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go to these target ranges and exercise their adrenal glands by firing rifles and machine guns until the cows came home. No handguns, mind you, only shoulder weapons. High-end customers, however, were sometimes allowed to fire small rockets. At one such establishment, those wishing a truly special holiday memory to take with them back to the States were shown how to throw hand grenades.
At length, all this became too much for the government, which began cracking down amid calls for more calm in the society generally. This was the stage, for example, at which, in a development frequently mentioned even now, banks began forbidding customers to carry automatic weapons onto bank property lest their motive be misunderstood by staff and fellow patrons. The result was that only one shooting range remained and it was part of the government, which profited from it just as the private sector had done when competition was fierce. The range was located at an army training camp where, in a dazzling coincidence, Vorn’s uncle was in charge. Vorn looked over at my khakis and briefly took his right hand off the wheel to feel the material admiringly.
“I telled him you are Canada ambassador in country,” he said.
I could have throttled him right there as he sat at his steering wheel. Instead, I only sighed.
At length we came to a dirt road with a fork in it. One path led to a go-kart track, the other to the army camp. The camp, which had various obstacle courses and the like, seemed quite crowded and busy. There was a long queue of recruits in shiny new helmets waiting to climb to the top of a tall wooden tower and jump off the other side: part of their training to be parachutists. The uncle, whom Vorn told me was a colonel (he looked like a colonel all right), came out to greet us accompanied by two soldiers of other ranks, all of them wearing fatigues, but without any flashes or insignia. I was shown to a little wooden structure somewhat like a garden trellis. One stood under this facing an earthen track at the far end of which was a bull’s-eye target.
“You can shoot at that,” said the colonel, “or I can have a live chicken run across for you to shoot at.”
I said the paper target would do just fine. He handed me an AK-47, showing me the safety and the selector switch.
Now over the years I’ve written “AK-47” any number of times in one book or another and in this or that piece of reportage. I’ve made similarly cavalier use of the term “M-16” for the weapon developed by the United States in answer to the Soviet Union’s Kalashnikov. Certainly I’ve often enough seen both weapons close up, as they have been shamelessly copycatted by other countries round the world. I’ve ever had them pointed at me. Please forgive my bad manners if I quote something I published a few years ago. Given the choice, I wrote:
Some people will always choose the ripoff of the American technology while others inevitably would pick the AK-47 or one of its younger siblings, two of whose banana clips can be joined together with duct tape for twice its rival’s load. Like PC and Mac users, or Coke and Pepsi drinkers, never the twain shall meet. One day there will be a war between people separated by nothing more than such preferences in the tools of war.
Until now, however, I had never actually been in a position to compare the two weapons. Now I fired a few thirty-round clips with each one, first single shots, then short bursts, and finally rock ’n’ roll. The weapon designed for the Red Army by General Mikhail Kalashnikov when he was a sergeant is light, easy to handle, and mechanically simple. In a sense, it is the ballpoint pen of death; when it breaks, you throw it away and get another. The M-16 is more solidly constructed and more accurate. It’s also heavier to carry and is said to be less reliable under certain conditions.
When I finished, the colonel was smiling at me. He offered me what he considered a special treat: the chance to fire an M-60 machine gun, one of those fed by a circular drum on top. It was a Chinese weapon of mature years, one I’d only ever seen in movies. It had a bipod, suggesting that it was to be fired from a prone position, but conditions at this makeshift range weren’t set up for that, so I fired it while standing, first from the shoulder, then from the hip. I suppose I’m of average strength for a fellow of my age and skeletal frame, but I couldn’t control the weapon very well, at least not on rapid fire.
I suspected that all the busy-ness at the camp, and maybe the reason Vorn was invited to bring me there for a look-see, had to do with the latest outbreak of ill will between Cambodia and Thailand about the eleventh-century temple complex the Khmers call Prasat Preah Vihear, but the Thais insist is named Khao Phra Vilharn. It is perched on a cliff 550 metres above the border between the two countries about 450 kilometres north of Phnom Penh. Centuries of Thai sovereignty over the spot ended with the 1907 treaty, but in 1959, the Thais grabbed it a second time, only to lose it again in 1962. Since then, emotions have boiled over frequently, as was the case at the time I’m describing, and the uneasy peace was being disturbed by exchanges of mortar and artillery fire.
In any event, I returned the ear plugs I had been lent, and was led away to a small display of landmines and booby traps. On the way back to Vorn’s car, my ambassadorial boots were crunching over a thick stratum of discarded shell casings. Why they weren’t being either recycled or sold for scrap, I couldn’t imagine. I bent down and picked up a few for examination. They were Chinese.
— THE VICTORY GATE —
Vientiane, the capital of Laos, is a fading one-time French colonial outpost on a spot where a bend in the Mekong makes room for a large tear-shaped island directly opposite the centre-ville, which runs only far enough back from the riverbank to allow a few commercial streets. The new bridge to Thailand is only a short distance away. Thai-style wats and other temples, minor and major, are everywhere. Otherwise, barring the usual joint-venture hotels and such, the architecture is either Chinese-style shophouses, many of them quite elderly, or French buildings recalling the old days. The latter include the Presidential Palace, formerly the French governor’s palace, and large French villas, expropriated at Independence, but left to ruin because no new use for them, or money to maintain them, could be found. They stand in overgrown lawns, their windows shuttered or punched out.
The most bizarre architectural remembrance of the French century is the Patuxai, or Victory Gate, a miniature copy of the Arc de Triomphe, sort of, but with enormous Buddhist spires on top. Such blending of French and Southeast Asian architectural styles became common in time, especially in Vietnam. This example stands at the terminus of the local equivalent of the Champs-Elysées. It is seven storeys high and contains stalls for the sale of knick-knacks. In other parts of the world, as well, the French enjoyed erecting monuments in the middle of traffic roundabouts. As I write these words, plans are afoot to rebuild the one that they put up in the middle of Rasheed Street in Baghdad, a once-grand boulevard that the American invasion turned into rubble. In Vientiane, neglect is more apparent than violence. This is not the case, however, in the more northerly part of the country.
In a sense, the Lao nation is more of a bald political construct than an organic expression of what’s nonetheless, admittedly, an interesting and vibrant culture. For century after century, its people were under the control of either the Thais (their close cousins) or the imperial Chinese. The French didn’t begin to insinuate themselves into the picture until after the Taiping Rebellion of 1845−65, instigated by a Chinese mystic named Hong Xiuquan who believed himself to be the brother of Jesus (not James, the one mentioned in the Bible — another one). He led China into the costliest civil war in world history, in which at least 20 million people were killed. After only eleven years in power, however, the rebels were driven from their capital, Nanjing, and decimated. The survivors, called Ho, dispersed into the mountainous no man’s land in southern China where, in those days, the lines on the map separating China from northern hinterlands of modern Laos and Vietnam began to blur. There the Ho lived by plundering, kidnapping, murder, and extortion. They also fought one another. This was especially the case with two factions named for the colour of their battle flags. The French, who were nosing about, looking for a lucrative route to China, knew them as Les Pavillons Jaunes and Les Pavillons Noirs. The Black Flags were arguably the more frightening of the two. They also acted as mercenaries, retained by the Vietnamese emperor