Survival in the Killing Fields (9 page)

Though the North Vietnamese mounted occasional rocket and mortar attacks on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, the war became immediate and real for me on Pchum Ben, the Buddhist day of prayer for the
souls of our ancestors, in 1972. Huoy and I were sitting on the floor of a temple, praying with hundreds of people around us, when the explosion came. Everybody ran from the temple in a panic. Out
in the street someone told us that the Chhruoy Changwa Bridge had been blown up. This was a huge, ultramodern bridge across the Tonle Sap River at the northern end of the city, built with Japanese
aid. We usually called it the Japanese bridge. When we got near the river we could see that the middle spans had fallen down. There was nothing left but immense standing columns and a long stretch
of empty water between. Then automatic-rifle fire broke out in another direction, inside Phnom Penh, where guerrillas were attacking a government military position. The government soldiers
counterattacked, and the shooting went on for hours.

The following day, the Lon Nol soldiers laid out the corpses of the North Vietnamese and stood over them like hunting trophies. The soldiers grinned proudly, as if they had successfully defended
Phnom Penh from the enemy. And when I saw their false pride I felt I finally understood what war is about. Men fight for glory or ideals, but the result is not glorious or idealistic. The main
result, besides the suffering, is that civilization is set back many years. Take the Japanese bridge as a practical example: when it was built, travel between Phnom Penh and north-central Cambodia
became much faster and easier than before. It was a great improvement. People like me could drive to the ruins of Angkor within hours instead of days. Merchants prospered from the new commerce. So
did farmers, who began to grow new crops for the Phnom Penh markets. Relatives visited one another more often. Everyone benefited. The bridge brought the country closer together. Now the largest
bridge in the country had been destroyed. We would have to cross the river slowly, on boats, if we crossed at all. Wars do that – they bring societies back into much more primitive ways of
living.

In the early war years I belonged to a student group that collected donations from private companies for victims of the war. As a representative of the group, I flew to Kampot,
where Huoy was from, and to other provinces. On most of the trips it was necessary to fly because the roads had been cut by the communists. The planes passed over vast stretches of apparently empty
forest and uncultivated fields. Once at my destination I distributed blankets, kramas, sarongs, candles, canned foods and other goods to soldiers and their families, and also to refugees.

Some of the refugees lived in camps run by the Red Cross and CARE and World Vision. But most came to the traditional places of refuge in Cambodia, which were the temples. They lived next to the
walls of the temple compounds in tents or covered oxcarts or else out in the open on mats woven from palm leaves. Dark-skinned women and children, they were away from their land and they could not
farm, though some of them planted garden vegetables. Their husbands and sons were off fighting for one army or another, for Lon Nol or the communists, and to them it really didn’t matter
which.

If a government official walked among them the women fell silent; but as soon as he left they started complaining about the government’s corruption and the incompetence of Lon Nol, and why
Lon Nol allowed the war to continue. They all wanted Sihanouk back, because they remembered peaceful times under him. They knew nothing of politics, of the foreign powers behind the war, the
Americans backing Lon Nol and China backing the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge. All they knew was they wanted the war over with, so they could go home and live in peace.

Besides bringing gifts to the refugees and to the soldiers’ wives, who followed the soldiers from one place to the next without adequate food or supplies, I worked in nearby hospitals and
clinics. There were always bandages to change and battlefield wounds to clean and suture. There were never enough doctors to give the soldiers sufficient medical care. But the refugee women and the
soldiers’ wives needed medical care just as much as the soldiers did, and got even less of it.

In rural Cambodia, traditional health care is provided by spirit doctors, who interpret dreams, cast spells and use magic, and by herbalists, who make their own medicines from plants. Sometimes
the spirit doctors are able to help their patients, because the patients believe in the treatments; and some of the herbal medicines are good. (The herbal cure for syphilis, for example, a strong,
nasty-smelling tea boiled from bamboo joints, black pepper and about a dozen other ingredients, is reasonably effective, though why it works is hard to say.) But traditional medicine has no concept
of infection and no real method of surgery. It is helpless against many of the diseases that are easily treated by Western techniques.

