Father Missed His Plane: A real-life story of a boy's separation from his family, survival and adversity in the Killing Fields of Cambodia and beyond by VINCENT LEE

Author:VINCENT LEE [LEE, VINCENT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: VINCENT LEE
Published: 2017-02-12T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Angkar Preparing Our Own Grave

We returned to the camp and went straight back to work the next morning. To complete the construction of the dam before the next monsoon we were ordered to dig for longer. Our lunch break was cut short and we had to work through the heat of the day. If there was enough moonlight, we would work until after midnight. One night I was so exhausted that I took the two baskets I used to carry soil with and put them down in my ditch. I lay down on them and fell asleep to the sound of digging all around me. It seemed like it was only moments later that I woke up, but by then it was dead quiet. Everyone had gone back to the huts and I was alone in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps it had just been too dark and they hadn’t seen me, or possibly no one cared anymore, because we were all too tired to care. If a boy vanished no one would think about asking what happened to him. We knew the answer too well, and so the most we might say was Min Doeng, Min Luer, Min Skal (pretend you don’t know, don’t hear, and don’t recognise). Once the monsoon started we were sent back to the rice fields and planted, then we were sent back to the dam to dig, when the rains finished and the crop was ready we returned to the paddies to harvest.

Since we were now a mobile brigade, we were constantly on the move from one makeshift camp to the next. Angkar deliberately sent us far away from our parents. The only time we saw anyone from the village was in 1977 at Chamkar Leu (Upper Farm), about thirty kilometres north of Kor Village, where we found some other families we knew there. It took us hours to walk through the forest and across the fields to reach our destination, and only the local Khmer boys knew the way. As soon as we arrived we started building our temporary shelter: the usual bamboo hut with palm leaf walls and straw roof. We were here to harvest a vast area of banana plantations and a few hectares of sweet potatoes and yams which had been left abandoned until now. After a hard day at work Angkar gave us rations of boiled wild yams, but sadly there were no good tasting sweet potatoes on the menu. The yams had crystal white flesh that was fine to eat, but they were flavourless. In the old days, we only ate them with sugar.

As if Angkar was not cruel enough, lack of local knowledge continued to take its toll on the New People. We only ever ate the yams after they’d been peeled, but some New People were so hungry that they roasted the skins on the fire. Although they smelled delicious they were actually poisonous, I heard that some people became ill and a few even died from eating them.

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