Ba Chuc, Vietnam (2007)
Ba Chuc, a Vietnamese community in the Mekong Delta, sits just across the border from Cambodia. On April 18, 1978, Khmer Rouge soldiers entered the village from Cambodia and massacred 3,157 men, women, and children — almost the entire population. Today the skulls of many of the victims are on display in an outdoor memorial.
Statistics, when referring to numbers of dead, fall flat in their attempts to convey the humanity of what has been lost. This is because emotions are connected to people, not numbers. Try, for example, to process this excerpt from Chris Hedges’ book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning:
Look just at the 1990s: 2 million dead in Afghanistan; 1.5 million dead in the Sudan; some 800,000 butchered in ninety days in Rwanda; a half-million dead in Angola; a quarter of a million dead in Bosnia; 200,000 dead in Guatemala; 150,000 dead in Liberia; a quarter of a million dead in Burundi; 75,000 dead in Algeria; and untold tens of thousands lost in the border conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea,….
Travel helps make real the abstract. In Ba Chuc, I spent a good amount of time before these skulls, imagining the life that had once animated the now dry and hollow bones. I heard the laughter, the conversations, the sneezes, the crying, and then the sudden ending of it all. The victims in the photo above were almost all females in their late teens — girls in the process of becoming women — and more than a few of them died only after being horrifically raped (an adjacent room offered the most nauseating pictures of sexual violence I had ever seen). And in standing on this ground and looking into these skulls, I felt neither the sterility of statistics nor a mere twinge of sadness; I felt a palpable, riveting absence.
The skulls of many of the victims of the Ba Chuc massacre are housed in an open-air memorial.
I traveled to Ba Chuc on a rented motorbike, and on the way stopped at a rustic cafe at the intersection of two small country roads, where I met this mother and daughter.
Some miles after leaving Ba Chuc, I came across the beautiful sight of three laughing children sharing a bicycle, going home from a field.
For more on the Ba Chuc massacre, The New York Times published a short piece called “MEANWHILE : When the Khmer Rouge came to kill in Vietnam” in 2004.
