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Beyond the Killing Fields: War Writings

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Few journalists have seen as much war as Sydney Schanberg and this overdue collection of his war dispatches is a sobering look at some of the worst conflicts of the 20th century. Schanberg is best known to us as the journalist depicted in The Killing Fields, the classic Roland Joffe film. He emerges here against a broader backdrop of modern conflict, pondering in straightforward prose, the madness of war and the extremes that it brings out in people.

The first section of the book takes us to Cambodia, in the weeks preceding and following the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge. Here Schanberg captures the panic and misery of a besieged city, along with the contributing madness of US bombing and Khmer Rouge shelling. His prose helps us to understand the profound weariness that preceded Cambodia's dark age. Also depicted, of course, is his own near-escape from the Khmer Rouge, the terror of Cambodians, and the trauma of his evacuation from the country.

The second section contains the famous "The Death and Life of Dith Pran" - the basis for The Killing Fields. This is an amazing piece of journalism - as evocative in its own way as the film.

I was pleasantly surprised by the third section, which takes Americans to a conflict they know less about: Pakistan's savage suppression of East Pakistan, followed by the liberation of that territory by the Indian Army. Schanberg reported from East Pakistan in 1971, before he went to Southeast Asia, and one can read this section as informing his later approach to Cambodia. Given the tumult and terror that we associate with Pakistan nowadays, this section has a newfound importance, and it was wise of the editor to include it.

The fourth section is collected from Schanberg's tenure in South Vietnam, where he reported on the Easter Offensive. Much material here depicts the near-collapse of ARVN during the spring of 1972, but the best part of this, by far, is a frank discussion of relations between the press corps and the military, and a meditation on the responsibilities of the press during war.

The fifth, sixth, and seventh sections are the shortest in the book. Section Five takes us back to Cambodia during the 1990s and proves a troubling postscript to his earlier discussion of the Khmer Rouge years - Cambodia, then and now, remains mired in repression, and justice has been slow in coming for the victims of the Khmer Rouge. Section Six offers a provocative look at the likely fate of US POWs in Southeast Asia; Schanberg charges the Nixon administration with knowingly abandoning our fighting men in Vietnam and elsewhere. The final section offers more contemporaneous musings, including a touching piece on what motivates a war correspondent.

All told, this is a singular collection, with much to offer to anyone either interested in the Vietnam War, journalism, or war in general. Schanberg writes with an enviable directness and simplicity and lets his stories speak for him - as a correspondent, he showed little interest in writing editorials. Emerging here are frank, often heartrending portraits of war - ones we would do well to consult when we next consider sending in the troops.

This is an accurate account story of the war during the Vietnam War that spilled over to Cambodia and Laos. Everybody should read this book if you are interested in it's history and learning about war reporting through journalist experience in the front line.

As the only American journalist to remain behind in Phnom Penh after the city fell to the Khmer Rouge, this is what the author wrote for the The New York Times about the departure of the Americans and the coming regime change: "it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." The Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975 and killed approximately two million people. A dispatch he wrote on April 13, 1975, written from Phnom Penh, ran with the headline "Indochina without Americans: for most, a better life."(!!!)

Schanberg then went on to reject claims that the communist takeover of Cambodia could lead to state-sponsored genocide: "Wars nourish brutality and sadism, and sometimes certain people are executed by the victors but it would be tendentious to forecast such abnormal behavior as a national policy under a Communist government once the war is over."

NY Times Walter Duranty would have been proud of his colleague Schanberg's work! Like Duranty, Sydney Schanberg like the communists and went on to ignore or excuse their enormous crimes.

My advice to Sydney Schanberg is to apologize for his reporting on Cambodia and give back his 1976 Pulitzer Prize for International he won for his Cambodia coverage.