- [last lines - at their reunion, with warm smiles]
- Sydney Schanberg: You forgive me?
- Dith Pran: Nothing to forgive, Sydney. Nothing.
- Dith Pran: [in his journal while imprisoned] The wind whispers of fear and hate. The war has killed love. And those that confess to the Angka are punished, and no one dare ask where they go. Here, only the silent survive.
- [listening to BBC reporter Hugh Elder's broadcast on the radio]
- Jon Swain: Where do they get this crap?
- Al Rockoff: That guy across the gate there. The little guy. Could we all not look at once, please? I have it on reliable sources that that's none other than Hugh Elder.
- Jon Swain: You're kidding...
- Al Rockoff: He's disguised, but I got a little suspicious about it, you know what I mean?
- Dith Pran: How does he get his copy out?
- Al Rockoff: How does he get his copy out? Specially trained hens. Yeah, the BBC has commissioned them to walk past the Khmer Rouge like they're regular fowl, and then they've been crossing the border into Thailand every day and every night.
- Jon Swain: If the going gets rough, I heard our best bet's the French embassy.
- Sydney Schanberg: Who told you that?
- Jon Swain: [faint chuckle] The British embassy.
- Dith Pran: [voiceover in Khmer Rouge reeducation camp] They tell us that God is dead. And now the Party, they call the Angka, will provide everything for us. He says, Angka has identified and proclaims that the existence of a bad new disease, a memory sickness like those that think too much about life in pre-revolutionary Cambodia. He says, we are surrounded by enemies. The enemy is inside us. No one can be trusted.
- [young boy Xs out parents in stick figure family on blackboard]
- Dith Pran: We must be like the ox and have no thought, except for the Party. No laugh, but for the Uncle. People starve, but we must not grow food. We must honor the comrade children, whose minds are not corrupted by the past.
- Al Rockoff: It bothers me that you let Pran stay in Cambodia because you wanted to win that fucking award and you knew you needed him!
- Sydney Schanberg: [Shocked] I had no idea that...
- Al Rockoff: The fuck you didn't! The fuck you didn't!
- [Dith Pran is forced to leave the French Embassy]
- Morgan: For chrissakes, Sydney, why didn't you get him out then you had the chance? You had no right to keep him here! Funny sense of priorities.
- Dith Pran: I'm a reporter too, Morgan! I know his heart. I love him like my brother, and I'd do anything for him! Anything!
- U.S. Consul: Look, there could be a bloodbath here. Excuse the pun, but we're either staying or we're living.
- Sydney Schanberg: If anybody ever gets to read about this, you won't be able to look them in the face!
- Sydney Schanberg: Life isn't a '40s movie. You can't just get on a God damn plane and make the whole *world* come out right!
- TV Interviewer: How do you respond to accusations that you and other journalists underestimated the brutality of the Khmer Rouge and so share responsibility for what happened in Cambodia afterwards?
- Sydney Schanberg: We made a mistake. Maybe what we underestimated was the kind of insanity that $7 billion worth of bombing could produce.
- K.R. Cadre-First Village: [Referencing the earlier scene in which Pran saved his life by giving him the expensive Mercades Benz emblem] Mercades... Number 1.
- [grabs Pran's face roughly before cutting him loose instead of murdering him]
- Sydney Schanberg: They brought in the whole fucking press corps! They want to sanitize the story? Bastards!
- Dith Pran: [after requesting from the Cambodian Army guard to allow Sydney to use the restroom] He said there's no piss, Sydney.
- Sydney Schanberg: [disgusted] What do you mean, "no piss"?
- Dith Pran: It means there's NO PISS, Sydney.
- U.S. Consul: I will be damn glad to get out of here. This thing has dragged on too long for it to end in all sweetness and light. And after what the Khmer Rouge have been through, I don't think they're going to exactly affectionate toward Westerners.
- Military Attache: Schanberg, you came on a boat you go back on a boat!
