A Narrow Escape from the Genocidal Khmer Rouge

Ambassador Quinn recounts how following the January 1973 Paris Peace Accords his transformed role as a State Department Vice Consul was to roam along the Vietnam-Cambodia border reporting on security and political developments. When two fellow officers from the Embassy in Saigon arrived, Amb. Quinn drove them out to the defunct border crossing. On a whim, he offered to drive them into Cambodia to look around, now that the fighting was over. About halfway across the mile-long border crossing, as the sun was setting, some instinct caused him to decide to turn around and return to Vietnam. Several weeks later, it was discovered that the rebel forces controlling all of southern Cambodia were the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal mass murdering organization that killed every foreigner ever taken prisoner. Amb. Quinn feels today that had he continued down that road they certainly would have been captured and killed.