by Don McCullin
We landed in the furnace heat of a desert airstrip, where the wind was whipping up the sand. The Berets Rouges, in goggles and peaked caps, looking remarkably like Monty’s old Eighth Army, were grouping to move on all-night truck rides into the mountains, to take up positions.
The Legionnaires we had come across were truculent and suspicious, addicted to the consumption of large quantities of alcohol and endless talk about killing. We drove into Faya-Largeau past the wrecks of armoured cars and transport trucks—left there since General Leclerc’s march through Libya in 1943. Faya was like some isolated French garrison of the nineteenth century. Guns protruded through battlements and mud walls. The tricolour flew overhead. A tidal wave of the Sahara and its dunes crept up to it as if reclaiming its rights. An old man and his son showed us the magic of the dunes. When you slid down them, they produced an extraordinary singing sound, so loud it seemed to fill the entire desert. My hair stood on end. It was the most remarkable sound I ever heard.
We joined one of the convoys into the mountains, though not without difficulty. I tried to hitch a lift with a Dodge truck which I could see was carrying the Foreign Legion padre we had met on the plane. The padre leaned out and sharply told me it was full. I caught another truck. Three days later, as we were travelling in convoy, the Dodge toppled head first over the sheer end of a sand dune. The padre survived, with three broken ribs.
I went on patrols in which trucks and jeeps would drive into mud-walled ‘bleds’, or townships, to find horsemen, identified as the rebels, galloping away at top speed. A bloody chase would ensue.
It was after this sortie to the north that I heard some extraordinary news about my brother, in a bar in Fort-Lamy.
‘Sergeant McCullin?’ the Beret Rouge had said. ‘There has been some problem with this man.’
Some months earlier, it appeared, my brother had been involved in a strange incident with his adjutant. The officer had come up to him, apparently in high spirits, and stuck a pistol in Michael’s mouth, telling him to stick ’em up. When my brother had warned him, ‘Careful, it might be loaded,’ the officer told him not to worry and for reassurance turned the pistol towards his own temple. He had then blown part of his own head away.
The French soldier had also heard that there had been some kind of tribunal or hearing. The story sounded so improbable it was thought that Michael must have shot the officer. There were no very close witnesses, it seemed. He thought that my brother had been cleared, but wasn’t sure.
It was James who managed to fix the transport to the outpost. He wangled me on to a ‘milk run’, one of the French planes that took supplies around the camps. Only one seat was available so James, with some anguish, stayed behind. Arrangements weren’t ideal for me either. I would have to return with the same plane—get in and get out in not much over an hour.
As we descended to a dusty runway in the middle of nowhere, and emerged into the hot wind, I saw a lean, dark, shaven-headed figure in dark glasses at the head of a reception committee. Not in the kepi of course, or even the khaki, but in off-duty sports gear, with trainers. He looked very rugged, but was still recognisably my brother.
He spent a long time arm-waving and gesticulating when he learned how little time I had. As he ushered me to the bamboo hutted camp beside the runway he told me he had organised hunting parties and patrols for my benefit. His arms flailed with the unfairness of it all, and I realised that my brother had become more French than the French.
Of his ordeal and the tribunal, he had an extraordinary tale to tell. He had not been punished for the shooting, he said, because the adjutant was still alive. He had lain on the floor, his white neck-towel turning red, moaning, ‘What is happening to me?’ Michael said, ‘You’ve shot yourself.’ Later, the wounded officer was well enough to give evidence on Michael’s behalf. It was logged as a self-inflicted wound, and Michael was cleared of all suspicion.
Over lunch Michael told me that Legion training was less harsh than once it had been. He said that if ever he left the Legion he figured on a security job. There were networks that could fix you up, he said, as there were in the SAS and the mercenaries. The main difference between Legionnaires and the mercenaries was financial—the Legion didn’t pay much. The Legion was also still toughly disciplined; mercenaries were just a rabble.
He told me that Legionnaires bought women from local tribes. In Algeria four were officially provided once a month, in cubicles, to service some of the company, and Michael recoiled at this. My brother had a contract with a local man for his daughter. It worked out at £5 a month. They preserved the French military priorities: food, then women, and only after that la guerre. But the women you could see walking around in clothes that looked as if they had been shipped in by Oxfam were less than appetising.
