River Of Time

by Jon Swain

  When the boy died, I was in the middle of a paddy field 200 yards to the right, alone and too frightened to move. The Viet Cong kept on firing. The bullets ripped through the low mudbank and the straggly bush behind which I was hiding. It was clear I was at this moment a prime target and it would have been fatal to stay. I started to crawl. It seemed to take an age. In the end I got up and ran. The field was naked and open. I bent low, heart pounding, and darted across, expecting the impact of a bullet at any moment. When, by some miracle, I reached a muddy ditch, I tried to light a Gauloise but I could not hold the lighter. Meanwhile, the major seemed to lead a charmed life. He was fearless, standing on the road above, directing the battle. To my left, a young soldier hid his head under a waterproof cover, put his Buddha talisman between his teeth for protection, and sobbed in terror. The major came over and kicked him to his feet. Then the Viet Cong blew up the Cambodians’ armoured car with a B40 rocket. As smoke and flames poured out of it, three Cambodians leapt out of the turret, their uniforms on fire, screaming in pain and jumped into the waterlogged field to douse the flames. The water hissed around them. By the time the battle was over, the village was blazing. Eight Cambodians were killed and 20 wounded. No Viet Cong bodies were found. It was another of those dirty little battles that made up the war, and in the general scheme of things was an insignificant incident. But I could not forget my own fear, the image of the boy soldier crumpled in the dust and the major who turned his face away and wept.

  There was an endearing bravado about Cambodian officers. One general, Um Savath, had got drunk one night, placed an empty Nestlé milk tin on his head and with a superb sense of showmanship ordered his batman to shoot it off. The batman raised his rifle and fired. He was trembling so much that he missed. The bullet hit Um Savath in the head. He was brain-damaged and partially paralysed. Until his death, later on in the Cambodian war, he walked with a limp. He was mad, but insanely brave; his soldiers worshipped him.

  All this exposure to danger began to be routine. I did not want to become hardened to the bloodshed, but inevitably there were times when I had to be, in order to survive. There were reporters who hardly seemed to care; perhaps, for most, it was just that they knew that if they allowed themselves to give free rein to their feelings they could not have continued to do their job. Soon after daybreak we would foray into the countryside and witness the fighting, see the maimed and mutilated. Then we would drive back to Phnom Penh. Reaching the hotel was a moment of authentic joy. As the gates opened and the car turned into the driveway, we knew we were safe. War is a kind of jailbreak which we welcomed for its freedoms and its lifting of every kind of taboo. In time, there seemed to be no other reality but battle interspersed with relapses of agreeable apathy in Phnom Penh, and the familiarity of those homecomings to our hotel was a precious thing.

  The eternal Mekong, gliding by the city on its way to the sea, provided some of the more bizarre distractions. On Sundays after Mass at Phnom Penh’s Roman Catholic cathedral – later dynamited by the Khmer Rouge – some French people went water-skiing on its safer stretches, while Cambodian gunboats provided them with protection. This led to its own kind of tragedy when a French girl was cut to ribbons by a boat’s propeller. Wartime is the time to do wild things; another form of relaxation could be found in the company of the girls at the maisons flottantes, bordering the river a few miles outside Phnom Penh or with the cyclo-girls who congregated outside the Café de Paris. There were opium parlours and Madame Nam’s, a brothel specialising in caresses délicieuses. The journalist Donald Wise said he once spotted a sign on a doorway saying ‘Cunnilingus is spoken here’. One establishment whose location was a jealously guarded secret of the French colons refined this art by training its girls first on bananas. Sex and opium played important parts in our lives in Cambodia; these diversions were an essential ingredient of survival.

