THAT RED DIRT SHOWER

 Man I miss those showers.

The water heated by the sun, washing away that orange dirt picked up from a long day travelling the contours of some contested zone. Government probing Khmer Rouge or Khmer Rouge chasing them back. Always fluid. So you gotta be all pert, senses on high alert, locked on, focussed. Then the sun sinks, saying "that's enough for today." So it's back to whatever refuge you have found, hotel, hovel, brothel. And then that shower. Drencher or bucket and scoop, heavenly. The Grand in Siem Reap being the best, like an ageing silent film star, it was shabby but still echoed elegance. It clung to illusions of grandeur, confident of a comeback, due to the effort of that marvellous Swiss manager - Rudolf was it? - who would do anything to help you and help get your story out, a big deal in those pre-mobile days. Less elegant was him recommending you hit the bath tub if shit hit the fan at night. Was the only guest in the place for the later three of the six day UN poll in 93. The hotel was packed on day one with global stars and Japanese with almost coffin sized satellite phones. They would be outside the hotel trying to align with the gods as I walked out and headed to UN Military Observer office where I would ask to use the phone. I would dictate the copy and an hour later as I re-entered the Grand my wealthy colleagues were still searching for celestial contact. Then on day one over 85% of the population voted and the Khmer Rouge's odd rocket fire went without dramatic consequence. So by day three the stars were bored and the gods weren't listening. So everyone bailed. I mean everyone. Bar wannabe me. Think of The Shining dreaming of Michelin stars. Walking alone down those colonial corridors heading to bed, it felt pure Conrad. And if the heat wakes you, you sleepwalk to the shower. Then breakfast comes with me sitting by myself being attended to by about 10 staff. And there was a bar. Of course. With a barman. What more could an apprentice foreign correspondent ask for? Spent day 6 touring the temples without seeing a soul. Not even a coke seller. When I got back late afternoon I thought the sun had got to me. I thought I heard voices coming from the bar. A few of them. And this is getting trippy, They sound Irish. I stroll into the bar to discover three Irish policemen and three Irish election supervisors. So we had a drink. And then another. And many more. Then it was time for a shower, And dinner. At least the guest to staff ratio was now 1:2 as opposed to 1:10. I almost forgot to mention, I was getting paid to do this..

DON'T FUCK WITH THE MAN FROM ATLANTA

Back in the day I used to use Coca Cola as a travel guide or a remote barometer eg how far beyond Coca Cola have we gone. Only ever made it to a day. And that was a Khmer Rouge controlled zone in northwest Cambodia in the early 90s. And the barrier was as much ideological as it was geographical. To get some serious clicks in, you really need to hit the Congo - like the dude who wrote the book retracing Stanleys' footsteps searching for Dr Livingstone. It was some weird trip. And truly bizarre, he noted, was the fact that it was the grandparents en route who remembered "progress" as in motorways and railroads. For the kids, the jungle was back impeding the progress of Coke. In a vivid scene, the author is hacking through the bush when "clang" - his machete hits metal, it's the Belgian rail track concealed underfoot. Trains probably brought more wine and mineral water. But the Coke would have rode in on the back of the new CIA friendly political landscape following the assassination of the Congo's new nationalist Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. But back to Blood River and the author is taking to a canoe. He's going up river. It's dark. It's hot. The jungle screams. Sayonara Cola. We're way past the DuLong bridge and you can feel him. Sweat, decay, disease. And him. Yeah him. Kurtz. Kurtz has turned his back on Coca Cola. A pox on it and all its carbonated bubbles. Blood River, well worth reading. Anyhow as you'll see, putting a few days between you and the treacly stuff is not for the faint hearted. It's hardcore. For most people it's an academic idea, a folly The shit's ubiquitous and Musk plans vending machines on Mars. But talking about ideological barriers to Coke's conquest. I recall an Asian businessman opening up a Coca Cola bottling plant in Cambodia in the very early 90s as the last one - if the movie the Killing Fields is to be believed - was destroyed as the Khmer Rouge tightened its grip on the capital dooming Phnom Penh to inevitable fall. So here we are 28 years later and someone is trying to get the sweet black stuff flowing again. The main problem, however, was not the Khmer Rouge as Mr Coca Cola was not targeting the more remote provinces where the guerrillas were pridedominant. He was going for the population centres that the KR harried but didn't control. So security would be tight around the big towns and cities with checkpoints everywhere, manned by government soldiers who, if they saw any salary at all, were paid a pittance. So these bored underpaid grunts high on rice whiskey - the sort of shit that takes from sober straight to psychotic without pausing at drunk - and packing serious firepower would see the big bright red truck chugging towards them. Holy consumerism. It's Christmas for kids. And nirvana for Buddhists just to be culturally sensitive. It's the winning ticket. It's the shakedown of shakedowns. Captain America is here with his big fat chequebook. Hey you dumped all those bombs on us, now it's time to drop some dime and some dollar, Dolla, dolla, dolla. Love you long time. Break open a bottle. So we got a gang of kids with AKs. And they got Capt America, got him at gunpoint. Something has gotta give. Back in Phnom Penh Mr Coca Cola ends appealing to the then Prime Minister Hun Sen - himself former Khmer Rouge who bailed when the revolution started to eat its young and who just recently kindly handed over the reins of power to his young, his son, Hun Manet. "Stop the shakedowns," Coke pleaded. it was crippling, the show. was going flat. He threatened shutdowns or closure just as Cambodia was trying to sell peace and stability to investors. The pesky Khmer Rouge kept screwing with that script. So Cambodia Inc certainly did not need the added problem of rogue government soldiers shaking down businessmen especially if they had already been shook. They had paid already, paid on entry. So...Atlanta, we got a problem. But time is on the side of the bubbles. At this stage of the game, that sticky, messy shit is all over the wheels of time, if not progress. So money is on the bubbles cos it is coming. Better not be in the way. By the late 90s the Khmer Rouge has imploded. They were out of harmony, someone said. Then Pol Pot himself died in 98 and was cremated on a mound of old rubbish. It's all over now baby blue. It was a shabby swansong to a spectacular genocide and a low key but dedicated civil war. Coke is here now. The guerrillas as well as rogue government troops and shakedown artists would all be swept up and vacuumed up by the greater power of a gangsta capitalist government. Meet the new boss. He ain't talking Mao or Marx. Nah. he's just speaks fluent dollar. AK in one hand, Coca Cola bottle in the other. Two of the biggest icons of the 20th century. Click click. Now I know we would all like to teach the world to sing. 

