Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  I ended up paying one chi (a little less than one tenth of an ounce) of gold for my group to pass through. If all the soldiers wanted was gold, we figured we were lucky.

  In that part of the country the road and the railroad tracks followed parallel courses, side by side. In the railroad’s prime, before the civil war, trains ran all the way to the Thai border and beyond, to the Thai capital, Bangkok. Now, after years of war and decay, the trains stopped short of the border at a village called Nimitt and then reversed. As we walked along the highway, the westbound train passed us, carrying passengers in the boxcars and on the roofs, most of them heading for the border like us. Later the eastbound trains came back with a cargo of smuggled Thai goods. We reached Nimitt on foot as the sun was about to set.

  Nimitt was a one-street hamlet surrounded by rice fields. It had no market and no stores. It had no soldiers, either, because the smugglers and border guides paid the military to stay away. It was a nasty little jumping-off point for trips to the Thai border and a transshipment centre for black-market goods coming the other way.

  Several hundred travellers like us were in Nimitt trying to get out of Cambodia. The guides fanned out among us, competing openly for business. ‘Come join my group. I guarantee your safety!’ shouted one. ‘No! Over here! I offer cheaper rates!’ said another. Most of the guides were dark-skinned ethnic Khmer, and some of them were barefoot.

  I would have preferred to follow other travellers over the mountains, without hiring a guide. But the trails weren’t yet established, and I didn’t trust the other refugees. Still, there was no hurry to choose among guides. My group made a fire, cooking rice rations and boiling water to last us through the coming days. After we had eaten, Balam and I went off to look the guides over.

  To his surprise, Balam recognized one of them, a skinny old man of mixed Khmer and Chinese blood who had lived in Phnom Penh before the Khmer Rouge takeover. He recognized Balam too, though he could not remember his name.

  ‘My good friends,’ the old man assured us, ‘I bring groups every night to the border. I know the area very well and everybody trusts me. If I bring you to the border, the bandits in the jungle won’t take money from you. I will arrange everything. I will pay them off. And I’m the only one who can do it. I’m not saying I’m perfect, but if you trust me, go with me. I go to the border every night, and there’s never any problem. But if you don’t trust me, by all means go with somebody else.’

  I kept quiet. Word for word, his sales pitch was what I had expected to hear. That he had experience, that we had nothing to worry about, that he had plenty of customers even without us and so on. If I were a guide, it was exactly what I would have said myself. I watched and listened for something to believe in but didn’t find it.

  And yet I trusted the other guides even less. Their eyes gave them away. They had a calculating way of looking at our luggage rather than our faces. They let their glances rest on the women’s crotches. They thought they had X-ray eyes, looking for hidden gold.

  After four years of living under the Khmer Rouge, my ability to read people’s characters was highly developed. I walked around, listening to each of the guides, assessing them silently. I paid attention to their tones of voice, to their posture, to anything that emanated from their character, but above all to their eyes.

  At last I went back to the old man Balam knew from Phnom Penh. There was, I thought, about a 10 per cent chance that he would treat us properly. I chose him because he was part Chinese like me and because his remembering Balam might work in our favour. The rest of the guides I trusted about 2 per cent.

  The bargaining began behind closed doors in a crowded room in the old guide’s house. At first he asked for a damleung of gold apiece. He came down to four fifths of a damleung, and then Balam and I conferred. Ngim and Balam’s youngest son were both nine years old. ‘The children go at half price,’ I told the guide, who gave in.

  ‘But you pay me now,’ he added, letting his glance travel the length of my body.

  The total for the group was 4.8 damleung (about 5.75 ounces) of gold, worth around $2,000 US.

  I left Balam in the crowded room and walked outside. I had gold in several forms: in thin twenty-four-karat sheets, rolled into small tubes and hidden in my belt; in gold chains of twenty-two- or twenty-four-karat purity; and some other small twenty-four-karat bars and pieces. I returned to the group, which was sitting around the fire. Ngim heated food for me and we talked nonchalantly. My krama hung around my neck like a scarf. When enough time had passed, I bent forward slightly so that the end of my krama fell across the top of my trousers. I dug into my waistband pocket, pulled out the gold pieces, palmed them, then casually tied them into the end of my krama. Ngim and Balam’s wife noticed, but nobody else did. After eating I walked back to the guide’s house to give him the gold.

