by Don McCullin
I was led up to Hoare, who said, ‘I’ve got no time to talk to you. You will stay here overnight and then I’ll be handing you over to the Congolese authorities in the morning. I have no alternative.’
It was growing dark and I was hungry and tired. I was also thirsty and I was nervous. I had no water nor any canteen food. I had the cameras but the film I’d taken of the young lion warriors had been confiscated. I had nothing to show for my efforts, even if the most merciful thing happened and I was just booted out of the Congo.
A mercenary came by and offered me food. But before I could get a word out, an officer interrupted to say, ‘Don’t give this man any food. He doesn’t deserve it, coming in here, using our unit, disguising himself. Give him fuck all.’
‘You can fucking stick your food,’ I said.
I slept on the ground, in a foetus position, wrapped around my cameras. Next morning the fighting had died down and I could see some of the mercenaries shipping back to the other side of the river. After what seemed an eternity, but was probably only a couple of hours, I was taken to see Hoare again. This time he seemed more relaxed.
‘Much against my better judgment,’ he said, ‘I am going to let you come with us. We’re going downstream. The Simbas have abducted thirty or forty nuns and missionaries and we’re going to see if we can retrieve them, and save their lives. But I must say, you took a bit of a risk, and if you had been dealt with by anyone else, it could have gone against you, and gone against you dangerously. But I admire a bit of spirit, and so you’re welcome to come with us.’
Relief and elation struggled for the upper hand. The deal Hoare proposed was that I should consider myself a soldier first and a photographer second. I would have a weapon but I was not to fire it unless specifically instructed. Fortunately, no instruction ever came. The missionaries we were looking for were mainly Belgians and Canadians. It was known that the chief missionary, a man called Carlsson, had been shot in the crossfire when the Belgian paras had retaken the town. There were another fifty missionaries and nuns still unaccounted for—either abducted or dead.
We recrossed the river. By the timber pile another group of Simba ‘Jeunes’ was being brutally groomed for execution. I photographed them and their persecutors.
We went about twenty miles downriver in a little convoy—two big trucks and a couple of Land Rovers. I didn’t expect that we would find any missionaries alive, or even dead, given the methods of river disposal.
Alan Murphy and I could now talk to each other openly. The thought of being friendly with some of the other guys sent a chill through me. A South African Nazi claiming to be a doctor took a leading role in cooking the meal that night—chickens freshly slaughtered—and I decided to make do with biscuits.
The mercenaries were not over-fastidious in their methods of interrogating villagers en route. All the information they were getting pointed to a place called Asanti, about fifty miles on, where there was known to be a mission building that had been overrun by the Simbas. To get there meant another river crossing in the light assault craft. During the passage the mercenaries frightened off a dug-out canoe, deemed hostile, with a burst from the Browning gun.
We got to Asanti and surrounded the mission, meeting no resistance. Indeed, we met with no one. Then a trembling Belgian missionary appeared and told us there were some black sisters hiding in a building behind the mission. At first they were too frightened to open the doors to us, but eventually they came out crying, laughing and bringing several sick Congolese children with them.
Outside the mission there was a makeshift shrine to Patrice Lumumba with a glass front and gold tinsel round it. It had been built by the Simba rebels and, according to the sisters, had been the scene of daily sacrifices of their enemies. Two mercenaries kicked in the shrine and set the thing ablaze with a drum of palm oil.
In the middle of this conflagration, an Irish mercenary sidled up to me to ask if I could take a picture of him with the Belgian missionary. ‘I’m not very religious,’ he said, ‘but it will keep my mother happy.’
We heard that the bulk of the missing hostages were being held by the rebels further down the road in a long, low building we had missed on our way from the river. We doubled back, half suspecting an ambush. Any suggestion of cover was machine-gunned, to be on the safe side, but it proved unnecessary. The Simbas had gone.
