p On the five national highways leading out of Pnom Penh, the midday temperature those last days of April rose above 100 degrees. The dry season now ending had parched the flatlands and evaporated the rice paddies, leaving stagnant, fetid pools and ponds increasingly fouled by excrement and bodies.

p No stores of potable water, no stocks of food, no shelter had been prepared for the millions of outcasts. They slept wherever they could, frequently in the open fields and ditches.

p The very young and the very old were first to die. . . .

p . . .Dr. Vann Hay, thrown out of his Pnom Penh clinic on 94 April 17, had started northward on Highway 5, and spent a month on various roads and trails. Of all the agonies he saw, the most difficult for him to bear was the ordeal of the children.

p “We must have passed the body of a child every 200 yards. Most of them died of gastrointestinal afflictions which cause complete dehydratation. I had some medication with me, but most children brought to me required massive dosages, and lengthy rest afterward. Neither was available.”

p Generally, on the main highways, the march was guarded by troops stationed at checkpoints every few miles, and by soldiers posted along the way.

p . . .The discipline imposed by Angka Loeu was Draconian. During the first days of his trek Dr. Vann Hay saw soldiers cut down five or six people who failed to keep pace. “They would give a first warning, then a second warning, then they would shoot. Most of the ones I saw being killed were elderly”. . . .

p . . .Chaos increased as the communists also began emptying villages, jerking peasants from their homes of a lifetime and throwing them into the milling masses of urban exiles. . ..

. . .By early June, the first great exodus was over. Some 3.5 million people from the cities and probably another 500,000 from villages had been unrooted and scattered throughout the land. The highways out of Pnom Penh were barren and quiet. The corpses were deteriorating into skeletons, the hospital beds and cars rusting. . . .