Survival in the Killing Fields (40 page)

Then the sky closed in. The wind blew and the trees leaned over and the rain fell diagonally from the black undersides of the clouds, stinging my face. I ducked my head but the wind pushed my
hat brim against my cheek, and when I raised my head the brim flew up and the rain stung me again. The droplets made a tinkling noise when they struck the water in the rice paddies, and splashed
upward again like tiny fountains. I could see the man next to me swinging his hoe, and beyond him there was another one less distinctly. Beyond that there was nobody at all, no people and no
landscape, only a veil of water.

I loved the rains. They made the greens in the landscape brighter, the clay redder. The coolness they brought was like the answer to a prayer. Leaves sprouted on the trees, rice paddies turned
green, insects and fish and crabs multiplied. Life was better. On the front lines we were given more food. We didn’t have to work at night. There were fewer evening meetings, because the
leaders didn’t like getting wet. The water dripped from the eaves of the longhouse with a sound like the softest music. It splashed from roofs and trees onto the ground, flowed down the
paths, cut snaking, twisting channels where it chose. In the longhouse Huoy and I put the white plastic tarp above us, but that didn’t keep us dry. Lightning flashed, as bright as day.
Thunder boomed like artillery, and Huoy wrapped her arms around me and buried her head in my chest for protection. It rained for days and then turned foggy, with a shower so fine and thin it was
nearly invisible.

During the rainy season of 1976, from about July through September, I worked with a mobile crew, filling in wherever help was needed. We built more dykes. We ploughed fields, planted and
transplanted rice. Sometimes we tended oxen and water buffalo. But our biggest job was road repair. On the road leading toward the Khmer Rouge headquarters at Phum Phnom, the runoff water had
carved a gully thirty yards long. Brown, muddy water poured through like a river, and the rice fields beyond were like a lake.

We hadn’t seen the sun in a week. With new members there were eight men in our crew, each with a hatchet and hoe. We cut saplings near the roadside and put the trunks vertically in the
ground as a stockade against the water flow. We laid logs and branches behind to buttress it, and packed it full of mud entangled with roots and plants. The rain was falling steadily, neither hard
nor soft.

I told the others which trees to chop, where to get the mud, even though I was not the official leader. My father used to say, ‘Think like a boss, not like a worker.’ He meant that
it is better to use your brain and be active than to be sullen and passive, as most workers are. I worked harder than anyone in the crew because it kept my mind sharp and because it kept me from
thinking about other things. For hours at a time, if I was lucky, I would not have a mental picture of my father’s face when he was tied up, or my brother and his wife when they were being
marched away.

I chopped down a sapling and threw it like a spear across a small canal, where the others were building the vertical stockade. They moved in slow motion, their tiredness a form of protest. Only
one worked as hard as me. His name was Seng, and he was overseeing us that day. He was short and muscular, maybe fifty years old, with Buddhist tattoos on his chest. He was a village chief on the
back lines and one of Chev’s assistant chiefs on the front lines.

From farther up the road, out of sight, came a noise interrupting the quiet of the rain. It sounded like an engine whining at high rpm and tyres spinning in the mud. Seng raised his head to
listen, then walked off to investigate.

I chopped another sapling down without slowing my pace. It was funny about Seng – ‘Uncle’ Seng, as he liked to be called. He was the only one of the Khmer Rouge who seemed
fully human. The last time he supervised us, we had been tending livestock. While I sneaked off to cook a meal in a hillock, a pair of oxen wandered off into the forest. I looked for them all night
and didn’t find them until morning. Chev would have killed me for carelessness if he had known, but Uncle Seng only warned me not to do it again. He had never ordered anybody killed.

That wasn’t to say I trusted him. If he thought I was a model worker, fine. If he liked me as a person, even better. Neither he nor anyone else knew that I led a double life. They
didn’t know that almost every night I crept out of the longhouse to steal. I took vegetables from a nearby village. I carried my hatchet as a weapon, ready to attack anyone who caught me. I
was willing to die. They had already taken everything else away from me except for Huoy, and Huoy and I had decided that if the time came we would commit suicide together.

‘Hey! All of you!’ Uncle Seng’s reappearance broke my train of thought. He was waving for us to follow him. I plunged into the canal and swam across it with my hoe and hatchet.
When I climbed out I was no wetter than I had been before.