We could hear wailing when we got to the building, then screams which turned into screams of delight. The white nuns and missionaries came pouring out, scarcely able to believe that their ordeal was over. Not all were found. Some had been raped and hacked to death on the journey downriver.
The rescue of the missionaries gave the mercenaries a little hour of glory, but in reality they were a rough crowd. I got on relatively easy terms with Hoare, and even with the hard nut officer who refused me food, but I had no illusions about the people I was with. Back in Stanleyville, I roomed in a commandeered house with a Rhodesian mercenary called Peter, a compulsive looter of jewellery who had joined up after shooting his wife’s lover. And Peter was one of the most human. Their nightly diversion was to work themselves up with an old blue movie before they went to work on the local women, whom they would first bath and douse in Old Spice. Racism was not a qualification for the job but they seemed to be racist to a man.
One night I woke up in a cold sweat to hear a burst of gunfire that sounded as if it was in the room.
‘What on earth’s that, Peter?’ I said.
‘It’s okay mate, go back to sleep. It’s just some silly bastard letting off firearms.’
Unable to sleep, I crept down to the kitchen in the early hours to get something to eat. There, in a great pool of blood on the floor, were the two young African boys who helped cook and keep the place tidy. Both were dead, riddled with bullets.
When I checked the thing out it appeared that they had been killed by a rather shifty South African junior officer as part of a drunken bloodlust. His story was that the two boys, who had accompanied the mercenaries on the march to Stanleyville, had been stealing weapons. Whether or not they had been doing this, there didn’t seem any case for blasting them at three o’clock in the morning without any suggestion of a legal proceeding. I made myself unpopular by reporting the matter to a more senior officer, saying that the South African should be disciplined. I was not so politely asked to leave.
After delivering my pictures on the German commission, I took my Congo experiences to the Observer, where they were written up by my friend John Gale, under the title ‘Climb Aboard for Stanleyville’. It had a formidable impact though, for obvious reasons, I had to conceal the role of Alan Murphy in my adventures.
I was to hear of Alan again in tragic circumstances fifteen years later. He died in a struggle with two policemen, one of whom was shot, in the East End of London. At the inquest his mother told a crime reporter friend of mine that her son had ‘once saved the life of Don McCullin’, and I suppose in a way he had.
I went back to the Congo twice more, soon after Mobutu had overthrown Tshombe and established himself as one of the most evil men of Africa, responsible for a lot of killing. The restrictions placed on my movements made it almost impossible for me to operate, though I did have the experience of a drunken mercenary trying to hold me hostage at gunpoint in a town called Paulus. The second time, in 1967, I entered illegally across the Rwanda border to join a group of renegade mercenaries led by Colonel Jean ‘Black Jack’ Schramme, who were bottled up in the town of Bukavu, surrounded by the Congolese army. They were trying to build an airstrip with their bare hands in order to get out. A sort of phoney heroism grew up over their stand. It circled the world in news form as a sort of small-scale Dien Bien Phu. I spent ten days in Bukavu with the mercenaries, sharing their fears of sudden attack and being strafed in the streets, but it was hard to admire them even in adversity.
I shared a billet with a mercenary called Alex, who had
recently served a nineteen-day sentence in a Congolese jail. He told me tensely that he intended killing an African for every day he spent inside. He became more relaxed when after a few days he reached his target.
I was told by John St Jorré, another correspondent who had come in with me, of a ‘drinks party’ organised for some Indians who had returned to their looted homes. The mercenaries were lying in wait and forced the Indians to drink whisky to reveal the whereabouts of their hidden gold. One of the Indians protested that there was no hidden treasure and was cold-bloodedly gunned down.
The mercenaries did get out. Some deal involving the Red Cross and, I suspect, the CIA was stitched together to ensure their safe departure. They walked away from the siege in a little blaze of glory. But they could never be heroes to me.
