Jake Fonko M.I.A. (15 page)

Adhering to rank and local custom, Soh Soon humped my pack. I wore a ballpoint pen, putting me several rungs above a mere junior officer / translator; and Cambodian women did the heavy work, in any case. I slung the rifle over my shoulder and we started off. By that time I’d let it out that I’d seen a little action in Nam, as a paint-face guy. The news reassured her about our chances of getting through this escapade alive, and also she was delighted with herself that she’d figured out my secret back in the torture chamber. We swapped stories about the LRRPs and the Khmer Rouge jungle fighters as we ambled along. Would have been interesting to see those two outfits go head-to-head. From what she told me, all else being equal we could have taken them man-to-man, no sweat. But fighting in their jungle, all else wasn’t equal, and they’ve have stood up to us in any encounter. I was just as glad the face-off hadn’t happened during 
my
 tour.

We made a couple miles on foot, then I thought we ought to dig in before darkness caught us. I asked Soh Soon if she knew any place where we could hunker down for the night. “Just a little further, follow me,” she said. After another half-mile she led me off the track and up a jungle trail. We threaded our way through several hundred yards of trees along a stream bank, then stopped by the upended base of a huge fallen tree. “This was Viet Cong hideout last time,” she told me. “See?” Sure enough, the tangle of tree roots and dirt concealed a tunnel entrance.

“You’re sure we won’t be caught if we stop here?” I asked.

“No way,” she assured me. “Viet Cong guys all go to Saigon. Why they be sitting around out here?”

I dug out my flashlight and shined it into the tunnel. Cramped for somebody my size, it looked neatly dug, if a bit dusty. “How far does this go?” I asked.

“Several tunnels in network,” she said. “This one go under ridge, to secret trail other side of hill. Further down tunnel connect to Ho Chi Minh Trail. On other side cross Vietnam border, connect to network go all way to Saigon. Right around here maybe twenty kilometers of tunnel. Best way to father’s place, we go under ridge by tunnel, then follow secret trail.”

“How did you know about this?” I asked her.

“When twelve years old, help dig it. Everybody in area have to help or get big trouble.”

We sat on a nearby fallen tree trunk and broke out lurp meals. After two weeks on short rations of plain rice and dried barf bits, even humble ready-to-eats were a feast indeed. We tapped the stream for clear, cool drinking water. A little ways further along the trail a ten-meter waterfall flounced up a damp mist, refreshing the air in a steep-banked, lush hollow. We plunged into the pool at its base for a most welcome soak and scrubdown. Afterward we sat on a ledge under the overhang, gazing out through a translucent veil of water at orange glitters of forest-filtered sunset, listening to the hiss, swish and splash of the falls, and drinking in the delicious comfort of our spot. “It’s time to stop the Albanian act,” I told her. “That worked in Phnom Penh for fooling Angka, but now we need to pass through here without attracting attention. It would be better if I looked like a Khmer.”

“Good idea,” she agreed, “How you do that?”

I pointed out my straight black hair, squinted my eyes, and gave her a toothy smile, along with a prayer and a bow. “Let’s get rid of my beard and cut my hair, then we’ll see what else we have to do. Can you help me?” I tested my combat knife. It hadn’t shed a bit of its edge since the night Sarge gave it to me. I patted my beard as full of water as it would absorb, and Soh Soon carefully scraped it off. She had a delicate touch, making the operation close to painless. Then she gave my hair a going over, carving off a chunk here and lock there, until I sported the short-cropped style favored by the Khmer Rouge.

“Now what?” I asked. She looked me over carefully and applied a few light smears of mud to give a better shape to the face.

“Pretty good,” she judged. “You real rice farmer now, Jake. Put on coolie hat and fool anybody.” Then she gasped: “White men all hairy like monkeys!” and she broke into giggles. “Any Cambodian see you spot that right away.”

“How about if we just shave it all off?” I said.

“That do the trick,” she agreed. She made short work of my arms. I slipped out of my shirt and she started shaving the hairs off my chest. Her breathing seemed to change. “I ever tell you interesting thing they teach me in torture class?” she remarked.

“No, what’s that?”

“Difference between pleasure and pain. Very small difference.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Here, I show you.” She indicated a spot with the knife point. “If I stick you hard here, you scream, it hurt so bad. But,” she continued, teasing the spot ever so gently with the blade, “teacher say light touch here feel good.”

How right her teacher was. “Did your teacher show you any other examples?” Yes, several in fact. She proceeded to demonstrate, elevating my energy level by a couple quanta.

