A DROP OF SWEAT splatted on the page. Rita Donaldson wiped it away with her little finger, pulled her head from over the papers and continued reading, making notes in the margin. Slowly she leaned forward, attempting to keep her back in the shade of the large umbrella, attempting to avoid Phnom Penh’s parching January sun. It was only her third day in Southeast Asia, her first full day in Cambodia. Another drop of sweat splatted on the report. She straightened her back, angry, frustrated, rolled her head back, up, until she was looking into the segmented underside of the umbrella which covered the cafe table. Then she thought, smiled inwardly at the thought, that she was like Alice sitting beneath a massive mushroom.
For two years Rita Donaldson had worked a rewrite desk in the foreign affairs section of the Washington News-Times. Since the coup in March 1970 she had concentrated on Cambodia, had kept her own file on the country. Her knowledge was deep yet her feeling for the country was shallow. She pulled a hankie from her new jungle blouse, wiped her forehead. Then she rested an elbow on the table and momentarily cupped her chin in her hand. The sweat of her face on her hand, and of her hand on her face, felt disgusting. Again she wiped her face. She felt self-conscious, almost as if she were taking a bath in public. One week of this’ll...she thought. Ten days, tops. She looked back at the report, a briefing she’d compiled for News-Times correspondent Tom Jasson who, at the last, had decided not to go. Again perspiration dripped from her face onto the page.
SIGNIFICANT ACTIVITIES: During the second half of 1970 SA included: combined Communist force attacks on (1) Kirirom and (2) the, Pich Nil Pass on Highway 4, and (3) a series of battles, commando raids and terrorist rocket attacks around the country. By the end of September the NVA held four of Cambodia’s nineteen provincial capitals and threatened twelve of the remaining fifteen. Pocheantong Airport at Phnom Penh was sporadically closed by rocket raids which temporarily destroyed runways. The capital’s petroleum storage tanks at Kilometer 6 were burned; the oil refinery at Kompong Som was damaged; several strategic bridges over the Tonle Sap River were dropped. Evidence indicates these latter acts were carried out by North Viet Namese dac cong (sappers). The heaviest fighting of the period took place along the Mekong and Bassac rivers below Neak Luong, where a 200-vessel ARVN task force continued to hunt the NVA/VC. The Communists kept continuous pressure on the waterways, often closing them to freighters. Additional large battles were fought about Svay Rieng. In the Takeo area, the ARVN 495th Infantry Battalion rampaged through the countryside during and after operations designed to ferret out major NVA/VC supply units. The rampaging hurt the Allied cause and Lon Nol publicly protested their behavior...
“How long are you here for?”
Rita Donaldson looked up. The light skin of her face was flushed, pink, covered with rivulets of sweat. Her hands and arms were so wet the hand she placed over the page she’d been reading stuck to the paper. She wiped the side of her hands on her jungle blouse. “Excuse me?”
“How long you here for?” the man repeated.
“A week,” she answered. She did not know him but his being American made the approach acceptable.
“Mind if I join you?” He sat without her responding. “Jim White,” he said. “The Sun.” He motioned to a waiter. “You’re the new gal from the Washington paper.” She began to answer but he interrupted. “What can you learn in a week?”
“Two weeks,” Rita Donaldson said. “If there’s a real story.”
“There’s plenty of story,” White said. To the waiter he said, “Two cold orange juice. Bic?” Then back to Rita, “You better drink more.”
“How do you know? About the story, I mean.”
“Just a feeling,” White said. “Just a...” He leaned forward and grasped the report she had before her. “What do ya got here?”
“What?!” Rita was astounded. She pulled the report back.
“That’s not goina be the way to get along here,” White snapped.
“Who the hell are you?” Rita shot back.
“Screw it, bitch. You’ll learn.” White stood, yelled a jumble of pidgin Khmer, Viet Namese and English at the waiter, then stomped off. Westerners and the few Cambodians in the cafe stared at her. She swallowed, ducked her head, went back to the report.
The anniversary of Ho Chi Minh’s death (9/3) was marked in Cambodia by twenty-one ARVN battalions plus support personnel—about 12,000 soldiers. In Paris, NVA General Xuan Thuy issued a “very flexible and generous” proposal for a coalition government in South Viet Nam. For peace and coalition, the negotiator said, the necessary ingredient is American renunciation of Saigon and the withdrawal of all support.’
On 7 October, President Nixon, in a televised speech, offered the Communists a “cease-fire in place.” The next day the Communists denounced the proposal as “a maneuver to deceive world opinion.” They reiterated their demand for unconditional US withdrawal and the toppling of the Saigon government. In this atmosphere, in South Viet Nam, Nguyen Van Thieu manipulated the South Viet Namese October presidential election by eliminating all alternative candidates. The balloting, unlike the Senate voting in August, was a one-candidate charade. Even at that it might have served as a poll of Thieu’s support, but irregularities negated that potential....
Rita gritted her teeth. What The Sun? she thought. There’s nine hundred The Suns in the world. I should have slapped that son of a bitch, she thought. She had been angry since returning to reading, had not concentrated on the words, could barely remember what she’d read. She looked back over the last few pages, underlined “American bombing,” “Ho Chi Minh’s death,” and “televised speech.” She thought about the trip, about her air-conditioned Washington office. She had been given the assignment after Jasson’s abrupt cancellation, given it as if it were a present, a job bennie, a perk, something to put on her resume. One week in Southeast Asia because she’d been a loyal employee, a good little girl. Indeed, she had told herself, it was an excellent opportunity for advancement. Not unlike a military officer, a journalist needs to have her ticket punched. But Jim White had set something off in her. So too did her body’s reaction to the heat. She was fair skinned, fair haired, and had a soft Nordic countenance which was finding the tropical climate of the Cambodian dry season unbearable. I can do this, Rita Donaldson told herself. I can do it and do it right.
The American military posture in South Viet Nam has become one of protective enclave defense. (Only the 1st Cavalry and the 101st Airborne still ran, though curtailed, offensive operations.)
In the US, the Army opened its case, with heavy media coverage, against William Calley. President Nixon has requested an additional $155 million for small arms and ammunition for Cambodia.
Between 29 November and 2 December, NVA units launched one hundred attacks—raids or shellings—in South Viet Nam, with the reported objective of relieving ARVN pressure against their Cambodian bases....
Rita rocked back slightly. She raised her eyes, glanced up to see if people were still staring at her. Her report, she felt, and the story she’d received during her first embassy briefing, and what she’d obtained from the News-Times’s Cambodian stringer, didn’t jibe. But she didn’t know how or why. She pulled a steno pad from her bag, flipped it open, thumbed back several pages. The embassy aide had unofficially told her that in Hanoi General Vo Nguyen Giap had begun organizing for the next major phase of the war. The aide had said that ARVN/NVA engagements in Cambodia to this point had primarily been search and destroy for the ARVN, ambush and withdraw for the NVA. But with Americans banned from Cambodia, with increasing U.S. domestic pressure for U.S. withdrawal from South Viet Nam, the NVA general allegedly saw opportunity. The clashes between Viet Namese elements on Khmer soil were, to him, practice and preparation for a large-scale offensive invasion of South Viet Nam once U.S. forces were out.
On 22 December, the US Congress passed an amended bill forbidding any use of American ground troops or advisors in Laos or Cambodia. The Force Armée Nationale Kampuchea (FANK), swollen in one year to eightfold its precoup combat strength, was, according to US military spokesmen, incapable, without advisors, of assimilating, training, even equipping most of this new manpower. Congress has also banned the use of US airpower in direct support of Allied troops.
On the last day of 1970 the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) announced it had assassinated in the preceding 364 days “at least 6,000 South Viet Namese” civilians for the heinous crime of serving, at any level, in their nation’s government.
The story, Rita thought. What is it? Who, what, when, where, why, how. She paged through her notes. American bombing? FANK training? Some supposed NVA-ARVN future engagement? She turned the report over and wrote on the back: “(1) Find FANK training facility. (2) Determine U.S. role. (3) To hell with The Sun.”
From the front seat of the jeep Sullivan saw her stop. She was returning from morning prayers at the sala. He watched from a distance as she looked up, straight up into the cloudless morning sky. To Vathana the air felt soft, compassionate on the skin of her face, neck and arms. She closed her eyes momentarily, inhaled deeply. The temperature was mild, the humidity early-morning low. Vathana opened her eyes, stared into the endless deep blue, stared whispering a prayer of thanks to the Enlightened One for seeing her through the birth, for the beautiful healthy girl, and for the slowing of the war. And she prayed for her country, for Premier Lon Nol who had suffered a paralyzing stroke in early February and for Deputy Prime Minister Sisowath Sirik Matak who now, in reality, led the nation. As she prayed and gave thanks she thought about the depths of the sky, about the penetration by the astronauts of Apollo 14, men on the moon, again, about their journey which was barely a pinprick into the depth of the blue that she felt both a part of and a traveler through. As she prayed, her body felt light, weightless. The caressing blue depths called her. It was not light traveling infinite distances to her eyes but her spirit blossoming into the universe, being a part of what she knew she was a part.
From two hundred meters south Sullivan studied her. He had not seen her since their first encounter five months earlier yet he held her in his mind as if the first impression had stuck, lodged in some gap between brain convolutions, refused to melt and flow, to spread thin, to be assimilated or to evaporate. What the hell’s she doing? he thought. Her slow approach and her idle standing at the edge of the road, standing staring straight up, irritated him. His irritation at it made him seethe. Of all the stupid fucking things I’ve done, he thought, this...He did not finish the thought.
