River Of Time

by Jon Swain

  Everything seemed possible and our existence had many strange moments. By night, we journalists could join a C119 gunship, ‘zapping’ supply trucks coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail, watching in awe as the Gatling-style machine guns mounted in its belly spewed out 6000 rounds a minute into the jungle below; by day we could be swimming in the surf in the immense dazzling blue of the South China Sea. We could equally be on the ground, sloshing up to the armpits through oozing mud in the Mekong Delta or belly-crawling for cover amid a mortar attack on a firebase below the demilitarised zone (DMZ) between North and South Vietnam. The war continued every day as if part of sunlight itself from the Delta to the DMZ, but each experience was different, and reporting it was always strenuous, gruelling and emotionally draining, but unforgettable nevertheless. At the beginning, I was so mesmerised by the war that I felt a spasm of regret when President Nixon announced a major withdrawal of American forces, fearing it would end just as I had come on the scene.

  At the end of March, I returned to Saigon. To come back to it from the field, utterly worn out and filthy, hair and sweat-soaked fatigues encrusted in red laterite dust from the Khe Sanh plateau, helicopter rotor blades still reverberating in my ears, but with the exhilaration of being alive, was a powerful experience. The city blazed with all the passion, intrigue and insanity of a wartime capital.

  After several weeks away, the first rule was to drink a symbolic apéritif on the terrace of the Continental Palace, Saigon’s great colonial hotel owned by Philippe Francini, scion of one of Saigon’s oldest métis families and famous for his erotic paintings. It was impossible not to like the Continental, with its green shutters, gently rotating ceiling fans, its shabby, romantic air and its staff who always seemed to be sleeping on mats in the long corridors. We basked in the fantasy that Graham Greene had written The Quiet American there.

  In the middle of the hotel was a small garden. Nothing was so far from the clamour of the choking, fume-ridden streets outside – the lights, the bars, the rock music, the women – than the harmony and warm stillness of this secret garden. I sometimes went there for a late evening drink amid the frangipani and hibiscus blossom, the fairy lights and consoling singing of cicadas. It was the reverse of the frenzy of war, and a good place to think.

  The older waiters in their starched white uniforms, bobbing back and forth from the bar with ice and soda, had been working at the hotel since French colonial days, as had its rotund, immaculately dressed manager, Monsieur Loi. There was always a boisterous crowd on the terrace outside: US officers making small talk with their girls, whose Asian faces and petite figures contrasted with the clumsy bulk of these beer-bellied Americans; children whining for money; groups of journalists whose usual means of relaxation were the same as any returned soldier from the front – alcohol, women and food. The journalists congregated at the little round tables in rattan armchairs and recounted again and again their favourite stories of war and sex.

  There was a well-worn routine that went like this; first, off to one of Saigon’s Corsican-run restaurants near the flower market for a French meal washed down with wine; then to Mimi’s, or some other girlie bar, for more drinks and entertainment. Midnight and curfew was the hour of decision. The urgent need for a woman meant all sorts of compromises were made.

  Amid the blood, mud and heartbreak of the battlefields, we all dreamt of savouring one delicious sensation: the moment when we would wake up, in safety, in Saigon, between clean sheets, with an exotic Vietnamese woman in our arms. Sometimes we were lucky and savoured a thrill utterly beyond the reach of our normal, daily, deadly world of war in the rice fields. Then, only then, did we know that we were truly alive, and perhaps the sensation gave some of us a glimpse into what Kipling meant when he wrote ‘Eastern beds are softer’. But there were other nights which ended in trouble, sordidness, sexual emptiness, disgust or regret; screwing mechanically in some sleazy hotel catering for raunchy GIs and their whores.

  I became a student

  of Nha Trang today

  a city by the sea.

  I approached it as a child

  for I am still a virgin

  of the war.

  It’s full of Catholic priests

  and allied soldiers

  and Buddhist priests

  and other soldiers

  and garbage

  that seems to belong

  exactly where it is . . .

  I can’t say I learned a thing

  and I couldn’t find a whore,

  though I’m sure there are more than

  a few . . .

  I couldn’t find a need . . .

