For the Sake of All Living Things

by John M. Del Vecchio

  “He’s good to you?”

  “He loves me as if I were a porcelain doll.”

  “You’re...Angel?”

  “Do you like him, Sophan?”

  Sophan turned, from Vathana. “He can’t help it if he’s American,” she said.

  “If he were Khmer...” Vathana probed.

  “Even if he’s American”—Sophan turned again to Vathana and smiled—“he’s very nice. Much better than a husband who abandons his children.”

  Late that evening Sullivan pulled his BSA Lightning with a new metallic-red gas tank into the refugee camp at Neak Luong. It was raining hard. Wind buffeted the big canvas tents and the ground was slick deep mud. Sullivan revved the engine, alternately slipping and disengaging the clutch. The rear wheel spun and shot to one side then the other. He kept both feet off the pegs, legs out, catching and righting the machine as it tried to splat itself into the mire. Each time the bike tipped the headlight jarred to the side, and in the grass or in the gutters between tents, Sullivan saw rats, some scurrying, others bold enough to stand fast, their eyes reflecting like ruby beads.

  Since July Sullivan had come to Neak Luong as frequently as his duties, travel restrictions and the war would allow. Each time the city had been surrounded by more barbed wire, and each time, seemingly, the outposts and perimeter had shrunk back toward the enclave. With the closing of the ARVN river base in August, the ferry crossings had come under ever-increasing pressure and night crossings were prohibited. Still he’d come. For the right price, no matter the time, it was always possible to find an independent riverman with a boat large enough to carry the BSA.

  Throughout the summer it never occurred to Sullivan that Cahuom Vathana might have an ulterior motive for maintaining their relationship. To him everything was too right, too pure for there to be an evil element driving them together. He spoke freely about FANK personnel; who was good, who loathsome. He hid little about equipment delivered or about operations, though he revealed little for he believed Vathana wasn’t interested in details. These things made up but a fraction of their talk.

  For her part, beyond the politics and pressure which she did not fully comprehend, Vathana had accepted the relationship as she had her marriage—as if it were a professional contract. In Cambodia, marriage was a sacred conjugation with ramifications rolling into the future as the Samsara rolling through time.

  Teck’s visit had confused and embarrassed her. All day and all evening she’d worked cleaning the sick, feeding the disabled, scouring communal facilities and organizing rice and milk distribution. The camp had shrunk. With the announced closing of the ARVN base, thousands of able-bodied refugees had packed their belongings and headed upriver to Phnom Penh. Within a month the population, which had peaked at fourteen thousand and stabilized at nine thousand, fell to slightly under six thousand. Those left were the most disadvantaged and the sleaziest hustlers.

  The bike revved one last time then died. Before Sullivan dismounted a dozen children surrounded him. In broken Khmer, pidgin English and basic French they welcomed him and he hugged them and lifted them onto the BSA’s tank, consciously hefting each marasmic child, thinking each was thinner or lighter this time than last. Then from his pocket he pulled two hundred-riel notes. “You take care for me,” he said to the oldest boy while tapping the motorcycle. “Understand?” he added in Khmer. “You help.” Sullivan pointed to a shy girl of perhaps eight. With a bill in each hand he said, “For you—and brothers and sisters. Buy food. No candy.”

  “Cigarette?” a boy said.

  “No cigarette. Rice.”

  As he talked with the children he felt restless, almost frantic. It had been three weeks since he’d seen her, since he’d touched her dark skin, run his fingers in her thick hair. “Ouch!” The children giggled. The boy who’d asked for cigarettes had ventured to pull the bushy red hair on the back of his hand.

  “Hello, J. L.” Vathana stood demurely by the tent flap. In the single light above, rain droplets glittered like descending sparks from the tail of a skyrocket. She stepped forward. “Where have you been?” Her French was the most beautiful sound he’d heard in what seemed like years. He stepped toward her. She burst into laughter. “You’re all mud.”

  “You’ve two days to help me clean up.”

  “We obtained for you an office. With so many gone you can have your own house.”

  “Can you show me?” He blushed through his smile and through the mud that caked his face, and she felt the blush.

  “Where have you been?” Vathana said later that night. “I’ve been so worried for you.” She cuddled onto his chest and brushed a hand in the swirls of hair.

