Chapter One - Richard Lewis

But she didn't respond to his overtures. The old animosity rekindled. At this time,
Mantera's father died, and after the cremation ceremonies, Mantera took over as head of
the palace. He summoned Arini's father, who sharecropped for the palace. Mantera told
him that his rice fields were being poorly farmed and they were going to be given to a
more product tenant. Arini's father protested, but Mantera did not relent.
Then he said, the palace needed another attendant who could cook. His daughter
Arini was a good cook, was she not? If her father sent her to work at the palace, then he
could continue sharecropping the fields.
When Arini's father ordered her to the palace, she took with her the pistol that
belonged to Catra's aunt, a former underground guerilla fighter. At the palace, in front of
a delegation from another royal house, she tried to shoot the boar in the sty, but she
misaimed and the kick of the pistol knocked her to the ground.
The police arrested her. That night her warung burned down. Her family brokered
a deal with the palace that exiled her for a year to Java. So she joined Catra at his
university and returned a married woman, the wife of the village's new schoolteacher.
On the recording, Dharma's voice says: "Mantera kicked Arini's father off the rice
fields, but I worked out a private deal and allowed him to farming as usual for his tenant's
share. A minor administrative headache for me, but it kept Arini's family from poverty."
Tina asks, "And what happened between Mantera and Arini when she returned as
Catra's wife?"
"Nothing," Dharma says. "Until 1965 and Gestapu."
In the late hours of September 30, 1965 and into the early morning of October 1st,
rogue leftist army units led by Lt. Colonel Untung of the Tjakrawibawa presidential
guard kidnapped six army generals from their Djakarta homes. They seized the
telecommunications office and surrounded the Presidential Palace. In his proclamation of
a new government, read out over the national radio, Lt. Colonel Untung declared this
action to be the 30 th September Movement and stated that that he was rescuing President
Sukarno and the Revolution from a Council of Generals who were planning an antirevolutionary
coup. Three generals were killed in the abduction, and three were taken
alive to Halim Air Force Base, which served as headquarters for the plot. At the time of
the coup, the Air Force was conducting paramilitary training at the base for Gerwani
women, with representatives of various mass organizations due to arrive soon. At Halim,
the three generals still alive were killed, and all six corpses, plus that of a junior officer,
were thrown down a nearby well. Later on October 1 st , President Sukarno visited Air
Force base and consulted with the ringleaders, thereby opening himself to accusations
that he himself had masterminded the plot.
The plotters had overlooked Major General Soeharto and his Red Berets, crack
commando troops. In the morning hours of October 1, Soeharto was already mobilizing
his men to counterattack. With little bloodshed, his loyalist officers talked the rogue
battalions back into their barracks and retook the telecommunications building. During an
evening assault, they also retook Halim Air Force base, with only a single fatality, that of
a water buffalo, accidentally shot.
On these events, the fate of the nation turned. No graceful pivot, but a lurching
violent swing. In a clever acronym with overtones of the Nazis, barbaric cousins to the
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