The Healing Fields

At first, 18-year-old Setan Lee didn't notice the trucks full of armed soldiers rumbling into the Buddhist temple square in his hometown of Battambang.

On this final day of the Cambodian New Year, music and noisy celebration filled the packed square in Cambodia's second largest city. Children played in the warm afternoon air. Revelers sprinkled perfumed water onto the temple statues in a blessing ritual intended to bring good luck, long life and happiness.

"We were celebrating," Setan says. "We were having fun."

Setan didn't understand when he saw the grim, black-uniformed soldiers pouring out of the trucks, aiming their rifles wildly and shouting "enemy" over and over.

Setan's best friend didn't understand, either. He approached one of the soldiers.

I'm not your enemy, he told the soldier. Why do you call me your enemy?

The soldier's response was swift and irrevocable.

"Just like that, they shot him and killed him."

Setan froze in disbelief and terror. He went numb.

"Right away, I know he's not going to make it. He's already dead."

It was April 17, 1975, and in one terrifying moment, Setan Lee - son of a wealthy businessman, youngest student in his medical school class - lost a world of promise and possibility.

Setan (pronounced SEE-tahn) was no stranger to gunfire. The country had been in turmoil for decades - civil war, American carpet bombings and incursions from the Vietnamese.

For the past five years, Khmer Rouge communist soldiers had kept up insistent guerrilla attacks against the Cambodian army, which answered with rocket fire and shelling. The fighting had battered the country's cities and villages. Lately, it had even disrupted Setan's studies in the capital city of Phnom Penh, forcing frequent closings of the medical school he attended.

But it was, at most, an inconvenience. In the shelter that privilege affords, Setan's family had remained largely untouched. His father made sure his 14 children wanted for nothing. Each child had a nanny. Expensive clothes. The best toys. Setan had two mopeds and a brand new red Suzuki pickup truck, a reward for having done well in school.

Thanks to a superior education and private tutors, Setan had graduated from high school at 14 and entered medical school at 15.

As long as he could remember, he had wanted to be a doctor.

"It was my dream to open my own clinic," Setan says. "My older brother was going to be a pharmacist. He would have the pharmacy next door. We would see everybody. We would see a few rich people so we could make a living and help the poor."

His father, who had grown up in poverty and carved out a fortune in the import-export business, insisted that his children share their blessings with less privileged friends and classmates. He taught them "not to look down on anybody," Setan says.

He learned his father's lesson well. Setan often used his allowance to buy food, clothing or medicine - even a bicycle once - for needy friends in Battambang.

Setan knew that to make good on his dream of becoming a doctor, he would have to finish his education, and he feared that the ever more persistent fighting would interfere.

So Setan and his 22-year-old brother, Monthy, the pharmacy student, had hatched a plan to head to Paris where they could continue their studies uninterrupted. Monthy would leave immediately. Setan would follow when he finished the school year in June.

Their parents refused. Setan, not quite 18 then, was too young to travel by himself. Better that Setan's brother wait for him, and the boys could leave together. It's only a couple of months, they told him.

Monthy was furious. He blamed Setan for making him stay behind.

Setan saw it as a temporary setback. He and his brother would be in Paris soon enough.

It was something to look forward to during the New Year's festivities on this bright April 17 afternoon as Setan, in his new red truck, picked up his best friend and drove to the square, eager to celebrate the holiday, carefree and unsuspecting.

And now here was his best friend, as inseparable from him as a brother, lying dead on the ground.

Briefly, Setan thought, "Could I just go get a gun and fight back?"

But before he could catch his breath, the soldiers began to shoot, hitting dozens of people as they scattered, screaming and scrambling over walls to escape.

"I thought, 'No, no, this is not real. This is unthinkable,' " Setan says.

His mind went to his family. They had planned to visit relatives at the Thailand border, and he prayed they had made it safely. Yet that meant he was alone. Panic replaced the numbness.

