The New York Review of Books

In 1970, after the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk and the American invasion, Cambodia became fully involved in the war in Indochina. The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) swiftly took over much of the countryside and enabled the Khmer Rouge movement, the Cambodian Communists, gradually to replace them. Phnom Penh, the capital, was in the hands of the pro-American president Lon Nol, as were most of the other cities. But by the time the Paris Peace Agreement was signed in 1973 (the agreement which led to American forces’ withdrawal from the whole of Indochina), the provincial capitals were more or less all that Lon Nol controlled. Some of them still had airports, others could only be visited by helicopter, or one could land on a strip created out of the main road leading into town.

What was going on in the countryside, beyond these numerous front lines, was a matter of intense interest and speculation, and any journalist who worked in Cambodia in those days (as I did on and off between 1973 and 1975) wanted very much to find the answer. For Phnom Penh and for the Americans it was important for purposes of propaganda to insist at first that the Communist forces were either NVA or NVA-controlled. Critics of the entire war tended to the view that the insurgency was (as became increasingly true over the five years that it lasted) led by and fought by Cambodians, by Khmers. It was Cambodians who in 1973 ran those parts of the country that had long since been rendered out of bounds to the Lon Nol forces. Sihanouk, the titular head of government, was in exile in Beijing, and his authority among the Communists might well have been something of a sham. But there was a native liberation movement in Cambodia, the critics’ argument went. The Khmer Rouge were not just puppets of the North Vietnamese.

Ideally, to test such a hypothesis, one would have liked to visit the liberated areas, to get far behind front lines so as to see Khmer Rouge society at work. The trouble was that, in marked contrast with the Vietnamese Communists, the Khmer Rouge were passionately hostile to foreign observers. Those journalists who crossed the lines, whether by mistake or on purpose, only survived if the people they encountered on the other side were or included the North Vietnamese. The ones who met with the Khmer Rouge invariably disappeared without trace.

Some of them were celebrated characters such as Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, the friends Michael Herr later wrote about in Dispatches. Others included two Japanese who, shortly after I arrived in Cambodia, made the crossing in the apparent belief that they had somehow had the way prepared for them. But as far as I knew in 1975, when Phnom Penh was about to fall, and many journalists asked themselves whether to stay on and see what would happen, no Western observer of life under the Khmer Rouge had lived to tell the tale.[^1 …