Highways to a War

Contents

 

 

 

Acclaim for
Highways to a War

“Here is a mystery that is not a mystery, an adventure that is very much more than that, a subtle unfolding of character and history camouflaged in battle-dress.
Highways to a War
is an absorbing portrait of lives lived at the edges of terror and beauty ... Ly Keang’s febrile vibrancy, in particular, seems to stand for everything lovely and lost in her overrun country. At the centre of it all is Mike Langford ... a hero of the kind that has become unfashionable. But Koch has endowed his creation with a soul: his disembodied voice, captured in his diary, reaches out to the reader.... Koch is a powerful writer and this is a fine book.”

—Erica Wagner,
The Times
(London)

 

“A quite outstanding novel about the Indochina War, the best I have read since Graham Greene’s
The Quiet American.
Koch ... has brilliantly captured the mood and atmosphere of the times. He describes with almost uncanny accuracy people, places and incidents that are part of my own experience. It is a vivid, exciting and finally tragic story about a courageous man and two women, one of them French-Vietnamese, the other Cambodian, both brilliantly brought to life.”

—Richard West,
Literary Review
(London)

 

“Mike Langford ... is an obsessive idealist of the kind Koch has made his specialty: like Billy Kwan in
The Year of Living Dangerously,
he has the gift (or curse) of total identification ... The elder stateswoman of Franco-Vietnamese style, the lover from Battambang, the seedy secret servicemen ... have the air of characters in Greene, the compass of characters in James. The prose is so carefully tooled, you hardly notice how well it works. ... The narcotic attraction of the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia produced masterly fiction ... Christopher Koch’s magnificent new novel takes its rightful place beside these masterpieces: in its humanity and honesty, and the maturity of its storytelling, it belongs with the finest products of that sad and wasteful history.”

—Michael Hulse,
The Spectator

 

“This is not only a pulse-pumping depiction of combat and the journalists who cover it, but such a wonderful evocation of the old Indochina that it will have many a retired war correspondent weeping into his beer.”

—Phillip Knightley,
The Mail on Sunday
(London) “Koch has long been regarded as one of Australia’s finest writers, praised for his sensitive use of language and meticulous attention to detail ... These qualities are abundantly apparent in this, his fifth novel.... Above all, the book is rewarding because it brings alive a world that increasingly large numbers of readers will never have experienced and which others are beginning to forget. This is the author’s most striking achievement.”

—Milton Osborne,
The New York Herald Tribune

 

“Koch contributes powerfully to the imaginative literature of a period and place that history will ponder for generations. The book’s publication is an important event.”—Frank Devine,
The Australian

PENGUIN BOOKS

HIGHWAYS TO A WAR

Christopher J. Koch is the author of several novels, including
The Year of Living Dangerously,
which was made into a film starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver. An Australian who has both worked and traveled extensively in Southeast Asia, he currently makes his home in Tasmania.

Also by Christopher J. Koch

NOVELS

 

 

 

 

 

ESSAYS

 

 

 

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books USA Inc , 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

 

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc 1995
Published in Penguin Books 1996

Copyright © Christopher J Koch, 1995 All rights reserved

 

PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work offiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or
are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:
“Warning” from
Collected Poems
by James McAuley
“The Slowly, Slowly Poem” and “At White Deer Spring” from
Pilgrim of the Clouds
by Yuan Hung-tao,
translated by Jonathan Chaves.
“Myself’ by Po Chu-1, translated by L. Cranmer-Byng from
A Feast of Lanterns.
”Ting The Cauldron“ from
The I Chmg or Book of Changes
The Richard Wilhelm translation rendered into
English by Cary F. Baynes, Bollingen Series XIX Copyright 1950, 1967, © renewed 1977 by Princeton Univer
sity Press.
Number nine of ”Seventeen Old Poems“ from
Chinese Poems
edited and translated by Arthur Waley

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-16172-2

1. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975—Fiction. 2. War photographers-Australia-Fiction.
3. War photographers-Cambodia-Fiction. 4 Missing persons—Cambodia—Fiction.
1. Title.
PR9619.3.K64H54 1995
823—dc2G 94-34603

 

 

 

Beware of the past;
Within it lie
Dark haunted pools
That lure the eye
To drown in grief or madness.
Things that are gone,
Or never were,
The Adversary
Weaves to a snare,
The mystery of sadness.
James McAuley,
Warning

This book is one of a related pair: a diptych. The second will follow shortly.

