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What must not be forgotten, however, is that even Bima, the powerful brother of Arjuna and
Judistira Pandava, is himself half ogre, yet the three together make up the perfect combination
of dharmic qualities. This saves the Americans from an abysmal characterisation, as does the
fact that Koch has other characters, non-existent in the wayang but present in the cataclysm of
Southeast Asia, who really are the personification of evil. The Khmer Rouge are—or at least
are fully possessed by—the demons of the Hindu Triple World. Before discussing the Khmer
Rouge, however, it would be useful to distinguish them from the other communist fighters in
the war in Vietnam and Cambodia.
10.4.2.4. Vietnamese Forces of dharma
The NVA and VC are also caught up in the firestorm of the cosmic cataclysm, but Koch
again follows the manner of the wayang kulit in giving them varying degrees of refined and
unrefined characteristics. While the mostly undefined VC are, like the Khmer Rouge, clearly
aligned with the demons and forces for adharma, their vague portrayal leaves them outside of
Koch’s condemnation, and in death they seem, as in the above-mentioned scene (HW, 143), to
be defrocked of their masks of evil. At the same time, Koch makes some of the Communist
forces, especially Captain Danh and his men, unquestionably into forces of dharma. During
the long captivity of the three journalists, Koch avoids the brutal scenes of hatred and
retribution which typify historical accounts of Westerners taken prisoner during the war in
Southeast Asia. Rather, he displays the simple, redeeming human dignity of the captors, a
distinction which flies in the face of his ogre-like Americans when Danh explains to Volkov
the strong will of the North Vietnamese foot soldiers:
They know very little about politics, he said. Often they have marched
hundreds of kilometres; they have been bombed until they feel crazy; they are
half starved, and homesick for their villages and their families. But they
believe in their country. (HW, 318-19)
Jim Feng remarks how the ‘North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers had not been real to us’
as they ‘had seen them only as prisoners, or the dead’ (HW, 313), but his own captivity has
made them real and human. This gives Danh an opening to debunk the Western myth about
the Communist bugaboo when he says, ‘Marxism is not a religion for us that cannot be
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