  By 1.00 a.m. everyone who was going with the guide had assembled in a long line stretching from his house. It was a starry night, a crescent moon hanging in the western sky, and quiet, except for the crickets. We began to walk much more slowly than I would have liked, on a footpath, then on an oxcart path, through rice fields and jungle. Our route would take us north and then west, away from the roads and villages and into unpopulated territory. How far it was to the border, we did not know.

  When grey and then pink light had appeared in the east, the line stopped. Balam’s wife turned around and whispered to me over Ngim’s head, ‘Khmer Rouge. Pass it on.’

  I turned around and repeated the message to the person behind me.

  A loud surly voice came from up front. ‘Why do you want to leave the country? Why? You are betraying the nation!’

  Nobody answered.

  The sun rose. The line shuffled slowly forward. Ahead I saw four or five Khmer Rouge, dressed in black, holding rifles. They collected bits of gold from travellers in payment.

  My gold was hidden in various place – small bits in my waistband for bribes like this, some in my green Vietnamese sneakers, a few chi taped under Ngim’s armpit. Most of it I had given Balam’s wife, to hide in her underwear.

  Everyone in my family group was ahead of me. I stepped out of line for a moment, stepped in again at the front of the group. Slowly the line shuffled forward.

  The Khmer Rouge checked my knapsack.

  I gave them two chi of gold.

  ‘Open your mouth,’ they said. They looked in my mouth for gold, frisked me and threw my knapsack in a pile. Behind me, they looked in Ngim’s mouth with the flashlight and threw her basket in the pile. Then they went to Balam. When they were looking in his luggage I picked up my knapsack and Ngim’s basket. When they took Balam’s bag away, he followed my example and stole it back when they weren’t looking.

  The soldiers broke bamboo shoulderboards to see whether gold was hidden inside. They stirred cooking pots to see if anything was hidden in the rice. They confiscated Montagut shirts, always a favorite with the Khmer Rouge.

  But real Khmer Rouge wouldn’t have let us go. And real Khmer Rouge soldiers wouldn’t have been interested in gold. These were pretenders, Heng Samrin soldiers who had dressed in black uniforms. There were undoubtedly Vietnamese soldiers nearby, watching and waiting.

  We had entered a danger zone in far northwestern Cambodia. My trust in the leader had dropped from 10 per cent to zero. In the daylight I saw he hadn’t even accompanied us himself. He was using employees.

  An hour after the fake Khmer Rouge, another gang of the same kind stopped us. They yelled and threatened. They raised their rifles to shoot us, and the wild glare in their eyes nearly convinced me that they were real. But it was another bluff. They had everyone put the luggage in a huge pile and clawed through it, looking for gold. They found a lot of gold in the false bottoms of tea kettles. After they had searched the luggage they frisked the men but not the women. I gave them another two chi and they let my group go, but they made others without gold turn around and go back toward Nimitt.

  The trail led up into the
rain forest of the Dangrek Mountains. Hardwood trees of the species called chhoeu teal and khlong and theng towered high overhead; I recognized them from my family’s lumber business long ago. Vines as thick as my wrist hung from the branches, and lianas sprouted from the trunks.

  Except for the singing of birds, and the scurrying of lizards through the underbrush, it was quiet in the forest. Where there were boulders on the hilltops, we jumped from rock to rock. Where bamboo grew in dense groves on the slopes, we parted it with our hands and passed through. The trail led up and down.

  At the bottom of a valley we came to a river. Green scum floated on the surface of the water, which was a chocolate brown underneath. We waded across. On the other side we drank clean water from our makeshift canteens. An old woman with her palms together in the sompeah begged me for a drink. I poured her a capful of water, but no more.

