Alive in the Killing Fields (5 page)

“The Vietnamese are entering the cities!”
Van Lan told me in a low voice as I was just about to fall asleep one night. “They will save Cambodia from the ‘saviors.’”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“The freedom news reported it,” he said, and I knew what he meant. We got the news from the radio. Of course, the Khmer Rouge did not permit anybody to have a radio. But some of the adults had one anyway. Without a battery, it was of no use, and nobody had batteries. But someone managed to rig a battery out of salt, dried charcoal and a piece of metal. This makeshift battery worked for about an hour. The adults listened in the evenings, taking turns to make sure no Khmer Rouge could hear them. The Khmer Rouge usually camped at night in the jungle, away from us. Even though having a radio was risky, Van Lan craved information. Without it, we were totally isolated. We had no idea what was happening anywhere else in the country. In whispers, the adults called the program “freedom news.” It was broadcast in the Cambodian language from Washington D.C.,
a place that somebody said was in America. When Van Lan told me the Vietnamese were coming into the cities, I was happy. Even though I had never heard good things about Vietnam, it seemed to me having the Vietnamese in charge—anybody but the Khmer Rouge—would be an improvement. Maybe things would change for us, too. But right now, we were far from the cities. In the countryside, the Khmer Rouge still controlled everything.

One afternoon as I walked with some other kids from one rice field to another, I heard the roar of loud engines coming up the road. I hadn’t heard the sound of a motor vehicle for years. I actually had been missing the smell of gasoline. Would it be the Vietnamese who might protect us, or the Khmer Rouge who would threaten us? Gunfire opened up. The Khmer Rouge were shooting at Vietnamese tanks. Caught in the cross fire, I hid behind a banana tree and then jumped into a rice paddy. I knew that if I ran, the Vietnamese would think I was a retreating Khmer Rouge and shoot at me. I stayed under water behind a levee until the gunfire stopped. When it was quiet, I cautiously looked up. A lot of people were injured. When I joined my family at the end of the day, I didn’t say anything about what happened. I knew that Chantha would be really scared to know that I had almost been shot, so I just kept quiet about it.

We still slept in temporary camps. One day another camp of about a hundred people was set up across the road from ours. The next morning, as usual, I went to work in the rice fields. So did the adults from the new
camp. Only old people and very young children stayed behind at the camps.

While I was working in the field, I saw two jets flying low in the sky. They seemed to be heading right at me.

Some other boys yelled, “In the water, get in the water!”

I jumped into the rice paddy and held my breath as long as I could. But I had to come up for air, and then I heard a huge explosion. I ran back to our camp to see what had happened. Vietnamese bombers were probably trying to hit a Khmer Rouge truck parked in the road, but they missed their target. They hit the camp across the road from mine. It was on fire. I saw a girl about my age carrying her younger brother. I asked her, “What happened?” She just pointed to her brother, who had a hole blown through his chest. He was not dead yet, but I knew he did not have long to live.

When the workers from the new camp ran back to their families, I heard their sobs and screams. Almost everybody left in the camp was killed in the bombing—the youngest children, the oldest relatives. Each bomb contained extra explosives that went off after the main bomb exploded. Some workers ran into the camp to see if their families were all right, and the delayed bombs killed them. I heard the screams and smelled the smoke. The next day, nobody wanted to bury the bodies because people were afraid that more of the delayed bombs might go off if the bodies were moved.

As the Vietnamese gained more control in the cities and surrounding areas, the Khmer Rouge chased people
like me, and our families, further into the countryside. They did not want their workers to run to the city. They made us march day after day, always away from Battambang. I had no other choice than to move with the group.

The Khmer Rouge planted land mines along the larger roads. They wanted the mines to kill the invading Vietnamese, as well as any Cambodians trying to flee the countryside to head for the cities. One time when the Khmer Rouge made us move, one of them yelled, “Follow us exactly, one behind the other. We know where the mines are, so we know where it’s safe. If you step anywhere else, you will be blown up.”

