Survival in the Killing Fields (54 page)

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.

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.

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, and 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.

While waiting for my family I went to get rice. A little over an hour’s walk from my campsite was an underground rice storage warehouse similar to the one I had tried to
go to earlier. A huge crowd gathered outside, at the top of a staircase leading down to a concrete-lined subterranean chamber. Inside, piles of rice sacks were visible in the dim light. The rice
was free, and everyone took as much as they wanted. Women piled rice onto baskets they carried on their heads, and men staggered away with rice on shoulderboards or rucksacks. I tied a sack to
either end of a shoulderboard, which bent the ends of the shoulderboard downward like a bow. Everyone was happy. A few people loaded oxcarts high with rice sacks and drove off to Battambang to sell
them.

Finally the Vietnamese pushed the Khmer Rouge toward the Cardomom Mountains. I walked back to the town of Muong and found my family there. They had all survived, though the group numbered two
fewer than before.

What had happened was that just before liberation the Khmer Rouge forced all the civilians farther into the jungle. During the retreat my brother Hok, the fifth son in the family, ran into Hong
Srun, the fourth son, whom none of us had seen since Tonle Batí. The reunion was happy but brief. The Vietnamese attacked, shells landed nearby and everybody fled. In the chaos Hong Srun
went off, taking two of Pheng Huor’s children with him. Only Ngim, the daughter aged nine, stayed with Hok.

Thinking that I (the third son) had probably died, the group threw most of my luggage away. They dumped my medical books, which I had carried at such cost and buried in so many places. They
threw away my glasses, most of my clothing and, without realizing it, a cushion of mine with eighteen hundred US dollars inside it and a blanket with pieces of gold sewn into the hem. Fortunately
they kept a few small items, including the photograph of Huoy.

I brought them back to my camping place to wait for Hong Srun and the other two children so all of us could travel to Battambang together. Hong Srun didn’t show up, and about the first of
May I decided to take the family to Battambang to wait for him there. I wrote a sign to Hong Srun and fastened it to a tree. In the early morning we started walking westward on National Route 5,
and by dusk we had arrived in the second-largest city in the nation.

Battambang was a city of squatters living in the empty shells of houses. We stayed in a house on the edge of town with about twenty other people and slept on the floor. There wasn’t a
single piece of furniture.