Sullivan’s tour with the 5th Special Forces Group had been scheduled to end in October, yet he’d extended. The group was now standing down, returning to the United States. The teams had broken up, the remaining Phoenix Program personnel had been transferred, on paper, to a different command. Nearly half the Special Forces advisors who were ready to leave the country had volunteered to remain in Viet Nam, to form special units to train—in Viet Nam because advisors weren’t permitted in Cambodia—FANK personnel in raid and reconnaissance tactics, in communications and in the most fundamental tactics of patrolling and base security. Even concepts like flank security had to be introduced—not taught, as in “how to,” but introduced, as in “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
In the few moments that Vathana had spent concentrating on the sky the temperature rise had begun, had taken hold of the day. It was not yet uncomfortable but the hint of heat was there and it pleased her. Vathana walked barefoot, at the road’s edge, careful not to step in the debris of the past several months, debris brought to her city by the clashing armies which had surrounded it. She walked lightly, feeling renewed freedom in her body. She paused briefly at a market stall to check the freshness of the eels the vendor hawked, though she had no intention of making a purchase. She walked on, wishing to run, to skip like a schoolgirl, though she was restrained by the thought of someone seeing her, the Angel of Neak Luong, not bearing the burden of her city’s suffering. Today she did not feel like suffering. Today she felt like living. Where the river and roadway squeezed the levee she again stopped, gazed out over the yellow-brown water, gazed across to the ferry landing being rebuilt for the fourth time in four months, gazed at the barges and piers and at an ocean freighter with riverine escort disappearing to the east. Sun reflections off the cockled water tickled her. For a brief moment she thought of her womb, which had nourished and nurtured her little girl and was now mostly contracted, and she sent a special small love signal from her mind and her whole body to this organ which had brought forth such lovely fruit.
The death of Pech Lim Song and Vathana’s conditions to Teck for joining him in Phnom Penh had left her vulnerable to the whims and wraths of her mother-in-law, Madame Pech, who, since her husband’s assassination, demanded she be called by her own name, Sisowath Thich Soen. In November the woman had descended upon Vathana amid the refugees, verbally berating her. “Bonjour! One hundred thousand riels?! To whom? While these people live like...like...this!” Vathana had not answered but stood absorbing the abuse, thinking, Abuse given, like love, does not lessen that held by the giver but increases it, and with abuse it becomes self-damaging. “Bonjour? Perhaps, silly stupid girl, perhaps some to your own pocket? Three months, indeed!” Two months later, as Vathana, eight and a half months pregnant, prayed for a safe delivery, Soen again violated her, bursting in upon her in the Neak Luong flat. “From today,” Sisowath Thich Soen had said, “the barges will be controlled from Phnom Penh. And you”—she had glared at her daughter-in-law, daring her to take the offer—“you belong with your husband. Tomorrow everything will be removed from this apartment. Come to Phnom Penh or live with the filth in that camp.”
From the jeep Sullivan continued to watch her, to track her progress. He watched through the raised windshield as if he were spying. He attempted not to smile as she neared but found his heart racing, his muscles setting like a torn turkey’s about to strut, his face breaking into a silly grin. At seventy-five feet she still had not noticed him. The main road had become busy with morning activity, civilian and military. He watched her face, oval with strong cheekbones and large dark eyes. Serene eyes, he thought, knowing mysterious eyes. Eyes that have witnessed a thousand years, that can see the next thousand.
At fifty feet he turned his head, watched the Mekong. He had been raised by the Mississippi on Iowa’s eastern boundary and he’d always loved rivers, any river, and any river city which was still small enough to be affected by the current. “Not like New York,” he’d once told Huntley. “You get a huge metropolis and people go months, years, without even knowing they’re in a river city.”
His mind stopped. Vathana stood only feet from him, a radiant smile, sparkling eyes greeting him. “Hello, Mister Lieutenant J. L. Sullivan,” she said in English.
“Mrs. Pech,” Sullivan stuttered. His tongue tripped. Sounds barely emerged. “How many children have you?” He blurted the Khmer idiom, which was a simple greeting, not knowing its literal translation.
“Two,” she answered in Khmer, thinking he actually was asking the question.
He did not understand the answer and could not think of anything to say. Looking at her he smiled, then raised a hand to his face, covered his eyes, turned his head away, forced the ridiculous smile from his face, turned back and before he could speak broke into silly laughter.
Vathana also smiled. She raised her fists playfully. In French she said, “En garde, Monsieur Sullivan. What brings you to Neak Luong? The camp or the army?”
He grasped the steering wheel tightly. “Your camp, madame,” he said professionally. “I must inspect your camp again.” The smile fell from his face. There was nothing he needed to inspect. He’d come to see her but he couldn’t tell her and in lying he broke the fragile bubble of joy which had surrounded them. Glumly he said, “Will you ride with me?”
The camp had shrunk from ten thousand to nine thousand. Major improvements had been made in housing, in food and potable water distribution. Waste removal was still abominable, and though the ground was dry, mosquitos and flies still swarmed. The stink of people unable to wash or clean their shelters mixed with dry-season dust.
They circled the camp, walked its main aisles between flimsy huts, chatted softly, analytically, in French. The happiness of seeing each other turned sour. Sullivan’s reappearance stirred Vathana’s memory of the messenger she’d not seen or heard from since the first encounter. “Befriend the American!” She had had no idea what he’d meant. She thought, too, of her father and brother, of all her family, and she grew sad. She thought of sunshine and Americans and of Pech Lim Song hung by a leg, shot, slowly bleeding to death with no one to save or comfort him. Then it occurred to her that Mister Sullivan had not come to see the camp. He took no notes, seemed uninterested in the workings of the camp or in supplies, though, oddly, he seemed to have compassion for the refugees. Odd, she thought, for an American. So unlike the few Western “contractors” she’d met.
“We never received the remainder of the roofing,” Vathana said in the main camp tent where she’d brought him to a sectioned-off corner and introduced him to Sophan, Samnang, and her new daughter.
“I know,” Sullivan answered.
He thinks I sold it to the Khmer Rouge, she thought. He thinks I’m a Communist agent. Perhaps he works for Soen.
As they’d walked Sullivan had become filled with doubt. Perhaps she’s aiding the NVA, he’d thought. Perhaps...but he would not permit himself to think the thought.
“She’s beautiful,” Sullivan said, gently picking up the tiny swaddled infant. “Oh, look.” He beamed, pulling the thin blanket back from her face. He tapped the tip of her nose. “Very pretty,” he whispered.
“You have children?” Vathana asked.
“No. No, I’m not married.”
Sophan braced herself, stoic, silent, watching the large phalang cooing over the infant, disrupting her spirit, inviting the jealousy of the spirit of the baby’s last mother. The infant gave a minute cry. Immediately Sophan grasped for her. “Oh...ah...Okay. There,” Sullivan said. He looked at Vathana. Guiltily he whispered, “Did I do something wrong?”
“We should go. I work at the hospital, too. Have you more questions?”
“No. No. I’m sorry. Let me give you a ride to the hospital.”
Away from the camp the sullen mood dissipated. In the sunshine by the river Sullivan stopped the jeep. “I’m afraid of this,” he said to her without looking at her. “Your country petrifies me.”
“But why?” Vathana asked, surprised by both the words and the change of tone. “You are American. You are a soldier. The shellings in Phnom Penh have been bad?”
“No. It’s not that. It’s the way you think. The way your people think. You’re...they’re so beautiful. So peaceful. I could gobble you up...” Vathana smiled. “Oh, I don’t mean me, you,” Sullivan said self-consciously. “I mean a good army could conquer this country like...like...like the Germans rolled over Poland. Does that make sense to you, Mrs. Cahuom?” He didn’t look at her, nor did he give her a chance to respond. “No,” he said. “No, it’s more than that. It’s...it’s like there’s a monster outside and half the country’s inviting it in and the other half is pretending it doesn’t exist. I’m afraid for you.”
“And for yourself?” Vathana’s words were soft.
“Me? Hum? I guess,” he said. He said it but he did not mean it. He did not feel fear for himself. The admission of vulnerability made him feel he was sharing something of himself with her, yet he knew it was not true. “It’s a good thing we arrived,” he said. “You people were about to be slaughtered.” Vathana smiled a wry smile but did not speak. “Doesn’t anybody understand?” Suddenly he threw his arms straight up. “The goddamned North Viet Namese have seventy-five thousand troops in here. Damn it. They’d butcher every Khmer if they could.”
“You believe that and you’re angry?”
“Damn it, yes. Those murdering bastards...” He stopped. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Cahuom. I...I...I didn’t mean to use that language.”
“The anger warrants that language, the language excuses the anger.”
“God! That’s the kind of thing a Khmer would say.”
“I am Khmer,” Vathana said. “Khmers are concerned.”
“But nobody does anything!”
“My father-in-law used to ask, ‘What will happen if we do nothing?’ You sound like him.”
“It’s a damned good question. Giap, the NVA general...” Sullivan paused to see if she recognized the name. “Vo Nguyen Giap, he uses the phrase ‘aggression through internal war.’ Those Communist...pig’s...are conscripting and brainwashing thousands of Khmers in the seized territories. I see the documents. They’re trying to make it look like civil war.”
Vathana smiled. “I don’t think anyone takes the Khmer Rouge seriously,” she said. “There are some but they’re so poor. That’s what the radio reports.”
“But that’s it. They move in their agents. And it gives credibility to the Viet Namese.”
“How?” Vathana’s speech quickened. Suddenly both were speaking fast, in French, talking politics as Vathana had not talked politics since conversations with her father before the trip to the mountains. “How can anything give them credibility? And to whom? Khmers know they’re evil intruders. But they do support Prince Sihanouk, eh?”
“To the international community,” Sullivan said, his words overlapping hers. “Cambodia needs international help.”
“Then why is it your country offers so much but delivers so little? America is very perplexing. You ask what will happen if we do nothing, but you think you do much just speaking.”
“We can’t bring troops in. The American Congress passed a law...”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I. But, Mrs. Cahuom, that’s it. That’s the credibility problem...to...to the...Americans. Through their information sources.”
