Read For the Sake of All Living Things Online
Authors: John M. Del Vecchio
The next day they worked the field without having seen their huts, without having eaten. Chhuon pondered...to mold all members of our society into productive elements...To him, the phrases seemed overly simplistic, but in his weariness and hunger he wished only to use them to sidetrack his mind. For a while he repeated to himself...reeducation through work...reeducation through work...He thought of his notebooks and thought what he would write. By dusk he was feeling very weak and fantasized about the bowl of rice Sok would have waiting for him. Still they worked...productive elements...he thought. Why not productive people? Productive families? Ravana’s shrill voice had lambasted them about families. Families were for producing productive elements—some such nonsense. When families could no longer produce new elements they should be dissolved. Chhuon almost chuckled to himself at that thought. Dissolved! We’re not lumps of sugar. Once you are a father, a mother, a son, a daughter, he thought, you are always that. It is not something that can be dissolved.
Again that night the men were grouped in a field. The rain had stopped and the ground came alive with thousands of large brown moths. A new kitchen staff came to the field and served the men rice soup and bananas. They were not released and again slept in their back-to-back tripods. Again they labored without sustenance. Chhuon forgot about Ravana, and all day he fantasized about Sok and the meal she would prepare. That night when the men returned to their huts there were no women. They had been moved to a new women’s barracks built a forbidden half kilometer to the east.
As the assaults on the capital heart area continued, as other government enclaves were attacked, Vathana sat, sat by the first of the small mud huts, sat in the rain staring into the dying embers of the night’s cooking fire, letting the rain soak her long thick black hair and run down her cheeks like tears though she was not sad, not crying. Around her the few soldiers and the many association women huddled in the dark, eating, picking the last grains from their plates, barely moving, yet to her they whizzed by, passed so quickly their speed blurred their images. Time accelerated, yet each moment stretched out for all eternity.
Keo Kosol had tried to talk her out of it. He had grabbed her shoulders, touched her as he hadn’t in months, she so passive in his hands he’d dropped them to his sides in disgust. “You want to believe the rumors,” he’d said, “then go ahead. But then you’d believe anything, eh?” Still she’d remained inert. “The reason”—Kosol’s voice rose—“they were so harsh in the border area was because the Americans and the Viet Namese were there.”
“And in the North?” she’d whispered without moving.
“Everyone knows those people...those province people are lazy. They don’t work hard like our peasants. But we’re hard workers. We’ll produce for them and we’ll gain the paradise they promise.” He had yelled at her many more things. “Look at this.” He’d waved an old newspaper before her. “The American actress, Fonda, remember what she says. ‘...if you understood what Communism was, you would hope and pray on your knees that we would someday become Communists.’ She knows! Americans know, eh?! Now you must stop this craziness.”
Still Vathana had not responded. Kosol ranted on. “They’ll kill you with their bombs. You want that, eh? Look here!” He’d waved that day’s paper. “ ‘Eighty B-52 sorties. Sixty-four hundred bombs! Each day!’ Americans...they don’t care about Khmer people. Only about their bomb-making industry. Two million dollars...every day...yet children in your camp starve. What aid comes to the refugees? Not even half a million for a million refugees in three years! They’ve removed the middle path! They must go!”
Then Vathana had wept. Then tears had slid down her cheeks. More gently Keo Kosol had said, “The Khmer Rouge are Cambodian. Do we need Dr. Kissinger’s approval for Khmer to talk to Khmer? When the war is over, the cruelty will cease. We shall walk the middle path again.”
Still she had gone forward, led how many she did not know, did not count. It didn’t matter to her whether they were organized or not, whether they brought a kilo of provisions or ten thousand. Only that she go. That she was followed by forty from the Soldiers’ Mothers Association she did not know. That members of the Liberation Youth, the Rivermen for a Just Government, the Refugee Association, and the Khmer Patriots for Peace all joined her, did not gratify her. The rain came harder.
Earlier, even before Kosol’s harangue, she’d sat looking at her babies, at Samnang, at Samol. How the war overshadowed their lives, she’d been thinking. How will it be on this one? she’d thought, passing her hands over her bulbous abdomen. Will the schools reopen? Will they ever know their father? She’d felt so tired, so numb. Rumors were being passed that cigarettes, gasoline and even electricity were being rationed in Phnom Penh. She’d heard and she’d thought, Good! Perhaps they will understand what life is like for us.
