The Healing Fields

Randa Yos, pampered daughter of a university president, now lived and labored in the rice fields as a slave to her Khmer Rouge captors.

The new regime in Cambodia had ordered the evacuation of all cities on April 17, 1975, and Randa's family had left their home in Battambang for her father's home village. Within two weeks, Khmer Rouge soldiers who had been guarding the village began splitting apart all families.

Children as young as 5 were taken from their parents and assigned by age to separate camps in the surrounding farms and rice fields.

Randa, five months shy of her 13th birthday, was ordered to a camp for 13- to 16-year-olds, with none of her brothers or sisters. She was forced to work as many as 20 hours a day, sometimes in the rice fields, sometimes lugging huge rocks and piles of dirt on her young shoulders to help build irrigation ditches.

At night, Randa slept in the fields where she labored by day.

"Sometimes if you were lucky, you got to a place that had a lot of coconut trees. Then you had a roof to cover you. But if you didn't have anything, you just slept in the open fields - raining or sun, or whatever."

Randa was fed twice a day - mostly thin rice soup, every so often containing some vegetable "like what you'd feed a pig." But she was stubborn, and she hadn't lost her pickiness. She'd refuse the food, instead eating something raw from the fields. And that would make her sick.

Sleep was scarce, yet prisoners sometimes were kept awake and forced to listen to indoctrination sessions. "They told us to be loyal to the party, to be brave, to work hard. I got so tired, but you had to sit there. My mind would go to sleep. But when everybody clapped, I'd clap, too."

Now and then she'd be spared a long, hot day in the fields and maybe get something extra to eat, thanks to a young illiterate camp leader who asked Randa to prepare reports, keep track of supplies or write letters for her.

Randa worked, slept when she could, ate what she could, day after endless day, barely able to keep track of time, always wondering and worrying about her family.

The Khmer Rouge began trucking in hundreds of people to help build a dam one day, and they all gathered at a meeting that night.

Randa spotted her father in the crowd.

"All of a sudden, I just see him there. But he was so skinny - really, really skinny."

She couldn't risk talking to him, but she managed to find out where his camp was. She sneaked out to see him in the middle of the night. They cried and talked briefly before she reluctantly returned to her own camp.

A short time later, Randa also discovered her sister, "the one after me," and a cousin among the hundreds working on the dam. They pretended to be strangers during the day. But at night, they crept to their father's camp and tried to get him to eat the food they saved for him - a few grains of rice, a vegetable morsel from their soup.

"But he never wanted to take it from me. He was so skinny, but he'd say, 'I want you to have enough to eat.' "

With the dam construction under way, Randa's father took a chance and asked for permission to visit his wife, who was allowed to stay in his village because she was sick and had two toddlers. The Khmer Rouge leaders consented, but only on the condition that he build a dirt roadway of 400 to 500 yards over the water in a large irrigated field.

He could never do it alone, Randa knew. So she, her sister and their cousin crept out at night after their own long days in the field to help him "so he could go quick."

Finally, the roadway complete, Randa's father prepared for his visit.

On the day he left, Randa heard horses galloping furiously into the camp.

The next night, she heard them again. What was all the commotion, she asked her camp leader. The answer chilled her. "She told me the soldiers had come to collect all the doctors, all the professionals, whoever they hadn't killed yet.

"I was so scared, my body was shaking."

Randa, with all the nonchalance she could muster, asked the leader if she could see the list of the prisoners who were being taken away.

"Taken away," Randa says. "That's what they call it. But it means you never come back. It means they kill you."

On the list, as she feared it would be, as she knew it would be, was her father's name. Her body started shaking and tears welled, but she choked them back. "If I cry for an enemy of the state, they kill me, too."

When the soldiers learned that her father had left for his village, they set off to hunt him down, the ominous sound of their horses thundering through the fields.

She asked, again, as casually as she could, if she could visit her relatives in the village. The leader refused. So Randa waited impatiently for the sun to set. Then she took off, racing through the dark to her father's village.

"That night, I run and run and run and run. I fell into the lake. But I just kept running and running."

Setan

Like Randa, 17-year-old Setan Lee worked in the fields, slept in the fields. During the summer rainy season, he'd wake in the middle of the night - nearly submerged by water - and have to sit up to avoid drowning.

"My mattress was mud and my roof was the sky," Setan says.

He was reunited briefly with his family when they all were assigned to work on an irrigation system at a farm. They had all been able to hide their identities.

"We don't have the privilege to visit very long. It was a bittersweet reunion. There's not much we could do or say - just everybody try to survive."

Even thinking a day ahead seemed fruitless. "I just think that if I can live the next hour, I'll be lucky." He watched friend after friend die of starvation or untreated malaria, dysentery or pneumonia.

Guards his own age or younger beat him, "several times, just for the fun of it." Once, two laughing guards held a candle to one of his arms and a piece of burning firewood to the other until the flesh burned away.

The emotional torture burned as deeply.

At an abandoned temple where the prisoners were camped, Setan, the favored grandson of a Buddhist priest, was forced to smash a statue of a sleeping Buddha.

"I couldn't sleep because I thought I had killed my own god, and the god was going to take revenge on me."

He waited, terrified, for the god's vengeance. But nothing happened. Nothing ever happened, planting seeds of doubt in a faith he had embraced without question all of his life.

"There was no power or force to support that belief anymore," Setan says. "Yet I knew there must be something out there."

Like his grandfather, Setan was a searcher. "Like him, I was very religious. He taught me that there was a force out there greater, more powerful than anything."

But if not Buddha, who?

Setan didn't have the luxury of pondering such questions for long. The struggle to survive took every act of strength he had.

The scalding rice soup they had to gulp down quickly, and the lack of nutrition destroyed prisoners' teeth and gums. Setan lost all of his teeth.

The starving prisoners hunted for food in the swampy rice fields - fish, frogs, small crabs, insects that they swallowed quickly so guards wouldn't see them. Many children died from eating poison insects or poison frogs.

Having food of their own was forbidden.

One day a girl working next to Setan in the rice field found a crab and furtively passed her treasure to Setan.

But she wasn't stealthy enough. A young female guard caught her. Everyone knew the punishment. Despite the girl's cries, despite Setan's pleas, the guard shoved a plastic bag over the girl's head. Egged on by laughing comrades, right in front of Setan, for what seemed like forever, the guard held the bag tight around the convulsing girl's neck until she suffocated and collapsed, dead.

It was Setan's turn.

The soldiers dragged him away to an area by some railroad tracks. They buried him up to his neck and left him for red ants, poisonous snakes or a hungry animal to finish off.

Randa

Randa ran through the night in hopes of reaching her father.

By the time she arrived at the village in the morning, the Khmer Rouge soldiers had tied her father to one of their horses.

"I started screaming and crying, 'No, No.' I just kept screaming and screaming. I said, 'Take me, too. Kill me, too.'

"And the people in the village all came around me and said, "Be quiet, be quiet, or they'll kill you, too.' "

Even her stepmother, who was too ill to walk, crawled out of her hut and begged Randa to stop.

"But I didn't care anymore."

And it didn't matter.

"They took him. He was gone. I never saw him again.

"I found out they tortured him so bad, so bad until he died."

As with so many other victims of the killing fields, reports vary on how and where Randa's father died. Randa believes he was tortured to death in the caves of Sampeou Mountain, along with thousands of others whose scattered bones and messages scrawled in blood on the cave walls create a grisly monument to the brutality of the Khmer Rouge regime.