer Rouge for saying that anybody could practise medicine. It had taken me seven years of training to get my degree as a doctor. There was no single skill of farming that I couldn’t learn in a day. What nonsense, to say that only the peasants possessed worthwhile knowledge!

  Yet I liked farming. I liked working with the rice plants most of all. When the seedbeds were ploughed and harrowed and a few inches of rainwater covered the soil, we put seed rice (rice with the husks on, or paddy rice) in pails for a few days to sprout. We took handfuls of sprouts and scattered them into the water, which had been fertilized with manure. A day or two later, narrow, whitish shoots showed above the water. A few days more and the shoots had turned a pale green, and then a delicate green that is difficult to describe. This was the most critical phase of rice cultivation. A hard rain could cover the young shoots with water and kill them in a few hours. A lack of rain could deprive them of water and do the same. We stood by the seedbeds with our hoes to let water in and out of the dykes as needed.

  A month after planting, the rice seedlings were a foot high and densely packed together, like a lawn. There is no sight in the world as lovely as a young rice field with the sun shining through. It is like light shining through stained glass, only more natural, and more refreshing to the eyes. The rice has a clean, fragrant smell. Walk close to it and you can see the clouds and the sky reflected on the water between the stalks, or the reflection of your own face, until the wind ripples the water surface and stirs the rice shoots in waves.

  It was on sunny mornings in the rice fields that I felt happiest. The air was fresh. The scenery was beautiful in every direction. Working in the fields did something to me, like awakening an ancestral memory. My parents had farmed rice when they were young. I was descended from people who had farmed rice generation after generation, as far back as there had been a human race. It was almost enough to make me forget what had happened under the Khmer Rouge and forgive them. Almost, but not quite. If only I had time to fish and to gather foods openly, if only they didn’t kill us, if only men like me had time to make love to our wives and raise our families with dignity and take care of our old parents – if, if, if – I would have accepted my fate, and become a rice farmer with all my heart and soul.

  The most backbreaking part of the cycle was transplanting the rice from the crowded seedbeds to the rest of the fields. Most of the collective was mobilized to help with it. We used an ancient technique for uprooting the seedlings: standing with our knees bent to take the strain off our backs, we grabbed a few rice shoots at a time with a circular motion. The shoots came up easily and we put them in our left hands. When our left hands were full we swished the roots around in the water to loosen the mud, lifted our left feet and whacked the roots against the instep to make the mud and water fly off. Then we stacked the clean, neat bundles of shoots in the water behind us and moved forward. To either side were people doing the same; we were in a long line, making patient progress across a field.

  Then came replanting, another ancient technique. Carrying bunches of shoots in the crooks of our arms, taking care that the roots always stayed wet, we transferred the shoots one at a time to our right hands and planted them with a swift thumb-and-forefinger motion, first poking a hole in the mud with our thumbs, then lowering the roots into the hole, then tamping the mud around the stalk with our forefingers. Two plants in a row, then a step forward and one in the next row, then two again, planting in equilateral triangles. Again, I was part of a row of people working its way slowly across a field. The fields seemed to go on and on without end. It was an extremely ambitious planting programme.

  Everything about the front lines was ambitious. There wasn’t much planning or careful follow-through. The canals on which we had worked such agonizing hours were never a success. The rains had rounded the edges and silted the bottoms. In some places the water surged right over the canals, tore away huge patches of rice plants and carried the plants off with the current. For the fields that survived, and well over half did, the crews were too small to keep up with the maintenance. We went out there with our hoes, to weed and to regulate the water levels by tearing down or building up dykes, but we were like tiny human figurines in a vast landscape. Chev threatened us, but we simply couldn’t do it all. Most ‘new’ people didn’t even feel like trying. Whether we were diligent or not, we knew we would get the same amount of rice at harvest-time. There were no incentives. It was not like the old days, when the peasants worked much less and planted smaller crops, but ate more because they knew what they were doing and could keep what they produced.

  I worked hard to keep my mind sharp, but the others in the crew were sullen and slow and did as little as they could get away with. When there were no guards in sight we caught crabs in the rice paddies, then sat down and talked about food. The conversations were always the same:

  ‘Ahhhh . . .’ (a big sigh). It was a man named Som, who had one withered arm and who was our most outspoken critic of the regime. ‘Look at all this rice. We can plant it but we cannot eat it.’

