For the Sake of All Living Things

by John M. Del Vecchio

  “He is corrupt,” Sullivan said. “And he’s inept. His stupid orders botched Chenla II. But still there’s reason to fight. Fight the enemy and the corruption.”

  “We get no support,” Vathana responded. “Officers build villas with paychecks from phantom troops, from sales of weapons to the Khmer Rouge. Why should our soldiers fight?”

  “God damn em,” Sullivan rasped. As he let his anger ooze its intensity flashed. “Damn em! Even you. They’re getting to even you.”

  “Yes. They are getting to me.”

  “Those jackasses!” Sullivan blurted. “There’s a blatant murdering evil out there and their fanatic corruption masks it. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Leaders! They derive their strength from those led, not from some sort of ‘High Holy Powers’! Those bastards. They concentrate on false glory, and they forget responsibility. That’s what’s losing. Don’t get sucked in!” Sullivan stopped as abruptly as he’d begun. His tone softened. “Vathana. Dear, dear Vathana.” He almost whispered the words. “Don’t get sucked in by the rhetoric. There’s good reason to continue to fight.”

  Late that afternoon Sullivan made hospital rounds with the Angel of Neak Luong. He knelt by feverish soldiers in the storeroom and held their hands or rubbed a coin on their chest as he’d been shown. He washed wounds with boiled water and rebandaged infected tissue with stained, boiled, air-dried reused strips of cloth. He cleaned watery shit from floors, cots and mats, and he struggled to maintain some sense of cause and effect. After four hours of listening to the gasps, wheezes, painful groans, after only four hours of being shit, pus and blood covered, after only one shift of watching Vathana hold and comfort two men until death, he, American army captain John L. Sullivan, who had seen thousands die in battle, found himself wondering if capitulation to the Communists might not end the war and the suffering.

  When evening came Sullivan and Vathana washed the residual filth from their bodies and clothes and left the hospital. But the residual stench clung in their nasal sinuses like creosote in a chimney and the residual images stuck in their minds as if stored on film.

  “There’s a film at the cinema,” Vathana said. “We can go. I’ll translate for you.”

  Heat from the road radiated up and kept them hot even though the air had cooled. They walked in bursts, quick paces interspersed with pauses. She led him first into an alley, up a set of stairs, across a long balcony and down a second alley to a small room with a few tables—a backdoor cafe. There they shared a bowl of shrimp soup cooked with lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves and hot Cambodian chili peppers. To cool their mouths they shared a Howdy Cola. At first they spoke little, only enough to keep them in motion.

  “Tomorrow you return to the capital?” Vathana asked.

  “I can say I missed the chopper.” Sullivan smiled.

  “Can you miss it a long time? There’s so much to do here and so few hands.”

  “I’m afraid only one day. With the charges and all, I’m lucky to have escaped at all.”

  “I wish you could stay longer. In two nights there is a meeting of the Khmer Patriots for Peace. And the next day there’s the meeting of the Rivermen for a Just Government.”

  “Khmer Patriots?” To Sullivan the phrase meant a Communist front organization.

  “Yes. It’s a very good group. Very active. The Refugee Association has become a branch. Without the KPP the camp couldn’t survive. Every day the KPP attracts more members.”

  “Are there more groups?”

  “Oh yes. I’ve joined the Khmer Women’s Association but you can’t come to that meeting. Most of the hospital volunteers are KWA.”

  “I wish I could come.”

  “To the women’s meeting?” Vathana laughed.

  “To the KPP, maybe.”

  “If you do, I’ll introduce you.”

  “Who runs these organizations?”

  “People.”

  “Vathana...”

  “Yes.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Be careful?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of what?”

  “In Viet Nam the Communists would develop organizations like these. There’d be a hidden core of guerrillas. They’d infuse the whole group with their slogans, their ‘revolutionary spirit.’ ”

  “Oh John! We’re not Communists! These are the only groups doing anything for the people. We can’t wait for outside salvation. Buddha teaches us to depend on ourselves.”

