by Don McCullin
When we got to the battleground where Monty and the Eighth Army had thrown back Rommel’s tanks, it was an anticlimax. Most of the remnants of war had long since been removed, though there were still dodgy bits of German S-mines around, still perfectly capable of blowing off your leg. We were warned not to pick up anything. There had been many serious accidents among the civilian population in an area that had been sown with millions of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines. They gave Egypt its legacy of amputees.
After Monty had delivered a few lectures we started back in much the same stately manner, despite unwelcome events taking place in the real world, one of which was the Colonels’ seizure of power in Greece. A telex arrived from the Sunday Times in London telling me to proceed to Athens immediately. Monty would have none of it.
‘Donald will not go to Athens,’ he stated with an air of finality. ‘He will remain with my party. Nobody leaves my party.’ I stayed with his party.
One morning I was showing off on the beach doing a handstand in front of the house cleaners in a hotel complex and I fell into a table full of drinks and cups. There was a lot of merriment. Oliver Leese must have told Monty that I was making the ladies laugh. ‘You must go home and cosset your wife,’ Monty said to me sternly. ‘You must have nothing to do with ladies.’
When we were talking about women one evening, Monty came in with his wicked gleam. ‘You know Oliver’s got a lady.’ It was true, Oliver had a very nice lady whom he had known for many years, but Monty managed to cast a red light district glow over the enterprise.
Jesting complaint was all part of Monty’s funny way. He must have said we were taking two years off his life at least a dozen times, and he was obviously having a whale of a time for a man of seventy-nine. Great men must be allowed their share of oddities, though I think Monty had more than most. One of the more inexplicable foibles was the shine he took to me, and not just in the desert. When I returned from the Six Day War, he telephoned to invite me to his home. It was Christine who took the call. ‘Are you the housekeeper?’ the piping voice demanded briskly. Once assured that he was through to the right number, he issued his request for my presence at Isington Mill in the wilds of Hampshire. It would be a difficult journey, I figured, but there was no dodging it. This was like a royal command.
He met me at the station. The staff almost came to attention as he led me out into the station yard where stood a lovely old Rover car. To my astonishment, he himself was to be my chauffeur.
‘Are you quite comfortable?’ he asked before he let in the gear and began the slow, stately drive—at all of seven miles an hour. At one moment he dared to lift a hand off the steering wheel and pat the dashboard.
‘This is real wood, this,’ he said with pleasure. ‘Two-thousand-pound job, this vehicle.’
Lunch—a rather meagre meal—was served by a little housekeeping lady in a room furnished in light oak. Afterwards I was escorted to an identical room upstairs—it even had the same books on the coffee table.
‘Winston Churchill gave me that painting,’ Monty said, pointing to one of the framed pictures on the wall. ‘I shall probably sell it one day.’
He always had a wicked little kick-back in his remarks. Referring to the consequences of the Six Day War he said, ‘Most of our friends of the desert pilgrimage seem to have got the sack.’
‘Would you like a beer?’ I think it was a very large concession on his part—a non-drinking, non-smoking man—to pour a beer for me.
At four o’clock—‘not a minute before, nor a minute after’ said Monty—the housekeeper brought in tea. A huge iced cake was placed beside the pot of tea and cups on a tray. Monty said nothing, just watched her intently come and go. He seemed to have little time for women. He was like an old tomcat watching that programmed servant. He handed me a huge wedge of cake, and scarcely before I had finished was asking if I would like some more.
‘If you don’t have it the rats will get it,’ he said, dangling the implication that the ‘rats’ might not have four legs.
I visited Lord Montgomery at least half a dozen times over the next three years. He would usually get in touch through Denis Hamilton, and the ceremonial of the visits was always much the same. On one occasion, however, he had me photographing his flower beds, giving particular prominence to the red and white astilbe. Another time he honoured me with a visit to his garage, where he opened the huge doors to reveal Rommel’s caravan captured at the battle of Alamein.
Usually we talked about whichever war I had just returned from, and he was always knowledgeable and precise. I remember the removal of General Westmoreland at the time of Tet gave him particular satisfaction. He was the only person I called ‘Sir’, but I felt that this man had earned respect. As my view of him began to mellow, I saw the reality beneath all the honours as that of a very lonely old man.
16. THE BATTLE OF HUE
From my first visit to Vietnam I always felt that the Americans could never win the war, for all their power. That sense was never stronger than at their victorious battle for Hue.
It was one of those occasions when the timing of my arriving in Vietnam went wrong—or maybe too exactly right. As the Air France jet approached Bangkok I heard over the pilot’s radio of the Tet offensive, the synchronised Viet Cong invasion, in the lull of the New Year holiday, of a hundred South Vietnamese towns and cities, including Saigon itself. Astonishing things were happening. A Viet Cong ‘kamikaze’ volunteer had leapt out of a taxi at the US Embassy in Saigon and fired the first rounds in the battle for the American citadel. Diplomats were said to be returning fire from the Embassy windows. Four thousand guerrillas, smuggled in disguised as family visitors for the Lunar New Year, had materialised at the same time inside the city defences. The South Vietnamese HQ was under siege, so was the Presidential palace and Tan Son Nhut airport, where we were supposed to land. We were diverted instead to Hong Kong, and there I sat, waiting, when the news came through that Saigon had been reclaimed. The symbolic Embassy battle had lasted six hours and left twenty-six dead. I felt I should have been there to cover it. Some 37,000 people died in Vietnam in the aftermath of Tet.
