Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

THE BOAT SONTEPHEAP TO PHNOM PENH

AT THE CENTER OF CAMBODIA, in its enormous floodplain, lies an inland sea, Tonle Sap Lake, so broad in the rainy season that when you're on it you might be in a great ocean, no shores visible. It is not a big blue ocean but a brown one, the frothy chop beaten by the brisk wind to resemble the foam on a latte. It is not deep. Even in the middle it is full of mud banks and shoals, and in the unlikeliest places there are fish weirs and perhaps a narrow sampan sitting low in the water, two or three men and boys on board wearing lampshade hats, the whole scene in profile like an image of graceful brushstrokes on a ancient pot.

I took a jeep about seven miles from Siem Reap to the low-lying and mucky north shore of the lake, a fishing village, Phnom Krom, where in the early morning one or two long and usually overloaded motorboats leave for Phnom Penh. They travel southeastward down the lake to where the Tonle Sap River begins its flow, and continue along the river to the jetties of Phnom Penh, about six hours, the water route to the capital.

The departure of the boats is an event in Phnom Krom and the nearby village of Chong Khneas, where the fishing families live in basketwork huts perched over the shore, the places busier at six in the morning than most other inland villages at noon. Apart from the outboard motors on a few of the sampans, the scene could not have changed in hundreds of years: naked children slapping at mud puddles, women selling bananas and rice, but most people mending nets, tending cooking fires, and sorting fish in baskets.

Snakehead fish are caught here. They are the key ingredient in amok, one of Cambodia's delicious national dishes, the snakehead simmered in coconut milk with spices. Because the snakehead has natural enemies here, the fish grow to only a few feet and are not the monsters they've become in some places in the United States where they've been introduced.

I found the gangplank to my boat and was about to climb into the cabin when a big man in a Hawaiian shirt — obviously American — said, "I wouldn't go in there if I were you."

I smiled at him because he'd said it so confidently. I stepped back and let other passengers stream into the cabin.

"Look. There's only one way out," he said. "This thing capsizes and it's all over. How would you escape? You read about ferries that sink in places like this, and you wonder why so many people die." He shook his head. "Now I know."

So we sat on the roof together and he introduced himself — Mark Lane, explaining that he was a mate on a ferry out of Homer, Alaska, making runs to the Aleutian Islands. He was taking a break from that cold work by spending a few weeks here in the sunshine.

We had pulled away from the bamboo pier and out of the inlet and were about a quarter of a mile into the lake when the boat slewed and tipped sharply and almost slid us into the water. There were howls from people down below, trapped in the cabin. The boat had snagged on a mud bank and yawed. For about fifteen minutes the slanted boat did not move but only sent up mud and bubbles from the churning screws.

"This might be a long trip," Mark said.

But after we got under way once again, the boat went fast. The only other snag was a mud bank in the middle of the lake, out of sight of land, another slew and swerve and delay.

In stretches of the lake, floating villages were whole water-world communities of houseboats and buoyant huts, an economy of water people enclosed by the perimeters of their nets and bobbing net floats.

These fishing communities looked self-sufficient, orderly, and discreetly territorial, far from government intrusion and regulation. Even before Pol Pot, the government in Cambodia, whether French colonial rule or American puppetry, had brought nothing but war and destruction, torture and death. Left to themselves, in the middle of this lake, the Cambodian water people functioned perfectly.

Sitting side by side on the roof of the boat, using our small duffle bags as cushions, Mark and I talked about Angkor and what we'd seen.

"I did something in Siem Reap I've never done before in my life," Mark said.

"What a great opening," I said.

"No, seriously," he said. "I had a tuk-tuk driver — my wheelman. He only had one eye, he's twenty-five, lives with his aunt — really nice kid. You know how it is. You spend a few days with these guys and you hear their story.

"His name was Sar. He didn't talk much about his past, just about his future. He had it all mapped out. His aim was to be an accountant. Ever heard anyone say that? 'I want to be a doctor,' yes. Or an airline pilot. Or an astronaut. But an accountant? So it seemed to me he was on the level. He had been to high school and done some courses, but to get his accountant's degree he needed college.

"He told me that there's a certain man in Siem Reap who's a well-known teacher of accounting and economics. This tuk-tuk driver Sar wanted him as a mentor and teacher. 'So what's the plan, Sar?' I asked him.

