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Book Reviews

By Pete Zastrow

Pete Zastrow
VVAW National Office

When the War Was Over: The Voices of Cambodia's Revolution and Its People is Elizabeth Becker's attempt to help us understand what went on in Cambodia during the incredible regime of Pol Pot. She makes much of that remarkable history a little more understandable; more may be told at some later date; much will no doubt never be told but will die with the revolutionaries whose plans for Cambodia destroyed the country they were trying to save.

Becker is well positioned to write such a book; she has a degree in Asian studies; she covered the war in Cambodia (the war that the U.S. waged against the Khmer Rouge) for the Washington Post; she is clearly filled with affection for the country of Cambodia and its people; and she was one of the only American reporters permitted into Cambodia during Pol Pot's short reign. That her visit to Cambodia was marked by men breaking into her hotel and shooting Scottish journalist (friend of the Cambodian Revolution—which didn't have too many) Malcolm Caldwell only seems fitting in a story complete with horror after horror.

Her own affection for the country is clear during her visit to Phnom Penh at the invitation of the Pol Pot government. Every sentence cries for the past, for the days when the Cambodian capital was a thriving and vibrant city instead of what is now an empty hulk. Several times she escapes her guards and guides and strolls the streets that she remembers well from having lived in the city. There is no one. Beautiful old buildings are empty or have been turned into storehouses. Occasionally yards have become gardens for the factory workers in the city in the short periods they are not working. It is, in short, utterly joyless; if this is living, better to be dead.

One of the book's most memorable characters says much the same thing. Komphot, a middle level bank employee and distant supporter of the Revolution, was one of the millions swept out of Phnom Penh when the Kher rouge cleared out the city. Wandering into the countryside, being stopped to write his biography several times, Komphot ended up in a distant village cooperative, surviving—barley. Intellectuals were killed; during nights in the village there would be sounds of footsteps, muffled cries, a body being dragged off; a "body was fading away" people would say, and at night no one but Khmer rouge cadre would move. Komphot summed up his own future; "It is one thing to suffer to live, another thing to suffer only to die. I decided to give it two years. I f nothing changed, I would commit suicide."

Komphot is one of the characters who made it out of Cambodia (he fled during the Vietnamese invasion). Many of the characters who speak through these pages did not get out but ended up in Tuol Sleng, the prison camp from which there was, apparently, no escape and no hope of leaving—in fact, as Becker tells the story, death was both the only and a most welcome release.

Becker returned to Cambodia after the Vietnamese had taken control; she clearly was given access to many of the records of this horrifying camp (there is no way to understand how the commanders of this camp could allow these records to continue—they even kept skulls of their victims). Confessions, followed through a period of months, would get more and more "complete," involve more and more people as torture increased. The groveling please for death in some of the final "confessions" are painful to read—we can only guess at the pitiful state of the person who could have written such a "confession."

Yet the personal storied—whether collected from survivors who she interviewed, or gleaned from what must be volumes of prison records—are one of the strongest parts of When the War Was Over. It is a strength that we in VVAW can well understand, since much of the effect we have when we speak comes from experiences we can recount. If a picture is worth a thousand words, one personal recollection is worth numerous statistics. And so we can see the devastating results of the Pol Pot revolution on individuals whose suffering is unspeakable. In the prison camp, higher and higher level cadre appear as the Revolution begins to devour its own. But the effect on ordinary Cambodians must touch anyone who reads the book; every structure of society that they knew is destroyed. A theory (never well explained) of catapulting the country into the revolutionary vanguard works its destructive will on the people for whom, after all, the revolution is supposed to have taken place.

Becker helps us to understand the historical roots for Pot Pot's brutal approach to changing his country. A strain of feeling less violence runs through the history of Cambodia, the author notes, from the days of the Ankor empire centuries earlier. And Pol Pot his fellow revolutionaries are well versed in history, though they are also selective in its application; and early treatise written by Pol Pot (then a student in Paris) is signed "the Original Khmer."

Despite the clear attempt to come to grips with Pol Pot, even tracking down the apartment he lived in during his student days in Paris, Becker is left with mostly question marks. Her trip to Cambodia was capped by a meeting (audience might be a better word) with the mysterious ruler. He seems to have been average at best, a hard-working party cadre from his early days, but never distinguished at anything. And then he was party chief and absolute ruler of Cambodia. What maneuvers took place inside the party, how Pol Pot emerged on top of men whose backgrounds suggest far greater abilities and accomplishments, none of these questions will probably be answered, ever.

Wherever he came from, however, Pol Pot and his followers turned Cambodia into a Hell. Despite a long-standing political axiom that one country has not business invading another, whether it's the U.S. in Vietnam or the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the Vietnamese move into Cambodia may have been the only way to save the country. Becker's book provides a good argument that this was the case.

Tour of Duty: Vietnam in the Words of Those Who Were There

Edited by Cranston Sedrick Knight

Many people who have read any part of the rapidly growing collection of short works—poems, short stories, things like the "recollections" which appear in each issue of THE VETERAN—must have wanted their own anthology. For each of us there are particular poems or stories which speak to us, which capture some familiar moment or make clearer some half-remembered emotion.

Knight has made his own selection; it must have been extremely difficult to say I want this poem and not that one. But the result is a splendid collection; the works are loosely arranged to follow both U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the course of a single tour. Occasionally there are jarring interjections as when we read a section of an LBJ speech or a quote such as "We are in Vietnam because the United States of America has a stake in freedom" (Hubert Humphrey).

Stories and poems and quotes bounce against each other, the arrangement providing a new look at some familiar items, and new poems and stories providing a new look at the experience that was Vietnam. That means a new look at ourselves.

Tour of Duty is published by SAMISDAT, Box 129, Richford, VT 05476.