by Don McCullin
I heard some heavy incoming shells one morning when I was out with a Marine close to the Citadel wall. We both jumped into a foxhole by the wall, one that the NVA had dug for themselves for the impending Marine invasion. We were cowering under our helmets when the American said, ‘Goddammit, there’s an awful smell here.’ I noticed that this hole was not firm underfoot. Even though we were in sand, it was too soft. I looked down and saw a row of fly buttons by my boots. We were both crouched on the stomach of a dead North Vietnamese soldier and our weight had caused the stomach to excrete. Despite the shelling, we both leapt out and ran off in different directions, to find other bunkers.
In this kind of war you are on a schizophrenic trip. You cannot equate what is going on with anything else in life. If you have known white sheets, and comfort, and peace in the real world, and then you find yourself living like a sewer rat, not knowing day from night, you cannot put the two worlds together. None of the real world judgments seem to apply. What’s peace, what’s war, what’s dead, what’s living, what’s right, what’s wrong? You don’t know the answers. You just live, if you can, from day to day.
I was with some Marines one evening, probing below the Wall, when someone said ‘Tsai Kong’, the name for the Chinese stick grenade, a small grenade like a lollipop. I saw the grenade lying between me and all the other soldiers except one, a tall gangling Marine who was standing behind me. I dived into the dip in the ground. There was a colossal muffled explosion, followed by a rush of fragmentation. I felt a lot of stuff hitting my legs, and my waist. My lower half went numb. This is it, I thought, I’ve been wounded. I tried to recall what I’d read about being wounded and remembered Robert Graves saying it was like someone hitting you with a forceful blow. There had been forceful thumps all over my body. I thought, Any minute now I’m going to feel blood. I put my hand down to my crotch . . . I had already called out, I suppose as a child would call for its mother. There was a shout of ‘Corpsman’.
Then I felt down my legs. There was no blood, and there were no holes, just the numbness. I had been struck by all the debris and stones but not by the fragmentation. The gangling man had taken the whole lot in the back of his head, under his helmet. He was down, with blood oozing from his head and neck. The other soldiers were all firing in the direction from which the grenade had come because that meant close proximity. Very close. Then the back-up came and they poured all kinds of M-60 into the area, heavy machine-gun rounds.
We pulled back to the compound where Myron Harrington, the commander of Delta company, was based. Harrington was now looking with dismay at every new casualty. This was no mopping-up operation. His company was fast being whittled away by the Wall. And only at the Wall. One day I had stood chatting in a courtyard, and had just stepped into an adjacent courtyard for a moment, when a mortar shell landed just where I had been standing, seriously injuring the two soldiers with whom I had been talking.
The Marines have a tradition; they don’t abandon their wounded or their dead. Harrington would send out details at night to bring back anyone unaccounted for. I went on one of these night missions and felt as if I was intruding on something very private. They were bringing two bodies in and it was the first time I had seen a Western soldier weeping. He was black and was crying over a dead white comrade.
I took a picture of another black Marine hurling a grenade at the Citadel. He looked like an Olympic javelin thrower. Five minutes later this man’s throwing hand was like a stumpy cauliflower, completely deformed by the impact of a bullet. The man who took his place in the throwing position was killed instantly. One day I took a picture that was not of soldiers in action but of a dead Vietnamese with all his scattered possessions arranged around him in a sort of collage. It was composed, contrived even, but it seems to say something about the human cost of this war.
17. LESSONS OF WAR
Sometimes I crawled ahead of the phase-line in order to be in position to photograph the Marines advancing towards me. On one such occasion the advance was suddenly blocked and two men were killed right next to me, where I lay eating dirt in a foxhole. The platoon commander had his throat clipped by a round from an AK-47, and I saw him trying to get his finger into his throat to stem the bleeding. A muscle in his leg had been lifted right back. I crawled over to him after most of the others had crawled away, leaving us extended. The officer began talking heroically about bringing fire down on us, for a diversion.
