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VEGAS INC FORMER CAMBODIAN ARMY FIGHTER finds success, friendship in las Vegas DOUGHNUTS, From page 1 the 1970s and fought Vietnamese communists for years. His war stories impressed Metro Police officers who patrolled the east side and stopped by his store. Dozens of motorcycle cops, gang-unit members and other officers have posed for pictures with Seang at Donut Hut. The photos blanket the walls. In them, Seang wears military fatigues and carries a rifle and an American flag. Uniformed police line up on both sides of him, sometimes with squad cars or motorcycles as props. In one picture, cops stand side by side, flanking Seang and aiming their shotguns at the camera. "If you work southeast, you know Sothy," a veteran officer said. Seang arrived in the United States as a refugee with no money or job skills and lived on welfare for years. He's more than grateful for the help. Today, he is a gung-ho patriotic American citizen. He has marched in the local Veterans Day Parade for nine years as an allied soldier, and he tells everyone who will listen that he owes his life to the United States. "To me, this is my heaven because my life over there was hell," he said. ••• Seang was born in 1956 near Battambang in western Cambodia, a two-hour drive from the Thailand border. He was the second of three boys. Their mom, Sun, was a homemaker, and their dad, Sipan, worked for the local court system. In 1970, an already volatile Cambodia was thrust into further chaos. Gen. Lon Nol seized power in a coup, deposing the royal government and kicking off five years of civil war. With war raging in neighboring Vietnam, North Vietnamese forces used Cambodian jungles as a staging ground to attack the South Vietnamese. American and South Vietnamese forces invaded in mid-1970 to push them out but failed. President Richard Nixon then ramped up America's bombing campaign there, strafing eastern and central Cambodia to wipe out Vietnamese enemy fighters. Seang's father joined the Cambodian Army in 1970 and became a captain. Seang was enthralled with the military. He liked the uniforms and the fact that people got paid to be soldiers. 16 20140106_VI01_F.indd 16 PHOTOS BY STEVE MARCUS CASH ONLY: Cambodian refugee and Las Vegas entrepreneur Sothy Seang, 57, is shown at his doughnut shop, the Donut Hut. The store doesn't take debit or credit cards, and Seang has no plans to modernize in the future. "People go to the ATM and get cash because they need my doughnuts," he said. He wasn't interested in school — he usually ditched his homework to play soccer or do other activities — so he dropped out and joined the Army in 1972. He was 16 and was paid the equivalent of $1.60 a month. One night on watch, his partner was smoking a cigarette. Viet Cong soldiers hiding in the jungle saw the burning ember. Two of them crawled arm over arm, slit the partner's throat and stabbed him in the chest, killing him. Seang was 20 feet away. He saw the cigarette drop and heard his teenage partner moan. Seang screamed to get other soldiers' attention and shot the attackers with his M16, killing them. A Vietnamese fighter hit a nearby Cambodian machine-gun post with a rocket-propelled grenade. He fired another at Seang but hit a Cambodian bunker instead. Debris slammed into the back of Seang's helmet and right hand. Seang reloaded his rifle and killed the attacker and another Vietnamese soldier. Lightheaded and bleeding, Seang was airlifted to a hospital. Doctors stitched the back of his head and amputated his mangled index finger. His commander, a colonel, brought a one-star general to visit Seang in the hospital. The colonel had informed the general about the firefight, and the general told Seang that he wanted him as his bodyguard. Seang stayed with him for more than a year, until Pol Pot took control. ••• Pol Pot, born Saloth Sar, was a Frencheducated communist revolutionary. His brutal Khmer Rouge army captured the capital, Phnom Penh, in April 1975, starting a reign of terror and genocide that wiped out almost a quarter of the country's population. To turn Cambodia into an agrarian, peasant-based society, he evacuated cities and forced everyone to work in rural, slave labor camps, where thousands of people died from starvation and exhaustion. He emptied hospitals, shut the borders, abolished the banking system, and banned holidays, music and entertainment. Mass graves were filled with executed lawyers, teachers, bureaucrats, businesspeople, Buddhist priests and soldiers from the defeated army. Children who resisted the Khmer Rouge were buried alive, fed to crocodiles or tossed into the air and speared on bayonets. Seang's father was killed around 1976, and his family, like countless others, was split up and sent to labor camps. With the stench of decaying bodies in the air, Seang worked seven days a week, bathed in groundwater, slept crowded in between rows of people and ate little food. He got a bowl of rice and water twice a day. While working in the fields, he stuck frogs and crabs in his pockets to cook later over a fire. Pol Pot's regime collapsed after Vietnamese forces, retaliating against a Cambodian attack, invaded the country on Christmas Day 1978. The labor camps emptied out, but Seang had no plans to flee his country. He wanted to fight. ••• Seang's Army unit had buried their weapons under a Buddhist temple in | 6 JANUARY 2014 | 1/2/14 1:23:10 PM

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