  ‘Of course you can eat it,’ I said. ‘Just start chewing on a stalk, the way an ox chews on grass.’

  ‘Do you remember Phnom Penh?’ said Som. ‘Rice every day? Anytime you wanted it you could step into a restaurant. You could have it with anything you wanted, fried rice, steamed rice – ’

  ‘I’d rather have some noodles,’ another man said. ‘Every afternoon, I had noodle soup with curried beef and fish balls. Very spicy and tasty – ’

  ‘No, fried noodles are better, with ginger and beef – ’

  Everybody was talking now.

  ‘Fish fried with ginger and lemongrass was my wife’s specialty – ’

  ‘What I wouldn’t give for some fried catfish. Or pork.’

  ‘. . . or some juicy grilled chicken stuffed with herbs – ’

  ‘. . . so juicy, so tasty – ’

  ‘How about fruits?’ said Som. ‘Do you remember papayas? Mangoes? The tiny fried bananas in the market? I used to buy a bag of those every morning – ’

  ‘. . . so delicious, so good – ’

  We sat in the paddies and reminisced, licking our lips while our stomachs rumbled.

  ‘No, noooooo! Don’t remind me! Enough of this!’ said our group leader. ‘We’ve got to get back to work.’

  ‘Or cognac with ginseng,’ said Som. ‘I used to drink that before going to a whorehouse. Put my brain to sleep but woke my dick up – ’

  ‘Be quiet, will you? I don’t have the strength to think about sex. Let me get my belly full of food first.’

  ‘Back to work, comrades,’ said the group leader. ‘I think I see a guard coming.’

  ‘. . . fried rice with pork and lots of soy sauce . . .’ Som muttered as he picked up his hoe.

  When the rains stopped the rice paddies still held a foot of water. The plants branched and swelled to the sides – ‘pregnant’ was how they were usually described. They gave off a sweet, fertile smell. As the water in the paddies dried, seed buds appeared and the plants turned a tawny gold.

  As the harvest approached, Uncle Seng assigned us to make scarecrows for the paddies and to chase birds away when the scarecrows failed. We were also supposed to guard the fields against thieves. Naturally, we field workers were the biggest thieves of all. We just had to be careful, because we never knew when chhlop might be watching. I ducked down between the rows of rice plants and stripped the seeds off lower branches. I stored them in whatever container I could find, then went back to pick it up at night-time when nobody could see me.

  Finally, in November 1976, the harvest began. Everyone had high expectations. Chev said the regime was going to trade the surplus rice to other countries for tractors and bulldozers, so we could grow even more rice the next year. We ‘new’ people had hopes of eating bowl after bowl of real rice, the full year around, instea
d of the thin gruel with a spoonful of rice the common kitchen served at meals.

  Everybody in the collective was mobilized for the harvest. Even Huoy, who worked in the kitchen, came out to the fields and worked beside me in one of those long rows that stretched from one side of the field to the other and was just one of many rows in sight. We cut hour after hour, placing bundles of rice behind us, which others piled on oxcarts and drove off to the threshing ground.

  As soon as the first rice was threshed, the common kitchen began serving real rice at meals. We weren’t satisfied. The rice was ours. We wanted more. We helped ourselves to the rice in the fields. Smoke rose from quick, furtive fires on every hillock. We used sticks and holes in the ground as makeshift mortars and pestles, milling the husks away, then cooked the rice and ate it as fast as we could. Little children sat by the fields, pounding sticks into holes, sometimes just imitating the elders in play, but usually with actual rice in the bottom of the holes, milling the husks from the white inner seeds.

  The soldiers tried to stop the stealing. To set an example, they took a four-year-old child who had been milling rice and tied him to a post in front of his parents. They made the parents watch their little boy without touching him or giving him any food or water until a few days later, when he died of dehydration. But even the horror of that punishment didn’t stop the rest of us from stealing.

  As we cut the stalks in the fields, revolutionary songs blared from the loudspeakers, alternating with news broadcasts from the radio. The news programmes announced the ‘glorious victory over the elements’ that had resulted in a harvest larger than ever before. ‘Soon we will begin the struggle again to put more fields into production!’ said the announcer, who started reading a long list of rice tonnage statistics in which Phnom Tippeday was mentioned. ‘The women and men there are very active and working vigorously in the harvest! And they are very happy, singing in the rice fields and coming home to plenty of rice to eat!’