Boston.Com
By H.D.S. Greenway
April 1, 2008
THE WORLD got to know of Dith Pran, who died of cancer Sunday, through the power of movies, specifically "The Killing Fields," in which he was played by Haing Ngor, who won an Oscar for his performance.
I first got to know Pran - in Cambodia the first name often comes last - when he was a receptionist behind the desk of a hotel just outside the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat. That was more than 40 years ago when Cambodia was at peace while the war raged throughout the rest of what was once French Indochina.
If you flew in from Vietnam you could always tell you had crossed over the Cambodian frontier when you saw a train moving on the ground. Trains didn't run very much in Vietnam in those days. But Cambodia was an oasis of calm. And Angkor Wat was something that war reporters longed to see, especially since there was no one shooting at you. Pran arranged evening elephant-back rides to a high hill overlooking the Tonle Sap, Cambodia's great inland sea.
But the ides of March 1970, saw a coup that deposed Cambodia's eccentric ruler, Norodom Sihanouk. The war he had so assiduously maneuvered to avoid overwhelmed Cambodia with a fierceness that would eventually overshadow Vietnam in cruelty and access.
When the tourist business abruptly shut down - the Khmer Rouge ultimately burned Pran's hotel to the ground - Pran, along with many of his colleagues, moved to the capital, Phnom Penh.
There they found another, less wealthy and infinitely more dangerous group of clients, the foreign press, who desperately needed their services to get around in a country they knew little about.
Pran seemed to me to be the best of them. We worked together a couple of times, but when I tried to hire him permanently for The Washington Post, for which I was working, I got a polite no. He was signing up with Sydney Schanberg of The New York Times, and there began the extraordinary friendship that "The Killing Fields" portrayed.
I have often thought of those gallant guides and interpreters as similar to big-game hunters who would bring their exotic customers from overseas into close proximity to the dangerous beasts of war so that they could shoot their pictures and get their stories. If needs be they would risk their own lives to get their clients out of trouble.
It was these guides who taught us how to survive. If, for example, you came to a village and no children surrounded your car, you got out quick. For if the normally curious children were kept out of sight, then there was trouble in the neighborhood of which the adults might be too afraid to speak.
When the end came, and the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, Pran found his clients in more trouble than he could imagine. The fanatic Khmer Rouge were about to shoot Sydney, and his British colleague, Jon Swain, out of hand. Pran saved their lives by softly and persistently talking to their captors, who eventually let them go.
It was their white skins that immediately made Schanberg and Swain suspect, but later on it was their white skins and foreign passports that saved them in their refuge inside the French embassy. Pran's Cambodian skin almost cost him his life. Schanberg was unable to save Pran when the Khmer Rouge said all Cambodians had to leave the safety of the French Embassy compound, and so he slipped away, pretending to be an illiterate in a new genocidal society in which even to be able to read or write, or be caught with eyeglasses, was a death sentence.
The New York Times editor, Bill Keller, got it right when he spoke of a "special category of journalistic heroism - the local partner, the stringer, the interpreter, the driver, the fixer who knows the ropes," and who makes the work of "foreign reporters in frightening places" possible.
This is especially true today in Iraq where some 150 Iraqis have died trying to get the news or help foreign reporters in very frightening places. They seldom get the credit they deserve, but the news would not come to you without them.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
By H.D.S. Greenway
April 1, 2008
THE WORLD got to know of Dith Pran, who died of cancer Sunday, through the power of movies, specifically "The Killing Fields," in which he was played by Haing Ngor, who won an Oscar for his performance.
I first got to know Pran - in Cambodia the first name often comes last - when he was a receptionist behind the desk of a hotel just outside the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat. That was more than 40 years ago when Cambodia was at peace while the war raged throughout the rest of what was once French Indochina.
If you flew in from Vietnam you could always tell you had crossed over the Cambodian frontier when you saw a train moving on the ground. Trains didn't run very much in Vietnam in those days. But Cambodia was an oasis of calm. And Angkor Wat was something that war reporters longed to see, especially since there was no one shooting at you. Pran arranged evening elephant-back rides to a high hill overlooking the Tonle Sap, Cambodia's great inland sea.
But the ides of March 1970, saw a coup that deposed Cambodia's eccentric ruler, Norodom Sihanouk. The war he had so assiduously maneuvered to avoid overwhelmed Cambodia with a fierceness that would eventually overshadow Vietnam in cruelty and access.
When the tourist business abruptly shut down - the Khmer Rouge ultimately burned Pran's hotel to the ground - Pran, along with many of his colleagues, moved to the capital, Phnom Penh.
There they found another, less wealthy and infinitely more dangerous group of clients, the foreign press, who desperately needed their services to get around in a country they knew little about.
Pran seemed to me to be the best of them. We worked together a couple of times, but when I tried to hire him permanently for The Washington Post, for which I was working, I got a polite no. He was signing up with Sydney Schanberg of The New York Times, and there began the extraordinary friendship that "The Killing Fields" portrayed.
I have often thought of those gallant guides and interpreters as similar to big-game hunters who would bring their exotic customers from overseas into close proximity to the dangerous beasts of war so that they could shoot their pictures and get their stories. If needs be they would risk their own lives to get their clients out of trouble.
It was these guides who taught us how to survive. If, for example, you came to a village and no children surrounded your car, you got out quick. For if the normally curious children were kept out of sight, then there was trouble in the neighborhood of which the adults might be too afraid to speak.
When the end came, and the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, Pran found his clients in more trouble than he could imagine. The fanatic Khmer Rouge were about to shoot Sydney, and his British colleague, Jon Swain, out of hand. Pran saved their lives by softly and persistently talking to their captors, who eventually let them go.
It was their white skins that immediately made Schanberg and Swain suspect, but later on it was their white skins and foreign passports that saved them in their refuge inside the French embassy. Pran's Cambodian skin almost cost him his life. Schanberg was unable to save Pran when the Khmer Rouge said all Cambodians had to leave the safety of the French Embassy compound, and so he slipped away, pretending to be an illiterate in a new genocidal society in which even to be able to read or write, or be caught with eyeglasses, was a death sentence.
The New York Times editor, Bill Keller, got it right when he spoke of a "special category of journalistic heroism - the local partner, the stringer, the interpreter, the driver, the fixer who knows the ropes," and who makes the work of "foreign reporters in frightening places" possible.
This is especially true today in Iraq where some 150 Iraqis have died trying to get the news or help foreign reporters in very frightening places. They seldom get the credit they deserve, but the news would not come to you without them.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
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