VATHANA BENT TO THE amputee, placed the back of her fingers on his temple. His fever had spiked again. The young man moaned quietly but did not speak. His eyes did not focus on her nor was he conscious of her hand. “Your suffering is my suffering,” Vathana whispered. “Let your pain be my pain. Let me bear it for you. Let my eyes weep your tears.”
She looked up to see Doctor Sam Ol watching her. “Has his fever returned?”
“Yes,” Vathana said. “It’s very high. My hand burns.”
Sam Ol sighed. There was a critical shortage of medicine. To give the soldier anything would be to deny it to someone with a chance.
“Angel,” the FANK soldier called out in delirium. He’d been wounded ten days earlier in a skirmish along the Mekong four kilometers to the south. At first he’d been high spirited, hyper even though there was nothing below his left knee. Slowly infection spread up his leg. Every morning and evening Vathana had changed the dressing and washed with boiled water the tight flap of skin Sam Ol had sewn over the bone end. For this man there were no antiseptics, no antibacterials, no antifungals. Only boiled water. On the fifth day the young man complained of the smell of his leg. On the sixth the fevers began their sine-like spike and drop pattern. No family came to visit him, to feed him, to pay for his care or to bring or buy medicine. Without that support he was relegated to Vathana’s team of volunteers.
“I’m here,” Vathana whispered. She felt embarrassed under Sam Ol’s tired gaze—embarrassed by her inability to do more now than just hold the quivering hand, embarrassed by the malodorous stench of the leg, embarrassed for Sam Ol who died a little more each time a patient went undertreated, embarrassed for the soldier reduced in painful delirium to begging for the last kind face he’d seen.
“Angel, it hurts. It hurts me. Please.”
“Give me your pain,” Vathana whispered. She wished the doctor would leave so she might be alone with the dying boy, alone with him and two young volunteers and forty more wounded without means to pay for care, alone in the small windowless storeroom she’d begged them to open for at least the semblance of care, alone with all the odors of live and rotting flesh. The soldier’s back arched, his stomach thrust upward, an arch suspended atilt by shoulders at one end and the good leg and stump at the other. Immediately at the stump end a red growth oozed across the bandage.
“Angel,” the soldier called. His body relaxed. From his chest came an eerie rattle as if small wooden cubes were being shaken in a dried gourd.
Vathana closed her eyes, squeezed the soldier’s hand in her two.
“Your American is here,” Sam Ol said softly.
For six months Vathana had not seen or heard from John Sullivan. In that time she’d immersed herself ever more deeply in the swarming disease-ridden ghettos of Neak Luong’s refugees and in the world of the wounded without families. Before dawn each day she walked barefoot to the pagoda to pray and bolster her spirits, then she made first rounds at the hospital or at the infirmary tent in the camp. At noon she went to the small refugee hut she’d taken as her own. Nothing bolstered her more. Each noon she was met by Samnang, now 28½ months old, and by Samol, just over a year. The boy had grown, lithe yet hard, strong and wiry—not a typical toddler. Perhaps it was his limited ability to interact with and thus be affected by his surroundings which allowed him to be so healthy and happy. With a wonderful smile and a slobbering “ba-ba-ba-ba” greeting, he would run with his distorted arms to his mother, wrap her legs in his iron hug and not let her go, thrashing his seeping nose back and forth on her thigh, singing, laughing “ba-ba-ba-ba.” Samol would wait until Vathana entered the hut then totter her delicate frame toward her mother, chattering with a vocabulary of forty or fifty words. After the midday meal and rest, with the children being cared for by Sophan, Vathana spent two hours organizing, doing administrative chores for the camp, the hospital or the pagoda orphanage. Then she again would make her rounds of the sick, wounded and starving.
It was 22 February 1972, the day after Richard Nixon had arrived in Peking, arrived and altered the geopolitical conditions which so strongly affected every life in Southeast Asia. Vathana’s morning rounds were over. Two orderlies came for the corpse. In the doorway beyond Sam Ol, Vathana could see a swath of dust-speckled sunlight. “Captain Sullivan,” the doctor said. “He’s in the reception area.”
Vathana nodded. “America,” she mumbled to herself, “sunshine and death.”
“Are you in good health?” Sullivan uttered the Khmer greeting idiom which had replaced the traditional “How many children have you?” or “Have you had rice today?” He stood there looking uncomfortable in civilian clothes, his hair lighter than before, red-blond, his skin darker, his eyes staring not just at her but through her and beyond, not unlike the eyes of the soldier she’d just left.
“I’m well,” she answered in Khmer. “Are you in good health?” Vathana wanted him to hold her but she remained very formal and he didn’t move. She wanted to say, I was afraid when you were missing, but he was here now, alive now, and the other had just died.
“I’m being crucified.” Sullivan switched to French. “Or about to be.” He too wanted to hold her, wanted to release six months of death and frustration, wanted to bury it with an intimacy they once shared. But all about them was more pain and imminent death.
“Crucified?!”
“Figuratively. My photo was in all the newspapers back in the World. I’ve been accused of advising FANK troops and that’s against the law.” For Vathana to understand what Sullivan was talking about required more energy than she, at that moment, could muster. She let the comment go unquestioned, unexplained. “The hospital appears to be packed full,” Sullivan stammered.
“Come and see,” Vathana said matter-of-factly. “My rounds are complete.” She turned and walked toward the first ward, a long narrow room with windows on both sides. “We’ve added all the cots we could get,” she said, stopping at the ward entrance. “Some patients sleep on mats on the floor and there are two in each bed. There’s no medicine. Little medicine.” Her voice was flippant. “Sometimes we just let them die so we can give their space to someone else. If all the relatives would go home maybe we’d be able to walk in there.”
Sullivan followed her, stared into the crowded ward with its mingling of the sick, the healthy grievers, the listless children. He glanced back to her thin face, her straggly hair. Two flies buzzed at her temples.
“We’ve added at least three beds for each one that was here”—Vathana’s voice cracked—“but we haven’t added a single nurse or another doctor.” Tears ran from her eyes. “Just once I’d like it if a politician were in there. Ill. Without tetracycline and without sterile bandages. War is for politicians, isn’t it? For mine and for yours who started all this!”
Sullivan did not console Vathana. He had no compassion for that viewpoint. Instead he said coldly, “I’ll see that you get some. Tetracycline?”
Vathana did not look at him but gazed over the heads of the people in the ward to a picture of Buddha in repose someone had taped to the far wall. “It’s good against typhus fever, lung and urinary tract infections, and...” She did not finish but turned and led him down the corridor to a second open ward where the scene was similar, then out a door to a small shed surrounded by wailing women and workers with their mouths and noses covered by dirty surgical masks. Amongst the crowd were three children with shaved heads.
“They come here to claim the bodies,” Vathana explained. She attempted to be detached, impersonal. “But now many bodies go unclaimed because...” she stammered, “...with the land broken people die without their families.”
Sullivan looked at Vathana as she looked at the morgue and kept her side or back to him. He wanted to reach out to her, say to her, I’ve seen thousands die with their families, wanted her to understand, but the chill kept him at bay. “That’s why there are only a few shaved heads?” he asked.
“No,” Vathana answered. She turned again. “With so many deaths,” she said as she moved toward the storeroom, “the practice is not so much anymore.”
They entered the dank stench-fouled storeroom. Immediately several broken bodies quivered and from anguished faces came the call, “Angel. Angel, touch me.” “Angel, hold my hand for a moment. Just one moment.” Vathana squatted by a mat here, a cot there, squeezing hands or saying prayers.
The scene disgusted Sullivan. Mutilated and ill ex-soldiers, still unwashed and in the tattered uniforms in which they’d been wounded, lying en masse amid swarming flies and filth. Sullivan grabbed Vathana’s blouse at the shoulder, gently pulled her back into the sunlit corridor. “What the hell’s going on in there?” A dozen flies had come out with them. Sullivan jerked his arm to get several out of his red hair.
“They’ve no money,” Vathana said. “No families. There’s no money to pay for their care.”
Sullivan snapped his left arm back, setting the pesky flies abuzz. One landed on the sweat of his upper lip and scurried to his nostril. He shook his head violently, snorting like a horse, then grabbed Vathana’s wrist and pulled her farther from the storeroom door. “It doesn’t take money to clean the place up.”
“It takes more than we can do,” Vathana said, politely, cold.
“More?”
“So many casualties. We’re not equipped for war. War is civilian casualties and dead young men and my country destroyed.” Again several flies landed on Sullivan’s left arm and burrowed beneath the red hair. Slowly he moved his arm down and before his torso. He squeezed his left hand into a fist making the arm hard and rigid. “We look to America to save us,” Vathana said, not looking at Sullivan but back toward the storeroom. “In our time of need we look to America for salvation. But of course America must first protect its own soldiers in Viet Nam.” Sullivan made his right hand into a rigid paddle and slowly brought it into striking position. “We suffer from this limited intervention,” Vathana said. “Better all or none. Why do you hold back? If ever there was a country with a just cause, with need, it is Cambodia.” The flies on Sullivan’s arm were both facing toward his face. Sweeping in low-level from behind, slapping hard, he splattered two insects, the fly guts popping like pimples, leaving puslike globs smeared in the red hair. The slap snatched Vathana’s attention.
