by William Boyd
But I could see at once he was in a state, ill at ease. We shook hands – Renata was hovering, curious – and he asked if we could go somewhere quiet where we could talk properly. I picked up my bag and we left, heading down the street to Bonnard’s, a French-style café where they played American Forces Radio at low volume – you could talk without raising your voice.
We took our seats, ordered coffee, I lit a cigarette.
‘I’ve missed you,’ I said. ‘Silly me.’
‘Queenie’s run away. Run away home.’
‘Well, you know what these—’
‘She’s pregnant.’
‘Bargirls get pregnant, John. Occupational hazard.’
‘She says it’s mine.’
‘Come on—’
‘It can only be mine, she says.’
I felt a weariness of spirit descend on me. Fool, I rebuked myself for the second time in ten minutes. You were a one-night stand, old lady. I tried to reason with him but he didn’t want reason.
‘You can’t be sure it’s yours.’
‘Yes I can. She wouldn’t lie to me.’
‘What’s it got to do with me?’ I asked, letting some cynical steel into my voice. I was, I had to admit, a little hurt.
John explained. He knew where Queenie’s parents lived, in a village called Vinh Hoa on Highway 22 north out of Saigon, on the road to Tay Ninh. He needed someone who spoke French to be able to explain the situation to them – Queenie’s parents spoke French, she was proud of that, which was how he knew. I could see the panic rising in him so I said: whatever I can do to help, just tell me. He wanted to go directly to Vinh Hoa – he was sure Queenie would be with her parents – also he wanted me to bring my photos of her as a means of identifying where the family lived.
‘Hang on,’ I said, remembering. ‘There’s still fighting on Highway 22.’
‘Very sporadic. They’re mopping up. It’s only thirty clicks up the road, anyway – an hour, max.’ He wouldn’t stand for any caution. ‘Traffic is flowing. I checked.’
‘I’ll try and get hold of Truong.’
‘We can’t wait. I’ve got my bike with me. Come on, Amory – it’s very important. You owe it to me.’
I bridled at this: I owed him for a fuck?
Then he leant forward and kissed me and I forgave him.
‘She’s carrying my child. I can’t just let her vanish. I’ll never find her if I don’t go immediately. It’s now or never.’
He was right, I supposed, or so I thought as we walked back to the bureau. I wanted to take one precaution – I insisted – we had to tape BAO CHI1 in large letters to his bike.
‘Of course, anything,’ John said. ‘We can tape it to the leg shields.’ He pointed at a dirty old red and white motorbike, paint smirched and flaking.
‘What kind of bike is this?’ I asked.
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I just like to know these things.’
‘It’s a Honda Super Cub.’
‘You meet the nicest people on a Honda.’
‘Ha-ha.’
I went into the office and found what I needed – I also put my camera in my bag (a Paxette, a 35 mm miniature, a solid little thing) – and taped a piece of card with BAO written on it in black marker on one leg shield and CHI on the other. John kick-started the motor and I climbed on the small pillion behind him. There was an aluminium handhold between the seats but I felt safer with my arms around him.
‘You don’t mind if I do this?’ I asked.
‘I don’t mind.’
We set off and I hugged myself against his damp sweaty shirt. It was cheap cotton and had a pattern of red clipper ships in full sail on it. I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling like a teenager again. It was proving to be the strangest day, with my emotions veering around from soft and silly to cynical and uncaring; and my sense of adult responsibility seemingly switched off – what was I doing on this bike with Oberkamp heading off to Highway 22? It was as if I was in some hallucinatory state.
John seemed to know where we were going. He had a street map folded up in a pocket that he consulted from time to time, pulling into the side of the road for a few seconds to get his bearings. We took back roads to avoid the traffic jams at Tan Son Nhut airport and finally pulled on to Highway 22 about four or five kilometres north of the city limits. I was very pleased to see it was busy – military and civilian vehicles going in both directions. ‘Highway’ was something of a misnomer, though: a two-lane strip of potholed tarmac with wide dusty verges heading through a scrubby landscape and the occasional grove of coconut palms. It was a hot and hazy day – I wished I’d brought a hat.
But half an hour up the road we were the only vehicle moving. I tapped John on the back and he pulled in.
‘What’s happening?’ he asked
I pointed to my right where, about two miles away, a converted Dakota known as a ‘Spooky’ was flying in a tight pylon turn. Then there came a noise like a chainsaw as its Gatling gun opened up from its position in the gaping side door.
‘There’s a problem,’ I said. ‘Where’s all the traffic? What’s the Spooky shooting at?’