"'The plan is that I earn enough money as a tuk-tuk driver to pay for my education. I live with my aunt. I study with this man. I get an accountant's degree and then a job in Siem Reap. All the new hotels need accountants. New businesses also need them. It's a perfect plan. But one thing — it's impossible.'

"He's staring at me with his good eye, and he's smiling. I asked him why it's impossible.

"'Because I rent this motorbike. I can't make enough each day to pay rent and save money. So I'll go on driving, and first I'll make enough to buy a motorbike. Then I'll use the bike to make money, and I'll save some of that. When I have enough, I'll study to be an accountant. But that time is far away.'

"I said, 'Good for you.' He took me to Angkor. He took me around town. I kept thinking about his plan. And by the way, he didn't ask me for money. I paid him the usual, ten dollars a day.

"Couple of days went by. I kept waking up at night — couldn't sleep. I was thinking about Sar and his plan. I also thought how, when I was sixteen, my father kicked me out of the house—'Get out of here. I don't want you.' My father was a complete bastard. A man in the neighborhood took me in and treated me as his son. He's my real father. He was a Navy SEAL. If he hadn't done that, I would have become a druggie, on the street, a lost soul. That helping hand made the difference. I thought about that a lot.

"Next day I met Sar as usual. I said, 'Let's go to the motorbike dealer.' I got all the prices and compared them. I put down eleven hundred dollars and he got the motorbike, a Suzuki 110—just what he needs to be a tuk-tuk driver in Siem Reap and make some money.

"I said, 'Okay, now it's up to you. It's not impossible anymore.' And I gave him my e-mail address. We'll see what happens. It might be interesting.

"Hey, it was the last of my money, but I didn't really need it. It might make the whole difference between success or failure in his life."

"That's a good story," I said. He wasn't boasting. It had just happened and he was still ruminating about it. He was a nice guy with a good heart, not a wealthy man but a hard-working mate on an Alaskan ferry, nearing retirement, with a modest income. He seemed something of a loner, but I could see he was energized by his good deed and eager to see how it would all turn out.

When I told him about my experience with the rickshaw driver in Mandalay, he said, "The great thing is, it's not like foreign aid. Every dollar is being used. No middlemen!"

All this time we were traveling along the wide brown inland sea, under a cloudless sky, in sunshine that blistered my face and arms. My perch on the cabin roof was so bright and so blowy, I had given up trying to read — it was Robin Lane Fox's biography, Alexander the Great. A shore appeared to the south, and as we approached it, a shore to the north became apparent as a black line in the distance. Farther on, the shores closed in, and houses on stilts teetered at their banks. In the distance was a large gold temple, and then we passed through a break in the shore that narrowed to a river. This was the Tonle Sap River, the major outlet from the lake, which joined the Mekong at Phnom Penh and continued south through Vietnam.

While the sun beat down on our heads, frying us on the boat's metal roof that was like a griddle, Mark told me about the storms on his ferry run to the Aleutians, the days of fog, the way the whole boat would ice up and freeze and become top-heavy and unstable. In the distance I could see some half-naked men tossing fishing nets and others pulling up crab pots.

Borne by the current, we passed higher banks, bigger houses, riverside settlements, fishing boats, motorboats, and fortified embankments. The houses piled up and became more dense, and the city appeared as we approached the landing stages.

***

PHNOM PENH HAD A SCRUFFY, rather beaten-up look, like a scarred human face in which its violent past was evident; it was a city that had suffered extreme punishment of a kind that was impossible to conceal. It was a city under repair, which is also the look of a city falling apart, and there were very poor neighborhoods, but unlike India, it was poverty without squalor. There are architectural marvels in Phnom Penh — the royal palace, residence of Sihanouk's successor, Prince Ranariddh (Cambodia had reverted to being a kingdom), the national museum with its imposing collection of Angkor treasures and statuary, some colonial-era villas, the main post office, the Grand Market, some temples — yet instead of raising the tone of the city, these dignified buildings only made the rest of it look worse.