- Sydney Schanberg: That won't stop my story!
- Sydney Schanberg: I got a story to get to New York!
- Dith Pran: [worried] Don't leave me!
- Sydney Schanberg: I won't leave you.
- radio announcer: President Ford, in his foreign policy speech, hardly referred to Cambodia... except to say that, as of now, it may be too late.
- Al Rockoff: I don't like the look of this! I was in Keng Kang this morning, practically got my ass shot off! I just don't think these guys are for real!
- Sydney Schanberg: [standing outside New York City's World Trade Center] Dith Pran! P-R-A-N. He disappeared in Phnom Penh in 1975. Pran is his first name. Any information you can give... well, we're hoping for any information at all! He was last seen in '75.
- Sydney Schanberg: [On the telephone with Pran's son] Is your mother there?... When?... Alright, I want you to get this down... no, write it down! Write it down...
- [laughing joyfully]
- Sydney Schanberg: I've got a message from your dad!
- Australian Journalist 1: Americans take themselves so damn seriously.
- Australlian Journalist 2: Don't be hard on the man. He's just trying to get to the top of the heap, like anybody else.
- Australian Journalist 1: Yeah. We'll just have to pay more to the telex operator, in order to get our telexes to the top of the heap.
- Australlian Journalist 2: The man has just bought you a beer. Now drink up. Cheers.
- Dr. MacEntire: We've had one unit of blood in the last two days. Plasma substitute, please, quick.
- Nurse: Oui, Monsieur.
- Dr. MacEntire: We've plenty of blood, gentlemen. Plenty of blood. The problem is, it's all in the wrong fucking place.
- Sydney Schanberg: As they pondered their options in the White House, the men who decided to bomb and then to invade Cambodia concerned themselves with many things: great power conflicts and collapsing dominoes, looking tough and dangerous to the North Vietnamese, relieving pressure on the American troop withdrawal from the South. They had domestic concerns, as well, which helps explain why they kept the bombing of Cambodia a secret for as long as they could. And they may be assumed not to have ignored self-interest in their own careers. But they specifically were not concerned with, were the Cambodians themselves. Not the people, not the society, not the country. Except in the abstract as instruments of policy. Dith Pran and I tried to record and bring home here the concrete consequences of these decisions to real people - to human beings, the people left out of the Administration's plans, but, who paid the price and took the beating for them.
- Dith Pran: [voiceover in Khmer Rouge reeducation camp] Sydney, Angka says that those who were guilty of soft living in the years of the great struggle and did not care for the sufferings of the peasant, must confess. Because, now is the year zero and everything is to start anew.
- [first lines]
- Sydney Schanberg: Cambodia. To many westerners it seemed a paradise. Another world, a secret world. But the war in neighboring Vietnam burst its borders, and the fighting soon spread to neutral Cambodia. In 1973 I went to cover this side-show struggle as a foreign correspondent of the New York Times. It was there, in the war-torn country side amidst the fighting between government troops and the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, that I met my guide and interpreter, Dith Pran, a man who was to change my life in a country I grew to love and pity.
- radio announcer: So here we go with Voice of America. News for Southeast Asia. It's 6:45 and a partly cloudy morning here. Clouds too in Washington. President Nixon has announced that he will address the nation on the Water Gate case within the next few days. The speech will be Mr. Nixon's first comments since May on the scandal which has resulted in resignations and nearly paralyzed the White House staff. It has also led to a tense confrontation, and perhaps a constitutional crises, with Senate investigators and the special Water Gate prosecutor. His speech was announced after the Gallop Poll disclosed that Mr. Nixon's popularity had fallen to the lowest point for an American president in 20 years...
- Sydney Schanberg: I got a right to go wherever I like in this sad little country. That's their law, that's our law. You impede me, you're breaking the Cooper-Church Amendment!
- Military Attache: Well, up the Cooper-Church Amendment's ass!
