Afterward they talked again.
“You have only one sister?” Vathana lay with her head on his chest.
“Um-hum. Your family’s large?”
“We’re scattered,” Vathana said. “Most of my family is in Communist areas.”
“By the border?”
“In the North. Do you know Stung Treng?”
“Only from maps. It fell before I got here.”
“There are many small villages in the hills and along the rivers. My father’s village is Phum Sath Din. On the Srepok.” Vathana hesitated. “ ‘They,’ ” she purposefully left it indefinite, inviting inquiry, “have told me my brother, Sakhon, at my father’s request, has been moved to Kratie.”
“That’s held too,” Sullivan said. She felt wonderful on him. “Your father must be a strong man to be able to let his son go.”
“He used to be very traditional, very religious. Always he read the scriptures.”
“My father used to make us, my sister and me, read the Bible before dinner,” Sullivan said. “One passage every night.”
“He too must have been very religious,” Vathana whispered back. She kissed his ear.
“It wasn’t so much that.” Sullivan ran his hand over the smooth skin of her hip. “It was his way to teach us to think. We’d read the passage, then all through dinner we’d talk about it. What did it mean to us? What did the nuns say it meant? I remember one passage.”
“Just one,” Vathana kidded him, and snuggled in closer.
“Oh, lots,” he responded seriously. “But I was thinking of one. It’s from Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, they’d asked him why he spoke to the people in parables, and he said, ‘Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. Seeing they do not see, hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.’ ”
“Are you certain, Mister Sullivan, you are not Buddhist?” Vathana giggled then turned mock-serious. “You sound Buddhist. It’s written in the Dhammapada, ‘If a fool be associated with a wise man even all his life, he will perceive the truth as little as a spoon perceives the taste of soup. If an intelligent man be associated for one minute only with a wise man, he will soon perceive the truth, as the tongue perceives the taste of soup.’ ”
“You know, I used to think Buddhism was all this mystical stuff and Christianity more down-to-earth. Never mind that. It’s me. I feel like I’ve been given to know, not the mysteries of heaven, but the mysteries of hell.”
“Perhaps it’s because you are an intelligent man.”
“But they’re intelligent too.”
“Who?”
“Why is it they see but don’t see? Why don’t they understand?”
“You mean your people?”
“Vathana, it’s as plain to me as the freckles on my nose.”
She rubbed her nose against his. “They’re very plain.” She giggled.
“Saint Paul said, ‘Always learning, they are never able to come to the knowledge of the truth...they will not progress...their folly will be manifest to all....’ They study. They write. They’ve no idea what’s happening. When will their folly be manifest? Is it going to take a bloodbath for them to wake up?”
“John L.,” Vathana whispered in his ear. “Love me again. You cannot enlighten a fool.”
After they loved again and Sullivan lay on his back with his head in the gentle fog pillow of postejaculation, Vathana massaged his forehead. “You are too young,” she said softly, “to have such furrows.” He opened his eyes. She looked down into his face. “How did you say it? ‘I could gobble you up.’ ” She opened her mouth wide, placed her teeth on his forehead, gently raked the skin, half eating him, half trying to dislodge the pain and worry. “What would happen if we did nothing?” Vathana said in altered tone. “Really. What would happen if there were no you, no me? If John L. Sullivan and Cahuom Vathana did not exist? If we left Cambodia and moved to...to Paris?”
“Well,” Sullivan said, wrapping his arms around her, twisting her down and nipping her nose, “well, first off, they’d come get me and toss my young ass in jail for being—how can I say it?—absent without leave.”
“Truly, John,” Vathana said.
“Truly,” he whispered back. He ran kisses lightly down from her ear, down her neck to her shoulder. He felt the chain which she wore, ran a finger under it as if it blocked him from feeling all of her. Vathana lifted the statuette and rubbed it on the back of his hand. “What’s that?” Sullivan whispered.
“A charm,” she whispered proudly. “From my grandfather’s tooth. My father gave it to me when I married.”
