Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  By this time the whole Phnom Tippeday region was on the move. Several villages camped together in the rice fields, guarded by soldiers. Far to the southwest, beyond the uncompleted dam, the first rumblings of artillery could be heard. In the following days the sounds of artillery came from the south and the east, and then mostly from the east. Judging from the direction, the heaviest fighting was somewhere near the town of Muong, where National Route 5 and the railway converged. We heard no small-arms fire, which meant that the fighting wasn’t yet nearby.

  We waited ten days, and then the ‘enemy’ attacked from the northwest.

  When the chattering of automatic rifles and machine guns broke out, I was with my group. Artillery shells landed and exploded on the hillocks and in the rice fields to either side, and smoke and dust spewed up where they landed. We picked up our luggage and ran with a strength we never knew we had. Everyone around us was running. Trees fell, and water buffalo stampeded with their eyes bulging and the whites showing around their irises. Dust filled the air, there was a mad tinkling of ox bells, and those with oxcarts stood up like charioteers, shouting at their oxen and whipping them to make them go faster.

  We poured toward the railroad tracks, but Khmer Rouge in their black uniforms sprinted toward the jungles, outrunning all of us. It was almost enough to make me stop and laugh to see them run away so fast, after all their boasts about what good soldiers they were.

  When the shooting finally stopped, we were in an area called Boeung Reaing, where Huoy and I had dug canals on the front lines. There were thousands of ‘new’ people around us, confused and leaderless. We didn’t know where the Khmer Rouge were. We were afraid to move, afraid to take the initiative. So we stayed where we were, hoping that the freedom fighters would come to us.

  While waiting, we spread out into the rice fields, which lay unharvested and inviting in all directions. The skies were clear and hot. Everywhere, within an hour, men, women and children were harvesting rice. We threshed it with our bare feet, milled it with mortar and pestle or with sticks in holes in the ground. The shooting and the stampede had vanished from our minds. Food was our first priority, safety our second. The rich rice of Battambang was everywhere for the taking. Nobody could punish us for taking rice. There was rice for all.

  And after we filled our bellies and stored rice for future days, we sharpened our hatchets and knives and started looking at the Khmer Rouge who had reappeared, while muttering among ourselves. The Khmer Rouge knew our minds, and were afraid, and joined their comrades in large groups.

  I looked around and saw Pen Tip. He had an oxcart, with large spoked wheels and a narrow high-sided bed piled with bags and possessions. Pulling the cart were two oxen. The cart and the ox belonged to the community, but Pen Tip had appropriated them for himself. Few others had oxen, or carts, or anything they could not carry themselves.

  Pen Tip wore new black clothing, the same as the soldiers. He wore his krama in classic Khmer Rouge style, like a scarf, with the two ends hanging down on his chest. He was talking to his brothers-in-law, who stayed at his side to protect him, and rolling his cigarette around in the fingers of one hand. He blinked his eyes, looked this way and that. His facial features were constantly in motion.

  The time had come to deal with Pen Tip, I said, and Sangam ran his thumb along the blade of his hatchet and agreed. He was a strong old man, and it was comforting to have him on my side.

  But before I could make my move, the Khmer Rouge leaders returned and issued an order. They told it to people like Pen Tip, and Pen Tip relayed it to us. He said we were supposed to go to a village far off to the east, in the forest. I had never even heard of the place, but the crowd, accustomed to obeying orders, lifted its luggage and began its trudge. The opportunity for revenge had been lost. Dust rose from the passage of feet and oxen. The road became a twisting, braided maze of paths. As the sun sunk behind us, I brought my group to a halt. Pen Tip was nowhere in sight. I had no intention of following his orders. I told the group that we were going to cut north, toward the railroad. They agreed.

  We set out on our new course. Before long, someone from Phum Ra came up and told me that he had seen Pen Tip split off and go northwest.

  I smiled grimly. I had expected something like that from him. Pen Tip wanted to escape from the Khmer Rouge too. He knew they were a losing cause. It was time for him to change allegiances and collaborate with the Khmer Serei instead. But he also knew that he could not head directly toward the liberation forces without being noticed. So he had issued the orders to the rest of us and then tried to lose himself in the crowd.

