ABSTRACT
My first exposure to a situation that felt like a civil war took place not in Cambodia, but later, during my travels in Ban-gladesh in 1983. I was exploring the countryside outside the capital city when an uprising brought the military out into the streets. Unfortunately, I had lost my passport and so was at the time an undocumented alien in a country under martial law, on the brink of upheaval. I made the journey back to Dhaka hidden under a pile of luggage in the back of a bus. I ended up confined to the tenuous safety of a local YMCA compound with a group of other foreigners. The military had set up a sandbag fortification, complete with machine guns, right outside that compound. Protesters came from the side streets to confront them, and were beaten and thrown in the back of an army truck. After that, neither I nor any of the other guests at the compound had any interest in going any further than peering over the compound wall. Seeing one protester beaten and carted away was enough to dissolve my naive thoughts of joining the dissidents. Standing at the barricade took on an entirely different meaning.
