Bullets & Fire
“I know I was afraid, but we were so busy running.” — Rindy
Three days later
I called to the back of a woman.
“Mteay!” Her shoulders were sharp ridges, and her spine protruded from the back of her black clothes, but there was a hint of the familiar. She was swarmed by a mob of other black clad people, pressing in panic. The commune where I had last seen my family was in a frenzy as the half-dead occupants grappled with their newfound autonomy while trying to find their lost families.
“Mteay!” I hoped I wasn’t shouting at the back of yet another woman who was not my mteay. The woman turned; her black eyes stared at me from the dark hollows of her face. I recognized the remnants of who had once been my beautiful mteay. Her frame was withered and frail. Her hair, which had once been a lustrous black, was streaked with gray and matted. Her eyes were as starved as she was, as if they too had only feasted on disease and loss for the past four years. My chest throbbed looking at her. How had she survived?
“Rindy,” she gasped as if coming to life in a fleeting burst of energy. She wove through the mob of confusion toward me with groping arms, eyes locked on mine.
“I’m so happy! So, so happy—” she whispered over and over again as she clutched me to her sunken chest. Her breath rattled like a rock clinking into an empty canyon. Her heart throbbed against my cheek. Weak but relentless.
“Have you seen Vuthy? Anyone else?” I asked, still pressed against her cheek.
She shook her head, trembling. I couldn’t tell if she shook from the shock of seeing me or if her frame always quaked like a dying leaf barely hanging onto a branch.
It was hard to breathe, hard to think in an embrace that was so unfamiliar. I didn’t feel safe, even in Mteay’s shaking arms.
I had been running with the constant fear of the Vietnamese shooting at my back, and it had consumed me—every step—for the last three days. The face of Vichet and my fallen mets stared at me from puddles in the dirt. Their voices called out to me in the night. The ideology of the Khmer Rouge was crumbling around our heads. Ironically, I felt the need to help support its teetering stilts for fear a greater oppression would replace it. I feared the Khmer Rouge, but it was a fear I had grown comfortable with. It had rocked me to sleep each night, awoke me each morning and held my hand with each step of the day for the last four years. It was familiar to me, and I knew every corner of its massive temple. The Vietnamese were a new fear, an unknown fear. Unknown fears are worse.
I couldn’t stop the feelings in my chest—feelings of guilt, panic, and rage that played tug of war with my senses. Why had I been spared when everyone else had died? I could only see one way out. To help fight the green typhoon ripping through my country. Maybe it could help redeem the bad karma sticking to me for being a coward. It seemed like my only logical option. I had rehearsed it over and over in my head for the last three days as I made my way to find Mteay.
“I’m joining the Khmer Rouge forces—” I wheezed; my voice muffled in her shirt.
“What?” she rasped, bending down closer to hear me.
“I’m going to join the fight.” My eyes met hers. “We must fight the Vietnamese. They’re going to kill us all.” Each word I uttered made her face contort in pain.
“No.” She shook her head, moaning. “No, no, no!”
As she clutched me closer to her chest, I realized how much I had grown since I had last stood beside her. I now stood taller than her. I was still short for a sixteen-year-old, but I welcomed the realization of growth. Despite the starvation and overwork, my bones had managed to stretch themselves upwards. My feeble body’s determination to live surprised me. Feeling Mteay shaking me, brought me back.
“Rindy, you will not go that way.” Her voice was pregnant with resolve. “Do you hear me? You are not going that way. I need you with me now.”
It was strange to hear the words from her tongue. Words I had wanted to hear for as long as I could remember. I had often imagined what it would feel like to be wanted by her, to be needed by her. But now that it had come, I didn’t know how to feel. The deep pleading in her eyes made me relent on my decision to join the Khmer Rouge. I could at least help her get someplace safe before leaving. Maybe I could find Vuthy on the way.
“Let’s go back to Phnom Sampov.” Mteay summoned me with her words and her strong grip on my arm. “Everyone will know to go there. Everyone who—” She left the words unfinished, but I knew what they were.
Everyone who was still alive.
It was the unspoken current throbbing through the air. Who was left? Who had survived?
I helped her onto the road with the mob of others who were fleeing the hopeless camp where we had been held prisoners of a twisted ideal, which was crumbling all around us.
Mteay gripped onto me as if she were holding the only thing she had left in the world. As far as we knew, that could be true. Loss and fear have a way of making life constrict, leaving only the necessary in its clutch. Everything else blows away like chaff in the wind. Family was a concept she now clung to. Desperately. Hopefully.
Bullets exploded in the distance, endlessly shooting. We picked up our pace and ran east with thousands of others. We weren’t sure if we were running from or toward danger. We just ran.
