A Night of Death at Takeo

TIME'S Robert Anson and T.D. AIIman arrived in Takeo, 50 miles from Phnom-Penh, only hours after Cambodian soldiers had gunned down more than 150 Vietnamese. The victims included 110 men, 30 boys under the age of eleven, half a dozen government officials of Vietnamese extraction, and an unknown number of women and girls. Anson's and Allman's report:

WE came upon the massacre almost by accident. In Takeo we hoped to get a military briefing from the local commander, a tall, soft-spoken captain. We called him "Killer" because journalists here believe that he was responsible for the massacre of 92 Vietnamese at Prasaut. We were heading toward Killer's office--he refused to give us his real name--but we decided first to visit the 200 Vietnamese men we had seen interned at the Takeo primary school two days earlier.

From a distance of 200 yards, we knew something was wrong. Before, the men and boys had been crowded into a bandstand, and you could see their black shirts from far away. Today the place seemed nearly empty. We got out of the car and ran. Blood, flies and bullet holes were everywhere. Crouched in one corner were the 50 survivors, every one of them wounded or sick, waiting to be shot.

They told us that early in the week all Vietnamese males from the age of six up had been arrested in the Takeo market and herded into the schoolyard bandstand. For two days they were without food, water or sanitation. Last night, a few minutes after a Cambodian officer arrived on the scene, they were ordered to lie down on the cement floor and go to sleep. Seconds later they heard the order in Cambodian: "Ready, aim, fire." There were three fusillades in all, administered by Cambodian troops shooting into the darkness. Some soldiers then waded into the tangle of bodies, shooting the wounded in the head.

At 2 a.m. a truck arrived at the school and soldiers loaded the dead and dying onto it. They were dumped into nearby woods. It was afternoon before we reached the school and found the survivors and the bodies of three men who had died since. The Vietnamese had had nothing to eat or drink and no medical treatment, even though there is a hospital in Takeo. Both of us had just one thought: to save at least some of the survivors. "Please stay with us," an old man wearing a Catholic cross pleaded. "They say we are Viet Cong, but we are not. They will kill us all unless you stay."

Promising to return within two hours, we scooped up the most pitiful of the wounded, a little eight-year-old boy with two bullet holes in his mangled right leg, put him in the back seat of the car and rushed back to Phnom-Penh. All the way, he kept a tight grip on Allman's hand; it was the only way we knew he was still alive. We dropped him off at the French hospital.

Back at the blood-spattered bandstand, we crammed four kids into the bucket seat in the front of one car. Three men got into the back seat, one of them terribly wounded in his stomach, chest and limbs. Another, for whom there was simply no more room, told us solemnly: "Please rent a truck in Phnom-Penh to take us out. We will pay you for all your trouble." His two sons had been killed the night before and his brother was lying badly wounded on the cement.

Next to the suffering, the most horrible thing in Takeo was the hope that our presence created. We naively assumed that other people would be carrying these victims out. We could not have been more wrong. Nobody gave a damn. We know that even now, if the Vietnamese haven't all been shot, they are sitting there in the dark, alone, with the Cambodians all around them, hoping against hope that we'll show up again.

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