SHELDON KELLY: An American From Cambodia Golden Bones: An Extraordinary Journey from Hell in Cambodia to a New Life in America
Siv, Sichan
booKs In RevIew KGB, and the Soviets, which reveals some of the fatuousness of the Olympics as an extension of the Cold War. Avery Brundage, president of the IOC in 1960, is savaged by...
...They died kneeling, bending their necks down so pointed hoes could be driven into their brainstem...
...He had been in the camps for a year...
...Perhaps Brundage was just around too long...
...With our eyes,” Sichan had said...
...Avery Brundage, president of the IOC in 1960, is savaged by Maraniss for allegedly being a Nazi sympathizer, an autocrat, a plutocrat, delusional, and a philanderer of the sort that Maraniss never found particularly offensive when he wrote his Clinton biography...
...Currently, I notice it is in one titled Cultures in Diversity...
...Yet he accepted at face value Soviet assurances that their state-supported athletes were amateurs...
...his breath while skirting the snake pit of paralyzing memory...
...And he revels in American and Cambodian history...
...Wealthy people were necessary to manage the Olympic movement...
...Enemies”—the literate, those who wore glasses, or simply had started their march with nice clothes—were killed...
...ocTobeR 2008 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR 75 booKs In RevIew death sentences were announced...
...Madness, despair, suicides, death by sheer exhaustion and starvation...
...I realized I had to avoid “triggers” to these terrible memories of his...
...Yes, he returned to Cambodia with Martha, his beautiful all-American Texas-born wife of 25 years, and yes, he confronted his demons, as he told me recently...
...Back in 1912 his simple interpretation of amateurism motivated him to turn in his fellow competitor in the 1912 decathlon, Jim Thorpe, as a professional...
...Sichan was there...
...Land mines, deadly snakes, communist outposts and camps: he made it, was jailed, released, became a Buddhist monk, with shaved head and eyebrows and saffron robe...
...But usually, much sooner...
...Brundage was a stickler for amateurism...
...To put Brundage into perspective, he graduated from the University of Illinois in 1909 as a civil engineer...
...If you’ve seen the movie The Killing Fields, you might understand...
...Speaking would implicate Sichan, his mother, and then the rest...
...Now, as a friend and close reader, on to Sichan’s always poignant and, incredibly, sometimes humorous memoir— written in his own natural, eloquent hand, sans ghostwriter or workshops...
...The story I wrote about Sichan for the “old” Reader’s Digest rated first in surveys, was published in editions throughout the world, and in all these years has always been found in some anthology or 76 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR ocTobeR 2008 another...
...During a return in 1980 he learned that, indeed, shortly after his escape an announcement had been made to his brother that “Angka wants to see you,” and he and Sichan’s entire family had been led off to the jungle and were never seen again...
...In short, Sichan seems to hurry through the hell— and we all must understand...
...By the time you’ve gotten to America, where he went from picking apples for two dollars a bushel to U.S...
...Lord knows, he’s earned it...
...I saw horror...
...there were no words...
...And so, as an experiment I’d insisted upon, we talked for a while ourselves—using only our eyes...
...His book, when dealing with corpses, camps, or saying goodbye to his brother and entire family, is more documented than finely written...
...An American from Cambodia “You are a Man of Golden Bones...
...ambassador to a UN body—representing us throughout the world—you will know why he repeats his mother’s enduring words, and her last ones to him, to “never give up hope...
...I knew he was avoiding certain triggers of nightmarish memories—I understood...
...It is almost clinical in its explanation of what happened—of what it was like inside this modern, very true Holocaust...
...Sichan had been in the war as a Cambodian CARE worker prior to the Khmer Rouge entering Phnom Penh, the capital city...
...It was better to cooperate, otherwise your death would be long and painful...
...But, I had to know...
...Ambassador Siv, referring to the Khmer myth of one having very good luck...
...These factors have had more to do with changing the Games than anything, and Brundage might be more deserving of the idealistic sports fan Maraniss’s admiration than his contempt...
...Sichan was there...
