Southeast Asia -- Raw and in Your Face

This is the first in a series of five stories dealing with several month-long trips to Southeast Asia between 2004 and 2010.

Southeast Asia is a place of stark contrasts -- rich and poor, ancient and modern, serenity and violence.

That's part of the attraction of the region. And, while most visitors spend their time in search of beaches, bars, and Buddhist shrines, the tourist trail also leads to some sites where the main attractions are misery and death.

In Cambodia, that road leads to the Choeung Ek “killing fields” and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where a simple high school in Phnom Penh was turned into the notorious Security Prison 21 (commonly known as S-21).

Cambodia got caught up in its own revolution during the Vietnam War and fell to ultra-Communist Khmer Rouge forces in 1975, the same year the South Vietnamese government was finally overrun by the combined military might of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. Led by Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge restarted the historical clock at “Year Zero” and sought to return Cambodia to an agrarian economy. During the next four years, they managed to murder and starve to death an estimated 3 million people.

In one relatively small cog of that killing machine, an estimated 17,000 doctors, teachers, engineers, students, monks, and former supporters of the previous Lon Nol regime were systematically interrogated, tortured, and killed at the former Chao Ponhea Yat High School. Originally, the bodies were buried nearby. But, when they ran out of room, it became standard policy that after two or three months at S-21, the prisoners would be marched nine miles out to Choeung Ek and dispatched with pickaxes, iron bars, or machetes. There were 12 known S-21 survivors. I believe four of them were still alive around the time I first visited Cambodia in 2007.

It was the Vietnamese Army that finally put an end to the Khmer Rouge. They went in and kicked out Pol Pot, installing a kinder, gentler one-party Communist government. In the process, they stumbled upon S-21 and numerous mass gravesites that were later made famous in the 1984 movie “The Killing Fields.” The film, by the way, won three Academy Awards, including one for Haing Ngor, a Cambodian doctor who portrayed his own real-life events during Khmer Rouge nightmare.

Today, the Choeung Ek killing field is a little Disneyland of death. You pay a small price and get to wander around a dusty spot where several of the burial pits were excavated. Signs tell you 80 people were unearthed here; 120 were found there. As you look in the holes in the ground, you notice bits of old clothing mixed in with the soil.

There’s a memorial in the center of the site. Inside are hundreds, maybe thousands of human skulls. If you want to, you can buy some incense to honor the dead. There’s also a souvenir shop. All in all, it’s a pretty depressing locale.

But, if you really want to give yourself a case of the willies, head out to S-21. That place is just plain creepy.

Other than burying the bodies that were still tied to the rusting bed frames where they were tortured to death, not much has changed since the prison was abandoned as the Vietnamese Army approached. Oh, there are some photographs of victims on the walls, along with their life stories. And, there are some interesting paintings depicting daily life at the prison. But, basically, the place has just been disinfected and opened as a museum.

You can stand in the wooden enclosures (about the size of a dressing room at a typical clothing store) that served as cells for the prisoners. You can peer into the dusty rooms where detailed dossiers were compiled for each prisoner – complete with confession and an often-expansive list of other “counter-revolutionaries” the person knew. You can even examine some of the torture tools used to extract those confessions.

In fact, the whole place could be up and running again in no time at all.

Vietnam is a different story. There, the government is still celebrating their victory over a variety of foes, including the United States.

Nowhere is this more evident than at the Cu Chi tunnel complex, about a two-hour bus ride out of central Ho Chi Minh City. The Cu Chi area has a long history of resistance, and its sandy soil has been used to hide guerilla soldiers since at least the 1880s when the Vietnamese were fighting the French. By the late 1940s, the system really started to expand, and, by 1965, when the U.S. military got heavily involved, there were some 75 miles of interconnected tunnels that housed hospitals, kitchens, workshops, and sleeping areas.

I visited the tunnels in 2010, and according to my tour guide, Duc, the Americans first happened upon the Cu Chi complex when an officer’s hunting dog sniffed out one of the tunnel ventilation shafts disguised in a termite mound. True or not, by early 1966, U.S. B-52 bombers had turned the surface of the region from a lush jungle and farming community into a pockmarked moonscape. And, with the help of some 8,000 troops from the U.S. 1st Infantry Division and the 173rd Airborne Brigade, along with members of the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, “Operation Crimp” began a systematic effort to eradicate the underground military complex.

Unfortunately, for the American military, they vastly underestimated the size and sophistication of the tunnel system. When they would find one of the tiny, concealed openings, they would toss in a grenade and pour water or gas into the hole. Some of the Cu Chi fighters would be killed, but others would flee to a different part of the complex.

A year later, the U.S. military tried another push, this time with 30,000 troops and the addition of “tunnel rats,” soldiers of small stature who crawled into the cramped, twisting tunnels, armed with guns, knives, flashlights, and balls of string (so they could find their way back out). This deadly cat-and-mouse game continued until the Americans finally pulled out in the early ‘70s.

Today, the region is home to rubber tree plantations, small farms, and a national historical site, complete with original and “tourist” (slightly enlarged and partially lighted) tunnels, samples of dozens of inventive booby traps, and a firing range (where you can try your hand at firing an AK-47, an M-16, or, even, an M-60 machine gun).

Groups of tourists stop to view the remnants of an American tank and listen to their guide proudly explain how the Viet Cong would build booby traps using simple bamboo spears coated with a combination of scorpion and cobra toxins. "They would stick the American soldiers and it was Bye, Bye Miss American Pie," according to Duc.

Considering the numbers of persons on both sides who died in the region, I found the whole process a bit gruesome. But, that's Southeast Asia -- served raw and in your face.