Highways to a War (33 page)

Peace in the boulevards, Harvey said, with so little traffic that sometimes it seemed that minutes went by before a car passed. Peace in the squares and the narrow lanes, where hibiscus and bougainvillea climbed over sleepy walls. Peace in the deep green country beyond the town’s edges, where the big rivers met: the Mekong, the Bassac, and that other strange waterway called the Tonle Sap, which in spring flows backwards. A river city. Hot silence; and Phnom Penh’s noises were the muted, magic sounds that come to you in a doze: an afternoon siesta where you’re having good dreams.

A dream was what it was, Harvey said: a good dream with a bad one at its edges, waiting to invade. You know the kind? Even in your sleep, you know the other’s waiting: there’s the sense of something out on the perimeter; something you can’t quite see. You know that if it breaks in, the terrible will arrive. Well, it finally arrived in Cambodia when the sixties ended.

He drained his beer, and looked out through the grille. Over by the
klong,
a boy in bright orange trousers and a blue shirt was squatting in the sun by a stall, sorting bunches of long green vegetables.

We used to say Cambodia wasn’t serious, Harvey said. We saw it as a country of make-believe: our land of Holiday. Bloody nonsense, of course, and we half knew it—but we didn’t care, in the sixties. Phnom Penh was our place to escape to from Saigon and the war: our capital of pleasure, and of opium trances at Madame Delphine’s. And Mike Langford more than anyone believed in the good dream of Cambodia. He knew about the bad dream, waiting on the edges, but he wanted to believe that the good dream would continue. I think he was like a sleeper who wakes up and can’t bear the dream to end, and goes back to sleep to try and get inside it again. We never can—right, brother? But he wouldn’t accept that.

The bad dream had been there all the time, of course, up in the jungles on the eastern border. That was where Prince Sihanouk had allowed the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong to maintain sanctuaries inside the country: bases for their drive on South Vietnam. Sihanouk was a little prince of pleasure, whose main interests were directing films, broadcasting five-hour speeches to his people, and playing in his jazz band. His family and his court were also said to run some of Phnom Penh’s brothels, and to control its gambling. But he’d declared himself a Socialist prince, and a neutralist; he’d turned against the Americans, removing Cambodia from the American camp. He was a cunning politician, and he already saw the North Vietnamese Communists as winners. Perhaps he tried to forget that the sanctuaries existed up there in the jungle, and put them out of his mind.

Meanwhile, we scribes used to hunt for evidence of them: they were the great mythical scoop of the sixties for Indochina correspondents. But no one ever saw them, although I believe Mike Langford and Dmitri Volkov once got pretty close. And the U.S. Command in Saigon grew more and more obsessed with them. They claimed that the headquarters of the North Vietnamese organization known as COSVN was located there too, in those border jungles: the Central Office for South Vietnam, from which (so they said), the whole Communist war effort was being conducted. Their B-52s began secretly bombing inside Cambodia, in an effort to knock out the bases, and perhaps to knock out COSVN as well: the ultrasecret nerve center of the war. But they didn’t succeed; and COSVN was never found.

Did it even exist? I still wonder. Like so much else about Cambodia and the war itself, COSVN was a secret inside a secret. The sanctuaries and the unofficial bombing both had an existence on the level of rumor, and the Central Office in the jungle lay in the realm of legend: a final secret at the heart of things, tantalizing the Americans. Perhaps if it could be found and rooted out, all the agonizing problems of the war in Vietnam could at last be solved, and victory achieved. This haunted the minds of their Special Forces men, their top military commanders and their CIA operatives—as well as the minds of humble scribes like me.

Alas, the dreams of the 1960s had to come to an end, Harvey said: everything changed with the new decade. But by then I’d been moved out of Asia: ABS had sent me to London. The devious little prince was overthrown, and went into exile with his patrons in Peking; the kingdom became a republic; the Americans and the South Vietnamese Army were sought as allies, and briefly invaded to clear out the sanctuaries. They didn’t succeed; but when they pulled back across the border, the real war in Cambodia had begun, and the news media caravans rolled into Phnom Penh as they’d done into Saigon.

