For the Sake of All Living Things

by John M. Del Vecchio

  Vathana put her hands to her face but she did not hide her eyes. Black chunks of charred meat clung to bone shards which had been blown everywhere by the explosions. On the highest tier, evidently a pocket protected from the concussion, were thousands of decomposing bodies amid thousands of skeletons whose bones had been cleaned by insects and bleached by the sun. On the middle and lowest levels the bodies were mashed and macerated beyond recognition.

  Nang began to back out. His joy at showing her the new system had been deflated. His anger had not yet risen. Vathana stopped him. She grabbed him by his disfigured hand, then turned back to the massacre. “Angkar has raped Cambodia.” Her voice was as hard as his.

  “What do you know?” Nang’s anger finally caught. His eyes glazed. He cocked his arm to bludgeon her.

  “You don’t know how to fuck,” she snarled. She stepped into him. One hand went straight to his groin. He squirmed backward. She held him. “You fuck with this.” She squeezed him. “I’m going to teach you. I’ve fucked imperialists. I’ve fucked an American. Now I’m going to teach you and you’ll know. Then you won’t have to rape Cambodia.”

  “An...an...an American. You’ve...with an American. Raped! You can say Angkar has raped Kampuchea! Kampuchea’s been raped. Raped by the French. Raped by the Thais, the Japanese, the yuons. Sihanouk raped Kampuchea. Lon Nol raped Kampuchea. Americans raped Kampuchea. Now yuons again.” As he spoke his furry expanded. Vathana did not let go. He shoved fingers into her eyes. “There’s nothing”—he stepped forward, she tripped back—“nothing we do which is not justified. All deserve to die. The rapers. The looters. The invaders. The bombers. I laugh at their deaths. I gorge myself on their blood. I should rape you. It is justified.”

  Vathana exploded into hysterical menacing laughter. “You’re a little boy. Your father, ha! He didn’t teach you to be a man.” Again Nang cocked a fist to smash her but she skipped back. He shuffled forward, slipped on a human heart, fell. “Let me teach you,” she taunted. “Let me make you a man.” She laughed hysterically. “Fuck me very special! Ha!”

  Nang stopped. He was trapped. He could kill her but then she wouldn’t teach him. I’ll kill her after, he thought. “Okay.” His voice settled. “Tonight you teach me.”

  John Sullivan sat in a bath in the Royal Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. The door to the small suite was open, and lounging on the bed reviewing the new reports was Ian Conklin. For almost a year they’d worked in the camps along the border, helping, by day, refugees as prescribed by the Cambodian Crisis Relief manual. At night they’d searched for clues to Vathana’s whereabouts, asked every new refugee if they’d seen or heard of a small red-haired girl. Very few refugees from the East had reached Thailand, virtually none from the far Northeast. Their original intensity waned, their enthusiasm dwindled in the boredom of routine. Once a month they returned to Bangkok for self-authorized R&R.

  “ ‘The Viet Namese invasion of December 1977 to January 1978 threw the interior into a great state of madness,’ ” Conklin read loudly enough for Sullivan to hear over the gurgle of water. “ ‘Although the entire front advanced, there were major blitzkrieg spearheads against which KK air power (nearly nonexistent) and artillery were ineffective. Major Khmer units were ill equipped and poorly led. In the North the PAVN rolled to the east bank of the Mekong River at Stung Treng; in the South they advanced to Neak Luong with little difficulty. Radio Hanoi claimed the drive freed 150,000 Khmers. Phnom Penh reported the Viet Namese forcibly conscripted 150,000 and sent them into battle against Pol Pot’s forces.’ ”

  “Probably ten times too high,” Sullivan called out. “Neak Luong, huh?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, probably. ‘On 6 January 1978, the Viet Namese spearheads—with amphibious vehicles, ferry boats, helicopters, portable bridging, tanks and artillery—stopped. Phnom Penh claimed a glorious victory saying guerrilla tactics behind the PAVN lines forced the Viet Namese to withdraw. Some observers have concluded the problem was the new Viet Namese army was heavily comprised of ex-ARVN soldiers who purposefully sabotaged the invasion. On 6 February, its troops withdrawn to old border sanctuary bases, Hanoi publicly called for peace talks between the two nations—indicating that only by its good grace was the offensive canceled and Phnom Penh left standing. Pol Pot immediately rejected Hanoi’s proposal.’ ”

  “You know what I think?” Sullivan called. He didn’t wait for an answer. “I think any observer who thinks the PAVN is full of ex-ARVNs is full of shit.”

