Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I wanted to read about Pol Pot. I found a bookstore near the national museum and swapped my copy of Robin Lane Fox's life of Alexander for Philip Short's life of Pol Pot. On the shelves, to my surprise, were copies of my own books: bootlegged copies, smudgily printed, looking homemade.

"Where was this printed?" I asked, picking up a copy of Dark Star Safari.

"It's a photocopy," the clerk said, though it was a chunky book, more like a bound proof copy than the finished article.

"Why do you go to all the trouble to photocopy this book?"

"Because it's a bestseller."

"People read this guy?"

"Oh, yes, sir," he began, but before he finished I took out my driver's license and showed it to him. He held it in two hands, studied it closely, then shrieked—a gratifying reaction. Then he became anxious and said, "Are you angry with me?"

"Of course not."

His name was Cheah Sopheap. He asked me what I was doing in Cambodia. I took a bootlegged copy of The Great Railway Bazaar

off the shelf and showed him the endpaper map. I had wanted to travel from Thailand through Cambodia in the early seventies, I said, but it had been impossible.

"It was a bad time then," Sopheap said. "The city was empty. All the people had been sent to the countryside."

"So there was nothing here?"

"Just prisons."

"And Pol Pot was making trouble for you?"

"Pol Pot was nothing," he said. He made a face and flicked his finger as though at a gnat.

To the world, Pol Pot was a moon-faced monster, so this was a surprising answer. Sopheap explained, saying that before the coming of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian society had evolved to the point where the rich were ostentatiously wealthy and the rural poor simply desperate. The countryside, especially in the east of the country, had been ruined by the war in Vietnam, which had spread to Cambodia. Khmer Rouge was what outsiders called Pol Pot's organization. In Cambodia it was known as Angkar, the Party.

Sopheap did not say so, but Nixon and Kissinger had secretly approved an invasion in 1969 and the carpet-bombing of Cambodia, in the ruthless and irrational belief that it would help win the Vietnam War. For the next several years, without any authorization from Congress, B-52s from Guam flew thousands of bombing missions. This outrage, accurately documented by the journalist Seymour Hersh, included the dropping of half a million tons of American bombs and the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars to prop up the American-funded regime of Lon Nol. The blitz only made the Vietcong more resolute, and the bombing created havoc in Cambodia, killing an estimated 600,000 people and driving the peasants into joining the Khmer Rouge.

"The poor people hated the rich and hated the Americans who were killing them," Sopheap said. "They were so angry! And when they came to Phnom Penh they did anything they wanted."

He meant the men in black pajama-like uniforms, who appeared in the capital in April 1975 and took over, expelling all the residents, looting their houses, and sending them into the countryside. These guerrilla soldiers had been living in the jungle, fighting and scavenging, some of them for many years. They were hungry, battle-weary, and resentful. A large number of the more recent recruits were in their early teens.

"They liked having power and killing. Pol Pot was not the only reason. The people themselves made the terror."

"What happened to your family?"

"My father survived because he was a farmer. He was lucky. He knew how to make sugar from palm trees."

Sopheap's father would have been shot. But in the midst of the terror and starvation, the regime introduced "dessert day." Rice soup was all that was available for people, but on dessert day, three times a month, it was decreed that the soup was to be sweetened with palm sugar—cane sugar was unavailable. Sopheap's father was able to provide homemade palm sugar. So he was not shot.

"I was sick," Sopheap said. "My body was swollen big. I almost died. It was a terrible time. You've seen the museum and the killing fields?"

***

THE KILLING FIELDS Sopheap meant were only ten miles from the city. The place was locally known as Choeung Ek. It was one of many. There were 343 other killing sites spread across Cambodia, and numerous torture prisons too, from the Khmer Rouge period, 1974-1979. By then the United States was tacitly supporting the Khmer Rouge government, because of our humiliation at having been driven out of Vietnam. By allowing the Chinese to arm Pol Pot, we could hobble the Vietnamese, who were fighting the Khmer Rouge with Soviet artillery along the Cambodia-Vietnam border.