THE SHELLING STOPPED. ALL was quiet. Then an odd noise came out of the mist and smoke and dark. He cocked his head trying to stretch his ear, his hearing. The noise was clear, familiar, yet Teck could not identify it. He pivoted his head, back, forth, back-forth, looking without seeing, searching the line, wondering if others had heard, had identified the source. He placed it in the shroud of yetdark a hundred meters out, a hundred to his right. Perhaps a thousand, perhaps fifty—chir-rick-chrik...chir-rick-chrik. Not moving, he thought, yet because of the shroud he wasn’t sure. Then it stopped.
Behind him Louis slept in quiet agitation as if churning thoughts drove his bodily twitches but his body knew to muffle its sleep noise. A howitzer far behind the line fired. For three months the sounds of war had been constantly upon them; the quiet made him tense. His mind raced. He checked his M-16, his bandoleers of magazines, his gas mask. In January the Communists had started using incapacitating gas fired from B-40 rocket launchers. Equipment delivery had responded. The entire Auto-Defense force, along with FANK’s main force units defending Neak Luong, had been inundated with masks, U.S. jungle fatigues and small arms ammunition. Food remained scarce.
Again the howitzer report—seemingly random sporadic out-going. Beyond Louis was a small lean-to, Teck’s squad’s headquarters. No one slept there—superstition, unlucky, a magnet attracting artillery. Up and down the last-resort line Krahom mortars, 107mm rockets and rounds from captured 105mm cannons had blasted defender lean-tos to shreds. Radios with drained batteries slept there. On the civilian transistor they’d heard reports of rumors that Lon Nol was willing to abdicate if the Communists assured the government that peace talks would follow.
Teck looked over his shoulder. The low lean-to stood in vague silhouette. Beyond, almost in town, a huge, hazy orange-pink semisphere glowed in the blackness—the continuous military pyre, the unending obsequies of cremation. In three months more than twenty thousand government soldiers had been killed. Teck turned forward. The first graying of night’s mantle revealed the shattered tops of two tall palms which marked the bank of the Mekong. The sounds, he thought, had come from there. The sky grayed. A thin white vapor rising from the river spilled over the embankment, crept onto the dry paddies, thinned further and vanished. Teck looked out over the floodplain, down the sentinel line of broken palm trees protecting the riverbank. In the still air not a frond ticked, not a leaf rasped its brother like the rear legs of a cricket. Louis stirred.
In January the Khmer Krahom committed five thousand troops to closing the Mekong below Neak Luong. Using sophisticated Chinese Communist antiship mines, the 1st Eastern Brigade sank twelve freighters. By month’s end the Krahom, equipped by Peking—the results of a new agreement with Hanoi—with more arms and ammunition than ever before, controlled both banks of the river along with all major midriver islands. In February FANK’s 1st Division received a new commanding general and the previously mauled and demoralized unit regained its lost pride. FANK’s 1st took the fight to the Communists. Gradually they enlarged the southern enclave and pushed the front downriver. Throughout the country the Krahom sacrificed the lives of ten thousand yotheas stemming the counterattacks. KK desertions ran higher than ever, and again the Center had to scramble to stave off tactical defeat. FANK’s February successes spurred the Auto-Defense militia to greater aggressiveness. For several weeks these soldiers, too, counterassaulted with the newly coordinated armor, infantry and artillery. It was FANK’s finest hour, its period of highest leadership. By 31 March, though the defenders had fought hard, the closing of the river and the ensuing unlifted siege ran them dry. Food and certain military supplies, particularly batteries, needed to be scrounged. Communications with Phnom Penh and between units all but ceased. Inside the Neak Luong perimeter, sixty to seventy thousand artillery-battered civilians languished, half starved—the rice airlift to Phnom Penh did not extend to the southern citadel.
“You’re still up, eh?” Louis joined Teck on the berm.
“You slept well?” Teck asked, looking at his close friend.
Louis grunted. “Like water splashed in hot oil,” he said. “I’m so tired but I don’t sleep. Are there provisions?”
“I haven’t gone to see,” Teck answered. “Maybe there’s lemon grass fish with hot chili rice, eh?”
Louis scoffed. “The only hot chili here is between your legs. Look, Brother, I’ve saved this all year but you must give it to her.”
“Eh?”
Louis pulled from his pant-leg pocket a wad of cloth. Slowly he unwrapped it. In the gray air a thin ring shone gold. “When she comes, give it to her. Tell her to get us some better food. I have to have more to eat. All night I dreamed of food.”
Louis dropped the ring in Teck’s palm. Teck rubbed it with his thumb, feeling its smoothness. He did not speak but only looked at his friend. Louis did not look back but kept his head down. Down the line other defenders were moving. Behind them the pyre glow dissipated into the dawn. Louis mumbled, bitched lowly as he took up his position. Finally Teck said, “You still don’t like her, do you?”
“Aa...,” Louis sneered.
“Vathana. You’re still angry with her.”
“Without her I’d have starved.”
“No,” Teck said quietly. “I mean over the red-haired phalang.”
“She’s your wife. Not mine. I only think of you.”
“I know,” Teck said. “It’s good to have you watch over me. But, Brother, I’m not angry. For me, don’t be angry with her.” Louis cleared his throat, spit the night’s phlegm into the dry dust, did not speak. “Do you know what my littlest imp did yesterday? Or two days ago?”
“What?”
“She saw her brother—”
“Naw. Don’t tell me. Not yet. I forgot to tell you. Last night the civilian radio had Khieu Samphan’s speech. He said the regime of the seven supertraitors is ‘withering in death throes.’ He said the Khmer Rouge are only interested in bringing ‘that flesh-eating clique’ to justice. Everyone else will be pardoned.”
“You believe him, eh?”
“I don’t care anymore. Again we are losing, eh? Let them win. So what? I just want peace. I want to live in peace.”
“You fight well for someone who’s losing. Tell them to stop attacking. Then we’ll have peace.”
“They aren’t attacking!” Louis looked up. Not a round had fallen since predawn. He looked at Teck. A smile cracked his grouchiness. “Do...” he began. It was hard to say because to say it might hex it. Still he could not keep from blurting, “Do you think it’s over?”
