| My Travels with Aki Ra Siem Reap, Cambodia, November 2006 • It started out as a 3 hour trip to see how Aki Ra did his work. We were supposed to drive into the jungle in the morning work in the afternoon, and come back the next morning. It didn’t quite evolve as I had expected. I wasn’t too concerned until someone passed an AK47 over my shoulder and Aki Ra inserted a 30 round banana clip and chambered a live round. But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. I’d been helping Aki Ra in his work for about 3 years, but had never had the chance to spend some time with him in the field. When my wife and I got to Siem Reap we were met by some friends who work with Aki Ra. They took us by tuk- tuk, a motorized rickshaw, to Aki Ra’s Landmine Museum. Oh yes, Aki Ra’s chosen trade is de-mining. His objective is to rid Cambodia of the estimated 5,000,000 landmines that maim and kill 3 people every day. Along the way to meeting that objective he’s “adopted” some 20 maimed and orphaned children. He and his wife raise them with their own 2 kids, send them to school, clothe and feed them, and offer them a future they would never have under normal circumstances. The organization I chair, the Landmine Relief Fund, purchased a used Mitsubishi Montero 4-wheel drive truck for Aki Ra in the fall of 2006, and I was there to see how it was working out for everyone. In the past, when Aki Ra was contacted about the discovery of a new minefield, usually after someone had stepped on one, he had to take a taxi to do his work. Our friends, Khan and Roy Warren Clark, a Canadian, run the Aki Ra Mine Action Center in Siem Reap. Their organization also supports Aki Ra’s work. They met us at our hotel and we headed off to the Landmine Museum, a simple compound, at the end of a dirt road, behind a stick fence. As soon as we walked in, Aki Ra saw me, and came over with a smile to thank us for his new truck. We spent a few minutes talking and then he looked at me and said “I’m going into the jungle to clear some mines tomorrow. Why don’t you come with me?” Hardly the welcome I expected, but I was instantly ready to go with him. My wife, Jill, looked at me as though I had lost my mind. Her eyes welled up and she simply stared quietly at me. Roy, sensing Jill’s concern, suggested that Khan go with me, as he’d lived through the 3 years, eight months and 20 days of the Khmer Rouge, and the 20 year civil war that followed. He’d also been through a lot of mine fields and would make sure I didn’t do something stupid. We’d leave the following morning, Sunday, and return to Siem Reap Monday afternoon. Sounded easy enough. Right. That afternoon we went to the local market and I bought a mosquito net and hammock since we’d be spending the night “in the field”. Then we headed off to the local “7-11” for groceries: peanut butter, jelly, bread and water. I had a rucksack. I hadn’t traveled like this since I was in the army, and that was longer ago than I care to discuss. The next morning Khan and I got to the Museum about 8:30, ready to head north. I’d heard about “Khmer time”. Now I was about to experience it first hand. Sometime later, after Aki Ra had gone into town to pick up some more observers, gassed up the truck and gone shopping, we left for the northern provinces to look for landmines, unexploded ordinance, and any booby traps that had been left behind by the Khmer Rouge, the Royal Cambodian Army, and the many countries who’d fought their proxy wars in someone else’s backyard. We were a pretty diverse group crammed into the “tank” as Hourt, Aki Ra’s wife, called the truck. There were 6 of us on the trip: myself, Aki Ra and Khan, a Cambodian Army captain who drove the tank like he was qualifying for the X- Games, and two Australian army vets who’d both served two tours in Vietnam, fighting along side American Special Forces troops in the 1960s. Jim, recently widowed and with a couple of grandkids was traveling with his friend Dave, a member of the Hell’s Angels who’d raised more than $11,000 to buy mine detectors that Aki Ra freely passed out to local villages. Both Jim and Dave were doing all they could to help Aki Ra as they believe that Cambodians deserved none of the horrors that were visited upon them by all sides during the Vietnam conflicts. So, how should I describe the roads in Cambodia? Have you ever ridden a roller coaster for an entire day? Maybe you’ve driven through a pothole or two after the frost heaves have visited your town? Put the two together and you might get an idea how the roads are in Cambodia once you leave the tourist areas. While 120km (75 miles) didn’t sound like a long distance to travel, it took us 6 hours. That doesn’t count the hour we spent waiting for a bent rim to be pounded out when we hit a gully that crossed the “highway” about two hours out of Siem Reap. It was about 2 hours north of Siem