to rehabilitate the struggling Hmong districts devastated by years of war. At the same time, they hoped to wean the Hmong off their dependency on their opium crop.
He neglected to mention that the Hmong comprised some 10 per cent of Laos’s population and many of them had been on the other side, fighting the communists alongside the Americans. Siri’s immediate but unasked question was why the military would give aid to the Hmong when many other Lao areas were in an equally desperate state.
Captain Kumsing explained that the project had begun in July and was initially under the command of Major Anou, a veteran of Xepon and Sala Phou Khoun. Siri remembered Anou as an ambitious man with relatives in France. He was about fifty and had been in excellent health when they’d met. Siri had given him a medical exam a few years back. That’s why he found it hard to believe that the major had died of a heart attack after only a month at the project site. He had died in his sleep, and the camp medic could find no suggestion of foul play.
They buried the major, as was the custom, and the Vietnamese adviser, Major Ho, took over while they waited for a Lao replacement. After two months, this second major vanished. He wandered off into the jungle and didn’t come back. But few people were surprised. By then he’d already started to talk to himself and act oddly. When he left, he’d been wearing a crown of
In September, after a period without a commander, two young officers arrived from the north. Both had been newly promoted. The senior of the two took over the role of project director. But after two weeks he developed mysterious stomach cramps. He was in such pain that they flew him to Savanaketh for a checkup. The doctors there could find nothing wrong with him.
He came back with a clean bill of health, and died a week later. He was thirty-four.
His colleague took over. He’d been doing fine until a week ago. He hadn’t had any physical or mental problems. Everyone thought the curse was ended. Then one day he was driving out to view the project site. He liked to drive the jeep himself. There were two other men with him. They warned him he was going a little too fast, considering the state of the road, but he didn’t take any notice. It was as if he wasn’t really himself.
He told them he was going home. He cut across a cleared area of land and stood, actually stood, on the gas pedal. He sort of froze. He was headed straight for this big old teak tree on the far side of the clearing. The men tried to wrestle the wheel from him, but he was solid – like cement, one of them said. When it was clear what was about to happen, the men threw themselves out of the jeep. They had no choice. One of them didn’t make it. He hit his head on a stump and died instantly. The other broke both his legs. He’d looked up in time to see the jeep smash headlong into the tree. His boss was still standing up with his foot on the gas. He flew through the air and hit the tree like a sparrow flying into a pane of glass. Didn’t stand a chance.
Siri was amazed. “Who’s next in the chain of command?”
The captain sucked his teeth. “Me. But we aren’t announcing that. As far as anyone outside knows, there’s nobody in charge. The commander’s office is empty, and we’ve passed the word around that we’re waiting for a new officer from Vientiane.”
“You think that’ll make any difference?” The truck was bobbing along a furrow that had been churned through the thick jungle. It was barely a road, and Siri held on to the dashboard to keep his teeth from being shaken loose.
“Of course. We don’t want them to know who’s in charge. It’s obvious they’re targeting the leaders.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Well, it’s obvious.”
“Not to me.”
“The Hmong, of course.”
“The Hmong? But I thought you were helping them.”
“Well, yes. Most of them see it like that. But, of course, in every community you’ll find capitalist sympathisers who hold a grudge because they lost.”
“And how do you imagine they’re knocking off your leaders? Surely a bullet or a grenade would be easier than what you’ve described.”
“Ah, they’re cunning. They know that would start a land battle. No, they do it all with their potions.”
“They have potions?”
The captain lowered his voice and was almost inaudible above the sound of the engine. “They’re heathens. They practise witchcraft, Doctor. They have all these poisons and hallucinogens. All they need to do is drop some of these drugs into the water supply or the food.”
“The Hmong are poisoning you to stop you from developing their community?”
“It’s revenge, Dr Siri. They were brainwashed, you see? The Americans convinced them that us communists would never do anything to help them if we came to power. They don’t realise that we’re all brothers. The Americans managed to make them believe that they aren’t Lao.”
“They’re not.”
“Not technically, Comrade. But they’re family. They may not have been born to Lao parents, but we all live together in the same homeland. A dog or a cat isn’t a human being, but think how many families treat their dogs like a member of the family. It’s the same thing.”
“H’mm. Good point. So you think the dog’s biting the hand that feeds it?”
“In a way, yes. Not the whole pack, Doctor. Just one or two rabid strays. But until we know what poison they’ve been using, we won’t be able to round them up. That’s why we need you.”
They pulled into a sprawling military complex with machinery and vehicles all over. To anyone foolish enough to believe the captain, this would have seemed a humanitarian effort to exceed even the most extravagant of the UN’s follies.
Under a makeshift palm-leaf shelter behind the empty command office, two large caskets lay side by side. Bare-chested soldiers carried them inside and placed them on trestle tables that wobbled under their weight. The men pried off the lids to reveal Kumsing’s predecessor and his companion. They were wrapped in natural tobacco leaves and garnished with herbs. This reduced the smell and kept the bodies in remarkably good condition. There was minimal insect damage.
The camp medic was a twenty-year-old, trained as a field nurse on dummy patients without blood. He and a middle-aged woman from the mess tent were assigned to help Siri with the autopsies. If he’d ever had doubts as to his good fortune at having Geung and Dtui at the morgue, the following six hours dispelled any of them. These two were worse than hopeless.
Even before the bone cutters had begun their cracking of the first ribcage, the boy was throwing up through the open window. He repeated this trick a dozen times during the day. The woman didn’t stop gabbing the whole time, asking silly questions, getting in Siri’s way to get a better look at the fellow’s insides. She had to get it all right to tell the girls back at the canteen. With those two, and the huge flying insects that buzzed in his face like little helicopters, the ordeal was a nightmare.
It wasn’t even a nightmare with a happy ending. He wanted very much to find clear signs of natural causes of death, but he couldn’t. Neither was there anything to suggest foul play in either man. The junior officer’s collision with the tree had made an awful mess of him. Some thirty-eight bones were broken and the skull was shattered. But it was all post-mortem. He’d died some time before his jeep hit the tree.
Both men had been in prime physical condition, strong and healthy; but, for some reason, they’d simply stopped living. He couldn’t understand it, and he knew that wasn’t an answer Captain Kumsing would want to hear. The only other option was, indeed, that someone had used a toxin that left no obvious signs.
Siri put the men back together as best he could without assistance, and soldiers came to replace them in the caskets. It was usual, with deaths such as these, that didn’t result from natural causes, for the bodies to be buried as soon as possible without any ceremony at the gravesite. They couldn’t be cremated, because the belief was that their souls weren’t yet ready to go to heaven.
Superstition, religion, and custom often overlapped in Laos, and even Siri, who had no spiritual beliefs, found nothing strange about such a practice. It was just the way it had always been. The bones would be left to commune with the earth until the family decided a fitting period had passed. Then the body, if the family could find it, would be dug up and cremated with full ceremony.
Siri went to see Kumsing in the project office that he shared with five enlisted men. He was sitting at a far desk, the smallest desk in the office. Siri noticed how the thin man twitched as he worked and wondered whether
