For the Sake of All Living Things (15 page)

First light penetrates the jungle canopy. Met Nang opens his eyes. He is surprised at the size of the complex, at the number of small shelters. He sits up. There are at least thirty two-man sleeping positions, perhaps more, plus a dozen hammocks, and half a dozen coffins. He does not move. From the coffin lid he can see a single delicate filament strung to a leaf perhaps ten feet away. Mist has settled on the web and formed a series of miniature pearllike droplets. They are beautiful, he thinks. He shivers. He is afraid to move. Others in camp are up. He stares at the pearls, stares into the jungle. There are thousands of filaments with minute morning pearls reflecting almost imperceptibly the hint of light beneath the vegetation. Whoever Nang is, he thinks, there is still the spider, the web, the glass beads.

They can have him, he thinks. He does not think clearly, verbally. He sees his body as a mass of glutinous rice capable of being tamped and shaped by the blade of a knife. Nang’s body rises, rolls the sleeping mat and blanket. Outside, he is obedient, withdrawn, pliable, yet at the core there is a being still intact. Whether, he thinks, the vessel is Samnang or Met Nang makes no difference.

For eleven days Nang marched with the long patrol, marched through jungle and over mountains, seemingly not in a single direction but in circles, or perhaps in an expanding spiral or simply in meandering curves with a general destination but no constraint of time, marched toward the first segment of his formal training. Each day Nang marched more easily, each day he ate better, each day he became stronger and each day Met Hon instructed him in hygiene, jungle and camp life, cooking, sanitation, even sleeping, resting, sitting on one sandal with feet on the other so as not to muddy one’s clothes. Each day Hon instructed him in proper thought and action. Each day he punished him for improper behavior.

“No crying,” Hon seethed the third night.

Nang had dreamed Chhuon’s spirit was beseeching him. “But my father...” Nang began.

Hon snapped. “There is no father.” He dropped his anger. “There is only the Movement. The man who sired you only did his duty for the collective good of Cambodia.”

On the fourth day Nang asked, “May I speak to Met Ur?”

“He is ill,” Hon answered.

“But he marches with us. I’ve seen him at the rear of the column.”

Hon spit, disgusted. “Why do you concern yourself with him?”

“He’s...” Nang’s face contorted. “He’s my friend.”

“He’s a burden to the Movement,” Met Hon rasped. “The Movement is your only friend.”

“I could help him. He’ll help the Movement.”

“Ah. So you’re that strong, eh? Then you’ll be responsible for him. If he doesn’t keep up, you’ll be beaten.”

Y Bhur, Met Ur, was wretched, sick, pathetic. Nang himself felt dirtier than a sweat-coated mountain woman cutting dry rice in the hot sun, but Met Ur’s countenance was vile, repugnant. Nang’s smell was that of the unwashed; Met Ur’s that of decay, mummification. Under Hon’s eyes Nang forced himself to behold Ur, forced himself to near his friend, to touch him, to offer him a hesitant repulsed hug.

“Met Ur,” Nang whispered, “we’re...we’re to march again. I’ve come to”—Y Bhur glared at the boy through sunken hollow eyes, the skin below them so drawn and the eyeballs so shrunken and glazed, Nang could see the yellow inner tissues of the sockets—“I’ve come to help you.”

“May their spirits depart in peace,” Y Bhur muttered in Jarai. “May they never return.” Nang froze. He had lost his father and sister. He had not thought of Y Bhur’s loss. “Spirits.” Y Bhur coughed. “Do not retrace your steps.”

“Stop him from muttering that cluck,” Met Hon descended upon them. “Make him march.”

Nang gripped the boy who had once been his friend, who had once been much larger than he, gripped his flaccid arms and pulled him up. “You can do it,” he said. “You must...” He cowered beneath Hon’s glare. “His...his leg’s bad,” Nang mumbled. “It should be treated.”

“If the Movement wished to treat him,” Hon scowled, “he would be treated.”

Throughout the day Nang urged Y Bhur to walk faster, to try harder. “Do all you’re capable of,” he said as sincerely as his father had once said it to him. “Don’t cry.” When they came to steep inclines Nang half carried him. When they rested by a stream Nang unwound the leg bandage. The stench revolted him. The sight of the festering raw meat horrified him. He forced Y Bhur to sit in shallow rushing current where he, Nang, scraped the surface of the wound with a sharp stone as he’d once seen the khrou clean an abscess from his father’s foot. Nang beat the swollen thigh with the butt of the rock until the oozing yellow-green fluid turned red. Then he washed the bandage and reapplied it.

