River Of Time

by Jon Swain

  I have never seen or heard of Chantal since.

  A few days later I flew to Saigon. South Vietnam too was irretrievably defeated and disintegrating. A presidential guard, fixed bayonets gleaming, still stood outside Doc Lap palace, but in the grounds there were anti-aircraft guns and tanks, while planes circled the city and jeeps bristling with guns patrolled the streets. The city had an air of siege. Much of the countryside had been abandoned or had fallen. The familiar northern cities – Quang Tri, Da Nang, Hué – were being rolled up by North Vietnamese armour and millions were in flight from the abandoned Central Highlands. It was a terrible scramble down Highway Nineteen to the coast, through hills redolent with war. The stream of deserting South Vietnamese soldiers and refugees trekked by the old US First Air Cavalry Division base at An Khe, and through the Mang Yang pass where the crumbling remains of the French army’s Groupement Mobile No. 100, annihilated in a 1954 ambush, still littered the scrub on either side of the road, next to a monument, ‘Here soldiers of France and Viet Nam died for their countries’. The French were buried standing upright, facing France.

  Frequently, the deserters and refugees were ambushed too, and by the time this exhausted and miserable column reached the coast at Nha Trang, the crowded, panic-stricken city was about to fall. Every front was disintegrating and there was nowhere left to go, no way out except by sea to Cap Saint Jacques, the Mekong Delta and Saigon. Misery and despair were absolute. I still wonder what happened to Dai úy Phuoc, the old information officer for Two Corps who was so well-read, so helpful, and who loved to speak French with me whenever I visited his Two Corps headquarters in Pleiku. He can’t have had an easy time.

  His boss, General Pham Van Phu, was one of the principal actors in the army’s débâcle. There was perhaps a depressing personal explanation for his panic. As a young man, he had fought with the French army as a lieutenant in the Fifth Vietnamese Parachute battalion at Dien Bien Phu and was taken prisoner by the Viet Minh. The memory of those camps from which only a small number of prisoners ever returned – 3000 out of 11,000 – must have made him supremely conscious of death as the communist juggernaut rolled southwards in 1975 sweeping all before it. Maybe he thought it was enough to be a prisoner of the communists once in a lifetime; or maybe it was the humiliation, for he took out his pistol and shot himself. At least he escaped the fate of other South Vietnamese generals, who suffered years of incarceration and mistreatment at the hands of the communists in wretched re-education camps. Some of them did not come home either.

  In Saigon, tension was rising. The city was stricken with fear. Almost everyone, it seemed, was mourning a family member lost in the general military collapse. One tragedy piled on another. One Friday afternoon, a US air force C5A Galaxy cargo plane filled with nearly 250 babies for adoption in the United States ploughed into a rice field two minutes after take-off from Tan Son Nhut. The pilot reported sudden decompression problems and turned back, but a door blew out and he lost control. The huge plane came down a mile from the air base, burst open and scattered its cargo of dead and injured babies through the mud.

  This tragedy put all the others into context; it reinforced the view that the Americans in Vietnam were jinxed, however honourable their motives. It was the final straw. ‘Poor Vietnam. What more can they do to you after this?’ I remember saying to a colleague.

  Few of my friends in the city though yet believed that the war was lost. Having seen death close at hand during the big Viet Cong attack on Saigon during Tet 1968, and survived, they were psychologically unprepared for anything so fatal as a lightning communist victory over the South. Monsieur Ottavj had died a few months before. I am glad he never saw the end. He was buried at the French cemetery at Mac Dinh Chi. After their victory, the communists demolished the graveyards, turning the French cemetery into a park which, with a strong sense of irony, they rechristened Dien Bien Phu Park.

  Afterwards Madame Ottavj, his young widow Thai My Le, invited me over to the Hôtel Royal and met me in the lobby with a conspiratorial air. She wanted me to have her husband’s opium pipes. I was flattered and imagined inheriting a fine collection of ivory pipes befitting someone who had smoked opium with Graham Greene, had a lifetime addiction and had derived from it so many dreamy hours of pleasure. She emerged from his room with a wooden toolbox. I took it back to my flat and opened it: it contained yards and yards of foul rubber tubing and other odd contraptions which looked more like unmentionable medical paraphernalia than traditional opium pipes.

