Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  ‘Yo dee!’

  The freedom fighter was just ahead at the corner of two dykes, alternately firing his rifle and beckoning for us to come. Between him and me was the length of one rice paddy. I pulled myself along in the shadow of the dyke; an eel couldn’t have gotten any lower in the mud. Then it was up and over the dyke next to him.

  I lay directly behind him in the mud and water, as close to the dyke as possible, panting from the exertion.

  Gradually, my breathing eased.

  I was safe.

  A little piece of rice straw floated on the water, a few inches in front of me.

  I turned to look at the soldier. He was crouching at the intersection of the dykes in classic military posture, his left arm supporting the rifle, firing and waving people on with his right. He wore a light green uniform and a green plantation-style helmet. He turned toward me for a moment. He was a young man with a light bone structure and pale yellow skin and slanting eyes. There was a red star on the front of his helmet.

  He was Vietnamese.

  What were the Vietnamese doing here?

  Everybody knew the Khmer Serei were coming. We knew all about the Khmer Serei. In Tam, an honest general who had lost a crooked election to Lon Nol in the early 1970s, was their leader. Nobody said anything about the Vietnamese.

  Even the Khmer Rouge hadn’t mentioned the Vietnamese. They only talked about the ‘enemy.’

  Why were Vietnamese communists shooting at their fellow communists, the Khmer Rouge?

  Why weren’t they shooting at me?

  ‘Yo dee!’ the young soldier yelled again. ‘Yo. Yo dee!’ He removed the banana-shaped ammunition clip in his AK-47, changed it for a new one, aimed, squeezed out a burst. The bullet casings ejected to the right and splattered into the water.

  As he finished the burst, a Cambodian civilian in rags came rolling over the dyke behind him, his legs a bloody red. He fell on top of me, wiggled to an empty spot farther down the dyke and lay there, groaning.

  I hugged the dyke.

  Slowly, gradually, the firing tapered off. In the paddy next to ours another Vietnamese soldier advanced cautiously, ducked behind a dyke, advanced again.

  The shooting had stopped.

  ‘Dee,’ said the soldier next to me, motioning to the dozen of us Cambodians in the paddy. He crawled off toward the forest and we crawled after him, except for the man with the leg wounds, who had died. The soldier rolled over a dyke and we followed his example, except for the women among us, who climbed over awkwardly on their hands and knees.

  After crawling and rolling the length of several more dykes we were out of the line of fire. We stood up and walked rapidly behind the far side of a hillock. There, safe from bullets, a man with dark skin and wide features – a Cambodian – waited for us. He was holding an AK-47 but wore ordinary civilian clothes.

  He told us in Khmer, ‘We have come to liberate you. Don’t worry. Don’t be afraid.’

  More survivors from my foraging group, forty to fifty in all, arrived behind the hillock, escorted by Vietnamese. Some of them asked if we could go back into the field to help wounded relatives, but the Cambodian liberation soldier said no. ‘The Khmer Rouge are still in the forest beyond. Leave it to our Vietnamese friends to get your relatives.’

  More Cambodian liberation soldiers appeared from the safety of the jungle nearby. They had not engaged in any fighting. More Vietnamese returned wet and muddy from the battle in the rice field. The Vietnamese were tense and angry. They waved pistols in our faces, motioning us to raise our hands. They asked, ‘Pol Pot? Pol Pot?’

  I didn’t know what ‘Pol Pot’ meant, but I quickly told the Cambodian soldier that we were civilians and were just looking for something to eat. A few of us who could speak Vietnamese told the Vietnamese soldiers the same thing. We all had our hands raised and everyone was talking at once. It was obvious that the Cambodian soldiers and the Vietnamese soldiers were not on good terms. The Cambodian soldiers were outnumbered and were submissive but resented it. The Vietnamese looked down on them and on us. After translating, the Cambodian soldiers said we could put our hands down, but the Vietnamese went from one of us to the next, pointing their weapons and asking through interpreters whether we were Khmer Rouge.

