For the Sake of All Living Things

by John M. Del Vecchio

  Trinh paused. His expression was one of calculated sorrow, not anger. He continued to face the crowd. “Chairman Cahuom, you’ve asked for an amnesty program, yes?”

  Chhuon stepped forward. His chest was tight. “Yes,” he said.

  “The charade goes on!” Trinh erupted at the crowd. “We know the truth! No one! No one can get away with lying! We have captured a traitor who has identified all criminal elements.” Trinh stopped. The villagers startled. Eyes flicked to each side, heads remained rigid. Chhuon swallowed the rising burning bile bubbling at the back of his throat. “Traitors,” Trinh shouted, pointing before him to the bottom step of the pagoda. “Stand there! Now! Now there is amnesty. Now you may be reeducated. In one minute there will be no amnesty. One minute and you will be treated like the criminals you are.”

  There was silence. No villager moved. No guard. Chhuon’s teeth chattered. He clamped them shut to control his jaw. Who? he thought. Who have they captured? Who would tell? It’s a ploy. Where’s Vanatanda? Chhuon’s eyes searched for the derobed monk. His eyes widened until they felt as if they’d pop from their sockets.

  “Ten seconds!” Trinh screamed.

  Still there was no sound, no motion.

  Then, in the Children’s Association group a small boy jumped up shouting, “I know. I know who the traitor is. It’s him.” Peou ran toward the wat porch. “It’s him!” he yelled angrily. “He’s a traitor,” he shouted, pointing at his father.

  “Come here,” Trinh said kindly to the boy. Peou climbed the steps. “Him?” Trinh squatted by the child.

  “Him,” Peou cried. He stood ramrod straight with a stiff arm, hand, finger aimed at Chhuon. The mob of villagers buzzed.

  “The chairman?” Trinh asked sweetly. “A traitor? What has he done?” People nudged one another with their hands or elbows, kept their heads and bodies stiff.

  “He said we must resist. He said the teachers lie. He calls Viet Namese ‘yuons’ and says we must resist their teachings.”

  Behind Chhuon a man’s voice boomed, “He also plants bombs which kill innocent civilians.” Hang Tung smiled from ear to ear. “That fact has been established.” The villagers now began to shuffle, mumble, tremble. “You can’t deny it,” Tung shouted.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying.” Chhuon’s voice was weak.

  “You are a traitor. A saboteur,” Hang Tung said. He relished the public accusations. “You must apologize to the people.”

  “I’ve never done...” Chhuon began a stronger defense.

  “Your colluder has been identified,” Cadreman Trinh interrupted.

  Chhuon’s energies rose. “I’ve no colluder,” he snapped. “I’ve done nothing. I am the chairm...”

  “Kpa has confessed,” Trinh snarled.

  “Kpa?” Chhuon repeated. The revelation of the mountain boy’s identity shocked him. He sucked in an erratic breath. The mob, too, stood shocked.

  “Tonight”—Trinh’s voice was menacing—“you’ll tell me all.”

  Now Colonel Nui addressed the crowd. The people froze. “The evidence,” he said sadly, “against Cahuom Chhuon is irrefutable. In spite of his subversive duplicity we have progressed rapidly. There will be further realignment and expansion of the fields for work by mutual-assistance groups. The May planting will be the first totally communal operation with Khmer and Viet Namese working together as brothers. Cahuom Chhuon”—Colonel Nui sighed—“I’ve treated you like a friend, like a brother. You’ve betrayed me. But worse, you’ve betrayed us all. On 18 March, to commemorate the vile ousting of Norodom Sihanouk by the American imperialists, you shall publicly hang until dead.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  VATHANA BENT TO THE amputee, placed the back of her fingers on his temple. His fever had spiked again. The young man moaned quietly but did not speak. His eyes did not focus on her nor was he conscious of her hand. “Your suffering is my suffering,” Vathana whispered. “Let your pain be my pain. Let me bear it for you. Let my eyes weep your tears.”

