THE LAND IS ARID, barren. Before him rises a cliff. Rock outcroppings project to the sides. There is a shack of wide, crude-cut boards. In the harsh sunlight it looks old, weathered. He stands before it, barefoot, bare chested. There is no door. The shack is built into the rockface, the opening arch is very dark. He approaches. He attempts to peer into the blackness. About him there is not a single tree, not a blade of grass. The opening is an adit, a mine shaft entrance. The sound of digging comes from in deep. He moves into the shadow of the shack but does not pass beneath the timber frame. He thinks to call but he has no voice. He thinks to call but he has no voice. He thinks to call but he has no voice.
For a time he stands still. The cliff shadow lengthens then melts into night. Now all is dark. No longer can he look into the darkness, into what is before him, into what is behind. Still the sounds. Groans. Digging. Laughter. The night becomes cold. The wind carries minute ice crystals, then thick snow, driven, drifting up against the shack, sealing the adit, encasing the groans, the digging. He is so cold his teeth chatter. The laughter comes from there, and there, from behind, to the side, over there. He wraps his arms about his chest, shoulders. His fingers sting near frostbite. He squats, tucks his head, hugs his legs to his chest tucking his hands between his calves. There is a crack, a snapping, a rap. He can’t...
“John! John! Come on. Open up.” Sullivan rolls to his back, straightens his legs into the sleeping bag. “John, are you in there?”
“Ah, yeah, one second.” His voice is sleep-hoarse. He shuts his eyes, pulls his legs back up, attempting to recall the vision, the thought.
“Come on. It’s freezing out here.”
It has taken the last days of December and the entire month of January for him to begin reacclimation to the cold winds of an Iowa winter, has taken every minute of that time to begin to defrost his emotional numbness, his intellectual stupor. At the end of his first tour of duty in Viet Nam his folks had thrown him a large welcome-home party. Then he’d gone back. On his second homecoming he was greeted at the airport by his parents and sister and her boyfriend. He’d gone back again. At his third return only his father met him and at home only his mother was there.
“You aren’t going back again, are you?” his mom pleaded.
“No. No more,” he’d said without looking at her.
“You’ve done enough,” his father said. “Let somebody else go.”
“Yeah, I guess so. I’m out for good.”
“I can always use you here.” His father put his hand on John’s forearm. “Gus could use you, too.”
“Henry, that poor boy just walked in and already you’ve got him rushing off to work.” Mrs. Sullivan wiped her hands on her apron then smoothed it down against her dress. “Tomorrow night we’ll have ham with pineapple slices. And baked beans. I’ll start em soaking right now.”
“That’s nice,” J. L. said. “But...ah, I think I’d like to go out to Uncle Gus’s.”
Two days later he’d moved into the heated tack room of his uncle’s old barn. Then for a month he’d walked the frozen snow-covered fields, walked them at sunrise and at sunset, alone. For a month he’d slept in the tack room, not talking, not listening to a soul.
“Come on.” Margie banged on the door. “I brought you the paper. The war’s over.”
He moved deliberately, pulled on a pair of dungarees, let his sister in, pulled a quilted wool shirt over his tee shirt and long-johns top.
Margie held up the newspaper. “They’ve signed the peace accords in Paris.” Her smile was broad. She was happy, thrilled, not by the agreement but for her brother.
J. L. looked quizzically at her. He smiled his boyish smile and said, “That’s nice.” It was the same “that’s nice” he’d said to his mother about the beans, the same “that’s nice” a parent, not really listening, might say to a child who’s just reported that her imaginary friend has been run over by a bus and is now lying splattered against the walls of her mind.
“John”—Margie dropped the paper on his sleeping bag—“why don’t you come and live at home?”
“Yeah, I will,” J. L. said. “In a little bit. I just want to resettle a bit first.”
“It’s been five weeks.”
“That’s not so long.”
“They signed the peace agreement.”
“Yeah. That’s nice.”
“Please come back. Mom’s sick with worry about you.”
“There’s nothing to worry about, Kiddo. I’ll be back in a bit. Right now I’d just like to rest!”
What nonsense, Vathana thought. Dear Holy and Enlightened One, what can it mean? She blinked. She dared not leave her eyes shut should the apparition return. Tigers, she thought: Of all things. Chased by tigers, as if I didn’t have enough complications. In the darkness of the hut she turned to the soft sounds of Samol and the synchronous snoring of Samnang and Sophan. Papa, she thought, he’d say it means someone is in love with me. Oh sweet Papa, sweet Mama, how I long to kiss you again. What is your life in our beautiful little town? The best of Cambodia, eh Papa? The best. Have they left you alone to grow rice? Surely they tax you horribly. It’s not as bad as some say, eh? Do you remember the time Samnang got stuck in the tree in the orchard and I went up to get him and the branch broke. Oh Papa, I thought you’d die laughing. Tigers! Of all things. They almost caught me.
For hours she lay with her eyes open, talking to herself, to Sophan who’d become so much a part of her, to her parents and children, talking to rivermen and peasants, talking happily to hundreds of people in her mind—trying, trying so hard, to hide her fears. Through cracks in the blue plastic tarp she could see the sky graying. She thought to rise, to visit the pagoda before the children woke, but as she rolled forward her abdomen tightened spasmodically and she fought back an urge to vomit. She lay back. Where is my energy? she thought. I feel so ill. So weak. Always tired. She tried to think why but she was afraid to pursue the thought. Instead she thought of the camp. It had never been anything but poor huts with poor sanitation and poor people but now it seemed shabbier than ever. The sun had corroded the blue plastic of the tarps and many were cracked, some shredded. What would they do when the rains came? What would they do if the FANK security teams came? Overtly it was not a crime to belong to an association but there were new, unwritten rules. Even to have a friend in the associations could label one an infiltrator. From the Khmer Rouge came irregular nocturnal conscription raids. No one was safe. Association activity had become covert, more radical. The city, like the nation, continued to move outward along the dim lines of political polarization.
A few days before, Teck had visited her in the camp. His constantly shifting beliefs confused her. “There are rumors,” Vathana had whispered.
“I know,” he quieted her.
“They say they are very cruel. They kill every soldier they capture. And they kill the families, too. They take all the other people out to the forest.”
Teck chuckled at her fears. “It’s only a transitory step, eh? It’s a necessity of war.”
“Are government troops equally cruel?” she asked.
“How would I know?” Teck said. His tone was light, amiable. “With the Americans gone from the South, well, one can see the future, eh?”
“They say,” Vathana said, “the Khmer Rouge have launched new attacks against Kompong Thom. Here FANK cracks down on...”
“FANK is much better,” Teck had retorted. “Our battalion-days in the field are back up to the best months of 1971.”
“And you say the cruelty of the KR, it is empty rumor, eh?”
“Some of it. Khmer are Khmer, yes? We share certain values. Some KRs might be terrible, but not all. Those madmen and atrocity stories, they’re exaggerated. You know what I believe...”
“Teck, we should speak more quietly...”
“...I think it is the government propagandists that start the rumors. If the KR win, they won’t be any worse than Lon Nol. Ha! They won’t be so corrupt like that Sihanouk.”
“They say...”
“If you are so afraid, move to Phnom Penh with me. Aah, why do I ask?”
“...some people”—Vathana avoided his remark—“have escaped. They say the KR soldiers rip children apart with their hands. That they line up all the pregnant women and stab their bellies with long bamboo needles...”
Teck broke into full-blown laughter. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this from an intelligent woman. You’d believe anything. Ha! Besides, you’ve got a flat belly, eh?”
“Then you, you a FANK officer, you think we’ve nothing to fear from them?”
“No. You can be afraid. Be afraid of war. But I think the war will stop. I think maybe a few more battles. Lon Nol, he’s asked for a cease-fire. Kissinger worked a cease-fire for Viet Nam. Now, maybe, for us.”
“Cease-fire!” Vathana shook her head woefully. “They still fight—like Captain Sullivan said they would. What did we have, a four-day lull?”
“What would he know! Four days now. Then a few battles. Then maybe forty days. Then maybe four hundred.”
“So, the attacks in the North, you think...”
“I think it is time my wife and children came to live with me.”
“You were going to come here.”
“My orders, you know...Anyway, you are for peace, eh?”
“Of course.”
“Then I think it’s time we settle with the Khmer Rouge. What do they want, eh? An end to corruption? Me too. You believe just like me. Soon we’ll stop this war.”
Again Vathana thought to rise but again she felt nauseous. She sat up. Teck’s visit had been short. A perfunctory gift to each child. Then he’d gone—where, she didn’t know. Probably to gamble or to see his friend Kim, she’d thought. Or maybe to find Louis. Louis had been drafted and was assigned to the southern Neak Luong garrison. She stood. She felt dizzy. For a moment she stood with a hand touching the wall, her eyes closed. When she opened them she felt better. “Sophan,” she called quietly.
“Yes Angel?”
“I’ll be at the clinic tent. When the children wake, maybe they would like to wash in the river.”
Vathana worked with the patients for an hour before Keo Kosol appeared. He had not spent a night with her since Doctor Sarin’s release. He arrived and departed on no schedule. Vathana had not learned any more about him, his true identity, his reasons for coming, what he wanted. At times he laid his eyes on her with such longing it made her think of a heartsick puppy, yet because of her rejection he stubbornly refused to recognize or give in to his desires. She had not and would not chase him away. She could not report him to the authorities. How could she subject him to the possibility of the same torment as Doctor Sarin?
“Hey Angel”—Kosol’s loud and beautiful voice made her face snap up from the woman she’d been tending—“you know what I hear?”
“You don’t even say hello?”
“Aah! Who needs it?” Vathana stood, stepped toward him so their voices would not be so public. Kosol boomed for the entire infirmary, “If we want to see Samdech Euv, we must give him our support.”
“Kosol.” Vathana shut her eyes, put a hand to her forehead.
“No. It’s okay to say so. I heard he’s in Preah Vihear. Or maybe Stung Treng. All we need do, if we want him to return, is offer him our support.”
The words set the infirmary abuzz. Norodom Sihanouk might return! He might bring peace! Return us to the peace we once knew! Even within Vathana, though she struggled to keep it hidden, the idea sent a flutter through her bosom. Or perhaps the flutter was caused by feelings she still harbored for this poet. Simultaneously she felt embarrassed by his loud, obnoxious behavior.
“Hey Angel, you know what else?” He opened a Khmer newspaper. “This is straight from an American. Listen to what she says. ‘I would think that if you understood what Communism was, you would hope and pray on your knees that we would someday become Communists.’ Ha! She’s very famous. Jane Fonda. Very famous, very smart, eh? She visits Hanoi. Here’s what else she says. ‘I loudly condemn the crimes that have been committed by the U.S. government in the name of the American people.’ Here, you read it. Have everyone read, eh? She knows. She knows they are immoral fucking foreigners.” Vathana froze at his last words. Perhaps the war led to rough language, but not in her infirmary. Again she was embarrassed. Worse. She was terror stricken. What if they came and took her away, took her like they’d taken Sarin Sam Ol. “Immoral fucking foreigners,” Kosol boomed in his beautiful sonorous voice. “I’ve got to go, Angel. See you later.” He stopped at the tent flaps. “Just think,” he shouted back, “our choice: Samdech Euv or the fucking phalang.”
Vathana could not keep her mind on work. Still for two hours she projected a confident, content facade. But when she left, tears welled to her eyes. She returned to the hut where Samnang and Samol both greeted her with leg hugs. “Up,” Samol sang. “Pick me up.” “Ba-ba. Ba-ba,” Samnang said. His face sparkled with an earwide grin. Vathana lifted Samol. “Ba-ba-ba.”
“Yes, you too,” she said, and Samnang climbed to her arms as a monkey climbs a tree. “Oh,” Vathana sighed as Sophan came and lifted both children, “oh, you’re both getting so big.”
When they were in, out of the sun, with the children off on an adventure, Vathana moaned, “Sophan.”
“Angel, you look very sad.”
“I’m so tired,” Vathana said. “And...”—she thought to tell her about Kosol but instead said—“...there’s so much to do.”
“Saye, Angel. Tomorrow. Tomorrow things will be better.”
“Sophan.” Vathana’s chin furrowed, her mouth quivered. “I’m so afraid.” Again her eyes filled with tears.
“Afraid?”
“I’m going to die. In childbirth. The soldiers are going to kill the children.”
“What soldiers? What birth?”
“No soldiers,” Vathana blubbered now, and Sophan held her. “It’s a feeling. I can’t shake it. What will happen to them if I die? They’ll be orphans. Teck...he’ll never...what if Samnang becomes a soldier?”
“There, there.” Sophan squeezed Vathana to her. “He’s a long time to go before...”
“And...I think I’m...again...pregnant.”
“You’re...”
“Oh Sophan! I don’t even know by whom. Maybe Kosol. Maybe Captain Sullivan. Oh God, what will I do?”
“You’ll love the baby, Angel, eh?”
“Of...Yes. Of course.”
“So! It makes no difference by whom, eh? If the father were a prince or a peasant, by now the war would take him and you’d raise your child yourself. Ah, Angel, but with me, too.”
“Sophan, you must think I’m a very terrible girl.”
“No Angel. I don’t think that.”
“A very stupid girl.”
“No Angel. No.”
“Last year three men wanted me. Wanted to marry me. Or with Teck, wanted to remarry me. Now none. No one. No one. No one would think to have me....”
5 February 1973—Sithan had brought the orders. Team SA-3 was to disband. They had terrorized the capital city for an entire year; now larger game, the orders did not indicate whom, was being sought.
“You’ll go back east,” Nang said. One by one the team members had left. By midnight only Nang and Rin remained.
“Yes. You’ll go north, eh?”
“Yes. I think. Only I’m to rendezvous near Oudong. That’s all it said.”
Rin studied Nang’s eyes in the dim light of the single candle. “They’ve renewed attacks in the North. Be careful.”
“Ha!” Nang scoffed. “What can get Met Nang, eh?”
Rin smiled. “I don’t think of FANK rifles,” he said. “I think of warped thought.”
“Warped...” Nang straightened his back, increasing the distance between himself and Rin.
“You know”—Rin changed his tone—“we never did get that spoiled brat Pech Chieu Teck.”
Nang scratched his forehead, looked down at the candle flame. “He was afraid to leave his mother’s house, eh? How could we get him?”
“Ah, someday, my friend. Someday we will, eh? Sar thinks you failed.”
They sat in silence. Nang thought briefly about being a great teacher, then about the liquidation of the hooligans, the new Khmer Viet Minh cadre sent to Kampuchea by Hanoi, the Khmer who’d sold their bodies and souls to the yuons. He did not ponder any particular thoughts but simply allowed them to come and go. His mind fell on warped thought—not analyzing it but tasting its sour taste in his mouth. Other tastes, bitter tastes, produced shallow thoughts yet deep emotions. He thought of the thmils who’d shot off his fingers, of the imperialists who’d dropped the napalm which he’d used to purify himself but which had disfigured him, made half his face ugly; he thought of Soth who’d betrayed him, of the boys—what were their names?—who’d humiliated him in his youth by stripping him. He thought of revenge. It was not enough to knock off a few evil ones here and there. Someday, he thought, someday Rin—he addressed his teammate in his mind—we will carry the fight to the yuons and, maybe, to America. We’ll disfigure them. We’ll disfigure their land.
