Growing up in Olympic in the early 1970s

Those shots over Psah Olympic brought back so many memories. My house is on the bottom left corner, a 3-storied block my dad built in 1965.  At the time much of the area behind the apartment blocks was sparsely built on; there were knee-deep ponds here and there, criss-crossed by muddy dirt roads, and lined with houses on stilts.  In those days the roads you could drive a car on were the one that linked Wat Moha Montrey with the Chinese Embassy, and the one that runs from the Psah to the Tuol Svay Prey school.  The latter flooded regularly too anyway.  I used to fish for Trey Kranh behind my house (Tip: when fishing in Cambodian lakes use pieces of prahok for bait). The area behind Wat Moha Montrey crossed by that black sewer was a large swathe of grassy land where kids used to fly kites early in the year.  Street lighting was unknown and it was pitch-black everywhere at night except over the roads immediately around the Psah and along Sihanouk Boulevard. Under the street lights, we kids liked to fool flying bats by throwing them stones which they mistake for prey. Blind as a bat as they say.

In those days the Psah itself was just getting established.  Much of the Psah was enclosed by a metal fence.  Until 1970, the dirt road was covered with red gravel.  In a good northerly wind a fine red dust would get blown into the houses.  Guess who got the job to sweep it all back to the street? The wide asphalted area at the top of the photos is where the bus station was. Buses that came there were from the southern part of the country bringing in farm produce.  By the late 60’s at around 11 am the area was so busy that buses had to park all around the Psah wherever they could drop their cargo off.  Smaller passenger cars (usually the trusty Peugeot 404 station wagons) also plied the routes from there. Country folk would come and ask to use our bathroom because they simply didn’t know where to go when nature called urgently.

Under the tiled roofed area on the left were the meat sellers. Next to them in the open air were the fish mongers. The vegetable sellers occupied the bottom left of the photo (opposite to where I lived). From there and over to the right of the picture there were sellers of dried fish, eggs and live ducklings, then the noodle stalls, and the Vietnamese food and dessert stalls.  Finally it’s the bric a brac traders on the bottom right corner. In the early 1970's they sold anything from denim jackets to pilfered US army rations, backpacks, hammocks, uniforms - that's from where I got my first taste of tinned peanut butter and cream cheese. A Chinese circus used to provide entertainment in the grassy open air north of the roofed area.  As it was impossible to charge a fee for the show, the astute performers would first draw up a crowd with a crazy round of drums and cymbals, followed by promises of a great spectacle on offer.  After more drumming and even more hear-ye’s they would suddenly start to spruik vials of health tonics, packets of cure-alls, and the inevitable remedies for piles.  Cambodians, including the fearsome Pol Pot, were especially terrified of hemorrhoids or reuss daung baht as known in Khmer.  The real show begins only when the crowd has been sufficiently supportive of the marketing drive. The little white oblong structure on the left hand side of the bus station was where the military police were based. In the early 70’s, now and then they would catch some deserter, burglar or whatever, strip him to his underwear and bring him there. Now and then someone would throw a grenade in there too.

A bunker was set up in 1971 north of the Psah, abutting the iron fence of the Stadium. Many of us from the area around the Psah who were drafted into the militia to patrol the area at night, were also ordered to take turns guarding it. A seventeen year old by then, I had a choice between a M1 rifle, an M16 and an AK47. The AK was of course weapon of choice, but being junior I was only allowed the rifle. And so I would straddle the M1 over my bike’s handle bar, and set off for my 4-hour duty to “bamreur cheat” (serve the Nation). Instead of watching for the KR however I took the opportunity to while away with either some Emile Zola, or a translation of William Shearer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" borrowed from the Alliance Francaise.  Poorly trained as I was, I would have “bamreur cheat” poorly anyway had the KR decided to attack the Stadium which by then had become a recruitment-cum-training centre for the Republican army.

