For the Sake of All Living Things

by John M. Del Vecchio

  On a wet evening in early October, after the three men had remapped and replanned the escape across the Mekong and west and north toward Preah Vihear and up the escarpment to the Thai border, the one-armed man sat with Vathana. “Can’t you hug your child?” he asked her. His Khmer was poor. He dropped his eyes, embarrassed by the deficiency. “Can’t you...” He repeated the question in French.

  Vathana turned. She glared at him. Then for the first time in one hundred days she spoke. “Where’s your other arm?” Her voice was accusing, in French, flat.

  “The Communists took it,” he answered in Viet Namese.

  “You are yuon.”

  “Viet Namese. Call me Le.” He switched back to French.

  “Thmil.”

  “No.”

  “Lon Nol warned thmils would bring a dark age. Would bring an age where the ignorants would rule the educated and Buddha would be chased from the land; where only deaf-mutes would survive.”

  “Yes, I remember. His prophecy holds true for my country as well.”

  Vathana’s glare widened. She leaned away from him. The stub of his left arm involuntarily jumped. “What country?” Vathana’s tone remained flat.

  “South Viet Nam,” he said proudly. “My country. My people. They are not the thmils.”

  “Why aren’t you there?”

  “I escaped.”

  “Escaped?”

  “The Communists, they’re your thmils. In my country too they’ve ushered in a dark age. They took my arm in 1972. I was captured but released when the Khmer Rouge attacked the NVA base. I think they meant to kill me but your uncle’s men assisted me to ARVN lines.” Vathana stared uncomprehendingly. It was the first time she’d spoken. Le was afraid if he stopped she’d slip back into her remote void. He talked on. “I was medically discharged but even so...when...they put me in the Ka Tum Reeducation Camp west of An Loc. Then they told me, because I was an intelligence officer, I should go to Nghe Tinh, to Reeducation Camp Number 6 in Tanh Phnong, very very far north. I was sure they meant to kill me so I escaped and ran for days. West of Ban Me Thuot I jumped into the Krong River and I floated downstream until it became the Srepok and then I followed the river until I recognized the peak by the old NVA camp. Then your Uncle Sam found me again. Only he and Kpa remain from their...”

  “You must take my children to Thailand.”

  “Uh...yes. Of course. We’re all going.”

  “I will die here...The children, they are yours now.” At that Vathana turned from Tran Van Le. She pulled her legs back up to the platform with her hands, fell to her side, curled and slept. As she did, in her mind, an old prayer unfolded.

  From great suffering comes great insight. From great insight comes great compassion. From great compassion comes a peaceful heart. From a peaceful heart comes a peaceful family. From a peaceful family comes a peaceful community. From a peaceful community comes a peaceful nation. From a peaceful nation comes a peaceful world.

  The rains slowed. The winds shifted. The rains stopped. Kpa led the tiny column away from the camp toward the swollen stream and to the bamboo-and-vine suspension bridge. Each day in the month and a half since Tran Van Le had broken through to Vathana, he, Kpa and Sam had forced her to listen, to talk, to eat and to walk. Each day, though her health was fragile, she became a little stronger. Each night they told her their dream of Thailand. Each night she too dreamed. Each dream ended with her in Kampuchea and the children in Bangkok. Vathana was happy, happy as the day she raised the first medical tent for the refugees fleeing the border war, happy as the day Samol was born. She believed the dream.

  Su Livanh, too, recouped much of her lost spirit. The lilt returned to her voice; flaccid muscle turned taut. Kpa and Samnang became almost inseparable, a hunting-foraging team able to supply the tiny unit with enough food if not to thrive, at least to heal and regain some weight. Only Sam remained weak. The malarial bouts which should have tempered remained a nagging constant, dragging him closer and closer to despair.

  The bridge was intact but weather worn and flimsy. They spent an entire day laboring in its repair. Then they crossed it and camped. The trails had not been used since they’d come to the camp in July. In five months the jungle had nearly obliterated the trails and the going was painfully slow. What once had taken the best part of a day to traverse now took a week. Again food was scarce. Where for five years Vathana had viewed her scant diet as a religious precept or as an exercise in self-denial and self-control, now she saw it as starvation. It weakened and depressed her. She fought to move on. Her mind and body, so fragile, slowed. Her soul filled with dejection. Kpa pushed her. Le prodded. Samnang, bursting anew upon adventure, tugged her. Day by day they moved closer to the main road. Now Vathana wanted to burst from the jungle, to run, to scream, to surrender. Kpa forced a halt. Vathana seethed, mad, claustrophobic. Le restrained her. Sam held her. “Not now. Not now. Not until we know. Tomorrow.”

