For the Sake of All Living Things

by John M. Del Vecchio

  The assaulting force increases. The southern line is breached. Half of Teck’s unit has clumped together, has banded into a smooth withdrawal force, firing and backpedaling. Half of FANK’s troops are standing fast at the trench line before the artillery batteries. Everywhere there are soldiers retreating in panic. Teck, Sahn and others fall back to the crematory and take up positions behind an ash heap. The full brunt of the Krahom force is sweeping in upon them. Fear and terror are anticipatory emotions and Teck no longer sees his own existence beyond the exact moment in which he is. He fights without hate, without fear. He is a technician with his M-16, trusting his fate not so much to others or to his God but to ignorance, to a calm present-only mind-set.

  In the infirmary tent in the Khsach Sa refugee camp Vathana’s mind was running wild and scattered. A few soldiers in nothing but underwear had run in looking for peasant clothes. “It’s over,” people were saying. “FANK has lost. It’s over.”

  Vathana grabbed a white towel. She cut two nicks in the side then ripped it into three swaths. Where is Teck? she thought. She tied a swath to Samnang’s right wrist. Will I ever see Neak Luong again? She tied one to Samol and the third to Su Livanh. There are rumors they make everyone go back to their home village. How will I get there? Oh my beautiful Phum Sath Din with Mama and Papa. Where is Teck? What’s happened to our wedding album? Sweet Lord Buddha, what’s happening? Why are they still fighting?

  “Angel,” an old man called to her. “I have just heard...on the radio...” The man was crying. “Lon Nol, he has fled. He’s abdicated. Praise Sweet Buddha. Samdech Euv can now return.”

  Phnom Penh was frantic. Rita locked her door to add several lines to her story. “Prince Norodom Sihanouk this afternoon on KR radio has called Lon Nol’s successor, Saukham Khoy, ‘a war criminal and an executioner.’ The head of the government-in-exile further stated, ‘I proclaim openly...that on no account, under no circumstances...will the Cambodian resistance agree to be reconciled with the traitors...[We] will always fight...in the spirit of no retreat or compromise...’

  “In other developments, along the southern, front there are reports that captured towns are being ravaged by Khmer Rouge ‘slaves’ and that everything salvageable, from rice to automobiles, is being loaded into boats with Viet Namese crews and is being shipped east.”

  Rita sat. The excitement of the impending collapse invigorated her professionally, yet personally she felt spent. She could no longer feel disgust at the Republican government, at FANK corruption. Now she felt pity and fear for them. Yet she could not write that. If America felt pity or fear for the new regime, President Ford might attempt a last-minute life-saving maneuver. To Rita, nothing, nothing, could possibly be worse.

  The river was low. He could see the river, smell it, almost step in it. Teck, Sahn and dozens of others had pulled back to the southernmost neighborhoods of the city. Teck hid amid the stilts of an old house. Others were tucked into doorways or behind courtyard walls of homes and shops on the landward side of Main Street. On the levee a small battered Ami 6. Citroen lay on its side. Near it a military deuce and a half truck billowed smoke and shot flames into the tormented postnoon sky. Still they came.

  Behind the withdrawing troops, artillery rounds from captured 105s were blasting chunks out of Neak Luong’s already scarred facade. Teck aimed, fired, watched an invader drop, then crept back a few more meters into the dim light beneath the house. What if they come for me? he thought. I can go there, then to that post, then that hole. He shot another attacker. The din of small arms rose, fell, never ceased. Teck saw Sahn firing his M-79 grenade launcher, lobbing rounds over the burning truck. The enemy charge had been fanatical. Every inch was paved with dead and dying. Now they came more methodically, insidiously. Teck fired an entire magazine. Retreated. Up the street he could see people, city people, tearing posters of Lon Nol from the walls of the few concrete structures. FANK, the Auto-Defense force, no longer had command, control, communications, yet the soldiers fought hard, fought house to house, stilt to stilt. The Communists, FANK command or not, were their hated enemy. KK rifles were killing them. KK artillery was reducing their city to a trash heap.

  Teck dashed the short distance from beneath one house to beneath the next. A wave of frustration washed through him. He could not stop them. He knelt and pressed a piling. Tears flooded his eyes. He raised his M-16, aimed but did not fire. He looked townward. Soldiers, many soldiers, were stripping, throwing away their uniforms, their weapons. Beneath a shattered cart he saw Sahn, saw him sitting, staring at him, his, Satin’s, hands on his abdomen, his, Sahn’s, intestines squirming out between the fingers.

