What I was told in the three camps, which had no communications with one another, surpassed the worst that I had heard before. The accounts were strikingly uniform and consistent with one with one another, wherever I heard them and whether they came from Cambodian typical of the majority of the refugees, ordinary peasant or common soldiers from the border regions, or the rare educated men and women from Phnom Penh or Battambang. They were all too credible. They very composition of the mass of refugees was a kind of corroboration of the radical leveling of an entire nation that they related. They represented a fair cross section of Cambodian society. Most were, like the great majority of Cambodians, of the unlettered and unfavored mass, overwhelmingly rural. The number of men whose torsos were heavily covered with Sanskrit tattoos to protect them from evil by their magic was remarkable. It indicated a preponderance of the uneducated and superstitions. There were also urban laborers, petty government employees, and a smattering of the French speaking educated class