(Or: How Good Intentions Paved a Road Straight to Hell)
You want to know about evil? Real evil—not the kind that
comes slouching out of old Pet Sematary grounds or shambling through the mist
with tentacles where its face should be. No, friend, I’m talking about the kind
of evil that wears a uniform and carries orders from men who’ve never smelled
cordite or seen what a .303 round does to a human skull at close range.
The kind that happened in a little place called Bekasi, back
in 1945, when the world was supposedly getting sane again.
But let me back up a minute, because this story—like all the
good ones, like all the true ones—starts with the best of intentions.
The Sky Was Falling
Picture this: November 23rd, 1945. The war’s over, or
supposed to be, anyway. The rice paddies around Cakung shimmer like green silk
in the Indonesian sun, and somewhere high above, a C-47 Dakota is coughing like
an old man with lung rot. Inside that bird, twenty-five souls—five Brits who
probably missed their mums’ shepherd’s pie, and twenty Sikh soldiers who’d seen
more than their share of dying in a war that had finally, finally wound
down to its bloody end.
The pilot—let’s call him Henderson, because there’s always a
Henderson in these stories—felt his starboard engine start to miss, then catch,
then miss again with the irregular rhythm of a failing heart. Below him, the
rice fields of Rawa Gatel spread out like a green carpet, and Henderson knew
with the cold certainty that comes to men about to die that he was going down.
“Mayday, mayday,” he radioed back to Kemayoran Airfield, but
the radio crackled with static like something alive and hungry was eating his
words before they could reach safety.
The Dakota hit the rice paddies at 11 a.m. with the sound of
God’s own trash compactor, belly-sliding through the muck and stalks until
physics finally called it quits.
The Road to Hell
Now here’s where it gets interesting, boys and girls. Here’s
where good intentions start building that road.
The villagers came running—not with pitchforks and torches
like in the movies, but with genuine concern etched on their sun-weathered
faces. These were farmers, simple people who understood that when something
falls from the sky, you help if you can. The independence fever was running hot
in their blood, sure, but so was basic human decency.
Harian Merdeka got it right when they wrote it up
later: “The people came to offer help, not to attack.”
But here’s the thing about fear—it’s got a language all its
own, and it doesn’t need a translator. Those British soldiers, rattled and
bleeding and a long way from home, looked out at the approaching crowd and saw
not good Samaritans but something else entirely. Something that moved with
purpose through the rice stalks.
The first shot cracked across the humid air like a breaking
bone.
Then all hell, as they say, broke loose.
When the Shooting Started
You ever been in a situation where everything goes sideways
in about three seconds? Where the world shifts from normal to nightmare so fast
you get whiplash? That’s what happened in those rice paddies.
The Brits opened fire—scared men with scared fingers on
scared triggers—and the bullets found their marks because bullets always do.
Villagers dropped into the muck, their life’s blood mixing with the muddy
water, and suddenly those good intentions turned into something else entirely.
Something with teeth.
The crowd didn’t scatter. No sir. Instead, they did what
crowds do when they taste blood and injustice in the same mouthful—they got mad.
And an angry crowd is like a living thing, a beast with a thousand hands and
one terrible purpose.
They swarmed the Dakota like ants on a dropped ice cream
cone. The British soldiers, trained though they were, found themselves
outnumbered about a hundred to one by people who’d suddenly remembered what
occupation felt like, what it meant to have foreigners’ guns pointed at their
children.
The crew was subdued. Captured. Dragged before H. Maksum of
the Barisan Rakyat, then marched like cattle to the TKR headquarters in Ujung
Menteng. From there, to the police barracks in Bekasi.
And that’s where the real horror show began.
What Happened in the Dark
What they did to those twenty-five men in the Bekasi
barracks… well, let’s just say that human beings, when they get their blood up,
can make the monsters in my books look like choir boys.
De Telegraaf would later report that republican units
killed the entire Dakota crew. The group they blamed—and isn’t there always
someone to blame?—was something called the Zwarte Buffel. The Black
Buffalo Militia.
But it wasn’t just killing. No, that would have been too
simple, too clean. What happened was mutilation. Systematic, deliberate,
creative mutilation that would have impressed the Spanish Inquisition.
Some were left alive but crippled for life—walking reminders
of what happens when you point guns at people who’ve had guns pointed at them
for too long. The dead ones? Their bodies were carved up like Thanksgiving
turkeys and dumped in the river behind the barracks, where they floated
belly-up under the Indonesian sun.
No single person gave the order. That’s what made it so
terrible, so... natural. It just happened, the way forest fires happen,
the way cancer happens. One moment, twenty-five men were alive. The next, they
were meat.
The Reckoning
General Christison—and there’s always a Christison in these
stories too, isn’t there?—heard the news and went what you might call apeshit.
The kind of furious that makes sensible men do insensible things.
Within hours, he’d mobilized a full company of Punjab
infantry, a cavalry squadron, fifty trucks, and five cannons. All to hunt down
a militia that called itself Black Buffalo and the people who’d dared to defend
themselves.
