A lot of the other racers have already posted amazing and touching blogs about our tour of The Killing Fields here in Cambodia. I’m old enough that I really did live through this stuff. I wasn’t just born as it was coming to an end. At the same time, I wasn’t sitting glued to my television when I was a young teenager watching this drama unfold. In fact, I was completely unaware of what was happening in this land so far away from the rural Mississippi Delta.
Here’s the bullet list- the timeline- and some of my impressions via YouTube:
- About 1970 as I was entering the first grade- the first year of Racial Integration in Mississippi, the Vietnam War was spilling over into officially neutral Cambodia.
- The Communist Vietnamese Army was taking refuge in and using a shortcut through Cambodia (The Ho Chi Minh Trail).
- The US began secretly bombing their enemy on the Trail, killing as many or more Cambodians as they did enemy combatants- an act that failed to endear Cambodians to the USA!
- At the same time the US backed a coup in Cambodia- forcing the reigning King to go into hiding… and ultimately to cast his lot with the growing communist guerilla movement- the Khmer Rouge.
- Civil War ensued from 1970-75 between the US backed government and the Khmer Rouge.
- In 1975 the Khmer Rouge overran the Capitol City- Phnom Penh.
- Almost immediately the Khmer rulers began a systematic extermination of all undesirable elements of society- anyone associated with a westerner, former govt. workers, academic elite (those with an education), Buddhist and Christians, doctors, leaders of all kinds.
- For the next 5 years 2 million of the country’s population of 7 million were executed.
- Ironically, the slaughter was brought to an end when the Vietnamese invaded Phnom Penh in 1979.
