War Museum · Siem Reap · Cambodia

Garden Gnomes
of Siem Reap

The only army museum where you truly feel at peace.

Before you enter

These pages are no substitute for the museum. They're an invitation to go. Go: walk slowly among the wrecks, read the placards, listen to the park's green silence.

Here rest machines that took lives, a few ghosts, dogs and chickens. What's missing, perhaps, is a few benches — to sit, to look a long while, and to think of the veterans of every war.

These fine war machines, served by men, are nothing without them.

Here, steel has been disarmed by time, rust, moss, and chickens.

Char vu de face, gueule du canon — Soviet T-54/55 medium tank. Quite the machine: it saw every theatre of war — Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, all the way to Peru.

Siège de tracteur face à un char au repos — A wooden bench, a tractor seat: the only ones left to watch the two T-54/55s.

Poussette vide devant l'hélicoptère Mi-8 — Soviet Mi-8 transport helicopter, in the background. The spot is so peaceful you take children for a walk there.

Hélicoptère Mi-8 entier sous les arbres — Mi-8T, the transport version of the Soviet helicopter. That pale-blue livery is anything but military — converted to civilian use before ending up here?

Only ghosts still haunt this place.

Obus peint, transformé en panneau Toilet — One of the finest crapper signs ever devised. A soldier wrote that, no question — an NCO.

The placard, word for word

If only he knew what happened to chickens during the war…

Artillery 130mm M.46-M47 made in USSR 1952 used in Cambodia 1979 destroyed at Anlong Veng district Oddar Meanchey province on 20 Feb 1994

Text recorded on site, reproduced as found.

The bestiary

The park belongs to hens, roosters and dogs now — and a little to the garden gnomes.

The war's odds and ends

Lined-up ordnance, whole machines, shells turned into furniture: it all ends up stacked, planted, or forgotten in the grass and the astroturf.

III

The green won

Green creeps in through loopholes, hatches and rails. It doesn't ask permission.

The one sign you read to the end

Improvised mines

“You can take any mortar and the detonator from a grenade and you have a fragmentation mine.”
— Leonard Kaminski, project officer, The HALO Trust

Quote recorded from the museum panel.

Cadre de photographies d'archives : survivants, blessés et vétérans cambodgiens

Lest we forget

This frame gathers those who lived through the hell of antipersonnel mines — these survivors, the wounded, the veterans: it's to them the park should offer benches.

Metal & rust

Rust is the passage from metal to plant.

Char T-54 au canon pointé, sous les cocotiers — T-54/55. The one garden gnome that might wake up.

Mara, la main posée sur un canon antichar, regard à la caméra — Mara, the painter, in her polka-dot dress, adjusting the howitzer's aim.

Grenades artisanales alignées dans la salle rouge — Fragmentation grenades, lined up. On the wall, what it costs to throw one.

Life's emergency exit.

Fleur rouge d'ixora sur une mécanique rouillée — The only spot of red in the garden, thankfully.

With no one to arm them, they're just garden gnomes.