Cambodia

I spent a month in Cambodia in August of 2009. I'm pretty sure I was a PFC, second award, when I went. Before going to Cambodia I mostly knew it because of Ankor Wat, reading about the War in Vietnam, and the Dead Kennedys.

Getting there

Also, unlike the Philippines, we didn't make a camp; we stayed in a guest house. As best as I can remember we stayed in Takeo Province, most likely in a town called Doun Kaev. The guest house had three floors, but I stayed on the second floor, because in French fashion, the first floor is not called the first floor. Remnants of French Indochina. I am pretty sure we rented out the entire place for the month we stayed there. Across the street was a restaurant that someone in our chain of commander must have essentially contracted out to provide regular meals. I can't remember paying. They would bring mystery meat and never told is what things were. This was the first time I had seen Sriracha. I don't know it was the Sriracha brand or something similar, but the bottle was the same as most folks would know Sriracha.

I don't have a list of everyone who was there with me, but I remember Tabor didn't get his passport in time. At the sight I was at I remember Shaw, Corley, maybe Hawkins, Bailey, maybe Bleaker?, Whetzel. I can't remember if Whilden was at my site or the other. Another guy was at our site, but I don't think it was Cosen. I have a photo, which may or may not get put in here. I think I was roomed with Whetzel. I definitely was on duty with him when we left, which I'll get to later, but that's why I didn't go to Ankor Wat. Fuckin Sgt. whatever. There are photos out there of Hawkins doing tile work on a wall with a Cambodia guy. I don't really remember interacting with the Cambodia folks like we did in the Philippines. Most of them didn't speak English, or very little. I think that is a product of The Khmer Rouge and the Pol Pot times, then the isolation during the Vietnamese occupation.

We had a two beer limit each night. I remember one guy getting plastered anyway and not much was done about it. I remember being kind of pissed about that, wanting to drink more myself, but having not. This on guy Bradley had this weird thing where he would walk around when we were back at the guest house out in the street with his shirt pulled up to below his pecs, his stomach out. It was weird. I never knew why he did that. He eventually got told to stop doing that.

The beetles were huge. I believe they were rhino beetles. It's hard not to realize why they are called that. Their exoskeletons are pretty tough, but these dummies aren't good at flying and would fly up about 3 stories high, lost control, flip over and tumble back to the ground. Smack! I'm sure that exoskeleton helped, and probably wind resistance, but not all of them survived that fall. I don't know if the building encouraged them to do this, if they were trying to escape, if they would natually do this on their own near trees.. I don't know. I wrote I haiku about it in a Write in the Rain notebook. If I ever find it, and I will one day, it's around somewhere, I'll put it up here.

The trip from the guest house to the site was about an hour. It was a rough ride, even rougher if you sat at the very back of the truck. It was an old truck, a 2.5 ton(?). It looked like a truck from the Vietnam era, but probably was from the 90's. I don't remember who drove the thing. Possibly a Cambodian working with us. We would put a safety strap across the back tail gate to act as a catch if someone might fly out. The roads were rough, and I don't think they were paved. I think they were hard pack dirt, well maintained for dirt, but not paved like one might think. My best guess is we took Route 22 West to Route 3 North.

On the way I always knew when we were passing through a town because you could smell it. I'd see hanging shanks of some kind of ungulate (goat, cow, water buffalo?). At the time I thought that was a terrible idea, but I never did get sick. Who knows if that was the source of the food we ate. And when I say you could smell it, I mean it had the scent of rotting vegetables. I thought at the time it was. In hindsight, many years later, I realized it was probably Durian fruit. There is a reason it's not allowed on subways/public transit in some Asian countries and why you only ever see it frozen at places like H-Mart in the US.

From the back of the truck there wasn't much to see if we weren't going through a town. Cambodia is a pretty flat country. The only mountains are in the north. We were in more of less the center of the country. There were long wide stretches of fields or rice paddies with the idyllic tall palms trees. Occasionally you'd see a little hut by the road, rarely with more than a roof and floor, no walls, and usually a hammock strung up.

Our platoon was split into two, with one going to one site to work on a hospital or clinic, and the other half, which I was a part of going to a larger building, which used to be a hospital. We renovated it to be such. It wasn't a large building, not like a hospital we think of in most western countries. As far as I can tell, since I didn't write anything down at the time the place was Veal Ang Pepel or Popel Health Center. Unlike the Philippines we were mostly on our own. We really only saw the Gendarmeri at the end when they opened the place up and had a little ceremony.

What we did was a lot of painting (using chalk paint, something I wasn't familiar with), tile work, roofing, and concrete work. Bailey go a rash from the concrete dust getting on his shirt and mixing with his sweat. Was it a chemical burn? Maybe, lime can do that. Those bags were a surprise weight. I thought when I first saw 50 it meant 50 lbs like we have in the US. Nope, it was 50 kilos. I was basically carrying my own weight on my shoulder. They were handed down to us from a truck, not being dead lifted. The concrete mixer was ancient, and likely bespoke, custom built, improvised. It was diesel and had an actual hand crank. Shaw did the cranking most of the time.