“Get the radio,” Teck said. “Maybe...”
“It’s dead,” Louis interrupted.
“Hey, you’re back in,” the shopkeep said pleasantly.
“For mail and provisions,” John Sullivan answered. He had been living in a rented cabin along Owl Creek in the Badlands of western South Dakota for nearly two years.
“Mrs. Em’s got those books you ordered,” the man said. “Been there awhile.”
Sullivan looked at the round-faced man. “Hum?” he grunted.
“Something about physics, Em said. I think that’s what she said.” Sullivan’s reserve made the man uncomfortable. “Quantum mechanics, right? And organic chemistry.”
“Good,” John Sullivan said. The flow of his thoughts masked the shopkeep’s inquiry. Since the spring of 1973 he had secluded himself; solitarily hunting, fishing, hiking the streams and hills into eastern Wyoming. In the fall of 1973 he’d shot, cleaned and butchered a deer but it had made him queasy, the meat and bones without hide looked too much like human flesh he’d seen without skin. He had not hunted since. In the winter he holed up in the cabin, read the Bible and began studying an advanced mathematics text someone had left behind. He had no radio, no television, no stereo, no phone. He received no mail, no newspapers or magazines. Early in 1974 he had ordered a set of textbooks on chemistry and microbiology and set out to learn, for his own pleasure, what they had to offer. Then came the physics and philosophy of science texts. How beautifully, he saw, each revelation dovetailed with all the others. And where they didn’t, he saw, it was not the material but the presenter who erred. All year he fished and trapped and read and tried to formulate for himself, for his own satisfaction, a theory of existence which could encompass all life, all energy, all the absurdities and hurt and all the wonderment and love.
“Well,” the shopkeep said, “that’s all you ordered. Might take a paper, too. Don’t hurt none to know what’s goin on in the world.”
“Thanks,” John Sullivan said. He lugged the cardboard boxes out to his jeep and drove to Mrs. Em’s Last Chapter book and gift shop—a store stuffed with Indian moccasins and turquoise bracelets and one case of books for bored travelers passing through in their motorized travel homes. As he parked he glanced at the newspaper in the box on the passenger seat. As if there were no other words on the page a byline jumped at him: Rita Donaldson. Quickly he opened the door. His head jerked back to the box but he did not read the headline. He slammed the canvas wire-frame door. It popped back at him. He closed it more deliberately. He’d been thinking of something he’d read about particle physics, about how everything is on a cyclic continuum of creation, transformation, destruction. Over and over. Had been speculating on the ramifications of the cycle—if one observed the smallest elements, creation and destruction or annihilation did not exist—only transformation, a continual recombination into different patterns. Then Rita Donaldson had stopped him.
Sullivan stood by the side of the jeep. The morning was clear, crisp. After the winter it felt warm. He cupped a hand about his face, drew it down over his beard, down his chin and neck. Then he wiped it on the side of his dungarees. He had not read a newspaper in fifteen months, since he’d visited his folks at Christmas in 1973. At that time he’d said to his Uncle Gus and his sister, Margie, and her new husband, Bob, “All the evidence pointed to this incredible buildup by the North Viet Namese. There was some hard proof but no one wanted to exploit it. Instead, it seemed the whole world was beaming in on Thieu and Lon Nol, and because they had access to it they exploited every bit of corruption and ineptitude they saw.”
“Oh cut the bullshit, John,” Bob had said forcefully. “We’ve been reading The New York Times while you’ve been hiding in that cabin. We know you guys bombed those places so bad there’s hardly a civilian left. We know what impact the war and America have had on those poor people. How our country’s turned Cambodia, especially Cambodia, into a goddamned moonscape!”
“What?!” John had looked at his uncle expecting some support from the World War Two veteran but Gus had his head hung and his eyes on the floor.
“Okay, now.” His father had come into the room. “There’ll be no more talk of this. It’s Christmas. This is no time for politics.”
Sullivan walked into Mrs. Em’s, purchased his ordered books and left without speaking more than two sentences. In the jeep he glanced at the paper. Then he looked at the window of the Last Chapter. Mrs. Em was peeking at him. Thinks I’m out of it, he thought. He looked back to the paper. He had not even known the date: Monday, 31 March 1975. Sullivan started the jeep, let it idle. The front page was full of stories of battles raging in South Viet Nam and Cambodia. His eyes wouldn’t focus. He couldn’t read Rita’s article. Instead he began one with a New York Times credit: “Western diplomats,” the article began, “say that the Lon Nol regime has treated its people so poorly, it has forfeited the right to govern.” Sullivan huffed. He did not read on. In the middle, just below the fold, there was a map of Cambodia with five arrows ending in exploding stars. One star engulfed Neak Luong. Sullivan gritted his teeth, thought, Boy, did she make a fool of me. She was probably part of the KR’s people’s intelligence network. External reconnaissance! What a jerk I was.
He looked back at Rita Donaldson’s article, jumped to the middle. “When the end comes...” His eyes jumped to another paragraph: “...the hatred here runs so deep,” she’d written, “victory and peace may be more brutal than the brutality of this war.” The theory of relativity, he thought, allows one to experience time and space, life and death, as abstractions.
He put the paper into the grocery box. He would save it, but he would not, could not, yet, read it.
With her right hand Vathana balanced the small bundle atop her head. She walked the worn path gingerly, watching for sharp objects. Quickly she was to the alley and then to the street which led through Neak Luong. As she walked she tried not to look, tried to protect herself from a cityscape which could have been plague-ravaged Europe during the bleakest period of the Dark Ages, tried not to witness the pleading eyes of fatalistic beggars, the dull faces of children resigned to lives of poverty, starvation and war. A maimed soldier sitting splay-legged in a pocked doorway called to her. Her scant energy drained. She attempted to not see him, not hear him. Still the drain. Each shattered building, each burned-out ruin, each tattered lean-to of plastic sucked life from her exhausted body. The urge to sit, to lean into a doorway, to sleep, to join the thousands of homeless, listless, grabbed her. She fought it, attempted to shed it.
Earlier, as she and Sophan had set about their separate tasks, she’d been snared by a spurt of timid eagerness—by hope. “It’s so quiet out there,” she’d said to Sophan.