Reap when the AK47 was passed to the front of the truck and Aki Ra "locked and loaded" a 30 round clip. My eyes got real big and I thought "maybe this is going to be more interesting than I thought." Not too much later, the Captain pulled to the side of the road and Aki Ra took the AK and calmly walked into a nearby field. He was hunting. That's how many in Cambodia feed themselves and their families, from the bounty of the forest. We were headed for a village about 32km north of Anlong Veng. Anlong Veng is the village where Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge spent his last days fighting a retreating battle with the forces of the Royal Cambodian Army. The war ended in 1998, when Pol Pot died, either of natural causes (he’d been sick for years), or poison, administered by someone close to him. Anlong Veng is still very sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge. Most everyone there served with them in some form or anther. But then as a friend told me once when I asked him “who were the Khmer Rouge” he said “We were all Khmer Rouge. If we weren’t, they killed us.” Homes in rural Cambodia have no running water or electricity. Water is carried to each house in clay jugs or plastic containers. It comes from wherever it can be had: streams, old wells, and occasionally piped water shared by the whole village from a single spigot. The little electricity available is supplied by 1 neon light that’s run for a few hours a day from a car battery. We left Anlong Veng in the late afternoon and headed north on another indescribably bad road. It soon turned dark and we continued on until we arrived at a small village Aki Ra knew well. We stopped at the chiefs house, an ex Khmer rouge officer, and Aki Ra asked him if we could spend the night. Most of Kampuchea (Cambodia) is Buddhist, and the Buddhist tradition welcomes strangers. There is always room at the inn. The chief gave us his home for the night, a 20 foot by 20 foot tin covered hut, open on 3 sides and raised 5 feet off the ground on stilts. 2 boards were our ramp into the inn. We dined with the family: rice, meat, and bottled water. The food we brought was shared by all. About 9:30 we bedded down on the floor, covered ourselves in our mosquito nets and fell fast asleep. I opted not to use my hammock. If I had fallen out it would have been a 6-7 foot drop to the ground below, as the hammocks were hung on the lodge poles at the edge of the hut. It must have been about 11:30 when I heard the gunfire coming from the nearby jungle. I’d heard AK47s before and recognized the distinctive clack of the receiver. I looked around and no one seemed concerned, so I lay back down and cautiously went back to sleep. Sometime after midnight I was awakened by a flurry of activity as a group of hunters walked out of the jungle with the nights catch: a “polecat” that looked a lot like a raccoon, a couple of pheasants and a “mouse deer” that was about a foot tall. We all admired the nights catch and soon drifted back to our nets and slept until dawn when the polecat graced our breakfast, served over a bed of rice. We headed into the jungle later that morning to look for a mine field one of the villagers remembered laying 10 years earlier. I was directed by Khan to stay on the path, such as it was, since the whole area was probably mined. Mines aren’t laid as many think, in precise places with maps and posted signs. They are often dropped from planes, helicopters, or fired from artillery. They stay wherever they land and destroy who or whatever steps on them. When planted by hand, as were the ones we sought out that morning, they are scattered willy nilly wherever the miner thinks they will cause the most damage. No maps, no warnings. Mines aren’t designed to kill. They’re designed to wound, maim and most of all terrorize those who find them. If you kill a soldier, you take out one person. If you wound a soldier, it takes out three; the one who is wounded and two to carry him out. They are weapons of terror. They not only blow off the foot or leg of the poor soul who steps on it, they terrify everyone else; no one wants to find the next one. It’s not like in the movies; you don’t step on a mine and then hear a “click”, detonating it when you lift up your leg. When you step on a mine it trips the detonator, fires the explosive, and you are a cripple for life…if you don’t bleed out and die first. All these thoughts were running through my mind as the 6 of us and 4 others from the village walked an hour into the jungle looking for the elusive minefield. When we reached the spot where our new friend thought he’d laid his little surprises we broke out the metal detectors, the machetes to clear the ground, and went to work looking for landmines. Not the way I usually spent my mornings. An hour later we hadn’t found any mines, but we’d found a lot of 7.62mm