Marc Levy
Torque in Angkor Wat
I am fortunate. I have no problems with highly charged emotional states. No past events which I cannot discuss. I am lucky. I do not struggle with feelings of loss, feelings of guilt, anger, flashbacks, nightmares. I sleep well. I do not toss or kick or leg cramp or leap at ghosts. I am fortunate. I have not one splinter of conflict within me.
There are two of us in the great tan field of withered grass. It is the heat and drought that have done it. Everywhere the sun disk kills with its merciful light. Only the surrounding jungle, which lords over buried ruins, the leafy sheltering jungle which may harbor unsavory men, only the effervescent green canopy provides shade, here at Preah Khan.
I am wearing faded blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and hiking boots. I am thin. It is easy to lose weight back packing, and I have lost thirty pounds in four months. At forty-six I am lithe and muscular. My thick hair is jet black. I'm told I look young for my age. I'm told there are no lines on my face because I do not smile. Often I say to myself "What do they know?" and I say it without malice.
In Cambodia, marijuana is sold in open air markets at five dollars per kilo. It is not uncommon to see young tourists huff on long, thick joints. I do not smoke or drink or take drugs, but Jack does.
Jack is an engine of madness. He envies me. Jack wanted war and did not go and knows I did and pretends he doesn't care. In this way we continue the game, the one in our sweaty heads, the other, with the frisbee, which arcs like a rocket between us.
Jack is built like an iron bull. His broad shoulders frame a massive chest with twin pectoral shields; he is narrow waisted; his abdomen is a ladder of muscle. His arms and legs are taut and firm. A square jaw juts a manly cleft chin. Beneath the pummeling sun his steely eyes glow in their sockets. He is fast, agile, cat-like.
Jack has smoked and drank and worked his body for ten years, and today the red dragon tattoo which spans his proud chest breathes salty fire in the hot, sweet air.
We are standing fifty meters apart. When Jack wings the frisbee, it cuts a well-placed bullet path into my waiting hands. My hands which are bleeding and blistered.
"Nice throw," I say.
Jack is astonished when I pivot and catch the energetic disk behind my back. He cannot believe it. I am ten years his senior. But I have killed, saved, and lost men. I have the papers and medals to prove it.
Poor Jack. Poor well-built, swagger-walk, shaven-head, glow-eyed, stoned-cold Jack cannot believe my prowess.
"You're damn good," he says. "You're really damn good."
When I toss the dancing circle so well, so finely placed that he need not move, not budge, not shift one inch to catch it, he is doubly astonished.
"Christ," he says.
Here is how we met:
The speedboat from Phnom Penh to Angkor Wat cost twenty-one dollars and took five hours. Inside, the long sleek craft is crowded with double rows of tourists. Many are drunk. They laugh, sing, and frolic. Others are sleeping, lulled by the constant roar of the boat's turbo engines. I am kept awake by loudspeakers hooked to the walls, which blare American rock music throughout the stuffy cabin. After an hour, the noise makes me crazy. I walk up a narrow stairway and sit in one of two canvas chairs near the stern. The boat scuds forward on the Tunnele Sap River; its pitch dark water sprays my body and pelts my face. It feels good to be alive.
Soon, another passenger, Jack, joins me. Bare-chested, he is wearing military rip-stop cargo pants. His blond hair is cut short, and white-walled. As he walks the boat's roof he instinctively sways with the watery rhythm. By the way he steps, by the way he seats himself, drops his lean body into the sun-bleached chair, he exudes confidence. He exudes manliness. I do not ask about the furious dragon with its rolling eyes and scaly skin and whip like tail. After a time we speak.
"Yes, yes. I look too young, but I was there, and war is a terrible thing. It plays tricks on your mind," I say. "It changes you. But now we're in Cambodia and it's 1995." When I become emotional, Jack looks away. Then I regain my poise, and he tells me his story.
Jack enlisted in 1976 after one year of college. Infantry. Jump school. Special Forces. "Why?" I ask. Jack says his brother lost both legs in Vietnam. "Both legs," he repeats. Jack wanted revenge, but the Army said no. After a time he re-trained as a cook, and never left Ft. Carson.
