In the fifth basketball game of my senior year, I dislocated my right ankle badly enough that it required surgery.  I remember people bent over me.  I remember pain reaching the point that I wondered what would happen if it continued. I remember telling myself to close my eyes and breathe.  To this day, I shut my eyes in movies if someone is about to break a bone.  Just writing that sentence creates a feeling like fingernails on a chalkboard.  Mentally, I close my eyes.

Yesterday, Melissa and I visited the infamous Cambodian Killing Fields and the prison, S-21, at which the victims were mercilessly tortured before being driven in covered trucks in the middle of the night, blindfolded, shackled, and starved to be executed and dumped in mass graves.  I thought about what I saw all yesterday and last night.  I woke up thinking about it.  I tried to read, to distract myself, to mentally close my eyes.    

I’ve composed the beginning of this entry a dozen times in my head.  Nothing seems fitting.  I can no more capture the lingering, sickening horror of what I witnessed than I can figure out a respectful, dignified way to write about it.  

The first people Pol Pot systematically murdered were teachers.  His regime converted one of the schools, emptied of teachers, into S-21. The wooden desks were used to divide the classrooms into three by six foot cells.  The playground equipment was sadistically transformed into tools for torture.  Melissa and I walked through these former classrooms, stepped lightly into the prison cells, and read with disgust and horror the frank, unembellished, process used to exterminate human beings — men, women and children. 

On the ground floor of the two-story school, the classrooms were not divided into cells.  They were divided by rows of display panels each one exactly like the other, each one containing photographs, headshots, exactly the same size lined up in neat columns and rows.  Each photograph was a face, like looking at pictures in a yearbook, except no one was smiling, and draped around the neck of every face was a number.

Before they tortured the prisoners, the guards measured and recorded their height.  Then the guards forced each prisoner, even the children, to sit in a chair with a device that held their head upright for the photograph. It was these photographs that were arranged on the display panels, rows and rows of them, room after room.   

Ellie Weisel was asked what punishment he would impose on the prison guards who tortured him and others at Auschwitz and Dachau.  He said he would force the guards to sit in a room for eight hours and watch an endless stream of the faces of the people they murdered.  I understand, now.  The pain reaches a point that you wonder what happens next.

But unlike the pain I felt in high school, this pain comes from an unseen source.  It is the pain of despair, the loss of hope and meaning, the pain of touching evil itself and knowing deeply how real and present it is. Our tour guide, Sing, a gentle, funny soul who has guided countless tourist through this hell, a man, who like most Cambodians, lost five members of his family to the Pol Pot regime, told us, courageously, that his leaders are like the tigers and crocodiles that once lived in the jungles of Cambodia.  You can feed them.  They may even seem gentle, apologetic.  But at any moment they will eat you. 

Earlier that same morning, before visiting S-21, we went to the killing fields, the place where the prisoners were executed and buried in mass graves.  I cannot write in complete sentences when I think about that experience, what I saw.

I saw a tree in a field. Large, strong, old.  Hanging from the tree like braids or dreadlocks were multi-colored bracelets, the kind middle school children make and give to one another as a sign of friendship.  I saw this tree standing silently in this field, a field marked by depressions in the earth, sinkholes, but too perfectly geometric in shape to be natural.  I walked along ridges in the earth between these depressions in this quiet field.  I saw in these depressions, bits of clothing, the tattered remnants of some one’s pants, or skirt.  I saw white specks of bleached bones, and I felt tears press against the inside of my eyes.

I saw a tree in a field with braids hanging from the lowest branches, standing still beside a small depression. 

The guards took the babies from their mothers because they would cry.  Silence was needed to cloak their crimes in secrecy.  

I was told many things about the trees.  From one the guards hung a large speaker to play music to cover the sounds of murder, the moans and screams, the scrapping of shovels on dirt to cover the bodies.  

I was told many things about the trees, but I will never forget the tree with the pretty braids, the trunk of which was used by the guards to smash the heads of babies.  

I saw a tree in a lonely field.  I will never forget it.

Oh loving God, teach us peace.