Read Online Cambodian Book of the Dead by Tom Vater - Free Book Online Page A

Whatever they got, they exchanged with the Vietnamese for rice. Hard times.”
    Les coughed thick clouds of smoke across the dark, scratched wood of the bar.
    â€œBut that was all a long time ago. Now we got three hotels in Kep and the first scuba diving outfit opened some while ago. At weekends it gets really crowded with locals who come for the crabs. The crabs are fucking delicious, you should try them. About a dollar a kilo. Otherwise, backpackers, weekenders from Phnom Penh, adventurers and lunatics. Which crowd d’you run with, Maier?”
    A young Vietnamese woman with a closed face and short black hair that was trying to grow in several directions at once appeared silently in the door between the bar and kitchen and handed Maier his vodka orange. Les had his hands full with his joint.
    â€œThat’s the fashion in Vietnam these days. The girls want to look like the guys in the boy bands.”
    Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” poured from the speakers that hung amongst the ordnance from the ceiling. The wall facing the sea had been almost completely destroyed and replaced by thin wooden slats. The other walls, in which various calibres had left their marks, were covered with framed photographs of the American wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
    Les pointed at a faded image of a young man in jeans, sporting a huge moustache, posing in front of a helicopter. “I was a pilot. First I flew Hueys out of Danang for the Navy. Later I worked for Air America in Laos. Black Ops. Top Secret. This shot was taken in Vientiane. We flew weapons, troops and drugs for the CIA. Then, from ’73 on, I was here, until the KR took over.”
    â€œYou must have been on one of those last buses full of foreigners to leave Phnom Penh, which the Khmer Rouge accompanied to the Thai border?”
    â€œNo, wasn’t there. Just prior to that, I evacuated employees from our embassy. I flew an overloaded Huey to one of our ships. After the last flight, we tipped the bird off the ship and into the sea, just like my colleagues did off Saigon. You can’t imagine how that felt.”
    â€œSo why did you come back?”
    Les “Snakearm” Leroux looked around his bar as if he’d just entered it for the very first time.
    â€œI ain’t a historian or anything. But I saw a lot in the war. I saw a lot of war. Not all of us were junkies, at least not all of the time. I knew even then that politics was behind the rise of the KR. We ran an awesome air campaign against suspected Vietnamese positions inside Laos and Cambodia. We killed thousands of civilians and carpet-bombed their fields. How is a Khmer farmer supposed to understand that a plane drops from the sky and burns his village to the fucking ground? Just think, one payload dropped from a B-52 bomber destroyed everything over a three square kilometre area. Everything. Nothing’s left after that. We atomised people. We vaporised them. Hundreds of thousands died. And that was before the KR ever took over.”
    Les lit the next joint. Maier was sure that the pilot had shared his story, his trauma, his life, with anyone who came through his door with open ears. It was a good story.
    â€œAnyway, buddy, the war years were my best. We lived from day to day, hour to hour. We drank through the nights and learned Vietnamese, Lao, Thai and Khmer from the taxi girls. Many of us also consumed industrial quantities of opium, heroin, LSD, amphetamines and marihuana, uppers and downers. And in the morning we were back up in the mountains to pick something up or drop something off, to set fire to some village, to carry on killing. As I said, my best years.”
    A bout of coughing interrupted his nostalgia. “When it was all over, I had no desire to go back home. The New Orleans that I’d left more than ten years earlier no longer existed. That’s how it goes in war, I guess. It changes the perspective, and stands everything that you