In perfect harmony. 

Grow apple trees. 

And honey bees. 

Not to forget those snow White turtle doves. 

But sing along there suckers. 

Here's the real thing: 

Don't fuck with the man from Atlanta .

Crossing Cambodia's Great Lake Into The Khmer Rouge Controlled Heart Of Darkness

Crossing Cambodia's great lake, the Tonle Sap, on a heavily armed boat with Liz Gilliland. Siem Reap 95.

Crossing the Tonle Sap on a heavily armed boat heading into the Khmer Rouge infested marshlands '95. Just visible in front is an armoured naval patrol boat and we had fifty cal machine guns mounted in skiffs on our port n starboard sides. We were not taking chances.This was the badlands. It was also beautiful. And I had just fallen in love with Liz, featured. This was my idea of a heavenly honeymoon. Everything fascinating and terrifying about life ram-packed into a day. A gov anti Khmer Rouge unit had been accused by the UN of going rogue and kidnapping for ransom, maintaining a secret prison in the marshlands, murdering those without ransom money to pay and dining on their livers. All the usual lovely stuff. So armed up to the teeth, the gov took us across the lake and into the marshlands. The purpose was to show us that there was no secret prison ie there was no massive old colonial fortress with bars. But you didn't need that shit. Out there there was no escape. You were upriver in Col Kurtz territory. We stopped off on a nearby little island where jittery gov troops were dug in with deathly seriousness in a unprecedented disciplined manner. These guys were not messing around. And whatever went down as sun did too was real Heart of Darkness drama. Sometimes the war seemed distant, almost quaint. But not out here. That's why there were three other gun boats escorting us. Tried to interview some locals about prisons and prisoners but with gov officials and soldiers all around, we got nowhere. Adding later credibility and added horror to the report was the subsequent attack on a UN official outside his home in Phnom Penh. Assailants stole his car. With his 3 year old daughter still in the back. She was later dumped outside the royal palace. A supposed act of mercy as it was a place she would soon be found. Not so merciful was the fact they shot the toddler in the leg. This was a daughter of a man who worked for the office that produced the report about the secret prison way out on the lake. So we're now back on the lake. Starting the return journey. Feeling a bit more relaxed. Thinking this is some holiday. But despite all the colourful and panoramic vistas and the fact that we were way way way off the still to emerge tourist path, there was the incoming from the brutal backdrop of violence, war and tragedy. Fresh love and novel passion was doing a good enough job at providing Kevlar for my soul and keeping the horrors at bay. But you were not allowed to just sit and dig sunsets. Not in this show. So it was good to have company as distraction. And all of the accompanying intensity of 'foxhole romance.' And Liz was thrilled to lig along. And presumably to be with me. Hopping the helicopters and boats without question. I was being treated like a big shot. If it wasn't so comical I might have tried -and then failed - to spin it as impressive. But enough about me. The entourage on the boat stopped off at floating crocodile farms and other fishing villages. Although most of the big floating fishing villages had disappeared. The Khmer Rouge had pulled off a successful campaign to ethnically cleanse the area of Vietnamese fishing people who lived in boathouses in floating villages along the great lake. Attacks culminating in a 93 massacre of around 40 villagers led to a mass exodus down the Mekong to the Vietnamese border. There was very little sympathy forthcoming from most Cambodians at the time. The usual show. Brutality and beauty. As King Sihanouk said: "We smile but we also kill." What a day. 

