Paul Thai

Tales of great tribulation and survival are extraordinary no matter how you cut it.

Loung Ung, author of “First They Killed My Father” and the Book-in-Common guest speaker, is a walking testament of determination and the human will.

Paul Thai’s story projects the same sentiment, the same warmth and empathy.

Thai, a lieutenant with the Dallas Police Department, spoke Oct. 24 at the Central Park Campus as part of the What it Means to be an American speaker series about his experiences in his home country of Cambodia during the four-years of Khmer Rouge reign and genocide, and his escape to the United States.

Thai was an 11-year-old living in Phnom Phen, the capital city of Cambodia, when the communist regime, Khmer Rouge, grabbed control of the government and evacuated all the cities, forcing everyone to the countryside to toil in work camps.

Thai said his family -- 18 children, total -- were poor and during the fighting between the existing government and the guerrilla Khmer Rouge, they moved around the country for safety. Once the Khmer Rouge grabbed control, they thought days of peace were in the mail.

“We were so tired of war, the shooting. When the Khmer Rouge took over, we were so happy because we thought the war was over,” he said.

Following the evacuation of the city, Thai and his family took a 3-day trek to a farming village, seeing dead bodies of the executed strewn on the roads. At the farming village, his family was eventually torn apart -- siblings sent to neighboring villages and his father taken to a “re-education camp,” where he was tortured.

At a new camp, Thai dug ditches and built dams for rice paddies. He did not make friends or alliances in fear of spies. He ate his daily allotment of water rice soup. His body faded from a healthy countenance to a near skeleton from malnutrition and starvation.

He saw men and women executed -- doctors, teachers, students, academians and artists. Or those who wore glasses, had soft hands and high foreheads -- any evidence that they were not members of the lower, working class.

“Many days I remember going to bed hungry. It was rough,” Thai said. “I got sick many nights and if you’re sick you don’t get your rations.”

At age 11, Thai found himself at a precipice.

“I prayed to God to tell me who he was. I didn’t see any meaning to life,” he recalled. “I was so skinny and I thought I was going to die.”

Then the rockets began. The Vietnamese army invaded, liberating many of the camps. He returned to the camp his mother and younger siblings were at and discovered that other siblings had perished. His father returned. The family risked their lives staying in the village to wait for another brother, who eventually arrived.

Together, the family dreamed of one thing -- coming to America. Thai’s father bribed some soliders and the family attempted an escape through the Cambodian jungle, ducking booby traps, wildlife, thieves, land mines and bullets from the Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai and Khmer Rouge armies.

Once they arrived in Thailand, they were loaded on buses and told they were on the way to the airport for a ride to the United States. Instead, they were dropped off among the perilous mountain range on the border of Cambodia with Thai rifles pointing in their backs.

The family walked in a line with all the other refugees back to Cambodia in order to minimize contact with land mines. The elderly and newborn were left in the mountains. Thai recalled seeing the body parts of land mine victims. Thirty days and 30 nights later they were back in Cambodia proper with still the dream of America.

Again, they snuck through the jungle in order to find passage to Thailand and to America.

This time it worked, they found a refugee camp, and took shelter and two years later, they received sponsorship to arrive in Dallas in July 1981.

“Still, we had life,” Thai explained succinctly.

Thai continued to discuss he and his family’s transition to American life -- hamburgers, grocery stories stocked with an overabundance of goods, “I Love Lucy,” etc.

In 1986, Thai became a U.S. citizen and one of Dallas’ finest for 22 years serving in the northeast part of the city.

His survival brought on more life than he could’ve imagined as a starving 11-year-old: he’s been married 23 years and has five children.