Hout Seng's Long March

By Stanley W. Cloud/Phnom Penh

The first time Hout Seng saw the Khmer Rouge up close, they were running past his ground-floor apartment on the southern outskirts of Phnom Penh. They wore black pajamas and sandals made of tires, and had branches tied to their backs as camouflage. All carried AK-47s. It was the morning of April 17, 1975. % After five years of war, the Communist rebels were on the brink of victory. As the government's remaining defenses collapsed, more and more guerrillas poured past Seng's residence into the capital. By midafternoon the war was over, and people were celebrating in the streets.

For 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 all Cambodians -- men, women and children -- would be herded into slave-labor communes.

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 to pick them up two days later, they were gone, swept up in the first stage of the forced evacuation.

Soon, he and the remainder of the family were part of the mass exodus. Carrying only a little rice and some blankets, they joined thousands of others on foot or 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. No one had.

About 35 miles south of Phnom Penh, the great throng ground to a temporary and unexplained halt, like a train whose engine had broken down. For several months, the Khmer Rouge did not seem to know what to do next. Some of the , evacuees grew ill and died. Others wandered away to unknown fates. Most were assigned to villages where they worked in return for food rations.

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.

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 guerrilla -- Seng and his ragtag, nearly starved company of survivors crossed into Thailand. Today they live in the Washington, D.C., area, where Seng is a successful taxi driver.

His family's saga does not end there. Not long ago, Seng received news from Cambodia about his daughters: in 1975 they had been sent to a work camp in the western province of Battambang and assigned to dig irrigation ditches. Seng Ly died of malaria and malnutrition. She was ten years old. But Theary somehow survived. Married and the mother of three small children, she was reunited last month in Phnom Penh with her brother Neang. There were tears at the reunion -- and many overdue smiles.