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ut also, as when confronting Lenin, ‘like a buffalo: one that would charge’ (HW, 341-42).
Colonel Chandara, after Mike takes up an arm for the first time and the two of them survive a
Khmer Rouge attack, repeats the moniker given Mike by the Cambodian Army soldiers: ‘No
doubt about it, Mean Samnang, he said, you really are the Lucky One’ (HW, 378). Chandara is
at the same time reinforcing Langford’s association with Sri Lakshmi, the Goddess of Fortune,
as also the bringer of luck role which Ly Keang has identified for him in being associated with
the ‘buffalo boy’.
After their capture and release by the NVA and Volkov’s death, Ly Keang visits Mike at
his apartment. He indicates that he also understands his role as the human sacrifice necessary
to satisfy Kali’s bloodthirst. She kisses him, and whispers, ‘You’re alive’:
—Yes, I’m alive, I said. But Dmitri isn’t. I’m sorry.
—But she didn’t understand me.
—I’m sorry too, she said. (HW, 367)
She may not consciously understand that he is assuming blame at that moment in which he is
indicating his readiness to offer himself in order to quench Kali’s hysterical blood rampage.
Subconsciously, however, she knows, and indicates her respect for his fate to be the sacrifice.
In a note citing earlier works by Mircea Eliade (Yoga: Immortality and Freedom.
Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1958) and Philip Rawson (The Art of Tantra. Greenwich, Conn.:
New York Graphic Society, 1973), Preston emphasises the importance of such readiness in the
choice of a sacrificial offering:
Human sacrifice was performed even during the early part of the twentieth
century (Rawson 1973: 48). The temple of the goddess Kamakhya in the
border state of Assam was famous for human sacrifices. The victims were
volunteers, admired for their desire to be sacrificed and given special honorary
treatment. Human sacrifice seems to have been performed for the sake of
agricultural fertility. (Eliade 1958: 305, 306)
The willingness was always in Langford’s character, from his readiness to stand up to
his strict father, to enduring the physical pains of his first arrival in Asia, to listening carefully
to the outlandish wisdom of Madame Phan, to going into the field with ARVN troops, to
supporting the street children, to sharing the hardships of the forced march with Feng, Volkov,
and their NVA captors, to putting aside his camera to help carry the wounded from the field,
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