The Killing Fields.

No trip to Cambodia is complete without a trip to one of the many killing fields, to help understand the brutality, the history and to pay your respects. To me it's doubly sad that a race of people, humble, respectful and quiet were exterminated  so brutally by one of their own and in my life time. Just on the outskirts of the city is a Genocide Museum, somber, tactfully and respectfully portraying this period of life. 

Cambodia,  having been pounded by American bombs during the Vietnam conflict, found itself in chaos, poverty stricken and desolate, and an ideal time for a  military regime to sweep into power, over throw the government and begin a new decree supporting the true ideals of Communism and an agrarian based society. People were driven from the cities to work in the fields harvesting mostly rice which in turn was exported to China in return for weapons and ammunition.  Everyone was at risk. Anyone who was an intellectual, those with religious beliefs, a city dweller, traitors, soldiers, and anyone talking to the wrong person was executed. People were just rounded up and bought to places such as these and killed with machetes, clubs, hammers, sugar palm bark which incidentally is razor sharp. Bullets were too expensive to waste. The few hundred women and children who came were very brutally murdered, naked after being raped,  and or smashed against the trees. It is all so sad

They have built a Stupor as a place of prayer  and worship, which has thousands of heads and bones in cased. I think it was the mass graves sometimes 16 ft deep  and the walk around the perimeter listening to the audio commentary supplied,  told by a survivor of the regime, a young boy exported west to work in the fields that was the most sobering. Sally and I declined the trip to the torturing prison S14 that in its time had been a high school. There are only so many atrocities that one can cope with. The world remained ignorant as all the borders were sealed off with land mines.  The Vietnamese bless them crossed the border and finally came in 3 years later to over run Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.  And all this happening in my life time. I didn't take any photos, it's not the place.

I want to remember " Jock " my tuktuk driver in Kampot,  who as a 2 year old was driven  with his family out of Phnom Penh to  the far reaches of Kampot and where he lives today.