  “There’s so much,” Sullivan said. “The Northern Corridor’s as active as the border. My God, Vathana, they’re driving a wedge right down to the heart and those bastards, all of them, they’re like puppets, like caricatures, playing roles, reading lines without paying the least bit of attention to what the hell’s happening about them.”

  “You’ve been up north again?”

  “Oh, to Kompong Luong, Skoun, Phum Pa Kham and Baray. I took a helicopter to Kompong Thom. One of the nights I was there an entire FANK garrison just disappeared. No signs of a fight. Nobody knows what happened. I choppered back to Oudong and then back to headquarters.”

  “That’s where...in the North, where General Lon says the thmils are massing, yes?”

  “Thmils?”

  “The foreign pagans.”

  “Is that what that means?”

  “Um-hum.”

  “All along the corridor I heard that word but no one would tell me what it meant.”

  “It’s a very sad word,” Vathana said. She laid her head on his chest. His heartbeat was strong, slow, rhythmic, and with each beat their bamboo cot shivered. “A long time ago the prophets forecast a dark age which would be heralded by foreign atheists who would conquer the people of faith.”

  “Umm. Thmils.” Sullivan had difficulty with the idea of prophets and forecasts but he knew many Khmers strongly believed in them.

  “General Lon Nol says the Viet Namese are the thmils and if the Communists win a dark age will descend upon Kampuchea.”

  “I brought you something to keep that from happening.” Vathana lifted her head, put both hands on him and rested her chin on her hands. “It’s a TT-33.”

  “And what is a TT-33?”

  “It’s a pistol. I’m going to teach you how to use it.”

  “Teach the FANK soldiers. They’ll protect me.”

  “With what I’ve seen you may need to protect yourself and the children...from them.” Vathana was about to say something but he put his hand to her lips. “Don’t. I’m serious. It’s an NVA pistol I got in Baray. There’s four hundred rounds.” Again Vathana tried to speak and again he hushed her.

  “This is how it happens,” he said. “It’s always the same pattern, always the same cause. The bastards don’t pay their soldiers. The soldiers are as poor as the refugees. Poorer. They’re ordered into a village to chase out a Viet Minh agent and they sack the place. Steal everything. Maybe rape a few women. Then that village hates FANK and they welcome the Khmer Communists and hide them. Again and again and again.”

  “Do they welcome the Viet Namese?”

  “No.”

  “The ARVN?”

  “No. No. They’re, how do you say it? thmils, just like the NVA.”

  “And is FANK so bad?”

  “That’s just it. For every corrupt son-of-a-bitch commander there’s a decent unit with an honest commander.” Sullivan huffed. His anger rose and as it rose he could almost see Colonel Chhan Samkai at Turn Nop. “Even when they’re paid,” he began again, “they can’t feed their families. Guys like this guy Chhan charge them for rations, for ammunition, for petrol for their vehicles.” Sullivan huffed again. “I hate it. I hate seeing it. You’ve got some wonderful soldiers. Some who are so Buddhist they shoot the ground to make certain they don’t hit anybody...but that�
��s okay. That’s really not the problem. There’s such a command failure...and my embassy’s part of it.”

  “This Chenla II of Lon Nol’s,” Vathana whispered, “that will drive out the Communists, yes?”

  Sullivan just growled.

  “No?”

  “Vathana, to defend terrain for a long period, one must have an offensive thrust which can keep the enemy at bay. Otherwise the enemy sits just out of reach and picks you apart.”

  “But what of the bombers...they’re an offensive punch, no?”

  “You can’t rely on them alone. They’re one tool...effective up to a point...against troop concentrations; but when the enemy’s dispersed or once they get in tight, you’ve got to have good basic infantry. Colby had the right idea.”

  “Colby?”

  “The CIA guy. He wanted to arm the population, get the people involved. The idea was to build a broad political base so each community would defend itself. Then some jerk forced divisional organization on FANK and the government disarmed the people. That concentrated the political base in a few hands and most of them were old corrupt hands Sihanouk left behind.”

  “So why do you stay here!” Vathana sat up. She did not like to hear Sihanouk criticized by anyone, especially an American.

