Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  That was what the Khmer Rouge radio said. But in reality there was no singing. Our faces had become pained and sorrowful. A month after the harvest began, while we were still cutting the fields, the rations were cut back again. Not to watery rice, but to a loose porridge with five or six spoonsful of rice in each bowl. Next year, Chev promised us, we would get to eat more.

  From a distance, with aching hearts, we watched the activity at the threshing grounds. Soldiers poured the rice into large hempen sacks and loaded them onto trucks. The trucks drove off. A few were unloaded at nearby warehouses under heavy guard. Most drove away and vanished. And by early January 1977, when the harvest was half through, we were eating watery rice again.

  25

  The Dam

  The Khmer Rouge always held meetings before the start of new projects to make sure we had the correct revolutionary understanding of our tasks. In January 1977 they called a mass meeting and gave us half a day off to attend it – a very unusual step for a regime that never gave weekends, vacations or any other relief from the work routine.

  On the day of the meeting I collected my ration of watery rice, put it in my field cooking pot and started walking. The paths and roads were crowded with ‘new’ people heading toward the same destination. Huoy was waiting for me there. We sat down on a hillock, spread her krama over both our heads as a sunshade and took out our food. I brought leaves of water convolvulus and several aquatic plants called truoy snor and slap chang wa and kamping puoy. Huoy had fixed a traditional dish of crabs ground up with tamarind and peppers. We ate with our spoons, reaching into the watery rice and then the crabs and the leaves. It was a good rural-style meal under the circumstances, though with real rice it would have been much better.

  Around us sat war slaves in ragged clothes, eating watery rice with whatever they had found to add to it. It was the largest gathering I had seen on the front lines – more than ten thousand people, by my guess. Yet we looked small in comparison to our surroundings. To the east, drab clay flatland stretched for miles, broken by the humps of two hills. To the north, the mountain ridge rose almost vertically, the ridgeline hiding the old temple, which lay on the far side. To the west, the ridge curved around and southward to a point in front of us, where it was joined by the start of an earthen dam.

  The completed segment of the dam was a slope of orange clay about a hundred feet high and a hundred feet long. When finished, the dam was supposed to connect to the first hill, from there to the second hill and from there to the big curving mountain ridge, making a reservoir in the shape of a ring.

  Huge red flags hung limply from poles on top of the dam segment and on top of the ridge. Armed soldiers walked from one flagpole to the next, keeping a lookout for trouble that would never come from unarmed people as tired and beaten-down as we were. Where the dam and ridge intersected, a stage had been set up, with more red flags and palm fronds around the dais and on top of the roof. A jeep was parked off to one side of the stage, and next to the jeep a horse was tethered. A throbbing generator powered the loudspeakers.

  On the stage sat Chea Huon, his subordinate Comrade Ik – the old man who rode the horse – and the village chiefs, including Chev and the kindly Uncle Seng. The lesser leaders had already made their speeches, expressed their allegiance and repeated revolutionary clichés. The master of ceremonies was at the microphone.

  ‘Today is an historic day,’ he was saying. ‘We have an opportunity to listen to our leader speak about the new dam-building offensive. He will talk about the revolutionary spirit of struggle and renunciation! Let us show him how firmly we take our destiny in hand! Let us demonstrate our solidarity with Angka’s goal of rebuildmg our nation! Here’s Sama Mit Vanh! Please give him a big hand!’

  Everybody clapped dutifully as the thin, stooped figure stepped to the microphone. Of ten thousand people, only Huoy and I knew his original identity: Chea Huon. To the rest he was Sama Mit Vanh. ‘Vanh’ was his revolutionary nom de querre. ‘Sama Mit’, meaning ‘Equal Comrade’, was a title given only to high officials. I always wondered why the bosses were called Equal Comrades; it was another one of the Khmer Rouge’s crazy inconsistencies.

  ‘LONG LIVE THE KAMPUCHEAN REVOLUTION!’ Chea Huon bellowed into the microphone, his amplified voice echoing off the mountain walls.

  We scrambled to our feet and answered, ‘Long live the Kampuchean revolution!’ pounding our right fists over our hearts, then raising our fists in the straight-arm salute.