At sixteen Nang was a full yothea, a cadreman of the Krahom, a provisional member of the Kampuchean Communist Party. He’d been trained, indoctrinated, baptized in battle. He’d proven resourceful in the most adverse conditions, he’d led troops against superior forces, he’d spied, informed, instigated riots and organized an entire city’s fifth column. And he’d terrorized the capital. Yet he did not feel fulfilled, sated, even competent. In him, as there had been for years, yet now growing even wider, was a void, an abyss which demanded filling yet was unfillable. He wanted revenge—fulfilling revenge even though at some level he knew revenge would never be fulfilling.
“You must go now,” Rin said. Nang looked at him but did not rise. “All this talk,” Rin warned, “these speeches against our allies, take them with a grain of salt, eh?”
“You think it’s warped thought, eh?” To Nang, his own voice sounded different, eerie, challenging.
“They’ve a system for justifying any thought,” Rin said as if the voice from Nang had been normal. “That’s why I say to you, be careful. You know who the enemy is, who he’s not. Don’t let them infect your thinking.”
“The yuons,” Nang whispered harshly, “you know they killed my father. The Sihanoukists too. KVM! Rumdoah! Thmils! All are evil.”
“No, Nang.” Rin also whispered yet his muted words were condescending. “Viet Namese are not evil. Chinese are evil. Americans are evil. I was trained in Viet Nam. You didn’t know that, did you?”
“Then you’ve gone to them. In your mind. Only your body is Khmer.”
“No.” Rin’s conviction was strong. “I’m as Khmer as you. Too much self-righteousness, Nang, leads to fanaticism. Too much rigidity without principles, it too leads to fanaticism. Don’t be someone’s fool. They’ll use you and throw you away.”
“If they use me as I wish to be used...”
“Someday, my friend,” Rin injected, “someday you’ll need me. Someday I’ll be useful to you and you’ll come to me. You ugly Watercrow, when you understand that, you come and I’ll help you.”
Two days later, near Oudong, Nang rendezvoused with the escort team taking Met Sar’s mobile headquarters nearer the new battle zone. Afternoon light was dying in clouds of dust stirred from the dry earth by lethargic winds. Yotheas sat idly, only their eyes piercing from the red-checked kramas bandana-wrapped over faces, hair, ears. Without words, without greeting, Nang joined the armed, dust-covered elite protecting Sar’s bunker; without words, thinking that he, Nang, should have been the director of the camp where this inert rabble had been trained.
Sar was in a panicked and foul ranting mood subjecting members of the Center to sprayed spittle, to spattered sweat each time he slapped his forehead. “Betrayed,” he swore. “They have left us open to this!” He stamped to the wall. “Just like Geneva 1954. They’ve sold out the Kampuchean revolution. They’ve...” In his anger his lips sputtered. “And that fornicating curly-haired dog—who the fuck does he think he is telling the world the cease-fire extends to Kampuchea! De facto! Kissinger! Ha! Seven days! Seven days they did not bomb! If we stop fighting! Get the yuons to quit Kampuchea and we’ll explore a ceasefire.”
“Met Sar...” Met Yon rose from the field table where they sat. His wispy voice and frail countenance belied his persuasive powers. Sar turned a calculated sneer upon the gray-haired old man, yet Yon, meeting the high general’s stare with the porosity of a sieve, was unintimidated. “This cease-fire, it calls for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Kampuchea, eh?” Sar gritted his teeth, snorted. “It prohibits foreign armies from moving through Kampuchea, eh?” Yon, of all the members of the gathered headquarters, was calm, efficient, well prepared for the meeting. Only Sar ranted.
“So,” Met Dy asked without conviction, “you say it is nothing more than an attempt to have us lay down our arms and rob us of total victory, eh?”
“Damn it, yes.” Sar steamed back to the table. “The yuons have cut off all supplies. They say join the cease-fire. Shit! We sent them a request to dismantle their bases and clear out.”
“This should be a time of joy,” Met Meas, the scribe, said. “At last, the Americans will leave. What is FANK without American support?”
“You”—Sar’s face widened immensely in caustic fury—“stupid”—he raised both arms—“fucking”—slammed both fists down on the table—“idiots! Don’t you understand! We can’t agree to a cease-fire. If we did the yuons would overrun Kampuchea within a year. American disengagement! That’s the damned sellout. If we don’t agree to the cease-fire, the Americans will concentrate on Kampuchea! It’s yuon criminal egoism. We’ve been set up for annihilation! Either way! Attack. We must attack! We must achieve quick victory or the stinging red ants will take it from us.”
Sar sat. He breathed a heavy sigh as if this venting had purged his pent spleen. His body seemed to settle, to spread over his chair. In a most rational and patient manner he said, “Met Sen, you have a detailed report, eh?”
“Yes,” answered the new security chief.
Sar looked about the table. “Let Lon Nol take the blame when the cease-fire collapses. The people already...rightfully...hate him. Or let Sihanouk. We have a tape of his speech, eh?”
Sar’s aide, Nim, sheepishly raised his arm. “Here.” He hesitated. “Should I play...”
“Just tell them.”
Nim ran a finger down the transcript to the proper point. Sar’s rancor had unnerved him. “ ‘Never, never will I enter into negotiations with the treacherous Lon Nol clique,’ ” he read. “ ‘Our future shall be determined by the resistance operation in the interior.’ ”
“How does the interior resistance now stand?” Sar asked.
Met Sen answered. “All factions combined control seventy to eighty percent of the land, perhaps forty percent of the population.”
“Do we have the maps?”
“Here,” Nim answered.
As he unrolled them Sar looked to Met Dy. “Within sixty kilometers of the capital,” the personnel chief said, “we’ve seventy dispersed battalions—nearly twenty-five thousand armed stragglers. We have an additional one hundred battalions spread from Battambang to Takeo to Stung Treng. With six more battalions in training, our forces, because of excellent utilization and economy, have reached nearly sixty thousand. That does not include the militias of Rumdoah and mekong.”
“And then how many?”
“One can only estimate. The figure changes rapidly. Perhaps two hundred thousand.”
“A quarter million, eh?” Sar smiled. Met Phan, the tactician and strategic planner, plunked an elbow on the table, dropped his head into his hand and scanned the map. “Then we have the ability to achieve victory,” Sar said. “All we need is the will.”
Phan cleared his throat. Eyes turned to him. “A comparison of our forces”—he smoothed down the curling map and overlay before him—“with those of Lon Nol’s over the entire area does not show any areas of numerical superiority. In order to obtain proper advantage we will need to abandon the Northwest, pull troops from the South and Southwest. We dare not pull troops from the East or Northeast.”
“Why not?” Dy asked. He pointed to heavy concentrations of symbols in Kratie and Svay Rieng Provinces. “We’ve more troops there than...”
Phan cut him short. “We can’t attack. Not yet. Not a major offensive.”
“Why?” Sar sat forward, his body condensing.
“When an army launches a frontal attack on a civilian population”—Met Phan spoke with the tone of a university professor—“it tends to strengthen the society. Lon Nol’s support will increase. The people’s determination will increase. The way we are spread, the way we must remain spread...we cannot guarantee victory. It would be better to continue the political offensive, to increase terrorism. We should use every conceivable backdoor maneuver. The people’s will withers and we are victorious without all-out assaults.”
“FANK is rotten to the core.” Sar snarled. “If we do not launch the offensive the NVA...”
“A city at a time,” Phan injected. “Gauge the American response. If Kompong Thom falls within a week, if the United States remains...”
“If we do not attack, the yuons will grasp control.”
“We need them.” Phan was adamant. He did not want Sar to railroad them into a decision. “We still rely on NVA artillery. Their tanks and artillery will be a decisive element in any offensive.”
Sar banged his fist on the table. “We will rely on no one.” He turned to Nim. “That landless johnny is in Preah Vihear, eh?”
“That’s as reported,” Nim said.
“Have we reached him? Have our messengers told him we’ve been abandoned by Hanoi?”
“There’s been no word.”
“That NVA-KVM puppet,” Sar seethed. “Just as Lon Nol’s a valet of American imperialism, Sihanouk’s an agent of Viet Namese expansionism.” Sar pushed back from the table. He pointed at Meas, then at Dy, at Yon, at Phan. “The will to attack, the will to break the enemy...Each of us must harbor a burning rage toward the enemy. Sihanouk awaits word from Hanoi. They wish him to keep the war going for their benefit. He publicly rejects negotiation and tries to draw the people from us.” Sar turned to Nim. “Tell them. Tell them what has happened in the East. Tell them the true situation.”
Nim shuffled the reports.
“ ‘The NVA,’ ” he read, “ ‘at least in the second military region of the South, is exhausted. They cannot attack east or west. The South Viet Namese are spread thin and have no reserves. Their Airborne and Marine Divisions are mired in the North. They also cannot attack. From Bu Ntoll up past Duc Co and up to the triborder we have a secure flank. For the moment.
“ ‘What is disturbing,’ ” Nim continued, “ ‘is the amount of men and materiel on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. They have never been so well organized. The NVA 559th Transportation Group now has fifty to eighty thousand workers and combatants. There are two pipelines being extended from Mu Gia all the way past An Loc with lines into A Shau, to Duc Co and to Tay Ninh—one, a twelve-inch gasoline line; the other, a four-inch oil line. Also, they’ve begun a massive road-paving operation throughout the Laotian panhandle.’ ”
“Road paving?!” Meas was astounded. “How many trucks...”
“Sixteen, eighteen thousand,” Nim reported.
“Now,” Sar snapped smartly, “do you understand?! If we do not win quickly, the yuons will return in force! But, right now, they are occupied with rebuilding. For the moment all Sihanoukists are vulnerable. Now, we can attack. I have ordered a doubling of the assault on Kompong Thom. Now, come up with a plan to take the capital!”
Sar smiled. His long white teeth glistened in the sun. He mopped his high forehead with a handkerchief. Then he clapped a hand on Nang’s shoulder. “Your new assignment...” he began. His smile was so wide his upper gums showed a quarter inch. He did not look at Nang but past him, did not focus on the scarred face but on his own hand on the boy’s shoulder. Sar laughed amicably. “Just as you wanted, eh? You must teach them very quickly. Met Paak will tell you. Ah, it is so good for me to be able to give you what you desire. Go now. Be desire not. It is the will of Angkar Leou.”
All that happened next happened quickly. Nang was sped north, rushed with a thousand toward Kompong Thom, split from them as they fragmented to reman the units of attack. On 7 February 1973 Sihanouk’s informal announcement was made public—the battle for Cambodia would continue. On the 8th, word reached Krahom cadre that Henry Kissinger was in Thailand to coordinate a new bombing war against Communists in Cambodia. On the 9th, U.S. bombing hit the Cambodian interior in full force.
“Ay, Met Nang. It is so good to see you. Have you quit whoring in the capital and returned to soldiering again?”
“Met Eng!” The words, the idea that Eng thought he, Nang, might have been with women, embarrassed him. But to soldier again, that was the reward. Nang embraced his old friend. They were just east of the sieging forces. “I’m to have a regiment for the new offensive,” Nang said proudly.
“New! Ha! Ah, a regiment like me, eh? You will be very proud.”
“You’ve a regiment?!”
“Mostly. We’ve been at the front knocking off lackey dogs. You know, the old offensive.” Eng chuckled. “Today we refit. Tomorrow we attack again. Can you join us? I’ll teach you how to hug the cur’s neck so tightly their damned bombers and helicopters are neutralized. Ha! It’s good to have seen you. I’ve got to get my fighters prepared.”
So quickly people came, went, Nang barely heard, saw or understood what was happening. It was as if a fine veil had been draped over everything before him and though he indeed did see, did hear, he saw and heard muted sights and sounds. Still it made him itch to fight, to direct yotheas against the despicable oppressors, to hear the sounds of battle, feel the power of the guns, smell the odor of cordite and blood.
Northeast of Kompong Thom, Nang was transferred to a squad of neary. The girls were young, serious, nearly mute. For a day he walked forest trails forcing himself to keep up. By nightfall they had melded with a company, by midnight with a battalion, by morning with a reinforced regiment.
“Met Nang.” Met Nu found him eating alone amid clustered cells of neary. “You’ve become soft in the city, eh?”
“Soft, comrade?” Nang fought to keep a grin from his face.
“You’ve no fighters?!” she said.
“I’m to have a regiment.” Nang stood, puffed out his chest.
“I’ve two,” Nu said. Her voice was cool. “All neary. Three thousand strong.”
“Three thousand girls! What can they do, eh?”
“Neary! Young women! They fight with the utmost resolve.” Nu snickered. “They burned Bailaing College and recruited all the students.”
“Bailaing? In Kompong Thom?”
“Yes.” Now Nu smiled. “You are still only a little piggy, aren’t you?”
Again Nang moved north, first to Rovieng then northeast to the intermittent grasslands and jungle east of Kompong Pranak. With each step he beat his fists against his stomach or against his thighs or into his shoulders or chest. Soft, he thought. His chest burned. Only a piggy, he thought. Whoring, he thought. His vision blurred. New offensive! He heard Eng’s laugh rattle in his mind. The jungle was dry, water holes were tepid and greasy with decomposing vegetable and animal matter. He stumbled on, squeezing his left fist and right pincer into sledgehammers. What they have done, he thought, to my father, he thought, they have done to me. Plei Srepok! Sraang! Yani! Names without faces bombarded him. Burned the college! “Without the people,” he thought, “we shall have no information, we shall be able neither to preserve secrecy nor carry out rapid movements.” They were General Giap’s words. Yuon scum, but they were good words. “The people...hide us, protect our activities, feed us, tend our wounded.” No more! Nang thought. No more. He punched his face. The blow jarred his head and hurt the muscles at the back of his neck. Soft no more.
At eight o’clock Vathana excused herself from the refugee processing table and walked back, behind the blue tarp curtain, deeper into the clinic tent toward where she, her children and Sophan had again taken up residence on a single cot in a far corner. She was exhausted. The camp was again being assaulted by waves of new arrivals. Quietly Vathana stepped between the rows of people, over the pitiful belongings of the listless and ill. Here a woman beseeched her quietly, cautiously, asking for a blessing, perhaps a smile. There an old man hunched, arms akimbo, one leg splayed to the side, three grandchildren tucked into the arches and aches of his pathetic body. Vathana’s eyes skimmed from his cot to the next, to the next, to the next. So many people, she thought. They are impossible to count much less help. Here one lay dehydrated, there one feverish, there one broken from a beating or a fall while fleeing. Blessed One, she thought, as she crossed beneath the huge, sagging ridgepole hung with a hundred bundles of food or clothes or whatever the inhabitants believed valuable. Blessed One, give me the strength to help as long as I may be of help. She thought of the new arrivals, of those animated with terror chattering continuously and of those shocked into painful withdrawn silence. Which do I prefer? she thought against conscious desire to think. Why must I prefer one to the other? But I do. The terror-stricken talkers scare me to death with their tales of children being nailed to trees by Khmer Rouge soldiers, yet they are easier—oh, is that the word, the feeling, easier?—easier to register than the ones in stupor. Those...they act as if they are afraid of me!
“Da-da deet-ta, deet-ta deet-ta, da-da...” Sophan had a bucket and wash towel and was methodically removing the dust, the camp filth, the vile Stench of their clinic-tent home from Samnang. “...deet-ta, deet-ta deet-ta...”
Vathana paused, watched from a dozen paces. Samol lay on her side watching the stolid woman scrub her brother. The little girl’s cheeks were hollow. Her eyes watered from airborne dust and perhaps low-grade fever. Seeing her daughter so, all the hates and all the fears of the new order inundated Vathana’s mind. “Truth and patience,” Vathana thought. They were Sophan’s words. Truth and patience and a gratitude for what we do have, Angel. But what we have, she thought, are new attacks, new bombings, more refugees than ever before and fewer ways to help.
