River Of Time

by Jon Swain

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Praise

  Map

  Chronology

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Lands of the Living Past

  War in the Rice Fields

  Jacqueline

  River Ambush

  Desertion

  The Fall of Phnom Penh

  Hanoi

  The Eyes of Vietnam

  Kidnapped

  After the Khmer Rouge

  Adieu l’Indochine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Between 1970 and 1975 Jon Swain, the English journalist portrayed in David Puttnam’s film, The Killing Fields, lived in the lands of the Mekong river. This is his account of those years, and the way in which the tumultuous events affected his perceptions of life and death as Europe never could. He also describes the beauty of the Mekong landscape – the villages along its banks, surrounded by mangoes, bananas and coconuts, and the exquisite women, the odours of opium, and the region’s other face – that of violence and corruption.

  About the Author

  Jon Swain left Britain as a teenager. After a brief stint with the French Foreign Legion he became a journalist in Paris, but soon ended up in Vietnam and Cambodia. In five years as a young war reporter Swain lived moments of intensity and passion such as he had never known. He learnt something of life an death in Cambodia and Vietnam that he could never have perceived in Europe. He saw Indo-China in all its intoxicating beauty and saw, too, the violence and corruption of war, and was sickened by it.

  Motivated by a sense of close involvement with the Cambodian people he went back into Phnom Penh just before the fall of the city to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975. He was captured and was going to be executed. His life was saved by Dith Pran, the New York Times interpreter, a story told by the film The Killing Fields. In Indo-China Swain formed a passionate love affair with a French-Vietnamese girl. The demands of a war correspondent ran roughshod over his personal life and the relationship ended.

  This book is one reporter’s attempt to make peace with a tumultous past, to come to terms with his memories of fear, pain, and death, and to say adieu to the Indo-China he loved and the way of life that has gone for ever.

  ‘Jon Swain’s powerful and moving book goes further than anything else I have read towards explaining the appeal of Indo-China and its tragic conflicts. Part love letter to the land he so adores, part self-analysis of the most unsentimental kind, River of Time is both an eye-witness account of painful and often sickening events, and an almost poetic meditation on the mysterious appeal of war and death . . . His book is unsparingly honest, a briliant and unsettling examination of the age-old bonds between death, beauty, violence and the imagination, which came together in Vietnam as nowhere else’

  J.G. BALLARD, SUNDAY TIMES

  ‘An absolutely riveting book . . . haunting, compulsive and beautifully written. River of Time looks set to become a classic’

  ALEXANDER FRATER, OBSERVER

  ‘His book is a damning indictment and a triumphant witness. Brief, wrenching, it is surely the freshest and most sensitive account of those times’

  MICHAEL BINYON, THE TIMES

  ‘[A] sombre, magnificent book’

  RICHARD WEST, DAILY MAIL

  Chronology

  1954

  Defeat at Dien Bien Phu marks the end of France’s Indo-China empire. Vietnam is divided by the Geneva Accords into communist North Vietnam, under Ho Chi Minh, and western-backed South Vietnam.

  1965

  United States pours in ground troops to defend South Vietnam, crumbling under a communist insurgency supported by North Vietnam.

  1968

  Communists launch Tet offensive in which they attack more than 100 towns and cities across South Vietnam. By now, there are more than 530,000 American troops in South Vietnam, American planes are bombing North Vietnam, and the Americans are engaged in a secret war in Laos against the communist Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese army. Only Cambodia, under Prince Norodom Sihanouk, has avoided the bitter wars that have torn through Vietnam and Laos. For the US, Tet is the political turning point of the Vietnam war when the Americans realise they will never win and begin the process of withdrawal.

  1970

  In Cambodia, Sihanouk is deposed by his right-wing Defence Minister, General Lon Nol. Following the coup, the Vietnam war spills over into Cambodia. The US arms Lon Nol, while the Cambodian communists, the Khmer Rouge, are backed by communist North Vietnam and China, growing into a cruel, disciplined force.

