A lively discussion followed until General Ouane Rathikone got up to speak. “Henry’s right. We have to organize a political movement of all the Cham and have soldiers and civilians working together in the interests of the country. We could call it the Cham Union Banda Solidaire, CUBS.”
Ouane had gotten the group’s attention, and they all started talking at once among themselves. The general was a good speaker and a popular figure. The betel-nut chewing army chief of staff, a former sergeant in the French maquis, had been expelled from St. Cyr, the French military academy, for referring to his instructors as “wooden-headed officers with Dien Bien Phu complexes.”
I was surprised to hear the rough ex-sergeant speak so eloquently about the need for a “national movement” and even giving it such a high-sounding name. Then I remembered Henry telling us about his “very good friend” General Ouane, and I knew where his inspiration for the CUBS had come from.
When Ouane finished, Phousat stood up and nominated General Ouane for CUBS president. The group clapped and someone seconded the nomination. Then another member of the group stood up and nominated Lieutenant Colonel Oudone as CUBS vice president. This nomination was also applauded and seconded.
I was sure Henry was pleased at this demonstration “of political action in the raw,” but I saw that he seemed upset and had taken Ouane aside out of earshot of the others. When Ouane returned, he took the floor again, this time nominating Impeng Soolay, a minor official in the ministry of information, as secretary general. After brief applause and seconding of Impeng, Oudone nominated Ciao Sopsana, a schoolteacher from Luang Prabat, as treasurer. The nominations were then closed.
Henry was breathing easier. With two leadership positions filled by civilians, he couldn’t be accused of midwifing a military junta.
The newly elected leaders would be our counterparts in the nation-building program. We became inseparable, in and out of each other’s homes, sharing sticky rice and mosquito nets, running together when the enemy wasn’t far behind. This intimacy affected our objectivity and often blindsided us from seeing cracks in the program until too late to stanch them. There was a tendency to get caught up in a “we-are-winning” hubris.
When we finally severed ties, the scars never healed.
My counterpart was Lieutenant Colonel Oudone, whose uncle was a high official in the ancien régime. His uncle had little use for the upstart CUBS even though his nephew was a vice president.
Oudone was an optimist by nature, a quality that had its downside, however. He always looked on the bright side of our nation-building activities, often misleading me into thinking we were making progress when the opposite was the case. He didn’t want to upset me by confronting me with problems, figuring they would eventually take care of themselves. His Bo penh yang—it doesn’t matter—philosophy was typically Cham. When I confronted him about rumored “paper” CUBS chapters, he brushed aside my concerns. If I asked him about allegations that military commanders were forcing village chiefs to establish CUBS chapters, he replied they were only helping to “color Henry’s map blue.”
Betsy Ross
Oudone and I were watching the sun, with its canvas of reds and oranges, set over the Mekong, when our reverie was interrupted by Bon Xou, his wife. Madame Oudone, wearing the traditional Cham gold-embroidered sarong, glided noiselessly around the house, rarely interrupting our conversations. I was surprised when I looked up and saw Bon Xou standing in front of us, arms crossed and scowling.
“I overheard you talking about the Cham not being patriotic. What do you expect? Until a few years ago, Cham didn’t even exist as a country. All most Cham remember is being ruled by the French, and unlike Vietnam and China, Cham has no modern heroes like Ho Chi or Mao to look up to!
“Cham does, however, have a good flag, red with three white elephants with their trunks entwined. Most Cham don’t know what their flag looks like, unless they’ve seen faded remnants of flags flying over government buildings or military outposts.
“Why don’t you have the CUBS distribute Cham flags throughout Cham, a flag for every village? Have the CUBS sponsor ceremonies, with the village chiefs given the honor of raising the flag.”
Oudone and I sat spellbound, with our mouths open, listening to the normally reticent Bon Xou. She wasn’t finished.
“The Cham Women’s Association, of which I am president, will make the flags if St. Martin can get us some sewing machines and bolts of red and white denim cloth. With twenty-five Singer sewing machines and two hundred bolts of cloth, in a month we can make enough flags to fly over all the villages in Cham!”
Bon Xou’s proposal was the most practical one I had heard since coming to Cham. I told her we would try to get the sewing machines and bolts of red and white denim cloth.
