Home » Vietnam » LZ - Cambodia - April 25th 2005

These are entries from my travel journal from www.travelbog.org.
They are descriptions/stories of my trip from Hanoi, Vietnam to Phi Phi Island, Thailand from April 2005 to May 2005.

LZ - Cambodia - April 25th 2005

Lt.col.lewin
2006-01-02 03:43:46

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tall in the middle of an open field. It was nicely decorated and had windows on all four sides. Through the windows, one could see little round, white objects. Ok, not objects...they were human skulls. Thousands of them on display as a memorial to those who were murdered by Pol Pot's Clique, as they called it. Surrounding the stupta were what looked like round bomb craters next to each other. These were the uncovered graves of the people that were killed. In 1980, they had uncovered about 86 mass graves out of 114. Some of the gravesites were marked with what was found in them at the time of exuming the bones. One of the sites contained over a hundred children, which was situated next to a tree that was used to torture the children in view of their parents. Other sites contained some 400 headless bodies and from there it just got worse. Over 8985 people were sent to their death here. It's hard to describe what it looked like, but picture a field of small crater like holes between each hole was a small dirt path you could walk along. Along some of the dirt paths you could still see the white of bones coming out of the earth. Along one path, there was a half buried skull that a little girl, who apparently lived nearby, went over to play with. It was a difficult thing to comprehend and think about. Did she even know what she was doing? or what this place represented? Most likely she didn't and probably never will. She and the other kids around the place were so poor and followed us around asking for money the entire time.
Now that I've thoroughly depressed you and myself for recalling this place, I will not continue on about the S-21 Genocide Prison/Torture Camp. It's just much worse and I already feel depressed thinking about it. More info is at your fingertips on the internet if you want it and I've included some pictures, as well.

So, I'm on the eve of a 7 hour bus ride to Siem Reap, the town outside of the temples of Angkor Wat. It should be an amazing experience to see these ancient temples, which has to be one of the biggest in the world.
My mission of finding Col. Kurtz will also come to a conclusion at Angkor. "They were going to make me a major for this and I wasn't even in their army anymore. The horror...the horror."
I'll be send some more updates from Thai Thai, the land of smiles, when I get there this weekend. That is, if I can drag my body off of it's beautiful beaches to sit in an internet cafe for a few hours. Oh, how I can not wait to stay in one place for a prolonged period of time.

Lt. Col. Lewin Out!