She bit down, repressing an urge to retch. “Do not kill,” she ordered, “the living thing.”
Sullivan looked up. Her eyes were on his. “Do not kill...” he mocked. “You’ve got to be kidding. Flies?”
“If all would care about all living things”—Vathana dropped her eyes—“perhaps all these people wouldn’t die.”
“Five hundred men are murdered around me. Suong! Villages as far as you can see wiped out! And you care about a fly?!”
“Buddha says all living things.”
“God!” Sullivan slapped a hand to his head and pulled his hair. His speech was quick. His eyes bugged. “You Buddhists are nuts. Tell me, where does it stop? A fly! You asked me for tetracycline. What do you think that does? Do you think it escorts bacteria to the bladder? Maybe carries it there to be pissed away. Waves good-bye, too. Those are living things. You want to kill them. You’ve got to draw the line someplace. What will you do, what will you kill, in order to save living things?”
Two hours later, after a nearly silent lunch with her children and Sophan, Vathana and Sullivan strolled beneath the shade trees at the edge of the Mekong just north of Neak Luong’s center. They had not been able to reestablish the warmth they had once shared, yet both wished for, needed, the warmth.
“The land is broken,” Vathana said. She placed her hand in his. “The economy is in shambles. Troops are demoralized. I don’t know if the country can survive.”
“It’s got to,” Sullivan said sadly.
“The government’s weak,” Vathana said. “It can’t protect us. They collect taxes but abandon the people. Nothing is right anymore.”
“It would be worse if the Communists won.”
“I don’t know. There are rumors of...” Vathana paused. She wasn’t certain if she should continue.
“...a coup.” Sullivan finished the sentence.
“Yes. They say Son Ngoc Thanh may become the new head of state. That Sirik Matak has urged Lon Nol to relinquish total command.”
“And what do you hear the Americans say?”
“What do they say? You must know.”
“I don’t. I think the embassy plays ignorant.”
“Maybe they’re not playing,” Vathana said seriously. Sullivan took it as a pun and laughed. He moved to put his arm around her but she squeezed his hand and kept it at her side.
“The students say he no longer knows the country.” Vathana repeated a phrase which had become common. “There’s no longer a reason for the people to fight. Bonjour is everywhere. Worse than before.”
Sullivan released Vathana’s hand. They had reached the spot along the bank where they’d made love a year earlier. How badly he wanted her again, yet how angry he was with the morose talk of demoralization and corruption, the fatalism in her tone. He knew disagreeing would further drive the wedge between them, yet accepting the defeatism would drive a wedge between him and his own beliefs.
“He is corrupt,” Sullivan said. “And he’s inept. His stupid orders botched Chenla II. But still there’s reason to fight. Fight the enemy and the corruption.”
“We get no support,” Vathana responded. “Officers build villas with paychecks from phantom troops, from sales of weapons to the Khmer Rouge. Why should our soldiers fight?”
“God damn em,” Sullivan rasped. As he let his anger ooze its intensity flashed. “Damn em! Even you. They’re getting to even you.”
“Yes. They are getting to me.”
“Those jackasses!” Sullivan blurted. “There’s a blatant murdering evil out there and their fanatic corruption masks it. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Leaders! They derive their strength from those led, not from some sort of ‘High Holy Powers’! Those bastards. They concentrate on false glory, and they forget responsibility. That’s what’s losing. Don’t get sucked in!” Sullivan stopped as abruptly as he’d begun. His tone softened. “Vathana. Dear, dear Vathana.” He almost whispered the words. “Don’t get sucked in by the rhetoric. There’s good reason to continue to fight.”
Late that afternoon Sullivan made hospital rounds with the Angel of Neak Luong. He knelt by feverish soldiers in the storeroom and held their hands or rubbed a coin on their chest as he’d been shown. He washed wounds with boiled water and rebandaged infected tissue with stained, boiled, air-dried reused strips of cloth. He cleaned watery shit from floors, cots and mats, and he struggled to maintain some sense of cause and effect. After four hours of listening to the gasps, wheezes, painful groans, after only four hours of being shit, pus and blood covered, after only one shift of watching Vathana hold and comfort two men until death, he, American army captain John L. Sullivan, who had seen thousands die in battle, found himself wondering if capitulation to the Communists might not end the war and the suffering.
When evening came Sullivan and Vathana washed the residual filth from their bodies and clothes and left the hospital. But the residual stench clung in their nasal sinuses like creosote in a chimney and the residual images stuck in their minds as if stored on film.
“There’s a film at the cinema,” Vathana said. “We can go. I’ll translate for you.”
Heat from the road radiated up and kept them hot even though the air had cooled. They walked in bursts, quick paces interspersed with pauses. She led him first into an alley, up a set of stairs, across a long balcony and down a second alley to a small room with a few tables—a backdoor cafe. There they shared a bowl of shrimp soup cooked with lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves and hot Cambodian chili peppers. To cool their mouths they shared a Howdy Cola. At first they spoke little, only enough to keep them in motion.
“Tomorrow you return to the capital?” Vathana asked.
“I can say I missed the chopper.” Sullivan smiled.
“Can you miss it a long time? There’s so much to do here and so few hands.”
“I’m afraid only one day. With the charges and all, I’m lucky to have escaped at all.”
“I wish you could stay longer. In two nights there is a meeting of the Khmer Patriots for Peace. And the next day there’s the meeting of the Rivermen for a Just Government.”
“Khmer Patriots?” To Sullivan the phrase meant a Communist front organization.
“Yes. It’s a very good group. Very active. The Refugee Association has become a branch. Without the KPP the camp couldn’t survive. Every day the KPP attracts more members.”
“Are there more groups?”
“Oh yes. I’ve joined the Khmer Women’s Association but you can’t come to that meeting. Most of the hospital volunteers are KWA.”
“I wish I could come.”
“To the women’s meeting?” Vathana laughed.
“To the KPP, maybe.”
“If you do, I’ll introduce you.”
“Who runs these organizations?”
“People.”
“Vathana...”
“Yes.”
“Be careful.”
“Be careful?”
“Yes.”
“Of what?”
“In Viet Nam the Communists would develop organizations like these. There’d be a hidden core of guerrillas. They’d infuse the whole group with their slogans, their ‘revolutionary spirit.’ ”
“Oh John! We’re not Communists! These are the only groups doing anything for the people. We can’t wait for outside salvation. Buddha teaches us to depend on ourselves.”
Again Sullivan backed off emotionally. As he did, he wondered why his love was so tied to his ideological beliefs, why there was no room in his heart for variations in thought. Vathana also cooled. She kept her face turned, not just the slight, polite amount to one side but far to the side, as if it had become painful to look at the red-haired foreigner so laden with inner contradictions.
The movie was the most popular film in Cambodia in 1972. A king of the Angkor era was the focus of an evil plot by his third wife and her secret lover, a powerful warlord with a huge army. Through black magic the monarch discovered the conspiracy and with hexes he forced the soldiers of his adversary to battle and decapitate each other. Quietly Vathana translated the Khmer to French and whispered it to Sullivan, but he seemed not to need the translation so she stopped.
When the movie was over and they were alone she told him, “Sometimes I think of you, my American, like that king.”
“Do you plot against me?” Sullivan tried to joke.
“No. Of course not,” Vathana said seriously.
“If you did,” Sullivan said, clutching her hands, not giving her time to explain, “I would forgive you.” He attempted to embrace her but she stepped back. He pulled her closer. She put her head down and gave him only her hair to kiss.
“You forgive me?” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“Even though I’ve done nothing?” She pulled away. “Humph!” She recommenced the walk to her camp hut. “Do one thing for me.”
“Anything.”
“Tomorrow, when you go, take a photo album to Phnom Penh for me. To my mother-in-law. Safer there than in Neak Luong, eh? I don’t wish it destroyed.”
For days they had not tortured him, had not asked him a single question, had even allowed him a bucket of water in which to wash himself and his clothes. The dry season was in its last weeks and each new afternoon sky seemed to grow heavier, darker. Still it had not rained. After six weeks of beatings and rope tortures in the small ex-storeroom of the ex-pagoda, Chhuon’s body was raw, bruised, as sore as if he’d been caught beneath a stampede of water buffalo or pounded by the concussion of a large bomb. As his strength had drained and his will to resist paled with each blow, his beliefs hardened. Even snared in fatalism and hopelessness his Buddhism, his nationalism and his adoration of Khmer family traditions strengthened as if the ropes and blows were concentrating his beliefs into his very core. The eighteenth of March had been preceded by threats, had arrived with the “last” interrogation, then had passed without explanation. To Chhuon’s disappointment they—Hang Tung, Trinh, Trinh Le, who else he didn’t know—had rescinded the order of public hanging, had bettered his treatment and had ceased the physical torture, only, he thought later, to change tortures.
At first he welcomed the break. Every day he had been dragged from the blackness of his cell, interrogated and beaten. Sometimes his wrists were tied behind his back and he was hung by his hands until just the tips of his toes touched the floor and his shoulders screamed in pain, the muscles and ligaments slowly tearing under his own weight and the good-natured slaps on the shoulders by the guard. “Names! Everyone who has helped you.”
“I’ve done nothing.”
“You are the head of the resistance. We know that.”
“Someone lies.”
“You are known as Cloud Forest.”