“Let me see if I’m understanding this correctly,” I said, taking the knife from her willing hand. “So, if I poke you lightly here?...and here?...and here? (the last one got her squirming)...is that the same thing as you’re telling me about?”

Her eyes had suddenly brightened up considerably. “Same thing, exactly. Torture tutor taught us about first and last one. Number two new to me. Where you learn about that one?”

“Ranger Training,” I told her. “It’s how we interrogate female prisoners.” Actually, it was one of several delightful discoveries I made during a prolonged biology experiment with Dana Wehrli while watching the tide come in one balmy evening at Zuma Beach. But why unnecessarily distract Soh Soon with the truth of the matter? She’d passed the novice level with flying colors. Advanced studies were about to commence.

“What would Angka say about this?” I asked her.

“Screw Angka,” she murmured, punctuating the sentiment with a little nip on my earlobe.

7

I’ve never been
much of a city person. After two months cooped up in hotel rooms, my cramped little office in the Saigon Embassy, abandoned shophouse flats, dungeons, torture chambers and Khmer Rouge villas, did it feel great to be back outdoors again! Soh Soon and I basked under the overhang of that waterfall for nearly an hour after the sun disappeared. But as gloriously cool and refreshing as our little nook was, the falls filled it with so much racket that we couldn’t have heard anyone sneaking up on us. Reluctantly, we backtracked to the tunnel and took it over for the night. It was a tight fit and a little stuffy, but comfortable enough if we slept end-to-end. I preserved our blood supplies by rigging a tent around us with the mosquito netting Sarge gave me, plus massive application of bug repellant (also courtesy of Sarge—that son-of-a-gun thought of everything).

Soh Soon had spent enough time in tunnels that sleeping there didn’t bother her, so she positioned herself furthest in. I had my head at the opening, the rifle stowed against the wall beside me. The night passed without incident. The morning frog/bug chorus of peeps, cheeps and gribbits awakened me to a clear sky and cool, still air. A random cloudburst had drifted over us before dawn—just enough rain to spritz everything down. The tunnel entrance overlooked the stream from fifty feet up, and through the tree trunks I could make out the ridgeline and thick foliage on the far side of the drainage. Rods of bright morning sun pierced the drops hanging on the branches and leaves, creating a magical gleam and glitter that reminded me of Mexican glassblowers’ displays.

Jungle has a beauty unlike any other—lushness, plants of every possible size, shape, texture and shade of green: an overwhelming sense of teeming life. At first glance it looks like an impossible tangle, but with time you begin to figure it out. Creeper vines, low bushes, ferns and big-leafed plants cover the floor like a foot-deep shag carpet, colorful mushrooms of fantastic shapes peeping out here and there. At the next level up you notice the low palms, the tree ferns, the shrubs, the thorn bushes and the banana plants with umbrella sized leaves (in a pinch they’re okay umbrellas). Thick tree trunks stretch upward from sharply ridged, buttress-like roots toward the high canopy, some covered with shaggy bark, others smooth, with slippery smears of fungus. Massive banyan trees spread their branches widely over sheltered clearings, dropping new roots to dig their way into the dirt. Millettia trees tower high above, flashing brilliant purple blossoms, closing off the sky shoulder-to-shoulder with feathery clove trees and bushy ironwoods festooned with big white flowers. Strangler figs wrap themselves on hapless trunks and struggle their way toward clear sunlight, eventually killing their encased hosts. Thick vines drape down, inviting Tarzan-like swings from branch to branch. Parasitic ferns and orchids droop out of knotholes and limb crotches. And throughout it all, delicate forest flowers shyly beckon to cruising insects, hoping to lure them to their pollen.

If rain forests are so great, why do people keep chopping them down? Sad to say, just like with movie starlets, sheer visual beauty isn’t everything. The early morning hours were habitable, but before long the heat and humidity would settle in and smother us in our own sweat once again. And this was relatively good weather: sitting out monsoon rains in the jungle is a special brand of misery. Plus there are all the things out there that, like Richard Pryor commented in his routine about camping out, want to fuck with you.

