For the Sake of All Living Things (68 page)

A kilometer south he’d seen the road rising to the bridge over the main drainage canal between Tang Kouk and Pa Kham. Sullivan had walked toward that point, weaved his way between soldiers and dependants, APCs and oxcarts, terror-stricken peasants and a few hotshot junior officers with souped-up jeeps. “Do you speak French?” he called to various peasant groups.
“Français? Français?”

An old man.
“Oui.”

At last. “Why have all the people come to the highway?”

“We were told to come.”

“Who told you?”

“Does it matter?”

“Certainly.”

“Then why doesn’t the government ask us? Why not the army big shots?”

“I will tell them to do so.”

“Now the government comes back.” The old peasant shrugged his shoulders. “Now the yuons come back. Now the Patriots. Who cares?”

“Then why do you leave your land?”

“I plow. I plant. I weed. I harvest. The government tells us to get out, the Communists are coming. We hear that on the radio. The Communists tell us to get out, the government is coming. We see them on the road. Then the Patriots tell us to flee, the planes are coming. Good, let the planes come. They can destroy all the soldiers. Good, eh? They will destroy my fields and my dikes. Not good, eh! Not good for me. The Patriots burned the village so no one will capture it. Not good for me, eh! The planes come and blow up my son. Go away! You go away.”

Another thunderclap jarred the sedan. Sullivan gritted his teeth. The first bombing raid in the western part of Caoutchouco Plantation east of Phum Chamkar was flown a few minutes past midnight on 24 October. Acting on ground-sighting reports, a single B-52 released eighty-four 500-pound bombs in a target area said to house an NVA regiment. Over the next two days the bombing increased significantly.

Then, close by to the south, a huge fire cloud leaped from the earth. Then came the explosion, then the concussion sweeping the bivouac like an angry wind. Blackness returned and the rain beat hard on the roof. Sullivan flung the door open. Already the escort officer had leaped from the car, from the roadway, and was off somewhere in the dark murk of the paddies. Sullivan stood tall, looked about. In the distance he could feel the unmistakable rumbling quake of high-level sorties pummeling the plantations to the east. About him people dashed in aimless frenzy or—rolled back to sleep or simply sat, frozen, unable to think of a direction to go. Just north, at the intersection to Tang Kouk, several FANK APCs turned on their headlights, aimed themselves toward the deluged fields, silhouetted themselves by their own lights. To the south there was more commotion. Sullivan reached into the sedan, grabbed his ammo bandoleers, his steel pot, his weapon. He slammed the door. The distant rumble came again, lasted less than a minute, then stopped. He marched south; toward the bridge, the commotion. Where the road began its rise over the canal, a Patton tank fired its machine guns, red tracers looping into the downpour for 300 meters then vanishing as if extinguished or blocked from view. Candles, flashlights and straw torches illuminated the road. Soldiers ran from their units to the dependant camps to make sure their families were safe, and from the dependant camps soldiers ran to their unit loggers to receive orders and prepare for an attack.

Sullivan walked. He cursed himself for not understanding the language, for not having taken the PRC-25 radio from the sedan even if he couldn’t understand the transmissions. He walked determinedly, cursing himself and his country for the half-assed effort, for the Nixon administration’s seeming approval of Lon Nol’s latest political blunder, for not having seen the attack coming and for not having advised—yes, damn it, Rita Donaldson or not—advised, found a way to subtly convince Colonel Chhan of the intelligence importance of the road refugees. He stopped. He had to have the radio. Now he ran, frantic, anguished by the thought that someone might have stolen it. The distance was short. He was there in minutes and indeed four young boys were pillaging the vehicle.

“No way, jack!” He growled, snarled, barked in English, grabbed one child and threw him off the road. Then he rammed his face into the backseat, felt the floor. “Oh thank god!” He strapped the radio on and jogged toward the bridge, his helmet banging even though he held it, the light web gear barely keeping the PRC-25 from smashing his lumbar vertebrae.

Sullivan glanced at his watch. The luminescence was dull. He moved toward a large straw torch. 0310. To the elders and children clustered below the fire he shouted in French, thinking, Damn em if they don’t understand, “You make yourselves targets with that light. Target! Understand? If there are—” in his anger he almost said “gooks,” then caught himself—“Viet gunners, they’ll see you. Understand?” No recognition. No response. A hard long quaking vibrated the road. In the distance—how far?—southeast where the plantation land jutted into the paddies and approached Highway 6—how far?—six, eight, ten kilometers, flashes, faint, not even certain. “Target! Understand?” Wet faces in the torchlight hardened, with fear, with hatred. Backs turned. Go away. You go away.