They moved again. Hon marched before them, several guards behind. “At our next rest,” Nang turned and whispered to Y Bhur in Jarai, “I’ll get you a walking stick.”

He turned back forward into Hon’s flying fist. The punch sent him sprawling. “Speak Khmer!” Met Hon spat angrily. “Or you’ll be killed.”

On the fifth day and again on the seventh and eighth the size of the column increased. Nang didn’t know the extent of the unit but he’d seen five more who he took to be, like himself, conscripts. He estimated there were at least three guards for each newly selected child.

The school to which Nang was being marched was officially known as the Liberation School, but Khmer Communist cadres (and later Royal Cambodian intelligence reports, and later still Western documents) referred to it as the School of the Cruel.

“Come on,” Nang tormented Y Bhur. “Get up. They won’t wait.” Y Bhur rolled to his side and pulled himself halfway up using the staff Nang had brought. He looked to Nang for assistance. They did not speak. In the five days since Nang had begun helping him his strength and condition had stabilized. He was sallow, limp, odorous and repulsive but the slide toward death had temporarily halted. Nang washed his bandage and wound only twice more, both on their second day. That night six guards beat Nang and for the next two days his rice ration was halved. “Damn it,” Nang cursed Y Bhur like Met Hon had cursed him so many times. “March. March, Met Ur, or
I
shall beat
you
.”

During marches Nang did not speak. He eyed Hon and the guards. Except for Met Hon all were humorless, faceless, hostile. Stupid, Nang thought. Underlings, he thought. Not crocodiles, not tigers: Dogs.

On the eleventh day they marched into the crotch of two blunt Laotian legs which jutted into Cambodia. They climbed beside a creek for several kilometers then rested and set up cooking fires. Met Hon motioned for Met Nang to come with him and Nang obeyed immediately. Hon led him nearly a hundred meters away from the others. Before he spoke he sized up Nang with his eyes. He spoke gently. “If you’re to survive, Little Brother,” he said, using the forbidden appellation, “you must learn to keep your mouth shut, your eyes closed and your ears plugged. You must forget everything from the past.” He glanced up the mountain. “Pong Pay is the hardest training on earth.” Nang looked up but could see little other than the vegetation of the canopy. “If you’re going to become a comrade of the Movement, not just a soldier, you must be serious. You must do what you are told.”

The cadres did not come for the conscripts until night had settled upon the temporary camp. At dusk the conscripts had been huddled together at the camp’s center, had had their wrists tied behind their backs with vines, and then all their hands were tied together. If seen from above they would have looked like a human wheel, their hands the hub, their arms stretched behind their backs like spokes.

“No words! No movement!” Met Hon had ordered. Then he and the guards had backed into the jungle and vanished.

For ten minutes no one spoke. They stood quietly in the blackness. Fear descended upon them, ten boys trapped, trussed together, cold, alone, shaking. Y Bhur broke the silence. He was wired to Nang on his left and a Khmer boy he’d heard called Pah on his right. “Samnang,” Y Bhur whispered. He spoke in Jarai. “My hands. I think I can get loose. We can run away.”

Nang shuddered silently. Y Bhur’s hands twisted at the hub of the wheel. The motion tightened the vines about the others’ wrists. “Samnang, raise your hand. No, push it down.”

On the far side a Mnong boy wept quietly, wrenched his hands distorting the circle. Another boy grunted. One groaned at the increasing pain. A third muttered in French, “Stop. You’re cutting me.”

“Be still!” Nang snapped. The boys quieted, quit pulling at the vines. Nang cowered—ashamed in the dark, ashamed of his voice, his order, afraid of alienating the others. Y Bhur again twisted. He pulled hard with his right hand and pushed with his left. The vines cut into the base of his right thumb. He pulled harder, twisting toward Nang. The vine slid. His hand deformed from the pressure, molded to the oblique circuit of liana. He pulled harder, gouging his flesh. The blood greased his skin. The vine began to slip. Nang raised his right foot. He cocked his leg behind him. “Be still!” he sneered. Then he whipped his knee into Y Bhur’s wounded thigh.

“Aaaaahhh!” Y Bhur shouted. “Why...oooph!” A club struck him in the chest. Another hit him. Then all of the conscripts were being wildly beaten by unseen attackers, bashed in the legs, the groin, the stomach. One cringing pulled another forward into a bludgeoning blow.

“Stand still!”
The order came in Khmer from deep in the blackness. The blows softened to probes and jabs. Still the boys could not see their tormentors.

A club poked Y Bhur in the groin. “Fuck water buffalo,” he hissed in Jarai.

