Diary of a Doomed Land

Extract

The American Air Force had pulverized a Cambodian town by mistake and Communist terror squads had flipped grenades into a packed Phnom Penh movie theatre. Now the corridor floors were peopled by families riddled with shrapnel, deformed by bomb fragments, and covered with charred, peeling skin. Flies homed in through the wall cracks to settle on pools of urine and feces that lay unswept. A surgeon poked his finger around the gall bladder of a casualty while he chatted with me about the wounded from the warfronts around the capital, the chronic shortage of beds, and lack of plasma.

Down one of the corridors in a filthy room of graybare concrete a family squatted around their six-year old daughter. Her left collarbone jutted out from a strip of deep red flesh. The jagged ends were already darkened and decaying as the bone hung in space. A young man held her right shoulder and propped up her back as she sat on a rag on the floor. I didn't want to stir the air around the little girl. She was rigid with tension and pain.