Highways to a War (60 page)

Langford sang well: he had a natural, pleasing voice. Opposite me, his face grew a little red, and a sheaf of yellow hair fell across his forehead. Watching him, I said to myself that his notion of belonging here was nonsense. He’d never looked more like a country Australian, and I decided that the declaration he’d just made to me was the product of a mood; a fantasy. After all, most of us were a little deranged, in that month.

Aubrey Hardwick proved to be wrong: the Khmer Rouge didn’t break through in the next few weeks. The city held on through February, and all through March as well.

It was April that brought the fall; and even then, it came as a surprise. Most of us were still imagining that defeat might still be a few more months away. We can never believe in any absolute end, I suppose; we’re never quite ready.

I know that was Langford’s frame of mind. If it hadn’t been, he’d never have come to Saigon with Jim Feng and me.

We made the short flight there on Thursday, April 10th, intending to return to Phnom Penh in forty-eight hours—and the reason we went was that it now seemed certain Saigon would fall first. It could now only be weeks—perhaps days—before the North Vietnamese Army reached the capital. Nobody knew what would happen then; there was still talk of a truce.

Our bureau chiefs were pressing us to go, of course, but that wasn’t what gave the trip its principal urgency. We’d given the war a good slice of our lives: we wanted to be there at the end.

 

 

Showered and changed, Mike, Jim and I sat in the same old green wicker chairs on the Continental terrace, drinking beer.

It was five in the afternoon on Friday. We were surrounded by familiar figures from the press corps and the foreign embassies; our drinks were brought to us across the tiles by the same aged Chinese waiters. But beyond the terrace’s low stone wall, nothing was the same. The Army of North Vietnam was moving south at terrific speed, and everything was going down in front of it. Sometimes there’d apparently been no resistance. The Communists were now about half an hour’s drive away, on Highway 1. No one had imagined that the end would arrive so quickly.

We’d just got back from covering a battle at Xuan Loc: a province capital where the Army of South Vietnam was trying to make a final stand. We’d gone in the back of a military truck to a point as close as we could get: a South Vietnamese artillery position in a hamlet where long-range shelling was going on. Mike had taken pictures; Jim and I had done a filmed interview with an ARVN military spokesman. The spokesman had said that Xuan Loc was crucial, and that the ARVN would hold it. But we knew they wouldn’t. Nothing would hold any more.

Hue was gone. Da Nang was gone. Kontum, Pleiku, Nha Trang and Cam Ranh were gone, as the North Vietnamese military machine came south. These were places that were meant never to fall: towns which the vanished American Military Command had sworn never would fall, and from where we’d reported times without number. Now they’d gone down within days of each other. Resistance was crumbling by the hour, and out on Tu Do Street, beyond the terrace, the refugees were streaming by: in battered cars, on bicycles and on foot. Peasants in black pajamas walked with middle-class families in Western dress, all of them carrying their toddlers and babies. All wore the same expressions; all carried baskets and suitcases and sad plastic airways bags crammed with possessions. Some pushed barrows. Malignant brown gusts of wind churned up choking dust about their feet.

How can I explain to you what Saigon was like, that afternoon? The smells were still petrol and diesel fumes, cordite, nuoc
mam
and spices. But it seemed to me that a new and larger odor lay over everything, permeating the whole city. It was the odor of human fear: a little like seaweed, or perhaps dying flowers. I can still smell it.

There was the usual traffic jam in the square, but a new sort of rage could be heard in the blaring horns and voices. Above the din hung impotent Government propaganda banners in red and yellow. Everything leaned and moved like the sails of a yacht, fast yet slow, fast yet slow: and as in bad dreams, the appearance of things remained slyly unchanged. But at the deep, hot core of the din, everything was changing.

Correspondents were now being visited in their hotel rooms by beautiful young Vietnamese women from wealthy families, who offered their bodies and then begged to be transported to America; Europe; Australia. One had knocked on Bill Wall’s door the week before, with a briefcase in her hand. She had opened it up, and it was jammed with a hundred thousand U.S. dollars in cash. All she asked was to be taken out, Bill said. She wept when he refused.

