Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  The worst problem was a shortage of food. The Vietnamese controlled all the rice mills. They sent some rice to Vietnam, kept some for themselves and gave the rest to the Heng Samrin troops. By the middle of 1979 civilians couldn’t get enough to eat. It was hard to raise crops. In some parts of the country there were no ploughs or oxen to plough with; in others there was no rice seed. A drought killed many of the fields that had been planted. For many Cambodians it was back to watery rice again.

  Steadily, throughout 1979, the Vietnamese pushed the Khmer Rouge farther and farther west. Every time Pol Pot’s forces planted food, the Vietnamese attacked before it could be harvested. Here was kama: the Khmer Rouge, the cause of so much hunger and starvation, now had nothing to eat except the leaves of the forests. Khmer Rouge units fought each other for food and medicine. Cadre deserted, and some died from starvation.

  Meanwhile, the faint trails I had followed to Thailand became highways. Thousands and tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of feet walked along the paths. With the increased numbers came safety from robbers and rapists. With rumours of free rice on the Thai border, soon confirmed by broadcasts over the Voice of America, the masses began the march to the west. The people were hungry, and they were tired of communism. They wanted freedom. They wanted rice. And all of Cambodia was on the move, fleeing, marching, stumbling, spilling over the border into Thailand.

  37

  Okay, Bye-Bye

  The van pulled up to the Lumpini gate and I climbed in, my heart beating fast. Except for the Thai driver there was only one person inside, and he was American. There was no way to avoid him. Nowhere to hide.

  You might think that after being tortured three times and walking out of Cambodia I had nothing left to fear. Not true. From earliest childhood I had learned to be shy toward white people. I wasn’t really afraid of them, but I deferred to them automatically. Most Cambodians did. We called them long-noses. Even as a medical student I had never talked with a long-nose unless there was a reason. I could communicate well enough in French, but I always felt more comfortable when the conversations were over.

  On the Thai-Cambodian border and in the Lumpini processing centre in 1979, Cambodian refugees were shy toward Westerners. We were shy and passive because it was part of our culture and because we had come from a regime where saying the wrong thing meant death. Why take risks? Why talk to Americans when everyone knows they all work for the CIA? If we say the wrong thing, word will reach the top and then we will be in trouble. That was what Cambodians said, on the border and in the refugee camps.

  We were also afraid of losing face. It was one thing to be able to speak French well, another to speak English badly. We were afraid the foreigners would look down on us for making mistakes in their language. Many Cambodians put off learning English, or didn’t try out the few words of English they had reluctantly learned.

  For me it was different. I had learned a bit of English under the Khmer Rouge regime. In Lumpini a kindly Burmese lady volunteer named Chhoi Hah Muul taught me a bit more. I knew how to count. I knew the pronouns, some basic nouns and verbs and common phrases, in all probably five hundred words. It was enough to understand what the man in the van was saying. His name was John Crowley. He worked for the Joint Voluntary Agency, or JVA, which handled refugee resettlement matters for the US embassy. Together we were going to Sakeo, a refugee camp for Cambodians that had just opened within Thailand, away from the border. I was going to be his interpreter.

  The van drove through the crowded streets of Bangkok. John Crowley noticed that I was nervous. He asked if I was okay, if I wanted to stop for something to eat or drink. I told him no thanks, but I was encouraged, and looked at him out of the corner of my eye. He was about my age. Moustache, reddish-brown hair, big nose, white skin. His courteous tone of voice and his relaxed body posture all signalled that he wasn’t going to order me around. By the time we got to the outskirts of the city, I felt better. John Crowley didn’t care about race one way or the other. He was treating me like a fellow human being.

  He asked me about my family.

  ‘My wife she got died,’ I told him in English. ‘My, my père, he got died. Dey killing too many.’

  ‘You lost most of your family.’

  ‘Too many. Too many,’ I assured him. John Crowley was actually listening to me. He worked with the American government. If I could make him understand what had happened, then maybe he could help other foreigners understand. But squeezing the meaning of four years into a conversation in a language I barely knew was impossible. I just couldn’t . . .

  I lifted my right hand to show him the stump of my little finger. ‘Dey . . .’ and I made a chopping motion.

