For the Sake of All Living Things (52 page)

SIGNIFICANT ACTIVITIES: During the second half of 1970 SA included: combined Communist force attacks on (1) Kirirom and (2) the, Pich Nil Pass on Highway 4, and (3) a series of battles, commando raids and terrorist rocket attacks around the country. By the end of September the NVA held four of Cambodia’s nineteen provincial capitals and threatened twelve of the remaining fifteen. Pocheantong Airport at Phnom Penh was sporadically closed by rocket raids which temporarily destroyed runways. The capital’s petroleum storage tanks at Kilometer 6 were burned; the oil refinery at Kompong Som was damaged; several strategic bridges over the Tonle Sap River were dropped. Evidence indicates these latter acts were carried out by North Viet Namese
dac cong
(sappers). The heaviest fighting of the period took place along the Mekong and Bassac rivers below Neak Luong, where a 200-vessel ARVN task force continued to hunt the NVA/VC. The Communists kept continuous pressure on the waterways, often closing them to freighters. Additional large battles were fought about Svay Rieng. In the Takeo area, the ARVN 495th Infantry Battalion rampaged through the countryside during and after operations designed to ferret out major NVA/VC supply units. The rampaging hurt the Allied cause and Lon Nol publicly protested their behavior...

“How long are you here for?”

Rita Donaldson looked up. The light skin of her face was flushed, pink, covered with rivulets of sweat. Her hands and arms were so wet the hand she placed over the page she’d been reading stuck to the paper. She wiped the side of her hands on her jungle blouse. “Excuse me?”

“How long you here for?” the man repeated.

“A week,” she answered. She did not know him but his being American made the approach acceptable.

“Mind if I join you?” He sat without her responding. “Jim White,” he said.
“The Sun.”
He motioned to a waiter. “You’re the new gal from the Washington paper.” She began to answer but he interrupted. “What can you learn in a week?”

“Two weeks,” Rita Donaldson said. “If there’s a real story.”

“There’s plenty of story,” White said. To the waiter he said, “Two cold orange juice.
Bic
?” Then back to Rita, “You better drink more.”

“How do you know? About the story, I mean.”

“Just a feeling,” White said. “Just a...” He leaned forward and grasped the report she had before her. “What do ya got here?”

“What?!” Rita was astounded. She pulled the report back.

“That’s not goina be the way to get along here,” White snapped.

“Who the hell are you?” Rita shot back.

“Screw it, bitch. You’ll learn.” White stood, yelled a jumble of pidgin Khmer, Viet Namese and English at the waiter, then stomped off. Westerners and the few Cambodians in the cafe stared at her. She swallowed, ducked her head, went back to the report.

The anniversary of Ho Chi Minh’s death (9/3) was marked in Cambodia by twenty-one ARVN battalions plus support personnel—about 12,000 soldiers. In Paris, NVA General Xuan Thuy issued a “very flexible and generous” proposal for a coalition government in South Viet Nam. For peace and coalition, the negotiator said, the necessary ingredient is American renunciation of Saigon and the withdrawal of all support.’

On 7 October, President Nixon, in a televised speech, offered the Communists a “cease-fire in place.” The next day the Communists denounced the proposal as “a maneuver to deceive world opinion.” They reiterated their demand for unconditional US withdrawal and the toppling of the Saigon government. In this atmosphere, in South Viet Nam, Nguyen Van Thieu manipulated the South Viet Namese October presidential election by eliminating all alternative candidates. The balloting, unlike the Senate voting in August, was a one-candidate charade. Even at that it might have served as a poll of Thieu’s support, but irregularities negated that potential....

Rita gritted her teeth. What
The Sun?
she thought. There’s nine hundred
The Suns
in the world. I should have slapped that son of a bitch, she thought. She had been angry since returning to reading, had not concentrated on the words, could barely remember what she’d read. She looked back over the last few pages, underlined “American bombing,” “Ho Chi Minh’s death,” and “televised speech.” She thought about the trip, about her air-conditioned Washington office. She had been given the assignment after Jasson’s abrupt cancellation, given it as if it were a present, a job bennie, a perk, something to put on her resume. One week in Southeast Asia because she’d been a loyal employee, a good little girl. Indeed, she had told herself, it
was
an excellent opportunity for advancement. Not unlike a military officer, a journalist needs to have her ticket punched. But Jim White had set something off in her. So too did her body’s reaction to the heat. She was fair skinned, fair haired, and had a soft Nordic countenance which was finding the tropical climate of the Cambodian dry season unbearable. I can do this, Rita Donaldson told herself. I can do it and do it right.

