For the Sake of All Living Things

by John M. Del Vecchio

“May I put my sleeping mat in your courtyard? I’m with a family of eleven. There’s so little room.”

  “Of course, Tung. Stay in my house.”

  That evening the young man and the old set out on the trail which led west from town to Phum Bung and then north to Phum Sath Nan. Hang Tung carried a dilapidated haversack over one shoulder. To Chhuon he seemed tense, nervous, his smile and talk forced. They walked slowly, carefully into the jungle. The path surface, hidden from the sun by the canopy, was damp here, wet there. “For all the troubles that have befallen us,” Chhuon explained quietly as he followed Tung, “this year’s rice looks to be the best ever.”

  “Really Uncle? The newcomers have so little.”

  “There’s so much to harvest and so few old families, my cousin and I had full granaries before half the paddies were cut.” Chhuon paused. It was becoming easier to mention Sam though the thought was still painful. “We’ll fill the vacant granaries with the surplus. And the pagoda’s small room. We can’t ship and sell as we used to.” Again he paused. “Perhaps we can share with the newcomers, eh?”

  “You’re a good man, Uncle. Here, this is the spot.” Tung opened the haversack. From it he pulled not just tripwire and flares but two Chicom grenades.

  “That’s not necessary,” Chhuon protested.

  “No one’s supposed to be here at night, Uncle.”

  “But what if a farmer is fleeing to our village?”

  “No more farmers,” Hang Tung said curtly. “All the farms are ruined. Only Royal soldiers or Viets will come this way.”

  “Tung! You said a flare. You...”

  “Uncle Chhuon, when we return to your house I’ll tell you what I know about their plans. They destroyed my farm. Killed my mother. Surely you understand.”

  At Chhuon’s house seven old family elders sat in the central room awaiting his return. Sok had served the men tea and rice cakes as they grumbled bitterly. Chhuon’s mother knelt before the family altar. She was crying loudly. Ry, Sam’s wife, knelt beside her, repeating the prayer for the dead. Peou waited on the steps. He wanted to be first to tell his father the important news.

  Horizontal light from the rising moon filtered through the low branches of the orchard as Chhuon and Tung entered the courtyard. “Father! Father!” Peou jumped up, ran to Chhuon, hugged his leg. “Father, Mafia Nyanananda has been assassinated!”

  The words hit Chhuon like a cloud of poison gas, surrounded him, enveloped him in a fog of disbelief. Peou repeated the words and others but Chhuon did not hear. Tung expressed appropriate grief for the community’s spiritual leader though his voice splashed on the viscous cloud about Chhuon without penetrating. Inside the elders addressed him, bombarded him with theories, badgered him with suggestions. For an hour nothing penetrated. A burning sensation steamed from his stomach to his chest and mouth. His knees grew sore. His back ached. Then he heard Hang Tung say, “Yes, my uncle will organize the village guards. Tonight he himself led me out the Phum Bung trail where he set both warning flares and booby traps. If every quadrant of the village blocked and monitored the incoming trails in their sections, no one could come without all knowing.”

  “Cahuom Chhuon”—one old man smiled ironically—“you are an explosives expert now, eh?!”

  “Not I...”

  “Don’t be so humble, Uncle,” Tung interrupted. “Now’s not the time for modesty. Now we need a strong leader.”

  “Then it is settled,” a second old gentleman said. “Mr. Chhuon will be chairman of the new guard.”

  To the west, on the trail to Phum Bung and Phum Sath Nan, two blasts erupted. The sound rolled over the Cahuom household like the first thunder of an approaching monsoon season.

  4 November—Nang sat atop Hill 982 with the NVA command post looking down upon the Special Forces camp at Bu Prang. For Nang, for the defenders of Bu Ntoll, for the remanned NVA 272d Regiment, revenge was near. For twelve days skirmishes and minor assaults had bloodied the hilltop defenders yet yielded nothing for either side except body counts. At midnight the final attack would begin.

  From the peak of 982, Nang, Bok Roh, and a contingent of political cadre and artillery forward observers scanned the base through scopes and binoculars. They checked the scale maps produced earlier by reconnaissance teams. Every building, every radio antenna, every machine gun emplacement, the commo and headquarters bunkers, supply points for ammo and POL (petroleum, oil and lubricants), and the tiny airstrip were noted, targeted, preregistered on the big guns at Bu Ntoll and with the mortar and rocket units infiltrating to points closer to the base.