Vathana raised her hands, clapped them to her nose and mouth. Her innards trembled. She fought back tears. What had Kosol said? We’ve a new radio grid. A direct link to the North. She’d thought it meant Ratanakiri or Stung Treng and had thought she’d be able to talk with her mother and father, and had said so to a frightened, registering young man but he, a deserter, had said no, it means Hanoi. A radio link to Hanoi?! But why? I don’t know, the deserter had said, and she’d processed him as a refugee, as an orphan, using the name Keo Samnang. All the fears. In February FANK’s 1st Shock Battalion had driven into Phnom Penh and staged a sit-down strike at the presidential palace. How can they protect us? Root out the infrastructure! Torture innocent civilians. It is only a matter of time, eh? She had confessed that feeling to Sophan and Sophan had looked at her as if she’d gone mad. Don’t think it, Angel. It’s not good for the baby and it’s not good for you. But the associations, Vathana had replied. I’ve been so active. And if it was because of Captain Sullivan that we enjoyed protection...he’s not here any longer. Vathana’s mind leaped to new fears. The old wet-nurse was subjecting Samol to the same torturous body-scrub which Samnang had endured, had—such a strong boy, the Ba-Ba Boy—enjoyed. What if she died? Poor frail Samol. Or the new baby? Or Vathana in childbirth? Had she heard the owl hoot? A chatterer had, and her child had been stillborn. With so many sounds, how could she know if she’d heard the owl hoot? Why had they been abandoned? Any day, any day the Khmer Rouge might enter the city. It was only a matter of time. Of waiting. They might be hit tonight. Takeo had fallen. That’s what the deserter said. And Svay Rieng and Prey Veng and dozens of villages closer to Phnom Penh. Everywhere, people said, there were battles. Would FANK abandon them? Would the Khmer Rouge pass Neak Luong by? Why had America abandoned them? Why had John Sullivan gone? So abruptly! So abrupt. Oh, Vathana thought, I cannot feel this. I have never felt this. I wish all Viet Namese would perish. Dear Beautiful Enlightened One, do not let me feel so. Do not let me hate. How does John say?...Discipline one’s mind. Form a habit of patient investigation...like Sophan. If it would just...just...just could end. Right now. Right now. I cannot go another step. How can I be trapped here, trapped in this pregnancy, in this camp? Teck would take me...Not another step...
A young couple with two children and a crippled uncle occupied the cot to Vathana’s left. For some time they’d waited for her to move from their space. Her standing there just was not proper. The young woman reached up and nudged Vathana. Vathana startled. “Every step a prayer, Sister, eh?” the woman said. “Every step a prayer.”
Before she could move a boy from the registration desk called softly into the dim, crowded corner. “Angel, there’s a Western lady here to see you.”
It pained Vathana to depart, to leave the children even before she’d reached them, hugged them. The idea of returning the short distance to the reception area seemed to her like a major task, a trek of light-years. Still, she turned, obeyed, raised her head and set off on the return voyage. She hesitated, thought, “A Western lady?” Who can it be? What does she want? Why don’t they all go away? She approached the table without her usual confidence.
Rita Donaldson’s eyes followed Vathana from the moment she emerged from the blue tarp. Immediately she saw the trepidation, the fragility, the delicacy of the brown woman, saw the brown woman’s thin face and arms and shrunken breasts, saw in her the lost resilience of Cambodia, the lost elasticity and strength of a people whose diet has been reduced every year, on whom emotional strain had compounded physical hardship, people in dire need of a solution before they succumbed.
For a moment the two women stood facing each other from opposite sides of the reception table. Gradually, simultaneously, both smiled. Rita’s light blue eyes twinkled as if she’d just discovered she had a younger sister; Vathana’s eyes sparkled, too, feeling, oddly, that this woman knew her as well as any person had ever known her. Very quickly they were talking, in French with scattered common Khmer phrases, getting to know each other, chattering not as interviewer and interviewee but as colleagues.
“...the Khmer Rouge,” Rita was saying, “their growth has been phenomenal.”
“Not so phenomenal,” Vathana explained. “They grow because FANK is so stupid, so corrupt and ruthless. Captain Sullivan would say that. You agree, eh?”
“With John Sullivan? Yes. He was one of the few who actually cared. Actually took the time to know what it was all about.”
“He cared very much, eh?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“Do other Americans? The bombs get closer...”
“Hmm. Most of the bombings, at least in the reports, are said to be against the NVA buildup in the border sanctuaries. Are they coming into the interior after the Khmer Rouge?”
“Oh yes. I think. I think it’s good America hasn’t abandoned us completely, but then I think they will as they did South Viet Nam. Ten years then, poof! they’re all gone.”
“Real poof!” Rita chuckled. “Real Nixon hocus-pocus. There are still fifty-four thousand American troops in Thailand and another sixty thousand on 7th Fleet ships off the coast.”
“So many!?”
“Um-hum.” Rita reached out and touched Vathana’s hand. “I need someone in this area to help me get my stories. A stringer.” Vathana nodded understanding of the term. “It doesn’t pay much. A pittance. But when people come and tell you about the bombings, then you tell me...”
“Captain Sullivan told me how important this is,” Vathana said. “So America can know Cambodia and then behave better toward her. That would be much more than a pittance.”
“Yes,” Rita said professionally. She added, “Do you have enough rice for yourself and your family? With inflation running, what was the last report, 257 percent...I have a few black market connections...”
“These,” Met Paak said, “are yours.” Nang and the commander of the Northern Zone Army stood on the edge of a long narrow platform overlooking Nang’s new command. “There are sixteen hundred,” Met Paak said. “Teach them. Train them.” Nang looked out across the opening and into the brush to the west where a mass of young boys were sitting or standing, milling about in clusters. “Met Sar tells me you can do it more quickly than any commander,” Paak said. “Good. I am entrusting you with creating a new regiment.”
“And cadre?” Nang asked. He gritted his teeth, swallowed. Them! he thought. They’re nothing. Children.
“Of course.” Paak chuckled. “You’ve a core of trained yotheas—all who’ve served with you before. Duch, your old radioman from the battles in Ratanakiri—he heard you were coming and he’s gathered them. Von, Ung and Sol, eh? You remember. Make them your battalion commanders. Some others. Met Nang, you are the 91st Armed Infantry Regiment of the Kampuchean Liberation Army. Train quickly. We must attain victory before the yuons or they will use the South as a base to consume Kampuchea. In three weeks you will move south.”
Nang stood alone on the platform. He could not see all the boys but, what he saw was disheartening. Children. Little brown boys with thin arms and skinny necks. Eng, Nang thought, has a real regiment. Nu has more than two. But me, I get a handful of untrained, frightened children.
On 9 March 1973, before Met Nang had even met with his cadre, other Krahom yotheas toppled the towns of Chambak and Samrong only twenty and twenty-four miles, respectively, south of Phnom Penh, and shelled Takhmau, only six miles south of the capital. Ten days later FANK’s elite 7th Brigade counterattacked and retook the two towns, but the Communists disengaged and seemed to slide sideways like a matador behind a smokescreen cape, then attacked at the nearby town of Phrasath Neang Khmaru. Additional KK units assaulted at Angtassom at the junction of Highways 3 and 25, at Roka Kong and Mouk Kampoul on the Mekong northeast of the capital and at Romeas on Highway 5 to the northwest.
Nang followed the reports with glee and with envy. Quickly he organized his command. Along with Duch, Von, Ung and Sol he was given Met Rath, Met Thevy and Met Puc whom he ordered, respectively, to establish new transportation, weapons, and supply-propaganda companies that would support the battalions and the regiment. In a day Nang had grasped the orderly format; in three he’d filled the command slots; in five his regiments—each unit commander having the power of life and death over the conscripts and volunteers—had achieved orderliness. It was still a mess.
On the third anniversary of the ousting of Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodian national troops abandoned Oudong after KK mortars ignited a FANK ammo dump near the Tep Pranam pagoda. Nearly four thousand FANK troops and civilians fled the rebels charging Oudong, and at least two hundred people were captured and herded away toward “liberated” zones. East of Oudong FANK’s best unit, the 80th Infantry Brigade, after eleven days of battle, withdrew to a new defensive ring at Chekei Themei. Before the month was over FANK suffered additional setbacks at dozens of sites along the Bassac River, and in the marshes lining the Mekong across from Neak Luong.
Amid these FANK disasters a disaffected FANK pilot bombed Lon Nol’s presidential palace, throwing the national leader into a rage which in turn precipitated his declaring a state of siege, closing the print media, banning mass meetings, and imposing a nine p.m. curfew. In response, teachers, students and proselytizers staged a general strike closing the little industry still operating in republic territory. Protest demonstrations increased as peasants and workers joined to demand an end to corruption and soaring inflation. Nang laughed at the reported follies and passed the stories on to his training yotheas. “Lon Nol has ordered nationwide conscription,” Nang told his troops. “And Nixon has announced the United States will bomb us until our offensive halts.”
They did not move south at the end of three weeks. The unit was not ready, could not possibly have been ready. Nang attempted to motivate the boys with more stories, more information. “We are on our own,” he told them on 29 March. “Hanoi has released its last American POW and the United States has withdrawn its last soldier from South Viet Nam. Now they are both free to come here. Now we are on our own.”
The 91st Armed Infantry Regiment trained day and night. It was Pong Pay Mountain accelerated. What luck, Nang thought at the end of the fourth week when Puc brought him a student who’d stolen a bottle of whiskey and become drunk. The regimental commander grabbed the boy by the shoulders, almost hugged him for the great opportunity he presented, led him to the drill field where Met Von’s and Met No’s battalions were practicing hand-to-hand combat. “Let them kill him,” Nang told Puc. “Have every straggler kill him. One learns to kill by killing, eh?”
Each day the little boys changed, changed as every yothea had, as every soldier must, transforming from innocent to executioner, from individual to expendable. Each day new word had come from the front. Each day rumors and stories of the bombings spread. Each day new recruits came and filled out the battalions until the 340-fighter units exceeded 400, until the regiment of 1,500 with support and staff topped 1,950. Each day reports came of the NVA buildup. Rush, came the word. Faster, came the word. We must win, now! The people have been mobilized. The army is committed. Faster. Faster. Move south.
In early April Nang again stood at the edge of the long narrow platform overlooking his troops. “Stragglers,” he shouted. The troops froze in the posture of perfect attention. “Stragglers. You are my brothers. You are my family.” Met Puc clapped his hands. Eyes skittered toward the noise. Then the boys saw it was the propaganda company leader. A few clapped, then more. “It is time to go to the front...” A few cheered. “It is time to knock off some lackeys of the running dogs...” Yotheas hooted, howled. “It is time to bring Kampuchea a humane and modern government.”
The ugly regimental commander’s voice boomed and the yotheas went into a frenzy of anticipation of battle, of victory. As they cheered, Nang seemed to grow. “Seventy battalions of our brothers attack Lon Nol’s heart. Should we sit here?”
“No.”
“Should we let them strive to liberate Kampuchea without us?”
“No!”
“Should we attack? Should we kill?” “Yes! Yes!”
Nang’s eyes beamed, his evil smile was infectious. “You have within you the blood of warlords from Angkor, from Funan. For centuries Kampuchea has been victimized.” Nang crouched, swept his hands out from before him to his sides as if he were erasing everything in the past. A hush fell over the regiment. “If we lose, not a single Khmer will remain. Kampuchea will cease to exist. But...it is within you, through the Will of Angkar, to be victorious.”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Again Nang paused. These boys had been well trained by their unit leaders. How flexible they were, how susceptible to his oration, how easily he plucked the strings of their fears, their insecurities, their xenophobia, their memories of their families’ discontent before they were ripped away and pressed into the new family of their cell, their platoon, their company, battalion, regiment and Angkar Leou.
“You are dead.” The words splatted from Nang’s mouth. “Only the moment of your death has yet to be determined. But if you are dead, you cannot be killed. You are invincible.” The little brown boys, still thin yet harder than before, stood, shouted, raised their weapons, assault rifles amid clubs, rocket-propelled grenade launchers amid hoes, mattocks and bush knives, raised them, shook them, pounded their chests with their free hands until Nang held his pincer high. “In rain...” Nang boomed.
“In rain...” came nearly two thousand voices.
“In wind,” they chanted together, “in health or wounded, day or night, I will obey...” Looking upon them from the platform Nang was seized with a commander’s love for his troops, with a tyrant’s adoration for power. “I am the offering.”
In April they’d begun the march south, yet even as they marched into the maelstrom of Allied firepower, their indoctrination and purification continued.
“Sihanouk, he eats well in Peking, eh?”
“How should I know?”
“Damn, I’d like to have just one meal like his. I hear he’s become yuon.”
“That can’t happen. If you’re born Khmer, you’re Khmer.”
“You must be right. Go see Met Puc. He’ll show you how.”
While Krahom units counterattacked the FANK Task Force attempting to retake Oudong, Met Puc systematically weeded out the Sihanoukists. By the time Krahom units forced FANK defenders to flee from the outposts between the Bassac and Mekong across from Neak Luong, the 91st Armed Infantry Regiment had lost nearly a hundred troops to the internal cleaning. The purge in the midst of battle was Krahom-wide. Even as KK units confiscated five 105mm howitzers with forty truckloads of ammunition from units of FANK’s 7th Division that they’d ambushed near Takeo City, the anti-Sihanouk, anti-monarchy, anti-Viet Namese campaign of the ultranationalists exploded. By May Krahom propaganda teams were infiltrating villages and cities throughout the liberated areas, were rendezvousing with association leaders and overtly denouncing Sihanouk and his ties to Hanoi and proclaiming the supremacy of Angkar Leou. In Svay Rieng the Gray Vultures and the people reeled. The backlash halted the progress of the KK offensive. Quickly the Center responded, backtracked while moving forward, announced, there in the East about Svay Rieng only, that the KK was pro-Sihanouk. The monarch, the Center proclaimed, had confessed to errors had apologized and had been reinstated as head of the government-in-exile. Norodom Sihanouk, the statement said, wished to return not as a prince but as a private citizen.
When a hardened yet still inexperienced 91st reached the northern front in mid-May, the KK in the East was again advancing on Phnom Penh. “Which army?” Nang asked Met Duch and Met Von.
“Southern Zone Army,” Von said.
“I think the Eastern Zone,” Duch countered.
“Met Paak won’t tell, eh?” Nang was angry. He’d worked very hard for this battle, this fight. It was the eve of the 91st’s first assault. The reports said Krahom mortar rounds had crashed into the southern half of Phnom Penh.
“Does it matter which army?” Duch said.
“What’s a mortar’s range?” Nang shot back.
“Ask Thevy,” Von said. “He’s head of weapons—”
“You should know,” Nang snapped. “Sixty-ones, two thousand meters; eighty-twos, thirty-six hundred meters. That’s how close they are.” Nang squeezed his right pincer. His hand, his arm, his entire torso shuddered in anger and envy. “We must be the victors,” he stammered. Hot acids billowed from his stomach to his throat and into his mouth. “No one can beat us to Phnom Penh. Is this battlefield prepared?”
