Leth brought his father breakfast two days after he had been taken away to the school. When he went back to deliver lunch, his father wasn’t there. No one was.
During the course of the week, schools, banks, government offices, and most businesses were being closed down. He had no idea why.
And now, as night turned to day, here were these fighters of the Khmer Rouge guerrilla army at their doorstep. At everyone’s doorstep. They shot rifles into the air. They commanded everyone to leave the city.
“You don’t leave, you die!” they threatened as they pushed guns into the faces and chests of men and women.
His mother, crying uncontrollably about this sudden takeover, wanted to wait for her husband’s return. Surely he’d be coming home soon. But there was no choice. The Khmer Rouge soldiers yelled through loudspeakers that the city needed to be emptied. Everyone had to leave.
Leth heard the frightened wails of neighbors, the pleading, the babies crying, the angry shouts of the Khmer Rouge soldiers. Every so often, there was the sound of a gun clearly hitting its target: someone who refused to leave. And then the piercing screams of the victim’s loved ones.
The smell of smoke was growing strong as soldiers torched the homes of those who put up a fight. Leth’s mother realized they had to get out, and fast.
She told Leth and his older sister to help pack their most essential belongings. There were few valuables. His mother worked as a seamstress, and his father didn’t make much money in the army. Leth knew his father could have already been captain and earned more money, if not for his propensity to speak his mind. He never kept quiet when he saw leadership making what he thought were poor decisions that endangered the lives of his men, who were embroiled in the country’s civil war.
Leth’s mother didn’t want the children to panic but needed them to act swiftly. They gathered some clothes, rice, cooking pans, and a few beloved books. His mother fashioned packs out of swaths of cloth and wrapped their possessions in them. She tucked away a few pieces of cherished jewelry, knowing there would be no use for them other than trading them for essentials. But it was better than leaving them here to be looted.
The children brought the packs over to their one-speed bicycles that were leaning against the side of the house. Leth thought his bike could be like his horse, taking him somewhere with little effort on his part, or at least bearing some of the load when he couldn’t ride it.
They had no idea where they were going. They slipped their makeshift packs over their shoulders, got onto their bikes, and said good-bye to home.
As they started on their journey from this new hell to nowhere, Leth’s dog trotted along, right by his side.
—
Three long days and nights they walked and the rain poured so hard at times that the children could barely push their bicycles through the thick mud. They had to stop often to wipe it off tires and rims.
The first night they stayed with his father’s cousin. They were tired and drained and in shock. But they had to push on.
By now they knew their fate. There was no avoiding it without being killed trying. They were to essentially become slave labor in rural camps, part of the communist Khmer Rouge’s radical social reform with the initial goal of creating an agrarian-based society.
Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot had declared this to be “Year Zero”—the beginning of a new era. In short order, money was banned, family ties shredded, religion denounced, education stopped, and businesses and hospitals shuttered. Newspapers were closed, mail curtailed, and basic rights restricted.
Most people ousted from the cities were to work to help the Khmer Rouge meet its goal of tripling rice production. The fertile land of the Battambang Province, known as “the rice bowl of Cambodia,” would be pushed to its limits, and beyond. So would the people.
Because Leth’s family lived in the province, their journey was a relatively short one. Others marched for weeks to reach the rice-growing areas.
On the second night, they came to a small village and asked distant relatives of his father if they could stay with them even for a night. They refused. The family wanted nothing to do with them, since the Khmer Rouge was after anyone even related to a soldier. It would be challenging enough for these relatives to cover up their ties to his father, but nearly impossible if the soldier’s children and wife had stayed in their home.
The relatives did let Leth’s family spend the night on their rice field dam. The rain poured down and they huddled close together with their extra clothes over them. The clothes became soaked in seconds. His mother thanked God that her youngest child, a three-year-old girl, had been staying with her grandmother in a small community outside the city, where she might escape the purges.
Even in the heat of the next day, with temperatures in the upper nineties, the humidity kept their clothing from drying completely. It was hard to move, but they didn’t want to stop. They needed shelter, and some food, even if it meant laboring in rice paddies for no money.
Dino, who had been walking beside the family most of the time, broke out ahead one afternoon. When they caught up to him, he was sitting in the shade of a large tree. He ran toward them barking, scrambled back to the tree, and sat under it.
They passed him by, expecting him to follow, but he just sat in the shade and barked at them. Leth knew what his dog was telling them.
You need to rest. Come here and sit with me and take a little break in the shade.
Leth explained this to his mother, and they backtracked to the tree and rested for a few minutes. When they were ready to continue their journey, Dino joined them without an argument, wagging along beside them once again.
—
Tens of thousands died en route to the labor camps around the country. The longer the trek, the worse the outcome. Lack of food, water, and shelter, combined with the scorching humid days, the rains, and the incessant walking, claimed the youngest, oldest, and feeblest.
