Pen & Sword History

Of course many wounded people never survived to get help. Innumerable Khmer stepped on mines and if not killed instantly died soon after. The bodies were never found. I heard of a Buddhist monk wounded by a mine who, carried by his friends, had almost made it to the hospital. They had stopped in the first village across the border and asked for medical help in the village shop. The shop had somehow got hold of a bottle of an intravenous plasma expander – a blood substitute – and sold it to them. These solutions have a short lifespan and must be absolutely sterile. This bottle was months old and instead of being almost colourless had become green with bacteria. It must have been similar to the green scum on ditchwater. The friends injected this into the monk who was dead within four hours

Sometimes there was a happier outcome. One evening an ambulance rushed in with a seven-year-old girl. She came from a village in the north, right on the border and had been playing in front of her house when there had suddenly been some cross-border shooting. The little girl had been shot in the head and was deeply unconscious. There is realistically almost no hope at all here for someone with a bullet in the brain and we assumed she would die very soon. But we put her on a table in the emergency room and took

X-ray of her head. The bullet was not where we thought it was. It hadn’t even penetrated the skull but had gone through the scalp at a sharp angle, ricocheted along the bone and was lying just under the skin further back. As we looked in amazement at the picture, the girl suddenly woke up, saw some strange-looking Europeans staring at her, jumped off the table and ran off into the courtyard screaming. We eventually persuaded her to come back and have the bullet removed. She kept it as a souvenir. A very lucky girl