“Never. They made it up.”
As the ligaments stretched farther, as cartilage popped and Chhuon’s feet rested more squarely on the floor, his interrogators raised the rope. “Cloud Forest. Give us all the names.”
“There are no others.”
“So you confess to your crimes alone.”
“No crimes.”
Some days the tortures lasted only a few minutes, other days he was beaten for six hours straight. Sometimes they tied him and left, then returned in five minutes and beat him again. Other times they tied him and left him alone for hours. He never knew what they would do. In the beginning, on the days he braced himself for the worst, it always seemed they were most lenient. Then he’d lapse and they’d set upon him with such vengeance he’d pray for the release of death.
“You can get away with nothing. We know everything. What we don’t have are two identifications to verify each conspirator. We’ve picked up sixteen. Ten implicate you. They’ve provided us with many names. Only a few have been identified by just one. Should we incarcerate those with just one identifier? You’re the leader. Tell us the names so that we don’t unjustly kill a villager to avenge the whim of one of your evil lackeys.”
“I know no names.”
“You know code names.”
“There is no one. I’ve done nothing.”
“It’s only a matter of time. Vanatanda supplied you with the plastique. The boy Sakhron brought you the cartridge trap.”
“Vanatanda is a monk. I know no boy Sakhron.”
Again and again and again the questions and beatings until Chhuon could barely remember what was real and what was the reality they wished him to tell. Then it stopped. His shoulders, fingers, ankles, feet, hips, and back tightened, recoiled as if they were springs overly stretched. And his mind recoiled. At first his anxiety grew because of the pattern of greatest wrath following lax days. Then that gave way to a vision of himself hanging by the neck from a rope secured to the pagoda’s porch roof carrying beam. And that to thoughts and conjectures about the rumors. How had he heard? He couldn’t recall. All Viet Namese officers had been withdrawn to the headquarters camp. Why? Were the nationals gaining? Had the Americans invaded? He had been cut off from all news except that which the guards or interrogators passed on. Had they indeed told him of the extractions? Certainly they had. Why else would Trinh Le have told him it wasn’t true? There was a plan to remove the Viet Namese settlers too. Of that Chhuon was sure. Oh how he wanted to ask for news of his family. He had had such a good life. What merit he must have earned in the last to have been granted the good wife, Sok. And his children—each one so special. Vathana in Neak Luong with her husband, both under the guidance of Mister Pech. An image of her at birth floated pleasantly in his mind’s eye. For the moment he breathed easily and his pains evaporated. Samay would be twenty now. Perhaps he had found his sister in Neak Luong. That would be best. There were the little ones who had died so young, at birth and at one year, died to be spared witnessing the atrocities of what had happened to our country and our people. And Kdeb and Yani...
Chhuon’s thoughts froze. Ceased. Four years had not only not erased or eased the memory but had nurtured his shame and guilt. Why? Why had he left them with Y Ksar? Why had he even taken them on the trip? Life is suffering. Life is suffering. Blood for blood. It meant nothing. It roused nothing in him anymore. It was not the fault of the Viet Namese but his own fault. He, Chhuon, their father, their earthly guardian, who had left them in the path of death. The path was there, had always been there, was as plain to see as if it were a street in Stung Treng with a hundred large trucks barreling up and down. Only he hadn’t seen it because of the numpai. He had let his two beautiful young children play in the road and they’d been obliterated by a death truck and for years he’d blamed the truck. He’d even, he knew now, blamed his children. Lord Buddha, he thought, when I die let my eyes close for I am ready to leave this earth. Let my youngest son not think badly of me. If it is your will, let me once more walk a forest trail and smell the orchids by my Srepok River.
Nang shifted slowly. The filth of the observation site disgusted him. His eyes darkened, sunk toward the back of his skull. In the sweet stench and predawn stillness elements of his personal inner contradictions battled for prominence. What had Ngoc Minh said, “Twice wounded makes a soldier cowardly?” Humph! But was it true? Had he lost his boyish invulnerability? No, that wasn’t it. That, he told himself, was the stamp of Ngoc Minh’s bourgeois classism shining through his thin veil of purity and brotherhood. There’s a difference between being cured of seeking impossible targets and being overly cautious.
For three weeks KT 104 soldiers had silently watched, planned, prepared the battlefield. The 81st Battalion was Nang’s reserve, reinforcement and ambush unit. Two other battalions of the KT task force were charged with regaining the village. Units from other zones had converged on the Northeast, readying a systematic, village-by-village liberation sweep. Nang’s and Von’s stragglers had been assigned the NVA headquarters camp.
Again Nang shifted. He had chosen the observation point, and since the offensive had begun across the border, the site had been deluged with tons of medical offal. Each night three stragglers slithered into the camp and rearranged the body parts so a cavern existed beneath the sheared-off legs, the amputated arms, the splintered chunks of rib cages. Then two left and one nestled down amid the waste and swill of the morbid pit behind the hospital complex.
In the predawn Nang occupied his mind alternately with a flood of thoughts and then with perfect attention to his own inner void. He listened, then fell into himself. He could barely see—occasionally a door opened and light squirted from the hospital or from the headquarters operation center up the hill. He dared not smell, feel or taste. At one point he thought about ice, huge slabs, not the blocks, he’d seen as a boy in a Stung Treng warehouse but sheets covering lakes or rivers. What a wonderful horrible thing to be able to freeze all the water, to freeze a body, to have ice for blood, to have that total control to freeze or thaw one’s own blood and that of all others. The air pulsed, vague, distant. Dossiers froze people, Nang thought. Cahuom Chhuon, village chairman. Eh? So now he’s chairman of a yuon village! He must have abandoned the people, must have abandoned the Khmer race. Ah, what could have been...The thought was vague—a pang, not words. And his wife, a resister. Ha! Sok a resister! Mama a resister! That’s crazy. Ha, the inner contradictions of the yuon apparatus—as disgusting as this hospital pit. And this Hang Tung. He lives in the chairman’s house! Beyond doubt he rubs the chairman’s wife’s parts with broken bones.
The pulsing became more distinct. Nang shifted, bringing his eyes to the arranged narrow slit between a mangled thigh and a discarded arm. There was little room to move beneath the parts, enough to hide, to blend in, when the orderlies brought new loads to the pit, then to shift, to observe when the way was clear. The sky had grayed since Nang’s last look. Now the pulsing became a loud whacking. Between the headquarters center and the hospital there was a flurry of activity. From a bunker men dragged several very old women toward the hospital surgical cavern. At a leveled area a dozen men pulled back the woven living canopy, opening a landing pad. Then the helicopter appeared. Nang recognized it from his training in China. Other yothea observers had reported the narrow, black, round-nosed ship but Nang had not believed them. Always the reports were from veterans of the Chenla II fight, “Helicopter fever,” Nang had whispered to Eng. “They see helicopters everywhere. They feel them in their sleep.” What the yotheas described, what Nang now saw, was not an American Huey or Cobra or a CH-53 but, Nang realized, a four-blade, single-rotor, grasshopper-looking Soviet Mi-4. From the pit of human sludge Nang could see soldiers, hospital porters and guards converge on the ship. The ship did not shut down, barely idled down, its tripod of tires touching the earth tentatively as if it were an insect set to jump away. High-ranking casualties, Nang thought. More vomit for my pit. They’d never bring in a soldier like that. Let them die and bury them trail-side. But the guards? He strained his eyes to ascertain the details of the picture unfolding a hundred meters away. He could see them separate the wounded, but could not tell what distinguished the groups. Then it hit him. Four were POWs.
The evening sky over Phum Sath Din was low, gray, filled with the light premonsoon haze which characterized the foothills of the Srepok Forest. From the treeline above the highest, and as yet never plowed, irrigated or planted paddy, Met Nhel and Ngoc Minh squatted amid a square of two dozen local resisters. “We all are the masters of our own destiny, eh?” Nhel said quietly to Kpa, Cahuom Sam and the others. He spoke in the idioms and accent of those with whom he sat. Cahuom Sam nodded. Sakhron grunted affirmation. Only Kpa kept his thoughts hidden.
For more than a year the local resistance had had loose contact with the Khmer Patriots via a series of small, tangential, local groups. When Ngoc Minh’s units arrived, Kpa’s locals were desperate for food, down to the last of their weapons. “With the weapons we’ve given you,” Ngoc Minh whispered, “your unit will be able to match the best yuon militia.”
“We’re grateful that the Kampuchean Patriots Liberation Front has arrived,” Sam whispered back. “We’ve had too little firepower to be effective.”
“But you’ve been very effective. The Center has depended upon you for intelligence. You’ve never let the Center down.”
Kpa flicked his little finger and tapped Sakhron. The boy, acting more the country bumpkin than he was, asked quietly, “What center?”
“It’s not important,” Ngoc Minh said. “What is important is the liberation of the people. How do you know about Colonel Nui’s request?”
“That’s not important,” Kpa said quietly. “Only that he requested a return of troops and that it was denied.”
“He wanted more troops about the village?”
“He reported to the next higher headquarters that an ‘uprising’ was possible.”
“Because of your increased activity?”
“One cannot know another’s mind,” Kpa said respectfully.
“This man Hang Tung, he...”
“He has four bodyguards,” Sam said. “He had one but he was killed by a trap set for his master. Now he has four. He’s smart, nervous.”