Until 1973 while the battle raged around Phnom Penh's perimeters, I used to climb up at night to the flat roof of our apartment block to watch US planes drop their bombs. In the distance you could see sudden flashes of huge explosions against the night sky, and the soil churned up. Seconds later anything loose would rattle like in an earthquake, and you could feel the air displaced by the explosions literally blowing on your face.  One morning on a day in August 1973 when the US Congress stopped all aerial support for their Khmer allies, I watched a Phantom F4 doing a few dive bombing passes somewhere beyond the undulating roof of the Russian hospital. At quieter times the odd AC47 gunship could be heard circling and spraying death down below with red tracing bullets.  One night in late 1971 a huge explosion rocked Borei Keila to the north of our Psah, followed by hundreds of other explosions that lasted for a few days.  Earlier some military genius had the bright idea of turning Borei Keila into a munitions depot not that far from the council of ministers, the US attaché’s office, the army headquarters, and the finance ministry.  The whole place was so badly guarded anyway that once someone was able to fire a 107mm rocket point blank at the council of ministers from one of those remorques that you pedal from the back and which is used to transport blocks of ice from the market.

Anyway, back to our Psah. The fun part was Saturday nights when the area to the top right hand corner was choc full of food vendors. I used to go there for the pong tear kaun (hard boiled duck eggs nearing their hatching time), or sach ko aing, and an obligatory copy of the Nokor Thom Daily Sunday edition. Editor Soth Polin, cartoonist Ung Bun Heang, and poet Mao Ayuth spared no effort protesting the destruction of our society and lampooning the corrupt military elite.  That was also when Ros Sereysothea’s strident Chnam Aun Dop Bpram Mouy offered urban youth a thrilling escape of sorts from the torment of the time.  Some Khmericans baptized the song’s flat tinny sound as “garage” rock. Didn’t they know it was war bloody war and that the singers couldn’t afford a decent sound studio to do a decent recording? Normal Khmers have never ever seen a garage in their lives anyway until some of them ended up years later in Lowell MA or Long Beach CA. You get the gist.

Back again to our Psah.  Now and then the KR would surprise us with a volley of 122mm Russian rockets with their tell-tale whirring noise. When they ran out of those the KR followed up with Chinese 107mm rockets. Not as scary but still noisy. Kids of my age would dare each other to be the first to run up to the roof and find out from the fire that followed the whereabouts of  the rockets that had landed, and shout down the news to cowering adults below. I vividly recall one that landed with a sudden bang somewhere behind our house while I was studying logarithms. I have never forgotten the log rules ever since. By 1974 as the perimeters of the city shrunk under the KR onslaught, the stadium had become a heliport, and we watched those (Bell UH-1) Iroquois come & go like the Psah’s buses in more peaceful time. I could go on with the human misery that enveloped the Psah, the masses of refugees who slept anywhere in it's open spaces, fossicking the rubbish site for scraps; thatched huts on every inch of spare dirt, around the Stadium, under the water tower, every where in the Wat; and this old man whose hut I biked past and who was playing his Tro Khmer at dusk. As if it was yesterday.

The next time I set my eyes on my home again was early 1993, a few months before the UN elections.  After the initial shock at the sight of this huge cemented monstrosity, I was thrilled to discover on the other hand that my house hadn’t changed at all.  Its iron doors, windows, and front railings were all still in their original coat of paint - the very same one my dad and I painted our house with.  The new occupant saw my heavy eyes and understood as I run my hand over those doors. How I missed my dad, and my brother, and the old man with the ashen face and the sound of his heart breaking Tro Khmer. And my Psah.


The top photo is the abandoned Olympic Market in 1979.
The second shows Phnom Penh residents sheltering from a Khmer Rouge rocket attack on February 11th 1974, it was taken by Françoise Demulder.
The picture of the sandbagged bunker in Phnom Penh in 1970 was taken by Dianne Sherman.
The following pphoto shows a Douglas AC47 gunship firing, and the following is an F4 Phantom.
The next picture shows a busy Monivong Boulevard in early 1975, and the final picture is the grounds of Olympic Stadium serving as a refugee camp in 1974.

This piece was originally posted as a comment on this 2010 post: Olympic Stadium 1979 and 2010 . The author kindly rewrote it adding extra details. Many thanks to chhmar99@gmail.com for his outstanding contribution.

