Peteskibreen's Blog

Spirituality/Justice

One thing is recurring in my mind and it’s the presence or absence of an interventionist God/god – and who, in the words of Nick Cave – doesn’t exist. That is, doesn’t intervene. Exists but doesn’t intervene, answer desperate prayer or the smallest non-desperate prayer. The interventionist stories and myths in the Bible with this view of Nick’s need to be carefully reframed as myths or at a stretch historical oral stories that were embellished over centuries to prop up interventionist god systems. Cave has good reason to abandon a saving god in this life after losing two children in separate tragic circumstances.

This creates world view challenges for me and yet it is essential for peace of mind to own my two-mind doubts while unpacking what about the belief system I still hold – or that hold me – that I have juggled with for years. “Against the flow of my constructed self” is a persistent undercurrent.

A while back I wrote a piece about my experience in pre-Pol Pot Cambodia, working in Phnom Penh on a medical team, narrowly missing injury and death a few times and maybe more than I knew about. Here it is to provide more context for my reflections on this theme of escape, salvation, justice and inevitable death.

The Bomb Went off Before I Arrived 

– a personal reflection 

Phnom Penh 1974 – 1975

Peter Breen

Former radiographer – World Vision Intl 

Rocket damage – Central Phnom Penh, March 1975

Photo Credit: Lindsay Nicholls

Body parts and cyclo bits littered the intersection. I vaguely remember yellow plastic shards from the Vietnamese plastics bomb that blew this family into bloody bits in the morning traffic rush hour one day in February 1975. I was on my way to the kids’ hospital on the other side of Phnom Penh on a 125CC Honda and skirted around the carnage. The horror remains etched in my brain. 

So why wasn’t I riding by 15 minutes earlier? 

Cambodian Cyclo similar to the one in the bombing

Credit: Peter Breen

Phnom Penh World Vision children’s Nutrition Centre at Toul Kouk

my destination the morning of the cyclo plastics bomb explosion

Photo Credit: Peter Breen

A few of us were standing on the steps of our French colonial villa home at #10 Keo Chea, Phnom Penh after dinner when we heard the screaming whistle and scrambled into our bomb shelter – the loo – while the Red Cross two doors down took the hit on their reinforced concrete porch roof. The thing is, in “rocket alley” where we lived  – across the Mekong River from the Khmer Rouge rocket launcher – why did that thing land 50 metres down the road and not on us? 

Front entrance and medical team morning gathering – my home for 3 months with the loo bomb shelter inside. 

I was shopping during a break in downtown Phnom Penh when I decided to turn back for something in the shop. It was in that moment that a direct hit landed on the footpath outside.

That was the life I decided on in 1974, leaving my pregnant wife back in Australia to attempt to bring professional compassion and training to a decimated country where the “killing fields “were yet to arrive via as a violent and murderous ideology. Driven compassion can mean a naïve energy that fails to recognise ideological realities where increased risk means increased risk.

Evacuated early – twice – I was flying out for the last time, as Pol Pot advanced on Phnom Penh, in a CIA DC3 with a massive sunlight catching golden painted tail pitching and lurching our way across the Khmer Rouge held Cambodian jungle to finally land in Bangkok with 2 exhausted and relieved pilots. It was not, however, the end of memories or questions for me. 

Before finally heading home via the golden tail plane to Bangkok, Lindsay Nicholls World Vision Medical Team administrator and I drove out of Phnom Penh to attend the wedding of one of our house guards. We had no a clue about where the Khmer Rouge were but knew that the further we drove out of the city and the closer we were to the village where the wedding was the greater the risk of violent encounters. We had an extra guard with his AK47 to increase our confidence and naïve bravado. The wedding was a gentle relaxed few hours as the couple and their family sought to maintain some degree of romance, love, custom and commitment in the midst of dark threats and an unknown future too soon to be realised. 

For the record, there were no land mines, random rockets or plastics bombs on this wedding trip. It begs the question about timing, risk and place. 

Target practice for the unseen Khmer Rouge on our way to the wedding with my Buddhist monk friend – Sauli.

Photo Credit: Lindsay Nicholls

World Vision Medical Team guard’s wedding day with Peter B and another armed guard on the outskirts of Phnom Penh in Khmer Rouge country – December 1974. 

