For the Sake of All Living Things Read online

  For the Sake of All Living Things

  A Novel

  John M. Del Vecchio

  FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER

  Contents

  Major Characters

  PART ONE: THE KINGDOM OF CAMBODIA

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  PART TWO: THE REPUBLIC OF CAMBODIA

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  PART THREE: THE REPUBLIC OF CAMBODIA FALLING

  Chapter Fourteen, 1972

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen, 1973

  Chapter Eighteen, 31 March 1975

  PART FOUR:

  DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one, March 1977

  Chapter Twenty-two, March 1978

  SULLIVAN’S EPILOGUE

  December 1986

  Additional Readings

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I shall become enlightened for the sake of all living things.

  —A BUDDHIST VOW

  MAJOR CHARACTERS

  The Cahuom family of Phum Sath Din, Stung Treng Province:

  CHHUON, b. 1923, an agronomist

  NEANG THI SOK, b. 1930, Chhuon’s wife

  VATHANA, b. 1950, eldest daughter of Chhuon and Sok

  Her children are SAMNANG, son b. 1969; SAMOL, daughter b. 1971; and SU LIVANH, daughter b. 1973

  SAMAY, b. 1952, eldest son

  SAMNANG, b. 1956, second son

  MAYANA, b. 1959, daughter

  SAKHON, b. 1965, son (nicknamed Peou, which means last child)

  SITA, Chhuon’s mother

  CHEAM, b. 1919, Chhuon’s older brother MOEUN, b. 1921, Chhuon’s older sister VOEN, b. 1925, Chhuon’s younger sister SAM, b. 1924, Chhuon’s cousin

  RY, Sam’s wife

  MOEN, Ry’s mother

  Other Villagers in Phum Sath Din:

  NY NON CHAN, a village elder

  NIMOL, Chan’s wife

  MAHA NYANANANDA, monk and spiritual leader of village

  MAHA VANATANDA, second monk

  KPA, a mountaineer boy

  HENG and KHIENG, schoolmates of Cahuom Samnang

  The Mountaineer village of Plei Srepok:

  Y KSAR, b. 1907, elder of the Jaang clan JAANG, wife of Y Ksar

  CHUNG, son of Y Ksar and Jaang

  DRAAM MUL, wife of Chung

  SRAANG, daughter of Chung and Draam Mul Y BHUR, son of Chung and Draam Mul

  BOK ROH, NVA/KVM soldier/agent, nicknamed after the Giant of Mountaineer legends

  In Stung Treng City and Neak Luong:

  PECH LIM SONG, a wealthy merchant SISOWATH THICH SOEN, Song’s wife, a/k/a

  Madame Pech, a distant cousin of Sisowath Sirik Matak, Prime Minister of the Republic of Cambodia

  PECH CHIEU TECK, son of Song and Madame Pech who marries Vathana, daughter of Chhuon

  KIM, LOUIS, SAKUN, THIOUNN, Teck’s friends from the university

  SOPHAN, Vathana’s wet nurse/servant SAMBATH, Pech Lim Song’s servant

  KEO KOSAL, a poet

  SARIN SAM OL, a doctor

  Americans:

  LT. JOHN L. SULLIVAN, b. 1948, two tours with Special Forces in Viet Nam, assigned to Military Equipment Delivery Team, Cambodia

  SGT. RON HUNTLEY, Sullivan’s sidekick

  SGT. IAN CONKLIN, team member of

  Sullivan and Huntley

  RITA DONALDSON, a reporter for The Washington News-Times

  Khmer Krahom leaders (The Center)

  (All characters are fictional. “Met” = “comrade.”)

  MET SAR, a high general, covert chief of the Kampuchean Communist Party

  MET PON, Sar’s wife

  MET RETH, Sar’s bodyguard

  MET NIM, Sar’s aide

  MET MEAS, scribe and historian

  MET DY, head of School of the Cruel, KK chief of personnel

  MET PHAM, tactician and strategic planner MET YON, theoretician and economic planner

  MET SEN, security chief

  North Viet Namese Army / Khmer Viet Minh agents, leaders, advisors:

  HANG TUNG, chief KVM agent in Phum Sath Din

  LTC NUI, commander of NVA unit in Ratanakiri Province

  CADREMAN TRINH, NVA political officer in Nui’s headquarters

  TRINH LE, Cadreman Trinh’s assistant

  LTC HANS MITTERSCHMIDT, an East German military and political advisor to Nui South Viet Namese

  TRAN VAN LE, an intelligence officer/agent with the ARVN

  CAMBODIA: Factions, Influences and Military Disposition

  HISTORICAL SUMMATION Part 1

  (to mid-1968)

  Prepared for

  The Washington News-Times

  J. L. Sullivan

  April 1985

  THE CAMBODIAN HOLOCAUST HAS not ended and we remain skeptical and uncertain if or how the “problem” will ever be resolved.

