The red and the black.

"I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion." - Jack Kerouac


I didn't see a single one that had front teeth. Top or bottom. I don't know if this was from malnutrition, or they had been knocked or yanked out by the Khmer Rouge during beatings or torture, or if that's just one of the first steps when bodies decompose. But I looked somberly and carefully at several hundred human skulls today, and not one of them had its front teeth in place. When surrounded by atrocity, sometimes it's these little details that distract you enough to get by. Because when I focused on where exactly I was, what had occurred in these fields and these cells thirty years ago, my normally granite stomach turned over and I nearly vomited. I wouldn't have been the first.The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, sixteen kilometers outside the center of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. When the Vietnamese liberated the country from the Khmer Rouge, this small area of six or so acres was found to contain 129 mass graves. Just under nine thousand corpses. Most of those remains are now piled in to the 17 tiers of the bone stupa memorial. Level one is a pile of clothing. The next eight levels contain nothing but skulls. The lower three of these were some of the ones I was able to look at, where only molars of their smiles remained. Skulls don't tell you all that much about a person's life. But they can scream sagas about their deaths.
The Khmer Rouge, not surprisingly, had very little money. Whereas their Nazi predecessors in genocide chose not to shoot their victims because it was too inefficient, too slow a destruction when attempting to wipe out an entire race of people, a good deal of the Khmer Rouge cadres avoided bullets simply because they were too expensive. They instead turned to methods of murder that were cheap. Repeatable. Hammers. Wooden stakes. Garden tools. Many of the skulls I saw today had a large, uneven hole in them from these instruments. One had a large slit. Could have been anything from an axe to a garden hoe, but while my mind will never be sure, it certainly visualized all the possibilities.
The killing fields were impossibly beautiful. Jade foliage broken up only by the mirror surface of ponds reflecting the most pristine of skies above. Not S-21. In horror movies and campfire stories, the wise elderly character will speak of places with an inherent evil, where venom is palpable in the building itself. It sounds like bullshit, and the places described in those stories actually are, but I wandered a complex of horror today for two hours. Its walls exhaled hatred. I legitimately felt the violence from those few decades ago still churning in the air I walked through. The air I had to breathe. Its proper name is Tuol Sleng, "Hill of the Poisonous Trees," which is fitting, but S-21 is even more appropriate. Those who entered this high school turned military compound in central Phnom Penh were unwillingly stripped of a name and reduced to a number, so why should it not be afforded the same courtesy. Security prison 21 was the epicenter of the Khmer Rouge's strategy of barbarism during its reign. This was nothing like Auschwitz, then or now. Then it was not a straight death or work camp but a place for political prisoners, even when that classification made no sense. Interrogations were conducted here to gain confessions, admissions of guilt and expositions of names of others just as guilty. Except that none of it made any sense. When you interrogate the same person for several months, you're going to run out of information to gain. What deeper knowledge are you going to acquire from the sixth fingernail you tear out, the thirty-eighth time you water-board somebody? (yeah. they did that. congratulations, we're in the same league as them). What you get is not accurate information, if that even existed to begin with. What you get is the names of everybody they have ever met, every grade school bully they can still recall and describe. What you get is a fuller prison, when all these new people are then brought in for interrogations, the further naming of names. And meanwhile the cells get smaller, are more hastily constructed, and walking through them now, today, it's not just your body that becomes claustrophobic. Looking around, you get a vise clamped on to your soul, your capacity for love, hope, faith in humanity.

This was not Auschwitz. Here you have solitude and space for the crimes to sink in. Because it was death manufactured on a smaller scale, you also have nuances that Auschwitz did not because of its sheer size. At S-21 I walked up and touched a bed-frame that just a few years before I was born a mutilated body was found on, covered in and hovering above a font of congealed blood. The broken plastic jug that held gasoline that was poured on the victim is still there. It was not to burn their corpse, but to get them to speak.... once that fire had been put out. In Building D you see the torture racks. The rooms of manacles that held the screaming in place. Still visible bloodstains.

Needless to say, I was not very successful at being distracted. You can only count a lack of teeth for so long.
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The first time I saw the tree, I frowned and took a picture. The second time, I cried. Because my only other option was to vomit.