That dawn Nang’s 91st had its baptism by fire. They attacked the village of Prek Yan. There had been no battlefield preparation other than the nocturnal massing of the regiment before FANK’s defensive perimeter. There was little artillery preparation. The 91st had but two 61mm mortars and a pair of 107mm recoilless rifles. Sister units in the 4th Brigade and in the 7th and 54th Regiments had circumvented Prek Yan and were set to attack farther south. From the flanks the 107s banged, the rockets flew, a poorly aimed one sailed high over the berm, a low one skittered along the earth, lodged and exploded in a clump of reeds. The wave, fifteen hundred strong, shouting, only a few firing, swarmed toward the defenders. Mortar rounds popping from tubes behind them exploded in the village. Then the government troops awoke, reacted, returned fire, spraying M-60 machine gun rounds across the horde as if spraying water hoses on a grass fire. Almost immediately the 91st broke, yotheas scattered, dispersed into the thinly treed forest about Prek Yan.
All that day Nang reinvigorated his troops. “Now you know. Now you understand. Tomorrow—kill everything. Burn everything. Destroy everything.” In the dirt of their forest command post, Nang snarled and chided his leaders. “Rath, how many casualties? Aah. Who cares? How many attackers for the morning?”
“Twelve hundred. We’ve a hundred wounded to carry.”
“If they can’t attack,” Nang said coolly, “leave them.” With a stick he drew the village, marked the machine gun emplacements, pinpointed the weak points. “Yon,” he said, “tomorrow...”
Before the next dawn his infantry moved into position; before dawn his 107s hammered bunkers and gun emplacements; before dawn his mortars set the village afire and backlit the FANK berm. Then the troops attacked, now sprinting and firing, concentrating column spearheads against the weak points while spread teams sprayed suppressive fire. By dawn the 91st had broken through and in violent resentful frenzy they chopped, killed, destroyed. In an hour only the FANK soldiers who’d hidden successfully or who’d fled Prek Yan were alive. Only the conscriptable and usable elements of the civilian population, and those who’d escaped, still breathed. Quickly Nang ordered his fighters to police up and withdraw. As they departed Met Puc’s team erected a handmade poster by the village well: BEING FORCIBLY GRASPED BY THE EVIL HAND OF IMPERIALISM, YOU HAVE LIVED YOUR PRECIOUS LIVES IN VAIN. TO CONSOLE YOUR SOULS WE HAVE PREPARED A GRAVE FOR YOU. REST IN PEACE. Into the well the propaganda team dumped the heads of ninety-one victims.
The 91st moved south. FANK reinforcements moved north. American fighter-bombers “walked, point” for the government column—F-105s screaming in low then sweeping up as they lobbed their ordnance at unseen targets before them. Now the bombers came in twos, now in fours. The 91st retreated through Prek Yan. The bombers hit the village, reducing its charred ruins to rubble and killing those who’d escaped Nang’s brutality by hiding. Government troops reoccupied the village. They found it pocked, with craters, the orchards broken and shattered, the ground littered with broken and twisted cooking pots and human parts. All day bombers and artillery blasted the surrounding forest, not attempting to ferret out the KK but hoping with random explosions to kill anyone in the wild. Then FANK withdrew. Nothing remained in Prek Yan worth defending. As they pulled back the 91st followed.
For more than two months, mid-May to mid-July 1973, the 91st Armed Infantry Regiment with its sister units of the Army of the North continued to attack down Highway 5 toward Phnom Penh. With every battle they became more experienced. With every battle their tactics improved. With every battle they added new recruits or new conscripts to replace those killed. “Forward” became their motto. Go forward at all cost. We must win, now! Even when the Congress of the United States voted on 30 June 1973 to force a complete cessation of American bombing in forty-five days, the Krahom did not pause. Instead they moved constantly, moved to avoid detection by VATLS, the American Visual Airborne Target Locator System, of which they knew nothing but its uncanny ability to bring the bombers to wherever they rested, if they rested for more than a few hours.
Mid-June 1973—Chhuon’s head was down in subjugation but his eyes were up, locked on the new canton deputy chief, Met Soth’s counterpart, the kana khum.
Until the bombings began life had been improving. Now everyone was terror stricken. More heads would roll.
Dry-season projects had progressed well. Unlike the earlier earthworks the peasants had been given control over the layout of small dams, dikes and canals within the much larger scheme. “Finally,” Chhuon had told Sok, “finally a woman like Than.” “You like her, eh?” Sok’s tone had been light, humorous. “She even works with us,” Chhuon had said. “And if one asks her, she will listen to reason. Ha! She knows water doesn’t roll uphill. More than Soth, eh?” “ssshh.” Sok had patted her husband’s shoulder as they’d lain in the two-person cocoon. “ssshh. knock on wood, don’t let anyone hear your voice.” “Ah, Sok, it’s not Phum Sath Din, but with Than there’s no corruption, no gambling. Everyone eats the same, dresses the same, works the same. As much as I dislike them, she is very fair. The bunkers are well prepared, the paddy dikes are straight, the feeder canals are level. There’s talk of being allowed a cooperative store. I think they mean a market. You know how they change the language.”
In the months after the rains ceased, Phum 117 of Khum 4, Srok 16, had become a strategic cooperative. Beneath each family hut of Chhuon’s interfamily group a digging team had burrowed into the earth, forming an S-shaped tunnel leading to a small cubicle. Around each set of krom huts an interior defensive perimeter had been built. About the phum as well as about the entire khum, fences and the belt of minefields and booby traps had been widened and improved. Everything was in perfect order. Seen from above the fortifications were symmetrical.
The kana khum, Met Ravana, did not speak. Before him sat every inhabitant of Phum 117. Every head was bowed. Maturing in the liberated zone was a system of checks without balances that ensured that every boy and girl, every man and woman, was constantly under surveillance, continuously watched by every other person about him or her. Anyone could report on anyone else. Anyone could claim that so-and-so had anti-Movement or antirevolutionary thoughts or said anti-yothea words, or behaved in an anti-phum manner. Without being able to face the accuser, the accused was automatically guilty, could be automatically punished. The result was a total breakdown of the normal fabric of Khmer society. In the name of “liberation,” in the name of “the people,” guilt was impressed on every psyche. Sanctimonious double-talk combined with totalitarian rule destroyed traditional social networks. The organized and “scientifically” planned transformation of the culture destroyed, as did other factors in government zones, Khmer resilience.
Throughout March and April 1973 the Krahom offensive against the heartland intensified. From the hinterlands Angkar had called as many yotheas as possible. They’d vacated the liberated lands in waves, leaving the liberated peoples in the hands of Rumdoah troops overseen by but an aroma of hardened yotheas. As the offensive blasted huge holes in FANK’s capital defenses, Allied bombers reached out to crush supply lines and rear bases. Convoys and fortifications were targeted.
Three weeks before this meeting of Phum 117, Sok had been quietly preparing the evening rice when without a half second’s notice the growling roar of three government T-28s shook the village. Lap kats (slap kats, or sawed-off wings) swept in fast, so low that had she had a long-handled rice knife she’d have been able to split the plane’s belly. Then instantly they were gone and napalm fires roared and consumed the family-group huts beside theirs. Chhuon, on his spindly bowed legs, had run to her and pulled her. She’d frozen like Lot’s wife. Flames sucking for air, heat rising, forming small tornados, had whipped the earth about them into a dust storm. Still Sok had stood agape. Then, later, huddled in their tiny bunker room, she’d collapsed sobbing, calling the names of her mother and father and of the seven children she’d borne—four dead, three lost. Hopelessness had engulfed her like black billowing napalm smoke.
“We are lost,” she’d cried. “Lost. We are no one. We are nothing. We are without family. We cannot even use our family names!”
“Someday,” Chhuon had tried to console her, “someday, when the war is over, when we’re truly liberated...”
A week later Khum 4 had again been bombed. This time a nighttime arc-light drop had unleashed its violent pent-up hate at the edge of the canton, the high explosives blowing iron shrapnel out hundreds of meters, ripping through huts and humans, punishing the land and any inhabitants who dared be on it. The next day a third punitive strike, American F-105s, had hit the commune, killing, destroying the dikes, a boray, some just-plowed fields which would have grown rice to support Angkar’s troops, fields Chhuon saw as his fields, his future food. Chhuon’s will had weakened. Then came the quiet days when the bombers moved south onto the points of attack or east against supply trails laden with trucks. Still he, Sok, so many, slept nights in their airless bunkers or slept in fields as far from their huts as the defensive rings about the commune would allow.
“Sihanouk is near.” Met Than, the straight-haired mekong, had whispered one evening to Chhuon and a group replowing and reflattening a paddy for the May planting.
“Who says?” a survivor of a devastated phum had asked.
“Everyone,” Than whispered. She too was depressed by the bombings, by the phum’s, khum’s, srok’s, by every level’s inability to retaliate. “A mekong from 116 told me.”
“Who needs him?” the survivor had snapped.
“But...” a third man said, his voice trembling, “...he is our...savior.”
Chhuon had bitten down hard, had pushed harder on the three-man bamboo bar from which the ropes trailed to the plow. The survivor had snorted. “Sihanouk’s been infected with yuon disease.”
Each day Chhuon had withdrawn more. The terror of the bombings, different from any terror he’d ever known, so remote, so unreachable, frightened him to his core in a way physical torture had never been able. He understood torture. He understood pain. He understood pain’s infliction. But the bombings. Those he did not understand. Their sudden onslaught, intense violence, sudden cessation. All from such a distance it might as well have been the moon exploding. One night he’d written in his notebook: “They say Samdech Euv is near, but the bombings keep him from returning. Perhaps Kdeb is with him.”
Now, to call the meeting to order, Met Ravana clapped his hands. Near Sok a woman’s bowels shuddered in terrified spasms and the smell of shit wafted across the cowering people. “All krom leaders,” Ravana shouted, “stand!” Chhuon and three others shot up. “You are charged with the responsibility of the order. Sit.” Chhuon dropped, thudded onto the dusty ground. Slowly the words crept from Ravana’s mouth, then gradually accelerated: “You will dig in. All movement will be by orders. Only. All aliens are subject to ultimate measures. Anyone not from Khum 4 is an alien. You will work for the Revolution. All material things belong to the Revolution. You may not talk, you may not pray, you may not smile. Your energy belongs to the Revolution. Talking, praying, smiling sap energy. Every infraction will be reported.”
The smell of shit reached Ravana. His face contorted. Then his eyes glinted. A flat smirk broadened his jowl. “You have heard that Norodom Sihanouk is near, eh?” He felt repulsed by the continuing smell. “If yes, stand.” A few stirred but no one stood. “Stand! Everyone!” The nearly four hundred people rose. Ravana walked into their midst. He walked between the silent rows, pacing, disgusted, following his nose. Then, “Are you ill, comrade?”
“N...n...n...”
“Don’t be afraid,” he said calmly. “Go with those yotheas. They will escort you. In case of a bombing.”
The woman who’d soiled herself left. Ravana strode back to the small one-step-high stage. “Sit!”
His eyes shifted. Still the smell lingered. “Turn yourselves over to Angkar to be rebuilt. Trust in Angkar, in the Movement, in the Revolution. Sihanouk was corrupt. Sihanouk was despicable. Sihanouk was oppressive.” Ravana paused. Chhuon’s eyes were locked on his. “You will launch an offensive to gain great victories of rice production to sustain the army and to defend our independence against imperialists and monarchists.” Chhuon thought of Met Than and her whispered news of Samdech Euv. This denunciation, this level of denunciation, was new to the “liberated and regained peoples.” It marked the transition from physical relocation to political reeducation. Why? Chhuon tried to think. Ravana ranted on. “Our goal is pure and classless humanity unencumbered by the dogma and doctrine of false gods and false civilizations.” The bombing, Chhuon thought as the kana khum raged, it has dislodged their fears. They are weak. They are vulnerable. “...in cities civilization is born, grows. In cities civilization differentiates between people, and that begets classes. Cities must be destroyed...” What stops something from reaching in and annihilating them? Chhuon thought. They are afraid! The thought amazed him. They are more afraid even than I am. They don’t believe their own words. It’s fear that induces in them this fanaticism—fear of revenge against them, fear of...
Again Met Ravana was ranting against Norodom Sihanouk. “...to speak that name, henceforth, will be punishable by death...” No, Chhuon thought, I must not have heard correctly. Without moving his head he attempted to force his eyes far enough sideways to seek Sok’s reaction. He could not see her.
So afraid, his thoughts began again. Then he saw Met Than, saw her short straight hair neatly combed, saw the even bangs lapping at her eyebrows, saw her clouded eyes. It did not register. It could not be. Than was one of them. She was there, before him, a head on a board, there without her body. Met Ravana slapped the head and it flew from the board into the midst of shrieking women. Chhuon swallowed. He thought, awkwardly, How, how, how did I do that?! And then he knew, was certain, without thought, that he, like Sok, like them all, was unalterably trapped in a commune of his own making.
In June there had been six nocturnal meetings in Phum 117; in early July, none. As B-52s were unleashing their ordnance about Phnom Penh and Neak Luong, the liberated commune in the far North was slowly recovering. The hopelessness and depression of April, the feeling of being incompetent in the new ways, had ebbed. The tension of May, the continual fear of being a bomb target, abated. And the horror of June’s night sessions faded in the constant forced labor. Even Sok, though daily she still muttered “We are lost,” seemed to have finally acclimated to the order of Angkar.
“A little more, eh?” Chhuon’s voice resounded in the pelting grayness of an early July rain. “Raise it higher,” he shouted. The water in the seedbed rose steadily until it was a finger’s width from the tips of the rice seedlings. “Ah. Close it,” Chhuon yelled up to his helpers. “Let’s move on to the next.” In the larger fields below the seedbeds men dragged logs over the furrowed mud, flattening the earth in preparation for planting the seedlings. “That’s it,” Chhuon called. “Open it for this feeder.” Water from the small boray gushed into the trench which led to the seedbed where Chhuon now stood. The operation was efficient, the water moved swiftly. Chhuon smiled, then remembering it was criminal to smile, cleared his face. Still he felt happy, pleased that the new agricultural layout was working, pleased at how perfectly the rain had fallen, at how beautifully the seedlings were growing, at how straight were the dikes and how level were the feeder ditches and at how well the water-control teams and the log teams worked. Only the memory of Than, the mekong who’d let him build a proper system but who’d been beheaded for speaking the old monarch’s name, only that thought dampened his spirit this wonderfully rainy morning.
Since the rain had begun in earnest, there had been no bombings. At first Chhuon had thought the planes couldn’t fly in the heavy rain, but he knew that wasn’t the case. Then he’d thought that the aerial detection men must have finally realized that Phum 117, Khum 4, was not a fortification or a training camp but only a peasant commune trying to raise enough rice on which to subsist. He knew nothing of the great bombings about Phnom Penh and the lesser bombings at Kompong Cham, Neak Luong and to the west at Siem Reap. Things were looking up. Even the local cadre had eased off. As long as the work progressed steadily, as long as everyone labored hard, they were being left alone.
“Let’s go,” Chhuon called to the two men who’d opened and redammed the spillways to the various seedling paddies. “Well done, Sichau.” Chhuon’s voice was clear. “Well done, Moeung.”
Quietly Moeung said, “You’d best call us ‘Met,’ Chairman Chhuon. There may be ears in the paddies.”
Chhuon did not pause or acknowledge the warning. “Let us spell Team Four. They’ve pulled the log all day. Let’s show them what three old men can do, eh?”
Chhuon’s enthusiasm infected Sichau but the fever, like all enthusiasm in Phum 117, was low grade. Soon, as the three skinny men—Chhuon now fifty, the other two in their mid forties—on their six spindly legs with the six bulbous knees well displayed beneath their rolled-up trousers—pulled the log, they were puffing and panting and only occasionally talking.