“Mister Kpa”—Ngoc Minh turned toward the resistance leader—“I need only one of your men for a guide. The village will be easy. But the headquarters will be difficult. Send your squads there.”
“You must”—Sam cleared his throat—“rescue my cousin.”
“It will be done.”
“When?”
“In three days,” Nhel said. “In three days the village will be liberated. Our fighters at the yuon complex will attack first.”
Quietly, almost as if he were a spirit without physical substance, Kpa walked the animal path along the river toward the village. With nightfall, mist had settled amongst the trees, between the bunkers and houses, isolating the area as much as if it had been surgically pared from the earth and set afloat in the ether. Kpa did not crawl through the minefield but walked where his feet told him he’d walked a dozen times before. He did not slither over the berm but stepped slowly through the gap the militia had left, left secure in the knowledge that no one would cross the mined belt between the river and the berm. He did not sneak along the alleyways toward the home of Cahuom Chhuon but strolled the middle of the main street as he’d done dozens of times, strolled to the turnoff, walked to the small angel house before the Cahuom home, said a silent prayer for Chhuon, then relaxed, motionless, awaiting the changing of bodyguards in the courtyard.
To the east the resistance squads had rendezvoused with elements of Von’s 81st Battalion and were being used to assist Von’s yotheas in their preparation of attack and withdrawal routes and of ambush sites in case the NVA attempted to reinforce from the east or in case the headquarters troops attempted to break out or counterattack. Farther east, across the border, the NVA had finally opened the third front of the Nguyen Hue Offensive and was fully committed to battles at Plei Ku and Kontum.
Two hours past midnight Kpa heard the familiar commotion of Hang Tung’s bodyguards. Like a cat he moved. Quickly he leaped from tree to tree within the small family orchard, then to the wall of the house where Hang Tung slept. “Get your rice-bottom up,” Kpa heard a guard grumble. “You’ve snored enough.” “Uhh. Not as much as Mister Committee Member, eh?” “I’d like one night to sleep on his mat.” Kpa glided to the window. A guard would be inside on a mat below the sill. Another across the threshold. “I’d like one night to return to my wife’s mat.”
Kpa waited. When all was again silent, he traced the jamb with his left hand, raised his right foot to the sill, his toes just reaching, then as if a helium-filled balloon, he rose effortlessly. Immediately he separated the curtain, dropped his foot, tenderly felt for the body which he had heard breathing beneath. He felt the mat, dragged his foot to its edge, stepped in. Hang Tung slept by the plaited curtain dividing the central room. His breathing was irregular, spasmodic, as if dreams haunted him. Kpa shuffled toward his symbol of evil. Slower, he cautioned himself. Quicker, his hatred ordered. Suddenly his legs felt as if they were sacks filled tight with a rush of water. He stopped. The guard across the threshold coughed, rolled, sputtered back to sleep.
From his sleeve Kpa removed a bamboo stiletto. Its tip was needle sharp, its edges like razor blades, its entire length soaked in poison made from an extract of wild raisins. Kpa listened carefully. He could not see even an outline of Hang Tung’s form. Which way were his feet? When Kpa descended upon Tung to clamp a hand over his nose and mouth, to ensure silence he needed to know whether Tung slept mouth-nose or nose-mouth from him.
Kpa slid a foot. Then another! His shin contacted the low table and he froze. Something, ajar, a lamp, wobbled. “Umph!” Hang Tung hacked, arched his neck, resettled. Kpa knew. Mouth-nose. He turned ninety degrees to the body, slowly descended, slowly passed his hand up until he felt the heat of exhausted breath. He waited. Inhale, Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Clamp. Hang Tung tried to gasp. Before he could, Kpa’s dagger found the soft tissue beneath his jaw. He drove the dagger in, down through the mouth, tongue, palate and into the brain—exactly as a butcher might kill a chicken. Hang Tung’s body shuddered, first head and shoulders, then arms, hips, legs and feet. Then all movement ceased.
“One slow, four quick! One slow, four quick!” Nang chanted as the main force concentrated on the few strong points. Their attack on the NVA headquarters east of Phum Sath Din followed classic North Viet Namese tactics. The first LP/OPs were knocked out as Hang Tung shuddered and died, two days, not three, after Ngoc Minh had met with the resisters. An hour later every KVM/NVA village in the lower Srepok Valley was under siege and Lieutenant Colonel Nui’s lightly defended headquarters (not a single artillery piece,
AA gun or even mortar had been left back) was being prepped by Krahom 61mm mortars as KK commandos penetrated the perimeter, grenading fighting positions, hitting the internal structures with 57mm recoilless rifle fire and creating general chaos amongst the defenders, POW guards, medics and porters.
“Move! Move! Move! Attack!” Adrenaline surged through every cell of Nang’s body. The rapid barking chorus of his yotheas’ AKs elevated the excitement. “Without this,” he shouted back at a cell of new yotheas as they huddled behind a large tree trunk, “without Angkar, all Khmers are doomed. The Khmer race prevails or vanishes tonight. Move!”
His troops moved. They ran into sporadic return fire, disciplined fire from those few soldiers who remained along the south berm. Within minutes, perimeter pockets of resistance fell back or were flanked and destroyed. The fighting moved deeper into the camp. From the north berm a huge explosion—a bomb to be transported, no Krahom soldier knew where—a fireball flashed, leaped skyward illuminating attackers, defenders, structures. Then blindness in blackness as the concussion blasted outward knocking troops of both armies flat, ripping eardrums, zinging stones, tree splinters, charred jeep shrapnel. Wounding. Killing. “Move!” In the second-long pause following the concussion Nang rallied his fighters. “Through the center,” he ordered. “There, there, there.” Nang pushed yotheas into the gap between the hospital and the main operations bunker. “Duch, get Thevy. Cut it in two.”
“Got it.” Duch radioed the Rabbit Platoon leader of the 2d Company. He monitored others. Nang was too excited to direct; Eng also was too deeply immersed in the direct killing of NVA resistance pockets. Duch radioed orders as if Nang had told him: 3d Company take the operations center, 1st mop up the perimeter, 2d to the hospital complex. “Met Nang!” Duch grabbed the CO’s shirt. “Met Nang. Hawk Platoon is out of ammo.”
Nang paused, looked eerily at Duch. “Have them fall back.”
“Hawk! They’re the recoilless rifle team. Rifle fire can’t penetrate the operations bunker. There’s a company of defenders there.”
“Get Von. The 81st has a recoilless platoon, eh?”
“Yes sir.” Duch smiled and set about with his calls. All about them yotheas were in a destroying frenzy.
Nang ran downhill toward the hospital. Firing was sporadic. He found Rath, the company commander, talking lustily with Puc, the leader of Monkey Platoon. “They’ve no way out.” Met Puc laughed. “First we eliminated those in the upper wards. Now our strugglers have sealed all the exits. They’re working through the caves room by room.”
“Bring me there,” Nang said triumphantly. “Have those standing around collect all the medicine. Police up the weapons.”
“Should we set up our own bivouac?”
“No! We don’t want terrain. Let them have it back so we can trap them here again.”
Nang scurried in through a tunnel opening, down a short corridor and into a large room. The bodies of half a dozen dead Viet Namese orderlies were strewn amid the floor clutter. That of a traumatically decapitated yothea lay on the table in the center of the room, his mangled head set upon his chest like some repugnant cancerous growth. Nang smiled broadly at the few yotheas relaxing with the corpses. From a narrow connecting passageway came the muffled sound of small arms. “Have we taken the next room?”
“Oh yes, Met Nang. The next two are ours. It’s the middle one that’s fortified.”
“Fortified?”
“Met Nang.” A small thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boy stood. “You remember me?”
“Yes,” Nang said.
“Met Tam. I helped you at Baray.”
“Yes. Yes, I remember.”
“Met Nang, this is too much. Must we kill those who lie helpless?”
“Would you have us leave them to heal and attack us again?”
“I...I would...Could we take them prisoner? Most have been wounded by American bombs. Wounded in the same fight we fight.”
“We fight the same enemy, Tam, but if they win they’ll turn again on Kampuchea. A tiger doesn’t change its stripes because it’s been maimed by an eagle.”
“I just...think...”
“Why is there fortification in the center room?”
Another yothea stepped forward. “It’s their prison,” he said. “That’s what Thevy thinks.”
“Prison! POWs!”
Nang squeezed through the passage to the second room, a large ward in which forty or fifty patients in narrow three-high bunks had been bayoneted. He squeezed through another passage into a third opening, a room with four operating stations. Again there was the litter and stench of death—doctors, nurses, their heads smashed by clubs or rifle butts—and patients, tubes and hemostats removed, allowed to drain.
Nang slowed, took his time. He sauntered about the ward ordering yotheas to confiscate various medical supplies and instruments. The underground facility was more modern than anything Nang could have imagined—better equipped than any operating room he’d ever seen. “What’s this?” he asked, lifting a chromed instrument.
“I don’t know,” Tam said. From the back of the third room came childlike whimpering. Tam glanced up, looking for the source.
Nang grabbed the handle of the instrument he’d found and shook it. The outer chamber began to whirl about the central handhold. Nang smiled. To him the centrifuge was like a shiny toy. Into the narrow slit passage leading to the final room, two yotheas were firing short bursts. Nang turned, turned back. “What’s that crying?” The distraction of the instrument had temporarily broken his drive for immediate conquest.
