For the Sake of All Living Things (22 page)

Each day began with rigorous calisthenics followed by long, grueling hill runs and practice sessions in crawling, hiding, digging in and hand-to-hand combat. Then lecture, drill, review, rehearsal. Through the long months of training Nang changed. He had shed his flimsy appearance at the School of the Cruel, now, taller, he filled out, added muscle, developed a form like his father’s.

Lectures were systematic. Each class began with one student reading the material aloud while the others followed in workbooks. Trainers demonstrated and summarized, then asked for opinions, which were mandatory. Every student responded either by rote or by paraphrasing. No deviations in thought or style were accepted. Nonconforming thought, political or military, was justification for a public self-criticism session. Repeated nonconformity was justification for washing out.

Nang learned pistol and rifle marksmanship. He fired SKS and AR-15 carbines, RPD and M-60 machine guns, RPG and M-79 grenade launchers, Soviet and Chinese mortars. By February he could field-strip and reassemble a TT 7.62mm pistol, an AKH-47, and an M-14, all in total darkness. He learned about explosives, mines and booby traps, about target acquisition, approach and engagement. He learned to use radios, read maps, plan village attacks. With mock explosives he practiced tactics for destroying American tanks and APCs. With heavy machine guns and AA weapons he practiced blowing up small cutouts of Huey helicopters. He learned how to infiltrate and booby-trap fixed installations, which terrorist acts drew the most attention and thus were the most effective. And he learned to spy.

Through it all he received constant indoctrination. “ ‘Political work in the ranks,’ ” Guoshen quoted Vo Nguyen Giap, “ ‘is of the first importance. It is the soul of the army.’ ”

He was not there to learn a new political ideology, but to learn how to teach political ideology, how to indoctrinate, to establish propaganda networks, to teach others to teach. At the age of twelve, Nang was a soldier, a combat leader, a spy. Now he would be capable of being an instructor, a political officer. Of the seventy-eight Krahom boys in his company who began the training, by February forty had suffered self-criticism sessions, twenty had washed out. Nang suffered neither. He learned to be sly, obedient, a fanatically militant nationalist Communist.

“When you spy,” Guoshen whispered to Nang, “you must smile. You’ve learned not to smile. That’s for soldiers. You’re the elite of the elite, a trained leader. Be flexible. When you mix with civilians in unliberated areas, you smile like them. That way you are invisible.” Nang smiled for Guoshen. The Chinese boy trembled.

Throughout March and April Guoshen spent extra hours each day with Nang. “Don’t think,” Guoshen said to him one evening, “of only the war. Think beyond.”

“How are men led to abandon their pasts?” Nang responded.

“The quickest way is to remove them from their pasts. In a blink of the eye, when a peasant is moved to a collective, he transforms. He ceases being absorbed with his self and his family and immediately recognizes a new allegiance to the collective and the Party.”

“And”—Nang spoke quietly, for this question, if asked during class, would bring a criticism—“how can you tell that it works?”

“Nang,” Guoshen whispered, “behind closed doors, some people will attempt to revert to old ways.”

“Then,” Nang said, “why not remove the doors?”

Another night, Guoshen and Nang discussed communism and the economics of rice first. “ ‘Revolution and production,’ ” Guoshen repeated a slogan of the Cultural Revolution, “ ‘will solve all problems.’ Peasants know how to grow rice.” About South Viet Nam Guoshen told Nang, “Their leaders are too corrupt to hold off the North, and the Americans won’t stay there forever.” He produced a lesson sheet. “See. On 12 November last year, Clark Clifford, the American secretary of defense, declared that if the Thieu clique won’t join the peace talks, the U.S. will conduct unilateral negotiations. Cambodia’s only chance for true independence is to befriend China. Sihanouk knows, but he’s fat. He splashes perfume on himself like a ‘broken shoe.’ ”

“That’s why we’ll destroy him,” Nang answered. An eerie glint possessed Nang’s face. He was not thinking about Sihanouk or the Americans, but about yuons.

“Beware of American mercenaries,” Guoshen went on. “They’re savages! Ugh. They’re hairy. And ugly with big noses. If they capture young boys they sell them to capitalist men for sex. I’ve seen pictures. And when their bombers are shot down and the pilots captured, they confess they search for hospitals to bomb. In Viet Nam they’ve been known to roast children alive, before their parents, and then eat them.”

