When he fled Phnom Penh, Saloth Sar abandoned the double life he had led since he began teaching at Chamraon Vichea and the identities he had adopted since 1953. He was no longer restrained by his career, by his family connections, or by the exigencies of a united front. From this point on he was a full-time revolutionary. His movements were more restricted, but in his own circle he now had greater freedom to develop his views and to plan the party’s seizure of power.

As a full-time militant, Sar assumed a new set of identities. After 1963 his personality, statements, and behavior became fused with Cambodia’s Communist movement and with his position as “Uncle Secretary” (om lekha) or “Brother Number One” (bong ti muoy) as he came to be called. His later history suggests that either he kept much of himself hidden or he had a protean personality, revealed in his frequent changes of direction. In any case, after March 1963 Saloth Sar’s personality became even more inaccessible and his life story more difficult to write.44

CHAPTER FIVE - “Red Khmer,” 1963—1970

CHAPTER FIVE

“Red Khmer,” 1963—1970

For seven years after his flight from Phnom Penh, Saloth Sar was on the run, hiding in makeshift camps in eastern and northeastern Cambodia. The only respite occurred in 1965-1966, when he spent several months in North Vietnam and China. Most of the time, Saloth Sar, Ieng Sary, and others on the Central Committee were cut off from developments in Phnom Penh and elsewhere in the world, except as filtered through intermittent party couriers (known as nir‘sei, or “trusted people”) and shortwave radio broadcasts from China and Vietnam. This isolation affected their decisions.

After 1963 Sar and his friends met few nonbelievers. They talked continuously to each other, bonding together and reinforcing their paranoia and their self-assurance. They probably spent most of their time identifying “enemies” (khmang) and constructing scenarios for the Cambodian people. Gaps between the scenarios and what Cambodians wanted—to say nothing of what was feasible—were numerous and wide. They went unnoticed. When the leaders of the party said that theory was subordinate to practice, what they meant was not that theoreticians had much to learn from ordinary people but that the integrity of the leaders themselves, rather than a theoretical stance, determined which strategies and tactics the party would follow.

For Saloth Sar this period, discouraging as it seemed, probably reinforced his sense of destiny and self-importance. Approval of his ideas came from subordinates in the party who were forced by his status to be deferential. Moreover, with no territories or populations to administer, he made few practical mistakes. Because his realm was insubstantial, his ideas could be utopian. The party members he met were all, in a sense, his students. To extend the metaphor, he ran the school he taught in—a school that had no inspectors, no parents, and no external governing body, except, perhaps, the Vietnam Workers’ party in faraway Hanoi.