Sullivan fought a sudden twinge of revulsion, an urge to retract his hand. For a quick moment he felt repulsed as if she’d said the Buddha was fresh feces from a hepatitis-ward latrine. He repressed the urge and gently grasped the carved figurine. As he held it, rubbed its smoothness between his fingers, a feeling of the tie to the ancient Wheel of Life rose in him, spread through him, finally reaching expressible thought. “It’s very beautiful,” he said.
“Truly?” Vathana giggled. “Would it be beautiful to you in Paris? Would they really throw you in jail?”
“You mean”—Sullivan flopped back onto his elbows and looked into the night sky—“in Paris. Not here. Hum...I think it would still be beautiful. Paris. Would your camp run without you? Could this stinking city survive without its Angel? Would any more or any fewer weapons be stolen or misused if I told Mataxis I wanted out? God, at least that damned Sun reporter’d be off my ass. I was with a FANK unit...I flew up to Kompong Thom last month. The place...the whole city is fortified but there’s something crazy going on. I was thinking after...I was with the unit at Kilometer 19 near Vat Bakheng.”
“Oh, John. You mustn’t...”
“God. Those devils rose up outa the swamp. A full regiment against, I don’t know, maybe five hundred FANKs. I called in the air strikes and this son of a bitch sees me do it. Did he see fifteen hundred NVA a dozen miles from the capital? Did he see them wipe out the first line? Nope. All he sees is me on the hook with a map. I thought Mataxis would shit. If The New York Times hadn’t started publishing that Pentagon document I’d probably have been court-martialed for advising. Vathana, they see but they don’t see.”
“John, you take this very hard, yes?”
Sullivan rolled away from her. He propped himself up on his elbows and held his chin. “The guy paints me. He paints a picture of me and the whole team with his words. I’m working to keep these people from being slaughtered and he labels me a ‘hard liner.’ He thinks he’s some sort of antiwar idealist and I’m a warmonger. I’m some hawk psychopath. What would happen if we moved to Paris? Who knows? But if they pull all the American lunatic hawks like me out of here, it’s not going to stop the fighting.”
“Truly?”
“Yeah. Truly.”
Rita Donaldson let the heel of her pump fall loose from her foot. She and Tom Jasson were in the veranda dining room of Washington’s Chez Pasquier, sitting, reading the latest installment of the Pentagon Papers as it appeared, exclusively, in The Times, sitting, sipping vodka martinis, amused and simultaneously angered and frustrated by the revelations and by the Times’s coup.
Rita’s shoe fell to the carpet. She turned the page. The photo of a large man dressed in jungle utilities, his back to the camera, caught her eye. Tom Jasson moved his leg deeper under the table.
“Another American advisor in Cambodia...” she said. The words were unconnected with previous utterances.
“Um,” Jasson said. Her toes found his shin, slid to the side of his leg, caressed—suddenly withdrew. Jasson looked up.
“Who the hell...?” Rita said. Her foot fidgeted with the lost pump as she leaned forward, stared into the newspaper-quality photograph.
“What—” Jasson began.
“Arnold White,” she said. “Arnold...The outline credit is to...Do you remember when I got back...?”
/> “Sure.”
“Remember that obnoxious son of a bitch I told you about?”
“Yeah. Harvey called Chicago and, ah, what was it, San Jose?”
“He called all over. He even checked with the State Department. That bastard said his name was Jim White. Nobody had ever heard of him. Look at this.” Jasson leaned over the table. “Arnold White!?” she said.
“Ah, maybe that’s your man.”
“May...I don’t think so. Harvey checked for anyone named White. There weren’t any in January.”
“You’re really upset about this, aren’t you? So one guy was rude to you—so what?”
“He wasn’t a correspondent. He was CIA, I bet. Trying to set me up.”
“Rita? Rita, it doesn’t make...Well, you tell me. You said nothing came of it, didn’t you?”
Rita Donaldson sighed, thought, You jerk, glared at Tom Jasson. “I don’t know.”
“Look. It couldn’t have worked out better for you. You spent a lousy ten days in that hell and you got a promotion. Now you get to see Paris and cover the talks. I would have gone but my dad’s illness...”
“Yeah, I know. But you know what...”
“It should have been me,” Jasson said. “You didn’t even turn in a decent story. Who was going to read a feature on Cambodian military training? Really!”
