By David K. Shipler
You could
not look away from the grim faces on the front page of The New York Times this morning. They were students in Parkland,
Florida, who returned to classes two weeks after their school became the latest
memorial in America’s litany of shootings.
Their
hollow gazes chilled me in a special way, because they wrenched me back to a
picture I had taken 45 years ago of Cambodian children about two weeks after
their village of Neak Luong had been mistakenly bombed by an American B-52. The
huge bombs had marched through town leaving enormous craters like the
footprints of some giant, smashing most of the hospital, obliterating fragile
houses, killing and maiming parents of children and children of parents.
Unlike most kids I’d met elsewhere
in Indochina, these youngsters of Neak Luong did not crowd curiously around an American
to grin and laugh into his camera. They stood silent and unsmiling, their faces
impassive from torment—just like those Florida kids—as if the reverberations of
shellshock had not yet died away. And perhaps never would.
The eyes of
the tallest girl in my picture haunt me still. She is probably about 12 years old.
She looks straight into the lens, but vacantly, without guile or passion. Her
stare seems neither angry nor fearful but emotionally flat, like a veil across
a wound.
In the
center of today’s picture, too, is a Florida girl whose downcast eyes, in
shadow, should not ever be forgotten. She looks broken. Her head bends slightly
forward; she might be carrying a red flower, just visible between two teenagers
in front of her. She seems about to weep—for all of us.