  The Vietnamese took our kramas and used them to tie our elbows behind our backs. Then they searched us, confiscating knives and hatchets and pouches of tobacco. They marched us off into the jungle and along a path.

  I thought: Well, it’s happening again. They say they are liberating us but they have tied us up. Just like the Khmer Rouge.

  They brought us to a Vietnamese military camp with tents in straight rows. The commanding officer emerged from his tent wearing a white T-shirt and holding a pistol in his hand. Through an interpreter he asked who of us spoke Vietnamese. One man volunteered and was taken a short distance away for questioning. Then the commander asked the rest of us through the interpreter where the Khmer Rouge were based, how many of them there were and what kinds of weapons they had. None of us knew, and we were too afraid to say anything. Nearby, the interrogators were using their fists to beat the man who had volunteered.

  They tied us back to back in groups of three, using our kramas as rope. The man who had volunteered was brought back and tied behind me. Lower-ranking Vietnamese went around to the groups of three, asking the same questions about the Khmer Rouge through interpreters. When they came to me I said I didn’t know, I was only looking for food, and they punched me in the stomach, knocking the wind out of me. They punched the man behind me, the one who had already been beaten, and the Cambodian soldiers who had been doing the interpreting did nothing to stop it. I noticed that the Vietnamese did not hit everyone, just those of us who were light-skinned, which is to say those of us whose ancestry was partly or wholly Chinese. But I do not know whether the Vietnamese hated Chinese-Cambodians and wanted to punish us, or whether they thought we more observant, more likely to be good sources of information than the dark-skinned ethnic Khmer.

  In the midafternoon they untied the groups of three but left each person with his elbows tied behind his back. They led us across a rice field and through the jungle to National Route 5. We walked westward, our bare feet on the hot asphalt, and across a fallen-down bridge, where they let us take a break. They untied the dark-skinned ones, but the light-skinned ones like me they kept tied up, and I thought they were marking me for special treatment.

  We walked along the road toward Battambang, the tied and the untied together, and only one Vietnamese guard in front. I motioned for a dark-skinned man to untie my arms, and he did, and I walked along with my arms free. Then I untied someone else. A few refused to be untied because they were afraid of the guard, but he didn’t look back and didn’t seem to care. We stopped at the entrance to a Vietnamese military base with a tank out front, and the soldiers living in a village of traditional Cambodian houses on stilts. Our guard went in to report, then came back and told us, though an interpreter, while pointing his finger, ‘Go this way. Everybody. Go this direction. Go to Battambang.’

  We walked numbly down the road.

  I had no shoulderboard, no hatchet. Only my field cooking pot, which was still full of rice, and my torn and muddy clothes, and the hidden contents of my waistband pockets.

  Some of the survivors from our foraging group rested while others walked on at their own pace toward Battambang. Soon those who were ahead and those who were behind were strung far apart along the road, out of sight.

  I walked until the dirt turnoff road for Phnom Tippeday, and stopped. It was late afternoon.

  I pulled out my calendar watch. The date was April 17, 1979.

  I had been under the Khmer Rouge exactly four years.

  I thought: No, the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh on the morning of April 17, 1975. It’s 6.00 p.m. now. A little over four years. Four years and eight hours.

  I tried to grasp the meaning of the time that had passed, but there was nothing to hold on to.
<
br />   Phnom Penh was forever ago but fresh as yesterday.

  So much had happened.

  Everyone had died. Huoy, my parents, everyone.

  I was alive, but the price was too high.

  The gods had made a horrible mistake.

  33

  Battambang

  In the morning I walked down the red clay road to Phnom Tippeday, to visit Huoy’s grave.

  It was a long, straight road, with channels cut into its surface by the rains, and grass growing high and thick on either side. The wind and the birds made the only sounds; there was not another human being in sight. I crossed the railroad tracks and took a shortcut across the fields, scurrying from hillock to hillock, stopping to look around, afraid of being caught by a Khmer Rouge patrol or a Vietnamese patrol, afraid of losing the liberty I had gained. Arriving under the big sdao tree, I felt safe again. Every detail of the place was familiar to me, and permanently fixed in my memory: the grave aligned with the temple on the mountain, the tree arching protectively overhead, the patchwork pattern of the dykes and paddies.