12. SEARCH AND DESTROY
When I returned to London after my first visit to the Congo I discovered that my Cyprus pictures, taken earlier in the year, had won the World Press Photo Award, the top award for a photographer, and I was the first Englishman to win the £500 prize. I was delighted, not just by the money but because I thought it would increase the opportunities to do the work I wanted to do. At the same time I felt the beginnings of uneasiness, which would become much more pronounced in later years, at the idea of receiving a prize for depicting the misery and suffering of other human beings.
The award did help me professionally, without a doubt. I was now recognised as an international photo-journalist, among the first to be sent for when any conflict suddenly hit the news. This soon took me to the war that was already usurping the world’s headlines and would continue to do so for the next ten years—Vietnam.
Press pass, Saigon, 1965
In Vietnam I would learn a lot about the technical difficulties of photography under fire. One of the greatest dangers lay in taking light readings. Pictures can be rattled off at speed, but when it comes to making a correct appraisal of the light there is no substitute for a few moments of immobility and deliberation; thus you become a still target. Loading film was another high-risk business. On my early trips to Vietnam I had a camera called a Nikon F, which did not have a hinged back. You could only load the camera by taking the back off and having a good fiddle around. Under fire, I used to lie flat on the ground with the camera on my chest, and do it blind. If I had put my head up to look at it, I would probably have been a dead man.
Vietnam killed a lot of newspapermen. The final count of those killed or missing, presumed dead, was sixty-eight. Both journalists and photographers were involved, but the photographers got the worst of it. Photographers had to get out in the field where the risks were infinitely greater. There was no security in any of the different methods of covering war. Sean Flynn, the son of Errol, was said to go flamboyantly into combat on a Honda, toting a pearl-handled pistol, while Larry Burrows, the brilliant English photographer who worked for Life magazine, was the model of professionalism and polite diffidence. Both joined the list of the missing, presumed dead.
You could take all the precautions, like wearing your tin hat, buttoning your flak jacket and loading your cameras horizontally, but ultimately there was no defence against the worst. If you stepped on a landmine, or on to the wrong helicopter, that was it. Yet Vietnam was the war that attracted newspapermen more than any other. This was partly a reflection of the appetite for news, but it was more than that. The war had an addictive quality for those who covered it. Michael Herr, in his book Dispatches, would later suggest, ‘Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.’
I first went there early in 1965, dispatched by the Illustrated London News, a classy old magazine that was short of money. They wanted me to do the pictures and the words, and were apologetic about it, but it suited me very well. On the flight over I conquered my aversion to reading to the extent of dipping into Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.
It was good preparation though not sufficient warning of the incredible heat and humidity or the notices at the airport referring to what the Americans called ‘an in-country plague situation’. In Saigon I checked in at a hotel that was pure Graham Greene, the Hotel Royale, run by Monsieur Octavie, an ex-Legionnaire who had stayed on after the country was partitioned. They showed me up to a room and a double bed that looked as if it had seen a lot of screwing, but this may have been my inflamed imagination. Though there were prostitutes in the bar below, M. Octavie, quirkily by Saigon standards, never allowed women into the men’s rooms. He just had very old beds, and very old everything else. At least the company was good. After the war was over, I heard that the building had been converted into a factory making flags for the new Vietnamese nation.
The American presence was nothing to what it later became but it was already conspicuous. For a correspondent wanting to work in South Vietnam there was no way around it. If you went into the field of combat you went in an American helicopter. You had to get your MAC V accreditation from the American military and they were the people who determined where you could go. Your full accreditation card would give you the honorary rank of major—handy for getting around the US bases but not, I thought, a very comforting document to have on you if you happened to be captured.
I was attached to what was called an Eagle Operation, directed at suspected hideouts and villages under the control of the Viet Cong. There was a savage procedure to these operations. It would start with heavily armed helicopters flying over the suspected VC territory with the main purpose of goading sniper fire from the ground. Once enemy positions had been identified by this method, the search-and-destroy operation would begin. This consisted of concentrated bombing of the area, then sending in the Vietnamese Ranger troops at lightning speed. Their task was to flush out the rebels.