  In truth, Monsieur Ottavj had always dreaded the prospect of one day being forced to leave Saigon and return to his native Corsica where opium was of course illegal (as it was, officially, in Saigon, but nobody minded; after all, it was not so long ago that it was a monopoly under French government control). In preparation for this unhappy day, he had been trying to assemble a pipe which bore no resemblance to the conventional Indo-China opium pipe, with the bulb in the centre, and would not attract the suspicion of the French Customs. In the end, I dumped the box, with all its pipes, behind a cupboard on the landing of my apartment block in the rue Gia Long. For all I know, it may be there still. I have often thought of going back.

  Jacqueline, though, knew the end was in sight. She was quieter, more reflective. We used to slip away and eat at Chez Henri, a restaurant unknown outside a tiny French circle. There were four tables in the kitchen of Henri’s house where he served good French provincial food – jambon cru, paté de campagne and rognons. Henri was an ex-legionnaire with a Vietnamese wife who shared the cooking. But now there was nowhere left to forget the war, not even here. The curfew was being vigorously enforced and, returning to Jacqueline’s house after dinner, we were stopped everywhere by patrols. Rats scuttled across Thai Lap Thanh, the little street near the waterfront where she lived, and under the parachute flares the city we both loved looked oddly supernatural. Saigon was losing its permanence, in every sense. I wanted Jacqueline to leave and go to France. But she would not leave without her mother and her mother had nowhere in France to go to. In any case, it would be very difficult for either of them to make the transition. On Saturday, 12 April, we heard that the Americans were abandoning Phnom Penh in a helicopter operation; a humiliating end to their five year involvement in Cambodia. John Gunther Dean, the US ambassador – on whom such high hopes for a solution had been pinned, based on the settlement that he had negotiated in Laos, and who had first come to the US as a refugee from Nazi Germany – was helicoptered out of the city by American marines, weeping, the Stars and Stripes folded under his arm.

  It was a day I cannot forget and have never been able to get into proper perspective. I decided I had to fly to Bangkok to write a story on the evacuation; there was a flight which would just enable me to meet my Saturday night deadline. It was not really my intention to go back to Cambodia. But, in case it was possible, I spent that last Saturday morning persuading the Cambodian embassy in Saigon to give me a visa; so I suppose there was the germ of an idea in a back corner of my mind. The visa office could not see the sense of it and nor could anyone else. Most western journalists had been evacuated and the Cambodian collapse was imminent. It could only be a matter of hours, days at the most, before the Khmer Rouge guerrillas would overrun Phnom Penh, and the American warning of a ‘bloodbath’ was in everyone’s minds. The airport was closed, and it was unlikely that there would be any more inward flights, certainly not by civilian airliner from Bangkok: with the city about to fall, it was too dangerous. But the embassy gave me a visa anyway, the last issued anywhere in the world by the crumbling Lon Nol regime.

  I hardly imagined I would miss the fall of Saigon, or I would not have left Vietnam that day. It was too precious to me. But Jacqueline knew and implored me not to leave. Her emotion was all the stronger since we had just learned of the death of Michel Laurent in fighting near Saigon. Michel was a fine photographer and the last journalist to be killed in the war. And Jacqueline knew intuitively that I would feel compelled, once in Thailand
, to try to go back into Cambodia, the place where Claude had died.

  We had been together nearly five years but she had never used the expression ‘Adieu, Jon’ to say goodbye to me before; a French girl never says Adieu to her lover unless she wishes to mark a definitive separation. I looked back at her standing on the steps of the Caravelle Hotel, not knowing what to think or say, and all the way to the airport her Adieu repeated itself in my mind like a lost refrain and was like a dagger-prick to the heart.

  Eighteen days later, she was swallowed up in the communist capture of Saigon; I was trapped in the fall of Phnom Penh and facing my own personal anguish. It had been an act of desertion, of her and of her mother, and it was ten years before I could face going back to Saigon, so intense was the pain from that parting.

