SwiftVets.com

[GenrXr]

I will soon be dead and my hope in writing this letter is for the legacy of murder to be remembered so as not to be repeated. My name is Seng and the year is 1976. I was educated at Oxford, England, yet no one knows this. All my family and friends have since been separated or killed. When they ordered the evacuation of Phnom Penh, I advised all family members to dress down so as not to draw attention to ourselves, but this accomplished little in keeping us together, for we were all forcibly separated upon leaving town to be sent to different camps. Although, not certain, being the fittest and most studied of my family the chances are that I am the only remaining survivor. Pol Pot calls our country Democratic Kampuchea and his political arm the Communist Party Kampuchea, yet we call his evil-doers the Khmer Rouge and cry inside at the thought that our country is Democratic. My advice to family from the outset to dress down played huge dividends early on in that all Cambodians were quickly placed into a class system. Fourth class citizen is an educated or capitalist ‘Townie’. These people were immediately murdered, because they were a threat to Pol Pots Communist ideology. The third class of citizen is a ‘Townie’ considered from an ideological point of view to be low level risk to the CPK ideology. The second class of citizen is the uneducated low land farmer. The first class citizen is the illiterate hunter/gatherer Khmer mountain tribe. Fortunately, I have been able to feign being a class II for a long time and as such been afforded a livable meal. That time has passed though, for now the government can no longer feed the class II people. We are now exporting for trade more then half our field’s production and can no longer feed all our people. We long ago killed off the educated, industrious and abolished all capitalistic commerce. We are all stuck in the rice paddies from sun up to sun down. I have a great desire to speak out and plead my case for life, but this acknowledgement of education would be a sure death sentence. So I keep silent and do not speak. I say nothing and do nothing to plead my case. Although, I am starving to death and the rains are wreaking havoc to our already low level of crops, the sun does shine from time to time. I feel everything is doomed, yet every day the sun comes up and shines brightly I feel hope and am given strength from a place I know not to continue on regardless of my situation.

I died 30 days after writing this letter. I should have died 30 days before.

What is keeping Terri alive now is the sunlight her loving mother and father give her when they visit her each and every day. The darkness which is starving her is the system which decides to kill off people it deems not worthy to live. Her husband is a Khmer Rouge illiterate and Judge Greer is Pol Pot. Fits perfectly.

This is a fictional piece based upon historical fact to metaphorically speak of the Terri Schaivo case and warn all of the dangerous waters we wade.
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"An activist is the person who cleans up the water, not the one claiming its dirty."
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing." Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Founder of Conservative Philosophy

[GM Strong]

There several well written pieces on this and you have added one more.
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8th Army Korea 68-69

[GenrXr]