Stephan Talty by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Tibet Autonomous Region (China), Escapes, Bstan-Dzin-Rgya-Mtsho - Childhood and Youth, Tibetan, Tibet, Dalai Lamas, Asia, General, Escapes - China - Tibet, Religion, Buddhism, China, Biography & Autobiography, Religious, History
ISBN: 9780307460950
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2010-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

After a few hours of exchanging gunfire with the Chinese at the transport station, Soepa realized the PLA was winning. “Their bullets were finding their mark and many were killed on our side.” As morning approached and the first rays of the sun lightened the sky, Soepa looked around and counted ten corpses nearby, “blood oozing from everywhere,” with many more injured, crying out for water or moaning as they lost consciousness. He ran back into the interior of the Norbulingka, ravenously hungry now, and found a spot behind the office of the Tibetan cabinet that seemed sheltered from the shells falling across the gardens and government buildings. Another fighter sat and ate with him, but minutes later, a mortar shell dropped a few feet away, sending shrapnel and a huge cloud of dust over the crouching figures. Soepa shook the dust off as his companion staggered off, cup still in hand, then collapsed and died.

The sculptured grounds of the summer palace became a killing zone ruled by randomness. No one was in charge. No Tibetan commander had a battle plan or really an objective other than holding the Chinese off. There was no chain of command to consult. No one, it seemed, had any sense of tactical street warfare or an idea of the PLA’s vulnerabilities. The enemy was not even visible, only his victims. The Tibetans, wholly unprepared for war, were slowly being blown up by the Chinese artillery and picked off by its sharpshooters. Yet few ran away. The rebels felt they had to stay to defend the palace and His Holiness, who many believed was still hidden on the grounds. Soepa and hundreds of other brave and utterly confused men ran back and forth from the gates to the buildings in the interior, as the smoke drifted from the Chinese artillery batteries and fires broke out in the palaces and chapels. Soepa remembered conversation after conversation with people who emerged out of the darkness and the billowing dust, each reciting his own fragment of the war situation, only to disappear again on an errand or to be scattered by a shell dropping from the sky.

The dead were now “everywhere”:

There was one man who had his backside ripped off, and he was breathing, I could see blood spewing out. He called me and asked me to shoot him, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Shells blew human bodies into pieces. Legs, hands and broken pieces rained down with the dust.

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