Chance Meeting Led to Killing Fields to Secret Service Memoir
By Joe Samuel Starnes
Leth Oun and Joe Samuel Starnes at the book launch at the Free Library of Philadelphia.
I did not know and was not expecting Leth Oun when he stepped into my office unannounced on a sleepy summer afternoon in 2011 when I was the editor of Widener University’s alumni magazine. A sociology professor and friend of his introduced us, and I asked Leth to sit down for an interview. The story he told me of surviving the horrors of the Cambodian Killing Fields as a child, immigrating to America as a penniless teen, and eventually becoming a U.S. Secret Service officer protecting presidents proved to be exceptional. More than twelve years later, I am still deeply moved by his life’s journey.
That meeting, which initially resulted in a magazine article, led to our close friendship and his book, A Refugee’s American Dream: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to the U.S. Secret Service, which I coauthored. Temple University Press published it in February, and on October 10, it will be released as an audiobook narrated by the accomplished actor Tim Lounibos. I’m excited that Lounibos will join our Collingswood Book Festival presentation via Zoom from Los Angeles to read from and talk about the book. If you can’t be there in person, we plan to turn the session into a podcast that we will share online following the festival.
I also am thrilled that I have the opportunity to talk with Leth about his book at the festival, which I always enjoy and where I have always felt welcomed as an author, participant, and volunteer. The book festival, which takes place only five blocks from my home, is a fantastic gathering of book lovers. I’m happy to have been involved in some capacity every year for the past dozen years.
My previous three books were novels, and I never planned to coauthor anyone else’s story. But the power of Leth’s amazing journey compelled me to work with him. Leth, who did not begin learning English until he was seventeen, wrote a much shorter first draft. I began working with him on it in 2017. It took almost five years of numerous interviews, additional writing, and revisions, to complete.
It has proved to be the hardest yet most fulfilling writing project I’ve taken on, an experience that has changed me for the better. Leth’s life story prompted me to appreciate with great gratitude the good fortune of the idyllic childhood I had growing up in rural Georgia and the comfortable existence I live today in South Jersey. I’ve been so fortunate compared to many around the world who live in fear of war, hunger, and poverty as Leth and his family did. His story for me is not just his American dream but a dream of America as a place that embraces immigrants of all races and religions and welcomes them into our family, a story that fulfills what the Statue of Liberty symbolizes.
The book also has a bigger mission for us. All proceeds that Leth and I earn from the book will go to support Cambodians in need.
Serving as coauthor for Leth—who introduced me to his fellow Secret Service officers as “my brother” when he took my family on a tour of the White House—is an honor that has been more rewarding than I could have ever imagined when I answered his knock on my office door.
Leth Oun, coauthor Joe Samuel Starnes, and actor/audiobook narrator Tim Lounibos to read from and discuss A Refugee’s American Dream: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to the U.S. Secret Service at noon, Saturday, October 7, at the 21st Collingswood Book Festival.
Joe Samuel “Sam” Starnes is an author and journalist who lives in Haddon Township on the edge of the Collingswood city limit. For more about him, visit www.joesamuelstarnes.com.
