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May 5, 2003
Cambodian survivors await word from Iraq
By JAMES MILLER | News-Journal Staff Writer
PALM COAST — Corpses contaminated the water in the few ponds along the path to Chumrom Tmay. The camp near the border with Thailand was safe, but it was a week's journey by foot through rice paddies and jungles dotted with landmines, booby-trapped pits and hostile guerrilla fighters.
A son at war |
Maybe the young family from Battambang, Cambodia, would reach Chumrom Tmay, but the dead bodies in the ponds silently told them that others had not.
It was 1979. Defeated in Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, the radical communist Khmer Rouge still controlled much of the countryside. If Khmer Rouge fighters found Sophal and Chantha Kes and their 6-month-old son, Sophan, on the path, the fighters might kill them, just as they had killed one of Sophal's brothers and Chantha's mother.
Unable to make money or find food in Battambang, the city nearest Sophal's village, the family could not stay there, either, or they would starve, just as his father and another brother had.
"We just know if we stay, we are going to die. If we leave, we are going to die -- but we have a chance," the 49-year-old part-time pastor said during an interview at First Baptist Church of Palm Coast.
Almost 25 years after escaping Cambodia, Sophal Kes, who converted from Buddhism after he and his family reached Thailand in December 1979, pastors a 17-member Cambodian Baptist mission sponsored by the Palm Coast church.
Since 1989, he and his family – Chantha plus four sons – have lived in Palm Coast. As it has on many Americans though, war intrudes on the family even here – in a world much different from the one in which Sophal and Chantha grew up.
Last July, one of Sophal and Chantha's sons, 19-year-oldMark, joined the U. S. Marine Corps. A private first-class with the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines, he most recently wrote to his parents from Nasiriya, Iraq.
"He's been in a lot of fire-fighting, but he's fine. He has a lot of things he wants to tell us, but we have to wait until he comes (home)," Sophal said.
Sophal said he wants to hear what his son says about the war in Iraq. Like Mark, Sophal was a soldier, but unlike Mark, he grew up in a country wounding itself and being wounded by savage conflict on its own soil.
In 1970, Sophal, then about 17 years old, joined the Cambodian Army of Lon Nol, an anti-Communist general who helped stage a coup against Cambodia's ruling prince, Norodom Sihanouk.
Supported by the United States with money, weapons, training and bombing until 1973, Lon Nol's army fought both the Vietnamese Viet Cong, which had been assisted by Sihanouk, and the Khmer Rouge.
Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge and its leader, Pol Pot, in 1975. In the next four years, more than 1 million Cambodians were murdered or died from starvation, torture and disease. The country's plight was portrayed in the 1984 film "The Killing Fields."
Even after being ousted from power in 1978-1979, the Khmer Rouge destabilized Cambodian society from its jungle bases. Pol Pot's death on April 15, 1998, followed by the capture of another leader in 1999, brought an end to the movement.
Sophal remembers Cambodia's suffering when he thinks of the war in Iraq.
"I support the war (in Iraq). War is not fun. It's not good. I know it kills people. But war is good to get the bad people, the dictators, out," he said. "So, I'm glad Saddam has no power. I hope people in Iraq will understand and have freedom. Myself, I'm blessed. I like the American way."
Sophal speaks with pride and love about Mark Kes, the Marine.
"He is a nice man. He is a happy man. Very active. Smiling always," Sophal said. "And very brave."
He doesn't know whether he and his son see the Iraq war in quite the same way, though, he said. Until Mark returns, he won't know.
"Mark was born here in America, and he lives here, right here," Sophal said.
Sophal and Chantha, on the other hand, survived what is widely considered to have been one of the most brutal regimes in history. They remember how Khmer Rouge soldiers put them in camps where they worked in the fields and ate little.
"My wife and I and our people, we just looked bony and skinny and dying. If a strong wind hit us, we could fall," Sophal said. "My brother. He died with no food. My dad. He died with no food. My older brother. They killed him because he was in the service (the Cambodian Army under Lon Nol)," he said.
"Nobody can speak up, no matter what they did," Chantha said.
In late 1977, when the Vietnamese army started fighting with the Khmer Rouge, the conflict heightened existing mistrust between the Vietnamese and Cambodians. Chantha said Khmer Rouge soldiers killed her mother because they thought she was Vietnamese.
Khmer Rouge soldiers twice imprisoned Sophal, he said. On one occasion, when he was imprisoned with 300 men, he was one of fewer than 40 who survived.
"I believe God saved my life," he said.
After spending about three years in refugee camps in Thailand and another few months in the Philippines, the family of three plus a younger son, Mesak, made it to Providence, R.I. It was 1983. They were among what a Library of Congress study says were about 136,000 Cambodians who settled in the United States between 1981 and 1987.
Mark and his younger brother, Michael, were born in Rhode Island.
"Now, I'm here in America with good people, good place, good education, good society. I look around me at people I can trust," Sophal said.
He and Chantha have steady jobs. He's custodial coordinator with the Flagler County Schools adult education program, and she's a custodian at Indian Trails K-8 Center. They have two grandsons by Sophan. Mesak, 21, is studying at St. Johns River Community College, and 17-year-old Michael is a junior at Flagler Palm Coast High School.
Sophal and Chantha visited Cambodia on separate occasions in the early 1990s and saw a society highly stratified between rich and poor, where people struggle to trust one another after decades of war and corruption, they said.
"The next generation, I hope young people get education," Sophan said. "I hope they make Cambodia better."
In the meantime, Sophal and Chantha await Mark's return from Iraq.
"We have so many things to ask him," Sophal said.