Highways to a War (42 page)

—The village where the base was located was very small, and the people had deserted it. Major Chandara had taken over a house next to the camp, and he offered me accommodation for the night.

—It was the usual small farmhouse on wooden piles, and I shared the evening meal with him on the verandah. Afterwards we lay back in cane chairs, drinking beer. Below us were the camp’s galvanized iron lean-tos, military trucks and APCs, and the flames of the soldiers’ cooking fires, pale in the last daylight. The heat had been eased by a short, unexpected downpour : one of those premature storms you sometimes get in March, and which really belong to late April. The Cambodians call them mango rains. It had swept away the dust-haze, and suddenly we could see for miles across the dry, yellow, dead-flat land to the southeast: all the way to the mountains on the Vietnam border, perhaps forty kilometers away. The mountains had been hidden by the haze, before; now their pale shapes stood straight up out of the plain like a mirage.

—The Seven Mountains were among those peaks: the ones the Cambodians say are magic mountains. There are old Buddhist shrines and pagodas there where holy men live, and caves for guerrilla groups and bandits. They’re not very tall, but they’re eerie: peaks of whitish rock, with green vegetation, like mountains in a vision. They’re a main smuggling route into Vietnam for beef and marijuana, and I remembered how Jim and the Count and I once made a trip there in the sixties from the Vietnam side, to buy prime Cambodian weed from the frontier people.

—Major Chandara leaned to offer me a cigarette, and smiled as though reading my memories. He wasn’t a man you took for granted, but I felt relaxed with him: he was quiet and courteous. I’d still to find out why Ly Keang had set up this meeting, but I was going to let him be the one to raise it. Cambodians don’t like to be rushed.

—It’s good to see the mountains after the rain, Chandara said. You know this border country?

—I said I did. I’d covered action against the VC here.

—He’d lit my cigarette and now he lit his own, drawing deeply. You know Mike, I once spent a lot of time in the Seven Mountains, he said. I was a member of the Khmer Serei: the Free Khmer. Back in the sixties we lived in exile there, on the other side of the border. We were working to overthrow Sihanouk: we had Vietnamese backing, and help from the Americans. Some didn’t like to see us turning to such allies—but what we wanted was a republic, and freedom and democracy for our country. We could see what was going to happen: Sihanouk would deliver us to the Communists. You find allies where you can, when the danger is great enough.

—He waited for me to comment, but I didn’t; then he looked out over the rail. Dusk was setting in quickly, and the shapes of the soldiers were black against the cooking fires, moving in and out of the circles of orange light.

—It’s pleasant to sit on a verandah and look out, Chandara said. Don’t you agree?

—Yes, I said. We like to sit on verandahs in my country too.

—But you want to make your home here in Cambodia, he said. Or so Ly Keang tells me. You are staying on a sinking ship, when I understand you are famous enough to work anywhere. Excuse me, but this seems strange. I asked Ly Keang why you would do this, and she said she thinks that in your heart you’re a soldier. She should know: she’s a soldier’s daughter. Her father, Ly Pheang, was my best friend in the Free Khmer.

—Ly Keang’s wrong, I said. She’s got a strong imagination, that girl.

—He smiled; he was watching my face. It was good of you to help carry our wounded today, he said. You may not fight with us—but you help us.

—We sat quiet for a while. Then he said: My mother came from this province—from a little village not far to the north, up Highway 2. My father is an advocate in Phnom Penh, and that’s where I grew up; but my happy childhood memories are of holidays in my mother’s village. I’d look out from the verandah of my grandparents’ house as we are doing now, at the rice fields and the forest beyond, and imagine many adventures. Well, they’ve come to me. Here I am in Takeo again, fighting for my native soil. Last week we nearly lost this whole province: it was very close.

—I asked him had he always wanted to be a soldier.

—He shook his head. I wanted to be an architect, as a young man. But I decided as a student that I had no wish to try and live a normal life in a country full of corruption, run by a corrupt prince and his court. I wanted better for Cambodia than that—and I didn’t want the answer of Communist dictatorship. So I went across the Vietnam border and joined the Free Khmer.

