When the War Was Over (83 page)

Pol Pot lectured us for more than one hour on the Vietnamese. He spoke without a script, without a scrap of paper, slowly, painstakingly building up the case against Vietnam and his prediction of the upcoming war, ending up with a fantastic scenario pitting Warsaw Pact armies against NATO troops on Cambodia's battlefields.

His voice was soft and reassuring: “We want only peace, to build up our country. World opinion is paying great attention to the threat against Democratic Kampuchea. They are anxious . . . they fear Kampuchea cannot oppose the Vietnamese. This could hurt the interests of the Southeast Asian countries and all of the world's countries. We would like to inform you about this situation. . . .”

This was the man who said he preferred to “live in the calm,” who, unknown to us and the rest of the world, had overseen the execution of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and who led a party that had brought about the deaths of at least one million more fellow citizens. A man who could wreak havoc in his country for the larger good only the party could perceive, and could do so with equanimity. Not once, during a violent attack on Vietnam and the Soviet Union, did Pol Pot raise his voice or slam his fist on the arm of the chair. At the most he nodded his head slightly or flicked his dainty wrist for emphasis.

He repeated himself regularly. Vietnam wanted to swallow up Kampuchea and make it a satellite in a Vietnamese-controlled Indochina Federation. To that end, Pol Pot said, Vietnam had become a satellite of the Soviet Union. “Vietnam went and kissed the feet of the Soviet Union and made a military alliance with the Soviet Union.”

This was proof for Pol Pot that Vietnam wanted to “internationalize” the dispute between the two countries.

By internationalizing the war, he continued, Vietnam could use Soviet troops and troops from the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe to invade and occupy Cambodia.

“Vietnam wants to rely on the international expansionist Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact,” he said. “But if they want to send their army to invade Kampuchea they have to send them from a long distance and they have to transport everything they need, because there is nothing in Vietnam.”

Pol Pot continued unraveling this worst-case scenario. When the troops arrived in Indochina they would have to worry about the reaction in Europe. “If they want to withdraw some of their forces for the Southeast Asian front they have to be careful, they have to worry. . . . Kampuchea and the Southeast Asian countries and countries throughout the world do not accept that
the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries can take possession of Kampuchea and Southeast Asia.”

The mind that spun the conspiracy theories at Tuol Sleng and the other torture centers had concocted an extraordinary vision of Polish tanks and Czech infantrymen advancing across the rice paddies of eastern Cambodia toward Phnom Penh—and farther. Pol Pot predicted that these Warsaw Pact countries would not stop there. They would march from Phnom Penh to Bangkok and on down to Malaysia and Singapore.

It was a new twist on the old domino theory and, perhaps, a blatant attempt at blackmail. Pol Pot said: “The Warsaw Pact also has to face NATO.” Somehow he hoped to tie his survival to the states of ASEAN and even NATO. Most remarkably, China was not mentioned once in this war game. NATO and ASEAN were raised as if they were on Cambodia's side. China and the weapons China had supplied did not exist in the scenario.

At this point Ieng Sary started pacing back and forth behind Pol Pot. He knitted his brow and clasped his hands behind his back.

The translators asked for clarification on the Warsaw Pact.

Dudman and I checked with each other to see if we had heard the same thing—Warsaw Pact, yes, and it was on our tape recorders.

Pol Pot went on to explain why Vietnam could not defeat Cambodia on its own. Vietnam, he said, “absolutely cannot succeed to take possession of Kampuchea . . . the Vietnamese cannot grasp the geography of Kampuchea, they have no [Cambodians] on their side to help them and they cannot carry their supplies inside Kampuchea.

“We have inflicted successive defeats to the Vietnamese . . . that is why they have to launch larger attacks against us,” he said.

Pol Pot ended with a word of advice to the rest of the world: “A Kampuchea that is a satellite of Vietnam is a threat and a danger for Southeast Asia and the world . . . for Vietnam is already a satellite of the Soviet Union and is carrying out Soviet strategy in Southeast Asia. The situation will be clearer and clearer . . . what are the criminal acts of Vietnam and the Soviet Union against Kampuchea, Southeast Asia, and the world.”

Our interview was over, our heads were spinning. A few months later there would be even more surprises when it became clear that U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski agreed with much of Pol Pot's last assessment.

