We were forced to sleep outside in the fields. I would stare at the stars and recall Cambodian fairy tales my mother told me. One I particularly liked. A hen found out the farmer was going to kill her the next morning. So she told her chick what was going to happen. She asked him to be strong. She said she would go to heaven and become a star the chick could look at every night. The next day, when the farmer killed the hen and threw her into the cooking pot, the chick jumped in after her. They both became stars. Whenever I wanted to be with my mom I’d look up at the stars.
I returned to the village three years later. I was really shocked. There were about 1,000 families living in that new village when I left. When I returned, it was almost empty–like a ghost town. I saw people dying and heard people crying. Even the huts were falling down. Hundreds of people had been killed, had starved to death or had died from lack of even the most basic medicine. Just before I reached home one of our neighbors stopped me and told me that when the Khmer Rouge took me from the village, my mom had left a watermelon in the field so we could eat it when I returned. It rotted on the vine because she refused to pick it while I was still away. I was touched. But then I heard the bad news. The local Khmer Rouge had killed my sister, her husband and their young daughter. No one knew how they died. We only knew that the soldiers came to my mom’s house and took all three of them away one night. They never returned. They were killed because they had an education. My brother-in-law had been educated abroad as a mechanic and my sister was a schoolteacher. That was their crime.
So I’m gathering all this evidence–documents, photos, eyewitness testimonies–for a trial. I want the law to decide whether what they did to my sister and to 1.7 million other Cambodians was wrong or right. Without a trial, Cambodia cannot become a state of law. If those Khmer Rouge who are responsible for so many deaths go free, unpunished, how can there be any justice in our society? I’m also gathering and preserving these histories for the younger and future generations so they will understand what happened here and not allow it to happen again, anywhere. But perhaps you had to live under Pol Pot to understand the full horror. We always say we are afraid of nightmares. Well, Pol Pot was your worst nightmare that became a horrible reality.
WASHINGTON, APRIL 29, 1975:As Americans and South Vietnamese fled by helicopter from the U.S. Embassy, PresidentGerald R. Fordwatched in anguish.
You have no idea how painful it was. The secretary of defense, Jim Schlesinger, had wanted us to get out of Saigon a week earlier. And then we had Graham Martin, the ambassador. He wanted to stay until the North Vietnamese shot him. So we were torn, Henry Kissinger and myself, between the two extremes. [I decided that] we would stay as long as possible to get all our military and as many of our civilians and as many as we could of our South Vietnamese allies out. I think we made a very heroic effort and did the best we could.
