Survival in the Killing Fields (44 page)

Food – that was our main obsession. The size of the rations, and whether the common kitchen was going to serve a vegetable along with the rice. If certain days stand out from the others in
my memories of 1977, food was usually the cause. Like the time a particularly ignorant cadre suggested growing clams in the vegetable gardens. Or the night I made oxtail soup by cutting the tail
off an ox that was still alive. Or the time I raided a vegetable garden, cooked the food, overate, vomited and then ate the vomit. It is extremely unpleasant to remember eating my own vomit. It was
not a normal act. But it shows how malnourished my body was and how obsessed my mind was by food.

But to some extent Huoy and I got used to being hungry. At least we could exercise a basic choice: if I was willing to take the risk of foraging or stealing, we could eat.

What was worse than hunger was the terror, because we couldn’t do anything about it. The terror was always there, deep in our hearts. In the late afternoon, wondering whether the soldiers
would choose us as their victims. And then feeling guilty when the soldiers took someone else. At night, blowing out our tiny oil lanterns so the soldiers wouldn’t notice the light and come
investigate, and then lying awake and wondering whether we would see the dawn. Waking up the next day and wondering whether it would be our last.

We didn’t talk about the terror much. There was no use. Huoy and I wanted to live; we were willing to die if we had to, but the terror forced us into a state of half life that was worse
than either. Everything else about being war slaves – the grating music from the loudspeakers, the tedious meetings, the lice in our hair, the drab and endless work, the gruel we pretended
was food – we could get used to, but our fear of dying was worse than death itself. I tried fighting it. I joked with Huoy’s fellow workers. I learned English from Som. I deliberately
took risks in stealing, hoping to master my fear. But everything I did to rebel against it merely confirmed that it ruled me.

I had full trust only in Huoy. We were as close as two people can be. Only grudgingly did we give portions of trust to outsiders. I began to trust Som more and more as time went on. And even
this was a mistake.

Som and I talked about everything. We were intellectual equals. I only wish he was my physical equal, because that was his downfall – his right arm, hit by shrapnel, operated on by me, but
never allowed to heal properly during the takeover.

It happened this way: Som was sent off on a detail to cut bamboo in the mountains and got less done than his fellow workers because of his withered arm. He fell into disfavour with a Khmer Rouge
who, a few weeks later, also supervised the ploughing of rice fields. All work on house construction was suspended for the important job of readying the rice fields. I was part of the ploughing
detail and Som was too. It hadn’t rained enough yet to make the ground soft. By using all my strength and skill, I ploughed straight furrows, but Som’s plough kept drifting to the
right, the side of his weak arm.

The soldiers came at lunchtime, when Som and I and our wives were resting on a hillock. They tied his arms behind his back. They kicked him and he fell head first on the ground while his wife
and Huoy were sobbing and screaming. Then they took him away. The rest of us were in shock. For me it was not only shock but loss. He had been my only friend.

I grieved for Som. He was certain to be killed. Then it occurred to me: what if they torture him? He will tell them I was a doctor! He knows everything about my past! He was still in sight, a
sad figure trudging away to his death, when I forgot about him and started worrying about myself.

I couldn’t sleep that night, or the next night. Surely the soldiers would come for me. A heavy rain fell. While ploughing the fields, I misguided the ox, who stumbled. The ox, the plough
and I tumbled over into the muddy water of the rice paddy. The same Khmer Rouge who ordered Som’s death looked on. His eyes burned into mine. At lunch, on a hillock, my hands were shaking. I
told Huoy good-bye. I knew the soldiers were going to take me away. But at the end of lunch the bell rang and I went back to work. I ploughed all afternoon. At the end of the day the bell rang
again, and Huoy and I went to the common kitchen. There was no explanation. I was allowed to keep on waiting.

I knew my own death was near. It could be delayed but not avoided. Maybe a few days, maybe a few months until they caught me doing something wrong, and then it would be over. I could feel myself
aging from the stress. And everyone was, not just me. I came to believe more than ever before what my father had said, that such a regime could not last.