Sullivan marched off, south. APCs and tanks had clustered near the bridge approach. Spotlights and mortar flares illuminated the twisted steel beams stabbing the blackness at eerie angles.

“Monsieur! Monsieur Captain!” It was Captain Sisowath Suong, Colonel Chhan Samkai’s aide who had ordered Sullivan to leave Turn Nop when the skirmish between FANK APCs and infantry had broken out. “The bridges are out.”

“I can see that,” Sullivan answered, angry, sarcastic.

“No. No, monsieur. Not just here but over the Chinit north of Baray and near Phum Chamkar. All the main bridges. We are trapped.”

At the edge of the plantation forests Colonel Hans Mitterschmidt filmed bright bursting flashes against the black night curtain. The B-52 devastation three kilometers south jiggled the saturated earth beneath him as if it were Jell-O. Uncomfortably his NVA escorts held oiled parasols over him and over the camera. “Sir, we’re much too exposed,” Lieutenant Nam Thay cautioned him in French.

“Not so,” the colonel responded. “I want to move forward.”

“It’s not safe, sir.”

“I didn’t come here to be safe. What are they doing over there?”

“That’s the 209th Regiment. They’re preparing the battlefield, sir.”

“Excellent. But so noisy?”

“There’s no one to hear. The lackey army doesn’t send patrols.”

Colonel Mitterschmidt dropped to one knee and hunched over his camera, a modified Bolex H-16 EBM motion picture camera with a specially designed 8mm to 90mm zoom lens set on a gunstock mount. As Lieutenant Thay held a flashlight, Mitterschmidt removed exposed film and inserted new. Then he placed the exposed film in a plastic bag and put that in the waterproof ammo can his porter carried attached to his rucksack. For several days the East German had filmed the NVA 7th Division in high-gear motion, closing in on their chosen battlefield. With the 7th came the 40th Artillery Regiment: antiaircraft and 130mm field gun batteries, 122mm rocket teams, and 120mm mortar squads. Quickly the infantry had shifted southwest, seemingly jumping from one forested area to the next, always moving, attempting to avoid aerial detection and subsequent bombing. Behind them came the artillery and, interspersed, the armor. The weather had been advantageous, a continual heavy mask of clouds rendering normal visual aerial detection ineffective. The more sophisticated electronic, radar, infrared and laser target detection systems had picked up the general movement but without cross validation most targets had been denied at embassy level. Behind the attack force had come long, heavily laden truck convoys—the concentration of heat-producing engines giving the bombers their only targets.

With each kilometer covered, Mitterschmidt had grown more and more anxious, exhausted. To him each sight was new and he viewed it all as if framed, bracketed by the edge of the film. Whenever possible he filmed the troops in their prepared environment. In the past day his travel group had seen an intermittent parade of peasants marshaled toward some rear point by black-clad Khmer soldiers. These, too, he filmed as he ogled each group, searching for his Khmer students, knowing how ludicrous was his thought that elite
dac cong
might be used this way but unable to overcome the racial stereotyping, thinking all Khmers looked alike and thus one of the boy-soldiers should be known to him. Then there had been the first glimpse, beyond the forest, broken by vegetation, shrouded by rain, yet there, unmistakably, of a land torched. By early evening a double score of fires had dotted the flat land and the smell and sight of smoke quickened, neared, as night had fallen.

“Lieutenant.” A messenger came to Nam Thay. “There’s good news.”

Mitterschmidt watched the two men, uncomfortable in his lack of understanding of their words. In the darkness they were black silhouettes against a black backdrop. The German looked east. Before him the land fell away, the canopy disappeared. What earlier had been flatlands alive with fire now seemed to be an endless black void. By 0330 hours the rain softened and the fogmist fell to hug the earth in a layer no thicker than a man’s height. Across the unseen quagmire the raised highway emerged, a line of lights—torches, flashlights, headlights, spotlights, and mortar-launched parachute flares.

A second messenger came to Thay, spoke, quickly and left. “There’s good word, sir.” The Viet Namese escort officer beamed. “You’re to be congratulated.”

“The bridges?”

“Yes sir. They floated the mines downstream to them with complete success. All three have been dropped.”

“Without
dac cong
?”

“The sappers floated with them to the bridge supports, then floated on.”

“Is that one?” Mitterschmidt asked as a parachute flare lit a twisted sculpture in the distance.