She’d wanted to stop thinking about the children so she’d left the tent only to see hundreds, thousands more—idle children beneath the growing number of cardboard or thatch or scrap truck fender shanties disintegrating in the rain. Why? she’d thought, and the pain sat heavy on her shoulders and in her bowels and in her tired legs. Why hasn’t the rain stopped the Khmer Rouge? Still they attack the capital. Will it fall? Today? Or Kompong Cham? She could feel the shaking earth as she watched the children, then she could hear the not-so-distant sound of explosions, and she’d thought, Are they invincible? Where is Norodom Sihanouk? He would never allow things to be so bad. He must not know. Where is Teck? Where is Papa? Her lower jaw trembled and she tried to chase those thoughts away. Some people say the Khmer Rouge have engaged an evil spirit. In exchange for invincibility they have traded their souls. If only...
Windswept raindrops flew beneath the poncho roof over the fire and sizzled in the embers. The front was very close. Indeed, she was now at the back of the front. In the rainbound dark a wide circle of fires of FANK’s defenders flickered sporadically. Neak Luong, the southern citadel on the Mekong, defender of the southern approach to the heartland, was again an isle in the Communist-conquered sea.
Sarin Sam Ol had heard of her plan and had come to the camp to talk. “It is very dangerous,” he cautioned her halfheartedly.
“Yes,” she’d said, not agreeing but confirming that she’d heard, that she knew the words though they no longer had meaning in Neak Luong, that she respected the doctor’s thought.
“I won’t come to help,” he’d said.
“I understand,” she’d answered.
“Then I will say good-bye. I have received a visa for France. There is an eye doctor...”
“Then see him.”
He reached out, grasped her hands as if passing a blessing. “You understand. I can do nothing. Nothing.”
After Doctor Sarin had left, Vathana had written a sketch of his anguished ordeal and sent it via messenger to Rita Donaldson. It was her twentieth such letter. For each she received the equivalent of two dollars, enough to buy eighteen pounds of rice on the black market—at just above starvation levels, enough to feed her, Sophan and the children for one week.
“You understand,” she had ended the account, “I can do nothing. Nothing.”
But
I
can do something, she’d thought. She’d talked to Rita—when, she couldn’t remember. Time had become so warped she was unsure if it were this life or the last. “This is Louis”—she’d introduced the young man who’d been her husband’s friend. Rita had glared at the disheveled, angry soldier.
In Khmer Louis, glaring back at the blue-eyed Western woman, snapped at Vathana, “Does she know you carry a kid that’s not your husband’s?”
“You came to me,” Vathana shot back. “This is what I can do.”
“What does he say?” Rita did not hide her dislike for him.
“He says,” Vathana spoke alternately in Khmer and in French as if Louis did not understand French, “he needs help. He says he will desert unless he has food and is paid.”
“When was the last time he ate?” Rita asked.
Vathana translated then listened and translated back. “Two days,” she said. “But he says they have had only small rations for two months. Had he not been caught in the general conscription he would never serve this government.” Louis sprayed out another angry burst. “He says, those with families here eat because the families bring them food but those without families are starving.”
They had talked for an hour when Louis said he had to go or they’d come for him. Alone the women spoke amiably and Rita Donaldson pulled from her shoulder satchel a plastic bottle of protein tablets. She kissed Vathana and whispered, “For your baby. So it will be strong.” Then again she pulled a book from her bag and said, “Translate this for me, dear. Now I must go. Your stories are very good.”
Vathana had held the book, staring at the sad cover for some minutes. She opened the bottle and took two tablets then looked back at
Regrets for the Khmer Soul
by Ith Sarin. The cover was a heart-shaped map of Cambodia torn in two by the Mekong River. Before she could open it Louis had returned, had scowled, spat. “Teck has joined my unit,” he’d said. “Give your pussy to others, but give your husband some food.”
A mile, perhaps two, into the blackness, lights popped hazy through the rain, burst in a row in the amorphous dark. Then came the quaking and the thunder. The ash of the cooking fire tumbled exposing the last hot coals. A mud hut collapsed. Three soldiers cussed and stamped and shook the clods from their heads and bodies.
Vathana and three association women rose. There is something we can do, she had told them without emotion, without ardor. “We can help the wounded. We can feed the unfortunate. We can show compassion for those who seek only to defend their own homes and their own families, for those demoralized, for those who fight without hope of victory.”