‘They’re just mopping up. I checked with CIB,1 I told you. We’re heading west. All the trouble’s in the north.’
Then, as if to back up his reassurances two cars sped down the road towards us.
‘See? We’re only fifteen minutes away, I reckon.’
‘OK, let’s go.’
After about another mile the vegetation became sparser and over to the left I saw a flat expanse of semi-dried-out lake come into view, that had drained away or been half-evaporated by the heat. Parked on the near shore were three US Army personnel carriers, their crew sitting in the shade cast by their high sides. I was pleased to see them, made John stop and took a few photographs and gave them a wave as we puttered off. One of the soldiers jumped to his feet and shouted something at us, making crossing motions with his hands, but he was quickly lost to sight as we turned a corner. I tapped John on the back and he brought the Super Cub to a halt, once again.
‘Those GIs,’ I said. ‘They were telling us not to go on.’
‘We’re almost fucking there!’ he protested, pointing.
Up ahead, I could see a wooden shack by the roadside, roofed with palm leaves and with some rickety market stalls set out in front of it on the verge, ready to trade with passing vehicles – except there was no produce laid out.
I slipped off the bike and stepped into the middle of the road, looking up and down the shimmering tarmac. All traffic had disappeared and we were quite alone on Highway 22 again. Far in the distance the Spooky was banking into its pylon turn, looking for targets. I shaded my eyes, feeling the sweat trickle down my spine, listening.
‘Come on, Amory!’ John shouted and just at that moment I saw something move in the roadside shack.
The first shots hit the tarmac about ten feet in front of me. I felt the sting of bitumen chips hit my forearms and as I turned and ran heard the flat firecracker noise of several AK-47s open up and sensed the burn and tug of something hitting my right calf muscle. We ran into the undergrowth and crouched down. The Super Cub lay incongruously on its side. A bullet pinged off its front fork and tall puffs of dust erupted around it.
I looked down at my right leg. My chinos had a tear at the calf and blood was spreading. I rolled the trouser up and saw a neat three-inch furrow torn along the surface of the muscle. I felt no pain.
John pulled off his shirt and ripped off a sleeve – with remarkable ease – and bound it round the wound, knotting it tightly. The gunmen in the shack were now spraying the undergrowth, randomly searching for us. We were safe for the moment if we kept our heads down. Then I heard the roar of engines from the APCs from the lake, heading up the road towards us at full speed. The firing stopped and I raised my head to see three people run from the roadside shack and pelt into the scrub, just before the palm-frond roof was shredded into a thousand swirling pieces as
the .50 calibre machine gun on the lead APC hosed the building. Some internal structure must have shattered because the whole shack half-collapsed with a creak and what sounded like a sigh and a thick cloud of dust rolled across the road. We stepped out of the undergrowth, hands up, just in case, as the lead APC lurched to a halt and its commander, sitting in the turret with the machine gun, began to swear at us colourfully.
I had my little war wound – that was now beginning to throb. And, now we were safe, John pulled on his one-sleeved shirt, righted the Super Cub and declared his intent to drive on to Vinh Hoa.
‘Are you completely insane?’ I yelled at him.
APCs by the parched lake. Highway 22, Saigon, 1968.
He hugged me, kissed me quickly on the lips to halt my protestations and said, ‘I’ll be back tonight. I’ll come to your place. I’ll bring Queenie.’
‘No, John, don’t go,’ I said, angrily and grabbed his arm. But I released it when I saw the look in his eye. Mad, unreachable.
‘I don’t advise it, sir,’ the lieutenant commanding the APC squadron said, dryly.
‘I’m a journalist,’ John said. ‘I’ll be safe. Don’t worry.’
‘Oh yeah. One of those fuckin’ crazy journalists. You’ll be fine, man. Go for it.’
His men laughed.
John climbed on to his bike, started it, smiled, gave me a thumbs-up and motored off down the road, flinging out a final wave as he dwindled away into the wobbling heat haze.
I waited in for him that night, but he never came. The next day he was posted as missing in action – villagers in Vinh Hoa said he’d been taken prisoner by a cadre of retreating Viet Cong, no doubt the ones who’d fired at us from the roadside shack. I wasn’t too worried: journalists were quite frequently captured but usually well treated and released after a few days, the reasoning being that they would speak favourably about their captors – good propaganda.
A week went by, and there was no sign of John Oberkamp and his Honda Super Cub.