Boueng Tumpun - late 1970s

This picture shows troops from the NADK Division 703 Animal Husbandry Unit which was based around Boueng Tumpun in the late 1970s. The division was better known for guarding the notorious S21 or Tuol Sleng Prison. It looks like a moment of happiness, but although conditions were not as harsh at Boueng Tumpun as they were at the prisons the unit worked at, they were tough and troops suffered severe hardships while working there. The troops in the picture are wearing wrist watches which were generally a sign of high rank.

The picture comes from the excellent DCCAM book "Victims and Perpetrators."

Bokor Post Office

This was a strange-looking stilted structure; it had an arched concrete roof, with a sort of false angular eave built above it with brick. A footbridge connected it with the nearby road. There was extensive damage to the rear of it, there had been a lot of fighting on the plateau in 1979, and this building was the most obviously war-damaged. Many stories tell of a battle between Vietnamese/Salvation Front soldiers fighting Pol Pot troops who had taken refuge in the church. The post office was directly in the firing line, and most of the back wall was knocked out by a mortar round.
There are conflicting reports on the damage to all the buildings on the plateau, which have all been stripped completely bare, with channels cut out to scavenge copper electrical conduits and almost all woodwork gone. As per usual, this gets blamed on the “Khmer Rouge,” as is almost anything that looks old and broken. Although the combined Vietnamese and Salvation Front managed to wrest the plateau from Pol Pot’s forces in 1979, in later years the Kampot area became a hot-bed for resistance forces and Bokor changed hands many times.
One ex-resistance fighter who lived in the area from the late 1970s till recent times claimed in an interview that the hill-station was preserved in good condition during the Pol Pot regime, and it was only later that Vietnamese troops who were stationed there scavenged everything. Blaming the other side is par for the course but it doesn’t really matter, war tends to destroy everything anyway, whether by direct damage or the poverty and desperation that inevitably follows.
In the early 1970s, as the area became caught up in the war, and B52 strikes were pounding coastal parts of Kampot, the resort was abandoned again. The manager of the Bokor Palace Hotel had enough foresight to see what was about to happen, and took the entire contents of the hotel’s wine cellar down the hill to nearby Kep, where he hid it. He returned from exile more than twenty years later, in 1993, and recovered the untouched wine from the stash-place, and managed to sell some for a good price.
Anyway, back to the post office. It was recently demolished, along with a few other buildings up on the hill. The developers claimed that it was in a very dangerous state, which seems reasonable enough as it was one of the more wrecked structures. The Bokor Palace Hotel/Casino itself is due to be refurbished, good news as there was an initial period when it wasn’t clear whether it would be kept or not.

Olympic Stadium.

This was designed by eminent Cambodian architect Van Molyvann and completed in 1964. The first few pictures show the huge pond which was originally in front of it, and crowds at its inauguration.
One picture shows the stadium in around 1974, when it was used as a camp for republican soldiers and their families.
The black and white ones show Khmer Rouge troops parading in front of the stadium after their victory, Pol Pot in one picture and then Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary, members of the Khmer Rouge leadership.
Another picture shows Raoul Jenner, a political analyst on the terraces of a rather run-down stadium in the early 1990s. The last picture shows the stadium dressed up for the 2009 World Disabled Volleyball Cup. In recent years the stadium has been painted and kept fairly well, although it's not difficult to see where improvements could be made.

Monorom Hotel

This was one of the first large modern hotels built in Phnom Penh. It stands on Monivong Boulevard, not far from Central Market and the railway station. At the time it went up there was little development along what was to become one of the city’s most metropolitan and built up streets.

The photo of the “Khmer Rouge” troops passing by the hotel on April 17^th 1975 poses some questions. The ”Artful Dodger” character out front is wearing some strange-looking bandoliers and has a certain jolly expression which seems very exaggerated. He certainly doesn’t have the usual stoic and mean expression that you usually see in pictures of KR soldiers, and the people in the truck look to me to be civilians. The flag flying from the truck is one which has often been identified as a Democratic Kampuchea flag, but I have rarely seen pictures of it actually being used.

The crowd to the left of the truck are mainly dressed in camouflage military fatigues, of the type worn by Lon Nol’s Republican forces. I understand that there was a certain amount of jubilance at first on the streets of Phnom Penh, but I ‘m surprised to see Republican soldiers celebrating. I thought they would have been too busy getting rid of their uniforms first, as they were the number one target for execution in days to come. .