The field of women’s health is particularly backward in Cambodia because of all the taboos about the reproductive organs of the body. The refugee women and the soldiers’ wives bathed
in their sarongs, either in the nearest river or else simply by pouring basins of water over their heads. They were out in the open. Everyone could see them. So they washed their exposed skin, but
out of modesty and ignorance, they didn’t wash anywhere else. As a result they had a high rate of vaginal infection. When they got pregnant – some of them didn’t know exactly what
it was that got them pregnant – local midwives attended the births. Between uncleanliness, unskilled midwives, superstition, malnutrition, and lack of medicines, the infant mortality rate for
Cambodia was well over 50 per cent.

In the hospitals I saw numerous cases of leucorrhea, or white discharges, which seemed to be linked to a high rate of cervical cancer. There were many cases of damage done by rural midwives
– primitive Caesarean deliveries that didn’t heal right and became infected from herbs placed on the wound, cases of acute shock resulting from placental debris left inside the mothers
after childbirth and so on. It was terrible to see the suffering of those women, because most of it was unnecessary. And it was gratifying to help deliver a child and to see that both mother and
baby were healthy.

Back in medical school in Phnom Penh, I began specialized training in obstetrics and gynaecology. Besides the need for doctors of this sort, I had personal reasons for my choice that went all
the way back to the beating my father gave me as a boy. My mother was always kinder to me than my father. My sister Chhay Thao was always nicer to me than my brothers. In Samrong Yong and Phnom
Penh and other places I had many good male friends, but none of them meant as much to me as Huoy and her mother. I am a man with an affinity for women. A rock with a liking for paper.

The government required all doctors to work for it but allowed us to take other part-time jobs even before we got our degrees. I took one part-time job in the government’s military
hospital, a position that made me technically an army officer and gave me the use of a military driver, and another part-time job with a private clinic that did mainly obstetrical and
gynaecological work.

I stayed busy. From seven to nine o’clock in the morning I worked at the private clinic, near Tuol Toumpoung market, in the southern part of Phnom Penh. From nine to twelve noon I was on
rounds at the teaching hospital connected to the medical school. In the afternoon I attended medical school lectures. From six to seven in the evening I worked again at the clinic. After that I saw
Huoy if possible, but I was also on call at the military hospital. Sometimes I worked all night sewing up wounded soldiers at the military hospital, then went over to the private clinic to begin
the next day.

The war went on.

One Saturday I got a telephone call from an army general ordering me to go to a battlefield outside Phnom Penh to pick up wounded soldiers. The site was ‘Bridge 13,’ across the Tonle
Sap River and thirteen kilometres out along a road to the east. Because the Japanese bridge had been destroyed, the ambulance had to cross the river by ferry, and that was slow. On the road on the
far side, a motorcycle drove past us from the opposite direction, the rider wearing a green paratrooper shirt and carrying a camera bag. It was Sam Kwil, returning from a newspaper assignment.

Eventually we got to Bridge 13, a small wooden structure over a dry gully. We turned down a bumpy oxcart trail leading to a cornfield. The wounded were lying on the ground, moaning, bloody and
messy. The medics and I put them on stretchers and carried them to the ambulance. Then the North Vietnamese opened fire.

Brup! Brup-brup-brup! Brup-up-up-up-up!
They were hidden in the cornfield ahead of us.
Brup-brup-up!
Then the sound of automatic-rifle fire came from behind us, from a grove of
trees.
Brup-up-up-up brup brup!
This time it came from the gully, near the bridge. They had us surrounded on three sides. The Cambodian commander was lying on the ground near the ambulance.
He had allowed himself to get outflanked and now he was pinned down in the cross fire.

‘Hey, motherfucker! Get us out of here, will you?’ I shouted. ‘We’ve got wounded to take care of. Call in the air strikes, man! Hurry up! Get the planes here!’

The commander rolled over and looked at me with wide, frightened eyes. He saw I had a lieutenant’s uniform on, the same rank as his. Obediently, he lifted the handset of his radio and
began talking into it. Around him were his troops, hilltribesmen from northeastern Cambodia, waiting for orders.

