For the Sake of All Living Things

by John M. Del Vecchio

  “You are very afraid,” Vathana said softly, “yet you volunteer to be here.”

  “Yes. I’m...I want to help. I want to be here. I’m mostly afraid for your country.”

  “Help me establish a school for the camp children.”

  “Certainly.”

  For ten minutes they spoke of school supplies, simple things, paper and pencils. “And wood, for a classroom. And more roofing.”

  “Yes. I’ll see. I’ll try.”

  “And a slate board? In my village we had a wonderful slate board.”

  “I know where one is.”

  “You Americans can do anything.” Vathana closed her eyes and her hand. “You will not be hurt,” she said. “They will never hurt you.” She squeezed his hand. “I see that. You will be very good for my people.”

  “Thank you,” Sullivan said. He felt she had bestowed total confidence on him, had absolute faith in his survival and his ability to contribute.

  Vathana squeezed his hand again then let go. She looked at him, smiled, laughed a very soft kind laugh. “You’re welcome.” She said it so innocently he could not think how to respond.

  The hospital at Neak Luong had received equipment for a modern surgical room from several international aid agencies, but there were many in need and only one full-time doctor, Sarin Sam Ol, and he was not a fully trained surgeon. Vathana assisted him, primarily with patient care and paperwork, each morning after her early duties at the refugee center. An hour after Lieutenant Sullivan dropped her off, she was alone in the dank corridor leading to the new surgery room. Suddenly, from behind, a shove. She stumbled, began to rise, turn, was shoved again, grabbed. She struggled, turned. A small dark man, young yet very strong, grabbed her face, dug fingers into her cheeks below her eyes, a thumb into the soft tissue below her jaw. His other hand seized her breast. He lifted her like a rag doll. “Sakhon has been moved to Stung Treng, Sister. Your father wishes him a safe journey. Tell me all the fire-hair phalang tells you.”

  He relaxed the pressure on her face but he did not let her go. Vathana’s eyes cast left, right, hoping to see someone, anyone, who might at least yell, who might scare off the assailant. The corridor was empty. She did not speak. Her mind raced to find words but the pain of his grasp frightened them from her throat. “Tell me,” the man hissed. “Tell me or your baby will never taste your milk again.” He tightened his fingers on her tit and twisted.

  “Yes. Yes. He said nothing. Just talk. He said he was afraid.”

  The man smirked, then jiggled her as if to shake out, more words. The hospital was crowded yet the hall remained empty. Vathana talked. She told him all she thought he wanted to hear, everything except about the school supplies.

  “Listen, Sister. And obey. Be his concubine. Be his whore. You’ll find it easy. Sakhon will be moved to Kratie. Khmer Patriots will protect your camp.”

  The khrou plastered a poultice on Nang’s face, another on his left side. He gently cleansed the horn and canal of his left ear. Nang lay quietly on the pallet in the man’s home, a thatch and plastic-tarp hovel amid a thousand similar refugee abodes clumped together in the open spaces of Kompong Thom. The shaman hummed softly as he worked methodically. From his stores he poured a few drops of palm oil into a rosewood bowl. Then he ripped a cabbage leaf into squares and dropped it in. He ground the leaf into the oil until it became a green paste. To this he added bits of chopped fresh cayenne pepper and dried, powdered comfrey root. Again he mashed the mixture, adding once several drops of rice vinegar to thin it. With a finger he scooped a blob and gently pressed it into Nang’s ear. “In time you’ll have full hearing,” the khrou said. “These foreign devils...”

  “They shall perish,” Nang interrupted.

  “Yes. You’ve said that. You always say that yet the bombs, the artillery come closer and the siege is renewed. You heal quickly, Little Rabbit. Why did they torture you?”

  “Because they are fornicating buffalo scum.”

  “The Northerners?”

  “And the Southerners. It was the Southern yuons that burned my feet. The Northern killed my father.”

  “And who is Angkar?”

  Nang turned to the khrou. He did not know how the man knew. He remained silent.

  “You spoke of Angkar when they first brought you. You said, ‘Angkar was our salvation...’ perhaps more like, ‘Angkar will save us.’ You repeated it many times.”

  Nang stared at the healer who continued his methodical procedure. “You are Angkar,” he said. “All Khmer Patriots are Angkar.”

