On the road above me a porter gasped and groaned. I dug myself still deeper into the muck so that it practically covered me. The shots dropped off, and at some point I heard soldiers’ voices commanding us to check on the wounded. I didn’t move. They just wanted to see whether the rebels would open fire again. Beside me Thar Thar roused himself and crawled up onto the road. I held my breath, dreading the next shot, but all was quiet.
The soldiers had used us to stop the bullets. Four of us lay wounded on the road. A fifth was dead. Two officers briefly discussed what to do next and then ordered us to leave the wounded behind. They would only slow us down.
The wounded begged us to take them with us. One of them got to his feet to prove that he could walk on his own, that he wouldn’t be a burden. He stumbled two steps before collapsing unconscious right in front of me. Blood flowed from a gaping wound in his belly and seeped into the ground. A captain bellowed that we should ignore him and get a move on if we didn’t want to come under fire again. Fifty yards on I turned around again and saw two of the wounded trying to follow us on all fours. When they started to cry out, begging us to wait, not to leave them alone, the captain himself opened fire. Four shots later a dreadful silence lay over the paddy.
Now I had to carry a rice sack from one of the dead porters, and it wasn’t long before my strength failed. My legs buckled a couple of times, until at some point I just fell down.
I lay on the ground, the sickly sweet taste of blood in my mouth, listening to my heart beating while insects swarmed around my head. It was the end of the road for me.
Get up, get a move on, the soldiers commanded, but I could not. One of them rolled me with his foot onto my back, put the barrel of his rifle in my face, and threatened to pull the trigger. I mumbled something and closed my eyes. Suddenly Thar Thar was whispering in my ear, telling me not to give up now, it wasn’t far now, another hour tops, that’s what the captain told him, and he, Thar Thar, would carry both of my sacks. He took my hand and lifted me up.
I have no recollection of how I made it to the outpost.
We had thought we would be safe there. What a mistake. Rebels had attacked it twice in recent days. The soldiers were expecting another attack anytime. They weren’t much older than we were, but they were more brutal than anyone I had ever met. They beat one of us half to death over a spilled bowl of rice. The next morning they forced another of us to stand in the sun on one leg until he passed out. They were placing bets the whole time on how long he would last.
On the way back we lost a porter to a mine. He was the youngest among us and had only recently relieved Thar Thar at the front of the party. I heard the explosion and thought at first that it had been Thar Thar. The soldiers took cover in the brush. We porters threw ourselves to the ground. When no shots or explosions followed I looked up and saw Thar Thar wriggling over to the wounded boy. He had lost a foot and he died a few minutes later in Thar Thar’s arms.
This first mission changed every one of us. Up until that point, I think most of us still harbored hopes of getting out of that hell alive. Now we understood that there was no way out. We were doomed to die. If we weren’t torn to pieces by a mine on the next mission, then we’d get struck by a bullet or beaten to death by a soldier. It was a question of weeks, months, maybe a year if the cards fell right. There was no other outcome. The military did not send people home, only to death.
Even Thar Thar seemed to be changed.
I had the feeling that he was only now ready to put fate to the test.
After our return from that first mission they caught one of us with a handful of stolen rice. Since he had stolen the rice from our rations, we were supposed to cane him as punishment. They bound his hands and tore off his shirt. A captain showed us how to do it. He whaled the boy so viciously with a bamboo stalk that he cried out, and his skin tore open in long lines. Then it was our turn. If you didn’t thrash hard enough, they warned us, you could share the same punishment side by side with the thief.
The first porter hesitated initially, raised the bamboo reluctantly, and looked to us for help, as if we could tell him what to do. The officer screamed. Two soldiers moved to take the cane away from him, but he shook his head fearfully and struck a mighty blow. The skin burst open in two places and spurting blood ran down the boy’s back. He bellowed in pain. After ten strokes his back was just one open wound from his neck to his hips. It was my turn. My hands clenched the stalk. I concentrated, took a big windup, and struck as hard as I could. My victim sobbed loudly. Relieved, I passed the bamboo to Thar Thar. He took the stick and wound up just as big as I had, then let loose a mighty swing. He brought it up short at the last second, looked coldly at the captain, and tapped the boy lightly on the back of his head.