“Chhuon...” Moeung blew words out one per breath, “I...heard...Soth...he’s...replaced...by...Ravana.”
“Eh?” Chhuon puffed back.
“My wife...” Sichau spoke more smoothly than the others, “...she says...she heard from the mekong...we are to raise...to the next level...of community.”
“What...” Chhuon did not turn but continued pushing on the bamboo pole—“...does that...mean?”
“Eh...” Sichau said. “...tonight we’ll hear.”
Chhuon, Sichau, Moeung, all the new and old peasants of Phum 117, didn’t know what event triggered that night’s reeducation session and the new harsh reprisals. But some cadre knew; some were held accountable. Fifty kilometers south-southwest in the direction of Kompong Thom, in the absence of a strong force because so many Khmer Krahom yotheas had been sent to the front, forty thousand “liberated” peasants had escaped to government lines.
“It is the most severe crime...” Ravana addressed the men workers of Phum 117. They had not been permitted to return to their huts; they had not eaten. Torches had been brought to the field Chhuon had been dragging at dusk. “...in the eyes of Angkar. Anyone attempting to escape will be arrested, tried and taken away. Why should anyone wish to leave? Angkar provides for everything. Angkar cares for all. Angkar is good.
“Are you curious? What’s next door? There”—Ravana pointed north into the night—“there is a commune of monks. There they learn to become productive members of the community; they are taught to earn their own way.” He ranted for an hour then was quiet for some time, then he left. He did not dismiss them. All night they sat in the field. One by one the torches burned out. The rain came at times hard, at times gently. When the rain was softest the omnipresent metronome of crickets lulled the men toward sleep. Yet all feared sleeping, for sleeping during a meeting might be a crime. Sichau’s head drooped onto Chhuon’s shoulder. He snapped it up. Another torch burned out. He laid his head against Chhuon and fell asleep. On the other side Moeung did the same, turning slightly so the back of his shoulder was to Chhuon’s back. Chhuon moved slightly so the three formed a tripod. At first he could not sleep. He pondered one line Ravana had repeated several times: “...though our rice farmers were greatly oppressed and are now free, they must still learn a proper agricultural worker’s nature. They must be instilled, via socialist ideals, with a working-class spirit....”
The next day they worked the field without having seen their huts, without having eaten. Chhuon pondered...to mold all members of our society into productive elements...To him, the phrases seemed overly simplistic, but in his weariness and hunger he wished only to use them to sidetrack his mind. For a while he repeated to himself...reeducation through work...reeducation through work...He thought of his notebooks and thought what he would write. By dusk he was feeling very weak and fantasized about the bowl of rice Sok would have waiting for him. Still they worked...productive elements...he thought. Why not productive people? Productive families? Ravana’s shrill voice had lambasted them about families. Families were for producing productive elements—some such nonsense. When families could no longer produce new elements they should be dissolved. Chhuon almost chuckled to himself at that thought. Dissolved! We’re not lumps of sugar. Once you are a father, a mother, a son, a daughter, he thought, you are always that. It is not something that can be dissolved.
Again that night the men were grouped in a field. The rain had stopped and the ground came alive with thousands of large brown moths. A new kitchen staff came to the field and served the men rice soup and bananas. They were not released and again slept in their back-to-back tripods. Again they labored without sustenance. Chhuon forgot about Ravana, and all day he fantasized about Sok and the meal she would prepare. That night when the men returned to their huts there were no women. They had been moved to a new women’s barracks built a forbidden half kilometer to the east.
As the assaults on the capital heart area continued, as other government enclaves were attacked, Vathana sat, sat by the first of the small mud huts, sat in the rain staring into the dying embers of the night’s cooking fire, letting the rain soak her long thick black hair and run down her cheeks like tears though she was not sad, not crying. Around her the few soldiers and the many association women huddled in the dark, eating, picking the last grains from their plates, barely moving, yet to her they whizzed by, passed so quickly their speed blurred their images. Time accelerated, yet each moment stretched out for all eternity.
Keo Kosol had tried to talk her out of it. He had grabbed her shoulders, touched her as he hadn’t in months, she so passive in his hands he’d dropped them to his sides in disgust. “You want to believe the rumors,” he’d said, “then go ahead. But then you’d believe anything, eh?” Still she’d remained inert. “The reason”—Kosol’s voice rose—“they were so harsh in the border area was because the Americans and the Viet Namese were there.”
“And in the North?” she’d whispered without moving.
“Everyone knows those people...those province people are lazy. They don’t work hard like our peasants. But we’re hard workers. We’ll produce for them and we’ll gain the paradise they promise.” He had yelled at her many more things. “Look at this.” He’d waved an old newspaper before her. “The American actress, Fonda, remember what she says. ‘...if you understood what Communism was, you would hope and pray on your knees that we would someday become Communists.’ She knows! Americans know, eh?! Now you must stop this craziness.”
Still Vathana had not responded. Kosol ranted on. “They’ll kill you with their bombs. You want that, eh? Look here!” He’d waved that day’s paper. “ ‘Eighty B-52 sorties. Sixty-four hundred bombs! Each day!’ Americans...they don’t care about Khmer people. Only about their bomb-making industry. Two million dollars...every day...yet children in your camp starve. What aid comes to the refugees? Not even half a million for a million refugees in three years! They’ve removed the middle path! They must go!”
Then Vathana had wept. Then tears had slid down her cheeks. More gently Keo Kosol had said, “The Khmer Rouge are Cambodian. Do we need Dr. Kissinger’s approval for Khmer to talk to Khmer? When the war is over, the cruelty will cease. We shall walk the middle path again.”
Still she had gone forward, led how many she did not know, did not count. It didn’t matter to her whether they were organized or not, whether they brought a kilo of provisions or ten thousand. Only that she go. That she was followed by forty from the Soldiers’ Mothers Association she did not know. That members of the Liberation Youth, the Rivermen for a Just Government, the Refugee Association, and the Khmer Patriots for Peace all joined her, did not gratify her. The rain came harder.
Earlier, even before Kosol’s harangue, she’d sat looking at her babies, at Samnang, at Samol. How the war overshadowed their lives, she’d been thinking. How will it be on this one? she’d thought, passing her hands over her bulbous abdomen. Will the schools reopen? Will they ever know their father? She’d felt so tired, so numb. Rumors were being passed that cigarettes, gasoline and even electricity were being rationed in Phnom Penh. She’d heard and she’d thought, Good! Perhaps they will understand what life is like for us.
She’d wanted to stop thinking about the children so she’d left the tent only to see hundreds, thousands more—idle children beneath the growing number of cardboard or thatch or scrap truck fender shanties disintegrating in the rain. Why? she’d thought, and the pain sat heavy on her shoulders and in her bowels and in her tired legs. Why hasn’t the rain stopped the Khmer Rouge? Still they attack the capital. Will it fall? Today? Or Kompong Cham? She could feel the shaking earth as she watched the children, then she could hear the not-so-distant sound of explosions, and she’d thought, Are they invincible? Where is Norodom Sihanouk? He would never allow things to be so bad. He must not know. Where is Teck? Where is Papa? Her lower jaw trembled and she tried to chase those thoughts away. Some people say the Khmer Rouge have engaged an evil spirit. In exchange for invincibility they have traded their souls. If only...
Windswept raindrops flew beneath the poncho roof over the fire and sizzled in the embers. The front was very close. Indeed, she was now at the back of the front. In the rainbound dark a wide circle of fires of FANK’s defenders flickered sporadically. Neak Luong, the southern citadel on the Mekong, defender of the southern approach to the heartland, was again an isle in the Communist-conquered sea.
Sarin Sam Ol had heard of her plan and had come to the camp to talk. “It is very dangerous,” he cautioned her halfheartedly.
“Yes,” she’d said, not agreeing but confirming that she’d heard, that she knew the words though they no longer had meaning in Neak Luong, that she respected the doctor’s thought.
“I won’t come to help,” he’d said.
“I understand,” she’d answered.
“Then I will say good-bye. I have received a visa for France. There is an eye doctor...”
“Then see him.”
He reached out, grasped her hands as if passing a blessing. “You understand. I can do nothing. Nothing.”
After Doctor Sarin had left, Vathana had written a sketch of his anguished ordeal and sent it via messenger to Rita Donaldson. It was her twentieth such letter. For each she received the equivalent of two dollars, enough to buy eighteen pounds of rice on the black market—at just above starvation levels, enough to feed her, Sophan and the children for one week.
“You understand,” she had ended the account, “I can do nothing. Nothing.”
But I can do something, she’d thought. She’d talked to Rita—when, she couldn’t remember. Time had become so warped she was unsure if it were this life or the last. “This is Louis”—she’d introduced the young man who’d been her husband’s friend. Rita had glared at the disheveled, angry soldier.
In Khmer Louis, glaring back at the blue-eyed Western woman, snapped at Vathana, “Does she know you carry a kid that’s not your husband’s?”
“You came to me,” Vathana shot back. “This is what I can do.”
“What does he say?” Rita did not hide her dislike for him.
“He says,” Vathana spoke alternately in Khmer and in French as if Louis did not understand French, “he needs help. He says he will desert unless he has food and is paid.”
“When was the last time he ate?” Rita asked.
Vathana translated then listened and translated back. “Two days,” she said. “But he says they have had only small rations for two months. Had he not been caught in the general conscription he would never serve this government.” Louis sprayed out another angry burst. “He says, those with families here eat because the families bring them food but those without families are starving.”
They had talked for an hour when Louis said he had to go or they’d come for him. Alone the women spoke amiably and Rita Donaldson pulled from her shoulder satchel a plastic bottle of protein tablets. She kissed Vathana and whispered, “For your baby. So it will be strong.” Then again she pulled a book from her bag and said, “Translate this for me, dear. Now I must go. Your stories are very good.”
Vathana had held the book, staring at the sad cover for some minutes. She opened the bottle and took two tablets then looked back at Regrets for the Khmer Soul by Ith Sarin. The cover was a heart-shaped map of Cambodia torn in two by the Mekong River. Before she could open it Louis had returned, had scowled, spat. “Teck has joined my unit,” he’d said. “Give your pussy to others, but give your husband some food.”
A mile, perhaps two, into the blackness, lights popped hazy through the rain, burst in a row in the amorphous dark. Then came the quaking and the thunder. The ash of the cooking fire tumbled exposing the last hot coals. A mud hut collapsed. Three soldiers cussed and stamped and shook the clods from their heads and bodies.
Vathana and three association women rose. There is something we can do, she had told them without emotion, without ardor. “We can help the wounded. We can feed the unfortunate. We can show compassion for those who seek only to defend their own homes and their own families, for those demoralized, for those who fight without hope of victory.”
16 July 1973, 0430 hours: What was that! He jerked but did not rise. His eyes, red, angry, obsessed, flicked, searched. Behind them the village still smoldered. Before them FANK troops were moving—maybe withdrawing. In two hours it would be light, in two hours the Krahom 91st Regiment would again attack. Nang pushed his torso up off the earth, swept his eyes back and forth across the battlefield. The B-52s had hit them—hit them again, hit them at dusk, two three-plane flights, six sorties, 324,000 pounds of bombs. The eleventh straight day of being hit, still they attacked, the thirty-fourth day in two months, yet they continued forward, always forward, nearly six hundred million pounds of iron-encased high explosives expended against him, against Nang and his 91st Armed Infantry Regiment of the 4th Brigade of the Army of the North, against some forty to fifty thousand armed Krahom yotheas—expended in the heaviest bombing of the Southeast Asian war, expended against the most ruthless “Pure Flame” land assault in history. Attack! Nang ground his teeth. We must attain victory before the yuons rebuild and devour us. The Party line—it was his faith, his need to believe to press on. Again the noise. He startled. What was that!
By July, the 91st’s mission and tactics had been perfected. “It is better to maim than to kill,” Nang told his fighters. “When useless elements are killed they are soon forgotten, but if they are maimed they are always in the sight of those who oppose us. The maimed drain the enemy’s resources. Their suffering demoralizes the lackey troops who must watch them whimper and die like pathetic dogs. Maiming is good. Better even than having bombers.”
Each battle varied, each was the same. Increasingly FANK withdrew in the face of the KK assault, withdrew and condensed into refugee-clogged enclaves. The yotheas grew confident, overzealous, exposing themselves to aerial reconnaissance and thus bombing. The yotheas wavered and FANK pulled back without cause. Nang directed his mortars, now mounted in ox carts, to target fleeing villagers, thus blockading FANK’s withdrawal. “If they escape,” he screamed at his battalion commanders, “the officer responsible will be executed. Now attack! Attack! Attack!”
What was that! Slowly Nang rolled to his knees, then rocked back on his heels into a squat. The earth was soft, mulched, pulverized. The rains had become heavy, had combined with the earth, not so much making mud as making warm red-brown slush, “duch,” Nang call-whispered. The 91st was dispersed and concealed amid cratered forest, mashed fields and the rubble of a previous battle, “duch.”
“met nang.” Duch had two radiomen, each with two small radios, and a man with a field phone set. Messages were relayed point to point to point.
Nang stared into the grayblackness. Clouds were machine-gunning billions of slow projectiles of rain onto the earth, dousing the fires behind them, “duch.” Nang could not hear his commo chief because he’d re-ruptured his ears during the campaign. “duch.”
“Met Nang, here.” Duch squatted beside him, slapped his arm.
“What was that?” Nang said.
“What?”
“I heard something. A minute ago. Very odd. Loud.”
“I didn’t hear anything. How could you, eh?”
“I did.”
“Aah! You didn’t hear. You can’t hear.”
“I can’t hear bombs,” Nang said. “That’s good, eh? If you couldn’t they wouldn’t frighten you so. But I hear death walking.”
“You get more mystical—”
“No. Listen. Does the enemy move out? Tell the battalions to move in, now. Now. Tell them to move up to the berm and dig in. Dig in with FANK. Don’t let them escape. Now.”
“Yes, Met Nang.” Duch thought to ignore the order.
“Duch,” Nang said.
“Yes.”
“Have them jam the fighter-bomber frequency with Radio Peking.”
Suddenly, amid the rain Duch heard the drone of a spotter plane’s engine.
Quickly orders passed. Quickly the yotheas sneaked forward—not fierce human-wave assaults but owl-quiet approaches—a wave in midocean closing on an atoll. They were now south of Ponheapon, ten miles north of Phnom Penh’s heart. The earth burst.
In Phnom Penh, the evening of 15 July 1973, Rita Donaldson was at the typewriter in her small office. “Western sources,” she wrote, “have estimated one hundred civilians are killed every day by American bombs. This figure is believed, by many observers, to be conservative.” Rita Donaldson looked at the sentence and shook her head. Reducing the atrocity to words lessened its impact upon her and that somehow made her feel guilty, as if even though her writing might expose the atrocity to world view, it could never catch the horror, the crime, the pain she’d witnessed. She reached up, adjusted the goose-necked lamp to reduce the glare on the page and continued. “Embassy sources, who have asked not to be identified, have confirmed the existence of a secret communications center in the embassy which gathers bombing requests from the Cambodian General Staff then forwards them to U.S. 7th Air Force headquarters in Thailand. These same sources state that civilian property damage and death are being kept within ‘acceptable limits.’ ”
“Goddamn,” Rita growled. She checked her notes to ensure she’d quoted the phrase properly. “Acceptable?” What’s acceptable? she’d wanted to ask on the page, to put into the story, to ask her source, but her source had insisted on no questions. She didn’t need to ask. She knew the answer already. Acceptable limits were defined as the number killed. If it were one hundred per day then one hundred per day was acceptable. If five hundred per day...She lit a cigarette, inhaled, put the cigarette on the ashtray lip, blew the smoke aside, wetted her lips with her tongue. Why? she thought. Why didn’t he say something? The light flickered, paled, then came back.