  Walking again, the line of travellers filled the path and twisted out of sight, around the bends. A sudden muffled explosion, like an artillery shell, came from ahead. We kept on walking. A few minutes later word came back that a mine had gone off and that many people had been killed.

  The line stopped. We stood where we were, suddenly afraid to move to the side of the path and sit down.

  Then the word came back that the guides had all deserted us.

  We waited for an hour, and then the line started moving forward again. I told Ngim to walk exactly in my footsteps.

  We walked cautiously around a bend and came upon the site of the explosion. It was a blood-spattered scene, an arm hanging from a tree branch, part of a leg caught in bamboo. Ten or more dead lay by the side of the path, and many more were wounded. I made a tourniquet, removed some large pieces of shrapnel from wounds, tied makeshift bandages and advised the relatives on preventing infection. With no medical supplies, there was little more to do. It was a terrible way to die, or to be maimed, after living through the Khmer Rouge years and coming so close to freedom.

  The mines appeared on either side of the path, sometimes in the middle. They had coin-size detonator buttons, white or rusted in colour. From the detonator buttons, trip lines made of nearly invisible white nylon thread led to tying-off points such as trees or rocks nearby.

  We crept forward, around curves, up and down, and then we heard another explosion ahead. When we came down the side of the hill to a river we saw the burials already under way. The seriously wounded were being carried off in hammocks slung from bamboo poles; a few with puncture wounds from the shrapnel sat around in shock. This time the mine had been rigged underwater. Ngim was a good swimmer, but I made her put her arms around my neck, and I swam across as she held on to me.

  Whether the Vietnamese or the Khmer Rouge planted the mines didn’t matter much to us. All we knew was that we had to keep our eyes on the trail, searching for white threads. Dry leaves fell across the trail and drifted in the wake of footsteps, making spotting them more difficult.

  There was a third mine explosion far ahead. When we got there, there was a crater across the path, and flies buzzing around the blood. Nearby were graves with thorns piled on top to keep the wild animals away.

  We kept on walking. It was hot and dusty. People had stopped beside the path to beg for food or water, but I gave only sips of water, and only to old ladies.

  As the daylight faded we examined an area next to the trail for mines and settled down for the night. We made no fire; it was too risky looking for firewood. The mosquitoes covered our arms and legs; we spent most of the night slapping them. Moonlight filtered through the treetops high above.

  The next morning we started walking again, following everyone else and hoping that whoever was in the lead knew where to go. I didn’t think they did. The morning sun was on our left, meaning that we were going south. Our original plan had been to go north and west – the morning sun should have been to our right, or else over our backs. But I was tired and mistrusted my own sense of direction too.

  In midmorning the line stopped. It went forward again, and then everyone was made to gather in a clearing. Eight newcomers had joined us. They had hunting rifles, and they spoke a language that we guessed was Thai.

  I do not know for a fact that these first men or those who came later were Thai citizens. Probably some were Cambodians who spoke Thai from living near the border. What I do know is that they made me glad that Huoy was not with me.

  They made the women remove their clothes and underclothes, but allowed them to change into sarongs to protect their modesty. With swift, expert hands, the thieves felt the brassieres, the straps and seams and hems of dresses and trousers. They found the bulk of my gold in the underwear of Balam’s wife.

  Then they started body searches. Mouths. Ears. Hair. Finger violations of the women.

  Then they searched the men. Same thing. They found the gold in my waistband but not the gold in my sneakers.

  Then they separated the men from the women, and the rapes began. In full view. The prettiest young women were raped again and again. The bandits who were not taking their turns kept their hunting rifles pointed at the rest of us. There was nothing we could do.

  They didn’t rape Balam’s wife and didn’t search or molest Ngim.

  We walked half a mile farther, then stopped when we saw more armed men. No rapes this time. When they finished searching us, we picked up what remained of our baggage and trudged on for another half mile, where we had to stop again.

