For the Sake of All Living Things

by John M. Del Vecchio

  Again the lights went out. The night was very black: “What boys?” The shout, a woman’s voice, came from the mango grove.

  “Quiet,” Chung ordered.

  “What boys?” the woman called out again. It was Draam Mul, wife of Chung, mother of Y Bhur and Sraang.

  Lights again. Three now. “Tell them to shoot the lights out,” Chung whispered to his father, but as he spoke a man, trussed at the elbows, shackled at the ankles, was thrust before each light.

  “Y TUNG IS DEAD. HE DIED LIKE A COWARD ABANDONING HIS COMRADES, Y BHUR, Y NANG, Y TANG. WE WILL EXCHANGE THESE BOYS FOR Y KSAR.”

  “Release them. Withdraw your troops, and I will come forward,” Y Ksar shouted in Viet Namese. He laughed, chuckled. Beneath his breath he cursed the yuon dogs.

  Trussed before the jeep light, a white bandage wrapped about his left thigh, Y Bhur stood straight. Before one tank light Samnang cowered; before the other Y Tang’s head dropped stiffly to one side, the result of muscle spasms from being beaten.

  The lights went off. There was no answer. Draam Mul began to wail. Someone began to play the gongs. The jeep light flicked on. Eight soldiers advanced behind the vehicle. Behind them the sound of two hundred soldiers moving filled the canyon. “Y KSAR, WE SHALL SEND IN A DELEGATION WITH Y NANG. TELL ALL YOUR PEOPLE TO STACK THEIR WEAPONS AND ASSEMBLE IN THE COURTYARD.”

  “Uncle! Uncle!” Mayana reached for the elder. “Don’t! Don’t go.”

  “It’s all right, Daughter,” the old man said in Khmer. “Everything which blooms, perishes. The rice withers. The mango falls.”

  Y Ksar stepped into the center of the road, faced the brilliance of the lightbeam.

  “Don’t let them in,” Chung ordered from the shadow of a pigsty. “Stay put.” One villager rose. Then another. The dignity of Y Ksar walking into the lightbeam mesmerized them. Soon many villagers were milling about at the edge of the lighted swath behind Y Ksar.

  “Let the boys go.” Y Ksar smiled at captors unseen behind the light. Both tanks closed upon the village, clicked on their lights.

  “TELL YOUR PEOPLE TO ASSEMBLE TO TRY YOU OR THE BOYS WILL BE SHOT! NOW!”

  A few of the milling people moved toward the courtyard. “Stop!” Chung commanded.

  Immediately a rifle cracked. In the light before one tank Y Tang’s head jerked. His body collapsed. Again the gongs. More women wailed. A defender sprung from his trench before the tank, threw his rifle down, ran to his brother’s body. Of all days for the crow to land on my house, Y Ksar thought.

  “WE WILL KILL THESE TWO IF EVERYONE DOES NOT ASSEMBLE IMMEDIATELY. DRAAM CHUNG, DRAAM MUL, IS THAT WHAT YOU WISH FOR YOUR SON? RAM SU, ELDER OF THE EBING CLAN, WILL YOU STAND BY AS CHUNG ORDERS HIS OWN SON’S DEATH AND THE DEATH OF THE VILLAGE MUTE, Y NANG? NAY SAH, ELDER OF THE H’MAT CLAN, ARE YOU TO BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR THESE DEATHS CAUSED BY Y KSAR? STACK ARMS. ASSEMBLE.”

  The tank light went out. Where Y Tang had stood there was the sound of scuffling. Naming the village elders had great effect on their descendants. The milling crowd drifted toward the courtyard. Y Ksar could not find it in himself to order the defenders to hold the line when indeed it seemed the NVA wanted only to punish him. One by one the defenders rose. Some abandoned their weapons, others carried theirs to the road before Y Ksar’s longhouse and dropped them. On the east ridge a resister was shot. The incident was radioed to the men at the jeep and the details were broadcast into the village. From houses, holes, trees, fields, the villagers converged on the courtyard. Only Y Ksar stood his ground at the entrance to Plei Srepok.

  Chhuon brought the truck forward a few more meters. Then he stopped. Beyond the blockage, stretching for several hundred meters, he saw milling groups of soldiers, jeeps, trucks, a tank. A whole army seemed to be before him. He opened the door and stood with his hands up. With a big smile he said in Viet Namese, “I go Jarai village. Get son. Get daughter. Go home.”

