The year was 1979 and the jungle reeked of death, with a Cordite haze filling the air like a deathly fog.
After several bloody battles on the outskirts of the jungle resulted in heavy Khmer Rouge losses, the Cambodian and Vietnamese liberation forces forced the Khmer Rouge to flee deeper into the rain forest, scattering them in disarray. Nguyen and his troop of twenty soldiers were ordered into the jungle to capture or kill any stragglers. The Vietnamese soldiers knew what to do as they were proficient in this type of warfare. Armed with Chinese mk56 rifles and wearing slippers made of rubber tyres, ideal for this harsh and sometimes flooded terrain. A short way from their base camp they entered the jungle and grouped in a small clearing. Nguyen ordered his men to split up and gave them different directions where to search. “We will meet back here in three hours,” he said and his soldiers looked at their watches, taken as spoils of war from recent conflicts.
The troop split up and made their way through the foliage. However, this time, unlike the Americans, they knew they were fighting an enemy equally adept at jungle combat.
Nguyen cut his way through the dense vegetation heading toward the Mekong River, stepping over decapitated corpses, some Vietnamese, but mainly Khmer Rouge.
The stench was foul, but having experienced this before many times, he had become immune to the smell. His and his troop’s objective was to go into the rain forest, kill or capture fleeing Khmer Rouge stragglers, round up any prisoners, and bring them to their base camp set up on the jungle outskirts.
Making his way through thick, stinging foliage, Nguyen headed toward the sound of the fast flowing water of the river. Edging his way towards the riverbank, he came out of the jungle and surveyed the area. He ducked down while he checked for any sign of an ambush, but all he saw was rotting, leech covered corpses wedged between roots of mangrove trees along the river edge with patches of blood in the water, swirling around like red whirlpools. Checking his compass bearings and seeing no sign of life, he turned to go back into the jungle. He then gasped as a Khmer Rouge soldier stared at him with his rifle pointing.
Nguyen stopped in his tracks and glared at the young soldier. “Damn!” he mumbled. “Why didn’t I hear him?”
Nguyen froze as he waited to feel a bullet tear into his flesh. ‘Why hasn’t he fired? I am an easy target’ he thought and quickly raised his rifle and aimed at the black pyjama Khmer Rouge soldier’s head. He then looked at the face of his foe quivering with fear. Nguyen estimated the soldier to be about 13 years-old. He looked like a street urchin, with his face covered in tear-streaked mud. This boy reminded him of his sons, Phaol and his little scamp, Ca. He knew the Khmer Rouge children were brainwashed and unfeeling, but this boy looked terrified.
Nguyen saw the boy struggling to take aim, hands trembling and his face distorted, he fought clumsily with the large, heavy bolt-action M1 carbine.
Nguyen, now with the boys head in his crosshairs, looked at the youth, who now had his eyes closed awaited death. Nguyen saw this pitiful site, sighed, and lowered his rifle.
“Put your weapon down,” he shouted in Vietnamese.
The boy, not understanding, panicked, scrunched his eyelids tight shut, and fired at Nguyen. The bullet whistled past Nguyen’s ear and went into the jungle.
Nguyen fired, as did the panicking boy. The bullet glanced off the top of Nguyen’s head, but Nguyen’s 7.62 calibre round ripped into the boy’s chest. The boy wheezed as the round exploded from his back before falling face first onto the jungle floor.
Nguyen’s world then went fuzzy and black as he fought consciousness. His legs gave way, and he tumbled uncontrollably down the muddy embankment. He tried to grab onto something to stop his fall, but this proved futile as he splashed into the dirty brown, blood-drenched, fast flowing, Mekong River.
Semi-conscious and caught in the powerful current which kept dragging him under, Nguyen grabbed hold of a mangrove root and took a lung full of air while he clung on to the vine. Pulling himself through a mass of floating foliage and debris to the edge of the bank, he wedged himself between some exposed tree roots and caught his breath. Lying with the hot afternoon sun beating down on his face, he lost consciousness.
Nguyen awoke with a start some time later. Disorientated and confused, he regained his faculties. “Where am I?” he wondered as he grabbed the tree roots and hoisted himself up to see his surroundings.
