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He has a simple ‘broad brown country face’, but also the fierce, hard ‘killing shine’ they had
earlier seen in Khmer Rouge fighters. Langford tells him that they are Australian, hoping to
deflect the evil in the soldier’s eyes. ‘The soldier frowned and looked puzzled; then I saw the
shine go out of his eyes. He lowered his gun, and I knew we were going to live’ (HW, 420).
Vietnam will not become a paradise, but it is not because the NVA are permanently corrupted
by their association with demons.
10.4.2.5. Les Autres—Dehumanised Soldiers of the Dark Age
The Khmer Rouge, however, are so brutalised. Even their NVA allies consider them
thieves (HW, 330) and uncivilised (HW, 332). Koch’s evidence to this are numerous, among
the most striking being that the Cambodian troops never leave their dead, ‘no matter what the
risk’. The Khmer Rouge mutilate the bodies since ‘Buddhists believe that any mutilations and
deformities will go with them into the afterlife’ (HW, 274). This behaviour can not be
explained except that the Khmer Rouge revolution is primarily over that reality which lies
beyond the edge of this world.
Unlike the VC, the Khmer Rouge seem irredeemably possessed by demons. In the first
description of them they are all very young, brown-skinned Khmer peasants with long wavy
hair and the red-and-white checked krama typical of Cambodians, but, unlike the curious,
waving NVA, the Khmer Rouge stare directly and lifelessly at the captured journalists. Jim
Feng suspects ‘they came from forest and mountain regions which had very little contact with
the outside world’, but their brutalisation is so profound that they resist material presence.
They are mere shadows in black pyjamas, even though they are standing directly in the
headlights of an NVA supply truck. In addition, Feng notices a horrifying look in the faces of
these agents of annihilation:
In the lights of the truck, which put strong shadows on their faces, their eyes
seemed to shine with anger at something: something they didn’t understand;
something which made them all the more hostile because they didn’t
understand it. It was as though something larger then themselves had taken
possession of their spirits, filling them with malice.
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