Lt. Gen. Nhek Bun Chhay, like countless Cambodian fighting men over the centuries, wears a blanket of tattoos across his chest and a string of talismans and boar tusks around his neck.
"It is a Cambodian belief to have this protection against bullets," the armed forces deputy chief of staff said. "Many times I have been shot at but never hit."While the stocky general and Cambodia's tattoo masters swear by the power of the ancient designs, maimed soldiers in hospitals around the country seem to tell another story about the efficacy of the pictorial panaceas and magic medallions they sport.
"Before I believed in it very much, but I don't rely on it after I lost my right forearm in a mine blast," said Hem Saron, 29, at Phnom Penh's Preah Ket Mealea military hospital, adding that the chest tattoos had protected him for eight years.
"The magic's gone from my body . . . for the first one or two years it was strong, then it became less and less, and now it's gone," added the intelligence agent who lost his limb while on a mission against Khmer Rouge guerrillas.
Keo Vibol, a tattoo master whose body is a blue-black blur of ink animals, ancient script, ornate designs and human figures, acknowledges the magic can fail but maintains this is because the wearer has not followed the instructions of his kru (teacher).
"When the person with the tattoo does something wrong and forgets what their teacher said, something will happen to him," said the former monk turned soldier, who has pricked protective images on to the skins of thousands of soldiers and civilians.
Nhek Bun Chhay, who has been wearing tattoos for more than 15 years, agreed, saying: "Some men who have this are protected, some not - you have to do some good deeds."
Keo Vibol takes great care in the preparation and execution of the tattoos after his clients have chosen from hundreds of designs, some centuries old, that he has been carrying for years in tattered notebooks and on scraps of paper.
"I use a special needle and make a special (Buddhist) sermon to the needle so when it pierces the skin it can't bleed or hurt," the 43-year-old army major said, before practising his art on a grim-faced colleague as incense burned on a nearby altar.
The rusty-looking needle, more like a dart that had been fitted onto the end of an umbrella spoke, was charged with black ink made from animal bile. Keo Vibol kept up a continuous chant as he jabbed the needle in and out of the chest flesh.
He says his own tattoos have protected him from mines and bullets for the past two decades, while his wife Sang Savin swears to the properties of the simple but distinctive tattoos that cross the top of her chest and run down one calf and a forearm.
Sang Savin firmly believes in their power and recalls an incident when she had lived at a guerrilla camp during the 1980s civil war. "At one time I followed my husband and the person without tattoos who kept behind me stepped on a mine. But I was all right and so was my husband."