Dith Pran: From the killing fields to freedom

On the morning of 12 April, 1975, the day the United States withdrew from Cambodia and evacuated its embassy in the enveloping chaos of a civil war gone horribly wrong, the New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg made a fateful decision. He wanted to stay behind.

For three years, as the paper's south-east Asia correspondent, Schanberg had become increasingly drawn to the tragedy of a country that had endured a covert US bombing campaign, a succession of puppet governments inspiring popular disgust and, now, the threat of an impending takeover by the fanatical and murderous Khmer Rouge.

But Schanberg had also developed a more personal passion, and that was the strong bond tying him to his invaluable interpreter and local assistant, Dith Pran. He had no intention of doing anything in Cambodia without Dith's support and help.

So when the word came that US citizens and their Cambodian friends and dependents had just a few hours to report to the embassy, hop on a helicopter and flee to the safety of the USS Okinawa battleship docked in the Gulf of Siam, the first thing Schanberg did was to send a messenger to summon Dith.

They both had a choice, he explained. To leave now, while their safety could still be guaranteed, or to cut their ties with American officialdom and take their chances. "Though we have little time," Schanberg later wrote, "his face is calm. He knows I want to stay and he says he doesn't see any immediate risk and therefore no reason we should leave now. We reinforce each other's compulsions and desires. He is as obsessed as I am with seeing the story to the end."

They both calculated, wrongly, that once the Khmer Rouge overran Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, and took over the government, they would temper their ferocious rampage and make some effort to unify the country under their leadership. Journalistic passion, or friendship, or an exaggerated sense of professional loyalty – it's hard, even after the passage of more than three decades, to be sure which – blinded them to the dangers.

And it came very close to killing them both.

Five days later, the Khmer Rouge entered the city and began the brutal campaign of revenge and ideological frenzy that would later grow into one of the worst instances of mass murder in modern history, the killing, by starvation or assassination, of almost half of Cambodia's seven million strong population.

On the very morning of the Khmer Rouge's arrival, Schanberg, Dith, their driver and two other Western journalists – Jon Swain of The Sunday Times and a freelance photographer called Al Rockoff – were picked up by troops patrolling the streets in an armoured car. Quickly, they became convinced that they were about to be executed. All but Dith were thrown into the armoured car; the translator stayed outside arguing, pleading and entreating with the soldiers.

At first, Schanberg thought Dith was trying to avoid being thrown into the car and save his own life. But, in fact, quite the opposite was happening. Dith was making the case that he should be allowed to accompany his Western friends, whatever fate awaited them, calculating that, without him, their death was certain. He was, Schanberg said, "offering, in effect, to forfeit his own life on the chance that he might save ours".

And that is exactly how things played out. For 40 minutes, on a gut-wrenching drive to a remote riverside where the journalists almost certainly faced summary execution, and then for another hour after the vehicle had stopped, Dith talked and argued and cajoled and reasoned with the men until, at last, they put down their rifles and offered their prisoners something to drink.

Dith later explained to Schanberg: "Even if I get killed, I have to first try to say something to them. Because you and I are together. I was very scared, yes, because in the beginning I thought they were going to kill us, but my heart said I had to try this. I understand this and know your heart well. You would do the same thing for me."

Behind the success of almost every foreign correspondent who ventures into hazardous territory in lands where the customs and the language are unfamiliar lies the efforts of a local assistant, or "fixer", like Dith. Fixers don't just act as interpreters for interviews, or perform secretarial tasks to set up appointments. They are the correspondent's window into a culture, their instant expert telling them where the boundaries of reasonable risk lie, their number one inside source who can provide access to key officials or rebel leaders.

Mostly, they remain unsung – paid well by local standards while the news story is hot, then left to return to their normal life, or what is left of it, once the conflict subsides and the attention of the world's media moves on.

Dith Pran, though, was a little different – not only because of the extraordinary personal risks he took and the heartbreaking personal catastrophe that ensued but also because of the dogged loyalty and friendship of Schanberg, who told his story of horror and survival in an absolutely gripping New York Times magazine piece, published after he finally escaped from Cambodia in 1980. That piece became the basis of the hit movie The Killing Fields, directed by Roland Joffe and starring another Khmer Rouge survivor, Haing S. Ngor, as Dith.

