River Of Time

by Jon Swain

  The next day life suddenly got easier. The Khmer Rouge seemed to be loosening up. Presumably this was because the Cambodians we were harbouring had left. They brought us water from the Mekong and several pigs in the back of a lorry. Sapper killed the first, knocking it out with a neat axe-blow, then slitting its throat with his jungle knife. Daly, the surgeon, used his surgical skills to clean it. There were eighty-two kilos of meat for more than 600 people remaining in the grounds.

  But tempers were fraying. The squabbling over food was fantastic. Some people had a lot; some almost none. The officials in the chancery were eating turkey, and at one point, I saw a Frenchman toss a steak to his dog. The Calmette doctors had a sideboard stacked with food and booze which they refused to share. We labelled them petits Français and they hated us for it. I remember Albert Spaccessi, patron of the Café de Paris. He had cooked for Général de Gaulle on his controversial 1966 visit to Phnom Penh (when the general delivered an inflammatory speech about the neutrality of Indo-China which outraged the United States). Now Spaccessi was lamenting that he had recently re-equipped his restaurant with a chic new dinner service for one hundred place settings. ‘What will become of it?’ he moaned. Poor Spaccessi, his outsize tummy carried an enormous scar from an operation to cut out kilos of excess fat. He was feeling very lost indeed. I often wondered what became of him and learned later that he ran a restaurant in Marseilles where he died of diabetes.

  There was increasing danger of disease. We had dug latrines in the grounds. But there were already more than one hundred cases of diarrhoea. Non-existent sanitation had turned the compound into a disagreeable collection of faeces. Dr Henri Revil, the médecin-chef of Calmette, was constantly cabling Paris about the growing health problem. There was already a case of hepatitis. As there was no water, we collected the drips from the air-conditioners and drank those. And when it rained, we stripped off and washed. I remember a particularly heavy downpour when, with one accord, we rushed outside, threw off our clothes and stood naked in the rain. Bizot ran naked through the grounds, with Avi, his boxer dog, barking and gambolling at his side. It was a refreshing and spontaneous act that eased the tension. We gave him a thunderous round of applause but he told me later that some of the French had complained about his frivolité.

  It was gratifying also to find that Khmer Rouge xenophobia encompassed even comrades from the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. They expelled Herr Stange, the East German diplomat. I watched him climb down from his white embassy van loaded with embassy furniture he hoped to take with him. The French ordered him to leave it outside. He was dishevelled and very angry. He had been on the last flight into Cambodia with me before the city’s fall, and I had found his enthusiasm for the imminent Khmer Rouge victory and the humbling of America nauseating. Now he ran over and grasped my hand. ‘I never expected this. We must have been mad to come back,’ he said. ‘How can they do this to me?’ Stange had several times refused to quit his embassy. ‘But today,’ he said, ‘a Khmer Rouge with four pencils in his breast pocket – a colonel, I know these things by now – was very firm, and gave us two hours to get out. I told him he knew very well that for five years East Germany had recognised his government, but he just shrugged. I understand. He is a peasant and behind him is another one. There is no use to argue with such people.’

  Stange was billeted with us. When he saw our overcrowded room, he was so downcast it was funny. We introduced him to Martin Bloecher, his West German ‘countryman’. We told him this was a workers’ camp and he could work in the kitchen, sweep, dig latrines. He was not amused. But that night he became more affable and chattered away with Bloecher while the whisky flowed and some of us smoked grass.

  There was a stir at the front gate. Jean-Pierre Martini, my French Maoist friend, arrived with Danielle, his pretty wife, after five voluntary days with Khmer Rouge forces in the countryside. True believers, when the city fell they had donned black pyjamas and Ho Chi Minh sandals and joined the mass exodus from the city. About ten miles out, they were stopped at a Khmer Rouge roadblock and sent back. Now they wanted sanctuary at the embassy. As the doors swung open, Migot, the Frenchman guarding the gate, saw them in Khmer Rouge uniform and exploded with rage. He walked up to Jean-Pierre and slapped him hard on the face with a crack like a gunshot. ‘Enlevez-moi ça,’ he shouted. The pair of them were forced to strip off their black pyjamas on the spot and put on western clothes.

