Highways to a War (18 page)

Dmitri and Jim and I began to laugh, and some of the American servicemen joined in. Volkov staggered about the pavement, pointing, bent double, while Langford smiled and scratched his head. Then one of the bar girls from the banquette appeared, small and angry and vivid in a purple camisole and skimpy black shorts, frowning up at Langford.

“Dumb GI bastard,” she shouted. “You smash my radio. Why?”

Volkov pushed a handful of bills into her hand. “Buy yourself another one, darling.” While she stood counting the money, he turned and slapped Langford on the back, his pale eyes alight with joy. “What were you trying to do, Aussie? Blow up whole goddamn street?”

Langford asked him for a cigarette. Taking it, leaning to the flame of Volkov’s lighter, he said: “Less people in the road than in the bar.” He looked apologetic, but unruffled.

Volkov turned to Jim and me. “This man becomes interesting,” he said. “He is genuinely crazy. I want to see what tricks he plays with grenades.” A Slavonic hundred-degree turn had taken place: he’d decided to like Mike unreservedly.

Yes, Langford had become interesting; but also a little disturbing, I thought. I was curious to know whether he was suicidal or just foolish, and as Volkov and Feng headed across the pavement to the Budgie, I hung back and took his arm.

What had that been about? I asked him. Had he really wanted to die before he even got into the field?

He gave me a sidelong look, and didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said: “It had to be a radio. That little bloke had been in the bar selling them half an hour before. You guys didn’t notice him.” He gave me his country wink. “Don’t tell Volkov,” he said.

 

 

We ended the evening on the roof of the Caravelle Hotel.

We’d eaten at a French-Vietnamese restaurant near the river, and had drunk a large quantity of French wine. When we left, Volkov was reeling from a mixture of liquor and exhaustion, but he remained in high good humor.

A curfew began at midnight for Vietnamese civilians and U.S. military: what we called Cinderella Time, when the bar girls disappeared. The roof garden of the Caravelle was one of the few places where drinks could still be had. And from there, you could watch the war.

It was dark, quiet and half empty this evening. A few lamps put an aquarium light on the leaves of the potted shrubs and trees; there was a scent of frangipani. A small number of Europeans and Americans lingered here, wandering out from the cocktail bar inside, drinks in hand: staff from the various embassies; diplomatic wives; hotel guests; U.S. Army officers; other correspondents. The darkness and space made us all speak in undertones. Saigon is very flat, and at ten stories, the Caravelle was its tallest building: from here, a good deal of the city could be seen. In one direction were the grubby ferroconcrete apartment blocks of modern Southeast Asia, with their teeming balconies. In another was the traffic-clotted channel of Tu Do Street, whose ornate, nineteenth-century public buildings always looked forlorn to me. The white clock tower of the City Hall should have been veiled by the rain of some French provincial town, I thought—not trapped here, in this heavy Asian heat.

We wandered around to the side that faced towards the river, and stood in a line by the parapet. From here, looking southeast, you could see intermittent flashes in the dark. This was South Vietnamese artillery fire in the Rung Sat Special Zone: an area of mangrove swamp at the mouth of the Saigon River, where the South Vietnamese Government had military outposts. The Viet Cong also had bases there, and tried to sink the boats coming in through the shipping channels. They were probably attacking a South Vietnamese outpost now, and at this distance, the flashes looked not ominous but serene. I suppose that sounds odd.

“There you are, Mike.” Volkov’s voice, like all others here, was pitched low. “There is your war,” he said.

“This close,” Langford said.

“This close, as a matter of fact. And getting closer all the time.”

Suddenly, out above the southeastern horizon, parachute flares flowered, lighting up the landscape like daytime. They were dropped from old DC-3s to light up VC positions, and fields and lines of trees sprang into sight from nowhere: tan-and-olive tapestries in a black frame. A chorus of murmurs went up on the roof—some of them delighted, like the exclamations of children at a fireworks display. One of them carried clearly: a young American woman’s. “Hey, wow. Isn’t that just beautiful?”

Below his breath, Jim Feng muttered: “Beautiful for some, lady. Not so beautiful for others.”