  From one tollgate we went to the next, and the next, and the next, until we were dazed. Sometimes the thieves spoke Thai and sometimes they spoke Khmer. They confiscated canes and the bamboo sticks from hammocks, in case there was gold hidden inside. They removed bandages looking for gold. They tore the clothes off a pretty girl seventeen years old. She had no gold to hide, but she struggled anyway, to protect herself. And because she resisted, they dragged her into the woods and shot her in the head.

  Counting from Nimitt, including the two times we were searched by fake Khmer Rouge, we passed through thirty-seven tollgates. I lost my Vietnamese sneakers with the gold inside and the Zippo cigarette lighter I had carried with me since leaving Phnom Penh. At the last tollgate, when we had little left, they took knives, hatchets, shoes, hats, new clothes.

  Everybody was numb. We were unable to accept that it had really happened, that our women had been raped, that our possessions were gone. In all our years under the Khmer Rouge, we had never been bodily searched, and few women had been abused.

  In a daze we trudged past the swollen corpse of an ox that had stepped on a mine. There had been few mines since the thieves had set on us.

  The landscape flattened. The vegetation changed from rain forest to a dry, open forest with little underbrush. The leaves of the hardwood trees nearly touched high overhead, but the tree trunks were far apart.

  A Thai civilian stood alone in the path waiting for us to arrive. He was an intelligence officer for the Thai government. He asked us in good but accented Khmer about the Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge and conditions walking toward the border. He said there were Thai soldiers ahead but not to worry. He added that the Thai Red Cross and United Nations agencies were there too.

  We walked on and came to the Thai soldiers. They checked us for weapons and let us through. If there was a marker at the border, we didn’t see it.

  As the sun was sinking we came to a city of tents and makeshift huts. The colour blue was everywhere – the relief agencies were giving away blue plastic tarps, and the refugees used them for the roofs and awnings of their shelters.

  This was Nong Chan, a border camp. I was surprised that so many had come before us.

  We found a place by the river and sat down.

  I thought: We have survived. They have taken our gold, but it does not matter. From now on, no more killings, no more rapes. We will block the past out of our minds.

  The nightmare is over.

  We are safe. We are free.

  Ngim sat down next to me, smiling happily. She had been a good girl,
and I had decided to adopt her as a daughter.

  I sat there thinking about the future. About starting life over again, and going back to work as a doctor.

  Then I thought: Yes, but I will never forget these past four years. And someday, somehow, I will tell the outside world what has happened.

  There were still a few bits of gold taped under Ngim’s arm. I removed them, and Balam and I went to exchange the gold for Thai money from a man with a scale. For the piece of gold I offered we got four hundred Thai baht in paper currency, which was then worth about twenty American dollars. We spent the money on rice, dry salted fish, fish sauce and vegetables from market sellers nearby. When we finished we still had money left over.

  Balam and I drifted back toward the family but stopped when we saw a man with a pushcart. There was a red, blue and white insignia on the side of his cart and ice and bottles of Pepsi-Cola inside.

  ‘Siep baht! Siep baht!’ the vendor yelled to the bystanders. The word siep sounded like the words for ‘ten’ in Mandarin and Teochiew Chinese. I asked some Cambodians and they said yes, the price was ten baht.

  ‘Brother,’ I said eagerly to Balam, ‘we’ve got to buy some. You drink first. Go ahead.’

  ‘It’s too expensive,’ said Balam, a man of cautious instincts.

  ‘No. I haven’t had ice or Pepsi for four years.’

  ‘Don’t waste your money,’ said Balam.

  ‘This isn’t a waste. This is living! Come on, brother, come on!’

  I held up two fingers. The vendor nodded that he understood, then asked me a question in Thai. The other Cambodians translated:

  Did I want him to pour it into a plastic bag, with a straw?

  ‘Tell him I want two bottles,’ I said. ‘I want the two coldest bottles he has.’

  He reached into the bottom of his cart and pulled up two glistening bottles. The label on the bottles was in the Thai alphabet, which is a little different from the Cambodian alphabet, but I recognized the name Pepsi-Cola all the same.