“Yes,” Sophan whispered back. “Why have the shells stopped? What do you think’s happening?”
“I don’t...” Vathana paused. Then her eyes widened. “Clean the children,” she declared. “Dress them in their best clothes.”
“Do you think...” Sophan’s entire face lit. “Oh Sweet Blessed One, is it over?” Sophan had put a hand to her lips to hide the words but she could not hide the anticipation which had infected all Neak Luong. “What will they look like?”
Vathana hunched, lowered her voice. “Like us, eh?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. They’re Khmer, after all.”
“Today,” Vathana asked rhetorically, “you’re at the hospital? Maybe their radio is working.”
Vathana had stepped to the tent corner where all three of her children were playing. She bent, kissed each. A melancholy smile spread across her face. “I must bring your father his clean shirt.” She smiled. “Sophan will clean you up. Today you must listen carefully. And”—she tapped a finger into her left palm—“stay clean.”
“Ba-ba,” Samnang said happily.
Sophan had clutched the five-and-a-half-year-old boy. “He knows, Angel,” she’d said. “He’s sensitive to things we can’t feel. I told you he’d be perfect, eh? In his way.” Vathana had smiled a euphoric fearful smile and hugged the three children and Sophan. Then she’d added the shirt to the bundle for Teck and Louis.
Vathana walked around a shell crater. Inside, at the center, she could see a half-buried rocket canister. She picked her way over the debris only to enter the debris ring of the next crater, then the next. By one crater people were picking at the mashed remains of a dog. She turned away, detoured around a pockmarked house. Behind the house she saw a young woman holding a small girl. The infant looked peaceful, angelic, except for one eye slightly opened and her left leg and foot neatly missing.
Vathana stalled. She had to decide to stay, to help, to mourn, or to go on. “Arrange for a funeral,” she ordered the dazed young mother. She walked on. It was a snap decision and it haunted her even as she told herself, First I must tend to my husband and to the living.
“There are no KR in sight,” Teck told Vathana a few minutes later. He had withdrawn to their rendezvous point, a vacant shack near the crematory.
“Doesn’t anyone know?” Vathana said. She’d opened the bundle and given Teck the clean shirt.
“What else do you have?” He unbuttoned his filthy fatigue blouse to remove it.
“These.” Vathana removed two bread rolls. “Once,” she said, “I would pay four riels. Now, they cost eight hundred. And...” She brought out two rice balls wrapped in pages removed from Ith Sarin’s book. “Also”—she smiled at Teck—“these.” From a shirt pocket she delicately pulled two cigarettes.
“I have something for you, too,” Teck said.
“What?” Vathana asked.
From a pant pocket he pulled Louis’s cloth. Carefully he began unwrapping. “Remember when we were married?” he said mischievously. Her eyes flashed at his words. “Remember?” He teased her.
“I remember,” she answered.
“It’s...” He stopped. “This is from Louis for food,” he said seriously, “but maybe...for a minute”—he held up the thin gold ring—“I could put it on your finger and pretend, like the wedding song, you are still jealous of my hot green chili, because...because you love me.”
“I am jealous”—Vathana touched his thin chest—“because, like the song, I love you. I shall be jealous of you every day.”
“If the nation is to fall,” the stocky doctor said to an orderly, “the new nation will need doctors, eh?”
Sophan looked at their backs, looked beyond them into the ward. The hospital had been rebuilt after the 1973 American bomb had hit it, but it was much too small for a city of sixty thousand plus defense force troops during active battle. Each bed was cramped with five, seven, ten patients. Rivers of diarrhea flowed from cots of those so ill they couldn’t rise. Clouds of flies swarmed amid aisles packed with family members.
“Then you think it’s over, Doctor?” the orderly asked.
“I wouldn’t have returned if I didn’t think that traitor was about to lose his head,” Doctor Sarin Sam Ol answered.
“But surely, now,” the orderly retorted, “President Ford will send in troops. As a matter of honor.”
“Honor?” Doctor Sarin scoffed bitterly. “In Neak Luong? All the world knows America’s shame. My sons...” The doctor stopped, turned, stared at Sophan with his good eye.
“Is it over?” she asked weakly. “We’ve no radio...”
“Ha! It was over years ago,” Sarin Sam Ol snapped. “My eldest son is dead. By my second son’s words, FANK is ready to surrender. My peou, in the maquis, now he can come home.”
To the Krahom, Preah Vihear was a svayat or autonomous region. In the “secret zone” south of that city Nang had prepared his team for the final victory. He was bitter. “A high-level reeducation facility,” Met Sen had told him, “to instruct ‘students’ how to live in a pure society.” Banished, he’d thought. Shunted aside just as victory is within our grasp. “Angkar Leou wishes for you to go forward and establish Site 169,” he’d been ordered. Expelled, he’d thought. Kept from the rewards of conquest. His bitterness imbued each of his a-ksae teos, his “telephone wires,” his new soldiers who would use the wire to bind students’ hands behind their backs.
Nang stood at the edge of a small clearing. He burped and hot acid seared his throat. In February there had been a secret high-level meeting of the Kampuchean United Revolutionary Front—the Center plus zonal secretaries and delegates from the dumbon and phumpheak levels and from the svayats. Nang had not been invited. He touched his face and the bitterness sizzled in him. He’d received but a verbal briefing. All the sacrifices, he thought. The years in the swamps, the months below the bombs. My face. Every a-ksae teo knew. Every one of them had been betrayed with him, abandoned with him, isolated with him. Hate coagulated them into a demonic band.
“We’ll need a hundred peasants,” Nang said to his aide.
“Yes Met Nang.” The young boy’s answer snapped.
“This is much too small. Clear it so when I stand here, I can see the Dang Rek cliff without looking through trees.”
“Yes Met Nang.”
“Have it done in ten days,” Nang said. He did not look at the boy-soldier. Met Sar’s words, from the messenger, were simple. “Immediately upon victory, all cities will be emptied. Prepare for many new people. Annihilation of class enemies is the highest form of class struggle.”
Nang taught the a-ksae teos the last line. Met Sen had sent a separate message which Nang did not pass on. “Extermination,” he’d said, “is more productive than war: In your facility, you are God.”
