Water Outranks the Khmer Rouge

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 308-310:

The sun is very hot, and water vapor rises from under the layer of dead leaves up into the sky, so that you can see the hazy waves. The sky is cloudy, and the air is still, and we each feel like suffocating. Now and then, someone gets dizzy and passes out, so everybody is pulling hair and pinching skin [to revive each other].

We wait expectantly for the people we secretly sent out looking for water, who don’t return until at least noon, and for the water truck whose shadow is nowhere to be seen. Oh, holy angels above, why such bad karma? If they want to kill us, why don’t they just kill us quickly? Why leave us to suffer such drawn-out agony? If they spare us in order to work, why don’t they provide adequate rice and water? As for food, when they starved us to the point of measuring and distributing dry rice with a spoon, we still worked hard, following the directions and the rules of the Revolution without daring to do anything that could be called a reaction against the Organization’s leadership.

Now we see clearly what is the thing which can make us forget about work and the Organization’s disciplinary line; what can make us forget death from failing to obey the Organization’s orders. We don’t want to die, but we are all dying, dying from despair of living.

If we endure working even another hour, we will pass out and fall over dead, one by one. If we stop working and rest, we can live for another three or four hours waiting for the water truck. If the water truck shows up within this time, we will live! But if they take us away to kill us while waiting for help, what of that? No, nobody can take us away to be killed now, as the unit leaders and soldiers are all as thirsty as we are; and even if they weren’t thirsty, the twenty or thirty of them don’t have the ability to kill the tens of thousands of us in the space of just two or three hours.

Right now, the unity of our unit is equal to when we were raising the dams at Trapeang Thmor. We are all united in sitting down and lying down and watching the road for the water truck. Ever since we started to live in this revolutionary society, many people have been taken away to be killed because of hunger, from daring to steal paddy rice, milled rice, corn, or tubers; but nobody has dared to put up any resistance. Now people do dare: they dare to go on strike and refuse to work, a strike without any preparation and no leader.

No, this strike actually does have clear leadership. The leader, who is as strong as life itself, is Thirst. Water has blocked the wheel of history from rolling forward for an hour now. Water is powerful! More powerful than human life! More powerful than the Revolution!