“Call me Vathana.”
Sullivan’s mind froze. The line of thought in quick exchange disappeared like the flash from a sniper’s rifle. “Vathana.” He said the name slowly. To him it was the most beautiful word he’d ever uttered. “Vathana,” he said smoothly, “your country still petrifies me.” He reached to her and very gently grasped the small finger of her left hand. “I’ve seen your mother-in-law a few times. And her son. They say she’s a Sisowath of the same family as the deputy prime minister.”
“They’re of the same family.” Vathana did not move her hand. Has he come, she thought, to do Soen’s bidding?
“Could you...I...Can she...” Sullivan stopped. He wanted to ask her to come to Phnom Penh where he might have a chance of protecting her, though he knew he had no real resources, that a month earlier downtown Phnom Penh had been rocketed by the NVA with thousands of people wounded or killed, that Phnom Penh was not safer, only closer to him.
“You are very afraid,” Vathana said softly, “yet you volunteer to be here.”
“Yes. I’m...I want to help. I want to be here. I’m mostly afraid for your country.”
“Help me establish a school for the camp children.”
“Certainly.”
For ten minutes they spoke of school supplies, simple things, paper and pencils. “And wood, for a classroom. And more roofing.”
“Yes. I’ll see. I’ll try.”
“And a slate board? In my village we had a wonderful slate board.”
“I know where one is.”
“You Americans can do anything.” Vathana closed her eyes and her hand. “You will not be hurt,” she said. “They will never hurt you.” She squeezed his hand. “I see that. You will be very good for my people.”
“Thank you,” Sullivan said. He felt she had bestowed total confidence on him, had absolute faith in his survival and his ability to contribute.
Vathana squeezed his hand again then let go. She looked at him, smiled, laughed a very soft kind laugh. “You’re welcome.” She said it so innocently he could not think how to respond.
The hospital at Neak Luong had received equipment for a modern surgical room from several international aid agencies, but there were many in need and only one full-time doctor, Sarin Sam Ol, and he was not a fully trained surgeon. Vathana assisted him, primarily with patient care and paperwork, each morning after her early duties at the refugee center. An hour after Lieutenant Sullivan dropped her off, she was alone in the dank corridor leading to the new surgery room. Suddenly, from behind, a shove. She stumbled, began to rise, turn, was shoved again, grabbed. She struggled, turned. A small dark man, young yet very strong, grabbed her face, dug fingers into her cheeks below her eyes, a thumb into the soft tissue below her jaw. His other hand seized her breast. He lifted her like a rag doll. “Sakhon has been moved to Stung Treng, Sister. Your father wishes him a safe journey. Tell me all the fire-hair phalang tells you.”
He relaxed the pressure on her face but he did not let her go. Vathana’s eyes cast left, right, hoping to see someone, anyone, who might at least yell, who might scare off the assailant. The corridor was empty. She did not speak. Her mind raced to find words but the pain of his grasp frightened them from her throat. “Tell me,” the man hissed. “Tell me or your baby will never taste your milk again.” He tightened his fingers on her tit and twisted.
“Yes. Yes. He said nothing. Just talk. He said he was afraid.”
The man smirked, then jiggled her as if to shake out, more words. The hospital was crowded yet the hall remained empty. Vathana talked. She told him all she thought he wanted to hear, everything except about the school supplies.
“Listen, Sister. And obey. Be his concubine. Be his whore. You’ll find it easy. Sakhon will be moved to Kratie. Khmer Patriots will protect your camp.”
The khrou plastered a poultice on Nang’s face, another on his left side. He gently cleansed the horn and canal of his left ear. Nang lay quietly on the pallet in the man’s home, a thatch and plastic-tarp hovel amid a thousand similar refugee abodes clumped together in the open spaces of Kompong Thom. The shaman hummed softly as he worked methodically. From his stores he poured a few drops of palm oil into a rosewood bowl. Then he ripped a cabbage leaf into squares and dropped it in. He ground the leaf into the oil until it became a green paste. To this he added bits of chopped fresh cayenne pepper and dried, powdered comfrey root. Again he mashed the mixture, adding once several drops of rice vinegar to thin it. With a finger he scooped a blob and gently pressed it into Nang’s ear. “In time you’ll have full hearing,” the khrou said. “These foreign devils...”
“They shall perish,” Nang interrupted.
“Yes. You’ve said that. You always say that yet the bombs, the artillery come closer and the siege is renewed. You heal quickly, Little Rabbit. Why did they torture you?”
“Because they are fornicating buffalo scum.”
“The Northerners?”
“And the Southerners. It was the Southern yuons that burned my feet. The Northern killed my father.”
“And who is Angkar?”
Nang turned to the khrou. He did not know how the man knew. He remained silent.
“You spoke of Angkar when they first brought you. You said, ‘Angkar was our salvation...’ perhaps more like, ‘Angkar will save us.’ You repeated it many times.”
Nang stared at the healer who continued his methodical procedure. “You are Angkar,” he said. “All Khmer Patriots are Angkar.”
During the final trek into Kompong Thom Nang had been corralled with a group of sullen young Khmers. The ARVN lieutenant had called them detainees, the soldiers had treated them like convicted prisoners. Most were men, most were farmers, all were interrogated by ARVN intelligence personnel at the FANK garrison in the city’s southwest district.
“Khmer Rouge, where are your weapons?” the Viet Namese inquisitor had screamed at each. When it was his turn Nang had squatted on the concrete floor in the small stark cell and covered his ears. His training had gone deep but in injury, in pain, in exhaustion he could think only to remain silent, to deny everything. Then: Who am I? Think. Act. Be that part. Keep it simple so as to avoid contradictions.
“You are Khmer Rouge,” the inquisitor accused. “Look at your hands. You’re no farmer.”
“My father, farmer.” Nang’s voice sputtered. “He was killed by the Communists. I bake bread.”
“Yeah. Sure. You’re Buddha’s baker. Never touched a weapon, huh? How’d you get those scars, baker-boy?” Nang touched his face. “Not that, you shit. On your back. On your leg. Those aren’t calluses from riding buffalo. What’s your unit?” Nang stared at the man as if he, Nang, were an imbecile. “Hook him up,” the man growled, angry that one more victim was bringing torture upon himself, justifying his actions in the anger.
Two soldiers grabbed Nang. His body was stiff, sore from the beating it had taken early that morning when the concussion from the American bomb had thrown him and broken the forest; sore too from his afternoon sprint through brambles and branches; and sore from the pokes and prods of the ARVN soldiers bull-dogging the detainees into the city. Nang did not resist as they tied his elbows behind him, nor as they clamped his feet to metal cuffs on the ends of a three-foot-long wooden rod. He watched with dread as they attached wires to his toes and the soles of his feet and displayed the rheostat and switch.
“Let’s try it again. What’s your unit?”
“My father is farmer,” Nang said in rural dialect. “I learn to be baker.”
The officer flipped the switch. The tingle of a very low voltage entered his feet as if he’d squatted too long without moving and cut off the circulation. Slowly the tingle rose through his ankles, into his calves, then his knees. “Your unit?” Nang closed his eyes, concentrated on breath control. “Your unit!?” The tingle entered his thighs, hips, groin, buttocks, rose to his navel and became a queer indescribable pain.
“Tien!” A shouted voice came from the hall.
“Sir?” The voltage was turned to very low.
“There’s two hundred more to question. Don’t take forever.”
“Yes sir.” The interrogator walked to Nang’s side. He grabbed the boy’s face. “One chance. Tell me or I’ll spin this to high.”
Nang flicked his eyes away from the man’s face, closed his eyes, whispered, “I bake!” He set himself for the jolt. “Aaaacccchouhaaaaa...” As the current wrenched his legs and torso he jerked in convulsive shitting, pissing spasms. Sparks flicked at his feet. Then it stopped.
“Unit?!”
“Baker,” Nang whimpered.
“Make him wipe up that shit and get him out of here.”
Moments after his release, ARVN first lieutenant Tran Van Le broke into the interrogation cell. He was frantic. “Tien. You had a boy here?”
“Lots of boys.”
“No. A strong kid. Looks maybe thirteen, fourteen. Napalm burns on his face and right hand. Cut up all over.”
“Oh. Yeah. The baker.”
“Baker my ass. Where is he?”
“They sent him to release.”
“Damn it. He’s Hai Hoa Binh. A top VC agent. Shit, I knew I recognized him.”
At Mount Aural Met Sar sat on a cushion on a bench in his personal bunker. His face was drawn tight at the corners of his mouth, drawn down into a morose mask as he lamented the fate of his units and infrastructure at Kompong Thom. The NVA 91st Division had pulled back intact, suffering, his reports said, only eight percent casualties. His own units had eight percent killed, eleven percent wounded, sixteen percent missing. Better than a third, some of his best yotheas, cadremen, village agents and informers, gone. And the government! Sar thought. What fools! That two-tongued demigod Lon Nol! His stroke proves to all Kampuchea his utter lack of merit. The siege is lifted. The NVA withdraw. The ARVN withdraw. The siege is renewed. FANK is a disgrace. Met Sar clenched his fists, spread his fingers, then clenched his fists tighter. One hundred and fifty thousand FANK soldiers and not a hundred and fifty decent leaders. A disgrace. They shame every Khmer. I should have a quarter that force. With a quarter, Sar thought, I’d make the yuons wish they’d died at Tchepone and never entered Kampuchea. Ah, fine to incapacitate the refineries, but the yuons, no, they destroy the entire facility. Without Neak Sam, FANK is a stinging centipede without a head. We must act. Now! Now. But do what?
Sar rose, left his bunker, strode as a fat man attempting to walk with speed, his advancing leg stretching before him, his body lagging, his rear leg seeming insufficiently powerful to propel his mass and be brought forward simultaneously. He entered the tunnel corridor to the operations bunker and map room. Two guards were there.
