Survival in the Killing Fields (62 page)

As we walked past the camp hospital, two
mit neary
in black came out carrying a corpse between them on a stretcher. The hospital wasn’t large enough to take care of the living or
the dead. There were too many sick and not enough room. Patients lay on the ground outside with IV bags suspended above them from nails driven into trees. They lay in hammocks made of cloth bunched
at the ends and tied to trees. They were too tired to brush away the flies. Some of them were just waiting for death. If they had to defecate, they just lay there and did it, sunk in the apathy of
the late stages of starvation. There were mothers so weak they ignored their babies, and babies so weak they didn’t cry. There were children with bright round eyes and hollow faces; when I
waved my hand in front of them to test their reactions, they didn’t blink.

John Crowley was upset. All the Westerners were, even the newsmen. They had never seen such suffering. But I had seen even worse, and I knew what it was to suffer myself.

Sakeo was like the death march from Phum Chhleav, I decided, except that the people of Sakeo didn’t have to go any farther. They had already arrived. Yes, I thought bitterly, it was like
the death march, but with doctors and international aid and photographers to record it. Most of them would live, and the ones who died would have the dignity of burial.

I had no sympathy for the Khmer Rouge of Sakeo. For them my heart was like stone. Let them die. Enemies forever. My sympathy was for the innocent civilians, like the old man from Tonle
Batí, and others like him. It was not their fault that they were trapped in a place like this. I looked from the Khmer Rouge to the long-nose officials of the UNHCR and felt disgust. The
UNHCR was supposed to protect refugees. That was the reason for its existence. But it had done nothing when the Thai government pushed forty-five thousand innocent Cambodians over the border and
onto the minefields of Preah Vihear. Now it was setting up a camp to take care of Khmer Rouge. It did nothing for the victims and everything for the criminals. What was wrong with the UNHCR? Why
couldn’t it help the right refugees?
⁶

The Westerners just didn’t seem to understand much about Cambodians. Even John Crowley had to ask me which people were Khmer Rouge. But at least he knew there was a difference, and he was
trying to learn to spot it with his own eyes.

I could tell the Khmer Rouge at a glance. They were the well-fed ones, with healthy, round cheeks. They wore black clothes that were not ripped, and new kramas made of silk or cotton. But even
without the clothes and the healthy bodies, their expressions gave them away. They looked at me with narrowed eyes and curled-back lips, and they turned disdainfully away. They didn’t want
anything to do with a Cambodian accompanying a white-skinned devil.

Luckily, John Crowley didn’t want to talk with them either. He asked me to bring him to the kind of refugees he would be working with, the civilians. We walked around and found some who
had been rice farmers and small traders before the revolution. They told me their stories in Khmer, and I translated into my broken English as best as I could. John Crowley listened carefully and
asked questions.

By the time the van brought us to Aranyaprathet, a town on the Thai side of the border, it was late at night. Many years before, my father had driven to Aranyaprathet in his old Ford truck to
get the bronze Buddha statue. Maybe it had been a nice town then. In 1979 it was a rather menacing place serving border smugglers, thieves and the Westerners who were helping the refugees. Under
the streetlights a few heavyset men watched us, standing next to their elongated motorcycle-taxis, decorated with chrome and powered by automobile engines. We drove in the van from one hotel to
another. They were all full. Finally we found a room with two beds for four hundred
baht
or twenty US dollars, more than double the usual price. John Crowley took one bed, I took the other
and the Thai driver went off in the van to look after himself.

Lying on that hotel bed, I felt tired but content. It was the first time since Phnom Penh that I had been on a real mattress with sheets. How nice that the driver had to go off, instead of
me.

I thought: John Crowley has helped me. He hasn’t looked down on me, or patronized me. He has treated me as an equal. So friendly and informal. Maybe all Americans are like that. If
that’s how they are, the United States will be a good place for me.

Yes, how different the foreigners are. They do not care about face. They do not have to present a mask to society and keep their feelings hidden behind it. They do not care so much about social
rank. A Cambodian would have treated me either better than himself or worse. Probably, a Cambodian would have sent me off with the driver and kept the hotel room with two beds for himself.