‘I need to head downstream and get help,’ he thought, let go of the roots, pushed himself away from them, and floated on his back washed along by the current.
This was not a well-planned strategy, and he drifted on his back, being smacked against rocks in the shallows, and pulled under in the brown rivers depths.
Exhausted, he tried to guide his body into the shallows again and hang on to something. He grabbed onto the branches of a fallen tree, but some of the branches spiked him in the side, causing more puncture wounds, and lacerating his already beaten flesh.
He knew he was losing blood from his wounds and felt that he was going to die.
Holding onto a thick branch, he swung around in the shallow water. He felt a root beneath a fallen tree with his foot, so wedged both feet under the root. He let go of the branch, pivoted around, and managed to beach himself onto a shallow sandy bank. He snapped his ankle with this manoeuvre and he screamed in pain before his world went dark.
Nguyen drifted in and out of consciousness, he felt like a camera taking snapshots as he looked up at two shaven headed, emaciated women smiling down at him and then blackness.
The next time Nguyen awoke he felt a sharp pain under his armpits where a vine had been tied. He looked up at a treetop canopy and then his head and shoulders were lifted. He then felt excruciating pain in his ankle while being dragged along the ground… then darkness.
When he regained conscious again, a strong stench of decaying flesh filled his nostrils and, when he opened his eyes, a woman was mopping his brow. The woman’s gaunt, ashen face, looked like a skull covered in skin and although she had despair written in her eyes; Nguyen thought she appeared to be a kind and caring woman. The woman lifted his head and gave him a drink of foul smelling Mekong River water, which he drank. The woman smiled and said. “Don’t worry you are safe, my name is Darah… what’s yours?”
Nguyen only understood a little Cambodian, but knowing what the woman said about her name being Darah, he croaked and tried to speak before again losing consciousness.
****
Nguyen’s nursemaid, Darah, had once been a happy, beautiful, intelligent woman, but that was a lifetime ago.
She and her husband had been lawyers in Phnom Penh before the Khmer Rouge took the city.
Once Pol Pot took power in Cambodia, Darah and her husband were rounded up along with other ‘New people,’ as educated people were called by the Khmer Rouge. They sent them to communes outside Phnom Penh to be processed and transferred to work camps.
Like all educated people in Cambodia, they were despised by the Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime, who worked them to death in rice fields and quarries.
Two years after arriving at a labour camp, Darah fell pregnant, which made her life easier. The Khmer Rouge knew they would have another child to take from its parents and brainwash, so the hard labour for Darah stopped. She and her husband were moved to an easier work camp closer to Phnom Penh.
Eight months later, the Vietnamese invaded to liberate Cambodia.
The Khmer Rouge, fearing defeat, now needed to hide their atrocities from the outside world. Darah and her husband were scheduled to be transferred to Choeung Ek death camp, better known as the killing fields.
Heavily pregnant, Darah, along with other New People, traipsed several miles over dried up rice paddies before being crammed into a small river boat and taken down the Mekong river, to one of the small transit camps set up to process the wretched individuals.
They arrived at a transit camp within thick jungle and only accessible from the small riverbanks. The emaciated group were herded off the small vessel and taken to a patch of jungle cleared of trees and vegetation. The boat then left to pick up the next batch.
A young Khmer Rouge Commander barked out Pol Pot’s doctrine, and with no food and only dirty river water available, he told them that they would leave early the following morning for Choeung Ek. There were 30 soulless Cambodians in the camp, kept prisoner under small palm leaf-roofed open shelters. Darah had felt sharp twinges on the boat ride and during the evening, as her pain intensified, she went into labour. With no light and the sleeping Khmer Rouge knowing there was nowhere for then to escape, the other women helped Darah.
Darah bit down on a branch as a woman cooled her down with the brown dirty water from the Mekong.
She gave birth to a son and as one woman held her hand over the infant’s mouth to stop it screaming, another chewed through the umbilical cord.
The woman gave the struggling infant to Darah who clutched it to her chest where the infant tried in vain to suckle on her shrivelled empty breasts.
The sound of gunfire and shouting, brought a new day to an abrupt beginning, with everyone ushered outside into a small clearing. Darah wrapped her infant in a piece of cloth from her shabby skirt and hung it over her shoulder like a sling. She felt afraid knowing the Khmer Rouge would notice.