English is a quirky language; the word "set" has somewhere around 150 different definitions. So I guess it's understandable not to get things right on the first go-round, even for someone who has studied history, specifically Twentieth Century warfare. The sign read "Killing tree against which executioners beat children." This sounded hideous, deplorable. I pictured toddlers being whipped, kicked, punched- desperate to keep their hands submissively on the tree's cutting bark to avoid further torture. Minutes later and a few hundred meters away, inside the Choeung Ek museum, I read the brief history of the tree and gagged. Because I wasn't even fucking close.

The tree itself stands next to one of the 129 mass graves found within Choeung Ek. This grave alone, when exhumed in 1980 after the Vietnamese defeated the Khmer Rouge, was found to hold the corpses of over one hundred women and children, most naked. The first time around I said I pictured toddlers, but I think that would be inaccurate. The soldiers wouldn't have the arm strength. Certainly not to get the proper torque or velocity. You see, what they did, what that sign is actually telling you, is that soldiers would grab children, infants, by the calves, or by the ankles and swing them, as you would a tennis racket, a baseball bat, and slam their heads in to the bark of the tree to kill them. In front of their mothers. "Killing tree against which executioners beat children."

Maybe it's reassuring that I didn't comprehend that upon my first reading. At least I had 26 years of peace not knowing human beings were capable of doing that. Not simply to other humans, but to their own innocent people. That peace of mind of mind is gone now though. You don't get something like that back.
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Last night I went to sleep still thinking of the gorgeous girl I saw in the Bangkok airport. Tonight I'll be trying to convince myself that I'm not a monster.
It probably would have been worth the three or four shitty dollars not to feel like this. To break my rule of not giving to beggars, one that exists not out of apathy but equality. I can't give to all, so I shouldn't give to any. And what's a Band-Aid to a bullet wound anyway.

The first time he asked me, on my way in to S-21, the prison camp museum, I mumbled a "Tay, sohm toh (no, sorry)" out of pure instinct, still struggling to see my camera's playback screen in the glare of a noon sun. I glanced up and didn't realize what I was looking at right away. The first thing I noticed was the amputation, high above the left knee, condemning his genetically skinny legs to a lifetime of fragility. When I scanned up I saw the too-smooth flesh that comes with years-old third-degree-plus burns, these covering the left side of his entire head. I don't know how many years ago, but considering who he was and where I saw him, I would guess between the years 1975 and 1979. I would guess it was done by a man wearing loose-fitting black clothing and a red and white checkered sash around his head. What kind of a fucking prick says "no, sorry" to a genocide victim......

I said no on the way in, then spent the next two hours of my life wading through the most morally depleting site I've been to in my life. I left in a state of shock. I wasn't thinking clearly (still am not, that's why this post is in 3 incoherent parts) and simply said no to everyone, the several tuk-tuk drivers trying to get me to go with them, the women selling food and cheap wares by the gates, and the four or five beggars there as well. The burn victim/amputee included. Literally a blur of humanity to me at a time when I just trusted my feet to get me somewhere that my brain could catch up with later.
I realized only when I was somewhere across town that I had said no to what I can only assume was a victim of Khmer Rouge atrocities. For hours, I couldn't fathom my own self-disgust let alone express it. Typing this I'm still seething, but the loathing is waning in favor of something more promising. Determination. I have more in my arsenal than Band-Aids. When this five-month journey ends and I move to New York, it will be in search of the same type of job that I had in Los Angeles. I make documentary television. If I can't change the world, I can help enlighten it, and however small a fraction of the population it is at a time, at least it's forward movement. Writing this helps me for now. While some parts of this are graphic, and my photos in a few weeks time will be as well, it helps tremendously that for the few minutes you're reading this I feel like I'm catalyzing thought, maybe even discussion. No amount of money I could ever give would bring that man's ear, face, or eye back, bring back the years of embarrassment or torment that he has endured. But my effort to bring his story, Cambodia's story, Poland's story, the stories of guerrillas in the Spanish countryside, anti-Soviet demonstrators in the Baltics, environmentalist politicians in Scotland silenced by the Thatcher regime, Catalans vying for independence, Russian prisoners of the Gulag who died building trains to nowhere.....
This effort can really achieve something.

Phnom Penh and Battambang:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2115845&id=35804394&l=bee6341c00