  ‘LONG LIVE THE KAMPUCHEAN REVOLUTION!’ he repeated. We gave it back to him. ‘LONG LIVE THE KAMPUCHEAN REVOLUTION!’ he said a third time, and we answered. Then he recited other revolutionary slogans, three times each, and we echoed, as automatically as the mountain, and saluted with our fists.

  ‘Long live the great solidarity!

  ‘Down with the American capitalists!

  ‘Long live the great leap forward!

  ‘Long live the great prosperity!

  ‘Long live the great splendour!’

  When everybody sat down again, Chea Huon began his speech. He spoke in a mild voice, though to emphasize his points he waved his two clenched fists. It was a gesture I remembered from the classroom in Takeo.

  I still couldn’t get over it. My former teacher, who had helped me when I was an adolescent, was now the leader of my enemies.

  It wasn’t so much that Chea Huon had killed my father and my brother. He didn’t deserve all the blame for that. Chev, who sat smiling and nodding onstage, had been much more directly responsible for their deaths. Of course, Chea Huon could have stopped Chev from killing so many, but on the front lines the cooperative leaders had a great deal of autonomy. It was our bad luck to get Chev as a leader rather than a basically kind man like Uncle Seng.

  No, what amazed me most about Chea Huon was the change in his character. He was the first intellectual I had ever known. He was very smart. But if he was smart he couldn’t possibly believe what he was saying to us now, in the dam dedication ceremony.

  He had begun with a recital of the victory over the American capitalists. How the patriots had fought the American invaders, first with ‘empty hands,’ later with hatchets and crossbows, and driven them out of Cambodia. It was a lie. And he knew it was a lie. The Americans had hardly ever engaged the Khmer Rouge in head-on combat. American ground troops had been in Cambodia for only a few months, in 1970, fighting the North Vietnamese. The US bombing had stopped in 1973, two years before the communists took over.

  But Chea Huon wasn’t interested in facts. The myth of defeating the Americans was something that the Khmer Rouge repeated over and over again until they believed it. They needed to believe in it, because it was the basis of their programmes to develop the country. To them, defeating a superpower proved that they, the Khmer Rouge, were superior beings, like supermen. If they had defeated the largest superpower in the world, they were capable of anything. Nothing could stop them. Nothing could stand in their way. Not logic. Not common sense. Not even the laws of physics. And if they were supermen surely we, their war slaves, could work twenty-hour days and never complain.

  He said that anti-aircraft guns would shoot down any American planes that dared fly over Cambodian territory and send them hurtling in flames into the sea. I thought, Oh yeah, motherfucker? I’d like to see what would really happen if the Americans came back. In my mind’s eye American jet fighters came in low and fast over the treetops, and the stage went up in splinters and black smoke and billowing flames. If the planes blew me up too that was all right.

  Chea Huon said, ‘Democratic Kampuchea isn’t afraid of any aggressors. Right now our soldiers are guarding the borders against imperialist invaders.’ Oh yeah? I thought. I wish the imperialist invaders good luck. Whoever they are. Probably the Khmer Serei. I’ve heard they have been growing stronger near the Thai border. Why don’t you tell us who the invaders are, Chea Huon? But he didn’t.

  He talked for the first hour and into the second hour and it was all propagand
a. Word for word, the same as the speeches on the radio. ‘Under the regime of the arch-fascist, arch-corrupt, arch-imperialist Lon Nol, we were oppressed and never had any happiness.’ The same nonsense. ‘Under the glorious rule of Angka, we have entered a new age, as masters of the nation, the land, the waters, the rice fields and our destiny, working together to achieve independence-sovereignty.’ Chea Huon wasn’t telling us anything we hadn’t heard before. What he was doing was proving his orthodoxy. It was like what he had said to me when I was cutting the sapling and his bodyguards came near:

  ‘We must fight on all battlefields. We must struggle to control nature.’ The words meant nothing – except that he was faithful to Angka. I wondered why someone as high-ranking as that needed to go to such lengths to show his devotion.