- Al Rockoff: Pran's not gonna last five minutes out there! The Khmer Rouge have killed every fuckin' journalist they've ever caught! Now does Syd know how serious this is!
- Jon Swain: [Panicking] Of COURSE he bloody knows!
- Al Rockoff: Anything I eat's gotta be absolutely dead. That is why I can never eat an oyster. I read somewhere that they put that lemon juice on them just to stun them. What's the difference?
- Al Rockoff: I'm not feeling good.
- Sydney Schanberg: I don't want to yell. I want to be in a good mood. The plane was 3 hours late, no car. I had to take a taxi here. All I want to do is work. I got you.
- [picks up the phone to make a call]
- Sydney Schanberg: Deux cent quatre.
- [to Rockoff]
- Sydney Schanberg: What the fuck is that? On your head?
- Al Rockoff: It's a sanitary napkin. I had it soaked in ice.
- Sydney Schanberg: There's a rumor that the United States Air Force dropped a bomb or several bombs, on the city Neak Luong.
- Military Attache: Come on, Schanberg, that's a rumor. Now, I'm not gonna comment on a rumor.
- Sydney Schanberg: I don't understand you. I just want to know if that's the reason why my airplane was delayed!
- Military Attache: No comment.
- Sydney Schanberg: How many killed?
- [pause]
- Sydney Schanberg: How many wounded?
- [pause]
- Sydney Schanberg: Thank you for your cooperation, Major Reeves. When I scrape this story out, I will no doubt be quoting you in *full*.
- Dith Pran: Telex for you.
- Sydney Schanberg: You've been to the telex?
- Dith Pran: Yes.
- Sydney Schanberg: We made the front page.
- Dith Pran: Sure.
- Sydney Schanberg: We must be doing something right.
- Sydney Schanberg: What the hell is this?
- U.S. Consul: Well, listen Sydney, If you weren't down here, I wouldn't be down here. And I don't want to be down here!
- Military Attache: Now, if you can hear me, if you just look across the river you'll see positions we believe to be held by Khmer Rouge infiltrators who moved in over the past few days. But, as you see, the forces of the Cambodian Republican Army are moving in on them. They'll have the K.R. out before you can say "Jack Robinson."
- Sydney Schanberg: K.R.'s making a push for the airport road. If they cut it, the city could be lost. We hype these people up. "You'll be all right with us," we tell them. Now look at all this *fucking* mess!
- U.S. Consul: Hello, Sydney. Good night, Sydney. Listen, I can't talk with you.
- Sydney Schanberg: You can talk to me.
- U.S. Consul: The embassy is jittery. If you want any information, get it from a press officer.
- U.S. Consul: What pisses me off is, that this country has a lot of faults and a lot of strengths and we have done *nothing* but play to the faults.
- Al Rockoff: [Pran pleading with Khmer Rouge soldiers outside of an armed vehicle where Sydney and Rockoff, taken prisoner, are sitting] Why doesn't he get his ass in here?
- Cambodian Prisoner: He's trying! He's trying to get in! They won't let him in.
- Dith Pran: Tell my wife I love her and look after all my children. She doesn't speak any English, Sydney. Please, I don't want anyone to be bad to my wife.
- Al Rockoff: [taking Pran's passport photo] Don't smile.
- [Pran laughs]
- Sydney Schanberg: You're smiling.
- Al Rockoff: Very serious. You are smiling. Stop, please.
- Sydney Schanberg: Very serious.
- Al Rockoff: Very serious. Very American.
- Dith Pran: Yes.
- Richard Nixon: [archival footage] There are no American combat advisors in Cambodia. There will be no American combat troops or advisors in Cambodia. We will aid Cambodia. Cambodia is the Nixon doctrine in its purest form.
- Dith Pran: [voiceover in Khmer Rouge reeducation camp] I'm full of fear, Sydney. I must show no understanding. Not of French or English. I must have no past, Sydney. This is the year zero and nothing has gone before.
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