‘Listen, let’s not be irrational now,’ I said.
Suddenly the remaining men were looking to me for leadership. With the officer out of action, I was easily the oldest there. The fire was too intense to entertain any immediate thoughts of carrying the officer to safety, so we held on until the old M-60 came up again and gave us covering fire.
To my way of thinking, the battle plan of these Marines lacked sophistication. There was altogether too much charging straight down the line, like American cavalry shooting from the hip. With the benefit of raised positions, NVA snipers were just picking men off. Through sheer force of numbers and firepower, it seemed that the Marines must eventually win, but at what cost? You could see that they were losing faith in the war. The swing of public opinion against the war at home in the States was also manifesting itself here in the front line as it was being fought. Several soldiers had told me that if they got out of Hue alive they would be writing to their Congressmen, opposing American involvement in the war. Most American soldiers were openly contemptuous of the South Vietnamese troops who operated in the rear. Even in Hue you could see ARVN looting the possessions of the people they had come to liberate.
One day a child appeared suddenly in the thick of the battle. Thousands of civilians still hid in Hue, though they tried to flee from the front lines, and this child just appeared, an unexplained presence so far forward in the battle. Everyone’s attention turned to it. Soldiers became human beings again instead of warriors. It hurt these nineteen- to twenty-two-year-olds to see this lost infant. Gently they shepherded him to a corpsman, who took him into a house and dressed the nasty gash on his head. I photographed this being done by candlelight, and the soldier who carried the child away from the sniping and the mortar fire did so as if he was making the most important delivery of his life.
The Citadel was eventually taken. It took such a torrent of shells to do it that there wasn’t much worth having. Hue was devastated. The wooden houses had been blown away, the city centre was rubble. They had destroyed the city in order to save it. Almost 6,000 civilians were killed in Hue, more than the military dead on either side. At Khe Sanh, where the siege lasted seventy-seven days, the bombing and shelling exceeded five Hiroshimas.
Yet this was not the whole cost. The minds of the living were being mutilated as much as the bodies of the dead. On one of my last days in Hue I heard some whimpering behind a shack. Two Marines, real old rednecks, had got a little Vietnamese with a rope round his neck and were leading him around as if he was some kind of pet billy-goat. They blindfolded and gagged him and made him kneel and lie down in the dirt. They put him through misery and torment. It was the same cowardly, murderous sequence I had seen in the Congo, now being practised by apostles of freedom in Asia.
Eleven days I had spent in Hue . . . I am not sure what it taught me. I don’t know if it taught me anything beyond a new appreciation of how terrible war can be. It certainly made me ashamed of what human beings are capable of doing to each other. In a grim way I suppose it taught me to survive, and part of that new knowledge was knowing when to leave.
Very early in the battle, a Marine chaplain had come up and offered me the last rites. He had frightened me, and I had said firmly, ‘No, I don’t want that.’ Somehow he put the fear in me, offering me the sacrament, and the flesh of Christ. I thought, this man is offering me a very pessimistic ending here. He spooked me. I thought, I’ve got to put some distance between me and this man.
That night I mentioned the incident to a fr
iend. I must have displayed great emotion, because he urged me to take it easy. There are people at home, he reminded me, thinking of you. I was touched by what he said at the time, but it wasn’t until I got back to England that I felt its full force. While I had been courting death in Hue, my little boy Paul had almost died at home. He had been playing with a bow and arrows, the ones with rubber suckers, and he had put one in his mouth. It stuck to his throat, and he very nearly suffocated.
Before I left Hue I thanked Myron Harrington for what the Marines had given me—camaraderie to one who didn’t bear arms. He told me he would see me in London. Wrongly, I didn’t believe him, and took my leave.
I went down to the casualty clearing station where they kept the body-bags, the plastic body-bags, and the living bones. I saw the priest who had spooked me before, and he smiled.
