For the Sake of All Living Things

by John M. Del Vecchio

The 91st Armed Infantry Regiment trained day and night. It was Pong Pay Mountain accelerated. What luck, Nang thought at the end of the fourth week when Puc brought him a student who’d stolen a bottle of whiskey and become drunk. The regimental commander grabbed the boy by the shoulders, almost hugged him for the great opportunity he presented, led him to the drill field where Met Von’s and Met No’s battalions were practicing hand-to-hand combat. “Let them kill him,” Nang told Puc. “Have every straggler kill him. One learns to kill by killing, eh?”

  Each day the little boys changed, changed as every yothea had, as every soldier must, transforming from innocent to executioner, from individual to expendable. Each day new word had come from the front. Each day rumors and stories of the bombings spread. Each day new recruits came and filled out the battalions until the 340-fighter units exceeded 400, until the regiment of 1,500 with support and staff topped 1,950. Each day reports came of the NVA buildup. Rush, came the word. Faster, came the word. We must win, now! The people have been mobilized. The army is committed. Faster. Faster. Move south.

  In early April Nang again stood at the edge of the long narrow platform overlooking his troops. “Stragglers,” he shouted. The troops froze in the posture of perfect attention. “Stragglers. You are my brothers. You are my family.” Met Puc clapped his hands. Eyes skittered toward the noise. Then the boys saw it was the propaganda company leader. A few clapped, then more. “It is time to go to the front...” A few cheered. “It is time to knock off some lackeys of the running dogs...” Yotheas hooted, howled. “It is time to bring Kampuchea a humane and modern government.”

  The ugly regimental commander’s voice boomed and the yotheas went into a frenzy of anticipation of battle, of victory. As they cheered, Nang seemed to grow. “Seventy battalions of our brothers attack Lon Nol’s heart. Should we sit here?”

  “No.”

  “Should we let them strive to liberate Kampuchea without us?”

  “No!”

  “Should we attack? Should we kill?” “Yes! Yes!”

  Nang’s eyes beamed, his evil smile was infectious. “You have within you the blood of warlords from Angkor, from Funan. For centuries Kampuchea has been victimized.” Nang crouched, swept his hands out from before him to his sides as if he were erasing everything in the past. A hush fell over the regiment. “If we lose, not a single Khmer will remain. Kampuchea will cease to exist. But...it is within you, through the Will of Angkar, to be victorious.”

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  Again Nang paused. These boys had been well trained by their unit leaders. How flexible they were, how susceptible to his oration, how easily he plucked the strings of their fears, their insecurities, their xenophobia, their memories of their families’ discontent before they were ripped away and pressed into the new family of their cell, their platoon, their company, battalion, regiment and Angkar Leou.

  “You are dead.” The words splatted from Nang’s mouth. “Only the moment of your death has yet to be determined. But if you are dead, you cannot be killed. You are invincible.” The little brown boys, still thin yet harder than before, stood, shouted, raised their weapons, assault rifles amid clubs, rocket-propelled grenade launchers amid hoes, mattocks and bush knives, raised them, shook them, pounded their chests with their free hands until Nang held his pincer high. “In rain...” Nang boomed.

  “In rain...” came nearly two thousand voices.

  “In wind,” they chanted together, “in health or wounded, day or night, I will obey...” Looking upon them from the platform Nang was seized with a commander’s love for his troops, with a tyrant’s adoration for power. “I am the offering.”

  In April they’d begun the march south, yet even as they marched into the maelstrom of Allied firepower, their indoctrination and purification continued.

  “Sihanouk, he eats well in Peking, eh?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Damn, I’d like to have just one meal like his. I hear he’s become yuon.”

  “That can’t happen. If you’re born Khmer, you’re Khmer.”

  “You must be right. Go see Met Puc. He’ll show you how.”

