For the Sake of All Living Things (95 page)

Sar smiled. His long white teeth glistened in the sun. He mopped his high forehead with a handkerchief. Then he clapped a hand on Nang’s shoulder. “Your new assignment...” he began. His smile was so wide his upper gums showed a quarter inch. He did not look at Nang but past him, did not focus on the scarred face but on his own hand on the boy’s shoulder. Sar laughed amicably. “Just as you wanted, eh? You must teach them very quickly. Met Paak will tell you. Ah, it is so good for me to be able to give you what you desire. Go now. Be desire not. It is the will of Angkar Leou.”

All that happened next happened quickly. Nang was sped north, rushed with a thousand toward Kompong Thom, split from them as they fragmented to reman the units of attack. On 7 February 1973 Sihanouk’s informal announcement was made public—the battle for Cambodia would continue. On the 8th, word reached Krahom cadre that Henry Kissinger was in Thailand to coordinate a new bombing war against Communists in Cambodia. On the 9th, U.S. bombing hit the Cambodian interior in full force.

“Ay, Met Nang. It is so good to see you. Have you quit whoring in the capital and returned to soldiering again?”

“Met Eng!” The words, the idea that Eng thought he, Nang, might have been with women, embarrassed him. But to soldier again, that was the reward. Nang embraced his old friend. They were just east of the sieging forces. “I’m to have a regiment for the new offensive,” Nang said proudly.

“New! Ha! Ah, a regiment like me, eh? You will be very proud.”

“You’ve a regiment?!”

“Mostly. We’ve been at the front knocking off lackey dogs. You know, the
old
offensive.” Eng chuckled. “Today we refit. Tomorrow we attack again. Can you join us? I’ll teach you how to hug the cur’s neck so tightly their damned bombers and helicopters are neutralized. Ha! It’s good to have seen you. I’ve got to get my fighters prepared.”

So quickly people came, went, Nang barely heard, saw or understood what was happening. It was as if a fine veil had been draped over everything before him and though he indeed did see, did hear, he saw and heard muted sights and sounds. Still it made him itch to fight, to direct yotheas against the despicable oppressors, to hear the sounds of battle, feel the power of the guns, smell the odor of cordite and blood.

Northeast of Kompong Thom, Nang was transferred to a squad of neary. The girls were young, serious, nearly mute. For a day he walked forest trails forcing himself to keep up. By nightfall they had melded with a company, by midnight with a battalion, by morning with a reinforced regiment.

“Met Nang.” Met Nu found him eating alone amid clustered cells of neary. “You’ve become soft in the city, eh?”

“Soft, comrade?” Nang fought to keep a grin from his face.

“You’ve no fighters?!” she said.

“I’m to have a regiment.” Nang stood, puffed out his chest.

“I’ve two,” Nu said. Her voice was cool. “All
neary.
Three thousand strong.”

“Three thousand girls! What can they do, eh?”

“Neary! Young women! They fight with the utmost resolve.” Nu snickered. “They burned Bailaing College and recruited all the students.”

“Bailaing? In Kompong Thom?”

“Yes.” Now Nu smiled. “You are still only a little piggy, aren’t you?”

Again Nang moved north, first to Rovieng then northeast to the intermittent grasslands and jungle east of Kompong Pranak. With each step he beat his fists against his stomach or against his thighs or into his shoulders or chest. Soft, he thought. His chest burned. Only a piggy, he thought. Whoring, he thought. His vision blurred. New offensive! He heard Eng’s laugh rattle in his mind. The jungle was dry, water holes were tepid and greasy with decomposing vegetable and animal matter. He stumbled on, squeezing his left fist and right pincer into sledgehammers. What they have done, he thought, to my father, he thought, they have done to me. Plei Srepok! Sraang! Yani! Names without faces bombarded him. Burned the college! “Without the people,” he thought, “we shall have no information, we shall be able neither to preserve secrecy nor carry out rapid movements.” They were General Giap’s words. Yuon scum, but they were good words. “The people...hide us, protect our activities, feed us, tend our wounded.” No more! Nang thought. No more. He punched his face. The blow jarred his head and hurt the muscles at the back of his neck. Soft no more.

