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The following day, as we were driving back to Phnom Penh, I could tell that Vorn was up to something, but I couldn’t tell what. Finally, not more than an hour away from the metropolis, he let it slip with perfect timing. Permit me to summarize what was in fact a long conversation often interrupted by honking at water buffalo and other drivers.

When all of Cambodia’s cumulative military troubles — Americans, rebels, Pol Pot, Vietnamese, peacekeepers — finally subsided, the country was left with an enormous stockpile of small arms and ammunition, tonne upon tonne of the stuff, cached or abandoned and turning up everywhere. If properly stored, ammunition can have a very long life before becoming unstable. Clever businessmen, testing entrepreneurial instincts that had lain dormant during long years of totally state-driven economics, started buying up the stuff and opening shooting galleries. This coincided with the rise in Western tourism. Visitors would 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.