I worked my way over to the lieutenant. He was about my age, a light-skinned city boy, probably from the Phnom Penh elite. He was still in shock, holding the radio. It was my first time under
fire too, but my gang fights as a boy had been good training. I pointed to the side of the cornfield nearest the bridge. ‘Have your men attack there, to clear the road. That’s the only
way we’re going to get the ambulance out. Now
do
it! Don’t wait any longer!
Do it now!
’

When I got inside the back of the ambulance the hill-tribesmen, dressed in motley combinations of army fatigues and baggy trousers, had gotten up from the ground. They were firing their assault
rifles as they ran forward barefoot into enemy fire. The driver turned the ambulance around to face the main road and lurched forward. As the North Vietnamese retreated, we bounced along the oxcart
trail. Then there was an explosion, and the back of the ambulance lifted up. It settled down and kept on moving. I felt a pain in my stomach, on the left side. The hole in my shirt was only a
quarter-inch wide, but there was blood around it and the stain was growing. I yelled at the driver to hurry. Whatever hit us, probably a rocket-propelled grenade, had also torn a hole two feet wide
through the metal side of the ambulance, next to the floor. I could see the dirt road surface through it. Then I could see the gravel of the main road, and the ride was smoother. The medics were
raising my shirt and wrapping gauze around my stomach and I was yelling for the driver to hurry.

Then there was a loud roaring sound coming toward us, getting louder fast. The medics were looking for shrapnel punctures on other parts of my body. By bending over I could see, out the front
windshield, the propeller-driven T-28 fighter-bombers coming in fast and low over the treetops. They roared overhead and toward Bridge 13.

When we got to the flat expanse of the Tonle Sap River we had to wait by the remains of the Japanese bridge. I was furious. There was a long line of cars and trucks and only one ferry. I cursed
the Vietnamese for blowing the bridge up, cursed the Lon Nol military for not protecting it, and most of all cursed the inept field commander back at Bridge 13. No leadership at all. I knew the
type. He probably felt ‘above’ his dark-skinned hilltribe troops. What brave, wonderful soldiers those hilltribesmen were, charging directly into enemy fire to open up the escape lane!
They had saved our lives. They deserved a much better commander than the one they got.

We finally got onto a ferry and made it back to Phnom Penh that afternoon.

At the military hospital, my colleagues operated on me. There wasn’t much damage, just the small puncture in my abdomen and minor cuts around my waist and left arm. Only four stitches. It
was nothing compared to the wounds on the soldiers coming into the hospital every day. Still, Huoy cried when she saw me, and I couldn’t help feeling the pride of the veteran soldier bravely
hiding his wounds. My driver, Sok, took me back to her apartment and she made a big fuss.

By this time Huoy was mine. Busy as we both were, we managed to see each other three times a day. First, in the early mornings, I drove from my bachelor place over to her
apartment for breakfast, which we usually took in a little restaurant on the ground floor of her building. After breakfast I took her to school on my scooter, a white 150 cc. Vespa, a
gentleman’s version of a motorcycle and a popular model at that time. If I couldn’t drive her myself, Sok took her to work in a car. Sok was friendly and respectful, a man who enjoyed
his undemanding role.

The second visit was lunch. At noon, when Phnom Penh was drowsy with heat, everyone who could went home. Huoy and I met at her apartment. There we changed from our Western clothes into
comfortable cotton sarongs, which we wrapped about our bodies, sighing with content. We relaxed, enjoyed each other’s company, showered and then ate lunch before returning to work at about
two. Finally, after work, unless the hospital called me in, I came over to Huoy’s for the third time. I ate dinner and stayed until it was time for me to go home to my apartment. We had to
follow the outward rules of Cambodian society, like staying in different places overnight, but we were together as much as we could.

And yet I was not truly hers. Not yet. I was not so easy to tame. There had always been a rascally streak in my nature, and my new medical specialty, obstetrics and gynaecology, gave me plenty
of opportunities. Put it this way: once my female patients visited me professionally, some of them began thinking about me personally. I had a lot of offers. I didn’t always refuse.