Saloth Sar is remembered by contemporaries in Kompong Cham as a mediocre student. “His manner was straightforward, pleasant, and very polite,” one of them said. Another recalled that Sar “thought a lot, but said very little,” while a third noted that he spent much of his spare time playing basketball and soccer: “He was a pretty good player, but not outstanding.” Saloth Sar seemed to have had no clear ambitions. He was content to drift along, enjoying his companions without making a strong impression on them, secure in the knowledge that he was among friends and would always be welcome in Phnom Penh and Prek Sbauv.

Ironically, in view of the paths they followed later, Saloth Sar’s closest friend at the school was Lon Non, an official’s son from Kompong Cham. Lon Non’s oldest brother, Lon Nol, became president of the Khmer Republic in 1970, leading his country to defeat at the hands of the Cambodian Communists, led by Sar, and the Vietnamese Communists. There is no evidence that the friendship with Lon Non survived Sar’s politicization in the 1950s. Under the republic, Non was a political troubleshooter for his intellectually limited brother. As defeat loomed in 1975, Lon Non, by then a general, hoped to capitalize on his friendships with the Communists who had gone to school with him in Kompong Cham. He lingered in Phnom Penh after it was captured, certain that these old friends would remember him and that he could reach an arrangement with them. He was executed within forty-eight hours.19

In late 1944 the war in the Pacific reached a crescendo, and the students in Kompong Cham experienced some of its effects. Phnom Penh was bombed by Allied aircraft in February 1945, and American bombing of coastal shipping isolated southern Vietnam from the less prosperous north where severe famines killed tens of thousands of people. Communist guerrillas in northern Vietnam, calling themselves the Viet Minh, began to attack isolated Japanese positions. To the west, the Thai government began to drift into the Allied camp. In Europe, where most of France had been liberated from German control, a new French government under General Charles de Gaulle pledged that it would assist Great Britain and the United States in their war against Japan. De Gaulle also promised to restore French rule in Indochina. Sensing a change in the political atmosphere, some French military officers and civil administrators in the colony began working surreptitiously for the Gaullist cause.

The Japanese response to these developments was swift and unexpected. On March 9, 1945, they staged a coup de force throughout Indochina, imprisoning French officials and military personnel and placing other French citizens under house arrest. Soon after, the Japanese asked the rulers of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to declare that their kingdoms were independent. King Sihanouk complied on March 11. The French protectorate, considered by nearly everyone in Cambodia to be a fact of life, had been unceremoniously blown away.20