“There’s a jail cell back there,” Tam said. He had made a brief investigation and now walked past Nang, his head down as if he were about to vomit.
“Stop!” Nang ordered. With the instrument in his claw he motioned for the young yothea to lead him back. Tam covered his nose.
At the back of the surgical ward Nang, Tam and several yotheas stared into two small dungeons. Inside each were perhaps a dozen Mountaineer or Khmer elders. In one the people were dead—drained human bags—rotting in a half-resealed cave. In the other the living huddled, terrified. “Open it,” Nang said to the yotheas. Immediately two ripped the bamboo-slat door apart. The elders cowered farther to the rear. Nang stepped in, squatted. He still held the chromed centrifuge. “Why are you here?” he asked quietly. No one answered. He pointed at an old woman. “I know you, Auntie,” he said. “Come out.” Still the old people didn’t move, didn’t answer. “Come,” Nang said, gesturing with the instrument.
“take me,” an old man said, “you take me. leave moeun.”
“Moeun?” Nang said.
“take my blood,” the old man said. He rolled to his knees expecting to be dragged from the dungeon. He did not comprehend what had happened in the underground surgical ward before him. In his bitterness he crawled and swore and mumbled at Nang. “bastard, yellow bastard, you don’t need that instrument. i’m O. O positive, you typed my blood twice already, bastard. you keep us for blood for your wounded, then suck us dry and seal our bodies in the caves, go ahead, bastard.”
Nang and his yotheas stumbled back as the barely human creature crawled from the dungeon. Then Nang said, “Get them out of there. They are Kampuchean. To be regained.” Nang turned, stepped toward the slit passage where two yotheas were sporadically firing toward the central wardroom. Then Nang stopped. “Moeun,” he muttered to himself. He turned to see his soldiers assisting the old people. Moeun, he thought. Aunt Ry’s mother! How did she get in...What have those yuon bastards done to Phum Sath Din?!
Nang clamped his teeth, strode to the slit passage. A yothea was about to roll a grenade into the tunnel. Pistol cracks exploded from the far end, the unaimed rounds impacting the sides of the curved tunnel.
“Stop!” Nang barked the order.
Heads snapped. Some yotheas looked at him with who-the-hell-is-he? glances. A few leaped up. The grenadier snarled, “This’ll get em.”
“No. Angkar wants those POWs—alive.” Nang pointed to the man with the grenade. “You. And you, Puc. Go out and come in from the other side. Order the fire ceased.”
In the absence of Krahom fire from the operating ward the firing of the NVA guards in the center chamber increased. For ten minutes they fired wildly. For ten minutes Nang could hear the muffled sounds of KK fire from the other side. Then all fire stopped.
In Viet Namese, to the astonishment of the Khmer Krahom soldiers about him, Nang shouted, “Dung ban nua! Dung co so.” Cease fire! Don’t be afraid! To his astonishment the NVA firing stopped. “Di ra day!” Come out here.
“Who are you?” a voice shouted.
“I am Comrade Nang, commander of the KT 104 Battalion of the Khmer Liberation Army. Come. You will not be harmed.” With hand signals Nang directed yotheas to move or cover up the corpses.
“Why have you attacked us? Colonel Nui will be furious. We are allies.”
“Yes. A grave mistake. We have ceased our fire. Have you American prisoners?”
“A mistake!”
“Yes. Terrible.” Nang stopped shouting. “Come out now. You’ll see.”
“What?”
“I said”—Nang raised his voice infinitesimally—“if you come here, you will see. We mean you no harm. Some agent must have penetrated our system. You’re not part of the ARVN offensive, are you?”
A soldier peeked around the curve in the corridor then pulled back. He peeked again. Nang laid his rifle at his feet. The soldier stepped into view. “What offensive?”
“Haven’t you heard? The ARVN has attacked all behind the lines.”
“No! How?”
Nang held his arms out as if to embrace the soldier. The man edged back. Behind him a second guard peered about the earthen wall. “Two American divisions and the ARVN Airborne Division have landed to the west. They’re trying to cut off your troops from the rear. We were told they’d captured this camp.”
The Viet Namese guard turned and spoke quickly to the men behind him. A moment later he emerged alone. “Are we free to go above?”
“Yes.” In Khmer Nang ordered free passage for the allied troops. Yotheas glanced at one another quizzically. A few, copying Nang, smiled at the NVA guard. The guard retreated into the center room then emerged leading seven men. Nang did not attempt to disarm them but let them mill a moment amid the yotheas. In Viet Namese he addressed the soldier who had emerged first. “Have you American prisoners?”
“No. Only an ARVN captain.”
“Seven guards for one captain?”
“No. No. Two guards. These others fell back when your troops came.”
“Are there more?”
“An orderly with the captain.”
Nang smiled. In Khmer he said, “Give these men cigarettes.” None of the Viet Namese indicated understanding though all smiled tentatively and, when offered, accepted the smokes. “Give them more.” Nang smiled. “Then take them to meet their brothers.”
The light in the center room was faint, worse than in the wards, much worse than in the surgical cave. The air was stale, foul, smelling of infection and mildew. A single orderly, a man of sixty or more years, sat on a gray metal chair reading a recent copy of Hanoi’s newspaper. In the only occupied bunk a severe-looking man lay grinding his teeth against a constant pain in his left arm and hand—pain in a limb that was no longer part of him.
“You”—Nang gestured to the orderly—“why do you sit there?”
The man slowly lifted his head from the news and looked without understanding at the filthy black-clad boy with a filthier scarf wrapped about his waist and a dust-covered assault rifle held by a two-fingered claw. Nang repeated the question in Viet Namese. “I understood the first time,” the orderly said in Khmer. “Your Viet Namese is Northern.”
Nang pointed the weapon at the orderly’s chest. “Forget my Viet Namese. Who’s that?”
“He is a wounded man,” the orderly answered gently.
“Why haven’t you killed him?”
“Me?!”
“Your command. Why do you let an enemy live?”
“He is a wounded man,” the orderly repeated. “I could never hurt him. As for the command, they think he may be of value. Maybe to you, too, eh?”
“Who is he?” Nang demanded. The soldier grimaced at Nang’s harshness but seemed to pay little attention.
“He is from somewhere. Saigon maybe? The Americans washed his brain.”
Nang pushed the old man back with the flash suppressor of his rifle and approached the patient. “You were captain?”
“Ah intelligence officer,” the orderly offered. “An intelligent intelligence officer. But I don’t think he understands Kh...”
“Captain?” Nang repeated in Viet Namese.
“Có. Dai úy.” Yes. Captain.
Nang stared at the soldier, at his left arm truncated and wrapped in gauze. Nang raised his own stubbed hand and smiled a slight smile. “For you they brought in the Mi-4?”
The captain acknowledged Nang’s hand with a flick of his eyes and an easing of his grimace. “Không. No,” he said. “It was for a colonel but they let me come, too.” It was a joke, the second part, and the captain tried to grin.
“Where’s this colonel?”
“He’s dead,” the orderly interrupted. “He didn’t have much blood.”
“These murdering pricks killed him.” The captain’s words were acidic. His countenance changed. His pain-tensed features became caustic.
“I know you,” Nang said. “What’s your name?”
The captain didn’t answer.
“Name? Unit? Tell me everything.”
Still the captain didn’t answer.
The old orderly stepped between Nang and the bunkside, put a hand on the prisoner’s forehead, then said, “He is too hot to talk.”
Nang lifted his rifle and aimed it at the orderly’s head. “Name, Dai uy Tran.” The captain’s eyes snapped to his filthy captor. “I know you,” Nang repeated.
“He is a wounded man, eh?” The orderly turned and looked down the barrel to Nang’s eyes aiming in on his own. “Such a small world. You know...”
Nang squeezed. The AK cracked three times. Teeth, eyeballs, brains burst, splattered. The body fell. The captain, covered with wet bloody tissue chunks, startled, shivered, amazed not by what had happened, but by its suddenness.
“I know you, Lieutenant. Oh, now Captain. Tran. Tran Van Le. Or is it Mister Truong Cao Kiet?” The captain’s eyes widened. He searched Nang’s face for a clue to who this madman might be. “Hey, now you’re my detainee. Ha!” Still Tran did not recognize Nang. “I bake bread. Remember?”
Tran Van Le shook his head. Then a faint memory clicked. Then flowed back. “Hai? Hai Hoa-Binh?”
Nang laughed. He laughed uproariously. “Ha! You do remember!”
Tran attempted to sit up but the wounds in his abdomen shot pain throughout his body. He fell back on the bunk. “Who,” Tran gasped, “are you with this time?”
“I am the Liberation Army of Kampuchea.” Nang smiled, giggled.
“Then let me help you,” Tran said. He did not plead. He did not show weakness but even in supplication showed his strength.
“Help me?” Nang removed his bayonet from its sheath.
“How are you called? You’re not Binh.”
“Call me...Nung. Nung Angkar.”
“Lao? You are northern Khmer?”
“First Khmer,” Nang said. “Very first.” He walked slowly to the oil lamp and placed the bayonet in the flame.
“You wish to rid your home of Communist Viet Namese?” Tran said.