It was twenty minutes past noon, 1 April 1975. The battle lulls of the previous day had been broken by tremendous artillery barrages during the night. Rita Donaldson crouched with her back to a sandbagged revetment. On her knees was a steno pad. She scribbled furiously. She looked up. The Air Cambodge jet had vanished into the hot dry air. Before her stretched Phnom Penh’s Pochentong Airport. The runway was cratered from thousands of rounds of 81mm mortars and 107mm rockets which had impacted in the past two months. At one end was the skeletal wreckage of a DC-8; close by the charred remains of a C-130. Rita lowered her head. The roar and rumble of a departing airlift plane vibrated the pen in her hand. Then that craft too was gone.
“President Lon Nol has left,” she wrote. “The head of state and marshal of the army, with his weeping wife and an entourage of 29, has left this war-torn nation en route to Thailand and Indonesia. Assisting the president’s wife was Madame Sisowath Thich Soen, an elegant woman who some say acted as the go-between for U.S. embassy officials and the Republic’s government—”
Rita stopped to collect her thoughts. She would later rewrite the notes into a cohesive article. Now it was imperative to record her observations. “The president, wearing a dark gray business suit and looking somber, slowly limped from where he had been assisted from the helicopter which had brought him from the Chamcar Mon Palace to this point, to the waiting white jet. Twice he raised his cane, necessary since a stroke partially paralyzed him in 1970, to salute those troops who have been loyal to him for five years.”
A C-130 cargo plane, a rice and ammo flight, dove in steep approach and landed. Very quickly a team of Khmer soldiers, directed by U.S. Air Force officers, unloaded the craft. Immediately it roared off.
“For the past 30 days,” she wrote, “this city’s perimeter defenses have been continuously battered and progressively pushed back. In this atmosphere and at the urging of both American ambassador John Gunther Dean and Lon Nol’s own party and general staff, the president has stepped down. According to sources close to Prime Minister Long Boret, this will remove a critical stumbling block to opening negotiations between the Republican regime and the Communist Liberation Front. An aide to Acting President Saukham Khoy believes the new chief executive and his cabinet are acceptable, for talks, to Khmer Rouge officials. Prime Minister Long Boret had, as recently as two days ago, stated that American diplomats here ‘are not working for our surrender,’ but that the ‘provisional departure’ of Lon Nol will assist the U.S. embassy here both in convincing Congress to appropriate additional aid and in giving them ‘a margin of maneuverability’ in their attempts to negotiate a peace settlement between the warring parties. A dissenting opinion, it is rumored, will be forthcoming from ex-prime minister Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak. Further bitterness was expressed by a head government financier who asked not to be identified but who alleges that Lon Nol was given half a million dollars as an incentive to flee.”
Another plane approached. The airport rocket warning siren erupted, its penetrating wail sending cargo crews scrambling for cover. “One...two...” Rita pressed her back harder to the revetment, pulled her knees in tighter. “...six, seven...” she counted. She forced herself not to look up, put her hands and the steno pad atop her head. By fifteen, she knew, the round would explode, somewhere, on the kilometer-long facility. Concentrating on counting was the only way to avoid terror. Then, beyond the DC-8 carcass, an explosion.
Rita looked up. Filled her lungs with the acrid air. Exhaled. Wrote. “Statements from the Communist side have been contradictory. In February Khieu Samphan announced that every Cambodian would have an important role in the new nation ‘no matter what his past held.’ Norodom Sihanouk, later that month, stated in Peking, ‘The Khmer people have nothing to fear from a Khmer Rouge victory. There will be no bloodbath. Cambodia will be governed not even by a Communist state but by a Swedish-style kingdom.’ ” After this note Rita added a parenthesis, “(check exact wording.)” She continued, “However, the Communist hit list of supertraitors has been expanded, according to Khmer Rouge radio, from the original seven to a present figure of twenty-eight. All on the original list, now labeled the “arch-traitors,” according to KR radio, will be executed. The added twenty-one, KR radio said, will be dealt with by a people’s tribunal after victory. All other ‘imperialists, lackeys, stooges, puppets and traitors’ will be granted general amnesty ‘if they cooperate with the new regime.’ Still there is here the fear of harsh reprisals. U.S. embassy officials privately seem miffed at Secretary of State Kissinger’s warning of ‘serious consequences to American credibility,’ without at least equal caution and concern expressed about serious consequences for the Cambodian people.”
Again Rita paused. She looked out beyond the airstrip, over the paddies to the forested fields in the west. Because of all the close writing she’d done, her eyes focused slowly and the distant trees remained blurry. It made her feel as if she were aging too quickly and that, along with her fears and prayers for the many Khmers she’d come to respect, made her feel tired. Again she returned to the pad.
“America has had many good people stationed here,” she wrote. “Perhaps its best team, including Ambassador Dean and General William Palmer, are here now. (Or is it me?),” she wrote. “(Have I changed? Maybe matured or become wiser or hardened from my years here? Once I had a simple desire to see peace return to this gentle land. Now I suspect peace will be as violent as war. At once I feel there is a moral obligation to push for surrender and let the killings cease...and I fear they won’t. When I arrived here earlier today I spoke with an airport guard. I asked him how he felt about the president’s abandonment. He would not answer. I said, ‘There is so much hate now. If the war stops, can the hate be forgotten?’ He looked straight at me like I was crazy. ‘Western Lady,’ he said, ‘hate, you know, it lasts thirty generations.’)”
Rita clasped her hands over the pad. In the heat she shivered. “America,” she wrote, “has had good people in Cambodia, has had decent advisors with the best intentions. Why were all their best plans and policies blocked by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger?”
Chhuon could just barely hear the words, and not all of them. They had been given the afternoon off—the first break from the kara than, the official worksite, in thirty days. Quietly he weaved palm leaves into the deteriorating fabric of his sleeping cocoon. His knuckles ached as he laced the strands delicately into the pattern, yet he worked steadily. One’s body, he’d been thinking, deteriorates exactly like old leaves in the sun. Then he’d seen the three men approaching.