Sar thought of Nang. There had been no word. “Ah,” he grumbled. “Nang, he was a yothea.” Aah, Sar thought, just a soldier. Perhaps valuable but just a soldier. Has he gone to the KVM? “Echh.” Sar coughed on the idea. Then he thought, Did I use him to best advantage? He pondered that thought amid scores of others.
In the cavern map room, alone, Sar did not study the maps. How? He picked up a pen from the desk, fidgeted, twiddled the pen with his left hand about his pointing right index finger. Around and around. Then he leaned forward, placed an elbow on the table, his forehead in his hand. With the pen he doodled the Khmer script symbol for “How?” Again and again. “How?” “How?” The script looked beautiful on the page and he felt pleased at the sight of his own penmanship. He pulled a sheet of paper toward him and scrawled across the top page, “It is necessary. Thanks to Angkar Leou, it is being realized.”
“Realized,” he said softly. He knew well how to organize, how to infiltrate. He knew when to be ruthless, when to cajole. Yet at every step the North Viet Namese gained, and he, though advancing, fell a step further behind.
How do you raise the consciousness of the masses? he asked himself. How do you change them? How do we maintain our covert posture yet swing all Kampuchea to our cause? Sar sat, pondered. They were close yet conquest was elusive. How to use other resources to his advantage? How to direct his own leaders without seeming to direct? Sar sank into depressed frustration. Can we continue to pick our battles, or should we risk all?
“In 1177,” he wrote, “Angkor was invaded by Champa. In 1250, by the Sinhalese with their loathed Theravada Buddhism. In 1620 the first yuon devils penetrated Prey Nokor. Twenty years later the Khmer king was enslaved by the dogma of Islam. The French, the Thais, the Japanese, and the Viets have all invaded. Yet we endure! We shall always endure! We shall rise up and discard all alien elements! Kampuchea for Kampucheans!”
He stopped. How? he thought. How best to use the armies of Angkar? How best to use the chrops, the agents and spies. How best to use the Americans without falling into the trap of dependence? They are strong but they are going and will not counterbalance the weight of the yuons much longer.
Sar turned back to the paper. “First,” he wrote, “commit the people. Then the army. Then Angkar Leou.” Yes, he thought. That’s the proper order for commitment. How? How? The people are ready to join us, to follow.
Again he thought of Met Nang. For every highly trained yothea there were a hundred with no training, a hundred poorly armed boys of the rural and urban dung heaps. The new battalions of Cham hated his Khmers as much as they hated FANK and the Viets. There was no loyalty there. Only opportunism. Mountaineers were as bad: two brigades whose main motivation was to avenge their losses and liberate the highlands from Khmer and Viet. To lose Nang! he thought. Ach! His kosang had revealed the evil elements. What is infected must be excised. What has been tainted by any alien form must be erased.
But first, first, the people must be gained.
“Angkar,” Nang whispered to the soldiers of the ambush team.
“Hello Number Two Rabbit,” a private whispered back. “How did you find us?”
“I asked my brother the hare.”
“Ha ha. That’s good. Rabbit’s brother...”
“Ssshh. Mister Private, you must not speak so loud.”
“What have you brought?” The team leader crept close. Nang unhooked a length of black cloth from about his waist and dropped it. It thudded on the earth. “Are they—”
“Use them first,” Nang whispered. “They’ll keep your position concealed.”
“Grenades! American grenades! Rabbit, where did you get them? The garrison has none.”
“My brother the scorpion showed me where they were buried.”
“I don’t know how you do it.”
“Ssshh. Follow me. My brother the chickenhawk overheard...”
Nang led the FANK ambush patrol of the northwest quadrant garrison deeper into the jungle. The national soldiers had balked the first time he’d appeared at night at their listening post only fifty meters from their wire, but on subsequent nights he’d arrived with various gifts, from boots to trip flares. Always he’d come upon them from the rear, emerged within their circle. Each time he’d attempted to tell them or show them a better way to operate and slowly the scarred boy had gained their trust and respect. To the teams of one post he became known as Number Two Rabbit, to those of another Little Rabbit, and to a third Night Rabbit. No one saw him during daylight and the soldiers kept him secret from their commanders. Through the late dry season and into the early months of the 1971 monsoons Nang urged, prodded, led the teams deeper and deeper into the jungle, deeper into the swamps or farther out along hedgerows and treelines between paddies. “The chief method of learning warfare,” he told them, “is through warfare.”
“Where did you learn, Little Rabbit?”
“Who taught you, Number Two Rabbit?”
“Night Rabbit, for one so young, when did you learn?”
“In the conquered zones,” Nang explained patiently. He used the term “conquered” instead of “liberated.” It distinguished him from the Khmer Viet Minh agents who were also attempting to infiltrate FANK. “My father led the resistance in my village. He was very good but a traitorous snake bit him with its tail.”
“Where do you get the weapons?”
“When you are destitute, you must supply yourself from the enemy’s stores.”
Slowly Nang proselytized, denouncing first the Viets and their Khmer Viet Minh lackeys. The FANK underlings agreed fully. The NVA and the KVM, whom they sometimes called Khmer Rouge, were the most serious threat to Kompong Thom. Nang then denounced Norodom Sihanouk for what he’d become. Again there was major agreement, for the ex-Prince had become the figurehead and legitimizer of the Viet Namese Communists. Nang carried it further. He denounced Samdech Euv’s role, policies and actions when he had been head of state, denounced all the things Sihanouk had not done to protect Kampuchea. In every unit Nang’s words convinced at least one soldier. He moved on to criticizing Lon Nol, the Americans and the barbaric South Viet Namese whom Lon Nol had brought to Cambodia, and then on to condemning the war crimes of all aliens.
By May he had nearly 150 FANK soldiers in fifteen units under his spell. He taught them to use “Angkar” as a password. They kept it secret. During daylight, in the city, Nang organized whoever would follow. From the pallet bed at the khrou’s hut he scurried through the camp alleyways and the city’s narrow back streets, searching, recruiting children, training.
For months he worked using the remnant of the Krahom agent organization already in place, the remnant left after the NVA had wiped out at least half in the November 1970 ambushes and assassinations and the ARVN had killed or captured and turned over to FANK another quarter. Nang recruited, organized, indoctrinated and trained. He worked with an energy even he did not know he possessed, as if the painful energies of the B-52 concussions and the electroshock torture had been absorbed by him. Nang found the terrorized, besieged people of Kompong Thom willing, eager, to listen. To them, no one seemed destined to win. Battles could go on forever until all were trampled. No one presented a desirable alternative. Certainly not the Viet Namese Communists.
Nang talked of people’s war but he dropped the weight of Marx, Lenin and Mao. He talked of the Americans, told government troops they were not the solution. “First,” he said, “they are tied to a policy of saving their own skins. They throw away South Viet Nam because they fear the NVA. They’ll never assist Kampuchea with troops. They won’t even follow up their bombings.” Angrily, Nang added, “The targets may be NVA but the bombs destroy our irrigation systems. The yuons hug villages or set up their field guns in the lee of dams thinking the Americans won’t bomb. Still they are bombed.” Peasants agreed with him. The colossal power of the bombs terrorized them. To those who said, “If only the Americans would...” Nang replied, “Khmers, only Khmers, can be responsible for the salvation of Kampuchea. If we are organized we can save ourselves.”
“We don’t need the ARVN,” Nang told them, and the radio confirmed it. In August the Cambodian Foreign Ministry made public a 15 July report which detailed ARVN atrocities against Khmer civilians. Lon Nol’s high command immediately demanded the complete withdrawal of all South Viet Namese forces and the closing to them of the naval facility at Neak Luong. Public outcry reverberated throughout Republic-controlled areas. The fact that an ARVN Column had relieved the siege of Kompong Thom nine months earlier was lost in the confusion, diminished by the cost to Khmers. “The cost,” Nang mused as he squatted with peasants in market stalls, “is very high, eh? We cannot rely on a crocodile who weeps over our pain as he devours us.”
Of the Republic and its army, Nang told his growing number of followers, “They oppose so much that we oppose we should be very close. But that Lon Nol, that Sirik Matak, that General Fernandez—it is they who have invited the B-52s. They who brought in the Southern crocodile. The Republicans have walked the same trail as the old regime. Bureaucratic functionaries so jam the government nothing works.” To soldiers he said, “When was the last time you were paid? Was it enough to feed your families? Do you have to buy your rations from your commander? How can you afford to be soldiers? Even in the army there is a Khmer Patriot’s movement. Once the yuons are eliminated, we’ll turn our guns on Phnom Penh. In the liberated zone the smartest Khmers are planning for the day when Khmers will be self-governing and self-sufficient.”
In late summer the “Patriotic Intellectuals” distributed a document entitled “Declaration to the Khmer People from the Liberated Zone.” Unknown to Nang, to the peasants, the document had originated at Mount Aural. “You see,” Nang said, “there is the Movement, the resistance for which my father died. There is a man I once met, he is fat and full of merit, who can lead us into a new era, a new beginning.”
“Yes,” answered the simpleminded.
“Yes, yes,” answered the intelligent and the patriotic.
As his network increased so too did the risks and thus the insecurity of Little Rabbit. About him he maintained a core of hardened bodyguards, agents, FANK deserters, the strongest and quickest of the new recruits. No longer did Nang reside with the khrou who had restored his hearing and healed his wounds but now in random and scattered “safe houses” throughout the city, in remote hamlet huts, in secret forest hideaways. In every corner he had eyes, in every wall ears. Not a comment escaped him, not a propagandist’s line was missed—for exactly as Nang was attempting to organize Kompong Thom, so too were the Khmer Viet Minh proselytizers.
