Highways to a War (19 page)

—We both had our heads down as low as possible. Bullets were passing quite close overhead, and one ricocheted off a front mudguard. They sounded just like the bullets in the old Western movies, and I half wanted to laugh. I was sweating like a pig and my heart was thudding, but I got out my Bell and Howell again, twisted in the seat, and tried to shoot film of the VC backwards, on long lens. For a moment I had them in my viewfinder, and I felt no more fear at all; all I wanted to do was to capture them. That was all that was real: what was inside the frame.

—But Jim yelled at me to stop. Forget the bloody film, he shouted. They’re targeting that bloody red shirt of yours!

—Tall bamboos appeared beside the highway again, and a settlement with low wooden shops, and thatched huts like haystacks. The open paddy fields and the Viet Cong were gone.

—A heavy monsoon shower began, wetting us through, and we both started to laugh.

 

 

—I doubt that I’d ever be able to find that little noodle shop again. I only know it was somewhere in a side road, where Highway I comes into Saigon. We stopped there to have a quick coffee before going on into the city; but we found we didn’t want to leave. We ended by eating dinner there, and getting pretty drunk.

—I still felt light, when we first sat down; I’d felt light ever since we got away, and I was still trembling. They’d tried to kill us and we were still alive, and I kept wanting to laugh.

—The rain had stopped. The Budgie was parked where we could keep an eye on it through the entrance door, in this muddy side road that was lined with long wooden shop buildings like sheds, with rusty iron roofs. Children and chickens ran about, and purple bougainvillea hung from the coffee shop’s red canvas awning. The coffee came in cups with aluminum drip filters; no coffee ever tasted so good, and I said so lo Jim.

—He looked at me with a humorous expression. Everything tastes better after action, he said. Food; beer; dope; making love to a woman. Now you have found that out, Snow.

—Then he got serious. You have also found out about the VC, he said. You can never tell whether they are there or not: they dress the same as the peasants; hide in the villages. You can be next to them and not know it: remember that. The peasants call them the Black Ghosts. They also call them the People Over There.

—I asked him why they’d hit the trucks.

—Probably because they wanted to move a large unit across the highway further north, he said: it would have been closed, after that convoy was shot up. The VC have invisible roads through the paddy fields.

—Then he pointed at me. I should have realized sooner what was happening, he said. That was my mistake. You know what your mistakes were, Snow? One: you wanted to help that ARVN officer. A cameraman can’t do that: you can’t get involved. Two: you went into the Cameraman’s Daydream. That’s what the Count calls it. When you were trying to shoot the VC, you were forgetting your situation. You thought that what was in your viewfinder wasn’t quite real: that you were watching your own movie. That you couldn’t be touched. Right?

—Right, I said, and Jim nodded.

—We all have to fight it, he said. Never let it take over. That’s how you get your arse shot off. And please don’t wear that shirt again. Then he laughed, and I joined in. We were still laughing a lot; we knew how lucky we’d been.

—There were no other foreigners in the noodle shop: there was nothing here for them. Just three or four cyclo boys: young men in their twenties, tired from pushing their machines, smoking and drinking beer. Maybe they were VC, but I don’t think so: they didn’t seem to mind us. The round wooden table we were sitting at was very low, like a table for children, and the chairs were old cane ones like some we had on the verandah at home. It was like being in a private house: children’s toys were stacked in a china cabinet; a little boy played with a truck on the tiles; a white cat was asleep on a chair. Behind the bar counter, you could see the living area, with an old woman in black pajamas asleep on a bed, and a man in a cotton army hat mending a bicycle. Red candles and incense sticks burned in a little shrine.

