by Don McCullin
We took a route snared with roadblocks but enlivened by friendly Cambodian soldiers. About two miles from Setbo we came across a cluster of highly coloured buses which gave the impression of an English travelling funfair. Soldiers in red and yellow scarves, with personal flower arrangements and wearing flip-flops, turned out to be the Cambodian paratroopers. Their commander said that where we were going there would be ‘beaucoup VC’. To me it all seemed too lackadaisical to be real.
The sun was streaking golden light through the leaves of trees beside the Mekong as we stopped on the embankment above it. The trucks behind us were loaded with sacks of rice and pots and pans, but I could also see machine guns and mortars being lifted down. The soldiers grouped and then moved forward. Khmers must have been watching us all the time.
I was walking in front of a jeep, with soldiers probing forward, when the breeze from the river blew off my jungle hat. As I went to retrieve it from the middle of the road, a hail of AK-47 rounds started pouring round me, whipping and lashing. I could see the road spitting dust as the bullets struck, and I dived down the side of the embankment where houses on stilts stood in the water.
I peered back at my hat, still in the road, defying me to pick it up. Bodies, some bearing red wounds, came tumbling down the bank. The commanders then started to mount the semblance of a counter-attack and I went back up to the road with them.
I crouched behind a jeep. As the man with me made to move forward we were rocked by the blast of a tremendous explosion. I could feel ringing in my ears, and stinging in my legs, and the shock waves blasted me backwards. My ears were in terrific pain. I realised I was deaf. I was in a daze and could feel something burning. I looked down and saw blood coming from my legs and crotch.
I tried to get away. Instinctively I wrapped my cameras and half-crawled, half-scrambled down the embankment. Some men fell on top of me and were treading on my legs. I knew from the pain of their impact that I must have taken some wounds. I dragged myself on hands and knees for a couple of hundred yards, falling into a pit of wounded men—one of them with two holes in his stomach—and then into a pit full of ants. My legs felt as if they were on fire.
With the fate of Gilles Caron so fresh in my mind, I was determined not to be taken prisoner. Like Gilles, we had walked into a classic ambush. I wanted to get at least 300 yards from the point of ambush before I would allow myself to feel at all safe. I thought of hiding the camera bag and swimming for it in the Mekong. It might even ease the pain in my legs.
Then I came across the medics behind a culvert, trying to patch up some raw, red flesh. Two paratroopers saw me and dumped me in a house where there were more wounded. I wasn’t taking very much in at that moment. I was only interested in getting my trousers down to see what had happened. My dick was bleeding like a pig but it had only been nicked by a piece of fragmentation. The more serious area was my right leg, which had taken four mortar fragments, one in the knee joint. I had another wound just above the knee of my left leg. I still could not hear properly.
Someone jabbed a morphine needle into my right leg and the next thing I knew I was being dumped unceremoniously with the other wounded on to the back of an open lorry. To my horror, they turned the lorry round and backed 300 yards towards the ambush from which I had just fled. They wanted to pick up more wounded, among them soldiers who had got the worst of the mortar explosion that had hit me.
As they brought the wounded to the lorry and started piling them in, the Khmers suddenly opened up with another round of mortars. The driver ran away. We were left on the back of the lorry taking a lot of incoming flak while the wounded were screaming and trying to hide. I recognised the soldier lying next to me. He was the man who had been just in front of me by the jeep when the first explosion took place. We had shared the fragmentation, but he had taken most of it in the stomach.
With some courage, the Cambodians were still loading the injured on to the lorry under heavy fire. Eventually the driver was located and forced to come back. I cannot say how relieved I was when we drove away from that place.
As we passed the primitive medical station there was new encouragement. Jon Swain, true to his word, had come back in his little black Citroën, and I heard him sing out, ‘Okay, matey. You’re going straight to the hospital. I’ll follow.’
The deafness and the shock were wearing off. I took my mind off the pain by photographing the wounded soldiers. The day had become evening as we wound through the leafy suburbs of Phnom Penh, and caught the sweet smell of cooking. People on verandahs looked down nonchalantly to see the distorted shapes in our lorry. The shock would just begin to register on their faces as we pulled out of view and they realised how close they were to the battle.
Don, French Hospital, Phnom Penh, 1970, photograph by Kyoichi Sawada
The man beside me with the awful stomach wounds sat up and was kicking his legs, pleading for life. Minutes later I noticed he was lying down again, his feet drumming too perfectly with every motion of the lorry. I knew that he had gone. It could so easily have been my dead corpse rattling. I thought, He’s gone instead of me.
There were chickens running round the hospital. Jon Swain did not think it was satisfactory. He had me whisked away in an ambulance to a French civilian hospital where I slept for most of the next ten days. The only excitement was a telegram rushed round from the British Embassy. It had been facilitated by the British Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart, and was a ‘get well’ message from my fellow Sunday Times photographer, Tony Armstrong-Jones.