  We walked toward the railroad, arriving at a village of houses on stilts set among shade trees and fruit trees.

  Thousands of the uprooted had come to the village before us. It was not a sanctuary so much as a no-man’s-land, with no soldiers around. We decided to stay there too.

  While we waited, hoping the war would pass us by, there were rice fields to forage. Every day we went out to the fields and harvested as much as we wanted. There was a big river too, and we went there to bathe. We did not yet have our freedom, but we didn’t move for six or seven days, because here we could satisfy even more basic needs. For water and rice.

  Then the liberation army pushed on farther and the Khmer Rouge retreated, and Pen Tip showed up with them, in his oxcart. Blinking nervously and looking from side to side, Pen Tip told everyone from Phum Ra to move on to the Khmer Rouge camp a short distance away. He spotted me in the crowd and shouted, ‘Samnang, you move on to the military camp. Our leaders are waiting there.’

  ‘Pen Tip, you go first,’ I said sarcastically, and spat on the ground.

  His eyebrows raised. He pointed in the direction of the Khmer Rouge camp. ‘The leaders are waiting. The front lines are retreating. Uh, you have to move. Angka will provide rice over there.’

  My hand went to my waist, but the hatchet I usually kept in my waistband wasn’t there. I had left it with my luggage.

  ‘You go first,’ I repeated. ‘Nobody trusts you, Pen Tip. Nobody believes what you’re saying. Before, you told people who had no oxcarts, who carried all their belongings on shoulder-boards, to go someplace very far away. But you didn’t go there yourself. You went in a different direction, and you had an oxcart to carry your luggage.’

  Dozens of people from Phum Ra had clustered around to watch. They all understood what was happening, which was indirect and ritualized and very Cambodian. This was a declaration of war, like slapping someone with gloves to provoke a duel. I was ‘breaking his face.’

  Pen Tip looked worried and glanced away. ‘You, uh, you don’t have to talk that way. Um, I’m not that kind of person.’ He twisted the bamboo-leaf cigarette in his fingertips. ‘No, you don’t have to talk that way, Samnang. Words like that are for temple boys.’

  ‘Because you are a temple boy. You never told people the truth, or treated them correctly. You always lie to innocent people.’

  Pen Tip said, ‘If you don’t want to go, you are responsible for yourself. Angka told me to tell you to go. I’m just trying to help you by passing on the information.’

  I stared at him but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  Then he drove away.

  When the adrenaline finally drained and I calmed down, I still felt good. I had acted properly. In Cambodian society, which is inhibited and indirect, you must publicly insult someone first before moving on to the next phase. Only in this way can you, the accuser, keep face yourself. To attack someone physically without establishing the basis for the fight is low-class and unethical, like the behaviour of the Khmer Rouge.

  Anyway, I thought, we will have the showdown soon enough. I can use my hatchet then, to defend myself or to attack. Pen Tip is small and he will be easy to defeat.

  But after I bathed in the river and lay down and thought about it some more, I realized my mistake. What was wrong with me? How could I have made such an error? Pen Tip wouldn’t give me the pleasure of a one-on-one duel. N
ot when he had re-established himself with the Khmer Rouge. He would get soldiers to take me away.

  I told my group to pack quickly. We would leave as soon as it got dark, before Pen Tip could make his move.

  When the last light left the sky we waded across the river, making several trips until we had all the baggage and all the children on the far side. We walked on. Soon we came to the railroad tracks, dimly reflecting the starlight. We camped beyond the tracks on a hillock. I lay awake, thinking about Pen Tip, gripping my hatchet.

  At dawn the others went off into the rice fields to build up our supplies while I made a reconnaissance. I looked all around for Khmer Rouge and the liberation soldiers, but I saw nothing and heard nothing.

  No sounds of artillery. No trains coming along the tracks. No planes in the empty blue skies.

  It was quiet around us. I didn’t like it. The previous day there had been gunfire to the east, the north and the west, none of it nearby.

  Sangam and his wife decided to go east toward Phnom Penh, along the railroad tracks. I decided to take my group north to National Route 5, and from there westward toward Thailand. We wished each other luck and parted on excellent terms. Sangam had been an honest, reliable friend.