  The Fall of Phnom Penh

  It was not simply journalistic ambition that led me to go back to Phnom Penh, nor was it a zest for adventure. I have pondered on it a great deal since then and of those two facts I am certain. Yet, I still find it impossible to analyse my own motives for my action. Most western journalists had been evacuated to Thailand in US marine helicopters the day before; but here, a few hours later, I was contemplating travelling the other way, back into besieged Phnom Penh, on the last flight before the city fell.

  I arrived in Bangkok from Saigon and after filing a story on the humiliating American abandonment of Cambodia I spent sleepless hours in an agony of indecision, my mind racing with emotional thoughts about the doom gathering over Indo-China.

  It was well past three in the morning and in a few hours (at 10 a.m. according to the timetable) an Air Cambodge flight was due to leave Bangkok for the Cambodian capital, the last international carrier flying in. There was every chance the flight would be cancelled; the frightened and rational side of my being very much wished that it would be.

  But another side of me got the upper hand and, with dawn streaking the sky, an irresistible impulse propelled me out of the security of my hotel room that Sunday morning, into a taxi and to the airport, just in case the plane – any plane – was going to Phnom Penh.

  I took almost no clothes; just my Olivetti portable and a camera. These were the same two journalistic implements I had arrived in Phnom Penh with from Paris five years before.

  Cambodia had given me so much. In Phnom Penh, I had lived through intensity and exaltation I had never before known. Now that the dream was ending, I had no moral choice but to share its fate. I had a visa. I even had an old Air Cambodge ticket. If there was a plane, I had to be on it; otherwise, I could never look comfortably in a shaving mirror again. I knew I would always be haunted by that cowardice.

  There was a plane. And I was on it.

  It was an old and overworked DC7 flown by a daredevil American adventurer named Rakar. He was determined to fly into Phnom Penh to rescue his trapped Cambodian girlfriend. At Bangkok airport, however, early that Sunday morning, I had been told emphatically that there was no such thing as a plane for Phnom Penh. Then I was told one had just left. In desperation, I asked the ground staff to get clarification from the control tower. To my astonishment, joy and certainly alarm, I was told that a DC7 was at the end of the runway, on hold because of a fault in its number three engine.

  Using all the persuasion I could muster, I got myself whisked through immigration and on a special airport bus to the foot of the plane. The doors swung open. A ladder was lowered. I clambered aboard. I was in the nick of time. Moments later Rakar lined up on the runway, revved the three good engines, released the brakes and, with a rumble, we took off.

  It was an astonishing journey of tranquil normality. A smiling Cambodian stewardess served champagne and petits fours, as usual. Also on board were Jean-Jacques Cazaux, an old colleague from Agence France-Presse who had been sent back by his office, and Erich Stange, an odiously smug East German diplomat who was going back to reopen his embassy now that a communist victory was imminent. Unlike most countries, France never completely abandoned her embassy in Phnom Penh, counting on her links to Sihanouk and a long history with Cambodia to guarantee the safety of French people and a future French role.

  After an hour, the plane rumbled low over Pochentong airport. Rakar shouted to hang on. Then we were down. The door opened, and hard sunlight penetrated the cabin. We had landed in the middle of a rocket and artillery barrage and, scrambling out of the plane, we raced across the tarmac and dived into a sandbagged bunker.

  All around was chaos and terror. A frightened crowd mobbed the plane. How many scrambled aboard I do not know, but the aircraft did not hang about. Swinging around wildly it shook off the crowd, waggled its flaps, and was gone; Rakar’s girlfriend in the cockpit with him, I hope. Seldom has an airfield felt lonelier than Pochentong did that April morning, as our last link with the outside world rose into the sky, shrunk to a dot, then vanished into the clouds.

  I felt a curious sense of relief at being back where I belonged; in a dangerous place, perhaps never more dangerous than then, but one I was familiar with, whose terms of reference I understood. In short, I was at home, and my eyes thrilled at the sight of the frangipani, laden with blossom, on the airport road. My spirits rose at the thought that there were some things, like the fantastic flowers, the dawns over the Mekong, that even war could not despoil.