The death marches were just the beginning. For the next four years, the utopian vision of “agricultural communes” would become one of the world’s worst genocides. About two million—one-fourth of the population—died of starvation or disease, or were executed.
It seemed as though almost anything was punishable by death. Having an education; practicing religion; being able to speak or understand another language; being of Chinese, Vietnamese, or Thai ancestry; and even wearing glasses—a sign of intellect and education, believed the Khmer Rouge—was a death sentence. Close relatives of soldiers and even former civil servants also faced death, or at least especially cruel treatment.
Leth and his family took on other names and identities to disassociate themselves from the link to the army. “I didn’t care what I was called,” Leth says. “You can call me Tin Can as long as I can survive.”
Only Dino kept his original name.
Leth and his family decided to tell people his father was a tricycle driver who taxied people around, and to say his mother and father were divorced. Leth felt guilty lying about his father, but he knew his father would approve.
Paranoia grew rampant. Children were bribed to betray relatives and other adults, often having no idea that even an offhand comment, no matter how innocent, might become a reason for the person’s arrest and disappearance. Some children indoctrinated deeply enough with the brutal regime’s ideology ratted people out, knowing the consequences.
During their years living under the Khmer Rouge, Leth’s family was discovered four times by people who knew them. The family had to flee, and did so under dark of night.
The labor camp where they spent the most time was at a long-abandoned rice-processing factory. They shared the rat-infested domicile with twenty to thirty families. Everyone slept on the floor, on sheets of plastic.
Some days Leth left for the rice paddy at 4 A.M. and did not return until midnight. Twelve-hour shifts were stand
ard, but they usually went far longer, and sometimes it was miles to the paddy.
Food was in as short supply as sleep. Workers were given the most meager portions possible for survival—a little rice in liquid was all Leth expected on a daily basis. People were hungry all the time. Starvation was rampant.
In desperation, Leth and some other children would try to catch field rats. Everything was watched, and if they were caught, the best they could hope for would be to be tied up and deprived of food for a day or two. Some were shot for the offense.
The safest time to catch rats was at night, which worked well with the nocturnal habits of the rodents. The children would steal out of the factory and find them in nearby fields using homemade lanterns made from bottles with oil.
Cooking the rats had to be done with the greatest of care, since the smell of cooked meat—whatever the source—was easy to trace in a place where food was almost nonexistent and rarely smelled of anything other than cooked rice. They would skin the rats, gut them, wash them, and cook them over a fire far from camp. If they could get their hands on herbs, especially mint, it would help kill the rat smell and taste.
Leth also collected water bugs in the rice fields whenever he wasn’t being watched. Their sting burned his skin but his hunger made him not care. He would cut off their heads, clean out some part in the middle he knew he wasn’t supposed to eat, and roast them on bonfires. They tasted like nothing, but the crunch was satisfying and they were a source of much-needed protein.
A friend a year older than Leth went off looking for edible vegetation one afternoon. He didn’t come back that night. Two days later his decapitated body, stuffed at the neck with hay, was tied to a tree for all to see. It was a lesson to others who might attempt to think and act so freely.
In this dark time, the one light in Leth’s life was his dog. Somehow Dino had managed to stay alive. He was well liked by the families. He added a little memory of home, of normalcy, of better times, to the misery. Plus he chased away the bad rats. The kind of rats in the factory were believed to be disease ridden, so they were not usually on anyone’s menu.
It seemed to Leth that his dog knew what to do for survival. Dino escaped the scrutiny of the Khmer Rouge because he usually stayed in the factory during the daytime. With food so scarce, the dog fended for himself. Sometimes Leth would sneak him some of the extra rat meat if there was any. Or rice.
When Leth came back from the rice paddies, Dino would run to the door and greet him, just as he had at home. He jumped up and down and wagged with excitement at seeing that his boy was home again.
One night, Dino wasn’t there to greet him. A couple of people said they’d seen him by the train tracks. With his makeshift lantern, Leth ran outside and found Dino. His lifelong friend was lying in a pool of blood, with two bullet holes in his body.
Leth wept silently. He wanted to open up and wail but he knew he would end up like his dog if he did.
He later learned that two young Khmer Rouge soldiers had used Dino for target practice. They laughed as they walked away after killing the dog.
Leth and his mother buried Dino in the yard of the factory. They said no words, in case someone would accuse them of praying.
—
Shortly after Dino’s death, Leth was separated from his mother and sister, and taken ten miles away to another labor camp, only this one had no shelter. He was ten years old.
Separation of children from their families was common. It made it easier for the Khmer Rouge to inculcate youth with its lessons. The other children could tell from the way Leth spoke that he had a decent education for a boy his age. His father had taken his schooling seriously. He had hoped to one day send his son to France or Australia for college.
But in the camp, Leth refused to acknowledge he had any education. He acted illiterate. They tested him several times but he kept up the ruse.
Leth and the other children slept outside. A pile of leaves was his mattress. His imagination helped him get through the nights.
