It is with great sadness that I read today of the death of Dith Pran at the age of 65. He was nothing short of a hero, and his story serves as an inspiration to journalists everywhere.
Those who have seen the movie The Killing Fields know why. He was the interpreter for Sydney Schanberg, The New York Times reporter who documented America’s disastrous war in Cambodia in the 1970s and ultimately the murderous rampage of the Khmer Rouge, led by dictator Pol Pot, who killed a third of the country’s population.
They say truth is the first casualty of war, and Pran and Schanberg did their best under almost impossible circumstances to get the truth out — both before the American withdrawal and after. Pran’s family escaped, but he stayed behind to work with Schanberg.
After the Khmer Rouge cemented their power, Schanberg was forced out but Pran could not leave. He survived on a teaspoon of rice a day, working as an uneducated peasant, so as not to give away his true identity, which would have meant certain death.
He escaped a few years later, was reunited with his family in the United States, and became an American citizen. The Times hired him as a staff photographer. But he never stopped talking about the genocide in his native land. He wanted the world to know about the atrocities so that history would never forget.
Even in the last weeks of his life, in the hospital where he was being treated for pancreatic cancer, he urged others to take up his cause.
“If they can do that for me,” he said, “my spirit will be happy.”
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