“Last year,” she typed the words quickly, “American B-52s dropped nearly 37,000 tons of bombs on this devastated land. In March alone the Stratofortresses released 24,000 tons. The pay-load reportedly increased to 35,000 tons in April and 36,000 tons in May. The source, deemed reliable, said the June figures had yet not been tabulated. Those numbers do not include fighter-bomber releases, which last year totaled 16,500 tons and which have allegedly reached that amount each of the three months of this spring bombing campaign.”
Again Rita stopped. The cigarette had fallen from the ashtray and burned a fat line in the desktop. He could have told me, she thought. Again she went back to the story. “The Nixon administration has repeatedly stated America has no formal responsibility to uphold the Lon Nol government. According to Secretary of State William Rogers, ‘U.S. air strikes...do not represent a commitment to the defense of Cambodia itself but instead represent a meaningful interim action to bring about compliance with this critical provision of the Vietnam agreement.’ ”
She stopped, lifted a ballpoint from the desk, tapped her forehead, stuck the pen between her teeth, then, without consulting her notes, typed, “The volume of bombs dropped has become the embassy’s yardstick to measure the ‘effective response’ of the bombings on the Khmer Rouge. The volume measures nothing of the sort. This bombing has gotten totally out of hand. It is as if a surgeon attacked a multitude of metastasized pockets of cancer with an ice cream scoop.” (She smiled at that line, knowing it would never be printed.) “Perhaps the degree of accuracy is what embassy officials claim but its effect on the reported 25,000 to 30,000 Communist troops attacking this city seems minimal. Every day Communist units push government soldiers back. The true effect seems to be that the bombing has driven the people off the land and into the government enclaves. Village agricultural systems, the very basis of Khmer life, have been destroyed. And the Khmer Rouge, a force nearly nonexistent two years ago, has exploded in size and might.
“Though, allegedly, the accuracy and effectiveness of the bombings have kept the massed Communist battalions from sweeping into Phnom Penh, in adjacent and distant areas it seems to have become a game played by American military planners. Which group can fly the most sorties? Who can drop the most ordnance? Who can destroy the most ‘targets’? Whose aircraft utilization ratio is highest?”
Rita chomped on the pen in her mouth. The words were coming fast. “The bombing cost, in U.S. dollars to U.S. taxpayers, in civilian casualties and ecological ruin, as well as in the stiffening resolve of the enemy, is not part of their equation. Tactical close-in air support remains effective. Where the Khmer Rouge have massed troops, perhaps high-level sorties are effective in the defense of Phnom Penh. But rear-area bombing is out of control.”
Rita spit out the pen, lit another cigarette. She looked at the papers and reports scattered on her desk and on the floor. “WATERGATE” was in every headline. She hit the return bar several times to add disconnected notes.
“Communist regular force development, despite the bombings, continues to evolve. Where only a year ago the Khmer Rouge could operate at best at company level they have reportedly grown in organization to battalion, regimental and even division-size operations. Air power, without effective infantry, cannot hold this enemy at bay. The all-out Khmer Rouge assault on Phnom Penh...”
She stopped. It was a bit like writing one’s own obituary. She made a note to go back to the front, now only a few miles north. Then she stood. Then sat back down. “Air power is the last American military involvement in Southeast Asia...” Watergate, she thought. Again she stood. She packed the small bag she carried when on assignment. Those sneaky bastards, she thought. What more can we uncover? Again the light flickered. She sat, typed quickly, picking up where she’d stopped, “...and in forty days it will come to a legislated halt.” Sneaky, she thought. He could have told me she was so damned pretty. Damn that Sullivan. Damn him. The light dimmed. Then it went out. Phnom Penh’s electricity was gone.
The earth burst. The earth gushed fire. Shrapnel slashed the forest, the cratered and mulched paddies. High explosives churned the debris and ruin of yesterday’s fight. Clods of dirt rained into the vacated positions of Nang’s Krahom 91st Regiment. A mist of seared sand coated them as they huddled in against FANK’s berm, hid directly under FANK’s protruding gun barrels, froze in the flashes of bombs and the flat light of parachute flares. In minutes the bombers, drained of their potency, departed. The night closed down. FANK’s defenders relaxed. Nang nudged Duch. They’re so predictable, eh? he conveyed without words. So predictable.
“should we attack now?”
“wait until the wives come with the food.” Nang was jubilant.
Jubilant too were Met Sar and Met Sen. Jubilant in their roles as victims, as martyrs, as targets one pace ahead of their assassins. Twenty kilometers north of the 91st, thirty-five kilometers from the capital, Met Sar and Met Sen fed each other’s self-righteous hate. “He has confessed,” Sen sneered. “Confessed.”
“And...?”
“And he has been dealt with.”
“To kill me!” Sar said.
“To wipe out the Center,” Sen corrected.
“And he was yuon.”
“He was Viet Namese, all right,” Sen said. “He doesn’t know, but we have other security reports. Hanoi is on the move.”
“How dare they! How dare they!” Sar banged his fat fist on the table. In his most pious voice he repeated, “How dare they!” Then he opened Met Nim’s report. He skimmed one page, another. “More men,” he growled. “More tanks. More trucks. More guns. More of everything than ever before. Why the fuck do the Americans bomb us? The yuons are the real threat. Look at this.”
Sen leaned over. He already knew the contents. A month earlier North Viet Nam’s 7th Division with the 297th Tank Battalion and the 40th Artillery Regiment (130mm) had destroyed Polie Krong just west of Kontum in South Viet Nam. It was the first major assault since the peace accords, and America had not responded. “And some”—Met Sen snorted—“...want us to stop. Some say stop until the legislated bombing halt.”
“The Americans won’t stop bombing.” Sar chortled. “Push them. We must be victorious. Now! That traitorous snake in Phnom Penh, that imperialist lackey...I want his head. Ceasefire!? Negotiate!? It’s the most despicable conjurer’s trick; it’s designed to manipulate international opinion. Make—the offensive—go forward!” Sar elatedly banged his fist. “Forward. Rid the land of this evil. Let the armies be purified in the rain of flame! Forward!”
Twenty kilometers south Nang whispered to Duch, “have them move forward.”
On the other side of the berm, inside the FANK position, Rita Donaldson watched a government sergeant erase the enemy 91st Armed Infantry Regiment from the map area surrounding them. “How can he do that?” she asked her interpreter.
“Do what?”
“Say they’ve been destroyed without going to see.”
“Go where?!”
“Where that unit was.”
“But what if they’re still there?”
“Then how can you erase them?”
“They’ve been bombed.”
Rita left the command bunker. It hit her that she—how could she think this?—that she would make a good sergeant. First light grayed the sky of 16 July. Many of the troops who were, or were supposed to have been, on guard had left their posts and were milling about a small squad about to go fishing. The ground about their post was still cloaked in darkness. Light rain fell. From the southwest came the distant thawap-thawap of helicopter rotors on the cool morning air. This is stupid, Rita thought. She moved toward the chopper pad. In a semicircle at bermside were a few hastily erected mud and poncho fighting positions. No one had cleared fields of fire. Beyond the berm a black shroud cloaked the rice fields. Within the perimeter FANK had allowed a dozen pieces of heavy equipment—three howitzers, trucks, a small bulldozer, several jeeps—to anchor the unit to passable roads.
“More resupply ammunition, eh,” the interpreter said. It was a statement and a question.
Rita could now see the headlight of the lead American Huey; then six lights—an entire flight. Government troops slowly congregated within a fifty-meter radius of the landing zone—close enough to watch, far enough to avoid being pressed into the unloading detail. No pay, Rita thought, no work. She’d heard it from numerous soldiers. No pay, no food, no work. The helicopter bodies took form in the sky. The noise grew louder. Women and children began to emerge from the dependants’ camp (Rita thought it would be appropriate to reverse terms) carrying baskets of food, jugs of water, even boxes of ammunition, on their heads—bringing the true resupply to the FANK soldiers. Very low the first helicopter shot in over the people’s heads.
“Now,” Nang said. Duch signaled his radiomen. To four points the message passed. Almost simultaneously, from four points, rocket flames streaked, then came the bang-wooosshh of the SAM-7s, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, then the jack-hammer pounding of two 12.7mm antiaircraft guns. The helicopter flight split—first bird still racing low across the compound, second bird up left dropping its hung load of 105 rounds, third bird up right, doorgunners popping flares to distract the heat-seeking missiles. Behind, the fourth bird, despite its exhaust deflection cowling blowing the hot jet gases into the rotorwash for dissipation, despite flares, exploded, a bright ball of flame and fragments blackening, descending, crashing into tarp lean-tos.
“Attack!” Nang screamed.
“Attack!” Von, Ung, Sol, No.
“Attack. Kill everything!” The Krahom platoon leaders, squad leaders.
“Burn everything!” The cell leaders. A thousand rifles, two KK 12.7s, seven, ten mortars, firing. Firing.
“If the attack fails,” Nang shouted, “the company commanders will be executed.”
For a second Rita stood dumbfounded. The odor of burning hair engulfed her. A cloud of blood-mist blinded her. Her interpreter—she’d never learned his name—lay dismembered at her feet. The first helicopter had kicked out crates, tilted, zipped campward and was gone. Then it was back, miniguns illegally hosing the berm. Another bird was grenading tangentially to the camp. Others were over the fields strafing. Screams hit her ears.
Not pain. Commands. FANK troops sprinted to positions. Survival. More smell of hair fire. Hers.
Nang did not direct the assault but was part of it. Here he sat, exposed, an AK-47 to his shoulder, one foot under his ass, one knee up, aiming, aiming up, waiting for the strafing run to descend upon him. How he hated them, hated the helicopters, hated the Americans, hated them with his whole heart and his whole soul. The chopper approached closer, closer, firing front minigun and side-mounted 40mm cannons, a stream of tracer fire spewing from the nose punctuated with grenade-launched thudding, the ground explosions lost in the cacophony of the battle. Nang aiming, waiting, locking in on the forward stream, firing up the stream as the bird scorched over, firing into the nose, the belly. The bird did not crash but he knew he’d hit, knew he’d forced it away. About him there were dead. About him there were wounded, moaning. His ears ached yet he could hear the moaning. “Go forward,” Nang shouted. “Forward at all cost. Leave the wounded.”
The perimeter had been breached. FANK soldiers fell back, firing, firing like deer hunters in a blind, into the crazed charge, killing exposed Krahom yotheas yet the yotheas kept coming, coming as if once killed they self-healed, resurrected, recharged; as if invincible. Two F-4 Phantom jets roared in from the east, roared in with the rising sun to their backs. They passed over. Without regard for his losses, their losses, Nang, the 91st, the entire Army of the North, surged against the crumbling yet firing FANK line. The fighter-bombers passed again and again without delivering their ordnance. FANK fell back through the dependant camp. Krahom mortars shelled the road, the fleeing. KK infantry moved in from roadside flanks. Rita, three thousand dependants, trapped. Then the F-4s bombed the road, “...forced,” Rita would write, but never be able to telex, “to destroy the civilian entourage in order to save the army and in turn those civilian survivors of our own bombs, including myself.”
Still the fighting raged. New Krahom units, replacement personnel, were massed at the front’s fringe. All day the 91st attacked, the Northern Army attacked. To the east, the south and the northwest more Krahom armies were committed. Behind them the earth was charred, pulverized. Now came the B-52s. The circle about Phnom Penh became the epicenter of the most intense bombing in the history of warfare. “Stay close,” Nang ordered. “Hug them.” He forced Duch to pass the word—messengers, not radios. “Pick up the dud bombs. We’ll mine their escape route.” To his damaged ears the bomb-box explosions were dull thuds but to his body the quaking was violent and his hate surged higher. Again, maniacally, he pushed the fighters, himself, to the limits of human endurance. In the afternoon the Krahom pushed Phnom Penh’s defenders through a small hamlet, then the yotheas fell back into the village and regrouped amid the rubble—a temporary safe zone—a target area not yet cleared.
Rita Donaldson broke through the FANK-civilian traffic jam and headed for her office in the capital, now only eleven kilometers away. Now 122mm rockets launched from the morning’s battlefield, from the now continuous B-52 target area, were crashing into city center. She was afoot. The velo-cabs had disappeared. Some streets were vacant as if the inhabitants believed their flimsy houses could protect them from the rockets. Other streets, particularly in refugee-dense quarters, were packed with bodies bumping aimlessly into one another. There was no refuge, nowhere else to go.
By dusk new KK units and replacements had ventured into the no-man’s-land—many, perhaps most, successfully crossing to the front line. The attack recommenced its suicidal fury. Bombers received clearance to release death closer. Bomb boxes overlapped, sorties doubled, tripled on single targets, dumping more than three hundred bombs within a square mile; doubled again, saturating identified massed-unit zones—650 five-hundred-pound bombs in under one minute. On the ground there were no options left except savage fanatical assault. “The Americans are not gods,” Nang screamed again and again. He’d been jarred to the core—numbed to the core—reduced to bashed painlessness, to zombodial shocked let-them-expend-themselves-on-me-because-I-can-endure-ness. Attack. Attack the hated imperialist lackeys, hate their war tools, hate the FANK pawns. The more he was pounded the more energy was absorbed by his hate, by his angry appalled detesting abhorring hate. Hate driving revenge. Hate demanding vengeance. Every step now, every order now driven by the need, the need to destroy that enemy, the need to destroy everything associated with it, the need to slaughter, murder, liquidate, the need to ravage that fungal distant nation which had sent its robotic war machines to pulverize Kampuchea. For five days the attack continued. For five days firing raged, the Krahom advancing in spurts, FANK digging in here, there, falling back, returning, both armies near total exhaustion, both armies devastated.
On the fifth day, 21 July, a bomb’s eruptive force blew out from its earth crater a windwave, out, up, expanding, throwing shrapnel from casing and crater in a billowing sphere, expanding concussive shock-sound-heat then collapsing in upon itself. Nang grabbed his face. Beside him Duch tried to speak, was speaking, pointing at Nang, but Nang couldn’t hear. Blood flooded Nang’s left eye. He couldn’t see. Yet he saw the image of horror on Duch’s face, Duch screaming though the side of his own head had been blown off.
“22 July 1973—Phnom Penh:” Rita typed. “Though the Communist offensive against the southern and eastern fronts of this city continues, the line of last resort has held. Field and aerial reconnaissance reports indicate the northern defensive ring has halted the Khmer Rouge advance and has broken that attacking force.”
It marked the end of sympathy, the end of charity, the end of compassion. It marked the end of life and the beginning of life, the end of love and its rebirth. 6 August 1973—yet dark.
Vathana sat cross-legged at the head of the cot in the far corner of the infirmary tent. Above her, rain patted the canvas; to her left side, water trickled off the base of the flap into the flooded drainage ditch. On the cot to her right she had a sheath of handwritten pages, the first half of the translation of Regrets for the Khmer Soul, for Rita Donaldson. Resting facedown against her eight-and-a-half-month-pregnant belly was Ith Sarin’s book. Passages of the book were reassuring; others were terrifying. Angkar this, Angkar that. Angkar, the Organization, a dehumanized entity demanding complete, yet at times benevolent, control; a near-mystical omnipotence combined with assistance to farmers and an absence of corruption. Plus battles between Khmer and Viet Namese rebels! Could Ith Sarin be believed? Certainly John Sullivan would have believed him. Plus, the book reported, Norodom Sihanouk was but a dupe, a powerless figurehead!
