GUERRILLAS
I
‘’You’ll like it here my man...just like me, you’ve found a home’’.
-Sympathy for the Devil Anderson, Kent
‘’I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thais to support the Khmer Rouge. The question was how to help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.’’
-Zbigniew Brzezinski
LOCATION: Phu Quoc, Cambodia
YEAR: 1975 A.D.
DATE: May 1
In the end, there was Sang Nam Wong. A man without a country - without nationality - fated to die in a matter of days in a country that was ceasing to exist, merely because it could only exist in situ - like a skeletal mummy that had deteriorated fully at molecular level into granular dust, yet had retained its form perfectly ensconced as it was in a splendidly sealed sarcophagus. Upon an instance of slightest vibration, the mummy would crumble into sand, before eyes even laid upon it. Such was the case of Cambodia in its final years. It was incidental that the process by which it was being eradicated was being facilitated by the most brilliantly engineered war machines then in existence. It could just as easily been any iteration of historical processes and any instrumentality of the tectonic movement of epochal motion, be it careless missionaries introducing strange foods, poisonous to indigenous bellies, a Vesuvian catastrophe of nature’s accidental cleansing of entire races, or a strange bacteria carried across oceans on the backs of vermin.
Sang was not a Nung Chinese - that hapless and remarkably stalwart martial race that had, in spite of the most ruthless efforts to eject them from the land and the territorial borders encompassing it (the most recent - and arguably most sadistic of such measures -being carried out by the People's Army of Vietnam and their National Liberation Front cohorts) all ended in abject failure. The Nung remained somehow against all probability and expectation.
The current maelstrom - it was no longer accurate to simply refer to the Indochinese situation as a War any longer when one (even the most dullard layman) considered the sheer scope of the territories, political stakes, psychologically symbolic and emotional investment of the civilian populations (to say nothing of their leadership castes) of the states party to the violence and of course the willingness of all the combatants to escalate already catastrophic levels of violence, and to do so in the most formal and deliberate terms,
Sang Nam Wong was not a Nung Chinese, nor was he of the storied Montagnard of the Central Highlands, although he spoke flawless Cantonese and had mastered a number of Montagnard dialects - at least adequately enough (although his own genius for violence and controlled addiction to bloodlust helped endear him to the younger man among them as well as their elders) to earn their trust to such degree that Sang had no doubt that he could rely on them to accompany him on direct action operations - operations which, considering the immediate political situation, the horrifically sanguinary gameness of the targeted OPFOR and his own status as a ‘’traitor’’ (or in the most charitable view held by these mountain-man and Nung allies of convenience and necessity a ‘’mercenary’’). Nevertheless, Sang’s aptitude for violence and, concomitantly, his ability to not inspire loyalty bordering on rabid zealousness was a characteristic that Sang would pass on to his son - young Bui Fang - and their common descendants over endless temporal oceans.
LOCATION: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (‘’Stasi’’) Hochschule (‘’College’) Potsdam, Deutsche Demokratische Republik
YEAR: 1969
DATE: March 11-September 15
The headquarters of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, a comparatively massive complex conspicuously situated in Berlin-Lichtenberg, despite its size, and subtly brutalist structural features (effective in intended purpose of generating an ambiguous unease and discernible stripping of any sense of meaningful individual agency within the person traveling - doubtlessly on orders - through its corridors, appeared far more purposefully subdued than its Moscow counterpart (and obvious model) that housed the, equally dreaded, Soviet KGB.
It was not, however, these structural features that attracted Sang’s attention - Sang had spend his childhood under occupation of the Empire of Japan - and no experience before or since, no matter how eloquently contrived by monarch or conceitedly ‘’modernist’’ officialdom to inspire fealty and terror had come to equal the psychic imprint of the Showa’s instantiations of absolute, sovereign authority. Rather, it was the complete, uncompromising and total belief not merely in necessity of mission and purpose but of the inevitability of ultimate victory that was characteristic of every MfS officer - young and old, newly recruited or of ancient tenure - that impacted Sang so profoundly. MfS headquarters was not a police station or an intelligence agency campus - it was a temple to the telluric religion of Bolshevism - a religion of armed prophets and apocalyptic longings, served not by mere border security guards, special commandos, savant analysts, and trained assassins, but veritable priests and acolytes of a modern age - the presence of whom, far from ironic or anachronistic, was somehow essential to the mission of the institution they served.
So it was that, in the fall of 1967 (approximately two years previously) Sang Nam Wong - North Korean passport and temporary emigration paperwork in hand and in perfect order - was invited to study civil engineering, a subject area that Sang’s alleged country of origin had desperate need for men with expertise of, at Karl Marx University in Leipzig. Sang however never attended a single class there. In fact, he had only visited the campus on two occasions, the purpose of both being to seduce a German girl whose parents had come to be viewed by the MfS as ‘’politically unreliable’’. The fact that she would so quickly, and without reservation, welcome sexual liaison with an obvious auslander of course did not improve the perception of her family’s loyalty to the Sozialistische Einhietspartei Deutschlands.