rifle rounds and empty shells. This had indeed been a battle ground. Suddenly the mine detector gave out with a loud squeal. The man with the detector bent down and picked up a 60mm motor round, still with its rope handle attached. Whoever had been carrying this either dropped it, or was dropped himself in a firefight. He handed me the round and I asked Jim if it was still live. He gave me a dead cold look and said “don’t drop it”. Aki Ra, with no concern at all, took the mortar round, taped a detonator to its head, added a fuse and put it in a hole one of the villagers dug. A mortar round has a blast radius of 20-25 meters. That means it blows up real big. It has a kill radius of 50 meters. We decided 100 meter was a good distance from which to watch the explosion. We waited a minute or so for the fuse to burn down and then there a little bitty “pop” from the hole in the ground. The detonator wasn’t strong enough to blow up the round. So Aki Ra decided to burn it. We all walked back to the hole in the ground. That’s when Khan grabbed my shirt and said “follow me”, and he walked away in the opposite direction. Hearing this coming from someone who’d been there before got my feet moving in his direction real quick. We stopped behind a big tree and Khan told me that sometimes the explosion was delayed a minute or two. If that was the case here he said there would be “a lot of dead bodies around. I’ve seen that before but I don’t think you want to be there.” He didn’t have to tell me twice. We waited behind the tree for Aki Ra to build his fire. Before building the fire Aki Ra loaded up all the equipment and prepared to move out back to our truck, the tank. Once the fire was lit we started our hour trek back to the road. About 15 minutes later there was a huge explosion behind us as the flames set off the powder charge in the mortar round. Aki Ra had decided to come back at a later date to find this elusive minefield in the jungle. There were a lot of other mines he needed to get to today. I was soon to see them for myself, 2 feet in front of me. We packed the truck and headed north. By now it was well after noon, and I had a plane to catch the following day. And that was at least 8 hours south of where we were headed. Aki Ra just smiled and said “I have to go to one more village. 30 minutes and then we head back to Siem Reap.” 30 minutes. In Khmer time you multiply by 10. We headed north on the “highway” for another hour and then turned off on a path leading deep into the jungle. There was a man on a scooter waiting to lead us to our next destination. We wound our way through a dense tropical forest for an hour. We crossed bridges out of some bad “B” movie, forded streams, eased our way over huge tree roots and eventually found ourselves entering a village of some 100 families. The truck stopped about a mile outside the village center. “The road is mined from here on in and the truck is too wide for the road. And be careful when you step out. Don’t step off the cleared path. 18 people got blown up here recently from an anti tank mine.” Now you only had to tell me something like that once. I can follow those directions quite well. I very carefully extricated myself from the truck and walked right behind Aki Ra to a bunch of “teepeed” sticks just inches off the side of the road, lined up directly with the tires of our truck. Inside the base of each teepee, covered by a thin dusting of dirt, I could see the green color of anti personnel mines. I need to interject here that I had been told that there were only 2 safe places to be when Aki Ra was de-mining: 50 meters away and 5 centimeters from his butt. Looking back at the minefield in which we were standing, I got as close to Aki Ra as discretion allowed. Aki Ra went right to work. He cleared the dirt from the mines, dug them out with a multi purpose tool he carried on his belt, unscrewed the base and dropped the detonator, the size of a pea, in his palm. All done. The mine was inactive. It had taken all of 2 minutes. Then Jim decided he wanted to give it a try. I backed up. After Jim, who'd laid mines himself, had disarmed his mine Aki Ra cleared the others and we headed into the village, a mile or so away. Aki Ra supported the school in the village. Actually, he built it and paid the teacher himself. The government doesn’t help those who pay little in tax. About half way to the village we came to a 2 foot deep stream we had to ford. One of the villagers said “go this way, you can miss the water”. About 20 feet into the jungle we asked if the area had been de-mined and he just looked at us and shrugged. We carefully turned around, walked back to the road and waded through the water. It was actually quite nice since the temperature was over 90 and the humidity the same. And considering the alternative. A scooter magically appeared on the other side of the