My brother Chanty had trouble keeping up. At one point he cried, “Wait for me, wait for me! I have to go to the bathroom.” He stepped out of the line, and I was terrified he might put his feet on a land mine. Nothing happened, so I stepped off next to him to see why he was crying. He was bent over in pain. A huge tapeworm was coming out of his body. With my knife, I cut it into pieces as it came out. It was disgusting, and he kept crying. Some of the tapeworm would come out, and then it would slip back in. Chanty would walk a few more yards, and then it would happen again. I don’t know how such a big worm could survive in such a small, skinny boy. Somehow he managed to keep moving forward.

I was about to find out that while my thoughts were filled with worries about my brother, Van Lan
and some of the other grown-ups were worrying about something else—a huge decision that would affect all of us forever.

Late one afternoon
, when we came back from the rice fields to our hut, Van Lan whispered to me, “Go get anything extra to eat that you can, and eat it. Tonight we are leaving!”

Leaving? I hadn’t seen any Khmer Rouge order us to move, yelling and waving their rifles at us like they usually did. How could we be leaving? Where were we going? But I held my questions back.

In the darkness that night, about thirty people left with my family. My older brother Bunna had been sent away the year before by the Khmer Rouge. We had seen him only once or twice that year. But now we were together. When we left, he carried a big bag of rice. I don’t know how he got it. Van Lan handed me two chickens. “Carry these,” he said, so I did.

We walked all night long. I was exhausted. Chantha, Van Lan, and I took turns carrying baby Vibol and helping my younger brothers. Just before dawn, Bunna stepped away from the trail and into the dense jungle. I wondered where he was going. I stopped to wait for him, and then he re-appeared, pushing a bicycle!

“How did you get that?” I asked.

“I saw it out of the corner of my eye,” he said. “It was just lying at the base of a tree.”

Who knows if the bike had belonged to someone the Khmer Rouge had killed. But no, they would have taken the bike for themselves. Maybe somebody else trying to escape had heard the Khmer Rouge get close, left the bicycle, and run into the jungle.

I would never find out who abandoned that bike, but now, we used it. It was rusty, and one pedal was missing. Bunna tied the bag of rice he had been carrying to the handlebars. The weight made the bike unsteady.

“Help me push it,” he said. With my left hand I carried the two chickens, and with my right I pushed the bike seat. Bunna also pushed and guided the handlebars.

I had no idea how long we would be walking, but I knew that if we ran out of rice, we would starve. Bunna and I carried the food that we all needed to survive. We trailed at the back of the group because we were weighted down with the heaviest supplies. I was scared the Khmer Rouge would come up on us from behind, and Bunna and I would be the first ones they would kill.

When morning broke, we finally rested. We were hidden in the jungle, out of sight. I later realized there was no plan, no plotted out route to the city. Our goal was just to stay away from the Khmer Rouge. Every night, we walked again, zigzagging to confuse any Khmer Rouge who might be tracking us. Van Lan decided which direction we should go. I did not ask, “Why are we
walking this way? How much farther do we have to go? What is going to happen?” It was as if I had blinders on. I just focused on placing one foot in front of another, again and again and again.

We never walked on a road where we would be easy to spot. Open, grassy fields—even if the grass was tall enough to hide us—were not safe either. The Khmer Rouge had put land mines in them to scare people from trying to run away. Instead, we criss-crossed the jungle on narrow, bumpy trails that had been made by small animals. Van Lan studied each path carefully to see if there was any hint of a land mine. He looked for disturbed roots, uneven ground, or anything that might show a mine had been buried there. Barefoot, we stepped as lightly as we could, hour after hour. We took short rests, but we traveled every night, and sometimes during part of the day, too. We were always listening for any Khmer Rouge that might be in the area. To keep the babies in the group quiet, mothers gave them tree bark to suck. It contained a chemical that caused the babies to sleep.

It was the summer dry season, and we were thirsty. I fantasized about the soothing, satisfying taste of water. Then I saw a rise ahead of us. Cambodia is mostly flat, so any ridge really stands out. I knew that during the rainy season, people stay in high and dry spots above the flood plain. They usually dig a well so they can have clear, fresh water to drink. When we got to the high ground, I was thrilled to discover a well there. I looked down into it, and I saw water. My tongue felt even drier than before.
My family stopped to drink. Bunna lowered me into the narrow darkness. I let go with one hand and filled a bucket with water. He pulled me back up, and we drank. But the rest of the group had not waited for our family. We were alone.