  Kneeling, I told her that this would be my last visit for a long, long time. Someday I would come back for her and take her to another resting place, next to the temple on the mountain. I asked her to protect me until my return.

  Huoy’s spirit answered. She said she would watch over me and guide me. She promised to stay with me wherever I went.

  I was comforted. It was important to know that her spirit was with me, even when our physical beings were far apart. But when I got up there was nobody else in sight. My bonheur vanished, and my loneliness and fear returned.

  I walked quickly through Phum Ra, which was even more desolate than before. In our house, the doors were torn off the hinges and the thatch torn off the walls. Everywhere, panels of thatch and pieces of corrugated metal and trash and rusted bowls lay scattered in the streets. The warehouse near the common kitchen was wide open at the doors, empty except for a few grains of rice on the floor.

  On the way out of the village I found a pair of green Vietnamese sneakers, canvas on top, rubber on the bottom. I put them on and wiggled my toes experimentally. They fit. And I walked away as fast as possible, with the strange feeling that my feet were no longer in contact with the ground.

  I returned to the National Route 5 intersection and camped. An ominous rumbling of artillery came from the southeast, the direction my family had been. There was no going back for them, nothing to do but watch and wait.

  Signs had appeared along the highway, scrawled on paper or wood and fastened to trees. Such-and-such a person announced that he had survived and had gone east, to Phnom Penh. So-and-so wrote that she had lost her husband and her younger children; her older children, if they were still alive, should follow her west, to Battambang. Handwritten signs, messages of hope and despair.

  Refugees wandered along the road in both directions, stopping to read the signs, then shuffling on again, tired and numb and traumatized. When I asked if they had seen my family they said no, but their minds were someplace else, and their eyes stared through me to some distant place beyond.

  As the days passed and my family did not appear, I grew restless and walked long distances on the road, up and back. I read the signs, talked with refugees, looked for familiar faces. It reminded me of looking for Huoy and my parents after the evacuation of Phnom Penh. But the traffic on National Route 1 in 1975 was nothing like the traffic on National Route 5 in 1979.

  In 1979 there were no cars being pushed, or motorcycles. There were no television sets, radios, electric fans or cartons of books being carried. If people had any possessions at all they carried them in small bundles on shoulderboards, on their backs, or balanced on their heads. They trudged along in barefoot groups, two or three or five skinny people in rags and then another few coming along a hundred yards later. Most had facial sores. In 1975 women had cared how they looked, but in 1979 there were only torn clothes, and the women had no sense of fashion or pride in their appearance. In 1975 when friends met they asked, ‘Have you eaten yet?’ or ‘How many children do you have?’ In 1979 they stared at you with haunted eyes and asked, ‘Who survived in your family?’

  Another difference was this: in 1975 everyone was afraid of the Khmer Rouge. In 1979 the fear had turned to anger.

  Three thin, ragged Cambodian men walked down the highway. They escorted a fourth man, who was sturdier and well fed, his arms tied behind his back so tightly his chest stuck out.

  The three young men were beating the fourth with their fists and shouting, ‘Say it! Say it: “I’m Khmer Rouge.” ’

  ‘I’m Khmer Rouge,’ the prisoner said in a faint voice as they paraded him toward the spot where I was standing.

  ‘Say it louder! Say, “I killed a lot of people.” ’

  ‘I killed a lot of people,’ the sturdy man repeated. He wore culottes, nothing more.

  Like flies to a meal, people emerged from the roadside and ran toward the prisoner. I ran toward him too. ‘One time each!’ his captors yelled to us. ‘You must take turns! Please! Each person can hit him only once!’ The crowd pressed in. Even the women took their turns hitting him with their fists.

  ‘Stand aside,’ I said. The crowd parted to give me room. I stepped in quickly and kicked high and hard between the prisoner’s legs. He crumpled, his face contorted in agony, and his guards jerked him to his feet.

