For the Sake of All Living Things (126 page)

Met Nem and Kosol broke into the room. “Get
out
!” Nang shrieked.

Vathana vomited. Again she glared at Nang. Still he sat on the floor. “Every day, every night, I see the dead parade before me and it’s...
it’s...it’s
because of my own brother.
My brother
!”

“Who’s your brother? Don’t be stupid. I’m...”

“Cahuom Samnang. That’s who you are. Little Samnang, son of Chhuon, lost at Plei Srepok...Oh! Oh...oh...oh...” She beat her fists on the floor, on her thighs. For a long time she cried. Nang sat stupefied. Then he rose, collected his tunic and left.

He did not return until long after the rains began. The monsoon rains of 1978 were heavier even than those of 1977, the worst in a hundred years. Everywhere fields washed out and people died but Vathana no longer was privileged to witness the genocide. No longer was she caged, but she did not flee. The house staff bitched constantly to her about betrayals, about new conditions, about Met Sar’s ignoble abandonment. They treated her not like a prisoner but like the shadow queen, yet she knew she could not escape. By June yotheas were complaining about the lack of rice and other staples, about the renewed moaning because there was no gasoline, about the loathsome stench which even the heaviest rains in a century could not wash from the air.

Then Nang returned. He was insane. With the others he bitched about the odor and the moaning though daily he tabulated the progress Site 169 was making in the eradication of enemies and useless elements. Each tenth day he filed his report exactly as he had for three years. And if the progress was less than satisfactory Nang meted out punishment to cadre and subordinates as if none of his acts were tied to the moaning and the odor.

In July Nang took Vathana back toward the cliff. She had read and memorized Chhuon’s file, had sent Met Arn to unearth the middle notebooks.

At the base of the cliff Nang took an overgrown path she’d not seen. It led down a steep escarpment to a gushing, vine-cloaked stream which flowed from the cliff. “I found it when I came for my father.” Nang’s words were unconnected to previous utterances. The banks were red—from laterite soil or blood. He led her, in silence, downstream hundreds of meters. There, partially buried by jungle, was a small temple. “I’ve been cleaning it,” Nang whispered. The stone walls were carved with hundreds of lingas, phallic symbols, the symbols of creative power of the Hindu god Siva. “He wished to bless the waters which flow to the paddies,” Nang said. “This is where I am from. I came at the wrong time.”

“Samnang,” Vathana whispered, “for our father...your father...let me go. Let the people escape.” Nang grasped her hand and pulled her to a second wall bedecked with ancient Apsarases, the heavenly maidens of Kambuja, and tortured slaves. “Samnang, you have a choice.”

“Like them”—Nang rubbed a hand on the bas relief—“we are condemned to cycles of destruction and creation.”

“Do you hear me? You can choose, right now. You can let the people live. They are not animals. Even animals, Samnang...Samnang...”

“Do you know why we call them yuons?”

“What? No. Listen. Please listen.”

“When Chams attacked Kambuja in the tenth century they had Viet slaves. They were called
yavana
, evil foreigners.”

“Samnang, you do not have to kill.”

“Hum? Every Khmer must kill. Everyone must kill thirty yuons. The Center so decrees. We may sacrifice two million in combat but we will kill sixty million Viet Namese. There will still be millions of Kampucheans to repopulate all Southeast Asia. I will have them all work harder. Double our production.”

“Samnang! Stop! Stop it! We don’t need to wipe out the Viet Namese. They aren’t devils. They’re humans too.”

“Ha! I know. Ha!” Nang turned to her, pulled her close, whispered so even the Apsarases couldn’t hear, “i’ve had a meeting, ssshh! no one must know, first i must finish the killings. then...
ha
! i’ve met with them.”

The interior of Democratic Kampuchea in mid- and late 1978 was more treacherous than anything Sullivan had seen in Viet Nam or Cambodia in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Ambushes were everywhere. The bodies of those who’d attempted escape lined the routes to the border. And of those who did not flee, the reports were numbing. The killings were the heaviest of the Pol Pot years. Like Nazi Germany in 1945, Angkar Leou seemed bent on stamping out the evidence of its own atrocities. It turned not only on the people but also upon itself, and the bloodbath leaped by logarithmic degrees up a vengeance scale. The Free World barely reacted.

New mass deportations struck some areas. Starvation continued everywhere. Reports claimed that up to 300,000 Khmers had fled to Viet Nam, that Krahom military units continued to mutiny, that forty thousand Khmer insurgents were “working the border” and that the Center had decreed a new offensive against the Viet Namese. The trickle of refugees to Thailand increased to a steady stream. Still the Free World barely reacted.

