Swimming to Cambodia (7 page)

 

 

So there we were, driving through the black smoke and Marine guards, heading for a Sikorski that didn't exist. We got to where the Sikorski was supposed to be and, “Cut.” End of shot.

Five months later, when the filming was over, they located the Sikorskis—at Camp Pendleton in San Diego. That was the only place they could find any. So we went down there for one last shoot—it was incredible.
The pyrotechies were running around pulling those same rubber tires, sending up black smoke, but this time the crew had tee-shirts on that read “SKIP THE DIALOGUE, LET'S BLOW SOMETHING UP.”

So there we were on this Marine base, the actors, these Thai kids who were playing Dith Pran's children who had been flown in from Bangkok for the day, and the Marines, who were very excited. It was the day after the Beirut Massacre and they weren't even talking about Beirut. Their flags weren't even at half-mast. (Actually, I figured out why that was. California American flags are the largest American flags in the world. If they were put at half-mast they'd drag on the ground. California also seems to have the smallest flag poles in relation to the size of the flag.)

The Marines were thrilled to have real actors on the base.

“Craig T. Nelson?
Big Chill,
I know it. Don't say no. I saw you in
The Big Chill.”

“Tom Bird?
Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.
I'm sure I saw you in that. Don't say no.”

So we weren't saying no. We were milling around, talking about what it was like to be a star, giving autographs, when over the horizon came these three giant birds. These Sikorskis are really big. And the Marines turned as though they'd rehearsed it and, on cue, sang the “tune” from
Apocalypse Now,
you know,
The Ride of the Valkyries,
“ba-BA-ba-ba-BAA-ba, ba-BA-ba-ba-BAAA-ba ...” as the helicopters came in and landed. We got on one of them with the wind blowing and the black smoke, and in the finished film it only lasts about thirty seconds. I got on with Ira Wheeler, but then we
had to get right off again because we weren't allowed to take off. Only the Marines who were playing Marines were.

One of the Marine guards who had escorted us onto the helicopter got a Polaroid picture of the scene from Continuity and asked us, “Would you please sign this picture for me? I want to send it to my folks in North Carolina. Because if I never do anything else in my life, at least I can say I have done this.”

 

 

The actual evacuation of Phnom Penh took place on April 12, 1975. Lon Nol had long since fled to Hawaii and there were two million people in the capital instead of the usual six hundred thousand. There was no food. Khmer Rouge rockets were coming in and landing in the streets, on schools, randomly. At six o'clock in the morning John Gunther Dean put out a letter to all American and Cambodian officials, notifying them that the evacuation was taking place: “You have two-and-a-half hours to make it here to the embassy and then we're taking off.”

The Prime Minister of Cambodia Long Boret said, “Two-and-a-half hours? How are we going to convince the Russians that we're Socialists in two-and-a-half hours? We're ruined.”

Long Boret, Lon Non and Prince Sirik Matak stayed behind. By the way, Lon Nol had two brothers, Lon Non and Lon Nil. Lon Nil was killed in an early insurrection and they cut out his liver and rushed it to a Chinese restaurant, cooked it up in a wok and fed it to the people in the streets. The Khmers were really big on the powers of the human liver.

Prince Sirik Matak sent a letter to the American ambassador informing him that they were not going to evacuate. It read:

Five days later their livers were carried through the streets on sticks.

 

 

The Americans thought it would be like Danang during the evacuation, but it wasn't. There was no rioting, there were no people hanging off the helicopter runners like in Vietnam. The Cambodians just waved and called, “Okay, bye-bye. Okay, bye-bye.” They were still smiling. The last helicopter took off and a Khmer Rouge rocket
came in and killed one of the people watching. Five days later, April 17, 1975, it was “Cambodia Year Zero.”

