River Of Time

by Jon Swain

  On the Monivong Bridge over the Bassac River, the army’s 2nd Division under Dien Del, the general with whom I first saw combat five years before, had regrouped. Dien Del strutted up and down in his tiger suit, pistol at his hip, saying he would fight to the last. Looking at me squarely, he said that if taken prisoner he would ‘accept the law of the vanquished’.

  Nearby was the scene of the previous night’s terrible fire. The conglomeration of wooden houses, on stilts near the Bassac’s confluence with the Mekong, was caught in Khmer Rouge shelling. As flames spread through the flimsy structures, hundreds were trapped and burned to death. Many more tried to escape by leaping into the water. Naval gunboats, searchlights blazing, manoeuvred among the bobbing bodies, trying to fish out survivors.

  There was one place I had to see again before the city fell: the lunatic asylum in the industrial suburb of Tak Mhau, three miles away on the river’s edge, which I had visited a few weeks before. What I thought I could do about it, I did not know. It was one of the most heart-wrenching places I had seen. Here, in degrading conditions, lived a group of men and women of differing ages, put away because they had been classed as mentally ill. They were certainly very disturbed and incapable of caring for themselves. Yet, with the buildings trembling from the shock of rockets and shells, one had to ask who was more insane – these pitiful human creatures, one of whom clasped a simply carved wooden figure of a bird in his hand (I like to think it was a dove of peace) – or the soldiers killing each other outside?

  My attention was transfixed by a girl who emerged from a small dark room. She was young, scarcely grown up. She was ragged and filthy, but with one of the most enchanting faces I had seen. She moved across the little courtyard with all the gracefulness and guile of a wild animal. She was like a wolf-child. No one spoke to her. Everyone ignored her. When I held out a piece of baguette and some boiled sweets she snatched them from my hand like an animal; then, before she scampered away into a corner to eat them, she smiled. It was a smile to dream about for a long time. I could not find out much about her, except that she had been found demented in a ruined village somewhere along the Mekong. In the terror of that fighting, something in her mind had snapped; she had not uttered a word since.

  Now the war had caught up with her again, with a vengeance. As I headed towards the asylum, smoke was rising above the houses and refugees were flowing down the road. I was stopped by soldiers at a barricade and told that Tak Mhau had fallen.

  Back at the hotel, rooms were being emptied of arms and even of military souvenirs like rocket fragments, mortar fins, North Vietnamese pith helmets – mementoes amassed by guests over the years. Cambodian officers and other ‘non-neutrals’ who had moved in with their families and belongings in the hope of escaping Khmer Rouge reprisals, were being expelled by the Red Cross. They left reluctantly.

  The Red Cross had given everyone in their ‘neutral zone’ a list of rules forbidding, among other things, bathing in the swimming pool. It was thought that if there was a prolonged siege, the pool-water – turgid and soupy after months of neglect – might have to be filtered and drunk. The hotel, already out of bread and fresh eggs, was now out of ice. Monsieur Loup was profusely apologetic. ‘C’est la guerre,’ he said with a wring of his hands, as if anyone didn’t know already.

  I found the Scottish medical team in a bungalow attached to the hotel which they had converted into an operating theatre complete with half a dozen camp beds. They were exhausted, having spent the blackest day of the war at the Preah Ket Mealea Hospital. In two hours in the morning they had performed ten operations. ‘I didn’t have time to put on gloves or a gown. I simply splashed alcohol over my hands and didn’t even have time to change the instruments between operations,’ said Daly, the Glaswegian surgeon.

  The bungalow where the team planned to keep operating to the end was something else. Throwing open a cupboard, Daly claimed he had enough equipment to operate on twelve patients without having to pause even to wash up.

  By early evening, the scenes of chaos and horror were mounting. Attempts to confine refugees to the outskirts ceased and they were converging on the centre from all sides, pushing, shoving, jostling, desperate to escape the fighting.