The Legionnaire’s most common disease, he said, was piles. It came from bouncing around in trucks over endless miles of unmade tracks. Michael’s unit would drive across desert scrub to mud-walled oasis kasbahs, with their date palms and wells, and flush the rebels out. They would shoot them down as they fled. As in Vietnam, it was a dangerous place to be seen running. If contact was made outside the settlements, there would be battles on the scorched plains between trucks and warriors on horseback.
It seemed bizarre to me, in this era of high-speed jets and rockets, that there should be bush wars going on between tribesmen and Legionnaires. It also seemed an unequal war, between barely armed primitives and some of the hardest soldiers in the world. Selective pacification, as they called it, seemed more like the sport of hunting men than any kind of political programme.
‘I’ve got a really great present for you,’ Michael said as I was about to leave, ‘I won it in a poker game.’ He then flourished an elaborate hunting rifle, complete with telescopic sights.
‘I thought you could go hunting with it today,’ he said, ‘but now there’s no time. Take it home with you.’
I didn’t know what to say. It was a mad situation, and also a mark of how far we had grown apart. It must have been well over six years since I had used a gun—I had stopped soon after I started taking pictures of war, when I got a better idea of what guns could do.
‘What on earth am I to do with it,’ I had to say, ‘in Hampstead Garden Suburb?’
He was upset by my attitude but I was incapable of accepting his gift. I left thinking Finsbury Park must have done something strange to both of us, for us to wind up in this godforsaken place. Two McCullins meeting on a battleground in Africa. One offering a bad conscience about not being able to stay, the other offering a rifle.
I felt sad as my plane took off, leaving that lonely figure in the bush. I would soon be home in Hampstead with my wife and children. Then I realised that pity was not the right emotion. My brother was completely at home with what he was doing. I was the one afflicted with doubt and division. For Michael, war was now a disciplined profession. For me, it had become an abhorrence that I could not bring myself to leave alone.
20. WOUNDED IN ACTION
There was a lethal atmosphere in Cambodia from the start. When I arrived I learned that three American network television men had been ambushed in the jungle and killed by an insurgent force known as the Khmer Rouge. Even more distressing for me personally was the rumour that Gilles Caron, my friend and rival from Biafra days, had fallen into the hands of the Khmers.
I hurried round to the office of Agence France Presse to get the latest word on his disappearance. All I found were a lot of gloomy faces and Gilles’s travelling bags, all packed. They had been lodged in the hotel for safe-keeping, but they would never be reclaimed by their owner.
Yet despite the ever-present danger to them, correspondents still thronged to Cambodia and its capital Phnom Penh. Before it was touched by war it was always said to be an exquisite place. Richard West once wrote: ‘I have seen the past—and it works.’ But even after the country had been sucked into the war i
t retained its charm. Newspapermen, jaded by the jagged edges of Saigon, came to look upon a Phnom Penh posting almost as R and R. The people were different, softer altogether, with friendlier faces. Compared to Saigon, everything in the Cambodian capital seemed smaller and cosier, and the Americans were much thinner on the ground. Not that their presence wasn’t much felt.
When I first went there, in June 1970, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, a ruler of infinite craftiness when it came to playing off East against West and vice-versa, had finally fallen off the tightrope. His replacement by General Lon Nol was said to be more suitable to American interests, and few coups took place in South-East Asia in those days without a suspicion of CIA involvement. In this case the suspicion was almost certainly correct.
The American administration, under President Nixon, was already embarked on a secret bombing campaign in the west of Cambodia to destroy the infiltration routes from the north, down through the Parrot’s Beak, into Vietnam. It was no secret of course to the Cambodian peasantry who bore the brunt. The massive scale of this operation, conducted mainly by high-flying B-52 bombers known as ‘Whispering Death’, was concealed from the American Congress for many years.