Nang’s battalion went through three phases of training. At the end of the first and the second, sixty percent of the cadets remaining were graduated and returned to Cambodia. Of the several hundred boys, almost all products of Khmer Krahom training camps in Cambodia, who began the course, fewer than fourteen percent remained for the last phase. These boys were trained in escape methods, clandestine communication, sabotage and assassination. During a martial arts class Nang puffed himself up. “You are a chameleon,” Guoshen noted. Nang looked stronger and older than the other Khmer boys. “A chameleon or a king cobra.” Guoshen laughed. “Go small again.” To Guoshen’s delight Nang deflated, looked slight; impish, even frail. Again Guoshen laughed. Nang smiled pitifully.

The elite were trained in disguise and deception until each had a repertoire of possible acts—orphan, escapee from the liberated zone, cripple. Nang added to those his perfected act as a mute Mountaineer. He learned new techniques of torture. For learning he was promised new privileges. They need not have promised him anything.

He became more proficient at killing by knife, pistol and booby trap. He barely recognized he had a background or family. He owed no one other than the Movement, which Khmer cadremen were now calling the Organization, or Angkar. To the fraternal nations joined in the Communist International and to Angkar, Nang owed total obedience and his life. He considered himself a Marxist and a Maoist, even while he knew he first was Kampuchean.

The last month of ideological training in China had emphasized the fraternal nature of all socialist movements. The section leader was a Chinese colonel, the executive officer a Viet Namese lieutenant colonel, the main lecturer a Khmer major. Each day a nationalist from a different country addressed the class about the struggle of his people.

In those final weeks Nang spent his evenings copying or paraphrasing sections of Mao’s little red book,
On People’s War
, into a notebook of his own.

War is the highest form of struggle...

Make wiping out the enemy’s effective strength our main objective; do not make holding or seizing a city or place our main objective. Holding [territory] is the outcome of wiping out the enemy...

In every battle concentrate an absolutely superior force (two, three, four and sometimes five or six times the enemy’s strength), encircle the enemy forces completely, strive to wipe them out thoroughly and do not let any escape from the net....

Although inferior in numbers we shall be absolutely superior in every specific campaign; this ensures victory...

Fight no battle unprepared
, fight no battle you are not sure of winning...

The imperialists, headed by the United States, are attempting to invade and subvert socialist countries. Therefore, the revolutionary people of the socialist countries must conscientiously study Chairman Mao’s theory of people’s war and get a good grasp of this weapon, the sharpest of ideological weapons for smashing the schemes of capitalist restoration and for consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat...

Then on the last day Nang bowed to the Viet Namese lieutenant colonel. “Where is Bok Roh, the Giant?” Nang smiled.

“Ah,” the lieutenant colonel sighed, pleased the Khmer boy knew of the Mountaineer who aided the NVA. “Is he a friend of yours?”

“I have a gift for him,” Nang replied.

“A lady chicken, perhaps,” the colonel laughed, referring to the Jarai legend of the Giant, Bok Roh, from which the large Mountaineer had taken his name.

“Perhaps,” Nang said pleasantly. The desire for revenge had not dissipated over the long months of training though it had changed. No longer was avenging his sister, Yani, or the tribal girl, Sraang, the main passion driving him. He was barely able to bring images of the girls to mind. His father’s murder, too, was no longer paramount. Revenge had gained its own life, its own justification. Revenge for the sake of revenge.

“You just missed him,” the officer said. “He’s gone again to the South. You’ll find him there.”

In May 1969 Chhuon returned to fields he had not worked in a decade. Stooped, he slogged in the fertile mud planting new seedlings—backstep, plant; backstep, plant; row after row. The rains had begun again, two weeks late this year. The brown of the paddies slowly took a green tinge. By midmonth they were the wonderful fresh light green of new growth, new life, new promise. Stooped, Chhuon did not think. Stooped with the rich organic smell whelming his sinuses, he did penance. Stooped, his forty-five-year-old back, unused to long bent hours, ached yet he repressed the pain until his day’s section was planted. Alongside his cousin and neighbor, Sam, he labored like Khmers of a hundred and a thousand years earlier. In his mind, he had returned to the very root of Khmer life. From there, he told himself, he would view the changes in his family, village, region and country; from there he would judge himself; from there he would discover how.