When the capital was finally taken, it wasn’t by one unified army, but by several allied groups from almost autonomous zones of the country. Some confusion, and even a certain amount of fighting erupted between the various groups at first. In the first few hours of confusion, one particularly strange event occurred. Some people, perhaps students or military decided to join in. They dressed up as Khmer Rouge combatants, and paraded through the streets on trucks proclaiming victory. It’s not clear what their motives were, perhaps they thought they would just blend in and get on with things, but I doubt any of them got very far.

The first picture shows the Monorom in the early 1960s, the B&W is from April 17th 1975. The bottom two are more recent, as you can see it hasn't changed a lot other than the awning along the front.

The scale of Tuol Sleng.

Anyone who has ever visited Phnom Penh probably knows this place. A very dark place, also known by the designation S21, it was at first located on Street 51 where the municipal police headquarters were, but in 1976 was moved to the former location of the Chau Ponhea Yat high school. It became a by-word for terror and was where the enemies of the Khmer Rouge were exterminated, many of them from within the organization’s own ranks. What most people don’t know is the original scale of this place. The central part has been preserved as a museum, but while it was still in operation it actually extended much further than just the grounds of the school. The elite Khmer Rouge Division 703 was in control of this place, and from their reports it stretched out from Monivong Boulevard in the east, across to Street 163 in the west. It apparently reached as far as Sihanouk Boulevard to the north, and down to Mao Tse Tung south. All of this area was surrounded by walls, fencing and barbed wire.
Very recently, I have had conversations with residents who contend that it was even bigger than previously reported. One resident who has lived in the neighborhood since 1982 has informed me that the compound didn’t stop at 163 but actually went as far as 199 to the west. At that time he says the previously enclosed area was obvious, and many of the now built up areas didn’t look anything like they do now, and for example some streets weren’t paved, but had banana trees planted all the way down the centre. On the map, the red area is the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum that is still preserved. The green part is the area which former Division 703 members say was the compound, and the blue area is the part which people in the neighborhood have told me was also included in the compound.
It is my understanding that the central, red part of the map was the actual prison, where people were incarcerated. There have been many studies which have shown that buildings close to this central area were used as interrogation centers. The greater areas which I have marked were probably not parts of the actual prison, but were enclosed areas where staff lived and grew vegetables etc. The reason that I feel this is important is that many of the Khmer Rouge top leadership have said they knew nothing of the existence of the place, and obviously this is doubtful because it is a very large section of the city.

The top black & white picture shows children who were rescued by Vietnamese troops from Tuol Sleng in January 1979. Most of these children still survive and are around middle age now.For a long time it was thought that only 7 people survived the centre, but recently it has been disclosed that quite a few more did. The color picture shows an exterior view of the Tuol Sleng museum as it is now. There are many high-school buildings around the city with similar appearance.

Le Royal.

This hotel, completed in 1929, for a long time held the distinction of being Phnom Penh’s highest building. This honor was later taken by The Intercontinental Hotel, and is at least for now held by the new forty-storey Canadia Bank headquarters. It was then, and remains, one of the finest hotels in the city. During the Khmer Rouge regime many of the leadership lived here. After the Vietnamese intervention in 1979 it was where the few international organizations that tried to aid the country’s recovery were based, along with many of the visiting journalists. It was called The Sammaki during the 1980s. The first picture shows the hotel in 1960, the other is recent.

Phnom Penh Cathedral

This was built sometime in the early 1960s, and was situated on Monivong Boulevard, somewhere about mid-way between where the railway station and Phnom Penh Hotel are now. It was demolished by hand in 1975. Many overseas Khmers, intellectuals and left-wingers returned to Cambodia after the Khmer rouge victory to help the new regime. They were not trusted and were incarcerated, many in a prison that was located at Boueng Trabek High School. Some were set to demolishing the cathedral, which was very hard work as it was built from reinforced concrete. Even in modern day Cambodia this is the normal way of demolishing a building, it's a lot cheaper to get a few guys and give them sledgehammers than hire a machine. Anyway, not a trace of the cathedral remains.