Unreasonable Behavior

by Don McCullin

  Lord Thomson genially introduced me to Premier Chou as someone who had spent a long time in Vietnam. I was unsure to what extent this endeared me to the Chinese leader. Whatever he thought, I was soon back in Vietnam again to find the old war had taken a new turn.

  The superior discipline and vastly improved armour of the Communists had turned the battle of Quang Tri into a rout. For the South Vietnamese this struggle for control in the north of their country represented the beginning of the end, but it was to be a long and bitter finale.

  I was with the television reporter Michael Nicholson when we found two badly wounded soldiers at the side of the Quang Tri road and tried to flag down help from the truckloads of their retreating comrades as they went thundering past. None would stop even for the moment it would take to pick up the injured. I became so angry that I snatched up an M-16 rifle from one of the wounded and tried to stop the next truck at gunpoint. It slowed down but then, as it drew close, speeded up again and roared past. I could hear Mike yelling at me. ‘Don! You must be crazy. What would you have done if they’d started firing?’

  Don (on left) and Michael Nicholson with wounded men, Quang Tri Road, 1972

  The answer was not a lot, because my rifle had no magazine. We managed to manhandle the wounded men on to the bonnet of Mike’s car and drove very slowly to the nearest casualty station. Both soldiers died the next day.

  At that time, in the early summer of 1972, another two dead in Vietnam meant little to anyone in Britain. Vietnam had become the forgotten war. The rage exhibited in the demos of the Sixties seemed to have been replaced by indifference. Because the Americans under President Nixon had greatly reduced their combat presence in Vietnam, it was assumed that the war had lost its ferocity. Nothing was further from the truth.

  I went to Vietnam again with James Fox, the magazine correspondent, and William Shawcross, who was then writing for the news pages. There was a wide choice of battle zones to visit, and everywhere the North Vietnamese seemed to be on the advance. I decided to concentrate first on one of the more southerly theatres, on An Loc and Highway 13, where the close combat seemed to be at its bloodiest.

  I had Alan Hart of BBC television to thank for getting me within range. I found him at a staging-area, with a helicopter organised and a full film crew, but minus the eyepiece for the camera. For the want of a little eyepiece they were all grounded, so I had the use of the helicopter.

  On the approach to An Loc, the fire was so intense that the pilot decided to set me down on a position behind a ridge about two miles from the town. As I got out an American adviser told me, ‘You’ve come to the wrong place. This is a very bad place. We’re taking a lot of rounds.’

  It was already getting dark and I decided to dig in. I offered a sip from my brandy flask to a passing American soldier, who declined. Seconds later we found ourselves on the receiving end of the night’s first incoming shells and I had this big soldier on top of me in my pathetic little hole, almost crushing the life out of me.

  ‘You know what?’ he said when there was a pause in the shelling. ‘I could sure use some of that brandy now.’

  It was an appalling night under shell fire. Next morning I heard automatic gunfire and got out my field glasses. I could see men all over the landscape, running through paddy fields and down hedgerows. They were coming in our direction, South Vietnamese paratroopers in full flight, many of them carrying heavy red wounds.

  A helicopter came down by the ridge and I persuaded the pilot to take me out. Then a party of wounded arrived, and they were all loaded in around me. We flew back to my original staging-area, which looked somehow different. Something was missing. While I was away overnight, VC sappers had crept in and blown 800 tons of ammunition sky high. For concentrated devastation those twenty-four hours were among the nastiest of my life—which said something for the resilience of the Forgotten War. Some South Vietnamese units were suffering as many as 50 per cent casualties.

  The suffering caused by the An Loc battle was overwhelming. James Fox interviewed a pregnant woman who was the wife of an An Loc police officer. A bomb from a South Vietnamese plane had hit her house, killing her father, brother and three children. She herself was wounded and some North Vietnamese soldiers put her arm in a splint. Eight days later her husband was killed at a police post by a B-40 rocket. Her only other relative, a younger sister, had been arrested by the North Vietnamese.