In marched the Khmer Rouge in their black pajamas and Lon Nol's troops threw down their guns and raced to embrace them, thinking that the country would then be reunited. The Khmer Rouge did not smile back. They took strategic points in the city. Some of the kids, because they had grown up in the jungle and never seen cars before, were jumping into cars, getting stuck in first gear and ramming them into buildings. There was chaos for awhile, but soon order reigned. And the Khmer Rouge said,
“Out.
Everyone out of the city. The Americans are going to bomb Phnom Penh. Get out. There's no more food, so out. Who will take care of you?
Angka
will provide.
Angka
is out there, so get out of the city.
Angka
...” like some sort of perverse Wizard of Oz figure,
“Angka . . .”
like some Kafkaesque thundercloud raining down manna to feed the people. They emptied a city of two million people in twenty-four hours.

Those who were in hospitals, who couldn't walk, were just chucked out the window, no matter which story they were on. Out the window. Survival of the fittest. Then the mass murder began. Eyewitnesses said that everyone who had any kind of education was killed. Any artist, any civil servant was butchered. Anyone wearing glasses was killed. The only hope was to convince them that you were a cab driver, so suddenly there were a thousand more cab drivers than cabs. It was just the opposite of New York, where everyone says, “I'm an artist, I'm an artist. Sure, I drive a cab to make a living, but I'm really an
artist.”
There if you were an artist, boom, you became dead. Little kids were doing the killing, ten-year-olds, fifteen-year-olds. There
was very little ammunition left so they were beating people over the head with ax handles or hoses or whatever they could get hold of. Some of the skulls were too tough for sticks and clubs, and because the kids were weak from eating only bark, bugs, leaves and lizards, they often didn't have the strength to kill. So to make it more fun, they were taking bets on how many whacks it would take to cave in a head.

Some eyewitnesses said that the kids were laughing with a demented glee. And if you pleaded for mercy they laughed harder. If you were a woman pleading for mercy they laughed even harder. And if you didn't die the kids just took your half-dead body and threw it in an American bomb crater, which acted as a perfect grave. It was a kind of hell on earth.

You were killed if you had your own cooking pot. It was better to kill an innocent person, the Khmer Rouge said, than to leave an enemy alive. It was nothing like the methodical, scientific German genocide. They were tearing apart little children like fresh bread in front of their mothers, gouging out eyes, cutting open pregnant women. And this went on for four years. Two million people were either killed outright or starved to death. And to this day no one knows exactly what happened, what caused this kind of mad autogenocide to come into being. Oh sure, it's easy to research what happened in Germany because we can speak German, and Hitler's dead or living in Argentina. But Pol Pot is recognized by the United States government. And he's still out there, waiting.

We don't know what happened because the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1979 and
they
say it was a liberation. Others say it was a piece of cake, a xenophobic
piece of cake. They invaded in '79 and now they're writing their own revisionist history. We don't know what went on. Maybe a cloud of evil did land and the people simply went mad.

But whatever was going on, Pol Pot is still alive and up there and waiting to return. He's protected by the United States and the United Nations, and the Red Cross brings him food. And he's fighting the Vietnamese up there, the people who originally taught
him
to fight. Roland Joffe said to me, “My God, Spalding, morality is not a moveable feast.” But I keep seeing it moving, all the time.

 

 

My last big scene was with Sam Waterston in Waheen, Gulf of Siam. Not at the Pleasure Prison, where we were sleeping, but at this beautiful Victorian hotel in Waheen that they had emptied out for the film because it looked like the Hotel Phnom Penh. The only thing that made it inauthentic was that it didn't have a swimming pool or a tennis court. So the film built a swimming pool and a tennis court.

Now what I haven't told you is that the American Air Force had what it called “homing beacons” on the ground. And when the planes flew over, six miles up, they could take a radar coordinate off those homing beacons and then the navigator threw a switch and all the bombs were dropped over the target by computer. So no one really dropped a bomb from six miles up; it was done on automatic. The beacons were everywhere. There was one on the American embassy. There was also one in Neak Luong, and on August 7, 1973, a navigator made a mistake. He threw his switch at the wrong
time and dropped an entire load of bombs on this strategic ferry town, Neak Luong. The navigator was fined $700 for the mistake.

