long beach, California, USA – Yoeun Ung lighted three sticks of incense with a disposable lighter, closed his bloodshot eyes and moved his lips in soundless prayer on Friday morning.
He placed the smoking sticks into a Styrofoam cup before a picture of his son, Marine Lance Corporal Sok Khak Ung of the Marines, who was shot dead along with a friend in the driveway of his father’s home Oct 19.
Words do not come easily to Yoeun Ung, who speaks little English.
He is a struggling handyman who fled Cambodia in 1979, hoping to find a haven in this country from the Khmer Rouge.
Instead, Yoeun Ung met the too-familiar US nightmare of sudden, causeless violence and death.
Sok Khak Ung, too, escaped a war, having served for five months with the Marines in Iraq this year, suffering a shrapnel wound and was awarded the Purple Heart.
His four-year hitch was due to end Friday. He was planning to attend college in the California city of San Francisco.
Yoeun Ung said he had simple dreams for his son. “I wanted to see him grow up, stay in school and get a good education and a good job,” he said, his words interpreted by another son, Vibol Ung.
“That’s what we came here for.”
The shooting occurred after midnight, as Sok Khak Ung and several friends and relatives were outside his father’s house, freestyle rapping, drinking and eating barbecue.
The home is a sparsely furnished shotgun-style shack at the end of a driveway off a busy street in a rundown section of Long Beach known as Little Phnom Penh.
The authorities say Asian, Latino and African-American gangs contend for territory and influence in the area.
The police said there was no evidence that Sok Khak Ung, 22, or the other victim, Vouthy Tho, 21, were involved in gang activities.
There are no suspects, although witnesses said that a figure in a dark hooded sweatshirt rose up from behind a 1.5 meter fence and fired a half-dozen shots from a handgun before running away.
Sok Khak Ung was hit twice in the head and once in the torso and died shortly after reaching the hospital. Vouthy Tho was hit in the head and died on Oct 20.
Vouthy Tho’s father, Anthony Tho, a truck driver and also a Cambodian refugee, said he learned of his son’s shooting on Oct 20 when he was in the state of Tennessee.
“When I first came to America,” he recalled, “I thought I was in paradise. I thought I’d have a better life and my son would have a good future. I can’t believe I raised my son for 21 years and now he’s gone.”
Yoeun Ung fled Cambodia in 1979 after 15 years in the military.
“I just kept running, running,” he said.
His journey took him through a refugee camp on the Bataan peninsula in the Philippines, where Sok Khak Ung was born in 1981.
The family landed in the US two years later and found freedom, but much of the rest of the “American dream” eluded them.
The parents split up, and Sok Khak Ung grew up with his mother in San Francisco. He joined the Marines right out of high school as a way of relieving his mother of the burden of supporting him and as a means to a college education.
Yoeun Ung remarried and settled in Long Beach, home to an estimated 70,000 resettled Cambodians and their families. He has barely managed to scrape by, and his face betrays not only his grief but the rigors of a life in perpetual want.
Narin Kem, who is editor of the Khmer-language newspaper Serey Pheap News, which is published in Long Beach, said that while Long Beach had welcomed Cambodians, there was too little police protection in their neighborhoods and too few Khmer-speaking police officers.
Narin Kem said many Cambodian families are trying to move to safer areas, becoming refugees once again.
Sok Khak Ung was assigned to a combat engineer battalion. He arrived in Kuwait with the
15th US Marine Expeditionary Unit in February and crossed into Iraq in the early hours of the war, said his platoon sergeant, Gunnery Sergeant Graham Hilson.
The unit moved into Nasiriya, scene of some of the heaviest fighting in the war, and took part in the diversionary attack to cover the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch on the night of April 1.
Two weeks later, he was injured when a Marine who was patrolling with him stepped on an unexploded bomblet from a US artillery round.
His family was told at first that he was seriously injured and missing in action, but he was located a day later, and his wounds proved relatively minor.
Sok Khak Ung was treated on the battlefield and returned to action three days later.
Sok Khak Ung’s older brother, Pulak Ung, 26, who lives in San Francisco, said he worried every time he heard that his brother was spending time in Long Beach, a place he considered as dangerous as a war zone.
Sok Khak Ung’s body was scheduled to receive a Buddhist blessing on Sunday morning in San Francisco.
He will be buried with full military honors at the Golden Gate National Cemetery today. Vouthy Tho’s funeral will be on Wednesday in Long Beach.