Unlike the Viet Cong in South Viet Nam where, because of intense military and political pressure (often by district and provincial militias using patient, proven police investigation techniques), the indigenous rebel infrastructure was methodically being dismantled, the Khmer Krahom and Khmer Viet Minh political and military organs throughout Cambodia were expanding almost unchecked. The war thrust upon the Khmer power vacuum by the Communist factions had caught Cambodia as unprepared as South Viet Nam had been a decade earlier—yet the Khmer rebellion matured far more quickly. Outside the capital heartland and the Battambang rice basket region, chaos ruled. With FANK, ARVN, and U.S. actions concentrated on countering Communist raids and main force offensives, the local proselytizers and organizers needed to be concerned only with provincial or local militias and local police—all of which, in many areas, were insecure in their own loyalties and thus easy targets for either terrorist action or rebel political recruitment.
To those who expressed worry and to those who seemed confused about which element to support, Nang said only, “When the time comes, as it will, death will come to those who oppose us.”
“May I see your pass?”
“Khieng!” Chhuon looked quizzically at the young militiaman. Khieng’s eyes were cold, his manner polite. Chhuon’s voice filled with exasperation. “We’re only three hundred meters from the village.”
“Your pass, Mister Chairman!” Khieng stood stiffly behind his rifle. “Those are my orders.”
“Of me! Yes. I’m sure you’re right.” Chhuon pulled a clear plastic bag from his pocket. He unwound the tie, reached in carefully and arranged the paper, so it lay flat inside. Then he held it out. The lettering, Khmer in script and Viet Namese in block, faced him. “I’m to inspect the fields the soldiers will help plant tomorrow,” Chhuon said.
Khieng grasped the edge of the plastic, pulled it to an angle at which raindrops rolled off into his palm. He studied the upside-down form then muttered, “Okay. But return by the precise time printed.”
Chhuon proceeded down the dike. On the night nine months earlier when San and Chamreum had been killed by fire and water, the demon had taken full control of Chhuon’s mind and Chhuon had not even struggled. That fact alone caused him immeasurable anxiety. Four families had escaped that night, thirteen people in all. True to his word, the next morning Major Nui had had thirty-nine villagers executed before the pagoda. None of the murdered were from the extended Cahuom family and in Chhuon’s mind the strings which bound him to the Viet Namese became cords, the cords ropes. He became sag-mouthed, hopeless, apathetic. Though he still fantasized of escape, he put no stock in the idea. Instead he immersed himself in the meditation: I am a small rock, an indistinguishable stone. With me or without me, what has happened would have happened. I am at most a paving stone keeping Major Nui’s feet from touching mud.
Yet, inside, his entire being was irritated, a rash rubbed raw as if he’d ingested a steel rasp which rampaged within his body at the whim of the demon. The irritation bubbled bile from his stomach burning his throat, had for nine months bubbled fire and agitation, so un-Khmer, so un-Buddhist, his mother and wife no longer tolerated his presence and he sought solace more and more amongst the Viet Namese and Khmer Viet Minh cadremen. Through the harvest season Chhuon had not entered a paddy. Through the dry season no one consulted him. He assisted no one with seed or plow repair, advice or encouragement. At times he’d felt it would be so simple to slave in the paddies and purify his spirit through toil and self-denial as he had after Samnang’s death. But he was afraid his own family would attack him, murder him. The fear prompted his absence which in turn proved to the villagers he’d become one with the new apparatus.
“How easily the chairman tells us, ‘We’re better off today than before liberation,’ ” they told one another. “How easily he says, ‘We must work together as a single production brigade for our community to prosper.’ What has he lost, eh?”
East of Phum Sath Din above the Srepok River, rice paddies stepped gradually up the hillside like a rock garden of slate slabs where the slate is paddy and the cracks between, dikes, hedgerows or treelines. Chhuon slogged barefoot in the rain. The lower fields were replanted and glowed with the iridescent green of new sprouts. In the middle paddies villagers, very young and very old, labored bent-back, scooping holes and sticking in seedlings. Some sang old planting songs but most, unlike in the past when all the teens and single men and women flirted, were silent. The upper paddies which bordered on the forest remained untended. As Chhuon climbed rain collected in his hair and ran down in rivulets across his face and forehead, into his eyes, into his partially opened mouth. Thoughts formed. They’re so clever, he thought. Three armies. Three separate armies. The main force battles the enemy, the area forces control the people, the district militia defends us and now it helps plant the rice. So clever. Separate. The butchers don’t taint the defenders even though all take orders from the same command. Eh! What could I possibly do? What is one pebble in an avalanche?
Chhuon reached the highest paddy, knelt, scooped a handful of mud. It would be best, he thought, to plant different seed here. He worked the soil in his fingers as he’d not done in a year. He grabbed a second handful and squished the red-brown muck feeling a grittiness the lower paddies did not possess. Without fertilizer, he thought, without organic compost, these paddies...He stopped, hesitated, closed his eyes....Still, he thought. In the muck he could feel a life force. Yes. It’s weak but it’s there. Chhuon opened his eyes. The paddy was empty. The next level up had been deforested for another tier but the work had stopped in order to plant the existing fields. Chhuon walked to the edge. No dikes had been built between the deforested land and the upper paddy. Orange streams cut gullies into the stripped land then dumped into the upper paddy and fanned clay silt into a dozen small deltas. Let the soldiers build—His thought began, then abruptly shifted. I could walk up there. I’m authorized. I could go to the edge of the last cut. He crossed a delta and climbed into a rising gully. The field had a peculiar feel to it as if its own tormented spirit still wandered above the land. Chhuon walked on. He walked to the center of the stripped terrace and squatted. The ground had not been plowed and much of it was still covered with years of jungle-floor decay. He spread the surface leaves and twigs. An inch down they were dry even though it had been raining for weeks. He dug farther. The old cover was not as thick as he’d imagined. A hand’s width in, tough roots wove a padded net. He ripped farther. Only two more inches and he exposed a mulch-clay mixture. Another two inches, homogeneous clay. If this washes out...Again his thoughts were interrupted. He looked up. In superstition he half expected to see the tortured spirit of the land, half expected to find a vengeful ghost about to thrash him. The sky was dull gray and close. The lower paddies and village were hidden in the mist. Only the spire of the pagoda gave away the presence of a village. Chhuon turned to the forest. It was too close, too inviting. They’d shoot my last son, he thought. From his squat he saw a flicker of movement in the mist between the trees. He swallowed hard. To run. To freeze. He shifted slowly. Militia, he told himself. Maybe the forest spirit. Resisters. I’ll run and alert Khieng. Tell Hang Tung. Spies. Hang’s or Major Nui’s. I’ll continue my inspection. A steel sliver of pain stabbed his right knee. He cursed quietly. A sudden overwhelming feeling of loss and isolation cloaked him as if he’d been covered by a tarp, snared, enwrapped. He bowed his head. “Kill me,” he wept. “Kill me!” He tore at his hair, ripping out tufts. “Shoot me!” He wailed.
“Uncle!” The voice sounded as if it came from the clouds.
Chhuon turned his head a few degrees. His neck muscles trembled. He cast his eyes to the heavens. “You sent me word,” Chhuon forced a meek pained voice from his throat. “You told me if our bodies toil for them our bodies are enslaved. You told me I am not my body. If my hands, eyes, process their papers, if my mouth passes their orders, my parts are their tools, but I am not my parts. I heard you tell me this. If our hearts embrace their ideology, then we have been enslaved.”
“Uncle!” The voice came clearer, came from the forest.
“Hang Tung?” Chhuon called quietly, tentatively. There was no answer. Chhuon rose slowly. He turned to the forest and thought how terrible it was that the village no longer had incense sticks to light in honor of the spirits. Then an ambiguous smile crept onto his face, a smile half fear, half love. For three years the only traditional act he’d practiced consistently was the feeding of Samnang’s spirit at the family altar. “Kdeb?!” He called the nickname reverently. “Kdeb? Has your spirit found its way home? It’s me, Cahuom Chhuon. Not your uncle. I pray for you every day. I have wanted to tell you of my dream the night before they took you. I want to tell you of the crocodile, the tiger, the water. I’m alone without you. Never should we have gone.” As he spoke he stumbled toward the treeline, his eyes blurry from the fog of emotion. “Kdeb, if it is not the fate of a person to remain alive, we must accept this. Come home to rest.”
“Uncle, here.”
“Who’s there?”
“Kpa.”
“Kpa?!”
“Quiet! Stay there. Pretend to study the soil.”
“Yes.” Chhuon knelt. His mind swirled...“Listen. Keep your head down. Don’t look for me.”
Chhuon dug a hand into the old leaves and thin humus. “It’s been very long,” he whispered.
“Mister Cahuom. We need your help.”
“You’re not hungry tonight?” Hang Tung eyed the village chairman with disgust. Loathsome, he thought. He’s perfect.
“The heat from my stomach...” Chhuon apologized.
“Perhaps the rations are too generous, Uncle.” Chhuon did not answer. “You measured the fields?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve reported the needs to Cadreman Trinh.”
“To the assistant. Trinh Le.”
“Tomorrow the soldiers will join the people. They’ll set an example of order and discipline.”
“Nephew—” Chhuon hesitated. Hang Tung had become increasingly difficult. “Don’t tax the village for those fields at the same rate...”
“You think I set the rate?!” Hang’s voice was sharp with accusation.
Chhuon rushed on. “Those fields won’t produce as the lower paddies. The soil’s thin. There’s not the same nutrients. When we plow the chaff and stalks...”
“Don’t talk to me of that,” Hang Tung snapped. “I’m not a peasant.” His tone changed. “We have some new procedures.”
“Yes?”
“Listen! Memorize! Everyone is needed in the fields. The pagoda is closed until all fields, gardens, orchards and roadways are planted. It’s only temporary. We must do it in order to avoid famine.”