  The wartime capital encouraged all kinds of indiscretions. It had its own resident French lady of pleasure, like a small town in Provence: Madame Cha-Cha, red-bonneted, face caked with coarse make-up, was a grotesque figure compared to the graceful Asian girls who almost floated down the streets. She had had a chequered history, beginning as a pute in the rue Saint-Denis, graduating to Marseilles, then to Algeria and finally serving the French Corps Expéditionnaire in Indo-China. Who knows why she stayed? Perhaps out of sentiment. In any case, she was a favourite with Cambodian army officers who regarded her as a stalwart specimen of French womanhood.

  Venereal disease was rife, and one or two clinics treated it to the exclusion of almost every other disease. Obsolete treatments, dating back to the French army days and involving courses of mercury, were still in use. ‘Be prudent,’ Doctor Grauwin advised. ‘Always take precautions. Remember the old saying we had in the Corps Expéditionnaire. “Three minutes with Venus is three years with mercury.”’ Even so, the press corps went down like flies; one unfortunate colleague was afflicted eleven times.

  Jean-Pierre Martini was a young French mathematics professor who taught at Phnom Penh university as a coopérant, an alternative to Service Militaire. An habitué of Studio Six, he was a Maoist at heart, believing in permanent revolution. He had a wonderfully warped view of life. His Paris 1968 background had convinced him of the righteousness of the communist cause in Cambodia. However Jean-Pierre’s number one passion was not politics but voyeurism. He used to regale me with stories of his sexual exploits and experiments with Cambodian girls, and seemed to be in a state of perpetual adolescence. It was he who made the interesting observation that the borderline between Cambodia and Vietnam is also the boundary of the female labia majora; on the Cambodian side women’s genitalia are more often fully developed as a result of their Indian heritage, but in Vietnam and further eastwards they are small and shell-like in the Mongoloid tradition.

  Once, he returned from a visit to Phnom Penh Central Market with the perfectly formed rim of the eye of a deer he had spotted at a stall of Cambodian folk medicine where they also sold tigers’ teeth and the bile of cobras. He explained, with a flourish, that Cambodian men liked to stick it on the end of their penis like a ‘tickler’ to excite their partner better during intercourse. No woman, regardless of her looks, was spared his advances. There was a secretary at the New Zealand embassy whom we called Pinched Lips because of her pursed unsmiling mouth. One of Jean-Pierre’s maxims was that it was not a woman’s looks that mattered when making love, it was her ‘technique’; if that was good, she gave pleasure even if she was plug-ugly. One afternoon, he arrived in the studio, a little out of breath, eyes sparkling with mischief, to announce. ‘Je l’ai baisé.’ What was it like, I asked. ‘C’était formidable!’ he cried. ‘C’était la Technique Commonwealth!’

  While the French got on with their lives and the Cambodians, Chinese and remnants of the frightened Vietnamese community muddled through and made contingency plans for their future, a dangerous competitive streak developed among the press corps. They were in a mood to despise danger and allow the narrowest possible margin of safety. Courage became a cult. More and more journalists went down uncannily empty roads never to return – twenty in a few weeks – and then one day I myself pushed my luck too hard. In southwest Cambodia beyond the infamous Pich Nil pass, close by the Gulf of Siam, I was so desperate to glimpse the sea, to feel its wet air on my face, that I broke my rule never to be on the roads after four in the afternoon, when it begins to grow dark and the peasants leave their fields.

  Faced with the choice of spending a lonely night at a Cambodian outpost guarding a bridge about fifty miles from Phnom Penh, which was quite likely to be attacked and overrun, or of driving with all speed to the next provincial town, Kompong Speu, I chanced it and chose the latter. I drove recklessly without headlights, leaning tensely forward, peering into the gloom. The Peugeot 404 crashed into a mine-crater, turned over and skidded for yards on its side before coming to a halt, a wreck. Scrambling out through the shattered windscreen, with a gashed shoulder, I spent a terrifying n
ight in the rice fields, expecting capture at any moment.