Yes, to be treated as an equal, I thought, as I stared at the hotel room ceiling. That’s what I want. And no more being shy toward Westerners.

Back in Bangkok, I had an interview at the JVA about going to America. Unfortunately my caseworker wasn’t John Crowley but a strong-willed woman whom Cambodian refugees called ‘The
Tiger.’ The Tiger looked at me with obvious suspicion. Since my name didn’t appear on any American embassy lists, she decided I had bribed my way off the border. I gave her General
Chana’s phone number, and she spoke with him, but whenever she looked at me she frowned. To her I was an ‘operator,’ a guy who was always finding a way around the rules.

Of course, she was partly right. I
was
an operator. With Chana’s pass I was constantly going in and out of Lumpini. I had even started to show up at JVA parties. And why not? I
wanted to be free – to go where I wanted, to do what I wanted, to live on my own terms. That’s why I had escaped from communism.

The Tiger made me an offer. She would let me go to the United States if I worked with refugees first, as a doctor. She said there was a big influx of Cambodians on the border and that the Thais
were going to open more camps like Sakeo. I told her okay. The only part of the arrangement I didn’t like was being apart from Ngim, who would stay with Balam. I told Ngim I would rejoin her
as soon as possible.

Ngim said she understood, and hid her sorrow.

The Cambodians came to places that had barely existed before but now would never be forgotten – to Kamput and Mak Moon, Nong Chan and Nong Samet, Ban Sangae and Camp 007,
the smugglers’ paradise. And they kept coming. They carried sacks on their backs and balanced baskets on their heads. The old supported themselves with canes. Widows carried shoulderboards
with the baby in the front basket and their belongings in the back basket. They made makeshift tents from sackcloth or from blue plastic tarps and strung them from sticks in the ground or from
trees. They sat in exhaustion with their knees bent and their elbows or forearms resting on their knees, and their thoughts were far away.

The border was a no-man’s-land. It didn’t belong to Thailand and didn’t belong to Cambodia. Each settlement was ruled by a military group – south of Aranyaprathet by the
sullen, disciplined Khmer Rouge; north of Aran by untrained, corrupt Khmer Serei factions. The Khmer Serei were a disappointment. They collected
bonjour,
put up tollgates and fought each
other for control of the black-market trade. It was hard to believe that a year before we had expected them to be our liberators.

In November 1979 the second refugee camp inside Thailand opened, away from the border. It was north of Aranyaprathet, on a broad slope of scrubby trees and hillocks with a forested mountain
rising beyond. A stream of people walked there from the border, and others arrived by bus or truck. The people were thin and dazed and looked as though they were trusting themselves to destiny.

The name of the place was Khao-I-Dang. It was a camp for Cambodians who were opposed to the Khmer Rouge, and it was busy from the start. Westerners rushed around organizing construction and
emergency medical care. Cambodians who were strong enough cut down trees and cleared land with their hatchets. Thai labourers began building a hospital of bamboo, with blue plastic spread over the
rafters as a temporary roof. I presented a letter from the JVA to the UNHCR office, got my credentials and began working before the hospital had walls.

Like Sakeo, Khao-I-Dang had a full-scale emergency at the beginning, but unlike it, the patients were not Khmer Rouge, which to me made them more worth saving. Certainly there were more patients
than we could handle. We all worked very hard, going from one sick person to the next. When I glanced up I saw another clinic being built next door. Everywhere, buildings were going up, and still
refugees were streaming in from the border.

In the first week at Khao-I-Dang so many died that the bulldozers had to take time out from making drainage ditches to dig a burial pit. In the hospital patients lay passively with intravenous
tubes pouring glucose into their veins. The children looked twice their age, solemn and sad, with hollow cheeks and blank stares. The Western doctors took the emergency cases. I treated walk-in
patients, many of whom were suffering from mental problems as much as from malnutrition or disease. They had seen too much killing, lost too many relatives. They were depressed and suicidal, and
they wanted to go home. They needed medical care but they also needed counselling, and this was something the Western doctors could not give them. I talked to them in Khmer, consoling and
encouraging them. If they did not need any other medication I gave them vitamins and iron pills, which seemed to help them psychologically. I knew from my own case how important it was to overcome
depression.