  Again Sullivan backed off emotionally. As he did, he wondered why his love was so tied to his ideological beliefs, why there was no room in his heart for variations in thought. Vathana also cooled. She kept her face turned, not just the slight, polite amount to one side but far to the side, as if it had become painful to look at the red-haired foreigner so laden with inner contradictions.

  The movie was the most popular film in Cambodia in 1972. A king of the Angkor era was the focus of an evil plot by his third wife and her secret lover, a powerful warlord with a huge army. Through black magic the monarch discovered the conspiracy and with hexes he forced the soldiers of his adversary to battle and decapitate each other. Quietly Vathana translated the Khmer to French and whispered it to Sullivan, but he seemed not to need the translation so she stopped.

  When the movie was over and they were alone she told him, “Sometimes I think of you, my American, like that king.”

  “Do you plot against me?” Sullivan tried to joke.

  “No. Of course not,” Vathana said seriously.

  “If you did,” Sullivan said, clutching her hands, not giving her time to explain, “I would forgive you.” He attempted to embrace her but she stepped back. He pulled her closer. She put her head down and gave him only her hair to kiss.

  “You forgive me?” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “Even though I’ve done nothing?” She pulled away. “Humph!” She recommenced the walk to her camp hut. “Do one thing for me.”

  “Anything.”

  “Tomorrow, when you go, take a photo album to Phnom Penh for me. To my mother-in-law. Safer there than in Neak Luong, eh? I don’t wish it destroyed.”

  For days they had not tortured him, had not asked him a single question, had even allowed him a bucket of water in which to wash himself and his clothes. The dry season was in its last weeks and each new afternoon sky seemed to grow heavier, darker. Still it had not rained. After six weeks of beatings and rope tortures in the small ex-storeroom of the ex-pagoda, Chhuon’s body was raw, bruised, as sore as if he’d been caught beneath a stampede of water buffalo or pounded by the concussion of a large bomb. As his strength had drained and his will to resist paled with each blow, his beliefs hardened. Even snared in fatalism and hopelessness his Buddhism, his nationalism and his adoration of Khmer family traditions strengthened as if the ropes and blows were concentrating his beliefs into his very core. The eighteenth of March had been preceded by threats, had arrived with the “last” interrogation, then had passed without explanation. To Chhuon’s disappointment they—Hang Tung, Trinh, Trinh Le, who else he didn’t know—had rescinded the order of public hanging, had bettered his treatment and had ceased the physical torture, only, he thought later, to change tortures.

  At first he welcomed the break. Every day he had been dragged from the blackness of his cell, interrogated and beaten. Sometimes his wrists were tied behind his back and he was hung by his hands until just the tips of his toes touched the floor and his shoulders screamed in pain, the muscles and ligaments slowly tearing under his own weight and the good-natured slaps on the shoulders by the guard. “Names! Everyone who has helped you.”

  “I’ve done nothing.”

  “You are the head of the resistance. We know that.”

  “Someone lies.”

  “You are known as Cloud Forest.”

  “Never. They made it up.”

  As the ligaments stretched farther, as cartilage popped and Chhuon’s feet rested more squarely on the floor, his interrogators rais
ed the rope. “Cloud Forest. Give us all the names.”

  “There are no others.”

  “So you confess to your crimes alone.”

  “No crimes.”

  Some days the tortures lasted only a few minutes, other days he was beaten for six hours straight. Sometimes they tied him and left, then returned in five minutes and beat him again. Other times they tied him and left him alone for hours. He never knew what they would do. In the beginning, on the days he braced himself for the worst, it always seemed they were most lenient. Then he’d lapse and they’d set upon him with such vengeance he’d pray for the release of death.

  “You can get away with nothing. We know everything. What we don’t have are two identifications to verify each conspirator. We’ve picked up sixteen. Ten implicate you. They’ve provided us with many names. Only a few have been identified by just one. Should we incarcerate those with just one identifier? You’re the leader. Tell us the names so that we don’t unjustly kill a villager to avenge the whim of one of your evil lackeys.”

  “I know no names.”

  “You know code names.”

  “There is no one. I’ve done nothing.”