“Of all Viet Namese,” Nang responded. He flipped the blade over, looked at the carbon smudge on the side which had been to the flame.
“I wish the same,” Tran said. “Let me help you expel the Tonkinese.”
Nang laughed. He pulled the blade from the flame, spun, grabbed Tran’s left ankle and slapped the flat of the steel on the sole of his bare foot. Immediately Tran jerked. Nang pulled. Tran’s abdominal sutures ripped and pain flooded him as he flopped back unable to kick, punch or pull away. The skin blistered beneath the blade, almost immediately filling with fluid, pushing the heat source away and protecting the inner tissues. The pain dulled.
Nang laughed, dropped Tran’s foot. “Yes, Captain. You can help me. That’s how my feet were burned. Mine were worse. Ha! That will heal. You get out of here. I’ll see that you make it back to your country, Captain. Go fight the Tonkinese. But remember, Captain...Remember Kampuchea. It is your fate. It is the fate of all Asia.”
There was but a single pin-sized hole in the wall, just below the roofline of Chhuon’s cell. Chained by the ankles to the floor he could see nothing but the faint beam lighting the dusty air when the sun shone brightly or a pale glow when the moon was full. Otherwise his cell was blackness. Twice a day for a few minutes the door was opened and he was given a bowl of rancid rice. His sanitation bucket was exchanged every other day. Then, in blackness with the door rebolted, his only friend was the pencil beam of light. He had tried to keep track of the days but in trying he’d confused himself. Had a day passed while he stared at the dust floating free and lazy in the still air, passed when he blinked, blinked or slept? He could not distinguish minutes from hours from days from lightdark. They feed me off schedule, he thought at one point. Surely they do. To confuse me. It’s not once a day.
Not twice. Once then fifteen hours then twelve then eighteen then nine.
He slept. The sound of an immense though distant blast woke him. He sat up. Looked for the pinhole but saw nothing but black. He felt his calves and ankles. Once muscular his legs had thinned while he’d been chairman, had atrophied while he’d been shackled. He lay back. There was scurrying about the pagoda. Then silence. He listened more carefully, listened for hours. A faint glow shone above. When it had first come he did not know. He’d missed its gradual appearance. For that he chastised himself. He wouldn’t have another chance until the next dawn to...
“Murdered,” Chhuon heard someone whisper.
“How?”
“In his sleep.”
“By a bodyguard?”
“Trinh Le arrested them all. Nouk says they deny it. Now there are the trucks across the bridge.”
The conversation passed. Chhuon strained to hear more but there was nothing. A moment later he heard a guard rant that none of the radios worked. Then again silence. No one came with his morning ration. To Chhuon it confirmed his erratic schedule theory. He felt in the dark for his bucket. When his fingertips tapped it he withdrew his hand then laughed to himself. Things have sunk pretty low, he thought, when you feel for a bucket of shit for security. Perhaps, he thought, to laugh aloud will get them to open the door. He began to laugh loudly, laugh about his friend the bucket of shit, but the stentorian outburst was only in his mind. When the guards did not respond he thought about the noise and considered the classic paradox, if no one hears it is it still noise? Then the corollary hit him: if one person hears a noise that’s not been made, is that still a sound? Ha! He chuckled delightedly, filling his entire mind with laughter and music and then with visions to accompany the sound. An entire gathering, family, friends, relatives from distant cities all milling around beside the wat and along the beautiful stretch that dropped to the river. He emerged and smiled and bowed and one by one they greeted him with graceful, respectful leis. In the dark he raised his hands returning the salutation. Then in graceful arcs he brought his arms to his sides. One finger, just the nail, ticked the bucket and the reverberation blasted across his mind, destroying the laughter, the music, the images. He lay back and wept.
Real noises from outside did not reach him or he did not register or record them. As Nang’s 104th overran the hospital complex to the east and as Von’s 81st ambushed two small squads coming to assist and a third, a transportation detail carrying dead and wounded from Plei Ku, the Krahom 71st and 24b Battalions led by Met Ung and Met Sol respectively parked three Soviet six-by-six transport trucks by the small bridge that spanned the Srepok. Chhuon’s laughter upon learning the story would astonish the still-proper village elders. For all his sophistication, for all his yuon learning, Cadreman Trinh—in charge of a village whose chairman was imprisoned, whose senior committee member had just been assassinated and whose senior officer, the province commander for political affairs, Colonel Nui, was absent—Trinh ordered the Trojan horse hauled into his fort.
Later, when Chhuon finally heard the entire story, he would be generous in his estimate of Trinh’s abilities. With Hang Tung dead Trinh had arrested the Khmer bodyguards. Then, fearing Khmer reprisals, Trinh had had his small contingent of Viet Namese soldiers quietly, sector by sector, disarm the Khmer militia. Then the trucks, with NVA markings, had been reported and reconnoitered. The top crates were full of arms. In the village, all the radios had been sabotaged. Trinh did not know about the regional fighting, about the Krahom attacks on Khmer Viet Minh villages. When two platoons of seemingly lost black-clad youths emerged from the trucks, Trinh was completely confused. Then an additional force of yotheas appeared at the village gate. With the two Krahom platoons in their midst, with most of the village defense force disarmed, the remaining militia and the Viet Namese allowed entrance to these anti-FANK, anti-U.S. soldiers. Phum Sath Din did not resist. It did not “fall without a fight.” It welcomed the guerrillas. Trinh accepted them as an allied force. The people, Khmer and Viet, and the leaders had no knowledge of Angkar’s intention.
Chhuon’s cell door opened. The light blast was blinding. It was noon. “Mister Cahuom Chhuon?”
Chhuon answered but he was unable to control his voice and the sound came garbled.
“Cahuom Chhuon, Chairman of Phum Sath Din?”
“Ay” was all Chhuon was able to squeeze out.
His eyes had not yet adjusted. He could not see the speaker. “I am Met Nhel, Commander of the Northern Zone Task Force of the Kampuchean Patriots Liberation Front.” The voice approached. Several fuzzy figures passed through the lighted doorway. One unlocked the ankle shackles. “Come with me, please.”
Chhuon clamped his eyelids shut then opened them. The man in the doorway looked huge until two others gently lifted him, Chhuon, to standing. Then, to Chhuon, Nhel seemed to shrink. Nhel backed into the hall. “There is some confusion as to your status.”
Chhuon’s legs seemed detached as he attempted to walk. The muscles of his buttocks would not coordinate with the motion of his feet. One cheek twitched in spasm, the spasm carried up, across to his anal sphincter. Chhuon hopped and wobbled as a person might whose legs had been injected with novocaine and who was having a stick shoved up his ass.
“Our records,” Nhel said, attempting to ignore Chhuon’s grotesque motions, “do not indicate your resistance work, yet local members and your evident incarceration vouch for your patriotism.”
Nhel lead Chhuon to the porch of the pagoda where he and Ngoc Minh had set up their command post. As Chhuon’s eyes adjusted to the light he saw six dozen men, boys and girls—the village Khmer militia force—sitting in the sun on the dusty main road, their elbows wired together behind their backs. At one end he recognized Heng and Khieng. Both were bruised. About the prisoners were nine black-clad boys with red-checked kramas. All carried assault rifles. Closer, on the porch, the stairs, surrounding the wat, was an entire platoon; farther, in the quadrant where the Viet Namese dependants had moved into the old Chhimmy family abodes, Khmer boys were roughly extracting the foreigners, pushing the women and children up the alleys away from the village center.
“Please sit,” Nhel said to Chhuon. Chhuon attempted to settle in a chair but halfway down his legs collapsed, his butt caught the seat edge and he splayed like a water drop falling on the deck. Two aides righted him and the chair and sat him respectfully. At the west end of the street another squad marched several Khmers toward the pagoda. To the north there were shots.
Nhel hefted Chhuon’s file. He pursed his lips. The shooting seemed to bother him. A yothea came and reported that all the communal rice had been confiscated. Nhel rubbed his face. Chhuon, caught by a wave of vertigo, wobbled, began to fall forward out of the chair. The yothea caught him by the shoulders. “Are you ill, Grandfather?”
“Please, let me sit there.” Chhuon indicated the floor.
As the soldier lowered him, Nhel said, “See that every Khmer family has enough for the journey.”
“See to your brothers first,” Ngoc Minh injected. “Be sure no food is left for other forces.”
“This is very difficult.” Nhel returned to Chhuon. “Very complex. The resistance heroine, Neang Thi Sok, she is your wife?”
“Heroine! Sok!” Chhuon’s face cracked into smile, then broke and beamed in laughter.
“Perhaps you prefer the cell,” Ngoc Minh said.
Chhuon tried to force the ridiculously broad smile from his face but could not totally hide it.
“Are we funny to you?” Ngoc Minh scowled.
“No! No! It is I am so delighted you are here.” Chhuon took a deep breath. “Sok. Yes. She is my wife but I hid my resistance from her. She’s not capable...”
“She’s a heroine of the Khmer Patriots,” Ngoc Minh snapped in his harsh, dour manner. “You, Chairman, on the other hand, have colluded with stinging red ants to sell your country. Your traitorous behavior...”
Chhuon bowed his head. Nhel interrupted. “Yet they charged you with being head of the resistance.”
