“Give me men to match the mountains.”

— epitaph for Jerry “Hog” Daniels, died 1982.

By 1972, my father was well aware that the days of American presence in Southeast Asia were numbered. He was already working with his Thai business partners to launch an import export business near Bangkok, and this pre-occupied all of his time after the Paris Peace Agreements were signed with Hanoi in 1973. On June 3rd of that year, the last of the Air America planes landed in Thailand, and my father officially retired from the secret airline.  By that point, AAM had evacuated 150,000 Hmong to refugee camps in Thailand. 

Since 1969, Nixon had expanded the American theater of war in Cambodia, where American B-52s were unloading their payloads on suspected positions of Viet Minh and Khmer Rouge.  The Americans dropped a half million tons of bombs in the countryside over this period, and the  drops were by nature imprecise, so there were many civilian casualties  — with estimates ranging between 100,00 to 300,000 casualties.  By the time these secret bombings became undisputed public knowledge in the U.S. and ended in 1973, the Khmer  were in position to take over a traumatized country from the fascist government of Lon Nol.  

Lon Nol, who began in 1951 as the brutal Chief of Police for the “neutral” regime of the sly Prince Sihanouk, took power by betraying his master in the coup of 1970.  In the name of the Khmer race, he conducted his own racist purges of Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai and Cham Muslim civilians, and especially, suspected Communists.

Meanwhile, the equally sly “Brother Number One” of the Khmer Rouge, Saloth Sar (later known by his nom de guerre, Pol Pot), was brilliantly orchestrating a hall of mirrors that disguised the brutal intentions of the Khmer Rouge from just about everyone.  

Working through the façade of the deposed “neutralist” Prince Sihanouk, he created the impression to American and Chinese leaders that the Khmer could be negotiated with.   Working through the façade of three former democratic intellectuals long thought to have been killed by the Chief of Police, he resurrected these honest leaders, the Three Ghosts, to espouse democratic reforms.    Working through the front of Cambodian activists trained in North Vietnam, he misled the Vietnamese into thinking they controlled the Khmer Rouge. But of course, by 1975, all these leaders would be killed. Working with the peasantry, he invoked the monastic ideals and purity of Buddhist heroes – so that few peasants outside the cities understood the ascetic Khmer Rouge was a Communist movement, until it was too late.

When the Khmer Rouge defeated the nationalist regime, and brought the country back to Year Zero, the power of the Angka was absolute. The Angka – which means “Organization” – could never be wrong. No individual sacrifice was too great for the Angka.  For thinking the wrong thoughts, or stealing a bit of food, or being lazy, anyone could be disappeared. There were no written laws, no judges or tribunals. There was only the Angka, which kept a jealous guard of its right to judge who was pure and who was not.  Over a million people would be murdered in the subsequent four years in the “killing fields”.

In April of 1975, my father was in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge paraded into the city in victory, and the city celebrated the onset of “peace”.  The US Embassy had already evacuated months earlier. The State Department had asked my father to “get some intel” on a country that would soon go terrifyingly silent.

He told me, from Air America days, he already knew how dangerous the Khmer Rouge were. He called them animals.