  During the final trek into Kompong Thom Nang had been corralled with a group of sullen young Khmers. The ARVN lieutenant had called them detainees, the soldiers had treated them like convicted prisoners. Most were men, most were farmers, all were interrogated by ARVN intelligence personnel at the FANK garrison in the city’s southwest district.

  “Khmer Rouge, where are your weapons?” the Viet Namese inquisitor had screamed at each. When it was his turn Nang had squatted on the concrete floor in the small stark cell and covered his ears. His training had gone deep but in injury, in pain, in exhaustion he could think only to remain silent, to deny everything. Then: Who am I? Think. Act. Be that part. Keep it simple so as to avoid contradictions.

  “You are Khmer Rouge,” the inquisitor accused. “Look at your hands. You’re no farmer.”

  “My father, farmer.” Nang’s voice sputtered. “He was killed by the Communists. I bake bread.”

  “Yeah. Sure. You’re Buddha’s baker. Never touched a weapon, huh? How’d you get those scars, baker-boy?” Nang touched his face. “Not that, you shit. On your back. On your leg. Those aren’t calluses from riding buffalo. What’s your unit?” Nang stared at the man as if he, Nang, were an imbecile. “Hook him up,” the man growled, angry that one more victim was bringing torture upon himself, justifying his actions in the anger.

  Two soldiers grabbed Nang. His body was stiff, sore from the beating it had taken early that morning when the concussion from the American bomb had thrown him and broken the forest; sore too from his afternoon sprint through brambles and branches; and sore from the pokes and prods of the ARVN soldiers bull-dogging the detainees into the city. Nang did not resist as they tied his elbows behind him, nor as they clamped his feet to metal cuffs on the ends of a three-foot-long wooden rod. He watched with dread as they attached wires to his toes and the soles of his feet and displayed the rheostat and switch.

  “Let’s try it again. What’s your unit?”

  “My father is farmer,” Nang said in rural dialect. “I learn to be baker.”

  The officer flipped the switch. The tingle of a very low voltage entered his feet as if he’d squatted too long without moving and cut off the circulation. Slowly the tingle rose through his ankles, into his calves, then his knees. “Your unit?” Nang closed his eyes, concentrated on breath control. “Your unit!?” The tingle entered his thighs, hips, groin, buttocks, rose to his navel and became a queer indescribable pain.

  “Tien!” A shouted voice came from the hall.

  “Sir?” The voltage was turned to very low.

  “There’s two hundred more to question. Don’t take forever.”

  “Yes sir.” The interrogator walked to Nang’s side. He grabbed the boy’s face. “One chance. Tell me or I’ll spin this to high.”

  Nang flicked his eyes away from the man’s face, closed his eyes, whispered, “I bake!” He set himself for the jolt. “Aaaacccchouhaaaaa...” As the current wrenched his legs and torso he jerked in convulsive shitting, pissing spasms. Sparks flicked at his feet. Then it stopped.

  “Unit?!”

  “Baker,” Nang whimpered.

  “Make him wipe up that shit and get him out of here.”

  Moments after his release, ARVN first lieutenant Tran Van Le broke into the interrogation cell. He was frantic. “Tien. You had a boy here?”

  “Lots of boys.”

  “No. A strong kid. Looks maybe thirteen, fourteen. Napalm burns
on his face and right hand. Cut up all over.”

  “Oh. Yeah. The baker.”

  “Baker my ass. Where is he?”

  “They sent him to release.”

  “Damn it. He’s Hai Hoa Binh. A top VC agent. Shit, I knew I recognized him.”

  At Mount Aural Met Sar sat on a cushion on a bench in his personal bunker. His face was drawn tight at the corners of his mouth, drawn down into a morose mask as he lamented the fate of his units and infrastructure at Kompong Thom. The NVA 91st Division had pulled back intact, suffering, his reports said, only eight percent casualties. His own units had eight percent killed, eleven percent wounded, sixteen percent missing. Better than a third, some of his best yotheas, cadremen, village agents and informers, gone. And the government! Sar thought. What fools! That two-tongued demigod Lon Nol! His stroke proves to all Kampuchea his utter lack of merit. The siege is lifted. The NVA withdraw. The ARVN withdraw. The siege is renewed. FANK is a disgrace. Met Sar clenched his fists, spread his fingers, then clenched his fists tighter. One hundred and fifty thousand FANK soldiers and not a hundred and fifty decent leaders. A disgrace. They shame every Khmer. I should have a quarter that force. With a quarter, Sar thought, I’d make the yuons wish they’d died at Tchepone and never entered Kampuchea. Ah, fine to incapacitate the refineries, but the yuons, no, they destroy the entire facility. Without Neak Sam, FANK is a stinging centipede without a head. We must act. Now! Now. But do what?