  At last, in the third hour, he began to talk about the dam. ‘It is a big project,’ he said. ‘When it is finished and we have connected the mountains, we will have a water supply the full year around. We will use the water to grow two or even three annual rice crops. We will never go hungry again. We will eat rice anytime we want, day or night.’

  ‘Liar,’ I said under my breath.

  ‘But,’ he said, clenching both fists and waving them in front of his body, ‘the dam will not just be used for agriculture. No, comrades! The water will also drive turbines to create electrical power! People from here to the Thai border, in the cities, in the villages and in the jungles will all have electricity to use!’

  I looked at the tiny segment of the dam that had already been completed and at the miles of dry surrounding landscape. We didn’t have any concrete to build the dam with. All we had was clay. We didn’t have any bulldozers to dig with. All we had was hoes. Our earlier projects on the front lines had all failed. The canals hadn’t stopped the flooding. There had been a halfhearted attempt to use canal water to irrigate fields for dry-season rice, but the rice had all died. And the dam was to be much larger than anything else we had attempted – on the same scale as the huge hydroelectric dams in America and Europe. Huoy poked me in the ribs and I turned back toward the stage again.

  ‘And when we have electricity we will build factories,’ Chea Huon was saying. ‘We won’t even need oxcarts anymore! We will build our own cars and trucks in our factories! Each family will have at least one car. And each house will have its own electric lights, to turn on and off whenever we like! And – this is not all – after we build factories, we will build skyscrapers near the reservoir! Anyone who wants an apartment to live in will have one! Our nation will be developed! Our factories will build our own bulldozers and tractors! We will use our machines to perform all the labour we need! And we will never use human beings to farm again!

  ‘LONG LIVE THE KAMPUCHEAN REVOLUTION!’ he roared, and the mass of ragged people struggled to its feet and obediently told him what he wanted to hear.

  ‘LONG LIVE THE GREAT SOLIDARITY!’ Onstage, the old skinny man and Chev and the rest of the leaders outdid one another with their enthusiasm and their clenched-fist salutes.

  ‘LONG LIVE THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD!’ On the site of the future city of skyscrapers and factories and shining automobiles there were exactly two machines, sitting on the clay: a generator, to amplify Chea Huon’s words, and a jeep to take him away. I hoped he would leave soon. The Chea Huon I used to know didn’t exist anymore. A puppet named Sama Mit Vanh occupied his body.

  ‘LONG LIVE THE GREAT PROSPERITY!’

  Give me real rice to eat.

  ‘LONG LIVE THE GREAT SPLENDOUR!’

  Just give me rice. And forget your stupid dreams.

  To supply the dam project with labour the front lines were reorganized once again. Several cooperatives like ours were merged into a giant one whose headquarters was next to the dam site. Huoy lost her job in the kitchen. She became a dam worker, carrying mud baskets. She worked harder than before, for much longer hours, with much less to eat.

  I was luckier. My group – the same I had worked with since rescuing Chea Huon’s jeep – was assigned to build houses on the back lines. Now that a hydroelectric dam was being built and the region was entering a new stage of development, the nearby villages were supposed to have permanent housing for ‘new’ and ‘old’ people. The houses were on stilts in traditional style, but they would hold three or four families each instead of just one. It was an easy job. We hammered secondhand nails into used boards. If the poles rested on dirt instead of foundations, or if one roof wasn’t finished before we moved on to the next, we didn’t care. We were just following orders. We didn’t have to work in the evenings. We didn’t have to go to many political meetings. We moved from one village to the next, sleeping in the houses we built.

  For me, life was much easier than before. My health was good. I was skinny but tough, and my infections had finally healed. There was only one drawback, and that was being apart from Huoy. I asked permission to rejoin her. I volunteered to work on the dam. But the leaders said no. They never even considered my request. To them, ‘new’ people were lower-level beings, politically suspect, enemies. To give in to my wishes would imply that I was on the same level as they. They could not give me permission without losing face.