“You are responsible for your own safety.” Chhuon overheard the shortest one say. The others did not answer. They drew closer. Chhuon ducked behind his cocoon. He recognized the speaker, Met Soth, chief of Khum 4, and with him Met Vong, enforcer of Phum 117. The third, too, looked familiar. “You understand,” Soth said. “Vong and I have secured for you a chance to redeem yourself.”
“I will serve and honor Angkar Leou,” the third man responded. Chhuon squatted behind his hut. He knew this young man.
“If ever it is reported,” Soth warned him, “you have been with a neary, without Angkar’s approval...”
Chhuon pretended to concentrate on the lashings which held the platform of the cocoon to the corner posts about a meter above the earth. That, Chhuon thought, that is Khieng. At first he, Chhuon, felt a surge of joy at recognizing the boy from his home village. But quickly the joy died. That, he thought, that is Khieng who stripped my Kdeb. That is Khieng who was a yuon militiaman and who humiliated me, my family, the entire village. That hen shit, he thought, brought the yuons, brought the Khmer Rouge, uprooted us. Ha, Chhuon thought. He crept to the other side of the cocoon, stood and watched the yotheas’ backs as they strode between the line of huts. Ha, once again we encounter each other, Met Khieng. Now it is my turn to prevail.
Teck crouched in his foxhole. The shelling had begun, not along the southern perimeter but to the north along Highway 15, which led to Prey Veng. All night shells had landed at the far garrisons. They’d thought little of the explosions except perhaps that they meant a new assault would begin or—thank the Lord Buddha—that it’s up there this time and not on us again.
During the night Louis had chided him, “A clean shirt! For what? She thinks the war is over? Or are you going to celebrate the New Year before the city falls?”
“Just eat your roll,” Teck had answered lightly. “Tomorrow she’ll sell the ring and we’ll celebrate whatever comes.”
“Next is the Hare, eh? I’ve had enough of the Year of the Tiger.”
“It’s not been all bad,” Teck said. “No matter what they say in the papers, we’ve fought well, eh?”
“Ha! Tigers fight, Hares flee. I’m going to run away.”
Teck laughed. “Maybe so, Louis. But not for another twelve days, eh?”
The shelling of the northern berm and garrisons increased. By morning the rumbling of explosions rolling across the city was nearly continuous. Before them, beyond the FANK outposts, there was no sign of life. Teck had eaten his rice ball but not his roll. Now he gnawed the hard crust, rasping a hole into its side, savoring each crumb, forcing the roll, the fragrance and taste, to last as long as possible. There were new sounds, explosions to the northwest. An attack was coming down the river road from Banam. Rumors spread beneath the second barrage. Still the southern front was quiet.
Louis was restless. “How can you eat that fucking thing so slow?”
“Like this,” Teck teased. He continued his gnawing. Out to his right he heard a faint chir-rick-chirk. He jerked his head. There was nothing to be seen. He closed his eyes and he saw an image of his eldest son and he thought how beautiful the little boy had become. He decided he would work with him until he could say “mama” and “papa.” When Teck opened his eyes he was smiling. He’d slept for hours. The sun was high. He still clutched his roll. Then, on the southern berm, down the line, a round exploded. Then again and again. He dropped. Louis leaped from the lean-to, slammed down atop him. Artillery rounds burst only meters away. The air filled with smoke, dust. Gravel rained on them. The storm swirled violently above their heads then moved up the line. There were long screams. Loud cries. Soft pleas.
Teck coughed. Rubbed his eyes. Pushed Louis off him. Blood trickled down his face. He touched it. There was no pain. He raised higher and saw the swarm approaching.
“Ooouw,” Louis cried. Teck’s head snapped to him. His pant hip was bloodsoaked, a ragged flap of flesh opened as he righted himself.
“Here they come!” a sergeant yelled.
They had never been so plain, so open, so clear. FANK rifles cracked. Teck focused on three black-clad soldiers sprinting toward him. He was aware of hundreds beside and behind them. He set his left arm firmly on the berm, lowered his head to the M-16 stock, aimed, fired. A soldier collapsed. Teck adjusted, aimed, fired. A second boy dropped. A third disintegrated in a volley by Teck, Louis and Sahn in the position next to them. Hundreds of bodies lay crumpled. The charge disappeared. The artillery barrages to the north could again be heard.
Teck checked his face. He looked at his shirt. It was blood splattered. Again he felt his face. “Cock shit,” Louis growled. “It’s mine you idiot.”
“What’s yours?”
“That blood on you. Look at my hip. Patch me up. I quit.”
Teck pushed Louis down flat at the edge of the foxhole. The earth was better than table height but Teck remained in the hole as he scrutinized the wound. Then he laughed. “It isn’t so bad. Ha! Now I’ll call you Half-Ass.”
“You wouldn’t laugh if it were you, Brother!” Methodically Teck surface-cleaned and bandaged the wound. “They fight well, too,” Louis snarled. “Damn them.”
“How are they so accurate with those shells?” Teck said. “Right down the line. They plan, they prepare and they execute. But they are stupid, too. Had they shelled us a little longer...” Teck paused. He looked down the line. A dozen teams were carrying bodies toward the crematory; a score were evacuating wounded. Up the line the numbers were higher. “...we’d never have been...”
Again there was that sound. Now the second bombardment began. Both men huddled at the hole bottom. Shells roared over, burst behind them—without roars burst before them. The earth heaved. Black clods smashed them. Teck watched as Louis rose. He seized his pant leg to pull him down. The air was thick with smoke and dust and sand. Smoke burns Teck’s eyes. Louis shakes his leg, pulls fiercely. He is gone. The barrage does not let up. There are screams to the front. Teck inches up. There are thousands of attackers. No defenders are firing. Rounds land behind them. Teck takes his position, aims, fires. A person drops, dies. He fires on semiautomatic, one round per...per...the shrill screams are not boys, men. They fire on him. Rifle rounds kick in the dirt by his face. He fires. A girl dies. Girls, women, neary continue to charge, to die to his bullets. They have no cover, no concealment. Teck’s arms twitch yet his aim is accurate. His chest is tight. Before him there is a leg, an entire leg with a boot, tossed by artillery. The shelling is farther back, now. Corpses are strewn before beside behind him. Rockets roar over on their trajectory to Neak Luong’s heart. Immediately Teck knows the enemy artillery has moved up, in for the kill.