Sullivan and Conklin found penetration deeper than a few kilometers almost impossible. They were
phalangs
, tall white foreigners. No matter where they went, they stood out. Still they made their forays—into the South, the center, the North. Always they returned, sometimes empty-handed, sometimes with a fleeing family in tow, to a small house they’d rented near Aranyaprathet. The home was in the town where many of the relief agencies had field headquarters. They made their house their headquarters, their information center. They lined the walls with maps, concocted an elaborate file system of where they’d searched, what they’d learned, where the people they’d contacted originated from, and their route to that border point.

Newsweek
magazine carried refugee stories in the 23 January issue. The articles concluded, “Some of the horror stories told by refugees about life in Cambodia are undoubtedly exaggerations....Several prominent Indochina experts have recently disputed many of the refugees’ charges, contending that a few thousand Cambodians at the most have died at the hands of Angkar Leou. They also maintain that it was a matter of economic necessity to relocate the population into rural areas because U.S. bombing forced too many people off the land during the Vietnam War.”

“Damn!” Sullivan blurted, reading the old issue which had just arrived. “If one replaces the word Cambodia with Germany the statement could have been from Free World papers of 1943 or even ’44 or ’45. Will we ever learn? It’s so much easier to deny the reports. Then they don’t have to feel the guilt of apathy.”

Conklin picked up the magazine. The article showed photos of “baby-faced executioners” and spoke of ghost towns. “Who the fuck are these ‘experts’?”

“Can’t you guess?” Sullivan snapped back.

In the same issue there was a story about Soviet expansionism into the Horn of Africa—the USSR can move three divisions to African supply sites in one day. Also noted was the assassination in Nicaragua of
La Prensa
editor Pedro Joaquin Chamorro-Cardenal. Allegedly he was murdered by Somoza-backed death squads though there was the possibility the killers were Sandinistas posing as Somoza men. The death touched off major street rioting. Both stories, Sullivan said to Conklin, smacked of standard insurgent tactics seen in Southeast Asia for the past three decades. “How come they don’t suggest a connection?”

The two ex-Special Forces teammates crossed the border west of Preah Vihear in June. For three kilometers the area had been picked clean. Then they came upon an uncrossable swath of forest evidently so littered with land mines that even Khmer Rouge soldiers couldn’t pick their way through. They moved cautiously west, trying to outflank the mined belt. For two days they saw nothing but the mutilated bodies of soldiers. On their return to Aranyaprathet Sullivan was more depressed than ever.

His new reading material did nothing to bolster his spirits. Columnist David Broder, speaking of U.S. involvement in Central America, simply said America was pursuing “the path of stupidity again.” Quoting Senator Frank Church he said, “...we seem unable to learn from the failure of our Viet Nam policy...Somehow, someday, this country has got to learn to live with revolutions in the third world.”

“Which stupid lessons shall we learn, Mister Broder?” Sullivan threw the article at Conklin. “Shall we learn to allow the Pol Pots of the world to slaughter their own people—as long as we don’t see it? This morally depraved person thinks not. There are other lessons we should learn. To hide our heads is not one. To question why our Viet Nam policies failed is valid and essential, but to do so means to examine and analyze, not to accept flippant propaganda.”

In June 1978, Viet Nam cracked down on its 1.5 million people of Chinese ancestry, confiscating their property and driving them from their homes. In Asia it was major news. From what Sullivan and Conklin saw of American press coverage, it was virtually ignored. “Hey,” Conklin chuckled cynically. “What’d ya expect? There’s no photos of the self-immolation protests. No photos, no story, right? Didn’t happen!”

“Know what I think?” Sullivan countered. “I think we’re seeing a new American society—one so convinced of its own evil, it seeks only to reinforce that image. What effect is that gonna produce down the line? How many Democratic Kampucheas is this world gonna have?”

“Fuck it, man,” Conklin said.

“Fuck it is right,” Sullivan said. “There’s no chance, Conk. There’s no chance they’re alive.”

“Yes there is.”

“We haven’t been able to trace anybody, nobody, back to Neak Luong. Ya know what?”

“Come on, J. L. We’ve still helped a lot of people.”

“Fuck it. I’m sick of it. I’m gonna follow the American example. The American plan. That’s what the travel agents call it, eh?”

“What American plan?”

“I’m gonna quit.”