I wasn’t with them: it was a war I’d yet to see. I read about it in the newspapers, like everyone else, or in letters from Mike; he was always a great letter writer. It wasn’t until 1973, in the last week of January, that ABS sent me back to Asia. They based me in Singapore again, but I was expected to spend as much time as necessary in Phnom Penh. Lisa, who now had a job in London as a research assistant at the BBC, wasn’t very happy about this; but she promised to join me in Singapore if the war situation dragged on. It certainly did: I’d be covering in Indochina for the next two years.

There was a false hope of peace in Cambodia in that week of my arrival. A cease-fire was hoped for, arranged between Hanoi and the Americans as part of the Paris peace accords. But it wouldn’t happen. Out in the countryside, a new group of Communists had taken over from the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong: and these were native Khmers.

Sihanouk had called them les
Khmers Rouges;
but most Cambodians simply called them
les autres:
the Others. No one knew anything about them. They wore black, like the ‘Viet Cong, and when we covered engagements with them, we seldom got close enough to see their faces. They belonged to the dream at the edges too; but now they were moving to the center.

I’d been out of Indochina for nearly seven years, Harvey said. When I came back, all highways led to the war.

Pick any highway, I was told: all of them go to the war. I thought it was a joke, at first.

But what my colleagues were telling me was true: everyone of the highways that radiated out from Phnom Penh would take you to the front. The struggle had come down to keeping them open, so that the city wouldn’t die. This was a war over highways.

Will there ever be another war like it? One you could go to by taxi? On my first day there, I was taken by air-conditioned Mercedes.

The Mercedes belonged to Mike Langford. It was black, somewhat elderly, but still handsome; he’d named it Black Bessie, after some long-ago pig on the family farm. He’d bought it cheap, he told me, from a Chinese businessman who’d recently departed Phnom Penh: one of the many members of the merchant class now fleeing the country. But I couldn’t help seeing the Mercedes as a sign of Mike’s mature success: one of the few obvious rewards he’d allowed himself.

On the evening of my arrival he’d come out to Pochentong Airport in Black Bessie to meet my plane. He’d come alone, since Jim Feng and Dmitri Volkov were both out of town, and I was touched.

I’d learned from Mike’s letters that both Feng and Volkov had continued to work in Indochina over most of this time; but for Dmitri, there’d been a break of nearly two years. He’d married an American, an employee of the U.S. State Department based in Saigon; when she’d been moved back home, he’d gone with her to Washington, and had given up covering combat. But the marriage had ended, and for the past six months he’d been back in Cambodia, covering for CBS again. Trevor Griffiths was here as well, Mike said, after working for some years in Europe; Griffiths too had been married and divorced. Mike of course had never married. Correspondents aren’t good marriage material; the way of life’s against it, and I seem to be an exception. I hoped that Jim Feng would be luckier; according to Mike, he’d just become engaged to a young Chinese woman in Singapore.

There were soldiers manning sandbag emplacements all around the terminal, and the Caravelle that had got me here from Saigon kept its engines turning over for an immediate takeoff. No civil aircraft now stayed in Phnom Penh overnight, since Khmer Rouge rocket attacks on the airport were frequent. This put a certain chill in me; but I still looked forward to a reunion with my Saigon brothers. Walking across the tarmac, I tried to imagine in what way Langford would be changed by the years. But the figure waiting at the customs barrier looked exactly the same.

He stood among a small crowd of anxious-looking Cambodians who clutched outward tickets for the Caravelle. The edge of middle age didn’t seem to have made a mark on him; I saw with immediate envy that the mane of yellow hair remained as thick as a twenty-year-old’s. I was rather conscious of hair lately; in an era that had brought in a fashion for wearing it as long as a medieval courtier‘s, mine was going fast. Langford’s hair, I noticed, was still cut short by current standards, with only the sideburns worn longer as a concession to the seventies.

“Harvey,” he said, and put out his hand. “What took you so long to get back?”

He grinned and winked, comically contorting one side of his face: the exaggerated country wink that always conveyed a message. This one said:
You’ve been wasting your time all these years; there’s no other story; no other place to be.
And for him of course this was true.

