Free For the Sake of All Living Things by John M. Del Vecchio Page A

donation. No we need for hard work money. You donate rice.”
    As his father pulled back the tarpaulin Samnang winced. Four laborers came. “Our kind friend has offered us two sacks of rice,” the officer said in Viet Namese. “Help him.” Two men hefted each sack.
    Samnang wanted to jump out, yell, kick the soldier. He wanted his father to take the rifle. “They can’t do that,” he stammered to Yani. Then he slapped a hand against the seat. The officer started, spun, glared at him. The boy withered under his eyes.
    When the small truck was again under way Samnang blurted angrily, “Damn them. Damn them all.”
    “It’s not proper,” Chhuon said, controlling his own irritation, “for one to show anger. It only makes others angry.”
    “But...”
    “It’s difficult, but it’s something one must do.”
    Samnang had heard the admonition many times. To his eleven-year-old mind he understood it to mean, not control one’s anger, but don’t get angry. He repressed his anger, denied the emotions, pouted. Since early morning they had been on highways and back roads of northeastern Cambodia, passing through two major cities and by many villages, hamlets and isolated farms. Samnang had begun to see his country as a patchwork of different peoples, like contiguous rice fields separated by dikes and canals, forests and rivers. He saw them struggling, some prospering, some withering. It confused him and this too he repressed. With all that had happened in the past few days he felt like a powder keg.
    If going to Lomphat was like stepping back in time, going to Plei Srepok was a leap into time suspended, into an Iron Age tinged with technological sophistication. Cahuom Chhuon maneuvered the small truck up the last rutted incline. He watched the beautiful country of high mountains and deep valleys unfold under lightening monsoon clouds. By midafternoon the sun had broken through and was glistening in the wet canopy. Chhuon unwrapped his checked krama from his neck. He wiped his shaved head. They drove southwest into a jungled thicket, then arced west and northwest into the mouth of a tapering canyon created by mountainous fingers descending from a high peak. Four kilometers west a main branch of the Ho Chi Minh Trail intersected Highway 19 near Ba Kev.
    “Yani,” Chhuon said, “this is a very different place.”
    “Boy! I’ll say,” Samnang said.
    Chhuon glanced at him, noticed him rocking in the seat, smiling. He’d accompanied his father to this and other Mountaineer villages numerous times. “Yani,” Chhuon said, “to speak another language is to enter a different world. Words influence thoughts. The Mountaineers not only dress differently, they think differently. Some Khmers call them phnongs, just as yuons call them mois. They are our friends. My friends. I expect them to be treated with the very highest respect.”
    “I know...” Mayana began.
    “Forty, fifty years ago,” Chhuon said, “many of the tribes degenerated and acquiesced to the fate forced on them by lowland majorities and colonial powers. For them life stopped. They sat in their longhouses, smoked their pipes, drank from the jars. Then came the resurgence. They’re good-hearted people. Don’t be alarmed if you don’t understand. They’ll never allow harm to come to you.”
    “But Papa,” Mayana protested, “I know. You’ve told us their stories. Doesn’t Mister Y Ksar have a daughter my age? And don’t most of them speak Khmer? I bet I could talk to her even if she doesn’t.”
    “You don’t know anything,” Samnang snapped nastily.
    Chhuon ignored his behavior. To Mayana he said, “I bet you could. Mister Y Ksar is very old. His son Chung married into the Draam clan and lives with his wife’s family. Chung and Draam Mul have a daughter, oh, a little older than you. About Samay’s age. Maybe thirteen.”
    “Y Bhur’s my age,” Samnang said. “He showed me how to fire a crossbow.”
    The dense vegetation opened abruptly