Met Kosal has been replaced by two ten-year-old boys; Met Nem by a nine-year-old girl. The boys carry AK-47 rifles which dwarf them. The girl is unarmed—even her eyes—a total emptiness. They do not have names. They are “Comrade Child.” Nothing more. Today, Vathana is under casual house arrest. She sits in a large wicker chair in the central room watching these beautiful, relatively well nourished children. They speak Khmer though she finds she cannot understand them—their language is so different. These are the new people of Met Sar, of Pol Pot, of Mao Zedong, of Ho Chi Minh, of Lenin and Marx—the New Communist Man and Woman. Nang is not home, has not been in the house for a week. For a week he has not brought Vathana to the cliff. Vathana does not know why. She finds herself praying for him, her little brother, praying, hoping he will perish peacefully. Comrade Child, girl, brings Vathana’s lunch on a tray. The food is sufficient—bland rice with some kind of meat dried to hard tack—but it is not good—prepared with little skill, little thought. Still it is more than the people get, much more. Vathana does not eat; does not move. Many children, very young, five to eight, come and go. The girl, Met Child, gives orders but Vathana cannot ascertain an orderliness. The moaning from the abyss comes and goes, too. For months it has been continuous, oscillating only in intensity. At the moment it is louder than ever before. The nightly burnings have been suspended because there is so little gasoline and what there is is being used at the front. The children are abuzz. There are visitors. There are rumors. “The yuons are coming.” Vathana doesn’t move. Half a dozen little boys are running, playing. One steals some food from her tray. He dives behind her chair. Others are shooting at him with their fingers. Another takes food from the tray. Then another. Vathana doesn’t move. She feels exposed, raw, as if she’d been skinned and all her nerve endings exposed. Even the wind currents from the moving children are painful. The food disappears. The little boys leave. The one from behind her chair slithers around to the front. Then he stands. He faces her, stares at her as if she is a stone object. He nudges her leg with his knee. Vathana watches him carefully, studies him. His eyes are bright, he is beautiful, more beautiful even than her own son, as beautiful as Samay when he was so small, almost as beautiful as Samnang. The little boy raises his hand, points his finger, cocks his thumb. “Bang! You’re dead!” He runs out.

Vathana feels vulnerable, still she cannot move. She is not afraid of death, not afraid of torture. Everyone is vulnerable to those—no one escapes either—there are many forms of torture. But...Her brain refuses to carry the thought, to let it grow, blossom. Other thoughts germinate...to save her brother’s soul...what did he mean, ‘I’ve met with them’?...to get him to stop the killing...to let them all flee....The ideas pull in so many directions that her core thoughts behind those large black eyes are unable to move, unable to decide on a thought to think, catatonic. Still the vulnerability to...to...not to be killed but to kill. Not to be tortured but to torture. If her own brother could become a mass executioner, why not she? Why not me? Why not you?

“Where is Little Rabbit?” Vathana can see a young man on the porch. He is Nang’s height, perhaps slightly shorter. He’s built powerfully like Nang, perhaps more powerfully. He wears a khaki tunic with a white shirt beneath, a symbol of his status. With him are a platoon of older yotheas—seventeen to twenty-two years old.

Comrade Child, girl, does not understand. “Rabbit Number Two?” the man says. “Night Rabbit! Met Nang!” Vathana is certain Comrade Child is playing dumb. Most of the children have disappeared. For one so young, Vathana thinks, she is very worthy. The rifles which usually stand in a central room rack are gone.

“Yes, we have here Met Nang. He is not here but he is here coming.”

“Tell him Eng has come to assist him.”

“Met Eng?” Met Child, girl, cracks an infinitesimal smile.

“Met Eng of Angkar Leou. Nang is my very long time friend.”

For many days Met Eng stays at the house of Nang. His platoons, with Met Soth as an attaché, set up bivouac beyond the yard. Nang returns. The men meet privately. Their planning is detailed, far-reaching. Vathana knows none of it but every day she sees changes. No longer is the food sufficient. And Nang no longer looks healthy. His face sags, the scar tissue on the right side wrinkles, folds like soft wax. The scar on the left deepens as if it were a tightening cord burying itself into his head. Each day he is different. Each night he locks her in the tiger cage and prattles quietly. “Now Eng is here,” he confides to Vathana, “how everything will be made right. He will not let me fail. All enemies will be utterly crushed.” The next night he whispers, “The Viet Namese are coming. They’ve ten thousand troops in the East, a hundred and twenty thousand at the border. Soon they’ll come. Eng will be disappeared. We shall lead them.” Then the next, “Tomorrow get rice. Hide it where we can get it fast.” Then, “If they conquer us, first we’ll be their subjects, then slaves in their colony, then a minority in our own land. They’ll kill every Kampuchean. Khmer will be no more.”