  While Krahom units counterattacked the FANK Task Force attempting to retake Oudong, Met Puc systematically weeded out the Sihanoukists. By the time Krahom units forced FANK defenders to flee from the outposts between the Bassac and Mekong across from Neak Luong, the 91st Armed Infantry Regiment had lost nearly a hundred troops to the internal cleaning. The purge in the midst of battle was Krahom-wide. Even as KK units confiscated five 105mm howitzers with forty truckloads of ammunition from units of FANK’s 7th Division that they’d ambushed near Takeo City, the anti-Sihanouk, anti-monarchy, anti-Viet Namese campaign of the ultranationalists exploded. By May Krahom propaganda teams were infiltrating villages and cities throughout the liberated areas, were rendezvousing with association leaders and overtly denouncing Sihanouk and his ties to Hanoi and proclaiming the supremacy of Angkar Leou. In Svay Rieng the Gray Vultures and the people reeled. The backlash halted the progress of the KK offensive. Quickly the Center responded, backtracked while moving forward, announced, there in the East about Svay Rieng only, that the KK was pro-Sihanouk. The monarch, the Center proclaimed, had confessed to errors had apologized and had been reinstated as head of the government-in-exile. Norodom Sihanouk, the statement said, wished to return not as a prince but as a private citizen.

  When a hardened yet still inexperienced 91st reached the northern front in mid-May, the KK in the East was again advancing on Phnom Penh. “Which army?” Nang asked Met Duch and Met Von.

  “Southern Zone Army,” Von said.

  “I think the Eastern Zone,” Duch countered.

  “Met Paak won’t tell, eh?” Nang was angry. He’d worked very hard for this battle, this fight. It was the eve of the 91st’s first assault. The reports said Krahom mortar rounds had crashed into the southern half of Phnom Penh.

  “Does it matter which army?” Duch said.

  “What’s a mortar’s range?” Nang shot back.

  “Ask Thevy,” Von said. “He’s head of weapons—”

  “You should know,” Nang snapped. “Sixty-ones, two thousand meters; eighty-twos, thirty-six hundred meters. That’s how close they are.” Nang squeezed his right pincer. His hand, his arm, his entire torso shuddered in anger and envy. “We must be the victors,” he stammered. Hot acids billowed from his stomach to his throat and into his mouth. “No one can beat us to Phnom Penh. Is this battlefield prepared?”

  That dawn Nang’s 91st had its baptism by fire. They attacked the village of Prek Yan. There had been no battlefield preparation other than the nocturnal massing of the regiment before FANK’s defensive perimeter. There was little artillery preparation. The 91st had but two 61mm mortars and a pair of 107mm recoilless rifles. Sister units in the 4th Brigade and in the 7th and 54th Regiments had circumvented Prek Yan and were set to attack farther south. From the flanks the 107s banged, the rockets flew, a poorly aimed one sailed high over the berm, a low one skittered along the earth, lodged and exploded in a clump of reeds. The wave, fifteen hundred strong, shouting, only a few firing, swarmed toward the defenders. Mortar rounds popping from tubes behind them exploded in the village. Then the government troops awoke, reacted, returned fire, spraying M-60 machine gun rounds across the horde as if spraying water hoses on a grass fire. Almost immediately the 91st broke, yotheas scattered, dispersed into the thinly treed forest about Prek Yan.

  All that day Nang reinvigorated his troops. “Now you know. Now you understand. Tomorrow—kill everything. Burn everything. Destroy everything.” In the dirt of their forest command post, Nang snarled and chided his leaders. “Rath, how many casualties? Aah. Who cares? How many attackers for the morning?”

  “Twelve hundred. We’ve a hundred wounded to carry.”

  “If they can’t attack,” Nang said coolly, “leave them.” With a stick he drew the village, marked the machine gun emplacements, pinpointed the weak points. “Yon,” he sai
d, “tomorrow...”

  Before the next dawn his infantry moved into position; before dawn his 107s hammered bunkers and gun emplacements; before dawn his mortars set the village afire and backlit the FANK berm. Then the troops attacked, now sprinting and firing, concentrating column spearheads against the weak points while spread teams sprayed suppressive fire. By dawn the 91st had broken through and in violent resentful frenzy they chopped, killed, destroyed. In an hour only the FANK soldiers who’d hidden successfully or who’d fled Prek Yan were alive. Only the conscriptable and usable elements of the civilian population, and those who’d escaped, still breathed. Quickly Nang ordered his fighters to police up and withdraw. As they departed Met Puc’s team erected a handmade poster by the village well: BEING FORCIBLY GRASPED BY THE EVIL HAND OF IMPERIALISM, YOU HAVE LIVED YOUR PRECIOUS LIVES IN VAIN. TO CONSOLE YOUR SOULS WE HAVE PREPARED A GRAVE FOR YOU. REST IN PEACE. Into the well the propaganda team dumped the heads of ninety-one victims.