“November’s crop was abundant. Where’s all the...”
“I don’t control the storage of food! Damn you! Why do you accuse me?! Perhaps the rations are too generous. Perhaps if they had less, they’d waste less. Or are they giving it to the resisters?”
“What? The people barely...”
“Another thing. From now on this Khmer greeting with the hands, lei, humph...It’s banned.”
Chhuon’s mouth fell. Away from the table Sok, Peou and Chhuon’s mother licked the last morsels from their rice bowls. They pretended not to hear. “It’s only a...”
“It will be punished by a cut to half rations.”
“Nephew!”
“There’s more.” Hang Tung’s voice was forced yet forceful like an exhausted parent with a toddler, ready to spank the child at the slightest objection. “Henceforth the army shall be referred to as the Khmer Liberation Movement.”
“The militia or the Viet Na...”
“They are one and the same.”
“May I post these?”
“Of course. Sign the bottom. No. Tell everyone. Tonight.”
“It’s so....”
“More. The Chhimmy families’ homes...”
“New people have moved in...”
“Move them but. The homes will be lent to the families of our heroic People’s Liberation Army officers. And the house of Ny Hy San. Have it whitewashed. Major Nui’s family will occupy that one. Tomorrow we’ll see the major at his headquarters. You’ll have a good report.”
“it’s all i could get away with,” Chhuon whispered.
“we’re very grateful, uncle.”
“kpa...sam, ry’s mother, are they with you?”
“he’s liberated, they took her to the old people’s hospital.”
“what of...”
“i must go. the village is surrounded.”
“kpa...be careful.”
The night was very dark and the rain was heavy. Chhuon’s lantern had been confiscated months earlier. He bumped along slowly, smiled inwardly. He’d done it. He’d given a resister aid. God help me, he thought, if Kpa’s a plant. Ah, yet he’d crossed the line. Just as an individual’s resistance crumbles if he goes against his principles, one’s fear crumbles if he stands by them. It’s easy, Chhuon thought. What had Kpa said, “All one need do is match their flow and live in the spaces between.”
Chhuon knocked on Ny Non Chan’s door. Nimol let him in but she did not greet him. Nor did Chan. Since the night of his brother’s death he had only passed along Chhuon’s orders, never engaging his old friend in either conversation or argument. Chhuon imparted the new orders exactly as he’d been told. Chan snarled, muttered to himself but showed no outward emotion. Look at the pleasure, Chan thought, the son of...no, he’s no son. His father’s spirit must cry in pain to see him.
“Shall I whitewash my brother’s home in the rain?” Chan asked without emotion.
“I was told only to have it whitewashed,” Chhuon answered.
“And the major’s wife, will she arrive soon?”
“I was not told.”
“And if I don’t.”
“Chiet!”
“Chiet?!”
“That’s what I’ve been told.”
“You don’t use the Khmer word any longer, Mister Chairman? Now you speak in Viet Namese?”
Chhuon hesitated. The accusation weighed heavily, its weight seeming to fall on the skin below his eyes, pulling, pushing his features into a mask of sorrow. “Dear Brother”—Chhuon bowed to the vice-chairman, bowed with his hands high and together—“what I do, I do to protect our village. I do to protect the people. Please, I beg you, I beseech you, appease the”—Chhuon dropped his voice, quickly looked about—“appease the yuon crocodiles. We have no way to...”
“Yes, Mr. Chairman. You’ve demonstrated your capacity to kiss the hole from which they pass gas. It was what my brother saw before chiet!”
The jungle tunnel came upon them suddenly. Chhuon didn’t see the entrance until the front of the vehicle crashed against the curtain of living vines. “It’s time you understood, Uncle.” Hang Tung chuckled strangely, a laugh Chhuon had never heard from him.
“Why does the major want me?” Chhuon asked nervously.
The concealed road was smooth, well maintained. After the rough twelve-kilometer stretch of Highway 19, it seemed to Chhuon as if he’d entered a different world. Before Hang answered Chhuon asked, “Has Phum Nako been evacuated? Are the craters from American bombs? Why do we tear down the forest to make paddies while all these lie fallow? What kind of gun is that in the trees? Is that a hospital? Are you sure...”
“Uncle. You sound like a little boy on his first trip to the big city.”
“Oh. I...I haven’t been out of the village since...”
“I know. It’s time you became a productive element. The major, he likes you. He likes you very much. Now that he’s the province chief for village administration he wants you to move up with him.”
“Last night I’m like meat dripping blood thrown to the tigers with these new directives. They made a feeding frenzy of me. Today, you want me to move up! Oh, what’s that?”
“Those are surface-to-air missiles. Come. We’re late.”
Hang Tung sped past bunkers with overhead camouflage, past idle tanks and trucks parked in earthbound revetments, past hundreds of troops without weapons. Here the North Viet Namese were unopposed. Neither FANK to the southwest nor the ARVN/US forces to the east pressured “liberated” territory to this depth. The only concern was American high-level interdiction bombing. The vast majority of that was targeted in the Mekong-Bassac River corridor from the border to Phnom Penh. Second-priority targets were those within a few kilometers of the border; third, those at the advancing tips of NVA drives; finally, the identified supply and reinforcement columns. Even had the headquarters base been discovered, its priority on the target lists would have remained low.
“Ah, Chairman Cahuom, it is a pleasure to have you here.”
“Major Nui...” Chhuon began bringing his hands together, then jerkily halted.
“Lieutenant colonel,” Hang Tung corrected Chhuon. Hang Tung had led Chhuon to a large structure cut into a hillside at the middle of the camp. The north wall was solid mountain, the south, a meter of earth then a meter of window facing downhill. The front portion of the roof was thatch with wide overhangs giving the structure the appearance of a mountain lodge. The rear portion was four feet of earth supported by heavy timbers. Above it grew vines, bushes—near-perfect camouflage.
“Lieutenant colonel!” Chhuon corrected himself. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” Nui said amiably. “Come, I wish you to meet someone.”
Hang Tung followed Chhuon and Lieutenant Colonel Nui between offices separated by woven-palm walls to a large central rear room. On two walls were maps, on the third large framed pictures of Norodom Sihanouk and Ho Chi Minh, and on the fourth small black-and-white photographs. In the center there was a low, flat sand table with a detailed model of Stung Treng City. Immediately a wave of fear flashed through Chhuon—the terror of having entered a forbidden sanctum. The model city seemed to leap from the table and seize him. His brother’s warehouse, his home, pulsating like alarm lights, details so specific Chhuon felt he could be reduced and live in the model, visit Cheam, load a toy truck with experimental seed.
Chhuon swayed. He looked up to catch his balance. Black-and-white photos of his village caught his eye. There, his wife and Nimol at food distribution. There, the head of the Hem family and his cousin’s wife, Ry, at Ry’s front door. Another of Ry with a Viet Namese soldier. Another with two young militiamen. Chhuon looked to the maps. Lieutenant Colonel Nui prattled, asking of his health, of his family’s. Chhuon responded without hearing his own words. One wall had separate maps of eleven villages and a map of the entire Northeast. The other had maps of all Cambodia.
“...you see,” Nui continued, “we wish to integrate the community, not take it over.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that.” The sentence seeped from Chhuon, detached.
“The sand table?” Nui beamed with pride.
“Yes....”
“I was showing the colonel how we...he stepped out. I want you to meet him. He’s a fascinating man. And I want him to meet you. I want to show you off. Ha! You’re important to him. To all of us, you know. He stepped out for a moment. Where was I? Yes...for centuries our peoples have foolishly hated each other, Chairman Cahuom. We can’t deny the past yet our present struggles are interdependent. If we’re to save ourselves from the mire of imperialism and reach the shining road of the proletarian revolution, we must join arms. By integrating we can break the vicious cycle of prejudice.”
“By integrating?” Chhuon did not understand.
Hang Tung interrupted. “Uncle Chhuon is a master of khon thi chet, dai cung chet, biet moi song, eh, Colonel?”
Nui smiled. Chhuon still looked confused. “ ‘One too clever dies, one too stupid dies; to survive one must know when to be clever, when foolish!’ Ha! Let’s face it”—Nui rubbed his face—“Khmers and Viets are both members of the international community. We both struggle. It’s foolish to hate. It depletes our energy. You agree?” Nui did not wait for Chhuon to respond. “That’s why my wife will live in your village. My son will go to school with your son. As Prince Sihanouk wishes, a dozen Viet Namese families will be so integrated. We’ll have a model village, eh? Not unlike this?” He gestured to the table. “An experiment,” he said. “Once we’ve achieved our inevitable victory over the imperialists there’ll be no borders. In every school children will learn to speak one tongue. We’ll make a new Indochinese man. And you, Chairman Cahuom Chhuon, shall see the beginning.”
As Nui spoke Chhuon turned a few degrees from him and looked at the map of the northeast quarter of the nation. At first he noted the water features were in two shades of blue, monsoon-season water in light, year-round dark. Then he noticed the unusual road pattern, noticed the multiple routes descending from a hundred points along the Laotian border, merging into eight distinct clusters with three merging at the campsite where they stood. Various units were labeled in grease pencil on the acetate cover. As Chhuon’s eyes absorbed details the secret supply roads came to life. He could almost feel the thrust of descending armies, concentrating, then flowing southwest, south of Stung Treng City, west through the low forest and into the swamps and rice fields of the Sen and Chinit rivers about Kompong Thom, could almost hear the clatter of tanks and self-propelled field guns of the NVA 5th and 7th divisions as they headed for rendezvous with the clearly marked 91st. From there, he thought, where? The map ended and to face the next one would put him at such an angle to his host as to be disrespectful.
“Your wife will need many things,” Chhuon said.