  One in ten Cambodians were killed in the multiforce fighting between 1967 and 1975—600,000 to 700,000 of 7.1 million—approximately half to the civil war and half to various invasions, pogroms and purges. From April 1975 to January 1979 more than two million people were killed, starved to death or died of epidemics caused by government policies. In the twelve months after the Viet Namese conquest of January 1979, an additional 600,000 to 700,000 Khmers were sacrificed to the policies of this new regime. And now, amid talk of new superpower détente and Viet Namese withdrawal from Cambodia, the cruelty, enslavement and murders continue.

  How did it happen? What were the conditions and events that drove an unwitting people to the threshold of extinction? Was Cambodia a gentle land or the heart of darkness? A sideshow or an inextricable theater of the Southeast Asian war? A fertile lacustrine basin or an inevitable killing field?

  By midsummer 1968 Cambodia was a nation set on a course of destruction, yet only a decade earlier Cambodia had been experiencing a period of unprecedented prosperity and optimism.

  BROKEN PROMISES—BROKEN LEADERSHIP

  In 1946, as Viet Namese nationalists were battling the reestablishment of French colonialism, France granted Cambodia internal autonomy. Three years later, as France foundered in Viet Nam and America sent its first anti-Communist aid to Southeast Asia, Cambodia gained de jure independence. Full independence was granted to the Royal Government of the Kingdom of Cambodia in November 1953—six months before the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, eight months before the Geneva Agreements divided Viet Nam into Communist and non-Communist halves.

  The excitement of independence drove Cambodia but the new state never expunged the weaknesses of colonialism or the underlying feudal structure. King Norodom Sihanouk abdicated his throne to become prince and head of state. Using his early popular mandate, partially based on a belief in the divinity of the monarch, he reduced his critics to states of impotence. Sihanouk became a neomandarin, a leader unable or unwilling to understand or direct his people. Under his growing cult of personality, contrary views had no outlet. Elements of the political right and left faded into urban back alleys or into the forests and jungles that cover three quarters of the country. Hidden, the disenchanted joined or formed revolutionary parties.

  In the decade and a half following independence, there was no development of democratic institutions or of an independent bureaucra
cy to run the daily business of the government. Sihanouk delegated almost no authority. No ministers of the cabinet, no representatives in the legislature, no officers in the army, and no intellectuals at the university were allowed to mature into leaders. From 1955 Sihanouk ruled as if he were the government, overriding all institutions at his personal whim, suffocating all those subordinate to him. By 1960, he had established near-total dominance over all means of mass communication.

  He seemed blind to the dynamic changes surrounding him. From 1945 to 1968 the population doubled. Half of all Cambodians were under fifteen years of age. In the six years 1962 to 1968, the population of the core areas around the major cities increased by 30 to 50 percent. Phnom Penh grew from 394,000 in 1962 to nearly 550,000 in 1968. The move to urban centers was coupled with the establishment of a large secular block which began to shed its Buddhism and its belief in the divinity of the monarch.

  Outside the capital, the underlying feudal structure of barons, warlords and powerful landowners severely hampered the development of a modern state, and Sihanouk’s monarchy did little to lessen the power of that traditionally corrupt class. His control of the national government and his influence over the regional barons was nearly absolute, but he was a man of contradictions. He pressed for universal primary education and encouraged secondary and university study. If the nation were to grow, he believed, it would need an educated class. Yet he was afraid that those with education would become prominent and powerful, potential enemies. Sihanouk and the ruling class undercut the institutions and blocked graduates from gaining employment, thus rendering them powerless. By 1968, protest and criticism were being dealt with by the jailing of teachers and students without charges being filed and without families being notified. These and other human rights violations were rampant.