"I can't run. I can't do anything. So many things come into my mind. But I don't know what to do. I don't know what to say."

Finally, the soldiers stopped shooting and, still aiming their rifles at their captives, ordered those who remained to raise their hands above their heads.

"So I thought, OK. OK."

Randa

It started just after lunch.

Randa Yos was settling in for a lazy holiday afternoon with her stepmother and her sisters and brothers at home in Battambang. Her father, the president of a university in the city, had called his driver to take him to his office as usual that April morning in 1975. The family was Buddhist, but not particularly religious, so there were no plans to join the festivities at any of the temples.

Perhaps 121/2-year-old Randa (pronounced RAHN-duh) could talk her sisters into letting her style their hair into an "up-do," her specialty.

Suddenly gunfire and shouting erupted outside, and in the next moment, one of Randa's cousins burst into the house, shouting that the Khmer Rouge had taken Randa's father. They heard voices from loudspeakers ordering residents to evacuate the city immediately, warning that American forces would begin bombing Battambang at any minute.

"They said don't take anything," Randa says. "Just go. Go several kilometers for three days. The old people knew to grab something to eat."

These were not the usual riots and shelling that had grown almost commonplace and that sometimes forced Randa to stay home from school, though she was too young to understand why. Her father hadn't talked about it much to her.

"It was scary," she says. "But when you live with it, sometimes you just learn to ignore it."

Young Randa had more personal pain and confusion to live with. Her unending source of shame was the divorce of her parents when she was 4.

Her mother had returned to her village outside Battambang with the youngest child. The oldest three lived with Randa's father in the city. Randa was allowed no contact with her mother. And nobody would talk about it.

"In Cambodia, when you're divorced, sometimes one side of your family won't let you see the other side," Randa says.

Her father, who traveled frequently, entrusted her upbringing to her grandmother and an aunt until he remarried when Randa was 9. He and her stepmother, a university professor, had three children of their own.

"I was depressed sometimes. I wasn't like the rest of my friends, because my father was divorced. They would tease me. I wanted to call somebody Mom, and I didn't have anybody."

She eventually grew close to her stepmother, "but she wasn't my mother."

Despite her sadness, despite her father's hectic schedule, it was a good life. "We weren't spoiled, but we had more than a lot of people."

Randa's father, having lived through lean times during World War II, taught his children to be grateful for what they had, cautioned them that if the war pounding Cambodia came closer, they might not have much to eat.

It was an apt warning for finicky Randa. She stubbornly refused to eat vegetables. The fat on pork disgusted her. She hated the bones in fish. "I didn't want to touch it. I was crying all the time. I like to eat something that can go smooth in my throat."

She gave thanks for her younger sister, "the one after me," who would eat whatever Randa discarded. The sisters, only a year apart and as close as twins, were united in a solemn promise to each other: They would go to college, become professionals. And they would stay single. "I would have my own life," Randa says.

College was a priority for this university president's family, even for his daughters - even in the 1970s, when many Cambodian girls were allowed only to learn to read and write, nothing more. "They'd stop after junior high," Randa recalls.

She had set her sights on becoming a dentist, undaunted by the obstacles she knew she would face.

"I wanted to be the first woman in history to open a dental clinic. I saw so many children who could hardly take care of their teeth. I wanted to help them."

But in an afternoon, Randa's dream disintegrated. Her stepmother gathered the family and headed toward Preakh Noren, the village outside Battambang where Randa's father had been raised. They didn't know what had happened to him, but they hoped he would look for them there.

They walked until nightfall. Hungry and exhausted, they finally stopped to rest. They prayed Randa's father was safe.

They had no way of knowing that after the Khmer Rouge had stormed his office at the university, he had been ordered, like hundreds of others, to put on his school uniform to celebrate the triumphant return of King Norodom Sihanouk after years of exile. But there was no return. The "king's request" was a ploy to identify and round up unsuspecting professionals, teachers, administrators, students and government workers - all members of the educated elite classes, all enemies of the Khmer Rouge blueprint for a utopian communist peasant state.