...Angka” was the faceless, invisible machine that drove the maddened homicidal illiterate teenagers with their red kramas and rubber-tire sandals...
...Brundage then went on to become quite rich running a Chicago construction firm...
...his family was killed, he starved, became deathly ill at times, saw horrors not seen or fully comprehended by modern minds since the Holocaust, when the world said, “Never again...
...A great American story, told by a great American...
...And you will genuinely like this tall, lean, handsome man with the shy smile, who became a Republican back when it meant “anti-communist,” and who now lives in San Antonio, helps out on friends’ ranches, and wears a big Texas hat...
...By the time you’ve reached the death camps, you should know why and how you got there...
...And yet, Sichan had described to me their having said goodbye...
...The subtitle of this book is dead-on...
...At least from those Games we now have the stirring images of Jesse Owens displeasing Hitler...
...For example, his brother: They were in the same camp, but, because his brother had been a military officer, they had never spoken...
...Today money abounds from television, commercial endorsements, and government...
...Sichan Siv escaped the communist Khmer Rouge killing fields in 1976 and made his way across the frontier jungle to a Thai refugee camp...
...Unless you have a burning interest in the subject, your time could be better spent on other pursuits...
...Angka wants to see you,” was how sheldon Kelly,a former Reader’s Digest staff writer, lives in Chesapeake, Virginia...
...I understand...
...On track and field Maraniss writes vividly and the book becomes a page-turner...
...Although he details the killing fields, it is less about them than it is about hope, which was his mother’s—Mae’s—legacy...
...As the century wore on and totalitarian states entered the Olympics, this old gent may have lost sense of how the world was changing...
...He then competed for another nine years, and one suspects he was not subsidized in any way, thus contributing to his austere vision of amateurism...
...Like a biography of Avery Brundage written by David Maraniss...
...M y reason for telling you this is that I think Sichan today has backed sensibly away from all those horrifying “triggers...
...They had said goodbye...
...If the reader is expecting a comprehensive report of the 1960 Games, he will be disappointed...
...On other sports the book frankly bores...
...I felt myself catching my breath, slipping near tears...
...Well, it was “again...
...But I think he did so only as one might sleepwalk, holding Although he details the killing fields, it is less about them than it is about hope...
...Before he ignored the professionalism of Soviet athletes, he ignored the heinousness of Nazism and allowed the Games to go on in 1936 in Berlin...
...booKs In RevIew KGB, and the Soviets, which reveals some of the fatuousness of the Olympics as an extension of the Cold War...
...So, in that nice French restaurant, Jean-Pierre’s on K Street, I’d asked him how he had done this if in fact they dared not talk...
...Cambodian villager speaking to U.S...
...Many sports are reported anecdotally...
...Then came another war...
...One fall day many years ago while dining in a nice French restaurant in Washington, D.C., I gently refused to let Sichan nudge me away from those times...
...Hitler was reincarnated as Khmer Rouge dictator Pol Pot—more than two million executed, and half that number forever missing...
...F irst, a Disclaimer...
...According to VA studies, the human mind can take, maximum, 240 days of combat before it simply shuts down...
...Later he taught English to refugees, served those most in need, and withdrew inside himself...
...More importantly, on the large issues Maraniss want to take up—politics, race, and Avery Brundage—the author is unpersuasive...
...i met sichan siv many years ago while reporting for the Reader’s Digest...
...He escaped...
...He had fallen into a booby trap, almost impaling himself on killer punji sticks, had followed the path of the westerly sun and moon...
...We learned to talk with our eyes...
...What his eyes said was too powerful for a simple journalist to attempt repeating...
...Three years later he made the Olympic team in the decathlon and pentathlon, finishing 16th and 6th respectively...
...I wrote about him, his extraordinary journey out of Cambodia, and his extraordinary journey as a new American...
...Thanks to his severity, young swimmers, like myself, were prevented from even checking clothing baskets into swimming pools, as that would make us professional athletes...
...He revels in both, in his childhood, his school learning, his Cambodian family, and his doomed mother...
Vol. 41 • October 2008 • No. 8