Vathana had turned the pages against her belly, closed her eyes, and was thinking of these strange revelations when she felt the earth tremble, opened her eyes and saw the flame jump off the candle then burn down the smoke and reignite. So many bombs had fallen about Neak Luong that their devastating rumble outside the city barely brought conscious concern. But beneath, amongst all the other tensions of war-torn Cambodia, amid the continuing and renewed offensive along the Mekong, the quaking was one more repressed horror. Only one cannot, Vathana thought, give in. One must keep going, keep doing what is necessary. Then she thought of the book on her abdomen, the descriptions of ruthlessness on her fetus, and she immediately jerked the book up and tossed it away like a hot coal.
Southeast of the city, Teck sat with Louis in a new Auto-Defense Militia prepared fighting position. Teck had given up his FANK commission to return to this city. The Auto-Defense Militia was a home district defense force similar to South Viet Nam’s regional and popular forces. In six months, while growing to a strength of 57,000, it had become the Republic’s first line of defense for the enclaves. Once the Khmer Rouge drive on Phnom Penh began to falter, to deteriorate with amazing speed, the militias blossomed. Still the Communists had not stopped, but now they assaulted neither daily nor in such force as they had only two weeks earlier. Neak Luong’s defensive ring was now the front.
“It’s not a Monet,” Louis joked, shining his flashlight onto Teck’s chest.
“Not bad, eh?” Teck had pulled his shirtfront up to his shoulders. “Really, pretty good, eh?”
“When did they do it?”
“Four months ago. Maybe five. At a parlor in Phnom Penh.”
“You think it’ll stop bullets?”
Teck laughed. “No, my good friend.” He let his shirt fall down over the tattoo. “It was a lark, you know?”
“You can have a lark, eh?” Louis said. “You smile so much now. More than ever. Me, I wish we could go back like before the war.”
“You know why I’m happy?” Teck said. “You know, eh? Every day Vathana brings me food. Every day I pat my hand on her belly and I say I am a lucky man.”
“With a bastard!?”
“With a wonderful wife. Ahh! So I’ve shared her? So what? I watch her with all these men. I see her direct all those women who come to help. I see she really is an angel and I think I am a very lucky man.”
“You sound like a dumb peasant!”
“Maybe. Maybe by choice, eh?”
“You’ve told her these things, eh?”
“No. How could I?”
“If you’re so lucky,” Louis said—in his dejection he could not smile again—“wish that the Khmer Rouge go away. Maybe...if only the Americans would bring in a few battalions, eh? Then they could be out here in this filth listening to those damned bombs explode.”
Vathana opened her eyes. The sound of a Cambodian air force unmuffled T-28 came from over the river. It’s early, Vathana thought, for them to be up. Who could pay so much bonjour to have them up this early? She closed her eyes. The sound and the thought passed. Her fetus moved. Just a small kick. Pretty soon, baby, she thought. Her mind descended into her abdomen, into the fetus. The baby was in good position. Vathana was certain, was certain the baby told her this. No complications, eh, my sweetlove, her mind sent the message and again she was certain the infant answered: Yes, Mother, nothing to fear. Vathana felt a rush of joy, an overwhelming flood of contentment, but the fetus did not release her mind. Instead it directed it and she sailed out her back to Phum Sath Din to a time when Norodom Sihanouk held power and her father talked of an emerging Buddhist-socialist state. Vathana looked up. Her mother was laughing and humming and busying herself cleaning the house. Vathana rushed to her with the wild flowers she’d picked and she hugged her leg and smelled her mother’s fragrance—sweeter than any flower, sweeter than ripe bananas, sweeter than sugarcane. She looked into her mother’s face so wrinkled from her wonderful smile and Vathana felt the simple and quiet tie of love from generation to generation which...she spiraled back, snapped back like a rubber band stretched to breaking...the devastating rumble outside the city—immediately her subconscious alerted her it was off pattern...a part of her lingered in Phum Sath Din, but time released, sped, and Vathana saw the wrinkles in her mother’s face deepen to the day Samnang and Mayana were lost...snapping back through her back, through the fetus, her eyes wide open.
Miles above, a B-52 had locked on a navigation beacon located improperly at the mayor’s in-town villa-office. Miles before the bomber was over Neak Luong the navigator—had he been reading about the upcoming National Football League season on the long flight from Guam?—“forgot” to flip the offset switch which would order the plane’s flight-direction computer to make the minute adjustment away from the beacon toward the targeted coordinates. The bomb bay doors were spread. “Hack,” said the pilot. “Hack,” answered the bombardier. For thirty seconds the load spilled from the mother ship’s abdomen. The plane banked for its return flight before the first five-hundred-pounder, following an unturned trajectory, burst behind Teck and Louis and Neak Luong’s 1st Auto-Defense Battalion.
In the infirmary tent, in the camp, in town, the constant subconscious terror which keeps war-zone inhabitants alert in sleep exploded tens of thousands awake. In ten seconds thirty bombs, fifteen thousand pounds of iron and explosive, erupted down Highway 1, down Main Street, hitting the hospital, the old stilt houses, Doctor Sarin’s looted office, piers, the concrete apartment building, the fish market and pagoda and orphanage and on up into the old Chinese section and FANK’s north-city garrison, then farther, the remainder of the load blowing in the few secure paddies and vegetable fields still enclaved.
Vathana leaped, leaped like a gazelle with a ball and chain, up from the cot leaving her abdomen fractionally behind, crashing into the lurching Sophan, Vathana’s belly pulling her back down, Sophan’s body smacking her as the stolid old peasant woman smothered Samnang and Samol beneath her protective muscle and fat and bone. Vathana, sprawled flat on her back, rolled to her knees and plopped atop Sophan, protecting too the precious future of Kampuchea, yet the danger had already passed, the last bomb’s concussive force was spent.
Neak Luong, which had been purposely shelled and reshelled by the NVA, which had been intentionally mortared and rocketed by the KK, which had been callously looted by its own child gangs and maliciously abused by FANK and foreign Allied soldiers, which had come to look more and more like a war zone, like an old battlefield, now smoldered and reeled from this most terrible, accidental bombardment.
“Dear Sweet Buddha,” Teck mumbled, shocked at the instantaneous devastation behind him. He rose.
“What the fuck...” Louis rose with him. Teck took a slow numbed step toward town. “Where are you going?”
“Where would she be? It’s almost dawn. She’ll be praying at the wat.”
“Wait!”
“No. I’ve got to”—along the front hundreds of Auto-Defense men were up, appalled yet numbed into momentary disbelief—“find her. Oh Dear Sweet Buddha.”
“I’ll go too,” Louis said. He grabbed his and Teck’s M-16s. Now others were running, now they too ran.
“Halt!” an officer commanded.
“My wife!” Teck shrieked.
“Get back!” the officer boomed. “What if the Communists attack?”
Thousands swarmed in from every side of the city. “I must go,” Teck cried.
In the tent many people were crying. Some were packing their worn clothing, leaving. The entire camp was up. Sophan was quietly hugging the children, not fully aware of Vathana’s weak moans. Vathana blew out her breath, then panted. She was on her knees holding the edge of the cot. Her uterus had clamped down like a giant’s fist trying to squeeze a pea from its pod. Past pain is impossible to remember but in pain it is easy to recall, to anticipate, to fear along with all the fears and concerns of birthing. Again she blew out her breath, panted. She wanted to grab Sophan’s arm but she could not. She wanted to ask someone, anyone, for help, but she could not. She gritted her teeth. The contraction passed and another came. She would hold on a moment longer, she told herself. She would cross the great ocean alone like all mothers must. Sweat beads broke on her brow. The kneeling position was not uncomfortable and she did not have the energy or the willpower to waste on moving. Again a contraction grabbed her and she thought of the pain, of the struggle, or the suffering and she saw them as a gift to this child and as a repayment to her own fragrant mother.
“Oh good, you’re all right.” The voice was deep, mournful.
Sophan released the children who’d not once squirmed to escape as if they’d known how great their being hugged consoled their old “aunt.” “And you,” Sophan said politely.
“Immoral fucking foreigners.” Keo Kosol’s voice was loud. He wanted everyone in the tent to hear it, to know how he felt. “Why pray?” he snapped at Vathana who had not turned to him. “There are thousands who need your...”
“Angel!” Sophan blurted.
Rita Donaldson jumped gingerly from the press helicopter. The day was partially overcast yet behind the clouds the sun stood high in the sky. Newer reporters, younger cameramen, jostled for position but she barely moved. Her left leg was wrapped tightly with elastic bandages because of knee ligaments she’d torn on the rush from the northern front two weeks earlier. She thought to excuse herself to her colleagues saying she couldn’t run after them but that was not the case. She simply could see, without moving, the destruction. “You”—she gestured for a teenage boy. “Parlez-vous français?” No response. She held out two stacks of riels. In Khmer she said, “Mrs. Cahuom Vathana. Angel of Neak Luong.” She gave the boy one stack, waved the other. “Here bring,” she said.
“Sending the kid for Cokes?” a reporter from Boston asked Rita Donaldson.
“Um,” she answered. She did not wish to have the young man follow her.
“Did you get the part from the briefing officer about the payments?” he asked.
“Hundred dollars per death,” she said, not looking at him.
“Yeah,” he scoffed self-righteously. “Thirteen thousand seven hundred dollars. It cost more to deliver one bomb!”
“Yeah,” Rita said.
“Did your paper send you that Air War report by the Cornell group?”
“I’ve read it.”
“You remember the part about the mismatch in power in the confrontation between a major industrial power and a predominantly rural, underdeveloped country?”
“Quentin”—Rita turned on him—“how long have you been here now?”
“Ten days, Rita.”
“Ms. Donaldson.” She glared at him.
“Ah, yeah. Anyway, what do you think? The report said in the absence of reciprocity, they can’t bomb us, right? The battle raises moral issues beyond military factors. I’m going to use that in my lead.”
“Um-hum.”
“The military keeps denying the inaccuracy of the bombings,” he went on, “but look at this place.”
“They also deny that Cambodia is in crisis situation,” she said. She thought to continue but decided against it. The entire press corps chatted constantly about their stories and what finally came through was a homogeneous puree of reduced and preedited facts. Rita bit the inside of her cheek. What, she thought, would have happened on the northern front, without aerial support? Absence of reciprocity? Do you want to be bombed?
Vathana was now on the cot. Her knees were spread, her heels were under her buttocks. Keo had been overly attentive, holding her shoulders, supporting her, talking in his most beautiful voice into her ears. At first it had bolstered her waning confidence but quickly it became bothersome. All about the tent people were talking about Vathana’s labor and about the air raid. Many were still weeping. The number of dead and wounded crept up—50 and 150, 100 and 200, 120 and 250. Many people were stoic, spartan, denying, repressing, internalizing the grief. Vathana too was bitter. Three years, she thought. Three years for naught. These people are no better off today than the day this tent was raised. Another contraction hit.
“That’s it, Angel. Give in to it. Surrender to it. Let it flow. Let me see the baby.”
The contraction passed. Shyly Samnang came close for a hug and Vathana held him and kissed his hair and he blubbered, “ba-ba-ba-ba,” and ran off to see what else was happening.
Again Vathana’s uterus squeezed down. Again she lost herself in thoughts of what could be done. The country has never been worse off. And she answered herself, Nothing. Nothing. Despair grabbed hold of her heart.
Then, “Yes. Yes,” Sophan sung, cheered.
“Eh?” Kosol’s face was brilliant. His chest puffed out.
The contraction’s force was immense. Vathana’s buttocks tightened, her thighs quivered, as she exhaled her cheeks flapped. She pushed. She pushed. She stopped. Her chest heaved regaining air. She shifted to the cot’s edge and Sophan squatted before her. Then her whole body bore down. “Very good,” she heard Sophan’s words. “Let it be very hard. Give me that baby.” Now came the top of a hairy, wrinkled, waxy head. “Oh come, baby,” Sophan cried. “Come, little darling.” Waters covered Sophan’s hands. Vathana grunted. More head comes, ears and eyes. Sophan lifts Vathana’s hand from her quaking thighs and places Vathana’s fingers on the infant’s head. Vathana feels the nose, the mouth. The baby’s mouth seems to kiss her fingers. Vathana’s entire body is recharged. Again she pushes and the head is in Sophan’s hands, turning as if searching upward for mom, then shoulders, an arm, now quickly the torso. Sophan wipes the infant’s face, its head. She pulls and clears its nose. Catches it. “A girl!” She squeals. She hands the baby to Vathana, who is being lowered to the cot by Kosol.
“Immoral fucking phalang!” Kosol’s voice explodes. Everyone in the tent, half the camp, hears. “Red-haired fucking bitch.” He throws a towel he’d had on his shoulder on the baby. Immediately Vathana’s hands, arms swing to protect her. Kosol barges by Sophan, shoves Samnang to the ground, storms from the tent.
“Ms. Donaldson,” Quentin, the reporter from Boston, said. Rita looked at him. He was pale from witnessing the festering and filth of the wounded, ill from the volume of dead. She herself, though hardened, was queasy. More than queasy. Angry. The boy she’d paid to find Vathana had returned with a French-speaking friend who’d told her Mrs. Cahuom had just given birth to a baby girl and could not come. Stupid girl, Rita had thought. What kind of person would bring a kid into this world?!
Quentin smiled. He needed reassurance, yet he tried to keep it light, to not irritate the veteran correspondent. “Hey,” he said. “Did you hear about the miracle?”
“Hum?” Rita would not allow herself to be friendly.
“Did you hear about the lady here who gave birth to a blue-eyed, red-haired baby when the bomb fell. Some of these local yokels think it’s a miracle. Ha! An angel, they say.”
Rita’s look stopped him cold. He huffed, half turned away. “Shit,” he stammered. “You don’t have to be so sensitive. I’m not writing the story.” His smile was gone and he too was angry. Then with his head cocked, he said, “Oh, I get it. ‘Yokels.’ Look, none of these people understand English.”
In the tent Teck knelt beside Vathana’s cot. He held her hand. Samnang hung from his back. Samol sat on Sophan’s lap on the cot’s end, and Louis stood behind Teck. “Step by step,” Teck whispered. His heart was bursting with love for his exhausted wife. “You’ve taught so many the prayer. I looked at the pagoda. I was so afraid. Every step a prayer. Every step a prayer for a miracle.” His face was radiant.
Vathana looked at him. Her eyes closed, opened halfway, closed. The swaddled baby lay in the crook of her arm.
“My father is dead,” Teck whispered to her. “We don’t know where your father is, when we will see him again. Should we ask my mother to name her?”
Vathana smiled weakly but did not open her eyes. Then she whispered, “no. she is named.”
“Eh?” Teck whispered, not hearing her.
“Pech,” Vathana said. “pech. pech su livanh.” She fell asleep.
There was no option. No words could assuage the feelings, the anger, the hate. Even later when Met Sen said, “Come with me,” he could not release it. The clean and pure victory against U.S. imperialism was empty in the absence of a final victory over FANK and Lon Nol. Not simply a victory. Revenge.
