Epilogue: Samsara

Senator Deustch looked through the glass window of the hospital door, unsure of what he would do or say to the wisp of a man on the other side when he opened it. The smell of astringents and clean cotton filled his nose, the undercurrents of pain and sorrow that filled every hall of Walter Reed Army Medical Center not well hidden. He knew the smells very well from a hundred visits to meet another family's wounded veterans, meetings that typically ended in tears and handshakes. He knew them from being allowed to view his son not long ago, deep in the cold morgue where the doctors kept the honored dead.

A nauseated flutter filled his stomach at the memory, the sight of his son's brutally thin, waxy face filling his mind. At least he was permitted to see Dylan one last time before burial. The 'benefit' of his place on a top level Armed Services Committee; the gift of top secret clearance. Most families with children in Special Forces might never know what happened if they were lost in the field. Deustch knew. Because of the man sitting stone-still on a bed on the other side of the door, with eyes that seemed to look through everything. The last survivor.

The senator took a sharp inhale and let himself in.

. . .

Ed Jameson finished his climb up the steep brown steps of Wat Phnom, deep in the center of the city. He arched a thick eyebrow at the sight of Agent Pendergast seated quietly on a bench near one of the white stone nagas, the man a stark contrast in the crisp black suit with his hands clasped together on his lap. He didn't seem to be looking at the statue, nor much of anything, really. The pale blue gaze drifted east, perhaps towards where the three rivers met.

"I thought to look for one of the Irrawaddy dolphins before I left, but I understand it's very rare now to see one." The soft drawl carried towards Ed on a stray, cooling breeze. "A shame."

"The ambassador wanted to see you before you left," Ed said by way of response. "She's extremely grateful for the FBI's professional assistance and blah, blah, blah. Get a few words from you before Siha – real name Pramook Muy; past history, some minor Khmer Rouge shithead – gets a private trial."

"I would prefer not to."

Ed rolled his eyes. "Sure, Bartleby." His reply drew the fleeting wisp of a real smile. "She knows the score, Pendergast. She's down with what happened, to as much extent as she can ethically accept it. I filled her in. Personal line follows the public. Bellani was a friend."

"You've been together long?" A slender hand rose to wave off his own question. "Ignore that. It's absolutely none of my business."

Ed shrugged, putting his hands in his pockets. "A while. Few years. Probably going to get stuck with the dishes for the next decade for making her play clean up with the Bureau. Told you I'd deal with the shit end of the stick."

"Mhm." Pendergast's gaze came around to him for a long moment, then slid away again. "A costly endeavor."

"Yeah, well." Ed took an accompanying bench. "Still felt like a way to hit unfinished business." He glanced over, sensing the other man's suddenly chilly presence rise to fill the open space.

. . .

Senator Deustch fumbled for words as he stood framed in the hospital doorway, feeling a sudden rush of shame. He was a politician, words were his goddamned job. He clenched his hand on the doorknob, all of his fingers turning cold and numb against the metal and he grasped at the first thing that came to mind. "I wanted to say 'thank you,' sir." His voice faltered on the last word, suddenly aware how trite it all tasted in his mouth.

The ghostly figure on the bed didn't acknowledge his voice. He didn't even move. For a long, strange moment Deustch wondered if the man had died after all. A sudden swell of grief hit him, making him sag against the door. "I got to see my son again. I don't... I don't fully understand what you went through out there. What killed my son. Your team." He cleared his throat, mostly to try and fill the silence that drained the room of life. "I read the report you filed with the Army."

"I believe you may be the only one." The voice was raspy and hollow. Sergeant Pendergast remained unmoving otherwise, unblinking eyes staring at nothing.

"No, I..." His voice trailed off. What could he realistically say? Several other members of the committee dismissed the man's clinical, horrifyingly detailed intelligence report as a crock at worst, a statistical outlier at best. They wanted it buried, and buried down deep. Cambodia was one of the country's best allies in the still-unstable Pacific region and men like Dole and Helms wanted to keep it that way.

But the others hadn't seen Deustch's son. "I believe you." He inhaled. "I owe you anything I can. I'm sorry. Anything you need after this. Anything I can do for you in DC. I got to see my boy again. That's worth more to me than I can explain."

Something flickered in the frozen silver stare and the too-thin face turned very slightly to regard him. A ghost of sorrow passed across the pale features and was gone again before Deustch could be sure he saw it. "He survived well, Senator," came the rasp again at last. "He fought the best he could. To the very end."