The Cambodian army, which enjoyed a less than awesome reputation, had been bolstered with a lot of support from the South Vietnamese army, which operated with the Cambodians in much the same way Americans operated with the Vietnamese in Vietnam. The enemy was invariably described as ‘the VC’ though in most cases it was the indigenous Khmer Rouge who presented the problem. There were strong links between the North Vietnamese and the local guerrillas, but the Khmers would subsequently assert their independence with ruthless and terrifying effect.
It was a hot sticky day, with a monsoon approaching, as I flew by helicopter towards Prey Veng, thirty miles east of Phnom Penh. It was known to be an area of intense Khmer activity as the guerrillas tried to cut communication between Saigon and Phnom Penh.
By the riverside you could see the Vietnamisation of Cambodia as before I had witnessed the Americanisation of Vietnam. Boys were cadging chewing gum and cigarettes. The Vietnamese general I approached for a helicopter ride wore a baseball cap and was smoking a big cigar. To my request, he said, ‘Sure, no sweat.’
When we got over the front line, the pilot decided it was too risky to put the machine down. Instead he hovered a few feet above ground while we jumped out. I came down new Marks and Spencer desert boots first and landed up to my crotch in a rice paddy. Any resemblance between the smartly attired photographer who had left Phnom Penh that morning and myself was now purely coincidental.
On an embankment by the rice field I saw a lot of soldiers milling around and two Khmer prisoners, no more than seventeen, bound hand and foot. That evening I made myself unpopular with their captors by giving them some chocolate and some water, which they accepted with a kind of resigned courtesy. They had given up all hope of survival.
Cambodia can be enchanting by day, but it is spooky by night for Westerners and Orientals alike. The Vietnamese are very superstitious about ghosts. They bedded down two by two for reasons that were not erotic. One soldier said to me, ‘Eh, you, you want to sleep me?’ and I was glad of the offer.
So we paired off in the stubble of the last crop of rice, little twosomes all over the field. My partner took out his ‘indigenous rations’—two plastic bags of pre-cooked rice—and spread his groundsheet for us. From the direction of Prey Veng we could hear the sound of tracer bullets, B-40 rockets and 120mm Chinese mortars.
All this was eclipsed by the arrival of what was known as ‘Puff the Spooky Dragon’, a droning old Dakota with a faint red undercarriage which suddenly burst into an incredible yellow, like a huge sunflower in the sky. The parachute flare glided slowly to earth lighting up the countryside, and then came the pyrotechnics, as the gunship rained down fire on the illuminated targets. For some strange optical reason, however, it actually looked as if the bullets were pouring back into the gunship. In my half-awake condition, it seemed the most phenomenal fireworks display, a great, if sinister, piece of theatre.
Next morning a platoon of Cambodian soldiers showed up, looking like gypsies. They arrived in basketball boots, baggy trousers and all kinds of exotic headgear. They had AK-47 automatic rifles and a standard-bearer who proudly held the Cambodian flag aloft. The plan was that they should go in first across the rice paddies to see where the fire was coming from and, if possible, link up with some beleaguered troops in a hamlet, less than a mile away. The Vietnamese commander advised me against going with them, but I was too keyed up not to go.
As we set out—a little platoon of no more than a dozen men—the Vietnamese were calling out insults to the Cambodians, ‘Number Ten’ being the most popular. We crossed three dry rice fields and then some that were full of water. Suddenly a hail of fire rose from a line of trees and the water started splashing up around us like fountains. There seemed to be a great many fountains round me, possibly because I was a head taller than anyone else on the march.
There was a ridge to my right, and I managed to lie in the water with my head almost under while my right hand held the cameras propped on the ridge. I made up my mind to move away from the bank and get behind the radio operator. My one thought was to avoid a head wound, and I thought the big radio should give me some shelter. I was in a panic, and began to feel that someone was drawing a line on my position, and would keep firing at me whatever move I made.
All over the paddy there were figures up to their necks in slime. The absence of any returning fire indicated that most of them had discarded their weapons. I edged away from the radio operator and bumped into three men in black outfits lying face-down in the water. They were Khmer Rouge, killed in the previous day’s fighting. I noticed that one of the dead men was wearing ‘Ho Chi Minh 1,000 milers’—the name for shoes made out of car tyres.
