Highways to a War (22 page)

 

Trung had told Langford to keep the cotton bush hat on at all times. (“VC will target that yellow hair.”) He had also urged him to keep close behind the man in front: to tread in the soldier’s footsteps, and imitate his every move. In this way, Trung said, Langford had a chance of avoiding the booby traps that were everywhere in Viet Cong country; sometimes mines, sometimes grenades, but most commonly bamboo
punji
stakes: fire-hardened barbs planted in the rice fields and the grass, their ends smeared with human shit. To step on one was to contract almost certain infection; and they’d been known to pierce even the soles of jungle boots.

So the patrol trod always carefully, carefully, slowed not just by mud and water, but by the thought of the barb that couldn’t be seen, and Langford paid strict attention to the soldier in front of him: a young man of about twenty-two called Tho. They talked together whenever there was a halt.

Tho spoke more English than the others. He told Langford that he’d learned English in a Saigon bar where he’d worked as a general handyman. One day, out fetching ice, he’d been stopped and shanghaied for the Army by an ARVN street patrol; they did this, it seemed, if a young man’s papers weren’t in order. Tho didn’t seem bitter about this; he was always cheerful.

 

—Even though he had very Vietnamese face, he reminded me of a kid ’d been friends with in New Norfolk when was young, who’d been fond of jokes: ame wide jaw and wide-apart brown eyes. Tho liked to show off his bit of French; when I’d ask where the VC ere, he’d point to the horizon and say:
“Beaucoup VC!”
It got to be sort of joke between us. ’d say there weren’t any VC, and he’d shake his head. “
Beaucoup VC!”
He helped to keep me going.

They had still not encountered the Viet Cong, after nearly three days of slogging. Tomorrow they’d start back to base, joining the rest of the brigade there; and Langford had begun to doubt that they’d make contact with the enemy at all. The company covered some twenty-four kilometers a day: three times the distance the more heavily laden American patrols, could achieve. Their food at breakfast was a little dried fruit and dried fish or jerky. During the day they ate nothing. In the evening they had a thin vegetable soup, small pieces of fish, and rice. Their only drink was water. Most Westerners would have found this diet a privation: Langford seems not to have minded it.

On the first day, he says, they’d marched all afternoon and through most of the night, trudging down the aisles of the coconut groves, stumbling across sodden plains of marsh-weed and elephant grass, stopping only for snatches of sleep on patches of dry ground, or on paddy dykes. At midday on the second day they’d made a halt beside a rice field, under the emerald fans of some water palms. As Langford had sunk gratefully onto his poncho, a group of soldiers had gathered about him.

They smiled broadly, watching him unlace his boots, their stares frankly curious. He began to burn blood-filled leeches from his legs with a lit cigarette, and they laughed; but their laughter was soft; polite. Captain Trung watched from a distance. They asked him in Vietnamese if he was tired.
“Mat
,
khong?”
He made signs that he was; then he got them to teach him how to say it.

“Co, mat qua.”
Yes, very tired, they said, and laughed.

He handed around American cigarettes, and they took them appreciatively, elongated brown fingers reaching delicately into the pack; and suddenly he became aware that two of them were plucking curiously at the blond hair on his forearm, discussing it in Vietnamese.

 

 

He took some still pictures of them with his Leica, and they immediately formed groups, asking him to take more. These pictures have survived, and the faces under the outsize helmets are lit with youth’s pleasure in life, the smiles carefree, as though they are on a pleasure trip. Some of them produced photographs of wives and children from their wallets and showed them to Langford. He sat talking to them with his first words of Vietnamese: happy.

Tho had gone to the edge of the paddy, and had scooped some water into his helmet. He came back with it brimming, and dropped some purification tablets into it. Few of the soldiers in this platoon carried canteens; the streams and paddies were their main source of water, and in the regular downpours, they would sometimes collect the rain in their helmets. Tho drank, and then held the helmet towards Langford, smiling and nodding.

Langford still had water in his canteens, but he accepted out of politeness, he says, and with some misgivings. Paddy water was lethal without the tablets, and risky to Westerners even with them.

