For the Sake of All Living Things (54 page)

“Let’s try it again. What’s your unit?”

“My father is farmer,” Nang said in rural dialect. “I learn to be baker.”

The officer flipped the switch. The tingle of a very low voltage entered his feet as if he’d squatted too long without moving and cut off the circulation. Slowly the tingle rose through his ankles, into his calves, then his knees. “Your unit?” Nang closed his eyes, concentrated on breath control. “Your
unit
!?” The tingle entered his thighs, hips, groin, buttocks, rose to his navel and became a queer indescribable pain.

“Tien!” A shouted voice came from the hall.

“Sir?” The voltage was turned to very low.

“There’s two hundred more to question. Don’t take forever.”

“Yes sir.” The interrogator walked to Nang’s side. He grabbed the boy’s face. “One chance. Tell me or I’ll spin this to high.”

Nang flicked his eyes away from the man’s face, closed his eyes, whispered, “I bake!” He set himself for the jolt. “Aaaacccchouhaaaaa...” As the current wrenched his legs and torso he jerked in convulsive shitting, pissing spasms. Sparks flicked at his feet. Then it stopped.

“Unit?!”

“Baker,” Nang whimpered.

“Make him wipe up that shit and get him out of here.”

Moments after his release, ARVN first lieutenant Tran Van Le broke into the interrogation cell. He was frantic. “Tien. You had a boy here?”

“Lots of boys.”

“No. A strong kid. Looks maybe thirteen, fourteen. Napalm burns on his face and right hand. Cut up all over.”

“Oh. Yeah. The baker.”

“Baker my ass. Where is he?”

“They sent him to release.”

“Damn it. He’s Hai Hoa Binh. A top VC agent. Shit, I knew I recognized him.”

At Mount Aural Met Sar sat on a cushion on a bench in his personal bunker. His face was drawn tight at the corners of his mouth, drawn down into a morose mask as he lamented the fate of his units and infrastructure at Kompong Thom. The NVA 91st Division had pulled back intact, suffering, his reports said, only eight percent casualties. His own units had eight percent killed, eleven percent wounded, sixteen percent missing. Better than a third, some of his best yotheas, cadremen, village agents and informers, gone. And the government! Sar thought. What fools! That two-tongued demigod Lon Nol! His stroke proves to all Kampuchea his utter lack of merit. The siege is lifted. The NVA withdraw. The ARVN withdraw. The siege is renewed. FANK is a disgrace. Met Sar clenched his fists, spread his fingers, then clenched his fists tighter. One hundred and fifty thousand FANK soldiers and not a hundred and fifty decent leaders. A disgrace. They shame every Khmer. I should have a quarter that force. With a quarter, Sar thought, I’d make the yuons wish they’d died at Tchepone and never entered Kampuchea. Ah, fine to incapacitate the refineries, but the yuons, no, they destroy the entire facility. Without Neak Sam, FANK is a stinging centipede without a head. We must act.
Now!
Now. But do what?

Sar rose, left his bunker, strode as a fat man attempting to walk with speed, his advancing leg stretching before him, his body lagging, his rear leg seeming insufficiently powerful to propel his mass and be brought forward simultaneously. He entered the tunnel corridor to the operations bunker and map room. Two guards were there.

Sar thought of Nang. There had been no word. “Ah,” he grumbled. “Nang,
he
was a yothea.” Aah, Sar thought, just a soldier. Perhaps valuable but just a soldier. Has he gone to the KVM? “Echh.” Sar coughed on the idea. Then he thought, Did I use him to best advantage? He pondered that thought amid scores of others.

In the cavern map room, alone, Sar did not study the maps. How? He picked up a pen from the desk, fidgeted, twiddled the pen with his left hand about his pointing right index finger. Around and around. Then he leaned forward, placed an elbow on the table, his forehead in his hand. With the pen he doodled the Khmer script symbol for “How?” Again and again. “How?” “How?” The script looked beautiful on the page and he felt pleased at the sight of his own penmanship. He pulled a sheet of paper toward him and scrawled across the top page, “It is necessary. Thanks to Angkar Leou, it is being realized.”

“Realized,” he said softly. He knew well how to organize, how to infiltrate. He knew when to be ruthless, when to cajole. Yet at every step the North Viet Namese gained, and he, though advancing, fell a step further behind.

How do you raise the consciousness of the masses? he asked himself. How do you change them? How do we maintain our covert posture yet swing all Kampuchea to our cause? Sar sat, pondered. They were close yet conquest was elusive. How to use other resources to his advantage? How to direct his own leaders without seeming to direct? Sar sank into depressed frustration. Can we continue to pick our battles, or should we risk all?

