This [U.S. bombing] had a reverse effect on the Vietcong. Instead of driving them back into Vietnam, it drove them further into the Cambodian jungles where they hitched up with this weird bunch of rednecks headed by Pol Pot—the Khmer Rouge. And the Vietcong began to teach the Khmer Rouge how to fight. Now no-one knows how they got so weird up there. They were eating barks, bugs, lizards, and leaves up there, for about five years, basically going wacko. Now, there are some theories: one is that Pol Pot was educated in Paris, in a strict Maoist doctrine, and someone threw into the soup a perverse bit of Rousseau. Which put him over the edge and made him worser than Hitler, even. A back-to-the-land, pure, agrarian, racist ideology with no Jewish Other to get. The only Other they had was the Urban Other, the city dweller in Phnom Phen. So you have to imagine something like 200,000 rednecks rallying 90 miles upstate in New Paltz about to move in on New York, eating barks, bugs, lizards, and leaves.

Suddenly Lon Nol is in office, all of a sudden in a day. Now no-one in America knew anything about Lon Nol, the press didn't know anything about Lon Nol except that 'Lon Nol' spelled backwards is 'Lon Nol.'

He's simply a genius at covering a lot of ground in a very efficient, entertaining (and sometimes terrifying) way. Every writer in the English language could learn some lessons from these eight minutes.

If there's one chunk of Spalding Gray you ever see, let it be this—though the whole performance is galvanizing.

His setup for the story of the invasion of Phnom Phen is gallows humor, but his punch line about the actual invasion is heartbreaking. Don't watch this lower one if you want to preserve your good humor.

And five days later, all three of their livers were carried through the streets on sticks... The Americans took off and thought it was going to be like Da Nang, with Vietnamese riding and holding onto the helicopter wheels, but the Cambodians didn't. They just waved and said: 'Okay, bye bye! Okay, bye bye!' And as the last helicopter took off, a Khmer Rouge rocket came in and killed one of the innocent bystanders. Five days later, April 17, 1975—Cambodia Year Zero... and then the killing began... the motto was: "Better to kill an innocent person than to leave an enemy alive."