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TRAVEL MEMOIRS
Flip Flops Littered the Bloody Ground
Protesting in the USA with memories of Phnom Penh, Cambodia
DG Harman was a publisher and US Embassy Warden in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Her memoir, Love and Loss in Cambodia, is available at Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, and — of course — Amazon.
A bomb exploded. We felt it. We heard it. My husband Ken and I slept in a room with thick concrete walls, with an air-conditioner that sounded like an airplane. But that bomb? The reverberation is a memory I feel in my body even now — twenty-eight years later.
A deep, low boom.
“What was that?” Ken got up fast and dressed. He was out the door to kick on his motorcycle, a 250cc he rode fast all over the city. I was less interested in hearing about one more incident of violence in the city. It was getting hot in Cambodia, and I wasn’t thrilled about it, to say the least. Ken talked me into staying to publish travel guides, rather than move back to the USA.
In 1997, we’d lived there for three years. I loved Cambodia, but the constant stress of living in a country with so many AK 47s — and people who shot at clouds to stop the monsoon rains — wore me down.
