Sichan Siv remembers the day the Khmer Rouge communists invaded his homeland of Cambodia in 1975 and forced his family and 3 million other residents to flee the capital city of Phnom Penh.

“My mother, my sister, my brother and their children — 16 of us altogether — left that day, and I am sad to say that of all the 15 people who left with me, I am the only survivor,” recalled Siv, who eventually was resettled in America and later became the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Siv shared the horrific story of his escape from the killing fields of Cambodia and his eventual rise to the top of America’s diplomatic corps with members of the Beeville Rotary Club on Wednesday.

“It’s been quite a journey for me to come from Cambodia to America to New York to the White House to Texas and then to Beeville,” he said.

Siv’s wife, the former Martha Patillo of Pampa, Texas, joined him at the luncheon.

Rotary Club President Blant Miller said Siv was guest speaker at a Rotary luncheon in San Antonio recently and the district president suggested Blant invite Siv to speak in Beeville.

“He said Siv has a really inspiring story to tell so I’ve been working on getting him down here since January, and I’m glad I did because his story is truly inspirational,” Miller said.

Sichan, pronounced See chon, was 9 years old when his father died. He was working for an American relief and humanitarian organization, CARE, in the capital city and studying English, education and law at the University of Phnom Penh in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge communists invaded Cambodia.

When the communist guerillas, led by the merciless dictator Pol Pot, took over the country in 1975, Sichan was given the opportunity to evacuate with the Americans because of his association with CARE.

“On April 12, I was told by the U.S. embassy to be at the embassy within one hour because the embassy would be closed and there would be an evacuation by helicopters,” he recalled. “But I didn’t go right away.”

Instead, Sichan met with the provincial governor’s staff, which was seeking to provide food, water and medicine for some 3,000 refugees trapped in a rural hamlet cut off by the Khmer Rouge.

“I thought that by going to that meeting I would be able to save the lives of those displaced persons,” Sichan recalled.

That decision almost caused him to lose his own life.

“I came to the embassy and I was told the last helicopter had taken off 30 minutes before,” he said. “Five days later the Khmer Rouge came in and forced everybody to get out of Phnom Penh, the capital and the provincial cities.”

Sichan said the Khmer Rouge communists considered intellectuals enemies of the state.

“The first thing I did was to throw away my glasses because glasses were a sign of being educated,” he recalled. “I changed my identity. I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t speak on anything. Because of my background — having been a university graduate, having worked for an American organization, speaking French and English — were all the qualifications for being killed, being eliminated by the Khmer Rouge.”

He can still remember his mother word’s during that frantic departure.

“My mother told me to run and never give up hope,” he said.

Sichan said he rode an old bicycle 500 miles across Cambodia to the border of Thailand in hopes of seeking asylum in that country. He passed decomposing bodies along the way.

“Because of my mother’s wisdom, because of luck and fate, I was able to go through all of the checkpoints,” he said. “I was able to use fake passes and false excuses to get close to Thailand, but unfortunately not close enough.”

Twice he was captured by the Khmer Rouge, and a truck driver saved him from the killing fields both times.

“I was captured and scheduled to be killed but thanks to a truck driver, I was saved,” he said.

Sichan was sent to a forced labor camp. One day when the Khmer Rouge were looking for a crane operator to pick up logs along a river near the border, Sichan volunteered — even though he had never operated a crane before. He said he secretly practiced operating the crane’s controls at night while hiding beneath a sheet and holding a candle.

On Feb. 13, 1976, while he was sitting alone in back of a timber truck, he jumped out and made the three-mile trek to Thailand.

“I walked, I crawled, I swam, I ran for three days. I fell in a booby trap and was severely wounded,” he recalled.

He was arrested by Thai authorities for entering the country without the proper documents and after his release was assigned to live with thousands of other refugees in a camp the size of a soccer field.

To help his fellow refugees combat mental depression, Sichan spent the next several months teaching English to the refugees.

On June 4, 1976, he was resettled in Wallingford, Conn., as a refugee with $2 in his pocket “but full of hope.”

He set out to, as he puts it, “adapt myself to America so that America would adopt me.”

He went right to work, picking apples — “and eating a lot of apples” — selling ice cream and cooking a lot of hamburgers in a restaurant before heading to New York City where he became a cab driver.

Sichan eventually earned a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University.

While in New York, he was introduced to Martha Patillo of Pampa, Texas, who he married in 1985.

In an effort to better understand U.S. politics, he joined the presidential campaign staff of Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush.

After his election to the White House, Bush asked Sichan to serve as an assistant to the president.

“Here I was, a refugee from Cambodia, who escaped from the killing fields, from genocide, only 13 years before and now I was working for the president of the United States,” Sichan said. “So I wrote a letter to 41 — that’s what we called him, 41 — and I said I cannot thank you enough for the privilege and the pleasure to serve you and the American people.”

In 2001, Sichan was named U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a position he served until 2006.

He visits Cambodia and Thailand regularly.

When the people he knew in Cambodia discovered he had escaped the killing fields — and the other 15 members of his extended family had not — they told him he had golden bones, a Cambodian expression given to people considered fortunate.

An estimated 1.5 million of the 7.5 million Cambodians were executed, tortured or starved to death during the four years the Khmer Rouge were in power.

Thirty years after fleeing Cambodia, Sichan recounted his flight and his ascent in the U.S. diplomatic corps in a book he titled “Golden Bones: An extraordinary escape from hell in Cambodia to a new life in America.”

Sichan and Martha live in San Antonio.