(Dobbs) They Had To Run

The killing fields: "Some victims were required to dig their own graves.”

The man said that when communist guerrillas came to his city, his family had to run. Not figuratively, literally. They had to run. 

He was a baby, so he is lucky, he doesn’t remember it firsthand, but what his mother and father told him after five years of inhuman horror by the Khmer Rouge guerrillas was that they came on so fast, capturing or killing everyone in their path, that his parents bundled him frantically into a scarf that they could wrap around their necks, a scarf they call a krama, and run. They escaped the guerrillas with their baby, and the shirts on their backs, and nothing more.

Then, they had to hide. As the man told us the story, it was as if he was telling someone else’s terrible tale, but that’s because his only memories are his parents’ memories. But that’s where the story turns even worse. Once he’d grown up, they told him that whenever he began to cry, they actually thought about killing him. Those were the stakes. They had only cruel choices: either they kill their baby and maybe evade the Khmer Rouge who were hunting for anyone who wasn’t on their side, or his innocent cries attract the hunters on their tail and they all die together. Or, they all get caught together and eventually die anyway from slavery, from starvation, from sickness, from imprisonment, from execution. 

A short history I read while there paints a picture of the fate from which his family was running:

“Approximately 1.7 million deaths took place during the Khmer Rouge reign in the late 1970s. (They) set about to turn Cambodia into a pure egalitarian society, free of capitalism and unwanted foreign influences. They forced everyone, including children, to work. Those who disobeyed were killed. Almost anyone who ‘threatened’ the regime was killed. That included political opponents, the educated and ethnic minorities. Executions were often carried out by young men or women from peasant families, using rudimentary weapons like hammers or sharpened bamboo sticks. The dead were buried in mass graves; some victims were required to dig their own graves.”

The barbaric era is known by three words immortalized by a Hollywood movie: The Killing Fields. And memorialized at a “Killing Fields” museum in the city of Siem Reap.

It was brutality on a par with Hitler, with Idi Amin, with Stalin. 

That’s what the man and his parents were running from.

Now, he was driving a small group of us to the airport outside of Siem Reap to begin our long trip home. Siem Reap is Cambodia’s second largest city, and its very name suggests the brutal legacy of life in this ancient and enduring place. Centuries before the civil war that left the Khmer Rouge free to rape the nation for a devastating half of a decade, the Cambodians fought several wars with their neighbor Thailand, then called Siam. After a decisive one, in the 16th century, they gave a new name to what was then their capital: “Siem Reap,” which means “Siam crushed.”

Now, Siem Reap teems with tourists and with good reason: it is home to the roughly 300 ancient temples known as Angkor Wat. 

Many were overtaken by the jungle in the almost thousand years since they were built— interestingly, once archeologists dated the trees that wrapped themselves around the stone walls after the temples were abandoned, they could figure out easily enough how long the temples have been around.

The Khmer Rouge used many of the ruins as hiding places, to conceal munitions and to conceal themselves. Luckily, some say inexplicably, they left the biggest and most elaborate alone and it stands today after almost a millennium as a reminder of the perseverance of the people of this nation. They have been attacked by the Thais, by the Vietnamese, by American B-52s, and by their own Khmer Rouge. And yet, as I wrote just a few days ago about forgiveness next door in Vietnam, the story here in Cambodia is a story of serenity.

Despite their history of hardship and their legacy of suffering, everyone has a smile for us and always returns our greeting of “suostei” (pronounced “sous-day,” which means hello) with one of their own, which I attribute to the pervasive peace they feel from their Buddhist culture. I first saw it (even felt it) a half-dozen years ago in Bhutan. It seems to center those who practice it. But that doesn’t mean their lives are easy. They never have been. While you can see impressive modernity in the centers of the cities of Cambodia, you don’t have to look hard to see the simple lives that people still live in the background of a developing nation. 

Simple, and limited. The man who drove us to the airport so that we could fly from Siem Reap to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, then to Tokyo, to Los Angeles, and on to Denver, has never seen the inside of an airplane, has never crossed beyond the borders of his country. 

Yet he is full of joy. Just as the trees swallowed the temples, the Khmer Rouge swallowed the civilization of his nation. But his parents ran. And he survived. 

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.