“Committee Member Hang has a list.” The colonel beamed. He had expected sighs, perhaps objections presented as potential problems with other inhabitants, but Chhuon had shown not only complete acquiescence but an apparent interest and desire to cooperate. “Ah”—the Viet Namese officer raised his hand as if giving an invocation—“here is another most honored guest.” Chhuon turned to see a towering Caucasian. “Let me introduce Colonel Hans Mitterschmidt of the Democratic Republic of Germany. Colonel”—Nui changed tongue to French—“this is Chairman Cahuom Chhuon of Village 517. He is in total agreement with your integration plan.”
Sullivan rode in at dusk. The sky was soft. Between breaks in the fast-moving clouds the evening’s first stars glowed. He rode slowly through Neak Luong. The used BSA Lightning motorcycle purchased from a departing British embassy employee purred steadily. He had not found much time to ride since the purchase, nor the momentum to bring him to Neak Luong, until this early July night when he no longer could stand the pressure and needed to see her. Huntley had delivered a truckload of school supplies in March—more in April and in June—school supplies, roofing, and a blackboard he’d appropriated from the Military Equipment Delivery Team (MEDT) briefing room. On the last trip he’d brought a message: “Augh, Mrs. Cahuom,” he’d drawled in English though Vathana understood little English and of his dialect not a word. “J. L. cain’t come rig-aht naa. God a’mighty, some reporter caught him teachin’ a FANK cap’n how ta use a prick-25...radio, ya know. God a’mighty, ma’am. He’s in a world a cow dung rig-aht up ta his ears. Gotta lie low.”
As Sullivan rode in, for a quick moment he pictured himself a cowboy in a western, but the image did not hold off other thoughts. He blipped the hand throttle, the front wheel unweighted, the bike hopped, settled back. The town looked different. The anti-Sihanouk posters plastered to sidewalls of concrete apartment buildings had faded and shredded, and the inhabitants walking head down under the words took no notice of the slogans. The spirit which had spawned the Republic, which had brought Sullivan to Cambodia, was no longer apparent. In five months traffic in the city had become more motorized though the number of civilian cars and trucks had declined. Small motorcycles were everywhere. Old-timers clung close to building walls, seemingly trying to escape the raspy whine. The traditional buffalo-drawn farm carts had all but disappeared from the main road, though now idle they cluttered side alleyways. Military trucks, FANK and ARVN, lumbered more, as if the troops were “cruising the strip” rather than heading somewhere specific. And the people seemed different. The inflow of refugees had been nearly constant at about four hundred per month. The outflow almost matched, with around three hundred a month leaving for Phnom Penh. But the new refugees were more destitute than the old, more terrified, less likely to remain in the camp. At first they simply wandered away from their swamp hovels during daylight, but as the rainy season increasingly turned the camp into a horrid quagmire in which the sanitation system had broken down completely and malnutrition and stomach disorders, despite Vathana’s efforts, became widespread, many refugees built makeshift huts against the sides of in-town buildings from material begged or stolen. A second wave of ARVN soldiers had come to man the South Viet Namese river and road bases—many who had not taken part in the earlier battles—foreign soldiers with money who saw Neak Luong as their home base much as U.S. soldiers came to think of areas of South Viet Nam as “theirs.” With their wealth came higher inflation, thirty percent in the first six months of 1971; and with inflation came additional corruption and prostitution. “Whores earn more than doctors,” Doctor Sarin had complained to Vathana. “Little boys who sell Coca-Cola to the Saigon troops earn more than commanders of Republic garrisons.” Long-time residents of the city began to feel encircled, cramped, their early gracious generosity taxed beyond their ability to give. They closed their doors, hoarded the little they still retained, praying it would be sufficient to feed and clothe their own children. And although Sweden’s foreign minister, Torsten Nilsson, had announced his country would deliver a half million dollars in medical supplies to the Khmer Republic (plus an equal amount to the Viet Namese Communists), medicine was in critical shortage. (The Nixon administration, despite MEDT requests, refused to include drugs in the Commodity Import Program aid package and further blocked requests from Cambodia’s health minister to the International Red Cross for medicine and bandages—assuming either that these supplies would be stolen by the VC/NVA or that the giving would somehow contradict the administration’s “low profile” policy.)
Neak Luong’s new countenance had three contrasting faces: one military, one the new rich, and one the new hungry and diseased masses, with the growing adjunct of roving child gangs, hustling young pimps, and younger prostitutes.
To Sullivan, as he continued north on the main road, the scene was familiar. Why, he thought, had I thought it would be different here? Because of her? If anything it’s worse. More ARVNs. More poor Khmers. He rode past the pagoda with its high central spire and refugee huts clustered in every square meter about it. More huts, he thought. He flicked the throttle and headed to the camp.
Vathana rocked the infant girl in a net hammock as stolid Sophan crawled on the tent’s dirt floor with the twenty-one-month-old Samnang. The boy’s hands had loosened, though when he crawled his fingers remained closed and he supported his weight on the backs of his wrists. “Come!” Sophan called playfully. “That’s it.” She held a toy wagon made from a sardine can. “How do you think your mother feels when you don’t crawl?” she whispered lovingly to the child.
“What should I do?” Vathana asked. She sat on the edge of the cot she shared with the wet-nurse and her son.
“What can you do?” Sophan answered not changing her tone.
“She has told all their family—” Vathana began.
“If she told the whole world and it weren’t true, how could it hurt you?”
“My father’s sister thought I was dead.” Vathana’s voice was full of anguish. “She’d heard I’d run to the forest to join the Communists. What if my father heard? What if my mother believed her lies?”
“You must renounce your marriage, Angel. What does Teck say?”
“He says nothing. No word at all. I only hear from his mother.”
“What about the children? Doesn’t she want to see them? She could take them to the capital, to her villa.”
Tears came to Vathana’s eyes. The sadness wrenching outward from her abdomen twisted her features. “To her, the Wheel of Life is nonexistent. They are not part of her.”
“Angel,” a young woman called quietly from beyond the partition. “Mister new-Captain John Sullivan is at the registration desk.”
Sullivan bowed formally when Vathana appeared. At first he tried to repress his smile, to show shock at her loss of weight, to show empathy for her living situation, but he could not. A boyish smile brightened his face. It either reflected from her or caused her to relinquish her suffering, for she too beamed. He reached out and covered her clasped hands with his. A flood of words came from his throat before he knew he’d opened his mouth. “Yes. Yes.” She smiled up at him—he at five-ten, she barely five feet, her black eyes gazing into his blue.
“The Dhammapada says, ‘Do not speak harshly to anyone,’ ” Vathana quoted.
“ ‘Those who are spoken to will answer thee in the same way. Angry speech is painful; blows for blows will touch thee.’ ”
“Americans say the same thing.” Sullivan heard his voice for the first time and wondered what they were talking about. “ ‘What goes around, comes around.’ The Marines add another line. ‘Payback’s a...’ Ah...well, it’s kind of similar.” He paused, aware suddenly that at least a hundred infirm, cot-ridden refugees were staring at them. “The rain’s stopped,” he said, stepping back, pulling gently. “It was a beautiful rain this afternoon.”
“My father used to worship the rain,” Vathana murmured. “Because it renews the land. Here it only makes mud.”
“Is there someplace we can go. I...I...want to talk. It’s kind of American of me, I know, but I’d prefer to talk alone.”
Vathana smiled, assented. Then her face tightened. An image of a dark assaulter ripping her, clutching her, flashed in her mind. Sullivan was sunshine in darkness, winking, momentary, soon to withdraw and leave eternal night. “There’s a place by the river,” she whispered. “Let me tell Sophan.”
Vathana had been ordered, for the protection of her brother and the camp, to become the American’s consort. This was terrible. She was the mother of two children. To lie with a long-nose, a fire-haired phalang... Society in Cambodia, in the camp, was closed. This was scandalous. She was ashamed. But, too, there existed a pang, a need, a growing attraction and infatuation beyond what was forced upon her.
For an hour they sat, talking quietly, fishing in the dark Mekong with hand lines and hooks baited with parhok, small pieces of pickled fish.
“I don’t know what’s happening.” Sullivan’s voice was thick with concern. “My country’s lost its, ah...I don’t know. Does it make any sense to you if I say it’s lost its masculinity?” Vathana sat very close to him. She leaned, pressed her shoulder against his. “Between men, when there’s friendship, each man gives the friendship his best. It doesn’t make any difference if one can give a lot and the other only a little. It’s as though what’s given is multiplied.”
Again Vathana swayed into him. “Yes,” she said. “That’s like all friendship.”
“Maybe. But...” He paused. “Masculine-feminine friendship is different.” Sullivan jerked on the fishing line then let it fall again. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go on. He didn’t want to build a wall between them. “I’m talking countries here,” he said. “Masculine and feminine traits in nations. If one gives in a feminine way to one in a masculine stance it’s like adding pluses and minuses. The given isn’t multiplied. It’s neutralized. When my country gives in a masculine way the given is multiplied. When it gives in a feminine way it negates what the receiver puts up. It’s apron-string giving. I’ll give you one hundred APCs if you’ll love me. I’m at the tail end of it. I’m the guy who says, ‘Colonel, you told my country you’d do this and this if we put ten thousand rifles in your hands. Now I know you got the rifles so let’s see you show your love for me.’ Somebody in Washington defines the ‘this and this.’ Maybe ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ aren’t the right words.”
“John, why is it you choose to work with Khmers? To fight beside Khmers?”
“Why? Vathana, I wish you could see it. There are some good troops here. Some good leaders. Some of these guys can fight. I know the American press is full of stories about FANK corruption, FANK incompetence, but...I wish I could show you. The garrison at Takhmau was hit by the NVA 12th Regiment and they waxed the Commies’ asses....I mean....”
“It’s okay.”
