Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  The war still goes on in Cambodia. When the Vietnamese army goes out in force in the daytime it can travel wherever it likes, but as soon as its troops pass or as soon as night falls, the countryside belongs to the resistance forces. Night-time curfews are imposed in all the cities. It is a guerrilla war without fixed lines and with many different participants. The resistance forces get most of their assistance from mainland China. The Vietnamese get assistance from the USSR. So in a sense the war in Cambodia is a war between the two communist sponsors, China and Russia. Cambodia is a pawn in their struggle for power and influence in Asia.

  The resistance has three factions. Over time the thieves and warlords of the Khmer Serei were joined by more and more Cambodians who were serious and patriotic. They formed the two anti-communist factions: the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF) and the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia (FUNCINPEC in its French initials). Sad to say, both factions have leadership problems. The head of FUNCINPEC is Prince Sihanouk, who lost credibility for siding with the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s and who lives now in China and North Korea. The head of the KPNLF is Son Sann, a frail old gentleman without much military experience. Their Thailand headquarters both have had problems – public quarrels and power struggles and many, many reports of bonjour. But both the KPNLF and FUNCINPEC have good men in their organizations, particularly those who get out in the field and do the actual working and sweating and fighting. I admire these men very much.

  The third and strongest resistance faction is the Khmer Rouge, who are now well fed and well armed once again. The Khmer Rouge claim they are not communist anymore, just nationalists who want to drive the Vietnamese out of Cambodia. They also claim that Pol Pot has ‘retired’. Pol Pot has been seriously ill, but as long as he is alive he is likely to stay in command. After all, he has had years of practice pretending that someone else is in charge. His successor will probably be Son Sen, who was minister of defence when the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia and who oversaw the prison system, including the prisons where I was tortured. Son Sen’s wife was minister of culture, responsible for the slaughter of the monks and the elimination of Buddhism as a religion in Cambodia. The other contender for the leadership position is Ta Mok, a notorious military commander who killed his main rivals to get the job of Southwest Zone commander while Pol Pot was still ruling the country.

  In 1982 the three resistance factions’ backers – China, the five ASEAN or noncommunist countries of Southeast Asia, plus the United States – forced the Khmer Rouge, the KPNLF and the FUNCINPEC to form a coalition government-in-exile. This coalition, which is called Democratic Kampuchea, the same as the old Khmer Rouge regime, serves a certain practical purpose. It has enabled the combined resistance forces to keep Cambodia’s seat at the UN. The diplomatic presence has helped keep pressure on Vietnam to get out of Cambodia. Each year a resolution passes the UN General Assembly by an overwhelming majority calling on Vietnam to leave. Militarily, by working together, the three factions have made the occupation of Cambodia expensive for Vietnam. They have not been able to defeat the Vietnamese, but neither have the Vietnamese been able to defeat them. Someday this combination of military stalemate and diplomatic pressure might lead to a conference that will pave the way for a political solution. The first signs of yielding to the pressure have already appeared.

  Morally, this coalition government is another matter. It is a terrible, terrible thing to have to accept the Khmer Rouge into a partnership to drive the Vietnamese out. Like the sign said on National Route 5, ‘Khmer Rouge – Enemy Forever’.

  Reluctantly I agree that it is necessary to fight on the same side as the Khmer Rouge until the Vietnamese leave the country. But I do not think it is necessary to wait to put the Khmer Rouge leaders on trial for their crimes. They have committed genocide against their own people and they should pay the price. Currently, an organization called the Cambodia Documentation Commission is trying to arrange for the trial of top Khmer Rouge leaders before an international tribunal.8 I support this effort completely. Besides serving justice, the removal of the top Khmer Rouge leaders would have a practical effect on diplomacy: it would take away Vietnam’s excuse for staying in Cambodia, which is to protect the country against the return of Pol Pot.

