Ode To Comrade Duch

I wrote this in a rush after one of the killers in Cambodia's genocide, some 35 years ago, was found guilty of crimes against humanity, may he rot in hell forever and ever, amen. I've held this for days, trying to decide whether to post it. And I may take it down in a while.

Ah, what the hell. We're all friends here, right?

Besides, as the header on this blog says, it's probably all lies anyhow. I do that a lot, you know.

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From a side note on a blog entry from a few years back:

Side Note: Lovely country, Cambodia, and lovely people. Phnom Phen was an absolutely spectacular place, very classy, much less frenetic than Bangkok, and had some of the most gorgeous females in Southeast Asia.

'Course the Commies killed everyone and turned the whole fucking country into a pile of rotting corpses which, back then, we didn't know you could actually do. Huh. Live and learn. It was considerably less attractive what with the piles of skulls and the stink of death everywhere and whatnot, but the Khmer Rouge seemed to like it.

It's a near certainty that most (or more likely, all) of the soft beauties I knew back then wound up executed in the killing fields or starved or worked to death in the Commie agrarian utopia of Year Zero. I occasionally marvel that I'm one of the few left who knew it back when....what a strange life.....

This came up again a few days back when Kaing Guek Eav was found guilty of crimes against humanity for his little contribution in the affair.  For those of you living in a cave, he ran S-21, a Khmer Rouge prison facility. Over the course of two or three years, about 20,000 "enemies of the state" were processed through the facility, which was a high school before the Khmer Rouge took over. That's appropriate, as Kain Guek Eav, who in those days was known as "Comrade Duch" (pronounced, roughly, "Doik") was a schoolteacher.  He was also a very detail-oriented man:

Duch oversaw a precise department of death. His guards dutifully photographed the prisoners upon arrival and photographed them at or near death, whether their throats were slit, their bodies otherwise mutilated, or so thin from torture and near starvation that they were beyond recognition. The photographs were part of the files to prove the enemies of the state had been killed. Duch even set aside specific days for killing various types of prisoners: one day the wives of "enemies"; another day the children; a different day, factory workers."

--Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over

Below is a picture of Duch, a wanted man in 1999, who was found by a photojournalist living peaceably with friends and leftist supporters some twenty years after his foray into activism in the service of far-left political ideology. Shortly after this appeared, Duch was finally arrested for crimes against humanity, and has been in detention since.

Here are all the survivors of S-21. No, that's not a figure of speech. Literally. All of them. They were freed in 1979 by invading Vietnamese who were trying to bring down a neighboring government that was too radical for them.  Too radical for the Vietnamese only four years after the end of the Vietnam war. Think about that.

Seven. Out of about 20,000. That works out to about 25 deaths per day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks per year.  Now, that's only about 1 per hour, but you have to keep in mind that

1. It's a very small country.
   
2. This is only one pretty small prison, albeit the worst for "enemies of the State."
   
3. The Khmer Rouge were sticklers, bureaucrats so fanatical they'd fit in any Federal agency in Washington, and bureaucracy takes time. 

These bureaucrats insisted on filling in every check-block - in short, at this "facility," they had to have a confession, or they wouldn't kill, at least for political crimes. But, then, they always got confessions, and the end was always -- well, being killed. That's what S-21 was for.

From the first moment of their arrival at the place, prisoners were beaten, hanged, stretched, electrocuted, cut, starved, burned, and broken. If they weren't accidentally allowed to die of torture (which apparently happened with some regularity, but which annoyed the Khmer Rouge) and after they'd named enough names to make up the next shipment of "enemies," and signed enough documents or made sufficient statement to confess to whatever the bureaucrats needed, they were killed, usually by being beaten to death with axes, iron pipes, or farm implements.

Smaller children of inmates were spared all this, as even the Khmer Rouge knew they had nothing to confess other than the crime of their family connections - so, they were simply bayoneted, or more commonly, picked up by the ankles and bashed against this tree till they died:

Around the rest of the country, the Khmer Rouge were also busy little beavers. They wound up killing somewhere between 1.5 and 2 MILLION Cambodians in pursuit of an ultra-communist, classless society ideal - roughly 1/4 of the entire pre-Khmer Rouge population.

Another runaway genocidal success of the socialist concept of leveling society to the least common denominator. They join the millions killed in pursuit of that ideal in the gulags and fields and cities and towns across eastern Europe, and Russia, and China, and...

Of course, by then I'd long since been back in the States. None of it mattered to me any more, really. Did it?

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Nimol was somewhere between 16 and 20 years old. Ages of oriental women are notoriously difficult to pin down. She claimed to be 18, but that may be because at least sometimes she worked in the local bars, and needed to be that old. Or that young. Whichever.

She was an illegal alien, having migrated across what in those days was a porous border between Cambodia and Thailand, drawn by American dollars sloshing in knee-deep profusion around the bases up in the highlands. She was a house girl when I met her, making good (for Southeast Asia) money cleaning hootches and doing laundry for those GIs who were living off-base on the local economy. The big money was on the base, but she couldn't get papers - but she did OK, a lot better than she would as even a lower-middle-class merchant or peasant in Cambodia. She was a pretty girl, or at least seemed so to me, I suppose. Mostly I remember jet black hair and deep, dark eyes - she couldn't have been a fraction over 5'2, and was probably less. I doubt if she weighed 95 pounds soaking wet..