The Krahom has committed two entire divisions plus a separate brigade, over ten thousand troops, plus three thousand of Met Nu’s ten thousand neary, to the annihilation of Neak Luong’s defenses.
“Fall back! Fall back!” Sergeants and officers are manic yet orderly. “Back to the last trenches! Keep firing!”
Teck reloads. He does not move from the foxhole. Twenty rounds, he thinks. Twenty kills. “Back to the 105 battery! We’ll target the line!” Target the line, Teck thinks. Target the line. Observe the line. In the maelstrom he pauses to look to his right, down the pickets of palm trees. Chir-rick-chirk, he thinks. Observers...
From behind and to his left there is an incredible bang. FANK cannoncockers have lowered the tubes for point-blank fire. Teck slithers out of the hole, scampers like a rat. He steps on a chunk of flesh and falls. He rises, runs on.
Beyond the howitzers Louis has stripped off his uniform and thrown it away. He is sprint-hobbling for town, for a hovel in which to hide.
The assaulting force increases. The southern line is breached. Half of Teck’s unit has clumped together, has banded into a smooth withdrawal force, firing and backpedaling. Half of FANK’s troops are standing fast at the trench line before the artillery batteries. Everywhere there are soldiers retreating in panic. Teck, Sahn and others fall back to the crematory and take up positions behind an ash heap. The full brunt of the Krahom force is sweeping in upon them. Fear and terror are anticipatory emotions and Teck no longer sees his own existence beyond the exact moment in which he is. He fights without hate, without fear. He is a technician with his M-16, trusting his fate not so much to others or to his God but to ignorance, to a calm present-only mind-set.
In the infirmary tent in the Khsach Sa refugee camp Vathana’s mind was running wild and scattered. A few soldiers in nothing but underwear had run in looking for peasant clothes. “It’s over,” people were saying. “FANK has lost. It’s over.”
Vathana grabbed a white towel. She cut two nicks in the side then ripped it into three swaths. Where is Teck? she thought. She tied a swath to Samnang’s right wrist. Will I ever see Neak Luong again? She tied one to Samol and the third to Su Livanh. There are rumors they make everyone go back to their home village. How will I get there? Oh my beautiful Phum Sath Din with Mama and Papa. Where is Teck? What’s happened to our wedding album? Sweet Lord Buddha, what’s happening? Why are they still fighting?
“Angel,” an old man called to her. “I have just heard...on the radio...” The man was crying. “Lon Nol, he has fled. He’s abdicated. Praise Sweet Buddha. Samdech Euv can now return.”
Phnom Penh was frantic. Rita locked her door to add several lines to her story. “Prince Norodom Sihanouk this afternoon on KR radio has called Lon Nol’s successor, Saukham Khoy, ‘a war criminal and an executioner.’ The head of the government-in-exile further stated, ‘I proclaim openly...that on no account, under no circumstances...will the Cambodian resistance agree to be reconciled with the traitors...[We] will always fight...in the spirit of no retreat or compromise...’
“In other developments, along the southern, front there are reports that captured towns are being ravaged by Khmer Rouge ‘slaves’ and that everything salvageable, from rice to automobiles, is being loaded into boats with Viet Namese crews and is being shipped east.”
Rita sat. The excitement of the impending collapse invigorated her professionally, yet personally she felt spent. She could no longer feel disgust at the Republican government, at FANK corruption. Now she felt pity and fear for them. Yet she could not write that. If America felt pity or fear for the new regime, President Ford might attempt a last-minute life-saving maneuver. To Rita, nothing, nothing, could possibly be worse.
The river was low. He could see the river, smell it, almost step in it. Teck, Sahn and dozens of others had pulled back to the southernmost neighborhoods of the city. Teck hid amid the stilts of an old house. Others were tucked into doorways or behind courtyard walls of homes and shops on the landward side of Main Street. On the levee a small battered Ami 6. Citroen lay on its side. Near it a military deuce and a half truck billowed smoke and shot flames into the tormented postnoon sky. Still they came.
Behind the withdrawing troops, artillery rounds from captured 105s were blasting chunks out of Neak Luong’s already scarred facade. Teck aimed, fired, watched an invader drop, then crept back a few more meters into the dim light beneath the house. What if they come for me? he thought. I can go there, then to that post, then that hole. He shot another attacker. The din of small arms rose, fell, never ceased. Teck saw Sahn firing his M-79 grenade launcher, lobbing rounds over the burning truck. The enemy charge had been fanatical. Every inch was paved with dead and dying. Now they came more methodically, insidiously. Teck fired an entire magazine. Retreated. Up the street he could see people, city people, tearing posters of Lon Nol from the walls of the few concrete structures. FANK, the Auto-Defense force, no longer had command, control, communications, yet the soldiers fought hard, fought house to house, stilt to stilt. The Communists, FANK command or not, were their hated enemy. KK rifles were killing them. KK artillery was reducing their city to a trash heap.
Teck dashed the short distance from beneath one house to beneath the next. A wave of frustration washed through him. He could not stop them. He knelt and pressed a piling. Tears flooded his eyes. He raised his M-16, aimed but did not fire. He looked townward. Soldiers, many soldiers, were stripping, throwing away their uniforms, their weapons. Beneath a shattered cart he saw Sahn, saw him sitting, staring at him, his, Satin’s, hands on his abdomen, his, Sahn’s, intestines squirming out between the fingers.
Teck turned forward. He fired. He fired again and again and again and he cried as he fired. He shot another, thinking, One more down. If I can kill one more, kill one more, we could still win. If I could kill them all, we could...
In town the street blossomed with white rag flags. “Lon Nol is gone!” Teck heard the shouts. “Lon Nol has fled the country!” He heard but he did not believe he could hear those voices, thus he could not have heard the words. Lon Nol fled! The thought sunk in, jarred him. He, Teck, had not fled! He raised his rifle, but except for the crackling of house fires, all about him was now still.
Emptiness engulfed him. He could not move. In the shadow of the stilt house he could see the battlefield, could feel the desolate spirits swirling, could sense the 2,000 ex-KK and the 2,600 ex-FANK, Khmer souls, weeping at the stupidity of their passions which had embroiled them and delivered them to untimely enlightenment.