stream and carried each of us into the village where Aki Ra was fast asleep in a hammock, waiting for the villagers to come here him talk. I think the man only does 3 things: eat, sleep and de-mine. Within about 30 minutes the villagers had surrounded the hut we were in, and were quietly watching Aki Ra sleep. He’d open an eye and doze back off, waiting for as many villagers as possible to come to his meeting. He finally stood up and started to tell the people how to identify mines and warning them not to try and disarm any mines unless they had been trained by him. He also told them to wear masks when de-mining to avoid inhaling the TNT dust and contracting nitrate poisoning, from which he has suffered for over a year. Aki Ra was right; the meeting took about 30 minutes. Khmer time. We’d brought boxes of school supplies, which the 18 year old school teacher gratefully accepted. We’d also brought clothes and medicine the villagers badly needed. This village had been a Khmer Rouge camp for years and received virtually no support from the government. The villagers had found a cache of unexploded artillery shells and had placed them in an old bomb crater. This is why Aki Ra had insisted we visit this village today. While the rest of us, villagers included, started our hike a mile back to the truck, Aki Ra set out to destroy this deadly pile of explosives. Back at the truck we waited for the explosion. When the ordinance went off, you could clearly hear the explosion. Aki Ra soon showed up on the back of a scooter and we headed back to Siem Reap to a surprise none of us wanted or expected. The trip back was amazing. As we passed through village after village in the dead of night Aki Ra would roll down his window and call out a greeting. Villagers and children would come out of dark homes to greet this man whose only objective is “to make my country safe for my people”. He paid a teacher in a village where he built the school with the help of some Japanese supporters. We gave a little kid a ride home. Sitting in Aki Ra’s lap he giggled the whole way. We passed through 2 roadblocks, one where the villagers were extorting tolls from travelers, I think, and another where the army had set up a roadblock to “check for smugglers”. Our driver, the army captain, who’d removed his rank from his uniform when we left Siem Reap, draped his field jacket, with rank now showing, over the driver’s seat. As we reached each roadblock and he turned on the dome light, the barriers rolled back without question and we continued on our trip home. About halfway back to Siem Reap, about 7PM, we got our surprise. I got a phone call from Roy on my mobile phone. (Yes, they have very good cell service in Cambodia.) It seems the police had raided the Landmine Museum. Hourt and the kids were okay, but concerned. The government was having a major conference in Siem Reap and the Prime Ministers of Cambodia and Korea were due to visit. The government doesn’t like Aki Ra’s museum on landmines. It can scare the tourists. And tourism is the largest industry in Cambodia and is growing exponentially every year. Khan explained it all to Aki Ra and said it would all calm down after the officials left and that he should keep a low profile for a few days. Aki Ra was very quiet the rest of the way home. We got back to Siem Reap about 11PM. We dropped Aki Ra off at the Captain’s house as he didn’t want to go back to the museum without knowing who or what was waiting for him. I got back to my hotel and a relieved wife about midnight. I threw my clothes in the trash, took a long shower, and slept until 9AM. The next day we had lunch with Roy, Khan and Chat, the young boy from the Museum we are sponsoring for college. It was a wonderful lunch and we all had a great time. It seems that after dropping off Jim, Dave, Khan and me, the Captain had retrieved Aki Ra from his home and they’d headed right back into the jungle. Soldiers do 1 of 2 things. They either attack, which was not a good idea for Aki Ra to pursue, or they retreat and evaluate the situation, which was the option he chose. When the police had raided and closed the Museum to tourists Roy had gone to see a local official who’d counseled Aki Ra to keep a low profile and let the whole matter blow itself over. The kids were scared but Roy assured them all would be well. They would continue to live with Aki Ra and Hourt, be fed and schooled, and have a future they could look forward to with hope, not dread. We headed back to California later that day and within a few days I found myself in Las Vegas on a business trip. Talk about “culture shock”! I’m planning to go back to Siem Reap in the spring when I can spend a couple of weeks with Aki Ra, Roy, and Khan and find out more about this amazing man and how he is changing his world for the better. |
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