“There’s this one guy up in Baray, Lieutenant Bousa. He’s really good. There’s a major at Chamkar Luong on Highway 4. When his troops aren’t fighting, and they’re the best in the South, they’re in the paddies his uncles and father had. They’ve got a truck farm there that feeds the whole battalion and their families.”
“A farm of trucks!?”
Sullivan laughed. “I guess that doesn’t translate, eh? A big vegetable farm. They have paddies and fishing boats. Some commanders charge their troops for rations. They get terrible soldiers. Major Preap’s are great. I’d fight with them anytime.”
Vathana leaned into Sullivan again. He put his right arm around her. Very lightly he hugged her. Visually, in the darkness, she was but a silhouette against the Mekong. He squeezed her gently. She turned her face up to his. Suddenly it hit him. He didn’t know if traditional Khmers kissed. He wanted to kiss her. Instead he repeated with concern, “I don’t know what’s happening. My country’s...They think”—he slipped the fishing spool under his left leg—“they can bomb without complete intelligence, without follow-up by skillful infantry maneuvers...” Vathana placed her left arm around his back and snuggled against him. “You can’t drop an arc-light on a village because there’s a T-54 parked on the green.” She leaned against him and he lay back. Sullivan watched a mosquito alight on her hair. He reached up and gently pushed it into flight. About them the earth’s surface lay black-and still. Slowly, quietly, they hugged, kissed, embraced more and more passionately. Across the river, deep in the swamp, a firefight erupted then faded.
Afterward they talked again.
“You have only one sister?” Vathana lay with her head on his chest.
“Um-hum. Your family’s large?”
“We’re scattered,” Vathana said. “Most of my family is in Communist areas.”
“By the border?”
“In the North. Do you know Stung Treng?”
“Only from maps. It fell before I got here.”
“There are many small villages in the hills and along the rivers. My father’s village is Phum Sath Din. On the Srepok.” Vathana hesitated. “ ‘They,’ ” she purposefully left it indefinite, inviting inquiry, “have told me my brother, Sakhon, at my father’s request, has been moved to Kratie.”
“That’s held too,” Sullivan said. She felt wonderful on him. “Your father must be a strong man to be able to let his son go.”
“He used to be very traditional, very religious. Always he read the scriptures.”
“My father used to make us, my sister and me, read the Bible before dinner,” Sullivan said. “One passage every night.”
“He too must have been very religious,” Vathana whispered back. She kissed his ear.
“It wasn’t so much that.” Sullivan ran his hand over the smooth skin of her hip. “It was his way to teach us to think. We’d read the passage, then all through dinner we’d talk about it. What did it mean to us? What did the nuns say it meant? I remember one passage.”
“Just one,” Vathana kidded him, and snuggled in closer.
“Oh, lots,” he responded seriously. “But I was thinking of one. It’s from Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, they’d asked him why he spoke to the people in parables, and he said, ‘Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. Seeing they do not see, hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.’ ”
“Are you certain, Mister Sullivan, you are not Buddhist?” Vathana giggled then turned mock-serious. “You sound Buddhist. It’s written in the Dhammapada, ‘If a fool be associated with a wise man even all his life, he will perceive the truth as little as a spoon perceives the taste of soup. If an intelligent man be associated for one minute only with a wise man, he will soon perceive the truth, as the tongue perceives the taste of soup.’ ”
“You know, I used to think Buddhism was all this mystical stuff and Christianity more down-to-earth. Never mind that. It’s me. I feel like I’ve been given to know, not the mysteries of heaven, but the mysteries of hell.”
“Perhaps it’s because you are an intelligent man.”
“But they’re intelligent too.”
“Who?”
“Why is it they see but don’t see? Why don’t they understand?”
“You mean your people?”
“Vathana, it’s as plain to me as the freckles on my nose.”
She rubbed her nose against his. “They’re very plain.” She giggled.
“Saint Paul said, ‘Always learning, they are never able to come to the knowledge of the truth...they will not progress...their folly will be manifest to all....’ They study. They write. They’ve no idea what’s happening. When will their folly be manifest? Is it going to take a bloodbath for them to wake up?”
“John L.,” Vathana whispered in his ear. “Love me again. You cannot enlighten a fool.”
After they loved again and Sullivan lay on his back with his head in the gentle fog pillow of postejaculation, Vathana massaged his forehead. “You are too young,” she said softly, “to have such furrows.” He opened his eyes. She looked down into his face. “How did you say it? ‘I could gobble you up.’ ” She opened her mouth wide, placed her teeth on his forehead, gently raked the skin, half eating him, half trying to dislodge the pain and worry. “What would happen if we did nothing?” Vathana said in altered tone. “Really. What would happen if there were no you, no me? If John L. Sullivan and Cahuom Vathana did not exist? If we left Cambodia and moved to...to Paris?”
“Well,” Sullivan said, wrapping his arms around her, twisting her down and nipping her nose, “well, first off, they’d come get me and toss my young ass in jail for being—how can I say it?—absent without leave.”
“Truly, John,” Vathana said.
“Truly,” he whispered back. He ran kisses lightly down from her ear, down her neck to her shoulder. He felt the chain which she wore, ran a finger under it as if it blocked him from feeling all of her. Vathana lifted the statuette and rubbed it on the back of his hand. “What’s that?” Sullivan whispered.
“A charm,” she whispered proudly. “From my grandfather’s tooth. My father gave it to me when I married.”
Sullivan fought a sudden twinge of revulsion, an urge to retract his hand. For a quick moment he felt repulsed as if she’d said the Buddha was fresh feces from a hepatitis-ward latrine. He repressed the urge and gently grasped the carved figurine. As he held it, rubbed its smoothness between his fingers, a feeling of the tie to the ancient Wheel of Life rose in him, spread through him, finally reaching expressible thought. “It’s very beautiful,” he said.
“Truly?” Vathana giggled. “Would it be beautiful to you in Paris? Would they really throw you in jail?”
“You mean”—Sullivan flopped back onto his elbows and looked into the night sky—“in Paris. Not here. Hum...I think it would still be beautiful. Paris. Would your camp run without you? Could this stinking city survive without its Angel? Would any more or any fewer weapons be stolen or misused if I told Mataxis I wanted out? God, at least that damned Sun reporter’d be off my ass. I was with a FANK unit...I flew up to Kompong Thom last month. The place...the whole city is fortified but there’s something crazy going on. I was thinking after...I was with the unit at Kilometer 19 near Vat Bakheng.”
“Oh, John. You mustn’t...”
“God. Those devils rose up outa the swamp. A full regiment against, I don’t know, maybe five hundred FANKs. I called in the air strikes and this son of a bitch sees me do it. Did he see fifteen hundred NVA a dozen miles from the capital? Did he see them wipe out the first line? Nope. All he sees is me on the hook with a map. I thought Mataxis would shit. If The New York Times hadn’t started publishing that Pentagon document I’d probably have been court-martialed for advising. Vathana, they see but they don’t see.”
“John, you take this very hard, yes?”
Sullivan rolled away from her. He propped himself up on his elbows and held his chin. “The guy paints me. He paints a picture of me and the whole team with his words. I’m working to keep these people from being slaughtered and he labels me a ‘hard liner.’ He thinks he’s some sort of antiwar idealist and I’m a warmonger. I’m some hawk psychopath. What would happen if we moved to Paris? Who knows? But if they pull all the American lunatic hawks like me out of here, it’s not going to stop the fighting.”
“Truly?”
“Yeah. Truly.”
Rita Donaldson let the heel of her pump fall loose from her foot. She and Tom Jasson were in the veranda dining room of Washington’s Chez Pasquier, sitting, reading the latest installment of the Pentagon Papers as it appeared, exclusively, in The Times, sitting, sipping vodka martinis, amused and simultaneously angered and frustrated by the revelations and by the Times’s coup.
Rita’s shoe fell to the carpet. She turned the page. The photo of a large man dressed in jungle utilities, his back to the camera, caught her eye. Tom Jasson moved his leg deeper under the table.
“Another American advisor in Cambodia...” she said. The words were unconnected with previous utterances.
“Um,” Jasson said. Her toes found his shin, slid to the side of his leg, caressed—suddenly withdrew. Jasson looked up.
“Who the hell...?” Rita said. Her foot fidgeted with the lost pump as she leaned forward, stared into the newspaper-quality photograph.
“What—” Jasson began.
“Arnold White,” she said. “Arnold...The outline credit is to...Do you remember when I got back...?”
“Sure.”
“Remember that obnoxious son of a bitch I told you about?”
“Yeah. Harvey called Chicago and, ah, what was it, San Jose?”
“He called all over. He even checked with the State Department. That bastard said his name was Jim White. Nobody had ever heard of him. Look at this.” Jasson leaned over the table. “Arnold White!?” she said.
“Ah, maybe that’s your man.”
“May...I don’t think so. Harvey checked for anyone named White. There weren’t any in January.”
“You’re really upset about this, aren’t you? So one guy was rude to you—so what?”
“He wasn’t a correspondent. He was CIA, I bet. Trying to set me up.”
“Rita? Rita, it doesn’t make...Well, you tell me. You said nothing came of it, didn’t you?”
Rita Donaldson sighed, thought, You jerk, glared at Tom Jasson. “I don’t know.”
“Look. It couldn’t have worked out better for you. You spent a lousy ten days in that hell and you got a promotion. Now you get to see Paris and cover the talks. I would have gone but my dad’s illness...”
“Yeah, I know. But you know what...”
“It should have been me,” Jasson said. “You didn’t even turn in a decent story. Who was going to read a feature on Cambodian military training? Really!”
“A lot of people read it!”
“Yeah, uh-huh.”
“You envious twit! God!” She finished her martini. “You know what? I’m going to go back.” She tapped the photo of the American “advisor.” “I’m going to go back and nail these bastards. Goddamn gall of the government and these hooligans raping that country!”