Several miles from the commune, the landscape opened into rice paddies, ripe and golden. The farther we walked, we found dead bodies slumped over on the road, swollen and days old. I passed one, not thinking much of it, but then I passed three more. The road and paddy was littered with bodies. As we got closer, we could see their stomachs were swollen by the sun and crawling with maggots. Decay had disfigured them past recognition, and the hot earth had already begun to eat their eroding flesh. I didn’t know if they were fallen Khmer Rouge, Vietnamese or those caught in between. The flies feasted without discrimination. I had never seen so many dead in one place before. As my gaze traced the horizon, I found thousands laying amidst the ripe rice. Life was interlaced with death.
Carefully, we tiptoed around them, with our krama’s covering our faces. It felt like it took days to get past them all. The very soil was full of death and I wondered how it could possibly hold another bite. My lungs burned from the putrid air, but they continued to suck it in. We kept going until the air was cleaner and the stars began to glimmer in the night sky.
Near a large paddy, I left Mteay to sleep for a few hours, while I gathered rice and threshed it beneath my feet. Finding a plastic jug, I poured the rough rice grains in, making them easier to carry. I was thankful the paddies were dry, crisp and ripe for the taking. And that there was no one to stop us. The Khmer Rouge were too busy fighting the Vietnamese.
Mteay awoke, and we continued on, tripping at last into the shrouded village I had once called home. It was barely recognizable. Mteay clung to me in shock at the devastation. The formerly neat streets of Phnom Sampov were polluted with ashes and toppled structures but alive with stray animals and birds. It looked grotesque in the darkness, like a face broken and bruised. I had known these streets well, but the disarray erased all familiarity.
“I think it’s this way.” I turned down a road, trying to trust my instincts when my eyes were no help.
We wound our way through felled bamboo poles, crunching and gray amidst abandoned carts and supplies, until the surroundings offered a hint to my memory. The farther we went, the bleaker it became.
We approached the place where Chidaun’s house had been, desperately hoping it hadn’t been burned or torn down. Hope is a resilient thing, and I marveled that we were still capable of it. Standing on familiar ground, we looked to where the house had been, with its fine walls and roof, seeing only a few charred stilts and broken water pots. That was all that remained of Chidaun’s once grand home. I stood where we had burned her corpse, but the memory felt like it was from another life. And it was.
“Why would they do this?” Mteay asked feebly.
“Because they could.”
Even in the darkness I bent down and saw the vibrant colors of baby clothes and one of Mteay’s vibrant skirts, half buried in the dirt. I reached out to touch it, letting my eyes linger on them for a moment. I had almost forgotten what color looked like. Following Mteay, I walked to where the porch had been.
“I wonder if there is anything the Khmer Rouge has not taken,” Mteay whispered as her tears fell. She didn’t bother to wipe them away as she surveyed the wreckage.
Soon, the smell of smoke choked the air. I ran down the road to see what was on fire.
The horizon danced with firelight. My stomach twisted, disbelief churning in my gut. They wouldn’t do this. How could they do this?
At the edge of the trees, the rice paddies were engulfed in flames as far as I could see. The sky was alight with an eerie glow. The dry rice cracked and popped as it was consumed. The trees around Phnom Sampov were green with vegetation to ward off the flames, but not the paddies. They were miles upon miles of kindling.
“If I had known, I would have gathered more. Now it’s all gone,” I mumbled to myself, looking at the jug I still carried, tied to a string over my shoulder.
“How did this happen?” I said again, aloud.
“How do you think?” a voice answered.
I jumped, turning toward the shadows behind me.
“Why do you think?” The voice asked again, as a form emerged with it. He was an old man. His body was blackened by ash, but his eyes glinted in the firelight.
“The Khmer Rouge soldiers. They set fire to all the rice before fleeing that way—” he pointed absently in the scorched distance toward Thailand. “I tried to stop them, but what could I do? What could any of us do?” He continued to mumble.
“Why? I don’t understand!”
“Because they hate us.” The words dropped from his mouth and thudded into the ash, spitting and sparking. “The Khmer Rouge say the Vietnamese have come for our rice and that they will starve them out of Kampuchea, but I know it was because they enjoy watching their own people starve. Angkar is the king of death. They’ve sent us all into hell, and we must pay for what we have done. We’ve all become pret. We will never get out.”
Without another word, the man turned to walk down the road, muttering to himself about us being pret: the tortured souls of the damned. They were the ones destined to endure torment because of bad karma. I knew I had bad karma, and the reason wasn’t a mystery to me. It haunted me with every step.
How could I be set free from myself? The question burned in my lungs as I went back to Mteay. Turning back one last time, I looked over the ashen fields, the graveyard of rice resurrected my fear of hunger.