  This time, I came back to Saigon with a vague premonition that my life was about to change. A few days later it did. A chance midday appointment took me to the old Rex Hotel, headquarters of JUSPAO, or Joint United States Public Affairs Office, the American propaganda machine in Vietnam which looked after the huge Saigon press corps and where the ‘Five o’clock Follies’, the daily press briefings, used to be held. There, amid the scented flowers of Nguyên Hué Street, I met Jacqueline again.

  No day, I thought, could have been brighter. Other memories of Saigon have been dimmed by the forgetfulness of time; the magic of that encounter has still not faded from my recollection. Her unconscious grace, her gentle, faintly Vietnamese eyes, her smile, the appealing curve of her nutbrown body remain so vivid. She stood in a simple flowered dress in the noonday sun, untouched, and to me untamed and unattainable, a true child of nature.

  I completely missed my JUSPAO appointment. We took a dented yellow-and-blue Renault taxi to the French colonial sports club, the Cercle Sportif, for lunch and a swim with her friends. As the cab rattled up rue Pasteur, past the AFP office, past Doc Lap presidential palace, along a wide avenue bordered with trees, I was totally absorbed in her and the exotic blend of Franco-Vietnamese culture she represented. I realised with a jolt, that my intuition had been right. I had a strong feeling when we had first met in Phnom Penh that I would fall in love with her if I ever saw her again.

  It seems unjust now to bring Jacqueline into this story, for the roots we put down in Saigon have since been torn up and may never grow back again. But I cannot look back to those formative Indo-China years without allusion to her. At first, the loss of Claude, the first man she loved, lay across our relationship like a physical barrier. She had loved him without compromise. She was petrified of an emotional entanglement with another journalist, a species she saw, through eyes shadowed by the tragedy of his disappearance, as harbingers of uncertainty and unhappiness. Nor did she want to be a prey to one of Saigon’s petty love affairs.

  She was on the defensive, and I did not dare to insist. When, finally, we acknowledged our love, it was outside Indo-China, in Malaysia, on a holiday snatched a few months later; exploring Penang, swimming at the Lone Pine beach hotel, exploring the Cameron Highlands, sleeping where we stopped, touching hands amid the soothing cadence of a tropical night. It was an entrancing setting that inspired fantastic dreams; soon she became the person I loved most in all the world.

  It was a love that sustained me for the rest of my time in Indo-China, enabling me to escape from the horrors of the war into something truly romantic. Not only was she wildly beautiful – considered by many to be the beauty of Saigon – but she was also unceasingly loyal and when I stumbled in life she was there to pick me up again.

  Jacqueline lived in a narrow side street near the end of Tu Do, formerly Catinat, the main thoroughfare of Saigon which runs down from the pink basilica to the Saigon river. She was in charge of the Saigon office of the Overseas Weekly, a hard-biting alternative paper for GIs in Vietnam that told the war as it really was. The generals banned it from sale in the PX, but it still sold well. Her mother, Regine, was a dressmaker, a saintly woman who had known more than life’s share of unhappiness, and who was deeply involved with the local Red Cross Association and the blood bank at the Hôpital Grall, the old French military hospital. Her father, who had first
arrived in Indo-China on a Messageries Maritimes boat from Marseilles, was living again in France. Jacqueline was a product of Saigon’s famous convent, the Couvent des Oiseaux. As well as French and Vietnamese, she spoke faultless English, learnt from the convent’s English teacher, a fierce little Scot. She enthralled me once by reciting a passage of Robert Burns’s poetry. Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was the book that she really loved.

  She had never known Vietnam without war. It was there when she was born; it was there as she grew up. For all she knew, it would be there when she died. She belonged to a fated generation. Yet she could not conceive of life anywhere else. She personified freedom, straining to hang on to a life which seemed to have been more and more Utopian as the war dragged on.

  There was nothing more enchanting than the sun playing on her face, lighting eyes full of expression and appeal. The simplest pleasures – a bowl of noodles in the street, dancing, going to the cinema, swimming at the Cercle Sportif, talking – took on a new allure: and when the war permitted it, she showed me her Vietnam. We travelled to Hué, the former imperial capital and the spiritual centre of Vietnam; to the cool hills and pine forests of Dalat; and, on quiet Sundays, to Vung Tau near the mouths of the Mekong, the sea-resort closest to Saigon which the French called Cap Saint-Jacques.

