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By Root 767 0

among various unlovely private armies, organized criminals, former Vietnamese stooges, and extremist groups. The Khmer Rouge ‘defected’ to the ‘central government’ (such as it is), awhile back, in return for amnesty, and was basically given control of its former stronghold and cash cow in northern Cambodia, free to pursue its traditional pastimes of gem smuggling and lumbering – and its new gambling ventures. Those in the Khmer Rouge were given central government uniforms when they put down their guns, which means that nearly every male Cambodian of draft age, it seems, wears the same fatigues in one form or another, making it difficult to tell exactly who is robbing and extorting you on any given day. There are the much-feared private armies (everybody’s got one), which act mainly as security for various despotic scuzzballs and their relatives – with attendant hit men – making it a dangerous matter if some drunken lout steps on your toe in a nightclub and you voice your displeasure too expressively.

Driving out by the airport one afternoon, my cabdriver pulled his car over suddenly, as did everyone else on the road. A police escort whipped by, sirens screaming, followed in short order by a spanking new black Humvee with tinted windows.

‘Hun Sen nephew,’ said my driver with distaste. Hun Sen’s family and friends are the subject of frequent stories of drunken beatings, stabbings, and pistol-whippings, when one of them gets cranky during an evening out in the discos. There’s a famous tale of the time one business associate arrived at Pochentong Airport on a commercial airliner. Told that the airline had misplaced his luggage, he is said to have disembarked, procured a gun from a waiting flunky, then begun shooting out the airplane’s tires until his belongings were recovered. Needless to say, this behavior did not result in arrest.

Shooting things, if you have enough money in your pocket, is perfectly all right in Cambodia. Drinks are free at the Gun Club. Ammunition, however, you pay for by the clip.

My waiter, a slim, friendly Khmer, stood over my shoulder as I perused the menu. A tray of Angkor and Tiger beers sat in the middle of the table. Under the thatched roof of the long, open shelter, a few well-muscled soldiers in paratrooper camos from the nearby base sat at another table, unsmiling behind their sunglasses, drinking sodas and beer.

‘I think I’ll start off with three clips for the .45 . . . three clips for the AK-47 . . . followed by an entrée of five clips for the M16 – can I have some grenades on the side?’

‘You like James Bond?’ asked my waiter, refilling my glass for me. ‘You like James Bond gun?’

‘Depends,’ I said. ‘Sean Connery or Roger Moore. If we’re talking Roger Moore, forget about it.’

‘Look!’ said my waiter, dangling an automatic pistol in front of my face. ‘Walther PPK! James Bond gun! . . . You like?’

‘Sure,’ I said, hefting the thing over a picnic snack of baguette and sausage I’d brought along. ‘I’ll try it.’

You’ve got to admire an establishment that invites its customers to get drunk and then fire automatic weapons indiscriminately. Next to the gun racks and the ammunition locker, at the Gun Club, there was a sign on the wall that said in big block letters Please Don’t Point Your Weapon at Anything You Do Not Intend to Shoot. This being Cambodia, I thought the text left a lot of room open for interpretation. A Japanese businessman boozily pulling the pin from a grenade a few feet away gave a glassy-eyed look in my direction, smiled, and hurled the thing at a target about fifty feet away. Boom! Next time I looked over, he was playing with an M16, trying to jam a full clip into the rifle – backward.

I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t have a great time. Firing bursts from heavy weapons at paper targets of charging Russians is fun. I did surprisingly well with the AK-47 and the .45, hitting center body mass almost every time. At one point, his hands over his ears to protect them from the racket of my discharging weapon, my waiter tugged my sleeve and asked, ‘So . . . whey you from?’

‘New