Spelled out in pebbles underwater near a temple, I found the message If you want a good rebirth you must liberate from the delusions. It seemed to me that Cambodians had few delusions. Within recent memory, they had seen everything — terror, starvation, mass murder. They had needed to be tough to survive, so they did not have the geniality of Thais or the dreamy obliqueness of Burmese or the practicality of Singaporeans. But even the streetwise Cambodians in the city, who were direct and demanding, were capable of graceful gestures. With good reason, they had lost hope in the promises of government and justice. Once, in casual conversation with a Cambodian, I said I'd like to come back someday. He looked at me with disbelief. He said, "Why you want to do this?"

It seemed incredible to him that anyone would want to return to this death-haunted country. He wanted to leave Cambodia; everyone he knew wanted to leave. Phnom Penh was thronged by pedestrians, by cycle rickshaws and scooters. No one had money for cars. That alone made it picturesque for me, trying hard not to be a romantic voyeur, though it was obviously a struggle for everyone else.

For superficial reasons, I was happy — happy in the way the big pink middle-aged men were happy in Cambodia, though most of them were in beach towns like Sihanoukville. It was one of the greatest places in the world to be a barfly. Cheap beer, good food, fine weather, and any number of congenial companions — other barflies and beautiful women who, it seemed, had little else to do but watch you drink and smile.

On a side street of Phnom Penh, at Sharkey's bar, one of many such bars, big ugly Western men drank beer and played pool in the company of small pretty Cambodian women, who pawed them and poured their drinks. This arrangement is a kind of heaven for many men. It was the atmosphere of cheap beer and mild debauchery I had seen all those years ago in Vientiane. It wasn't outdated; it had just moved farther down the Mekong River.

"What do you want?" the tuk-tuk drivers asked in Phnom Penh with a smile, confident that they could provide anything I named — heroin, a massage, a woman, a man, someone to marry, a child to adopt, a bowl of noodles, or a souvenir T-shirt.

As in Siem Reap, the Phnom Penh hotels ranged from the luxurious to the basic. The sumptuously furnished and Frenchified chateaus like Le Royal, set in walled compounds with guards posted outside, had rooms for $500 a night; at the other end, the little side-street pension where Mark Lane was staying was $15 a night. But his room had no windows. I found a hotel overlooking the river for $25 a night, with breakfast. Since Burma, my usual morning meal had been noodles or a mound of rice with a fried egg on top.

I wanted to read about Pol Pot. I found a bookstore near the national museum and swapped my copy of Robin Lane Fox's life of Alexander for Philip Short's life of Pol Pot. On the shelves, to my surprise, were copies of my own books: bootlegged copies, smudgily printed, looking homemade.

"Where was this printed?" I asked, picking up a copy of Dark Star Safari.

"It's a photocopy," the clerk said, though it was a chunky book, more like a bound proof copy than the finished article.

"Why do you go to all the trouble to photocopy this book?"

"Because it's a bestseller."

"People read this guy?"

"Oh, yes, sir," he began, but before he finished I took out my driver's license and showed it to him. He held it in two hands, studied it closely, then shrieked — a gratifying reaction. Then he became anxious and said, "Are you angry with me?"

"Of course not."

His name was Cheah Sopheap. He asked me what I was doing in Cambodia. I took a bootlegged copy of The Great Railway Bazaar off the shelf and showed him the endpaper map. I had wanted to travel from Thailand through Cambodia in the early seventies, I said, but it had been impossible.

"It was a bad time then," Sopheap said. "The city was empty. All the people had been sent to the countryside."

"So there was nothing here?"

"Just prisons."

"And Pol Pot was making trouble for you?"

"Pol Pot was nothing," he said. He made a face and flicked his finger as though at a gnat.

To the world, Pol Pot was a moon-faced monster, so this was a surprising answer. Sopheap explained, saying that before the coming of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian society had evolved to the point where the rich were ostentatiously wealthy and the rural poor simply desperate. The countryside, especially in the east of the country, had been ruined by the war in Vietnam, which had spread to Cambodia. Khmer Rouge was what outsiders called Pol Pot's organization. In Cambodia it was known as Angkar, the Party.

Sopheap did not say so, but Nixon and Kissinger had secretly approved an invasion in 1969 and the carpet-bombing of Cambodia, in the ruthless and irrational belief that it would help win the Vietnam War. For the next several years, without any authorization from Congress, B-52s from Guam flew thousands of bombing missions. This outrage, accurately documented by the journalist Seymour Hersh, included the dropping of half a million tons of American bombs and the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars to prop up the American-funded regime of Lon Nol. The blitz only made the Vietcong more resolute, and the bombing created havoc in Cambodia, killing an estimated 600,000 people and driving the peasants into joining the Khmer Rouge.

