It’s still beyond me that my loving husband had gone through five horrifying years of the Killing Fields when he was just a kid… and survived it all. Imagine a 7-year-old boy in a remote village in Cambodia with nothing but a piece of tattered shirt — replaced only once every 12 months— to cover his emaciated body and nothing at all to protect his already-calloused feet. He was a buffalo boy who greeted mornings with grumbling noises in his stomach and delighted at the sight of snails and snakes, which he often referred to as his “perfect protein-rich meal”.
He had no concept of a normal childhood but perhaps seeing villagers tortured and hacked-to-death seemed pretty normal to him, as he knew nothing else other than that (maybe except ebbing memories of his privileged pre-war life, but he must have forgotten by then).
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