Worry about staying alive mingled with concern to keep my cameras dry. I made it back to the ridge and crawled on my back the 200 yards to the edge of the paddy. When I got up to run the last stretch, it was like a bad dream. My legs were like two heavy weights. I was doing a sort of zigzag run and the mortar fire was hitting the ground all round me, earth exploding in huge cascades. I was labouring under the camera equipment and the sodden clothes and heavy fear.
When we got back, I crashed out in an exhausted state at the feet of the Vietnamese commander, who smiled at me when I looked up. He had told me so. I started to check over the condition of my cameras and found that one of my Nikons had the perfect imprint of an AK-47 round. The discovery was oddly exhilarating. I thought to myself, Boy, you’ve done it again. You’ve managed to get away with it.
No mood was ever more fleeting. The commander came over again and said, ‘We are ready. Are you ready?’ Old Skyraider aeroplanes had started to bomb the flanks of Prey Veng to keep the VCs’ heads down, and the 400 men of the South Vietnamese Crazy Buffalo battalion were moving in.
I crossed one field with them before I heard sniper fire again and lost my bottle. I lay down and became a coward. But I couldn’t forgive myself for losing my nerve; shame got me to move again. A Vietnamese corporal came up and shooed me on.
‘Go, go, you are with crazy buffaloes. Go, mister, go.’
These buffaloes rarely stood more than five feet in height but their numbers made the advance impressive. We crossed more fields, then dropped down into a little valley and, before we knew it, were trotting along the road into town. It was just gone ten o’clock in the morning but seemed as if a whole day had passed by. The arrival of rescuers was no great occasion for rejoicing. The VC went on stepping up the mortar fire into town.
I found a huge rice store full of women and children crying. I felt wretched in front of them, and they seemed suspicious of me. I pulled out packets of peppermints. At first some of the kids resented the gesture, they thought I was evil, but others began to enjoy the sweets and to smile. Pretty soon you coul
d hear twenty sucking mouths. I found myself getting tearful as I took pictures.
With VC mortars still exploding, reinforcements started to arrive. By nightfall there must have been over a thousand soldiers in the little town.
Around two o’clock in the morning there was a very loud crunch. I woke stiffly and reached for my helmet. Two mortars had landed on the compound where the Cambodian soldiers had been sleeping. Ten or more were injured. I walked away. Enough was enough.
When I woke in sunlight, you could hear the birds. It was a sign, better than any peace treaty. I knew the VC must have moved on. However, there was still work to be done. Near where I had been sleeping I found a low wicker bed with a dead man on it covered by a white sheet. I looked closer and saw two little feet sticking out beside him. They belonged to a pretty little girl with dead staring eyes.
I wandered off and came across two dead Khmers in a pit. They looked like exhausted lovers on a bed. To the official war machine these men were just part of the body-count that was supposed to define military success. It was all highly dubious. Commanders would always overcount and often lump in ordinary civilian deaths just to make up the numbers. The Vietnamese claimed a body-count of 150 VC after the battle but I saw only about thirty of their dead.
I got the first helicopter out of Prey Veng that morning, along with a bunch of wounded Vietnamese soldiers. The pilot, still apprehensive about Khmer ground fire, climbed too quickly for his engine revolutions. As the helicopter plummeted back towards the earth I had plenty of time to review my life, but the only thing I could take in was the extent of the gold fillings in the screaming faces of the soldiers. Somehow the pilot pulled his machine around and we made it back to Phnom Penh without further surprise.
Jon Swain, the Sunday Times man in Phnom Penh, had the face of an English schoolboy, which indeed he had been until very recently. He was an alert and resourceful correspondent, always ready to help those who came in with his local knowledge. I asked him to let me know if he should hear of any firefights on the city outskirts. A couple of days later he called in at my hotel to tell me of some Khmer Rouge activity in a place called Setbo, only a short distance from the city. He was due to attend a press conference that afternoon—with Marshal Ky, the South Vietnamese war leader who idolised Hitler—and proposed to run me down there to link up with some Cambodian paratroopers who were probing the area, and to pick me up when the press conference was finished. I felt reassured at the prospect of being with paratroopers, always the elite troops in any army.