Deustch seemed to grasp at the words with something like relief, never doubting what the other man knew was one final, gentle lie. Somewhere in a dark hole within himself, Pendergast had found enough mercy to give the man that much.

. . .

"Don't talk to me any further about your grief or your burdens. Do me that respect, Officer Jameson." The voice had gone dead and Pendergast's head had turned to regard him with a narrow, unforgiving stare. "Do me that kindness."

"I only meant-"

"I know." Pendergast cut him off with a curt gesture. "I realize that you felt responsible, after the fall of my team. That you feel somehow at fault or at blame."

Ed struggled to find a path through the conversation that wouldn't lead to further quiet fury. "I couldn't do anything then. Command wouldn't authorize search and rescue, even after ops verified the last transmissions from Golovchenko. I read the report you filed after the fact."

"So there's two." Pendergast didn't seem about to clarify the apparent non-sequitur. "It's interesting. They think handing out fistfuls of medals shuts one up and sends them away with their hat in their hand. It was hardly necessary; the silence was perfectly effective and I wasn't much for pursing the matter regardless. It matters no longer, Thelonius. It's the past. Washington said their part. The laughable trials after the Rouge fell said the rest."

"It sure as fuck didn't look like the dead past out there, Pendergast. It looked like you up and went to fucking war." Ed suddenly leaned back as if ducking out of firing range, mentally cussing himself out for the jab.

"I do my job as I will, and what needs will be accomplished. Do you suddenly now have issue with my method?" More dead ice.

Ed rolled his eyes at himself and passed a hand down over his own face. Dear Jesus, bless this fuckup brother with the runaway blowhole. "No, that is in fact all on me and I knew likely what we were getting into when I had you called."

"Enough, then." The voice gentled very slightly. Ed looked up to see the agent looking away again. "Let it be enough."

Ed spread his hands, at a loss to do anything except say what he was sure would anger Pendergast further. "I can't."

. . .

Sergeant Pendergast watched the senator leave with his shoulders hunched over like a very old man. There was nothing more to say. Pendergast wanted no handshake, no teary, uselessly emotional farewells. He wanted only to be left alone in the quiet, where there were no screams, no concerns about where the next meal came from, no more suffering given without reason.

The doctors were very distant men, if gentle enough. They were overwhelmed with still hundreds to thousands of others shattered from Vietnam. They fed him medication for the pain they were sure he constantly suffered, gave him a therapist that seemed to make all the right noises in the right places, but he believed it actually did very little. He was afraid he would leave still wanting the pills. Other soldiers did. He would try to refuse the medication from here. Try to sleep without help.

The senator's offer was sincere and he numbly filed it away in his mind. Someday soon he would be out of the hospital and he would have decisions to make. The Army had already left not so subtle noises that they wanted him out of the service, so there was that avenue decided for him. He was quite sure it would be all very honorable; thank you for your dedicated service, here's a set of good references and a polite ceremony that will be thoroughly redacted in your file along with every other thing you ever did for us, do write your former superiors at holiday. He no longer cared. It was past.

First he would go home, for good or ill. Decisions would be necessary. They didn't have to be prompt. He had all the time in the world, if he so chose. He was free. Control would not be taken from him ever again. No matter what he chose from here, he had that much.

. . .

"You can," Agent Pendergast replied, merciless. He refused to look again at Ed. "You do this solely to yourself. Take a therapist, they've gotten better in the last decade as I'm to understand. It isn't yours to bear."

"Pendergast." Ed closed his mouth again, stuck.

"What? What is it you think you'd like to hear? Do you wish it had been you instead?" A short, brittle laugh. "No. You do not. If you read the report, you know far better than that." He bent forward slightly, steepling his fingers in front of him with elbows on his knees and studying the crackling stone under his black shoes. "What do you want? Is it forgiveness?"

Ed exhaled, unable to give a good answer. He suddenly realized that all he had for decades after ODA-531 was abruptly halved was a series of mangled questions with no answer at the end. He couldn't have what he wanted. He didn't know what he wanted.

The agent broke into his thoughts. "I'm not your priest."

"I know. I'm sorry, man. I shouldn't be riding you on this shit." He shrugged. "I don't know what I want. I'm just... incredibly fucking sorry and I know that's incredibly fucking trite to say. And I never got to say it. Not to anyone. I never got to see Tuck again, or the rest of the kids. And you up and vanished for a long, long time."