I trotted down the road with a few others just behind me and the rest hurrying to catch up. When we got close to Seng we saw a low, wide, model B-1 jeep with a cloth roof.

Only one jeep looked like that in the Phnom Tippeday region, and that was the one belonging to the highest-ranking civilian Khmer Rouge. I had often seen it driving around, the leader’s
right arm sticking out of the passenger window, his hand on the roof.

One of the jeep’s wheels had become stuck between logs lain across the road below the surface. The motor roared, the tyres spun and a plume of slippery mud shot to the rear. The driver, a
soldier with a green Mao cap, sat blankly behind the steering wheel and revved the accelerator while two other soldiers pushed the jeep from behind. Nothing happened. The tyres spun and the wheel
sank even farther between the logs, tilting the jeep at a crazy angle.

‘Stop, please,’ a voice said mildly, and the driver lifted his foot from the accelerator. I walked behind and saw a man bending down to examine the wheel. He wore the same black
pajama uniform and Mao cap as the soldiers, but there was something about him that suggested authority. He was good-natured, with narrow Chinese eyes and a wart on his cheek. It’s Chea Huon,
I said to myself. Then I thought: No, it can’t be.

‘What should we do?’ he asked the driver, but the driver was too shy to answer. Better to act stupid than risk contradicting a superior – that was the driver’s attitude.
Typically Cambodian. If Chea Huon said the best way to get the jeep out was to spit on the tyres, the driver would have started spitting. But I was not sure it was Chea Huon. He had the same slight
build, hunched shoulders and bad posture. The same wart. If it was not Chea Huon it was his twin. What was he doing here?

‘We’ll do it for you, comrade,’ Seng said deferentially to him. ‘We’re already muddy. No need for you to be muddy too. Come on,’ he said to our group. While
Chea Huon watched, the rest of us and the two bodyguards started pushing the jeep. If he noticed me glancing at him, then away, then at him again, he didn’t react. He looked as if he wanted
to oblige Seng, to cooperate with what was asked of him.

The rest of us pushed, but the tyres spun and the jeep sank even lower. We weren’t getting any traction.

‘Uncle Seng,’ I said, ‘maybe we could try putting tree branches under the tyres. It might give them something to catch hold of.’

Chea Huon had started walking slowly down the road. ‘Good idea,’ he said over his shoulder.

At Seng’s nod, we picked up our hatchets. ‘Get long tree trunks if you can,’ I called to the others in the group. ‘Branches too, and rocks if you find any.’ Two of
them immediately started hacking at a tree by the side of the road. I followed Chea Huon and passed him. He was pointing at a sapling farther on. I started to hack at its branches. He came even
with me.

There was nobody else in earshot.

I spoke in a low voice, without looking at him. ‘Excuse me,
luk
teacher. I may be wrong, but your name is Chea Huon. You were a teacher in Takeo. I recognize the mark on your
cheek.’

‘You know me?’

‘You taught me in 1962 and 1963.’

I removed the last of the branches, bent down, and attacked the trunk.

‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said after a moment. ‘And I now know who you are too. You got your doctor’s degree, right?’

‘Yes,
luk
teacher.’

The rain fell. He stood with his hands on his hips, nodding his head up and down to show he understood. Then he came closer, patted me on the shoulder and said in a kind and friendly voice,
‘Just keep working and stay quiet.’

The two bodyguards came up before he could say more. They walked within earshot and then stood a respectful distance away. I bent over, chopping at the trunk of the sapling. Only a few more
blows to go. It was up to Chea Huon, to keep on talking or not.

‘. . . And how is the rice coming along?’ he asked me, as if we were continuing our conversation. ‘Is the irrigation under control?’

‘It goes very well, comrade,’ I answered, a little louder than necessary. ‘Right now we have a heavy flow of water coming down from the hills and cutting the road, but under
Uncle Seng’s leadership we have launched a road-repairing offensive. We have already repaired many washed-out spots.’

‘We must fight on all battlefields,’ Chea Huon replied piously. ‘We must struggle to control nature.’

With that he walked farther down the road to inspect the rice fields, followed by the bodyguards. I carried the pieces of the sapling back to the jeep.