  “Just listen, will ya. It says, ‘The campaign resulted in the death of one third of Kampuchea’s army, about thirty thousand soldiers. The PAVN suffered almost equal casualties, though this represented but five percent of its force. In the Kampuchean interior cadre in several western provinces “planned” or launched small rebellions against the Center. All were put down, most (even those which were imaginary) by preemptive massacres. In the East dissident factions have flocked to join the new Khmer Viet Minh. Politically the interior is polarized and fragmented. Pol Pot himself has drawn distinctions between the units of Takeo, Kampot, and Kompong Speu, who are his “unconditional troops,” and all others, whom he suspects of double-dealing.’ ”

  “Where do they get that stuff?” Sullivan asked.

  “Same place we do, I’d guess.”

  “From refugee reports?”

  “There and commie radio.”

  “Conk!”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sick of these border camps. I haven’t gotten to step one in a whole fuckin year.”

  “Yeah. You haven’t gotten out of that tub yet, either. It’s my turn.”

  “I want to go inside,” Sullivan said.

  “Inside?”

  “Yeah. Inside.”

  Slowly Vathana unbuttoned Nang’s gray tunic. It was in her mind that she would be killed the moment they finished but that did not matter. In this one way, by this one act, she would attempt to plant a seed of love in his sterile desiccated soul. Perhaps it would germinate. Perhaps, in time, long after her body had rotted, he would abandon this murdering.

  “You have very big muscles,” Vathana said. It was the first time she’d seen him without, his uniform. “You have many scars.”

  “In the war...” He hesitated. He felt vulnerable without the tunic. He felt giddy. He felt foolish. “...I was stronger and quicker and more sure. I could pick a coin from a blind man’s cup without him feeling or the monk seeing.”

  “Do you remember, before the war...” Vathana pulled her blouse tail from her skirt. “...I would collect kathen...” She looked upon Nang’s face as never before, looked beyond the burn-scar, beyond the face of her master, her executioner. “...during the bon I would give the alms to the monks...” Vathana lightly laid a hand on Nang’s belt. “Papa was very...”

  Nang went rigid. A wave of humiliation swept over him. “Stop.” Vathana stilled. “Before...I...I want you to read my father’s confession. All of it. It is...you will understand then. Then we can proceed.”

  He forced her to the cage, left, returned with the file, released her, sat. Immediately, Vathana saw the notebooks. A shudder quaked her entire body, a tremor more severe than any malaria attack, more frightening than the errant bomb on Neak Luong.

  “...It...” Nang stuttered. “It was...an accident, really. He should have...What is it?”

  “Those...”

  “Those?”

  “Notebooks. You have one and seven!” Vathana’s hand flew. Crack! She slapped Nang’s face, knocking him from the chair. “One and seven! You murderer!” Shock grabbed her, grabbed him. To her these meant Chhuon’s death. She went beyond shock, beyond horror. Met Nang, executioner....She pounced on the file. The script was unmistakable. She glared, screamed, “Don’t you wonder...why...one and seven?”

  “Hum?” He was totally bewildered.

  “I have two through six.” She fell to her knees, wailed a terrible crying sobbing cackling wail.

  Met Nem and Kosol broke into the room. �
�Get out!” Nang shrieked.

  Vathana vomited. Again she glared at Nang. Still he sat on the floor. “Every day, every night, I see the dead parade before me and it’s...it’s...it’s because of my own brother. My brother!”

  “Who’s your brother? Don’t be stupid. I’m...”

  “Cahuom Samnang. That’s who you are. Little Samnang, son of Chhuon, lost at Plei Srepok...Oh! Oh...oh...oh...” She beat her fists on the floor, on her thighs. For a long time she cried. Nang sat stupefied. Then he rose, collected his tunic and left.

  He did not return until long after the rains began. The monsoon rains of 1978 were heavier even than those of 1977, the worst in a hundred years. Everywhere fields washed out and people died but Vathana no longer was privileged to witness the genocide. No longer was she caged, but she did not flee. The house staff bitched constantly to her about betrayals, about new conditions, about Met Sar’s ignoble abandonment. They treated her not like a prisoner but like the shadow queen, yet she knew she could not escape. By June yotheas were complaining about the lack of rice and other staples, about the renewed moaning because there was no gasoline, about the loathsome stench which even the heaviest rains in a century could not wash from the air.

  Then Nang returned. He was insane. With the others he bitched about the odor and the moaning though daily he tabulated the progress Site 169 was making in the eradication of enemies and useless elements. Each tenth day he filed his report exactly as he had for three years. And if the progress was less than satisfactory Nang meted out punishment to cadre and subordinates as if none of his acts were tied to the moaning and the odor.

  In July Nang took Vathana back toward the cliff. She had read and memorized Chhuon’s file, had sent Met Arn to unearth the middle notebooks.