  After my retreat from An Loc, I took to probing up Highway 13 every day with an American friend in his big old car. We would load up with cold beers, park a mile or so from the action, and walk the rest of the way.

  The action on Highway 13 was astonishing to see, especially when the B-52s bombed in such concentration that you could swear nothing would be left alive for miles around. Minutes after the bombers had gone overhead the North Vietnamese would come out of their bunkers and start inflicting more casualties.

  One day I was asked if I could deliver some mail to two Americans in a forward position, and so found myself acting as the crawling postman. Ensconced in a culvert by the road, I was assailed by a metallic screaming noise unlike any sound of battle I had heard before. A white flame seemed to be bobbing with the contours of the road ahead, and it was coming my way fast. The missile went past me and headed on for the M-60 tank coming up behind. It made a direct hit.

  I went back to the colonel to ask if he’d be kind enough to figure out an alternative postal service and found him pointing to the gruesome sight of a man in an armoured personnel carrier, holding the wheel but without a head on his shoulders. His commander, who had been thrown twenty yards down the road, was being picked up and folded like a child’s rag doll.

  Besides the B-52s, there were also the Cobra helicopter gunships, crewed by the wildest Americans around. They would drop calling cards on their targets with messages like ‘Killing is our business and the business is good’, or ‘The Lord giveth and the 20mm taketh away’. I wondered too what the conquerors made of graffiti in the lavatories in Quang Tri when it fell: ‘Withdrawal is something that Nixon’s father should have done 58 years ago.’ It certainly expressed a common feeling among South Vietnamese that their country’s fate had nothing to do with their President Thieu and everything to do with the Americans.

  I came across some South Vietnamese soldiers rejoicing over the kill of a North Vietnamese medic. They were horsing around with an NVA flag and making gestures with their penises as if to pee on the body. In the midst of their celebration I saw a little red book and asked the lieutenant if I could have it. He had to play with me for a while, pretending to rip it up, but eventually he gave it to me. It was a diary, meticulously kept, and I wanted it to have a further journey, a further life. Eventually extracts from it appeared in translation in the Sunday Times under the banner ‘Diary of a North Vietnamese Soldier’.

  Cambodia was regarded as no more than a sideshow to Vietnam, and, in consequence, it received little attention. As Vietnam faded from the news, Cambodia disappeared almost without trace. Yet when I next visited Cambodia, in the spring of 1973, the country was literally being torn apart. Caught between the ravages of American bombing and the cruelties of the Khmer Rouge, it was now a land of refugees. Almost a third of the seven million population had been forced to flee their homes.

  Don (on right) with wounded Time magazine journalist, Vietnam, 1972,

  photograph by Henri Bureau

  I arrived in Phnom Penh to find that the main topic of conversation among the press corps was a German photographer who had persuaded a Cambodian soldier to cut off the heads of dead Khmer soldiers and hold them up for his camera. It was enough to tell me that war-freaks were in the ascendant.

  I couldn’t get out of Phnom Penh fast enough. I went down to the airfield and hitched a ride on the first old Dakota going south. The friendly Taiwanese pilot eventually brought us down expertly on a road that had been converted into a runway. There wa
s a little township nearby, but I forget its name. People were waiting to get on for the flight back, among them a lady who took an interest in what I was doing. She said her chauffeur would be pleased to drive me into town.

  No sooner did we reach this little town than I heard news that came as a sickening shock. It hit me like a heavy blow to the solar plexus. The old Dakota that had deposited me here less than an hour earlier had been blasted to smithereens by the Khmer Rouge at the end of the runway as it was taking off again. Everyone on board had been killed, including the friendly lady whose driver had just dropped me off and the Taiwanese pilot with whom I had been on such good terms on the flight in.