"The poor people hated the rich and hated the Americans who were killing them," Sopheap said. "They were so angry! And when they came to Phnom Penh they did anything they wanted."

He meant the men in black pajama-like uniforms, who appeared in the capital in April 1975 and took over, expelling all the residents, looting their houses, and sending them into the countryside. These guerrilla soldiers had been living in the jungle, fighting and scavenging, some of them for many years. They were hungry, battle-weary, and resentful. A large number of the more recent recruits were in their early teens.

"They liked having power and killing. Pol Pot was not the only reason. The people themselves made the terror."

"What happened to your family?"

"My father survived because he was a farmer. He was lucky. He knew how to make sugar from palm trees."

Sopheap's father would have been shot. But in the midst of the terror and starvation, the regime introduced "dessert day." Rice soup was all that was available for people, but on dessert day, three times a month, it was decreed that the soup was to be sweetened with palm sugar — cane sugar was unavailable. Sopheap's father was able to provide homemade palm sugar. So he was not shot.

"I was sick," Sopheap said. "My body was swollen big. I almost died. It was a terrible time. You've seen the museum and the killing fields?"

***

THE KILLING FIELDS Sopheap meant were only ten miles from the city. The place was locally known as Choeung Ek. It was one of many. There were 343 other killing sites spread across Cambodia, and numerous torture prisons too, from the Khmer Rouge period, 1974–1979. By then the United States was tacitly supporting the Khmer Rouge government, because of our humiliation at having been driven out of Vietnam. By allowing the Chinese to arm Pol Pot, we could hobble the Vietnamese, who were fighting the Khmer Rouge with Soviet artillery along the Cambodia-Vietnam border.

I rode a tuk-tuk through rice fields in brilliant sunshine to a grove of trees where birds were singing. In this peaceful place, formerly an orchard and a Chinese cemetery, twenty thousand people were murdered over the course of three years. An open-air museum, it was shaded by tall trees, its largest structure a tower with stepped shelves containing some nine thousand human skulls. Many of the mass graves were still strewn with remnants of the victims' clothes. Most of the prisoners had been beaten to death with shovels, hoes, and pickaxes — among the cruelest and most painful deaths imaginable. Splits and cracks were visible in many of the skulls, from the force of a blunt ax head or the blade of a hoe. The skulls, young and old, male and female, said a great deal about who they had been and how they'd died.

When Vietnamese soldiers liberated Phnom Penh — against the wishes of the United States—129 mass graves were found here at Choeung Ek, one of the graves containing 450 corpses.

The victims were mainly people from the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, who had been tortured into confessing that they'd been spies or counterrevolutionaries. Many of them had been Khmer Rouge soldiers who'd fallen under suspicion, or been casually ratted on, or who'd just been unlucky. They were clerks, teachers, landlords — education was equated with wealth ("such people oppressed the poor") — or they were hapless bystanders who'd been pounced on for no good reason. Most were urbanites, termed "New People," considered inferior to peasants because they hadn't fought and suffered. According to David Chandler in Brother Number One (another pirated book I bought on a Phnom Penh street corner), they were mocked with the saying "Keeping you is no gain, losing you is no loss." These enemies of the state were driven in trucks the ten miles from the prison, twenty or thirty to a truck — frightened, starved, blindfolded, sick from torture.

When the truck arrived, the victims were led directly to be executed at the ditches and pits, a little sign at Choeung Ek said. Because the execution methods were so crude — it was not possible to club more than three hundred people to death and also bury them on any given day — a backlog of doomed people built up, and many of the prisoners had to wait in locked huts for their turn to die, listening to the screams from the edges of the pits.

A sign on one tree said, The killing tree against which executioners beat children— and it explained that these children, the offspring of the despised privileged class of doctors, lawyers, and teachers, were swung by their heels and their skulls smashed against the tree.

Pathways linked the mass graves with the trees and the shrines — small platforms on poles, like bird feeders — where the clothes and sometimes the bones of the victims were stacked. On this hot sunny day, just the sort of day on which the killings took place, these platforms were thick with buzzing flies.