  I could not get much sense out of Jean-Pierre as he was so awestruck by developments. But he assured us as he lit up his usual joint, that the Khmer Rouge smoked grass too. He said they had sealed off each section of the city for searching. They did not take risks, but fired grenades and B40 rockets into buildings where snipers might still be hiding. If they could not search a building or street efficiently, they burned it down with incendiary grenades, he said.

  Our forced confinement continued for another eight days. There were more times of tension – one when Khmer Rouge soldiers accompanied by French officials carried out a spot check of all our belongings. They claimed there was a spy in the compound with a secret radio transmitter. But a search of photographer Denis Cameron’s bags revealed a surprise: a bundle of French embassy silverware – coffee pots and bowls – tumbled onto the floor. He had taken them as souvenirs. The French were incandescent with rage. ‘People are dying while you are lining your pockets,’ Dyrac screamed. It was wrong. But Denis’s justification was that the silver would be left behind anyway when the embassy was finally abandoned; it was better he should have it than the Khmer Rouge. Cameron had stayed behind to try to arrange the evacuation of 500 orphans to Australia. For much of the time, he sat morosely in his corner, obsessively killing flies with a spray. The spray choked Rockoff’s lungs and sent him into coughing fits, but he could not dissuade Cameron. Rockoff’s heart had stopped when he had been seriously wounded the year before, and he owed his life to prompt surgery by a Swedish Red Cross team. ‘You are going to die,’ we joked as he spluttered and coughed. ‘It won’t be the first time,’ Rockoff said.

  On Wednesday, 30 April, a first convoy carrying about 600 foreigners left for the Thai border. The Khmer Rouge announced the evacuation plan at the end of a three-day special national congress. The French had offered to provide transport planes, but the Khmer Rouge refused. The congress also said Cambodia’s new rulers would countenance no foreign interference, either military or humanitarian – sad news indeed for the many tens of thousands they had forced at gunpoint into the countryside, who had been dependent on international relief agencies for several years and who needed it all now more than ever.

  Our last day was especially trying. The Khmer Rouge once more showed an amazing ability to turn nasty, suddenly announcing that no Asian without papers could leave. This meant splitting up more families. There were tearful, emotional scenes. Fear, apprehension, panic were once more written on people’s faces. And when, at 4a.m., we were told to line up to board Khmer Rouge lorries, several of us wondered if we would ever reach Thailand.

  Our departure was chaotic. A fleet of twenty-six open army lorries had drawn up outside the embassy. We were crammed in, twenty-four to a lorry, with our belongings. In the crush, Bizot managed to smuggle aboard two or three Cambodian women who had still been sheltering in the embassy. Among them was the wife of Tarr, the revolutionary New Zealander. At the last minute, Bizot, ingenious as ever, pushed the weeping couple into a truck behind the backs of the guards. Perhaps they had now a taste of what revolution was all about. The awful realisation sunk in that had Pran still been with us we could probably have smuggled him out the same way. But how could we have known?

  The convoy left Phnom Penh on a circuitous route that avoided Highway Five, the main axis of the population’s exodus. Five years before, Phnom Penh had been one of the loveliest cities in Southeast Asia. It was not only the old French colonial architecture, the glittering pagodas, its romantic position beside the Mekong, that gave it its enchantment. It was the warmth and gr
ace of its people even under siege. Now the people had gone and Phnom Penh, as we drove through the suburbs, was a sinister wasteland. Every single building in the city seemed to have been turned upside down in the soldiers’ search for food and booty – from the Soviet embassy, where they stamped on President Leonid Brezhnev’s picture and fired a B40 rocket through the window, to the stilted houses of the poor on the outskirts. They had wrecked the water plant and shut down the factories.