At eight o’clock Vathana excused herself from the refugee processing table and walked back, behind the blue tarp curtain, deeper into the clinic tent toward where she, her children and Sophan had again taken up residence on a single cot in a far corner. She was exhausted. The camp was again being assaulted by waves of new arrivals. Quietly Vathana stepped between the rows of people, over the pitiful belongings of the listless and ill. Here a woman beseeched her quietly, cautiously, asking for a blessing, perhaps a smile. There an old man hunched, arms akimbo, one leg splayed to the side, three grandchildren tucked into the arches and aches of his pathetic body. Vathana’s eyes skimmed from his cot to the next, to the next, to the next. So many people, she thought. They are impossible to count much less help. Here one lay dehydrated, there one feverish, there one broken from a beating or a fall while fleeing. Blessed One, she thought, as she crossed beneath the huge, sagging ridgepole hung with a hundred bundles of food or clothes or whatever the inhabitants believed valuable. Blessed One, give me the strength to help as long as I may be of help. She thought of the new arrivals, of those animated with terror chattering continuously and of those shocked into painful withdrawn silence. Which do I prefer? she thought against conscious desire to think. Why must I prefer one to the other? But I do. The terror-stricken talkers scare me to death with their tales of children being nailed to trees by Khmer Rouge soldiers, yet they are easier—oh, is that the word, the feeling, easier?—easier to register than the ones in stupor. Those...they act as if they are afraid of me!

“Da-da deet-ta, deet-ta deet-ta, da-da...” Sophan had a bucket and wash towel and was methodically removing the dust, the camp filth, the vile Stench of their clinic-tent home from Samnang. “...deet-ta, deet-ta deet-ta...”

Vathana paused, watched from a dozen paces. Samol lay on her side watching the stolid woman scrub her brother. The little girl’s cheeks were hollow. Her eyes watered from airborne dust and perhaps low-grade fever. Seeing her daughter so, all the hates and all the fears of the new order inundated Vathana’s mind. “Truth and patience,” Vathana thought. They were Sophan’s words. Truth and patience and a gratitude for what we do have, Angel. But what we have, she thought, are new attacks, new bombings, more refugees than ever before and fewer ways to help.

Vathana raised her hands, clapped them to her nose and mouth. Her innards trembled. She fought back tears. What had Kosol said? We’ve a new radio grid. A direct link to the North. She’d thought it meant Ratanakiri or Stung Treng and had thought she’d be able to talk with her mother and father, and had said so to a frightened, registering young man but he, a deserter, had said no, it means Hanoi. A radio link to Hanoi?! But why? I don’t know, the deserter had said, and she’d processed him as a refugee, as an orphan, using the name Keo Samnang. All the fears. In February FANK’s 1st Shock Battalion had driven into Phnom Penh and staged a sit-down strike at the presidential palace. How can they protect us? Root out the infrastructure! Torture innocent civilians. It is only a matter of time, eh? She had confessed that feeling to Sophan and Sophan had looked at her as if she’d gone mad. Don’t think it, Angel. It’s not good for the baby and it’s not good for you. But the associations, Vathana had replied. I’ve been so active. And if it was because of Captain Sullivan that we enjoyed protection...he’s not here any longer. Vathana’s mind leaped to new fears. The old wet-nurse was subjecting Samol to the same torturous body-scrub which Samnang had endured, had—such a strong boy, the Ba-Ba Boy—enjoyed. What if she died? Poor frail Samol. Or the new baby? Or Vathana in childbirth? Had she heard the owl hoot? A chatterer had, and her child had been stillborn. With so many sounds, how could she know if she’d heard the owl hoot? Why had they been abandoned? Any day, any day the Khmer Rouge might enter the city. It was only a matter of time. Of waiting. They might be hit tonight. Takeo had fallen. That’s what the deserter said. And Svay Rieng and Prey Veng and dozens of villages closer to Phnom Penh. Everywhere, people said, there were battles. Would FANK abandon them? Would the Khmer Rouge pass Neak Luong by? Why had America abandoned them? Why had John Sullivan gone? So abruptly! So abrupt. Oh, Vathana thought, I cannot feel this. I have never felt this. I wish all Viet Namese would perish. Dear Beautiful Enlightened One, do not let me feel so. Do not let me hate. How does John say?...Discipline one’s mind. Form a habit of patient investigation...like Sophan. If it would just...just...just could end. Right now. Right now. I cannot go another step. How can I be trapped here, trapped in this pregnancy, in this camp? Teck would take me...Not another step...

A young couple with two children and a crippled uncle occupied the cot to Vathana’s left. For some time they’d waited for her to move from their space. Her standing there just was not proper. The young woman reached up and nudged Vathana. Vathana startled. “Every step a prayer, Sister, eh?” the woman said. “Every step a prayer.”

Before she could move a boy from the registration desk called softly into the dim, crowded corner. “Angel, there’s a Western lady here to see you.”

