Troubles in Translation
First, I needed a translator. Initially, I thought this would be someone who could translate Khmer words into English––the talent for which was rare enough given the country’s ambivalent embrace of education. I heard stories of parents still too fearful of another intellectual purge to allow their children to attend school. But I quickly realized I required much more than language skills.
I needed someone who could be a cultural translator around medical issues, world visions and thinking patterns. I had already traveled extensively in Southeast Asia, but I still needed someone to explain to me how Buddhist notions of karma let grievous crimes, particularly against children, continue on a daily basis. Or to tell me that Cambodian interview subjects never wanted to be left alone in hotel rooms because they feared roaming ghosts. Before we even began, I had to learn that the term PTSD doesn’t carry weight in Cambodia; rather, it is a country suffering from Baskbat, broken courage.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder might be the most maligned malady the world over––and the most diagnosed, particularly in war-affected areas. Psychosocial interventions like the one I was conducting with TPO often have been accused of jeopardizing local coping mechanisms, pathologizing and stigmatizing war-torn communities, and conveying a purely Anglo-American therapeutic ethos. Labeling illnesses in Western terms has been called a form of “medical imperialism.”
Cambodians perceive trauma as a manifestation of unhappy spirits––not something covered on standard American PTSD questionnaires or in Western medical calculations. Doctors working with TPO learned to ask subjects if they had “been thinking too much”, had “wind attacks” or whether they felt “Khmaoch songot”––a term for describing a sudden inability to move or speak, sometimes in tandem with the appearance of dark shapes.
During my time in Iraq, I found Iraqis to be passionate and expressive, sometimes over-the-top melodramatic, but always engaged with their own emotions and with me. In Cambodia, the trauma was like an outside creature, allowed to emerge and sit on a sterile table to be analyzed for the purpose of our interview, but then politely put back again at the end of the day. I wasn’t sure how to react to the monotone descriptions of terror and trauma—that people could remember every province, commune, district and village to which they were sent during the regime, but sometimes forgot how many of their children were killed. There was a cyclical nature of telling, starting with the day one was born and winding on for hours through farming practices, or with former Khmer soldiers, military tactics; meandering past the years of trauma, always conveyed matter-of-factly, and around to the present day. Then: Was there a sleeping pill they could have? An antidepressant? And could they go home now, please?
The interviews wore me down, little by little, making me a bit colder every day.
This was secondary trauma, and I was beginning to realize the ways it was manifesting in my psyche. I would become frustrated with the lack of clarity and would push to connect people’s disjointed thoughts. I focused maniacally on organizing the testimonies at the expense of hearing the content, letting it settle and feeling the ways that the words played in my body. I didn’t like myself at these protective moments, but I was sure that, if I let myself go, it would open a floodgate that could never be shut. I didn’t want to be emotionally “out of control” in a country holding itself together through a guise of absolute restraint.
My photographer, Alan, had never encountered such detailed accounts of atrocity—so many, so often and so unthinkable. The impact of it all stayed with him for months after his return. If not for my fearless son Aiden, I’m not sure I would have made it. Returning at the end of the day to a bounding little boy, eager to share his new Khmer words and go riding in his go-cart around the pagodas of Phnom Penh, was like rainfall in the desert: life-giving oxygen.
Thank you for allowing my story on Cambodia so much space in the recent issue of the Reporter, and for including so many portraits and testimonies of Khmer Rouge survivors. I was disappointed, however, that you chose to edit out the paragraph that justifies culturally sensitive psychosocial interventions, the learning of which was the entire reason I was in Cambodia. The point edited out is that regardless of the criticism of Western intervention methods -- of medical imperialism, jeopardizing local coping mechanisms, etc. -- the fact is that war and violence creates trauma. There is no reason to believe that the physiological and cognitive experiences that underlie the human response to trauma are any less active or relevant in an Asian culture than in a Western country. There are certainly resilience factors in many different communities, (and immense study on how people working with war-affected communities might enhance those factors) and manifestation of trauma greatly varies in both form and intensity. But many argue, myself included, that the neglect of the impact of trauma is more politically-motivated, allowing abuse and exploitation to go unchallenged. What is different in other countries is the social meaning attributed to the experiences and, more importantly, to the approach to recovery.
Beautiful and touching narrative of Zelie's compassionate work with TPO helps us better understand how humanity needs to grow and share!
