When the War Was Over (5 page)

Komphot began to wonder if the rumors were true, if the United States had engineered the coup, if Matak had been paid off, or Lon Nol, or both. All of his friends had opinions, but no one had answers. Feeling betrayed, Komphot thereafter refused to have any further official ties to the Khmer Republic. He concentrated on his banking career and advanced at the Banque Khmer Pour le Commerce.

Beyond Komphot's cocoon, the city changed. The boulevards of Phnom Penh were strung with barbed wire. Cambodian officers dressed in olive-drab uniforms predominated in the cafés, sped through the city in jeeps kicking up dust, and acted like minor warlords. Some of the junior officers were Komphot's friends. They took up careers in the lucrative, expanding military field and the new government. He remained in touch with them all. Throughout the war Komphot was as likely to be seen drinking in the Hotel le Phnom bar with a group of colonels as lunching with staff members of the foreign ministry at the Café de Paris.

Attractive, outgoing, always well-dressed and well informed, Komphot was a welcome addition at such gatherings. He was well placed among circles of influence, both foreign and Khmer, and interested enough in the fate of his country to exchange gossip in hopes of finding answers. He was different in one respect. He rarely expressed an opinion. He trusted few people. He preferred to observe, not to participate.

At first the war did not interfere with Komphot's life. Until the turning point in 1973, Cambodia's war presented a puzzling, quaint, and vaguely sinister face. On the surface, Cambodians smiled and were full of pleasantries. What they considered political discussions were largely exchanges of gossip. None of Komphot's friends seemed to grasp the significance or scope of the war—how Cambodia fit into the Vietnam War or into American designs, or who were the actual opponents. The people in the countryside, as far as Komphot could determine, were also untouched by the war. Foreigners pointed to this lack of sophistication, or indifference, as proof that nothing serious or dangerous was afoot, as in neighboring Vietnam.

Komphot listened to foreigners, American and French, describe Phnom Penh and the war as if it were theater of the absurd. Senior American military officials called Cambodian soldiers their “little tigers” even as they lost battle after battle. The opposing Cambodian armies carried “humorous” acronyms—FANK and FUNK. Lon Nol's soldiers were seen as quaint, entering combat sucking Buddha amulets, some slightly stoned after smoking pipes of local marijuana. The commander-in-chief of Lon Nol's army, a diminutive general of mixed Khmer and Filipino ancestry named Sosthènes Fernandez, pampered his vanity by having a set of miniature furniture and platforms constructed for his office so as to appear taller and larger. The greatest joke, for the foreigners, was the name of the military spokesman—Am Rong. The foreigners were seduced by the never-never-land appearance of Cambodia.

Komphot was losing a sense of his own country. He knew the foreigners misunderstood Cambodia, but he was incapable of describing what was at stake in the war, what Cambodians were fighting about. When he looked at his friends he found them as confounded. Lon Nol was behaving like a superstitious dictator. He followed his favorite monk's orders to sprinkle the city's perimeter with “holy sand” to ward off the enemy. And he acted like a dangerous racist who believed in the superiority of the Khmer race and the inferiority of the Vietnamese. Komphot could not respect, much less obey, such a man—nor could many of his friends.

As early as 1971 the privileged classes of Phnom Penh began to quit their country. Cambodia's doctors, intellectuals, and other professionals left for
the safety of France. Others already in France simply stayed there. Komphot never considered leaving. “It is my country, I will see the war to the end,” he told his friends.

Lon Nol suspended individual rights of expression, as had Sihanouk. Komphot had expected as much. However, he did not imagine that corruption could become so prevalent. The army became the richest sector of society during the war, the one with direct access to millions of American aid dollars, and the most criminal. The generals were openly dissolute. They drank cognac and sodas before noon, built cement mansions, imported limousines, and opened Swiss bank accounts with money robbed from the United States and their own troops.

As a banker and a man in whom many confided, Komphot was all too aware of the scandals. Some were eventually unearthed and reported in the international press, but to little avail. The military scams were numerous. Officers concocted lists of “phantom” soldiers to collect the pay of nonexistent fighters, they sold their soldiers' equipment on the black market, they sold American-supplied ammunition to the Khmer Rouge, they pocketed the money for their army's food and let the soldiers subsist on rice gruel.

Komphot's own livelihood depended, ultimately, on American largesse. Every day he saw how the Khmer Republic was becoming ever more dependent on U.S. aid. Komphot's bank, like all others, earned its profits and overhead through an American subsidy program that paid the hard currency for Cambodia's imports. When Komphot joined other bankers and financiers to protest Lon Nol's inflationary policies, they saw how ineffectual they were. When Lon Nol needed money to cover up the amounts pilfered from U.S. aid, he simply doubled the amount of Khmer currency in circulation—without warning. The banks protested, but Lon Nol ignored them and so did the Americans.

The banks retaliated by trying to prohibit the luxury items imported by Lon Nol and his cronies. Lon Nol's military officers responded by opening their own bank, backed by “footloose army funds.” They imported their cars and air conditioners with notes from their own bank. This madness not only riddled Komphot's professional life, it permeated the city and the country still controlled by Lon Nol.

The deterioration began slowly. The war did not begin to strangle the lives of everyone—farmer and city dweller alike—until 1973, when the United States launched its massive bombing campaign and the Khmer Rouge simultaneously began their two-year-long push toward total victory.

During the seven months of constant American bombardment, over half a million Cambodians flooded into Phnom Penh, doubling its population.
They said they came to seek safety from both armies and the bombing that shadowed all the battles. “When the soldiers come now, the planes also come and the fields and houses catch fire,” they said.