Since the planting of the last main crop Phum Sath Din had changed dramatically. The closing of the Mekong at Siambok in October had shaken the Northeast. Sok, her sister and the women of other families urged their husbands to abandon their homes, their villages, their ancestral interments and move south or west. Both Chhuon’s sisters, Voen in Phnom Penh and Moen in Battambang, offered them space in their homes, yet Chhuon, like most of the men of Phum Sath Din, resisted, procrastinated, postponed the decision, lingering on reports, discussing the possible truth of rumors endlessly.

Each new thought seemed to produce a new rumor. Each real or imagined report of terrorism in the cities, or of entire villages being burned or simply falling behind the line of no information, or of isolated farms, like Keng Sambath’s, being swallowed by an ambiguous advancing front propelled by anonymous aggressors, elevated the tension in the village. Entire families left. The population dropped from 420 to below 300. The pagoda school closed as the first to leave were those with young children. The marketplace dwindled. Stalls at the ends of the row never filled and the habit of daily purchase of perishables gradually faded, replaced by essential gatherings on the first and fifteenth of the lunar month. And yet Phum Sath Din remained without incident until Chhuon’s brawl with the tinker.

At the end of the day Chhuon straightened his back. The pain was immense. He could no longer repress it. Nor could he suppress his thoughts, keep them from rising to conspicuousness. “Ahh,” he sighed.

“It’s been a long while since we worked together, eh?” Sam grinned. “Your back’s not used to it.”

“Each day it gets stronger.” Chhuon smiled back.

“When I look at the paddy like this,” Sam said, “I feel very good.”

“I feel good too,” Chhuon answered. “I could plant more rows. I could walk backwards until I fell on a yuon.” Chhuon paused. He looked over the richness of the land breathed deeply. “Why aren’t you going?” he asked Sam, not looking at his cousin.

“The best paddies are now mine to plant,” Sam answered. “Besides, where would I go? It’s only Ry and me and her mother. The children are grown. So what if things change? But you, why don’t you go? You still have Sakhon in your house.”

“The best paddies are now mine, too.” Chhuon laughed, yet mixed with the laugh was sarcasm. “Besides, someday they’ll come to me.”

The men walked the dikes to the edge of the village, then parted. Chhuon looked at the sky, the trees, the ground. As he passed the pagoda he did not lift his eyes but thought instead of his knees which were throbbing and tight with swelling. Before he entered his house he paused, glanced at the tiny angel spirits’ house, now neglected. I must fix it, he thought. Tomorrow. He shuffled to the outdoor washing area where he cleaned himself, where Sok met him with tea. He smiled, again a mixed, charged smile. He thanked the old woman, four years his junior, in proper fashion, sipped the tea then moaned and lamented, “My knees are so bad tonight I think I’ll need help up the stairs.”

“And your back?” Sok whispered.

“Terrible,” he said. Since he had returned full-time to the fields the household nightly ritual had become almost a game. Chhuon listed his ailments; Sok responded by silently assisting him; his mother sympathized, feebly attempting to get herself up until Sok laid a hand on her shoulder and told her to remain; and Peou withdrew to a corner of the central room to play with a small plastic John Deere tractor given to him by Mister Pech.

After a brief rest Chhuon rose, as he did each night, cringed, as he did each night, the pain in his knees and back rifling across his face. “And now,” he said, “a bowl of rice for Kdeb. His spirit needs sustenance. I feel it. His spirit wanders.”

“We should go,” Sok said quietly. “Today I heard...”

“We can’t go,” Chhuon snapped. “How can we go? Kdeb’s spirit...” He shuddered, twisted, a spasm of pain seizing his side.

Sok gave him a small rice bowl for the altar. “We received word today...” she began, but Chhuon interrupted her again.

“What do you put in my tea?” His eyes darted to her then away. He put a hand to his breastbone. “I’m burning up.”

“Your passions are too hot,” his mother said firmly. “The heat rises to your mouth.”

“It’s the damned yuons that rise to my mouth,” Chhuon cursed bitterly. “The damned yuons who are...are...killing me.”

Chhuon placed a small bowl on the altar and lit two incense sticks for Samnang. He tapped a heavy finger on the tabletop. Tapped it seven, eight, ten times. “Blood for blood!” he murmured. He turned, scowled, his face tightened, transformed to a mask. Sok rocked back, aghast. “Blood for blood!” Chhuon repeated louder.