  I felt a rush of panic. If the Khmers were that close to the airstrip they were much too close to me. My nerve started giving out as it had never done before under fire in the thick of battle. Ghastly images of savage Khmers bludgeoning me to death invaded my mind and wouldn’t let go. Soldiers fighting, however fiercely, was one thing but to end up one of a million corpses in the Khmers’ killing fields were something else, and I just wanted to be out of it. I junked my US army fatigues, bought some cheap regular clothes and made my way back to the airstrip to spend most of the day using too much imagination.

  Nothing was taking off. My stomach churned in a knot of fearful tension. Towards five o’clock in the afternoon I heard the distant sound of an aero engine and prayed that it would make a stopover. Pandemonium broke out as the aircraft circled a few times before landing. A fat Chinese man, who seemed to be in charge, waved me away when I asked him if I could be taken to Phnom Penh. Once the cargo was unloaded the aircraft would return almost empty, but he kept shouting that I couldn’t go because I was not on the manifest. When his attention was diverted I threw my gear into the DC3 and climbed aboard.

  ‘Come down, mister,’ the irate man called as he spotted me. When I refused he surrendered with a shrug and the plane took off almost vertically, like a rocket. I gazed down at the ashes of the morning’s tragedy, still smouldering, as we banked steeply away.

  Nightmares dogged my sleep long after I returned home from Phnom Penh, and to this day I carry a scarred memory of the time when I experienced fear running riot.

  26. DEATH ON THE GOLAN HEIGHTS

  With the American retreat from war in South-East Asia went a parallel decline in American enthusiasm for Israel in the Middle East. The Arab oil cartel changed perspectives there, and in October 1973 an emboldened Egypt and Syria mounted a lightning assault on their old enemy during the Yom Kippur holiday.

  It was like an echo of Ho Chi Minh’s successful Tet offensive, and I was sent in with a full Sunday Times team to cover the war from the Israeli side. On 17 October, in the second week of conflict, my colleague Nick Tomalin was killed on the Golan Heights front. The car he was driving, some distance ahead of mine, was blown to pieces by a Syrian wire-guided missile.

  Nick was forty-two and, many of us thought, the best English journalist of his generation. He was one of those writers who could do everything well, from turning a funny gossip paragraph to producing long and moving dispatches from the front line. His feature, ‘The General Goes Zapping Charlie Cong’, opened more eyes to the war in Vietnam than a thousand photographs could ever have done. There were many on the Sunday Times who thought that Nick should become the editor in the unlikely event of Harry Evans tiring of the job, and I was one of them. He was no popularity-seeker; indeed he could be prickly and sharp with those who displeased him, but I cannot think of a single journalist who did not admire him.

  We had never previously gone to war together, though we often operated in the same theatres. This was not entirely a matter of coincidence; like me, Nick had a preference for working alone. Unlike during the Six Day War, when some correspondents failed to turn up until after the last shot had been fired, the entire Sunday Times photographic first team—Steve Brodie, Frank Hermann, Sally Soames, Romano Cagnoni and my old friend Bryan Wharton—were soon in action. With the benefit of surprise, and greatly improved military discipline, the Egyptians chose the Day of Atonement to attack from the south while almost simultaneously the Syrians piled in from the north. We all knew this would be longer and bloodier than the 1967 engagement.

  I made for the Golan Heights where the Syrians had taken out a good deal of Israeli armour in fierce fighting. As the light began to fade on my first recce I made my way to a kibbutz where a number of photographers had agreed to meet for a meal. We pushed a few tables together and made a party of it. Apart from his commitment, there was no need for Nick Tomalin, as a writer, to be so close to the front. I can remember him turning round imperiously and saying, ‘You know, something has struck me as very strange about you photographers. Not one of you has asked for the bloody wine list.’

  He had arrived in Israel before me and was enjoying himself, shooting out that slightly cockeyed look from behind his glasses to see if everybody was with him. Already he had sent home a detailed brief on the war’s progress by smuggling it past the censor in the shoe of a friend returning to London. It provided the core for the Insight team’s story, and it was typical of Nick to contribute in this way to team efforts on the Sunday Times. Now the essential individualist would, I knew, be out to get a big story of his own.