All told, the United States dropped 257,465 tons of explosives on the Khmer countryside in 1973, half again as many as were dropped on Japan during the Second World War. The effect was immediate and devastating. It was no longer safe to till rice fields or fish in rivers. Roads were unsafe for travel. Those simple facts translated into hardships for nearly everyone. The amount of acreage cultivated for rice dropped from six million at the beginning of the war to little more than one million at the end of the bombing campaign. Food was scarce. Luxuries for the city were dwindling. It was too dangerous to import goods by road or river and too expensive to bring them in by air.

Komphot watched as his city became a mongrel version of itself. For the first time in modern history there were beggars on the street. The shade trees lining boulevards around Komphot's bank were stripped of bark for firewood. Refugee shanties were popping up everywhere. He and his friends were sheltering distant relatives.

Food was a far greater problem than shelter. Malnutrition began spreading through refugee camps. There was a full-scale food crisis. Lon Nol's government adopted policies that admitted defeat. His officials said their war strategy had changed; they would control the population, not the land. And the United States would provide the aid to feed the people. Lon Nol's army, made up of increasingly corrupt or incompetent officers and poorly fed soldiers, lost battle after battle, and the ability of the Americans to supply the capital was endangered. The Khmer Rouge were winning control of the Mekong River. By 1974 they had blocked off all land routes. Ultimately, air shipments were the only answer to bring in rice as well as arms. Phnom Penh became an isolated, artificial island sustained by a fragile lifeline stretching tens of thousands of miles to an American government shaken by its own corruption revealed through the Watergate scandal.

Rice became an obsession in the capital. The war effort was secondary. Finding rice and the money to buy it was the chief preoccupation not only of civilians but of soldiers as well. The corruption and callous disregard that marked the Lon Nol regime's abuse of military aid was matched by its handling of food aid.

The United States left the distribution of rice to the Lon Nol government, which in turn handed it over to the notoriously greedy rice merchants. These private merchants sold less than half the stocks at a low subsidized price and kept aside the bulk of the rice for their own sales at
exorbitant prices. Food became scarce, inflation became fantastic. The local currency changed from 280 to $1 on official charts to 1,600 to $1 one year later, at the end of 1974. The middle classes could no longer afford the necessities, much less the growing army of poor in the city.

Yet that middle class and the privileged like Komphot acquiesced to Lon Nol's rule. They complained bitterly, but saw no recourse other than an end to war. They felt cowed by America's complete support for Lon Nol, and the dictates of war gave them little room for maneuver. In March of 1973, Lon Nol had suspended the few remaining civil liberties: the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of speech, thought, assembly, and the press. He also revoked the rights to privacy of residence and correspondence in order to facilitate house arrests without warrants, censorship of mail, and control of all travel into and out of the country. Permission to leave the country required thousands of dollars in bribes.

By 1975, Komphot could not point to a single aspect of Phnom Penh with any remaining integrity. He was not alarmed when the Khmer Rouge launched their final offensive on New Year's Day that year and began inflicting a series of defeats on the army protecting him and all that he knew as Cambodia. He mistakenly thought there could be nothing worse than the Khmer Republic. Unlike his counterparts in South Vietnam who saw imminent defeat as a sign they had to abandon their country, Komphot made no plans to leave Cambodia. Nor did most of his friends. Komphot and his compatriots wanted to believe in the best. The Khmer Rouge were nationalists. Sihanouk was their token leader. Life could not help but improve.

On April 1, 1975, Komphot, along with the rest of Phnom Penh, realized the war was over. That day the Khmer Rouge captured Neak Luong, a river-port that had become the bellwether of Lon Nol's fortunes during the war. It was the southern citadel protecting Phnom Penh and the Mekong River. Neak Luong had been the scene of one of the war's most horrible tragedies—the accidental bombing in 1973 of the base by an American B-52 bomber, killing 137 people and wounding another 268. Thereafter the name of Neak Luong summed up the sense of shame and bitterness of this war and the Americans' disgraceful treatment of their ally There was a historical symmetry to the Khmer Rouge's choice of Neak Luong as the route for their final challenge, for their path of victory.

The fall of Neak Luong convinced the foreign community it was time to leave. Immediately the remaining embassies packed up. The Americans sent
off their support personnel as quickly as they could. Some of the wealthier Cambodians, particularly those with connections overseas, left at the same time. Then on April 12 the rest of the American embassy left. It was the final evacuation, but was unlike that in South Vietnam; there was no mad rush by Cambodians to leave with the Americans, no dramatic invasion of the embassy to compete for space aboard American helicopters. Only a few foreigners stayed behind: journalists, businessmen, clerics, French and Russian diplomats. The Cambodians were left to play out the drama.

Four days after the American evacuation, on April 16, the Khmer Rouge captured the city's airport. Komphot went to work that day at the usual hour, but he brought along an overnight bag, just in case. He did end up spending the night at the bank, sleeping on a cot near the bank vault. The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes the next morning was a colleague unfolding a bedsheet in the foyer. “What are you doing?” Komphot asked him, half-asleep. His friend answered, “I'm flying the white flag of surrender.”

At first Komphot felt nothing, a blessed nothingness. He did not feel like celebrating or jumping for joy. He felt neutral. He walked out into the morning air and stood on the stairs of the bank. It was already hot. Komphot looked in all four directions. His bank sat at one of the city's main intersections, where the airport road crosses Monivong Avenue, the city's main north-south street. He noticed little new beyond the sight of a few makeshift white flags adorning other buildings.