  “It’s only a matter of time. Vanatanda supplied you with the plastique. The boy Sakhron brought you the cartridge trap.”

  “Vanatanda is a monk. I know no boy Sakhron.”

  Again and again and again the questions and beatings until Chhuon could barely remember what was real and what was the reality they wished him to tell. Then it stopped. His shoulders, fingers, ankles, feet, hips, and back tightened, recoiled as if they were springs overly stretched. And his mind recoiled. At first his anxiety grew because of the pattern of greatest wrath following lax days. Then that gave way to a vision of himself hanging by the neck from a rope secured to the pagoda’s porch roof carrying beam. And that to thoughts and conjectures about the rumors. How had he heard? He couldn’t recall. All Viet Namese officers had been withdrawn to the headquarters camp. Why? Were the nationals gaining? Had the Americans invaded? He had been cut off from all news except that which the guards or interrogators passed on. Had they indeed told him of the extractions? Certainly they had. Why else would Trinh Le have told him it wasn’t true? There was a plan to remove the Viet Namese settlers too. Of that Chhuon was sure. Oh how he wanted to ask for news of his family. He had had such a good life. What merit he must have earned in the last to have been granted the good wife, Sok. And his children—each one so special. Vathana in Neak Luong with her husband, both under the guidance of Mister Pech. An image of her at birth floated pleasantly in his mind’s eye. For the moment he breathed easily and his pains evaporated. Samay would be twenty now. Perhaps he had found his sister in Neak Luong. That would be best. There were the little ones who had died so young, at birth and at one year, died to be spared witnessing the atrocities of what had happened to our country and our people. And Kdeb and Yani...

  Chhuon’s thoughts froze. Ceased. Four years had not only not erased or eased the memory but had nurtured his shame and guilt. Why? Why had he left them with Y Ksar? Why had he even taken them on the trip? Life is suffering. Life is suffering. Blood for blood. It meant nothing. It roused nothing in him anymore. It was not the fault of the Viet Namese but his own fault. He, Chhuon, their father, their earthly guardian, who had left them in the path of death. The path was there, had always been there, was as plain to see as if it were a street in Stung Treng with a hundred large trucks barreling up and down. Only he hadn’t seen it because of the numpai. He had let his two beautiful young children play in the road and they’d been obliterated by a death truck and for years he’d blamed the truck. He’d even, he knew now, blamed his children. Lord Buddha, he thought, when I die let my eyes close for I am ready to leave this earth. Let my youngest son not think badly of me. If it is your will, let me once more walk a forest trail and smell the orchids by my Srepok River.

  Nang shifted slowly. The filth of the observation site disgusted him. His eyes darkened, sunk toward the back of his skull. In the sweet stench and predawn stillness elements of his personal inner contradictions battled for prominence. What had Ngoc Minh said, “Twice wounded makes a soldier cowardly?” Humph! But was it true? Had he lost his boyish invulnerability? No, that wasn’t it. That, he told himself, was the stamp of Ngoc Minh’s bourgeois classism shining through his thin veil of purity and brotherhood. There’s a difference between being cured of seeking impossible targets and being overly cautious.

  For three weeks KT 104 soldiers had silently watched, planned, prepared the battlefield. The 81st Battalion was Nang’s reserve, reinforcement and ambush unit. Two other battalions of the KT task force were charged with regaining the village. Units from other zones had converged on the Northeast, readying a systematic, village-by-village liberation sweep. Nang’s and Von’s stragglers had been assigned the NVA headquarters camp.

  Again Nang shifted. He had chosen the observation point, and since the offensive had begun across the border, the site had been deluged with tons of medical offal. Each night three stragglers slithered into the camp and rearranged the body parts so a cavern existed beneath the sheared-off legs, the amputated arms, the splintered chunks of rib cages. Then two left and one nestled down amid the waste and swill of the morbid pit behind the hospital complex.

