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sequences of believing that some lives should be valued more than others. That some lives
don't mean anything at all.
When I arrived at the former killing field, I joined up with a tour group as they walked
around. The guide told us about the horrors that took place in the absence of humanity. He
described how the Khmer Rouge had brought prisoners out from the camp in green trucks,
naked, with their eyes blindfolded and hands cuffed. When they stopped the trucks' engines
they marched all of them to the exact spot where I was standing. The victims were forced
to kneel at the edge of the pits, often already filled with the stench of rotting corpses. And
then the orgy of killing would begin.
Innocent women, children, and men had been slaughtered on this very spot—by ma-
chetes, shovels, bamboo sticks, knives, and pickaxes. The Khmer Rouge tried never to use
bullets. They believed that bullets were more precious than the lives they were taking away.
The tour guide continued with his gruesome story: “Around this pit, there was one ter-
rible tree. It was 'The Killing Tree.' It was that tree there.”
He pointed only a few feet from where we all stood, a group of English-speaking tourists
of many nationalities—from Germany and Australia, India and America.
“The Khmer Rouge created a very traumatic killing here,” he explained, his eyes dark
as he told us the story. “They began to find things to entertain themselves. They know the
mother's heart. It's always love for their baby. So those poor mothers were brought here
together with the baby and children.”
We all braced ourselves for what was surely to come. I wasn't sure I could stand to hear
it. Again, that eternal optimist in me always wanted to believe that life could be a gentler
place. How on earth do we reconcile its cruelties?
The tour guide told us what we already suspected, but feared to imagine: “The soldiers,
they decided to remove the blindfold from the mothers' eyes, and they forced the mothers
to open their eyes and watch the killing of their baby. They grabbed the baby's ankle like
a chicken or frog and the killer just smashed the baby's head against the tree. They threw
them up high into the air and they used the rifle's bayonet and they stabbed them.”
He stopped for a moment. I imagined he had to tell this story frequently, a constant re-
minder of what had happened to his people— by his own people. It was as though he woke
up every day in the same nightmare, haunted by the millions who had fallen into those shal-
low graves.
“But right here,” he finally spoke. “We cannot even cry. The tears become blood because
the mothers already watched the baby die.”
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