“In 1177,” he wrote, “Angkor was invaded by Champa. In 1250, by the Sinhalese with their loathed Theravada Buddhism. In 1620 the first yuon devils penetrated Prey Nokor. Twenty years later the Khmer king was enslaved by the dogma of Islam. The French, the Thais, the Japanese, and the Viets have all invaded. Yet we endure! We shall always endure! We shall rise up and discard all alien elements! Kampuchea for Kampucheans!”

He stopped. How? he thought. How best to use the armies of Angkar? How best to use the
chrops
, the agents and spies. How best to use the Americans without falling into the trap of dependence? They are strong but they are going and will not counterbalance the weight of the yuons much longer.

Sar turned back to the paper. “First,” he wrote, “commit the people. Then the army. Then Angkar Leou.” Yes, he thought. That’s the proper order for commitment. How? How? The people are ready to join us, to follow.

Again he thought of Met Nang. For every highly trained yothea there were a hundred with no training, a hundred poorly armed boys of the rural and urban dung heaps. The new battalions of Cham hated his Khmers as much as they hated FANK and the Viets. There was no loyalty there. Only opportunism. Mountaineers were as bad: two brigades whose main motivation was to avenge their losses and liberate the highlands from Khmer and Viet. To lose Nang! he thought. Ach! His
kosang
had revealed the evil elements. What is infected must be excised. What has been tainted by any alien form must be erased.

But first,
first
, the people must be gained.

“Angkar,” Nang whispered to the soldiers of the ambush team.

“Hello Number Two Rabbit,” a private whispered back. “How did you find us?”

“I asked my brother the hare.”

“Ha ha. That’s good. Rabbit’s brother...”

“Ssshh. Mister Private, you must not speak so loud.”

“What have you brought?” The team leader crept close. Nang unhooked a length of black cloth from about his waist and dropped it. It thudded on the earth. “Are they—”

“Use them first,” Nang whispered. “They’ll keep your position concealed.”

“Grenades! American grenades! Rabbit, where did you get them? The garrison has none.”

“My brother the scorpion showed me where they were buried.”

“I don’t know how you do it.”

“Ssshh. Follow me. My brother the chickenhawk overheard...”

Nang led the FANK ambush patrol of the northwest quadrant garrison deeper into the jungle. The national soldiers had balked the first time he’d appeared at night at their listening post only fifty meters from their wire, but on subsequent nights he’d arrived with various gifts, from boots to trip flares. Always he’d come upon them from the rear, emerged within their circle. Each time he’d attempted to tell them or show them a better way to operate and slowly the scarred boy had gained their trust and respect. To the teams of one post he became known as Number Two Rabbit, to those of another Little Rabbit, and to a third Night Rabbit. No one saw him during daylight and the soldiers kept him secret from their commanders. Through the late dry season and into the early months of the 1971 monsoons Nang urged, prodded, led the teams deeper and deeper into the jungle, deeper into the swamps or farther out along hedgerows and treelines between paddies. “The chief method of learning warfare,” he told them, “is through warfare.”

“Where did you learn, Little Rabbit?”

“Who taught you, Number Two Rabbit?”

“Night Rabbit, for one so young, when did you learn?”

“In the conquered zones,” Nang explained patiently. He used the term “conquered” instead of “liberated.” It distinguished him from the Khmer Viet Minh agents who were also attempting to infiltrate FANK. “My father led the resistance in my village. He was very good but a traitorous snake bit him with its tail.”

“Where do you get the weapons?”

“When you are destitute, you must supply yourself from the enemy’s stores.”

Slowly Nang proselytized, denouncing first the Viets and their Khmer Viet Minh lackeys. The FANK underlings agreed fully. The NVA and the KVM, whom they sometimes called Khmer Rouge, were the most serious threat to Kompong Thom. Nang then denounced Norodom Sihanouk for what he’d become. Again there was major agreement, for the ex-Prince had become the figurehead and legitimizer of the Viet Namese Communists. Nang carried it further. He denounced Samdech Euv’s role, policies and actions when he had been head of state, denounced all the things Sihanouk had not done to protect Kampuchea. In every unit Nang’s words convinced at least one soldier. He moved on to criticizing Lon Nol, the Americans and the barbaric South Viet Namese whom Lon Nol had brought to Cambodia, and then on to condemning the war crimes of all aliens.

By May he had nearly 150 FANK soldiers in fifteen units under his spell. He taught them to use “Angkar” as a password. They kept it secret. During daylight, in the city, Nang organized whoever would follow. From the pallet bed at the
khrou’s
hut he scurried through the camp alleyways and the city’s narrow back streets, searching, recruiting children, training.