  Teck turned forward. He fired. He fired again and again and again and he cried as he fired. He shot another, thinking, One more down. If I can kill one more, kill one more, we could still win. If I could kill them all, we could...

  In town the street blossomed with white rag flags. “Lon Nol is gone!” Teck heard the shouts. “Lon Nol has fled the country!” He heard but he did not believe he could hear those voices, thus he could not have heard the words. Lon Nol fled! The thought sunk in, jarred him. He, Teck, had not fled! He raised his rifle, but except for the crackling of house fires, all about him was now still.

  Emptiness engulfed him. He could not move. In the shadow of the stilt house he could see the battlefield, could feel the desolate spirits swirling, could sense the 2,000 ex-KK and the 2,600 ex-FANK, Khmer souls, weeping at the stupidity of their passions which had embroiled them and delivered them to untimely enlightenment.

  Now the street was empty. Now he saw his comrades, milling, aimless, wrapped in white sheets, awaiting orders. He remained still. An urge to join them infected him. Then an urge to flee grasped him. Momentarily his leg muscles tightened. The urges dissipated. His legs lay limp. A thought of Vathana, the children, sped across his mind. He thought to lean forward, to rise, but a flash image and an aversion to seeing her, them, as he’d seen Sahn froze him. Then he heard the calls. “Cheyo yotheas! Cheyo yotheas!” Peace! Peace, brother soldiers! A few men from the milling undressed came forth. They waved a white sheet on a bamboo pole. “Peace!”

  Teck lay his M-16 at his feet. He thought to throw it into the river but he didn’t have the strength. His jaw quivered. He tried to stop it, tried to grind his teeth but he could not. He was covered with dirt, grease, filth. His good shirt was shredded. His face squeezed uncontrollably and again he cried. Then he saw them, saw not the charging black-clad horde but saw two files of silent little boys dressed in Chinese Communist green fatigues and Mao caps. They did not smile, did not speak. Before and behind each column was a black-uniformed leader but between all were little boys with assault rifles and rocket grenade launchers which looked comically too large for them. How? Teck thought. Two platoons passed softly. Then came two platoons of girls. Small, dark, resolute, perhaps frightened. Townward the boys dispersed, took up positions at intersections and alleyways. Undressed men called to them. They did not respond. Townspeople threw flowers, brought them fruit. Old women tried to give them coins. Precious hoarded hopes and belongings poured forth and showered the conquering, liberating army. More platoons passed. Teck could not understand. How? How did they beat...Then came the trucks, the cars, the guns, the black-uniformed troops he’d fought inch by inch all day, fought for months. His tears stopped. Now he understood. The first platoons were the expendable, the chaff, sent in to emotionally disarm the people, to physically disarm willing government soldiers who saw them and believed they had nothing to fear. In the best cars were gray-uniformed officers who directed the metastasizing of Neak Luong.

  Teck’s ears opened. His senses let go of his self and picked up the in-sweeping force. “Put out white flags,” a lead yothea snouted. “It is peace. Peace!” He fired his carbine into the air. “Peace!” he screamed angrily. A townsman waddled from an alley. On his shoulder was a sack of rice. “Hey! Brother! What have you?” The man stopped, turned. Yotheas surrounded him. The man tried to bac
kstep. “Please, Brother. Don’t be afraid. We are patriots, eh?” The soldiers jostled the man. “This”—the one with the angry voice shouted, grabbed the sack—“Angkar Leou wishes to borrow. In a day, maybe two, you’ll get it back.” The yotheas laughed. The man fled. The rice sack was tossed onto the roof of a commandeered car.

  Teck was now taut. He rolled to his side, crouched on hands and feet, peered out. In his vision was his rifle. Carry it or abandon it? He crept deeper into the stilt forest, without the weapon, crept upriver, townward, toward the “unliberated” neighborhood of the northwest quadrant where Communist mortars were now blasting the pagoda and FANK resisters were still killing vanguard yotheas.

  Everything was chaos. There were yotheas in the wards. Yotheas screaming from the operating room. “I said,” Doctor Sarin Sam Ol shouted, “come in! Come in! You do not have to behave such!”

  “We enter Neak Luong as conquerors!” The KK officer’s voice was shrill.

  “No. No,” the doctor yelled, not authoritatively, only loudly, trying to be heard over the massive turmoil. “You don’t understand! I have just returned from France. I’ve come to help you.”