The Khmer Rouge shouted and screamed as they pushed the terrified New People into two rows, with men on one side, women the other. Darah looked at her husband and then at the ground in front of her as the Khmer Rouge barked out orders for them to kneel on the ground and dig.
Weak, they scraped away small pieces of dry soil with their bare hands and could hear the gunfire in the distance getting closer.
The Khmer Rouge scurried around them and told them to stop digging. They ordered them to put their hands behind their backs and look at the ground.
The frightened New People complied and The Khmer Rouge walked behind the men and women. After one bound their wrists another bludgeoned the back of their heads with a hoe.
There were no sounds heard from the victims during this systematic murder. They had already suffered years of torture under the Pol Pot regime, so death would be a welcome relief.
A young girl came over to Darah and snatched her newborn from the small scruffy cloth holster. She glared at Darah and walked to a nearby tree where she swung the baby hard against the trunk. A dull thud signalled the end of the baby’s short life as the girl dumped the corpse at the base of the bloodstained tree.
She looked back at Darah and grinned.
Darah looked across at her husband knelt opposite. He smiled at her and she saw his wrists tied. Happy memories of them together washed through Darah and she hoped they would spend an eternity of peace together.
A Khmer Rouge boy pushed her husband’s head down and then a loud thud sent his lifeless bloody body lurching forward.
Darah felt her arms pulled tighter behind her back as a boy bound her wrists.
A loud explosion then shook the ground as a mortar shell hit the top of a nearby tree, sending shards of metal, wood, flame and smoke, cascading above their heads.
The Khmer Rouge panicked as they shouted and screamed at one another, firing their rifles wildly into the jungle.
“Let’s get out of here,” screamed the teenage Commander, and they ran into the jungle in the opposite direction of the gun fire.
Ten minutes later the jungle clearing became quiet. They could still hear artillery in the distance but that now sounded a long way off. Apart from the smoke and smell of scorched timber, it became peaceful and serene for the survivors of the genocide.
They remained in the same position, with their ears still ringing from the sound of the explosions.
Darah, expecting the Khmer Rouge to return and finish the job, smirked and thought. ‘At least these bastards will get their comeuppance.’
She had heard the Khmer Rouge soldiers talking about the evil Vietnamese coming to conquer their country. They all sneered and bragged at the time and said they were prepared to die for Pol Pot, but these evil children had run away. Darah felt hatred towards them, even though she was Cambodian.
Minutes passed in silence and, no longer hearing any gunfire, the man kneeling next to Darah’s dead husband broke the silence.
“They’ve gone,” he said as he looked up.
Looking around and seeing no sign of the Khmer Rouge, they stood, and looked at their dead. A woman untied Darah’s bonds and for the next few hours they all milled around looking for a sense of guidance and direction.
The survivors dragged their dead into the nearby jungle, but because they were too weak to dig, they covered the bodies with lime from large brown sacks, which the Khmer Rouge stored and used to turn humans into fertiliser.
They then went to the small shelters that the Khmer Rouge had used and rested.
Over the next few days of aimlessly wondering around, they realised that the Khmer Rouge slaughterers would not return. They drank the dirty water from the Mekong River awaiting death.
One emaciated middle-aged man then spoke to the remaining fifteen survivors and sounding frail said. “We don’t know where we are or how to get away from here. Our only hope is stay alive until someone finds us.”
“What? So they can kill us,” said a woman and sighed. “We may as well just stay here and die.”
Darah, although weak, felt enraged after seeing her husband and infant murdered.
“We aren’t going to die,” she said sounding defiant. “We have water and we can catch fish and find food in the jungle.”
The other survivors looked at the rage and determination on Darah’s gaunt face and mumbled.
For the next few weeks the survivors lived on fruit and vegetables they found in the jungle. They occasionally snared lizards and rodents which they ate raw as they were unable to make fire. Undernourished and weak, every day became painful, but they were all determined to survive as a community.
Months went by, and one day as Darah and her friend went to collect water from the Mekong and check their fish traps, they saw the unconscious Nguyen washed up onto the shallow riverbed.
She and the other woman slid down the embankment and dragged him to their small camp.