We were driven back home, and Caldwell was taken in the same car for his interview with Pol Pot. He returned delighted with his time with Cambodia's leader. The two had spent most of the interview discussing revolutionary economic
theory, the topic of choice for Caldwell throughout the trip. Pol Pot had personally invited Caldwell to return the following year to measure how the revolution had prospered. He agreed as long as it would not coincide with the Christmas holiday, when he preferred to be with his family.

We all compared notes and celebrated. We had been in the country two weeks and it had seemed like two years. Time marched slowly because of the hours of sheer boredom as we waited for our hosts to release us from various guest houses, because of the hours spent in the car traveling without getting out to see the country as we would have liked, and because of the passivity imposed on us by our hosts. But we had had our interview with Pol Pot.

After dinner, Dudman went to his room to type up notes and Caldwell and I stayed at the table to have our last argument about Cambodia. Caldwell took what he considered the longer view and said the revolution was worthy. I said, on the contrary, I was more convinced of the truth of the refugee stories—which is what I eventually wrote. That night Caldwell tried once more to get me to change my mind. He compared Cambodia to Scotland—he was a Scottish nationalist—and said Cambodia feared Vietnam the way Scotland feared the English. I saw no relevance to such a remark, and he retired to his room with the prophecy that Scotland would be independent of England by the middle of the 1980s.

I cleared the table and was asleep by 11:00 P.M. My bags were packed and waiting near the door of my room on the first floor. When I awoke a few hours later my thoughts were confused. Why were dogs knocking over the garbage cans outside my apartment? But I was not in Washington. I was in Phnom Penh and it was the middle of the night. The crashing noise couldn't be garbage cans. I hadn't seen one in the city, had I? I jumped out of bed and heard another sound that made my stomach drop. The sound was familiar but it wasn't a garbage can; it was gunfire, and near enough for me to smell cordite as I pulled on my jeans and went out into the dining room.

I heard a moan. I opened the door from my bedroom and stepped out just as a young man barged in from the back door. We met in the dining room and stared at each other. He looked strange to me: His clothes seemed different, he was wearing a hat shaped like a baseball cap, he was Khmer, and, my God, he had two belts of ammunition strapped across his chest, an automatic rifle slung over one shoulder, and a pistol in his hand, and he was pointing the pistol at me. I thought he looked more frightened than I felt, and I felt as if my body would burst from fear.

I yelled: “No, don't shoot.” I ran into my bedroom, shutting the door but forgetting to lock it. I kept running, into the adjoining bathroom, and
jumped into the bathtub. I lay stomach-down inside the tub. I wasn't thinking, I was moving by instinct, and some part of me remembered advice during the war years when I was told that the tub was a porcelain fortress and the best protection any house offered from stray bullets.

The young man didn't follow me.

The tub was under the stairwell, and I could hear the young assailant tear up the stairs, his arms and ammunition jingling. The lights were out, and it was black. I heard the shots. I couldn't count them. Maybe half a dozen, maybe more. Then the sound of feet running down the stairs and then silence. For one and a half hours.

Who was shot? Was anyone hurt? Why didn't anyone come down the stairs? Where were our guards? There are no telephones in this country, no emergency telephone number to dial and summon the police. Every refugee story came back to my mind. I tried to stand up. Maybe someone upstairs needed help. I couldn't stand. I was out of the tub, though, and propped against the wall next to the door. I could see the moonlight through the window. Was this a coup d'état? Where were our guards? Where were our hosts? Why hadn't anyone come to rescue me? Were they coming back to kill me?

I stopped thinking of Cambodia; I would go mad. I thought of other places, other people; for some sixty minutes I escaped in my mind. I could not imagine what was happening.

There was an enormous thudding sound. Then the crash. Glass, broken and splintered, heavy footsteps in the front living room, clomping up the stairs, a heavy object carried down, then up the stairs. Then footsteps in my bedroom. The steps came close to the bathroom door. I watched the knob turn—it was Mit La, someone I knew, one of our aides who spoke no foreign language. I was still on my knees. He looked at me quickly, a gaze to see if I had been hurt, and he turned away. I grabbed his arm and asked in my pidgin Khmer about the American man and the English man, about Dudman and Caldwell. “Fine, fine,” he said. I grabbed his arm and asked him to stay. He turned on the lights and told me not to move. And then he left. I was alone with the whir of the air conditioner and no idea what was happening.