  At the base of the cliff Nang took an overgrown path she’d not seen. It led down a steep escarpment to a gushing, vine-cloaked stream which flowed from the cliff. “I found it when I came for my father.” Nang’s words were unconnected to previous utterances. The banks were red—from laterite soil or blood. He led her, in silence, downstream hundreds of meters. There, partially buried by jungle, was a small temple. “I’ve been cleaning it,” Nang whispered. The stone walls were carved with hundreds of lingas, phallic symbols, the symbols of creative power of the Hindu god Siva. “He wished to bless the waters which flow to the paddies,” Nang said. “This is where I am from. I came at the wrong time.”

  “Samnang,” Vathana whispered, “for our father...your father...let me go. Let the people escape.” Nang grasped her hand and pulled her to a second wall bedecked with ancient Apsarases, the heavenly maidens of Kambuja, and tortured slaves. “Samnang, you have a choice.”

  “Like them”—Nang rubbed a hand on the bas relief—“we are condemned to cycles of destruction and creation.”

  “Do you hear me? You can choose, right now. You can let the people live. They are not animals. Even animals, Samnang...Samnang...”

  “Do you know why we call them yuons?”

  “What? No. Listen. Please listen.”

  “When Chams attacked Kambuja in the tenth century they had Viet slaves. They were called yavana, evil foreigners.”

  “Samnang, you do not have to kill.”

  “Hum? Every Khmer must kill. Everyone must kill thirty yuons. The Center so decrees. We may sacrifice two million in combat but we will kill sixty million Viet Namese. There will still be millions of Kampucheans to repopulate all Southeast Asia. I will have them all work harder. Double our production.”

  “Samnang! Stop! Stop it! We don’t need to wipe out the Viet Namese. They aren’t devils. They’re humans too.”

  “Ha! I know. Ha!” Nang turned to her, pulled her close, whispered so even the Apsarases couldn’t hear, “i’ve had a meeting, ssshh! no one must know, first i must finish the killings. then...ha! i’ve met with them.”

  The interior of Democratic Kampuchea in mid- and late 1978 was more treacherous than anything Sullivan had seen in Viet Nam or Cambodia in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Ambushes were everywhere. The bodies of those who’d attempted escape lined the routes to the border. And of those who did not flee, the reports were numbing. The killings were the heaviest of the Pol Pot years. Like Nazi Germany in 1945, Angkar Leou seemed bent on stamping out the evidence of its own atrocities. It turned not only on the people but also upon itself, and the bloodbath leaped by logarithmic degrees up a vengeance scale. The Free World barely reacted.

  New mass deportations struck some areas. Starvation continued everywhere. Reports claimed that up to 300,000 Khmers had fled to Viet Nam, that Krahom military units continued to mutiny, that forty thousand Khmer insurgents were “working the border” and that the Center had decreed a new offensive against the Viet Namese. The trickle of refugees to Thailand increased to a steady stream. Still the Free World barely reacted.

  Sullivan and Conklin found penetration deeper than a few kilometers almost impossible. They were phalangs, tall white foreigners. No matter where they went, they stood out. Still they made their forays—into the South, the center, the North. Always they returned, sometimes empty-handed, sometimes with a fleeing family in tow, to a small house they’d rented near Aranyaprathet. The home was in the town where many of the relief agencies had field headquarters. They made their house their headquarters, their information center. They lined the walls with maps, concocted an elaborate file system of where they’d searched, what they’d learned, where the people they’d contacted originated from, and their route to that border point.

  Newsweek magazine carried refugee stories in the 23 January issue. The articles concluded, “Some of the horror stories told by refugees about life in Cambodia are undoubtedly exaggerations....Several prominent Indochina experts have recently disputed many of the refugees’ charges, contending that a few thousand Cambodians at the most have died at the hands of Angkar Leou. They also maintain that it was a matter of economic necessity to relocate the population into rural areas because U.S. bombing forced too many people off the land during the Vietnam War.”

  “Damn!” Sullivan blurted, reading the old issue which had just arrived. “If one replaces the word Cambodia with Germany the statement could have been from Free World papers of 1943 or even ’44 or ’45. Will we ever learn? It’s so much easier to deny the reports. Then they don’t have to feel the guilt of apathy.”

  Conklin picked up the magazine. The article showed photos of “baby-faced executioners” and spoke of ghost towns. “Who the fuck are these ‘experts’?”

  “Can’t you guess?” Sullivan snapped back.

  In the same issue there was a story about Soviet expansionism into the Horn of Africa—the USSR can move three divisions to African supply sites in one day. Also noted was the assassination in Nicaragua of La Prensa editor Pedro Joaquin Chamorro-Cardenal. Allegedly he was murdered by Somoza-backed death squads though there was the possibility the killers were Sandinistas posing as Somoza men. The death touched off major street rioting. Both stories, Sullivan said to Conklin, smacked of standard insurgent tactics seen in Southeast Asia for the past three decades. “How come they don’t suggest a connection?”