—Through the door the afternoon faded, and we began to drink Ba Muòi Ba: the same Vietnamese beer the cyclo boys were drinking. It came crammed with ice: beer on the rocks, Jim said, the way the Vietnamese like it. The latest rain shower had stopped, and an orange, smoky sunset came on. And I felt I was being hypnotized: by the thick light out there; by the smells of camphor smoke and nuoc am, the fish sauce they put into everything; by the Vietnamese music coming from a radio that sat on the red bar counter at the back of the room. It was a woman singer, high-voiced like a very young girl, the way their singers always are, and her songs went on and on, to a very slow, rocking beat, unwinding like a stream, like one continuous song that wouldn’t end: slow, slow, with sexy, high-calling, wailing notes that made my nerves jump. The darkness came down now, and inside this dark were people who could kill you. The VC guerrillas were in charge, out in these suburbs at night. But I was confident we wouldn’t die today: that had already been proved.

—After we’d eaten a cheap but good Vietnamese meal served in clay pots, we went on drinking beer. We really liked it here, and had no desire to move.

—I think you will be OK, Snow, when it comes to your first bang-bang, Jim said. No sweat. I have taught you all I can. Just remember to take the lens cap off.

—He laughed, and punched my shoulder. We were both getting pretty smashed now, and it was the first time I’d seen Jim actually look drunk: eyes half closed and eyebrows raised. He signaled for two more bottles of Ba Muòi Ba. The young woman who brought them had a warm, smiling face, and Jim tried to chat her up, the way he always did pretty women. He turned to me with a question, when she’d gone.

—Do you have a girl back home, Snow?

—No, I said. Not now.

—I had a girl in Hong Kong, Jim said. Very attractive and intelligent young woman. We were engaged; but she broke it off last year. Her parents didn’t want her to marry a man who was likely to be killed at any time. Parents have a strong influence, in Chinese families. And I guess they were right. A man who covers combat is not a good marriage bet. Most people say your luck runs out after three years: three years of covering battle full-time is enough. And I have done five, in various places.

—He carefully poured more beer, spilling a little; then he suddenly looked up at me and shook his head and frowned. I am thirty-two and I have been in love with a number of women, he said. For a time. Sometimes I’m afraid I will never find the woman I can stay with. I get bored, Mike —I get bored with many people; many situations. So run away from them. I leave.

—told him I understood. I’d been running away myself, when I came to Asia.

—Hearing this, he didn’t go on immediately, but stared at me with a Chinese look I couldn’t read. When he spoke again, his voice was more soft and gentle than usual. it always has a rise and fall that’s good to listen to; now, perhaps because of the beer, it had a sort of extra rhythm to it.

—I thought that might be, he said. He leaned forward across the table and pointed a finger. I get bored, he said, and I run from this terrible boredom that is the opposite of life. But I never become bored with battle. Never. Please understand, Snow, I don’t approve of this war, or any other. I don’t enjoy seeing men mutilated. But still I have to tell you: I can’t keep away from battle.

—I asked him why.

—Because in battle everything matters, he said. Every little thing is clear, as though you see it for the first time, like a child. And in battle, you are all drawn together. You are close to those around you in a special way: you see the best in everyone. Afterwards, ordinary life seems unimportant: business; politics; all the things people get worked up about: unimportant.

—He lit a cigarette, looking out the door. Everythiing was a perfect mix: the slow Vietnamese music, still going on; the quiet-talking cyclo boys at the next table; the cat on the chair; the burning dark out the door.

—I’m telling you this because I think you may become like me, Jim said. You are the type. You could come to like war too much, and be good for nothing else. Look at Dmitri: he’s like that. He has had one failed marriage, and no woman stays with him for long. You will want a wife and children someday, and so will I. So do the job well, Snow, but don’t do it too long—that is my advice.

—I’ll give it up when you do, I told him, and that made him laugh. Besides, I said, this looks like too good a war to miss.

—He shook his head, glanced aside at the cyclo boys, and his voice dropped. Great to cover; but a bad war, he said. In Saigon, the South Vietnamese are making money out of it while the Americans try to save them. Their generals grow rich on graft instead of fighting, and waste the lives of their men. And the Viets really don’t want the Americans here, did you know that? They call them crude. They hate their rock and roll music; and they say the Americans are oversexed, with cocks too big for a Vietnamese woman. They would rather have the French back, they say. At least the French had style and good manners-and nicer music. The people of Saigon are living in the past, Mike, and that is a dangerous place to live. I know all about that; my father’s class were doing it in China, before Mao came. And now they are gone, and old China is gone.

