A third of Neak Leung—his hometown—razed by a B-52 bomber when it unleashed its twenty tons of metal and fire. A mistaken target, the papers said. But this brings him no comfort. Such a blunder only augments the horror. It all comes down to this simple truth: no matter the intended target, lives would be lost, homes obliterated. Two of his childhood buddies, soldiers, with their wives and small children. An elderly bedridden couple, bosom friends of his mother, people who’d loved him as their own. The woman he had been engaged to, whose heart he broke when shortly after his own mother’s death four years earlier he rescinded his promise to marry. Other friends and neighbors he’d visited every time he returned to his hometown. All dead, pulverized, their bones and flesh mixed into the pummeled earth.
Over thirty craters, one after another stretching from north to south, have sundered the center of town, as if some monster had prowled through unseen in the hours before dawn, leaving tracks more than two kilometers long. He will never forget it, the devastation he witnessed in the aftermath. Every death, every life scathed by it, left behind to endure this scorch, to bury its own dead. A mother bent over the edge of a crater, her entire being quaking at the scattered remains of her children—a wooden rattle here; an overturned bassinet there; a chubby, silver-bangled wrist beneath a layer of broken dirt, fist clutching at the air, at the breath that had already slipped away. The young mother clawed at her throat, gasping, grasping, when a group of townsmen began the work of covering up the pit. “Noooo!” She let out a long wail. “Leave it! I want them to see! I want them to see from their planes what they’ve done! I want them to see! Make them see!”
She lost everything, her entire family and home, Tun later learned as he made his way through the wreckage, the absolute stillness that had enshrouded the town. Anger, bewilderment, despair. How could they have done this? They said they were here as our friends—to defend us. Then they arrive to kill us in the middle of the night? They’ve succeeded in their mission. They’ve murdered our children in their sleep!
As of today—August 15, Tun remembers now—the Americans have officially ended their airstrikes in Cambodia. Other nations quickly condemned this denouement as irresponsible, leaving in its wake a massive refugee crisis and a government military, a supposed US ally, now far outmatched by the insurgent army. A clear indication of how the United States will treat the rest of its Asian allies, and perhaps the rest of the world. When the going gets tough, one diplomat decried, the tough abscond.
Morally vacuous, Tun thinks, swallowing the bitterness coating his throat. Unforgivable. You wreak havoc on a place, leaving it strewn with limbs and body parts, devastated buildings and debris and denuded trees, then you abandon it for those you’ve wounded and maimed to clean up. You cover your tracks, your mistakes and disorder, with the disarray of a mother’s grief. You try to seal her mouth, silence her rage, with your American dollar bills. A few hundred for a family dead, a bit less for a limb lost, and even less for a home destroyed. How much then would you pay for my shattered faith! I once believed in you Americans! Was filled with admiration for your land and your race, the wisdom of your democracy, the power of your technology. Your progress was the justice I dreamt for my country. The right that would’ve eradicated the wrongs of my history . . .
A melody emerges, and Tun forcefully stills it, the heel of his palm pressed against his chest, muting his heartstrings—the sudden tides of sharp pain—as one might mute the string of a guitar. Now . . . Now all he feels is disgust. Utter revulsion for a people whose conscience is as misdirected as their weapons.
What other sentiments could he summon to dampen the ill—this hate inflaming him? The word gives him pause. Hate. It’s not an emotion he assumes lightly. It’s not one that offers him light. To be inflamed is incorrect then. He feels absorbed by it. Hate would be his endless night, his covered grave. He’s not ready to die yet. He must hold on to some shred of hope. There is decency still in this world. He has to believe this, for his daughter’s sake.
Once again, he is aware of her presence on the other side of the thin wall, senses her breathing like a vibrato originating somewhere deep in his being, his consciousness—the silence that precedes voice. He often feels she is the current, that inaudible music just beyond hearing, slipping through this world, and he’s merely one of those things, like a leaf or a laundered sheet, that take on movement, flutter to life, when she brushes past. Yet, here he is, the sojourner tonight, ready to leave her and sneak away into another existence.
Survival by separation, he reasons. He’s doing this for her. What parent does not want a better place for his child? It’s been two years since Prama’s death, and he fears if he makes no sacrifices, if he does not take sides, more lives will be lost, and his country will be obliterated in the firestorm of another’s making.
The irony does not escape him that the tragedy forcing him out of his daughter’s life now is the same that brought her into his. Four years ago—1969—her home was also bombed, the entire commune of a dozen villages or so, including hers, completely decimated, along with the only school and what little there was of a clinic. She survived only by hiding in the hollow of an ancient rain tree, around which she’d been playing, while her mother was cooking outside their hut, keeping an occasional eye on the girl, who appeared in the distance no bigger than a starling flitting about in the open fields. Perhaps, Tun pauses to think for a moment, it should’ve been the other way around. The child should’ve kept her eyes on the mother. But then what? She would’ve only been witness to the blast that destroyed her mother and home, her entire world.
When the child heard the awful drone of the Stratofortress, she’d looked up and glimpsed the sleek silhouette of a winged minnow slipping in and out of the clouds. This troubled her, for she’d only begun to learn that while some creatures are aerial, others are bound to land and water. You’re not a bird, her mother would always warn. Don’t jump from that tree. Fish, the child thought, don’t belong in the sky. Or do they? But before she could rearrange the image in her head, there were other minnows—itsy-bitsy baby ones—dropping suddenly from the belly of the larger fish in neat little rows. The air vibrated with their descent. The coppery, translucent downy hairs on her arms and neck bristled. She began to run, paused to pick up a ripened kapok pod that had fallen to the ground, by some instinct broke it in half and sealed her ears with the white fibers inside, and kept running. She found cover, crawling into the womb of the giant rain tree, with her legs pulled up to her chest, arms around her knees, curled like a fetus, as the world erupted around her.