  “No go,” the soldier answered in Khmer. “No village here.”

  “My son and daughter are there,” Chhuon said in lyrical Khmer. “They’re there waiting for me to get this wood for statues of Buddha. We live...”

  “No go,” the soldier said again. He did not smile. “Go back,” he said. “No village here.”

  “Oh yes,” Chhuon said. He reached slowly into his pocket and pulled out the wad of riel notes. Before his face he peeled off ten bills. “Five hundred,” he said in Viet Namese. “Must go get children at Plei Srepok.”

  “No go,” the soldier shot back.

  Chhuon peeled off ten more bills. “One thousand,” he said nervously. He held out the whole wad in his left hand, waved his right as if to block the barrel of the soldier’s weapon. “More hidden,” he said frantically. “Much more. Rice too.”

  “Go back,” the soldier ordered. “No money.”

  “Plei Srepok,” Chhuon pleaded.

  “Plei Srepok, chiet! Dead!” The soldier swept his hand down as if it were an airplane diving. “Boom! Boom! Phalang!”

  “No. No!”

  “Go back.” He dove his hand again. “More boom!” Then he raised his rifle and aimed it at Chhuon.

  Chhuon dropped his hands. He felt the blood drain from his face. His breath seeped out but did not return. He shook his head, turned to the truck. His knees became rigid. He glanced at the soldier. Tears welled in his eyes. He climbed in, started the truck, turned it around. How could he go? How could he stay?

  Again there was no motion. His cheeks, chin and neck were wet. He drove, lost in darkness, confusion, despair. “Yani,” he whimpered. “Kdeb,” he cried. “I’ve abandoned them! Kdeb! My Kdeb. My Kdeb.”

  In the courtyard the villagers were ordered to arrange themselves not by clan but by age and gender. The first seven careless rows facing the front of the adobe edifice were comprised of the village children, boys to the right, girls to the left. Behind the girls were the mothers with infants, behind the boys, young men. In the last rows, according to the new order, stood the elders. Surrounding the assembly was an entire platoon of formally uniformed NVA soldiers, square belt buckles with stars, heavily armed. Other soldiers were going through the longhouses, flushing out the stragglers, herding them into the cluster.

  To one side of the adobe the Viet Namese had stoked, fed and bellowed the fire of the village forge. A jeep had been positioned behind the villagers, its light switched to flood. The entire arena was illuminated, flat and pale. At the adobe entrance there was a small platform. To one side Y Bhur and Samnang were tied, still trussed and shackled, to stakes. A very large Mountaineer had been directing the villagers, chatting, forcing many to drink from the jars he had placed like a low fence on the platform before him. Whispers abounded. “It’s Bok Roh, the Giant.” Fear spread at the repetition of his name. He was infamous for his cruelty. Bok Roh lectured them on the evils of alcohol as he forced the elders to drink more and more. He harangued the elders for their lack of courtesy and loyalty. Between each verbal explosion he consulted with a uniformed North Viet Namese political officer and a black-clad Khmer.

  At the stakes a soldier cuffed Y Bhur on the jaw. “Keep your head up,” he scolded as if disciplining a naughty child. Samnang watched. He had been playing mute ever since capture, acting out of terror the soldiers would discover he was Khmer and not Jarai. The soldier who had hit Y Bhur cocked his hand before Samnang. The frail boy trembled, bewildered, shrank back against the stake. “He’s a mute. An idiot,” Y Bhur said in Jarai. The soldier didn’t understand. The villagers did.

  “Y Ksar with the Large Foot...” Bok Roh shouted. A hush fell over the assemblage. The elder village chief had not been seen since guards had grabbed him by the village gate. Sraang and Mayana, seated on the ground before Draam Mul, both were crying softly. “Silence!” Bok Roh bellowed, his immense voice echoing off the cliff, reverberating down the canyon. “Y Ksar,” the giant seethed angrily, “you are accused of collaborating with the enemies of the people. You have, in your life, served the French ag
ainst your own people, and now you conspire with imperialist running dogs and bring a phalang invasion deep into the land of your people. You have aligned yourself with renegade Mountaineers. And”—Bok Roh turned toward the staked boys and laughed a guttural chilling disgusted laugh—“you have sent these ants, a boy and a mute, to fire arrows through our radios. Bad elements must be punished. Thoughts which veer from the true course of liberation for all oppressed peoples must be exorcised. Come forth. Make your plea.”