Pic by me.

A Disagreement With a Khmer Rouge Tank/Fear and Laughter on Cambodia's Route 10

In Memory of my friend and colleague Sambath Reach



I was in Sicily on a vacation and happened upon a computer in bar where I discovered the tragic news of Sambath's stroke and death. A young reporter called Julia Wallace from the Cambodia Daily had left me a message on Facebook asking me if I had any recollections of my time with Sambath. Needless to say I had many. The message had been there for a day so the deadline may have passed. But I couldn't not respond to a request to jot down something about Sambath. Especially since he showered me with generosity when I returned to Phnom Penh. I think he thought the scholarship to the States, for which I had spent quite some time writing him a sterling reference, was partly responsible for putting him on the road to other scholarships and further success.

Sambath had applied for the same scholarship under my predecessor Sheri Prasso and got nowhere. But she had written him a pretty mundane reference. She said she didn't think Sambath was up to it. I said that I wasn't sure either but why not give him the chance and let him sink or swim. At least let him see the world.

Perhaps Sheri also had a clearer idea of what I was to find out; it was very hard to find a replacement who would be half as good as Sambath.



Anyhow Ms Wallace never got back to me and I forgot about what I had hurriedly written in a bar on a sad balmy evening in Sicily as fighter planes took off in the background to bomb Libya, I wrote this about a survivor who had lost his parents to the Khmer Rouge and then through luck acumen and hard work had made a bigger figure of himself on the world stage than I could ever hope to be. That is until his luck ran out.


I just recently spotted it on my computer and, since it is written, thought I might share it with Sambath's friends and family.




When I took over as Cambodia Correspondent at AFP, I encouraged Sambath to get more involved in reporting and saw that giving him his first byline had a dramatic effect. Equally dramatic and difficult for me was his three month absence when he managed to get a Freedom Forum Foundation scholarship to the States.

The only time I ever got annoyed with Sambath was when I asked him to tell a Gov tank commander that if the tank waited 20 mins I would give him 100 bucks for a lift to Pailin.

Sambath duly translated. All fine, so I ran back to our jeep that was stuck about a mile back in a jungle military traffic jam to grab water, food, hammock and mossy net. When I got back the tank was gone. And Sambath was looking sheepishly at me - a look I had never seen before. I said where's the tank. "It's gone."
"I know that! Why is it gone?"
"I didn't think it was a good idea," he replied.
Under pressure as we had been trying to get to Pailin for three days, which the Gov. had now 'taken' some four days previously, I started shouting at him:
"That's not your fucking call, man. I need to get there."
A few hours later the first reports that a tank had hit an anti-tank mine, with a few soldiers dead and the fate of some freelance photographers unknown, came in. The survivors then faced a ground attack at dawn and a mortar attack at lunchtime.
I had to go back to Sambath and half apologise.
"OK you were fucking right...but we make these decisions together in future."
The KR retook Pailin shortly afterwards and chased the Gov. forces back to within 30kms of Battambang, Cambodia's second largest city.
Within days the Gov. in PP said everything was fine, back to the status quo ante-bellum. But nothing ever in Cambodia happened that fast. We were being spun a yarn.
Sambath complained I was making his "head hot" with screams to call various generals in the northwest to try and find out what was really going on. The odd comment we got didn't conform to the line being spun in PP. So I told Sambath we were heading up. We got to BTG late the next day so we only got some 25kms down route 10, the road to the Khmer Rouge stronghold of Pailin. The Gov. said they had retaken Treng - the last governement outpost before the jungle leading to Pailin - but there were still some dead KR on the road and a smoking tank a few kilometers on the Battambang side of Sdau, a good 30 km before Treng.

We also noticed that the soldiers we had given a lift to, dropped into firing position when they got out of the pick-up.