Thanks to Hollywood, which populates jungle movies with pouncing jaguars, bloodthirsty giant anaconda snakes, rabid orangutans and crazed headhunters so as to keep the audience awake, Americans have the wrong idea entirely. As long as you keep your head, jungles are safer than central LA. Wild animals fear people, natives avoid intruders, and chances of stepping on a poisonous snake are slight if you stay alert. The main dangers are getting lost, coming down with malaria or dysentery or something worse, or going crazy. It’s the steambath heat, the mosquitos, the gnats and the leeches that drive you crazy. Not complaining, but even behind a waterfall, making love among the strangler vines and banyan trees falls short of popular fantasy. It doesn’t surprise me at all that Tarzan and Jane didn’t have a treehouse full of kids. Take, for example, the etiquette of dealing with leeches sucking the blood out of your lady’s ankles, a common jungle problem and by no means the most bothersome. Should she daintily pluck them off before the action gets serious? Do you incorporate detaching them into the foreplay? Or does one simply ignore them and get on with it? Any way you might approach it, it dims the romantic aura.

We downed lurp meals and filled our water bottles. Soh Soon finished shaving my body—we’d suspended operations last night before she got to my legs. I felt like a varsity freestyler on the day of the Big Meet. We were pretty stiff after a night laid out on solid dirt, so we took some painkiller tablets (we LRRPs used to live on them, out in the field). Ever the conscientious jungle fighters, we policed the area thoroughly, making sure to leave no sign that we’d been there, then crept into the tunnel.

Having spent a year searching for Cong tunnels, and destroying, as best we could, those we found, I was fascinated to see one up close. I had to move through it in a low crouch, knees up against my chest, with hardly any clearance on the sides—no place for a claustrophobic. The air was stale and musty. Soh Soon led the way, pointing out branches and booby-trapped side alleys. We passed through areas for storage, for living, for cooking. Concealed vents brought fresh air in and channeled smoke out. It was remarkably well-engineered. During the 50s and 60s the Viet Cong had with hand tools dug a 200 mile tunnel complex throughout the Cu Chi District, ultimately creating an underground connection between Saigon and the Ho Chi Minh trail—a truly incredible feat. Thousands of people lived it in for months on end. Our 25th Infantry Division pitched their tents right on top of it, and it took them a long time to figure out how they were being attacked from within their own perimeter. I now appreciated the mechanics of how the Charlies had done it, but a couple days in those tunnels and I’d never stand up straight again. As for going in there after them—my hat is off to the tunnel rats, a job I could never have done well.

After an hour of scrunched-over tunnel-scuttling, we met daylight on the other side of the ridge. The secret path was hardly a secret at ground level, nor was it a path—it was a clay road wide enough for a two-ton truck. But it cut through high canopy forest, and the Charlies had woven the tree tops together, making it undetectable from the air. It was an auxiliary route, created by hand-labor when our B-52’s bombed them back away from the border.

Soh Soon seemed in especially good spirits. She smiled more today, and didn’t tighten up when I touched her. I was wearing my Chinese cap and my checkered silk kramar now, and I walked with a swagger, my red ballpoint pen prominent in my breast pocket and the AK-47 slung across my back. We figured if we looked like a team of Khmer Rouge officers inspecting the area for counter-revolutionaries, nobody was going to mess with us.

Her father’s place was about twenty miles further. At the pace we were making, we’d be there by noon the next day. I missed my jungle boots, but Ho Chi Minh sandals did well enough in that terrain, as proved by Viet Cong test. We had two days’ food, and plenty of streams for water. The high, dense canopy mercifully kept the road shady and made for easy walking. Almost like R and R. We passed through abandoned rubber plantations, undergrowth glowing green among the rows of tall, bare, slender tree trunks. We came upon moonscapes where the B-52s had worked the area over. We walked by overgrown clearings—sites of former villages, encampments, staging areas? Hard to say. Side trails intersected our clay road every now and then. And no other people at all.

Yet my jungle instincts began alerting me, midway through the first day, that we were being watched. As the day passed, the feeling got stronger, and in combat zones you ignored those feelings at the peril of your life. I mentioned it to Soh Soon; she’d been feeling it too. A little scouting around turned up nothing, yet the feeling persisted. I’d been hoping, when we holed up for the night, for a repeat of the previous night’s interlude, but now was not the time. After darkness came we quietly gathered our gear together and re-established ourselves a few grenade-bursts away from where we’d put down. We rigged some triplines at a twenty-meter perimeter to give us warning, and I couldn’t help but wish we’d had a few Claymores. We passed the night in strict silence, taking turns sleeping and standing watch, gun at the ready. Nothing happened. Plenty of jungle background noise—hoo hoo hoo, chik chik chik, squawk squawk, the whole night through—but no definite sign of other people. Damn, but that woman knew her way around the boonies! She could walk point for my outfit any time.

