Holiday in Cambodia - Jeremy Head wanders off the beaten track in Cambodia

At a distance, in the middle of the dusty countryside, it looked like a monument. A tall Buddhist-style tower surrounded by surprisingly green grass. The sign at the entrance gave it away though: Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre. Like it was some kind of academy or research lab. In fact it was a memorial. Some of the 2 million or so Cambodians that were clubbed to death, systematically starved, beaten and tortured by the Khmer Rouge regime of the late 1970s are buried here in mass graves. Under the brutal leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge attempted one of the most radical restructurings of a society ever - transforming the country into a Maosit peasant-dominated agrarian cooperative. Anyone with even a modicum of learning was deemed a potential traitor and put to death. A key predictor of guilt was the wearing of glasses - if you wore specs, chances were you were educated and should therefore be killed. Rifle bullets were an expensive import, so victims were usually clubbed to death with the back of a spade.

This should be easy. Pull the pin and chuck the grenade over a bank of dirt, then hit the deck. Except I couldn't get the pin out. My hands were shaking too much. I'd suddenly remembered a story about how the GIs in the Vietnam war used to take the pin out and let the fuse click down several seconds before reinserting it. This meant that the five second fuse was far, far shorter. The nice army bloke had to ease the pin halfway out for me. I chucked it as hard as I could. There was a loud click as the detonator fired just after it left my hand. Head in the dirt I heard the explosion. It was loud, but not earth shattering. We ran over the top of the mound to see what damage I'd inflicted. I'd been told things about 15 metre craters. My hole was about a metre square. In fact it looked rather pathetic. Even so that was enough high explosive for me.

© Jeremy Head 2003

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Total words: 2800
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