Nobody moved. Not even the soldiers.
The officer drew his pistol, walked up to Thar Thar, and shoved it forcefully in his face, his finger on the trigger. I saw his body shaking with rage and am amazed to this day that he did not fire.
Thar Thar yielded not an inch. The two of them stared at each other, and the captain must have seen something in his eyes that kept him from shooting. Several soldiers ran up, bound Thar Thar, and threw him to the ground. They gave us more bamboo canes and commanded us to beat him. They kept a special eye on me because they knew we were friends. I struck him with all my might.
When we couldn’t go on—he had passed out, and the skin on his back was in tatters—the soldiers picked up where we left off. When they were through with him four of us carried him to the Death House.
The next day, though it was forbidden, I slipped in to see him. I was sorry for what I’d done, and I was ashamed, even though I knew that I wouldn’t behave differently the next time. I was no hero. Would never be one. I didn’t want to die.
Thar Thar lay semiconscious on a straw mat with half a dozen other porters. Some of them had severe malaria. Others had gunshot wounds, infections, or diarrhea so extreme that it was going to kill them. The place reeked of pus, urine, and shit. The sobbing in the hut was just about unbearable. Thar Thar lay curled up in one corner. Dozens of flies had settled on his open wounds. He recognized me and whispered that he was parched and did I have any water for him. I promised to get some. On the way back to the Death House some soldiers stopped me and demanded to know who the water was for. They drank it in one gulp and threw the cup on the ground at my feet. I picked it up and turned around without a word.
That evening I saw them carrying six dead bodies out of the Death House and burying them in a shallow grave.
After that I gave that part of the camp a wide berth.
Ten days later there was Thar Thar, standing in the doorway to our hut again. Stooped. Haggard like an emaciated ox.
But alive. He had not left the Death House as a corpse.
We took care of him as best we could, sharing our food with him and our water, washing him, driving off the flies and mosquitoes that plagued him. Gradually he showed signs of improvement, and a couple of weeks later he was ready for action again.
But he was not the same Thar Thar. He was aggressive and volatile. He spoke nary a word with us; he had not forgiven us.
On our missions Thar Thar always marched right up front. Voluntarily! No light steps for him. He stamped his feet as if to make sure that any mine he stumbled on would be sure to blow. He sped along with a sack of rice on his shoulders. The soldiers had to order him to slow down because none of us could keep pace with him.
More than anything we feared the paths overgrown with plants, where the underbrush was thick and the ground was covered with leaves. Here, too, though, Thar Thar willingly took the lead. The soldiers gave him a machete and he cleared a path for us. He swung like a madman, hacking anything in his way to bits with the long sharp blade. A cobra reared up in front of him; he slashed its head off. A second one he chopped in half with a single blow.
We were all happy that he relieved us of this deadly work. The soldiers let him get as far ahead as he like
d. It had long since gotten to a point where they found him unsettling. Sometimes he got so far ahead that we could barely hear his wheezing and the splintering of the wood. Thar Thar could have made a break for it on these missions, but he was always waiting for us at the destination. We didn’t understand why until later.
He lost a finger to a mine, at one point, and a bullet grazed his right arm.
There was a phase where I came increasingly to fear him.
A chill would run down my spine when he looked at me. When the others came back alive from an outing you could see the fear of death in their eyes, their joy and relief, their gratitude when they got an extra ration of rice. His expression was utterly impassive. As if he was untouched by all that happened around him.
He no longer resisted the soldiers’ instructions. Yet his obedience was different from ours. It still did not seem that he was afraid of them, rather that he was just waiting for the right moment to defend himself.
