River Of Time

by Jon Swain

  When I got back to Phnom Penh, I went around the old French embassy, now a Vietnamese army camp. Partly in ruins and stinking of human excrement, the walls were covered in soldiers’ graffiti. Not a trace remained of our time there. A host of memories passed before my eyes: soldiers rotting at the wayside; the white knuckles of a woman’s hand clenching the child torn from her grasp; burial pits of skulls polished like billiard balls; pitiful fragments of bodies carried from the battlefields; the corruption, the incompetence, the intrigue, the dust, the soldiers, the refugees, the war without end. Cambodia at its worst was truly ugly.

  I stood still by the broken span of the bridge across one of the quatre bras of the Mekong, where the Khmer Rouge had been going to execute us. My mood was melancholy, filled with wistful regret. I thought of the lost ideals, the unfulfilled expectations, the changes that inevitably come in the course of a man’s life. Was the original man who had stood at this spot, a gun pointed at his head, still alive? I wondered. Or had he perished with his beliefs as surely as if a bullet had been fired from that gun and shattered his skull that day?

  Before me was the Mekong, immense, unchangeable, sweeping past on its eternal journey to the South China Sea; and, contemplating it for the first time since my return to Phnom Penh, I felt a link with my past. The Mekong was the river of my youth. My eyes caught the golden glitter of sunlight vibrating on its rumpled waters; my melancholy mood dissolved into the promise of better days to come, and my spirits sang.

  Adieu l’Indochine

  Like dreams

  carved from bars

  of ivory soap

  you float by and melt away

  with the passing of each day,

  growing smaller

  and smaller

  until there is nothing

  left of you

  to touch . . .

  My memories of Saigon lay for many years beneath the surface, too painful to bring out into the open again. The idea of going back filled me with dread, and whenever I thought of arranging a visit something got in the way; most often my own doubts and fears. It was not until ten years after the city’s fall that I felt I had gathered the strength to return. Even then I boarded the Air France flight to Vietnam with a strange, taut feeling in my stomach.

  My trepidation grew as we crossed the Vietnamese coast: down there was the Mekong, the fields of rice, the buffalo browsing in their pools, the eternal bomb craters. After a long downward glide, we landed at Tan Son Nhut airport and as we taxied, I stared in silence through the oval window, taking it all in. The rows and rows of curved hangars, divided by concrete blast walls, which once had housed the might of the US air force, were still intact; only now they were empty. A scrapheap of American aircraft and helicopters, bare and stripped hulks, slumbered at the far end of the base.

  At its peak, this had been the busiest airport in the world, where passenger airliners shared the runway with fighter-bombers and lumbering military transport planes filled with troops and ammunition. Now that madness had all dissipated together with the constant noise; the guard towers; the mess halls; the storage depots; the GIs on fork-lift trucks, sweating in the heat, loading and unloading war supplies. There were miles and miles of empty runways and a few Vietnamese soldiers in olive-green uniforms and pith helmets, standing desultorily in the sunshine, smoking cigarettes. The emptiness and heavy stillness was devastating.

  There was almost no motor traffic in the sunstruck streets. The blue-and-yellow taxis had gone, replaced by a few Soviet Volgas and Japanese vans. Motor bikes, bicycles and cyclos rattled by. My car slid past the twin-spired Cathedral of Our Lady and turned into Tu Do, the main street, which seemed to have shrunk, like the buildings.

  But looking down a few hours later from my hotel window on what the communists had renamed Ho Chi Minh city, I found, with a lurch of recognition, that I could easily bring back the Saigon of the war: the sluggish brown river clogged with rusting hulks, the pollution and roar of the Hondas, the whining beggars, stray children, pimps and flirtatious girls.

  Saigon had been a city of wild excesses; a bloated booming Sin City, dubbed the biggest whorehouse on earth; a city of slums made from plywood, cardboard and flattened tin cans, where garbage flowed onto the streets; an ugly city of barbed wire, guns and sandbags, always on the edge of catastrophe; a city of depravity; the Sodom of the East.