We now watched two cars stalled at right angles, a dozen yards away: a battered blue-and-cream Renault taxi with an ARVN captain in the back, and a long black Ford driven by a man I placed as a drug dealer, in white suit and sunglasses. He and the taxi driver and the captain waved their hands and screamed at each other, their faces distorted with a rage that looked psychotic. Then a pistol shot made us jump. Leaning out of the taxi’s window, the captain had drawn his Colt .45 and had fired into the bonnet of the Ford.

Mike threw back his head and laughed. “Shot him between the headlights,” he said, and Jim laughed too.

But I couldn’t laugh. My throat was dry, and sweat sprang from the palms of my hands. Even machines had to be punished now; and what everyone was thinking of was flight. It was in their faces, all of which seemed to look inward. Everyone was thinking the same thing: you could hear it, pulsing in the air.
Where, where can I run? Who will save me?

We’d listened to many rumors, that afternoon: rumors of what would happen when the Communists arrived. Everyone predicted a massacre of civilians-like the one that the Communists had carried out in Hue in 1968. The first people to be killed, it was predicted, would be civil servants—and foreign journalists like us. And there were stranger rumors. All single women would be made to marry Communist soldiers—and the painted fingernails of bar girls would be torn out. There were also rumors of reprieve: the American B-52s would come back, and save the South at the eleventh hour. The Americans would not desert them.

Jim Feng suddenly spoke to me, gazing out at the crowd. “How much longer, Harvey?”

It wasn’t the first time we’d discussed this question, and I knew he was asking now for a reappraisal.

Maybe a week or ten days, I said. It all depends on how hard the ARVN will fight for the city. Or maybe President Thieu will pull off a deat—although I doubt it.

Jim turned to Mike, his eyes narrow and sharp: almost elated. “We should stay, Snow,” he said. “We should stay for the bitter end, when the NVA get here. You too, Harvey.”

I shook my head. Beyond the call of duty, I said. I doubted that there’d be a single correspondent in town when the NVA arrived. The rumors could be wrong, I said, but I’d rather not put them to the test. All the big outfits were making their plans to evacuate already: Telenews too. No one wanted to be stood against a wall. Neither should you, Jim, I said.

But Jim shook his head, and leaned forward earnestly. “It won’t happen, Harvey. A lot of journalists are pissing their pants over nothing. The North Vietnamese won’t execute news people. We know what they’re like, Mike and I: they’re disciplined. They play by the rules. Isn’t that right, Mike?”

Mike nodded. “I’d trust them,” he said. “Although I wouldn’t trust the Viet Cong. But I won’t be staying, Jim. I can’t wait here that long. Things could go down at any time in Phnom Penh. I have to get back to Ly Keang.”

Jim leaned back in his chair and sighed, beer in hand, his expression resigned and wistful, his legs in their faded khaki trousers and highly polished boots extended in front of him. His white shirt was beautifully ironed as usual, and his slicked-back hair shone. But I suddenly saw the deep lines in his cheeks, and the worn look about the shrewd and humorous almond eyes; and I was looking at a double image. The young Jim Feng of a decade ago was sitting here too, in one of these same wicker chairs, in the time of Rolling Thunder.

“Sure, Snow, I understand,” he said. “You’ve got to be with her. But we spent a lot of years covering this war, didn’t we? A lot of our youth. A pity, not to see the curtain. Dmitri should be here too.”

“Yes, he should,” Mike said.

They were silent for a moment. Then, half humorously, half with sudden concern, Jim said: “Jesus, Mike. No more firefights. What will we do when there are no more firefights?”

 

 

He left us a little after this. Duty called him to dinner with one of his chiefs from Telenews, in town on a visit from London before the office closed down.

Mike and I sat on. He was looking out over Tu Do with a distracted eye, and the question he asked me now showed that his thoughts were with Ly Keang.

“Did you check with the AP office, Harvey? Anything new from Phnom Penh?”

AP had correspondents in Phnom Penh, and were getting stories on the wire all the time; so Jim and I made a habit of looking in at their office in the Eden Building, on the floor above Telenews, and seeing what they had. Yes, I said, we’d checked; nothing much had broken since this morning. But make sure you do come back on Saturday, I said. I’ve got a feeling.

