By the end of January 1975 the NVA had increased its forces in the Central Highlands of South Viet Nam to five divisions. This was the staging for the battle of Ban Me Thuot. Throughout Southeast Asia there were scattered spots of panic. At Neak Luong 350 FANK soldiers deserted (not to the Khmer Krahom but to back-alley hideouts), placing the onus of defense more heavily upon the local militia. By mid-February FANK losses for 1975 stood at 4,260 dead, 10,000 wounded and 1,000 missing. In addition more than 12,000 dependants had been killed. The Mekong was again cut near Neak Luong and all FANK garrisons downriver were destroyed.
On 10 March at 0200 hours the NVA launched the main attack of its final drive—a mechanized assault led by T-55 tanks and BTR-60 armored personnel carriers—against Ban Me Thuot.
For the Krahom, for Nang, for Vathana, for Chhuon, for all Cambodia, the race for salvation seemed to be a race to win or hold out until after the Communist victory in the neighboring land.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
31 March 1975
THE SHELLING STOPPED. ALL was quiet. Then an odd noise came out of the mist and smoke and dark. He cocked his head trying to stretch his ear, his hearing. The noise was clear, familiar, yet Teck could not identify it. He pivoted his head, back, forth, back-forth, looking without seeing, searching the line, wondering if others had heard, had identified the source. He placed it in the shroud of yetdark a hundred meters out, a hundred to his right. Perhaps a thousand, perhaps fifty—chir-rick-chrik...chir-rick-chrik. Not moving, he thought, yet because of the shroud he wasn’t sure. Then it stopped.
Behind him Louis slept in quiet agitation as if churning thoughts drove his bodily twitches but his body knew to muffle its sleep noise. A howitzer far behind the line fired. For three months the sounds of war had been constantly upon them; the quiet made him tense. His mind raced. He checked his M-16, his bandoleers of magazines, his gas mask. In January the Communists had started using incapacitating gas fired from B-40 rocket launchers. Equipment delivery had responded. The entire Auto-Defense force, along with FANK’s main force units defending Neak Luong, had been inundated with masks, U.S. jungle fatigues and small arms ammunition. Food remained scarce.
Again the howitzer report—seemingly random sporadic out-going. Beyond Louis was a small lean-to, Teck’s squad’s headquarters. No one slept there—superstition, unlucky, a magnet attracting artillery. Up and down the last-resort line Krahom mortars, 107mm rockets and rounds from captured 105mm cannons had blasted defender lean-tos to shreds. Radios with drained batteries slept there. On the civilian transistor they’d heard reports of rumors that Lon Nol was willing to abdicate if the Communists assured the government that peace talks would follow.
Teck looked over his shoulder. The low lean-to stood in vague silhouette. Beyond, almost in town, a huge, hazy orange-pink semisphere glowed in the blackness—the continuous military pyre, the unending obsequies of cremation. In three months more than twenty thousand government soldiers had been killed. Teck turned forward. The first graying of night’s mantle revealed the shattered tops of two tall palms which marked the bank of the Mekong. The sounds, he thought, had come from there. The sky grayed. A thin white vapor rising from the river spilled over the embankment, crept onto the dry paddies, thinned further and vanished. Teck looked out over the floodplain, down the sentinel line of broken palm trees protecting the riverbank. In the still air not a frond ticked, not a leaf rasped its brother like the rear legs of a cricket. Louis stirred.
In January the Khmer Krahom committed five thousand troops to closing the Mekong below Neak Luong. Using sophisticated Chinese Communist antiship mines, the 1st Eastern Brigade sank twelve freighters. By month’s end the Krahom, equipped by Peking—the results of a new agreement with Hanoi—with more arms and ammunition than ever before, controlled both banks of the river along with all major midriver islands. In February FANK’s 1st Division received a new commanding general and the previously mauled and demoralized unit regained its lost pride. FANK’s 1st took the fight to the Communists. Gradually they enlarged the southern enclave and pushed the front downriver. Throughout the country the Krahom sacrificed the lives of ten thousand yotheas stemming the counterattacks. KK desertions ran higher than ever, and again the Center had to scramble to stave off tactical defeat. FANK’s February successes spurred the Auto-Defense militia to greater aggressiveness. For several weeks these soldiers, too, counterassaulted with the newly coordinated armor, infantry and artillery. It was FANK’s finest hour, its period of highest leadership. By 31 March, though the defenders had fought hard, the closing of the river and the ensuing unlifted siege ran them dry. Food and certain military supplies, particularly batteries, needed to be scrounged. Communications with Phnom Penh and between units all but ceased. Inside the Neak Luong perimeter, sixty to seventy thousand artillery-battered civilians languished, half starved—the rice airlift to Phnom Penh did not extend to the southern citadel.