The cracks began to show. One of the first signs was the increase in stealing from the ‘common gardens’ that provided vegetables to the kitchens. In 1975 and 1976, many
‘new’ people had gathered wild foods, but few had stolen from gardens, because we were afraid of the sentries. In 1977, when I stole, I began noticing that I had more and more company.
If I saw another shadowy figure walking around in the dark, it was almost always a ‘new’ person. It was nothing we could talk about openly during the day; not yet, anyhow. But the night
belonged to us. The soldiers didn’t like sentry duty anymore, and they wouldn’t go out on patrol except in groups.

Another sign was the talk about the Khmer Serei. Stories had travelled from one cooperative to the next of the freedom fighters based on the border with Thailand, less than a hundred miles away.
There was so many rumours about the coming of the freedom fighters that people looked up in the sky, wondering when the helicopters were going to land.

I was still building houses on the back lines when the rebellion broke out. The leader was a man whose name was Thai. I had talked with him around a fire the year before and been sworn to
silence. So had Pen Tip.

Thai and a few handpicked men, a mixture of ‘new’ and ‘old’ people, one of them an assistant to Chev, killed half a dozen soldiers one night and stole their weapons. They
went to work the next day as if nothing had happened, then killed a few more soldiers the following night. The third night they hijacked a train and rode it northwest toward Battambang City,
intending to go west from there to the border with Thailand, to join the freedom fighters. It must have been a wild, dramatic ride.

The Khmer Rouge announced they had killed Thai and his fellow rebels, and though I never knew for sure, in this case I tended to believe them. Thai should have hijacked the train the first
night, when the Khmer Rouge were not on the alert.

A purge began on the front lines to frighten the rest of us. Every afternoon for about a week, soldiers tied up about a hundred prisoners and led them into the forests for execution. Huoy told
me about it. She said Pen Tip kept an especially low profile and worked harder than he ever had before.

But even though the rebellion failed, it had one lasting effect: it destroyed the mystique of the Khmer Rouge’s invincibility. Angka was strong but not omnipotent. Angka had lost face.

The regime did very little about the uprising and the stealing except to punish people. There were no real changes in policy, no attempts to cure what was wrong. The leaders of
most revolutions would have realized that they needed the support of the people, but not Angka. Instead, the drive to restructure society went on, alienating us war slaves even farther – if
that was possible. There was, for example, the matter of marriages.

The Khmer Rouge wanted to regulate and control sex, just as they tried to control all other basic human practices, like eating and working and sleeping. Earlier on in the regime, couples who
wanted to get married had to get permission from their village chiefs. If the answer was yes, they could go ahead. If the answer was no, they were in trouble, especially if
chhlop
found out
they were having sexual relations anyway. In prison I had seen lines of young women being led away for breaking Angka’s puritanical rules of behaviour.

But at the same time that people were being killed for the crime of sex, and hundreds of thousands of others were dying of starvation and disease, the Khmer Rouge encouraged population growth.
They told us that Angka needed more comrades ‘to protect the nation’s borders and to join the struggle for independence-sovereignty’.

The ceremony was announced in the morning over the loudspeakers. Comrade Ik, the old man on horseback, rode out into the fields to watch men and women at work and choose who to mate with whom.
Some of the more clever single women insisted they had been separated from their husbands, and they were excused. But the rest obeyed. They had no choice. Whether the men and women in the couples
knew or liked each other didn’t have anything to do with it.

When the noon bell rang, the workers came in from the fields, their hair matted, their bodies sweaty, manure from the rice fields caking their feet. The chosen couples sat impassively on a long
bench next to each other.

The old man stood and said into a microphone, ‘Today Angka has allowed these couples to marry. It recognizes them as being legally married. Let the people recognize these couples as well.
Angka hopes these people are revolutionary in spirit. They must have high levels of understanding of revolutionary ideals. They will have to work hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, sacrificing to
help complete Angka’s projects.’

