Imagine you’re happy with your family doing something, maybe playing, in a party, or eating the meal, promptly people outside start to scream, soldiers get in to your house and tell your family everyone should go outside; you discover that soldiers are taking over all the city, they take you to a camp, force you to put some black ugly clothes so everyone looks the same, cut your long hair that you like so much, force all the members of your family that are capable to work hard every day, give your family a small amount of food that barely one member of the family could eat alone in normal days, kill most of your family, send you to a camp that teaches you to fight, kill and that the soldiers that killed your family and the person that lead them are good people, the “good ones”. Now imagine you survive to that till the end of it and long time after it, how would you be after all? Would you be the same person as before? How you would be emotionally affected? Does the way it affected you will affect the way you’ll act in the future? Those are interesting questions to ask to people that have already had this experience and I will explain how Loung Ung, the author of First They Killed My Father, A Daughter of Cambodian Remembers, was affected by the Khmer Rouge invasion and the camps of child soldiers. Loung has enormous changes through the war and the camps she goes; she starts acting in a more violent way and just thinks about revenge in difference with her sister Chou, who also survived but didn’t let rage and hatred take over her actions and way of thinking. In this camp the Khmer Rouge and Met Bong train children to be soldiers, there they tell Loung and the others that Pol Pot is great and that the Khmer Rouge soldiers are the strongest, what made Loung be confused about what is wrong and right.
In the beginning of the novel Loung was a nice girl, but as the book says she didn’t act as most girls use to, “-You are the most troublesome child-…It must be hard for her [Loung’s mother] to have a daughter who does not act like a girl, to be so beautiful and have a daughter like me”(Ung 2). Loung was always playing and running, she was a happy girl. Close to the end of the novel Loung was no more a happy girl, she become a girl full of rage and desire of revenge as the book shows, “Die! I hate you! I am going to kill you!” (Ung 126). She almost killed a girl but Met Bong stopped her from doing that. She changed so much because the soldiers treated her and her family really badly and almost all her family died by the hands of the Khmer Rouge soldiers. That made the rage grow inside her slowly; she, as any other angry child, exaggerates the rage she feels by saying “Pa, I am going to kill them. I am going to make them suffer”(Ung 119), with that she shows all her rage that is as big as she says, but she exaggerates when she says that she will kill them all, make them suffer because she isn’t capable to do it.
Loung thought that to be strong was to fight back, to react in a violent way to the insults of other people and to always want revenge for what the soldiers did. Instead of Loung, Chou, her sister, was calmer than her; when people insult her Chou stays in her place quiet trying not to get in trouble; although Chou’s thoughts were never mentioned, in the novel she never says something about revenge or acts in a violent way. Because of that Loung thought Chou was weak as she shows in the novel, “Chou, you’re older than me, stop being so weak,” (Ung 130). Loung feeds her strength with her rage making herself want to be alive so she can revenge for her family, something Chou doesn’t understand because, instead of Loung, she dreams of a day when war will be over and everyone will find peace again; that shows Chou is more mature than Loung, she is mature enough to forgive people for the mistakes they have done, which doesn’t mean she never feels rage but she knows how to control it and not let herself be influenced about the simple thought of “an eye for an eye”, she thinks “they took an eye, I forgive them for that” and shows how mature she is. Loung thought she was strong, that she could stand with anything, that she could survive without her family, but at last she notice it wasn’t true, she couldn’t survive alone; and she notice that when she goes to the infirmary and see her family “I cannot believe my eyes. I look into their beaming faces” (Ung 154), here she notice how happy she is with her family, and doesn’t want be apart from them again, in this moment everyone can notice that she is not as strong as she says and all this violent actions and thoughts was like a wall protecting her, don’t letting other people see how vulnerable she was.
In Ro Leap was the camp where the Ung family lived for a long time. After a time when only Ma, Kim, Loung, Chou and Geak lasted in the hut, whole families started being killed and Ma forced Kim, Loung and Chou to go to different camps because there the soldiers wouldn’t kill them and maybe they could have more food than in Ro Leap. They obeyed her and Kim went to a different camp from Loung and Chou, but the girls couldn’t be apart of each other, they weren’t strong enough for that as Loung describes in the book “Without words of goodbye or good luck, he turns and walks away from us…Chou and I cannot separate ourselves so we head off in the same direction” (Ung 123). They went to a camp where the strongest girls would be trained to become soldiers; in all the girls' camps there was a person they called Met Bong who ruled the camp. The children in that camp were trained all day long and everyday ; first they just planted and harvested rice and other seeds; then, when they were older, Met Bong started teaching them how to use weapons; every night in the dinner Met Bong told them many things about The Angkar and The Youns as “Angkar is all-powerful! Angkar is the savior and liberator of the Khmer people!” or “Though there are many more Youns than Khmer soldiers, our soldiers are stronger fighters and will defeat the Youns! Thanks to the Angkar!” (Ung 125). Sometimes it changes from Angkar to Pol Pot and the children should repeat three times Angkar or Pol Pot, depending on what Met Bong says, after each sentence she says. After so much time hearing that and pretending she agrees with all Met Bong says, Loung starts getting confused about what she really believes; she knows that she hates Khmer soldiers for killing her family, but she doesn’t know anymore which side she must trust, which side is really trying to protect her instead of sending her to right death.
A war, it doesn’t matter of which kind, will always affect people in some way; some will be more affected than others, some will change from a happy person to a forever depressed person, or maybe a person doesn’t apparently change, maybe the only thing that changes in that person is the perspective of things and the appreciation for small and simple objects and moments. It doesn’t matter how much someone changes and how they do it, what matters is that in any situation a war changes everyone and everything, perspective, actions, decisions, appreciation, government and even a whole country.