Now the street was empty. Now he saw his comrades, milling, aimless, wrapped in white sheets, awaiting orders. He remained still. An urge to join them infected him. Then an urge to flee grasped him. Momentarily his leg muscles tightened. The urges dissipated. His legs lay limp. A thought of Vathana, the children, sped across his mind. He thought to lean forward, to rise, but a flash image and an aversion to seeing her, them, as he’d seen Sahn froze him. Then he heard the calls. “Cheyo yotheas! Cheyo yotheas!” Peace! Peace, brother soldiers! A few men from the milling undressed came forth. They waved a white sheet on a bamboo pole. “Peace!”
Teck lay his M-16 at his feet. He thought to throw it into the river but he didn’t have the strength. His jaw quivered. He tried to stop it, tried to grind his teeth but he could not. He was covered with dirt, grease, filth. His good shirt was shredded. His face squeezed uncontrollably and again he cried. Then he saw them, saw not the charging black-clad horde but saw two files of silent little boys dressed in Chinese Communist green fatigues and Mao caps. They did not smile, did not speak. Before and behind each column was a black-uniformed leader but between all were little boys with assault rifles and rocket grenade launchers which looked comically too large for them. How? Teck thought. Two platoons passed softly. Then came two platoons of girls. Small, dark, resolute, perhaps frightened. Townward the boys dispersed, took up positions at intersections and alleyways. Undressed men called to them. They did not respond. Townspeople threw flowers, brought them fruit. Old women tried to give them coins. Precious hoarded hopes and belongings poured forth and showered the conquering, liberating army. More platoons passed. Teck could not understand. How? How did they beat...Then came the trucks, the cars, the guns, the black-uniformed troops he’d fought inch by inch all day, fought for months. His tears stopped. Now he understood. The first platoons were the expendable, the chaff, sent in to emotionally disarm the people, to physically disarm willing government soldiers who saw them and believed they had nothing to fear. In the best cars were gray-uniformed officers who directed the metastasizing of Neak Luong.
Teck’s ears opened. His senses let go of his self and picked up the in-sweeping force. “Put out white flags,” a lead yothea snouted. “It is peace. Peace!” He fired his carbine into the air. “Peace!” he screamed angrily. A townsman waddled from an alley. On his shoulder was a sack of rice. “Hey! Brother! What have you?” The man stopped, turned. Yotheas surrounded him. The man tried to backstep. “Please, Brother. Don’t be afraid. We are patriots, eh?” The soldiers jostled the man. “This”—the one with the angry voice shouted, grabbed the sack—“Angkar Leou wishes to borrow. In a day, maybe two, you’ll get it back.” The yotheas laughed. The man fled. The rice sack was tossed onto the roof of a commandeered car.
Teck was now taut. He rolled to his side, crouched on hands and feet, peered out. In his vision was his rifle. Carry it or abandon it? He crept deeper into the stilt forest, without the weapon, crept upriver, townward, toward the “unliberated” neighborhood of the northwest quadrant where Communist mortars were now blasting the pagoda and FANK resisters were still killing vanguard yotheas.
Everything was chaos. There were yotheas in the wards. Yotheas screaming from the operating room. “I said,” Doctor Sarin Sam Ol shouted, “come in! Come in! You do not have to behave such!”
“We enter Neak Luong as conquerors!” The KK officer’s voice was shrill.
“No. No,” the doctor yelled, not authoritatively, only loudly, trying to be heard over the massive turmoil. “You don’t understand! I have just returned from France. I’ve come to help you.”
“You are a traitor,” the officer shrieked. To his bug-eyed yotheas he ordered, “Get them out! Out!”
“They can’t be moved.” Sophan stamped forward.
The officer shoved her. Sarin Sam Ol intervened. “Understand,” he shouted emphatically, “I came back to greet you! To cheer your great victory.”
Around them yotheas were screaming at patients, pushing the ambulatory, the families, out of the wards, out of the corridors, out of the hospital. Broken men limped, wives pushed hospital beds with IV drips of saline still flowing into the arms of their husbands.
The first calls had been milder. “Brothers, Sisters, Mothers, Fathers, you must leave at once. The Americans are about to bomb again. Go at once.” Only a few moved. The hospital had become their home, their refugee camp built about the base of loved ones’ beds. “At once! Evacuate at once! Leave everything and run!” Many had gone, but many of the patients were amputees or severely wounded or acutely ill and they and their families had not budged. Then the yotheas began shoving and clubbing and screaming more harshly than any of the patients had ever heard. “Get out or else!”
“Stop this!” Sarin Sam Ol shouted. He grabbed the officer’s arm. In the nearly vacant ward yotheas grabbed decrepit bodies, ripped them from their beds, piled them like trash in a heap at floor center. “Stop it!” Doctor Sarin ordered.
“Stop it!” Sophan barged up to the officer.
“What are you doing?” Sarin’s one good eye protruded menacingly. He slapped at the officer like an angry child slaps an adult. Now yotheas were clubbing the bodies in the heap, stabbing those who’d not been tossed.
From the street came the blare of a truck-mounted public address system. The voice was soft and lyrical and melodious and its beauty engulfed the fleeing who had not seen the executions. “The Father,” Norodom Sihanouk’s taped voice beseeched them, “wishes you to support the liberation soldiers. They free you from the bonds of American imperialism and from Lon Nol, the dog of the Americans. You will be safe. Your Father will be back.”
Khmer believed him. Khmer trusted him. He was the beloved prince, Samdech Euv. He promised the war weary peace and security.
Sophan was dumbstruck. Sarin was livid. He leaped from the officer to the executioners. They laughed as he grappled with a small lad. Then the officer pulled his pistol and shot the doctor in the back. Immediately Sophan jumped on the officer. She was not childlike. She smashed him to the floor. The pistol clattered, slid to a bed. Her attack was so unexpected the yotheas burst into giggles. With her pudgy thumbs she gouged the officer’s eyes, tearing both corneas. His arms jerked up but he could not see. Sophan grasped her fists together, smashed them down on his face. Again and again. Yotheas reeled in convulsions of glee—an old lady was beating the cadreman! Then Sophan rose, turned, looking not like an old woman but like a mythological monster about to breathe fire. The yotheas chuckled nervously, backed off, formed a U, their clubs and knives ready. Sophan roared. “GET OUT!” The boys jumped. One dropped his club and fled. Then one attacked, bludgeoned her. She fell and the rest beat her to death.