For three years, Jack griddles stuffed omelets, molds pastries, fancy breads, extracts the blood from immense raw steaks. For three long years he is undone by the clatter of cups, the clink of dishes, by white linen draped over smooth wood tables. Off duty he immerses himself in karate. He learns to kill with one punch, and during this time seeks conflict in dark GI bars and bright public places. He is arrested many times. He has never lost a fight. When it is time to go, he is honorably discharged with all rank and benefits, despite his poor conduct. But Jack has obtained no medals, no battle scars, only minor barroom bruises. When I explain his good fortune, Jack pretends to listen, as the sea wind buffets our faces and cools our bodies.
As he tells me his story, the hours pass, and the boat slows to enter a small narrow channel. Thin, tense Cambodian sailors man American gun boats armed with heavy machine guns, which are cocked and ready. The thin men come close, then step aboard to inspect passenger documents.
"Pass-port. Pass-port," they say, stressing the syllables.
The Cambodians are wearing French camouflage uniforms and Chinese steel helmets. They carry AKs and M-16s and smooth American grenades. Frags, we called them. Some passengers take pictures, but the sailors shoo them away, as if they are scolding children. Then the sailors are gone. When our boat pulls to shore, we are met by a legion of nervous soldiers, who form a phalanx through which we pass.
It begins raining a cold, piercing rain which turns the dark earth to chill muddy soup. The passengers, mostly young foreign backpackers freighted with too much clothing and gear, slip and slide and look for shelter. Soon they panic. Only Jack and I remain calm. We make a gallant path through the fumbling amateurs. For some reason the frightened youth and well-armed men make way. We step with authority, we step forward as if we know this ground.
The driver of the idling truck is a middle-aged man, his caramel face pitted by a hundred stories that would take a lifetime to tell. He wears simple, common clothes; he wears a red-and-white checkered Cambodia scarf around his neck. When he speaks, I watch the rise and fall of his jugular vein, which is thick with blood.
"Me take you to finest guest house," he says, through a bridge of rotted teeth.
At first I never killed anyone. The machine gunners and riflemen did that. I carried morphine and bandages to ease their pain. The first dead American I saw was black. Then I helped in the killing. And the killing helped me.
It is cold and damp inside the rusting American military truck. Jack nods his approval. I lower my chin. There is war in my mouth and it tastes like bullets. I am silent. Then we are off. In the blinding downpour, rain pelts the windshield in thunderous beats, which makes sight impossible. I expect the last minute swerve, the grind of gears, the screech of brakes, the slow motion fragmenting glass as our bodies pass through it. But the driver grips the wheel with one hand and repeatedly ducks his head out the side window, squinting and shaking and steering all at once. Soon he is thoroughly wet. Water drips round the sacred curve of his large Cambodian ears. It drips down the well-worn path made by his venerable cheek bones and triangular jaw. It drips into the red-white checkered scarf softly knotted around his throat. Water gathers and drifts down his lean torso, down his meager Asian hairless legs, down his delicate bare feet, until finally it pools itself onto the rotted steel floor and sinks to the flooded road beneath us.
In our wild dash through the broad and narrow streets of Siem Reap, as we glide and splash through submerged roads that crest like rivers, the pulsate drip, drip, drip of solitary water beads makes me calm.
"Here is guest house," says our driver, pointing toward a rain-swept path.
We pay with wet money and rush outside. By the time we enter the clean, dry, well-lit room, our clothes are drenched. Jack removes his shirt, seats himself at a wide yellow sofa, and busies himself in the crimp and curl of joints. I remain standing and silent, and he thinks I'm strange. I say I'm cold and tired. I say perhaps tomorrow we'll visit Angkor Wat. Jack says "Sure," and I say good night. An ageless friendly woman emerges from a glass bead door. She parts it with her hands locked in prayer.
"Here key," she says, accepting money.
In my large room with its square thick bed and vault of mosquito netting, I take pills and lie down and do not recall my dreams. Before sleep, I tell myself I am good, I am calm, I am strong.
This is how it works: they walk into us, we walk into them, we walk into each other. Oh, there is magic in these moments. Magic in the mannered step of patrol, ambush, jungle, monsoon. Magic in the machine gun's vile abracadabra. Magic in the illusory arc of seamless tracers. Wizardry in the rampaging men who run, crouch, advance, explode. Oh, there is infinite wit and timely jest in the ten thousand ways men hunt and kill. Survival. That is the sacred trick of war. That is the heart of it. The obscene and secret center.
