Home Fires: Shaking All Over

February 9, 2010
By BRIAN TURNER
Opinionator
The New York Times

Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.

PHNOM PENH — It’s mid-afternoon. From my hotel room at the Bright Lotus Lodge — only a block from where the Tonle Sap converges with the Mekong River — I can hear the keyboard strains of The Doors’ “Light My Fire” drifting out from one of the bars on the riverfront.

I’m lying in bed with a blanket pulled up over my shoulders, arms and legs shivering with fever, my forehead hot, my internal thermostat all screwed up. I don’t have a cough or a sore throat or diarrhea, thankfully — it’s a traveler’s cold, I think. The symptoms at the moment include fever, muscle tremors, fatigue, lack of appetite, nausea. What I would’ve called a really bad case of “the crud” back when I was in the military.

Outside, the riverside boulevard, Sisowath Quay, temporarily closes down until the king and his entourage drive by from the nearby Royal Palace. Things return to normal soon afterward. The tour buses unload their passengers near the palace entrance. Most of the foreigners try to ignore the man in the wheelchair, the man without legs who told me he lost them to a mine in Battambang province back in 1995. He wears a cardboard sign on his chest that explains he’s not begging, just trying to earn a living selling books (some of which I highly recommend, like “The Gate” by Francois Bizot and Jon Swain’s “River of Time.”)

Somewhere nearby a young woman in rags pulls a broken-down wood and metal vegetable cart with a man — or the remnants of a man — strapped to the wooden top. The man is moaning in a high tenor — an incomprehensible and yet fully recognizable pain, both of his legs permanently wrecked, bent out of plane by polio, perhaps, or some other disfigurement of birth or bad fortune, though I don’t really know.

There are a long line of people like this, street by street, trying to scratch out a living.

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Photographs of prisoners at Cambodia’s S-21 on display at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. (All photos by Brian Turner)

Earlier in the day, I went to S-21 at Tuol Sleng, the former high school that was turned into a prison and death camp by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970’s. Of the some 17,000 prisoners that passed through the S-21, only a handful survived. It is now part of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Raksmey, one of the drivers who sleeps in his motoremorque, drove me out there early in the morning.

As soon as I took the photograph above I wondered to myself whether or not I was repeating a kind of violence against these Cambodians. If you look at the boy in the middle row, third from the left, you can see how each person had a kind of brace against their neck to keep them placed for the photographer, for uniformity. I kept the photo — and I share it with you now — because Cambodians who survived the Khmer Rouge want all to remember what happened here, who suffered and who was lost. And to remind us that each generation needs to remain vigilant to keep it from happening again.

A former torture room at the S-21 prison.

I’m not one to talk about ghosts much, but there was a moment in the prison when one of the wooden shutters slowly opened up to allow more sunlight in. I thought maybe someone was outside, but of course there was no one. None of the other shutters moved at all.

There were bats, though, in broad daylight. Even at a high shutter speed it was difficult to get a clear, sharp image of them; they were shivering on the wall. It seem liked fear and stress and the spirit of the place had sunk into their bones.

Bats at S-21 prison.

After the museum, Raksmey drove me to Choeung Ek, the killing fields, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.

Skulls of victims at the Choeung Ek memorial.

By the time I returned in the afternoon the shivers had already begun.

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As the sun falls at dusk and the twilight deepens into night, and I continue to sweat the fever out, I can’t help but think I am in the throes of a physical reaction to S-21. After walking through the prison, standing in the rooms of torture and death, the long hallways where bodies must have been dragged in and dragged out, where the photographs of prisoners stare within those walls both day and night, their eyes never closing, waiting for the world to recognize them and remember, how could I not be sick?

When I went to Auschwitz and Birkenau not too long ago I had a similar reaction. I didn’t get physically sick, but I couldn’t get the smell of human hair and death out of my nostrils for at least a week afterward. In fact, whenever I think of it, that smell returns.

As I head towards sleep, pale yellow geckos stalk mosquitoes and other night fliers with the pads of their feet suctioned to the windowpane. I know that as the bars shut down and the tourists stagger back to their rooms, the motoremorque drivers will tout for their last fare for the night, and, failing that, whisper “marijuana,” or “you want lady tonight?” But there won’t be any takers. The streets will empty of tourists and the rats will come out from their holes in the walls — I’ve seen them working the shadows behind the line of tuk-tuks and cyclos, scrabbling for remainders of produce dropped throughout the day from the pushcart kitchens. And as the rats begin to feed, the drivers somehow perch themselves for the night on top of their motorbikes and cyclos, swaybacked, reclining, some of them with thin, white blankets covering them, like dead bodies with sheets pulled up over their eyes.

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Brian Turner served seven years in the Army, most recently in 2004 as an infantry team leader in Mosul with the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division. His 2005 book of poems, “Here, Bullet,” has won several awards. He is the recipient of the 2009-2010 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship and teaches at Sierra Nevada College.