  It was a beautiful tropical night; the stars shone like crystal – but this was no time to admire them. The area was a major Khmer Rouge supply and infiltration route to the Seven Mountains, and above the croak of bullfrogs and the rasp of cicadas I could hear the groaning of ox-carts carrying ammunition; ox-carts of the same design as those on the murals at Angkor Wat. The very darkness seemed to hold its breath; at each sound my muscles tightened in anticipation of a bullet. I even believed I could hear the Khmer Rouge breathing. Dawn brought the chirp of birds and villagers driving their grey buffalo to the fields. An army patrol came down the road in search of what it expected to be a body. I was bleary-eyed but safe, though I richly deserved not to be. Never again did I break the four o’clock code or take insane risks. Indeed, for years afterwards I was nervous about driving in the dark in Asia, once breaking out in a cold sweat driving through the rubber plantations of Malaysia at dusk, looking for a place to hide and having to stop the car to recover my nerve.

  In place of the Peugeot, a total write-off, I rented a little Japanese sports car. It roared like a Panzer Division on the move but I felt safer close to the ground. People usually shoot high in split-second ambushes. One memorable day, I took my colleague Donald Wise on an expedition to the front and we ended up having a picnic in a field – a bottle of Beaujolais, smoked oysters and a baguette – protected by a Cambodian paratroop battalion consisting entirely of girl soldiers. Mortars rasped and popped not far away but I felt safe. The presence of the girls certainly slowed down our lunch. We beat a retreat when a mortar bomb stuck in its tube and the mortar team, with typical Khmer insouciance, turned the tube upside down to shake it out. But never since have I had the benefit of such a charmingly coquettish, protective shield.

  Such times were all very pleasant. They could not last. Buried somewhere among the reefs of my mind is still the memory of a sultry Phnom Penh afternoon. The Khemara cinema in the Avenue Charles de Gaulle was comfortably filled. There were some soldiers in uniforms. There were many women and children. It seemed like any other afternoon at the pictures. The film was Enfer sur les Philippines, an American film about the battle of Bataan, dubbed in French.

  It was very quiet in the third-floor flat opposite. I had dropped by for a siesta with Mademoiselle Hoa, a half-Cambodian, half-Vietnamese girl with a cat’s beauty and midnight blue-black hair. We used to smoke opium together. The drowsy sleep it produced was the perfect antidote to a day at the front. Now, as we lay in the clammy air in her bedroom I wondered, not for the first time, whether I would ever be able to tear myself away from Indo-China.

  Then came an unmistakable noise – a dull boom from across the street which ended the steamy rêverie. No one spoke. Hoa’s flirtatious eyes filled with fear and she gripped my hand like a frightened child. I looked out of the window. People were tumbling out of the cinema and falling, in slow motion, to the ground. Someone had thrown a couple of grenades inside and they had burst in the air and showered the audience with splinters.

  I was gripped by a mixture of curiosity and horror. I remember dressing and rushing across the road. Inside the cinema, the air was thick with blood and death. There was whimpering from rows of broken bodies and wet red stains on the floor gleaming in the faint light. There was a little girl who still breathed but whose body was full of grenade fragments and who clenched a peanut between her front teeth as if her life depended on it.

  I carried her into the street and laid her gently on the ground, then went back in. When I returned she was still there, an innocent child close to death. All around was pandemonium, military police waving guns, but not a single ambulance. As a community, Phnom Penh was not organised to deal with such a tragedy. Even today, after years of suffering, the Cambodians do not have a strong sense of caring for their fellow men. Medical staff, negligent and greedy, demand to be paid for drugs provided free of charge by the international aid agencies. Perhaps this is due to the Cambodians’ fatalistic perception of human life. Perhaps it is due to penury, to the horrors of war that have blighted their lives. For many, morality is a luxury to be disowned; survival and money are the ultimate objectives.

  It was left to an American and myself to carry out the wounded. I bent over the girl. She whimpered and twisted as if to shake off death. In desperation I scooped up her broken body and put her in the front of the car, another two wounded in the back seat, another across the open boot, and drove to the military hospital.