  Such journeys were light-years from those I was making when covering the war. Jacqueline, by her very presence, brought the Vietnamese landscape alive for me. The inescapableness of death, which I had so often felt, faded into the background, replaced by the joy of living. I saw the Vietnamese countryside in a new light.

  This freshness of vision was particularly strong on the afternoon we took a small sampan from Hué up the River of Perfumes. Fugitives for a few hours during an uneasy lull in the war, we were making a pilgrimage to one of the emperors’ tombs lost in the eastern foothills of the Annam mountain range. Behind us, we had left a city infected by violence.

  The North Vietnamese army had crossed the demarcation line along the 17th parallel and fought their way to within a few miles of Hué’s northern gates. A swollen multitude of refugees were streaming southward out of the city, fearing a repeat of Tet 1968. The mood in Hué was suddenly sinister and dangerous. Retreating, demoralised, drunken ARVN soldiers had looted and burned down the market; shells screamed intermittently overhead, to crash into houses around the citadel.

  We were only a few miles away, gliding up the river through a beautiful valley of green-carpeted rice fields rimmed by distant peaks. We were lapped by warmth. When we arrived, we sat for a while, lulled by the ageless serenity of the tomb. It was a world of quiet and spirituality, the silence so complete that we felt we were in the presence of the infinite. Later, as we glided downriver at sunset, the water shimmered like bronze in the sun; farmers drove their buffalo home through darkening fields; and, as the shadows lengthened and the gaunt mountains turned blue, we quite forgot the war.

  No other city is so representative of Vietnamese culture and learning as Hué, seat of the former emperors of Annam; and no other city has such a tragic recent history. In 1968 it was devastated by the Tet offensive. The Viet Cong seized the red-walled citadel and much of the city around it. For a month, the blue, red and yellow flag of the Viet Cong’s National Liberation Front fluttered defiantly over the ramparts of the citadel, symbol of Vietnamese nationhood.

  The US Marine Corps, supported by airpower, retaliated; devastating large populated parts of Hué. Using terrifying firepower, phosphorus and napalm bombs, they blitzed the Viet Cong from the citadel. Some of the ornate temples, throne rooms and altars where the Annamite princes had received their mandate from heaven right up to the beginning of World War Two – many years after such Confucian rites had been abolished by Peking itself – were turned into rubble. This caused deep-seated resentment against the Americans.

  The heroism of the Viet Cong was phenomenal. They said they were fighting for liberty and were prepared to die for it. Many ordinary people in Hué, disgusted by the degradation of the war, its filth and corruption, admired their disciplined purity and nationalism even though they did not want the communists in power.

  The discovery after this withdrawal of the hastily-buried remains of thousands of Hué officials and their families in mass graves, massacred out of vengeance, tarnished for ever this vision of Viet Cong patriotism. Neither side in the Vietnam war behaved well, as we know too well from the barbarism of the plump Lieutenant Calley and his hate-filled men at My Lai. The Hué massacre by the Viet Cong ranks with My Lai among the most disgusting atrocities of the war.

  Small wonder that Hué, weighed down by that terrible baggage, exuded an underlying melancholy. It is a garden city of parks, shady streets, palm-fringed villas, a school where Ho Chi Minh and other revolutionaries were educated, a university. Amid the dark despair of war, it was the River of Perfumes cutting through its centre that gave it that special, magic quality. Some evenings, just to be on the water, we hired a sampan instead of staying in the overcrowded journalists’ hotel with its tribe of king-size rats and permanent undercurrent of nervous tension, and where it was all too easy to feel trapped, as in a prison.

  As curfew fell at 9p.m., we were poled out to the middle of the river where we anchored with a huddle of other sampans, visible in the darkness only by their winking lights. The hills around glowed red with fighting, but we slept snugly in a little matted cabin, knowing that the river was the safest place to be. Periodically, cockleshell barques crept out of the inky blackness, bearing steaming bowls of phò, the Vietnamese soup, and ripe mounds of tropical fruits. It was in Hué that Jacqueline introduced me to the Tale of Kieu, Vietnam’s romantic literary classic, an extended narrative love poem about a young girl of the Mandarin class who is forced to submit to every humiliation but who emerges true to herself.