For months he worked using the remnant of the Krahom agent organization already in place, the remnant left after the NVA had wiped out at least half in the November 1970 ambushes and assassinations and the ARVN had killed or captured and turned over to FANK another quarter. Nang recruited, organized, indoctrinated and trained. He worked with an energy even he did not know he possessed, as if the painful energies of the B-52 concussions and the electroshock torture had been absorbed by him. Nang found the terrorized, besieged people of Kompong Thom willing, eager, to listen. To them, no one seemed destined to win. Battles could go on forever until all were trampled. No one presented a desirable alternative. Certainly not the Viet Namese Communists.

Nang talked of people’s war but he dropped the weight of Marx, Lenin and Mao. He talked of the Americans, told government troops they were not the solution. “First,” he said, “they are tied to a policy of saving their own skins. They throw away South Viet Nam because they fear the NVA. They’ll never assist Kampuchea with troops. They won’t even follow up their bombings.” Angrily, Nang added, “The targets may be NVA but the bombs destroy
our
irrigation systems. The yuons hug villages or set up their field guns in the lee of dams thinking the Americans won’t bomb. Still they are bombed.” Peasants agreed with him. The colossal power of the bombs terrorized them. To those who said, “If only the Americans would...” Nang replied, “Khmers, only Khmers, can be responsible for the salvation of Kampuchea. If we are organized we can save ourselves.”

“We don’t need the ARVN,” Nang told them, and the radio confirmed it. In August the Cambodian Foreign Ministry made public a 15 July report which detailed ARVN atrocities against Khmer civilians. Lon Nol’s high command immediately demanded the complete withdrawal of all South Viet Namese forces and the closing to them of the naval facility at Neak Luong. Public outcry reverberated throughout Republic-controlled areas. The fact that an ARVN Column had relieved the siege of Kompong Thom nine months earlier was lost in the confusion, diminished by the cost to Khmers. “The cost,” Nang mused as he squatted with peasants in market stalls, “is very high, eh? We cannot rely on a crocodile who weeps over our pain as he devours us.”

Of the Republic and its army, Nang told his growing number of followers, “They oppose so much that we oppose we should be very close. But that Lon Nol, that Sirik Matak, that General Fernandez—it is they who have invited the B-52s. They who brought in the Southern crocodile. The Republicans have walked the same trail as the old regime. Bureaucratic functionaries so jam the government nothing works.” To soldiers he said, “When was the last time you were paid? Was it enough to feed your families? Do you have to buy your rations from your commander? How can you afford to be soldiers? Even in the army there is a Khmer Patriot’s movement. Once the yuons are eliminated, we’ll turn our guns on Phnom Penh. In the liberated zone the smartest Khmers are planning for the day when Khmers will be self-governing and self-sufficient.”

In late summer the “Patriotic Intellectuals” distributed a document entitled “Declaration to the Khmer People from the Liberated Zone.” Unknown to Nang, to the peasants, the document had originated at Mount Aural. “You see,” Nang said, “there is the Movement, the resistance for which my father died. There is a man I once met, he is fat and full of merit, who can lead us into a new era, a new beginning.”

“Yes,” answered the simpleminded.

“Yes, yes,” answered the intelligent and the patriotic.

As his network increased so too did the risks and thus the insecurity of Little Rabbit. About him he maintained a core of hardened bodyguards, agents, FANK deserters, the strongest and quickest of the new recruits. No longer did Nang reside with the
khrou
who had restored his hearing and healed his wounds but now in random and scattered “safe houses” throughout the city, in remote hamlet huts, in secret forest hideaways. In every corner he had eyes, in every wall ears. Not a comment escaped him, not a propagandist’s line was missed—for exactly as Nang was attempting to organize Kompong Thom, so too were the Khmer Viet Minh proselytizers.

Unlike the Viet Cong in South Viet Nam where, because of intense military and political pressure (often by district and provincial militias using patient, proven police investigation techniques), the indigenous rebel infrastructure was methodically being dismantled, the Khmer Krahom and Khmer Viet Minh political and military organs throughout Cambodia were expanding almost unchecked. The war thrust upon the Khmer power vacuum by the Communist factions had caught Cambodia as unprepared as South Viet Nam had been a decade earlier—yet the Khmer rebellion matured far more quickly. Outside the capital heartland and the Battambang rice basket region, chaos ruled. With FANK, ARVN, and U.S. actions concentrated on countering Communist raids and main force offensives, the local proselytizers and organizers needed to be concerned only with provincial or local militias and local police—all of which, in many areas, were insecure in their own loyalties and thus easy targets for either terrorist action or rebel political recruitment.