Only a few of the killing fields’ mass graves have been unearthed. The graves are much smaller than I imagined, each 7-by-7-foot plot holding hundreds of bodies. Here, prisoners were blindfolded and made to kneel at the edge of the grave. The Khmer Rouge did not have money to waste on bullets, so they hit each kneeling prisoner in the back of the head with the butt of a rifle. Some fell into the graves when struck; others had to be pushed. Some died instantly from blunt trauma to the head, while others were buried alive in the mass graves and suffocated to death.

In the middle of the field, a memorial tower houses the skulls and remnants of clothing from the unearthed graves. Cambodian Buddhism posits that when a skull is left open to the elements like this, the soul cannot find peace; it will roam aimless and hungry until it meets a proper burial. Looking up at those skulls, I am overwhelmed that each one was a person, a family member, a friend, and I, an avid agnostic, say a prayer that their souls know more peace now than they ever knew on earth. This is the closest I’ve come to believing in reincarnation; that somewhere, somehow, justice will be served. The year the Khmer Rouge came to power, 1975, is the year in which I was born, literally half a world away and figuratively worlds apart. Could I be one of these reincarnated souls?

An attendant hands me a stick of incense to light for the lost souls, and when I do so, placing it at the memorial, he asks me for a dollar. Even the maintenance of lost souls is an industry here.

Exiting the killing fields, we find our tuk-tuk driver and ask to be taken back to the hotel. “One more stop?” he asks, in broken English. “To the shooting range?” he chances. My husband looks at me as if to say, “This guy could not have possibly have said shooting range, right?” But in case we misunderstood, the driver does his best Rambo impersonation: “AK-47? Kalishnakov?” My Lonely Planet guidebook had warned about this. Apparently, ill-paid soldiers in the Cambodian army have taken to making ends meet by charging foreigners $20 to shoot submachine guns at livestock. “No, thanks, just back to the hotel,” my husband says.

Exhausted from the day’s drama, we go out for a low-key dinner at a pho place around the corner from our hotel. It seems perfect: mood lighting, hip, stylish interior, entrées topping out at $2. Paranoid about bird flu, I am excited to see vegetarian noodle soup on the menu and thrilled when it arrives. I can’t stop admiring the tofu’s perfectly firm texture, the delicious steamed greens, the soft, doughy noodles. But then, lifting a noodle up to my mouth with chop sticks, I see the unthinkable: a dead maggot, floating right there in my broth. It is a perfectly shitty end to a miserable day, and I can’t wait to leave my twenties behind.

Michelle L Caswell