“Let me take your picture.”

Captain Trung had come up, helmet in one hand, rubbing his spiky hair with the other. For the first time, he smiled at Langford. He took the Leica, which he seemed familiar with, and photographed Langford as he drank.

This picture too still exists, and went into Langford’s first published collection. Tho, smiling and holding the helmet from one side, is tilting it while Langford drinks, as though assisting a child. One can see why. Cotton army hat crushed in one hand, nose in the helmet, the long blond hair that the soldiers find so novel spilling forward as he drinks, Langford looks more like a twenty-two-year-old than a man of nearly thirty.

 

—They treated me a bit like a kid, on that first patrol: one who needed help with the simplest things. They reminded me of the country people in Tasmania, who treat strangers in the same way. I felt at home with them.

 

On the second day, the company had been up before dawn and had marched until sundown, passing occasional villages whose black-clad inhabitants stared at them sullenly. These were VC supporters, the men told Langford—either by conviction or because they were forced to be. After dark, they stopped and lit a small cooking fire, talking and laughing noisily. But minutes after the fire was lit, Trung called a low command; packs were picked up, rifles slung again, and they marched on, leaving the fire burning. Exhausted, hungry and baffled, Langford followed. An hour later they made camp again, this time without noise.

Trung came out of the thick, moist darkness to survey Langford with an amused expression, hands on his hips.

“You wonder what we do. We made false camp back there. Now we make a secret camp. The VC will see the fire at the other camp, and hit that. Oh yes, they are here—quite close. Always they attack at night.”

But there was no attack that night.

 

 

Now, at sundown on the third day, they waded on across the paddy field, which was like every other paddy field. They were making towards the tree line, which was like every other tree line.

There was a long irrigation canal there, some three hundred yards away, walled in by a high earth dyke, on top of which was a grove of fruit trees: guava; papayas; coconut palms; the big green sails of banana trees. Behind this grove, a palm-thatched roof could be seen, and a thread of smoke: signs of a hamlet. The trees and the smoke rose against sky that had a warning tinge of sunset. Under its vast, gray curve and its towering cumulonimbus clouds, treading in their own reflections, the figures of Captain Trung’s patrol seemed small and lost, toiling on without purpose. Birds whose names were unknown to Langford wheeled and called. The other company wasn’t in sight; but Langford had just learned that it had reported by radio that two guerrillas had been captured trying to escape the area. The VC were here then, somewhere; but he was too weary to feel concerned or even interested.

The patrol reached a paddy dyke and climbed onto it, marching towards the grove and the hamlet. Grateful to be on semidry land, Langford trudged behind Tho, in his waterlogged boots.

The gunfire, when it began, was without echo in these big, level spaces, under this sky. It was a flat, loud stuttering, coming from behind the grove of trees on the irrigation dyke: a noise that was workmanlike rather than ominous: the sound of the Kalashnikov AK-47, the standard assault rifle of the Viet Cong. For the second time in his life, Langford found bullets whining and cracking above his head. But this time was different.

 

—I thought: I’m not ready. God, not now, I’m too tired. Why not in the morning?

 

But it was now. All along the dyke in front of him, the ARVN soldiers were leaping and splashing into the paddy water, unslinging their weapons as they went. Langford followed, Bell and Howell raised to keep it dry.

He crouched next to Tho against the slick mud of the dyke, the water up to his thighs, half wanting to get below the surface as the bullets continued to whine. The patrol was almost completely exposed here, since the dyke ran at right angles to the irrigation canal; but so far the VC were aiming too high. Rolls of thunder joined the gunfire now, like giant echoes, and it began to rain, reducing visibility. Air and water became one element, within which Captain Trung was gesturing to his troops, water streaming down his face, shouting in Vietnamese.
“Di di maul Di di mau!”

He was pointing to the next paddy dyke, which ran parallel to the irrigation canal; a position in which to take cover. The men waded fast through the water after him, crouching, firing short bursts towards the trees. Langford, moving beside Tho, found the noise both shattering and reassuring.