  Without knowing something of Kieu, it is impossible to appreciate the dignity, passion and melancholia which reside in Vietnamese women. The beautiful, strong-willed Kieu is representative of Vietnam, overcome but not conquered, not servile but a survivor.

  Those nights on the sampan were some of the most perfect I spent in Indo-China. The bombing lit up the night sky. But our eyelids were shut against the red flash of these false dawns. Only in the morning, with the long overhead shriek and searing crunch of the first salvo impacting on Hué’s northern bank, did we wake, pole ourselves to the steps of the Huong Giang Hotel and begin the day afresh.

  Inevitably at such times, a few of us went in search of the one place in Hué where it was possible to smoke opium. It was a small house near the citadel behind a flyblown Chinese restaurant, the only eating house still functioning in Hué. A broken-toothed, shrivelled old man with a goatee beard, himself an opium addict, lived there with his grown children. While he prepared our pipes, the old rascal told us how, masquerading as a hairdresser, he had spied on the French army during the French Indo-China war. He had provided the Viet Minh with scraps of intelligence gleaned while cutting the French officers’ hair. Our arrival was fortuitous; our dollars enabled him to build a magnificent bunker fortified with sandbags to shelter in with his family during the shelling; the next time we went he invited us to smoke inside it, and we felt supremely safe. Hué was the only place in Vietnam where I felt it appropriate to smoke opium – it suited the softness of the imperial city’s mood as it had Phnom Penh.

  North of Hué, for thirty miles up to the demilitarised zone, stretched the narrow, sandy, grey and drizzly coastal plain between the Annamite mountains and the blue waters of the South China Sea. The French army had lugubriously named it La Rue Sans Joie. Here, some of the most bloody struggles of the Vietnam war were fought at Quang Tri, Dong Ha, Cam Lo, the US Marine Corps firebase at Con Thien, still with rusting relics of its past as a Foreign Legion outpost. It is an area scarred by death, confusion, fear and heroism. The blood of men from many nations has soaked into its sandy soil.

  I got to know this grim area intimately, and especially during the
eight-month battle for Quang Tri in the Easter 1972 communist offensive. I remember it now with nostalgia and a glint of terror. Sights and sounds spin through my head: patrols melting into the wilderness of misty rain like phantoms from the underworld; the belch of mortar rounds socking into the mud; straggly lines of refugees trudging down Highway One; dogs tearing at bodies; the constant rumble of artillery; brave smiles; helicopters against a darkening sky; the subdued moan of the wounded in the night; bullets everywhere.

  Who remembers it now?

  One of the reasons I do is because of Gérard Hubert, a freelance photographer. He had drifted into Saigon claiming to be a French Canadian and soon established a reputation for courage. He had an almost mythical rapport with the Vietnamese Airborne, the élite of the South Vietnamese army, and showed mysterious soldierly qualities. Once, his helicopter was shot down and another time he dragged three Airborne soldiers to safety under heavy fire. He was cited for bravery. On yet another occasion he was wounded, but with a true soldier’s conception of duty insisted on handing in his film before he sought hospital treatment for a nasty shrapnel wound in the shoulder. Hubert was a delightfully unassuming, uncommunicative man, especially on matters concerning his past. I saw him one day amid heavy fighting on the edge of Quang Tri. The next day he was dead, decapitated by a 130mm shell which scored a direct hit on the command post.

  When the Canadians said they knew nothing about Hubert, the mystery deepened. Inquiries revealed that he had been in prison, hence his reticence. It was also discovered that he had been a French paratrooper in Algeria – hence his love of, and identification with, the Vietnamese Airborne, an offspring of the French paras. Quite rightly, he was buried with full military honours in the French cemetery in Saigon, a lost, angry but courageous man who sought and seemed to find fulfilment in the lunacy of the Vietnam war.

  Two years later I made a bizarre visit to the Street Without Joy; it left a bitterly sad impression. The area was one of the most devastated parts of South Vietnam, but briefly, after the 1973 ceasefire, something like peace prevailed and it became part of a battlefield package tour. Air Vietnam, keen to promote tourism, was flying in tourists on weekend trips from Saigon for US$80. ‘Visit the historic battlefields of Quang Tri,’ its brochure said. ‘See with your own eyes how much Vietnam has suffered through more than twenty-five years of war and yet still survived.’