The photos that do exist online were likely taken by Combat Camera, i.e., MOS 4612. One of the guys that came out to take photos came up on the roof with us. I can't recall if anyone took a photo of me, but I remember this dumbass not listening when we said 'walk on the nails'. The nail mean there is a joist or rafter underneath. He didn't and broke one of the roof tiles. These tiles were big, not like shingles. They were probably dimensioned out in metric, to probably something like 1x2 meters. Big thangs. I think they were some kind of plaster chalk mix, pressed together with some kind of fibers, and then coated on the top in red. We had to replace that tile which meant pulling a number of them off so we could replace the broken one. We weren't real happy with that.

Behind the hospital was where, allegedly, so we were told, after birth and needles and other bio-hazardous waste was 'disposed of'. I can just see folks dumping bio-waste out the back door, just dumping it on the ground. There were definitely needles back there. I did not touch any of those. AIDS is still a thing in Cambodia, or was when we were there. Thanks UN! AIDS didn't exist before the country opened up and UN AID workers, ironically, brought AIDS. Whoops.

Sgt. Gonzalez was with us there. He once said he liked it there, it reminded him of Mexico. Every day when we left the guest house we would bring with us a heavy steel lock box full of M16A4's. We called them toys as a code word. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out what was inside the heavy steel box a bunch of Marines put in their truck everyday. We didn't carry rifles because we were there to do war. We were there to help rebuild and create positive relationships with the people of Cambodia. But, we were taking any chances. We never needed them. Back at the guest house they stayed with two Marines on duty. Duty was 'a day to rest' which, sure I guess, but it was super boring and you couldn't just sleep. That'll come up again later.

Towards the end I remember go to a facility for kids with AIDS. Most of the kids there were pretty young, unsurprisingly. We played soccer with them. It rained hard. That's where my iPod died. There was a kid who used a shirt for pants, and wore no shirt. The guy that ran the place was an older British man, bald (pretty sure), portly. He had a sort of monk like nature to him, a medieval European monk, not Buddhist monk, air about him. He showed us this shrine, very much in the style of most of the Buddhist temples scattered across Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, and else where. It was tall, but fairly small on the inside. I don't remember if the floor was tiled or dirt. It had photos of many, if not all, of the kids who passed because of AIDS. The guy told us the 'orbs' you could see in the photos were their ghosts. I have a photo from Thailand later on, in front of a fountain, that shows the same "orbs". I am 99% sure it's just dust in the air, much as the 'orbs' in front of the fountain are water particles. But it was a nice shrine. On the way there there were the typical iconic walls that surround most structures/houses/facilities. They are topped with glass, broken bottles, to act as a deterrent to any one wanting to jump the wall.

I didn't stand duty until basically the very end of the trip. We finished early, which I vaguely remember. It's in one of the articles I found that was written by someone not affiliated with us, our unit, or the Marine Corps itself. Sgt. Bradley Carlton was in charge of the operation, though Lt. Christman was there, somewhere. I have no idea what she was up to the majority of that deployment. The one day I was assigned duty, well the day after, Sgt. Carlton didn't have someone else lined up, so I volunteered, not because I was trying to get out of work, but because it was taking him too long and I was trying to help so the rest of the platoon could get moving. He agreed, but then basically said it was because I was trying to get out of work. So I ended up going to Phnom Pehn with all the equipment, rifles, carrying an M9 Beretta in my pocket while riding in a truck in a makeshift convoy to the capital. Gunny Cumper met us somewhere along the way, or he was there the whole time. I remember the drive taking quite a while and we didn't get in to Phnom Pehn until late. It was dark, so probably after 9 pm. I recall a lot of green in the dark, then showing up in the city, stopping at some alley for some reason, then moving on to the airport. At some point in the day, we were stopped on the road, I have this hand gun in my pocket, and all I remember was a bit of anxiety, confusion.

Lcpl Whetzel and I spent the next 4 days in Phnom Pehn waiting to find out when the Air Force was going to take us and all our equipment back to Okinawa. We saw the city, went to bars, ate at a Russian place. Went to a mall, used an ATM, perused through out door markets, rode in tuktuks. Riding in a cab through the city which at the time had basically no traffic lights was kind of chaos. Random dudes would come and (try) to wash the windshield and then expect payment. I think we went to a bar that was either American themed or an ex-pat bar. Buy-me-drinky bars exist in Phnom Pehn. I bought some books on Buddhism. And eventually we got on a different C-130, the only 2 Marines on that flight, and went back to Okinawa. This plane had a door on its bathroom, or head, or whatever Airmen call it on planes.

When I got back Tabor and I went out to Gate Two street, and went to this bar where this Filipino girl he was seeing worked. She performed covers there. Lady Gaga Poker Face was a common one. I got really hammered that night, bought drinks for the whole bar at one point. I spent something like $300+ that night. I was quite hungover the next day. I didn't have PT, thank Gilgamesh since my platoon wasn't back yet. They were still in Ankor Wat. I had to go to some training or seminar kind of thing. I got accused of sleeping because I had my head down. I was very hungover. It wasn't a great day. It wouldn't be the last time I did something like that.