In that aftermath my friend Eddie Adams, an American photographer, took the decisive picture—of the police chief, in public, shooting a bound Viet Cong prisoner in the head. More even than the My Lai massacre, that picture was to create a turning point in the heart of the American people. No longer were they in a war that they found to be honourable.
When finally I got to Vietnam, I headed north, to Khe Sanh. There, in a dustbowl in the hills of north-west Vietnam, close to the North Vietnamese and Laos borders, a replay of the French disaster at Dien Bien Phu thirteen years before was taking place.
Two crack North Viet divisions—directed from Hanoi by General Giap, the victor of Dien Bien Phu—had approached the big American base in Khe Sanh down the Ho Chi Minh trail. One was the 304th, the very same that had led the assault on the French. Linking up with 60,000 troops already in the area, the North Vietnamese army (NVA) had surrounded Khe Sanh and its small strategic airfield, a key to north–south movement. The American Marines in the base—outnumbered eight to one—were virtual sitting ducks as their enemy tunnelled to within a hundred yards of the camp wire. Their lifeline was air support, on a scale the French could never have conceived. The massive B-52 bombers dropped 5,000 bombs a day on the besieging NVA and thousands of tons of napalm.
I flew up to Da Nang, the huge US military base on the coast, still intending to go to Khe Sanh, though I was daunted by the amount of coverage it had received already. Reporters and cameramen were being flown in on the planes which came to bring out the wounded. They were using American air superiority to get their own job done. I had the same thought in mind when I saw in the press centre a bone-weary David Douglas Duncan, an ex-Marine colonel from Korea, and a very, very good photographer. He had rolls and rolls of film from Khe Sanh. It tipped my decision. W
hat was the point in doubling up on David?
There was talk of a US counter-offensive to reclaim the chief South Vietnamese city still in Northern hands—the Imperial City of Hue. This sounded a subject for me.
Hue, an ancient mandarin walled city, stood on the banks of the Perfume River up near the demilitarised zone. It was the cultural capital of Vietnam, Oxford and Cambridge combined. It had fallen in Tet to a force of 5,000 Viet Cong and NVA regulars, and their flag now flew above its battlements. There was a large civilian population and some horror was expressed that such a place should become a battleground of war. If the Americans were to recapture it, the action was bound to involve heroic assault and close street fighting for the Marines. As with Jerusalem, I was drawn to the idea of covering a battle in an ancient city.
Under a heavy overcast sky, I joined the convoy of the Fifth Marine Commando as it started rolling up to Hue. It ploughed through heavy mud and rain, past houses collapsed and pitted by artillery, and columns of fleeing refugees. It was very cold.
We trucked to the southern tip of Hue. The news was that the Marine force ahead of us had liberated the southern half of the city. The task of the Fifth Commando now was to free the Citadel, the walled city on the north bank of the Perfume River.
A vast bridge complex running down into the river had been blown. Big spans of it were broken in the middle. Ahead of me lay the northern city of Hue, apparently dead, crawling with North Vietnamese regulars, they said, a formidable and tenacious foe. Though not my foe. I never felt that the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese were my enemy. Although I arrived in Hue looking indistinguishable from an American Marine, I was not on an American mission. I was, what I always tried to be, an independent witness—though not an unemotional one.
Shell-shocked US Marine, Hue, 1968
Waiting to cross the Perfume River, I went out with a Marine patrol probing the firefights around the edge of the city, and checking out the seemingly deserted houses near the battle area. They went round the houses in a very macho fashion, throwing their weight around, rattling and banging their equipment. I hung behind, waiting at the back.
They entered and emerged from a house. I heard one say to another, ‘There’s nothing in there but a dead gook.’
I went in the house, to a dark room, and saw a mosquito net draped over the bed. There was a candle burning. As I moved closer to the mosquito net, I saw a corpse lying behind it, lying in a dignified way. I looked and thought, That’s a very small person. As I lifted the gauze, I saw that it was a small child in a grubby shirt. I let the mosquito net down and took stock. For the first time I pressed the emotional buttons that sooner or later got pressed in war. I left that patrol thinking about that small boy, that curtailed small life, which didn’t amount to anything to these men except as ‘another dead gook’.
I went back to the command centre and found another patrol. They were detailed to routine mopping-up. Bunkers and air raid shelters were approached with the warning cry ‘Fire in the hole!’ before a grenade was lobbed in. From one such fired hole emerged a family of wounded Vietnamese civilians.
When finally I reached the water’s edge I found a very tall US Naval Commander in charge of operations. He smoked a big cigar.
‘Good morning,’ I called. ‘I’m from the Sunday Times in London and I’ve come into Hue with the Marines. Could you tell me when I could board for crossing the river?’