Or maybe it wasn’t indifference at all. The rest of us porters eventually gave up, waiting spinelessly and apathetically for death while he nursed a contempt that spared nothing and no one, that kept him alive. I had the feeling that there was ultimately not much distance between his contempt and the brutality of the soldiers.
All that changed when Ko Bo Bo showed up in the camp.
He was one in a group of boys that had been hauled straight from their village to the front. He was the youngest and physically the weakest of them all. His delicate wrists and ankles, his big dark-brown, almost black eyes reminded me of my sister. I felt sorry for him. He was a kid. I had seen a few of his kind, with his constitution, come into the camp. Not one of them had lasted more than a couple of weeks.
During the first few days he didn’t dare to leave the hut. Huddled in a corner the whole time. Even at night. We set a little bowl of rice for him, but he didn’t touch it. Whenever we asked him a question he just lowered his head and held his tongue. A couple of us crouched around him and tried to get him to open up, but he gave no answer. On the third evening Thar Thar took the sleeping lad in his arms and laid him on the mat next to him.
During the night I heard whispering. I recognized Thar Thar’s voice, but the other one was strange to me. That morning, for the first time, Ko Bo Bo ate some rice and dried fish.
Two weeks after his arrival he had to go on his first patrol with us. The soldiers wanted to search a village. They suspected the farmers had stashed some weapons for the rebels. The settlement was only a few hours away, and you could get to it easily on broad, beaten tracks that the farmers traveled regularly with their oxcarts, so we didn’t have to worry about mines. The trip out was uneventful. Ko Bo Bo was carrying a jug of water. Thar Thar walked beside him with a crate of ammunition on his shoulder. Seeing as how the soldiers had told us to keep our mouths shut, no one said a word for almost three hours.
The first ones to spot us were kids climbing in the trees on the edge of the village. The soldiers dispatched the first farm; six of them searched the house and property. Two other porters and I were made to turn over the soil in a couple of places, but we didn’t stumble into anything fishy. Three women with babes in their arms, an old man, and a couple of kids were watching us in silent dread. I saw them holding hands and shivering with fright.
We didn’t find anything at the second farm, either. But the tension there was even thicker than at the first place. Two boys, maybe ten or eleven years old, kept running excitedly back and forth, and I imagined that I saw more than fear in the glances of an old woman, but I couldn’t have said what it was. One young woman was screaming hysterically. Her mother was able to calm her only with considerable effort.
The third farm stood there as if its occupants had just up and left it. Longyis and shirts were hanging on a line to dry; the smoke of a flickering fire rose out of the hut; cackling hens flitted about. No trace of the farmers. Two soldiers mounted the steps, guns at the ready, looking warily around the house. It was empty. An officer ordered us to dig under the hut, but we didn’t find anything there, either. Suddenly a soldier called us to the outhouse. Shining his flashlight into the cesspit, he had seen what he thought was the barrel of a rifle. We were commanded to tear down the straw building, and within a few minutes we had an open view of the pit.
It might have been a stick. Two porters had to climb down. They stood chest deep in the shit, rooting around. A few seconds later they held up a rifle. And another. And another.
That’s when the first shots rang out. An officer stumbled headfirst into the excrement. Two soldiers next to him fell stricken. The others returned fire without knowing which direction the shots had come from. I heard loud shouting, rifle rounds; everyone was trying to find some kind of cover. I threw myself on the ground, rolled to the side, and crawled as fast as I could behind a pile of wood under the house. Other porters were already huddled there, including Ko Bo Bo and Thar Thar. A soldier who tried to join us got a bullet in the back. He lay unconscious two yards in front of me. I saw the earth darken beneath him. We heard a dull crash above us, followed by ashes drifting down onto us. A few seconds later blood was dripping through the bamboo floor. Next thing we knew, the hut above us was in flames.
