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At first, these unorthodox interpretations of revenge seem less personal than traditional—an attitude inherited from an agrarian people accustomed to gentleness and passivity. To be sure, there was a long time, between the 9th and 15th centuries, when Khmer culture sustained a golden age—the period of Angkor Wat with its five peaked towers and massive stone gods. But fundamentally, Cambodia has remained a village nation, and the values of Pol Pot, not to mention his horrors, must have seemed as shocking as they were terrifying. The children in Khao I Dang have simple values. They have been taught to honor the land, the country, their dead ancestors, their parents and their village.
Still, it is not always this way. Many children use the same wiles in the camp that they employed to survive in the jungle and elude Pol Pot. There are even stories of children denying the existence of their parents within the same camp because they have heard that an unaccompanied child stands a greater chance of being claimed by another country. One boy was desolate because his friend suddenly left camp with a family with which he had been secretly ingratiating himself for months. A ten-year-old was so eager to emigrate that he found himself wandering around back at the Cambodian border. He had stowed away on a truck that—he had persuaded himself—was bound for America.
What you have to realize, says Pierce Gerety, the director of the International Rescue Committee in Thailand, is that "their whole country has been burned over." Gerety, his wife Marie, and Neil Boothby, a child psychologist, all of whom work steadily with these children, need continually to remind themselves that the small serious eyes that look up to them have taken in sights that should exist only in hell. A common story the children tell is of seeing pregnant women tied to trees, their stomachs then slit open by bayonets. More common still is the liver torture—the children draw pictures of this. Here the victim is also tied to a tree, and his liver is plucked out by a specially designed hook. He may survive 20 minutes in this condition.
Yet there is a kind of torment that goes deeper than such memories, and here is where their idea of revenge comes into focus. The children express this thought indirectly.
Nep Phem is 18, and a gifted artist. His eyes tear, perhaps from a cold, and his answers are very thoughtful, introduced by long pauses. When you ask him what liberty requires, for example, he tells you "Patience." On one subject, however, his responses are rapid and automatic:
"Do you think that people learn war or is it inborn?"
"War must be born in you."
"Can the impulse to make both war and peace exist in the same person?"
"No. They cannot live together."
"Which wins out?"
"Peace always beats war."
Kim Seng says the same thing. As does Meng Mom, a puffy-cheeked twelve-year-old dancer who toys shyly with the lavender sleeve of her shirt. She is silent on all topics but one:
"Why do men make wars?"
"There are a lot of bad men in the world."
"How does someone stay good if so many men are bad?"
"Good must fight the bad."
"Can good and bad exist in the same person?"