  The trim walkways and flower-scented parks were submerged under a heaving mass of homeless families; weeping, lost children; pigs; ducks; chickens; all increasingly afraid. Part of this great crowd saw the Red Cross signs and, assuming our ‘neutral zone’ was a relief centre, tried to push their way in.

  I made my way to the converted volleyball court which served as a receiving centre for the wounded. It was overwhelmed. Uncontrollable shrieks and whimpers of pain rent the sour, fetid air. A dozen doctors and nurses were dealing with more than 700 cases. The chief medic was in despair. The wounded were stacked like logs, two or three to a bed. Blood streaked the floor. The bins overflowed with gory bandages and field dressings. A human leg poked out of a cardboard box where a surgeon had tossed it in a hurry. Its owner lay staring blankly on a stretcher crimson with blood.

  A soldier staggered in, glassy-eyed and exhausted, cradling his baby daughter in his arms. He laid her on a bed occupied by a soldier with a mangled foot – laid her gently, almost apologetically, trying not to jolt the soldier. He pulled back the red-checked scarf he had wound round her little head and his young face collapsed as he saw she had already died – a lump of rocket had torn a hole through her.

  I was overdosing on horror and headed back to the hotel, straight into a deeply unpleasant argument. A few of the French colons and journalists could not stomach the prospect of Le Phnom, this exclusive hangout of foreigners and rich Cambodians, being converted into a refugee camp. They were rudely assailing Red Cross officials for giving refugees shelter in the spacious hotel grounds.

  Refugees were being admitted, family by family, after Red Cross officials, with commendable patience, had searched their bodies and belongings for weapons. From under their clothes and from innocent-looking bundles, poured out a fantastic array of arms – rifles, pistols, knives, switch-blades, chains, even a knuckleduster. The searchers dumped them in a big wooden box for disposal later. This incredible collection proved that some were army deserters who had quit the battlefield to get their families to safety.

  Disarmed, they tramped through the high-ceilinged lobby into the garden on the other side, where they spread out little mats beside the pool and fell into exhausted sleep. A green plastic rod separated them from the handful of westerners dining at La Sirène, the open-air restaurant on the far side of the pool. ‘That’s what’s called apartheid,’ said a French journalist, who had been in Johannesburg. It was not a moment any of us felt proud of.

  The protests from the grands messieurs, as the Cambodians call westerners, continued. Finally, André Pasquier, the chief Red Cross delegate, lost his temper. Shaking with emotion and fatigue, he told them to shut up. ‘If you don’t like it,’ he said, ‘get out.’ Few went.

  Sydney, Pran and I did not stay at the hotel that last night. We were in the post office, filing, until dawn the next morning. The buildings shuddered from the bombardment but we were oblivious as we concentrated on our work as though possessed, knowing that at any moment communication might go down.

  About an hour before dawn, I spoke on the phone for the last time to Long Boret, the prime minister. He was a man without malice and a higher standard of morality than the members of the unscrupulous circus around him. Lon Nol had left for Hawaii with one million dollars. Even as the city was falling we saw a grotesque exchange of telegrams involving the Cambodian National Bank in this payment. Long Boret’s responsibility was awesome. He had been determined that the city would not surrender, although its position was hopeless now that America had discontinued its airlift of food, fuel and ammunition. ‘I will stay and starve to death with my people,’ he had said, but I found him in bad shape, weighed down with despair and exhaustion. ‘The military situation has become impossible. We have no more material means. We f
eel completely abandoned,’ he said. ‘My first objective now is to end the suffering of the people.’ By this time, gun and rocket fire made it possible to communicate only in shouts. Abruptly, I was cut off.

  An hour later, the city fell. The chief telex operator, who had worked through the night to send our last dispatches to the world, learned that his little girl had been killed by artillery fire near Chamcar Mon Palace and his wife had been fatally injured. Dressing hurriedly, uttering not a word, he went out. As he passed us, a limp figure in the sunlight, we averted our eyes.