  The two ex-Special Forces teammates crossed the border west of Preah Vihear in June. For three kilometers the area had been picked clean. Then they came upon an uncrossable swath of forest evidently so littered with land mines that even Khmer Rouge soldiers couldn’t pick their way through. They moved cautiously west, trying to outflank the mined belt. For two days they saw nothing but the mutilated bodies of soldiers. On their return to Aranyaprathet Sullivan was more depressed than ever.

  His new reading material did nothing to bolster his spirits. Columnist David Broder, speaking of U.S. involvement in Central America, simply said America was pursuing “the path of stupidity again.” Quoting Senator Frank Church he said, “...we seem unable to learn from the failure of our Viet Nam policy...Somehow, someday, this country has got to learn to live with revolutions in the third world.”

&nbs
p; “Which stupid lessons shall we learn, Mister Broder?” Sullivan threw the article at Conklin. “Shall we learn to allow the Pol Pots of the world to slaughter their own people—as long as we don’t see it? This morally depraved person thinks not. There are other lessons we should learn. To hide our heads is not one. To question why our Viet Nam policies failed is valid and essential, but to do so means to examine and analyze, not to accept flippant propaganda.”

  In June 1978, Viet Nam cracked down on its 1.5 million people of Chinese ancestry, confiscating their property and driving them from their homes. In Asia it was major news. From what Sullivan and Conklin saw of American press coverage, it was virtually ignored. “Hey,” Conklin chuckled cynically. “What’d ya expect? There’s no photos of the self-immolation protests. No photos, no story, right? Didn’t happen!”

  “Know what I think?” Sullivan countered. “I think we’re seeing a new American society—one so convinced of its own evil, it seeks only to reinforce that image. What effect is that gonna produce down the line? How many Democratic Kampucheas is this world gonna have?”

  “Fuck it, man,” Conklin said.

  “Fuck it is right,” Sullivan said. “There’s no chance, Conk. There’s no chance they’re alive.”

  “Yes there is.”

  “We haven’t been able to trace anybody, nobody, back to Neak Luong. Ya know what?”

  “Come on, J. L. We’ve still helped a lot of people.”

  “Fuck it. I’m sick of it. I’m gonna follow the American example. The American plan. That’s what the travel agents call it, eh?”

  “What American plan?”

  “I’m gonna quit.”

  Met Kosal has been replaced by two ten-year-old boys; Met Nem by a nine-year-old girl. The boys carry AK-47 rifles which dwarf them. The girl is unarmed—even her eyes—a total emptiness. They do not have names. They are “Comrade Child.” Nothing more. Today, Vathana is under casual house arrest. She sits in a large wicker chair in the central room watching these beautiful, relatively well nourished children. They speak Khmer though she finds she cannot understand them—their language is so different. These are the new people of Met Sar, of Pol Pot, of Mao Zedong, of Ho Chi Minh, of Lenin and Marx—the New Communist Man and Woman. Nang is not home, has not been in the house for a week. For a week he has not brought Vathana to the cliff. Vathana does not know why. She finds herself praying for him, her little brother, praying, hoping he will perish peacefully. Comrade Child, girl, brings Vathana’s lunch on a tray. The food is sufficient—bland rice with some kind of meat dried to hard tack—but it is not good—prepared with little skill, little thought. Still it is more than the people get, much more. Vathana does not eat; does not move. Many children, very young, five to eight, come and go. The girl, Met Child, gives orders but Vathana cannot ascertain an orderliness. The moaning from the abyss comes and goes, too. For months it has been continuous, oscillating only in intensity. At the moment it is louder than ever before. The nightly burnings have been suspended because there is so little gasoline and what there is is being used at the front. The children are abuzz. There are visitors. There are rumors. “The yuons are coming.” Vathana doesn’t move. Half a dozen little boys are running, playing. One steals some food from her tray. He dives behind her chair. Others are shooting at him with their fingers. Another takes food from the tray. Then another. Vathana doesn’t move. She feels exposed, raw, as if she’d been skinned and all her nerve endings exposed. Even the wind currents from the moving children are painful. The food disappears. The little boys leave. The one from behind her chair slithers around to the front. Then he stands. He faces her, stares at her as if she is a stone object. He nudges her leg with his knee. Vathana watches him carefully, studies him. His eyes are bright, he is beautiful, more beautiful even than her own son, as beautiful as Samay when he was so small, almost as beautiful as Samnang. The little boy raises his hand, points his finger, cocks his thumb. “Bang! You’re dead!” He runs out.