“You’re still up, eh?” Louis joined Teck on the berm.
“You slept well?” Teck asked, looking at his close friend.
Louis grunted. “Like water splashed in hot oil,” he said. “I’m so tired but I don’t sleep. Are there provisions?”
“I haven’t gone to see,” Teck answered. “Maybe there’s lemon grass fish with hot chili rice, eh?”
Louis scoffed. “The only hot chili here is between your legs. Look, Brother, I’ve saved this all year but you must give it to her.”
“Eh?”
Louis pulled from his pant-leg pocket a wad of cloth. Slowly he unwrapped it. In the gray air a thin ring shone gold. “When she comes, give it to her. Tell her to get us some better food. I have to have more to eat. All night I dreamed of food.”
Louis dropped the ring in Teck’s palm. Teck rubbed it with his thumb, feeling its smoothness. He did not speak but only looked at his friend. Louis did not look back but kept his head down. Down the line other defenders were moving. Behind them the pyre glow dissipated into the dawn. Louis mumbled, bitched lowly as he took up his position. Finally Teck said, “You still don’t like her, do you?”
“Aa...,” Louis sneered.
“Vathana. You’re still angry with her.”
“Without her I’d have starved.”
“No,” Teck said quietly. “I mean over the red-haired phalang.”
“She’s your wife. Not mine. I only think of you.”
“I know,” Teck said. “It’s good to have you watch over me. But, Brother, I’m not angry. For me, don’t be angry with her.” Louis cleared his throat, spit the night’s phlegm into the dry dust, did not speak. “Do you know what my littlest imp did yesterday? Or two days ago?”
“What?”
“She saw her brother—”
“Naw. Don’t tell me. Not yet. I forgot to tell you. Last night the civilian radio had Khieu Samphan’s speech. He said the regime of the seven supertraitors is ‘withering in death throes.’ He said the Khmer Rouge are only interested in bringing ‘that flesh-eating clique’ to justice. Everyone else will be pardoned.”
“You believe him, eh?”
“I don’t care anymore. Again we are losing, eh? Let them win. So what? I just want peace. I want to live in peace.”
“You fight well for someone who’s losing. Tell them to stop attacking. Then we’ll have peace.”
“They aren’t attacking!” Louis looked up. Not a round had fallen since predawn. He looked at Teck. A smile cracked his grouchiness. “Do...” he began. It was hard to say because to say it might hex it. Still he could not keep from blurting, “Do you think it’s over?”
“Get the radio,” Teck said. “Maybe...”
“It’s dead,” Louis interrupted.
“Hey, you’re back in,” the shopkeep said pleasantly.
“For mail and provisions,” John Sullivan answered. He had been living in a rented cabin along Owl Creek in the Badlands of western South Dakota for nearly two years.
“Mrs. Em’s got those books you ordered,” the m
an said. “Been there awhile.”
Sullivan looked at the round-faced man. “Hum?” he grunted.
“Something about physics, Em said. I think that’s what she said.” Sullivan’s reserve made the man uncomfortable. “Quantum mechanics, right? And organic chemistry.”