The girl’s father, a mid level policy planner with a mathematics background who worked for a textiles Kombinate and had, despite considerable relative autonomy, had condemned in the strongest terms the reliance upon Soviet derived Gosplan data in determining the wisdom, efficacy and (although unsaid) profitability of the loosening of central controls on production of consumer goods had shortly thereafter been dismissed from his post and was, as far as Sang knew, subsequently employed as a machine operator under the nominal authority of the National Volksarmee. In other words, Sang had impressed his masters with his commitment to the mission he was being trained for within weeks of his arrival in his (second) adopted country.
Sang was one of only three true foreigners in the training class - held at the Stasi college [Hochschule] that he was recruited by and convinced, or perhaps more accurately press ganged and ordered depending on one’s perspective, into joining. Of the other two auslanders, one was a sullen Ethiopian who Sang learned (years later when deployed in the Republic of Vietnam) had been killed in action while on operations with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command during the 1973 War; a conflict that, more than any other single purely military event, set in motion the decision making process that culminated in WARDAY a decade subsequent.
The other man was older - at least in his 40s - and a Pole. He had apparently defected immediately upon invasion of his homeland by the Red Army in 1939, for which he was rewarded with being unceremoniously shipped to a particularly notorious Gulag. The constant glare of the northern sun on the ice and snow in the frozen Hell that was his home for nearly four years had destroyed his vision. On account of this, the (prematurely) aged Pole wore dark sunglasses at all times, even indoors. He was said to have an I.Q. that had tested in the 170 range; this may have been a rationalization (the Warsaw Pact apparatchiks in every role, bureaucratic, military, or political were unfailingly prone to mythological apologetics). The Pole was without a doubt highly intelligent - but he was also likely the only truly reliable man who could be poached from that particularly recalcitrant country, and the SED was not about to admit that Socialism was failing to point of crisis in Poland (a country essential to the Warsaw Pact’s ability to deploy in meaningful depth).
Sang excelled at tests of physical prowess and intellectual aptitude. It was the psychological ardours that proved the only challenges to truly test his mettle. During a classroom seminar on the nuances of chemical assisted interrogation - in particular, the purported utility of Lysergic acid diethylamide as a potential ‘’truth serum’’ a man that Sang recognized as a Haputmann assigned to counter-intelligence whispered briefly into the instructor’s ear, who abruptly motioned for Sang to approach himself and the senior officer, the latter of whom directed him into the hallway - informing him that his wife and child had been killed in by American and Republic of Korea forces after failing to be evacuated from their home in a timely manner in the wake of a substantial portion of the province being designated a free fire zone.
Sang betrayed no emotion, returning to his classroom studies and field exercises. His outstanding resilience to emotional and psychological stressors of the most extreme degree were noted for the entire nine day period before Sang was informed that his wife and child were in fact alive and well and he was merely being tested for frailties of character or emotional constitution. The more challenging test was conducted on August 13 - Sang was roused from his dormitory bed at several minutes past two in the morning by a squadron of eight uniformed Volkspolizei, flanked by a National Volksarmee Oberst (Sang recognized the man from the tour he and his class were afforded of the Mfs campus in Berlin during his first full week in the country. He subsequently was informed that the man - name of Wiegand - was a career Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (Directorate of Reconnaissance) officer, at that time assigned to Abteilung A X (responsible for ‘direct action’ measures) and was liaising with headquarters for one reason or another. As Sang contemplated the man’s fearsome resume, the Oberst abruptly shouted at him in German (of no discernible regional dialect) that Sang was under arrest for espionage.
After a thorough working over by the uniformed Polizei, a hood was placed over Sang’s head, his wrists were cuffed tightly behind him, and he was kicked and stung by electrified cattle prods to a waiting truck (clad in nothing but his undershorts), which rapidly shuttled him to an interrogation center. Despite his near total disorientation, and mounting, desperate anxiety, Sang reasoned that owing to the approximate time spent in transit, approximately two and a half hours, that at average speed for a military vehicle, even one traveling on a dedicated access roadway, they had likely traveled roughly 120-140 miles.
The realization prompted a wave of physiological agony - a sharp pain as if Sang’s bowels were being pierced from within, accompanied by a wretched nausea and rush of bile and evil-tasting stomach acids rushing into his mouth. Less familiar than this physical agony was the unrelenting mortal terror that overtook him, in those moment in which Sang discerned the solidly structured, armored truck precipitously slowing in speed. Sang was about to arrive at Bautzen II Prison. Colloquially, the ‘’yellow misery’’. As certain as Sang Nam Wong had ever been of anything in his relatively brief and violent life, he was certain that he would die within the walls of this penological tomb, his remains merely ceasing to exist as would autumn leaves through the onslaught of following winter.
Hey Thomas, everywhere I came in contact with you I guess got canceled. Tough times for dissident POV. Finally found you here on sub stack. Subscribed. I also noticed you’re on Gab but haven’t been poasting. Come back. You have a lot of interesting things to say and that platform is taking off now. People need to hear you. I DM’d you there
Take care brother