It pained Vathana to depart, to leave the children even before she’d reached them, hugged them. The idea of returning the short distance to the reception area seemed to her like a major task, a trek of light-years. Still, she turned, obeyed, raised her head and set off on the return voyage. She hesitated, thought, “A Western lady?” Who can it be? What does she want? Why don’t they all go away? She approached the table without her usual confidence.

Rita Donaldson’s eyes followed Vathana from the moment she emerged from the blue tarp. Immediately she saw the trepidation, the fragility, the delicacy of the brown woman, saw the brown woman’s thin face and arms and shrunken breasts, saw in her the lost resilience of Cambodia, the lost elasticity and strength of a people whose diet has been reduced every year, on whom emotional strain had compounded physical hardship, people in dire need of a solution before they succumbed.

For a moment the two women stood facing each other from opposite sides of the reception table. Gradually, simultaneously, both smiled. Rita’s light blue eyes twinkled as if she’d just discovered she had a younger sister; Vathana’s eyes sparkled, too, feeling, oddly, that this woman knew her as well as any person had ever known her. Very quickly they were talking, in French with scattered common Khmer phrases, getting to know each other, chattering not as interviewer and interviewee but as colleagues.

“...the Khmer Rouge,” Rita was saying, “their growth has been phenomenal.”

“Not so phenomenal,” Vathana explained. “They grow because FANK is so stupid, so corrupt and ruthless. Captain Sullivan would say that. You agree, eh?”

“With John Sullivan? Yes. He was one of the few who actually cared. Actually took the time to know what it was all about.”

“He cared very much, eh?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Do other Americans? The bombs get closer...”

“Hmm. Most of the bombings, at least in the reports, are said to be against the NVA buildup in the border sanctuaries. Are they coming into the interior after the Khmer Rouge?”

“Oh yes. I think. I think it’s good America hasn’t abandoned us completely, but then I think they will as they did South Viet Nam. Ten years then, poof! they’re all gone.”

“Real poof!” Rita chuckled. “Real Nixon hocus-pocus. There are still fifty-four thousand American troops in Thailand and another sixty thousand on 7th Fleet ships off the coast.”

“So many!?”

“Um-hum.” Rita reached out and touched Vathana’s hand. “I need someone in this area to help me get my stories. A stringer.” Vathana nodded understanding of the term. “It doesn’t pay much. A pittance. But when people come and tell you about the bombings, then you tell me...”

“Captain Sullivan told me how important this is,” Vathana said. “So America can know Cambodia and then behave better toward her. That would be much more than a pittance.”

“Yes,” Rita said professionally. She added, “Do you have enough rice for yourself and your family? With inflation running, what was the last report, 257 percent...I have a few black market connections...”

“These,” Met Paak said, “are yours.” Nang and the commander of the Northern Zone Army stood on the edge of a long narrow platform overlooking Nang’s new command. “There are sixteen hundred,” Met Paak said. “Teach them. Train them.” Nang looked out across the opening and into the brush to the west where a mass of young boys were sitting or standing, milling about in clusters. “Met Sar tells me you can do it more quickly than any commander,” Paak said. “Good. I am entrusting you with creating a new regiment.”

“And cadre?” Nang asked. He gritted his teeth, swallowed. Them! he thought. They’re nothing. Children.

“Of course.” Paak chuckled. “You’ve a
core
of trained yotheas—all who’ve served with you before. Duch, your old radioman from the battles in Ratanakiri—he heard you were coming and he’s gathered them. Von, Ung and Sol, eh? You remember. Make them your battalion commanders. Some others. Met Nang, you are the 91st Armed Infantry Regiment of the Kampuchean Liberation Army. Train quickly. We must attain victory before the yuons or they will use the South as a base to consume Kampuchea. In three weeks you will move south.”

Nang stood alone on the platform. He could not see all the boys but, what he saw was disheartening. Children. Little brown boys with thin arms and skinny necks. Eng, Nang thought, has a real regiment. Nu has more than two. But me, I get a handful of untrained, frightened children.

On 9 March 1973, before Met Nang had even met with his cadre, other Krahom yotheas toppled the towns of Chambak and Samrong only twenty and twenty-four miles, respectively, south of Phnom Penh, and shelled Takhmau, only six miles south of the capital. Ten days later FANK’s elite 7th Brigade counterattacked and retook the two towns, but the Communists disengaged and seemed to slide sideways like a matador behind a smokescreen cape, then attacked at the nearby town of Phrasath Neang Khmaru. Additional KK units assaulted at Angtassom at the junction of Highways 3 and 25, at Roka Kong and Mouk Kampoul on the Mekong northeast of the capital and at Romeas on Highway 5 to the northwest.