  Sihanouk also controlled the national “Buddhist-oriented system of voluntary contributions”—that is, taxes. To earn merit and achieve a better station in the next life, a Buddhist must be charitable. Sihanouk argued that because the rich were all devout Buddhists their contributions would support the poor and the state. In reality, the rich gave little to the poor and almost nothing to the state. The merchant or middle class, though taxed, was tiny, and state income from it amounted to little. This left only farmers to support the state, and they were heavily taxed, even though farmers as a percentage of the population had shrunk from nearly 80 percent to about 50 percent. Payment from them was usually in rice, which the government sold on the export market. By 1966, two thirds of the peasants were burdened by indebtedness, loans which carried interest rates of 12 percent per month. The new population pressures, the tax-caused indebtedness and the feudal order combined to create unstable land tenure conditions. In 1950, only one in twenty-five Khmer farmers rented his land. By 1968, the figure was one in five.

  Without broad-based taxes the government had no capital with which to modernize the state, to improve or maintain the transportation and telephone systems or to raise, equip and train a viable national army. Cambodia, from 1954, was an ever-increasing low-pressure area—a power vacuum—a nation unable to ensure domestic tranquility, much less the integrity of its borders.

  ELEMENTS, ARMIES AND FACTIONS

  By 1968 this power vacuum had attracted, nourished or allowed the imposition of seven nongovernmental forces with seven different political agendas, each, at times, set against Sihanouk’s poorly equipped Royal Cambodian Army.

  Not yet on Khmer soil but of influence were two major forces: the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Viet Nam) and the Americans with assorted allies, including those from the Republic of Korea and Australia. In the northeast border region of the highlands and Srepok Forest (from the Mekong River east to the crest of the Annam Cordillera) was the Mountaineer organization FULRO (French acronym for the United Front of the Oppressed Races) struggling to maintain the autonomy of their region, the old Crown Dominion Lands, from Viet Namese and Khmers, from Communists and non-Communists.

  There were four major Communist factions operating in Cambodia in the late 1960s—the Viet Cong (indigenous South Viet Namese rebels), the North Viet Namese, the Khmer Viet Minh, and the Khmer Krahom. The Viet Cong operated from bases along the border and concentrated their efforts on their war with the ARVN and the Americans in South Viet Nam. This was not so for the North Viet Namese Army (NVA). By 1968 the NVA, by far the strongest force in Cambodia, had transformed the Northeast—Ratanakiri, Mondolkiri and portions of Stung Treng and Kratie provinces—into their own uncontested base area. In a different manner, they also controlled large portions of the South and Southeast. There they were entrenched—through bribery, through corruption, through threat of force and through assassination—in every area along the Sihanouk Trail from Kompong Som (Sihanoukville) northward to Phnom Penh and eastward, along coastal Highway 3 through Bokor and Kampot, to the border regions. Indeed, in many of the villages in Svay Rieng, Prey Veng, Kandal, Kompong Speu, Takeo and Kampot provinces, the North Viet Namese maintained at least a parallel governing administration to that of Sihanouk’s government. In portions of the southeastern provinces, especially along the border, they controlled the economy so completely they printed their own currency and forced local inhabitants to use it instead of the Cambodian riel. In addition, the NVA had established a front headquarters just outside Angkor Wat in Siem Reap Province in the Northwest.

  THE KHMER COMMUNISTS AND NORODOM SIHANOUK

  The two Cambodian Communist factions, the Khmer Krahom (KK) and the Khmer Viet Minh (KVM), trace their lineage back to common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh between 1925 and 1930 at the Hoang Pho Military Academy in Canton, China. In the early 1940s the forerunners of these movements were functionally operating as anti-Sihanouk, anti-French organizations. In 1943 these movements proclaimed an end to the monarchy and, fearing retaliation, disbanded. Some rebels remained in the wilds of Cambodia, others went into exile in China.

  The term krahom was never picked up by the ethnocentric free-world press and seldom used by Allied military intelligence. But the distinction between the two factions is important. Without an understanding of the differences, one cannot understand what took place in Cambodia. Those rebels who stayed in the Cambodian wilderness established the Krahom. Krahom is Khmer for “red,” a designation used long before Sihanouk gave all insurgents the monolithic label “Khmer Rouge.” It was the Khmer Krahom, Pol Pot’s faction, which came to power in 1975.