—He drank some of his beer and wiped foam from his mustache, looking out into the dark. Then he said: Some used to call Prince Sihanouk a clown, with his films and his jazz band and his pleasures—but he is much more than that. Cruel, like all selfish people, with much blood on his hands. To keep power for himself, he would do anything; he would deliver this country to demons. Now he lives with his patrons in Peking—stitt with his personal chefs preparing his meals; still surrounded by every luxury. How does such a man live with himself?

—For a moment his face got dark and set, and I saw that he’d be capable of considerable rage. He finished his beer and sat back, pouring another from the bottle.

—When Lon Nol overthrew Sihanouk, we came in from the border and helped to form the Republic, he said. Then the Free Khmer was dissolved, since its aims were supposed to have been achieved. We believed we had an honest government now, to resist tyranny. A mistake—as I’m sure you’ll agree, Mike.

—I wouldn’t want to criticize your government, I told him. They’re facing tough odds.

—You’re very polite, he said. He leaned forward to pour me another beer, looking at me from under his brows. But I’m sure you know the truth, he said, like all Western correspondents. I tell you, I’m ashamed of my government; ashamed of most of our generals. Phnom Penh never gives us enough equipment or enough troops—to get them, we must use any means we can, legal or not. But some commanders claim salaries for ghost soldiers, and use the money to build air-conditioned villas for themselves. You know this. They even sell ammunition to the enemy—and they make their own troops pay for their rice. They take money from the pay of poor peasants who are dying for us; from men like those you helped this afternoon. I’m a fool if I ignore these things.

—I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. It was peaceful, down in the darkened camp. Low voices, sometimes a laugh. A young soldier had begun to play a flute: a Khmer folk melody. I could see him sitting by a fire with a circle of friends around him, men and women, their faces quiet. He was a dark Khmer with a mop of curly hair; he played with great feeling, and the melody was so beautiful, climbing into the dark, it brought tears to my eyes. I loved Cambodia, just then.

—Chandara glanced at my face; then he pointed to the group by the fire, and his voice became gentle, its anger gone. A country is only as good as its ordinary people, he said. And these are good people. My young men and women are brave, and will fight to the end. If the Americans don“t desert us, it’s only our corrupt leaders who can cause us to lose this war.

—It was fairly extraordinary for a commander to be speaking to a Western correspondent like this on first meeting, and I decided now to be frank.

-Yes. But you know what a lot of the correspondents are saying, I told him. if that’s how the Lon Not leaders are, can the Communists be worse? At least the Communists are dedicated.

—He looked hard at me without blinking, and I wondered if I’d gone too far.

—I’ll try to answer you honestly, he said. You think to choose between President Lon Nol and
les Khmers Rouges
is to choose between two evils: I know. It’s a choice between the corrupt and the fanatical. But I have to say to you that it’s better in my opinion to choose the corrupt—even though I detest them. The corrupt are merely weak and vicious; they want to drink their brandy and have parties with their bar girls and wear nice uniforms. They love themselves, and have no sense of duty. But they also have no ideology. That means they have no wish to control our minds or our lives; no desire to destroy our religion. They are not fanatics. Under fanatics, there are no loopholes—they close them all.

—He looked out at the dark, and at the orange sparks of the cooking fires: only the faces near to them could be made out now. We have some knowledge of the Khmer Rouge leaders, he said. They are ex-students, who studied in Paris. Marxist intellectuals: a product of the West! But they recruit young people here who have no education—boys and girls from remote regions, ignorant and suspicious of the world beyond their villages. And these Paris intellectuals are telling them that the world outside is a bad world, and has to be destroyed. They urge them to cruelties: to blood lust. Before, I was fighting the Vietnamese invader. Now I must fight my own people: simple people, infected with a virus.

—I asked him what he’d do if they won.

—If the Khmer Rouge win, he said, the Free Khmer must revive and form a Resistance. We’ll fight a guerrilla war from the border, just as the Communists have done. There’ll be no choice: no compromise with the Khmer Rouge will be possible—and no hope of mercy. Ly Keang knows this: she knows what they can do. They murdered her father.

—This surprised me. I thought he died in action, I said.

—No, he said. They murdered him. But Ly Keang will tell you about this herself, when she’s ready. Not me. Well? Will you think about helping us?