Photo Credit: Lindsay Nicholls

The Couple

Photo credit: Peter Breen

Wedding guests

Photo Credit: Peter Breen

Convivial after wedding feast

Photo Credit: Peter Breen

The World Vision Outpatient clinic Phnom Penh – in the unfinished Sihanouk Hotel on the banks of the Mekong River activated as an outpatient clinic. The X Ray machine and dark room were set up here where I trained two Cambodian lads in basic radiographic positioning, exposure factors and dark room processes. With the influx of refugees, Phnom Penh’s population had risen to 2.5million by the time the Khmer Rouge took the city. Pre-war figures were something like 250,000. Marasmus, Kwashiorkor and TB were rife. 

Photo Credit: Peter Breen

Every weekday morning the medical team would drive  somewhere in the city to clinics, orphanages and hospitals.  Some nights we visited the Australian Embassy or local restaurant.

CEO, nurses, radiographer, administrator and pathologist from Australia, New Zealand and the USA, the head team doctor from the UK and a team of Cambodian/Khmer doctors, clinicians, nurses and trainees. 

Nurse [ Sharon] and pathologist [Barbara] Khmer assistant to Lindsay Nicholls [ Boun Hou] and two orphaned children at the children’s’ hospital

Solid state XRay machine – Tube, factor setting knobs and transformer all in one! The mobile forerunner!

A couple of years ago I found this book in a Salvation Army thrift shop in Brisbane.  “The Documentation Centre of Cambodia” seems to be a kind of Holocaust museum.  “The Killing Fields”, “Cambodia Year Zero”, Netflix “First they killed my father” [Angelina Jolie] build the story I experienced in embryo form in the mid 1970’s.

What happened to Bonaeu and Mondera the two lads I trained and Buddhist monk friend Sauli? The probability of survival is about zero given what we now know. I emailed “The Documentation Centre of Cambodia” only to be asked for the lads’ employment records with World Vision. Helpful but impossible. I suppose a revisit post the Vietnamese invasion and liberation would have been an idea in the early 1990’s but it never happened. 

Another book was given to me in 1979 in the heady years of anti-American imperialism and the boomer hope of a glorious new socialist state somewhere in the world. It is selective reporting with stunning photography but as with any inquiry that has an idealistic/ ideological agenda, Cambodia Year Zero was yet to emerge from the skull filled torture centres.

Then there is Nixon. The empire and legacy maniac who, like Putin, had religious Quake affiliations but who in an effort to stop the “yellow peril” and the domino stack collapse on the West had the Americans bomb the hell out of Cambodia to win at all costs in Vietnam and in doing so, enabled the Khmer Rouge. 

I was in Phnom Penh for about 12 weeks and then I left, as rescuers do, travelling home to family, new work and a middle class kind of living as a young father. What kind of good was done, what kind of legacy? Maybe all my beautiful young Cambodian friends and Buddhist monks were slaughtered, victims of the Khmer Rouge’s hatred of American capitalist expansionist superiority. The Cambodian pastor who worked with us had the opportunity to leave with his wife from Pochentong Airport but at the last minute decided to stay and was murdered by the Khmer Rouge. 

There is no sense in war, no value in violence for egos swollen with power soon fall, either on their own sword or on the swords of justice. Recalling wars never ends them or brings back the dead. The determination to be a pacifist will not see the powerful change or swords beaten into ploughshares. Tribes rise and fall and call for new believers trampling on the lives and loves of millions. Another and more will rise again with violence to preach empire and legacy bringing another cold heart into our streaming services for a few years more and then again. 

I am a poor mediator, a hater of conflict and a lover of beauty. I am some kind of an artist immersed in visions and ideas that sometimes arrive but mostly fall over. The greatest work must be however to work intelligently for real peace and an all encompassing justice founded on a kindness that sacrifices the self for the common good. But is that really so and possible? Is it worth the effort? I dare to suggest it is. I know those who have been such and dream for those who will be the new intelligent and passionate peace and justice workers.  However, what if all one can do in this rough and rowdy world is to take an extra moment to listen unhinged from a scrolling addiction to that spouse or child or friend – or aggressive work colleague – without words, judgement or categorising until they say “Thankyou for listening….it helped?” I think that if that is all I can do then I am part of an answer to a hope that wants to see “justice flow down like a river.” It is part of the peace making process. I am still unable to listen without butting in, forming opinions, wondering why they are in such a mess and wishing they would let me be. But I have decided again – and again – to give it a go.

Peter Breen © 2022

Edit: Dec 2023.