  Quickly, we moved back to join the other foreigners in the hotel. The crackle of small-arms fire came closer. From a balcony off Sydney’s room on the second floor, we saw soldiers who had thrown away their guns mingling with the refugees streaming into the city from the north. A squadron of armoured personnel carriers regrouped around the hotel. They had come from the collapsed northern front. It was unclear whether they would fight or surrender.

  The insurgent radio broadcasting a message ‘We are ready to welcome you’ was the first sign that the Khmer Rouge were entering the city. Then Pascal, a Red Cross doctor, burst into the hotel lobby, saying insurgents were near the French embassy half a mile down the road. As he raced upstairs for his passport, mortars fell a few streets away. The din of battle mounted to a crescendo and the refugees in the hotel grounds huddled closer together. The government radio began playing French military music, presumably to squeeze a last drop of patriotic fervour. Then it went off the air.

  People in the street began to run. White flags sprouted everywhere – on APCs drawn up outside the hotel, on houses in the northern sector of the city which the Khmer Rouge had penetrated. Yellow alamanda blossoms covered the headlamps of the APCs; after five years of war the army was packing up. Troops took out the clips of their M16 rifles and waited quietly in the sunlight.

  With fighting noises still coming from the southern part of the city, a crowd gathered on Monivong boulevard outside the French embassy. It stretched across the road and in the centre of it was a young man in black with a flat round face and a white scarf. The soldiers and townspeople around him joined hands, hoisted him on their shoulders and bore him triumphantly to an APC. Western photographers and a mixed group of soldiers and civilians climbed up with this apparent Khmer Rouge soldier. The APC moved down the boulevard, past the Hôtel Le Phnom, seeming to carry a message of peace.

  For a moment there was hope. Then a mortar crash tore the air, and there was a splash of smoke up the road. Another mortar bomb burst, closer. A machine gun knocked harshly. The APC slewed round, and roared back the way it had come. We scattered. The Khmer Rouge were welcome in one part of the city but met with force in another.

  For twenty minutes, fighting swirled through the streets round the hotel. A Red Cross stretcher team rushed a wounded soldier through the lobby filled with people cowering from stray bullets. Hardly more than a boy, he had a small, black hole in the side of his head.

  In the bungalow-cum-operating theatre, Daly took one look and shook his head. ‘He has a bullet in the brain. There is nothing we can do.’ The soldier coughed up a stream of blood. His hands fluttered. With a shudder, he died. Daly and his team moved on to the next casualty, a civilian with a bullet in the lung.

  There was a commotion outside. Prince Sirik Matak was among scores of refugees trying to fight their way into the hotel. Red Cross officials refused him entry on the grounds that his presence would endanger the lives of the others. Matak, Sihanouk’s second cousin and a career civil servant, had played a key role in the 1970 coup against the prince and became deputy prime minister under Lon Nol. He was one of the seven ‘arch traitors’ of the Lon Nol regime, condemned to death by the Khmer Rouge. He spoke briefly to reporters about the fighting. ‘You see, these are personalities who are determined to resist. We do not want a communist government here.’ In evident distress at being turned away, he left and was granted asylum in the French embassy, but first he handed out a copy of the letter he had written to John Gunther Dean. The ambassador had invited Matak to join the American evacuation the previous Saturday with other Cambodian leaders. He had refused and this is what he wrote:

  Dear Excellency and friend,

  I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion.

  As for you and in particular your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection and we can do nothing about it. You leave and it is my wish that you and your country will find happiness under the sky.

  But mark it well that, if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad because we are all born and must die one day. I have only committed this mistake in believing in you, the Americans.

  Please accept, Excellency, my dear friend, my faithful and friendly sentiments.

  Sirik Matak

  By and by, the fighting died down in the northern part of the city, and people emerged into the streets. They wore chromas, the checked scarves which are a symbol of friendship in rural Cambodia. Soldiers of both sides rode through the streets on the tops of half-tracks. ‘Hey, Mister Journalist, take our picture,’ they cried. Everyone seemed filled with joy at the end of the war and the dream of peace and freedom.

