Border Life in Black and White : Books: O.C. photojournalist Kari Rene Hall documents Cambodian refugees’ daily struggle in ‘Beyond the Killing Fields.’

He sits handcuffed on the floor of a bamboo jail cell, his eyes cast downward. Soeurth Tha had told his wife not to go out at night, warning that if she did, he would kill her.

But his wife, eager for entertainment that would break the monotony of their lives, defied him. And when she and their 6-year-old daughter returned from an evening’s outing to a movie parlor, a wildly drunken and screaming Tha attacked them both with an ax, killing them instantly.

“A devil came into my head,” he mumbled softly to a judge the next day. “I want my family back, but I do not want to live here anymore. This camp, it is not a normal place to be.”

The camp is Site 2, the largest Cambodian refugee camp on the Thai border. It is home to 200,000 Cambodians who have fled their homeland, seeking refuge from the civil war that erupted after the ouster of the genocidal Khmer Rouge in 1979.

But, as Orange County photojournalist Kari Rene Hall dramatically illustrates in “Beyond the Killing Fields,” the barbed wire-enclosed sanctuary is “a place where even the strongest spirits can shatter.”

Denied legal refugee status by the Thai government, the Cambodians have been ineligible for resettlement in third countries. Though they would prefer going home, the unrest in Cambodia continues.

And so they remain, year after year, in this interminable limbo, “a dusty bamboo slum in the middle of nowhere.”

With text, co-written by Hall (a Times staff photographer) and Times reporter Josh Getlin, “Beyond the Killing Fields” chronicles a displaced peoples’ daily struggle to survive.

Surrounded by mine fields and within shelling distance of enemy artillery, the narrow 2.6-square-mile encampment is a maze of tiny bamboo huts. Children play in open irrigation ditches containing raw sewage. The only lights in the camp hospitals are powered by truck batteries. Rations--mostly rice, soy beans and dried fish--are meager. Many of the children attend school, but jobs inside the camp are few and boredom prevails. Frustration and despair frequently erupt into violence.

Hall’s black and white images are a haunting mixture of the pain and joy of these all but forgotten victims of war:

- A shirtless young girl stares blankly from the door of her bamboo hut, an angel with a dirty face and a nasty looking eight-inch scar on her belly caused by an artillery shell that crashed through the roof of her house.

- A sobbing boy clasps his head after being beaten by his older brother for trying to steal rice from the distribution center.

- A former anti-Communist resistance fighter, who lost a leg when he stepped on a land mine, calmly picks the lice from his daughter’s head.

- A beaming young father proudly holds his newborn baby for the first time.

In the book’s foreword, Cambodian holocaust survivor Dith Pran calls “Beyond the Killing Fields” (Aperture; $40 hardback; $29.95 paperback) a “powerful documentary. . . . In pictures and words, it reveals the tragedy of Cambodia that has continued long after the Khmer Rouge.”

“I didn’t want people to think that once the Khmer Rouge were out of power and the headlines faded that these people’s problems were over,” Hall explained in an interview. “The suffering has changed (since the Khmer Rouge slaughtered more than 1 million Cambodians in the 1970s). It’s more of a psychological thing they’re suffering now: the frustrations of having their homeland clearly visible across that barbed wire and not being able to go home.”

A book-signing and book-warming party for Hall, with champagne and Cambodian hors d’oeuvres, will be held at 7 p.m. Oct. 22 at Rizzoli Bookstore in South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa.

Hall, who has shown a slide show of her Site 2 photographs on Capitol Hill, also will speak at “United Nations Day-Uniting For Peace” at 3:30 p.m. Oct. 24 in Crystal Cove Auditorium in UC Irvine’s Student Center.

Hall first encountered the plight of the nearly 350,000 Cambodian refugees languishing in camps on the Thai border in 1986 when she accompanied a U.S. congressional delegation on a whirlwind VIP tour of Site 2.

The group was given the usual VIP treatment: Stopping at each of the camp’s administrative centers, they were greeted by well-dressed Cambodians holding welcome signs and banners praising U.S. aid. The children smiled and teen-age girls sang songs. Refreshments were served, gifts given.

But beyond the administrative centers--on the dusty paths separating row upon row of tiny huts--Hall could see women in ragged clothes, their children naked or partially clad. Attempting to get a closer look, she was blocked by armed guards who herded her back into the tour group.

“They put on this show for us, but I just wanted to see what was behind all the smiling and waving,” said Hall, who continued to be haunted by the people of Site 2.

How, she wondered, are they holding up after all these years on the border? What is everyday life like in a war zone? And what of the generation that was growing up inside the camp, having never known a homeland?

Determined to document the effects of “living in this barbed-wire asylum,” Hall vowed to return.

Two years later--after “saving money and hoarding vacation time”--she returned for the first of two extended stays on the Thai border where she shot 10,000 pictures (400 rolls of film) of the people of Site 2.

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Hall said her task was complicated by bureaucracy, military restrictions and even logistics. Although she was once granted permission to stay inside Site 2 a couple of hours after dark, visitors and relief workers--more than 200 doctors, nurses, social workers and teachers from nine relief agencies--are only allowed inside between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.

To be at the camp when it opened, Hall had to be on the road by 6:30 to hitch a ride with relief workers or military personnel. The 1 1/2-hour drive along the border was marked by the ever-present danger of land mines and Thai and Cambodian bandits.

Because of possible shelling, which could close the camp for days or weeks and camp officials could deny her camp pass at any time, Hall said, “I had to shoot each day as if it were my last chance in camp.”

She had no trouble finding willing subjects for her lens.

“They were just so eager to tell their story so people would know what they had gone through and what they were going through,” said Hall, who chose to shoot in black and white because it “allows you to see the essence of the subject without the distraction of color.”

In documenting the camp, Hall also wanted to focus on the daily life of a “typical” family. At Site 2, “typical” means a family in which the husband is either away fighting, is already dead or is handicapped.

Because “it’s difficult to show the absence of something, I thought the handicapped soldier would be the best,” said Hall, who went to the camp’s handicapped workshop looking for someone with the tattoos of a soldier. “Generally, the fiercer the fighter the more tattoos they have,” she said.

She found Chan Peov, a former anti-Communist resistance fighter whose arms, chest and neck are covered with tattoos. One of nearly 3,000 war-wounded in the camp, Peov had lost his leg when he stepped on a land mine.

Although she describes Peov as “hot-tempered”--when he suspected a neighbor of stealing one of Hall’s cameras he attacked the man with an ax--Hall said he is “very gentle” to his 9-year-old daughter Nak, whose mother was killed by an artillery shell when she was a baby.

Hall spent about a third of her time with Peov and his family, becoming so close to young Nak that at one point Peov attempted to have Hall smuggle the girl out of the camp, saying “she loves you very much and wants you to be her new mother.”

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Despite the misery and despair, what impressed Hall most about the people of Site 2 is their spirit of survival.

“What really kept them going, I think, is the idea of someday going home. And they are starting to go home.”

Indeed, a peace treaty under the auspices of the United Nations was signed last fall, calling for the various warring Cambodian factions to disarm and for democratic elections to be held next spring.

But although about a quarter of the Cambodians living in Site 2 have crossed back into Cambodia and have been living in transition centers, Hall said, “the latest (news) is that a lot of them are coming back because the Khmer Rouge refuse to turn in their arms.

“The whole peace process is in jeopardy.”