A gripping story from Cambodia

Loung Ung manages to beat the odds and survive the killing fields of Cambodia after the United States abandoned the war in neighboring Vietnam in 1975.

While all eyes in America are turned on the collapse of Saigon, Ung and her middle-class family begin to run from the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge army and its merciless genocide campaign. All the while, the world turns its back on one of the ugliest periods of the 20th Century.

Ung is five years old at the time, and spends the next several years starving and on the run before landing in a child labor camp to train as a soldier.

Her memoirs are told through a child’s eyes in her gripping 2001 book, “First they Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers,” that became a national bestseller and is now available in paperback.

The book is uncomfortable and depressing to read as Ung, her six siblings and their parents suffer under the weight of Pol Pot’s regime. Some 2 million of Cambodia’s population of 7 million die, with many being executed, before Vietnam liberates her country in 1979. Yet, this book is difficult to put down because of Ung’s brilliant ability to tell a story, even though it gave me the urge to vomit while reading some passages.

At one point there are so many corpses in her village that many decay into clumps of foul-smelling maggots because everyone else is too sick to dig graves. “There are so many dead people here,” she recalls in the book. “The people who die here have no relatives to grieve for them.”

Ung eventually flees with a brother to Saigon, where they are smuggled by boat to a refuge camp in Thailand. Eventually, a family in Vermont agrees to sponsor them as immigrants. She obtains a good education and later works with a campaign to rid her country of land mines, all the while being haunted by nightmares of her childhood.

At least some good comes out of this horrendous tragedy.

Temples smile on visitors

SIEM REAP, Cambodia – A Cambodian teenager guiding an elephant motions
for the animal to stop under a tree.

The boy straddling the elephant's neck plucks leaves from a branch and
places them between his lips, producing a reed instrument to entertain
the American tourists he is leading. The elephant ride is a majestic arrival to the ancient Angkor
temples worthy of the Hindu kings who ruled this mythical temple city
from the 9th to the 15th century.

"There are over 100 temples. Most are dedicated to Hinduists," said Sar
Kunthy, an English-speaking guide at the "Lost City" in Northwestern
Cambodia.

After being ignored and neglected for decades, the ancient city is
gaining broad attention from across the globe now that Cambodia is
enjoying peaceful times.




It had not been safe to visit this region of Southeast Asia since
before the Vietnam War because of land mines and civil strife.
Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime also looted the temples, and its guerilla
fighters used nearby jungles as hiding places until the early 1990s.
Cambodia's monarchy had returned to power by the time the regime's
leader, Pol Pot, died in 1998, bringing an end to one of the bloodiest
chapters in the country's history.

In 2004, the palaces and temples were removed from the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's most endangered
ancient sites list because millions of dollars had been spent to restore
the former Khmer Empire capital city. It was a monumental task just
removing the land mines, as well as jungle roots and vines that covered the crumbling,
sandstone buildings.



Archaeologists from several countries, including Australia and France,
have been putting the temples back together and studying the many
bas-reliefs and intricate irrigation system that served the more than
one million people who once lived here. The temples, some built to
honor Buddha, are situated across 248 square miles, making up one of
the largest archaeological sites in the world.

There are many mysteries to be solved and unknown sites for researchers
to discover and explore.

"They recently found a 2,000-year-old tomb," Kunthy said. "There are
still underground temples yet to be found. So far, we have not been
able to find the tool used to cut the stone."

The most famous temple, Angkor Wat, was constructed over three decades
in the 12th century during the reign of King Suryavarman II. It took
50,000 workers 37 years to build the world's largest religious
building. It stands nearly 190 feet tall and is reached by a walkway
crossing a nearly 600-foot moat.

The entrance to Angkor Wat is flanked by giant sandstone sculptures of
serpents representing fertility. Crocodiles, according to legend, once
lurked in the water to protect the city from invaders, Kunthy said.

Inside, visitors pass the world's largest bas-reliefs telling the
stories of Hindu mythology. Some of the intricate and beautiful
sculptures pay tribute to the Hindu god, Vishnu, whose four arms, mercy
and power preserved the universe and ensured cosmic order.

Organized tours also offer visitors a taste of deep-fried crickets sold
at roadside huts. Villagers string light bulbs over small plastic ponds
to catch the insects, that when fried, taste like cashew nuts, the tour
driver says.



Children by the hundreds pressure tourists to buy postcards, small
flutes made from bamboo or Tro Us, the traditional Khmer string
instrument made with a coconut shell covered with snakeskin. Their
sales pitch requires them to memorize and recite the capitals of each
of the 50 states to impress American travelers. A Cambodian police
officer, meanwhile, follows a crowd trying to sell his police badge
that looks like a cheap, plastic replica of the one he is wearing.

A band made of up musicians with missing limbs or eyes – land mine
victims – performs outside one temple where the jungle has not been
stripped away. The temple, Ta Prohm, can be seen as a backdrop in
Angelina Jolie's 2001 adventure movie, "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider."

Every family in Cambodia has at least one member who was either killed
or injured by land mines placed by Pol Pot's army or the Viet Cong,
Kunthy said.

"There are up to 200,000 people with land-mine injuries," he said.

Angkor is drawing more than a million visitor, Kunthy
said, creating the need for the rows of new luxury resorts in Siem
Reap.

(One day is not enough to see or appreciate Angkor, an hourlong flight
from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.)

Cambodia, looking back

At the close of the Vietnam War, Cambodia became caught in the violence of America’s long and bitter struggle in Southeast Asia. The Viet Cong had taken a stronghold in its jungles when then President Richard Nixon carried out secret bombing raids over the tiny country.
New York Times bureau chief Sydney Schanberg stayed behind in 1975 when helicopters evacuated the U.S. embassy in Cambodia’s capital city of Phnom Penh. The rest of the world was watching a similar scenario in neighboring South Vietnam when the U.S. abandoned Saigon. Few seemed to care about what was happening in Cambodia.
Schanberg’s gripping story about the slaughter of life that followed in Cambodia was told in the 1984 movie, “The Killing Fields,” starring Sam Waterston. It was based on the reporter’s book, “The Life and Death of Dith Pran,” a Cambodian journalist who worked as Schanberg’s assistant.
The story later inspired the novel of the same name as the movie. While the book’s pages have yellowed over time, it’s worth another read today, while America is “spreading Democracy” in a war that seems to have no end in sight in Iraq.
Schanberg’s dispatches to New York revealed how a tiny insurgent group led by the infamous Pol Pot had grown to include thousands of members following the 1973 bombings. The ruler’s Khmer Rouge party stormed Phnom Pehn in the spring of 1975, taking command of the country. It would become responsible for an estimated 1.5 million deaths.
It took several years for Vietnamese troops to quash the regime, only after Pol Pot’s army had littered the country with land mines. Today, Cambodia’s government majority is held by Communists. And its citizens are living a legacy from that conflict where just about every family has lost a member to land mines, or has a relative missing an arm, leg or eye to the devices.
It’s safe now to visit Cambodia, only after millions of dollars in foreign aid have been invested to sweep the landscape of mines.


(Land mine victims make music, above, at the ancient temples of Angkor Wat, Siem Reap, Cambodia)

War follows similar paths. Last month, former army Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski spoke at California University of Pennsylvania about the need to pull out of a misguided war in Iraq. While serving there in 2004, she said many Iraqis who initially supported U.S. soldiers went on to join the insurgency in hopes of change. This is a war, too, where journalists of Schanberg’s breed are not given the opportunity to send home the full story.