“A lot of people read it!”
“Yeah, uh-huh.”
“You envious twit! God!” She finished her martini. “You know what? I’m going to go back.” She tapped the photo of the American “advisor.” “I’m going to go back and nail these bastards. Goddamn gall of the government and these hooligans raping that country!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
A CHANGED NANG STOOD amid his fighters. He had not uttered a word or moved a muscle for nearly thirty minutes and the fighters struggled to match his perfection. He did not make his mind blank, did not meditate attempting to achieve some higher awareness, but simply stood in perfect awareness of the here and now. “He who breaks first,” Nang had told the group, “will face this scarred face in full sparring, just as he who breaks first is first heard and engaged by the enemy.” The boys and young men concentrated on their breathing, concentrated on remaining relaxed. Every day they practiced being still and quiet, each day for a longer period. Never had Number Two Rabbit challenged them, never had the stakes been so high. By his countenance they knew the situation had changed, evolved. At thirty-five minutes one boy wavered. Eyes locked on him, then flicked to Nang. The teacher, leader, master did not move. As the sides had drawn tighter about Kompong Thom and American high-level harassment bombing had increased, Nang used the sanctity of the inner city more and more to train new yotheas and chrops and his youth corps, to train them in techniques as diverse as spying and sparring, fading into a crowd and facing enemy tanks.
In the heart of Kompong Thom, Nang followed the developing situation throughout the Northern Corridor, followed it as closely as any full bird colonel followed enemy movements in his brigade’s area of operation. Come on, he had thought. Come.
Come both of you. Come and fight and kill each other. Come, wound each other. Then face the Rabbit’s wrath. Nang fantasized a thousand scenarios. In the swamps he saw himself spring from a spiderhole, disembowel an NVA trail guide. In the city he saw himself enter the FANK garrison in the southwest, saw himself toying with the rheostat and electrodes that had burned his feet, saw the Republican governor weeping, lying in a pile of shit, begging Nang’s pardon as Nang cranked the rheostat, no, ten rheostats, ten hanging imperialist lackeys losing control and defecating on themselves, saw himself with a long-handled knife slit the stomach of an NVA general tied neck to neck with a Republican, slit the flesh, scoop out the entrails, then fill the cavity with wet human dung. He fantasized an ambush for Met Sar, an execution for Met Sar, tortures for Met Sar. “This is the man who burned my feet,” he saw himself say to his leader. “Watch as I have his feet burned off.” As he thought he had touched his own feet and felt the scars. He had touched his chest and felt the thick lump where his ribs were mending, touched his face and felt the pebbled skin where the napalm had seared him. He stretched his hand open. So many months and still the hand was stiff, the fingers painful. Pain. He could bear it, bear it well, but that did not mean it wasn’t there. Oh, come. Let the battle rage. Let them bear this pain.
After an hour a large young man coughed. He attempted to stifle it, to muffle it, but from between his lips came a burst of air from spasmatic lungs.
“Strugglers!” Nang screamed. “Attack!”
Immediately the closest five, two from the young man’s own cell, plus three from an adjacent cell, spun, kicked, punched, jabbed.
“Halt!”
The room froze. “You have done very well today,” Nang said calmly. “Very well. Fighters, when is the enemy most vulnerable?” As he spoke he walked, glided, through the class toward the young man who had coughed.
“When the enemy is close to his own position he is self-confident and careless,” the young man said.
Nang stood before him at two leg lengths. “When else?”
“When two echelons meet on a path of march.”
“The enemy is most vulnerable when...” Nang rebegan the answer. The young man repeated the phrase and his answer.
“When else, Met Han?”
“The enemy is most vulnerable when returning to basecamp.”
“You have learned well. When else?”
“When his point element moves by us without detecting us because of our concealment, the rear elements are careless.”
“Excellent. But if we cough we will not remain concealed.”
“I...I couldn’t stop it.”