I went in by helicopter with the Rangers to the town of Kan Tow in the Mekong Delta, where VC activity was suspected. The flight crew were all American.
It was my first time into a battle by helicopter and I was really fired up as we skimmed low over the trees. Not as much as the Rangers though. They almost knocked me out of the helicopter in their haste to disembark.
They came to a mangrove swamp and started to make their way with infinitely more care. We had been warned to look out for a Viet Cong device called the punge stick, which could pierce a boot with ease. The sticks were notched bamboo, needle-sharp and almost impossible to withdraw once embedded in a foot.
We gathered speed again as Kan Tow came into view. About fifty yards from the village the Rangers battalion, urged on by its three American advisers, broke into a trot. They commenced firing from the hip and emitting bloodcurdling yells. Anything that moved—from a dog to a chicken—provoked a hail of bullets.
At first the village seemed to be deserted, apart from the bodies of dead water buffalo, unfortunate victims of the air strafing. Then a soldier shouted and produced a soaking wet man, shaking with terror and clutching a year-old baby. He had been hiding up to his neck in the slimy village stream.
The soldiers started poking around on the ground and came across holes covered in palm leaves. Out of these holes emerged whole families, though mainly women and children. I learned later that this village used to dig slit trenches, but these were automatically bombed by the government forces.
The soldiers started poking further afield. More men were found. They were promptly taken prisoner, their hands tied behind their backs with their own shorts. Two men darted out of a bamboo shack just ahead of me and plunged into the river. I saw one blown to pieces by a hand grenade. The other tried to claw his way up the far bank only to be caught by the concentrated fire of twenty rifles.
Without a common language it was hard for me to determine on what basis the South Vietnamese troops chose their targets. It seemed to me they were simply trigger-happy. I also felt that what I was witnessing was not likely to achieve the avowed aim of American policy—winning Vietnamese hearts and minds.
All the men of the village, without
exception, were treated as suspects, as clandestine members of the Viet Cong. No arms were found in Kan Tow, but I was assured that the VC were expert at plunging them in the inaccessible muddy ooze of the rice fields.
We took off with a load of prisoners and as the helicopter banked I thought how easily some of them could fall out. When the war grew even uglier, some did.
By dusk we were all back at the Soctrang base with another score of new VC suspects. The interrogation of prisoners was not something I was invited to photograph.
On later trips I would find myself photographing more Americans than Vietnamese. As the US President Lyndon Johnson poured in ever more combat troops to shore up his South Vietnamese ally, the fiction of the ‘adviser’ melted away. The images of war became unmistakably American. I was there on the bizarre day when the Marines hit the beach at Da Nang. They came charging up, M-16 rifles at the ready, as if to take and give heavy casualties in a sort of replay of Iwo Jima. They were then met by a South Vietnamese welcoming committee of almond-eyed girls in ao dais who insisted on adorning the would-be combat heroes with pink and white orchids. But combat for these soldiers was merely deferred. At places like Khe Sanh and Hue, the Marines would take the most appalling casualties.
Vietnam bred its own species of gallows humour and black farce. One of my more ludicrous experiences occurred in 1966 when Quick magazine sent me out with a German reporter called Horst, who kept clicking his heels and bowing, making me want to hide.
Horst and I went into the jungle as part of an army patrol probing for VC. The day, aside from sleeting with rain, had been uneventful, but come the night, when we were camped in slimy mud with the rain still bucketing down, we heard another noise—shwam, the sound of an incoming shell. I found myself locked in Horst’s sobbing embrace with him saying to me, ‘Dear Christ, what was that?’ The shelling went on with Horst grabbing me each time for comfort and begging me to tell him when it would end. As if I had any idea. Then a gruff drill-sergeant’s voice came through the night.