Sidney Schanberg told me that he heard about it and went up to cover it for
The New York Times.
But the American embassy had put an absolute press lock on the whole area; no one was allowed in. Sidney bribed his way in, snuck his way in with Dith Pran, and they paid people to get them there. He told me that he reached Neak Luong about two days after the accident, and that all the dead had been removed, but he saw blood and hair all over the bushes and speculated that more than 200 people had been killed. He told me the Cambodians put him under “polite house arrest,” so he couldn't break his story to the
Times.

During the time he was under guard, the American embassy flew in officials to give out hundred-dollar bills to people who had lost family in the bombing, fifties to people who had lost arms or legs. And the Cambodians were grateful.

Sidney told me that he had the feeling he could just walk out if he wanted to; the Cambodians wouldn't shoot him in front of American embassy officials, he was pretty sure. As he started to walk, he heard the safeties on their guns click and men start screaming, “Stop.” He said, “This may sound strange, but I'd never felt more alive in my life than when I was right on the edge of death. I never felt more alive!”

 

 

Elizabeth Becker told me the same thing. She was reporting for the
Washington Post
and a colleague of hers was killed by the Khmer Rouge in the house they lived
in. She felt remorse for her colleague but also an enormous sense of being alive. She told me about it as we sat on the steps of her Washington house drinking white wine, eating pate with white bread. And I was listening but I wasn't looking at her. Instead I was watching some black ants crawl across the brick walk to eat this small piece of pate that had fallen there. And into my frame of vision came Elizabeth's hand, holding a white linen napkin. She just reached down and wiped out the entire trail of ants with one sweep of her hand. I appeared to be listening to her but inside I was weeping, oh my
God, all those ants, all those innocent ants dead for no reason at all.

 

 

Now what I had to say in my scene with Sam was simple—it was a little technical, but simple: “A computer malfunction put out the wrong set of coordinates. Seems a single B-52 opened up over Neak Luong. There's a homing beacon right in the middle of town. Check it out, Sid.”

All right. Simple enough . . . for some actors. But
this
actor needs images for technical words like that. I have to build my own internal film, you see, or I can't remember the words.

By the way, I played one of those American officials who flew into Neak Luong. We were at an old garbage dump that they had made into Neak Luong, right outside Bangkok. The assistant director said, “Would the artists please get on the choppers.” Now there is no way I would ordinarily get on a helicopter, but he called me an artist and hop, hop, I was right on that
chopper like Pavlov's dog. They said it was only going to go up ten feet and then just land. All they needed was a shot of the embassy officials jumping off the choppers.

So I got on the helicopter and it went BRRRRRRRRR—straight up. Straight up above this incredible jungle. I felt like I was in a movie, like I was in
Apocalypse Now,
and then I realized that I
was
in a movie! They were filming me, and I had no fear, even though the door was wide open and I was looking down. Craig T. Nelson was practically falling out the door—we had no safety belts—but I suddenly had no fear because the camera eroticizes the space! It protects you like Colgate Guard-All. Even if the chopper crashed, at least there would be rushes, right? My friends could show them on New Year's Eve at the Performing Garage.

We went up six times and the feeling was triumphant. I was looking up the Chao Phraya River and I saw, my God, how much area the film controlled! Twenty square miles of Thai jungle, all the way up the river, there were Thai peasants throwing more rubber tires on the fire to make black smoke, to make it look like war, and I thought, of course! WAR THERAPY. Every country should make a major war movie every year. It would put a lot of people to work, help them get their rocks off. And when you land in that jungle you don't have to Method-act. When those helicopter blades are whirring overhead, you shout to be heard. You don't have to Method-act when you look down and see a Thai peasant covered with chicken giblets and fake blood in 110-degree weather for fifteen hours
a day for five dollars a day. (If they're real amputees they get seven-fifty.) It's just like the real event!