Randa's father was among hundreds of people loaded into cars, buses and trucks by the Khmer Rouge. The soldiers took him to a building he didn't recognize. He had no idea what was happening until he saw a man who had once taught school with him.

"He told my father, 'Don't go with the Khmer Rouge. You must escape and find your family. They're going to kill (all of) you,' " Randa recalls. "The man was with the Communist Party. He knew what was going to happen."

With the man's help, Randa's father escaped.

Randa's family, after a night of fitful rest, continued their trek the next morning - still hopeful they would find her father. The narrow road along the Sangke River was jammed with people heading out of the city when Randa saw her father in the crowd.

There he was, riding a bicycle, searching faces as he rode by, calling out the names of his wife and children. Relieved and grateful, the Yos family found each other, and continued on their way, together.

The rest of Randa's family would not be so lucky. She learned later that the Khmer Rouge killed every other member of her father's extended family on that first day. "One of my cousins, they killed the whole family - 10 or 15 members in just that one family, even the babies. All on my father's side. His sister's son. Even my grandmother who took care of me.

"They killed them all."

Setan

Setan's instincts took hold. The Khmer Rouge had ordered him to change into his school uniform. But why should he believe these soldiers? They had just murdered his best friend right in front of him.

"I hate to say this, but it's a good thing I saw my friend get killed," Setan says. "If I hadn't witnessed that, I'd probably be fooled just like everyone else. I'd have put on my college uniform, and I'd be dead. I no longer trusted anything they said."

Instead, he ran home and put on dirty clothes so the Khmer Rouge wouldn't know he was from a wealthy "enemy" family. He joined the throngs streaming out of the city, soldiers' rifles trained on them.

In the middle of the road, a young soldier stopped him and asked him how long he had owned his shoes. A couple of months, Setan said. Well, you've had them long enough, the soldier told him, now let me have them.

Setan took off his shoes. He kept walking, his feet cut and bleeding, until he couldn't feel the pain anymore. Until the sun went down.

The next day brought new horror.

About 28 miles outside the city, Setan watched uniformed students, teachers and military officers being unloaded from a long procession of vehicles. Mechanically, soldiers lined up the prisoners, marched them into the rice fields - and shot them to death, one by one.

Sometimes the soldiers made them kneel. Sometimes they shot them in the back of the head. Or where they stood. Or while they were walking.

In an endless stream, the cars and trucks and buses disgorged the passengers, the soldiers killed them and the vehicles returned to the city for another round of victims.

The fields became a floor of bodies.

In a moment of terror, Setan recognized one of the cars - his father's new Peugeot.

Please, please don't let my father be in that car.

The next thing he knew, a military general who was one of his father's best friends, a man Setan called uncle, alighted from the passenger side of the car, grinning and waving to the crowd, shouting, Cheer! Cheer! Victory! Victory!

"And they shot him from behind."

Five other officers emerged from the car. Each was shot down.

The car held one more occupant.

The last out was Setan's father. A soldier walked behind him, pointing a rifle at his head.

Setan screamed, NO! NO! NO!

But he was too far away.

Ignoring the soldiers all around him, Setan raced to his father.

"I don't care at this point if I get killed. I don't care."

Setan could not have known that his father would be spared. He could not have known that his father was the driver, forced at gunpoint to ferry people to their deaths.

Setan's startled father embraced him, begged his captors for a moment so the two could talk. Quickly, quickly, the soldiers said, aiming their rifles at the heads of father and son.

Setan was bewildered. Dad, why are you here? Why didn't you go to Thailand?

Because of you, Setan, his father replied. Our family was waiting for you. I couldn't leave without you.

Guilt overwhelmed Setan. "Because of me, everyone in my family was captured."