The Healing Fields

Setan Lee should have died.

He was buried in the ground up to his neck as punishment for taking a morsel of food, a tiny crab, from a fellow prisoner in the fields. He was easy prey for deadly animals, poison reptiles or insects.

And yet, after two days and two nights, he was still alive when two young female Khmer Rouge guards came to check on him.

For all of their savagery, many of the soldiers were little more than children. Once in a while, however briefly, their youthful emotions and amusements got the better of them. As it happened, one of the guards who came to check on Setan had developed a crush on him.

And in the camps, Setan had learned a patriotic communist song that entertained her and the other soldiers.

So for a song and a brief infatuation, Setan was saved.

The guards pulled Setan from the ground. His legs were paralyzed, so they took him to their own camp instead of returning him to the slave labor camp.

"I couldn't do any work. All I did was boil water for (them) and sing that song."

He stayed for eight months - until he could move his legs again. Finally, they sent him back to the labor camp.

In the killing fields again, he was treated "worse than an animal." Some things he won't talk about.

Guards gouged out prisoners' eyes. Cut off their tongues. Pulled out their fingernails. Poured acid on them. Suffocated them, not always to death, sometimes just to paralysis.

His fellow prisoners became his friends, but not a day went by that one of them wasn't tortured or killed. Some slit their own throats instead.

Setan awoke every day wondering if it was his turn.

He thought what a relief it would be simply to give up.

"On so many occasions, I thought I'd rather die. I wanted to scream at the guards, 'I hate you.' That's all you'd need to do, and you'd be killed."

But something kept him going, one minute at a time. "Something just said, 'Move on, Setan. You're going to make it.' "

He had survived being buried alive. He had survived the assaults on his body and his spirit. Then he made a mistake that he was certain would cost him his life.

His captors found the student ID card he had hidden in a small pocket of his pants and forgotten about. He was a member of the educated class, a "city dweller," an enemy of the Khmer Rouge. It was a death sentence.

"I said, 'There's no way I'm going to make it.' "

The soldiers tied his hands, blindfolded him, attached him to a rope with four others, also students, all sentenced to be hacked to death with the sharp edge of a bamboo pole. Setan was last in line.

One by one, each of the prisoners was slaughtered. Setan felt their blood splatter onto his body. He heard their screams, their cries for mercy.

And Setan began to pray. "Lord of the universe, whoever you are, please spare my life."

He had no inkling where this strange prayer came from. "I had never heard those words before."

Then there was no one else left. All four before him were dead. Setan was next. He was shoved to his knees. He heard the soldier raise the bamboo branch "so close to my neck I feel it." He waited for death.

In that very instant, a guard rushed up, screaming at the soldier: Stop. Stop.

The guard wanted Setan brought to his court for further investigation. "But there's no such thing in the killing field," Setan says. "No investigation."

The soldiers yanked off Setan's blindfold, and he saw the four dead prisoners beside him.

"I knew whoever I called upon at that time - I felt release. I knew someone was there to help me. It was incredible."

He had left his own shattered faith in Buddhism among the debris of the sleeping idol he had destroyed without consequence. But he felt the beginnings of a belief in something else, some other nameless force.

Later that day, the guards handed him a piece of paper and a pencil, and he learned why he had been spared.

The education that condemned him had saved him. Despite Khmer Rouge claims that the country's rice production was healthy, it was, in fact, dwindling rapidly. The guards ordered Setan to design an irrigation system.

But Setan, who had been a medical student, knew nothing about irrigation, nothing about agriculture. He had never seen the great lake called Tonle Sap or the Cham Nom River, the water sources that would supply the system. Surely he could not escape death again. He braced himself to confess that he could not possibly complete his assignment - when suddenly he began to draw.

"Someone forced me to start drawing. It was supernatural intervention."

Though he didn't know it at the time, couldn't put a name to it, Setan says now, "God forced me to move, so I just flowed with it."

Setan drew the design and handed it to the leader. The leader declared it perfect. Setan's life was saved again.

"How I drew that system, I have no idea. That's why I believe so strongly in God."

In the months that followed, Setan often heard distant gunfire.

It was 1978, and the North Vietnamese, who had once been allies of the Khmer Rouge, were now on the attack, capturing more and more Cambodian territory.

Setan knew none of this. All he knew was that the fighting gave him his best opportunity to escape.

One day, with enemy gunfire approaching fast, the Khmer Rouge soldiers ordered the prisoners to stop working and head into the jungle.

"I told myself, 'Setan, this is it. If you stay (with the prisoners), you're going to die. If you leave, there's a 99, 100 percent chance you're going to die, but a little chance you're going to make it.' "

He took his chance. While the other prisoners headed for the jungle, Setan crawled into an irrigation ditch. He heard the Khmer Rouge soldiers calling his name, searching for him. Lying face down, he could see nothing. He dared not look up. He heard North Vietnamese gunfire grow louder. Khmer Rouge gunfire moved farther away. Hours later, all was quiet.

When Setan was sure he was alone, he, too, headed for the jungle.

Randa

Randa's desperate flight to reach her father in his village before his execution had condemned her, as well.

The Khmer Rouge now knew she was the daughter of a university president, a member of the enemy educated elite. Her cousin in the camp was already dead, and Randa was sent to another camp, "a camp where they send you to kill you - but before they killed you, they let you work."

At the new camp, Randa got only one meal a day.

She worked in rice fields, standing in water up to her thighs. During the rainy season, she had to tread water up to her neck at times to avoid drowning. The searing sun and hot, filthy water raised huge, raw blisters from her torso to her toes.

Leeches gathered everywhere. "You'd step into the water and they'd all swim up and get on you. The big ones, yes. But the worst were the little ones. They'd just all scurry up my legs."

She was sick constantly, with fever and diarrhea so severe she would faint.

Sometimes people collapsed and died in the fields, where birds or other animals would feed on them.

Randa saw people in the camp buried alive, their fingernails ripped out, beaten to death, bitten by a poisonous snake every day until they died. "Or sometimes they'd hang you on a tree and cut your throat - just a little bit - every day until you died.

"They don't kill you right away. They kill you slowly. They'd say they don't want us to die peacefully. They want us to die suffering."

But rather than wear her down, the terror and rage strengthened Randa's resolve to live. "I just kept praying every day for someone to just come and be a hero, and kill all these people and get me out of here."

Fueled by anger at the murder of her father and other relatives, she set her mind on escape, always escape. "No matter what, I wasn't going to die young."

Randa saw her chance one day when a line of trucks filled with soldiers pulled into her camp. She pretended to work as she watched them unload and disperse. When no one was looking, she climbed into the back of a truck and hid behind a seat. Though she figures she was maybe 15 at the time, she was so small that she fit easily without being seen.

An hour went by. Then two women soldiers jumped into the back of the truck, and it drove out of the camp, the small stowaway undetected.

As the truck headed for the jungle, one of the women heard a noise. She looked toward the seat where Randa was hiding.

In an instant, the soldier and Randa were staring into each other's eyes, neither breathing a word.