  1973

  Paris Peace Accords are signed giving the US the diplomatic means of withdrawing the last American forces from South Vietnam and having its prisoners returned. The war goes on.

  1975

  Khmer Rouge tightens siege of Phnom Penh and on 12 April US marine helicopters evacuate US embassy and other foreigners from the beleaguered capital. Five days later Khmer Rouge forces capture Phnom Penh.

  Deprived since the 1973 Peace Accords of US bombing and logistical support South Vietnamese forces also shed ground, and on 30 April they are defeated and communist troops finally capture Saigon.

  1975–1979

  Cambodia is convulsed by the Khmer Rouge revolution. Massive exodus of Boat People from the two halves of Vietnam, united under communist rule. Laos, too, becomes a communist state.

  To the memory

  of my Mother and Father

  Jon Swain

  RIVER OF TIME

  Two things greater than all things are

  The first is Love, and the second War.

  And since we know not how War may prove,

  Heart of my heart, let us talk of Love!

  Rudyard Kipling

  Lands of

  the Living Past

  By now, so many journalists have written their war stories about Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos that another book at this late stage may be thought superfluous. Their stale, wearied refrain is ‘I remember when I was in Indo-China . . .’

  If I am guilty of a similar sin and sound too much like an old Indo-China hand, I apologise. The exploitation of nostalgia is not my intention. If I romanticise some aspects of war, put it down to youthful exuberance. The countries of what was formerly French Indo-China are lands that still stand apart from the rest of Asia, though they no longer make such tragic headlines.

  Even as they are being modernised by the West they remain aloof, tragic, beautiful and provocative, a bewitching medley of the senses. They are places which have coloured my experience of life like no others on earth. I regret that I ever had to leave them, though I recognise that I did not get to know them as well as I should and that I saw them at a moment of dark tragedy when they were cockpits of conflict, decaying under foreign armies, ideologies, internal oppression.

  The impact of the wars upon Indo-China has been terrible, the communist victories a hideous disillusionment. But through these lands flows one constant, the Mekong. Great rivers have a special magic. There is something about the Mekong which, even years later, makes me want to sit down beside it and watch my whole life go by.

  The Mekong is the longest river in Southeast Asia. It begins its life tamely as a small glacial spring in the Tibetan Himalayas, the roof of the world. Then, fed by melting snow and mountain streams, it tumbles down through sheer-sided gorges in southwestern China, twists and turns through the jungly hills of Laos, descends through a series of rapids into Cambodia, then flows, at a more leisurely pace now, into southern Vietnam to meander peacefully into the South China Sea below Saigon.

  Between 1970 and 1975,
I lived in the lands of the Mekong – Cambodia and Vietnam – and forayed into Laos to report on America’s secret war there. This book is primarily a personal account of those tumultuous days. During this period the Mekong stole repeatedly into fragments of my life. It was to become more familiar to me than the Thames is to many Londoners. I was in my early twenties, one of six hundred-odd journalists accredited in Saigon to the United States Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) and, in Phnom Penh, one of a much smaller group accredited to the US-backed government of the ill-fated Khmer Republic.

  The Mekong soon washed through me like a tide. I learned something about life and death there that I could never have perceived in Europe. I learned about the excitement of the romance, tinged with melancholy, that is so peculiar to this corner of Asia. I learned, too, that the Mekong is not as innocent a river as it sometimes looks. It is true that the Mekong brings life to the lands of Indo-China; but there is another face of it that, in due course, I got to know too well. It is a face that reflects the violence and corruption of the countries it touches.