Don, French Hospital, Phnom Penh, 1970
An ambulance took me to the airport, where I found that the Sunday Times had splashed out by buying me a first-class ticket. I couldn’t help thinking that you had to go to ludicrous lengths before you merited this privilege.
On the way back I had plenty of time to reflect on my first battle wounds, but there seemed little of a profound nature to be thought on the subject. I must have seen thousands of wounded on battlefields since I first started going to the wars. Why them and not me?
21. BESIEGED
My leg wounds did not detain me in England for long. Generous industrial injury terms did not seem to apply to war correspondents, and I had a mortgage to clear and the dream of a new home in the country.
I was back in action again within four months of the Cambodian adventure—under fire with my colleague Murray Sayle in Amman. One of Murray’s many nicknames was ‘The Camel’, which derived from his ability to go for enormous lengths of time without any visible means of sustenance. It was an ability that came in particularly handy when I shared a room with him for ten days at the besieged Intercontinental Hotel. Inside the hotel there were breakdowns of every form of supply—heating, lighting, food and water. Outside there was the near-certainty of death by sniper fire. For the most part, we stayed in.
The siege for us and several score of the world’s press was caused by what was known as ‘The Battle of the Beds Versus the Feds’. The ‘Beds’ were the fiercely loyal Bedouin troops of the Jordanian King Hussein; their battle-cry was ‘Allah, Malik, Watami’ (God, King and Country). The ‘Feds’ were the fedayeen guerrillas fighting on behalf of Jordan’s huge Palestinian community.
The conflict centred on who was running Jordan—the King or the Palestinians? A punch-up had been in the offing for some time. All that was required was the spark—provided ultimately by the Palestinians when they hijacked three Western airliners, one of them a British VC-10, and brought them all to land in Jordan at a place called Dawson’s Field. It was an amazing feat, which highlighted the government’s impotence, and its inability to control what was happening on its own territory.
I went to Dawson’s Field to photograph the planes as smouldering ruins. The passengers had already been evacuated, many of them to the Intercontinental. When I got back to the city, the Jordanian army had taken to the streets and were attacking Palestinian strongholds aro
und the city.
In our hotel, a Swedish reporter took a bullet in the leg; just down the road, in a smaller hotel, a Russian correspondent was shot between the eyes. The electricity and the water supply packed up, and we were told the whole city was a no-go area to correspondents. Because the hotel was bursting at the seams everyone had to double up. This was how I came to be living on intimate terms with ‘The Camel’.
I did not know Murray Sayle very well, though we had been with the newspaper roughly the same length of time. In his early forties, he was the oldest of the Aussies, and by far the most complicated. He was a large man with a large nose that almost quivered with inquisitiveness. People would say that he could talk the legs off a donkey without ever letting you know what was in his mind. He was considered eccentric though this may have been because he never dressed any part other than his own; he once turned up to a reception at the Athenaeum wearing a crash helmet and a T-shirt with ‘Bloomsbury Wheelers’ emblazoned across the front.
He had suffered a disappointment in life—the suppression, for alleged libel, of his novel about journalism, A Crooked Sixpence, which opened with the rhyme:
There was a crooked man
Who walked a crooked mile
He found a crooked sixpence
It wasn’t enough.
Before Amman my contacts with him had been brief. In the Six Day War I was nervous of him, afraid that he might trample over my inside track on Jerusalem. We should have met up in Prague in the spring of 1968, when Russian tanks rolled in to crush Alexander Dubc˘ek’s hopes for socialism with a human face. I made it to the Czechoslovak border but the word ‘photographer’ in my passport put paid to any further penetration. An understanding official at the British Embassy in Vienna told me I had ‘lost’ my passport and issued me with a new one in which I featured as a ‘businessman’. While I continued to languish on the wrong side of the border, Murray cruised in with a car brimming with sales leaflets and some cock-and-bull story about a trade fair.
The only time we actually managed to work together was on a story about the American crack troops, the Green Berets, in Vietnam a year earlier. For the most part, he went his way and I went mine but we did meet up at Loc Ninh, an isolated Green Beret fortress near the Cambodian border. Murray aroused hostility in the garrison by going to interview a French rubber planter who was thought to be in the pay of the VC, but this was a mark of Murray’s professionalism. If anything, Murray was on the hawkish side in Vietnam—few correspondents wrote as sympathetically about the ordinary American soldier—but he was nobody’s partisan.
In the Amman siege, Murray was never idle. While at Dawson’s Field, he had picked up a charred coffee pot in one of the burned-out airplanes. He used to sit, wholly relaxed in his long john underpants, polishing it back to normal as if he were under contract to the airline to clean it up. Somehow he wangled himself on the organising committee, run on strict prison camp lines, and Murray would receive complainants while polishing his pot. There was no shortage of complaints, especially when the food was reduced to what seemed like pigs’ trotters and rice. Resentment also fastened on those people who had presciently filled up their baths before the water was cut off—should they share, or were they entitled to the whole reservoir? The big problem, however, was the odious toilets, eventually solved when Murray’s committee organised the digging of latrines in a protected part of the gardens at the back of the hotel.