  At that moment, from inside the adobe, four soldiers carried out a large wooden X-frame. To it was tied a naked, bruised old man. Immediately a murmur rose from the audience. Immediately voices of protest rose.

  “Silence!” Bok Roh’s voice exploded louder than artillery. Even the NVA soldiers jumped back, glanced furtively at one another.

  “Is this building”—Bok Roh, standing before Y Ksar, whipped his large arms at the adobe—“not proof of collusion with the running dogs who have invaded our land? Have you”—Bok’s angry voice spit from his hate-contorted mouth—“have you not even this very day, conducted illicit business with a lackey of Pech Lim Song? A lackey liquidated by the people.”

  “No!” Samnang screamed in Khmer. He strained his small wiry body against the wires and the stake. “No! No, my father...Papa...Papa...” He dropped his head. His body wilted.

  “Well...” Bok Roh smiled delightedly. He conferred with the NVA officer and the black-clad Khmer. Then, “So, Y Nang, you are not mute.”

  “Stop it!” Now Chung stood. Another Jarai man leaped up, jumped forward.

  Two guards fired. Five AK rounds slammed into the second man, twisted him, threw him.

  “Bring him here!” Bok pointed at Chung. He conferred again with the officer. “Who is this?” Two armed guards held Chung by the hair, one held a bayonet at his back. Chung’s eyes reached his father’s. “You don’t need to tell me. I know. Our intelligence on this village is perfect...Draam Chung.” Bok Roh gestured with his head. The soldiers pushed Chung into the adobe with the tips of their bayonets while they held him back by the hair so he was forced to walk with his groin thrust forward, his back arched. From the dark adobe interior, kicks were heard.

  “Y Ksar with the Large Foot,” Bok Roh mocked, “why,” he shouted in Y Ksar’s face, “are you at war with us?”

  “We shall be at war with anyone who defiles our land,” Y Ksar said. His voice was soft. Gentle.

  “And you and all your people will meet death,” Bok Roh hissed.

  “I am accustomed to death,” Y Ksar said. He addressed the village. “We are not frightened by death of the body. We are men of dignity.”

  “You are an enemy of the people. Plei Srepok must stop relying on old organizations.” Bok Roh turned to the villagers. “You must move forward within the new framework. You shall convict this man. And”—again four soldiers brought out a naked beaten man tied and splayed on a large X—“and this one. Traitors must be denounced. Their heads must be bowed. Denounce them! Or...everyone will be punished. Who is that crying? Bring her up.”

  Bok Roh pointed to Sraang. Two soldiers descended upon her. They grabbed her and immediately wired her elbows together. “Silence!” The large man screamed. “Do you hear me? Silence!” He grabbed her skirt and ripped it from her. Sraang’s cries became shrieks. She tried to collapse to the ground but a soldier behind her lifted her by the wires, cutting her already scraped arm. “Silence! You don’t hear!” She continued to shriek uncontrollably. “No! You don’t want to hear.” The big man clamped the sides of her face with his large hands and twisted her head up to look at him. From behind, a soldier placed a chopstick in each ear. Then the soldier behind grabbed her, held her up by the wires and her hair, and the big man before her let her head go. “For not hearing me,” Bok Roh screamed. He extended his arms far to his sides, then slapped them toward each other, catching the chopsticks and driving them into Sraang’s brain. She fell, withered, twitching, contorting, rasping her head horribly on the ground.

  A deluge of cold fear froze the assembled as totally as if they had been physically frozen in ice. From the forge a soldier emerged with a glowing steel machete. “Y Ksar, you have been convicted by your own people.” Bok Roh touched the blade ever so lightly to the old man’s lower lip. Y Ksar did not flinch, did not move. His skin blistered, burned, stuck to the red metal. “You are sentenced to death by decapitation.” Now Bok Roh stood perfectly still as smoke and odor from the blade and Y Ksar’s burning flesh rose and spread.

  In the frozen scene, Sraang’s head still madly raked against the ground. Then, from the row of girls, Mayana stood and as simply as if on a stroll to pick flowers, she walked to Sraang and pulled the sticks from her ears. Sraang collapsed, still. Mayana looked blankly up into the eyes of the giant. He turned his face on her. His mouth opened in tense horror. Mayana’s childlike naïveté was destroying Bok Roh’s control. From the row of old women in back, Jaang, Y Ksar’s wife, rose feebly. From her skirt she raised a .45 caliber pistol, aimed...

  “Yiii—” Bok Roh swung the machete up—“KA!”—down, cleaving the small girl in two.

