For the Sake of All Living Things (41 page)

The week-long early burst of monsoon rains broke and the evening air was no longer oppressive. Sophan squeezed the infant tightly to her bosom as the gawking mob pressed them against the piling at the end of the pier. “Please.” Vathana used her back and shoulders to push back against a teenage boy. “Please! You’ll force us into the river.”

An hour earlier the pier had been deserted and only the chattering of river birds and the imposing beauty of the jacaranda trees thick with deep blue-red flowers had diverted their attention from the serenity of the Mekong. The two women, the slight young mother and the older, stocky wet-nurse, sat touching, holding each other’s arms, massaging the infant’s legs and arms, breathing full breaths of air as if they’d been locked away in a dank cellar and only just released—the younger woman pouring out her trepidations as the sun dropped into smoke-gray overcast, its rays first streaking through cloud clefts, then bursting like fire, refracting from the cloud base, glistening off leaves and buildings, barges and cross-river swamps, glittering like glass shards on the rippling surface of the brown river.

“We’re an island now,” Vathana had whispered. Her preoccupation with the events of the past month obscured her vision of the spectacular scene unfolding. “Worse. More like the overcrowded life raft of a sinking ocean vessel.”

Sophan answered tenderly. “Yes Angel. An island. A lifeboat. An outpost. With Svay Rieng abandoned the front is less than twenty-five kilometers away. How can one trust that Lon Nol?”

“Sophan, the refugees. I can’t keep up with them. Every day more. I can’t even count them.”

“Must they be counted?”

“Yes. It’s the only way to get them food.”

“What does your husband say? Oh. Look up there. All those birds.”

“Like always. He says it won’t reach us. The army, he says, is very strong at protecting enclaves. Enclaves! That’s what we are. He says each day the army becomes larger. Seventy thousand have volunteered.”

“Do you see the birds, Angel?”

Upriver, in the distance, a massive flock of gliding black dots circled and swooped. “Yes,” Vathana said. “Mister Pech says if the Communists try to take any major cities, the Americans will come to our aid. Yet even now the Viet Cong hold the riverbanks. I don’t dare sail the barge.”

“What’s floating up there?”

Vathana strained to see the upriver flotsam or debris but could only make out a blackish gray clog in the brown water. She told Sophan of the most recent refugees as the wet-nurse cuddled the baby, cooed softly to him so his mother’s fears would not be sensed and frighten the child. Vathana shook her head slowly. “I don’t know what to believe,” she said. “Some of the rice farmers say the Viet Cong expelled them. Some say they fled terrible bombings. Some want to help the Khmer Rouge. Some want the army to kill all the Viet Namese. Sophan....Sophan, you’re so compassionate. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Or I without you, Angel.”

Vathana shook her head. “It becomes more difficult to buy rice just when we have more refugees to feed.”

Suddenly Sophan shook. Her arms became rigid, her neck spasmodic. A shudder transformed her soft face into a ghoulish mask.

“Everywhere people say the North Viet Namese have set a course to capture Phnom Penh....Sophan! What is it?” Vathana lifted the baby from the older woman’s frozen hands. “Sophan!”

“I...I don’t know.” The spasm passed, leaving her limp. Along the street, at the upriver levees and piers, from the market stands with their geese and fish and vegetables, a hush, then a cackle, a hush, then a building commotion.

Vathana saw people surging toward the first pier. She heard unintelligible shrieks. She clasped Sophan’s thick right hand with her delicate left as she hugged the infant. Squawking birds thick as swarming gnats swirled toward them as the grayblack clog floated closer. Youngsters sprinted down the pier to get the best view as the mass approached. Behind them, young adults then younger children and middle-aged women, and behind them like a final wave the old men, mostly refugee peasants, and the old women, a thousand in all pushing onto the pier, those in back surging, forcing those in front to the very edge, against the tops of the pilings driven into the river muck supporting the old wooden pier.

“Please!” Vathana repeated. She had handed her baby back to Sophan and was now trying to protect both from the mindless wall of flesh. “Go in front! Let us out!” Vathana’s voice was firm, authoritative, yet it was lost in the mass of tittering, jostling people.

