HEADLINE: How Khmer Woman escaped to Singapore... with a TV Newsman's help," 
BYLINE: By Evelyn Ng 

EXCERPT:...The woman, Soc Sinan, 27, flew into Selatar airfield in a Red Cross aid plane, Wednesday with American Broadcasting Company journalist James Laurie, 32."

" It was learnt that this was the second attempt by Mr. Laurie to arrange for Soc Sinan's escape. His first attempt was in 1975, in the last days before Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge."

"Mr. Laurie did not hear from Soc Sinan in the intervening years and  he did not know if she was alive. But she contacted him when he made a 26 day trip into Kampuchea recently to shoot a documentary film on the country." 

"She is described as Mr. Laurie's 'close' personal friend.'"

"She lay down, naked, her sleek, hairless body dim in the half-light; only the faint line between her thighs, and her eyes showed clearly. It was upon her eyes he fixed his gaze"

"Upon her eyes!" 

Eyes wider and possessed of both more innocence and more experience than I had ever seen.

In Sinan, I saw that extraordinary passion that Malraux described. A ready laugh and yet a tendency easily toward instant tears and sometimes quick and unpredictable violence.

Later I would come to know the more deliberate and calculating advances of the Chinese or the Vietnamese. Each captivating but never quite as enchanting. 

This exotic Khmer: on one side was an easy manner, an openness, a bluntness, and a seeming simplicity of thought and action devoid of the careful calculations I had come to expect elsewhere in Asia. But there was also the darker side: those flashes of anger that saw her wide almond eyes harden with immediate, unpremeditated thoughts of brutal revenge.

Both sides were part of the Cambodia I came to know. 
A seemingly gentle people deeply devout in a non-violent Buddhism who nevertheless produced one of the cruelest, most deadly regimes in history creating condition where people turned on one another with merciless intensity. 

When you are in your early 20's, love affairs seem deeper, partners more beautiful, dramas more intense, adventures more daring, and losses more wrenching. 

For more than fifteen years, my life was to be entwined with Sinan and with Cambodia. She and Cambodia possessed me in 1970. She and Cambodia haunted me through the 1980's and 30 years later still fill me with love, guilt, sadness, and remorse. 

I first saw Sinan at 8:35 on the morning of June 15, 1970. 

The encounter came after a morning walk.

It is rarely cool in Phnom Penh. This city built at the intersection of two great rivers the Mekong and the Tonle Sap has neither the breezes of the coastal cities that have since become favorites - like Nha Trang or Qui Nhon in Vietnam - nor the coolness that altitude brings to others - like Vietnam's hill station at Dalat or Malaysia's at Cameron Highlands.

Yet morning in the Cambodian capital was a special time. My habit was to rise early from my room at the old Hotel de la Poste and walk toward Le Phnom. There a first morning coffee waited at an outdoor café at the base of the small Pagoda. 

I would then walk back to the Khmer Bank building, near my hotel. 

(30 years later inn 2000 the hotel is long gone. The Post office is much as it was and the Bank building houses an insurance company "CAMINCO")

Upstairs in the bank building, Colonel Am Rong with his faithful interpreter and sidekick Chhang Song held their morning military briefing on behalf of the Army of the Khmer Republic which had come to power in a coup d'etat in March. The nation's leader for 16 years, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, had been caught unaware and unprepared on state visits to Moscow and Beijing. 

When I arrived in Phnom Penh a few months after the coup, opinions on Sihanouk were very much mixed. Older people, conscious that the Prince had kept Cambodia out of war for nearly ten years, regretted his loss. Some however branded him as a coward. "He didn't have the courage to return quickly from overseas to put down the coup, which he could have done!."

But at the Khmer Bank building, the best that could be said for the new Khmer Republic's  briefings was that they were held 

"The author with Prince Sihanouk January 1979"

 next to a coffee stand where the cafe was good and strong and the croissants were hot. I was ready for that second cup.

The briefing provided only a hint of Cambodia's new war.

After the few tips the briefing provided, Phnom Penh's reporters would head out of town for a daily drive to the battlefront or at least towards the front.

It seemed to me quite a civilized way of reporting war. It reminded me of Tolstoy's descriptions in War and Peace of the gentry who donned parasols for picnic lunches and headed for the hills to watch the French and Russians do mortal combat. It also reinforced the seeming innocent nature of this war. 

As a lowly freelancer in 1970 and 1971, I had no budget for a car of my own, but I could always tag along with one of my more seasoned colleagues. I was anxious to learn. They were anxious for ...well... I actually have no idea why they tolerated me. 

Derek Maitland, a Reuters reporter, was my companion for one of many journeys to "the front."

Like most of the reporters, Derek had a Mercedes, a good driver, and a "boot" (the Americans called them trunks) filled with iced Angkor beer.

There were five highways to choose from. Like spokes of the wheel with the city at the center- highways one, three, four, five and six. 

Am Rong's tip might be: "Khmer Republic forces launched a determined assault against enemy troops around Kompong Cham." It was a clear signal that the Republic had probably sustained a loss and that by heading north, up highway six we might see the retreating troops and have a story. 

"Interviewing Cambodian officer in Kompong Speu on Route 4
excursion December 1970"

I clutched more tightly the cup of coffee in my hands, summoning my nerve. I asked if the seat next to her was vacant. It was.

When the briefing was over, I introduced myself. She introduced herself in impeccable French with that distinctive Khmer lilt. 

"I am Soc Sinan. I work at Sonatrac, a French agricultural machinery firm not far way."

For much of the next two years, whenever I was in Phnom Penh, Sinan and I were inseparable. 

Looking back, it is hard to fathom why life could not stay that way. If only I could change the past, correct my stupid mistakes, revoke my callousness and blunder, we would be inseparable still.

(To be continued) 

NOTE: MORE OF THE "STORY OF SINAN" will be forthcoming in Jim Laurie's book "Down the Wrong Road," to be published soon. A love story. A story of survival. Under the Khmer Rouge. Under the Vietnamese. Being a refugee in America. Check back later to this website for details.

Soc Sinan in cockpit of Oxfam Relief plane. Leaving Cambodia after more than 4 years under the Khmer Rouge

Jim Laurie and Soc Sinan at Singapore airport January 1980