Standing by the parapet, we were all like people on the bridge of a ship. We could only just see each other’s faces, and now we fell silent, staring into the dark. Then Mike said: “I thought the Yanks were turning it around this year. This doesn’t look much like it.”

“Give them time,” Volkov said. “Their troops only arrive now in real numbers.”

Jim Feng’s voice came out of the dark. “True, Count. But there are some people here who think the war’s already lost.”

“Crap,” Volkov said. “Left-wing crap, James. Wait and see what happens when Marines dig in.”

“Maybe,” Jim said. “But the GIs are right: the night belongs to Charlie.” He turned to Mike, and pointed. “Out there in the Delta, Victor Charles is in charge at night. You want to travel the highways out of the city by Jeep, you only do it in the daytime: and Saigon officers need an armed convoy. Sometimes we wonder if it’s only a matter of time before just the city is left—like an island in the sea.”

“Feng, you are being very negative tonight, you will make the Michael depressed,” Volkov said. “Yank airpower will win in the end: how can it not?”

“The rainy season’s coming,” Jim said. “More difficult for planes to fly. Soon the VC will hit hard again.”

But Volkov was addressing himself to Langford. “This is a helicopter war, baby. It will be won in my opinion by the sweet little gunships.” He turned from the parapet to face us all, swaying a little, his voice more slurred than before. His eyes, almost white in the dark, were unfocused and red-rimmed, and his face had taken on a tender, exalted expression; he’d obviously reached a point of exhaustion that created both euphoria and mild derangement. This was alarming only if you hadn’t grown used to him.

“Amazing machines,” he said. “I recognize they are instruments of destruction, and in nice moral moments I do not approve of them—but I tell you, I am also in love with them, the Chinooks and the little Hueys. They have beauty. I think this term can be used of them. Yes: a Huey is beautiful. The gunships are like nothing else before them. You may think so too, Michael, when you ride a Huey into combat zone. But of course you may not turn out to be bloody war-freak like us.”

“Speak for yourself, Count,” Jim said. But his voice was soft and tolerant.

Volkov grinned. “You are not a war-freak, James? Why else do they call you Crazy Jim Feng? Hah?”

Jim smiled without answering; then both of them looked at Langford.

They wore an identical expression now: one that people wear who watch someone wandering into an area that’s shaped their lives, and whose consequences the other can’t foresee.

“Of course we are not bloody war-freaks,” Jim said. “I know I am not. I just like to shoot the bang-bang stories.”

Volkov gave a shout of laughter. “That’s right,” he said. “Never mind who wins or loses: in the end, it’s not our problem. James has summed it up. We like to shoot the bang-bangs.”

TAPE 4: MAY 12TH, 1965

—Jim Feng and I nearly died this afternoon. I didn’t expect to run into a situation like this on my second day here.

 

Headed back towards Saigon at four in the afternoon, the Budgie buzzed along the straight metal ribbon of Highway 1: the road that links South Vietnam and Cambodia. Jim Feng drove; Langford sat beside him. They were twenty-five kilometers north of the city, swerving among bicycles, cars and military traffic, and occasionally circumnavigating tall wooden oxcarts that were piloted by old men in straw hats: vehicles that seemed to move at the invisible pace of clock hands, oblivious of the century and the war. It was the beginning of the southeast monsoon, and on each side of the road, peasants were transplanting rice shoots into the paddy fields.

Langford studied the scene with rural eyes. It was still novel to him, he says, and the tree line on the horizon of this level, heat-sunk country contained no species that he recognized except coconut palms. Crisscrossed by a grid of canals and dykes, the newly flooded, cloud-reflecting paddies resembled a shallow, land-locked sea, and the small, tough green shoots of life, sticking up from the surface, looked deceptively frail to him, like things left behind from some casual children’s game: unlikely to survive. Far out on these water-plains, between the long green horizontals of the dykes, figures in black pajamas and straw hats stooped and straightened and stooped again, hypnotically. Water buffalo stood motionless.