He looked down at me with utmost contempt. ‘Excuse me,’ he said flatly, ‘you will not board any of my boats. You will leave this compound.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, but I do have authorisation,’ I said, ‘and I have accreditation to cross, and I’m part of this set-up.’
‘I don’t give a damn. You will leave my compound. You will not board my boats.’
I knew I would get nowhere with this man. He was one of those John Wayne types you sometimes came across, too busy admiring their own performance to take anything in. As I was walking away, thoroughly dejected, my eye fell on some Vietnamese soldiers boarding a pontoon assault landing craft further up the river, out of this man’s clear sight.
I darted through trees and gardens and surfaced close to the pontoon. With a bit of sign language, I got a friendly invitation to come aboard. I dropped my height, bent my knees and waddled on at the end of the queue. The gate went up, the boat backed out, it turned and set off downriver. I could see the huge, enthralled-with-himself Naval Commander, standing with his legs apart, still smoking the stogie, surveying the scene. As we put-putted past him I stood up to my full height and put up two fingers and gave him my best smile.
On the other side, I was getting ahead of the phase-lines, the plans of advance into battle, though I didn’t know it then. I left the Viets and found myself walking through mandarin gardens and waterparks, and by miniature lakes, within the confines of a medieval wall. It was peaceful. Then I heard small arms fire, and the crunch of incoming mortar. I had to jerk myself out of this mood of pleasant strolling and remind myself of the war.
I spotted some men taking cover in a roadside by the gardens. I could see bandages, bloody bandages, and bloody flesh. I ran over to them—they were Americans—and lay down in the same ditch. The crack of AK-47 rounds could be heard above our heads.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked.
‘There’s a hell of a lot of VC ahead. We’ve got casualties already, and we’re waiting for the medics to come.’
At a distance, I saw a man sitting by a wall with a corpsman (as they called the medics) close to the Citadel walls. I pointed out this scene to the man who had spoken. ‘What’s going on over there?’
‘That’s a man who’ll surely get a Congressional. He’s just taken two rounds in the face.’
I crawled along until I found this soldier sitting with his back to the low wall. There was blood and saliva running down his face, and the huge personal dressing he was applying was turning red as I watched. His eyes were like infernos, pleading with the pain. I raised my camera as he turned his head from left to right, requesting me not to do it. I backed off.
Later, in a lull in the fighting, I crawled over to another group of Marines who found me a tin helmet. One soldier, who had never met an Englishman before, said, ‘Let me do something special for you.’ He conjured up a magnificent fruit cocktail out of nowhere. I was lying in a ditch, sipping this gift, when there came a most tremendous escalation in the noise of battle. The incoming mortars were terrifying but so was our own back-up effort. The American fleet, fifteen miles away in the China Sea, were dropping shells in front of us in a co-ordinated pattern and, I later discovered, soldiers would spend sleepless nights worrying about them dropping short.
They were also bringing in Phantoms, just over our heads, to drop napalm. The actual canisters were released behind us to hit the Citadel in front of us. So your imagination gazed upon this huge delivery of canisters with a lot of apprehension.
Suddenly it grew dark. The Orientals believe that all sorts of demons are let loose at night, and sometimes they would prove to be the Viet Cong and the NVA, turning people’s fear of the dark to their own advantage. I was too exhausted to be scared. Exhilaration and adrenalin exhaust you. Your nerve-ends, your antennae, are raw, hanging out. Normally they tell you everything, and they make you feel everything. I was exhausted, but still excited and, above all, hungry.
In the fading light, I hunted for food. The soldiers were issued with what they called C-rats, a personal pack with some tinned food. I knew that even after a long time in the field, there were some C-rats that the soldiers couldn’t stomach. I soon came across plenty of discards of a concoction called ham and lima beans.
Spooning into my lima beans, I registered that, for the first time in my life, I was in a battle on a gigantic scale. My previous Vietnam battles, and the battle for Jerusalem, were skirmishes compared to this. Only a few months earlier, in the euphoria after the
Six Day War, I had said that I would like to do war photography every day of the week. Hue was to teach me a terrible lesson.
The Americans had told me they were going in for a twenty-four-hour operation. As the days turned into a week, and then a second week, I suddenly became an old man. I had a beard. My eyes were sunken. I was sleeping under tables in tin shacks, on the floor, shivering with the cold at night. I never took off my clothes, and I kept my helmet close by me, and a flak jacket for a blanket. I had acquired the jacket from the first field casualty station, where they cut the stuff off the wounded and the dead, and threw it on a big pile.
One morning I emerged from my little hut and went in a new direction, to the right instead of the left. On the other side of the corrugated iron sheet which made up the side wall of this little Vietnamese house I found a dead North Vietnamese soldier. He had been lying almost head to head with me for days; shot in the mouth. The bullet had ripped its way through the back of his head. Such macabre sights were almost commonplace. You would find corpses or detached limbs. I went to retrieve an object by the roadside once and found it was a foot that had been run over by a tank. The human mutilation was matched by the physical mutilation. Hue, that beautiful city, was becoming a city of rubble.