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June 1970.I fell in love this
month. With a woman. With a city. With a whole country.
Shaggy looking, fresh faced, at 22, I had just come from my first combat experience with the U-S First Air Cavalry in the Chup Rubber
Plantation of eastern Cambodia.
Now I was barreling down Route One from Saigon to Phnom Penh, first by rented motorcycle, then by Peugeot
taxi. I could hardly wait. Phnom Penh was one of those magical places I had read about in
school. I had to see it before it changed. The modern capital of the land of the Angkor temples.
Exotic beyond imagination. I had read of it through the French adventurer,
writer, later Culture Minister Andre Malraux. Phnom Penh and Cambodia did not disappoint.
The city I came to know was beautiful in every way. Neatly groomed parks. A
splendid Royal
Palace. A quiet Phnom or hill on which there was a small pagoda with friendly
monks. Wide avenues along which were splendid French built buildings and homes surrounded with bougainvillea.
Friendly, open people.
I ate well, lived well, loved well: meeting the most exquisite woman I should ever
meet. Was it all an illusion? If it was, it is an illusion that I shall cherish to the end.
This place would soon be one of great sadness and suffering .I was here at the start of a new war. A wider war. But even in war, there seemed
to be an inexplicable, tragic innocence about the place, about the people.
January 1980. Ten years later I am still in love. With a place. And with a woman - named Sinan.
The place, the woman, have gone though so much. Five years of war, four years rule by one of the most brutal regimes in the history of mankind.
Innocent no longer, the place had come to be known as the killing fields.
Atrocities and barbarisms had been carried out in the name of a radical government trying to create the perfect socialist society.
And the woman. By some miracle, she was still alive. She had survived. I
was determined to take her away from all of this. To rescue her after she had rescued herself from the worst. But I was also trying to rescue
something more. To rescue, to restore that lost innocence, hers and mine - the feelings of a 22 year old ten years
before. A moment lost time.
A yellowed cutting from the Singapore Straits Times, carefully preserved
in a plastic folder, tells a little of the story of the attempt at rescued love.
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