  Earlier, at Ban Me Thuot, ARVN and U.S. intelligence reported four new NVA regiments, upwards of seven thousand troops, descending onto the Dar Lac and Mnong plateaus from Cambodian sanctuaries. Yet even with knowledge of the impending attack, U.S. and ARVN efforts to thwart it had been miserable. For months the NVA meticulously planned and prepared the attack. Within the deepest caves at Bu Ntoll sand-table models of the entire area had been constructed in minute detail. Units rehearsed their roles. The battlefield itself was methodically eight kilometers south of the base and to trails and groves seven and ten kilometers west and east. Covertly, bridges had been constructed four inches below water surfaces in order to conceal them from aerial reconnaissance, across rivers that were along advance, primary and alternate withdrawal routes. Caches of food, water, ammunition, weapons and medical supplies had been hidden at strategic points. Ambush sites had been prepared, deep bunkers constructed, camouflaged and interconnected by trenches, fields of fire cut, guides, trail watchers and “custodians” planted. Even the steep hillside approaches to the Special Forces camp at Bu Prang had had stairs dug into the narrow covered trails.

  On 30 October the buried NVA guns of Bu Ntoll struck Bu Prang, Duc Lap and Firebases Kate, Annie and Susan which could offer the Special Forces base supporting fire. On the 31st, thirty B-52s bombed the forested valleys northeast of Bu Prang. The American contingent on the hilltop consisted of only twelve advisors and a four-man Studies and Observation Group (SOG). Indigenous Mountaineers made up the bulk of personnel, four hundred Mnong with the advisors and 150 Stieng tribesmen with the SOG. SOG teams had reported the new enemy regiments and the construction of ambush sites and rocket launch pads; indeed, Allied intelligence knew essentially the entire NVA battle plan. Yet both ARVN and U.S. commands responded minimally. The ARVN 23d Infantry Division moved only a two-company potential relief force to Nhon Co, twenty-four kilometers south of Bu Prang. The U.S. command reinforced the Mountaineer howitzer battery with six cannons from the U.S. 1st Battalion, 92d Artillery. As proof of the success of Viet Namization, no American infantry or armored units were brought up.

  Dusk settled on the border mountain. From the peak of Hill 982 Nang took last note of the camp’s preparations. He thought of the report he would send to Met Sar. Barbed wire barriers have been restrung and tightened, he imagined writing. Foot traps and mines were laid along obvious approaches. Huge stocks of food, water and artillery rounds have been delivered and stored in open pits or in bunkers.

  On 1 November, Firebases Annie and Susan had been abandoned after four thousand rounds of NVA heavy mortar, rocket and howitzer fire rendered them undefendable. More supplies had been brought to Bu Prang.

  Every structure on Firebase Kate, seven kilometers south of Bu Prang, had been leveled by 1500 hours on the 1st yet the defenders had fought on. At 1530 hours the NVA artillery units in Cambodia switched to air-burst shells, raining steel shards into the foxholes. American and Mountaineer defenders tightened the perimeter. Two of their five howitzers were destroyed. All that night the NVA guns from Cambodia continued firing, blasting the small hilltop. On 2 November the Allied commands refused reinforcements. Two more howitzers were destroyed.

  On Hill 982 Nang had heard Major Bui lament to Bok Roh, “Why don’t they take the bait? Why?”

  “What bait?” Nang had asked aside.

  “We’re the bait,” Bok had explained. “We must entic
e the Americans and their lackeys from the lowlands to the border camps. With their troops in the mountains, we’ll slip through the valleys and attack the pacification centers in the lowlands. We’ll make the cities bleed.”

  “I want to join them,” Nang had said.

  “We’ll see.” Bok had laughed at the boy. “With those artillery bases destroyed, Bu Prang is vulnerable.”

  “What of the bombers?”

  “They’ll be needed elsewhere,” Bok had said. “Elsewhere.”

  Early evening, 3 November, the NVA had offered the defenders of Firebase Kate a break. The surviving American advisors and Mountaineers pounced. Racing from bunker to bunker the officers and NCOs had quickly organized a withdrawal. Under cover of darkness the soldiers spiked the only working howitzer with a thermite grenade then crawled through the concertina wire and raced down the steep slope toward Bu Prang. Twenty seconds behind them, a regiment of NVA soldiers had swarmed the hill. The entire NVA force now was free to concentrate its destruction on the Bu Prang Special Forces camp.

