''The ideology we were taught was to clean up the rich and the corrupt, who used to drive cars and look down on peasants, and to send them to work in the rice fields," Nai Oeurn said.
It became a failed effort to demolish and rebuild the nation from scratch, and resulted in an estimated 1.7 million deaths by execution, starvation, overwork, or lack of medical care.
The Khmer Rouge leaders under Pol Pot declared 1975 to be ''Year Zero" and set out to smash private ownership, money, the family structure, privacy -- anything that smacked to them of the old Cambodia. But their ruthless efficiency couldn't fashion a functioning replacement, and in the end, all Cambodians were losers.
Among the biggest losers are guerrillas like Nai Oeurn, many of whom have moved back to their impoverished villages and face suspicious neighbors who still remember the Khmer Rouge days.
Khorn Prak says he was wounded 27 times in battle. When the Khmer Rouge were ousted by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979, he returned home to learn that his mother had died of illness in the years he had been away. Now, at 53, he farms and mends bicycles in a village north of Phnom Penh.
The struggle, he said, ''brought me nothing but my wounds. It was bloody and useless."
Cambodia had already been dragged into the Vietnam War and heavily bombed by US warplanes by the time the Khmer Rouge rolled into Phnom Penh.
They had been besieging the capital for months. The city was teeming with refugees and lacked food and medicine. But to guerrillas from the countryside such as 20-year-old Chhaing Tek Ngorn, it looked unimaginably wealthy.
Now 50 and a farmer, he remembers nervously smiling civilians shouting ''Long live the liberation army!"
Almost immediately, however, the new occupiers began driving the populace into the countryside. Government military officers and high-ranking civil servants were executed. Khorn Prak said it took just a week to turn Phnom Penh into ''a ghost town." Like Nai Oeurn, he was a believer who took part in the expulsion because he had a deep faith in the Khmer Rouge's pledge to eliminate distinctions between rich and poor.
''I had no feeling, did not pity anything. I had no desire to possess anything," he said.
Pol Pot died in the jungle in 1998, and about a dozen top Khmer Rouge aides may face a UN-assisted tribunal later this year. The foot soldiers, however, have been left to make their own peace with the past.
Although they have generally been able to rejoin society, an ''emotional barrier" still remains between them and other Cambodians from their era, said Youk Chhang, director of a center researching Khmer Rouge atrocities.
''Former Khmer Rouge and the victims are not socially integrated as yet, because the Khmer Rouge still remain a living symbol of evil in our society," he said.