  If Huoy and I had been like most married ‘new’ people, being apart wouldn’t have mattered. The strain of work, the shortage of food and the absence of normal family life had turned most marriages sour. There just wasn’t much left to keep couples together. Sex hadn’t disappeared entirely but there wasn’t much of it, because husbands and wives didn’t have the energy or the privacy. People carried within them an unspoken fear. They worried about their own survival, and they didn’t trust anyone else, even their spouses.

  Huoy and I had been exceptions. We spent all our free time together. We went for walks, talking and gathering wild foods when it was possible. We shared our food. We had the normal arguments between husbands and wives, but no more. I had never forgotten how Huoy had nursed me when I was sick and when I came back from prison. I needed her. I relied on her judgement. Every day she told me to keep my mouth shut, to plant a kapok tree. And she needed me to keep her from giving in to fear and depression.

  Within a few weeks of being assigned to my new job I was commuting to the dam site to spend the nights with her. I didn’t have permission. If the soldiers had caught me they would have killed me. But it was a relatively peaceful time in the area. There were few purges and hardly any night-time sentries. Besides, I figured that if I couldn’t be with her it didn’t matter what happened to me.

  I made my nightly trips with a man named Som from my work group. He and I had fixed roads and dykes together, transplanted rice together, talked about the foods we missed together and now we were building houses together. Like me, he wanted to spend the nights with his wife, who worked in Huoy’s group on the dam.

  Som was an intellectual from Phnom Penh. I knew that from his choice of words and his accent. From the start I also sensed that he was an idealist and a rebel. But he knew much more about me.

  One day when he and I were alone, Som told me that he recognized me from the military hospital in Phnom Penh. I felt a sudden tightening in my stomach and told him it was impossible, that I had been a taxi driver. Whenever I thought about admitting I was a doctor, my mind turned to Pen Tip. I still saw Pen Tip occasionally, and whenever I did it was all I could do to control my anger.

  Som pulled up the sleeve of his right arm and showed me a scar. He said he had been wounded by a Khmer Rouge artillery shell and that I had done the reconstructive surgery. When the Khmer Rouge came into the hospitals on April 17, 1975 he had been in traction. He was forced to leave, and his tibia had never healed properly. He now had about seventy percent use of his right arm, which was visibly crooked and atrophied.

  I didn’t remember operating on him and at first I thought he was lying. But gradually it became clear that Som wasn’t trying to gain power over me. Nor was he trying to gain favour with the Khmer Rouge. Whenever he had the chance, Som cursed them behind
their backs for the misery they had brought us. He was far more outspoken than me. He told me he had been a Buddhist monk for many years, then left the priesthood to become a student. He was good at languages. Eventually he became an interpreter at the US embassy in Phnom Penh.

  This was not the sort of background an informer would confess to. Being a monk was counterrevolutionary. Being a US embassy employee was cause enough for a one-way trip to the woods. I watched Som closely for signs that he was a chhlop. There weren’t any. We became friends. Sometimes, when nobody else was around, he spoke English for me, and it sounded exactly like the broadcasts on the Voice of America. I couldn’t understand what he was saying except for occasional words that were similar to French. But I wanted to understand.

  Among the books I kept wrapped in plastic and buried underground was one that taught basic English words and phrases to French speakers. I had traded some freshwater crabs for it in Phum Chhleav without quite knowing why. Huoy often asked me to get rid of it; she pointed out that if it were found it could mean my death. Now I realized why I had kept it. I wanted to learn English.

  Of course it was a crazy thing to do. I wanted to learn something, a new subject of any kind, to keep my mind sharp. I needed to use my brain for more than hammering nails for Angka. But I had another reason too. English was the language of the enemy. Learning it was a subversive act. I asked Som to become my teacher.

  During the day Som and I and about thirty others built houses. At the end of the afternoon, when the bell rang, the crew put down its tools, and Som and I got ready to visit our wives.

  After a quick dinner at the common kitchen we walked toward a nearby lake as if to bathe. From the lake we cut over to a canal, a long, straight trough of muddy water, the orange ball of the sinking sun reflecting on its surface. Birds chirped and twittered, and swallows dipped and soared above the water, catching insects. Frogs croaked, fell silent as we approached, then croaked again when we had passed by.