  “You are a traitor,” the officer shrieked. To his bug-eyed yotheas he ordered, “Get them out! Out!”

  “They can’t be moved.” Sophan stamped forward.

  The officer shoved her. Sarin Sam Ol intervened. “Understand,” he shouted emphatically, “I came back to greet you! To cheer your great victory.”

  Around them yotheas were screaming at patients, pushing the ambulatory, the families, out of the wards, out of the corridors, out of the hospital. Broken men limped, wives pushed hospital beds with IV drips of saline still flowing into the arms of their husbands.

  The first calls had been milder. “Brothers, Sisters, Mothers, Fathers, you must leave at once. The Americans are about to bomb again. Go at once.” Only a few moved. The hospital had become their home, their refugee camp built about the base of loved ones’ beds. “At once! Evacuate at once! Leave everything and run!” Many had gone, but many of the patients were amputees or severely wounded or acutely ill and they and their families had not budged. Then the yotheas began shoving and clubbing and screaming more harshly than any of the patients had ever heard. “Get out or else!”

  “Stop this!” Sarin Sam Ol shouted. He grabbed the officer’s arm. In the nearly vacant ward yotheas grabbed decrepit bodies, ripped them from their beds, piled them like trash in a heap at floor center. “Stop it!” Doctor Sarin ordered.

  “Stop it!” Sophan barged up to the officer.

  “What are you doing?” Sarin’s one good eye protruded menacingly. He slapped at the officer like an angry child slaps an adult. Now yotheas were clubbing the bodies in the heap, stabbing those who’d not been tossed.

  From the street came the blare of a truck-mounted public address system. The voice was soft and lyrical and melodious and its beauty engulfed the fleeing who had not seen the executions. “The Father,” Norodom Sihanouk’s taped voice beseeched them, “wishes you to support the liberation soldiers. They free you from the bonds of American imperialism and from Lon Nol, the dog of the Americans. You will be safe. Your Father will be back.”

  Khmer believed him. Khmer trusted him. He was the beloved prince, Samdech Euv. He promised the war weary peace and security.

  Sophan was dumbstruck. Sarin was livid. He leaped from the officer to the executioners. They laughed as he grappled with a small lad. Then the officer pulled his pistol and shot the doctor in the back. Immediately Sophan jumped on the officer. She was not childlike. She smashed him to the floor. The pistol clattered, slid to a bed. Her attack was so unexpected the yotheas burst into giggles. With her pudgy thumbs she gouged the officer’s eyes, tearing both corneas. His arms jerked up but he could not see. Sophan grasped her fists together, smashed them down on his face. Again and again. Yotheas reeled in convulsions of glee—an old lady was beating the cadreman! Then Sophan rose, turned, looking not like an old woman but like a mythological monster about to breathe fire. The yotheas chuckled nervously, backed off, formed a U, their clubs and knives ready. Sophan roared. “GET OUT!” The boys jumped. One dropped his club and fled. Then one attacked, bludgeoned her. She fell and the rest beat her to death.

  “We’re going to see Sihanouk,” one soldier told Teck. The firefight at the pagoda had abated, the officers in charge had surrendered or been killed. Teck had been too late, thought of himself as too late and cried because he’d not been able to tell them what was happening behind the advancing facade. “They think there are some Americans hiding in the city with a bomber beacon. So right now we all have to go so they can search the city.”

  From the roving speaker truck came the voice of Major Rin of the Gray Vultures. “Only political criminals will be tried...” The loudspeaker was focused on the surrendered garrison troops who had fought so bravely about the pagoda. “Angkar,” Rin continued, “will need administrators during this period of transition. All government officials and all military officers must report immediately to the Office of the Mayor of Neak Luong. Victory to the Revolution!”

  “We should help them, eh, Brother?” Teck looked at the FANK soldier who’d told him of Sihanouk and the hiding Americans. He wanted to shake his head but he was too exhausted to respond. Like most of the others, Teck had shed his uniform. Those still clothed were now told to rid themselves of the vile material. “You were an officer, eh?” the soldier asked.

  “Once,” Teck mumbled. “The Khsach Sa camp, it’s been liberated?”