Each can be read without reference to the other, and each stands on its own as a story. But there are correspondences and factual links: the principal link being that Mike Langford is the illegitimate great-great-grandson of Robert Devereux, whose story is told in the second novel.

Which order the books are read in isn’t important. The order in which they’re currently appearing places the present before the past; but ultimately their sequence can be a matter of taste—depending on whether the reader prefers to see the present carrying messages from the past, or the past delivering messages to the present.

 

 

Being in battle, like being in love, is one of the fundamental human experiences, and without the many conversations I’ve had with correspondents and cameramen who covered the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, I could not have written
Highways to a War.
When my characters speak of battle, it’s in the voices of these friends and acquaintances, who were unstintingly generous with their time. Many voices speak through me in this book, and I’ve tried to be faithful to them.

Among the war photographers, I owe thanks in particular to James Gerrand, David Brill, Hubert Van Es, Derek Williams and the late Yosep (Joe) Lee.

Among those former foreign correspondents whose talk has been invaluable to me, and who covered both the Indochina war and the old Southeast Asia of the sixties and seventies, I’m particularly indebted to Carl Robinson, Tim Bowden, Peter Barnett, Barry Wain, the late William Pinwill, and my brother Philip Koch.

Two authors and scholars who are experts on Cambodia were also very generous with their time and knowledge: Professor David Chandler, of Monash University, and Dr. Milton Osborne. My sincere thanks to them both.

 

 

The conflicts in Vietnam and Cambodia form the background here for a work of fiction. The characters and the events portrayed are inventions, and should be seen as such. Only the historical events are true.

Few wars have divided our society as the Vietnam War did, and these divisions are reflected among my fictitious correspondents, who range in their political opinions through the spectrum from Left to Right. None of their opinions is necessarily the author‘s—and I make no claims to any sort of wisdom about that long and bitter saga which did so much to dominate the second half of this century. A novelist’s commitment, in my view, should not be to the prescriptions of ideology, but to the conflicts and ethical dilemmas that grip his characters. Those here are of a kind that I hope go beyond the fabricated questions and answers of politics, as they do in life.

In the interests of background accuracy, I’ve read as widely as possible. Two superb works on the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia respectively have never been far from my hand, and should be acknowledged: A
Bright Shining Lie,
by Neil Sheehan, and
Sideshow,
by William Shawcross. I should also state my indebtedness to the correspondent Kate Webb’s remarkable book,
On the Other Side
—an account of her capture by the Viet Cong. This provided some valuable physical detail for the chapter
The Common Pot,
which principally took its inspiration from conversations I once had with the late Joe Lee, a Korean cameraman who was captured by the North Vietnamese Army while filming battle in Cambodia in 1970.

Finally, the influence and inspiration of two other books must be acknowledged:
One Crowded Hour,
Tim Bowden’s account of the life of the combat cameraman Neil Davis, and
Page After Page,
the autobiography of the cameraman and stills photographer Tim Page.

The late Neil Davis, my fellow-Tasmanian and schoolmate at Hobart High, who covered combat for a decade in Indochina, and was killed covering a minor Thai coup in 1985, may be seen by those who knew him as the model for Mike Langford. In this they will be partly right—but only partly. Mike Langford’s legend is similar to Davis‘s, and Mike carries the nickname that was once Neil’s: “the Lucky One.” But as is usually the case with characters in novels, Langford is a composite: mostly invented, and inspired as well by other war photographers—some of them friends, others men whom I’ve never met. And despite his Tasmanian origins, Langford’s family background is entirely different from Davis’s. So too are all his personal relationships, the crucial events of his life, and his eventual fate. All are essentially fictions.

There is one exception: although even here, I’m afraid, fiction has played fast and loose with fact. On the day after the fall of Saigon, Mike Langford waits inside the grounds of the Presidential Palace as Neil Davis did, to find himself filming the arrival of the first North Vietnamese tank through the gates. But Mike is taking still pictures, not shooting film, no real-life equivalent of Jim Feng was there at all, and the personal circumstances underlying this sequence are also fictitious.