Nguyen drifted in and out of consciousness over the next few days, but with no medical aid, Darah knew he would be lucky to survive as she mopped his fevered brow.
After four days, Nguyen’s fever broke and he felt pain in his ankle as he opened his eyes and saw Darah smiling down at him. “How are you feeling?”
Nguyen winced in pain as he looked at her and tried to sit.
Darah smiled and helped him.
“My name is Nguyen,” he said and looked around the clearing where the people in the camp gathered and looked at him. Nguyen looked bewildered as he looked at the ghostly gaunt figures glaring at him through soulless eyes and asked. “Where am I?”
Darah understood a little Vietnamese from her days as a lawyer and said. “We don’t know where we are.”
Over the next few days, Nguyen regained his strength.
Darah bound his ankle so he could hobble around with a thick branch as a walking stick.
Over the next few weeks, Nguyen used his expertise in jungle survival to hunt and scavenge, and taught them the natural resources of their jungle surrounds. He taught them how to make fire, efficient fish traps, and snares. He told them what jungle fruits, fungi and leaves were edible and showed them how to make bows and arrows to catch larger prey.
Nguyen’s head wound took a long time to heal, and although he could remember his name and that he was a Vietnamese soldier, his past life remained a mystery, but he felt that he had a family somewhere.
The small community began to thrive with them all now having a sense of purpose and hope, thanks to Nguyen. Darah and the others taught him the Khmer language that he soon picked up because apart from Darah, that’s all the others spoke.
Several months passed and Nguyen made a slow, painful recovery and now walked unaided, but with a limp.
At first, corpses regularly drifted down their small tributary of the Mekong, which the people from the camp dragged ashore. They took anything useful, clothing, weapons, small tools, etc., and then pushed the naked body back to carry on with its journey.
They made basic tools from what they had scavenged from the Mekong’s flotsam and built basic wooden huts using lumber and large leaved foliage from the jungle.
With the rainy season now upon them, they made large clay pots to catch fresh water, with the heavy rains refreshing and cleansing the jungle and the small community. Nguyen taught them how to make sandals from the blown out tyres washed down. These sandals were ideal for the wet jungle conditions.
The stench from the previously buried corpses of the people murdered by the Khmer Rouge dissipated, leaving a pleasant floral aroma drifting through the camp which lifted their spirits as they felt their loved one’s presence.
When corpses and useful debris stopped drifting by on the river, they all realised that either the battle had moved on or the war was over.
Because the Khmer Rouge never kept these transit camps on record, no one knew of the camp’s existence, so the small community realised they would be safe.
****
Eighteen years had now passed, and the camp had grown into a small, self-sufficient community.
Even though at first the conditions in which they survived had been harsh, they had adapted and thrived by using the jungle’s resources for food, clothing, utensils, and weapons to hunt.
There were now thirty-eight inhabitants. Several had died over the years and some of the men and women had paired off and had children. The camp was now a small Cambodian village with small stilted shacks with a larger banana leaf covered open communal hut at the centre.
Their small tributary of the Mekong River had no boat traffic due it not being on trade routes or maps, which was why the Khmer Rouge had used it for a transit death camp. Having no communication with the outside world and unaware that the conflict that had driven them to this lifestyle had been over for seventeen years, none of them felt safe leaving the village.
Nguyen and Darah had a son two years after they first met. Nguyen still could not recall his past life, but when Darah gave birth to their son, for some strange reason, Nguyen insisted they call him Ca, although he couldn’t figure out why he wanted to call his son fish, and because fish in Cambodian is Threy, nobody else knew what the name meant.
They still feared the return of the Khmer Rouge and developed their own language to communicate, a Cambodian, Vietnamese hybrid.
They kept the weapons and ammunitions that had washed up years earlier in working condition and remained on constant vigil.
Thanks to Nguyen, they were now all proficient hunters with bamboo blowpipes with cobra venom covered darts, an accurate and lethal weapon at close range. They made booby traps, from punji and bamboo stake pits, to the lethal Malay whip log. Two large logs suspended from two opposite facing trees that smashed together when the trap on the ground was tripped, crushing whoever or whatever was there, messy but effective. The community were now formidable hunters, with the children taught from an early age. They felt safe and secure thinking nothing or nobody could come into their world uninvited. That was until the strangers arrived.