“Sure. I’ll come back Saturday no matter what,” he said. “But there’s something I have to do here first—people I have to see, at the U.S. embassy.”

He didn’t explain this immediately; instead he fell silent for a moment. Swallows flickered and wheeled in the early twilight; sunset was turning the sky deep red above the tower of the Caravelle. On the roof there, the usual tiny figures could be made out, looking down on Tu Do’s chaos; a cameraman was shooting film.

“I want you to do me a favor,” Langford said suddenly. “Come to dinner with me tomorrow night at Claudine Phan’s.”

This surprised me. He’d mentioned Madame Phan from time to time over the years, but only briefly; and he’d never suggested introducing me. I asked how she’d feel about having an extra dinner guest.

He smiled. “Why should she mind? She’s turned the place into a restaurant: that’s how Claudine survives now. The family business and the money are all gone.”

He leaned closer to me across the table, lowering his voice. “She wants me to get her two sons out to the U.S. They’re guys in their twenties: both up to their necks in Government circles. So you see what’s in store for them. Claudine believes the VC will execute them when Hanoi takes over, and it’s probably true. So I’ve got to do this for her, Harvey. And I want to get Claudine out as well.”

I pointed over the wall at the trudging, jostling streams of refugees. They’d pay every piastre they have for what you’re offering Madame Phan, I said. Some of them would kill for it. Can you actually deliver?

“Yes,” he said. “No problem. The Americans are planning an airlift of picked Vietnamese nationals when they pull the embassy out. Didn’t you know? They’re already drawing up secret lists, and they listen to journalists. I’ve got a mate in the embassy: I can get the sons on the list.” He leaned closer, both hands on the table. “But I’ve got to persuade Claudine to go too, Harvey. At the moment she’s saying she won‘t—but she’s got no more hope of surviving than they have: probably less. The problem is, she doesn’t want to be saved. It’s crazy.”

He looked away from me, fumbling for a loose cigarette in his top pocket. “Claudine’s a wonderful lady,” he said. “She can’t be left here to rot in a bloody prison camp.” He flicked on his lighter, looking at me again. “Help me to persuade her, mate. She might listen to you.”

So this was why he’d come to Saigon, I thought. It was this that had drawn him out of Phnom Penh—not the story. Yes: I understood. Phnom Penh was the present, and Ly Keang was the future. But Saigon was the past, and Madame Phan was the guardian of the past; and he couldn’t abandon the past or her. It was Claudine whom he’d really come to save—not her sons.

 

 

All the candles in the room were burning low, and some were flickering out, causing shadows to tremble on the walls. Young Vietnamese women wearing the
ao dai
had cleared the debris of dinner from the table, leaving us with balloons of brandy. They had been quite noiseless, except when they spoke to each other: a soft chirruping like that of sleepy birds.

Now the three of us were alone, and the room was silent. All the customers had gone.

For some moments we sat without speaking, as though in a trance. The Phan villa had that effect, I found: a house of musing silences. One of Madame Phan’s bare arms was extended at full length across the table, her hand covering Langford’s. They sat looking at each other, frozen as though on a stage, with me as their audience.

Her ivory-colored arm was firm and shapely: that of a much younger woman. But her face was haggard and weary. Her appearance had shocked me, when we were first introduced. Her hair was half gray, and a long wisp of it had escaped from the chignon at the back: a touch of disarray that I guessed wasn’t typical—or wouldn’t have been, once. She wore a sleeveless black silk dress of Chinese cut, with slits at the sides. She was probably around fifty, and was still a handsome woman—the surprising gray green eyes in the Vietnamese face her most arresting feature. I remembered how often I’d heard in the sixties how beautiful she was; how wealthy and powerful. Now here she sat: beauty going; the money gone; the North Vietnamese Army hammering at Xuan Loc, the door to Saigon.

“Dearest Mike,” she said. She had a deep, drawling voice that compelled your attention. “Tell me again,” she said. “You’re sure? No nasty little loopholes? They won’t go back on it?”

“No,” Mike said. “You know the Americans: it’s done when they say it’s done. Larry Hagen won’t let me down. All your boys have to do now is stand by and wait.”

She continued to look into his face, as though trying to discover some hint of deception. Then she blinked rapidly, and glanced at me.