Highways to a War (16 page)

The picture-like most of the others Mike: left me—is a black-and-white news-style photograph, six inches by eight. So the Budgie’s flamboyant blues and yellows can’t be seen, and the fabled vehicle looks like any other dilapidated Jeep with the top cut off. The photograph is typical of a good many others taken at this time: pictures that Langford and Jim Feng and their CBS competitor Dmitri Volkov shot of each other for amusement in the field, in periods of waiting. They’re laughing in nearly all these pictures.

Vietnam in the sixties was the peak of their youth. Middle age and the war in Cambodia were scarcely visible on the horizon, and laughter was like breathing. But Vietnam was also the place where their youth casually vanished. It vanished while they shot the action; vanished while they joked. Jokes were their food: more necessary than whiskey, or the many other stimulants the region and the period had to offer. They were high on everything, in those years, but their greatest high was risk: that sprint along the near edge of death they never tired of repeating.

The surviving combat cameramen who were Langford’s friends continue to chase stories, in their middle age—but the big story is over for them. They linger in Hong Kong; Bangkok; Singapore. Each year, their cumbersome gear has been getting a little heavier for the cinecameramen to carry, and the stills photographers find their wind growing shorter, their reflexes slowing. They’re like those aging gunmen in the Western movies that Mike and I watched in the little cinema in New Norfolk, on Saturday afternoons. It’s time for them to hang up their irons.

But how can they do that? The greatest high of all will be gone then: the one presided over by Dis, commander of the dead, whose other name is Meaning.

 

 

He arrived in Vietnam in the May of Rolling Thunder, coming in, as everybody did, through Tan Son Nhut.

The Pan American Boeing 707 banked as it prepared to land, leaning at an angle that passenger aircraft didn’t usually attempt: a precaution against Viet Cong snipers on the ground. The landscape tilted on its side, filling the whole porthole, and Langford was looking at flat, sack-brown spaces, thin dark lines of trees and long silver canals, rushing upwards. The plane dropped lower, returning to the horizontal, and the airfield appeared.

In this year, the United States Military Assistance Command in Vietnam had transformed a sleepy civil airport into one of the busiest on earth. Lined and teeming and glittering with aircraft, Tan Son Nhut had become a military citadel, with taxiways, highspeed turnoffs, operations buildings, mess halls and barracks, its air-conditioned PX stores and commissaries carrying every necessity of American life from ice cream to stereo systems. Aircraft landed and took off without cease, so that seldom less than a dozen were airborne at one time. Concrete runways stretched to the horizon.

The 707 taxied in between rows of screens painted military green, where pierced-steel planking flashed in the sun. Scores of American servicemen in olive fatigue caps and T-shirts tended Phantoms, Thunderchiefs and Super Sabres: fighter-bombers molded so exquisitely for speed that they seemed to breathe not death but exhilaration: lovely darts, crafted to puncture reality’s barrier, and then go on. Beside them were Hercules transports like winged barns, and the helicopter transports and gunships of the new age: the Shawnees, Hueys and Chinooks that were changing the style of war.

Tan Son Nhut was the imperial platform from which the war was being directed. From here, the United States had just launched Operation Rolling Thunder: the full-scale bombing of the North which was intended to end the struggle. But it would not end the struggle; the war was merely beginning.

Coming down the gangway, squinting in the blinding heat that rebounded from the tarmac, greeted by smells of aviation fuel and the roar of afterburners, Leica around his neck, camera bag over his shoulder, Langford was entering his future: that war whose remorseless sequences would devour the rest of his life.

 

 

The Big Budgie’s blue and cream color scheme was intended to advertise the fact that it was no longer a military vehicle. According to Jim Feng, this dissuaded the Viet Cong guerrillas in the city from bombing it. Or he hoped that it did: you could never be sure. He kept the Budgie parked in the garage of the Continental Palace Hotel on Tu Do Street, where he and Langford were sharing a room.

At the wheel of the Budgie now, with Langford beside him, Jim drove with hair-raising skill, swinging and weaving through Tu Do’s evening traffic. Both men wore garlands of wild jasmine, sold to them by child hawkers who worked the front of the Continental. Four of these street children rode in the back of the Jeep: three boys, and a long-haired teenaged girl who was crippled. A single crutch propped on the seat beside her, she sat up proudly, a tray slung from her neck displaying her wares: cigarettes and flowers.