  Now our group was down to twelve, all of us related. I was the leader. Ngor Balam and his wife had two children and a nephew. Hok and his wife had an infant daughter, whom they carried, plus the three children of my late brother Pheng Huor – two girls, named Im and Ngim, and the little boy, Chy Kveng. All of the children in the group were sturdy and well behaved. Even Chy Kveng could walk all day without being carried. But having so many children made us vulnerable and slow.

  We walked along oxcart paths, through rice fields and jungle, choosing the paths that led in the right direction. Every hour or so I checked our bearings by climbing trees. From the treetops, the Phnom Tippeday ridge was in sight, the ruined wat and the stupa together making one white dot in the distance.

  Because of the children and our frequent stops to gather food, we made slow progress. I was nervous and alert, going out on frequent, short reconnaissance trips and then returning. When we met other civilians we asked them if they had seen soldiers, but they all said no.

  Soft, hot dust covered our feet and ankles as we walked. We came to a canal, bathed in it, kept going and came to a deserted village. Bananas and green mangoes hung invitingly in the trees, and yams grew in the gardens. We helped ourselves. Later that day we came to another deserted village, with papaya and jack-fruit trees, and ate again. The next day we saw a pig rooting for yams in a field. We three men in the group chased after the pig and caught it. When we cooked it, other travellers appeared, and we shared it with them gladly. Everyone ate his fill and sat around, talking and relaxing.

  With all the good food and the companionship I began to feel better.

  We could eat what we wanted and when we wanted.

  We could say whatever we chose.

  We were free to criticize, to speak out, to show anger. We didn’t have to be silent if someone else did something stupid or committed an injustice.

  The long darkness was almost over.

  As we walked through the forest toward the highway, I began to sing.

  32

  Liberation

  We made it to National Route 5, only to find the Khmer Rouge still in control. They told us we couldn’t walk toward Battambang. Discouraged, we began walking eastward, toward Phnom Penh. We walked slowly, with the strange sensation of asphalt pavement under our feet. The road was crowded and the soldiers didn’t bother us.

  The sounds of battle came from virtually all directions, but far away.

  It was early March 1979. One day passed, and then the next and the next. We stayed on the lookout for opportunities, but there were none. We were patient and careful. As an old Cambodian saying puts it, the last wave sinks the boat. There was no sense in being careless when freedom was so near.

  We walked as slowly as possible, making less than a mile a day, passed by people hurrying back to Phnom Penh. Our group was not conspicuous or in any way remarkable. We were just another ragged bunch of refugees, the men with luggage bobbing up and down on their shoulderboards, the women carrying baskets on their heads, the children staying close for protection.

  We didn’t walk at night, even to step off the road to relieve ourselves. On either side of the road were punji pits with sharpened bamboo stakes at the bottom. There were also mines, in holes next to the road and near the bridges. The rain had washed the layer of dirt from the metal detonating buttons, which were about the size of kneecaps, so most of the mines were visible. Even so, an ox stepped on a mine, killing several people we had known from Phum Ra and wounding others.

  West of Muong we were caught in a storm, with lightning and thunder and drenching rain. Other travellers crowded into a hut near the highway, but not us. We just sat on the road, without shelter, all night long. After four years under the Khmer Rouge, being cold and wet didn’t bother us much. We were toughened by what we had lived through.

  We passed some soldiers digging trenches and creating barricades with concertina wire, and then we got to the town of Muong, where the highway and the railway met. Tens of thousands of civilians were there ahead of us. The railway station and a row of Chinese merchants’ shophouses were still intact. Everything else was in ruins. Behind the railroad station were rusted boxcars with their wooden sides ripped out for use as firewood. Automobiles lay in heaps, their engines removed, vines growing up through the cavities. Houses had been turned to rubble. Part of the wat was destroyed, and there were no Buddha statues in it. The bridge over the river was a mass of twisted metal. A temporary wooden bridge had been erected beside it for foot traffic.

  We wanted to stay in Muong, but the next day the Khmer Rouge pushed us on, steadily retreating. Our group was the last to leave the town, and the slowest in walking.