Nang ran his pincer index finger down the scab and scar. For two weeks they had carried him north in a hammock hung from shoulder poles. He wouldn’t have done that for any of his wounded yotheas but they were doing it for him. The shame, the disgust, further fueled his inner rage, yet there had been no options. He’d walked as soon as he was allowed. The rains came heavy. A porter had guided him by pulling him with a rope. Each day had been a cleansing struggle purifying his hate and vengeance. They stopped north of Skoun where FANK commanders had abandoned their troops on 2 August and the troops had broken and fled and Angkar had had a great victory devouring and evacuating the enclave. Nang touched the scar where it parted his hair above the left eye. He picked the edge of the scab. The rain had softened it and it smeared beneath his fingernails. His left hand fingers followed the scar to his eyebrow. The skin was a glass-smooth lump. Why the shrapnel had not totally blinded him he didn’t know. His eye had been damaged yet he was sure it was healing. He closed his right eye to test the left. Yotheas and porters were rising from their rest. Through Nang’s left eye they were but blurry green or black oblongs. He closed both eyes, thought he heard the drone of T-28s, shivered. Even with both eyes open he could see Duch’s head, see Duch’s face staring horrified at Nang’s; not because of his, Duch’s, own wound, but because of Nang’s.
Nang rose. His fingers followed the scar below his eye where it split into two main branches and a dozen interlacing twigs. Puc, Von, Thevy, Ung, Duch were all dead. Rath, Sol and No had control of the remnant of the 91st. Nang didn’t know where he was going. Nor why. All he’d been told was “Trust Angkar.”
The Americans had been legislated out of action yet the offensive had not rolled forward. Indeed, it had sputtered worse than under the bombings. Nang did not know, was never to know, that air strikes had killed perhaps half, perhaps more than half, of the attacking KK yotheas, their conscripted porters and their militia aides. The cessation of bombing had coincided with the destruction of the Northern Zone Army and the crippling of those of the South and Southwestern Zones. Only the Gray Vultures of the Eastern Zone were able to pursue the battle, and they were now smashing FANK’s defensive ring about Kompong Cham.
They walked north for another week. Each day new reports reached the column. The yuons had attempted to assassinate the high generals of the Center, not once, not twice, but three times. Each time loyal yotheas had sacrificed their lives protecting the leadership of the Kampuchean revolution. The battle for Kompong Cham soured. Lon Nol had decided, with the relief of Phnom Penh, to commit totally to the salvation of that Mekong River city. On 18 August FANK reinforcements from the heartland reached Kompong Cham. Then FANK’s 80th and 50th Brigades caught a poorly commanded, poorly controlled Krahom force in a hammer-and-anvil operation, annihilating most of the yotheas, the stragglers fleeing to take refuge in the university and monastery of Angkor Wat—structures which the Cambodian air force would not bomb. More reinforcements arrived—twenty, naval convoys—and Kompong Cham was recaptured by FANK. Seventy percent of the city was in ruins. Still the Center claimed partial victory. The civilian administration had been wiped out and the Khmer Krahom had evacuated twenty to thirty thousand regained people.
North of Kompong Thom, Nang’s column crossed paths with the transportation and security companies escorting the Center. The next two hours changed the direction of Nang’s life.
“Eh?” Met Reth said quizzically, looking at the line of wounded. “That one you say?” Met Sar’s bodyguard had been sent for Nang, sent to bring him to Sar for debriefing and reinspiration. “I don’t see him.”
“The one with the pink scar through his left eye, there,” the porter said.
Met Sar smiled very wide when Nang arrived but after the first moment, Sar did not look at him. “We,” Sar lamented, “have suffered greater than any revolutionary army ever! Look at you.” Nang shuffled uncomfortably. A moment before he’d arrived he’d imagined Sar would hug him, would hold him and praise him for his hard work. “Two hundred days of bombings,” Sar went on. “Two hundred nights without interruption. No other nation has suffered so under the thumb of American imperialism. Only we. And only our superhuman will has enabled us to survive. Aah, look at you. You’re still alive, eh? A symbol of defeat! Go. Go away. Perhaps Met Sen has something for you. I won’t look at you again.”
The sense of abandonment was immediate. Reth led Nang out. Total confusion flooded the boy’s mind. Yet immediately he was before Met Sen and Met Sen was hugging him and comforting him.
“You never had a chance,” Sen said in his wispy voice, “to loot that capital. Ah, too bad,” he said. “Never a chance to play city folk. You will yet. I promise you, Met Nang.” Sen looked deeply into Nang’s destroyed face. “There are special privileges for a man of your record,” he said. “So come with me. Work in security with me, Met Nang of Kampuchea. We are far from finished. So Sar broods about Kompong Cham? So what? He’ll get over it and the imperialists and the lackeys will always neak-luong themselves. If you help me, I’ll take care of you. Come with me into the secret zone. Security—this is where the true power is.”
The next eighteen months for Nang, for Chhuon, for Vathana were extensions of the descending spiral which was dropping Cambodia into the worst horrors of human history.
Throughout the American spring and summer of 1973 revelations by Watergate investigators had accumulated and multiplied. Wiretaps, ordered to plug the leaks which had spilled the news about the secret 1969 Cambodia bombings, were exposed, as were the “plumbers’ ” break-ins. Each new report spurred bigger headlines and deeper searches. The Nixon administration shelved its dubious policies and plans for Southeast Asia and entrenched for the coming domestic battle.
The Krahom also entrenched, jerking along in sporadic fits of minor offensives, terrorist acts and withdrawals. By the time of the legislated halt of American bombing (15 August 1973), half the Khmer Rouge attacking force had been killed. The Krahom, and FANK too, recoiled from the long campaign. The Krahom Army of the North lay low and licked its wounds much as the NVA had after the 1972 Easter offensive in South Viet Nam. For the rest of the year the Krahom rebuilt and reequipped their battalions, and they stockpiled materiel for the final battle. In addition to their military losses, the Krahom suffered significant political setbacks, both with the population under their control and with their “allies.” American intelligence reports concluded:
The most significant development during the past quarter was the increasing disaffection of large segments of the population with KC [Khmer Communist] control. Reports from the countryside in all six KC regions reveal a rather widespread failure of the Communists to enlist the support of the villages under their control, as well as a general inability to recruit desirable persons into their organization. The openness with which the population has voiced its displeasure varies widely including several areas where dissenters have begun to band together and demonstrate publicly, despite a relatively strong KC presence. [The Situation in Cambodia, October 1973 (CIA report number 7881/73,)]
For the Krahom the situation further deteriorated in November 1973. On the 6th, Communist rank and file troops in Kampong Trach District openly revolted against the local Krahom leadership; in the ensuing firelight Rumdoah soldiers succeeded in stopping Krahom yotheas from forcing the evacuation and relocation of the “liberated” population. Two weeks later in Kampot Province peasants and Rumdoah troops, armed with scythes, machetes and rice knives, drove off a KK force that had come to collectivize and confiscate the local harvest. The villagers were doubly incensed by yothea denunciations of Norodom Sihanouk. Along the Viet Nam border the NVA continued its massive, unopposed buildup. Hanoi, viewing the exhaustion of the Cambodian factions, both KK and FANK, judged it had gained at least a year along its western front. In secret negotiations with Krahom leaders, the Hanoi Politburo thus agreed to keep its forces out of the Cambodian interior in exchange for a Krahom promise to end the purge against Khmer Viet Minh and Rumdoah cadre. In the enclaves of the interior, Ith Sarin’s Regrets for the Khmer Soul peaked in popularity. Its descriptions, along with those of a growing number of escapees from the “liberated” zones, of Krahom evacuations, “pure flame” policies, ruthlessness, and even growing Rumdoah totalitarianism, foretold virtually all the horrors that were to come. The Lon Nol regime, believing the book was Communist propaganda, dismissed the revelations. The Krahom leadership, however, was incensed. Security in the liberated areas was tightened. Krahom security chief Met Sen, along with zonal security officers, set out to establish high-level reeducation facilities in the “secret zones” for “students” requiring extensive and long-term classes on how to live in a pure society.
As Nang’s face healed, as his hearing partially returned, he was set to work on this expanded security concept. By November Nang had gathered a small core of subordinates; by February 1974 he had his first class, not of soldiers but of security agents. His dream of being a teacher was again fulfilled yet again he found the fulfillment penultimate. By mid-1974 he was itching to be back in battle.
For Chhuon the twentieth anniversary of Cambodian independence from France, 9 November 1973, was a moment of great sadness. Angkar bestowed its blessing upon Phum 117 and all of Khum 4 by forcing the settlement to abandon its nearly harvestable rice and to again relocate on uncleared ground—a mere six miles west. Communization at the new site was raised to a new level—a new alien mentality to the Krahom inverted pyramid of Khmer culture. Angkar Leou, the High Organization, the Party, now was institutionalized not only to yothea trainees but also to the peasantry as the highest abstraction of love and devotion.
In December Neang Thi Sok died of cholera...died of Krahom policies which forced unsanitary and starvation conditions upon the population, forced them to renounce their pasts, forcibly removed them from their cultural roots, forced them to exist without modern or even semimodern means to protect themselves from hazards in their environment. In January Chhuon was allowed to return to the old settlement, to dismantle his two-man cocoon, carry it to the new site and rebuild it as a one-man hut. Chrops, internal spies, multiplied. Chhuon barely trusted his simplest thoughts to his closest friends, Sichau and Moeung.
In 1973 North Viet Nam added 200,000 replacements to its forces in South Viet Nam and along the Cambodian border. Soviet and Chinese military equipment deliveries reached record levels and continued to increase in 1974.
In Neak Luong Vathana withdrew more and more deeply into herself and her family. The refugees, many who had lived in the camp for three years, who had suffered intermittent harassment or terror at the hands of NVA, VC, FANK and ARVN units, who had been horrified by the errant American bombs that had killed 137 and wounded 268, now had a new fear. Local youth gangs rampaged out of control—uncontrollable because FANK had taken all their fathers and uncles, the traditional authority in the culture, and because the nation’s leadership, while ineffective, set an example of corruption and brutality. The refugees came to be afraid of remaining in the camp at night—some even during the day, except to stand in line for rations.
With three children, including the Amerasian Su Livanh, Vathana spent virtually no time with the associations, only a little at the hospital and orphanage. Sophan took over many of her routine duties in the Khsach Sa camp. Kosol, Nem, Doctor Sarin were no longer a part of Vathana’s life. Often she dreamed of Phum Sath Din and of the wonderful years of her childhood. Teck came infrequently, his duties with the Auto-Defense forces, the constant improvement of the “last-resort line,” keeping him at the front. Daily Vathana trekked to the southern berm to bring him provisions, supporting not just him but also Louis. In all the hardship Teck found himself happier than ever before. He was now a man with a cause, a man with a family to protect.
At the beginning of the dry season in 1974 Madame Pech again offered to have Vathana and the children live with her in Phnom Penh. Constantly Vathana thought of the offer, telling herself, At least we’ll be near Aunt Voen, at least we’ll be away from the gangs, at least I will not spend every night clutching Captain Sullivan’s pistol. Without the weapon Vathana too would have dispersed nightly with the refugees into the swamp. Captain Sullivan’s pistol...she often thought. Captain Sullivan, not a single word from him since he left Cambodia. Still, Vathana could not bring herself to leave Teck in his need, to move to the city that had been John Sullivan’s home.
In January 1974 the Krahom temporarily regained momentum. From dispersed patrols and small unit ambushes they moved to heavy artillery raids. Their main targets were the densely packed refugee camps of Phnom Penh. By March they had killed over a thousand dependants and destroyed more than ten thousand homes and huts. In March FANK rallied and drove the KK from the rocket-launch belt, and for seven months, until the end of the next monsoon season, the capital breathed easier.
The United States continued to assist the Lon Nol government and to supply FANK units. In May Kampot, Oudong and Lovek were recaptured or relieved of siege by American-supported FANK units. Arms and ammunition were delivered by U.S. C-130 cargo planes to Phnom Penh airport and carried forward by armed U.S. helicopter teams. The C-130s were escorted by fighter-bombers that engaged enemy troops under the terms of protective reaction. In addition America continued to send in “special teams” on temporary duty. Senator Alan Cranston, Democrat of California, helped to shape the American public’s mood by denouncing this involvement on 15 March 1974. As the head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he said this “...covert and illegal war cannot be condoned by Congress.” Southeast Asia has been a “breeding ground...of lies, deception and illegal practices long enough.”
By June, the spectre of the impeachment of Richard Nixon, for keeping, or ordering to be kept, secret the “Menu” bombings of Cambodia on and since 17 March 1969, had paralyzed U.S. commitments to Southeast Asia. On 16 May the village of Dak Pek, north of Kontum in South Viet Nam, fell after being battered by seven thousand rounds of NVA artillery. Eleven days later Tuy Atar fell to the NVA after a thousand-round barrage. The United States did not respond.
Monitoring the American scene, the high command of the Krahom met in June 1974 to plan “the final offensive to liberate all Kampuchea.” At this meeting the complete evacuation of Phnom Penh was formally discussed for the first time. Also analyzed was the new NVA offensive in South Viet Nam. Encouraged by the stimulation of American internal contradictions and motivated by fears of an NVA victory over Saigon which would release troops to attack Cambodia, the Center decided to launch the final battle with the upcoming dry season.
On 9 August 1974 Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. Nixon’s early Cambodian policies and his paranoid attempts to keep them secret were at the root of the Watergate scandal. Despite the tremendous progress of Viet Namization, despite the first signs of the maturing of Cambodia’s Auto-Defense Force and the crippling of the Khmer Krahom, Watergate caused the final collapse of American will to defend anyone in Southeast Asia.
At the end of 1974 the U.S. Senate—as North Viet Nam’s 7th and 3B Divisions attacked Phuoc Binh, capital of Phuoc Long Province, 60 miles north of Saigon; as Krahom armies again besieged Phnom Penh—voted to reduce military and economic aid to Cambodia by 47 percent. (Aid to South Viet Nam, which had been reduced from $2.8 billion in 1973 to $700 million in 1974, was cut to $300 million in 1975.) Hanoi, the Krahom Center, Moscow and Peking concentrated their attention on Phuoc Long Province. The ARVN, they all saw, no longer had the mobility or power of main force units to stage large-scale, flanking counterattacks to halt or recapture strategic sites. Perhaps more importantly, America’s intention had now become clear. Phuoc Binh, a major provincial capital, fell 6 January 1975. Still the United States did not respond. In Saigon, in Phnom Penh, in Neak Luong, the mood was one of abandonment, betrayal, hopelessness and gloom.
By the end of January 1975 the NVA had increased its forces in the Central Highlands of South Viet Nam to five divisions. This was the staging for the battle of Ban Me Thuot. Throughout Southeast Asia there were scattered spots of panic. At Neak Luong 350 FANK soldiers deserted (not to the Khmer Krahom but to back-alley hideouts), placing the onus of defense more heavily upon the local militia. By mid-February FANK losses for 1975 stood at 4,260 dead, 10,000 wounded and 1,000 missing. In addition more than 12,000 dependants had been killed. The Mekong was again cut near Neak Luong and all FANK garrisons downriver were destroyed.
On 10 March at 0200 hours the NVA launched the main attack of its final drive—a mechanized assault led by T-55 tanks and BTR-60 armored personnel carriers—against Ban Me Thuot.
For the Krahom, for Nang, for Vathana, for Chhuon, for all Cambodia, the race for salvation seemed to be a race to win or hold out until after the Communist victory in the neighboring land.