Al, our logistics officer, was always glad to have an excuse to go to Bangkok. He liked scouring the markets along the klongs (canals) during the day and visiting the local massage parlors at night. He left for Bangkok two days after Bon Xou had proposed the flag project. He sent out word to his Chinese contacts for them to come up with twenty-five Singer sewing machines and two hundred bolts of red and two hundred bolts of white denim cloth. Within forty-eight hours, his order had been filled. The sewing machines and cloth were flown to Viensiang on a Dakota C-47 and then trucked to the headquarters of the Cham Women’s Association.
Several weeks later I went by the warehouse where the flags were being made. I had begun to have second thoughts about my enthusiasm for the project, because I had been in Cham long enough not to expect too much when it came to Cham productivity. I had underestimated Bon Xou, however. The warehouse was throbbing with the hum of pumping treadles. Bon Xou was sitting out front, facing two rows of sewing machines being operated by her colleagues in the Cham Women’s Association. If the rhythm of the throbbing machines slacked off or was interrupted, Bon Xou would immediately look up and search out the offender. She would then stare the culprit down and wait until the humming rhythm resumed.
Seamstresses on one side of the big room hemmed the squares of red cloth, and after finishing, handed them across the aisle to the other row of seamstresses, who would stitch on the precut elephant patterns. When they were finished their final stitching, young girl runners took the finished flags to the rear of the warehouse and tied them into bundles.
It was a mass production operation that would have made Henry Ford proud, turning out more than a hundred flags a week. The flag operation almost blew when a journalist, who had come to see me at my house in Viensiang, noticed a file of Cham women passing through my screened porch, depositing bundles of flags at one end of the porch. When the journalist asked me about the flags, I replied offhandedly that my hobby was collecting flags from different countries. He commented dryly that my collection was probably the largest in East Asia.
In Every Village
Oudone and I spent most of our time on trips to the various provinces, setting up CUBS chapters. During these visits, I tried to stay in the background, although in a Cham village it was impossible for me to “blend in” or keep a low profile.
Oudone’s routine rarely varied. He would begin by presenting the village chief with a petit pistolet, a 38-caliber “Saturday night special” that was the best rapport builder in our civic action kit. The village chief would then assemble the villagers so Oudone could make a speech about the CUBS. His speeches met with blank stares until he presented the village with a community radio set, which he immediately tuned to Radio Viensiang and a popular song program. He would then offer a medical kit to the village shaman, a box of school supplies for the local teacher, and CUBS pins, the Station having ordered fifty thousand CUBS pins from an enterprising tinsmith in Bangkok. The pins were worn as earrings, breechclout fasteners, or as hair ornaments.
The finale was the presentation of the flag, which the village chief would raise up the newly erected village flagpole. In the evening, there would be a CUBS-sponsored roast pig barbecue. Following the inauguration of each new
CUBS chapter, Henry would add another pin to his map.
The Moh Lam
Another political action vehicle was the Moh Lam team, a Cham creation that was very effective. The Moh Lam were itinerant actors and troubadours who traveled through the villages in remote mountainous regions.
The Moh Lam team would enter one of these isolated villages and distribute balloons, trinkets, and rice balls while performing juggling acts and magic tricks. They would put on puppet shows for the children in the afternoon while awaiting the return of the villagers working in the rice fields. In the evening, the Moh Lam would put on a play, one usually casting the Pathet Cham as villains and evil predators raiding hamlets and carrying off the village chief’s daughter. The play climaxed with the CUB warriors dramatically coming to her rescue.
The Moh Lam teams were popular with both Cham and montagnard audiences, but their success was short-lived. The Pathet Cham began retaliating against villages that had welcomed the Moh Lam teams, burning huts, carrying off livestock, taking hostages, and in several cases, executing Moh Lam team leaders.
Without security, the teams were forced to limit their performances to secure areas where they were less needed as a propaganda weapon. The teams were eventually disbanded.
The Rally
The walk-about was a dance where folks stood around in a semi-circle … and dance, dance the human-being story, however that story was, however that story felt and however you wanted to dance it, while everybody else watched.