  “You will see my children reach Thailand.”

  “Yes. All of us.”

  “I must go.”

  “No.”

  Before dawn Kpa and Le crept from the night camp toward the roadway. In July there had been no villages in the area, yet now they sensed many inhabitants. Inhabitants would mean soldiers, guards. They proceeded cautiously. They stayed in the trees, moved slowly from concealment to concealment until they could distinguish the sounds of voices. They stopped. They moved parallel to the road to a clearing through which they saw the multitudes—thousands upon thousands of filthy emaciated wraiths in tattered black cloth dragging their unshod feet, limping forth, dazed. At the roadside, in view of the nearly unconscious parade, a dozen yotheas were gang-raping a young woman. Then they dug a hole and buried her to the neck, then they beat her head with clubs until she was dead. Not finished, two boys hacked at her neck with bayonets until they severed the head from the body. Then they put the head on a stake and planted it so the smashed face would greet the oncoming procession. They laughed and ran off, moving against the flow, knocking people down until they found another young woman whom they pulled from the roadway.

  Kpa and Le turned back. Again they moved through the forest parallel to the road. All morning they traveled west. At varying intervals they reconnoitered the road. The procession was broken into units but the units seemed endless. By night they returned to find Vathana stir-crazy, Sam yet more anemic. They attempted to reason with both, to explain their sightings, their new plan to remain in the forest slowly moving west. Kpa was able to get nods only when he ordered, “Follow me.”

  Day fell to night, night rose to day, seemingly without end. One day they moved three kilometers, one day only a half. Always they were quiet. Snakes fell from the trees and frightened them. Spiders crawled over them at night. Ticks buried their heads into their flesh and leeches sucked precious moisture from their bodies. On and on. Wherever they approached roadways they spied starving processions. They crossed the Mekong south of Stung Treng by bribing a government ferryman who responded to every query, “Take care of your mouth, Brother,” or “Don’t talk of tigers, Sister, where tigers can overhear.” Then they came to an area of unharvested golden paddies shimmering in the gentle December wind. Again they slowed, established a camp in a treeline. At night they crept into the fields, rasped their fingers over the grains, filling bags. By day they husked, separated and dried—cooking and eating half, saving half for the next phase.

  In areas where few people had lived they’d seen multitudes. Now in areas of once dense habitation they saw no one. Vathana was heedless, indifferent. Kpa became disoriented on the flat plain. Sam remained weak. Le became lax. Only Samnang’s natural visual vigilance and Su Livanh’s fear of sounds remained intact.

  With full rice bags they stepped onto the open empty road. Suddenly there were shots. Kpa’s hip erupted red. More shots. Le scooped Su Livanh in his arms, sprinted. Vathana froze, trembled. She turned, looked back. A hundred meters away a herd of young yotheas were stampeding down upo
n them. Samnang grabbed Sam. They fled toward scattered palms along the roadside. Vathana dropped her bag, knelt by Kpa. Rice splattered in the dirt.

  “Go!” he screamed. “Go!”

  She grasped his shoulders with her frail hands. “Please,” she pleaded weakly.

  Kpa struggled. He sat forward, up. Vathana pulled. She looked up. Le, Sam and the children were gone. More shots. Kpa rolled to the knee on his good side, Vathana wedged her hands in his armpits, pushed up. As she held him above her two more shots, very close, exploded. Kpa’s face shattered. For a second he stood, to her weightless. Then he collapsed into her.

  For two hours the yotheas raped her. Whatever purity the Krahom had claimed before victory was mocked in this taking of the spoils of war. “This is Angkar’s rice, eh, Met Trollop? Angkar must be paid. Pay me. Pay my brothers.” Again and again. Bang, bang bang—next. Bang, bang bang—next. Rough, crude, cruel. Not concerned with their own pleasures—strictly hate, conquest, control, humiliation. Then beating and interrogation and more beating and then a second day of rape and beating and perhaps a third or a fourth but at that point Vathana did not think of time. “Please,” she begged. “Please, let me die. Let death release me.” Still she feared death at their hands. She feared they’d dig her grave, bury her to the neck, then bludgeon her. And she feared the decapitation. What pain does the human spirit feel when the head is rammed upon a stake and hoisted, used even in death to terrorize other slaves?