  ‘The Khmer Rouge cut off your finger,’ John Crowley guessed.

  ‘T’ree time,’ I said, nodding. ‘T’ree time. Vun, de finger. Two’ – I had to think for the right word – ‘fire’ – and pointed to the underside of my feet. ‘T’ree’ – but I had forgotten the English word for water. Why couldn’t I remember it when I needed it? It was very important to get him to understand.

  ‘You were tortured three times,’ he said.

  I nodded.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said.

  We were driving through the flat countryside east of Bangkok. John Crowley gazed out the window, sighing heavily. I looked out the window too, trying to see what he was looking at. In the rice fields, farmers were harvesting with tractors. The Thais were far ahead of us Cambodians in agriculture. They were ahead of us in everything.

  ‘Sakeo more far?’ I asked him.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Combien de kilometres d’ici à Sakeo?’

  John Crowley shook his head; he didn’t understand French. I tried English again. ‘How far more Sakeo?’

  This time he leaned forward and asked the driver in fluent Thai, then leaned back and told me in English that it was another hour and a half. He didn’t look down on me for not speaking good English. Still, I had asked him the distance to Sakeo and he had given me the travelling time.

  ‘My English not too good,’ I said.

  ‘Hey, I can understand you perfectly,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. Look at it this way: your English is better than my Khmer. I don’t speak any Khmer at all.’

  ‘I teach you.’

  The tiny shock of surprise showed as he reconsidered the refugee sitting next to him. ‘You want to teach me Khmer?’ he asked. ‘Well, okay, I could use it. When do you want to start?’

  ‘I ready.’

  He shrugged and smiled. ‘I’m ready too.’

  I turned around to face him on the seat.

  ‘ “Muoy,” ’ I said to him, holding up one finger. ‘ “Muoy.” Dat mean “vun” in language Khmer.’

  ‘Muoy,’ he repeated.

  ‘“Bpee,” ’ I said. ‘Dat mean “two.” ’

  ‘Bpee,’ he said. ‘Bpee.’

  ‘“Bei.” Dat mean “t’ree.” ’

  ‘Bei.’ His intonation was nearly perfect; he already knew how to make similar sounds in Thai. When he had learned the numbers he pointed out the window at things he saw, a water buffalo, an ox, a tree, and asked me for the Khmer words. The Thai driver looked back at us in the rearview mirror, too polite to say anything. Thais do not like to learn Khmer; they think it is below them. But John Crowley seemed as though he had always wanted to learn Khmer and was glad to have the chance.

  When the gate lifted and we drove into the Sakeo camp, I got out of the comfortable, air-conditioned van and back into the world I had left a few short months before. The camp was dominated by Khmer Rouge who had been driven over the Thai border by hunger and the Vietnamese. They had surrendered their weapons to Thai soldiers and allowed themselves to be trucked to this resting place, this dumping ground, administered by the Thai government and the UNHCR – the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

  About two thirds of the camp population were Khmer Rouge and their families. The rest were ‘new’ an
d ‘old’ people unable to escape from their control. Behind us the camp gate lifted to admit a truck carrying fresh arrivals from the border. Dazed, weak civilians climbed down from the back of the truck. Among them was an old man I recognized from Tonle Batí. He supported himself with one hand on a bamboo staff and the other on the shoulder of his daughter-in-law, whom I also remembered. When I greeted them they looked at me with astonishment. There I was, well fed, well dressed, wearing glasses and a watch, accompanying this tall American. They poured out their story. Except for the two of them, everyone in the family had died. Time after time they had almost lost their own lives too. I translated for John Crowley as well as I could, then reached in my wallet and gave them a few hundred Thai baht, worth five dollars. They looked at me as if I were a god.

  This was John Crowley’s first visit to a Cambodian refugee camp. He had been sent there to see the refugees’ condition firsthand, since he would be working in refugee resettlement. Other Westerners crowded into the camp, worried-looking UN officials, doctors and nurses, more than a dozen journalists with their cameras and television cameras. Around them was a sea of sick and dying Cambodians, and a few dirty but healthy children who followed the Westerners everywhere, repeating the only English words they knew: ‘Okay, bye-bye. Okay, bye-bye.’

