choueng ek

no worries, i can't really say it either. they're just referred to as the killing fields.

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even after my twenty-eight page senior seminar paper for doctor galloway on the inaccuracy and inability of language to describe life, i'm frustrated with the following attempt to get you all to truly understand what alex and i have experienced in cambodia. and i know that's how language works, that it doesn't. trust me, after jen payne and i scrambled for a solid forty-eight hours to compile our quality papers, we tried to learn a few things. maybe if i could speak five languages and you could understand those five i'd be able to throw together some mix, but english just isn't going to cut it. you'll have to think about these.

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it has been about four days since we were actually on these fields, and i have about the same amount of words to say now as i did before. i thought maybe i'd be able to process a few things, formulate something with which i could explain, but i really can't. looking at these pictures for the first time since they were taken-- i never even looked at the back of the camera as they were shot-- the same wave of pity came back over me and i still can't quite understand.

tuol sleng itself was quite difficult, but there, things were untouched. counting systems for the cells was still in plain sight, the beds that victims slept in were still in the same rooms, and there was question as to what we saw on the walls and floors was still dried blood. but the killing fields have been manipulated, excavated. the grass has to be mowed, landscaping has been done, most of the buildings were torn down, and the ground is now large holes. it was hard to grasp what happened here rather than just look around and see mounds of dirt, but to wrap my mind around everything the place represented was asking a lot.

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after a forty-five minute moto ride in which alex and i, again, thought we'd lose our lives, our crazy driver stopped at the front gate. much of the ride there, he tried to teach us khmer, then he wouldn't stop talking about the duck soup he would eat while he waited for us. he must make this drive fairly often, and it caught me off-guard that he actually looked forward to it, even for the simplest reason.

we weren't sure what we'd see today, but we had an idea. we walked in and got our tickets.




this beautiful building was the first thing we saw past the ticket counter. it has a typical asian / buddhist silhouette, with gorgeous landscaping out front. assuming it was commemorative, a monument, i took a few photographs from the outside.




this sign was out front, along with the numerous signs that asked us to keep our noise level as low as possible while we walked through the fields.




it was a tribute to all of the victims, with the count being somewhere between 1.4 and 2 million people. since there were no records kept, this is as accurate as it gets. this particular field has a definite count of 14,000 dead, but with those unaccounted for and the facts from the excavation included, they feel that 20,000 is more accurate.

how do you lose sight of six thousand people?

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i walked closer to the building, and as i did, i was able to start making out that it wasn't just a building, but it encased something. i kept stepping closer, but stopped about fifty feet back. i've done the research by now, and i've seen the pictures, video on the fields, and heard stories about what is there. i should have known.




the building is home to thousands of skulls that were brought up from the fields. i stepped inside, and though glass covered those higher in the building, i was face to face with the skull in front of me. holes had been cut out of the glass at eye-level so tourists could take photographs of what was in front of them.

amongst the skulls sat a sign that simply read "15-20 yrs women."

can you call a 15-year old a woman? or is child a better word?




many of them bared testimony to the tragic deaths they suffered with holes and large cracks facing towards us, on display as if to say "it's true, here's the proof". we had seen this back at tuol sleng, but knowing that it had been dug up only a few hundred yards away was one of the few things i could wrap my mind around. these aren't the plastic skulls you find at halloween. and these weren't donated to science like the skeleton that hangs in nininger.




these people had no choice, they died simply for existing.

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signs like this one were placed around the entrance area, marking the placement of certain buildings and stops along the way. this particular one shows where the building in which they kept hammers and other tools for bludgeoning, but it was destroyed right after the vietnamese drove the khmer rouge out of phnom penh. in fact, every relevent building was destroyed, most likely out of hate for their actions.




though i understand this and don't mind at all, it's partially what made understanding where we were so difficult. besides the skulls, there was nothing to visually mark the tragedy of the history here. sure, there were signs and words and holes in the ground, but we had to stand and look and think until our heads couldn't do it anymore.

there were a couple of these fenced in areas. this one in particular was right as we walked in the fields themselves, which were located behind the building. i just can't understand four-hundred and fifty people.




the area itself was so small, and couldn't have been longer than fifteen feet wide.




i try to figure-- were they all killed at the same time? in groups? over one day? three days? did they just dig a large hole and fill it in by the day until it was the same height as the ground? and i usually stop there. it's something i can't even let my mind wander off to now while i type.




this sign marked the grave of 166 more people, and i'm not sure how they were able to figure this out.

these bodies had no skulls to help in the victim count. they had been beheaded.

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we contined on, and the property of the killing fields included a short walk around this lake. i wondered why, because there wasn't really anything behind it. maybe the government understood that people would need to spend a great deal of time here, and wanted to give them somewhere to which they could wander. but it just didn't seem right to see something so tranquil in the middle of a place that had been filled with sounds of death and pain only thirty years ago.




after we finished our walk around the pond, we came out on the other end of the fields. in the middle of them was a large tree. this sign states that it was the "magic tree, used as a tool to hang a loudspeaker," which made sounds louder than the screams of the victims. this was so anyone who lived in the surrounding communities couldn't hear what was going on as people were being executed.




we stood for a bit, and alex decided this was the point in which she was done. there were only a few more things to see, so i thought i'd walk on. it was difficult to get photographs that could illustrate the number of graves in the area, and this was one of the few where you don't have to search for them.

in some places, there were even signs and ropes that held people back from unknowingly stepping on the sites.




i stumbled upon one more mass grave site, and though i don't remember how many were killed here, it was all women and children who had been stripped naked. it wasn't until i walked around the perimeter that i noticed this sign. the bones next to it had been dug up here, and their broken edges illustrate the beatings.




i walked back towards the entrance, slowly now, trying to understand and absorb my surroundings, but i had still couldn't quite do it.

though i walked out the same way i walked in, i noticed something i hadn't before. alex and i had to walk around a large roped-off area on the main pathway right as we had entered the fields. we didn't really pay attention to what was there, but as i walked by, this particular image caught me by surprise. i crouched down and realized that it was a bone, burried in the dirt.




in fact, all of these white specks in this picture are pieces of bone. it seems that they had recently discovered this grave and hadn't yet gotten the chance to excavate it. it was surreal-- bodies that had yet to be accounted for and given a proper burial after thirty years. this was as true-to-history as the killing fields got, and i couldn't have asked for a more straight-forward visualization to help me comprehend.




the mass graves in general seemed so small, this one in particular, and i can't understand how so many people could stand, kneel, shoulder to shoulder.

i sat down at the end of my walk and felt both frustration and unsettlement at my lack of reaction to where i was. the air was quiet, and the few people who talked were barely above a whisper. this was the first day there had been a slight breeze, but the air was so dry, and everything seemed to stand still, or move in slow motion.

as we walked out, our moto driver stood ready for us. he asked what we thought, but neither of us knew what to say. he was around forty-five years old, meaning he had lived through everything. he said to us,

"i don't understand. why khmer kill khmer?"

but we obviously weren't the ones to ask.

..






Y rae. racho. d.