Thar Thar took Ko Bo Bo by the hand and ran for the hedge. I followed them. We tripped over a dead body, stumbled, and kept going on all fours. Thar Thar threw himself with all his weight into the hedge and cleared a way for us into the neighboring farm. There, too, lay bodies, and the hut was ablaze. Gunfire on all sides. The soldiers had lost their minds. On the hunt for rebels, they were going from hut to hut shooting anything that moved. Chickens, cats, dogs, people.
We crept past the burning hut into the first farm, where we hid behind a haystack. The old man lay in front of us, his back full of holes and two dead kids beneath him. One of the young women lay bleeding against a palm tree, mouth and eyes open wide. Her baby floundered in her arms. Without hesitating, Ko Bo Bo left his cover and crawled over to her. Thar Thar tried to stop him, but he was too quick. He took the baby from its dead mother’s arms and came back to us.
The baby wailed in a raw voice, but then calmed down and eventually was quiet. From our hiding place we could hear kids calling for their mothers, loud bawling, screams for help, one blast, then several. I wondered if there was a chance to get away, but the settlement was too isolated. The army would find us before we could get anywhere.
At some point, a silence fell over the village that was more terrifying even than the gunfire had been.
The rebels had fled or been killed. We saw soldiers looking for their porters, and we crawled out of our hiding place. Thar Thar tried to take the baby from Ko Bo Bo, but he held on as tightly as if it were his own.
We gathered in a group in front of the first farm, the surviving porters, soldiers, and a few villagers. One of the soldiers spotted the baby and commanded Ko Bo Bo to set it down immediately. He did not react.
The soldier cocked his pistol and screamed that he would shoot it on the spot if he didn’t put it down immediately. Ko Bo Bo still did not respond. Not out of disobedience. I could see in his face that he couldn’t do otherwise. The soldier raised his weapon and aimed. Thar Thar spoke softly to Ko Bo Bo until he loosened his grip. Then he took the baby from him, walked slowly over to a young woman, and put it into her arms.
AFTER THAT MISSION the two were inseparable. Maybe Thar Thar saw in him a younger brother he needed to look after. Or maybe just someone who needed his protection. I don’t know what it was, but the two of them were always together. They washed their laundry together at the river, cooked, cleaned rifles, buried the corpses from the Death House. Somehow they always managed to get assigned to the same group. They slept next to each other, and I often fell asleep to the sound of their whispers. Thar Thar the Taciturn had suddenly started to talk again. His bad moods evaporated, as did his aggression. He had forgiven us porters for what we had done. Between him and Ko Bo Bo something had developed for which there was no room i
n the world we occupied. I don’t know how I should describe it. They conversed with each other long after the rest of us had retreated into silence. They laughed together. During the whole time that I spent in the camp they were the only people I would see smiling occasionally. They helped each other. They watched out for each other in a world where everyone who lived past the first couple of weeks was only looking out for himself. I envied them. There was some secret that bound them and that kept them alive. I’m sorry to say that I never discovered what it was. Thar Thar and I were no longer close enough.
And there was some power that protected them. Six months passed, and Ko Bo Bo was still alive. Most of us figured it was destiny. The stars were smiling on them.
Months passed and turned into a year and then another. We were among only a dozen or so porters to live so long. Maybe it was luck, instinct, or intuition to do the right thing in dangerous situations. Or maybe it was just our karma, though I’d be hard-pressed to say whether it was a good karma or a bad that kept us alive for so long in that hell.
Most of us wondered what we had done in a previous life to deserve such torture. We suspected that we had been soldiers ourselves, and that we had killed people. Or drunkards. Murderers. Animal abusers.
Thar Thar and Ko Bo Bo never indulged in these speculations. I have no idea whether they followed the teaching of the Buddha. I never heard them mention it. I never saw them meditating, and I don’t remember ever seeing them leave an offering at our little altar in the hut.
THE DAY OUR luck turned started with an extra ration of rice. That was not a good sign. Any time we got something more to eat it meant that we were slated for a special mission. A colonel came into the hut and picked a dozen porters. Thar Thar and I were the first two. Ko Bo Bo volunteered.