In the morning Jack and I flag down a weather-beaten motorcycle. It is a strange sight—two large men gathered around one thin man whose fragile machine we must commandeer to visit eternal Angkor Wat. In the banter of bargain, the gaunt Cambodian stands his ground, and we call his bluff by leaving.
"OK. OK," he shouts. "Five dollah for both. Five dollah."
A small fortune in a country where once a life could be lost for the crime of wearing glasses.
We straddle the slim seat and, bunched up, hold tight to flimsy belts.
"You ready? You ready?"
"Yes," we shout in unison.
The driver races down long empty boulevards flanked by massive leafy trees, which make the morning air bright and cool. Only the sputtering engine breaks the invisible silence. Ghosts are nearby, I know it, I can feel them.
When we reach the great sprawling temple, we are dumbstruck. The long pale building snakes across the horizon like a sideways totem spirit caught in the dream world between rest and waking. The strange organic stone palace beckons us forward. For three long hours we inhabit the intricate site. Stepping like deer over the white stone floors, we honor the warrior carvings. The driver grows impatient.
"All right," we say, and ride to a temple where the jungle has not been slashed and burned and cleared away.
"This Ta'Prom," says our driver. As we dismount, he wipes sweat from his brow, and beneath his breath utters the strange words "Khmer Rouge."
Jack tells him to wait by the side of the road, and we begin walking forward. I look about. Where have I seen these great twisty vines, sky poking trees, dirt trails studded by jagged rocks cocooned in pillows of emerald moss? Where did I first hear the animate sounds of green triple canopy tranced with decay and life? I want to run, I want to hide, I want to plummet childlike into this vast room of living dreams.
But the sweltering heat makes us lazy. We drink rivers of bottled water, and take refuge in lichen-covered stone temples where all colors are sublime. I sit and talk with a small boy selling souvenirs. Jack takes photographs, then hunkers down and smokes a paper stick while seated bunched up like a gargoyle.
Idiot, I want to say. We are guests to a lost age in sacred rooms which know the luminous voice of prayer and song. We are guests under low roofs locked in the vise of towering trees and serpentine vines. We are surrounded by stone and light and triple-layered jungle which knows no law but its own. Idiot, I want to say. Can you not feel each living moment tick past? Can you not know what it's like to live here? What it means to rush forward to the screaming men? Idiot, I want to say, can't you taste and smell the humans veiled in billowing cordite? Can't you see the frozen man who cannot move? In war, the living become like statues lifted by helicopters, or left to decay. Silly, wasted idiot. Do you not know what it's like to wake from a monstrous dream still swallowed in sprawling nightmare?
See how the impartial sun fills me with fear. See how the percussive white hammer spits metal through skin. See how I freeze decades after the event.
Dear stoned wasted one: In war all suffer their fates. I am fortunate: The dead do not speak when I talk back. Or judge my sins. Look at you smoking your tight-rolled reveries. What do you know?
It is our third day at Angkor Wat. Jack knows I will meet him later. I have risen early, hoisted my pack, and sped to a deserted point behind Ta'Prom. In the lustrous emerald shelter I unfold the once-green nylon hammock still stained by red dirt. Automatically, my eyes measure the distance for its still strong rope. Automatically, my fingers loop square knots to the center of trees; my hands adjust the hammock to hang just above the ground, the better to roll out in case of attack. But there are only flies and leeches and the jungle's slow organic crawl. I smear insect repellent on my hands, on my arms, and face. I straddle the embracing nylon sheet, then sit, then lie straight back. I am running; I am hiding; I am plunging full force into the dream. The book I have brought falls from my hand.
At dusk, after we form a perimeter with trip flares, dig fox holes, plant mines, after we have eaten, after we have checked our weapons, drawn matchsticks for guard, I lay in a small area cleared with a knife borrowed from a friend who will die in two weeks. In the middle of night a new man nearly steps on my face. "You're guard," he says, setting the bulky radio down before disappearing into the inky black.
