Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,072
By This is the grave of Dith Pran.
Born in 1942 in Siem Reap, Cambodia, Pran grew up fairly well off. His father was an official around public works in the French colonial government. Pran got a good education and learned French and English. When the American army arrived in Cambodia as part of trying to stop communism (or real freedom to control their own lives) for southeast Asians, replacing the French colonists without actually recolonizing the place, they hired Pran as a translator. He did that for awhile, then did translation for the 1965 Peter O’Toole vehicle Lord Jim, shot in Cambodia. He worked in high end hotels as well, given his language skills. When I am in a nation such as Cambodia, my thoughts about this are always this–with those excellent language skills, there aren’t better opportunities than working in a hotel? But the answer is often in fact no.
Pran started working with the New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg, who was on the ground covering the growing civil war in Cambodia. We should remember the American culability for the Khmer Rouge too. There are many reasons why that horrible movement rose and gained power, but at the very top of the list was the massive bombing of eastern Cambodia by American air forces trying to stop the spread of men and supplies into South Vietnam. Good job America, as always, way to really destabilize and fuck up a place for decades. Of course, to say the least, Mao has more than his share of blame for providing enormous support for the Khmer Rouge as well.
As the Khmer Rouge began to take power, Pran got his family out of the country. But he refused to go himself. He felt that he was a journalist and it was his job to report on what was happening. He also thought it was important that the rest of the world know what just what the Khmer Rouge was. Fair, but perhaps not so intelligent from a self-preservation perspective.
Pran and Schanberg were at one point captured by a group of young Khmer Rouge soldiers. Just because Schanberg was an American journalist did not mean he wouldn’t be shot. With guns pointed at them, Pran talked their way out of the situation. It was just a taste of the horrors to come. Schanberg was able to get out, but Pran was not. He tried to get into the French embassy but they weren’t allowing any non-whites in there. So he was captured and put in a labor camp.
Pran should have died. In fact, I suppose all survivors of the Khmer Rouge’s camps could say that. The chances of survival were not high. Pran worked very carefully. He feigned complete ignorance about everything he knew. He was fluent in English and French but he pretended like he understood neither language. He later stated that he would think through every move he made and not make it if he thought there was a 50-50 chance of dying. That’s….a rough set of odds over time.
Pran was alive still when the Vietnamese marched in and overthrew the Khmer Rouge in January 1979, creating some stability in the country that was destabilizing their own. They brought him back to Siem Reap. Over 50 members of his family had died. The Vietnamese made him chief of a village near Siem Reap, but they did not know that he was close to the Americans. Fearful of that being discovered, he managed to escape over the Thai border in October 1979. Shocked that his friend lived, Schanberg flew to Thailand to meet him and help get him to the United States. Schanberg went further–he got Pran a job with the Times working as a photojournalist.
Pran started publicizing what happened to the world. He coined the term “killing fields” to describe the mass graves he had seen while escaping to Thailand. This story became internationally famous when Roland Joffé turned it into The Killing Fields, which was a huge sensation when it was released in 1984. Haing S. Ngor, who also miraculously survived the Khmer Rouge, played Pran. I can only imagine how hard it was for both Ngor and Pran to relive this, but you do what you have to do.
Now, when I visited Siem Reap a few weeks ago, I was curious how central the Khmer Rouge history would be. I know there are parts of Cambodia where going to the Killing Fields memorials are a thing, though not really around Siem Reap. I wasn’t there to visit this stuff–I wasn’t going to not do it if it was something that was around, but I’m not generally traveling to see sites of mass death. When I went to Munich a decade ago for a conference (rough!), I thought about going to Dachau since I felt it was almost an obligation. I mentioned this to a Jewish colleague of mine and he was like, why would you go there and immerse yourself in mass death? I had no answer. So anyway, I was just going to go with the flow on this. The answer was that I did see a sign for one site and when I asked the tour guide about it, he feigned ignorance about what it was and changed the subject. Fair enough, who wants to talk about it. It was a sign labeled “Khmer Rouge Canal” and I assume was a forced work project. Interestingly, the next day, when I was on a tour that got me toward northeastern Cambodia and was based around boht birding and 10th century temple ruins (also, rough times!), I had a long conversation with the tour guide, whose English was really truly excellent and given the vast differences between Khmer and English I was impressed. We were talking about various crops being grown (always an interest of mine) and he stated that while the Khmer Rouge were horrible, they did build amazing water infrastructure that is the basis for Cambodian agriculture in the present. I guess that’s what forced labor will get you!
Later in life, Pran worked to publicize the experience of the Cambodians. In 1994, he created the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, which keeps photographic records of those who were killed, to the extent they exist, to help family members find some closure.
Unfortunately, Pran still had a hard ending to his life. He spent his last years in New Jersey (bad enough!). He died of pancreatic cancer in 2008. He was 65 years old. Unfair.
Dith Pran is buried in Chestnut Grove Cemetery, Herndon, Virginia.
If you would like to visit other Americans who became associated with Pran’s story and life, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Haing S. Ngor, quite possibly murdered by a Khmer Rouge agent in 1996, is in Whittier, California. Sydney Schanberg is in Poughkeepsie, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.