  This was never entirely the sleepy Asian backwater of docile, gently smiling peasants which it was popularly portrayed to be, but a place of despotism, primitive destructiveness and suffering. History has demonstrated that violence as well as sensuous pleasure is intrinsic to the Indo-Chinese character and to Cambodians in particular. Violence is in the blood. Cambodians ‘appear only to have known how to destroy, never to reconstruct’, wrote Henri Mouhot, the great French explorer who died of jungle fever exploring the upper reaches of the river in 1861. Of the Mekong, he said: ‘I have so long drunk of its waters, it has so long either cradled me on its bosom or tried my patience – at one time flowing majestically among the mountains, at another muddy and yellow as the Arno at Florence.’

  For myself, there are certain things I shall never forget: the bodies I saw being tossed about in its violent eddies near a ferry town thirty-two miles south of Phnom Penh in the early morning mist when the Mekong is at its most majestic and mysterious; or the dawn tragedy of the B52 bomber of the United States air force which prematurely unleashed its cargo of high-explosives on the same little town, turning its centre into a flattened mass of rubble under which many people lay dead. ‘I saw one stick of bombs through the town but it was no great disaster,’ Colonel Opfer, the American air attaché, told a press conference. Opfer had not understood a thing. The bombing had killed or wounded some 400 people. One man lost twelve members of his family.

  Nor shall I forget the day when a Cambodian general marched his soldiers behind a protective screen of Vietnamese civilians into the waiting guns of the Viet Cong. ‘It is a new form of psychological warfare,’ the general said as the bodies dropped in front of him.

  It was in Phnom Penh, on the banks of one of the quatre bras of the Mekong that, one morning in 1975, I thought I was going to die. A young Khmer Rouge soldier put a pistol to my head. There did not seem to be any reason why he would not pull the trigger. Today, I still have the uneasy feeling that perhaps I should not be alive.

  Of course there were other sides to these things, too. One can be romantic as well as cynical about war. There can be a magic attraction about tragedy; there can be exhilaration as well as exhaustion. When death is close, every object, every feeling, is golden. Camaraderie is stronger, love is deeper.

  Time inevitably dims the intensity of one’s feelings. Yet often I have a burning desire to go back to where it all began for me. But not so much the Cambodia I knew at the end, in its most tragic and lonely hour, when Phnom Penh was a city under siege, swathed in barbed wire, swamped by refugees whose suffering presented one of the most haunting images of twentieth century Asia.

  I want to go back to the Cambodia of early 1970 and the innocence of my first trip to Indo-China. I dream of Phnom Penh’s flower-scented streets; the simplicity of the villages along the banks of the Mekong surrounded by mangoes, bananas and coconuts; the splendour of the jungle; the rice fields green as lawns; the exquisite women; the odour of opium; the warm caress of the heat; and the peace that reigned over it all. The dawning of a beautiful love affair – that too belongs to the Indo-China I cherish.

  What carries me back to the Cambodia of my dreams is those first days. On that cold 1970 morning I had left Paris behind me, shuttered and pigeon grey beneath the monotony of a northern sky. I had been working on the English Desk of Agence France-Presse (AFP) for nearly two years, but harboured a desire to be posted to Vietnam and badgered my editors unashamedly to be sent there. My passion for Indo-China was fuelled in part by a brief flirtation with the French Foreign Legion, which had fought with such distinction there, and in part by a zest for adventure, which is why I became a journalist in the first place. In the end, a coup d’état was the answer to my prayers. The new rulers regarded Jean Barré, the AFP correspondent in Phnom Penh, as hostile and expelled him. In their wisdom, the French chiefs of AFP decided to replace him with a non-Frenchman. I was their choice and was sent as an envoyé special on a three month assignment. I stayed for five years.

  Twenty hours after taking off from Paris, the airplane made a final turn, the Mekong slid into sight then fell sharply away and I landed at Phnom Penh, a different world. On my first day I felt I had entered a beautiful garden. As I stepped off the Air France Boeing 707 onto the hot tarmac of Phnom Penh’s Pochentong airport to begin a new life, I forgot about Paris and began an adventure and a love affair with Indo-China to which I have been faithful ever since.