This tree was used as a tool to hang a microphone which make a sound louder to avoid the moan of victims while they were being executed, another sign said on a tree at the edge of one of the mass graves.

I was stunned and depressed by the visit to Choeung Ek. I had also begun to read the Philip Short book, which was not only a biography of Pol Pot but also a chronicle of Cambodia's recent history. One of Short's themes was how, today, the genocide was being marketed to advertise the virtue of the present government, which wasn't virtuous at all. He also emphasized that it was important to look closer at Khmer culture to understand the deep roots of this violence. The apparent anarchy was "a mosaic of idealism and butchery, exaltation and horror, compassion and brutality that defies easy generalization."

Writing of "the eternal Khmer dichotomy between serenity and uncontrollable violence, with no middle ground between," Short said that the killing fields were less an example of Pol Pot's excesses than the sort of behavior that was endemic in Khmer society. "The peculiarly abominable form [the ideology] took, came from pre-existing Khmer cultural models," he wrote. "Every atrocity the Khmer Rouge ever committed… can be found depicted on the stone friezes of Angkor [and] in paintings of Buddhist hells"

It was self-serving for the United States to call it genocide, Short wrote, for after all, we had helped bring Pol Pot to power. And the existence of these museums of Khmer Rouge slaughter was also a way of suggesting that Cambodia had reformed, which was untrue. The present government was "rotten" and "utterly corrupt," and many men in it had been in the Khmer Rouge and had not repudiated their past crimes.

Horrible as the killing fields were, this museum of atrocities distracted attention from the corruption of the present regime. Far from being an aberration, they were an example of Khmer culture run riot. A French missionary had called the terror "an explosion of the Khmer identity."

But Pol Pot had lit the fuse. All his life he had the Khmer smile. No one ever knew what he was thinking or feeling. Few people knew his real name. He was born Saloth Sar, and over the years he changed his name at least a dozen times. "The more often you change your name, the better it confuses the enemy," he said. What Pol Pot did not say was that the name changes reflected his multiple identities. He'd had a privileged upbringing, some of his childhood spent at the royal palace. His colonial education allowed him to travel to France in 1949, where he was known as a bon viveur, if a bit secretive, and eventually as an anticolonial ideologue. He discovered Stalinism. He became a utopian socialist, a leveler, unsentimental, but in the Khmer way, capable of preaching extreme violence.

On his return to Cambodia in the 1950s he allied himself with the anti-French forces and rejoiced in the French retreat. The Vietnam War emboldened him, as the American bombing had, by winning more converts to his cause. Because of his Chinese support, he had powerful reasons to be anti-Vietnamese. He kept to the rural areas, strengthening his army, at a time when the United States was currying favor with China. In his five-year civil war, he fought a weakened, unpopular, and crooked government. Half a million people died in this war of attrition. Seeing that the end was near, America's man, Lon Nol, left for Hawaii with a million dollars from Cambodia's central bank. Cambodians were relieved, believing they might at last have a stable and independent government. No triumphant processional by the new leadership entered the fallen capital. Pol Pot waited for days and then slipped into the city in darkness.

As an expression of his weird idealism, Pol Pot declared Year Zero — a clean slate — and abolished money. That alone was the cause of much of the chaos that ensued, because food took the place of currency and was hoarded and fought over. Food became scarcer, and soon starvation and malnutrition were universal. Books were burned and ministerial files dumped in the streets. Phnom Penh was emptied of its population. City dwellers, sent into the countryside, were unprepared for this rustication; most left their homes with as many of their belongings as they could carry; a great number died on the way to remote areas. The whole nation reverted to chaos, a kind of madness and primitivism characterized by machine-smashing and virtual slavery. Hardly anyone laid eyes on Pol Pot, since he was obsessively secretive, an enigma even to his followers.

No personality cult attached to Pol Pot. No pictures of him appeared anywhere. There were no songs, no poems, no sayings, no anecdotes about his life. Turkmenbashi in Turkmenistan was inescapable; Pol Pot in Cambodia was unfindable. No one knew where he lived. He gave no speeches and published very little under his own name. He owned no property. He had no personal wealth. His austerity extended to government events. At one celebration to mark the party's anniversary, only orange juice was served, and the entertainment was Albanian films.