  Jaang’s weapon fired. Immediately she was shot. Her body crumpled as if it were not supported by a skeleton of bone but only by a spirit. Her fired round lodged in the adobe wall.

  “Burn the village,” the NVA political officer said. He said it matter-of-factly, then turned and spoke to the black-clad man. To Bok Roh the officer said, “Save those boys for me. Kill the rest.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The brotherhood of suffering is a bond, power is a drug.

  —Theodore H. White,

  China After The War

  THE NIGHT WAS DARK. Samnang’s lips were cut. Dry. His throat rasped. He coughed dryly. The pain in his arms and shoulders would not subside, would not dull. His hands pulsed numb, tingled on the stretched surface. The soldiers had wired his elbows tightly together before the march from Plei Srepok. In the blackness he could hear voices, mostly Viet Namese, some Khmer. He tried to hear, to concentrate on the voices, to listen so as to forget his lips and throat and arms. He tried to force himself to lie on the ground without moving and listen but each moment he lay still his mind shot to his shoulders, elbows, to the pain, to the terror. He did not yet question why they had taken him, why they had not killed him, what they were going to do with him. The terror was numbing. He shook violently yet was hardly aware of his tremors. He did not realize or understand the magnitude of the scene carved onto his mind.

  He moved. The noise of his motion masked the voices and he missed part of what was said. It did not matter. From the Khmer he ascertained the men were bartering over something. The Khmer man spoke with the sarcastic formality of an educated city dweller. Samnang laughed to himself, amused, realizing the Viet Namese soldiers didn’t know, couldn’t understand, the sarcasm, the antagonism held in the Khmer idioms the man used graciously.

  The pain grabbed him, he fidgeted, the noise again blotted out the voices. He took a deep breath, held it, counted to four and let it out.

  “Nuoc?” a guard asked him.

  He stared into the blackness. There was nothing there. Again the guard asked, “Nuoc?”

  Samnang cleared his parched throat. He tried to speak but no sound came. He licked his lips. His tongue was dry. He could taste the faint saltiness of blood. The soldier clicked on a flashlight and poked the beam into his eyes. “Nuoc!” The light was blinding. The soldier held a canteen cup in the beam. Samnang nodded and the soldier gently allowed him to drink. Then he turned the light off and left.

  As his eyes readjusted Samnang looked to see if Y Bhur was near. He could not tell. The Khmer man who had been bartering with the Viet Namese left. From somewhere in the darkness came a staccato female radio voice. He picked out the words “Radio Hanoi.” The radio seemed nearby, perhaps less than ten meters. The broadcast was sad, soulful songs. Samnang rolled. He rolled gingerly, afraid of hurting his hands. His hands no longer felt like overfille
d balloons. There was no feeling at all. Now his chest screamed. The radio noise was soothing, giving him something on which to focus but his mind couldn’t hold it in his body’s agitation. He rolled again. Images of the night flashed subliminally in his mind, yet again, in the agitation caused by pain, he couldn’t hold a single image, not of Y Ksar, not of Sraang, not of Yani, not of the tremendous conflagration and its sucking wind.

  Several Viet Namese soldiers began arguing. He recognized the voice of the political officer, understood a few phrases, did not understand the context of the argument. Then he heard the voice of Bok Roh. Samnang’s body went rigid. Urine squirted into the loincloth he still wore. Without emotion the giant told the Viet Namese, in Jarai, he wanted to keep the Jarai and sell the Khmer. Again there was argument in Viet Namese. Samnang tried to pray but his teeth chattered so violently he could not.

  The camp was quiet. Not because the soldiers were practicing noise discipline, in the sanctuary area it wasn’t necessary, but simply because most were asleep. A rustling noise came from below, approaching. Samnang rolled. A group of men with flashlights came toward him. He could not make out how many or who. When they reached him one guard passed a beam up and down his body and face. Samnang turned away, jammed a heel against the earth, breathed hard. He began to whimper. A guard said something and a second soldier rolled the boy and loosened the wire at his elbows. Immediately relief swept him from head to foot. His shoulders and chest, which were near spasm, relaxed. His hands pulsed, ached. In a moment they felt cold and hot, clammy, partially numb, stiff, flashed hot. After no feeling, the sensation was wonderful, terrible. He did not notice when guards deposited Y Bhur beside him. He slipped into a drowsy haze, not sleep, not consciousness, a protective limbo in which his mind blocked the horror.