Cambodian’s longest night began on the morning of April 17, 1975. Gradually the Khmer rouge guns and rocket launchers, which had continued to hail death and fire onto the defenseless city of Phnom Penh through the night and into morning, fell silent. The longtime residents of the capital called their children inside and locked the doors. The majority of Phnom Penh’s people at the end of the five-year war, the countless refugees from the zones of fighting who were not favored with the luxury of fixed homes, clustered around pagodas, schools, ministries, and other public buildings. Soldiers of the government army ditched their weapons and blended into the population. The few remaining foreigners – diplomats, journalists, aid worker – gathered in the hotel Le Phnom, which they had declared a neutral safety zone under Red Cross auspices, or in the spacious grounds of the French embassy. The city waited nervously, its people trembling when an occasional burst of small-arms fire crackled nearby. And then the Khmers Rouges came. Silently marching in single file, dressed in black, shod with sandals cut from tires, arms, mainly Chinese-made or captured American rifles, at the ready. what struck the people of Phnom Penh most, according to firsthand accounts of those who escaped, which I began gathering shortly after the event, were the youth of the conquering soldiers and their fierce, unsmiling, automatonlike demeanor. Their grimness was frightening. Whatever fears the citizens may have harbored of the Khmer Rouge before, their coming meant to many Cambodians the end of the five years of war, and that was cause enough for gladness. That a Communist regime was arriving was certain, and to most Cambodians no cause for rejoicing. But even to them it meant not merely a future under a regime of unforgiving rigor but also an end to the violent lawlessness and corruption that the Lon Nol government and the war had visited on Cambodians. But on that very first day of what was so romantically called the ‘liberation,’ came the stunning order to all to evacuate the city. The old and the young, the healthy and the invalid, those who had secretly wished for the victory of the Khmers Rouges as well as those who until the last moment had served the Lon Nol regime, whatever their beliefs – all were driven out. For weeks the roads of Cambodian were clogged with masses of wretched men, women, and children heading away from home, far from where they wished to be, from where they wanted to begin their lives anew in a time of newfound peace. The new rulers drove them to distant places, whose principal attribute was as often as not unsuitability to sustain life. Some were spared the long march. Cabinet minister and generals who failed to escape did not survive the ‘liberation’ long enough to join the exodus. They were summoned to appear in front of the Information Ministry, and it is presumed that those who did – they included Lon Non and Long Boret – were killed on the same day, without even a sham trial. Reports I have never been able to confirm said the slaughter of Lon Nol’s men, and perhaps their families, took place behind the ministry at the Cercle Sportif, the club of the Cambodian and French elite, between the tennis courts and the swimming pool. The news that officers were to report to the new authorities reached my friend Am Rong, the frustrated cineaste and most unmilitary of military spokesmen, who had unaccountably risen to the rank of brigadier general, a day or two after he had set out with the wretched flow from the city. A witness told me years later that, guileless to the end, Am Rong turned back and, walking alone against the steam, made his way to Phnom Penh to report. He was taken to a shoddy hotel on the main avenue, apparently a gathering place for the doomed. His trace ends there. Whenever I now walk past that hotel, I feel a plaque should be put up at its entrance to commemorate the credulous naivete that led a nation into unending catastrophe. In early july 1975 I traveled along the thai-cambodian border for five days to seek out Cambodian who had succeeded in escaping. About 6000 had by then made it to safety after treacherous treks through uncharted jungles, avoiding known roads or paths. How many failed and met a cruel fate cannot be known, but from the journalist who had found sanctuary in the French embassy and were finally allowed to leave in a truck convoy 2 weeks later. Their reports were necessarily limited to what they experienced in the first hours of the new regime, until they were shut up in the embassy, and what they saw from their open trucks as they crossed the country under heavy guard to the thai border. The occasional reports that drifted out of the new Cambodia, whose nameless rulers had expelled all foreigners and sealed the country against the outside world, were too horrifying to credit at school or third hand. My purpose was to hear of the experiences and observations of Cambodians themselves, particularly those who had most recently made good their escape and had lived under Khmer Rouge rule for long weeks.