Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor

did with them, Lon Nol cared even less. His generals sold weapons to the enemy. They put extra names, or ‘phantom soldiers’, on
their payrolls, and kept the extra pay. They built huge villas for their own use, while their men in the field went hungry for lack of rice. The generals didn’t really want to win the war,
just keep it going, so they could make as much money as possible before taking the last plane out.
    Cambodia was no longer an island of peace. It was a nation at war with itself.
    I told my father that he should sell the mill and leave Cambodia. He and my mother could live anywhere they wanted, with enough money to last them the rest of their lives.
    My father said no. He liked living in Cambodia. Instead, he suggested I leave. He even offered to send me to France to finish my medical education, at his expense.
    This was a change – my father offering to support me through school. But I said no thanks. I told them that even if the communists took over, they wouldn’t harm doctors. Not a
chance. The Khmer Rouge were communists, but they were also Cambodians. Cambodians wouldn’t hurt each other without reason. That’s what I believed, and that’s what my friends were
saying too.
    For my father and me and people like us, Cambodia was home, the only place we had ever lived in. We didn’t want to leave. The outside world was unknown. It seemed a greater risk to go
abroad than to stay and wait for the war to end. And even though we didn’t like the Lon Nol regime, we were doing well under it. For it was one of the strange things about the war that the
worse things got out in the countryside, the better life became in Phnom Penh. Not for the refugees, living on the outskirts of the city in shantytowns that grew by the week. Not for the common
soldiers, going barefoot because their officers sold their boots on the black market. Not for the rural people, conscripted into one army or the other. But for the
nouveaux riches
and the
elite, life was luxurious. The war brought a bubble of prosperity to Phnom Penh the likes of which we had never seen. We had never had so many parties, nightclubs, Mercedes, and servants
before.
    I myself became rich during the Lon Nol regime. My wealth grew out of an argument in my family – out of another battle, so to speak, in my family’s ongoing civil
war.
    After Samrong Yong fell to the Khmer Rouge, my father decided to live in Phnom Penh. At first he and my mother stayed with my brother Pheng Huor, who had married a businesswoman named Lon Nay
Chhun. Pheng Huor and Nay Chhun had three children, including a little boy whom my father loved more than anyone in the world. My father had always dreamed of having grandsons to keep him company
in his old age.
    My father, in fact, seemed to care more about his grandson than the boy’s mother did. She liked going to the lumber mill with my brother, counting the money and bossing the employees more
than she liked staying home and raising her children.
    One day when my father asked her to stay home to take care of her children, Nay Chhun did an extraordinary thing: she pushed him with her hand. My father, who was unsteady on his feet, fell over
backward and cut himself on a barbed-wire fence.
    In Cambodian society, it is bad manners to talk back to a father or father-in-law. To push him physically is almost unthinkable. It was as bad-mannered, in its way, as it was for Lon Nol to
overthrow Sihanouk several years earlier. And like the coup against Sihanouk, my sister-in-law’s pushing of my father set a long chain of events into motion.
    I took Papa to the hospital and then brought him back to my bachelor apartment. Nay Chhun’s parents showed up to apologize and later Nay Chhun herself. I shut the door in their faces. In
the evening, my brother came. He stood in the doorway with the same wide face and calm, grave manner as my father.
    I told my brother that if he wanted to help Papa he could come in. But he would have