—stared at him, and he smiled: his expression was lighthearted now. You say you won’t leave Cambodia: that this is your home, he said. Good! If the country falls, you can join us: join the Free Khmer.

—I thought he was joking; I laughed and shook my head. Then I looked down at the camp again. The flute player had stopped, and our voices were very distinct, on the verandah. The whole point about my work is to stay uninvolved, I said. A correspondent can’t be involved.

—But the formula was sounding more and more feeble to me lately, and Chandara seemed to know this. He smiled now as though I were a slow child. Mike, you are coming to middle age like me, he said. And this is the time when we must find true purpose in our lives. As a Buddhist, I know it’s time to start acquiring merit. Maybe you should know this too.

—Half joking, I asked him how he could be a Buddhist and a soldier at the same time.

—He laughed. Because I’m not a monk, he said. Only they can follow the Eightfold Path. I’m a man of passions, you can see that. But Buddhism’s tolerant of people like me. It only asks that we live our lives as well as we can. And this is what the Khmer Rouge threaten too. They used to pretend to respect Buddhism, just for propaganda; now they mock it, and desecrate the pagodas and say there is no spirit: that human beings are only clay. That’s how we know they are people of darkness, who’ll destroy goodness. If the mass of the people aren’t good, what hope is there for our lives?

—We talked of other things for a time. A soldier brought us some fresh bottles of beer, and we sank quite a few, in the end. I began to feel pretty happy, and I think Chandara did too. It was so dark now that, when he spoke next, lying back in his chair, I could barely make out his expression.

—Perhaps Cambodia won’t fall, he said, against all the odds. But if it does, I’m hopeful that you’ll be with us. No need to answer now. Battle is at the center of your life, even if you don’t use a gun: I know this. And I think you may be more of a soldier than I am. I’m a soldier only because it’s necessary: I hope in the end for peace. I know that my family are waiting for me, up there in Phnom Penh; I wait to see them. I long for my wife, I long to feel my children put their arms about my neck when I pick them up, and to smell their hair and skin. This is the greatest thing in life: not fighting. But what about you, Mike? Forgive me for being personal. You’ll go back now to your empty apartment that Ly Keang tells me about. Maybe you should be married. Time you had children of your own, at your age.

—He sipped his beer, and watched me over the rim of the glass. He’d really become quite drunk, and so had I. If you want to become Cambodian, he said, and make this your home, you should perhaps look at Ly Keang. She greatly admires you. She’s a fine girl.

—He’d surprised me again, and I answered carefully. Yes she is, I said. But I hardly know her. She’s closer to my friend Dmitri Volkov.

—She sees death in your friend, he said. She sees life in you. So do I.

—He raised his glass to me and smiled, as though what he’d just said had been quite ordinary.

Harvey looks out through the grille, hands folded.

“Kompong Cham,” he says. Then he stops; staring into the white afternoon.

“Kompong Cham in that April just wasn’t a place to be,” he tells me. “It was expected to fall at any time. All the Government held any more was a buffer zone around it. So for Mike to urge that the three of them go up there—”

Turning back to me, he spreads his hands palms upwards. Then he expels breath through his lips so that they bubble, and drops his hands to the table. “I didn’t offer to go with them,” he says. “Not many correspondents would have. And I’m not gung ho, Ray—as I’ve told you.”

He stops, staring at me for a moment, as though expecting a question.

“Oh shit,” he says softly. “I’m not saying that Mike lured them up to Kompong Cham irresponsibly: of course not. But in a way, he was challenging Dmitri. There was a sort of extra rivalry between them at that time. For no good reason—they weren’t in direct competition any more, now that Mike had given up film work. But they all played that game, those bloody cameramen, even when there was nothing to be gained. It was the way they were.”

He raises a hand to rub his bald crown, and then takes off his glasses. Exposed, the large, fish-like eyes are sorrowful, and he sighs.

“This time it was different,” Harvey says. “It’d be another two years before Phnom Penh fell—but for me everything began to be over, in that April and May. The war was coming to its climax, we all knew that: and when it reached it, nothing could be the same again. We knew that too.”