  As we walked past the camp hospital, two mit neary in black came out carrying a corpse between them on a stretcher. The hospital wasn’t large enough to take care of the living or the dead. There were too many sick and not enough room. Patients lay on the ground outside with IV bags suspended above them from nails driven into trees. They lay in hammocks made of cloth bunched at the ends and tied to trees. They were too tired to brush away the flies. Some of them were just waiting for death. If they had to defecate, they just lay there and did it, sunk in the apathy of the late stages of starvation. There were mothers so weak they ignored their babies, and babies so weak they didn’t cry. There were children with bright round eyes and hollow faces; when I waved my hand in front of them to test their reactions, they didn’t blink.

  John Crowley was upset. All the Westerners were, even the newsmen. They had never seen such suffering. But I had seen even worse, and I knew what it was to suffer myself.

  Sakeo was like the death march from Phum Chhleav, I decided, except that the people of Sakeo didn’t have to go any farther. They had already arrived. Yes, I thought bitterly, it was like the death march, but with doctors and international aid and photographers to record it. Most of them would live, and the ones who died would have the dignity of burial.

  I had no sympathy for the Khmer Rouge of Sakeo. For them my heart was like stone. Let them die. Enemies forever. My sympathy was for the innocent civilians, like the old man from Tonle Batí, and others like him. It was not their fault that they were trapped in a place like this. I looked from the Khmer Rouge to the long-nose officials of the UNHCR and felt disgust. The UNHCR was supposed to protect refugees. That was the reason for its existence. But it had done nothing when the Thai government pushed forty-five thousand innocent Cambodians over the border and onto the minefields of Preah Vihear. Now it was setting up a camp to take care of Khmer Rouge. It did nothing for the victims and everything for the criminals. What was wrong with the UNHCR? Why couldn’t it help the right refugees?6

  The Westerners just didn’t seem to understand much about Cambodians. Even John Crowley had to ask me which people were Khmer Rouge. But at least he knew there was a difference, and he was trying to learn to spot it with his own eyes.

  I could tell the Khmer Rouge at a glance. They were the well-fed ones, with healthy, round cheeks. They wore black clothes that were not ripped, and new kramas made of silk or cotton. But even without the clothes and the healthy bodies, their expressions gave them away. They looked at me with narrowed eyes and curled-back lips, and they turned disdainfully away. They didn’t want anything to do with a Cambodian accompanying a white-skinned devil.

  Luckily, John Crowley didn’t want to talk with them either. He asked me to bring him to the kind of refugees he would be working with, the civilians. We walked around and found some who had been rice farmers and small traders before the revolution. They told me their stories in Khmer, and I translated into my broken English as best as I could. John Crowley listened carefully and asked questions.

  By the time the van brought us to Aranyaprathet, a town on the Thai side of the border, it was late at night. Many years before, my father had driven to Aranyaprathet in his old Ford truck to get the bronze Buddha statue. Maybe it had been a nice town then. In 1979 it was a rather menacing place serving border smugglers, thieves and the Westerners who were helping the refugees. Under the streetlights a few heavyset men watched us, standing next to their elongated motorcycle-taxis, decorated with chrome and powered by automobile engines. We drove in the van from one hotel to another. They were all full. Finally we found a room with two beds for four hundred baht or twenty US dollars, more than double the usual price. John Crowley took one bed, I took the other and the Thai driver went off in the van to look after himself.

  Lying on that hotel bed, I felt tired but content. It was the first time since Phnom Penh that I had been on a real mattress with sheets. How nice that the driver had to go off, instead of me.

  I thought: John Crowley has helped me. He hasn’t looked down on me, or patronized me. He has treated me as an equal. So friendly and informal. Maybe all Americans are like that. If that’s how they are, the United States will be a good place for me.

  Yes, how different the foreigners are. They do not care about face. They do not have to present a mask to society and keep their feelings hidden behind it. They do not care so much about social rank. A Cambodian would have treated me either better than himself or worse. Probably, a Cambodian would have sent me off with the driver and kept the hotel room with two beds for himself.

