The Pen family farmhouse—wooden, tall, and aged—sits in the middle of a former battlefield in Lumphat District, Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia. The original thatch roof has been replaced with aluminum, but the house has retained much of its traditional Khmer architecture like the hardwood frame, gabled roof, and open-air ground floor. The bedroom and living room on the second floor sit upon 10-foot pylons, allowing to circulate air during the hot season and lifting the house above flooding waters during the wet season. Acres of agricultural land—some of the most fertile in the country—are visible from the kitchen and the platform table on the ground floor.
When the first generation of Pens settled here sometime in the 1940s, this land was a forest basin, filled with nutrient-rich, loose, loamy soil. Over the course of twenty years, Thida and Rithy Pen cleared most of the trees on their ten hectares, using the wood to build the house that stands here today. Looking around their property from the ground floor, our view is broken by an occasional 30-meter-tall tree, a remnant of the dwarf rainforest that was here when the Pen family arrived over eighty years ago. The trees have long, smooth trunks topped by bushy branches spread against the sky, like giant broccoli crowns. They are called cheuh tiel tom in Khmer. You can cut a notch in the tree, burn the hole to stimulate sap flow, and place a bucket to collect the sap. The liquid serves many purposes: a wood sealant, a soap ingredient, and a fire starter. For these reasons, English-speaking arborists call them “resin trees.”
Thida and Rithy Pen are now retired, but have passed their farm onto their children, including their son Leang and daughter-in-law Lom. Trim and teacherly, Lom takes us to their garden to see the soil, calling it by its colloquial name, dei krahom (red soil). The technical Cambodian name is labansiek soil, according to scientists at the International Rice Research Institute. It has a burnt, reddish-brown color. The soils formed on the sides of hills as the lava flow of ancient volcanoes created balsatic rock that has been weathered down over millennia. When you touch the grains of soil, it feels both cushioned and dense, like an expensive foam mattress. It has a clay-like texture, but also falls apart like sand when it’s dry. The soil’s microstructure is well-suited for holding water, to the point that it does not need to be regularly irrigated for commercial production. Horticulturalists estimate that without fertilizer, this soil should be able to produce 1,400 to 1,600 kilograms of rice per hectare.
Lom and Leang are experienced farmers—she can identify wild boar by its tracks and he has built a walking tractor from spare parts—and the fruit trees and vegetable garden that surround the house are thriving. Leang has grown up on this land, and Lom raised chickens, dogs, cows, cassava, and cashews in Prey Veng Province, Cambodia, where she was born. Together, they grow fruits and vegetables twelve months a year in the garden beds (jomkaa in Khmer). Hollow-stem spinach, amaranth, wax gourd, mungbean, kabocha squash, eggplant, cucumber, winged beans, tamarind mangoes, apple bananas, plantain bananas, and Madagascar plums are among the produce that the family grows here.
Despite their years of experience and hard work, Lom and Leang are failing at small-scale commercial production. The couple own about three hectares (the rest of Thida and Rithy’s land is owned by Leang’s siblings), but Lom and Leang have scarcely a hectare under cultivation now, and their land is thus an odd patchwork—largely wild and overgrown but punctuated by irregularly placed planted and well-maintained fields. In the cultivated areas, Lom is usually able to produce only a half-kilogram of rice per year, and even that depends on luck. (Once, she lost her entire crop in one night when a wild boar ate everything.) Why are these smart and hard-working farmers in one of the most fertile areas in the country tallying so many losses, unable to clear their share of agricultural profits?
To answer this question, Lom and Leang tell me about two intertwined local events, which loom large in the family’s memory: the 1970 siting of a military base within a few kilometers from the Pen family farmhouse, and the subsequent repeated US bombings of the area. The base was built by General Lon Nol, who took over the country from 1971 to 1975, seizing power from King Norodom Sihanouk on the encouragement of the US State Department. During Lon Nol’s rule, he sent the Khmer National Armed Forces, a branch of the state military, to Ratanakiri Province, where they fought Pol Pot’s guerrilla army of revolutionaries and their Vietnamese communist counterparts. Lon Nol sited the army’s Ratanakiri base on Elephant Hill, only a few kilometers from the Pen farmhouse; it included a hospital tent, soldier barracks, and even hiding places underneath the treeline. Shortly after Lon Nol took power, the US renewed its aerial attacks in Cambodia as part of an effort to break up communist supply lines that ran from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam. From 1970 to 1973, the US dropped bombs over Elephant Hill and throughout much of the basin where the Pens’ farm is located.
As they tell me this story, Leang and Lom’s body language and voices betray just how immediate these fifty-year-old events still are: “There’s a bomb crater as big as our house,” Leang shouts from the house, pointing in the direction of Elephant Hill. Lom wants to take us to see it, but she is worried: we mustn’t stray off the path, she cautions. She is dressed casually in a bright floral shirt, loose trousers, and rubber flip flops, and weather creases line the bottom of her eyes. “Even I still get scared…” she admits and tilts her head to gauge my comprehension. Her land is covered with unexploded bombs, some hidden inches or even feet below the surface, and it is impossible for newcomers to detect what is lurking inches below without specialized equipment and training.
Over the course of the summer, I would crisscross the province many times, revisiting people and places to describe not only the undetonated and leftover weapons that remain behind in conflict zones, but also the hangover effects of those weapons on the civilian population. But that morning at the Pens’ farm in Lumphat District retains a certain burnish, because it exemplified for me not only how vulnerable farmers are to unexploded bombs as they move from one of their fields to another but also the bombs’ outsized effect: as I found, an unknown number of hidden bombs create a “sphere of fear” that dampens economic activity throughout an entire settlement.
By the end of the summer, my respondents taught me a central irony of life in post-conflict Cambodia. American airstrikes were targeted to avoid civilian settlements, but the remnants of these rural bombings have forced civilian farmers to regularly do one of the most dangerous and strenuous tasks that the military can assign to its professional soldiers: the identification and clearance of unexploded ordnance. Our failures in military technology—the bombs’ failure to explode on impact—have drained Cambodian fields of their safety and economic potential.
As I show in When the Bombs Stopped, these leftover bombs connect the local and the global. In the modern era of airstrikes and bombardments, it is as impossible to draw a sharp line between domestic and international politics as it is to understand the layered realities of Cambodian daily life without understanding its language, religion, and conflict history. To move beyond the US-centric corpus of Vietnam War history, I spent more than a decade studying Cambodia and learning Khmer to write a book that refocuses history on first-person accounts. The strengths of these narratives lie in how my respondents tell their stories with such vivid intimacy—personal, individual stories that illuminate the legacy of military violence. History has a way of lingering, and Faulkner’s old chestnut about the past never being dead or even past is carried throughout their stories.
The reality of Cambodian rural life among the bombs raises important questions for students of civic engagement and American politics. How do we hold our leadership—and ourselves—accountable for past foreign military actions? More disturbingly, what if the worst things we have done are things we do not even know about? The American political community can seek to answer these questions by connecting to the experience of victims of American military violence. Only by informing ourselves, caring about others, and being curious about the world outside of ourselves can we start to feel the true weight of our military actions.
Erin Lin is associate professor of political science at the Ohio State University.