  She looked up to see Doctor Sam Ol watching her. “Has his fever returned?”

  “Yes,” Vathana said. “It’s very high. My hand burns.”

  Sam Ol sighed. There was a critical shortage of medicine. To give the soldier anything would be to deny it to someone with a chance.

  “Angel,” the FANK soldier called out in delirium. He’d been wounded ten days earlier in a skirmish along the Mekong four kilometers to the south. At first he’d been high spirited, hyper even though there was nothing below his left knee. Slowly infection spread up his leg. Every morning and evening Vathana had changed the dressing and washed with boiled water the tight flap of skin Sam Ol had sewn over the bone end. For this man there were no antiseptics, no antibacterials, no antifungals. Only boiled water. On the fifth day the young man complained of the smell of his leg. On the sixth the fevers began their sine-like spike and drop pattern. No family came to visit him, to feed him, to pay for his care or to bring or buy medicine. Without that support he was relegated to Vathana’s team of volunteers.

  “I’m here,” Vathana whispered. She felt embarrassed under Sam Ol’s tired gaze—embarrassed by her inability to do more now than just hold the quivering hand, embarrassed by the malodorous stench of the leg, embarrassed for Sam Ol who died a little more each time a patient went undertreated, embarrassed for the soldier reduced in painful delirium to begging for the last kind face he’d seen.

  “Angel, it hurts. It hurts me. Please.”

  “Give me your pain,” Vathana whispered. She wished the doctor would leave so she might be alone with the dying boy, alone with him and two young volunteers and forty more wounded without means to pay for care, alone in the small windowless storeroom she’d begged them to open for at least the semblance of care, alone with all the odors of live and rotting flesh. The soldier’s back arched, his stomach thrust upward, an arch suspended atilt by shoulders at one end and the good leg and stump at the other. Immediately at the stump end a red growth oozed across the bandage.

  “Angel,” the soldier called. His body relaxed. From his chest came an eerie rattle as if small wooden cubes were being shaken in a dried gourd.

  Vathana closed her eyes, squeezed the soldier’s hand in her two.

  “Your American is here,” Sam Ol said softly.

  For six months Vathana had not seen or heard from John Sullivan. In that time she’d immersed herself ever more deeply in the swarming disease-ridden ghettos of Neak Luong’s refugees and in the world of the wounded without families. Before dawn each day she walked barefoot to the pagoda to pray and bolster her spirits, then she made first rounds at the hospital or at the infirmary tent in the camp. At noon she went to the small refugee hut she’d taken as her own. Nothing bolstered her more. Each noon she was met by Samnang, now 28½ months old, and by Samol, just over a year. The boy had grown, lithe yet hard, strong and wiry—not a typical toddler. Perhaps it was his limited ability to interact with and thus be affected by his surroundings which allowed him to be so healthy and happy. With a wonderful smile and a slobbering “ba-ba-ba-ba” greeting, he would run with his distorted arms to his mother, wrap her legs in his iron hug and not let her go, thrashing his seeping nose back and forth on her thigh, singing, laughing “ba-ba-ba-ba.” Samol would wait until Vathana entered the hut then totter her delicate frame toward her mother, chattering with a vocabulary of forty or fifty words. After the midday meal and rest, with the children being cared for by Sophan, Vathana spent two hours organizing, doing administrative chores for the camp, the hospital or the pagoda orphanage. Then she again would make her rounds of the sick, wounded and starving.

  It was 22 February 1972, the day after Richard Nixon had arrived in Peking, arrived and altered the geopolitical conditions which so strongly affected every life in Southeast Asia. Vathana’s morning rounds were over. Two orderlies came for the corpse. In the doorway beyond Sam Ol, Vathana could see a swath of dust-speckled sunlight. “Captain Sullivan,” the doctor said. �
�He’s in the reception area.”

  Vathana nodded. “America,” she mumbled to herself, “sunshine and death.”

