A great man is gone: Cambodian-born photographer and reporter Dith Pran, whose personal story of escaping the enslavement and genocide of 1970s Cambodia under dictator Pol Pot became the film “The Killing Fields,” died Sunday of pancreatic cancer.

Dith, 65, is credited with coining the terrible term “killing fields,” according to The Associated Press, whose obituary of him ran in this morning’s Press-Telegram–to describe “the horrifying clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims he encountered on his desperate journey to freedom.”

His story emerges from Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, where he was working as an interpreter and assistant to the New York Times’ Sydney Schanberg during the Vietnam War.

Schanberg helped Dith’s family escape Cambodia, when the war ended in April 1975 and both nations were consumed by Communist forces–but he was forced to leave Dith behind.

Dith had to escape Pol Pot’s regime on his own, as the dictator tried to return Cambodia to an agrarian society by–among other sophisticated techniques–killing about 1.5 million people. It took Dith approximately two years.

Eventually, he emigrated to the U.S. and went to work as a photographer for the New York Times.

Here’s his Los Angeles Times obituary, with much more detail on Dith’s life in Cambodia, and how and why he stayed behind. And here’s New York Times coverage.

On film, Dith was portrayed by the late actor Dr. Haing S. Ngor, himself a Cambodian refugee–which may sound like a normal turn of events to those of us who haven’t experienced something as horrible as life under a dictator.

(Ngor was murdered in 1996–some speculated, as retribution for opposing the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot’s regime.)

But it can’t be stated strongly enough that for many Cambodian emigres, the genocide of the 1970s will forever be a central event–the life-changing event–in their lives.

We should also note the Afghanistan and Iraq wars here; they are being covered by armies of reporters and photographers–and, in many cases, native-born assistants who are fulfilling the modern-day role Dith played 30 years ago in Cambodia.

Some of these folks will, we hope, have their own amazing, heartwrenching stories to tell.

Tags: Afghanistan, California, cambodia, Dith Pran, Dr. Haing S. Ngor, iraq, khmer rouge, Long Beach, Los Angeles Times, new york times, Phnom Penh, pol pot, press telegram, Southern California, Sydney Schanberg, The Associated Press, The District Weekly, The Killing Fields, Theo Douglas