When we came out of the jungle, we found ourselves with no clear way to go other than across an open area with high grass, much taller than we were. We had no choice other than to risk the land mines that might be set there. The high grass would hide us from the Khmer Rouge, but we could not see them, either. As usual, Van Lan led the way. I guess he looked at the sun to decide what direction to go. The soil was hot and sandy. My feet burned so much from walking on it that I wrapped rags around them. As the hours passed, the rags shredded. I just trudged along, pushing the bike and thinking about nothing except the miserable discovery I had made—that I could move when I was too tired to move. Then, I snapped out of my thoughts. I spotted what looked like a mound of something, but I could not see clearly what it was. Could this be as valuable a find as the bike? I was still carrying chickens in my hand, so with my foot I tapped the mound. The “mound” leaped up at me! It was a dog. It attacked me and bit my leg. Blood poured out from the wound.

“Van Lan,” I yelled. “I’m hurt!”

He stopped and came to me.

“I’ll make a bandage,” he said. He pulled the shirt off his back and wrapped it around my wound.

“I know you can keep going,” he said. “You have to.”

As I walked, my leg swelled. I yanked a small branch from a tree and pulled the twigs and leaves off it. Even using that as a crutch, I still could barely move ahead. But somehow, I did.

We walked by day, we walked by night. We rested in short stops, but kept going as much of the time as we could. When we did sleep, we had no choice but to lie down on the ground. When I woke up, I still felt tired. Even the chickens needed breaks. We carried them upside down, and their feet swelled. If they did not walk right side up every now and then, they would die.

A single person could have traveled much more quickly than our family did. We had eaten such poor diets for so long, we were all weak. Hackly and Chanty could not go fast because they were so small. We were all exhausted, but our fear kept us moving.

It was hard to find water. One time we came across a pond, but the water was so muddy it wasn’t drinkable. We needed water to cook our rice. Van Lan boiled the water to purify it, but the amount of water was so small in comparison to the dirt that as soon as the water boiled, all that was left was dirt. We walked for many days before we finally came to a good-sized pond of clean water. Alongside it, we saw neat rows of coconut palms and mango trees. There were no houses in sight. The Khmer Rouge must have destroyed the buildings of a small village, and only the trees remained. I was exhausted, and my feet were burned and sore from the hot sand. I was glad that we stayed there for a few days to regain our
strength. We ate fruit from the trees, I fished, we cooked rice, and we felt better. Then Van Lan said. “It’s time to move ahead again. Let’s go.”

We met other people trying to escape, too. One man told us that he’d heard the Khmer Rouge caught a group not far away from us. They were all killed.

After three weeks, our zigzagging route brought us closer to Battambang, which we knew the Vietnamese controlled. Van Lan hoped his parents would find their way there, too. Finally, after about a month of walking, we got to the outskirts of Battambang. We were totally worn out. Van Lan asked everyone we met on the road, “Do you know my parents? Have you seen them?” No one had, but we continued into the city.

The first night in Battambang, we were so tired and weak that we just lay down and slept on a sidewalk. The next day, Van Lan met someone who knew his family. He said that they were living in a house by the train station. Van Lan found them. It was a reunion not of joy and celebration, but of exhausted relief. For a short time, Van Lan, Chantha, Vibol, my brothers, and I moved in with Van Lan’s parents, sisters, brothers, and their children in a house that had a roof and walls. What a change from sleeping in a primitive hut, or on the ground with no protection at all! I began to feel like a human being again. I was reminded that life might be more than endless work, endless hunger, and endless fear.

Many of the houses in Battambang had been abandoned. People like us who escaped from the Khmer
Rouge looked for an empty house that suited them, and then they moved into it. The house my family found was fairly close to Van Lan’s parents’. It needed two new windows, the sink had to be replaced, and the front step had cracked. We made the repairs, and then put a new lock on the door to show that the place was now occupied. That house provided the best living conditions I had experienced for years. It had a flush toilet and, sometimes, even electricity.

“We are free of the Khmer Rouge at last!” I dared to whisper. At least that’s what I thought.