Around eleven the next morning Soh Soon led me off the clay road onto a side path that disappeared into dense woods and impenetrable undergrowth. It was narrower than the one we’d been using, but hard surfaced and just wide enough for a small truck. It went quite a distance, and it zig-zagged, so that at any point I had the impression of being totally swallowed up by jungle. Wide spots every now and then indicated pullouts for two-way traffic. We climbed up and down ridges, curved around ridgelines and seemed to be gaining altitude, but the density of foliage made it impossible to get any idea of general land features. We rounded a bend and the track came to an abrupt halt in a small clearing.

“We take a wrong turn, or what?” I asked her.

“No problem,” she said. “We home.” She called out something in a soft voice, and I barely heard an equally soft reply. She said something else, and a camouflaged gate swung open beside us, revealing a continuation of the track, striking further into the bush at a sharp angle. We walked through the gate, and the three men standing guard in a clearing behind a well-camouflaged barbed-wire fence gave Soh Soon a warm greeting, which she returned. She chatted with them for a moment, then motioned me over to a nearby jeep. We tossed our stuff in back and climbed aboard. One of the guards hopped in on the driver’s side, and we took off down the path. A couple more turns and we burst from dense forest into a well-tended stand of rubber trees. Unlike others we passed on our walk, these were still being tapped.

Several hundred meters through the rubber grove we entered a compound of several well-cared for, low buildings on four-foot stilts. Tall coconut palms shaded the grounds, but more to the point they were closely enough placed to foil detection from the air. The driver pulled up to the main building, a bungalow sitting on stone pillars. A man at a table on the screened verandah looked up with a start, put aside what he was doing, rose and rushed to the door. Soh Soon jumped down from the jeep and with little bleats of joy bounded up the steps to meet him. They clasped hands warmly and jabbered animatedly. Then she took him in tow and led him down to the jeep.

“Father, this Jake,” she exclaimed proudly, aiming him at me. “He escaped me with him! Jake, this my father, Mr. Poon.”

I slipped off the jeep and shook his outstretched hand. His grip could have crushed a few bones, had he chosen to do that. He was Chinese, in his mid-40s I reckoned, handsome, tall for his race, and solidly built. He looked cunning and tough. Whether or not I could take him would depend entirely on his level of martial arts. I was glad I’d never have to find out. “Pleased to meet you, sir,” I said.

“Soh Soon tells me you rescued her from the Khmer Rouge,” he said in a cultured voice. “I owe you much for that. I knew they were a bad lot, but who could have guessed what monsters they would turn out to be?”

“Your daughter exaggerates, Mr. Poon. She sure did her share of rescuing. One remarkable young lady, if I may say so.”

“’Remarkable’ is the proper word,” he said, and I caught a wistful undertone in his voice. “Her adventuring is a perpetual source of amazement, not to mention concern. That accent… You’re American? From the porch I thought you were a Khmer, but yes, up close I can see otherwise. Tell me, what brings you to this troubled land?”

Poon obviously was the kind of man it was no use trying to snow. He’d catch on in a second, and then you’d feel like a damned fool as he methodically pried the truth out of you. “I’m Captain Jake Fonko, U.S. Army,” I explained. “I was sent on mission to Phnom Penh in late March. Before I could complete my mission, the Khmer Rouge took the place. Soh Soon’s cadres captured me, and it turned out the two of us had a mutual interest, to get out of that death trap. I’ll leave it to her to fill you in on how we went about it.”

“I’m sure she will. We’ll have plenty of time for that later. You two must be exhausted. Here, let’s get something to eat.” He led us into what would be called the living room back in the States. The furnishings were elegant, but not ostentatious, like what you’d expect to find among the wealthy in Switzerland or Germany, rather than in Beverly Hills or Dallas. A pert little Khmer woman came in, got her orders from Poon, and disappeared.

Meanwhile, Soh Soon engaged in a project of her own. “Hereby resign from Khmer Rouge!” she declared as she unwound the red rag, unpinned her hair and shook it loose from that severe bun. “Bunch of crazies! Why anybody wreck their own country like that?” Her hair flopped down straight and heavy, a silky black curtain flowing over her shoulders. “Father, can you believe it?” she exclaimed. “They burn up piles of 
money
!”

“That’s the least of their crimes,” he remarked coolly. “Some of the stories that have reached me… well, we’d all hoped for better. We thought anything would be an improvement over Lon Nol and his band of incompetent crooks. But there’s always something worse, you can count on that.” He shook his head in dismay and regret. “In the long run, that pack of fools is doomed, you know. We Chinese have a saying, 
xiucai zaofan, san nian bu cheng
—‘a revolt by scholars could never succeed’—but my sympathies go out to the Cambodian people until this farce collapses.”