Chev, grinning and dangerous, and sturdy, tattooed Uncle Seng, who had never hurt anyone, squatted on their haunches behind the old man, along with the other village leaders. Except for Chea
Huon, who was absent, it was the same set of leaders I had seen at the dam ceremony. As usual, Comrade Ik was barefoot and shirtless. He wore only baggy shorts, a half-length sarong and a krama.
His toothless lips held a banana-leaf cigarette.

Those of us in the audience stood outside a longhouse and watched.

The married couples sat expressionlessly on the bench, their hats in their laps.

The old man continued, ‘The new man must know our revolution and its goals. The new man and the new woman will be creating our future society.’ He removed the cigarette, and his
toothless lips broke into a leer. ‘You women must be quiet if your husband gets angry.’

In Khmer slang, ‘getting angry’ means getting an erection.

Comrade Ik leaned forward into the microphone and shouted, ‘Long live the Kampuchean revolution!’

Everybody rose to their feet and repeated his words and they gave the clenched-fist salute. Each phrase was spoken three times.

‘Long live the great solidarity!’

Everyone watched the married couples to see if they yelled with the proper enthusiasm.

‘Long live the newlyweds!’

The brides and grooms echoed the words without a smile.

‘Long live the great leap forward!’

There were other slogans. And finally, again, ‘Long live the Kampuchean revolution!’

‘You may now have lunch,’ the old man said with a kindly smile. The new couples went off to eat watery rice with everybody else. No feasts and no honeymoons for them. They sewed
their single hammocks together and slept in the longhouses, with neighbours a few inches away on either side. Later some of them moved into the houses my crew built, or built their own. From what I
heard, few of the husbands and wives really cared for one another. They certainly didn’t trust one another. They fought over food. There were a few instances of wives getting rid of their
husbands by reporting them to the Khmer Rouge for stealing. Virtually no pregnancies resulted from these marriages, because the food rations were too low for the women to be fertile.

The next time I saw the old man was a few months later, at the beginning of the rainy season of 1977, when all the heads of families were called to another special meeting. He presided again,
standing in front of a microphone.

He started off with the usual speech about building up the country’s economy. ‘You people in the second lines have to give greater support to the people in the front lines. You must
plant more food to support them. You must work even harder.’ He went into a long harangue about sacrificing to achieve work goals. What he didn’t say was what everyone knew – that
the work on the dam had fallen far behind schedule. A few small segments had been completed, but at the current pace it would take five or ten years before it was finished.

Then he changed the subject. ‘The other reason we invited you here is to tell you about a man who betrayed the country. For a long time we did not know that our very own Angka had a
traitor within. Before, we trusted him to the highest degree, but now we know his true character. I am talking about Vanh,’ he said.

Behind me someone whispered, ‘Incredible! Is that why we haven’t seen Vanh driving around in a while?’ A buzz of conversation broke out, but I kept quiet. I wanted to hear what
had happened to the man I knew as Chea Huon.

‘We have already captured Enemy Vanh,’ the old man was saying. He shifted his glance uneasily over those of us in the audience. ‘And we will find out those who have connections
to him. These people will not be allowed to make trouble anymore. Furthermore, if someone in your villages says good things about Vanh, don’t believe him. Report him to Angka. Those people
are Vanh’s henchmen and collaborators. They are the enemy. They will not be allowed to live in our country anymore.

‘That’s all. Before leaving, please give me a big hand.’

I looked closely at Comrade Ik as I clapped. He wasn’t telling everything that he knew. If Chea Huon had been captured alive, he wouldn’t be asking for our help to discover who the
collaborators were. He would have already extracted the information, by torture.

And I was glad. Chea Huon, who had become a revolutionary so early, had finally realized his mistake. He knew he couldn’t stop the madness, and finally he got out. When did he decide to
leave? I wondered. Did he know it even when he met me? If so, the advice he gave me – to keep my mouth shut and keep on working – was the best he had to offer. Yes! He knew even then!
Or maybe he did. He knew if I became his protégé the Khmer Rouge would hurt me later.