The Healing Fields

Randa waited to die.

The soldier stared at her as she crouched behind the seat of the truck where she had stowed away to escape the labor camp. Randa stared back. There was no way out. She was exposed. She would be killed.

Instead, without saying a word, the young female Khmer Rouge soldier moved quickly but casually to the seat where Randa was hiding and sat down, shielding Randa from the view of the other soldier in the back of the truck.

Relieved, Randa stayed put.

But for how long? When the truck pulled into a military camp in the jungle, the other soldier jumped out and ran off. The first soldier waited until she was sure the others in the camp were out of sight. Only then did she order Randa from her hiding place.

Randa pleaded for her life.

If I save you, the soldier replied, you'll have to do as I say.

She took Randa to her tent, gave her one of her uniforms and helped her clean herself up. The soldier reported to her group that she had found someone to cook her food and take care of her tent.

And so Randa did. She washed the soldier's clothes. She brought water for her bath. She cooked.

But when the young soldier tried to teach Randa to shoot an automatic rifle, she balked. I'll do whatever work you give me, no matter how hard, but please don't make me shoot a gun, Randa begged. I don't want to kill people. The soldier relented.

In the way that war creates strange friendships, they were becoming friends. The young woman, probably about 20, told Randa that she was the daughter of a schoolteacher. When the Khmer Rouge captured her province, they took her to train in the military. She agreed so she wouldn't be killed. Randa, in turn, shared her own story. "We learned to trust each other."

The military camp kept moving, trying to stay ahead of the North Vietnamese forces that were invading Cambodia. Gunfire, rockets and the sound of exploding land mines drew closer every day.

One morning Randa awoke to find the camp empty. The soldiers had crept away, leaving Randa behind. She headed for a road, but the fighting was too intense, too frightening. She slipped back into the jungle to hide.

When the gunfire quieted, she made a decision. She would flee Cambodia, head west toward the closest border - to Thailand, which she had visited many times with her father.

She wasn't sure how far it was or how long it would take. Randa walked along the nearest roads, toward what she trusted would be a friendly country - and freedom.

Setan

Setan forced himself to step from corpse to rotting corpse, body to mangled body - all land-mine victims. He knew these bodies littering the jungle floor provided the only safe route because the mines had already exploded.

Sometimes the people weren't dead yet.

"There are a lot of corpses everywhere. Some are fresh. Some are still alive. But there's not much I can do. I wish I could help them, but they're about to die anyway."

Setan had known to head west toward Thailand after escaping the labor camp, where his Khmer Rouge captors were preoccupied with their own flight from the approaching North Vietnamese. But he knew nothing about the jungle, so thick with tangles of strange trees and vines that he sometimes couldn't see the sun. He ate leaves, fruit when he could find it. He drank water from the hollows of trees or in ditches where bodies lay. He worried about strange sounds, dangerous animals.

If he heard soldiers or gunfire, he stayed in hiding for a few days. He trusted no one.

One day, out of nowhere, in the heart of the jungle, Setan was startled by a dirty, bedraggled man, clothes in tatters. He grabbed Setan, shocking the breath out of him. Yet strangely, Setan wasn't afraid.

"There was something in his eyes I trust."

Holding onto Setan, the man kept repeating one question: Do you believe in the Lord of the universe? Do you believe in the Lord of the universe?

The phrase echoed. Why was it so familiar? Setan tried to reach back into his mind. Then he remembered. He had prayed to a "lord of the universe" when he was seconds away from being hacked to death. Now it was clear.

"Yes, I believe," Setan replied.

Then the man said to Setan: His name is Jesus Christ.

And just as quickly as he had appeared, the stranger disappeared into the jungle.

"I believe that man was a messenger from God," Setan says. "I had never heard of Christianity. I knew nothing about it.

"This was the moment of my conversion."

Randa

Everywhere she walked, Randa saw people dead, people dying, wounded soldiers. She met kindness along the way in strangers who invited her to stay in their huts and share their food.

Walking into a village one day, Randa, 16 by now, was startled to see her grandmother, her sister, her brother, an aunt and an uncle, all on her mother's side. Most had been in the labor camps.

Now they were headed back home to their village, and they insisted that Randa go with them.

Randa wanted desperately to go to Thailand. But she had been taught, as all Cambodian children are taught, to respect her elders. So, reluctantly, she accompanied her relatives back to her father's village, where she found her mother.

But as happy as she was to find her family, Randa was convinced that Cambodia was still dangerous. She didn't trust anyone, including the occupying North Vietnamese troops who had routed the Khmer Rouge.

She tried time and again to persuade her family to leave with her, but time and again they refused. Her younger sister and brother begged to accompany her. No, she told them. You stay here until I find a safe place, then I'll come back and get all of you.

To avoid a scene with her grandmother, she slipped away a few weeks later and headed toward Thailand, vowing to return for her family as soon as she could.

She reached a camp at the border run by Cambodian freedom fighters, early escapees from the slave labor camps. People were coming in from everywhere. They had to pay to get in, but Randa had no money. So she hid among a group of people who had paid. "There were so many people, children crying, all the fighting, they didn't know who was who."

Once in the camp, Randa had nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep. She hid at night, fearing that she might be kidnapped, or dragged away and raped.

Again, strangers came to her aid. Two young women invited her to their family's tent and to share their food.

They all agreed they must escape across the border to Thailand.

So in the middle of the night, they ran for the border - ran for their lives, carrying few belongings, dodging barrage after barrage of earsplitting gunfire from both sides until they reached safety.

The next morning, American Red Cross and United Nations representatives were waiting to load them onto trucks that would take them to the new Khao I Dang refugee camp. And take Randa to her future.

Setan

After a month in the jungle, Setan, too, straggled into a military camp on the Cambodian side of the border with Thailand. And he, too, sneaked across the border into Thailand, into the arms of American Red Cross workers.

"It was just like heaven as soon as we saw those guys," Setan recalls. "They looked so nice, clean clothes and all that. And here I am, so dirty, so stinky. And here this guy just opens his arms and embraces me. To me, he is an angel."

Setan and hundreds of other refugees were trucked to Khao I Dang.

They were safe.

It had been four years and seven months since the promising 17-year-old medical student had driven his new red Suzuki pickup truck into the temple square at Battambang.

From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge killing fields had claimed the lives of somewhere between 1.7 million and 3 million people - victims of murder, starvation, disease, exhaustion and torture.

Cambodia had lost at least one-fifth of its population.