I remember one patient above all others, a dehydrated twelve-year-old girl with falciparum malaria. She was an orphan, black staring eyes in a flesh-covered skeleton. A Western doctor had taken
her history and her blood, and the lab was running the tests on her. She was lying on the bed without focusing. She had rejected her food. There was nobody around her. I sat on the bed and picked
her up in my arms. She was nearly weightless. I talked to her in Khmer and got her to swallow a few spoonsful of food. She was conscious, though not by much, and I knew she was listening. Then her
head jerked back with a spastic gasp of air and it jerked back six or seven more times and then after one last deep breath her head sagged to one side with her eyes half open.

I could hardly work the rest of that day. The girl’s death was too close, too personal. She had lived under the same regime, seen the same clouds in the same sky. She had lost her family
and I had lost mine. When she died I was holding her in my arms, the same way I had held Huoy.

Around me were dying Cambodians, Western doctors working hard to save them and cheerful little children peering through the split-bamboo walls, calling out, ‘Okay, bye-bye.’

By December 1979 the World Food Programme, UNICEF and other organizations were delivering large amounts of rice along the border. Some of it never reached the refugees. The
Khmer Rouge took what they could, and so did the Khmer Serei warlords, who sometimes sold the rice they stole back to the UN so it could be distributed a second or third time. But even with the
stealing there was more food on the border than before, partly because of international aid and partly because of the black-market traders. Each morning a stream of Thais headed for the border
carrying everything from live chickens to vegetables to soft drinks to soap, radios and bicycles. The refugees produced bits of gold they had kept hidden for years, and deals were made. By this
time, also, the border camps had better medical care than in the months before.

In Khao-I-Dang itself the medical crisis eased. The patients who were strong enough to survive their first few days in the hospital generally recovered. They regained alertness, filled out in
body size, started to talk again. They got better quickly because they were physically tough – they had to be, to come this far – and because of Western-style medicine, which had far
better healing properties than the ‘rabbit turds’ and other herbal medicines of the Khmer Rouge era.

Western aid poured into Khao-I-Dang. The original bamboo shed where I worked became the adult medicine ward, run by the American Refugee Committee (ARC), of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Bamboo-and-thatch wards sprang up on both sides of a street, specializing in paediatrics, surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, feeding and rehabilitation and so on, each one run by a different
foreign voluntary agency. Thirty-seven of these agencies, most of them from the United States, France or Germany, ran programmes in Khao-I-Dang. Ironically they had come in response to photographs
and television footage taken in the Sakeo camp of starving Khmer Rouge. But I was glad they were there, and they surprised me with their energy and their good hearts. I had never seen people who
worked with such determination and who got so much done. Public-health workers, teachers, journalists, administrators, immigration officers, politicians – the Westerners kept coming and
coming.

And the Cambodians kept flowing into the camp. They cut trees down for firewood until the hillside was bare. They built shacks with bamboo and thatch and palm-leaf panels and the blue plastic
tarps. The shacks spread along a gridwork of red-clay roads with familiar names, like Angkor and Monivong and Phnom Penh. The population climbed to an official figure of 130,000, though the actual
figure was higher. At its peak, Khao-I-Dang was the largest settlement of Cambodians anywhere in the world.

At night the camp was unsafe. There were revenge killings, robberies and rapes. Thai villagers came over the fence at night to sell goods, and Thai soldiers fired at those who wouldn’t
give them
bonjour.
Under the dirt floors of the shacks were storage holes and tunnels. Most of the families in camp had something or someone to hide.

During the day, when the Westerners were there, the camp had a better character. It was a place for life to begin again, for bargaining at the market, for praying at the temple. Because of the
chance of resettling abroad, most of Cambodia’s old middle class and elite showed up in Khao-I-Dang. People who hadn’t seen each other since the fall of Phnom Penh met in the red-clay
streets and asked each other how they had survived. The camp was like a city. Besides hospitals it had schools, workshops, soccer fields, quasi-legal markets, cafes, tailor shops, a temple and a
tracing centre where people went to look at notices and photographs of missing relatives.