BA CHUC, Vietnam— Before the Vietnam War, Cambodians used to trudge across the border into this nondescript town in Vietnam's Mekong Delta to trade. During the war, supplies for Viet Cong forces also came this way. That's why the landscape is cratered and often sparse in vegetation, the result of American bombing and use of the herbicide Agent Orange.

Especially after the war spread into Cambodia, Vietnamese communist forces assisted their Cambodian co-revolutionaries, the Khmer Rouge.

But the large force of armed Khmer Rouge that entered Ba Chuc, four miles from the border, on April 18, 1978, was different. And it was two mysterious "Chinese beauties" carrying rifles that Ha Thi Nga, 64, remembers most as destroying her family.

"These two beautiful Chinese girls came with three dark-skinned Cambodians and herded my family outside our house at gunpoint," she murmured, adding that the girls spoke to one another in a language that was neither Vietnamese nor Khmer.