  In 1947, more than a year after France granted internal autonomy to Cambodia, Ho Chi Minh tapped the externally exiled cadre to establish a second front for his revolution.

  This marked the birth and became the core of the KVM. In the 1960s and 1970s, the KVM, sometimes called the Khmer Hanoi, was commanded by Le Duc Anh, a North Viet Namese politburo member and head of Hanoi’s Central Office for Kampuchean Affairs (COKA).

  The internally based Krahom necessarily wrapped itself in a tighter cloak of secrecy than did the externally based KVM. Also, the KK, untainted by the Viet Namese, attracted the Paris-educated Marxist extremists and the supernationalists.

  From 1954 to 1968 Sihanouk’s Royal Government selectively increased its harassment of the internal Communists, the KK, while pandering to the sponsors, the NVA, of the KVM—a fact that bred Krahom resentment toward the KVM.

  Independence, in 1953, was a severe political setback for the Communists though the event had little military effect on the small bands of armed guerrillas. During the early 1950s, the exiled KVM fell more and more under the control of Hanoi, while the Krahom, under the covert guidance of Communist China, grew steadily in number and evolved ideologically. Saloth Sar, using the name Pol Pot, was among the leaders of the Krahom. He established relations with and became a disciple of Mao Zedong at the time when Mao was formulating the ideas that led to the Great Leap Forward, a major social experiment of 1958 to 1960.

  During those years, Sihanouk, attempting to walk a tightrope between all the internal and external elements, squandered much of the goodw
ill of his own people. Sihanouk feared Ho Chi Minh and North Viet Namese hegemony. At Geneva in July 1954, the North Viet Namese had attempted to have a KVM area designated in northeastern Cambodia—patterned on the Pathet Lao zone they were able to secure in Laos. This amounted to an attempt to have Cambodia partitioned into Communist and non-Communist halves, like Viet Nam.

  After the Geneva Agreements of 1954 Ho Chi Minh ordered the fledgling Cambodia-based KVM to maintain their jungle hideouts and to form an infrastructure that would eventually carry on his Indochinese revolution. At this time he also ordered these rebels to conscript and bring to Hanoi as many as 10,000 Mountaineer and Khmer boys to be trained as teachers, political agents and medical technicians. Hanoi strategists had determined very early, as NVA chief General Vo Nguyen Giap stated, “To seize and control the highlands is to solve the whole problem of South Viet Nam.”

  It was this perception which led the North Viet Namese to establish sanctuaries and bases—at whatever cost to the mountain peoples—on the Cambodian side of the border.

  Over the years there was a growing animosity between the KK and KVM, yet both benefited from the established bases and the protection of Viet Namese Communist armies. Though an overt spirit of cooperation existed, each sought advantage over the others. The Royal Cambodian Army had 30,000 to 35,000 troops—11,000 in combat units and the remainder in public works detachments doing road repair and like jobs. While rebel factions were building their military forces, Sihanouk, who feared a strong army would seize power and discard him, kept the Royal Army weak.

  Western historians have referred to the insurgent forces in Cambodia in 1968, particularly the KK, as insignificant. The Krahom, Pol Pot’s group, had an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 regular fighters plus a large contingent (Pol Pot claimed 50,000, though reality would probably be closer to 10,000) of irregular guerrillas and urban spies. The KVM had between 4,000 and 12,000 soldiers and cadre trained and stationed in North Viet Nam. The Viet Cong (VC), for whom figures vary drastically, had perhaps 20,000. The North Viet Namese, according to Royal Cambodian Government intelligence estimates, had 40,000 soldiers on Khmer territory. Thus the Khmer Communist movements, by 1968, had 8,000 to 17,000 combat troops to attack a Royal Cambodian Army, top-heavy with rear-echelon soldiers. Plus, the Khmer Communists had the backing of at least 60,000 Viet Namese Communist troops. This would be the equivalent of an insurgent force in the United States of 127,000 armed and organized troops, with a well-equipped reserve force in Canada of perhaps 254,000 political and combat cadres, plus an allied hostile force, stretching from Texas to California along the Mexican border, of 1.7 million troops. That can hardly be called insignificant. These figures are from May 1968, ten months before secret U.S. bombings began. Obviously, neither the KK nor the KVM was born out of the inferno that U.S. bombing created.