  They did not kill her but left her to die. Someone helped her. She did not know who. In mid-December she was given to a newly relocated phum. No one knew her. The mekong in charge threw her out. “You can’t stay here,” the mekong snapped angrily. “What’s your village? Where’s your family?” Vathana was forced to the road, alone, without food, without water, without shelter, without passes. For two weeks she wandered through the new wilderness zone begging for food at each settlement, sucking water from clawed hard dirt clumps at the bottom of dried puddles.

  Then, “Phum Sath Din, eh, Sister? Those people are in Sangkat 117. That’s where you must go. Here. Take these mangoes. And this. I’m sorry we have so little to give. In the old days...”

  Then, “You will live with me. How did you get here?”

  Vathana could barely answer.

  “Who is she?” demanded Met Nem, a mekong of Sangkat 117.

  “She is my daughter,” the woman answered.

  “Met Voen, if this is a lie, you’ll be sent to Site 169.”

  “I tell you, she is my daughter. She is very ill. Let me treat her. She’ll become strong and will struggle hard for Angka’s glory.”

  “Humph!” Nem left to report to the commune’s enforcer.

  “vathana,” Voen whispered. It was their first of almost five hundred nights, “your father left a message for you.” Vathana’s body trembled. Dry sobs wracked her once-beautiful face, “you must live, little niece.”

  “auntie, where is papa?”

  “they sent him to site 169.”

  “and mama?”

  “i will tell you all, but first you must hear your father’s words.”

  “yes.”

  “ ‘you must live to tell our story and the story of our people to the whole world.’ he told me to make you promise that.”

  “i promise.”

  “for our people, vathana.”

  “i promise.”

  “i’ve hidden his notebooks, get them to thailand. he’s been disappeared.”

  “There’s a letter for you. From Washington,” his father said over the phone.

  “An official one?” he asked.

  “No, John. Personal. Looks personal. That’s why we didn’t open it. Looks like a woman’s hand. Return address says, R. Donaldson. Want me to forward it or are you coming home for Christmas?”

  “I’ll be home, Pop.”

  “Good. It’s not right for you to stay away like this.”

  “I work, you know. For Mr. Pradesh. I’m essentially the ranch manager. It’s hard to get away.”

  “What kind of name is that, anyway?”

  “Pradesh? Indian. He...”

  “Indian?! That doesn’t sound like any Indian name I know.”

  “India Indian. He’s a political exile.”

  “Ah, well, you come home for Christmas, okay? I’ll keep the letter till you’re here.”

  John Sullivan went home for Christmas 1975. He arrived on Wednesday, the twenty-fourth, perfunctorily visited aunts, uncles, cousins, with his parents, sister and brother-in-law. He felt weird, out of it, as if he’d become an alien, but he kept it to himself. On his mind was Rita’s letter and ranch business and his independent studies—nothing he felt he could share with his father or sister or any of the others. Christmas morning and through dinner Margie and Bob remained polite yet distant. By noon his Uncle Gus was drunk and wanted John to join him. His mother became furious but she too bottled it up. The day passed as holidays do. On the morning of the twenty-sixth he packed his one bag, carried it to his jeep, then went back in, made coffee and waited for his father to come down.

  “Predesh, you say?” Henry Sullivan sat with his son.

  “Pradesh,” John corrected.

  “Indian?”

  “Um-hum.”

  “Them and the Arabs and the Japs are buying all the farms in this county. That’s gotta stop.”

  “I don’t know,” John said. “I know Mister Pradesh runs the place better than the guy that had it before.”

  “Humph!”

  “Look, Pop, I don’t want to argue. There’s nothing I can say—or do—that makes sense to any of you here. Some of it doesn’t make sense to me.”

  Henry Sullivan squeezed his coffee cup. A thin wisp of white vapor swirled over the dark liquid. “John,” he said. It was difficult for him to find the words. He looked at his son. “There’s nothin you can say, or do, that’ll keep us...that’ll...you’ll always be our son. You know that? Whether you’re three or thirty, understand?”