  Midnight arrived. The main assault was delayed. Around Bu Prang tunnels, trenches and bunkers were extended toward the camp. As planned, most of the B-52s were diverted elsewhere. Fifteen hours earlier, timed to coincide with Richard Nixon’s television speech half the world away, NVA and VC units had shelled forty-five Allied bases and towns and attacked eight more outposts along the border and the coast.

  At Firebase Ike, twenty-six kilometers northeast of Tay Ninh, in a two-hour pitched battle, U.S. helicopters killed forty-eight soldiers of the Viet Cong 9th Division; all but two were Northern replacements. At Firebase Ellen, southwest of Song Be, an element of the Dong Nai Regiment wounded sixteen Americans. Five kilometers away, at Firebase Burton, Dong Nai and NVA 88th Regiment troops breeched the wire and minefields but withdrew under immense firepower, leaving fifty-five bodies. Finally, at 0120 hours on 5 November, heavy shelling of Bu Prang began.

  Vathana retched. She covered her mouth, forced the vomit back. She paused, leaned against the wall of her apartment building looking up at seemingly swaying concrete and glass. She panted. The pain eased momentarily. I should have stayed at the pagoda, she thought. I must get home.

  Ever since the incidents with the border children and the dead boy on her barge she had spent an hour each morning at the wat in prayer. Even as she’d left the apartment for the quarter-mile walk she’d felt ill, but nothing compared with this horrible, nausea-producing cramping pain—at once constant and throbbing. She breathed slightly deeper. Her vision cleared. She stepped through the main door into the small courtyard and toward the stairs. Again she paused. The proximity of her apartment pulled her. The stairs looked formidable. She grasped the railing, forced back another heaving. Again her vision blurred, her hearing dulled as if her ears were stuffed down deep with wet clay, her sense of balance waned, she swayed, gripped the railing more tightly.

  I must get there, she told herself. Must. Must. Up a step. Must. She squeezed the railing until her knuckles whitened. Someone come by and help me, she thought. Why, of all times, are the stairs empty? Up. Up. Must. Labor isn’t like this, she thought. This is too early. Three more weeks. Mother was never so sick. Aunt Voen never said she was sick. Up. Must. Up. At her crotch she could feel warm liquid, a trickle. She squeezed her thighs together but her expanded pelvis held them so far apart the squeeze was useless. On the last flight the trickle reached her ankles. Up. Must. Only a little more. I have calls to make. Three more weeks. Oh, just one more week. The shelter. The barge. Mister Pech. The new oil tanks. Vathana lifted her skirt to see the fluid, the water. Her ankle was bright red. Blood oozed to the top of her foot. The sight shocked her. The pain surged. She vomited, the effluent gushing with such force its spatter splashed back from the few stairs yet to be ascended, splashed over her feet, against her skirt, blouse and shawl, tiny globs hitting her cheeks. The sight and smell disgusted her but much more was the fear. What’s happening? I’ve been so careful. Not a thing have I stitched shut. Not a doorway have I lingered in. What’s happening to me? What’s happening to my baby?

  “Teck.” Vathana’s voice was weak. Her foot smeared blood on the floor as she wobbled toward the bedroom. “Teck,” she called. Her husband was still in bed. “Teck,” she panted. “Wake up.” Her voice was shallow, hollow, fearful. “Please wake up.” She shook him. The agitation set off a burst of pain stabbing outward from her abdomen, reaching her entire body, splitting her face, forehead. Teck lay like a corpse, cool like a corpse. “Teck!” Vathana forced a wail. Still he didn’t respond. “I need you,” she whimpered. Tears flooded her eyes. “Why? Why do you do this? I need you.”

  She began to sit. How easy to let herself fall, let her knees fold, to collapse beside her husband in his deep heroin-slumber. She straightened. The pain throughout her abdomen was as if a vise were gripping her, the screw closing down with constant increasing pressure. She vomited again, dry bile phlegm. Her long black hair stuck in slithering coils to her sweat-wet face like snakes of the Gorgon Medusa. Again she tried to wake Teck. Still he slumbered. The hemorrhaging flow increased as the placenta, in partial previa, split.