—T. SPANBAUER, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon
The Pathet Cham retaliated, not only against the Moh Lam teams but also against the villages where the CUBS had set up chapters. They burned flags, smashed village radio sets, and ripped off CUBS pins in areas where the there was little security and no Cham army presence.
The escalation of Pathet Cham attacks in areas where the CUBS had apparently been making inroads caused some concern in Washington. Something had to be done to reinvigorate the political action program. Headquarters suggested a CUBS political rally.
Henry resisted the idea at first, contending that rallies and demonstrations were not in the Cham tradition and the foreign hand would show. Henry changed his mind, however, when one of his case officers suggested that if the rally was tied into the popular fertility festival, it would have a good chance of success.
The solstice fertility festival was the most popular annual event in Cham. A wooden phallus fifty feet high was erected in the center of the marketplace. Revelers doused themselves with Tiger Balm oil and reptile aphrodisiacs and danced around the marketplace and through the town, throwing buckets of water at stall keepers and passersby. The dancing and merrymaking went on for three days, revelers making their way down to the riverbank at sunset, where they gyrated and copulated to the rhythm of thumping tom-toms, “climaxing” as the skyrockets burst overhead.
Filipino technicians helped the CUBS in their preparations for the rally. A twenty-foot neon sign, powered by a portable generator, was erected on a sandbar in the middle of the Mekong. The sign flashed the Cham letters C-U-B-S, in sequence and then all together.
The blinking lights flashed into the Soviet ambassador’s bedroom fronting on the river, and he protested to the Cham foreign minister about the neon intrusion into his sleeping quarters. The foreign minister shrugged off the protest, telling the ambassador that the sign had become a popular evening attraction for the Cham who gathered along the riverbank to watch the flashing neon display.
The rally was set to coincide with the final day of the fertility festival, when the crowds would be the largest. The plan called for hundreds of CUBS cadre to assemble near the giant phallus, march through the marketplace, and end up at the Salle de Fete, the grand hall where French colonials danced their minuets on Bastille Day. The plan called for General Ouane to make a speech from the dais erected in front of the Salle.
CUBS cadre assembled and then marched off carrying cardboard placards condemning CORRUPTION (caricatures of fat Vietnamese merchants handing out wads of the local currency) and COMMUNISM (fang-toothed Pathet Cham with hammers and sickles tattooed on their buttocks). The column marching to the Salle was swelled by hundreds of revelers who fell in with the CUBS marchers.
A seasonal downpour interrupted the parade briefly, causing some of the placards to run, but the sun soon reappeared and the march continued. Arriving at La Salle de Fetes, the CUBS cadre dutifully piled their placards in front of the dais, where General Ouane stood waiting to speak.
Ouane was a natural orator and a popular figure with the Cham. He began by welcoming the crowd and then announced it was too bad the Pathet Cham couldn’t make it to the rally, because of an epidemic of the “shrinking organ disease” in their villages. The crowd roared its approval, prompting Ouane to poke more fun at the “Pathetic Pathets” before leading into the main theme about the CUBS.
Ouane extolled the CUBS as an organization that would BURN out corruption and communism! The word “BURN” was the signal for two CUBS cadre to light their torches and apply them to the pile of placards. The cadre applied the flaming torches to the placards and stepped back. The pile of still-soggy placards failed to ignite.
As the placard pyre fizzled, Ouane repeated his call to “BURN” out corruption. Two more cadre ran forward, applying torches to placard pyre, and this time a faint trickle of smoke curled in the air. The pyre, however, stubbornly refused to catch fire. One of the Filipino technicians suddenly ran forward carrying a gerry can of gasoline. He poured it over the placards as two more cadre rushed forward with their torches. Finally, a flicker of blue smoke curled up from the bottom of the pile, until the placards suddenly took fire. It was too late, however. By the time the placards caught fire and the pyre began to burn, the crowd had drifted away to watch a better show of couples copulating on the riverbank.
The caption of the Associated Press release read, “CUBS Rally Fizzles!”
The release added that “Corruption and Communism” had apparently emerged unscathed.
The Montagnards
Mountain dwellers are wild and proud, valley people soft and effeminate.