  I echo all the familiar complaints. But to those of us who were captivated by it, Saigon was a poignant city which aroused powerful human emotions. It was often a cruel and unkind place. Who could fail to be moved by the poverty and the distress of the orphans and waifs, the dust of life? But it was a city, too, of love and spontaneous friendships and of brave people who tried with honesty and dignity to lead good lives despite the war. Many of them I counted among my friends.

  Swarms of lively, eager-faced children descended on me, tugging at my pocket and heart strings. I looked eagerly for the places I remembered: Chez Henri, the Club Nautique, the bar in Tu Do where Graham Greene had a girl; the Phu To race-track where the Viet Cong once controlled the back-strait. They had become as nothing. The Hôtel Royal was now a textile warehouse. The Cercle Sportif was lifeless, the paint peeling. The clubhouse was boarded up and the swimming pool drained of water. Grass sprouted between cracks in the concrete. It was all shabby, rundown, sad. But I felt sure that Saigon would rise from the ashes of the war. Down by the river front where in The Quiet American the fictional Fowler had watched American war planes being disembarked there were cargo ships from many nations.

  I went back to my old flat. Were Monsieur Ottavj’s opium pipes still behind the wardrobe where I had hidden them all those years before? It was important to know. The building was now a billet for officers of the Vietnamese army. Would they permit me to have a look? I opened the door to be met by a sullen soldier. Instinctively I froze. My reflexes were ill-attuned to the sight of a man in a North Vietnamese army uniform standing inside my old apartment building. Throwing me a suspicious glance, he signalled me to leave.

  Giant billboards everywhere proclaimed that this was the anniversary of the Liberation. Unsurprisingly, the ideology of Mac-Lenin, as the Vietnamese translated Marxism-Leninism, had failed to take root in Saigon despite the arrival from Hanoi of serried ranks of tough northern cadres dedicated to instilling party discipline.

  The communists had almost cut the heart out of the city; almost, but not quite. Saigon was still stubbornly insubordinate, a city of whispers, intrigue and defiance. Somewhere here were the underground escape networks that had organised the flight of boat people from Vietnam.

  One day I met Kim again, a girl from one of the gentlest and noblest of Vietnamese families; a family with an abiding honesty which looked with disgust and almost with shame at the destruction the American military presence had wrought on civilised Vietnamese values and had kept their heads upright through those corrupt days. She was a friend from the war. In 1975, the communists had brutally confiscated her parents’ beautiful house, compelling them to live modestly in a poor suburb. They adapted to their impoverished circumstances with characteristic dignity and good manners.

  We sat in a coffee shop in the city centre. She was wearing a silk aó dài, a slim attentive and cultured woman with long jet-black hair, speaking faultless French and English. She kept looking nervously about her; to be seen talking to a foreigner was possibly dangerous. We sat there chatting for perhaps thirty minutes. Then, for no apparent reason, tears streamed down her face. She pulled herself together and with downcast eyes told me that for the past ten years she had been too traumatised to set foot in the centre of the town where her old home stood, or put on an aó dài; she did not want to be reminded of the happiness which had died on the day of ‘liberation’, the day the communists took power, the day they won the war. Like many other Saigonese she had always visualised that day – the first day of peace – as being the best of her life. For Kim it was the beginning of a nightmare.

  She had been accuse
d of being a spy (and was still under a small cloud) because, almost on the eve of the city’s capture, she had cut short her studies in Australia to come back to Saigon. She had come back because she was a Vietnamese who loved her country, believed in its traditions and wanted to be there to give support to her parents at this critical time. It was an emotion the communists did not understand. Her life was blighted.

