The Killing Fields

The Killing Fields

The Killing Fields

Sam Waterston

American newspaper correspondent, New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg is covering the secret US bombing campaign in Cambodia, along with American cameraman Al Rockoff and English reporter Jon Swain. After having persuaded his Cambodian assistant, friend and interpreter, Dith Pran to remain behind with him to help cover the story after the communist Khmer Rouge takeover and withdrawal of US military forces, Schanberg unintentionally betrays his aide by miscalculating the situation. They are separated and Pran is forced to remain when Schanberg and other American journalists and Westerners evacuate to escape a life-threatening situation in occupied-Cambodia during the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975. Continuation of 21(1). Dith Pran endures the atrocities of the Pol Pot regime and is captured by the communist Khmer Rouge and punished for befriending the Americans. His struggle to stay alive in the rural, barbaric 're-education' labor camp, his two escape attempts from his captors, and his horrifying walk through the skeletal remains of the brutal massacres in the Valley of Death, the muddy "killing fields," all present potent images on his journey to Thailand. He is reunited with Schanberg in October 1979 and returns with him to the United States where he is reunited with his family.