My first overseas tour would be
the one in Cambodia in ‘92.
It was a United Nations mission and
it was designed to support the free and fair elections
under the Dayton Accord, but the problem
was that for United Nations all the parties
have to agree so, at least for 30 seconds,
and unfortunately one of the parties that
was there reneged on it after the fact so we
were already in theatre and they were still
having some problems up to the north west,
up around the Thailand border with the Khmer Rouge
so it got kind of tense in some times
there but where we were around in Phnom Penh
was still pretty stable, just a lot, there was
still ethnic stuff going on.
We got off the plane it was like getting hit
by a fire hose because of the torrential downpour
during the rainy season there and it was funny,
you could set your watch by it.
It would start raining at four o'clock,
stop at six and it was like getting nailed by a,
like I said, a fire hose,
it was so intense the rain that was there.
So that was our first hit.
Then when the rain stopped, the big thing there
was the smell from the city was brutal back then.
The city was designed for originally close
to half a million people.
Really, the infrastructure was in place
for two hundred fifty thousand and
by the time we left there was over a
million people in that city.
So everybody was coming back and
this was after the Khmer Rouge had pretty
well ripped out every, anything you could
salvage out of that city was gone.
So it was just the shells of
the buildings that were pretty well left and
everybody was trying to rewire them and
sewage was flowing into the streets and
it was pretty wicked.