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Hero rats and the need for humility

26 0
11.07.2026

(This is the third of three columns covering my recent visit to Southeast Asia with 20-year-old granddaughter, Sarah.)

Cambodia is a country next door to Vietnam with 17 million people and a suffering past.

In the late ’80s, under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge committed mass murder against his citizens, including the well-to-do, journalists, and intellectuals. He said anyone who wore spectacles was suspect.

He led the dreaded political party whose name recalled the glories of the past. Khmer was an ancient civilization most prominent between the ninth and 15th centuries. The film “The Killing Fields” recalls Pol Pot’s era, when an estimated two million Cambodians were killed in civil conflict.

But before that time, the U.S. had carried out 60,000 bombing raids between 1965 and 1973, depositing a deadly legacy of small hidden bombs as part of its war on Vietnam — an action which seeded the country with small explosive devices, the results of........

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