A Cambodian Story
The Many Lives of Moun Sinat
By Tobias Rose-Stockwell

“The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.”
—William H. Borah

Siem Reap District, Cambodia,
February 2004
Last week I rode my bike out to the National War Museum. I was one of six tourists to visit that day. The museum is a big field crammed with derelict machines of war, bullet-ridden with gaping holes. It looks like a very well organized junkyard for the military. There was a man sitting at a big wooden table under a veranda, rubbing his single foot, drinking a glass of water. He was a guide, and he introduced himself as Moun Sinat, while gently wrapping a cloth bandage around the stump of his left leg.

“I have three times been shot by gun, and four times found by mines.”
He began telling me the story of his life in Cambodia, as he methodically attached his prosthetic leg.
At 15 years old Sinat was forced to join the military, fighting with the government against the Khmer Rouge. He was on his own and had no money to buy food or clothing, so he convinced them to accept him despite his age.

“No work then, only war.”
We stood up and began walking around. The mid-day sun was beating down on the twisted chunks of green metal strewn about. We stopped a few minutes in the shade of a bamboo structure with a row of old guns. He pointed to a snub-nosed Uzi, blackened by rust.

“This one cost me one year of my life, and every year of my friend’s life.”He told me the story of how, on patrol a few months after joining the army, he was walking through the jungle with an identical Israeli-made Uzi. This type of gun has no safety and a side trigger, and when he pulled it out of its holster it caught on his trousers and shot his friend in the back multiple times, killing him. The military put him in jail for a year.

“Government had no sympathy for foolishness, but they very foolish themselves.”
As we walked, a lime-green snake slithered past us and disappeared under the shade of a crushed jeep.

When Sinat was released from jail, he was 17 and still penniless. He learned to fish with explosives, which were cheap and ubiquitous at the time. One day at a pond he tried to teach his 14-year-old friend how to fish with a grenade. His friend pulled the pin out and threw it into the water, still holding the grenade in his hand. Sinat screamed at his friend to drop the grenade and run, but by the time he did, it had exploded, cutting his friend in half and filling Sinat with shrapnel. Sinat then spent many months in the hospital, living with the pain and guilt.
We stopped at a massive chunk of brown metal, with a little wooden sign that read “Tank” in white painted letters.

“This one destroyed with fertilizer bomb. Chinese taught Khmer Rouge to make 300 kilo anti-tank mine. But they made 2,000 kilo mine and blow up this tank. Coffin for four men,” he said and kept walking.

In the years afterward, the desperate government put him back in the military, where he learned to drive that same type of tank. During that time he was shot in the knee, which put him in the hospital again.

“That was bad, but this was the worst,” he said, patting his behind.
Months later he had fired a rocket launcher toward enemy troops in the jungle at night. The “single-use” launcher lit up his position immediately, and he was shot in his rear-end. The bullet went through his femur and cut off part of his penis. He suffered through massive blood loss and many surgeries.

After Sinat had spent a year in the hospital and learned to walk again, the Cambodian government forcibly recruited him once more. He found himself with his friend on the front line, laying a Chinese-made Claymore mine.

“American Claymore have letter that say ‘front toward enemy’; Chinese copy do not.”
He showed me one, a flat little brown box, full of tiny steel balls. Sinat told me how his friend had laid the mine upside down, detonating it immediately, killing his friend and filling Sinat with a dozen ball bearings.

He made me poke a small scar on his hand, and I could feel one of the hard chunks of metal rollingaround under his skin.

The next year, he stepped on an antipersonnel mine, which destroyed his leg and imbedded the splintered bones from his foot in his eye, completely blinding him. That ended his military service.

He left Cambodia and, with no other options, became a beggar for a year,
living in a refugee camp on the Thai border. After a long time he received a prosthetic leg, learned to speak some English from a nurse, and eventually got an eye operation, which restored 50 percent of his vision.

He returned to Cambodia only to find that his papers—the full documentation of his life—had been lost in the war. He was a refugee with no past and no proof of his service beyond scars and a missing limb. It is the policy for such refugees, even veterans, to work for one year without pay before regaining citizenship. He took up fishing again, this time with a net.
Just last year, he was walking through the countryside with his eight-year-old daughter. He stepped on a bouncing-berry mine. The mine was spring-loaded to bounce into the air two meters and fill surrounding troops with shrapnel. The mine bounced up but did not detonate and instead came down and hit him in the face, blinding his one eye again. He told his daughter to run as he went into shock, but confused and frightened she ran up and hugged him.
The mine was defunct and did not explode.

Sinat is 39 years old. All his scars, his missing leg and his blind eye amount to a salary of $30 per month for giving tours through this rusty steel graveyard. He is as much a war relic as the wreckage around him.

I left the museum that day with a knot in my stomach.His story stuck with me, and a few days later I rode my bike out to find him again. I got directions to his house from the museum and rode ten kilometers out to a nearby village. I found him sitting on his brother’s porch, drinking beer with his cousins. He was excited to see me, and we spent the afternoon sipping cheap Cambodian beer and talking well into the evening.

During that time, I asked to draw him. In my mind I was formulating a plan.
“Please, please do! I come to your guesthouse tomorrow at 7 a.m.”
The next morning he took me out into the countryside, where he introduced me to more of his extended family. At his cousin’s house, his nephew climbed a huge palm tree and threw coconuts into a small stream where they splashed and bobbed in the water. We drank them under a bushy red flowering tree, and his cousin told me he was honored that I was the first “farang,” or white person, who had ever visited his home.

We went back to Sinat’s one-room shack where I met his wife and children. We sat at his plywood table, chatting over the oinks and squeals coming from his backyard pigpen, and I drew him for an hour.

I left that day with some good drawings and a quiet promise to help him by retelling his story. He is saving money for an operation to restore vision in his right eye. It will cost him $130. He has saved $60 for it.
I plan to visit him again with the money for his operation. AV

TOBIAS ROSE-STOCKWELL earned a major in art in 2004 from Allegheny College, PA. He is now working on a humanitarian project that he started in southeast Asia while traveling. To benefit humanitarian causes abroad, he has developed the web site www.HumanTranslation.org and is selling his artwork. For more information, contact him at Tobias@humantranslation.org.