  Another friend I met was Tuan, a Vietnamese who had worked as a freelance combat photographer for Agence France-Presse. He, too, regretted staying behind and told me that even ten years afterwards the authorities still frowned on contact with foreigners. Typing in his home late one night, he found the building surrounded by security police with detection equipment. A neighbour had mistaken his typing for the tapping of a message in Morse code and was convinced a CIA spy was operating from the building.

  At the press conference celebrating the anniversary, the pat answers of the communist cadres that all was sweetness and light plainly were not true. Megaphones blared propaganda. The stage management of the event was flagrant. Beneath the surface of bustle and excitement, there was agony. The discrepancy between those in power and those subjected to the system was glaring. Most people were struggling to survive. Bug-eyed children, squatting on the pavement, sold bottles of petrol next to a stall which offered half a dozen different brands of fine cognac. Making ends meet was as much a hustle as it had ever been. The contents of entire households were up for sale in the shops. Saddest of all were the cripples, the former ARVN soldiers made outcasts by the regime. Seeing these defeated men scrabbling on their crutches outside hotels and restaurants for a few scraps of charity, reminded me that many ARVN units had been brave fighters.

  I remembered the colonel in the defeated Saigon army who marched in full uniform up to the war memorial in the city centre on the day of Saigon’s fall, stood rigidly to attention, saluted and shot himself in the head. Now the memorial has disappeared – blown up by the communists. I did not see a re-education camp. But my colleagues told me about their visit to one in North Vietnam – a bleak and dreary place set up to reform and remould senior officers of the South Vietnamese army. They had been released, but a particular commander was still in detention because of his stubborn refusal to knuckle under. He recognised the journalist Neil Davis the instant he walked in. Forbidden by the guards to talk, he closed and opened his eyes swiftly as a sign of acknowledgement. Then he smiled at Davis through the tears.

  As I wandered the streets, thoughts of the past obsessed me. Finally, by myself, I went back to Thai Lap Thanh, where Jacqueline had lived. A quiver of recognition ran down my spine as I turned the corner, past a gaggle of screeching children playing with a dead rat. I half-imagined it would no longer exist, but the little house was there, a faded sign above the iron grille of the door saying ‘dressmaker’. It was now a café and noodle shop. I stood across the street and watched the people sitting at the tables, smiling and laughing, the privileged grown-up children of communist cadres from Hanoi who had appropriated her house.

  I sat on a tiny stool and ordered a café. I tried hard to swallow it but something rose in my throat. I asked one of the children playing if she knew who had lived in the house before. She shook her head. ‘Are you a stranger in Saigon?’ she asked. ‘I used to live here,’ I said.

  I got up and walked inside the café. Suddenly I was aware of two big shining green eyes – a black and white cat lying in the sun outside. With a thud of the heart, I recognised that it was Slap, Jacqueline’s kitten, born in war, still alive in a Saigon at peace. The communist upheaval had left the cat untouched while it had destroyed the lives of the people around it. I went over to stroke it. With a start, it was up and bounding away. It was still the master of its own life, unlike so many of us whose lives had come to a full stop here. I turned and walked away from the street for ever.

  Epilogue

  I was in Indo-China for only five years. But I know that in my heart I will be there all my life. I will always lament its romantic past and sentimentalise the grand adventure of death we lived through in the midst of such ravishing beauty. Perhaps I am deceived by unworldly dreams. Perhaps I weave too many illusions about the past. But I don’t believe it was just a romantic fantasy. After years of travel, I have encountered nowhere like Indo-China, and I am not alone in this. Whole generations of westerners who went out there as soldiers, doctors, planters or journalists like myself, to document the sorrow, the tragedy and the stories of its wars, lost their hearts to these lands of the Mekong. They are places that take over a man’s soul. The pain of memory endures alongside this nostalgia. Some memories remained buried in a body bag so deep within me that it was years before I let them out.