The last of the sun was upon the water and the clog. Vathana’s mouth slackened. A hush fell over the front of the mob though those behind continued their noisy positioning. Below her, bumping the piling at the water surface, out across the main channel and still coming from upriver like a single fetid swollen blob, eight hundred bodies, the mob-executed Viet Namese men of Chrui Changwar, hands tied behind their backs, heads with faces, sides or backs blown off, floating lashed together like a raft of meat logs. Vathana tried to close her eyes. Yet her face drained of energy. She stared. Bodies bloated with decomposition gasses hissed at her, at all the gawkers, as they slowly spun in the current. Open-eyed corpses stared at her with gray fogged orbs glistening as riverwater lapped the faces then trickled like tears back into the Mekong. Naked bodies, bellies so swollen that genitals disappeared as if swallowed by giant expanding balloons, sickened her. Gaping jaws frozen in death fears flashed broken-toothed fiendish smiles at her. A body’s leg snagged the piling against which the two women were pressed. For a moment it seemed as if the entire jam would stop. Then the pressure of the other bodies in the current overcame the snag. The legs stretched apart until the body ripped at the hip and anus and the regatta from hell, reviewed unwillingly by young mother and old wet-nurse, floated on.

“Blessed One”—Vathana squeezed the Buddha statuette on the chain about her neck—“be compassionate.” The mob pressure ceased as those at the back scurried toward downriver piers to view that which they ever after would wish they’d never seen. “Compassionate One,” Vathana whispered as she removed the necklace, “bless us. Enchanted One”—she placed the amulet about her son’s neck—“what is to happen?”

“I can’t fucking believe it,” Sullivan said. “One more fucker fuckin’ ’em in one more fuckin’ way.” He had gotten drunk after hearing the tape and reading the stories and the operations and intelligence reports and reducing them to his own analysis.

Eight hours earlier he’d been elated.

“Gawd damn!” Ron Huntley had bellowed. “You shittin’ me?!”

“Nope,” Conklin had said. “I’ll tell you the whole thing when the L-T gets in. I recorded it off AFVN.”

“He goina be here in zero-five,” Huntley said. “Better crack us some beers.”

Sergeant Ron Huntley had just come in with Sullivan from an uneventful three-day ambush patrol. They had not heard the news. “It’ll take this piece a junk zero-five just to rewind the tape,” Conklin said.

“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” John Sullivan burst into the teamhouse. “Did you...”

“Old hat, L-T,” Huntley said. His feet were up on the field table, his beer was half gone. The recorder clicked as the tape finished rewinding.

“Man!” Sullivan threw a right-fisted hook into the air. “Man! They’re goina do it. They’re doing it!”

Ian Conklin pressed the play button and for Sullivan and Huntley it was 9
P.M.
Eastern Standard Time, 30 April 1970. “It is not our power but our will and character that are being tested tonight....” The voice was Richard Nixon’s. He was addressing America, announcing to his country the incursion of U.S. ground troops into Cambodia. Sullivan pulled hard on his beer. Huntley playfully splashed some of his on Conklin.

“...We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia,” Nixon said, “but for the purpose of ending the war in Viet Nam and
winning
the just peace we all desire—”

Sullivan pushed the stop button. “Where’s Major Travis?” he asked Conklin.

“Went up to province HQ,” Conklin said. “Ever since this shit came down, we’ve been swamped with info. He’s trying to make heads or tails of it with Colonel Trinh.”

“Play some more,” Huntley said. He pushed the button.

“...If, when the chips are down...America acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world....”

“Yeah,” Huntley agreed quietly. The three advisors listened to the President’s speech in its entirety. A general feeling of euphoria held them. Sergeant Quay came to them when he heard that Sullivan and Huntley were back in from ambush. Jovially and profusely he congratulated them. It was a wonderful time, a wonderful maneuver. Re came too. And Lieutenant Hoa came with Major Travis.

Conklin rewound the tape and Sullivan replayed it. Something bothered him. He went into the sleeping quarters and rewound and replayed it again, now sentence by sentence. Something. He asked Huntley to listen to parts with him and the two listened and drank more beers. “Something isn’t right,” Sullivan said.

“Sounds more right to me than anything I heard in a fuck of a long time,” Huntley shot back.

“But look,” Sullivan said. He leaned forward. “Look what he’s done. He’s laid upon this one battle’s success the success of the entire war itself.”