He said, ‘Are you going to Da Nang?’ I told him that I was, and he said, ‘Well, I’m going to Da Nang too.’
When the helicopter arrived they said there was room only for one person. The priest suggested I should take it.
I said, ‘No, no, it’s your place, Father. You take it.’
‘Don’t argue, I’m your senior.’
I said, ‘Listen, I’m sorry about back there. It just frightened me.’
‘You don’t have to explain,’ he said; ‘go.’
I got in that helicopter and flew down the coastline of Vietnam. I couldn’t speak, and felt as if I had aged twenty-five years. Another photographer aboard that helicopter, a very courageous Frenchwoman, Catherine Leroy, who had been among the Viet Cong in Hue on the other side of the battle, later astonished the world with her pictures of the war. She sat opposite and looked at me, and I gazed at her. I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t want to speak to anyone. I had a screaming in my mind, as if the shell explosions and the fire were still raging there. Images of blood and death and dying. It was all still there in my head. I was totally shell-shocked.
In Da Nang I thought I could start to restore myself with a hot bath and a bed. Then, in the press centre, I met Fred Emery from The Times.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘they want something in London urgently about what it is like up here. Could you talk it through with me? Would you do that?’
‘Can I have a bath first, Fred,’ I said.
My sleep was a long series of linked battle nightmares. To get home I had to fly first to Saigon, and then to Paris, where I found myself on stand-by at Orly. At ten o’clock there were still 100 people missing from the plane. Then I heard some of them coming, English rugby fans who had been to the France versus England international. They were singing through Orly, peeing in the pot plants, dragging fallen comrades. Fallen from drink, not war.
Years later I went back to Hue and walked through that battleground, where I had been so close to death, where I felt I was death’s permanent companion. It seemed so inconsequential, the whole thing. Those men who died, and those men who were maimed for life, went through all that, and it was totally futile, as all wars are known to be. Without profit, without horizons, without joy. I remember there was a street in Da Nang called the Street Without Joy. They could have called the whole country after that street.
18. CHILDREN OF BIAFRA
Five minutes after setting foot on Biafran soil I was in jail. I had made the journey after hearing reports that a woman had reached Iboland with the severed head of her child in a bowl you would normally eat your rice meal from. My Time-Life reporter colleague, George de Cavala, on the plane to Port Harcourt, had been diligently typing up his notes. They thought we were spies. Five hours later we had talked our way out. I was free to embark on one of the most emotional assignments of my life. As a nation Biafra survived for no more than three years. In each of these years I recorded its fragile existence, its struggle and its decline.
The feelings around the Biafran conflict are now hard for Europeans to recall. But in 1967 intense emotion seized not only Africa, but the whole world. At one stage it threatened to split even my paper, the Sunday Times.
The breakaway fragment of Nigeria had become a separate country on 30 May 1967, when Lieutenant-Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu proclaimed its secession from the Nigerian Federation. The Ibo, the dominant tribe of the new nation, had a prime motive for declaring independence—fear of genocide.
George and I had just returned from the north of Nigeria, home of the hereditary enemy of the Ibo, the Hausa. It was from here that the woman with her gruesome rice bowl had fled. Here, in medieval mud-walled cities, Muslim emirs presided in feudal fashion. In the Strangers’ Quarters of places like Kano, which we had just left, migrant Ibos had been savaged, looted and murdered by Hausa and fanatic Muslim extremists. Almost 50,000 were said to have died.
The Ibos, intelligent and resourceful, seemed fitted to escape their oppression and to declare the secession of their eastern territory. They had the wealth of Nigeria’s oil and mineral resources in their lands. It later became apparent that some foreigners with oil and mineral interests were not averse to seeing the Ibo free of the uncertain politics of the Nigerian Federation, where Britain still exerted a strong influence. Most of these outside interests were French. But Biafra’s fatal weakness lay in its inability to defend itself. All the heavy equipment and most of the military organisation were on the Nigerian side. After a few weeks’ pause, the Federation, under the leadership of General Gowon, decided to invade.