  The sentry refused to open the gates. Civilian casualties were not allowed in the military hospital. I implored. He shook his head, unmoved. I drove to the Soviet-Khmer friendship hospital on the other side of town, ran inside and grabbed a doctor. My hand, sticky with the girl’s blood, marked the sleeve of his white coat. ‘If you don’t look after these wounded, I will leave them in the courtyard and you will be responsible,’ I said. Reluctantly, he called for orderlies to unload the car. I took a last look at the child. Her mouth opened in a silent plea for help and for an instant her tiny fingers touched my hand. Then she was gone.

  In the morning, I went back. The child was dead. Her name did not matter. She was very young and had committed no crime. Twenty-three people were killed that afternoon by the hand grenades. Few died outright. It was a small thing when every day scores were dying in the great greenness of the Cambodian countryside, but the sense of waste was overwhelming. Seldom has the ending of a little life so touched me.

  By the following morning the bloodstains had been washed away. The military police closed all Phnom Penh’s cinemas and fleshpots and said they would punish the criminals. But who were the criminals? Most probably angry soldiers who had not been paid. Three weeks later, the Khemara reopened to La Chanson de Demain, a Shaw Brothers of Hong Kong romance. The earlier killing might never have happened. The whole incident had disappeared into thin air.

  Herein lay a recurring dilemma: in what circumstances should a journalist stop being a journalist and intervene to save lives? As I have said, there were some reporters who hardly seemed to care, developing a detached attitude to death. Perhaps they had found that personal involvement brought only pain and so masked their feelings with an outward display of hardened professionalism. Were they right? It was hard to think so. Yet on this occasion I was so preoccupied with the wounded that I was the last to file a story. My story was strong on colour and detail, but it was hopelessly late and I got a rocket from AFP in Paris. The editors there had, however, appreciated my difficulties and my dilemma. At the end of their note they added a single French word – ‘Courage’.

  By late 1970, Cambodia was becoming a country without a future. The cream of Lon Nol’s army had been defeated in an ill-conceived offensive named Chenla, after the pre-Angkorian kingdom of the same name. The twenty battalions of the task force were bogged down on Highway Six, linking Phnom Penh with the provincial capital of Kompong Thom. Strung out for several miles along the narrow asphalt road, the Cambodians were an easy prey for the Vietnamese lying in wait in the surrounding fields and rubber plantations. They were cut to pieces by the communists’ heavy guns and their forces never reached the besieged town; its inhabitants were reduced to eating the animals in their picturesque little zoo to stay alive. The Cambodians never recovered from this blow. Early in 1971, Lon Nol suffered a stroke. Although his health improved, he was never in full political control again. He became a recluse, surrounding himself with Buddhist monks, genuflecting fortune-tellers and clanging gongs in the palace of Chamcar Mon. There was to be no magic solution to this war.

  In those hard-bitten days, a number of us smoked opium. It seemed natural to do so after a day at the front. Opium had been legal in Indo-China just a few years before, and while it was now officially prohibited, was still widely smoked among the French colons. The most famous fumerie in Phnom Penh was Madame Chum’s. Madame Chum, a one-time mistress of a former president of the national assembly, was Cambodia’s Opium Queen. She ran the fumerie
for more than thirty years, until her death in September 1970, aged sixty-seven, and earned a small fortune from the pipe-dreams of others.

  Madame Chum sent her two children, a boy and a girl, to France to be educated. She also adopted a host of abandoned Cambodian children as her own, paying for their food, housing and education from her profits. Her generosity made her as well known for welfare work as for opium and she was accorded a national funeral, her body wrapped in a white cloth, holding three lotus flowers as an offering to the Buddha. People said she had never forgotten how she suffered when she was young and poor and had made a vow to help others all she could. I wrote her obituary for AFP and was pleased when Le Figaro published it in full.