The American military posture in South Viet Nam has become one of protective enclave defense. (Only the 1st Cavalry and the 101st Airborne still ran, though curtailed, offensive operations.)

In the US, the Army opened its case, with heavy media coverage, against William Calley. President Nixon has requested an additional $155 million for small arms and ammunition for Cambodia.

Between 29 November and 2 December, NVA units launched one hundred attacks—raids or shellings—in South Viet Nam, with the reported objective of relieving ARVN pressure against their Cambodian bases....

Rita rocked back slightly. She raised her eyes, glanced up to see if people were still staring at her. Her report, she felt, and the story she’d received during her first embassy briefing, and what she’d obtained from the
News-Times’s
Cambodian stringer, didn’t jibe. But she didn’t know how or why. She pulled a steno pad from her bag, flipped it open, thumbed back several pages. The embassy aide had unofficially told her that in Hanoi General Vo Nguyen Giap had begun organizing for the next major phase of the war. The aide had said that ARVN/NVA engagements in Cambodia to this point had primarily been search and destroy for the ARVN, ambush and withdraw for the NVA. But with Americans banned from Cambodia, with increasing U.S. domestic pressure for U.S. withdrawal from South Viet Nam, the NVA general allegedly saw opportunity. The clashes between Viet Namese elements on Khmer soil were, to him, practice and preparation for a large-scale offensive invasion of South Viet Nam once U.S. forces were out.

On 22 December, the US Congress passed an amended bill forbidding any use of American ground troops
or advisors
in Laos or Cambodia. The Force Armée Nationale Kampuchea (FANK), swollen in one year to eightfold its precoup combat strength, was, according to US military spokesmen, incapable, without advisors, of assimilating, training, even equipping most of this new manpower. Congress has also banned the use of US airpower in direct support of Allied troops.

On the last day of 1970 the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) announced it had assassinated in the preceding 364 days “at least 6,000 South Viet Namese” civilians for the heinous crime of serving, at any level, in their nation’s government.

The story, Rita thought. What is it? Who, what, when, where, why, how. She paged through her notes. American bombing? FANK training? Some supposed NVA-ARVN future engagement? She turned the report over and wrote on the back: “(1) Find FANK training facility. (2) Determine U.S. role. (3) To hell with
The Sun
.”

From the front seat of the jeep Sullivan saw her stop. She was returning from morning prayers at the
sala.
He watched from a distance as she looked up, straight up into the cloudless morning sky. To Vathana the air felt soft, compassionate on the skin of her face, neck and arms. She closed her eyes momentarily, inhaled deeply. The temperature was mild, the humidity early-morning low. Vathana opened her eyes, stared into the endless deep blue, stared whispering a prayer of thanks to the Enlightened One for seeing her through the birth, for the beautiful healthy girl, and for the slowing of the war. And she prayed for her country, for Premier Lon Nol who had suffered a paralyzing stroke in early February and for Deputy Prime Minister Sisowath Sirik Matak who now, in reality, led the nation. As she prayed and gave thanks she thought about the depths of the sky, about the penetration by the astronauts of
Apollo 14
, men on the moon, again, about their journey which was barely a pinprick into the depth of the blue that she felt both a part of and a traveler through. As she prayed, her body felt light, weightless. The caressing blue depths called her. It was not light traveling infinite distances to her eyes but her spirit blossoming into the universe, being a part of what she knew she was a part.

From two hundred meters south Sullivan studied her. He had not seen her since their first encounter five months earlier yet he held her in his mind as if the first impression had stuck, lodged in some gap between brain convolutions, refused to melt and flow, to spread thin, to be assimilated or to evaporate. What the hell’s she doing? he thought. Her slow approach and her idle standing at the edge of the road, standing staring straight up, irritated him. His irritation at it made him seethe. Of all the stupid fucking things I’ve done, he thought, this...He did not finish the thought.