  The previous phases of the war have left more than three hundred thousand people along the Thai-Cambodian border and in the remaining refugee camps inside Thailand. The Thais have closed most of the camps and would like to close the rest. The Western countries have tired of accepting Cambodians for resettlement. Unable to go forward, unwilling to go back, the people of the border live in huts. They eat handout food because they do not have the land or the security to grow their own. The boys become soldiers before they are men. In the hospitals and clinics, Cambodian staff and a few Western volunteers continue the job of medical treatment. The case load never ends: malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery, rifle wounds. You see men who have stepped on mines hobbling about on low-cost artificial legs. You see refugees suffering from depression, from the trauma of losing their families and from the powerlessness of their existence as refugees. When I am in the refugee camp hospitals and I see that almost nothing has changed, I feel powerless too. Because nothing I have done, from my medical work to my acting in The Killing Fields to my fundraising, has been able to change the basic conditions along the border. At times like this, when patients fill every bed and the breeze barely filters through the split-bamboo walls, my Oscar award means nothing to me at all.

  The Cambodian holocaust ripped through our lives, tossing us randomly, leaving none of us the way we were. You can blame who you want, the outside powers for interfering, or our own internal flaws like corruption and kum, but when the talking is over we still do not know why it had to happen. The country is still in ruins, millions have died and those of us who survived are not done with our grieving.

  Of the Cambodians I knew, most died. That is the overall pattern. But it is hard to get information. I do not know what happened to Uncle Kruy the bus driver; to my doctor friends Pok Saradath and Dav Kiet; to Chea Huon, my former teacher and later Khmer Rouge leader; to Sangam, my friend from the fertilizer crew, and to many others.

  This I do know: Pen Tip, who tried so many times to kill me, is now in medical school in Phnom Penh. I am sure he has many friends among his new masters, the Vietnamese.

  My Aunt Kim, who told the chief of Tonle Batí that I was a doctor, has settled in a certain city in the United States. With her came her sons Haing Seng, who had the argument with me in Tonle Batí, and Haing Meng, who to the best of my knowledge (or as Americans say, allegedly) was a Khmer Rouge officer who managed to slip through his Immigration interviews without being caught. He has changed his name; I do not know where he is.

  Of my other relatives, my brother Hong Srun is still in Cambodia with two of my older brother’s children. My youngest brother, Hok, lives with his wife and child outside LA. My cousins Balam and Phillip Thong still live in LA and are doing well. I also have cousins in Macao and France and one niece in France, the only surviving daughter of my sister Chhai Thau.

  As for my niece Sophia, she was not happy living with me. Perhaps I was too traditional and Cambodian to understand what she was going through as an American teenager. I came home from one of my travels to find an envelope addressed to me. I never read the letter inside. She has never come back.

  All the arguments I had with my father, all my quarrels with my brother, and now this – this last, painful blow in my family’s troubled history.

  I miss Sophia.

  I live, for now, in my two-bedroom apartment with a balcony outside and a view of the towers of downtown Los Angeles in the distance. The walls are covered with awards I have received and pictures from The Killing Fields. Higher than the rest, in the position of honour, is a photograph of Huoy, enlarged from the ID picture I begged from the chief of Phum Ra so long ago.

  I still wear the locket of Huo
y on a gold chain around my neck. Her spirit still guides me. She would allow me to get married and raise a family, but so far I have not. It is not easy for me to find someone to take her place.

  Someday, when Cambodia is free, I will return to the leaning sdao tree on the hillock in the rice fields. With me will be Buddhist monks. We will hold a ceremony and build a monument for her next to the temple on the mountainside. We will pray for Huoy and her mother and my parents and family, and for all those who lost their lives. Then maybe their souls will be at peace. And maybe mine will be too.

  I remember walking with her along the riverfront in Phnom Penh, in the evening. The lights reflected off the surface of the water, and the wind blew through her hair. We strolled along without cares, talking about the future. How bright the future seemed then – working hard and prospering, having children, staying close to our families. How bright it all seemed. But our lives did not turn out the way we planned. Her life ended too soon. And I will never be forgiven by my memories.