I got on my hands and knees in the mud and jammed the branches underneath the tyre. Then I directed the others to bring the branches and the rocks, while making sure that Uncle Seng approved of
the way things were proceeding so he would appear to be the one in charge. The driver wasn’t very bright and didn’t understand that he had to rock his jeep forward and back so we could
work the branches in. I had to be polite about telling him what to do, because his rank was much higher than mine and I didn’t want him to lose face.

Covered in mud from head to toe, I thought about those long-ago days when I went to Chea Huon for free tutoring in mathematics. He lived a simple, spartan life. In his house on stilts outside
Takeo he wore a sarong, like a farmer. When we students were thirsty we dipped a bowl into the earthern water jar. He was very pure and intellectual and treated everybody the same. I never
suspected he was communist until later, in 1967, when I visited him in jail in Phnom Penh. Yet when I looked back, it all made sense. He was typical of the idealists who joined the communists in
the 1960s and then vanished into the forests. Yes, he was about the right age and background to be at his level of the Khmer Rouge hierarchy.

I pushed more branches in the tyre’s hole. When the driver rocked forward and back we wedged the poles farther and farther in.

Chea Huon knew I was a doctor. Somehow I was certain he wouldn’t turn me in. But everything else about him left me confused. ‘Just keep working and stay quiet,’ he had told me.
And that was all. What was that supposed to mean – that he wasn’t going to help me? He had a brain, he had eyes! He
saw
the unhealed sores on my arms and legs and face. He
knew
I was a doctor. It was in his power to order me to set up a real clinic, to treat the sick on the front lines. He had a higher rank than Chev. He could save even me from being a war
slave, if he wanted. He could take me off the front lines!

Why didn’t he?

We rocked the jeep forward and back, wedging more and more brush underneath. Finally the jeep popped out of the hole and onto the level road surface.

Chea Huon returned from inspecting the flooded fields. He was soaking wet, but unlike the rest of us he was not muddy. He thanked everybody and looked at each of us briefly in turn, nodding and
smiling. He turned to Uncle Seng. ‘That one there,’ he said, pointing at me, ‘is a good worker. He shows initiative. Take good care of him.’

Then he climbed in his jeep and drove off, disappearing in the drizzle.

We stood there, holding our hatchets and hoes. The road was emptier than before. The rain was cold on our skins.

The rest of that day, and the next day, and for many to come, questions and attempts at answers crowded my brain:

Chea Huon is educated. He is smart. He is not like the rest. Why then does he allow those like Chev to kill people like my father and brother? Does he know about it, or not?

If he does know, why doesn’t he stop the killing? He is smart enough to realize that the revolution will fail if it doesn’t have the support of the people.

If he doesn’t know of the killings directly, he must have heard about them. If he hasn’t heard, how could he be so stupid? But I know he isn’t stupid, so he must have heard of
them.

He is the head man in the entire region! Doesn’t he have enough power to stop the killing? And if he doesn’t have enough power, why doesn’t he go to someone higher up who
does?

I must go to his headquarters to talk to him and ask why there is so much killing. He would receive me. He knows me from the past. If I could get through to him, it could change the entire
situation on the front lines. The upper-level Khmer Rouge just need to realize what a disaster they have created. Then they would change it.

No, they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t do that at all.

I must think this over carefully.

Dam doeum kor.

I don’t want to go to Khmer Rouge headquarters. It is too dangerous. I cannot trust Chea Huon, because he has killed many, many people. He must have. He is one of them! The last thing the
Khmer Rouge want is suggestions for change. They would call it complaining or having a capitalist mentality. They would kill me for sure.

I am afraid.

And – I think – Chea Huon is afraid too.

When the heaviest of the rains was over and the roads were fixed, my group went back to rice farming.

Farming was our reason for being on the front lines. Directly or indirectly, everything centred around it. We dug canals to have irrigation water for the dry season and to prevent flooding in
the rainy season. We built paddy dykes to grow rice on a huge scale. We tended oxen and water buffalo so they could pull our ploughs. We guided the ploughs and harrows around and around the fields.
We went to propaganda meetings so the Khmer Rouge could tell us how glorious farming was.