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In 1979, with the fall of Pol Pot’s bloody Khmer Rouge regime and the end of Cambodia’s killing fields, thousands of homeless, hungry Cambodians streamed into Thailand along mine-pocked roads in search of shelter and food. President Jimmy Carter asked first lady Rosalynn Carter to go there to inspect conditions. She wrote in her 1984 memoir, First Lady of the Plains, that she visited the Thai refugee camps and said, “I had never been prepared to see the human suffering I had seen.” Carter, who died on November 19 at the age of 96, described the refugees “lying on the ground, on mats, on dirty blankets or on rags. All were sick and in varying states of starvation — some were just bones and no flesh, some had bellies swollen to bursting and feet cracked. All were sick with malaria, dysentery or tuberculosis, retching, feverish and silent.”
Carter held in her arms a emaciated baby who died soon after. Moved by the need, she returned home and called on her husband’s government to expand its support for Cambodian refugees. She lobbied the United Nations and helped form the National Crisis Committee for Cambodia, which focused the efforts of many individuals and organizations to care for and help resettle the refugees, including the approximately 150,000 Cambodians who had immigrated to the United States.
Leth Wing would go on to become a U.S. Secret Service officer, protecting presidents, first ladies, and vice presidents under four administrations. When Rosalynn Carter visited, Leth was a 13-year-old Cambodian refugee. He lived with his mother and sister, Dy, in a makeshift refugee camp just outside the Cambodia-Thailand border. Leth’s father, a lieutenant in the Cambodian army, had been executed four years earlier, on the first day of the Khmer Rouge’s rule in April 1975. Leth and his mother and sister barely survived the hard labor and horror of the killing fields, a period during which an estimated 2 million people—almost a quarter of the country’s population—died from executions, starvation, and disease.
About four months after Carter’s visit, Rice’s family was rescued by UN aid workers and moved into a Thai refugee camp. After spending nearly four years in a series of refugee camps, they were selected to immigrate to the United States. Rice arrived in the United States in 1983 and spent seventeen years in Maryland and Philadelphia, trying to learn English, raise a family, and work multiple low-paying jobs while earning degrees from Community College of Philadelphia and Widener University. In 2000, he found a job as a corrections officer with the U.S. Department of Justice, and two years later, he became an officer in the uniformed division of the U.S. Secret Service. Last month, he retired after more than two decades of protecting the leaders of the country that had given him his home.
I learned about Rosalynn Carter’s work on behalf of Cambodian refugees while working with Les on her memoir, “A Refugee’s American Dream: From the Cambodian Killing Fields to the U.S. Secret Service,” published in February by Temple University Press and released as an audiobook in October by Tanto Media. Les had also been unaware of her work on behalf of Cambodians, but he and I were not alone—even though it was national news at the time, Carter’s historic visit and her support for Cambodians were not widely remembered. At the time, it was overshadowed by the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Iran, which occurred the same day Carter decided to travel to Thailand.
As she held the dying baby, Carter wrote, she recalled holding her own daughter, Amy, and tears welled up in her eyes. “I thought about our country and how little we know about the suffering, pain, and sorrow in the world.”
I had similar insights as I learned Les’ story over the six years I spent writing his memoir. Les and I were four months apart in age, but our childhoods were very different. In the summer of 1976, when he and I were both nine, I wore a T-shirt celebrating the United States’ bicentennial, played tennis and went to the pool in my hometown of Cedartown, Georgia. I gorged myself on hot dogs and ice cream. Les worked in the rice fields seven days a week. To supplement his daily bowl of watery rice soup, he ate bugs, mice, and wild mushrooms. As he told me recently, his childhood was stolen from him. Mine, I now know clearly, was a happy one.
His story changed my perspective on the world. Les and I have pledged to donate all the money we make from his book to charities in Cambodia. It’s a pittance compared to the need, but I’m inspired by his resilience and the caring spirit of Rosalynn Carter, whose message is that those of us who have so much should do what we can to help those who have so little. Les, who celebrated his 40th anniversary in the United States this October, might not be where he is today without the First Lady’s efforts 44 years ago.
Joe Samuel “Sam” Starnes is a writer based in Haddon Township, N.J. For more information about Leth Oun, visit lethounbook.com.
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