  Sar rose, left his bunker, strode as a fat man attempting to walk with speed, his advancing leg stretching before him, his body lagging, his rear leg seeming insufficiently powerful to propel his mass and be brought forward simultaneously. He entered the tunnel corridor to the operations bunker and map room. Two guards were there.

  Sar thought of Nang. There had been no word. “Ah,” he grumbled. “Nang, he was a yothea.” Aah, Sar thought, just a soldier. Perhaps valuable but just a soldier. Has he gone to the KVM? “Echh.” Sar coughed on the idea. Then he thought, Did I use him to best advantage? He pondered that thought amid scores of others.

  In the cavern map room, alone, Sar did not study the maps. How? He picked up a pen from the desk, fidgeted, twiddled the pen with his left hand about his pointing right index finger. Around and around. Then he leaned forward, placed an elbow on the table, his forehead in his hand. With the pen he doodled the Khmer script symbol for “How?” Again and again. “How?” “How?” The script looked beautiful on the page and he felt pleased at the sight of his own penmanship. He pulled a sheet of paper toward him and scrawled across the top page, “It is necessary. Thanks to Angkar Leou, it is being realized.”

  “Realized,” he said softly. He knew well how to organize, how to infiltrate. He knew when to be ruthless, when to cajole. Yet at every step the North Viet Namese gained, and he, though advancing, fell a step further behind.

  How do you raise the consciousness of the masses? he asked himself. How do you change them? How do we maintain our covert posture yet swing all Kampuchea to our cause? Sar sat, pondered. They were close yet conquest was elusive. How to use other resources to his advantage? How to direct his own leaders without seeming to direct? Sar sank into depressed frustration. Can we continue to pick our battles, or should we risk all?

  “In 1177,” he wrote, “Angkor was invaded by Champa. In 1250, by the Sinhalese with their loathed Theravada Buddhism. In 1620 the first yuon devils penetrated Prey Nokor. Twenty years later the Khmer king was enslaved by the dogma of Islam. The French, the Thais, the Japanese, and the Viets have all invaded. Yet we endure! We shall always endure! We shall rise up and discard all alien elements! Kampuchea for Kampucheans!”

  He stopped. How? he thought. How best to use the armies of Angkar? How best to use the chrops, the agents and spies. How best to use the Americans without falling into the trap of dependence? They are strong but they are going and will not counterbalance the weight of the yuons much longer.

  Sar turned back to the paper. “First,” he wrote, “commit the people. Then the army. Then Angkar Leou.” Yes, he thought. That’s the proper order for commitment. How? How? The people are ready to join us, to follow.

  Again he thought of Met Nang. For every highly trained yothea there were a hundred with no training, a hundred poorly armed boys of the rural and urban dung heaps. The new battalions of Cham hated his Khmers as much as they hated FANK and the Viets. There was no loyalty there. Only opportunism. Mountaineers were as bad: two brigades whose main motivation was to avenge their losses and liberate the highlands from Khmer and Viet. To lose Nang! he thought. Ach! His kosang had revealed the evil elements. What is infected must be excised. What has been tainted by any alien form must be erased.

  But first, first, the people must be gained.

  “Angkar,” Nang whispered to the soldiers of the ambush team.

  “Hello Number Two Rabbit,” a private whispered back. “How did you find us?”

  “I asked my brother the hare.”

  “Ha ha. That’s good. Rabbit’s brother...”

  “Ssshh. Mister Private, you must not speak so loud.”

  “What have you brought?” The team leader crept close. Nang unhooked a length of black cloth from about his waist and dropped it. It thudded on the earth. “Are they—”

  “Use them first,” Nang whispered. “They’ll keep your position concealed.”

  “Grenades! American grenades! Rabbit, where did you get them? The garrison has none.”

  “My brother the scorpion showed me where they were buried.”

  “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “Ssshh. Follow me. My brother the chickenhawk overheard...”