I did not serve in Vietnam, rejected as unfit, details omitted.
I am so happy to hear of the work in Cambodia to help people abused past redemption by Pol Pot and his agrarian marxist vision. I have met vets and refugees from the Southeast Asian (SEA) Peninsula over the years. I wrote a paper in college, which concluded that as with other marxist revolutions, when "peace broke out" in SEA the killing would begin in earnest. That is the a feature of marxism, that non-believers who might offer resistance are dealt with switfly.
The vivisection of pregnant females to obtain a fetus for "fun" was not limited to Cambodia, but regularly practiced in Laos and South Vietnam, and a long time before it happened as related here. The consummate depravity and perfection of terrorism as a tool by communists in SEA is well documented, as early as 1960.
All this information was there if you dug into it, as I did. After April of 1975, the plight of all the people abandoned by our poltical class was similarly available and is documented, if not in the detail here. Totaling up, about 5M in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam perished at the hands of the communist masters so attractive to John Kerry and other luminaries.
Joan Baez tried to organize a concert to raise money to aid refugees, as the atrocities got too big for apologist media to hide, and could not attract any support from the former "peace" community. All I can say is I guess they are like good Germans in 1944. Anything goes as long as I am fine and the "right people" are getting hurt.
Is there a lesson in this project? Many, I think.
The first one is what will you do to prevent such atrocity in the future? This nightmare is the work of men, it is not ordained, and particularly this one was created by a US Congress too afraid of "peace activists" to sell rifle ammo to the South Vietnamese as the communists came across the DMZ in bald violation of the Paris Peace Accords.
The second is what did the great moralists of peace do when the killing shifted into high gear? Nothing. What does that say about them as people? The numbers (and damn McNamara, too) are that the "peacetime" body count escalated by multiples from the height of US engagement in the war.
Where was Jane Fonda when this was going on? She wasn't walking in the street, protesting organized murder even more effective than the Final Solution.
I find it very admirable that SFR has printed this article. I am in awe of Zelie and Alan, that they could do this and retain their sanity and hope. I hope deeply that some in Cambodia may appreciate that we here care a bit, and forgive us our easy cowardice when, in fact, the war on the ground was going the right way. It was the war of politics where Pol Pot won, and turned loose on his countrymen. And this country turned its eyes away.
I remain, as for some time, disgusted and angry past redemption that Zelie and Alan, those went before them and told accurately of what was happening in SEA, have to witness a truth inconvenient to polticians and opportunists, current and past, pretenders to moral superiority in all manner of things. But that's my problem.
Unless you think the better solution is to prevent this kind of horror than try to help after it has done its work.
We cannot win all fights. I have no illusions about that. To understand what is happening on the ground in the horror of war (and it is a horror) you have to dig with an open mind.
John Kerry has announced from Pakistan that the tail rotor of the "...Navy helicopter" lost in the raid to get Osama. Kerry sells himself as a warrior and Vietnam vet, sometimes, a man of military experience.
If this quote is accurate, however, he didn't watch Obama's victory lap at Ft. Campbell. SEALs belong to the Navy, but all the aircraft in this op came from the 160th SOAR. Army aircraft, and no disrepect to USN, the 160th is just the best there is at doing this kind of op.
What else does Kerry not know?
I would also point out a huge difference between the US engagement in SEA and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The US could walk from SEA without comebacks. Ho, the Pathet Lao and Pol Pot had all they could handle dealing with killing off any potential opposition, and later fighting among themselves for who would rule the Peninsula. Ho lost.
Pol Pot, Ho and others could talk about the success of communism in SEA and how history was on their side, but they really didn't have global ambitions, or by any means global reach.
Radical Islam, as opposed to people I have met in Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, has global ambitions, and has global reach. Er, if you didn't figure that out in 2001, just ride with me. It's true.
Not sure what the right path is, but we are in a fight we need to win. We cannot walk on this one and hunker down.
War is horrible. And the sorriest (worse) state of a person is that they have nothing at all they would fight for. Life is so empty one cannot be stirred to preserve it. Smarter people than me figured that out, but I will bet my life on the concept.
Life is not for the faint, sorry. You can be inoffensive, diverse and multicultural all you want. I've been there and done it, in the muslim world and other places. And bad people with ugly intent may or may not find you, appreciative of your willingness to be their victim.
Is that what you really want? What you bring to the world, your friends, you family?