“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, Cambodia.
Last week I rode my bike out to the national war museum. Very sad place. I was one of six tourists that visited that day. It's this 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 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, as a child growing up in Cambodia. I sat there and listened, watching him slowly and methodically attach his prosthetic leg.
At fifteen years old he was forced to join the military, on the government side fighting 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 open-air museum. It was a hot and hazy. The mid-day sun was beating down on the twisted chunks of green metal strewn about. We stopped a few minutes under a bamboo shade 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.”
On patrol a few months after joining the army he was walking through the jungle with an identical Israeli-made Uzi. That 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. Fifteen year olds and automatic weapons do not mix well.
“Government had no sympathy for foolishness, but they more foolish than I.”
As we walked, a lime-green snake slithered past us and under the shade of a crushed jeep.
When he was released, he was seventeen 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 fourteen year old friend how to fish with a grenade. His friend pulled the pin out and threw it in the water. He screamed at his friend to drop the grenade and run, but by the time he did it had exploded, cut his friend in half and filled Sinat with shrapnel. He spent many months after that in the hospital, living with that pain and guilt.
We stopped at a massive chunk of brown metal, with a little wooden sign that said “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 2000 kilo mine and blow up this tank.”
Twisted metal, huge gaping hole in its front. Didn’t look much like a tank anymore.
“Coffin for four men.” he said, and kept walking.
In the years afterwards, the desperate government put him back into 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 almost the worst.” He said, patting his behind.
Months later he fired a rocket launcher towards 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 lived through massive blood loss and many surgeries.
After a year in the hospital, learning to walk again, the Cambodian government forcibly recruited him again. 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 little steel balls. His friend lay the mine upside down, detonating it immediately, killing his friend and filling Sinat with a dozen ball-bearings.
It does not pay to be Sinat’s friend.
He made me poke a small scar on his hand, and I could feel one of the hard chunks of metal rolling around under his skin.
The next year, soon after he was released, 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, finally.
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% 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 of his scars, his missing leg, his blind eye, amount to a salary of thirty dollars per month for giving tours through this rusty steel graveyard. He is as much a war relic as the wreckage around him, and relives his past every day. All the implements that nearly killed him now provide his meager livelihood.
I left the museum that day with a knot in my stomach, thoroughly amazed and disturbed by his story.
It 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 into a nearby village. I succeeded only after asking for him at a little fruit stand, who only knew him as Knee.
He was sitting on his brother’s porch drinking beer with his cousins. They were having a small party, celebrating the fact that he was still alive after everything. His family was as amazed as me by his tenacity for survival.
He was excited to see me, and we spent the afternoon sipping cheap Cambodian beer and shouting 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 7am.”
One legged half-blind men can in fact drive motorbikes, slowly. 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 like a little monkey, throwing coconuts into a little stream where the 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 that had ever visited his home.
There are beautiful things about this country. The people are one of them.
We went back to Sinat’s house where I met his wife and children. His house is in fact a 10’ by 20’ shack. One room for everything. We sat at his plywood table, and I drew him for an hour, chatting over the oinks and squeals of his backyard pigpen.
I left that day with some good drawings and a quiet promise help him by telling his story. He is saving money for an operation to restore vision in his right eye. It will cost him $130. He has saved sixty dollars for it.
Something above is either desperately trying to kill Sinat or protect him. I’m not sure which. He manifests survival in a very extreme way, and is a very serious man because of it. His face tells a painful story. There is no humor in freakish bad luck when you have to live with it every day.
I am planning on visiting him again, with the means of getting him his operation. I hope those drawings might provide that.
My return to Moun Sinat: Saturation of Old Footprints
Drawings of Moun Sinat
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