Ton stared at the ceiling of the ambulance.
Somewhere he heard the siren rhythmic and shrill. He felt the dazzling sheet of pain in his shoulder while the nurse crouched over him administering care and morphine and he felt the vague sense of the hollow. His body shuddered when the ambulance pitched over the potholes in the road. Later, Brian showed me the picture of the exit wound. ‘They’re using dumb-dumbs’, he said. This turned out not to be true, but the rounds are so light, and so fast, they tumble through their victims. That photo I saw showed the cavity in Ton’s shoulder, at his back. It was ragged but round and roughly nine centimeters wide. The KNU are using bullets that explode the bodies of their victims.
Without papers, Ton had fled the village when the KNU turned up, and sprinted through the forest to catch up with his little girl and his wife also escaping. The automatic arms fire shredded the foliage he ran through and whizzed past his ears. His daughter scampered before him letting out little cries and whimpers when the bullets struck the rubber trees. Ton knew he was being aimed at and whispered sharply to his family to zig-zag, to go this way and that, so they couldn’t so easily be struck by the bullets. But his wife was trying to keep her close by. She’s nine, their daughter. And in any case, they are terrified just as he is, and a tactical response is obliterated by terror. His family were running from the craziness at the border, trying to get into Thailand. He was punched by the bullet and fell.
Forever he lay on the ground, it seemed like, thrown by that round. But he wasn’t alone. Intel was supportive. Mary knew there was shit going down and drove the ambulance to the area. He lay under the trees with his belly on the ground and his arms out. He smelt the earth under his nose. Now the nurses crunched over the leaf litter and retrieved him. Trauma flushes adrenalin into your system to quell the pain or it’s lights out. Ton was determined. He was listening to the birdsong and thinking about his child and his wife when the support arrived and hoisted him onto a stretcher.
The ferocious pain in his shoulder and his back he offset with the sight of his little one. Not the militia men did he think of, and their cruel ways. You and I would call it the brutal behaviour of Nazis. He closed his eyes to the ceiling of the ambulance and saw his child not running from the whizzing projectiles, or even his little girl falling; she was riding her bicycle; she was flying a box kite he’d made; swimming butterfly strokes in the lake (she was that good). The pain of the bullet to his shoulder dissolved in the vision of his child and her mother.
But now he looks at the ceiling of the ambulance and wonders where they are and then, with desperate focus, if he is going to die. If his family are dead. His little girl a crumpled form cradled by the dried up leaves of the forest and his wife by her side also broken by bullets.
Brian told me they needed plasma, and his CIA friend provided it immediately (gotta love the CIA), and Ton got his plasma and his wounds stitched up and his family back.
When Ton lay in the clinic, little Noi appeared in the ward and cried, ‘Daddy!’ and ran over to the bed and wrapped her arms around Ton’s head. His wife blessed him with flowers and prayers. Now they wait without papers, to see if they will be sent back.