“With your member.” The tormentor laughed. He spoke Jarai.

Y Bhur lunged outward trying to butt his head against the source of the voice in the dark. The entire circle stumbled, the sides fell, the back toppled. Y Bhur, pinned at the bottom, screamed vicious obscenities in Jarai and Khmer and Viet Namese.

“Quiet!” The order came from nearby. The officer moved close. “You shall be as one,” he said calmly. “You shall walk as one. School is two kilometers. If you walk as a team, we will be there shortly. If you walk as ten...Well, we have all night. You”—he reached down and grabbed a head by the hair and lifted—“you shall lead off. What’s your name?”

“Met Nang.”

A slap stung Nang’s face. He shivered, tried to pull his face into his chest. “Nang,” the cadreman said. “You don’t merit to be called ‘comrade.’ If you last through school, then you’ll be Met Nang. Now walk.” Nang could feel the conscripts struggling to their feet beside and behind him. “Met Din,” the cadreman said softly, “hook your rope to Nang’s neck so he’ll know the way.”

The night was hard on the conscripts. For hours, tied, they stumbled in the dark attempting to negotiate steep, narrow mountain trails. When one fell, they all fell. When one collapsed, they all collapsed. The clubbings continued. If their progress was too slow the leader was jabbed in the stomach. Then the lead changed. At times the boys worked together, counting steps quietly to develop a rhythm, but more often they argued nastily, blaming one another, or one gave up, fell, cried like an infant, or tugged back when he felt another tug too hard. The guards laughed at the boys’ pain.

As dawn broke they glimpsed the compound for the first time. Nang glanced furtively past Y Bhur. He looked down. Not until they had reached a point only two or three meters from the bluff did any of them realize they had finished their night’s trek. They stood at the edge of a small cliff which formed one end barrier of the school. Ten feet below, and stretching for several hundred meters, Nang could see a huge, partially camouflaged compound sectioned like an egg crate into subcamps by high bamboo fences. The closest compound was empty except for a flagpole with a small red flag hanging limp. Other sections held a variety of buildings: one had small shells, another seemingly had longhouses and schools. Glimpses of hundreds of armed guards along the fences made him tremble.

A guard’s laugh tore him from the view. The guard laughed hysterically. Other guards were pointing to different boys and giggling mean giggles. They placed wagers—this one will break, this one will die, this one will be good fertilizer. More guards appeared. They were dressed in black with red- or green-striped kramas about their necks. They were more solemn though they too laughed menacingly. The guards of the night stood back and gave wide berth to the new squad. The conscripts, still tied in a wheel, sensed a new phase had begun.

One boy, the smallest, to Nang’s left, began sobbing. Nang jerked the hub, trying to shake the child. Two more black-clad guards appeared. Between them they carried a long, thick bamboo pole. They chuckled. The others laughed. The conscripts cowered, silent except for the littlest, spent, exhausted from days of fear and constant walking, and the night of the wheel. Nang knew what was coming. He sensed the meaning of the bluff even before the pole appeared, and he vowed inwardly to survive. The pole was placed tangentially against the circle, contacting at the waists of two boys with their backs to the bluff. The two touched by the pole stepped back, forcing the wheel to stumble a step closer to the edge. At each end of the pole, first one, then two, then three guards pushed the pole toward the small cliff. The wheel resisted. The guards pushed harder though not hard enough to force the wheel off the edge. Y Bhur faced the cliff. Below, the ground was barren red-orange hardpack. Nang, to his left, planted his heels as best he could. He crouched, pulled with his right hand, pushed with his left, trying to turn the circle. He did not want to be on the bottom when they hit. Y Bhur stood, offered little resistance. Some resisted violently, some spasmodically. The circle turned counterclockwise a full hour as the side opposite Nang fell back a step under the pressure of the pole. The guards giggled, keeping the pressure constant, not wanting to push the wheel over the cliff, which they could have easily done, but wanting to see the conscripts relent, slowly, to their sense of the inevitable. “Nooo,” the smallest boy wailed. “No-aaahh.” The far side stumbled back another step, the circle rotated. If the boy with his toes over the bluff’s edge was at twelve o’clock, Nang was at nine. He judged that to be a good position. The guards forced the pole another inch. The heels of the boy at twelve skidded to the edge, he straightened, the edge collapsed, his feet shot out, his arms snapped up as the hub resisted, then slowly the sides collapsed, accelerating, Y Bhur to his right knee, off, others, then all. The wheel slapped down, a rapid thudding and three loud cracks. Guards cheered. Then the moaning began.