He lay half prone in the water against the protective wall of the new dyke, and began to concentrate on his technical problems, while the troops concentrated on theirs. The cloudburst was already easing, and instead of being concerned about the better visibility this gave the VC, he was grateful: now he’d get good film. He checked the light with his meter, switched on his cassette tape recorder to pick up wild sound, and began to adjust the lens aperture on the Bell and Howell. His hands were shaking slightly, but he found himself calm.

 

—The sunset was coming on fast, and I was more concerned about that now than the bullets; I had to get the aperture right. I also had to be economical with what I shot, since all I had was two minutes forty seconds to a roll of film, and there might not be many opportunities to get in new rolls.

—We still couldn’t see the VC, and didn’t know how many there were. They were dug in behind the irrigation dyke, among the trees. So they were still invisible, still ghosts: it was only their bullets that weren’t ghostly. I began to move along the dyke, filming as I went.

—My tiredness had gone; all that mattered was what was in the viewfinder. I could hear Jim Feng talking in my head, teaching me all he knew about filming battle. Always look for movement; look for action. Get involved. Move. There’d be no Cameraman’s Daydream this time: l knew I’d be lucky to get out of this paddy field alive. I had confidence in Trung, though, and my main aim was to capture the way the ARVN troops were handling themselves: I wanted to show them functioning out on the edge. As they watched the irrigation dyke, firing off bursts, their faces had the same look of concentration that the faces of athletes get when they push themselves to the limit; the same concentration that faces have when people do delicate and expert work. I believe I got that.

—So the cinecamera work went well. But a thing I found was that I kept wanting to freeze the frame: to capture single images that summed everything up. I wanted to get out my Leica, but there just wasn’t time. You can’t do both. I guess I’m a stills cameraman at heart.

The firing from the irrigation canal seemed to have stopped. Captain Trung called for the troops to advance, and they moved out across the paddy field, spraying the grove of trees with heavy fire, making for the last paddy dyke that lay between them and the canal. Langford was beside Tho, filming as he came; once, between bursts of fire with his outsize M-1, Tho grinned at him sideways.

“Beaucoup VC,”
he called, and Langford had a surge of deep affection for him—as though, he says, they’d known each other for years, or were blood relations.

There was no answering fire until the company came quite close to the cover of the new paddy dyke; then there were two bursts, and a bullet passed close to Langford. Crouching behind the low mud wall, he saw in his viewfinder two black-clad figures with assault rifles in the grove of trees, half obscured by broad banana leaves.

 

—Black Ghosts! Where had I seen them before?

 

As he filmed them, one dropped, and the other vanished. The hammering of the machine guns and rifles around him was continuous. Then there was silence, and Captain Trung’s voice shouting a command. Langford lowered his camera and turned towards Tho.

But Tho was lying on his back in the water, clutching his rifle, his arms wide-flung. From a depthless cavity that had appeared in the front of his shirt, long red skeins crept through the water’s gray.

Two soldiers stooped over him and lifted him carefully, murmuring in Vietnamese; the mud and water sucked at him, wanting to hold him there. Langford received the gaze of his wide-set, sightless brown eyes, from which all glint of humor was gone.

 

—I shot film of them carrying Tho away. In one way I hated doing it, but it was exactly the sort of shot I badly needed to get. So I had to shut off my feelings. That’s what the trade’s mostly about: I’ve learned that already.

The hamlet was almost deserted, except for two old women and some small children. The rest of the people had gone. It had been a VC hamlet, Trung said. Walking beside Langford, he pointed to a blue and red Liberation Front flag on a bamboo pole above one of the houses; two soldiers were climbing onto the roof to get it down.

 

—I got good footage of this. Also of four dead Viet Cong lying in foxholes on the irrigation dyke. Big bluebottle flies were already buzzing around their wounds; it was very quiet here, and that was the only sound. I thought of slaughtering day on the farm, when we butchered pigs; but these were men. One of them, with a square, dependable-looking face, had his belly torn open: something that shouldn’t be seen. There was a stink from him you should never have to smell, either, and after I’d shot the film, I had to go and throw up. I found then that I was thinking of Ken again, and of how he did the same, when he had to kill that Jap.