16 July 1973, 0430 hours: What was that! He jerked but did not rise. His eyes, red, angry, obsessed, flicked, searched. Behind them the village still smoldered. Before them FANK troops were moving—maybe withdrawing. In two hours it would be light, in two hours the Krahom 91st Regiment would again attack. Nang pushed his torso up off the earth, swept his eyes back and forth across the battlefield. The B-52s had hit them—hit them again, hit them at dusk, two three-plane flights, six sorties, 324,000 pounds of bombs. The eleventh straight day of being hit, still they attacked, the thirty-fourth day in two months, yet they continued forward, always forward, nearly six hundred million pounds of iron-encased high explosives expended against him, against Nang and his 91st Armed Infantry Regiment of the 4th Brigade of the Army of the North, against some forty to fifty thousand armed Krahom yotheas—expended in the heaviest bombing of the Southeast Asian war, expended against the most ruthless “Pure Flame” land assault in history. Attack! Nang ground his teeth. We must attain victory before the yuons rebuild and devour us. The Party line—it was his faith, his need to believe to press on. Again the noise. He startled. What was that!
By July, the 91st’s mission and tactics had been perfected. “It is better to maim than to kill,” Nang told his fighters. “When useless elements are killed they are soon forgotten, but if they are maimed they are always in the sight of those who oppose us. The maimed drain the enemy’s resources. Their suffering demoralizes the lackey troops who must watch them whimper and die like pathetic dogs. Maiming is good. Better even than having bombers.”
Each battle varied, each was the same. Increasingly FANK withdrew in the face of the KK assault, withdrew and condensed into refugee-clogged enclaves. The yotheas grew confident, overzealous, exposing themselves to aerial reconnaissance and thus bombing. The yotheas wavered and FANK pulled back without cause. Nang directed his mortars, now mounted in ox carts, to target fleeing villagers, thus blockading FANK’s withdrawal. “If they escape,” he screamed at his battalion commanders, “the officer responsible will be executed. Now attack! Attack!
Attack!
”
What was that! Slowly Nang rolled to his knees, then rocked back on his heels into a squat. The earth was soft, mulched, pulverized. The rains had become heavy, had combined with the earth, not so much making mud as making warm red-brown slush, “duch,” Nang call-whispered. The 91st was dispersed and concealed amid cratered forest, mashed fields and the rubble of a previous battle, “duch.”
“met nang.” Duch had two radiomen, each with two small radios, and a man with a field phone set. Messages were relayed point to point to point.
Nang stared into the grayblackness. Clouds were machine-gunning billions of slow projectiles of rain onto the earth, dousing the fires behind them, “duch.” Nang could not hear his commo chief because he’d re-ruptured his ears during the campaign. “duch.”
“Met Nang, here.” Duch squatted beside him, slapped his arm.
“What was that?” Nang said.
“What?”
“I heard something. A minute ago. Very odd. Loud.”
“I didn’t hear anything. How could you, eh?”
“I did.”
“Aah! You didn’t hear. You can’t hear.”
“I can’t hear bombs,” Nang said. “That’s good, eh? If you couldn’t they wouldn’t frighten you so. But I hear death walking.”
“You get more mystical—”
“No. Listen. Does the enemy move out? Tell the battalions to move in, now. Now. Tell them to move up to the berm and dig in. Dig in with FANK. Don’t let them escape. Now.”
“Yes, Met Nang.” Duch thought to ignore the order.
“Duch,” Nang said.
“Yes.”
“Have them jam the fighter-bomber frequency with Radio Peking.”
Suddenly, amid the rain Duch heard the drone of a spotter plane’s engine.
Quickly orders passed. Quickly the yotheas sneaked forward—not fierce human-wave assaults but owl-quiet approaches—a wave in midocean closing on an atoll. They were now south of Ponheapon, ten miles north of Phnom Penh’s heart. The earth burst.
In Phnom Penh, the evening of 15 July 1973, Rita Donaldson was at the typewriter in her small office. “Western sources,” she wrote, “have estimated one hundred civilians are killed every day by American bombs. This figure is believed, by many observers, to be conservative.” Rita Donaldson looked at the sentence and shook her head. Reducing the atrocity to words lessened its impact upon her and that somehow made her feel guilty, as if even though her writing might expose the atrocity to world view, it could never catch the horror, the crime, the pain she’d witnessed. She reached up, adjusted the goose-necked lamp to reduce the glare on the page and continued. “Embassy sources, who have asked not to be identified, have confirmed the existence of a secret communications center in the embassy which gathers bombing requests from the Cambodian General Staff then forwards them to U.S. 7th Air Force headquarters in Thailand. These same sources state that civilian property damage and death are being kept within ‘acceptable limits.’ ”