Sullivan’s tour with the 5th Special Forces Group had been scheduled to end in October, yet he’d extended. The group was now standing down, returning to the United States. The teams had broken up, the remaining Phoenix Program personnel had been transferred, on paper, to a different command. Nearly half the Special Forces advisors who were ready to leave the country had volunteered to remain in Viet Nam, to form special units to train—in Viet Nam because advisors weren’t permitted in Cambodia—FANK personnel in raid and reconnaissance tactics, in communications and in the most fundamental tactics of patrolling and base security. Even concepts like flank security had to be introduced—not taught, as in “how to,” but introduced, as in “I’ve
no
idea what you’re talking about.”

In the few moments that Vathana had spent concentrating on the sky the temperature rise had begun, had taken hold of the day. It was not yet uncomfortable but the hint of heat was there and it pleased her. Vathana walked barefoot, at the road’s edge, careful not to step in the debris of the past several months, debris brought to her city by the clashing armies which had surrounded it. She walked lightly, feeling renewed freedom in her body. She paused briefly at a market stall to check the freshness of the eels the vendor hawked, though she had no intention of making a purchase. She walked on, wishing to run, to skip like a schoolgirl, though she was restrained by the thought of someone seeing her, the Angel of Neak Luong, not bearing the burden of her city’s suffering. Today she did not feel like suffering. Today she felt like living. Where the river and roadway squeezed the levee she again stopped, gazed out over the yellow-brown water, gazed across to the ferry landing being rebuilt for the fourth time in four months, gazed at the barges and piers and at an ocean freighter with riverine escort disappearing to the east. Sun reflections off the cockled water tickled her. For a brief moment she thought of her womb, which had nourished and nurtured her little girl and was now mostly contracted, and she sent a special small love signal from her mind and her whole body to this organ which had brought forth such lovely fruit.

The death of Pech Lim Song and Vathana’s conditions to Teck for joining him in Phnom Penh had left her vulnerable to the whims and wraths of her mother-in-law, Madame Pech, who, since her husband’s assassination, demanded she be called by her own name, Sisowath Thich Soen. In November the woman had descended upon Vathana amid the refugees, verbally berating her. “
Bonjour
! One hundred thousand riels?! To whom? While these people live like...like...this!” Vathana had not answered but stood absorbing the abuse, thinking, Abuse given, like love, does not lessen that held by the giver but increases it, and with abuse it becomes self-damaging. “
Bonjour
? Perhaps, silly stupid girl, perhaps some to your own pocket? Three months, indeed!” Two months later, as Vathana, eight and a half months pregnant, prayed for a safe delivery, Soen again violated her, bursting in upon her in the Neak Luong flat. “From today,” Sisowath Thich Soen had said, “the barges will be controlled from Phnom Penh. And you”—she had glared at her daughter-in-law, daring her to take the offer—“you belong with your husband. Tomorrow everything will be removed from this apartment. Come to Phnom Penh or live with the filth in that camp.”

From the jeep Sullivan continued to watch her, to track her progress. He watched through the raised windshield as if he were spying. He attempted not to smile as she neared but found his heart racing, his muscles setting like a torn turkey’s about to strut, his face breaking into a silly grin. At seventy-five feet she still had not noticed him. The main road had become busy with morning activity, civilian and military. He watched her face, oval with strong cheekbones and large dark eyes. Serene eyes, he thought, knowing mysterious eyes. Eyes that have witnessed a thousand years, that can see the next thousand.

At fifty feet he turned his head, watched the Mekong. He had been raised by the Mississippi on Iowa’s eastern boundary and he’d always loved rivers, any river, and any river city which was still small enough to be affected by the current. “Not like New York,” he’d once told Huntley. “You get a huge metropolis and people go months, years, without even knowing they’re in a river city.”

His mind stopped. Vathana stood only feet from him, a radiant smile, sparkling eyes greeting him. “Hello, Mister Lieutenant J. L. Sullivan,” she said in English.

“Mrs. Pech,” Sullivan stuttered. His tongue tripped. Sounds barely emerged. “How many children have you?” He blurted the Khmer idiom, which was a simple greeting, not knowing its literal translation.