I met her at one of her bar jobs, serving up drinks (and probably more - that was common enough) at Mickey's, a dingy little place that was an often-times jumping off point for a night of partying downtown. I was in and out of town a lot, with work that took me into Vietnam and Cambodia and other, stranger places, and any time I was back, I'd see if I could find her. She could always make me smile. Her English was only fair, and occasionally difficult for her (although vastly superior to my Khmer/Cambodian,) but she had a subtle, gently wicked sense of humor which I doubt anyone else ever noticed.

I finally rented a place somewhere near Sawa Riang Soi Road - the exact location escapes me - as a touchstone, a single place that was always the same in a transient life, something more anchoring than a barracks or temporary quarters as I ghosted in and out of far-flung places. She became my house girl, coming every day, cleaning, doing laundry, polishing my combat boots. I liked her, and paid about double or triple what anyone else would, which was still a pittance on the American scale of wealth, but it was enough that she stopped working at the bars.

I invited her to eat with me one evening, and she turned me down. But she didn't the next time, or a week later, either. Soon, it was an end-of-day tradition, if I was in town - we would sit and eat together at home or in a local restaurant in a companionable and (in my case) fruitless quest to understand one anothers' languages.

Almost incrementally, a little more every day, every week, she was with me. Usually a dinner, sometimes followed up by a night out downtown in a smoky theater, laughing at one of the ubiquitous kung-fu movies chattering on screen in Chinese with Thai, English and French subtitles or a day visiting the outdoor markets, or walking along one of the klongs (waterways) as the peasant kids swam and splashed, or watching a sports team light incense and pray for victory at a shrine covered in the gold-leaf offerings of the faithful, or visiting and receiving the blessings of the yellow-clad monks chanting in their wats.

In the end we were a couple. We lived and played together, traveled together - were together. I don't think I loved her, not exactly, and I doubt she did me. But she was a friend when I needed one, and one of the gentlest people I've ever known and she created an almost transcendental calm space for us in the storm. To this day, some of the Buddhist principles she taught me turn up in odd corners of my life. The job took me away, for days, or for weeks, and when I came back she was always there, waiting patiently. At night she would curl against my chest and belly and legs and pull my arm over her and hold my large hand in both of her small ones as she slept.

Then one day, the day came, and she announced she had to go. It was inevitable, of course, and I'd always known it, as had she. She was homesick, and had gotten word that her mother was ill. She told me she would be back. I knew it was a lie. I was due to rotate back to The World in a couple of months, and even if she came back, I would be gone, back to my real life, about a hundred years older than when I left. So, I told myself, it was for the best.

At the end of that week, I took her to the bus station with everything she owned in two suitcases. And just before she got on the bus she grabbed me and hugged me so tightly it crushed the breath from me. It spoke volumes -- in a very PDA-unfriendly country, this sort of thing was frowned upon, and she had never before done anything so blatantly against custom. Then she got on the bus and waved goodbye from her window.

And she was gone.

She wrote me just once, about a month later, her awkward English making the read stilted, a caricature of unintentional formality as she struggled to explain that she was safe back home and was going to stay because it was where she belonged. She and her family made good use of the money she'd made, and things were going well, and she thanked me for that and for being good to her. The letter is long gone, but I'll never forget the words she finished with:

"I miss you very much and more.
" - Nimol -"

I'd only known her for three months. And I never heard from her again.

I could never figure out whether she and her family lived in Kâmpóng Cham Province or Kâmpóng Chhnang Province. To an English-hearing ear, they sound very much the same, and I never expected that it would matter whether I knew, so I never bothered to pin it down. Here's a map of Cambodia, with those two provinces highlighted in light green:

The red dots scattered liberally across the country are the locations of mass graves, filled by the Khmer Rouge as part of their utopian Year Zero vision of classless agrarian socialism Nimol is almost certainly in one of those killing fields. She had been out of the country, sending her family dollars from the enemy. She spoke English, which made her an intellectual. Her family was a bit ahead of their neighbors because of her industry.. She was, in short, exactly who Comrade Duch and his compatriots were hunting. There were more than enough neighbors, and informants, and others put to the question by the Khmer Rouge who knew her history. Her odds of going undetected were nonexistent, and she was not the type of girl who would have survived a cross-country death-march to get out of the country.  She would have stood silently, her head bowed in respect as the red wave swept over her and carried her away.  Most did.


I could find out nothing, of course. Even a casual inquiry through neutrals would have instantly marked her for death, if she weren't already. And once the Khmer Rouge were finally deposed by the Vietnamese, the country was in chaos.  Several years later, as sanity slowly reasserted itself in Cambodia, I did some checking, or what little I could, anyhow.

As far as I can tell, her entire family has ceased to exist, vanished without a trace. As has she.

Recently, a variety of historical groups have been gathering together the photographic evidence left by the Khmer Rouge and putting it online. I happened across it when I was reading a story about the prosecution of Comrade Duch. Included were pictures of the prisoners as they arrived at S-21. Men, and women, and children.

And as I looked, I clicked a link and opened a picture, and my heart stopped. There was Nimol, staring grimly at the camera.

Or was it? I opened another.  No, this one was her for sure.  And another. And another. And I realized that, even if she were known to be there, I would not be able to pick her out of this catalog of misery.

I think she may be one of the first three or four photographs. Or maybe not. Probably not. Most of the photographs were destroyed. Only a few thousand remain, so it probably would not be there. And, that assumes she was ever in Comrade Duch's care at all, and wasn't simply hacked or worked to death in one of the political re-education camps that became rotting mass graves.

The truth is, I don't know and I never will. There are so many... and age and time have eroded memory and details to a degree that surprises me. But they are all her in some sense, at least as it should affect us as humans who have seen such a good and fine thing destroyed.

In Our Next Episode: Something less graphics-heavy. And less grim.