  Sullivan was so disturbed by the thought that the war would go badly, he barely noticed her irritation and he ignored her words. “They do it like actors,” he repeated the idea. “As if they don’t see the enemy at all. The enemy schemes every waking moment; at first light with their first sip of tea they discuss plans and plot how to topple the next town. Every day a new scheme. Every day they initiate new terrorist acts or recruit new people. The best the government does is react after the fact. They’ve got to meet major offensive thrusts with counteroffensives and small scattered attacks with police action.

  “Three NVA divisions are closing on the Northern Corridor and elements of the NYA 479th are infiltrating from Siem Reap. Vathana, I don’t know what’s going to happen. In Viet Nam the most ardent anti-Communists were the ex-Communists. The second most ardent were the Northern refugees who’d escaped their rule. It’s got to tell us something. Those among us most against them are the ones who know them best. The ones who know their lies.”

  “John L. Sullivan. Why do you talk so much?”

  “Oh, sorry....I...I got carried away. I keep thinking about what might happen.”

  “So why do you stay?”

  Sullivan paused. How to answer? “There’s a motto I believe in,” he said. He slid his hand up her bare back and softly caressed her shoulders. “De Oppresso Libre. It’s the Special Forces slogan. ‘To Free From Oppression.’ ”

  “You are a very strange man, my Mister Sullivan. You tell me the Republicans oppress the people yet you stay to keep them from succumbing to the Communists.”

  “FANK’s full of fools. It’s inefficient. It’s corrupt. But it’s not ruthless. Not in the Communist sense. If the NVA win there’ll be a dark age worse than anything Lon Nol predicts. If the people don’t learn, if they don’t understand ruthlessness and terror and absolute control, they’ll never be able to counter those pathological fanatics. That’s why I’m here. I’ll be back in Phum Pa Kham and Baray next week. I’m here to help them change, to help them learn about the efficient and righteous use of power.”

  “Oh, John, doesn’t every side think it uses power righteously?”

  Chhuon’s knees throbbed. Hot fluid burned from his stomach to the back of his throat. The taste in his mouth was foul, stale, vile. Near him, on her own sleeping mat, Sok shivered. Beyond her Peou and Grandma huddled for warmth. For a week the rains had been hard and there had been no food distribution, no lamp oil, no medicine, no clothing to replace that taken for the militias. Hang Tung flipped pages on the other side of the plaited wall, reading by the only light in the Khmer sector. Chhuon breathed deeply. His head ached. He wanted to claw his eyes from their sockets. Nimol and Chan were gone and in every village hut the people cowered in fear.

  A week earlier Colonel Nui had had the bodies of the radar crew brought before the pagoda. The face of all four men had been burnt. Nui had ordered the carriers to bring them exactly as they’d been found, rags and ash stuffed in their mouths, their faces obliterated not by gasoline but by white phosphorus or by C-4 plastique, holes burnt four fingers wide and four fingers deep right through their skulls. And all had been disemboweled. They lay agitated, without peace, all day and all night as the villagers passed, sneaked glimpses and fled. Then the village had been assembled. In the rain Nui and Hang Tung passed through the rows, asking every soul, “Did you do this? Who did it?” A thousand times from Khmer mouths, “Da, khong biet,” “Da, khong biet.” A thousand times in. Viet Namese, “I don’t know, sir.”

  That night a B-52 sortie released 120 five-hundred-pound-high-explosive and fragmentation bombs less than a mile north of Phum Sath Din, hitting a convoy of about forty trucks heading for the Northern Corridor. The bomb box was well clear of the village, yet two peripheral hits (bombs don’t always drop as expected; these were probably at the outer limit of what is termed “circular error probability”) exploded just beyond the village perimeter. Shrapnel and fireball pierced and ignited two homes. Three people were killed, seven more wounded. Still Colonel Nui demanded that the radar men be left unburied.

  A day later the stinking corpses were removed and replaced by two headless, limbless torsos who were identified by their clothing. “First,” Hang Tung told the reassembled village, “resisters murdered four men of our heroic defense force. Now they have mutilated the vice-chairman and his wife. Only last week Ny Non Chan intervened on your behalf and requested the pagoda hours be liberalized, and Colonel Nui, who is a devout Buddhist, agreed.”

