Showing results for "the field" in Southeast Asia

"I saw many killed. I almost starved. But I escaped to refugee camps in Thailand and eventually made it to the U.S." Thus begins Leth Oun's poignant and vivid memoir. A survivor of the Cambodian Killing Fields—having spent a torturous three years, eight months, and ten days imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge—Oun thrived in America, learning English, becoming a citizen, and working as an officer in the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division. In A Refugee's American Dream, Oun shares hard memories of Cambodia, where his father was executed, and his family enslaved in labor camps.

From April 1975 to January of 1979 Pol Pot murdered nearly two million of his own people out of a population of seven million, thus introducing a new word into the English language, "auto-genocide": the murder of one's own people. The world just stood by and let it happen. Why was this allowed to happen? What events created this monster? Was it the dropping of two and a half million tons of explosives by the USA on a neutral country in its war with Vietnam?