  Vietnam is part of history now. It is more than twenty years since the last American combatants left; more than forty since the French army’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu. In Washington, more than 58,000 names of Americans killed in Indo-China are sand-blasted into the granite of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, mourned by their comrades-in-arms and by their families. Their sacrifices in a war that split America still weigh heavily on the nation’s psyche. In Vietnam, the United States had experienced defeat for the first time in its history and that defeat has altered international perceptions of it as a superpower. It has raised doubts, still present in America, about whether the United States should fight a foreign war again.

  At last the French, too, have been able to honour their Indo-China war dead, erecting a memorial at Dien Bien Phu in honour of all those who died for France. For his part, General Marcel Bigeard, one of the indomitable paratroop commanders of that battle, whose heroic stand against overwhelming odds set the highest standards of professional soldiering, has expressed the wish for his ashes, when he comes to make his ‘grand saut dans l’inconnu’, to be dropped by parachute over the battlefield; to mingle with the ravaged earth where his comrades fell. ‘C’est bien en Indochine que j’ai laissé la moitié de mon coeur,’ he said.

  Countless thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians, who fought as soldiers on all sides, or were civilians caught up in the fighting, have no proper resting place and little recognition that their suffering mattered. This is true above all for the ex-ARVN who fought on the South Vietnamese side. In the sentiment of Nguyen Du, the eighteenth-century Vietnamese poet, they are the Wandering Souls searching for peace.

  Meanwhile, the small struggling nations of Indo-China continue the quest for lasting peace, proper international recognition, and the regeneration of their countries against hard odds. In the second half of the twentieth century, they endured the worst extremes of human suffering. The story is by no means over yet. Each day that passes sees a fresh crop of injuries from the millions of unexploded mines, shells and American bombs littering jungles and rice fields, especially in Laos and Cambodia.

  Journalism, too, had its casualties in Indo-China, as this book relates. The figures are still being assessed. But according to the research of the Indo-China Media Memorial Foundation, 320 journalists of all nations did not return. And one or two tragically became casualties of the war long after the bullets ceased to fly; unable to cope with the difficult transition to peacetime living, they killed themselves.

  Indo-China cast a potent spell over many of those it touched. Nothing has been able to break that spell for my friend Bizot, either; not the passage of the years, nor even the closeness of his family. The Frenchman persists in thinking about it every day. He has taken away and stored the gates of the old French embassy in Phnom Penh because he feels they ought to be preserved. The great wrought-iron gates were a witness to the city’s fall; and it is right that they should have been rescued, above all by Bizot who was their guardian during the dark days when they and his matter-of-fact heroism were all that stood between us and the murderous Khmer Rouge; not destroyed, as they were otherwise inevitably destined to be, in the redevelopment of the old embassy ruins.

  Bizot’s own story of his captivity by the Khmer Rouge in 1971
inspired John Le Carré to write a poignant short story; I think it is the best to be found in his book The Secret Pilgrim. As for the little Khmer Rouge girl who used to check the ropes binding his ankles and have them tightened if they were loose, the memory of her eyes have never left the Frenchman. Perhaps sometimes he sees them superimposed on the eyes of his daughter Hélène; she who was so much in his mind’s eye during those three months in captivity.

  On an impulse, Hélène, ignorant of the country of her birth because she grew up in France, gave up a modelling career in Paris and New York to go back to Cambodia. It was a pilgrimage to uncover her roots. The unrivalled corruption and greed of the new Cambodia marred the experience, and soon she left in despair and disillusionment. If only she had been able to see what her father had seen, she would have loved Cambodia more than enough.

  When I last saw Bizot, after we had lost sight of each other for many, many years, he told me that he had dreamed that I had died in the Middle East. It was while I was a captive in Ethiopia; it was a prescient dream. For years afterwards, he said, he believed I was dead. ‘It’s a lucky sign,’ he said. He also echoed Jacqueline’s reaction, saying that if I was doomed to die, then to perish anywhere other than in the lands of the Mekong would have been tragic injustice.