  Nevertheless, I was comforted to see familiar faces at Hôtel Le Phnom. There was Sydney Schanberg, the New York Times correspondent, and Dith Pran, his interpreter and guide. Sydney did not join the American evacuation even though his paper asked him to do so. He sent a cable saying, in effect, that he had decided for personal reasons to stay in Phnom Penh. The NYT sent back a message endorsing his action and concluding ‘We Love You’. Other faces came crowding in, puzzled to see me, but not entirely surprised. There were about a dozen western journalists who had missed the American evacuation for a variety of reasons. They were a diverse group, including the often-wounded freelance photographer Al Rockoff, a former GI from Vietnam who was on about the sixth of his nine lives. Some, like Denis Cameron and Lee Rudekevich, were there rescuing children, and felt their involvement in a baby adoption programme obliged them to stay and protect their charges. The majority, however, were French, reliant on their nationality as a safeguard. Others included Ennio Iacobucci, an Italian photographer friend who did work for AFP; Doug Sapper, a redoubtable American mercenary-cum-businessman involved in a private air charter business to Battambang, the second city; Dominique Borella, a tall, blond French soldier-of-fortune who had made the Cambodian cause his own and had attached himself at the head of a battalion of parachutists defending the airport. There were also the Cambodian journalists and stringers, with whom I was united by five years of shared dangers on the battlefield, in particular the loyal Moonface.

  Five other Britons had stayed behind: a Scottish medical team brought out by the Red Cross to alleviate some of the misery in the city’s primitive, overcrowded hospitals – Helen Fraser and Pat Ash, nurses; Michael Daly, surgeon; Murray Carmichael, anaesthetist – and Major ‘Spots’ Leopard, field director of the Save the Children Fund.

  In the past we had been somewhat cut off from the war in the Hôtel Le Phnom – not any more. The façade of the old colonial building was bedecked with giant white flags and red crosses and surrounded with barbed-wire barricades. It had been declared a ‘neutral zone’ by the Red Cross. Outside, however, a squadron of armoured personnel carriers squatted menacingly on the wide avenue, arousing fear that the government might be setting a strong-point up around the hotel in defence of the city. The Red Cross finally got assurance that its neutrality would be respected and it would be left in peace.

  Monday was Cambodian New Year. There were no celebrations. A mutinous air-force pilot dropped four bombs on the military headquarters, killing at least seven soldiers. General Sak Sutsakhan, the new military leader, proclaimed a twenty-four-hour curfew and declared the struggle would continue. The Khmer Rouge attacked the western outskirts, driving thousands of refugees towards th
e city centre. They poured through the military police barricades like floodwater. But other aspects were astonishingly normal. Cyclo-drivers, all smiles in the morning sun, glided past while the government news agency ignored the imminent defeat and carried a big story about the death of the singer Josephine Baker.

  Sydney, Pran, Al and I travelled in a group around the city. We drove to the airport and the main transmitting centre nearby, but it was shut and the technicians had fled. Our dispatches were sent from the post office by an extraordinary emergency transmitter made in China before the fall of Shanghai. Worried it would shut down at any moment, we used to spend the night at the post office, gunfire mingling with the chatter of our portables, handing page after page to the telex operator, who punched it, and fed it down the line to our respective masters in London and New York. None of us got more than an hour or two of snatched sleep, resting our heads on our machines, our bodies dripping in the heat.

  By Wednesday, the misery was overwhelming, the gunfire growing louder. A huge fire raged on the southern edge of the city, where thousands of wooden shacks lined the river. Another inferno at the Shell depot lit up the sky to the north. With the US evacuation, the relief organisations had broken down and the refugees had nobody to rely on. A woman came down the airport road dragging a sewing machine, all she had salvaged from her home. In the university grounds, half-tracks churned up the grass and positioned themselves for clearer fields of fire. Troops who had pulled back from the east bank of the Mekong, now entirely in Khmer Rouge hands, thronged the building.

  Upstairs, in the Faculty of Medicine, a Para Corps captain, swagger-stick in hand, strode up and down, barking orders. Students had barricaded the stairs with desks and watched the bustle from classroom windows. And in the sunshine outside two young lovers sat on the grass, holding hands, wrapped in their own private world.