“You must”—Ngoc Minh came closer—“write out all your activities. Start with the day you sold your son to the yuons. Put him in the cell.”
Across the village street a Viet Namese woman shrieked. Two children, five or six, ran from a house toward the wat. Four yotheas were in the alley. As the first child reached the street a yothea guarding the militia soldiers pounced on him, knocked him flat, then bashed in his skull with the butt of his rifle. The second child skidded to a halt. The mother shrieked wildly. Swore. A guard grabbed the second child by the neck, lifted her and threw her into a house wall. The mother ran a step toward her children and was shot in the back.
Chhuon watched, horrified. Another incident broke out in a cross alley, out of sight, identical of sound.
Chhuon heard his voice demand, “What son did I sell?”
“Samnang. Cahuom Samnang. You sold him to the yuons in August 1968. Angkar knows. Angkar saved him.”
“Samnang! Sam...” Chhuon’s voice trailed off. Then, “he’s alive?” Then loudly, “Kdeb is alive! Alive!”
All afternoon screams and small arms fire and the smell of smoke penetrated the walls of Chhuon’s cell. He was again shackled but the door was not closed. He had been given a ballpoint pen and a spiral notebook. In it, as he recorded his memories, tears of joy splashed on the pages. Again and again and again his mind shouted alive! alive! Oh, to see him again, Chhuon whispered inside, whispered even within his own mind for fear that the wish, the desire, the passion would damn itself, yet he was unable to control the passion. Alive! Oh, to touch him. He’ll seek me out. I must go on. I must find him.
The next afternoon Chhuon was led back through the wat to the porch. There, hanging from the porch roof support beam, by the neck, were Trinh, Trinh Le, and fourteen others—the quadrant chairmen, the heads of the women’s and the farmers’ associations, and the leaders of various production teams. Beyond, half the homes of Phum Sath Din had been destroyed as if a whirlwind had ripped a swath of destruction across the village. No one, other than a few yotheas, was to be seen. Chhuon’s face collapsed, his heart wrenched. He gasped, clenched his teeth.
“Come on, Grandfather,” the yothea who led him said gently.
“Where?” Chhuon’s voice was weak. “We must catch the others.”
“Why have you ruined my town?”
“To keep the yuons from having it, Grandfather.”
“And all the people?”
“They’ll be given new homes in the liberated zone.” The boy helped Chhuon down the steps. “I’m sorry for the village, Grandfather,” the boy said respectfully. “The older troops, the ones who have been with Angkar, they are very enthusiastic. Most of us would never treat the people such. Most of us...” The boy’s eyes watered. He did not attempt to hide the tears.
Chhuon’s voice came hoarse. “I understand, Nephew.”
“You must learn, Grandfather.” The boy looked away. “Hear nothing. See nothing. Say nothing.”
At the bottom of the steps Chhuon turned and looked at the hanging dead. Alive! he told himself. Kdeb is alive. I must be alive too to find him.
Nang stared at the small, well-kept Angel House on the post. He had not seen another standing in the Northeast, yet this one not only survived but was in impeccable condition. Beyond it the modest home had been destroyed; one wall and half the roof were caved in, the large hearth of the kitchen was dismantled and the bricks shattered and strewn. Nang stood listless.
For two days his 104th Battalion had attempted to overrun the final bunkers of the headquarters complex only to have each assault frustrated by heavy NVA return fire. Then came the first small counterattacks, then reinforcements that had evaded Von’s 81st and its contingent of local resisters. “Ours is not to hold terrain,” Eng had cautioned him. “Ours is to strike, to destroy as much as possible, to withdraw and preserve our forces, and to protect the people.”
By 15 April 1972 most of the hill towns of the Northeast had been evacuated. Nang’s 104th fell back, allowing a small contingent of NVA to emerge and chase them until they, the Viet Namese, outran their covering fire and the 104th reversed and slaughtered all but two who fled back to the command bunker, and by their chaotic and frenzied reports gave the Krahom 104th and 81st time to withdraw, to sweep backwards, pillaging, looting and burning, retreating but ready to fight as rear guards but never again being hit. As the KK swept back, they left a wasted, barren, depeopled buffer zone.
On the seventeenth, at the outskirts of Phum Sath Din, soldiers of the 104th stumbled into a mass grave—a heap of unburied bodies piled two meters high and covering an area seven meters long. Nang was notified. He came and took great pleasure in the sight and the touch. Two hundred bodies were piled atop one another. He flipped the body of a young woman as if he were flipping bags of trash looking for one in which he’d perhaps misplaced something of value. A cheap plastic cigarette lighter fell from her clothes. He snatched it up and jammed it into his pocket. Then from the depths of the pile came a low moan that slowly rose through the dead. Others searched for gold rings or necklaces, oblivious to the sound. Nang looked into the trees. The leaves were still. The moan grew louder. “Ahk!” He forced a laugh and a smile. “If I know Met Nhel, not an earring hidden in an asshole has been left.”
Nang entered the village where he’d been born and raised. About him yotheas were picking through homes, confiscating anything moveable, destroying anything uncarryable. He did not stop to join his strugglers in their frolicking. He marched past the pagoda where bodies hung like sides of beef in a meat locker and where other fighters were desecrating the statues and scrolls.
Without thought Nang walked to the southwest quadrant, to the home of the Angel House. He stared at what he considered a hideous and archaic icon from an unenlightened time. Still he did not destroy it. Oddly, as if touched by déjà vu, he glanced about for the small pickup truck that should have been parked right where he stood. He looked for the little girl and her brother who should have been playing in the orchard or in the small courtyard. Nang sidestepped to better view the home. The entry door had been ripped from its hinges and the stairs to the threshold had been overturned. He summoned the energy to approach. Though it took no energy it took all his energy; though it took no courage, it was the most difficult path he’d walked; though he sauntered forward lackadaisically, almost apathetically, his inner fight was full-scale mayhem.
He climbed to the front doorway, ducked under a broken roof beam, looked, about. The low table in the center room could have been from any peasant home in Cambodia. Otherwise the room seemed bare. He stepped farther in. On the floor there was a filthy rag, an old krama tattered and stained. Nang grabbed it, spread the folds of its center between his good and mutilated hands and examined the cloth as if he half expected to find a written message. Then, without desire, he raised the cloth to his nose and sniffed. He pressed it to his face, rubbed it against his cheeks, held it, against his overt will, tightly to his chest.
Nang raised his head, glanced back to ensure he was alone. He looked at the plaited curtain that divided the room. Beyond the edge he could see a family altar, a large table and two small, covered with photographs of family members. At the angle and in the confused light and shadows beneath the shattered roof he could not make out faces. Amid the framed pictures were a pair of boy’s pants, several pens, pads and gum and a bowl of rice. Nang tried to step toward the altar but could not lift his feet. He stood there, dazed, his leg muscles flaccid, vaguely trying to move forward or back but somehow unable to send the right message from brain to legs. Then his abdomen tightened and a hot burning sensation rose from his stomach up through the center of his chest to the back of his throat.
He sniffed, snorted, shook himself. He looked at the krama in his hands, dropped it, turned to leave. Something intangible seized him. He turned again, snatched the old rag from the floor, wrapped and tied it about his waist. Then he strode to the door, hopped down, carefully collected a handful of splintered wood, piled it inside the threshold and ignited it with the lighter he’d found earlier. The flames spread quickly as if the home were entirely tinder. In minutes the flames leaped out and above the roof, reaching for the trees. Nang stood back to the far side of the parking space and watched fire backlight the little Angel House. Inside he shuddered. Good-bye, he thought. Now I have no home, he thought. Maybe I have never had one. I am the First Khmer. I have never had an ancestor. No one came before me.
By midday 19 April the column of deportees from Phum Sath Din had traversed nearly sixty kilometers of dense jungle, following a circuitous path, generally east toward the Mekong. There were nearly eight hundred refugees and they were a miserable lot. Met Sol’s 24b Battalion had split the people into three groups: villagers and peasants in the lead; the militia and lower-strata phum workers, whom they guarded heavily, in the middle; and a loose group to be questioned and their status determined at the end. Among the last group was Chhuon and his mother, wife and seven-year-old son, plus Maha Vanatanda and three young men who had worked at the pagoda before Phum Sath Din had fallen to the Khmer Viet Minh and NVA, a half dozen strong young men who were feared to be KVM plants, and the heads of nearly all the oldest families of the village, along with their wives, children and grandchildren.
Krahom soldiers ordered a midday halt. Refugees settled on the hillside among tall grass and dry brush. They did not spread out. No one attempted to slither off and escape. The sun was high, hot, beating the last vestiges of strength from the elderly and infirm. From the valleys of the wild forest to either side came the fearsome whooping of gibbons and the tat-tat-tat-tat of woodpeckers hammering on standing-dead hardwoods.
“They say, Uncle Chhuon,” a young pagoda worker said respectfully, “where we are going it is very beautiful.”
“Yes, so I’ve been told.” Chhuon’s spindly legs and bony ulcerated knees attracted flies. He had labored beyond his body’s capacity in order to reach and keep up with the column. In sitting he ached. In resting he feared he would never again be able to stand. Yet over and over he had told himself, Alive! To find him we too must be alive! It had driven him. Sok wiped Chhuon’s legs with a moist cloth. On the night of the first day’s march, when Chhuon and Sok had been reunited—physically for the first time since his incarceration, emotionally for the first time in four years—they exchanged only silent touches of hands and heart, not because of old cultural norms requiring decorum but because they were very afraid. Each now knew the other had done secret resistance work. Chhuon also, because he feared telling would damn the truth, said nothing of Samnang being alive. Nothing could yet be voiced aloud.