I’d followed his career over the past seven years through his letters and his published work. He was getting more and more famous, and he’d been briefly lured out of Indochina to cover other conflicts for leading magazines: the Chinese-Indian clash on the border of Tibet in 1967; the street fighting in Belfast in 1969; the civil war in Jordan in 1970. But he only did it for the money, his letters told me; they’d been interesting interludes, nothing more. There was only one war that mattered.

Three years ago, a New York publisher had brought out a book of his Vietnam photographs, with a text by a well-known American correspondent. It had included not only scenes of battle, but other pictures showing the plight of the peasants in the countryside, and the tribes of the displaced in the shantytowns and streets of Saigon. It had attracted a good deal of favorable attention in most of the major newspapers—and also praise from the antiwar movement, which eventually used some of his pictures as propaganda. Last year a book on the war in Cambodia had followed, with pictures of equal power. Some of the reviews had treated his collections as art, as well as documentary—which I suppose they are, now that one looks at them again. And a leading New York magazine had recently run an interview and a story on him, dwelling heavily on his reputation for unusual risk taking, and elevating him towards the edge of that plateau inhabited by celebrities.

But he had no wish to be there, apparently. Another photographer would have proceeded to enjoy the fruits of such success, basing himself in New York or London. Langford had spent time in both capitals when his books were launched; but then he’d come back to the war, and he’d based himself now in Phnom Penh. He was under contract here to a big American newsweekly, and his pictures often made its cover.

Cambodia was his home, he said.

 

 

 

At seven o‘clock the next morning, the Mercedes rolled down Highway 5.

Its air was nicely cooled, “Tupelo Honey” was playing on its tape deck, and an icebox sat in the back, filled with bottled orange juice. So this was the way my colleagues went to war in Cambodia. It made me laugh; and I have to admit that my laughter was euphoric.

Don’t misunderstand me: I didn’t like the sound of this war, which was said to be killing more correspondents than any other in history. But I’d just come out of a London winter, my grateful body was clad in light cotton clothing again, and the big warmth of Asia surrounded me; I was back, and it put me on a high, that morning. So too, if I’m honest, did speeding down a highway towards the action in Langford’s Mercedes, with “Tupelo Honey” coming over the speakers.

Van Morrison was a favorite with the brothers, Mike told me: he was especially good for playing on the way to a firefight. So were Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Rod Stewart. I savored this information, which had the same importance for me as learning some vital news source; it tuned me in to their lives again, and after seven years away I yearned to be tuned in. We journalists love the ephemeral, and there’s no hunger so exquisite as hunger for the ephemeral; now Van Morrison belongs forever to the war in Cambodia, and the clear sunlight of the dry season. I wouldn’t be this high in an hour or so, but the moment lives on, its fragile structure built on air, like all our best moments.

We were headed towards a battle. Mike’s sources had told him of a probable engagement between Cambodian Government forces and the Khmer Rouge, about sixty kilometers northwest of the city. We were driven by a thin, brown-faced Cambodian of middle age called Lay Vora, whose crisp white shirt and navy trousers made him look quasiofficial. He had a thick cap of wrinkled black hair and many wrinkles in his forehead from perpetually raising his eyebrows; he smiled a lot, his eyes wistful and kindly, and had the permanently concerned air of a good family man. Vora was Langford’s driver-interpreter—and also his landlord, I’d discover. He and his family lived in a three-story house near the Old Market, and they sublet the top floor to Langford. Mike and I were sitting next to him on the old-fashioned bench seat; in the back were two correspondents who were strangers to me.

Bill Wall was an American who was bureau chief here for the U.S. newsmagazine Mike took pictures for, and who wrote the stories the pictures accompanied. The other man was a BBC correspondent called Godfrey Wardlaw. He’d arrived here the night before as I’d done, and had struck up a conversation with Langford and me in the bar of the Hotel le Royal: the unofficial club for correspondents, where I’d taken a room. Langford was generous with both. lifts and information; he often helped new-comers like Wardlaw with a story, and he’d invited him along today.