Dith Pran was educated in French and English and worked as an interpreter for United States officials in Phnom Penh. 

He was working as an interpreter and assistant in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh when the Vietnam War reached its chaotic end and both Cambodia and Vietnam were taken over by Communist forces.

Dith resorted to other work in 1965 when Cambodia broke off relations with the United States.  

Dith's colleague Sydney Schanberg helped Dith's family get out, but was unable to help him escape. 

In 1972, he and Schanberg were the first journalists to discover  the devastation of a US bombing attack on Neak Leung, a vital river crossing on the highway linking Phnom Penh with Eastern Cambodia. 

He escaped from Cambodia's murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979. He first escaped to a commune near Siem Reap and trekked 40 miles, dodging both Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge forces. He then reached a border refugee camp in Thailand, where he contacted his friend Sydney Schanberg.  

Dith settled in the US and went to work as a photographer for the New York Times.

After moving to the US, Dith became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, dedicated to educating people on history of Khmer Rouge regime. 

Schanberg described Dith's story and escape from enslavement in a 1980 magazine article "The Death and Life of Dith Pran", which served as the basis for "The Killing Fields", which later won three Oscars. 

Dith coined the term "Killing Fields" to describe the clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of the victims he encountered. 

Dith said in 1998 when Pol Pot died that he "was saddened that the dictator was never held accountable for the genocide of two of the seven million Cambodian people, including his three brothers. 

Dith was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in early 2008, of which he died three months later on March 30th. He encouraged others to get tested for cancer and defy and fight the odds to live life to the fullest.