  In adversity, in sorrow, in the presence of greed, corruption and evil, in the wake of the killing of the bandit boy by her barge crew and the turning out of the border children by Teck, Vathana had become more Buddhist, more giving, more concerned. With it came more business success, more business, more social responsibilities. Throughout the summer and fall there had been a steady trickle of refugees from the Northeast and border areas seeping into Neak Luong. Most had moved in with relatives, unnoticed, without social burden to the community or the government. Yet an increasing number arrived without money, without food, without shelter, without destination. They slept in parks, along byways, on riverfront piers. They ate by begging. In her fifth month of pregnancy Vathana, her skills sharpened through business, organized through the monks an assistance shelter supported by half a dozen local businessmen, staffed by a dozen volunteer women from apartments and homes. In two months the program had expanded to include a small house for orphans. Each day Vathana split her time between prayer, business and volunteer work. Each evening she remained alone as Teck went to dance halls or to share a pipe with his friends.

  Vathana stared at the photo album. Teck was beyond waking. She concentrated on the album’s cover as the pain overwhelmed her body. Her face felt swollen, her eyes forced to squint through puffed skin slits. She had made the call. Help would come. Now she could let go, let what would happen happen. Her eyes pushed closed. The album faded to a negative retinal image, then to nothing. Her hand groped, found the Buddha statuette at her throat.

  Vathana woke with a needle and red tube in each arm. The pain had subsided. Her head was clogged. About her dozens of people were attending patients on steel beds in the cold clinic ward. Teck’s face hung over her, looked down at her, seemingly suspended from the ceiling or floating in air. She closed her eyes.

  She opened them again. One arm was plumbed with clear tubing. Teck had vanished. “Welcome back, Angel,” a stout border woman whispered in French. Vathana could see tears in the woman’s eyes but she didn’t know why she was crying or who she was. “You’ve crossed the great ocean alone,” the woman whispered. “You have a son. The grandfather has called him Pech Samnang.”

  “They were both Royal soldiers,” Tung said to Chhuon. Chhuon sat on the ground. His legs were spread. He leaned forward and beat the ground rhythmically with his fists. Tears of despair seeped from his eyes. Do not kill the living creatures, he thought. Do not kill. Do not kill. It was a basic tenet of his Buddhist morality, of his righteousness. Through all the struggles he had been able to maintain his integrity, his inner purity. Perhaps he had transgressed on occasion but never had he killed a living thing. Never had he killed a human.

  “Uncle, I think they were an assassination team. They would have killed another village leader had they not walked into your trap.”

 
; Chhuon continued to pound the earth with his fist. To him they could have been devils and the words would have made no difference.

  “Blood for blood, Uncle,” Tung said. “Blood for blood. Your own words.”

  Chhuon rocked farther forward. Had they been yuon, he thought, then it would have been just. “But,” he cried, “they were Khmer boys.”

  “Just like those who killed my mother,” Tung said bitterly. “Perhaps like those who killed the monk.”

  “We don’t know who killed the monk.”

  “Uncle, I’m certain it was Royal treachery. It’s Prince Sihanouk’s wish to punish the Northeast.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “It makes no difference, Uncle. In the eyes of the Royal army you now are a criminal. You can no longer stay in the village unless the village defends itself from the Prince’s troops.”

  Nang carried ammunition for Bok Roh. The giant carried an assault rifle and a lightened pack. They moved quickly through tangled vegetation, off Hill 982, into the jungle to join troops poised for the attack. They crossed defoliated swaths, moved down onto narrow paths marked with short white stakes, down toward the river. They paused to rest with a three-man cell of infantry troops from the NVA 272d Regiment. From every direction, unseen in the night, cells moved forward, merged to form fire-teams, combined to form squads, converged to form platoons, rivers of men surging toward final staging, five thousand Communist troops coordinated for the clockwork attack, waiting for the signal.

  The NVA plan was simple. The 32d Regiment would launch a broad frontal attack from the east, over Bu Prang’s airstrip and POL storage points, attempting to pull in as many defenders as possible. Then the 165th Regiment would assault the southwest perimeter. Finally, when the defenders were bogged down, pinned down or dead, the 272d would concentrate a pinpoint force against the north berm, would blow through the wire and overrun the hill. From Bu Ntoll the 66th Regiment’s heavy artillery would soften up the foe, and its 82mm mortar teams, dug in and supplied at five points about the camp, would support the infantry. The 40th Artillery Regiment with 120mm mortars could move to reinforce the 66th or deliver knockout blows. Support units included a company of elite dac cong, combat engineers or sappers, plus command and control posts, communication and transportation companies, and the ever-present custodian-guides. In reserve were the 24th and 174th Infantry Regiments.