Uncovering Strip-Mines

I can't say my first impression of Cambodia was a good one.

At the Koh Kong land border crossing from Thailand, we met with corruption and confusion. First, we were charged 20 Thai Baht (THB) for a mandatory "health check," which involved a stern-looking Cambodian man in a shabby, blue uniform shining a laser-pointer at our throats and holding it there for 10 seconds.  From there, we were separated and ushered, one by one, into a small, dimly-lit room where at least 8 border officials sat counting money.

"1,500 Baht for visa!" the man sitting nearest to the door barked at me without looking up from the pile of cash and papers in front of him. I looked at the money in my hand: 30 US dollars--exactly what the internet and guidebooks told me I'd need. The border official was asking for $45 and in Thai currency, no less. Unsure of how to proceed, I left the room to gather my thoughts and re-group.

Outside, regular Cambodian citizens accosted me with questions and offers of "help" in the form of negotiation services or rides--all at highway-robbery prices. Eventually, after talking to other travelers and attempting twice more, I was able to get the visa for $39, though I still had to rustle up the sum in THB.

We drove away from the border rattled but glad to have made it through. What we saw next only rattled us further: poverty on a scale none of us had ever witnessed. We drove past rural towns where babies with no pants on ran around piles of burning trash, fields with haggard-looking men and women dragging impossibly skinny cows, rows of ramshackle, roadside homes propped up on stilts and draped with tattered Angkor Beer ads. I watched it all from the comfort of my bus seat as if I were ten thousand miles away, viewing the same scenes on a Discovery Channel special. It seemed so far away, so unreal as I sped past in a tour-bus blur, separated by a pane of window glass.

I didn't think about these first impressions again until a week later in Phnom Penh. Too sick to join my travel companions for a trip to the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields and S21 torture prison, I decided to watch a documentary about the tragedy called Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia. The film was shot in 1979, shortly after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, and showcased a country reeling from unfathomable devastation. For 50 minutes, I watched babies dying from treatable diseases in abandoned hospitals, an empty Pnomh Penh littered with worthless paper money and teeming with stray dogs, bodies and skulls stacked high at the Killing Fields.

It was no substitute for visiting the actual sites and talking to real victims, but there was one advantage to watching the documentary: it focused on the events that gave rise to the Khmer Rouge regime, rather than just its atrocities. In particular, it shined a light on the top-secret American bombing campaign codenamed Operation Menu carried out from 1969-1970, which unloaded 100,000 tons of bombs on neutral Cambodia--the equivalent of 5 Hiroshimas--in a move to knock out some Vietcong sanctuaries in the region.

More than 4,000 Cambodian civilians were killed in the process. Only in the chaos that ensued did the Khmer Rouge, a formerly fringe, radical group, gain enough traction to topple the existing government. From 1975-1979, they carried out one of the worst genocides in human history, murdering an estimated 25% of the Cambodian population.

I thought back on my first impressions--the frustration, annoyance, and removed apathy I first felt towards the country and its people--and felt a growing sense of guilt-by-association spreading through my already nauseous stomach. No longer was I so comfortably disconnected from what I saw and encountered on those first days. In fact, I was starting to feel a strange sense of reluctant responsibility--similar to what I imagine young Germans must feel learning about WWII and the Holocaust.

And I felt embarrassed--embarrassed that I knew next-to-nothing about what happened here. Not once in all my years of elite American schooling did I learn about the Khmer Rouge or my country's role in its rise to power, and I was a history major. Meanwhile, I can tell you everything there is to know about the Holocaust and WWII, a story we love to tell and retell because, just like our Marvel movies, it contains such impossible extremes of good and evil. And because in that black-and-white world of good and evil, we got to be "the good guys."

Not the case here in Southeast Asia. In Laos, I learned that we dropped about 2 million tons of bombs here too during the Vietnam War, leaving the peaceful, mountain country littered with unexploded ordinance (UXO's) that remains a problem to this day.

I recently read a scene from short story called "Big Bertha Stories" by Bobbie Ann Mason, in which a Vietnam war vet tries to convey to his American wife what we were doing in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war. "Strip-mining," he calls it:

We were stripping off the top. The topsoil is like the culture and the people, the best part of the land and the country. America was just stripping off the top, the best.

I'm uncovering truths in the strip-mines that are blowing my initial, simplistic view of Southeast Asia sky-high. Now, as we drive past remote Cambodian villages, or fly over the mountains and rivers of Laos, I no longer feel like a passive, unaffiliated observer, free to form my own surface judgements.

No more misguided preconceptions. This is Day Zero of the rest of my trip.