  Nang led the FANK ambush patrol of the northwest quadrant garrison deeper into the jungle. The national soldiers had balked the first time he’d appeared at night at their listening post only fifty meters from their wire, but on subsequent nights he’d arrived with various gifts, from boots to trip flares. Always he’d come upon them from the rear, emerged within their circle. Each time he’d attempted to tell them or show them a better way to operate and slowly the scarred boy had gained their trust and respect. To the teams of one post he became known as Number Two Rabbit, to those of another Little Rabbit, and to a third Night Rabbit. No one saw him during daylight and the soldiers kept him secret from their commanders. Through the late dry season and into the early months of the 1971 monsoons Nang urged, prodded, led the teams deeper and deeper into the jungle, deeper into the swamps or farther out along hedgerows and treelines between paddies. “The chief method of learning warfare,” he told them, “is through warfare.”

  “Where did you learn, Little Rabbit?”

  “Who taught you, Number Two Rabbit?”

  “Night Rabbit, for one so young, when did you learn?”

  “In the conquered zones,” Nang explained patiently. He used the term “conquered” instead of “liberated.” It distinguished him from the Khmer Viet Minh agents who were also attempting to infiltrate FANK. “My father led the resistance in my village. He was very good but a traitorous snake bit him with its tail.”

  “Where do you get the weapons?”

  “When you are destitute, you must supply yourself from the enemy’s stores.”

  Slowly Nang proselytized, denouncing first the Viets and their Khmer Viet Minh lackeys. The FANK underlings agreed fully. The NVA and the KVM, whom they sometimes called Khmer Rouge, were the most serious threat to Kompong Thom. Nang then denounced Norodom Sihanouk for what he’d become. Again there was major agreement, for the ex-Prince had become the figurehead and legitimizer of the Viet Namese Communists. Nang carried it further. He denounced Samdech Euv’s role, policies and actions when he had been head of state, denounced all the things Sihanouk had not done to protect Kampuchea. In every unit Nang’s words convinced at least one soldier. He moved on to criticizing Lon Nol, the Americans and the barbaric South Viet Namese whom Lon Nol had brought to Cambodia, and then on to condemning the war crimes of all aliens.

  By
May he had nearly 150 FANK soldiers in fifteen units under his spell. He taught them to use “Angkar” as a password. They kept it secret. During daylight, in the city, Nang organized whoever would follow. From the pallet bed at the khrou’s hut he scurried through the camp alleyways and the city’s narrow back streets, searching, recruiting children, training.

  For months he worked using the remnant of the Krahom agent organization already in place, the remnant left after the NVA had wiped out at least half in the November 1970 ambushes and assassinations and the ARVN had killed or captured and turned over to FANK another quarter. Nang recruited, organized, indoctrinated and trained. He worked with an energy even he did not know he possessed, as if the painful energies of the B-52 concussions and the electroshock torture had been absorbed by him. Nang found the terrorized, besieged people of Kompong Thom willing, eager, to listen. To them, no one seemed destined to win. Battles could go on forever until all were trampled. No one presented a desirable alternative. Certainly not the Viet Namese Communists.

  Nang talked of people’s war but he dropped the weight of Marx, Lenin and Mao. He talked of the Americans, told government troops they were not the solution. “First,” he said, “they are tied to a policy of saving their own skins. They throw away South Viet Nam because they fear the NVA. They’ll never assist Kampuchea with troops. They won’t even follow up their bombings.” Angrily, Nang added, “The targets may be NVA but the bombs destroy our irrigation systems. The yuons hug villages or set up their field guns in the lee of dams thinking the Americans won’t bomb. Still they are bombed.” Peasants agreed with him. The colossal power of the bombs terrorized them. To those who said, “If only the Americans would...” Nang replied, “Khmers, only Khmers, can be responsible for the salvation of Kampuchea. If we are organized we can save ourselves.”

  “We don’t need the ARVN,” Nang told them, and the radio confirmed it. In August the Cambodian Foreign Ministry made public a 15 July report which detailed ARVN atrocities against Khmer civilians. Lon Nol’s high command immediately demanded the complete withdrawal of all South Viet Namese forces and the closing to them of the naval facility at Neak Luong. Public outcry reverberated throughout Republic-controlled areas. The fact that an ARVN Column had relieved the siege of Kompong Thom nine months earlier was lost in the confusion, diminished by the cost to Khmers. “The cost,” Nang mused as he squatted with peasants in market stalls, “is very high, eh? We cannot rely on a crocodile who weeps over our pain as he devours us.”