  “Maybe,” the soldier said. “Maybe leveled in the fighting, eh?” Teck’s heart dropped lower. More announcements came from the speakers. The captured soldiers began to separate by ranks. “Officers there.” The man who’d talked with Teck nudged him toward the smaller group. Down the street yotheas were pulling furniture from the apartment building and piling it against the wall. Some shot the refrigerators. Others burned cars. A few raced, crashed commandeered motorbikes. Cooking pans and transistor radios were confiscated and tied to backpacks and web gear. Anyone protesting was forced into the alleys. Fires burned in every direction.

  “Parlez-vous français?” a Krahorri officer asked a senior-looking underweared prisoner. “Oui,” the man answered. He was hustled away.

  Teck glanced back at the soldier who’d nudged him. There was no place to go. Nothing else to do. He stepped slowly to a group of lieutenants. His feet dragged, his mind felt like wet muck. Rumors, opinions, flowed subtly all about him. “Siem Reap has fallen, too.” “They’re pulling six thousand from here. Going to use them on Phnom Penh.” “Those bastards deserve it.” “They’ve already set up street committees to monitor security. We should have surrendered months ago.” “Listen to that. Listen! That is Samdech Euv!”

  Teck’s group was trotted barefoot down the main street to the government building. “...There will be a general amnesty...”

  Sihanouk’s voice surrounded them. “...All government employees, leaders and soldiers, if they surrender unconditionally to the glorious liberation forces, will be granted amnesty...”

  Inside, one by one. “You are...”

  “Pech Chieu Teck.”

  The Krahom major laughed. “Pech Chieu Teck, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Son of Sisowath Thich Soen?”

  “Yes.” A smile flicked to Teck’s face. To be recognized, he thought, by a major, that’s something. The smile sagged in the melancholy of his fatigue and bereavement. Cambodia was dead.

  “You are a very corrupt supply officer, eh?”

  “Brother.” Teck bowed his head. “I...”

  Met Rin interrupted. “When did you come from Phnom Penh?”

  “That’s what I must tell you,” Teck said. “I am surprised you know me, but you are right. Once I was with supply, in the capital. But I was not meant to be corrupt. I was very young, you know. The corruption sickened me so I quit...that’s maybe two years. Now I am just a corporal in the Auto-Defens
e.”

  “Just a corporal, eh?” Major Rin said pleasantly. “A bourgeois corporal, eh?”

  “For that, Brother,” Teck answered, “I am very sorry. You know, I admire what you have done for our country. The war is over, eh? It is a great burden lifted from our backs.”

  “Ha!” Rin chuckled behind closed lips. “Corporal Pech, you could turn white to black.”

  “Truly, Brother,” Teck answered calmly. “I want only to help the nation, to join the entire population in reconstructing our country.”

  “You shall.” Rin smiled. To the guards in the office Rin nodded. They grabbed Teck’s elbows.

  Teck jerked. “Now what?!” he demanded.

  Rin smiled pleasantly. “Now,” he said, “you will help build the country.”

  Teck froze. He stared Rin in the eyes and he sensed a tremendous shallowness. “You are not Khmer after all, eh?” Teck shook his head. The guards grabbed him again. Sadly Teck muttered, “You are only Communists.”

  Behind the mayor’s office the executioners laughed. “Another one,” one said, “who’s spit on his own chest.”

  Night descended upon the Khsach Sa camp. Many people had come, run through, vanished. A hospital worker had pulled Vathana away from her children. “Your sister, Sophan, they killed her. You must flee.”

  Vathana had stared blankly, at once convinced and disbelieving. “I will wait for my husband.”

  “Go now, Angel.” The worker sped on.

  An old association friend had come. “Angel, you worked with the poet.”

  “Yes, everyone knows.”

  “He was Viet Minh. They’re killing all the Viet Minh.”

  “I’m not Viet Minh.”

  “They’ll kill you anyway. Go quickly.”

  “Teck will come.”

  All afternoon they had heard the fighting and withstood the flow of those deserting and those fleeing the forward line of the Krahom. Late in the afternoon when the sounds of battle slowed, a few Krahom advance soldiers came and told them to remain where they were until they were called. That began the refugee camp evacuation. Then came dusk and the flames leaping into the dimming sky as the pagoda and orphanage were consumed. Vathana prayed and clutched her children and prayed and collected their few belongings and rolled them into a bundle and prayed again. She prayed to Buddha, she prayed to the spirit of the sky, she prayed to Norodom Sihanouk. “You are such a gentle king.” Vathana’s lips moved but she made no sound. “I love you very much. Bring us peace. I miss you very much. Bring us peace.”