p With a terrible efficiency, the communists concentrated initially upon expelling the sick and wounded from hospitals jammed with fresh casualties. Troops stormed into the Preah Ket Melea Hospital, Pnom Penh’s largest and oldest, and shouted to patients, physicians and nurses alike. . . .

p . . .Hundreds of men, women and children in pajamas limped, hobbled, struggled out into the streets, where the midday sun had raised the temperature to well over 100 degrees. Relatives or friends pushed the beds of patients too enfeebled to walk, some holding aloft infusion bottles dripping plasma into the bodies of loved ones. One man carried his son, whose legs had just been amputated. The bandages on both strumps were red with blood, and the son, who appeared to be about 22, was screaming, “You can’t take me like this! Kill me! Please kill me! ...”

p . . .One trained observer who watched them from the French embassy compound was John Swain, a young British journalist. Recording the scenes in his diary, he wrote. . . .

p . . .“In five years of war, this is the greatest caravan of human misery I have seen. The Khmer Rouge must know that few of the city’s 20,000 wounded will survive. One can only conclude that they have no humanitarian instincts”. . . .

p . . .That same afternoon the communists began to purge the capital of all printed matter. Rare and ancient manuscripts from temples and museums; the records of government and business; the contents of libraries; dictionaries, medical textbooks; even personal identity-cards—all were targets.

Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of books were thrown into the Mekong River or burned on its banks. Untold others were burned at a dump, and the libraries of Pnom Penh and Buddhist universities went up in flames.