  The 91st moved south. FANK reinforcements moved north. American fighter-bombers “walked, point” for the government column—F-105s screaming in low then sweeping up as they lobbed their ordnance at unseen targets before them. Now the bombers came in twos, now in fours. The 91st retreated through Prek Yan. The bombers hit the village, reducing its charred ruins to rubble and killing those who’d escaped Nang’s brutality by hiding. Government troops reoccupied the village. They found it pocked, with craters, the orchards broken and shattered, the ground littered with broken and twisted cooking pots and human parts. All day bombers and artillery blasted the surrounding forest, not attempting to ferret out the KK but hoping with random explosions to kill anyone in the wild. Then FANK withdrew. Nothing remained in Prek Yan worth defending. As they pulled back the 91st followed.

  For more than two months, mid-May to mid-July 1973, the 91st Armed Infantry Regiment with its sister units of the Army of the North continued to attack down Highway 5 toward Phnom Penh. With every battle they became more experienced. With every battle their tactics improved. With every battle they added new recruits or new conscripts to replace those killed. “Forward” became their motto. Go forward at all cost. We must win, now! Even when the Congress of the United States voted on 30 June 1973 to force a complete cessation of American bombing in forty-five days, the Krahom did not pause. Instead they moved constantly, moved to avoid detection by VATLS, the American Visual Airborne Target Locator System, of which they knew nothing but its uncanny ability to bring the bombers to wherever they rested, if they rested for more than a few hours.

  Mid-June 1973—Chhuon’s head was down in subjugation but his eyes were up, locked on the new canton deputy chief, Met Soth’s counterpart, the kana khum.

  Until the bombings began life had been improving. Now everyone was terror stricken. More heads would roll.

  Dry-season projects had progressed well. Unlike the earlier earthworks the peasants had been given control over the layout of small dams, dikes and canals within the much larger scheme. “Finally,” Chhuon had told Sok, “finally a woman like Than.” “You like her, eh?” Sok’s tone had been light, humorous. “She even works with us,” Chhuon had said. “And if one asks her, she will listen to reason. Ha! She knows water doesn’t roll uphill. More than Soth, eh?” “ssshh.” Sok had patted her husband’s shoulder as they’d lain in the two-person cocoon. “ssshh. knock on wood, don’t let anyone hear your voice.” “Ah, Sok, it’s not Phum Sath Din, but with Than there’s no corruption, no gambling. Everyone eats the same, dresses the same, works the same. As much as I dislike them, she is very fair. The bunkers are well prepared, the paddy dikes are straight, the feeder canals are level. There’s talk of being allowed a cooperative store. I think they mean a market. You know how they change the language.”

  In the months after the rains ceased, Phum 117 of Khum 4, Srok 16, had become a strategic cooperative. Beneath each family hut of Chhuon’s interfamily group a digging team had burrowed into the earth, forming an S-shaped tunnel leading to a small cubicle. Around each set of krom huts an interior defensive perimeter had been built. About the phum as well as about the entire khum, fences and the belt of minefields and booby traps had been widened and improved. Everything was in perfect order. Seen from above the fortifications were symmetrical.

  The kana khum, Met Ravana, did not speak. Before him sat every inhabitant of Phum 117. Every head was bowed. Maturing in the liberated zone was a system of checks without balances that ensured that every boy and girl, every man and woman, was constantly under surveillance, continuously watched by every other person about him or her. Anyone could report on anyone else. Anyone could claim that so-and-so had anti-Movement or antirevolutionary thoughts or said anti-yothea words, or behaved in an anti-phum manner. Without being able to face the accuser, the accused was automatically guilty, could be automatically punished. The result was a total breakdown of the normal fabric of Khmer society. In the name of “liberation,” in the name of “the people,” guilt was impressed on every psyche. Sanctimonious double-talk combined with totalitarian rule destroyed traditional social networks. The organized and “scientifically” planned transformation of the culture destroyed, as did other factors in government zones, Khmer resilience.

  Throughout March and April 1973 the Krahom offensive against the heartland intensified. From the hinterlands Angkar had called as many yotheas as possible. They’d vacated the liberated lands in waves, leaving the liberated peoples in the hands of Rumdoah troops overseen by but an aroma of hardened yotheas. As the offensive blasted huge holes in FANK’s capital defenses, Allied bombers reached out to crush supply lines and rear bases. Convoys and fortifications were targeted.