  “Are you in good health?” Sullivan uttered the Khmer greeting idiom which had replaced the traditional “How many children have you?” or “Have you had rice today?” He stood there looking uncomfortable in civilian clothes, his hair lighter than before, red-blond, his skin darker, his eyes staring not just at her but through her and beyond, not unlike the eyes of the soldier she’d just left.

  “I’m well,” she answered in Khmer. “Are you in good health?” Vathana wanted him to hold her but she remained very formal and he didn’t move. She wanted to say, I was afraid when you were missing, but he was here now, alive now, and the other had just died.

  “I’m being crucified.” Sullivan switched to French. “Or about to be.” He too wanted to hold her, wanted to release six months of death and frustration, wanted to bury it with an intimacy they once shared. But all about them was more pain and imminent death.

  “Crucified?!”

  “Figuratively. My photo was in all the newspapers back in the World. I’ve been accused of advising FANK troops and that’s against the law.” For Vathana to understand what Sullivan was talking about required more energy than she, at that moment, could muster. She let the comment go unquestioned, unexplained. “The hospital appears to be packed full,” Sullivan stammered.

  “Come and see,” Vathana said matter-of-factly. “My rounds are complete.” She turned and walked toward the first ward, a long narrow room with windows on both sides. “We’ve added all the cots we could get,” she said, stopping at the ward entrance. “Some patients sleep on mats on the floor and there are two in each bed. There’s no medicine. Little medicine.” Her voice was flippant. “Sometimes we just let them die so we can give their space to someone else. If all the relatives would go home maybe we’d be able to walk in there.”

  Sullivan followed her, stared into the crowded ward with its mingling of the sick, the healthy grievers, the listless children. He glanced back to her thin face, her straggly hair. Two flies buzzed at her temples.

  “We’ve added at least three beds for each one that was here”—Vathana’s voice cracked—“but we haven’t added a single nurse or another doctor.” Tears ran from her eyes. “Just once I’d like it if a politician were in there. Ill. Without tetracycline and without sterile bandages. War is for politicians, isn’t it? For mine and for yours who started all this!”

  Sullivan did not console Vathana. He had no compassion for that viewpoint. Instead he said coldly, “I’ll see that you get some. Tetracycline?”

  Vathana did not look at him but gazed over the heads of the people in the ward to a picture of Buddha in repose someone had taped to the far wall. “It’s good against typhus fever, lung and urinary tract infections, and...” She did not finish but turned and led him down the corridor to a second open ward where the scene was similar, then out a door to a small shed surrounded by wailing women and workers with their mouths and noses covered by dirty surgical masks. Amongst the crowd were three children with shaved heads.

  “They come here to claim the bodies,” Vathana explained. She attempted to be detached, impersonal. “But now many bodies go unclaimed because...” she stammered, “...with the land broken people die without their families.”

  Sullivan looked at Vathana as she looked at the morgue and kept her side or back to him. He wanted to reach out to her, say to her, I’ve seen thousands die with their families, wanted her to understand, but the chill kept him at bay. “That’s why there are only a few shaved heads?” he asked.

  “No,” Vathana answered. She turned again. “With so many deaths,” she said as she moved toward the storeroom, “the practice is not so much anymore.”

  They entered the dank stench-fouled storeroom. Immediately several broken bodies quivered and from anguished faces came the call, “Angel. Angel, touch me.” “Angel, hold my hand for a moment. Just one moment.” Vathana squatted by a mat here, a cot there, squeezing hands or saying prayers.

  The scene disgusted Sullivan. Mutilated and ill ex-soldiers, still unwashed and in the tattered uniforms in which they’d been wounded, lying en masse amid swarming flies and filth. Sullivan grabbed Vathana’s blouse at the shoulder, gently pulled her back into the sunlit corridor. “What the hell’s going on in there?” A dozen flies had come out with them. Sullivan jerked his arm to get several out of his red hair.

  “They’ve no money,” Vathana said. “No families. There’s no money to pay for their care.”

