Not many people know about the massacre in Cambodia in the mid-70’s, which is weird after learning the scale of how evil it was. I personally didn't enjoy this sad place.

When Pol Pot ‘liberated’ Cambodia in 1975, within 3 hours his army or Khmer Rouge as they were known started arresting people for no more than being teachers, farmers, engineers, professors and students. The reason is that these we ‘learned people,’ and could be a threat to Mr P. Also, there would be a chance that offspring of these ‘learned people’ would be intelligent too, so best elminate them as well.

The Khmer Rouge would ‘detain’ prisoners at S-21 which was a prison, but formally a high school, before the Khmer Rouge came to power. Here they would interrogate and torture the prisoners before moving them to the Killing Fields were they were ‘exterminated.' S-21 is now a museum, which is still kept in disturbingly original decor. Between 1975-78 when the Kymer Rouge regime started and ended, 11000 people were moved through the prison, holding 1200 and 1500 prisoners at any one time, where the duration of imprisonment would be between 2-4 months. Only7 survived.

They said that the Khmer Rouge were so evil that they would take babies from there mothers and simply cut their throats in front of them, then torture and rape the mother. They have some of the torture tools they used in huge cabinets. Even more chilling were the black and white photos taken by the Vietnam army when they finally found the prison and realised what had been happening. The last 14 prisoners that were there were all tied up, tortured and had either there throats cut or were bludgeoned to death. The rooms they were found in and the iron beds they laid in are still in the same room, with the disturbing photo of how they were found hanging on the wall.

The Killing Fields are about 20 minutes away from the prison. All that is there now, are the countless excavated mass graves and a huge memorial stupa which has many human skulls that were from the graves. A few have bullet holes in them, but most have smashed skulls as the Khmer Rouge wanted to save bullets. The prisoners were literally lined up and one by one were either shot or bludgeoned to death and thrown into the mass grave. There are signs around the Memorial stating “this is where….” etc. The worst I think was the Killing tree, where they would beat and kill the children. And the branch above would hang huge speakers that played music as to deafen the noise coming from the prisoners. All of this for being no more than a civilian. Some say that Pol Pot wanted equality between the Cambodians, thus ‘exterminating’ anyone with skill or money, and starting over the entire Cambodian race.

After being demoralised at the Killing Fields we decided to lighten at the shooting range

There was an array of weapons to choose from:

• AK-47 ( Ben and Sam; the most popular with foreigners)
• M16 ( I used this one; it kept jamming though!)
• K50
• Various grenades
• Rocket Launcher
• Anti-aircraft canon
• Colt 45
• Shot-gun

So you can see what a fun day to be had, the only problem is the cost. Each bullet is $1us, except on the M16 which was twice the price. (Smaller bullet, but higher cost!) We only used one rifle each, and we spent $30 each for about 40-50 seconds of fun.