Word: seng
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After the Vietnamese army ousted the Pol Pot regime in January 1979, Seng gathered up his family. He joined with the family of a recently widowed woman named Ol Sam, whom he would later marry, plus the orphaned daughter of a mutual friend, and set out to escape from Cambodia. Largely on foot, with occasional hitched rides on oxcarts and trucks, the group made its way to the northwest, a distance of some 250 miles. Along the way, Seng's wife died. Finally, in May -- more than four years after he got his first close look at a Khmer Rouge...
Eventually, Seng and his family were sent to a rice-producing commune in the Kampong Cham area of eastern Cambodia. There, father and sons labored twelve hours a day and more in the paddies, although Seng's wife was too weak to work. At that, they were lucky: in the same commune, perhaps a third of the 3,000 workers died of disease, starvation and overwork, or were executed by their Khmer Rouge overlords...
...thousands, that celebration may have been the last happy moment of their lives. For millions, including Seng and his family, it marked the beginning of a nightmare of death and suffering. Before nightfall on that first day, the Khmer Rouge were rounding up "traitors" (those who had served in the previous government) and "collaborators" (professionals, people who spoke foreign languages, teachers and the like). Most were summarily executed or tortured to death. By the next morning, the Communist government had begun the complete evacuation of the cities, which Cambodia's new rulers regarded as cesspools of bourgeois corruption. Nearly...
...Seng, a driver for the TIME correspondents who covered the Cambodian war, soon grasped the dimension of the crisis. The day before the final assault on the capital, with rockets landing less than a block from his apartment, Seng and his stroke-crippled wife asked a relative to take their two boys and two girls to a nearby hospital, thinking they might be safer there. The boys, Neang, 14, and Aun, 6, returned home later that afternoon as the rocket attacks subsided. But the two frightened daughters, Seng Ly, 9, and Theary, 12, stayed put. When their father went...
...bicycle heading south along the Basak River. No one knew where they were marching or why. The troops who rounded them up said only that they would not be gone long from Phnom Penh. At night they slept beside the road. After a few days, the flip-flops Seng and his family were wearing disintegrated, and they had no choice but to go barefoot on the road's blistering macadam. Frequently, Seng would ask if anyone had seen his missing daughters...