  Yes, to be treated as an equal, I thought, as I stared at the hotel room ceiling. That’s what I want. And no more being shy toward Westerners.

  Back in Bangkok, I had an interview at the JVA about going to America. Unfortunately my caseworker wasn’t John Crowley but a strong-willed woman whom Cambodian refugees called ‘The Tiger.’ The Tiger looked at me with obvious suspicion. Since my name didn’t appear on any American embassy lists, she decided I had bribed my way off the border. I gave her General Chana’s phone number, and she spoke with him, but whenever she looked at me she frowned. To her I was an ‘operator,’ a guy who was always finding a way around the rules.

  Of course, she was partly right. I was an operator. With Chana’s pass I was constantly going in and out of Lumpini. I had even started to show up at JVA parties. And why not? I wanted to be free – to go where I wanted, to do what I wanted, to live on my own terms. That’s why I had escaped from communism.

  The Tiger made me an offer. She would let me go to the United States if I worked with refugees first, as a doctor. She said there was a big influx of Cambodians on the border and that the Thais were going to open more camps like Sakeo. I told her okay. The only part of the arrangement I didn’t like was being apart from Ngim, who would stay with Balam. I told Ngim I would rejoin her as soon as possible.

  Ngim said she understood, and hid her sorrow.

  The Cambodians came to places that had barely existed before but now would never be forgotten – to Kamput and Mak Moon, Nong Chan and Nong Samet, Ban Sangae and Camp 007, the smugglers’ paradise. And they kept coming. They carried sacks on their backs and balanced baskets on their heads. The old supported themselves with canes. Widows carried shoulderboards with the baby in the front basket and their belongings in the back basket. They made makeshift tents from sackcloth or from blue plastic tarps and strung them from sticks in the ground or from trees. They sat in exhaustion with their knees bent and their elbows or forearms resting on their knees, and their thoughts were far away.

  The border was a no-man’s-land. It didn’t belong to Thailand and didn’t belong to Cambodia. Each settlement was ruled by a
military group – south of Aranyaprathet by the sullen, disciplined Khmer Rouge; north of Aran by untrained, corrupt Khmer Serei factions. The Khmer Serei were a disappointment. They collected bonjour, put up tollgates and fought each other for control of the black-market trade. It was hard to believe that a year before we had expected them to be our liberators.

  In November 1979 the second refugee camp inside Thailand opened, away from the border. It was north of Aranyaprathet, on a broad slope of scrubby trees and hillocks with a forested mountain rising beyond. A stream of people walked there from the border, and others arrived by bus or truck. The people were thin and dazed and looked as though they were trusting themselves to destiny.

  The name of the place was Khao-I-Dang. It was a camp for Cambodians who were opposed to the Khmer Rouge, and it was busy from the start. Westerners rushed around organizing construction and emergency medical care. Cambodians who were strong enough cut down trees and cleared land with their hatchets. Thai labourers began building a hospital of bamboo, with blue plastic spread over the rafters as a temporary roof. I presented a letter from the JVA to the UNHCR office, got my credentials and began working before the hospital had walls.

  Like Sakeo, Khao-I-Dang had a full-scale emergency at the beginning, but unlike it, the patients were not Khmer Rouge, which to me made them more worth saving. Certainly there were more patients than we could handle. We all worked very hard, going from one sick person to the next. When I glanced up I saw another clinic being built next door. Everywhere, buildings were going up, and still refugees were streaming in from the border.

  In the first week at Khao-I-Dang so many died that the bulldozers had to take time out from making drainage ditches to dig a burial pit. In the hospital patients lay passively with intravenous tubes pouring glucose into their veins. The children looked twice their age, solemn and sad, with hollow cheeks and blank stares. The Western doctors took the emergency cases. I treated walk-in patients, many of whom were suffering from mental problems as much as from malnutrition or disease. They had seen too much killing, lost too many relatives. They were depressed and suicidal, and they wanted to go home. They needed medical care but they also needed counselling, and this was something the Western doctors could not give them. I talked to them in Khmer, consoling and encouraging them. If they did not need any other medication I gave them vitamins and iron pills, which seemed to help them psychologically. I knew from my own case how important it was to overcome depression.