“Good,” John Sullivan said. The flow of his thoughts masked the shopkeep’s inquiry. Since the spring of 1973 he had secluded himself; solitarily hunting, fishing, hiking the streams and hills into eastern Wyoming. In the fall of 1973 he’d shot, cleaned and butchered a deer but it had made him queasy, the meat and bones without hide looked too much like human flesh he’d seen without skin. He had not hunted since. In the winter he holed up in the cabin, read the Bible and began studying an advanced mathematics text someone had left behind. He had no radio, no television, no stereo, no phone. He received no mail, no newspapers or magazines. Early in 1974 he had ordered a set of textbooks on chemistry and microbiology and set out to learn, for his own pleasure, what they had to offer. Then came the physics and philosophy of science texts. How beautifully, he saw, each revelation dovetailed with all the others. And where they didn’t, he saw, it was not the material but the presenter who erred. All year he fished and trapped and read and tried to formulate for himself, for his own satisfaction, a theory of existence which could encompass all life, all energy, all the absurdities and hurt and all the wonderment and love.
“Well,” the shopkeep said, “that’s all you ordered. Might take a paper, too. Don’t hurt none to know what’s goin on in the world.”
“Thanks,” John Sullivan said. He lugged the cardboard boxes out to his jeep and drove to Mrs. Em’s Last Chapter book and gift shop—a store stuffed with Indian moccasins and turquoise bracelets and one case of books for bored travelers passing through in their motorized travel homes. As he parked he glanced at the newspaper in the box on the passenger seat. As if there were no other words on the page a byline jumped at him: Rita Donaldson. Quickly he opened the door. His head jerked back to the box but he did not read the headline. He slammed the canvas wire-frame door. It popped back at him. He closed it more deliberately. He’d been thinking of something he’d read about particle physics, about how everything is on a cyclic continuum of creation, transformation, destruction. Over and over. Had been speculating on the ramifications of the cycle—if one observed the smallest elements, creation and destruction or annihilation did not exist—only transformation, a continual recombination into different patterns. Then Rita Donaldson had stopped him.
Sullivan stood by the side of the jeep. The morning was clear, crisp. After the winter it felt warm. He cupped a hand about his face, drew it down over his beard, down his chin and neck. Then he wiped it on the side of his dungarees. He had not read a newspaper in fifteen months, since he’d visited his folks at Christmas in 1973. At that time he’d said to his Uncle Gus and his sister, Margie, and her new husband, Bob, “All the evidence pointed to this incredible buildup by the North Viet Namese. There was some hard proof but no one wanted to exploit it. Instead, it seemed the whole world was beaming in on Thieu and Lon Nol, and because they had access to it they exploited every bit of corruption and ineptitude they saw.”
“Oh cut the bullshit, John,” Bob had said forcefully. “We’ve been reading The New York Times while you’ve been hiding in that cabin. We know you guys bombed those places so bad there’s hardly a civilian left. We know what impact the war and America have had on those poor people. How our country’s turned Cambodia, especially Cambodia, into a goddamned moonscape!”
“What?!” John had looked at his uncle expecting some support from the World War Two veteran but Gus had his head hung and his eyes on the floor.
“Okay, now.” His father had come into the room. “There’ll be no more talk of this. It’s Christmas. This is no time for politics.”
Sullivan walked into Mrs. Em’s, purchased his ordered books and left without speaking more than two sentences. In the jeep he glanced at the paper. Then he looked at the window of the Last Chapter. Mrs. Em was peeking at him. Thinks I’m out of it, he thought. He looked back to the paper. He had not even known the date: Monday, 31 March 1975. Sullivan started the jeep, let it idle. The front page was full of stories of battles raging in South Viet Nam and Cambodia. His eyes wouldn’t focus. He couldn’t read Rita’s article. Instead he began one with a New York Times credit: “Western diplomats,” the article began, “say that the Lon Nol regime has treated its people so poorly, it has forfeited the right to govern.” Sullivan huffed. He did not read on. In the middle, just below the fold, there was a map of Cambodia with five arrows ending in exploding stars. One star engulfed Neak Luong. Sullivan gritted his teeth, thought, Boy, did she make a fool of me. She was probably part of the KR’s people’s intelligence network. External reconnaissance! What a jerk I was.