“So?” Huntley didn’t want anything to spoil his pleasure in knowing that American forces were, right at that minute, driving into Cambodia, battling NVA troops that had eluded them for years, that had struck at them and then pulled back into the unauthorized zone. Major Travis had brought back updated reports of movements, engagements and results. To Huntley it could not have been more positive.

“Damn it, Ron! Since when does an army’s commander-in-chief, on the eve of a surprise assault, announce to the enemy the time, scope and goals of his raid?” Sullivan banged his hand onto his cot. “That’s inconceivable arrogance. That’s stupidity. It’s a goddamned war crime. Imagine if, on 28 January 1968, Ho Chi Minh had announced the Tet Offensive, its scope, targets and units.”

“Oh, come on, man!” Huntley said, and Sullivan got up and left and went to the operations room and got Major Travis’s reports and studied them.

Years later John Sullivan would conclude that “the speech, even more than the action, ignited dozens of fuses, setting off eruptions around the world. Its immediate effect,” he would write, “was numbing shock, a state in which the information distributors ignored the realities of the Cambodian nation (exactly as the highest U.S. authority had ignored many of those same realities). The biggest tactical-strategic blunder in American military history was Richard Nixon’s handling of that announcement. Had America’s highest leadership not been compromised by that bungling, ensuing events certainly would have turned out differently. Had the announcement come at the Saigon ‘five o’clock follies,’ from a junior-grade officer—after the ascent of the Lon Nol government—something to the effect of ‘...also, in agreement with, and at the request of, the Cambodian national government, American and South Viet Namese forces will begin joint operations with FANK units in the border region in an attempt to clear the NVA resupply and staging areas in the Parrot’s Beak and west of Binh Long Province’...
period
, the explosion of antiwar sentiment and activity would have been much reduced. Top military advisors in the United States and Viet Nam had begged the President not to make the announcement a major event. General William Westmoreland had attempted to enlighten the commander-in-chief about the realities of the sanctuary area—forest camps from which the NVA could easily withdraw until the heat passed, which then they could easily reoccupy. The President’s blunder, beyond all others, represented the essence of the failure of American leadership. America’s body politic became like a person gone mad: the heart and all other organs continued to function, but the seed of futility had been planted, and the spirit needed to continue the war began its slow, torturous death.

“Some historians,” Sullivan would conclude, “have placed the turning point of American spirit at Tet 1968. Others attributed the bankruptcy of spirit to the transgression of the secret Menu bombings. These views ignore both American public opinion polls and the successes and expanding peace in South Viet Nam. The 30 April speech became the critical fulcrum of American will, Became the instigator of actions and reactions, which accelerated exponentially. Four days later the single most decisive battle of the Viet Nam War ensued, a battle with four KIAs. That battle occurred approximately twelve thousand miles east-northeast of Saigon, at Kent State University in Ohio. But before that battle tens of thousands of Americans and South Viet Namese were committed to the new Cambodian front.”

Sullivan read the first report. “On 30 April four task forces crossed the border. ARVN troops (preceded by eight B-52 sorties) rolled unhindered through Prasaut and into Chipou. Early monsoon rains have abated. The land is in a dry-season state. This has aided armored and airborne operations and favored the Allies in the border region. Guerrilla units, also moving easily, have generally fled before the ARVN and US task forces.

“A second task force, code named Operation Shoemaker,” the report went on, “launched into the ‘Fishhook’ area on 1 May. 8,000 US plus 2,000 ARVN soldiers, led by B-52 strikes and heavy artillery shellings, the column of armor [Sheridan recon vehicles, M-48 Patton tanks and M-113 armored personnel carriers from the US 11th Armored Cav, and the US 25th Infantry Division’s 34th Armor], and infantry [the US 9th Infantry Division’s 2d of the 47th, and the ARVN’s 1st Armored Cav and 3d Brigade], and airmobile infantry [the US 1st Cav and the ARVN 1st Airborne Division], have met little resistance. They have, however, uncovered and destroyed tons of enemy supplies including numerous large military trucks.

“As of 1900 hours 2 May 1970, no evidence of Hanoi’s ‘key control center, its headquarters for the entire Communist military operation in South Vietnam,’ as outlined by the commander-in-chief, has been found.