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set). The names in the directory proceed in seniority from eight people listed by their full names, with no ranking prefi through ten whose revolutionary pseudonyms are prefi with the word mit (friend or comrade), to nine whose pseudonyms appear with the prefix bong (older brother). The last category was reserved for people with the greatest authority. An even more respectful classifi ta (grandfather), was used for Duch in a few documents, even though he was only in his thirties. Freed from the “exploiting classes” of the past, CPK members and workers at the prison followed deferential rules that were as complex, hierarchical, and baffling as those they might have encountered on their fi day of school or as Buddhist novice monks. The analogies are appropriate because Duch and his colleagues in the interrogation unit had been schoolteachers for many years, and nearly all the workers at the prison were males in their late teens and early twenties, just the age when many of them, in prerevolutionary times, would have spent some time as monks. Moreover, those in charge of the prison, like Buddhist monks, were accustomed as teachers to unquestioning respect. The discipline of S-21 was based on the memorization of rules; it induced rev—
erence for authority and unquestioning obedience.
The hierarchy of the names in the telephone directory suggests that Duch and his close associates were unwilling or unable to forsake the rankings and the deference that had marked prerevolutionary Khmer society and that the revolution had promised to overturn. Those beneath them might also have been reluctant to see the ranks abolished. The former guard Kok Sros, for example, recalled that on one occasion, “Duch told me I had done a good job, and I felt that he liked me. I was pretty sure from then on that I was going to survive, because I had been admired from above.” 12
With the constraints of hierarchy in mind, we can examine the lives and characters of Son Sen and Duch before turning to the people in charge of the various units at the prison.
Son Sen
In 1975 Son Sen was a slender, bespectacled man in his mid-forties. Like DK’s foreign minister, Ieng Sary, he had been born into the Cambodian community in southern Vietnam, where his parents were prosperous landowners. After moving to Phnom Penh as a boy, Son Sen
soon attracted attention for his academic talent. He received a scholarship for study in France in 1950, shortly after Saloth Sar (later known as Pol Pot) had been awarded one. As a student of philosophy and history in Paris, Son Sen joined the French Communist Party alongside Saloth Sar, Ieng Sary, and several other Khmer. Returning home in 1956, he embarked on a teaching career and became part of the clandestine Cambodian Communist movement. In the early 1960s he was the director of studies of the Pedagogical Institute attached to the University of Phnom Penh. He was dismissed from his post in 1962 for his anti-Sihanouk views but was allowed to continue teaching.
In 1963, after Saloth Sar had been named secretary of a reconstituted Communist Party, Son Sen joined him on the newly formed, concealed central committee. In 1964 he was spirited out of the capital in the trunk of a Chinese diplomatic vehicle and joined Saloth Sar and a handful of others in a Vietnamese Communist military base known as “Office 100,” which moved back and forth across the Cambodian-Vietnamese border in response to battle conditions in Vietnam. 13
Son Sen did not return to Phnom Penh until April 1975. During his twelve years in the maquis he bonded with the men and women who would later make up the Party Center, several of whom he had known in France. When armed struggle against Sihanouk broke out in 1968, Son Sen became a fi commander. He soon revealed a talent for battlefield operations. By early 1972, he was chief of the general staff. His colleagues in the Party sometimes found him peremptory and his point of view “bourgeois,” 14 but by