Totally outgunned, Biafra seemed likely to collapse in a matter of weeks but its resistance was fierce, and enduring. As the bitter conflict dragged on opinion polarised. While the French gave covert support to the Biafrans, the British Government, behind a public pretence of neutrality, pumped large amounts of arms into Nigeria. The Soviet Union did the same, only more openly.
Popular opinion in Britain was split, and this split was reflected by my own newspaper, where the Foreign Department took the pro-Nigerian line, fearing ‘Balkanisation’—one breakaway state in Africa leading to many more—while the magazine (with which I worked) strongly sympathised with the Ibos. We were influenced by the magazine’s guru figure, Francis Wyndham, a brilliant writer and a friend of mine. He was closer to the fray than most. He knew Ojukwu. Harry Evans leaned to the Nigerian side but he was much too good an editor to suppress honestly held alternative views. Throughout the conflict, the magazine ran Biafra-sympathetic pieces totally at odds with the view in the paper as a whole.
Such subtleties of British feeling of course had not penetrated to the Biafran police who arrested me at Port Harcourt. In their eyes I was suspect, merely by being British. And our wanderings in the north of enemy heartland could only make us more suspect. We had seen the army in Kano trying to contain anti-Ibo feeling there, by patrolling the streets with staves and punishing looters—the same army that was trying to bring Biafra to its knees. We did have some explaining to do, but the Wyndham connection worked. One hour after our release I was taking tea with Ojukwu.
He was a noble and dignified man—a gentleman, I thought, and well equipped to handle the English-speaking press. He had been brought up in Epsom and educated at Oxford. He was thoroughly at home fielding our questions. Only one gave him pause—my request to go to the front.
I got permission, though the circumstances were ironic. I went with a French photographer, an ex-para called Gilles Caron. In terms of nationality we should have been on opposite sides. In fact, we were very good friends. The other irony was that, given the size of Britain’s undercover contribution to the war, any bullet I encountered in this fray would have been paid for out of my own taxes.
Two days later we joined a Biafran battalion which planned to cross the Niger River and hit the Nigerian army from the rear. They had to go behind enemy lines and creep up to attack and seize a strategic bridge, the key central crossing from Nigeria to the new Biafra, at a place called Onitsha.
We had qualms when we saw the troops. It was a rag-tag outf
it, 600-strong, many with the backsides out of their trousers. Some had equipment and a uniform, some had not. Many had no shoes for this sortie into the bush. Winkle-pickers had high status. On some bearers’ heads, cushioned on banana leaves, were borne very modern rockets. They also carried—to my astonishment and pleasure, though I thought more important things should have come instead—many crates of beer.
Silently we crossed the Niger River into enemy territory. It was no smoking, no lights, and all very clandestinely exciting. I knew this was the real thing. Not just a charade laid on for the benefit of pressmen, as sometimes happens. We found a village in which to stay overnight and then set off through swamplands with the soldiers.
Progress was painfully slow. It took four days to cover little more than thirty miles. And we were getting weaker by the day. Our provisions ran out long before we reached our destination. By the end Gilles and I were chewing on coconuts to stem the hunger and dehydration. Still, there were limits to what I could be persuaded to regard as food.
On the night before the attack, one of the bearers brought me a meal just as I had taken off into the bush for a pee. I was conscious of a patient but irritated presence behind me while I performed and turned to see a man standing with a bowl which he held out for me to take. I could not identify the large round substance in it.
‘What’s that?’ I asked in some alarm.
‘It is your meal, Sir. It is Congo meat. No blood, no bones.’ It turned out to be a giant snail, the size of a small goldfish bowl.
‘I can’t eat that. You have it.’
The man was delighted, and dug out the insipid flesh with great relish. He wouldn’t otherwise have eaten that night. This was a meal prepared specially for the visitors. The troops, it seems, were going into battle on empty stomachs.