The Dead
Siem Reap, Cambodia

"...to know that the kindest, most worthy people have all fallen away, or even been tortured, humiliated before being killed, or buried and wiped away by the machinery of war, then this beautiful landscape of calm and peace is an appalling paradox. Justice may have won, but cruelty, death and inhuman violence had also won.

"Just look and think: it is the truth.

"Losses can be made good, damage can be repaired and wounds will heal in time. But the psychological scars of the war will remain forever."

--Bao Ninh, Vietnamese veteran of the American War, from his book, The Sorrow of War

South East Asia knows death on a massive scale. And I'm not just talking about the genocidal domination of these nations by Axis-allied Japan during the second world war. I'm talking about the last four decades, the last two generations. There isn't a South East Asian over thirty who knows not some sting of war-related death.

The blood that flowed during the Twentieth Century washed away the dead and continues to drown the living.

Along with the two million Asians killed by the South Koreans, Australians, and Americans during the American (Vietnam) War, millions more have died from internal spasms of violence--all for ideology's sake. And for what? If General Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge Party had not achieved its revolutionary and genocidal communist revolution in 1975--after five+ years of civil war and American bombing--Cambodia might be more developed than, say, Thailand, which has known relative peace, despite its 17 coups and attempted coups since 1932. If none of the 55,000 Americans that lost their lives in the war had died, American companies would still be importing Snickers Bars and Pringles for the locals to sell to the tourists.

I never made it to the American War Crimes Museum in Saigon. Thien and I slept away the afternoon of my last day there ("you changed my schedule," said the former bar owner). Which was fine. The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (Link is to the official site) in Phnom Penh was enough (here's a professor's guided tour, with pictures and here's a site showing some of the victims, tortured or otherwise).

The site itself was a quiet place in the center of the Cambodian capital city, a former primary school. At the time it was converted into a prison, the city's millions of residents had been herded into fields by the army, and agents of the Khmer Rouge killed and tortured over 14,000 ethnic minorities, intellectuals and other undesirables. Their goal was to achieve a totally agrarian society--a country of peasants. Historians give conservative estimates that two million Cambodians were killed over the four-year Khmer Rouge period. Others say the numbers are as high as nine million.

The dead don't stay in the ground. The living aren't quite whole. "All of the scouts, one way or another, were killed," Bao Ninh wrote. "But then you read of them dragging themselves along the streets, living hand-to-mouth lives as city-dwellers in the post-war years." The mutilated victims of war stalk the streets looking for money or pedal cyclos to market with one leg. They go crazy. They get strange syndromes and unexplained cancers. They lose both legs in war and then lose to a Republican who brands them unpatriotic. All the while, leaders remain untouched, and--so far--unimpeached.

Still, I'm just a traveler. I look at things. I smell things. That's my job right now.

On the bus to Siem Reap, just outside of Angkor Wat, I was glad I had tucked my handkerchief in my bag for easy access. (This was Thien's suggestion). While connecting to the capital two days ago, the dust rag was unnecessary, but en route today, the asphalt roads gave way to red dirt. This was the same kind of red clay that, when wet, gave me an unwanted facial last year on the back of a truck as I rode through the jungles of Loas.

Now the dust penetrates deeper. The dust settles like the poverty. In the eyes, throat, all over you. In your gut from the smell of it and its hands all over you. Trees turn the color of that earth, that sickly brown red, echoes of agent orange. Joyce (I know you're probably thinking, Joyce, what did he have to say about war? and Joyce, enough with the Joyce already), well, Joyce is suitable in such a pedestrian scene. The dust is a bit like the January snow storms now falling in my native Michigan. The dust reminds me of the last line in Dubliners, from a chapter called The Dead. The dust--like the snow--covers everything. It makes us forget. We experience...

"the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."