  We saw a smiling monk in saffron robes riding in a jeep with a guerrilla and were told through an interpreter that the new regime would respect Buddhism. Khmer Rouge soldiers, hardly more than boys, were riding around in a host of vehicles including captured ambulances. I walked the quarter of a mile to the post office, only to find it deserted, its communications down. Outside, in the Provence-style square, a Khmer Rouge soldier pedalled by on a bicycle. He wore the usual soft Mao hat, green fatigues and hanging field glasses. The pistol on his belt indicated he was an officer. He smiled politely, but refused our gifts of oranges and cigarettes. ‘The corrupt and the traitors will have to be punished,’ he said. ‘But I can assure you there will be no bloodbath.’

  Out at the Olympic Stadium, senior army officers and politicians of the collapsed regime were making their getaway, among them General Sak Sutsakhan, the Supreme Commander, and General Dien Del. The helicopters had been standing by for the last thirty-six hours, fuelled and ready to go. They clattered into the air as the first Khmer Rouge pushed into the stadium, bazookas and rifles at the ready, and flew to Thailand. Notably absent was Long Boret. One story claims that, at the last moment, he left the stadium with his wife and went back to collect some valuables she had left at home. The helicopters had to leave without them. I like to think, however, that he was sincere and, true to his word, stayed behind to hand over the city to the victors and end the bloodshed.

  Intense fighting continued in the west near the airport, where the crack paratroop brigade was making a final stand. A key figure was Borella, the ex-legionnaire. Powerfully built, larger than life, Borella had been wounded three times in the past six months. He lived and fought with the Cambodian paratroop brigade for very little money. I had met his sort before in the Foreign Legion, very much the adventurer, a man without a country, whose first love was soldiering. He met an agonising end the following year fighting on the Phalangist side in the Lebanese civil war. He was captured and tortured to death. Borella helped direct the last defence of the brigade headquarters on the edge of the airport. When it finally crumbled in the late morning, he shed his uniform. His girlfriend fixed him up with some civilian clothes and, resourceful to the last, he sought refuge in the French embassy. At the Para HQ, the Cambodian brigade commander shot himself.

  It now seemed tolerably safe to wander around the central part of town. The Khmer Rouge, who were firmly in control, seemed a friendly bunch. With Sydney, I headed for the Ministry of Information, where we had heard there was a gathering of Khmer Rouge military leaders.

  A curious sight greeted us. Holding court on the gr
ass outside the long, colonial-style building, was a young man in black, with a handsome, angular face. In impeccable French, he introduced himself as Hem Ket Dara, son of a former minister, and described himself as the commanding general of a nationalist movement that had ‘liberated’ the city.

  He was twenty-nine, had been educated in Paris, had a French wife in France, and had been in Phnom Penh since 1971. He was not a communist. He had the arrogance of a playboy. There was an air of fantasy about him and it was inconceivable that he could fit the tough mould of the Khmer Rouge. Even his black uniform looked as if it had been tailored by Yves Saint Laurent. He issued orders all the time, telling the young, black-clad soldiers around the building to move back and stay still. When they pushed forward again, he brandished a pistol in Hollywood fashion, which elicited only token respect.

  He boasted that he had taken Phnom Penh with only 300 men and had suffered no casualties. Then, dismissing us with a wave of the pistol, he told us to listen to broadcast announcements. ‘The city must be reorganised before you can send dispatches,’ he said. But he and his soldiers struck a false note. They were too neat and friendly to be genuine Khmer Rouge straight from the hills.

  Now, worrying and conflicting reports began to circulate about the identity of these units swirling around town with guns. It seemed there were already at least two factions: those in the north (including the amazing Dara) appeared friendly. Reports from the southern sector of the city, where sporadic fighting still continued, however, told of a very tough force which had moved in and was busy digging foxholes. It was pushing refugees out of the city and seemed to be deploying for battle.

  The implication was that the troops in the north were nationalist; those in the south hardline Khmer Rouge. This was probably too simplistic. Dara and his merry band were opportunists who had misjudged the mettle of the Khmer Rouge and were trying to usurp power before they arrived.