“We’re going to see Sihanouk,” one soldier told Teck. The firefight at the pagoda had abated, the officers in charge had surrendered or been killed. Teck had been too late, thought of himself as too late and cried because he’d not been able to tell them what was happening behind the advancing facade. “They think there are some Americans hiding in the city with a bomber beacon. So right now we all have to go so they can search the city.”
From the roving speaker truck came the voice of Major Rin of the Gray Vultures. “Only political criminals will be tried...” The loudspeaker was focused on the surrendered garrison troops who had fought so bravely about the pagoda. “Angkar,” Rin continued, “will need administrators during this period of transition. All government officials and all military officers must report immediately to the Office of the Mayor of Neak Luong. Victory to the Revolution!”
“We should help them, eh, Brother?” Teck looked at the FANK soldier who’d told him of Sihanouk and the hiding Americans. He wanted to shake his head but he was too exhausted to respond. Like most of the others, Teck had shed his uniform. Those still clothed were now told to rid themselves of the vile material. “You were an officer, eh?” the soldier asked.
“Once,” Teck mumbled. “The Khsach Sa camp, it’s been liberated?”
“Maybe,” the soldier said. “Maybe leveled in the fighting, eh?” Teck’s heart dropped lower. More announcements came from the speakers. The captured soldiers began to separate by ranks. “Officers there.” The man who’d talked with Teck nudged him toward the smaller group. Down the street yotheas were pulling furniture from the apartment building and piling it against the wall. Some shot the refrigerators. Others burned cars. A few raced, crashed commandeered motorbikes. Cooking pans and transistor radios were confiscated and tied to backpacks and web gear. Anyone protesting was forced into the alleys. Fires burned in every direction.
“Parlez-vous français?” a Krahorri officer asked a senior-looking underweared prisoner. “Oui,” the man answered. He was hustled away.
Teck glanced back at the soldier who’d nudged him. There was no place to go. Nothing else to do. He stepped slowly to a group of lieutenants. His feet dragged, his mind felt like wet muck. Rumors, opinions, flowed subtly all about him. “Siem Reap has fallen, too.” “They’re pulling six thousand from here. Going to use them on Phnom Penh.” “Those bastards deserve it.” “They’ve already set up street committees to monitor security. We should have surrendered months ago.” “Listen to that. Listen! That is Samdech Euv!”
Teck’s group was trotted barefoot down the main street to the government building. “...There will be a general amnesty...”
Sihanouk’s voice surrounded them. “...All government employees, leaders and soldiers, if they surrender unconditionally to the glorious liberation forces, will be granted amnesty...”
Inside, one by one. “You are...”
“Pech Chieu Teck.”
The Krahom major laughed. “Pech Chieu Teck, eh?”
“Yes.”
“Son of Sisowath Thich Soen?”
“Yes.” A smile flicked to Teck’s face. To be recognized, he thought, by a major, that’s something. The smile sagged in the melancholy of his fatigue and bereavement. Cambodia was dead.
“You are a very corrupt supply officer, eh?”
“Brother.” Teck bowed his head. “I...”
Met Rin interrupted. “When did you come from Phnom Penh?”
“That’s what I must tell you,” Teck said. “I am surprised you know me, but you are right. Once I was with supply, in the capital. But I was not meant to be corrupt. I was very young, you know. The corruption sickened me so I quit...that’s maybe two years. Now I am just a corporal in the Auto-Defense.”
“Just a corporal, eh?” Major Rin said pleasantly. “A bourgeois corporal, eh?”
“For that, Brother,” Teck answered, “I am very sorry. You know, I admire what you have done for our country. The war is over, eh? It is a great burden lifted from our backs.”
“Ha!” Rin chuckled behind closed lips. “Corporal Pech, you could turn white to black.”
“Truly, Brother,” Teck answered calmly. “I want only to help the nation, to join the entire population in reconstructing our country.”
“You shall.” Rin smiled. To the guards in the office Rin nodded. They grabbed Teck’s elbows.
Teck jerked. “Now what?!” he demanded.
Rin smiled pleasantly. “Now,” he said, “you will help build the country.”
Teck froze. He stared Rin in the eyes and he sensed a tremendous shallowness. “You are not Khmer after all, eh?” Teck shook his head. The guards grabbed him again. Sadly Teck muttered, “You are only Communists.”
Behind the mayor’s office the executioners laughed. “Another one,” one said, “who’s spit on his own chest.”
Night descended upon the Khsach Sa camp. Many people had come, run through, vanished. A hospital worker had pulled Vathana away from her children. “Your sister, Sophan, they killed her. You must flee.”
Vathana had stared blankly, at once convinced and disbelieving. “I will wait for my husband.”
“Go now, Angel.” The worker sped on.
An old association friend had come. “Angel, you worked with the poet.”
“Yes, everyone knows.”
“He was Viet Minh. They’re killing all the Viet Minh.”
“I’m not Viet Minh.”
“They’ll kill you anyway. Go quickly.”
“Teck will come.”
All afternoon they had heard the fighting and withstood the flow of those deserting and those fleeing the forward line of the Krahom. Late in the afternoon when the sounds of battle slowed, a few Krahom advance soldiers came and told them to remain where they were until they were called. That began the refugee camp evacuation. Then came dusk and the flames leaping into the dimming sky as the pagoda and orphanage were consumed. Vathana prayed and clutched her children and prayed and collected their few belongings and rolled them into a bundle and prayed again. She prayed to Buddha, she prayed to the spirit of the sky, she prayed to Norodom Sihanouk. “You are such a gentle king.” Vathana’s lips moved but she made no sound. “I love you very much. Bring us peace. I miss you very much. Bring us peace.”
Then came a naked soldier. He ran into the tent. He ran to her corner, blubbered, “If you cry, they shoot you.” Vathana rose, grasped an old krama to give to the young man. He took no note. “Pech Chieu Teck,” he reported. “I saw him. They ate his liver.”