—GIOVANNI BOTERO, 1588
Dark-skinned, barefoot, and fierce, the mountain tribes, or montagnards, were not hard to distinguish from the lowland Cham. The men wore loincloths and strode proudly with a long-handled machete balanced on one shoulder and a crossbow or flintlock rifle on the other. The women wore colored blouses, heavy pleated skirts, and hammered-out silver necklaces.
Oudone referred to them as Peaux-rouges—redskins—when he pointed out the shadowy figures wandering through the marketplace during the day and melting back into the mountains after the sun went down.
When I mentioned organizing the montagnards as part of the nation-building program, Oudone, changed the subject. When I persisted, he told me I should contact Captain Pang Vao, a Meo and officer in the Cham army. Oudone said he would send a message to the district chief of Ban Ban, who could arrange for me to meet Pang Vao.
Oudone did not offer to go with me.
The Opium Trail
A Filipino Operation Brotherhood (OB) medical team was located in Ban Ban, and I asked Vitoy, a friend in OB, to go with me. Vitoy and I were the only passengers on the Veha Akhat flight to Xieng Khuong, the provincial capital and nearest airport to Ban Ban. Xieng Khuong was also at the crossroads of the poppy trade. The Veha Akhat flight to Xieng Khuong was known as “Opium One.”
The Veha Akhat plane resembled one of those biplanes in an “Eddie Rickety-back” cartoon. Its floppy wings and two “half-engines” were wired to an oil-spattered canvas fuselage. The pilot was a wire-haired Algerian wearing sun-blotched khaki shorts and a wine-stained shirt with torn epaulets. He motioned for Vitoy to sit in the back of the plane on some rice sacks and for me to take the copilot’s seat.
The pilot, Anton, turned the key, sending clouds of blue smoke belching from the engines. When the engines finally caught, the plane went lurching dow
n the tarmac and lifted off about ten yards before the end of the runway. Once we leveled off, the pilot turned and told me to take the controls, shrugging off protests that I didn’t know anything about flying an airplane. He reached over and took my hand, placed it on the control stick, and pointed to the compass: “Fly twenty degrees north.” The pilot then dropped off to sleep.
For me it was an hour of bare-knuckles flying, trying to keep my eyes glued to the compass while maneuvering the stick back and forth to keep the plane on course. When a mountain loomed up ahead, I shook Anton, who woke just in time to nose the plane up into the clouds. When we broke out, the mountains were behind us, and a sprawling mustard-colored steppe stretched out below us. Huge prehistoric urn-shaped boulders, dolmens haphazardly strewn over the plateau, protruded through elephant grass like echoes of a pagan past.
La Plaine des Jarres (The Plain of Jars)
The typical snow leopard has pale frosty eyes and a coat of pale misty gray, enormous paws and a short-faced heraldic head like a leopard of myth.
—PETER MATHIESSEN, The Snow Leopard
Nosing down toward the airstrip, our plane hit an air pocket and almost pancaked when it landed on the dirt airstrip. Anton had to swerve around a water buffalo grazing on the airstrip but finally skidded to a stop at the end of the airstrip, across from the Snow Leopard Inn.
The inn, its mangy namesake tied to a banyan tree out back, sat aside the main junction of the “opium route.” Over the years the inn has been a witness to a number of skirmishes and battles between the French and the Vietminh and has served as victualers to both.
Monsieur Bernard, the proprietor, reminded me of Casablanca’s Sydney Greenstreet, except for Bernard’s white safari jacket, which was caked with red dirt and wine splotches. Bernard walked out to the plane holding out a shot glass of pastis, the licorice-flavored French liqueur, for his old friend Anton. Then, noticing Anton’s passengers, he went back for two more.
After another round of aperitifs, Bernard served us large bowls of bouillabaisse stew along with a bottle of Algerian red wine. When we had finished eating, Bernard joined us for a cognac pousse-café. I asked him about getting transportation to Ban Ban, and he pointed to two Cham soldiers who were stationed in Ban Ban sitting at another table. Bernard suggested that if I offered them a round of beer, they would probably be glad to drive me in their jeep to Ban Ban. I stood them to two rounds of “33” beer and, as Bernard had predicted, they agreed to drive us. Before leaving, I went over to Anton’s table to say good-bye. I had taken a liking to the wizened Algerian pilot and told him I hoped to fly with him again.
Laughter in the Shadows Page 8