Word: cambodians
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...Cambodian Witness remembers a country at war with itself. -- A Client Called Noah regards affliction with stoicism and comic belief...
...singular achievement of Cambodian Witness, a quiet, devastating memoir of this genocide, is to reveal the faces behind the numbing statistics and, more terrifying, to show how familiar they look. The fanatics who unleashed the bloodbath were usually, it seems, the people next door...
...Cambodian Witness begins, happily enough, with an easeful and exotic tour of prerevolutionary life in the capital of Phnom Penh, where May's father was a doctor. The narrator's earliest memory is of fighting with his siblings for the free toy inside his mother's packages of Tide, and the household he describes with clear-eyed affection is governed by all the rites of any middle-class family anywhere -- watching TV on weekends, anxiously awaiting exam results, going for picnics in the countryside. The narrator himself appears to have been a regular little scamp who delighted in gambling with...
...behind the placid routine lie the very particular shadows and superstitions of Cambodian culture. May sets his story against the backdrop of his country's night world, a place of sorcerers and omens, in which dreams of blood mean money on the way and the hooting of an owl portends miscarriage. One day he drops in on a friend to find the boy spouting gibberish while a cross-legged magician tries to exorcise his "evil spirit" with the branch of a star-fruit tree...
...battle at the end of the film was based on a New Year's Day skirmish less than a mile from the Cambodian border. "They hit us with about 5,000 troops that night. They laid bombs right on top of us; we dropped bombs right on them. It's possible that our high command was using us as bait to draw the ! Viet Cong out so we could inflict heavy casualties. We lost about 25 dead and 175 wounded; we killed about 500 of them. Their bodies were scraped up by bulldozers, just like in the movie. For that...