“Met Han, I cannot stop your cough. Only you can. You can. You must control yourself. Today you will be my partner.” Nang turned to the class, indicated that they should pair for sparring, three pairs on the floor at a time. Then he returned to Met Han. The young man stood a full hand higher than Nang yet he stood in awe of the Rabbit’s speed, proficiency and power. He had seen the instructor pull his punches to some, smash the ribs or jaw of others, depending on the value he, the instructor, placed on the trainee. Han gulped. He was not certain if he was viewed as a potential yothea or as an exemplary target.
“Begin.” Behind him two pairs descended into full-tilt, no-equipment bouts. Immediately one boy was thrown, pinned and choked, carotid artery blocked so he experienced the wooziness of preunconsciousness. Nang stood light on his feet, one hand relaxed, the other beckoning, wanting Han to throw the first kick or punch. Han shuffled forward, then quickly back. Then forward, feigned a left front punch, skipped back. To him Nang seemed almost asleep. He shuffled forward, raised his rear knee, spun and kicked to Nang’s solar plexus. Nang sidestepped, letting the kick snap into empty air. Immediately Han regrouped, backed off, rushed forward. Behind them the second pair had ceased after each boy had landed painful blows. All eyes were on the instructor. Han snapped a right punch straight out, kicked Nang’s shoulder, then a left punch to Nang’s jaw. He bounced back out of counterpunch range. His entire body was tense. He breathed heavily. To the class, Nang, as he glided in and out of Han’s kick range, said, “It is not enough to learn how to strike. You must learn to have the will to strike, to break the enemy.” Han lunged in, threw a weak front left punch followed by a fast roundhouse right kick. Nang, in one motion, parried the kick spinning Han to face away, then lifting and uncoiling a rigid foot side-kicked into Han’s ass, propelling Han across the room into a circle of fighters where he tripped, splatted face first, to the laughter of all the boys until Nang snarled, “Isn’t there even one amongst you who can fight for his life?”
From the door came a new voice. “Yes, Met Nang,” answered a small dark figure. “I can, eh? There will always be someone to keep you from erring. It is the wish of Angkar.”
“There isn’t a damn sonofabitch among em who can fight to save his ass.”
“I don’t
know about that, sir,” Sullivan said to the major.
“I do.”
“Seems to me, sir,” Sullivan said in his most diplomatic voice, “some of the field reports show improvement.” The two men, along with Sergeant Huntley and a middle-aged Cambodian driver were on Highway 5 thirty kilometers north of Phnom Penh. The early morning was warm, pleasantly humid. The jeep had passed through the inner and outer defensive rings surrounding the capital and was now bumping along on the rough blacktop which paralleled the west bank of the Tonle Sap River to Kompong Luong where the road split, Highway 5 heading west, Highway 6 junctioning via the ferry crossing and running northeast to Skoun then north through Phum Pa Kham, Rumlong, Baray, Phum Khley and on to Kompong Thom. “FANK waxed ass yesterday at Prey Kry,” Sullivan said.
“That’s not your job, Captain,” the major countered. They rode without speaking for several minutes. The major fidgeted in his seat, twisting, turning, grabbing his M-16 from the snap clip attached to the windshield support, twisting his helmet, searching for an elusive comfortable set. As they approached the southern outskirts of Kompong Luong he threw his right hand into the air. “Christ! Look at that!”
“At what, sir?” Ron Huntley asked snappily.
“Isn’t that supposed to be a perimeter?”
“Where?”
“That!”
“You’d be amazed, sir,” Sullivan said, “at how quickly the families disappear at the first sign of trouble.”
The major let out a loud humph. The driver slowed the vehicle. A dozen young children played amid the FANK troops. To the major the scene was incongruous. The population of Phnom Penh had topped two million—including 1.3 million refugees—and here thirty-five kilometers north in a village which had been the recent point of attack of two NVA battalions, life seemed to be overly normal, overly casual. The major turned hard eyes on three saffron-clad monks standing beneath oiled paper parasols. The monks stared back, smiled, as the jeep passed. The major nudged the Khmer driver. “These good people, hey, Sambo?” The driver turned his head to the major, smiled broadly. As he turned, his hands followed and the jeep veered to the right. Someone shrieked. Quickly the driver corrected. The major heard angry women cackling. The driver’s smile broadened. “God!” grunted the major.
For the Sake of All Living Things Page 45
