Perhaps this is the “truth” they say they already know and he need only admit—that it was never the Organization he’d fought for and loved. To that, he must confess. He’s been a traitor all along.
The date, he now recalls, is September 5, 1978—that is if it’s still the same day. He’s not certain how long he blacked out. It doesn’t matter. Time serves no purpose, brings no splinter of light into his interminable nights blindfolded in a coffinlike cell, except as reminder of the sustained lie he told himself. He believed he could protect her, despite the grim reality, the total transformation of his land and people, the metamorphosis of idealism into depravity. After all, he’d kept her safe and alive even in those terrible months after Om Paan was killed, even through the countless battles in that last year before the Revolutionary Army won and seized control of the entire country. If she survived the war as it raged around her, escaping explosions and gunfire only meters away, while his soldiers smoldered like termites in a farmer’s field fire, then she would survive anything. It was a matter of luck, reinforced by love, his fierce determination to safeguard her life with his own. On the battleground one learns to believe in such things as luck and destiny, when time and again a skilled commander falls to a single bullet and a clumsy foot soldier survives a blast that has obliterated his entire infantry. It was his daughter’s destiny to live.
When the Revolutionary Army captured Phnom Penh that April in 1975 and the long, bloody civil war came to a close, Tun thought the most dangerous part of his journey was over. Even amidst the devastation caused by the conflict, the chaos that followed as cities were emptied and people arbitrarily flung to rural areas all over the country, he remained assured that order would be restored, that peace and calm would eventually come. Out of the maelstrom, the country would remake itself, and so would he. Mistakes could not be undone; nonetheless, he resolved to do good, because, having glimpsed barbarity at close range, it was the only way he knew to be human again.
During the mass evacuation, while patrolling a district some distance from Phnom Penh, he would find ways for families to stay together when they were threatened with separation. He’d send city dwellers toward towns and villages where they had family connections so they’d be welcome. He’d help lost children find their parents or, if they were orphaned, assign them to people who seemed good and kind, and likely to care for them. When transport became available, he’d give a place to the elderly and the disabled first. He tried to set an example for the company under his command. Though he did not always succeed. Once several soldiers marched into a small temple and ordered the monks out at gunpoint. While the battle-crazed adolescents shot at sacred shrines and statues, he herded the monks into a recently evacuated villa outside the temple ground and told them to shed their monastic robes and put on whatever ordinary clothes they could find. It was for their safety, he explained. Another time he had been unable to stop a soldier from shooting a man who’d tried to flee, apparently an officer from the defeated government army. Tun heard shouting behind him, then a shot, and as he spun around, he saw that the officer had already fallen to the ground, his face in the dirt, a bullet through the back of his head.
In situations like these, he was grateful that his daughter was back at the temporary base, cared for now by female comrades in a platoon assigned to provide backup support to his company during the evacuation period. Weeks after Om Paan’s death on the battleground in Oudong, his daughter tried to ask him why her beloved nanny had died in that horrible manner, why she’d died at all, and he could offer only this feeble explanation: “Because there’s a war.” She nodded, as if agreeing, as if she understood the cold injustice of warfare. Then after a moment she said, “It’s your fault, Papa. It’s your fault.” She never spoke again of Om Paan, or asked him why soldiers as young as herself were killed before her eyes in the subsequent battles she was forced to witness at his side. But she wouldn’t have needed to say another word, for he’d come to accept her judgment as irrevocable truth. When one engages in war, one must take responsibility for every life lost.
He no longer wanted to be a soldier, revolutionary or otherwise. He wanted only what the Organization promised to every citizen in Democratic Kampuchea: a simple life in the countryside. At the end of ’75, six or seven months into the new regime, the first “purifying” campaign was launched in an effort to cleanse the insidious bourgeois tendencies within the party membership itself. Art was unequivocally bourgeois, so Tun, a former musician and an intellectual, was stripped of his cadre rank, as were countless other party members of similar background. Henceforth, he was told, to sharpen his proletarian consciousness he had to work in the fields as a rice farmer. Yet, because of his valuable contribution during the insurgency against the Lon Nol government, he could transfer to a village of his own choosing.
Tun could hardly believe his luck, as if the Organization had heard and granted his wish. Many others were not so fortunate. Comrade Im—the commandant of the forest encampment where Tun had received his training—was eliminated; his previous collaborations with Vietnamese comrades marked him ideologically impure.