For much of the time even the briefest glance out of a hotel window was greeted with a barrage of fire from both sides. People kept their heads down, but all ears could pick up the din of battle, and sometimes more than the din. Arnaud de Borchgrave, a snappy dresser who worked for Newsweek, went to his bedroom wardrobe to find that a bullet had punctured his suits—all thirteen of them.
It took troops two hours to clear out one half-completed block opposite the Intercontinental. I could see four snipers being led away. Then, during the night, new snipers infiltrated, and it took three hours to clear them. And so it went on.
There was some education to be had from hanging around and listening to the wit and wisdom of Murray Sayle. He believed that journalism only required three things: rat-like cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability. But for me the situation was most unpleasant—cheek-by-jowl with my peers, with no scope for independent action.
After five days I decided to break out on my own, only to be sent back at gunpoint by the Jordanian army patrol just outside. Next day, when the fighting had died down a little, I asked Murray if he would like to exercise a little of his cunning and come with me for another attempt. We both agreed that the objective should be the home of the First Secretary of the British Embassy, who lived only a few streets away and was said to be in daily contact with the King.
This time the patrols were less vigilant and we made it. We returned with the promise that an army jeep would call for us the next day to take us to Hussein at the Palace. We were on to a big ‘exclusive’.
The jeep arrived when Murray, taking advantage of renewed water supplies, was in fully soaped condition in the bath. I had to run back downstairs and tell the Jordanian army, and by extension the King, to wait while Murray Sayle finished his ablutions. Fortunately they did.
As we came hurrying through the lobby, you could see the other journalists sniffing that something was afoot. Most of the correspondents had entered into an arrangement to pool their information. The reasoning was that all journalists were operating at a disadvantage, so it was only fair that any available scraps should be shared. I never liked such arrangements, and usually made myself scarce when anything of that nature was being discussed. As we were nearing the door, Arnaud de Borchgrave, the man with the punctured suits, made to cut us off.
‘Where are you guys going?’
‘None of your business.’
‘I want to remind you guys that this is a pool.’
‘It’s not a pool for me,’ I said. ‘I don’t pool for anybody.’
The exchange concluded with him calling me ‘a bastard’, and my promise to see him when I got back. Siege conditions rarely improve people’s tempers. There was no way Murray and I were going to risk our necks for a pooled dispatch.
We got to the Palace to find King Hussein in high spirits. He reckoned that his gamble had paid off. The fedayeen had been crushed, he said, and the rest was mopping-up. He looked forward to an immediate restoration of law and order, which would include lifting the siege of the Intercontinental.
We got all this, but not quite exclusively. A BBC Panorama crew was there too. And an obscure row broke out between Murray and a BBC man whom I happened to know slightly from Vietnam. Murray seemed to think the BBC crew were trying to pull a fast one by organising a Friday transmission (which would scoop him) rather than the usual Panorama spot on Monday (which would leave Murray in front). The BBC man seemed to think that Murray had poached his questions, though why Murray should ever need anybody else’s questions was a mystery to me.
That evening we gathered at the First Secretary’s house for a mild celebration. The diplomat’s wife was serving the drinks. It was best-behaviour time. I could hear this ludicrous row rumbling up again, and suddenly it took a turn that was to provide me with the most terrifying moment of the whole civil war.
Murray grabbed my arm and piloted me out into the garden, where he proceeded to take a pee over the First Secretary’s rose bushes. Simultaneously the First Secretary’s wife came out to hang some washing on the line. In an agony of embarrassment, I began thinking that pissing on English roses in a foreign field might even constitute high treason. Fortunately the diplomat’s wife did not see us, or pretended not to. I could hear Murray, all oblivious, wittering on about this friend of mine who seemed to have some kind of problem . . .
Later in the week I met Murray glowering over his typewriter in the bar of the Intercontinental. He was saying that nothing now
would persuade him to file a story, and I got excited about our missing the biggest story of the week in the world. Murray remained resolute.
It seemed that the features editor had got up his nose by telling him to write to the brief ‘The City That Committed Suicide’. Murray was saying it was just like those egomaniacal deskmen back home. Their idea was to write the headline first, regardless of what the slobs in the field were saying, and then mangle the words to fit in. He raved on. There was no way this city had committed suicide; most of its citizens were still alive and, being built of stone, it was in no danger of collapse. He was damned if he was going to file to fit the preconceptions of a man whose arse never left the office.
There was much in this tirade with which I could sympathise, but none of it amounted to a reason not to file. We had to do our job, I said, even if we didn’t like how others did theirs. I was coming on like a boy scout, but Murray was just winding me up. He had already filed before I entered the bar.
But the last laugh belonged to the features editor. My pictures, along with the dispatches of Murray Sayle and Brian Moynahan, all seamlessly welded together, appeared under the headline ‘In the City That Committed Suicide’.