  Epilogue

  by Roger Warner

  Fifteen years have passed since this book was originally published. With this new edition comes a chance to explain how this book came to be written and to tell the story of Dr Haing Ngor’s later life.

  In 1980, when I was a young freelance journalist, an American magazine assigned me to write about the refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos pouring into Thailand. In the dusty Thai border town of Aranyaprathet, I stayed a night in a house full of American doctors and nurses who were working at Khao-I-Dang, the nearby refugee camp for Cambodians.

  The house’s only Asian resident was a man who emanated a powerful negative aura. Though I didn’t catch the name I learned that he was a Cambodian doctor and a refugee from the Pol Pot regime. My attempt to get him to tell me about his experiences didn’t get very far. He didn’t speak much English. He was tired of trying to explain what he had gone through to barangs or foreigners who didn’t know much about his country, and he seemed exhausted and depressed. That evening I went out on the town with American doctors and nurses from the house. When we came back to the dormitory room where everyone slept on mats, there was the Cambodian, staring at us through the mesh of his mosquito net, his eyes like burning coals.

  The next morning the Cambodian doctor and I went our separate ways. He left for the US soon after, and I stayed in Thailand for several years, getting to know people involved in the refugee effort, such as John Crowley and Susan Walker (mentioned in Chapter 37 and 38). Another notable westerner was Father François Ponchaud, a Khmer-speaking missionary in pre-revolutionary Cambodia, who had returned to work quietly in the refugee camps. Ponchaud’s masterpiece, Cambodia Year Zero, was the first knowledgeable exposé of the Khmer Rouge regime and a great influence on me and on others who were trying to understand the Cambodian holocaust.

  At the time I wasn’t ready to write my own book about Cambodia. There were plenty of other topics to write about, from the CIA’s clandestine war in nearby Laos (eventually the subject of a book of mine) to the archaeological ruins at Angkor (another book) and various assignments for magazines. But freelance journalism was as frustrating back then as it is today, because of the highly selective interest of faraway editors; because of the low pay; and because the magazine article format was too short for my liking.

  When The Killing Fields film came out in 1984, I was back in the States. Surprisingly, perhaps, I didn’t connect the actor playing the part of Dith Pran in the film with the doctor I had met in 1980. But several months later, after Susan Walker told me that Haing Ngor had been one of her employees at Khao-I-Dang, I began to wonder whether the co-star of the film could be the same traumatized man I remembered from Aranyaprathet.

  After the Academy Awards, a literary agent called to invite me to meet Haing Ngor in Manhattan, on the 25th floor of a skyscraper with a spectacular view of Central Park. Haing looked uncomfortable in these surroundings. Discovering that we had stayed in the same house in Thailand and knew some of the same people helped him agree to this project.

  We spent about a year discussing his story, at his apartment in LA, at my home in Massachusetts, and in a trip to the Thai-Cambodian border. It was always fascinating. He had never learned to speak English particularly well. His accent was thick, and his grammar and vocabulary were limited in comparison to his obvious intelligence and his phenomenal ability to remember events. Whenever he got stuck trying to explain himself, he would switch to French, which he spoke much more fluently than I did. And if I didn’t understand his French, he stood up and acted out the scenes, playing the part of the different people involved. One way or another, he always got his meaning across.

  Successful collaborations are greater than the sum of their parts. I had been looking for a way to write a book about the refugees of south-east Asia. Haing had been looking for someone to help him tell his own story as a vehicle for telling the larger story of his country. We became energized by working together and obsessed with getting the details right. On our trip to Thailand, we waded out into the paddies to transplant rice; threshed and winnowed harvested rice; and foraged for edible foods in the forest. We looked through Ponchaud’s book and other sources to find Khmer Rouge speeches and slogans that matched his memories.