  In an angry, buzzing cluster, the crowd proceeded along the road, with the Khmer Rouge in the middle. His face was bloody and swollen. Every time he fell they hauled him to his feet again. Vietnamese soldiers stepped in to save him, but the crowd pushed them away so fiercely that the soldiers retreated. Then farther down the road a man rushed in swinging a hatchet and killed the Khmer Rouge.

  Someone cut the head off and mounted it on top of a bamboo pole. They wrote a sign with charcoal on wood, and fixed the sign to the pole and jammed the pole in the ground beside the road for everyone to see.

  The sign read, ‘Khmer Rouge – Enemy Forever.’

  Day after day Vietnamese trucks drove along the highway, some of them carrying troops and others pulling artillery pieces. Many tanks drove along too, their metal treads clanking on the pavement. What the Vietnamese were doing in Cambodia still puzzled me. It didn’t make sense, the early teachers of the Khmer Rouge fighting their pupils, communists fighting communists. The explanation was missing. But one thing was perfectly clear, and that was the overwhelming Vietnamese military power. They seemed to have endless equipment. Their troops were serious and disciplined. Nobody in Southeast Asia could defeat them. Not the Khmer Rouge. Not the Khmer Serei, if they even existed, and by now I doubted it. How foolish we had been to believe that the Khmer Serei were coming to free us. How ignorant we had been! Kept in the dark and inventing wishful stories about freedom fighters, and passing the stories on as fact.

  But there was nothing to be done about it. The country has been occupied by foreigners, I thought sourly. The regime that tortured me is overthrown, and another regime that tied me up and punched me is in power.

  Historically, Vietnam was our enemy. In the nineteenth century it had annexed Cambodian territory in the lower Mekong River delta, and when I was growing up it was often said that Vietnam wanted to take the rest too. But as far as I was concerned they were welcome as long as they stayed only a short while. They had hastened the end of the Khmer Rouge regime, though the regime had been falling apart anyway. Better to have them around than the Khmer Rouge. The Vietnamese didn’t bother the refugees on the highway. They let us forage for food wherever we wanted.

  I went on several foraging trips with some Vietnamese soldiers who had camped beside the highway. With me was a Cambodian man who spoke Vietnamese. We helped the soldiers catch domesticated ducks, and in exchange they shared with us the oxen and pigs they shot with their rifles.

  We always went out with the same three soldiers. They were about twenty years old, healthy and polite. We didn’t ask them personal questions, a
nd they didn’t ask us. But one evening over a campfire I asked them why the Vietnamese troops who freed me had tied me up and hit me in the stomach. They explained that it was hard to know which Cambodians to trust. ‘Some Khmer Rouge have pretended to be civilians and then killed Vietnamese. So we have to be careful,’ one of them said, through my acquaintance, who translated.

  I was sceptical. It didn’t explain the hostility of the soldiers who had interrogated me, or the bad feelings between them and their Cambodian counterparts. Still, the young soldier had regarded the question as a reasonable one and had given me an answer. It was the kind of conversation that had been impossible with the Khmer Rouge. Through my acquaintance I asked why Vietnam had invaded Cambodia.

  ‘Because Pol Pot killed a lot of people,’ one of them said. ‘We came to liberate you from Pol Pot’s hands.’

  Pol Pot. Ever since liberation I had been hearing the name. Pol Pot was said to be the head of Angka, the leader of the anonymous Organization. But I was sceptical about that too. It was hard to believe that one man, whoever he was, deserved all the blame for ruining the nation.

  Besides, I had my own theories. To me, the fault didn’t lie with an individual man but with an outside country: China. For four years I had been looking at Chinese trucks, Chinese-made weapons, Chinese-made uniforms. I had heard Chinese-style propaganda music. Almost everything about the Khmer Rouge, from the jargon about ‘independence-sovereignty’ to sending the city people to learn from the peasants in the countryside, was an imitation of Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution. Without China, the Khmer Rouge could never have come to power, or stayed in power as long as they did. So I nodded my head up and down at the young Vietnamese soldier, pretending to agree with him, and kept my own opinion inside.