I could have gone to the bedroom, but I stayed crouched in the bathroom. Were the people rising up? Would I be considered one of the enemy? Had the Vietnamese attacked? Finally I remembered what I had been fearing all along, that I was trapped in the country during the invasion. No, that didn't make sense. Unless they thought we were . . . no, we were Caucasians, we couldn't be mistaken for Khmer Rouge officials. I had to stop thinking again. And wait again. After forty-five minutes I heard a familiar voice. Prasith,
with his mandarin manners, was knocking at my bedroom door, calling me. I came out trembling, asking about the others.

Dudman was fine. Caldwell was dead. Shot dead.

Nothing else in the city, only Malcolm Caldwell had been murdered, no uprising, no coup d'état, no Vietnamese invasion.

They brought Dick Dudman downstairs so I could see him and then asked the two of us to go upstairs and witness the assassination. There was Malcolm, lying on the floor in his pajamas, blood on his chest, his long auburn hair wild around his face. His eyes were closed. And at the threshold of his room was another body, a young man clothed in black who looked like the boy who had pointed his pistol at me. What was he doing there, dead, sprawled across the floor?

And where had Prasith and the guards been all this while? No answers. Please, gather your things and leave immediately, Prasith said. A young girl was waiting in my room, and we threw some papers I had left out into a suitcase. I purposely left behind the ax given me at a cooperative the day before. I did not want an ax from Democratic Kampuchea. I needed no encouragement to leave immediately. A car waited in the driveway, and we were driven to a house not far away, on the same street.

When we got out of the car, Dudman and I were told to go directly to a security officer who was waiting to question us. We both gave our stories. Dudman had woken up at 12:55 to the sound of gunshots and had looked out his window and seen a single row of men running down the street, maybe half a dozen. They scattered in the space between the houses. He went out to the hall and onto the balcony, where he saw more men running. He knocked on Caldwell's bedroom door and woke him up. Caldwell stepped out, the two men said a few words, and they heard more shots. Dudman could not remember what Caldwell did; he was too frightened. He turned to go back to his room, then saw a heavily armed man walking toward him. The man shot once, at the ground, and Dudman ran into his room, slamming the door, and stepped to one side. The man shot into Dudman's door twice. Dick slid to the floor and heard more shots, or at least he thought he did. He was too frightened at that point to be sure. It was my turn to tell the story. I remembered details—the sound of men running around the house after the murder, during that long wait. I heard them speaking softly in Khmer; I thought they were whispering commands.

After our interrogation we asked Prasith for answers. Why? What was happening? He said our “intruders” were probably still at large—other than those who had been shot. He said that two of them had been captured in the
yard. He also said there were three armed guards at our house when we were attacked. And then he left us, alone, in this house with the promise that we were well guarded. The two of us stayed up talking until the morning, when we were given breakfast and told to get in a waiting Mercedes. Ieng Sary had prepared a ceremony for Malcolm; afterward we were to board a plane for Beijing.

The ceremony was at our old guest house, the scene of the assassination. Malcolm's body was laid out in a simple wooden casket, surrounded by bouquets of flowers. They opened it so we could see his face, pale and quiet. We bowed our heads in silence, and some of us cried. We were only four—Ieng Sary, Thiounn Prasith, Dick Dudman, and me. And the guards and aides, of course. Sary blamed the Vietnamese in his short eulogy and expressed his country's deepest regrets for the death of Malcolm Caldwell.

Some of the last confessions tortured out of prisoners at Tuol Sleng concerned the murder of Malcolm Caldwell. Two Khmer Rouge cadre were forced to confess they were under orders to kill Caldwell—and not Dudman or me—in what appeared to be a plot meant to embarrass the regime on the eve of the war. Two of Ieng Sary's fellow deputy prime ministers were blamed for this supposed plot. One, Von Vet, had been arrested and executed in November. He was the superior of Pin, the commander we had met on the Vietnamese border. The other was Son Sen, the onetime member of the Marxist Circle in Paris. Son Sen was theoretically in charge of Tuol Sleng for Pol Pot. But somehow Pol Pot had circumvented him and now Tuol Sleng's officials were secretly building a case against Son Sen. Caldwell's murder was only part of that case against Son Sen. Only one thing remains clear after years of research. Malcolm Caldwell's death was caused by the madness of the regime he openly admired.