I crawl to the foxhole. Its warm wet walls are studded with quick cut roots which bleed clear sap. An hour goes by. A voice whispers over the radio, "If you're sitreps are negative, break squelch twice." But my situation report is not negative. Twenty, thirty meters ahead I hear the soft graze of cloth on twigs. I hear the tell-tale rise and push of rubber-sandaled feet on the green-matted jungle floor. Huddled down, I squeeze the detonator and the mine explodes. A great white flash and metallic bang fill the air. For a moment they are visible. Then there is running and small arms fire and someone explodes a second mine. Boom! Now they are screaming. The machine gunners seek out survivors. In the morning we find blood trails and human meat. Save for one, they have dragged away their dead. The frail human sculpture trapped in rags is riddled with bullets. The pith helmet beside her is torn to shreds. Her weapon is mangled and useless. It is she who wept and groaned all night; it is she whose pleading voice haunts us as we scavenge her pockets.
When I wake the sun is directly overhead. It is time to move out. Time to march to the field. I untie knots, coil the rope, spread the hammock flat on the ground, fold it lengthwise in half and roll it up, hoist my pack, and begin walking. It is a good twenty-minute hike on a well-used trail. The last three words have special meaning. I scan for footprints, heel marks dragged backwards. Automatically I bob and sway and keep to the side; I am searching for men who lie in wait. But there is nothing. Only the tranquil path and flitting birds and unforbidding jungle. The mimic of memory. That is what most annoys me, what Jack cannot comprehend: When I see or smell or feel things which are not there. For every step of the next mile I tell myself I am strong, I am calm, I am good.
"Christ," says Jack.
We continue playing. He whips the flying ring across the flat dead field. I catch it left-handed, or between my legs, or with eyes closed, whatever it takes to heighten the risk. The day burns bright with heat, and I want to be ten-thousand times more powerful than Jack, who grins at each weapon-like exchange. He presses a joint to his lips between turns. The plastic wheel sings like a bullet between us.
Suddenly, behind Jack, nine young Cambodian troops emerge from the tree line. Their uniforms are ripped and filthy; their silent sandals are made from tires banded by strips of inner tube; tight-knotted red bandanas encircle their bushy heads. They wield a motley patchwork of AK-47s, shoulder-fired RPGs, a weary American machine gun. Yes. They have been hunting Khmer Rouge. Beads of sweat roll down their gaunt faces, which they mop with the backs of their filthy hands. I watch as their black almond eyes track the dancing disk sweeping over the field. Their expression is unreadable.
Seeing a curious look on my face, Jack turns around. After a moment, he slings the frisbee to an older man who appears in charge. The man fumbles the catch, and, annoyed, throws it back. It is a weak throw and he is clearly troubled. Jack laughs, then trots up to another soldier, man or woman it is hard to say, and offers the joint. The Cambodians uneasily share it, and Jack cannot control his laughter. He is slapping his sides. He is bent over double. In six puffs the paper wand evaporates, but the Cambodians raise their weapons and point them at Jack. He finds this hilarious and laughs even louder.
Walking forward, I stare straight into the Cambodians' blood raging eyes. Howling with laughter, Jack picks up the frisbee and tosses it to me. But I don't want to see it. Where are the foxholes? Where are the claymore mines? Where are the weapons and knives and radio? The war is everywhere and Jack is blind to it.
He continues to laugh. He thinks the forced grin on my face is reciprocal laughter. He thinks I have come to pick up the plastic wheel that has fallen at my trekking boot feet. He thinks I walk toward him and the seething group to triumph the joke in a halo of sweat. But when I reach Jack, I throw the hardest punch of my life, and he drops like a burlap bag filled with red dirt and does not move. Straightening up, I lock eyes with each Cambodian. The commander nods. The others lower their weapons. Then, like mist, they dissolve into the jungle.
I speak to Jack as he lays there jaggedly-jawed, the dead grass beneath him stippled red. Strange words fly from my mouth. I speak non-stop, and the words sound fierce in a language I don't remember.
On the boat back to Phnom Penh I recall the startled look in Jack's eyes. What had he seen and what did he know? Over the time it took to re-cross the Tunnele Sap, I realize it doesn't matter. Like a river, I am always moving forward.
©2005 by Marc Levy
Marc Levy served with the First Cavalry Division as an infantry medic in Vietnam and Cambodia in 1970. His work has appeared in various online and print publications, most recently in New Millennium Writings and 