  Haing was honest and outspoken in this book, as he was in life. To many of his countrymen, Haing Ngor seemed uncouth for speaking his mind and allowing himself to show anger; but that same ferocity helped him transcend Cambodian culture and connect with people from around the world.

  I was very fond of Haing. He was talented, courageous, flawed, and hot-tempered. He could also be cunning, devious, and exasperating, but generally he admitted his mistakes and he knew the difference between wrong and right. After much reflection, I have decided that the best way to pay tribute to him is to be truthful about his later years. It is what he would have wanted.

  * * *

  Haing Ngor never found peace in his later life.

  He was like his country: scarred, and incapable of fully healing.

  Haing’s friends – and he made and discarded many sets of friends – were always suggesting ways for him to become happier or more successful. They wanted him to marry and settle down, volunteer more time to human rights causes, take accent-removal classes to improve his marketability as an actor, and so on. And he would go out on a few dates with an especially worthwhile woman, or accept some speaking engagements, or take a few classes, and then move on to something else that caught his attention.

  He lived as though he had attention deficit disorder, though nobody could ever figure out whether his restlessness came from early childhood or from the traumas he endured under the Khmer Rouge regime.

  ‘He was impossible,’ one of his best friends told me, the fondness mixed with aggravation. ‘He was tormented,’ said another. There are psychological terms like post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor’s guilt that apply to Haing Ngor, but they did not do justice to his complex nature.

  He never returned to practising medicine. He got enough acting work to make a good living without having to get recertified as a doctor, or having to show up at an office job for regular hours. This suited him, because he liked the variety of going off on movie shoots, but the absence of a steady professional life didn’t help his personal life.

  He was deeply conflicted about women. On the one hand he usually wore the heavy gold locket with the photo of Huoy under his shirt, a talisman of his loyalty to her memory. On the other hand he had dozens of love affairs. Married and unmarried Cambodian women competed for his attention, and he sought them out. Some of them cared about him deeply and could have changed his life for the better if he had let them. Others were attracted because he was a celebrity or because they were after his money. He enjoyed the flirting and intrigue, but he left many women disappointed and their boyfriends or husbands furious at him without creating lasting security in his own life.

  In the early 1990s, a few years after the original p
ublication of this book, the political situation in Cambodia began to change for the better. With the fall of the Soviet empire, the Vietnamese communists lost their financial backing and withdrew from their neighbours Laos and Cambodia. In Cambodia a new political leader emerged, Hun Sen, of the Cambodian People’s Party or CPP. Hun Sen was no Buddha. He had lost an eye in combat while a battalion commander for the Khmer Rouge, and he left the Khmer Rouge just ahead of a purge. Still, the outside world judged him better than most of the other politicians, and with a lot of machinations Cambodia was reinvented as a constitutional monarchy, with Sihanouk as the ceremonial head of state and eventually with Hun Sen as the prime minister and sole day-today ruler.

  As the country became more accessible to the outside world, a news media expedition was organized, inevitably billed as a ‘Return to the Killing Fields’. At the centre of this media circus was Diane Sawyer of ABC News (who arrived in Phnom Penh clutching a copy of this book, with page corners turned down and many passages underlined), and her calm and congenial field producer Neal Shapiro, who later became the head of NBC News. Sydney Schanberg was there for The New York Times; and I was there for the magazine of the Sunday Times of London. There were Cambodian and American human rights spokes-people with us, and the stars were to be Haing and Dith Pran.

  The trip was a disappointment. Haing demanded to be put up in a different hotel from everybody else, and was late for all his interviews. Dith Pran (whom I like personally) didn’t behave much better. Haing was evasive about returning to Huoy’s grave site, or about going to see Pen Tip, who was in Phnom Penh. There were trips to Tuol Sleng (the Khmer Rouge extermination centre on the outskirts of Phnom Penh), to Angkor Wat, and to mass grave sites; and there were meetings to discuss human rights issues, at which Haing spoke loudly and unconvincingly and sometimes got his facts wrong.