The Killing Fields of Cambodia

The next morning when I met DJ Camera in the restaurant downstairs he was not so chipper. He greeted me with a genuine hotel, but his eyes were vacant and he looked uneasy. I thought for a moment and wondered if our destinations for the day had him uneasy and morose.


No.

It was the booze. DJ Camera was royally hungover. I wondered if maybe he was still drunk.

I was greeted by the manager, smiling just as much as the night before.

“Hello, Thomas!” He said. “DJ has lived through the night, I think.”

I ate a quick turkey sandwich and was soon in the back of a silent DJ Camera’s tuk-tuk, flying through the dust of Phnom Penh.

The Memorial Stupa contains thousands
of skulls.

We drove through the cluster of hotels and guest houses that populated the area next to the Chan Chhaya pavilion. I bounced in the back as DJ Camera picked up speed, mumbled something I didn’t catch, and launched us across a couple of lanes and into the frenetic every-way traffic fiasco that is every country in Asia.

Tuk-tuk is a good way to see a country. I used to think buses were the best means of efficient transport to see a country but tuk-tuks have this way of putting you directly into the action. For example, my eyes were constantly watering from the dust that was kicked up by the traffic. Also, as DJ Camera cut-off, squared-off, and otherwise basically played an extended game of Chicken with every driver in Phnom Penh, I felt a very real fear of death; something like a bus might have denied me this great cultural experience.

After a time the traffic thinned and the buildings on either side of the road descended in structural integrity until they were nothing more than shacks made of salvaged aluminum. The presence of shoes became rare.

We passed vehicles full to the tipping point with wood, goods, junk or people. Every so often we would pass green fields marked with giant puddles and the burnt-sienna mud and a cluster of water-buffalo. Kids walked and laughed in groups and bikes whizzed by leaving trails of dust and exhaust.

We crossed a river that was edged on both sides with houses on stilts, made largely of blue tarps and mismatched bits of wood, metal, and cloth. They stood on stilts and resembled tree-houses if you could put extreme poverty out of mind for a while.

--

Mass graves.

Choeung Ek. Outside the ticket booth a handful of amputees begged money or stood in the shade. It was extremely hot so mostly they just hung around in the shade.

At first glance, Choeung Ek doesn’t seem to earn its other names. It feels like you are buying entrance into an old orchard, or a second rate park. Off in the distance stands a Buddhist stupa that reaches to the sky. It looks as though it might be a kind of museum. Signs in Khmer and English dot the trails next to these pool-sized divots that cut into the earth. Grass has grown over these holes so their presence is muted, not shocking but unnatural.

The Killing Fields.

That so much of Cambodia’s tourism, particularly in or around Phnom Penh, is directly related to such a horrible time in the country’s history says something about their willingness to face such a nightmare without balking. The atmosphere at Choeung Ek, the best known of many Killing Fields is subdued, quiet, a bit creepy, and sad but it also has this feeling of “look at this, look at what has happened here, how?”

Victims of the Khmer Rouge.

I walked around Choeung Ek because that is really the only thing you can do there; it isn’t a place you really enjoy or are entertained. Groups of people were doing the same thing as I, some with guides who spoke in whispers.

The stupa was full of skulls. Thousands of skulls. They stare out of a central tower in the center of the structure and from the walls opposite. To walk in the narrow path around the stupa is to be flanked on either side by the faces of horrible deaths.

Estimates say that well over a million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot. Many of those people died in places like this and were buried in mass graves in places like this. Many people died in this place.

The divots in the ground were mass graves. Gnarled trees reach from their sloping edges, their shapes perverted by the uneven ground. Next to the trees are displays of what happened here and what is still happening as a result of rain and earth’s tendency to regurgitate what is put into it.

Remains that came to the surface.

There used to be a chicken coup in my back yard. It was destroyed a long time ago, but still pieces of glass come up through the dirt when it rains. Here, in Choeung Ek, torn strips of faded clothing and bones are still coming to the surface and are laid to the side. The bones at this tree belonged to a child, says the sign.

I walked through the woods for a while. The entire park was silent. At the back side there was a pond and then a barbed wire fence marking the end of the property. Shoeless and shirtless boys begged with their hands reaching through the links. Later I listened as a guide told his charges that he lost his whole family to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in these fields.

“Sad place,” said DJ Camera when I returned to his tuk-tuk. “Now, we go to school.”