He looked back at Rita Donaldson’s article, jumped to the middle. “When the end comes...” His eyes jumped to another paragraph: “...the hatred here runs so deep,” she’d written, “victory and peace may be more brutal than the brutality of this war.” The theory of relativity, he thought, allows one to experience time and space, life and death, as abstractions.
He put the paper into the grocery box. He would save it, but he would not, could not, yet, read it.
With her right hand Vathana balanced the small bundle atop her head. She walked the worn path gingerly, watching for sharp objects. Quickly she was to the alley and then to the street which led through Neak Luong. As she walked she tried not to look, tried to protect herself from a cityscape which could have been plague-ravaged Europe during the bleakest period of the Dark Ages, tried not to witness the pleading eyes of fatalistic beggars, the dull faces of children resigned to lives of poverty, starvation and war. A maimed soldier sitting splay-legged in a pocked doorway called to her. Her scant energy drained. She attempted to not see him, not hear him. Still the drain. Each shattered building, each burned-out ruin, each tattered lean-to of plastic sucked life from her exhausted body. The urge to sit, to lean into a doorway, to sleep, to join the thousands of homeless, listless, grabbed her. She fought it, attempted to shed it.
Earlier, as she and Sophan had set about their separate tasks, she’d been snared by a spurt of timid eagerness—by hope. “It’s so quiet out there,” she’d said to Sophan.
“Yes,” Sophan whispered back. “Why have the shells stopped? What do you think’s happening?”
“I don’t...” Vathana paused. Then her eyes widened. “Clean the children,” she declared. “Dress them in their best clothes.”
“Do you think...” Sophan’s entire face lit. “Oh Sweet Blessed One, is it over?” Sophan had put a hand to her lips to hide the words but she could not hide the anticipation which had infected all Neak Luong. “What will they look like?”
Vathana hunched, lowered her voice. “Like us, eh?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. They’re Khmer, after all.”
“Today,” Vathana asked rhetorically, “you’re at the hospital? Maybe their radio is working.”
Vathana had stepped to the tent corner where all three of her children were playing. She bent, kissed each. A melancholy smile spread across her face. “I must bring your father his clean shirt.” She smiled. “Sophan will clean you up. Today you must listen carefully. And”—she tapped a finger into her left palm—“stay clean.”
“Ba-ba,” Samnang said happily.
Sophan had clutched the five-and-a-half-year-old boy. “He knows, Angel,” she’d said. “He’s sensitive to things we can’t feel. I told you he’d be perfect, eh? In his way.” Vathana had smiled a euphoric fearful smile and hugged the three children and Sophan. Then she’d added the shirt to the bundle for Teck and Louis.
Vathana walked around a shell crater. Inside, at the center, she could see a half-buried rocket canister. She picked her way over the debris only to enter the debris ring of the next crater, then the next. By one crater people were picking at the mashed remains of a dog. She turned a
way, detoured around a pockmarked house. Behind the house she saw a young woman holding a small girl. The infant looked peaceful, angelic, except for one eye slightly opened and her left leg and foot neatly missing.
Vathana stalled. She had to decide to stay, to help, to mourn, or to go on. “Arrange for a funeral,” she ordered the dazed young mother. She walked on. It was a snap decision and it haunted her even as she told herself, First I must tend to my husband and to the living.
“There are no KR in sight,” Teck told Vathana a few minutes later. He had withdrawn to their rendezvous point, a vacant shack near the crematory.
“Doesn’t anyone know?” Vathana said. She’d opened the bundle and given Teck the clean shirt.
“What else do you have?” He unbuttoned his filthy fatigue blouse to remove it.
“These.” Vathana removed two bread rolls. “Once,” she said, “I would pay four riels. Now, they cost eight hundred. And...” She brought out two rice balls wrapped in pages removed from Ith Sarin’s book. “Also”—she smiled at Teck—“these.” From a shirt pocket she delicately pulled two cigarettes.
“I have something for you, too,” Teck said.
“What?” Vathana asked.
From a pant pocket he pulled Louis’s cloth. Carefully he began unwrapping. “Remember when we were married?” he said mischievously. Her eyes flashed at his words. “Remember?” He teased her.
For the Sake of All Living Things Page 81