  “Thanks, Pop. Maybe, just now, it’s better for me to be a few miles away.”

  “Maybe. But...John, don’t be away because you think no one agrees with you. That sister of yours and her husband, they don’t think for all of us. Look, you go back to this Mister Pradesh. If that’s what you want, be the best ranch manager there ever was. And...John...I’m fifty-seven...I...I, ah, got this letter for you from R. Donaldson. Do you have a girl out there on the ranch?”

  “No.” John laughed. “Not at the moment, Pop. There’s a few women in town but no one I’m interested in.”

  “Who’s this?” Henry took the letter from his shirt pocket. The envelope was cream colored, the script neat. He passed it to his son.

  John looked at it a moment, gritted his teeth. He didn’t want to open it before his father. He had no idea what it might contain. “She was a reporter in Cambodia,” John said. “A real hard-nosed bitch.”

  “Why’d she write?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Well, open the damned thing.”

  John slid the handle of his teaspoon beneath the flap, cleanly broke the glue. He glanced at the few lines, then read them aloud to his father. “ ‘John, if this reaches you, contact me. As you predicted, terrible things are happening in Cambodia. No one wants to hear about it. I would like your help in relieving what misery we can. You were the best ‘advisor’ I ever met there. Situation desperate. Let me send you our reports.’ ”

  The note was signed, simply, “Rita.” Beneath the signature was written, “Director, Cambodian Crisis Relief.”

  Six weeks into the new year, John Sullivan received a packet, via his father, from Cambodian Crisis Relief. He had not answered Rita’s letter. The packet seemed to be the rough draft of a yet-to-be-released report. Copies of news clippings with comments written in the margins were attached.

  The Khmer Rouge victory of 17 April 1975 has ushered in a new age, one which Khmers call peal chur chat, a sour and bitter time. It has not brought pe
ace.

  Sullivan dropped the packet on the coffee table in his small living room. He did not want to read it. He did not want to remember anymore. Indeed, he felt he had been quite successful at putting the memories, the bitterness and pain, behind him. He grabbed his jacket. There were fence lines to be checked, feed to be distributed. The words of the report stared up at him.

  Phnom Penh’s nearly three million inhabitants were herded from the capital only hours after Khmer Rouge soldiers entered...

  All towns! Sullivan said to himself. All? Those slimy scumbags.

  ...bloodbaths...all officers of the old army, down to second lieutenant, are being executed....

  Three hundred thousand! Sullivan sat on the cheap convertible sofa behind the coffee table. Bloodbaths...! How many...how many times did I tell them...? Sullivan stood abruptly, shot an arm into one sleeve of his jacket.

  Though these reports have been at least partially substantiated...that is, figures indicating half this number of deaths have been verified...President Ford, according to Press Secretary Ron Nessen, is “disturbed” by the confirmation of the execution of eighty to ninety of Lon Nol’s officers and their wives. Is it any wonder America isn’t outraged? Is it any wonder America has barely noticed these atrocities? Even the president of the United States has hardly mentioned the slaughter of perhaps 10,000 unarmed human beings in that tiny country each day.

  Sullivan sat, read the report. Then he reread it. He could no longer ignore what was happening on the far side of the earth, nor on the East Coast of his own country. His first response was anger. To Rita Donaldson he wrote.

  You know this Cambodian Crisis Relief of yours...Do you know who was, who used to be Cambodian Crisis Relief? Me! That was my job. It seems to me some people put major obstacles in my path, some people kept me from helping the people of Cambodia. Now they ask for my help!

  He did not send that note, but ripped it to shreds. He began again, tore up the pages again. He left, checked the fences, gritting his teeth the whole time. His stomach felt empty. In the evening, back in his room, he pored over the report. He pondered the meanings, projected the ramifications. For two days, as he rode to distant grazing areas to check feed supplies for the cattle, his anger built. Then he drove to town to begin a search for materials he might purchase, bring back to the ranch and study. For weeks he read, bringing to his study the same dedication and intensity he’d brought to his study of physics and organic chemistry. Finally, in March 1976 he wrote an impersonal response to Rita Donaldson.