I was still a young girl when the Viet Nam War "ended." I remember wondering what we were fighting for and never quite getting an answer that "went clunk" (having the kind of gravity that the truth often does). It was in 1984 or 85 when I went with some college friends to see the movie, The Killing Fields.

I'd never felt that way before (sad and glad and empty and strangely filled) and the movie chronicled both the atrocities of the war and the friendship of the two men, Dith Pran and Sydney Schanberg.

I didn't quite know if our involvement was to corrale the spread of Communism or to loose justice. I still think it was the former and not the latter.

The movie won three Oscars including a Supporting Actor nod for Haing S. Ngor, another Cambodian who had escaped from the Khmer Rouge, as Dith Pran, the subject of the movie. Sadly, Dr. Ngor (he was also a physician) was murdered by an Asian gang outside of his LA home in the early 1990's.

This from NPR:

'Killing Fields' Journalist Dies - Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist, whose experiences inspired the movie The Killing Fields, died Sunday at age 65. Pran coined the term "Killing Field" after seeing the remains of victims of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime.

Here's the ending of the film, when Sydney finally finds Dith (who he feared had died years earlier).

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