Outsiders demonized and denounced Pol Pot, by this time known as Brother Number One, but no one really knew who he was or what he stood for. In a way he was a classic geek, and like many geeks, a paranoiac.

His ideas remained obscure or oversimplified, but his paranoia percolated into the leadership — to soldiers, the police, prison guards, torturers, to everyone who had power. His reclusiveness and indecision helped create a tyranny that became random and improvisational; no one, neither the frightened populace nor the empowered soldiers, knew what they were supposed to do. Having a weapon helped, for if you had a weapon, you had power. A weapon might be something as simple as an ax or a hoe or a pitchfork. Kampuchea, as the country was known then, became a slave state where, in less than four years, a million and a half people were killed as enemies of the state.

Pol Pot was undone by the invading Vietnamese, who deposed him and installed their own man, Heng Samrin, in 1979. In the same year, wishing to see Vietnam weakened in the so-called proxy war (the Soviet Union was still Vietnam's best ally), the United States supported the right to a seat for the exiled Pol Pot's blood-soaked delegation to the United Nations.

***

IT GAVE ME THE CREEPS to read all this while I was staying in Phnom Penh. Some of the worst of the killing had occurred while I was taking my Railway Bazaar trip, and then writing it, complaining that it had been impossible for me to visit Cambodia. Little did I know what was happening here — but not many people on the outside knew much, or cared.

I had gotten this far in my reading about Pol Pot when I visited the torture prison at Tuol Sleng, known as S-21. The former Ponhea Yat High School, in a respectable residential area of Phnom Penh, had been converted to a prison — a natural conversion, since large schools of classrooms are designed for confinement.

The building itself looked like any three-story high school, the same brickwork, the same proportions. Inside, some classrooms had been divided into small wooden or brick cubicles for prisoners awaiting interrogation; other classrooms served as torture chambers. Some torture took the form of shackling a person to an iron bedstead, where he or she was shocked with electricity, beaten with clubs, stabbed, and made to confess to crimes against the state.

"The role of S-21 was not to kill but to extract confessions," Philip Short wrote. "Death was the finality, but it was almost incidental."

Obeying an obsessive if ghoulish sense of order, and so as to create a paper trail of traitors, all prisoners at Tuol Sleng were photographed before they were tortured, their names and ages and histories recorded — where they'd lived and worked, details of their families and education, the names of their friends. Far from being mere prison numbers or statistics, they were presented in the round, as utterly human. Their faces were fixed in terror, shocked, fatigued, very ill; oddly serene or dead-eyed; old women, young women, old men, wide-eyed boys, young children. Mothers too, many a woman holding her baby, posed in an agonizing pietà, both of them about to die.

Of the fourteen thousand people who passed through this prison, all were tortured, and all but twelve were murdered. The horror of their plight was evident on the upper floors, where outside the classroom cubicles a veranda was hung with barbed wire. A sign explained: The braid of barbed wire prevented the desperate victims from committing suicide.

Even though I knew that this torture prison had been turned into a museum by a sanctimonious government that itself violated human rights (corruption, embezzlement, torture in police custody, land seizure, and extrajudicial killings), I was horrified — who wouldn't be? — by the pathetic faces of the thousands who'd been killed.

One hot day I went through the bare dreary rooms and splintery cubicles, past the displays of doomed faces and the portraits of child soldiers, some as young as ten, and the glass cases labeled Instruments of Torture, most of them farm implements — mattocks, axes, clubs, machetes, shovels. Like my visit to Dachau, it was a cruel example of inhumanity, of sadistic and pitiless murder. "No other country has ever lost so great a proportion of its nationals in a single, politically inspired hecatomb," Short wrote, "brought about by its own leaders."

Though all of this was appalling, the worst moment for me came out side in the sunshine, in the courtyard of the prison, which had been part of the old school's playing field. It was a gallows, three sections, with hooks on each section, looming over three large-mouthed ceramic barrels. The sign on it said, Prisoners were hung upside-down [by their feet, from ropes on the hooks], until they lost consciousness. Their heads were then dipped into the jar of water. By doing so, the victims quickly regained consciousness and their interrogators could continue their interrogations.