  Nick drew me aside before going to bed. ‘I heard you have a spare combat jacket,’ he said. ‘Would you lend it to me? Can I come and get it in the morning?’ I assumed he was teaming up with Frank Hermann to go to the front.

  I was lacing my army boots at around 6 a.m. when the tap on the door came and Nick was standing there with an air of impatience.

  ‘Can I have that jacket you said you’d lend me? I want to get away now . . .’

  ‘Shouldn’t you wait for Frank?’ I said.

  ‘No, I can’t,’ Nick said. ‘I’ve got an arrangement with this man from Stern magazine. He’s got a Peugeot, and I told him I drive a Peugeot. So I’m going to act as chauffeur while he takes his pictures.’

  I asked about Frank again, but Nick snatched up the combat jacket and raced off. ‘See you later,’ he called over his shoulder. That was the last time I saw him alive.

  An hour or so later, when the rest of us had sorted ourselves into two cars and had been gathered up by the inescapable Israeli escort, we began to move slowly up towards the Golan Heights. Tanks hidden in groups of cypress trees caught my eye. A black pall of smoke rose from a valley some way ahead. Soon an Israeli officer in the road was flagging us down.

  ‘Will you stop here please,’ he said. ‘You cannot get any further. There’s been one journalist killed already. A man from the Sunday Times.’

  I got out and went straight up to him. ‘Listen, I’m from the Sunday Times. What’s happening?’

  ‘I don’t know, and you cannot go to see. The car was hit by the Syrians. They’re just over there and, as you can see, we’re here. Your friend was in the line of Syrian fire.’

  There could be no certainty that Nick was dead. Perhaps he was critically wounded and waiting for help. I thought of his wife Claire, and of my own family and of what they would have a right to expect if I were lying badly wounded. I became like a man possessed, taken over by madness, no longer in control. I put down my cameras and pulled on a helmet. I ran in a stooped position to make my head less vulnerable. It was extraordinarily quiet. ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?’ a voice in my head kept saying. I passed dead Syrian soldiers lying near some knocked-out Russian tanks.

  There was no chance of going unobserved by either side and I expected to stop an AK-47 round at any moment. If I could see the shape of a body, I told myself, I’ll turn back. No one could survive in that blaze. I was angry, willing Nick to be alive so that I could take him back. When I got nearer, I could see no shape in the car. Perhaps he had been thrown out. I made my way round to the other side of it and found him lying there. I tried to talk to him, so far gone was I with terror and grief, though there c
ould be no doubt that he was dead. Picking up his glasses from the road, I ran back in the same eerie stillness.

  I was speechless when I returned. Terror had drained the moisture from my body, from my lips and my mouth. I gulped down mouthfuls of brandy. I clambered into the back of a car where I could shed the tears for Claire and his kids in private.

  On the way back to Tel Aviv we talked, and it didn’t take long to piece together what had happened. Nick’s German companion had been Fred Ihrt, one of Stern’s senior staff photographers and a very experienced operator. They had seen the dead Syrians by the burned-out tanks and Nick had turned the car down the narrow side road. When Fred leapt out and started taking pictures, Nick had driven on a little way to where the road widened out and he could do a three-point turn. The missile hit the car as it was returning to collect the photographer. With a spare five-gallon drum of petrol behind the driver’s seat, the explosion had been devastating.

  Philip Jacobson met me in the hotel lobby. ‘You’re to go back to London, did you know?’ he said. ‘Message from Harry says he doesn’t want you taking any more chances. Frank, too.’

  At the airport I was singled out for a disagreeable strip-search. I was never given a reason for the humiliation. Maybe they had me logged from the time of the Six Day War, when I had managed to evade the censors. If they were trying to lay hands on my Yom Kippur pictures they were wasting their time, for they didn’t exist.