  Chhuon rolled to his side. He had been asked to say a few words and he had offered a prayer but he had not listened to his own words. It was not he who spoke but the demon, which reemerged about his larynx. Now the order had gone out that all twelve- to fourteen-year-olds would be recruited and trained for village protection, and even Peou had been approached by Hang Tung. “Little Nephew, look at this. That’s it. Come here. Would you someday like to fire my rifle? Tomorrow I’ll let you shoot. Someday you’ll shoot an American, eh?”

  Chhuon lay back. Dear Lord Buddha, he thought, take this fake authority from me. Take this responsibility. Let them catch me. Allow me to shed this horrible duplicity.

  On the other side of the plaited wall, Hang Tung checked his notes, his scratch sheets and his time charts. He smiled to himself, pleased with himself. Every hour of every day for the past month was in a vertical column at the side of the page. Beside each line was a note on Chhuon’s whereabouts and activity. Here and there were blanks, and the blanks were beginning to form a pattern. Hang Tung closed his hands, squeezed his arms to his body. Uncle, he thought, a stick whittled at both ends soon collapses the tree.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SLOWLY THE DEEP GRAY silhouette of Pa Kham appeared in the mist. The heavy rains of September and the first week of October, along with the equalization of the hydrostatic pressure between the surrounding highlands and the central Cambodian basin, and the final deluge of Himalayan snowmelt reaching the lower Mekong, had caused the waters to rise. Sullivan’s eyes stabbed west, north, east. Everywhere he saw huge inundated tracts. Then the image reversed. He was not on land but in the ocean in an area of low atolls and before and behind him snaked not an infantry column but a ship convoy, odd ships, shaped like buses and jeeps and trucks. Far to the front were the forward guns and towed artillery pieces. But just as the berms of Pa Kham lay submerged beneath ground mist, the gun carriages were hidden and the tubes seemed to float on a choppy sea of unseen raised roadbed.

  The North Viet Namese squeeze on the heartland and about the enclaved cities had become a siege of the entire country. Lon Nol’s reaction had been to order Operation Chenla II. Throughout the summer skirmishes and battles had erupted, usually resulting in a decrease
in the government’s area of control and an increase in the number of refugees. The population in government enclaves increased, condensed, concentrated, until their simple closeness became a factor in their attitudes, their frustrations.

  Far behind, the column had left the saffron-robed monks standing beneath their parasols chanting blessings, praying for the defenders of Buddhism, beseeching the Holy One, wishing the soldiers great victory in the holy war against the dark invaders. Between the buses, amongst the APCs, even clutching many of the troop trucks, families of soldiers followed their men. Each night the column halted, loggered on the road, and the unit families came to the unit soldiers and cooked the evening meal over fires they somehow started from the wet wood they’d gathered in the low forest to the west. Each morning the dependents broke camp, packed up and fell in behind their husband’s or father’s transport. From Phnom Penh, from Skoun, they marched, the entire column moving at the pace of the smallest child, except for the crack vanguard APCs.

  In July, in a three-way contest pitting NVA against Khmer Krahom against FANK, Takeo, the largest city in south-central Cambodia, fell to the NVA. The exposure of ARVN atrocities (especially the pillaging of the village of Chebal Moun near Kompong Speu) and the subsequent ARVN withdrawal had left FANK alone to face the NVA and the fast-growing Khmer Krahom. Though there had been major accomplishments in a year and a half, FANK still lacked mobility, equipment and combat experience and knowledge. It remained fragmented, and the old feudal system, which had existed from ancient times through the Sihanouk era, continued to render the military incompetent and corrupt. After eighteen months, there still was no system for delivering rations to troops, and thus the army remained road bound, tied to village markets for the purchase of daily sustenance; and where the men were unpaid, goods were simply taken. Some units were manned by ghosts, phantom names that padded the payroll and thus the unit commander’s pocket. At this time, six to eight percent of FANK—22,000 men—existed only on paper.

  Sullivan stared east. There was no flank security. It disgusted him but again he’d been warned about advising, and to be fair, the roadside, fields didn’t need infantry flank units but shallow-draft swamp boats or amphibious ducks—navy, not infantry—the land being so flooded. Perhaps scout birds, helicopters, he thought. But the weather was nasty and in the absence of actual battle it seemed wise to conserve that limited resource.