  The empty, dustblown streets were lined with hundreds of abandoned cars and motor bikes, cannibalised by the Khmer Rouge, their tyres cut up to make Ho Chi Minh sandals. We passed whole districts gutted by fire, with hungry pigs and dogs rooting through the ruins for scraps.

  The Khmer Rouge army, now the city’s only occupants, showed little pride in its prize. The main attraction to these country boys who had fought and won a ferocious war against a corrupt US-backed regime, was the multitude of watches, radios and trinkets they had been able to loot from its shops. The road out of the city, past the airport, was littered with evidence of the hurried migration – a giant boneyard of everything from trucks and cars to helmets, uniforms and TV sets. The rotting vehicles were scattered for miles around, abandoned as the petrol ran out. Some drivers, angry at the thought of leaving what was probably their pride and joy to the Khmer Rouge, had pushed them into pools of stagnant water. Motorised transport in Cambodia was now almost non-existent. We were to see no more than half a dozen moving vehicles in our 260 mile journey to the frontier. They were driven by Khmer Rouge officers, and badly at that.

  My mind groped and fumbled to explain the horror and enormity of Phnom Penh’s emptying. There had been no ‘bloodbath’ in the conventional sense. But what was taking place was equally horrific. My overriding impression was that the Khmer Rouge had ordered this mass evacuation not to ‘punish’ the people but to ‘revolutionise’ their ways and thoughts. Many thousands would die. At the time, I was reluctant to conclude it was a deliberate campaign of terror. I thought it pointed rather to poor organisation, lack of vision and the brutalisation of a people by a long and savage war. I now know otherwise.

  It took two bone-jarring days to traverse the first eighty miles from Phnom Penh because of the appalling condition of the roads and the lack of organisation by our guides. We lost our way and had to backtrack. Our frustration grew as we passed the same spot we had passed twelve hours before. Then two trucks broke down and, after yet another long delay, we were able to get moving again only by towing one of them. Much of our progress over the bomb-damaged roads was at less than five miles per hour.

  We had come to an even more startling realisation: outside Phnom Penh, virtually every other city, town, village and hamlet that had resisted the communists had also been evacuated into the countryside. The greater part of this nation of seven million, which had endured one of the most savage, futile wars of modern times, had been uprooted, its people hungry and bewildered and on the move.

  That night, we reached the provincial capital of Kompong Chhnang and found it emptied of its 500,000 people. In the nearby countryside there was an opportunity to say a few fleeting words to a poor male nurse, Tong San, from Kompong Chhnang hospital. (He was recognised by the Scottish Red Cross team who had trained him.) He said that on 20 April Khmer Rouge soldiers had carried away all the hospital patients in lorries and dumped them eighteen miles inside the forest without food or water. For ten days now, Tong San had been wandering aimlessly. The Khmer Rouge had given nobody firm instructions as to where to go or what to do. They simply told them to keep moving. ‘We are lost and confused,’ he said. ‘The Khmer Rouge do not accept money, so I exchange my clothes for rice to eat.’

  We met Tong San in a long-established Khmer Rouge collective a few miles outside Kompong Chhnang. The villagers were a dull, uninspiring lot. Everyone wore black, and the women had Maoist pudding bowl haircuts. One of the marvellous things about Cambodia used to be the spontaneity and gaiety of its people, even towards strangers. Now a wave and a smile was met with wooden stares.

  The war damage here, as everywhere else we saw, was total. Not a bridge, it seemed, was standing, hardly a house. I was told most of these villagers had spent the war years living semi-permanently in earth bunkers underground to escape the bombing. Little wonder that this peasant army was proud of its achievements. Sitting down with me to a meal of boiled rice and meat from a freshly killed pig, the local chief said: ‘I and my men worked in fields during the day and fought at night. That is how we won.’

  The entire countryside had been churned up by B52 bomb craters, whole towns and villages razed. So far, I had not seen one intact pagoda. At one particular village, where part of a 500lb American bomb hung from a tree as an air-raid signalling gong, we made a sordid spectacle of ourselves. Stampeding for food, breaking plates, tipping over bowls of rice and stealing coconuts in our haste to eat. Our wild behaviour surely hardened the Khmer Rouge’s conviction that westerners had no business in their new society and were better out of Cambodia altogether.