Now the story is being widely retold in the wake of Dith's death, at the age of 65. He succumbed over the weekend to pancreatic cancer at his adoptive home in New Jersey, 29 years after he arrived in the United States emaciated from hunger, his teeth rotting but his spirit, miraculously still intact. His is the ultimate survivor's story, as powerful as anyone's who has faced the horrors of genocide and come out alive.

As a Cambodian, Dith paid a far higher price for his journalistic courage than his Western friends. Shortly after their first narrow brush with death in Phnom Penh, they all rushed to one remotely safe place left in town, the French embassy.

The embassy compound was hardly secure – the Khmer Rouge entered at will to pick up high-ranking former government officials, whom they dragged away and killed – and it quickly became apparent that Cambodians seeking refuge there, like Dith, were in imminent danger of being abandoned.

Jon Swain had a second passport which they tried to pass off as Dith's but the French officials said the forgery was too blatant and could endanger the lives of everyone at the embassy if the Khmer Rouge discovered it.

After three days, Dith decided he would rather leave the embassy immediately and head for his home town of Siem Reap, near the famous Angkor Wat temples, rather than wait until all the foreigners had left.

And so, on 20 April, he departed in a rickety Toyota wagon, carrying $2,600 in potential bribe money as well as food and cigarettes given to him by the Western journalists. Schanberg, Swain and the others were trucked out of the country by the end of the month but Dith endured a very different fate.

He quickly understood that, as an educated man who had worked with Westerners, he was in mortal danger from the Khmer Rouge's campaign of death against the middle classes. So he threw away his Western-style clothes, had his hair cut and passed himself off as a humble taxi driver in a dirty shirt, shorts, sandals and a traditional working-class neckerchief.

He stopped 20 miles short of his hometown, in the village of Dam Dek, where he stood less chance of being recognised. The civil war wrecked the harvest that first year, leading to mass starvation. Dith worked slave-labour hours in the fields but saw his rice ration reduced to no more than a single spoonful a day.

On one occasion, he was so hungry he stole into a rice paddy at night and stuffed his pockets with what kernels he could find. He was caught, beaten with machetes and paraded before the entire local community for a ritual humiliation. He was lucky not to be killed outright.

In 1977, he moved four miles north to another village, Bat Dangkor, where the local commune chief liked him enough to make him his personal factotum and thus offer him a modicum of protection. He had access to the chief's radio, and learned from "Voice of America" broadcasts that the Vietnamese military was mobilising against the Khmer Rouge.

Once he heard that the Vietnamese had taken over Siem Reap, he headed there to look for his family. His father had died of starvation and four of his five siblings had been killed by the Khmer Rouge. In a nearby forest, he saw the remains of as many as 5,000 of his former neighbours scattered among the trees and clogging up water wells. Such were the notorious killing fields. "The grass grew taller and greener where the bodies were buried," Dith later said.

The Thai border was no more than 35 miles away but he did not dare head there for fear of being sent back by the Thai authorities. Instead, he became mayor of Siem Reap, serving at the Vietnamese's pleasure until, in early 1979, they discovered his connection to the New York Times and stripped him of his post.

In July 1979, he decided to head for the border, a perilous journey that turned to horror when the two men walking directly in front of him were blown up by a landmine. Dith was hit by shrapnel in his left leg, but it was a flesh wound and he managed to continue.

At the Thai border, he waited 17 days for the right opportunity to cross, eventually donning an anti-Khmer Rouge resistance uniform and satisfying the Thai authorities he was important enough to proceed to a refugee camp 15 miles away. There, he found an American relief worker and got word out to Schanberg that he had escaped.

The two were reunited a few days later, and quickly headed to the United States, where Dith's wife and four children had endured four-and-a-half years of uncertainty and fear while building up a new life in San Francisco.

With the New York Times' help, Dith soon invented a new life for himself, as a news photographer and also a roving ambassador, educating audiences about the Khmer Rouge genocide and its implications for the rest of the world. "I am a one-person crusade," he liked to say.

He prospered in his American life, and is survived by his four children, six grandchildren and two step-grandchildren. Still, his ordeal stayed with him to the end, like an open wound. "There is no doctor who can heal me," he once said. "But I know a man like Pol Pot, he is even sicker than I am ...

"We both have the horror in our heads. In Cambodia, the killer and the victim have the same disease."