“That’s the Tang Kouk Canal bridge.”

“I should like to film that when it’s lighter.”

From behind them in the forest the tremendous bang of two 130mm guns lobbing a salvo toward the small airfield between Tang Kouk and Rumlong made the German dive flat. His fear-leap caused Thay to respond alike. A minute later the explosion of outgoing erupted again and both men sat on the wet forest floor and laughed. Then again and again the blasts. Farther north a sister unit launched a series of l22mm rockets. Still the 130s banged out their rounds. With each salvo the ground jumped. The concussions hit Mitterschmidt’s ears as hard as if he were being hit by fists. Now he did not smile. Methodically he cleaned the Bolex. Three kilometers south, almost exactly where the bombers had hit earlier, there was more firing. A forested plantation ridge protruded into the vast sea of rice fields to within a few kilometers of Phum Pa Kham. From it four 120mm mortar squads were unleashing a continual barrage. All along the twelve-kilometer stretch from Pa Kham to Tang Kouk and Rumlong shells burst, and under the shelling, under the tully fog, the regiments of the NVA 7th Division moved out, ran along prepared trails, along dikes and through paddies with shallow water cover, trotted forward in the dark following the dim red or green flashlights of guides who had moved in as the farmers had evacuated. Behind the first wave of light infantry came a second. Behind the second a third and with the third trotted Hans Mitterschmidt, his two escorts and his personal porter.

At 0330 hours 26 October 1971 the siege and shelling of Pa Kham, estimated population 9,000 began. At 0335 hours shells began to rain down on Tang Kouk, estimated population 8,000. An hour later the airfield north of Tang Kouk was probed by ground assault teams. At 0440 hours the shelling of Rumlong, estimated population 12,000, commenced. The shelling of all four sites and the connecting roadway was heavy and sustained.

“Get them off the road!” Sullivan screamed at Sergeant Seng Sovat as he recognized Colonel Chhan’s enlisted aide. Sullivan grabbed Seng’s shirt shoulder with his left hand. With his right he pointed furiously at a mixed group of dependants, soldiers and refugees. “Them! Them!” He gestured. “Off there!” He pointed to the dark murky waters off the west side of the road. “Shit!” he cussed himself. For an hour he had coursed up and down the roadway attempting to force organization on anarchy. “Where’s the colonel?” he railed in French. “Perimeter! Here!” The refugee farmers needed little prodding. Their section of roadway wasn’t under attack but both north and south were being pulverized with thousands of rounds. Fear grabbed them. The bridge to Pa Kham, almost within spitting distance, was out. Terror grabbed them. They had nothing. Their past had been destroyed in the fires. Their future, the bridge to Phnom Penh, to reinforcements, to escape, was a twisted mass of steel with the long center span lying one end up, the other in the deep canal. The old, pulling and chasing the very young, hobbled over the edge. “Stay with Grandpa! Don’t get lost.” “Where’s Mama!” “Gone with the Patriots. We’ll find her later. Come down. Come down here. Help your grandmother.”

At first the FANK infantry soldiers of the First Brigade Group just north of the bridge panicked. They, like the peasants, scattered, dove, ran, fled. But quickly half realized there was no place to go. To swim or float the canal would only place them in the mortar explosions to the south. To sprint north would risk the artillery barrage on Tang Kouk or the airstrip. East was the enemy, west the uncharted paddies and formidable swamp. With no place to go, with their families hugging the west bank of the road, half the FANK troops rose and assembled in fire teams, squads and platoons. Those with training, no matter their rank, took charge while those who’d bought their office either obeyed or fled, huddled with the civilians or shouldered rifles and slid off the east bank into the paddies, sliding down the embankment under the tully fog until their feet and legs were in the cool water and their eyes were below the tops of the stalks—trained and untrained, officers and peons, a concealed perimeter without cover, without fields of fire, without observation ability—waiting, without offensive, counteroffensive or defensive tactical plans.

By 0500 hours the sky had lightened, the clouds had thinned, the rain had ceased. Along the road the six APCs of the brigade’s armor battalion had dispersed—two, with the section’s only tank, near the bridge ramp to cover that flank if the NVA launched a waterborne assault from the canal, then one every half kilometer to the outskirts of Tang Kouk. Sullivan found Colonel Chhan Samkai and his command post in a troop bus, behind the first lone APC north of the southern flank. To Sullivan the CP was a criminal cluster-fuck. Chhan Samkai was in a funk, a pout which he did not, could not, hide from the American captain.