Little Renault taxis painted blue and cream like the Budgie —aged survivors from the French days-scurried and buzzed and hooted among U.S. Army trucks and big-finned Chevrolets and Fords from the 1950s. The traffic jam was permanent, complex, and brutally loud. Trishaws the French had called cyclos were pedaled through pandemonium by wiry men in straw hats and nineteenth-century sun helmets, their bells ringing like alarm clocks. These and an insect swarm of bicycles, motorcyclos, and Italian and Japanese motor scooters moved in hundreds down Tu Do Street’s narrow channel. At its top end were the red brick Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace and the white, baroque public buildings of the French, with their orange-tiled roofs. At the bottom end, near the Saigon River, where the Budgie was now headed, was the newly expanding zone of bars catering to the American troops.

Even though Rolling Thunder was beginning to strangle it, Saigon still had echoes in this year of a dozing town in Provence. Stuccoed colonial buildings with French shutters and overhanging balconies were painted in pale pastels; fading enameled advertising signs fastened to moldering walls were still French:
Michelin; Pernod; Le Journal d‘Extreme-Orient.
But above dark doorways, new signs and neons were appearing:
Chicago Bar; Saigon Express; Massage; The Bunny.
Bougainvillea flared and climbed on concertinas of barbed wire thrown up by the Americans to protect clubs and hotels from Viet Cong bomb attack. Lines of spreading tamarind trees with bright green feathery leaves and dark trunks whitewashed at the bottoms survived like afterimages from the street’s colonial days, when its name was rue Catinat.

The jeep was nearing the river, and now every second doorway seemed to be a bar. Tu Do here became a carnival alley, its primary odors beer, urine and perfume. GIs in cotton khakis or Hawaiian shirts wandered in the humid heat: coarse and alien giants, white and black, badgered and pursued by a race of refined, ivory-skinned gnomes who waved mutilated limbs at them, or tried to sell them copies of
Time,
and
Stars and Stripes.

One of the street children on board the Budgie was a crew-cut nine-year-old with an old man’s face and a Batman T-shirt. He leaned out now and snatched a camera from the hands of a young GI on the curb who was taking a picture. Then, fast as a gull, he dropped from the Jeep and raced into the crowd. The soldier shouted after him, his pink, outraged face more childlike than his attacker’s. But Jim Feng drove on, glancing at Langford deadpan, with raised eyebrows.

“That kid is lightning,” he said. Then he yelled sternly at the remaining child passengers. “Off, all of you! I told you, no more stealing when you ride the Budgie!”

He slowed in front of a neon that said
Texas Happy Bar,
and the children began to drop off. Racing into the crowd, the boys called cheery farewells. “Sorry, Mr. Jim!” “Goodbye, goodbye!” “You Number One Saigon man!”

The girl peddler with the tray jerked after them on her single crutch, jaunty and confident in the traffic, and Langford stared after her. Her face was exquisite, he says, framed by her shining black hair: a flower. He’d never seen a face so beautiful. But one foot was twisted and withered to a mere flap of flesh. It was hard to look at it.

 

 

 

“Welcome, brother, to the Pearl of the Orient.”

Harvey Drummond had a gentle, ceremonicrus air, and his well-modulated voice was a professional broadcaster’s. He extended a huge hand to Langford, swinging around on his barstool. He was thirty-five: an Australian Broadcasting Service correspondent who divided his time between Saigon and Singapore, often doing television news stories for which Jim Feng shot the film. From behind their glasses, enlarged gray eyes asked Langford to prepare for jokes. He was wearing the type of safari suit currently popular among correspondents in Asia, and doomed to become a sartorial cliché in the next few years: olive, with huge patch pockets and epaulets.

Langford and Feng took stools on either side of him, and Harvey signaled to one of the two white-shirted Vietnamese barmen. His large finger was seen immediately: seated, he was as tall as some of the men here who were standing, being somewhere around six feet six. At first glance, he resembled a truck driver, or perhaps a mercenary soldier. But his shoulders were stooped and sedentary from years over a typewriter; his monumental head, with its high, balding forehead, curly brown hair and Victorian side-whiskers, was that of an old-style Anglican cleric, and there was a touch of clerical sing-song in his voice.