The young man continued. “They told me, Uncle, that there is a town waiting for us. All the houses are new and the granaries are full.”
“First we are liberated from Lon Nol,” Chhuon said. “Now we are liberated from the yuons. It’s good to be liberated, eh?”
The young man did not answer but squatted in respectful silence before Chhuon—respectful not just of his age, or only because of his past status as agronomist, as village chairman, as resister, but respectful of the man for the pain and imprisonment he’d endured. In the eyes of the villagers Chhuon was more than a national hero, he was holy.
Sok prepared rice, fed her husband. A slow, steady stream of people came to check on Chhuon, to offer him encouragement, to give him small gifts. All the while he wrote in the spiral notebook. To one side of the trail Chhuon’s mother lay on a mat. The trek had been very hard on her. The monk had helped her the first day, two boys the second, a young man the third. On this day they had helped less because they themselves were weary. In semidelirium she called for Peou though the boy had wandered off to talk to the yotheas who surrounded the column, to ask about Angkar and to look at their fine rifles.
An entourage of soldiers followed Ngoc Minh into the small clearing. “Cahuom Chhuon?” Ngoc Minh said.
Chhuon stared at the stiff political officer. “You know me,” he said wryly.
“You will bring your family.”
“Where?” Chhuon’s voice was demanding.
“Your efforts for Kampuchea are to be rewarded.”
Now Chhuon did not look directly at Ngoc Minh but kept the political officer at the corner of his eye. “A reward! Let me return to my town,” Chhuon said. “Let me plow the paddies and ready them for planting.”
“You do not know,” Ngoc Minh said caustically.
“Know?”
“There is no more town.”
“I saw it as I left. We could rebuild it.”
“There is nothing left. We rescued you in the nick of time.”
“Now what’s happened?”
“What’s happened! You provincials are so naive. All over Kampuchea the Americans bomb towns. Two days ago they hit yours. Had we not rescued you, all would be dead.”
“Bombed! But why? Why would they...”
“Because they are savages.”
“I don’t bel...”
“It’s all for the better. There’s nothing but evil in cities and towns. There’s old money that infects the spirit. From now on there will be no money. Now”—Ngoc Minh attempted to be pleasant—“come with us.”
Chhuon rose. The young man who had remained with him helped him up. Then he helped Chhuon’s mother. Sok began a furious search for Peou.
“Bring all your belongings,” Ngoc Minh said. “You’ll ride in the trucks when we reach the road.”
“My little son—” Sok began.
“He’s with the soldiers.” Ngoc Minh suppressed a scowl. “They’ll bring him.”
Once they were deep in the forest, a hundred meters from the column, Ngoc Minh withdrew a piece of paper from his tunic. Sok held Peou gently by the shoulders. Chhuon supported his mother. Ngoc Minh unfolded the paper and began to read. “Cahuom Chhuon, capitalist rice merchant of Phum Sath Din, born 1923, member of rebellious forces, Angkar Leou has investigated your activities. You have...”
Chhuon froze. Sok hung her head. The old woman seemed oblivious, Peou without understanding.
“...colluded with stinging red ants to sell your country...”
Chhuon’s eyes darted. Alive! he thought. We must be alive to find him.
“...these traitorous facts are clear and proven...”
Chhuon’s mind raced. About them was a squad of armed soldiers. Thoughts of flight vanished. Thoughts of resistance were absurd.
“...the security of Kampuchea. For such you are ordered to be severely pun...”
Chhuon pointed up the hill, behind Ngoc Minh. “Look!”
“...ished.” Ngoc Minh turned.
“What is it?” Sok whispered.
“I don’t know,” Chhuon said. There was a commotion back at the perimeter.
“Perhaps,” came the coarse, raspy, yet lucid voice of Chhuon’s mother, “perhaps they remember it is the new year.”
“The new year?” Chhuon repeated. “Is it...already?”
“Who are those soldiers?” Met Mey, the leader of the execution squad, asked.
“Cease!” A voice boomed from the hill. Soldiers appeared from the forest below the group. Then at both sides. One boy with Ngoc Minh’s armed squad swung his rifle toward those crashing closest. Three soldiers fired at him, catching him with rounds in the head; chest and abdomen. As he crumpled and fell the others dropped their arms.
“What—” Met Mey began, but immediately was cut short.
“Who’s ordered this?” the loud voice came from a short distance uphill.
“Who stops us?” Ngoc Minh called. His voice trembled. A company of KK regulars had encircled his execution squad. “You,” he said, recognizing one of the soldiers. “You’re with Met Nang’s 104th. What are you doing?”
The soldier didn’t answer. Instead the voice from uphill spoke. “Tell your squad to return to the column. The job of the Liberation Front is to help the people.”
“Is that you, Met Na...”
“Tell them to help the Cahuoms. They are to be protected.”
Ngoc Minh’s squad did not wait for their leader to repeat the order. Two boys stepped toward Chhuon, one to Chhuon’s mother; three fled toward the path leading back to the column. One yothea bent to retrieve his weapon. A single round barked. He slumped lifeless. The others doubled their pace. Peou led Sok. A yothea virtually carried the frail old woman, another unweighted Chhuon and hauled the family’s bundles. As they moved past the voice from the hill, Chhuon caught a glimpse of an ugly soldier whose face was severely scarred and whose right hand had been blown apart. He wished both to stop and thank the youth and to flee, vanish as fast as possible.
Nang stumbled to the clearing. His feet were bloody in his sandals from his forced march. He walked up to Ngoc Minh and stared the man in the eyes.
“Why do you interfere?” Ngoc Minh demanded. “The 104th’s supposed to be along the river.”
Nang bent and picked up the paper that had been dropped on the forest floor. He unfolded it, began to read. As he did he said, “One must develop a proper patriotic spirit, eh Brother?”
“Why have you interfered?” Ngoc Minh said again.
“A spirit of serving the people and the national revolution,” Nang said menacingly.
“A spirit of proletarian nationalism and internationalism,” Ngoc Minh corrected with disdain.
Nang laughed. He stared Ngoc Minh in the eyes. With his pincer hand he raised the page before him so as to be able to see it and Ngoc Minh simultaneously. “My father used to say, ‘Never forget our people’s legacy. Never forget the Path of the Revolution.’ You seem not to know which people are our people.”
“I know...”
“You’ve never fired upon the enemy. You’ve never been fired upon. Yet you direct us.”
“I’m a politica...”
“Silence!” Nang snapped his claw in the air. Yotheas from the encircling company closed in. “Ngoc. Minh,” Nang paraphrased the sheet, “puppet of the Viet Namese Politburo, agent of the foreign devils, Angkar Leou has investigated your activities. You have colluded with stinging red ants and aided enemies of the Khmer nation. These traitorous facts are clear and proven. You have endangered the security of Kampuchea. Angkar orders you detained.” Nang lowered the sheet slowly. His cheeks lifted, his nares expanded, his mouth curled in a bastardized smile. “You’re of Viet Namese ancestry, eh?”
Ngoc Minh shook his head.
“You trained in Hanoi, eh?”
“Yes!” Ngoc Minh’s voice was excited yet firm. “Yes. You know that. Met Sar knows. I...”
“You have a network of spies?”
“No!”
“The yuons”—Nang overpowered him—“they rape Khmer women and girls. I’ve heard they rub broken bones against women’s privates until they scream.”
“You’re crazy.”
Nang turned to Met Puc and his group. “Take him.” He gestured toward Ngoc Minh. “Subject him to ultimate measures.”
For two days the refugees sat, rested; regained some of the strength and composure their immense losses and forced migration had sapped from them. As they rested the Krahom task force leadership struggled for new direction. Met Ung of the 71st and Met Von of the 81st advised Nhel to put Nang in Ngoc Minh’s position. “A promotion,” they said, “which surely the Center would confirm.” But Nang declined. “I’m but a soldier,” he told them. A soldier he told himself. A soldier cannot be near his origin, for if he is he will not carry forth the revolution.
To Sar, Nang wrote a long report. In it he included a criticism of Ngoc Minh’s activities and said despite those activities the task force had achieved all the Center’s objectives. To the report Nang attached a short request. Then he sought out the young yothea, Tam, who had objected to the killing at the hospital complex. With passes and written travel authorizations from Nhel and Eng, who had moved into the task force’s vacant political officer’s slot, Von was ordered to go directly to Angkar’s headquarters at Mount Aural. Nang’s sealed message to Sar read: “I know my future. It cannot be where I once was known—but it is at the heart where more important functions await. Rabbit Number Two.”
Two weeks later, as Nhel, Nang and others led the various columns of regained peoples into the new wilderness zones between Kompong Thom and Preah Vihear near the junction of the Cambodian, Thai and Laotian borders, little Tam returned with additional orders and with an answer to Met Nang’s request. “Rabbit Number Two will report to Central Zone headquarters for assignment. He is directed to select two cells of yothea volunteers for hazardous duty.”