Homeward bound – at whatever the cost
Sat, 20 February 2016
Brent Crane
Around 1am on August 18, 1976, Soem Sei Lena and Nhek Veng Huor crept through a banana plantation towards the Mekong River. The former soldiers wore dark clothes and carried malaria tablets, vitamin pills, a homemade hatchet and a machete.

They headed east from Prek Pra commune on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, sticking to wooded areas. Earlier, Lena had scaled a coconut tree and scoped out a route that avoided any villages.

It was dawn by the time the pair reached the river at Chroy Ampil, so they hid out in a forest until dark. When night came, each man chopped down a banana tree and pushed the buoyant trunks into the water, using them to float down the river towards Vietnam. They hoped for good luck.

When the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh in April 1975 and toppled the anti-communist Lon Nol regime, hundreds of Cambodian servicemen remained in the US receiving military training. Suddenly stateless, these men were given a difficult choice: stay on in the US as refugees or repatriate to Democratic Kampuchea (DK). While most chose the former, 81 opted to return.

Cynthia Coleman remembers that period like it was yesterday. Now in her early 70s, Coleman was then 34, recently widowed and living in central Philadelphia with five children.

Though she came from privilege – her father was an ambassador under President Kennedy, an acclaimed investigative reporter and a speechwriter in three presidential campaigns – Coleman chose a career in social work. She dealt mainly with refugees fleeing Cold War turmoil in Southeast Asia.

In late 1975, Coleman was contracted by the US State Department to lead the effort in getting the 81, mostly young, Cambodian servicemen, as well as 11 refugee families, repatriated to communist Cambodia. It would become a defining period of her life.

Content image - Phnom Penh Post
A page from Nhek Veng Huor’s S-21 file.Photo supplied by dc-cam
“They were very brave, very crazy,” she recalled, sitting at a streetside table outside her Phnom Penh hotel this week, working her way through a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. “They felt a tremendous amount of guilt for leaving their families at a time when the regime was near collapse.” The men understood the risk of returning, she said, “better then any of us”.

Coleman first met the servicemen in December 1975 after they were flown from Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, to Philadelphia, where they were housed in a YMCA community centre. She was employed by an NGO called the Nationalities Service Center and saw them nearly every day, listening to their complaints, hopes and fears.

Coleman said Nhek Veng Huor, a 24-year-old naval second lieutenant, visited her office most often. Huor was thin and tall, with a dark mole under one eye, and unmarried, unlike most in the group. The only surviving son of farmers in Svay Rieng – his brother had died in the war – he had been in the US since September 1974, learning English in Texas and then how to pilot ships in Rhode Island.

Coleman remembers Huor as “terribly bright” and philosophical, “a quiet poet”. He dressed well, and spoke French and English fluently. “He became like a younger brother” to her, she said. She carried a copy of his passport photo in her wallet for two decades.

Now Coleman keeps something else of Huor’s: more than 100 pages of his confession from the S-21 Khmer Rouge detention and execution centre, where Huor was interrogated 12 times. She spent weeks transcribing it by hand from the original Khmer document, with assistance from DC-Cam.

During her time in Cambodia, Coleman used the S-21 confessions to trace the lives of some of the servicemen after they returned. She visited the areas mentioned in their confessions – including the wooded bank from where Huor and Lena escaped into the Mekong – before all of them were killed.

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Jamie_Lambo wrote:was a good read that thanks

phuketrichard wrote:nobody did,
same with Rwanda

Rutiger wrote:

phuketrichard wrote:nobody did,
same with Rwanda

or Syria today for that matter. Naive young muslims going over to join ISIL and not having a clue about the reality of that terror organization's disgusting methods and motives.

qinjingyou wrote:I was an interpreter in a refugee camp when word came through that the KR were accepting returnees. There was a family there that had been there for awhile, because it was a bit difficult to find a sponsor for them. The father was a farmer, uneducated and middle-aged, so didn't have good employment opportunities, the oldest child was about 14, a girl who became the contact because her parents were mostly overwhelmed. There were a lot of kids, too. The family had something like 12 or 14 people in all. Sponsors were cautious because they'd have to accept responsibility for a large family with no prospective wage earners.

So Dad decided to go back.
Each of the interpreters, the Area Coordinator, and some of the NGO representatives talked to him personally, trying to get him to change his mind. One of the NGOs found a farmer who would take Dad as a farm hand.
No deal, he wanted to go home.
In a fit of desperation, the interpreters and Area Coordinator worked out with one of the NGOs to accept the oldest girl and two or three siblings as a family of their own.
Nope, Dad was taking the family home.
The day the bus picked them up the interpreters went off duty and got seriously drunk.

For some reason, after all this time that girl haunts me.

phuketrichard wrote:nobody did,
same with Rwanda

TheGrinchSR wrote:

phuketrichard wrote:nobody did,
same with Rwanda

The horror it all is that it's worse in North Korea and we fucking know thanks to a UN report which labelled North Korea both a genocide and a holocaust... and thanks to money, no-one will do a thing about it.