He passed Langford a Scotch. “I’m glad Jim’s shown you the way here, Mike,” he said. “The Texas Happy Bar has ebullience without being frantic—wouldn’t you say so, Jim? And so far no playful VC has thrown a bomb in here.”

“Right,” Jim said. “The Happy Bar feels OK. You get to know.”

“You get to know,” Harvey echoed, and nodded at Langford. “I am a cautious journalist, Mike—I am not a crazy cameraman. Gun-happy types are everywhere in this town, and I pay due heed: I don’t want to die. I walk out of bars that don’t feel right. If someone stands next to me with a bag, I move away. I don’t like it when the barman is too smart; I leave such bars. I like around me dumb barmen and respectful customers. Smart-arse barmen end up dead: they are probably not paying enough kickback to the Viet Cong.” He drank half his whiskey at a gulp and pointed at Langford’s chest, his sing-song voice taking on a sermonizing cadence. “We have every sort of bar on Tu Do, brother. Loud bars; bars where you can get laid; bars where you can get thumped; and there are bars down lanes where the Special Forces gentlemen put their M-16s and UZIs on the counter. But the Happy Bar is where we like to be. Here’s where a sensitive correspondent can get sensitively
drunk.”

The place was narrow, crowded, and in semidarkness, lit by shaded lamps on the polished wooden counter of the bar. A pair of buffalo horns and a cowboy hat were set above backlit, multicolored bottles on shelves. There was a large framed picture of John Wayne, six-guns drawn; Country and Western music was playing on the music system. Apart from a sprinkling of correspondents, most of the customers were American military officers, some in starched khaki service dress, others in civilian outfits, with a small number of GIs among them. The aroma of their cigars mingled with a rumor of fish sauce. Some sat on stools at the bar; others were in a line of banquettes along the wall that were upholstered in lurid green vinyl. Most of these soldiers were white; Langford would discover that black GIs had their own bars, where whites weren’t welcome, and where soul music, Bo Did dley’s guitar and rich laughter flowed out through the doors.

Looking around him, he was aware of a constant, watchful tension, he says. Any new customer was discreetly scrutinized by the two barmen, and examined less discreetly by the officers and GIs. When the newcomer was passed as harmless, they relaxed and turned back to their drinks. Nearly all the customers were male; but a number of Vietnamese girls sat perched in a row on stools along the bar, and others sat on the knees of soldiers in the banquettes.

Out on Tu Do, Langford had been captivated by the beauty of young Vietnamese women: a common response among newly arrived males in Saigon. They rode sidesaddle on the backs of motor scooters as though on magic steeds from Annamese legend, all in their national dress: the clinging, semitransparent
ao dai,
with its tunic and matching pantaloons—mauve, green, red, white. Straight-backed, dignified and ethereal, black hair streaming, silk gowns fluttering, they’d passed with eyes averted, with the modesty of another time, their small, pointed faces delicate and remote. But their sisters here in the Happy Bar were different. Most had used so much mascara and lipstick that their faces were like those of clowns; and instead of the
ao dai,
they wore gro tesquely brief miniskirts, low-cut blouses and colored camisoles—their small breasts enlarged with padded bras to please the Americans.

Langford’s response to one of these bar girls was something that Harvey Drummond remembered about that night, when he and I talked. This and the incident of the bomb.

Old-fashioned isn’t really an accurate term for my first impression of Langford: but it was something close to that. I think it had to do with the way he treated the bar girl.

For what they called Saigon Tea—the colored water in tiny cups that you bought for them at $1.50 a throw—those bar girls would give you nothing but the pleasure of their company. Jim Feng and I found it a pointless exercise, and didn’t encourage them. Jim chased more promising Vietnamese women, being single, but I was that amazing anachronism among correspondents, a happily married man—and although my wife was in Singapore, I didn’t look for diversion in the fleshpots of Tu Do, as a lot of my colleagues did. For me, the bar girls were a frieze in the background, and its colors would alter from pathetic to tragic as the war went on. Few of them saw themselves as prostitutes, and some actually weren‘t—although many of them could be hired after-hours, if you wanted to pay a large enough sum. They took pride in their status as amateurs; it made them a sort of elite, in their own eyes, among the tribes in the city that were now living off the Americans. Most of the girls were peasants from the countryside ; their villages had probably been bombed or torched, and their families were either killed or living in the shantytowns on Saigon’s outskirts. But some of them were from once-prosperous Vietnamese families wiped out by the war.