It was getting late so we returned so we returned to the city to file that the government line was dubious to say the least. .
The next morning we retook route 10 in a beat up old taxi. AFP didn’t fork out for 4-Wheel Drives. Near the previous day's smoldering tank, we met a gang of top generals and Sambath engaged them. They too were parroting the PP line that the KR has been pushed back - although they were saying 20km to the capital's 40/50.
I said Sambath "I don't believe them, do you?"
He was skeptical. So I said we’d drive down the road a few clicks and see what’s happening.
But we both agreed that if the Gov. was saying 40 -50 and the generals on the road 20, we could probably safely believe 4-5 kms.
After 500 meters, there were no more Gov. soldiers to be seen. Just empty villages where returnees had recently set up in some of the swathes of land that had been cleared of the copious quantities of landmines.

The emptiness was eerie. No people, no ducks, no hens, nothing. The only sound came from two houses that were on fire.
"Kevin, I don't like this." Sambath said.
"Tell the driver just to go to the top of the hill – about a kilometer away - and we will look down into Sdau."
We continued for max a minute when I thought, "Sambath is right. This is all wrong. This is way too quiet."
Just as I was about to say 'let's turn' I heard the first bang and dived to the floor of the car. The second bang clarified we weren't being shot at. We were being shelled. It whizzed over the roof and hit an adjoining house that burst into flames. I later wondered what would have happened had we been in the high SUV that I was so longing for.

The third shell landed in a mere couple of feet to the side of the passenger seat where Sambath sat. But as the road was on a mound, it blew away from us.
According to Sambath my head appeared back up over the seat amidst a maniacal mantra of “Fuck, fuck, fuck, we gotta get the fuck out of here...tell the driver to reverse.” Sambath pushed shoved and shouted at the driver who had frozen with shock until he came round. But reverse on the then Route 10 allowed a max of 10kph. And the KR gunner meanwhile was doing a good job tracking. I suddenly understood the phrase “walking the shells.”

But it was the sort of comprehension you don't need in life

I screamed to Sambath: “Forget mines, we have to turn around, tell the driver turn in the field."
So we reversed into the field. And like a bad B movie instantly got stuck. This was where a SUV would have been handy.

Automatically Sambath and I jumped out of the car then dived to the ground as a shell landed nearby. As the debris settled, the two of us, pumped with adrenalin, leapt up and pushed the car free. A macho feat that neither of us would have been cast for. Free! The driver then took off ...without us.

Sambath and I ran after the car, hearts banging as loud as the sound of the shells falling in our footsteps. An eternal 200 meters later, the driver slowed down. I managed to jump into the front and turned to see Sambath dive headlong through the open door onto the back seat. Within seconds we were out of range and in hysterics of nervous laughter.

I roared: "Sambath I could fucking live without this!"

And then we cracked up laughing at the inadvertent wisdom of my words.

As the adrenalin receded, I realized I had lost my camera. A minor issue we both decided. As was forgetting my flak jacket in the taxi trunk when we paid the driver three month's wages. He had finally slowed down after all. And no one deserves to die for someone else's ambition. I moaned about the flak jacket though. Sambath rightly asked what would need it for? And pointed out that when I did need it, it was in the boot.

It was our last trip together before I left for LA. And it was 10 years before I was back in Phnom Penh.
Sambath was settled and prospering. On our first night together, he told me that he had been back to Palin within months of our trip when Ieng Sary did his deal with Hun Sen and the Pailin and Phnom Malai Khmer Rouge went over to the government side.

Sambath told me he was in Pailin after the changing of the guard ceremony and went into a restaurant - always fond of his food. Anyhow he starts talking to some local Khmer Rouge guys - as was his capacity both to engage with and animate anyone. Turns out the two guys are tank crew. They ask Sambath what he does and he tells them he's a journalist.
The KR guys tell him that they almost got a camera a short while ago but didn't stop the tank in time and crushed it. Sambath says: "That's funny, my Irish boss lost his camera on Route 10 a few months back." Sambath recalls a moment of silence and then the KR tank gunners said: "You weren't the guys in the blue Toyota Corolla."
Sambath - "Eh yes were in a blue Toyota."
"Achoi Marai! (Motherfuck!) We fired 16 shells at you. We couldn't believe you got away. Especially when your car got stuck in the field. We were sure we had you."
True to form, Sambath burst out laughing and then proceeded to buy a bottle of whiskey and head off to a house of ill repute with the two former guerrrillas.
 "We could have been killed by the same guys I was getting drunk a few months later...how stupid," he said as he clinked my glass and two of us bent over in hysterics.

Sambath...he could not only talk his way out of hell but he could get the devil to buy you drink and leave him thinking he was privileged to meet you.



It was marvelous to see him go on to do so well in life.

Cos he didn't have it easy. He was a gent and a hustler, a bon viveur and a hard worker.

It breaks my heart to think he will no longer be there to see me and -I must selfishly confess - invariably lavish hospitality on me when I revisit Cambodia.


Kevin Barrington.

Sicily, 2011.