  Three weeks before this meeting of Phum 117, Sok had been quietly preparing the evening rice when without a half second’s notice the growling roar of three government T-28s shook the village. Lap kats (slap kats, or sawed-off wings) swept in fast, so low that had she had a long-handled rice knife she’d have been able to split the plane’s belly. Then instantly they were gone and napalm fires roared and consumed the family-group huts beside theirs. Chhuon, on his spindly bowed legs, had run to her and pulled her. She’d frozen like Lot’s wife. Flames sucking for air, heat rising, forming small tornados, had whipped the earth about them into a dust storm. Still Sok had stood agape. Then, later, huddled in their tiny bunker room, she’d collapsed sobbing, calling the names of her mother and father and of the seven children she’d borne—four dead, three lost. Hopelessness had engulfed her like black billowing napalm smoke.

  “We are lost,” she’d cried. “Lost. We are no one. We are nothing. We are without family. We cannot even use our family names!”

  “Someday,” Chhuon had tried to console her, “someday, when the war is over, when we’re truly liberated...”

  A week later Khum 4 had again been bombed. This time a nighttime arc-light drop had unleashed its violent pent-up hate at the edge of the canton, the high explosives blowing iron shrapnel out hundreds of meters, ripping through huts and humans, punishing the land and any inhabitants who dared be on it. The next day a third punitive strike, American F-105s, had hit the commune, killing, destroying the dikes, a boray, some just-plowed fields which would have grown rice to support Angkar’s troops, fields Chhuon saw as his fields, his future food. Chhuon’s will had weakened. Then came the quiet days when the bombers moved south onto the points of attack or east against supply trails laden with trucks. Still he, Sok, so many, slept nights in their airless bunkers or slept in fields as far from their huts as the defensive rings about the commune would allow.

  “Sihanouk is near.” Met Than, the straight-haired mekong, had whispered one evening to Chhuon and a group replowing and reflattening a paddy for the May planting.

  “Who says?” a survivor of a devastated phum had asked.

  “Everyone,” Than whispered. She too was depressed by the bombings, by the phum’s, khum’s, srok’s, by every level’s inability to retaliate. “A mekong from 116 told me.”

&
nbsp; “Who needs him?” the survivor had snapped.

  “But...” a third man said, his voice trembling, “...he is our...savior.”

  Chhuon had bitten down hard, had pushed harder on the three-man bamboo bar from which the ropes trailed to the plow. The survivor had snorted. “Sihanouk’s been infected with yuon disease.”

  Each day Chhuon had withdrawn more. The terror of the bombings, different from any terror he’d ever known, so remote, so unreachable, frightened him to his core in a way physical torture had never been able. He understood torture. He understood pain. He understood pain’s infliction. But the bombings. Those he did not understand. Their sudden onslaught, intense violence, sudden cessation. All from such a distance it might as well have been the moon exploding. One night he’d written in his notebook: “They say Samdech Euv is near, but the bombings keep him from returning. Perhaps Kdeb is with him.”

  Now, to call the meeting to order, Met Ravana clapped his hands. Near Sok a woman’s bowels shuddered in terrified spasms and the smell of shit wafted across the cowering people. “All krom leaders,” Ravana shouted, “stand!” Chhuon and three others shot up. “You are charged with the responsibility of the order. Sit.” Chhuon dropped, thudded onto the dusty ground. Slowly the words crept from Ravana’s mouth, then gradually accelerated: “You will dig in. All movement will be by orders. Only. All aliens are subject to ultimate measures. Anyone not from Khum 4 is an alien. You will work for the Revolution. All material things belong to the Revolution. You may not talk, you may not pray, you may not smile. Your energy belongs to the Revolution. Talking, praying, smiling sap energy. Every infraction will be reported.”

  The smell of shit reached Ravana. His face contorted. Then his eyes glinted. A flat smirk broadened his jowl. “You have heard that Norodom Sihanouk is near, eh?” He felt repulsed by the continuing smell. “If yes, stand.” A few stirred but no one stood. “Stand! Everyone!” The nearly four hundred people rose. Ravana walked into their midst. He walked between the silent rows, pacing, disgusted, following his nose. Then, “Are you ill, comrade?”