As he would later describe, “Fire was the light at night, wind was the music, the sky was the movie.” He wished Dino could be there to watch the movie with him. He would have loved it.
When it rained, as it did for months at a time, his imagination dried up and he felt hopeless. He was sure he would not survive for long.
He would get to see his mother only rarely. One time she visited when he had a flu. She brought him some medicine she had made from a tree. He had taken it before and knew how bitter it was. He didn’t look forward to the medicine, but he knew it could help. “The more bitter the taste, the faster it will cure,” his mother used to tell him.
The leader of the group refused to let her give it to Leth. “Because of mothers like you pampering their children so much, that’s why the children are so weak and lazy!” he yelled. Leth watched helplessly as his mother stood under a large tree, only slightly protected from the torrents, and wept.
He waved for her to leave. He didn’t want her to be accused of anything.
When people were escorted away from the camps after a transgression—admitting they had an education, being caught hunting for bugs to eat, the discovery they were related to a soldier or government worker—they were often told they were being taken to a place where the slate would be wiped clean. At first, those left behind thought this meant a place of forgiveness, perhaps reeducation.
But when these people never came back, it was clear they had gone to the killing fields—the mass graves throughout Cambodia where the bodies of the executed and dead were rarely fully buried.
The lucky ones were shot. To save bullets, executions were often carried out using clubs, spades, sharpened bamboo sticks, deadly scorpions, and sharp palm tree leaves. Children and babies were sometimes killed by bashing their heads against the trunks of trees.
Young Leth was certain that with any misstep, this would also be his fate.
—
“Failure is not an option,” Leth tells a Secret Service dog handler he’s helping to train at the tactical village at RTC some thirty-six years later. It’s a phrase heard a great deal among Secret Service officers and agents. And it was the same mind-set that kept Leth alive through the years of the killing fields and on the subsequent arduous journey to refugee camps in Cambodia, Thailand, and eventually the Philippines.
A Vietnamese invasion that began on December 25, 1978, eventually forced the Khmer Rouge to relinquish control and loosen its death grip on the citizens. The killing fields were over, but it’s estimated that another three hundred thousand died of starvation from 1979 to 1980.
The torment was far from over for Leth and his family. On their long walk home, Leth and a friend were taking a quick bathroom break from a large group walking back to Battambang when Khmer Rouge soldiers armed with AK-47s saw them and accused them of spying. They marched them to a small house and separated the boys, bringing his friend down to the basement and Leth upstairs.
Five large men—anyone would be large to a thirteen-year-old boy who had been starved for four years—tied him up and beat him, urinated on him, and spit on him to get him to admit he was a spy. He told them he was going back home to reunite with his family but they insisted that he was a spy, that boys like him spy for the Vietnamese and that’s why they were successful in the invasion.
Leth knew they were going to kill him if he kept telling the truth. And he knew they would kill him if he said he was a spy. He couldn’t believe he had survived all those years only to be killed after the liberation of his country.
After eight hours, someone ran into the room and told his torturers that the Vietnamese were on their way. The men let him go and reminded him how lucky he was, “this time.”
In Battambang, the family’s house was in ruins. They had nothing. He and his mother and sister visited his younger sister and grandmother for the first time since 1975. It wa
s a tearful reunion, but it didn’t last long. Leth and his mother had to go off and make money to help them, and to survive.
They set out for a village a little past the border of Thailand, about a week’s walk away. They had to hide from skirmishes between the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese, and as they got closer to the border, Thai involvement as well.
Their route took them close to some killing fields. Leth could smell the nauseating odor of decomposing bodies for a mile before reaching them. He tried not to look at the wasteland of human decay, but sometimes he couldn’t help it.
He wondered if his father might be in one of these fields. He held out hope that somehow he had escaped that fate—that one day they might pass each other by and there would be a reunion like no other. Whenever he saw a man in a Cambodian army uniform, the boy’s eyes hungrily scanned the face for signs of familiarity.
When Leth and his mother finally reached the border, they went a little farther into a Thai village and bought bread, noodles, and moon cakes, then walked back to the border, selling the goods there for three weeks at a time, back and forth from the village to the border. They made the long walk home with the money they made, rested, and set back out.
His older sister joined them on what would turn out to be their last trip. They hadn’t brought enough provisions, and ran out of food and water on the way there. In the oppressive heat they would not survive long.
They drank water that had pooled in the footprints of elephants. They ate leaves off trees and bushes for their moisture and to try to stave off their incessant hunger.
They prayed for a miracle.
Shortly after, their path led them to a pond. It looked fairly clean. They couldn’t believe their fortune. They ran in, past its muddy shore, until they were thigh deep. There, they gulped their fill out of cupped hands. Leth felt like a dried-up old sponge someone had suddenly doused with water.
As they filled their containers for the rest of the journey, Leth spotted what seemed to be a couple of floating tree trunks on the other side of the small pond. One seemed to have some bright cloth on it.
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