  Sullivan snapped his left arm back, setting the pesky flies abuzz. One landed on the sweat of his upper lip and scurried to his nostril. He shook his head violently, snorting like a horse, then grabbed Vathana’s wrist and pulled her farther from the storeroom door. “It doesn’t take money to clean the place up.”

  “It takes more than we can do,” Vathana said, politely, cold.

  “More?”

  “So many casualties. We’re not equipped for war. War is civilian casualties and dead young men and my country destroyed.” Again several flies landed on Sullivan’s left arm and burrowed beneath the red hair. Slowly he moved his arm down and before his torso. He squeezed his left hand into a fist making the arm hard and rigid. “We look to America to save us,” Vathana said, not looking at Sullivan but back toward the storeroom. “In our time of need we look to America for salvation. But of course America must first protect its own soldiers in Viet Nam.” Sullivan made his right hand into a rigid paddle and slowly brought it into striking position. “We suffer from this limited intervention,” Vathana said. “Better all or none. Why do you hold back? If ever there was a country with a just cause, with need, it is Cambodia.” The flies on Sullivan’s arm were both facing toward his face. Sweeping in low-level from behind, slapping hard, he splattered two insects, the fly guts popping like pimples, leaving puslike globs smeared in the red hair. The slap snatched Vathana’s attention.

  She bit down, repressing an urge to retch. “Do not kill,” she ordered, “the living thing.”

  Sullivan looked up. Her eyes were on his. “Do not kill...” he mocked. “You’ve got to be kidding. Flies?”

  “If all would care about all living things”—Vathana dropped her eyes—“perhaps all these people wouldn’t die.”

  “Five hundred men are murdered around me. Suong! Villages as far as you can see wiped out! And you care about a fly?!”

  “Buddha says all living things.”

  “God!” Sullivan slapped a hand to his head and pulled his hair. His speech was quick. His eyes bugged. “You Buddhists are nuts. Tell me, where does it stop? A fly! You asked me for tetracycline. What do you think that does? Do you think it escorts bacteria to the bladder? Maybe carries it there to be pissed away. Waves good-bye, too. Those are living things. You want to kill them. You’ve got to draw the line someplace. What will you do, what will you kill, in order to save living things?”

  Two hours later, after a nearly silent lunch with her children and Sophan, Vathana and Sullivan strolled beneath the shade trees at the edge of the Mekong just north of Neak Luong’s center. They had not been able to reestablish the warmth they had once shared, yet both wished for, needed, the warmth.

  “The land is broken,” Vathana said. She placed her hand in his. “The economy is in shambles. Troops are demoralized. I don’t know if the country can survive.”

  “It’s got to,” Sullivan said sadly.

  “The government’s weak,” Vathana said. “It can’t protect us. They collect taxes but abandon the people. Nothing is right anymore.”

  “It would be worse if the Communists won.”

  “I don’t know. There are rumors of...” Vathana paused. She wasn’t certain if she should continue.

  “...a coup.” Sullivan finished the sentence.

  “Yes. They say Son Ngoc Thanh may become the new head of state. That Sirik Matak has urged Lon Nol to relinquish total command.”

&nbs
p; “And what do you hear the Americans say?”

  “What do they say? You must know.”

  “I don’t. I think the embassy plays ignorant.”

  “Maybe they’re not playing,” Vathana said seriously. Sullivan took it as a pun and laughed. He moved to put his arm around her but she squeezed his hand and kept it at her side.

  “The students say he no longer knows the country.” Vathana repeated a phrase which had become common. “There’s no longer a reason for the people to fight. Bonjour is everywhere. Worse than before.”

  Sullivan released Vathana’s hand. They had reached the spot along the bank where they’d made love a year earlier. How badly he wanted her again, yet how angry he was with the morose talk of demoralization and corruption, the fatalism in her tone. He knew disagreeing would further drive the wedge between them, yet accepting the defeatism would drive a wedge between him and his own beliefs.