Today I stood with my family in a school turned into a prison in Phnom Penh, where thousands of people from 1975-1979 were photographed, measured, weighed, imprisoned, tortured, and then killed. Seven of them survived. And I stood next to my 11 year old son, by a tree against which Khmer Rouge soldiers swung the heads of babies, so that they would not grow up to take revenge against their parents' murderers. Somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 million dead, in 4 years.
Maybe a bad parenting moment. But how do you hide from this? We gawked our way through the Vietnam War museum in Saigon too, displays of Agent Orange birth defects and photographs that haunted my own childhood. We stood by a B-52 bomb crater that helped mostly destroy a 1000 year old Hindu temple site where the US Army mistakenly believed the NVA were hiding. How can you explain this? Why should you try? I don't kmow. I hope I didn't mess this one up...
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