—He stubbed out his cigarette and was silent again, staring past my shoulder, and I knew he had memories too strange for me to get into: probably memories of Peking and his boyhood. He looked more Chinese than usual, and very serious and dignified, even though he was drunk. I liked him a lot now; ever since the VC had fired on us, I’d known that Jim and I would probably be friends for life.

—He leaned forward, speaking even lower, holding his beer glass in both hands. My father was never very practical, he said. He is a scholar. Once he was an important public official, and had a small estate; now he teaches in a Chinese school in Hong Kong. He taught us classical poetry, myself and my brothers. He made us learn a lot of poetry by heart, but I have forgotten most: I was never the scholarly type, which disappointed him. My two brothers were brighter than me. I am very fond of my father, and I know he is honest. He has no time for the Communists: he told me once how Mao Tse-tung boasted that he executed forty-six thousand scholars. So the Communists destroyed our best minds, as well as killing greedy landlords. Not many people want to hear this—or they won’t believe it. But even my father says that his class was no longer fit to rule. They had failed the people; they did too little to stop the suffering. They had lost what the emperors had lost: the Mandate of Heaven.

—And now it was all happening here in Vietnam, I said.

—Yes; and because I know how it was in China, I understand the rulers here in South Vietnam, Jim said. I’m afraid they may lose here for the same reasons.

—I asked him whether he ever went out in the field with the South Vietnamese Army.

—With the ARVN? No, he said. Nobody in the press wants to. Some of them fight well, but their bad leadership puts you at too great a risk. And when Charlie engages the ARVN, the ARVN either fight their way out or die—and that means you die too, if they lose.

—So it’s easier with the Yanks, I said.

—Of course. They lay it all on for us, he said. Air transport there and back guaranteed: same day. Purified water. Fresh food and ice cream flown into combat zones: even pizzas. And you’re back in the Continental that evening.

—So no one was covering the South Vietnamese Army, I said.

—You are thinking of doing it? You are serious? he said.

—Why not? I said. You say we get scooped with ewerything else.

—But Jim shook his head. Christ, he said. Do one patrol, Mike. I don’t think you will do a second. But if you must do it, find a good commander.

—He stood up. He was swaying, and quite drunk now. We had better get back to the Continental, he said. There are VC out here, and I don’t want to dodge being shot up again.

—When we came outside, it was black and spooky. Most of the kids had gone, and a dog was eating garbage from a pile by a stall. Kerosene lamps had come on under awnings, glowing in that murky way they do, like treacle, and lighting up the faces of some passing men. They didn’t look at us. We checked the Budgie to see that no VC had wired it to explode. Jim’s method was to throw a rock onto the accelerator pedal. He missed a few times, he was so drunk, and we started laughing and couldn’t stop, staggering around in the mud. But it was OK, and we drove away with no problems.

—I’d really like to go to that noodle shop again, but I don’t think I could find it. I guess there are places that you’re only meant to be in once.

TAPE 5: MAY 20TH, 1965

—Last night I had dinner at Madame Claudine Phan’s. When I phoned her, I found she’d been expecting to hear from me. Donald Mills had contacted her, and told her I was in Saigon. He doesn’t waste much time.

The Phan villa was in a narrow residential street of high stone walls and spreading tamarind trees, running off the top of Tu Do near the Cathedral. Langford arrived there after dark, riding in a cyclo.

 

The cyclo boy knew where the house was immediately, without being given the address. He was a long-haired young man with a thin, sly face, wearing a long-billed American fatigue cap. He’d already asked Langford his name and occupation, and Langford had answered his questions warily; he’d been told by Jim Feng that many cyclo boys were Viet Cong. As the young man bent forward to pedal, his mouth was brought conveniently close to Langford’s ear, since the passenger seat in the cyclo was in front.

“You are friend of Madame Phan, Mr. Mike?” The voice from behind was hushed and intimate.

No, Langford said, he was just about to meet her.