  I can still see it all in my mind’s eye and sense its indolent charm. Here and there on the road from the little airport where I had been met by Bernard Ullman, a correspondent with AFP, stood trees with astounding red flowers. The rocket attacks and acts of terrorism would not begin for some months and you could walk or be pedalled noiselessly through the streets without danger. There were few cars and, initially, little sign of war. Soldiers went to fight in gaily painted buses and Pepsi-Cola trucks requisitioned by the army.

  My home was Studio Six, a two bedroom duplex with ceiling fans on the ground floor of the Hôtel Le Royal. This spacious, almost baronial building, wrapped with flaming red bougainvillaea had once been the French Officers’ Club and more recently a comfortable base for tourists from France who came to Cambodia for la chasse, to visit the temples of Angkor and to savour the legendary beauty of the women. I liked its romantic air at once. Its carved wooden staircase leading to what seemed like miles of dimly lit corridors, the garden lush with strange plants, with a pool at the back, the faded picture of Angkor on its snuff-coloured walls, the machine-gun rattle of French from old rubber planters downing Pernods at the bar.

  In the studio there were piles of old copies of Le Monde, books, water bottles, rucksacks, cameras, discarded machine-gun bullets and an exotic Carte Touristique du Cambodge on the wall, illustrated with images of elephants, tigers, temples, waterfalls, across all of which the serpentine Mekong meandered in a thick blue line.

  The city was bathed in a soft and purplish evening light. Bernard, a veteran Asia hand, took me that night to the Café de Paris, Phnom Penh’s best French restaurant, to celebrate my arrival. Albert Spaccessi, the fat Corsican proprietor, his loose trousers hitched up with braces under his nipples, greeted us with loud effusiveness and positively glowed with hospitality. We dined on local venison washed down by fine French wines, beneath cheap posters of Nôtre Dame and the Place de la Concorde. But instead of emerging afterwards into a grey Paris street, full of passers-by hurrying with bent heads and collars turned up against the chill, I stepped into an enchanting world of tropical scents, the evening silence broken only by a bevy of girls in their cyclos who crowded round offering to pass the night with us.

  That evening, as we were pedalled back to the hotel in a cyclo, Bernard explained how he felt. ‘Indo-China is like a beautiful woman; she overwhelms you and you never quite understand why,’ he said with unashamed tenderness. ‘Sometimes a man can lose his heart to a place, one that lures h
im back again and again.’

  I have never forgotten his words.

  War in

  the Rice Fields

  This day was given to myself

  for the preparation of leaving . . .

  packing uniforms

  and one last look,

  folding memories neatly inside of myself

  and folding underwear into bags . . .

  taking only what I need

  and hoping that will be enough.

  THE VISIONS OF Cambodia always return – in colours, in people dying, in the dignity of the women toiling in the rice fields, in the glitter of dusk over the Mekong, in the barefoot children playing tag in the streets. Phnom Penh in early 1970 was ravishing: Buddhist monks in saffron robes and shaven heads walking down avenues of blossom-scented trees; schoolgirls in white blouses and blue skirts pedalling past with dazzling smiles, offering garlands of jasmine to have their pictures taken; lovers strolling in the evening along the placid river bank by the old Royal Palace; elephant rides in a park; tinkling bells coming from the shrine on top of the mound from which the city takes its name.

  After the bustle of Europe, there was a curious sensation that time stood still. With the coming of the war, this gracious tolerant life did not vanish overnight. Rather, it unravelled gradually like a ball of twine. There was hardly any visible poverty. Life revolved around the family, the Buddhist festivals, the rhythm of the seasons, as it had done since the time of Angkor, the pinnacle of Khmer civilisation. These Cambodians were not wily like their quicksilver Thai and Vietnamese neighbours, but pleasure-seeking, insouciant, with a childish faith in the ability of westerners to solve their problems. They lived simply, naturally. They had no idea of the havoc that was to come. Their naïveté was touching. To me, it was an integral part of their charm.