A week before I visited Tuol Sleng, Vice President Dick Cheney was asked about similar American practices, known by the laughable euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques." These were being used on suspected terrorists in American military prisons. In the torture called waterboarding, which was also used at Tuol Sleng, a hooded prisoner was strapped head-down on a slanted board and such a powerful volume of water poured over his face in a continuous stream that he was briefly suffocated, convinced that he was drowning. And Cheney was questioned about simple submersion, as with the torture jars I was staring at.

What did the second most powerful politician in America think of this way of extracting confessions, this "dunk in the water"?

"It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said, and the president backed him up. "It's a very important tool."

The traveler's conceit is that barbarism is something singular and foreign, to be encountered halfway around the world in some pinched and parochial backwater. The traveler journeys to this remote place and it seems to be so: he is offered a glimpse of the worst atrocities that can be served up by a sadistic government. And then, to his shame, he realizes that they are identical to ones advocated and diligently applied by his own government. As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the fact that mass murder is still an annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma, and elsewhere — the truer shout is not "Never again" but "Again and again."

***

MUCH OF MY KNOWLEDGE of recent Cambodian history had come from books, so I decided to find an eyewitness in Phnom Penh.

Heng, a man of about forty-five, spoke English well. Before the Khmer Rouge took over, his father had been a lieutenant in the army and his mother had run a small business in Kampot, about sixty miles south of Phnom Penh, on the coast. They had a good life and a comfortable house. When the Khmer Rouge invaded Kampot in 1972, Heng, who was just a boy, and his parents moved to the capital. Two years later, Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge.

I asked him, "In the beginning, were the people afraid or did they think, 'This will only last a little while'?"

"My father said that he heard that the Khmer Rouge wanted all the people to be equal," Heng said. "Others said the Khmer Rouge soldiers were like wild animals. That frightened us. When the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh they told all the people to go away without taking any property, because it would just be a few days. My parents asked them where to go. Khmer Rouge soldiers said, 'Any direction. It's up to you.'"

"Were your parents threatened?"

"Yes. If people didn't leave, the soldiers would kill them. My parents decided go back home to Kampot. It took almost a whole day to travel only fifteen kilometers from Phnom Penh, and we saw corpses almost everywhere by the road. They smelled very bad. It is really difficult to find words to explain all this. When we arrived near Takeo, some thirty kilometers from Phnom Penh, a lady said to my mother, 'Please cut your hair.' My mother had very long hair. 'And throw out your money. If Khmer Rouge soldiers see your hair and money you will be dead.'"

"What did Cambodians think of the soldiers?"

"They were so afraid, because soldiers could kill them at any time, anywhere. Khmer Rouge soldiers thought of people as their enemy." He paused and said in a softer voice, "Even now, ninety percent of people are still afraid of soldiers — I mean, government soldiers."

"Did you or your parents know of what terrible things were happening in Tuol Sleng torture prison or at Choeung Ek killing fields?"

"No, we didn't know anything about that," Heng said. "We did not even know the day, the month, or the year. You know, there were hundreds of prisons like those throughout the country."

"What sort of a person was Pol Pot?"

"He had graduated from a French university. If he had been a weak student, he would not have got a scholarship, so it means that he was a smart person. It is very hard to judge Pol Pot. For me, I think the situation during that time is similar to the situation in Iraq. The situation in Iraq before the invasion of American troops was — well, some good things, some bad things. But after America invaded, the situation got much worse."

"You mean Bush is like Pol Pot?"

"Maybe. But I don't mean Bush is a bad person. The problem was that he did not understand what Iraq people wanted. He cannot govern those people. When Pol Pot took over the country, the situation became chaos. For me, there was almost no single person responsible for Cambodia during that nightmare."

"Do you think he was heartless, or cruel, or vengeful?"

"I do not think so. I think he was a big boss that had no influence on the staff. I mean, that his people could do anything that they wanted to."

"What is the best thing you remember from those years?"

"There was absolutely not any 'best thing' to remember."

"What is the worst thing you remember?"

"The worst thing was when the Kang Chhlorp [armed village militia] came to check our house. If they found any rice, sweet potato, sugar, or any vegetable, I and my parents would be arrested. That meant the death penalty."

"If you'd had food?" I asked.

"Yes. If you had food in those times you were an enemy," Heng said. "They killed you and took your food."

The more I knew about Cambodia's infernalities and acrimonies, the more haunted the country seemed and the sadder I got, until, like many fed-up and disillusioned Cambodians I'd met, I just wanted to go away.