November 24th, 1945. The day Bekasi died.
Richard MacMillan, in his dry-as-dust academic way, recorded
it for posterity: Companies B, C, and D of the 6/5 Mahratta Light Infantry
Battalion rolled into Bekasi like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, if the
Four Horsemen had driven tanks and carried flame-throwers.
They found what was left of the Dakota crew near a canal.
The Battalion War Diary—written by men trained to be clinical about
horror—described bodies “shattered into pieces, one arm severed. Many wounds
all over the body.”
But finding the bodies wasn’t enough for Christison. Not
nearly enough.
Burn, Baby, Burn
“Burn Bekasi!”
Two words. That’s all it took to turn a town into a memory.
Six hundred homes went up in flames. Six hundred families’
entire lives reduced to ash and smoke that hung over the rice paddies like a
funeral shroud. The order came straight from the Brigade Commander, and his
boys carried it out with the thoroughness that only professional soldiers can
muster.
They found a villager hiding in a wooden house—probably just
some poor bastard who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time—clutching
Indian Army uniforms and a rifle. What happened to him after that, well, the
records don’t say. But you can probably guess.
Even the Chinese community, who’d had nothing to do with any
of it, got caught in the crossfire. Sixty Chinese homes burned, three hundred
people left homeless. Because when you’re painting with fire, precision isn’t
really the point.
More than twenty Chinese residents were taken captive, and
the houses that survived the flames got looted by locals who figured if the
world was ending, they might as well grab what they could.
The Last Stand
Some folks fought back, of course. About a hundred
republican fighters with swords and rifles tried to make a stand against
Company B. Brave men, or maybe just men with nothing left to lose.
They died like wheat before a scythe. Twenty-five killed,
twenty wounded, fifteen captured. Five more tried to run and got cut down by
Company D before they made it fifty yards.
On the British side? One Indian soldier dead, a few minor
injuries.
That’s how lopsided it was. That’s how it always is when
professional killers meet desperate farmers.
In Pondok Ungu, K.H. Noer Ali and his Hizbullah fighters
made their own stand at the Cakung River, supported by TKR Navy forces and a
silat master named Ama Puradiredja. They fought with bamboo spears and machetes
against tactical tanks.
The Battle of Sasak Kapuk, they called it later. Nobody won,
but everybody lost something.
The Hunters and the Hunted
The Black Buffalo Militia—the ones blamed for starting it
all—they got hunted down like rabid dogs. Het Dagblad reported that six
were arrested in Klender in 1947, two years after the fact. The other sixty who’d
fled were tracked down and killed wherever they were found.
By December 1945, Bekasi was a ghost town. Empty streets,
burned foundations, and the sweet-sick smell of death that hangs around places
where too much blood has been spilled.
“A Dutch boy, 20 Chinese and Indonesians, and three Ambonese
women were freed from prison,” MacMillan wrote with clinical precision. “One
Ambonese woman stated that the RAF crew and Indian troops had all been killed
two or three days earlier. Their corpses were found by Company D… buried on the
riverbank.”
The Judgment of History
Even the Algemeen Indisch Dagblad called Christison’s
actions “too extreme,” comparing them to Nazi genocide. That’s when you know
you’ve crossed a line—when the newspapers start using the N-word to describe
your handiwork.
Louis Mountbatten, Christison’s superior, felt “disturbed”
by the whole business. He raised it with the British Chief of Staff, but by
then the damage was done, the dead were buried, and the living had learned a
hard lesson about what happens when good intentions meet bad circumstances.
Christison defended himself, of course. They always do.
Called it “operational necessity” instead of retaliation. Used the kind of
doublespeak that turns murder into policy and genocide into crowd control.
The Moral of the Story
So what’s the point of all this ancient history, you might
ask? What’s the moral of this particular tale of woe?
Maybe it’s that evil isn’t some supernatural force that
comes crawling out of the sewer drains or materializing in your bedroom closet.
Maybe evil is just what happens when scared people with guns meet other scared
people with guns, and nobody’s willing to back down first.
Maybe it’s that good intentions, as my old friend Elmore
Leonard used to say, are like assholes—everybody’s got one, and most of them
stink.
Or maybe—and this is the part that keeps me up at
night—maybe it’s that we’re all just one bad day, one moment of panic, one
misunderstood gesture away from becoming the monsters in someone else’s story.
The people of Cakung wanted to help. The British soldiers
wanted to survive. General Christison wanted to send a message. The Black
Buffalo Militia wanted… what? Revenge? Justice? Or just to strike back at a
world that had been striking them for too damn long?
In the end, it doesn’t matter what anybody wanted. What
matters is what happened. What matters is that twenty-five men died badly, six
hundred families lost their homes, and a piece of Indonesia’s soul got burned
away with the rest of Bekasi.
That’s the thing about evil, friends and neighbors. It doesn’t
need a reason. It just needs an opportunity.
And in November 1945, in a little place called Bekasi,
opportunity knocked.
And somebody answered the door.
Comments
Post a Comment