  Throughout this journey, some of the greediest, most selfish, among us were the Soviet diplomats and their wives. While the rest of us nibbled on a Red Cross biscuit and a handful of rice, they settled down in the evening to a four-course meal brought along with their personal possessions, washed down with vodka and tea. They also had the gall to demand their portion of the communal food. Nor did they share their meals with a Bulgarian woman in the same lorry, claiming she was our responsibility.

  As the chorus of protests rose, the Russians threatened to expose those westerners who, with the connivance of Bizot, had smuggled Cambodian women aboard. Only when the journalists threatened to splash their names in the world’s press and expose their bourgeois tastes and their refusal to feed one of their Warsaw Pact allies did they submit. We were delighted to receive a placatory bottle of vodka.

  The night of Thursday, 1 May, was the lowest point of the journey. While our guides tried to find us somewhere to sleep, we sat for four hours in the open lorries in a driving rainstorm. We slept finally, wet through, on the stone floor of the magistrates’ court in Kompong Chhnang. During the night a nine-month-old French baby died of exposure and exhaustion. She was wrapped in a sarong and buried at once. But by that time I had run out of tears. And my thoughts increasingly were focusing elsewhere for, listening to the BBC World Service that night, I heard that Saigon had fallen the previous day as our convoy bucked and bounced its way through the tormented Cambodian countryside. I tried to imagine the scene – the communist tanks bursting triumphantly through the gates of the presidential palace, the North Vietnamese soldiers padding down Tu Do street, peasant-victors in the big city. I knew that Jacqueline would be suffering. There was nothing I could do about it. She was very far away. I cursed my decision to come back to Cambodia on that last flight into beleagured Phnom Penh and wished I was with her in Saigon.

  The journey was almost over. There was one last ugly incident as we approached Pursat. Our convoy was stopped by a group of Khmer Rouge soldiers who demanded that we hand over any Americans on board. We managed to bluff it out. Otherwise, the knots of Khmer Rouge soldiers we passed showed little interest in our presence.

  In peacetime it used to take ten hours to drive the 260 miles from Phnom Penh to the Thai border. Our journey took four days. The Khmer Rouge drivers brought the trucks up to the bridge over a stream which marks the frontier. We tramped across it, unshaven, our clothes thick with sweat-caked dust. We were greeted on the other side by Thai officials, French diplomats, foreign journalists, Red Cross nurses offering sandwiches and orangeade. They had been waiting for the best part of a week for our arrival.

  As I travelled down to Bangkok I reflected on the Cambodia we had left behind. In five years it had lost upwards of half a million people, nearly ten per cent of its population, in a war fuelled and waged on its soil by outside powers for their own selfish reasons. It was a wilderness of destruction. But I knew that if I thought too long about i
t that day, I would go mad with pity; and as the peaceful Thai countryside flashed by I longed to sink into the comfort of forgetfulness.

  Hanoi

  On the days

  there is no mail from you

  I sit quietly

  in my room and reread

  what I have . . .

  because I love you

  I am alone

  for the first time

  in my life . . .

  For weeks I felt empty, overweighed by a sense of weariness and lost happiness. An epoch had ended in Indo-China. That much I knew, and I needed time to be alone, to think. My life was changed for ever. My sorrow at leaving Cambodia and Vietnam was deepened by the knowledge that I might never return. I was tormented by the beloved and poignant face of Jacqueline, whom I had deserted in Saigon at her darkest hour and from whom there was now only a ghostly silence.

  But there was little time for brooding. The days flew breathlessly by. I had to be patient, and writing helped. I wrote the story of the fall of Phnom Penh for the Sunday Times and was invited to join the staff on the strength of it. The newspaper recognised that I had no desire to work in London; it was agreed I should base myself in Bangkok. I soon found myself a little Thai-style house near Samsen railway station on the main line to Chiang Mai and the north of Thailand. There I tried to begin life anew.