  In the predawn Nang occupied his mind alternately with a flood of thoughts and then with perfect attention to his own inner void. He listened, then fell into himself. He could barely see—occasionally a door opened and light squirted from the hospital or from the headquarters operation center up the hill. He dared not smell, feel or taste. At one point he thought about ice, huge slabs, not the blocks, he’d seen as a boy in a Stung Treng warehouse but sheets covering lakes or rivers. What a wonderful horrible thing to be able to freeze all the water, to freeze a body, to have ice for blood, to have that total control to freeze or thaw one’s own blood and that of all others. The air pulsed, vague, distant. Dossiers froze people, Nang thought. Cahuom Chhuon, village chairman. Eh? So now he’s chairman of a yuon village! He must have abandoned the people, must have abandoned the Khmer race. Ah, what could have been...The thought was vague—a pang, not words. And his wife, a resister. Ha! Sok a resister! Mama a resister! That’s crazy. Ha, the inner contradictions of the yuon apparatus—as disgusting as this hospital pit. And this Hang Tung. He lives in the chairman’s house! Beyond doubt he rubs the chairman’s wife’s parts with broken bones.

  The pulsing became more distinct. Nang shifted, bringing his eyes to the arranged narrow slit between a mangled thigh and a discarded arm. There was little room to move beneath the parts, enough to hide, to blend in, when the orderlies brought new loads to the pit, then to shift, to observe when the way was clear. The sky had grayed since Nang’s last look. Now the pulsing became a loud whacking. Between the headquarters center and the hospital there was a flurry of activity. From a bunker men dragged several very old women toward the hospital surgical cavern. At a leveled area a dozen men pulled back the woven living canopy, opening a landing pad. Then the helicopter appeared. Nang recognized it from his training in China. Other yothea observers had reported the narrow, black, round-nosed ship but Nang had not believed them. Always the reports were from veterans of the Chenla II fight, “Helicopter fever,” Nang had whispered to Eng. “They see helicopters everywhere. They feel them in their sleep.” What the yotheas described, what Nang now saw, was not an American Huey or Cobra or a CH-53 but, Nang realized, a four-blade, single-rotor, grasshopper-looking Soviet Mi-4. From the pit of human sludge Nang could see soldiers, hospital porters and guards converge on the ship. The ship did not shut down, barely idled down, its tripod of tires touching the earth tentatively as if it were an insect set to jump away. High-ranking casualties, Nang thought. More vomit for my pit. They’d never bring in a soldier like that. Let them die and bury them trail-side. But the guards? He strained his eyes to ascertain the details of the picture unfolding a hundred meters away. He could see them separate the wo
unded, but could not tell what distinguished the groups. Then it hit him. Four were POWs.

  The evening sky over Phum Sath Din was low, gray, filled with the light premonsoon haze which characterized the foothills of the Srepok Forest. From the treeline above the highest, and as yet never plowed, irrigated or planted paddy, Met Nhel and Ngoc Minh squatted amid a square of two dozen local resisters. “We all are the masters of our own destiny, eh?” Nhel said quietly to Kpa, Cahuom Sam and the others. He spoke in the idioms and accent of those with whom he sat. Cahuom Sam nodded. Sakhron grunted affirmation. Only Kpa kept his thoughts hidden.

  For more than a year the local resistance had had loose contact with the Khmer Patriots via a series of small, tangential, local groups. When Ngoc Minh’s units arrived, Kpa’s locals were desperate for food, down to the last of their weapons. “With the weapons we’ve given you,” Ngoc Minh whispered, “your unit will be able to match the best yuon militia.”

  “We’re grateful that the Kampuchean Patriots Liberation Front has arrived,” Sam whispered back. “We’ve had too little firepower to be effective.”

  “But you’ve been very effective. The Center has depended upon you for intelligence. You’ve never let the Center down.”

  Kpa flicked his little finger and tapped Sakhron. The boy, acting more the country bumpkin than he was, asked quietly, “What center?”

  “It’s not important,” Ngoc Minh said. “What is important is the liberation of the people. How do you know about Colonel Nui’s request?”

  “That’s not important,” Kpa said quietly. “Only that he requested a return of troops and that it was denied.”

  “He wanted more troops about the village?”

  “He reported to the next higher headquarters that an ‘uprising’ was possible.”