A long time passed, broken at last by a slow nod.

"You survived. That's a hell of a thing. I've seen the fields. They took me up to Choeung Ek not long after Vietnam started to really pull shit together. One of their guys was starting the museum there. And I found out there were photographs of fucking everything. Like, how could anyone doubt what happened? But there it was. All that doubt. And nobody did anything about it. That one little fuck in charge died in his own house, never uttered a word of apology. They got away with it. I have never gotten over that."

"You do. It takes effort." Pendergast was quiet again. The pale gaze flickered up. "One just... keeps moving."

Ed nodded. "How you got through, huh? Kept you together."

The agent shook his head. "No." He inhaled once, a soft rasp. "I think I understand now. You need a secret, not forgiveness." He stood up, looking down at Ed with the afternoon sun at his back and the statue of a coiling mass of snakes at his side. "I will tell you this – what I learned. And then... do not ever call me again." He raised a single finger to his lips and smiled very slightly. There was no kindness in that smile, nor enmity. It held nothing, a purely meaningless gesture. "Everyone breaks under the torturer, Thelonius. It will be different between each victim. You will not always see the damage. You cannot always know what cracked. But there's your secret."

Agent Pendergast stepped away towards the steps of Wat Phnom, the first steps that would take him down and away from Cambodia for the last time. He looked back over his shoulder at Ed Jameson and smiled again. This time it almost looked sad.

"Everyone breaks."

~fin~

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins" ~ The Waste Land, T.S Eliot

. . .

Afterword:

Vietnam entered Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) in December 1979. What was found remains argued, controversial, and to no small extent, beyond any given justice. The Khmer Rouge sent out missives during their reign that at worst admitted to problems with the food supply, chalked up to the adaptations the new utopic society had to struggle through. The facts are that perhaps more than two million people died under the regime, many of whom did indeed die from starvation and exhaustion in the 'collectives.' This is sometimes used to fudge the numbers and distract from the rest of the records - of which the Rouge did indeed keep astoundingly detailed records and photographs - of prisoners tortured and executed among the many prisons and killing fields. Tuol Sleng - S-21 - is the largest and most infamous. The prison and field referred to at Tlork was in fact the major facility of Svay Rieng Province. Its depiction here is fictional and contains elements of S-21. The torture methods, interrogations, and the bolting to the floor are accurate if incredibly understated depictions of the horrors Cambodians and other victims of the Rouge faced.

I recommend Facing Death in Cambodia by Peter Maguire for more information on both the haunting collection of information in the wake of the Rouge, including the interview and discovery of the man who photographed many of the prisoners that passed through Tuol Sleng. I also recommend it for being a look at another view of Jameson's hard struggle with questions with no answers. Previous to writing this book, Maguire had been a scholar of the Nuremberg trials and the contrast between the two genocides and their aftermath is striking and sad. He found no easy parallels with what happened in Cambodia. The trials given to Cambodian genocides left little dent in the legacy of the Rouge. Remnants of the Rouge itself continued with kidnappings and executions well into the 90's. The two incidents referred to in the story from 1994 (Two abductions and executions of tourists, four tourists each) are real.

Pol Pot died at home in 1998, as referenced in the story. Brother Duch (Kang Kek Lew), the real life version of the story's 'Brother Louis,' was not discovered until 1999. He is now 70, facing life imprisonment.

The current wait for military benefits through the VA system is now up to two years. The treatment of veterans at Walter Reed in the years after Vietnam deserves more attention than the brief note in the epilogue. It was not uncommon to leave addicted to painkillers, neglected, PTSD undiagnosed and dismissed, or virtually and actually forgotten. It happens today. It's not that the system is cruel or that the doctors don't care – the military system is not fully equipped to handle the real human aftermath to a war. It never has been. For all that we prepare soldiers to deal with the worst that can be found on the battlefield – the SERE program continually updating itself to both defend against and inflict what it finds – we still don't know what the hell to do with the tortured results. Pendergast's terse summary is true - most anti-torture courses such as SERE teach you that you will eventually break. It does not always teach you how to come back from that.

The statistics of sexual violence in Cambodia against women and children are adapted from a first quarter 2003 report. The situation has not vastly improved. Ketmoni Tep's organization is a real one.

This has been a work of fiction, inspired by the Agent Pendergast novels by Preston & Child. No infringement of copyright is presumed.

07-13, MDS. Thank you for coming. Namaste.