As a medical student in the 1980s, I watched The Killing Fields and it affected me profoundly. I began reading everything I could find about Cambodia’s recent, tragic history — books like William Shawcross’s Sideshow.
In 1993, I took a sabbatical from my post as an eye surgery registrar in London and moved to Battambang, in north-west Cambodia, to join an NGO project training Cambodian ophthalmologists and nurses.
On my first day there, while we were still unpacking, someone banged on the door. It was a British demining officer with the Mines Advisory Group. “Is there an eye surgeon here?” he asked, frantic. “One of our guys has been hit in both eyes by a landmine.” My first case in the hospital eye department was trying to save the sight of a young Khmer man.
Many more landmine injuries followed: a young man who lost both arms and one eye, dying of tetanus; a father and son sharing a hospital bed, each with a matching below-knee amputation.
Another demining officer, Chris Moon MBE of the HALO Trust, became a close friend. His experience of being kidnapped by the Khmer Rouge, not far from Battambang, provided the idea for this story. He later lost an arm and a leg to a landmine while working for the HALO Trust — his book, One Step Beyond, is truly inspirational.
Back in England, I became an NHS consultant and raised my family while juggling a busy working life. But I never forgot Cambodia’s extraordinary natural beauty, or the resilience of its people as they rebuilt from the ravages of the Khmer Rouge. I have published academic papers on landmine injuries and blindness in Cambodia, but I always carried the outline of this story with me. It has taken a long time to write, and I hope I have done justice to a remarkable country and its people.