 

—We were coming back from Cu Chi, which is only thirty kilometers down Highway 1. Jim had taken me out to have a look at the big American base there: the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division. We’d put a sound camera and a Bell and Howell in the back in case we ran into some action—which Jim said was always possible. The Viet Cong were active around Cu Chi, he told me, and the region’s not entirely safe—even though it’s commuting distance from Saigon, and pretty much controlled by the Americans and the Government.

—This morning, Jim had seen me through the process of getting my accreditation: the two press passes, American and Vietnamese, that you have to have if you even want to get on a military aircraft here. So I’m now a
bao
chi: a member of the Saigon press corps. He’d taken me to the Khu Dan black market in the city and helped me buy the gear I’ll need when I go out in the field: combat fatigues, canteens, jungle boots. Then, after lunch, we’d headed up the highway.

—Just a little outing, Jim said, to see what’s cooking. We’ll be back in Saigon before evening—no sweat.

—We were dressed in sports gear, as though for an outing in the city: I wore a bright red shirt, which I’ll never do again. It’s a crazy situation for correspondents at present, and Jim says it can’t last much longer. The Americans will soon tighten up, he says, and the only way we’ll get to the front then is by being attached to an American or South Vietnamese unit with our names ticked off on a list. But that’s not how it is just now. All you have to do is jump in some kind of vehicle and head off down the highway.

—The road passed between stands of tall green bamboo, as though entering a tunnel. Ahead of us was a line of slow-moving military trucks filled with South Vietnamese soldiers: small men wearing outsize steel pot helmets. Jim increased speed. He wanted to get past the convoy, he said. You could get in trouble traveling with them, especially this late in the day: they attracted Viet Cong attention.

—We overtook the trucks, leaving the other traffic behind. Once we got past, the jeep came out of the tunnel of bamboos, and the distances of the paddy fields opened up again on each side of the road. Then we heard an explosion.

—We looked back and found that the lead truck in the convoy had been blown up. It sat stalled, the cabin shattered, with a column of black smoke rising from it. Vietnamese troops were spilling onto the road from the back of it, and from the trucks banked up behind it. A rattle of gunfire had begun.

—Jim increased speed. Remote-controlled mine, he said. That means VC are here.

—I grabbed my Bell and Howell to try and shoot film; but we were going too fast for it to be much good. The road ahead was suddenly empty: there was no one here but us, and this made Jim look worried.

—No oncoming traffic, he said. Something else is happening up ahead.

—We came around a bend, and soon found out why the oncoming traffic had stopped. Another South Vietnamese military truck had been blown up. It was slewed across the middle of the road, the front of it smashed and blackened, black smoke climbing from it, the driver and his mate dead in the cabin. About fifteen dead and wounded South Vietnamese soldiers lay on the highway, automatic rifles beside them, their uniforms and the bitumen patched with blood. One or two were moving and crying out; a couple were crouched in the ditch by the road; most were still. Out in the flooded paddy, α group of α dozen or so peasants in black pajamas stood by α dyke, staring at the truck. They had objects in their hands, but I didn’t focus on what these were.

—We slowed almost to a halt. We were looking at a South Vietnamese officer in a peaked cap who was lying against the trunk of a banana tree at the roadside. He was holding his stomach, and staring back at us. He had a small mustache that looked false against the dead yellow color of his face. Blood blackened his shirt and welled between his fingers; he called out, asking us for help, and saw that his entrails, were coming out. It made me feel very bad not to be able to help him.

-I started to get out of the Jeep, but Jim pulled me back. No! he shouted. Get down, Snow!

—When I asked him why, he pointed to the peasants in the rice field. Because of them, he said.

—He gunned the Budgie, and headed past the truck at top speed. Then I heard a sharp, fast cracking, and looked towards the paddy field. The people in black I’d thought were peasants were moving forward through the water, shin-deep, firing burst after burst with automatic rifles. They were firing at us: the Budgie’s colors weren’t protecting us.

—I seemed to have seen them before, in some other situation I couldn’t quite recall; but I didn’t have much time to think about it just then. Jim had his foot on the floor, swinging around potholes, driving like a maniac. We were all alone on this road, absolutely exposed, the only sounds here the roar of the Budgie’s engine and the fading gunfire. From somewhere by the truck, the few Vietnamese soldiers left alive were now firing back.