  East of Muong, the Khmer Rouge ordered all civilians to turn off National Route 5 onto a dirt road leading toward the Cardamom Mountains. For military purposes they wanted to control the population, but they had no interest in us except for that. They didn’t give us any food or water. There was no water anywhere. The weather was hot. A few weaker people died of dehydration. The desperate put their lips to the ground and drank, where urine had filled up the footprints of oxen and water buffalo.

  It was on this dirt road that the revenge killings began. First the Khmer Rouge called a mass meeting. They fired their mortars at the civilians who showed up for it, killing hundreds. They had always looked down on ‘new’ people. They blamed us for the invasion, just as they blamed us for all their failings.

  Then the people retaliated. We saw only the aftermath, the bodies of a Khmer Rouge and his pregnant wife and his children, lying in bloody pieces on the forest floor. And the next day another Khmer Rouge body, and the day after that another. It was unsafe for the Khmer Rouge to travel, except in large numbers.

  My family was running low on food. A man who was camping near us told me about an underground rice warehouse on the other side of National Route 5. He described how he had managed to reach the site, find rice and return. I discussed going to the rice warehouse with Hok and Balam. They didn’t want to take the risk. I did. And at first light on April 17, 1979, I set out on another stage of my journey.

  About eighty men and women joined together to go to the warehouse. A few of the men had been there before and acted as our guides. We walked through jungle, waded across canals, followed dirt roads and oxcart paths. Several times we passed massacre sites, where Khmer Rouge had slaughtered civilians or civilians had killed Khmer Rouge.

  Around 8.00 a.m. we got to National Route 5. It was deserted, a long stretch of paved road with no one in sight. The rumble of artillery fire came from far away, like distant thunder. We crossed the highway and re-entered the jungle.

  I carried only essentials: a bamboo shoulderboard with two empty rice bags lashed to it; my metal field cooking pot, fille
d with rice, hanging from my belt; and my hatchet, which fit snugly against my waist, secured by my krama. I was barefoot, in torn trousers and a torn shirt. Hidden from sight in my waistband were my Zippo lighter, my Swiss calendar watch and a few pieces of gold.

  We came to a large rice field that cut into the jungle like a bay. The far end of the rice field opened up onto an even larger area of rice fields the likes of which I had seldom seen: utterly flat, stretching out for mile after mile, almost without hillocks. I sensed we were near the rice warehouse. Somewhere beyond, perhaps ten or fifteen miles, lay the great inland lake Tonle Sap.

  The bottoms of the paddies were covered with water. We left the forest and began walking on top of the dykes. We were about a hundred yards from the trees when the firing broke out, from the jungle to our right. A few were hit and crumpled to the ground before they could react. The rest of us dove for the shelter of the earthen dykes, which were about two feet high and a foot or more thick – thick enough, I hoped, to stop bullets from AK-47s. Goddamn Khmer Rouge! Opening fire on unarmed civilians who had just gone out to find food.

  Then, from the jungle on the left side, came voices. ‘Yo dee! Yo dee! Yo dee!’

  I didn’t know what ‘yo dee’ meant. I had never heard the words before.

  I lifted my head for a second and looked where the voices were coming from. Uniformed men were running toward us into the rice field, pausing to crouch and fire when they reached the safety of a dyke. They waved their arms, signalling us to come toward them. They fired at the Khmer Rouge, but not at us.

  ‘Yo! Yo dee! Yo dee!’

  Bullets whizzed by, making little fountains of mud and water when they struck the paddies. I stayed alongside a dyke and dragged myself forward with my forearms, pulling my shoulder-board alongside. My body was half underwater. In front, all I could see was water and mud and the feet of the next person worming his way ahead.

  The liberators were ahead of us and to the left. The dykes between lay on the diagonal, high enough to provide cover most of the distance except when crossing their tops, which were exposed to fire. A man ahead of me crawled up one side of a dyke and was hit. He stayed where he was, moaning, blood spurting from his legs. I scrambled up one side of the dyke, rolled down the other, unhurt, and kept on going. No one helped the wounded man.