Two weeks later I had a letter from his mother, Mrs Grace Oberkamp, from Sydney. John had written to her about her forthcoming grandchild and had given her my address, for some reason. It seemed to me a strange precaution, as if he had a prescient worry about what might happen to him. I was suffering from retrospective worry, also, recalling that moment alone on Highway 22 just before the shooting started. If those VC had been better shots I would have been cut down there and then, I was now realising. Annie and Blythe orphaned. I felt sick – genuinely shaken up – but these thoughts and images haunted me in the days after John disappeared. I could close my eyes and see myself fall, feel the bullets hit.
Mrs Oberkamp said that in his letter John had been concerned about his possessions and that if anything happened to him she was to contact me. Would I be so good as to gather up his bits and pieces and post them on to her? She would be eternally grateful and would reimburse me for all expenses incurred.
And just at that moment the first copy of my book arrived. Vietnam, Mon Amour (Frankel & Silverman, 1968). I knew the title wasn’t original but it served my non-combat photos admirably. Moreover, its appearance caused something of a stir in the press corps. A good number of the photographers working in Vietnam had books planned, I knew – we often discussed them – but I was one of the first to be published, beaten only by Jerry Strickland of UPI and Yolande Joubert of Paris Match. Even Renata Alabama looked at me with new respectful eyes, asking if I could put a word in for her with Frankel & Silverman. I should have savoured the acclaim – and the overt envy – but I was suddenly aware that whatever ‘amour’ there had been between me and Vietnam was swiftly diminishing.
I kept thinking – and, what was worse, dreaming – about that moment when I’d stood alone in the middle of Highway 22, south of Vinh Hoa, in the eerie stillness, apart from the distant drone of the Spooky gunship doing its pylon turn. It stayed in my head like a film loop, a scene from an unfinished movie. I had my three-inch bullet graze, nicely scabbed, now, and I had my shiny new book with its glossy photos. I was aware of my good luck, the good fortune, that had led me to this position. But I knew I wanted to go home – to Scotland, to Barrandale.
However, there was a last task to be done, a final deliverance of duty to John Oberkamp. I managed to hitch a ride on a Royal Australian Air Force Hercules that was making the short hop from Saigon to Nui Dat where I showed Mrs Oberkamp’s letter to the base’s senior PEO.
‘Oh, yeah, Oberkamp,’ he said. ‘Any news?’
There was no news, I said.
He drove me out to John’s sandbagged hooch near the perimeter by the main runway and showed me in. He said he’d be back in thirty minutes to pick me up. Inside there was a metal bed with a Dunlopillo mattress, some half-drunk bottles of rum and bourbon, about a thousand cigarettes, an electric fan and a gunny sack filled with dirty clothes. Under the bed was a cardboard box that contained a dozen paperbacks, two cameras and John’s trademark bush hat with its cryptic slogan – ‘BORN TO BE BORN’ – painted on the front in coral-pink nail varnish. Pinned to the wall above the bed, I was pleased to see, was one of my ‘Never Too Young To . . .’ T-shirts. That was it – he travelled light, did John; this was small cargo for a man who’d been in Vietnam since 1965. I dumped the dirty clothes on the bed and filled the gunny sack with the books and cameras and anything else personal that I could find (two Zippo lighters, an ashtray from the Hilton Hotel in Tokyo, a few rolls of undeveloped film). I kept the bush hat for myself and pulled it on my head, tucking my hair in under it.
I decided not to wait for the PEO and so set off, strolling back towards the control tower and the administrative buildings, John’s gunny bag over my shoulder. It was mid-afternoon and the sun was burning through the milky sky, a blurry, brassy disk. I smelt rain coming.
I heard the chugging clatter of helicopter engines and paused to see a couple of RAAF Hueys coming in low over the perimeter fence to dust down next to a waiting ambulance with medics standing ready by a gurney with a drip rigged, waiting for some casualties. I wandered over.
The Hueys landed, the rotors stopped and the men inside began wearily to disembark. The medics ran forward and carried two body bags into the ambulance before returning with the gurney for another soldier, seemingly unconscious, both legs bandaged from ankle to thigh. A jeep pulled up by the ambulance and a senior officer stepped out. He talked to the medics as they carefully loaded their grim freight of suffering humanity on board the ambulance. I saw him touch the shoulder of the wounded man.
I was close to the disembarked soldiers now – some standing, some sitting on the ground, all of them smoking – and I recognised that air of filthy, blank exhaustion about them that comes upon soldiers after hours of combat, of being under fire. I’d seen it before – most notably at Wesel in 1945 – and once seen, never forgotten. Their clothes were damp and dirt-ingrained, the green cotton drill dark and blackened from the grime and sweat. They carried an assortment of weapons – FN rifles, M16s – I even saw one man with an AK-47 – enough to tell me that these men were not regular Australian Army; this must be the Australian SAS – the SAS Regiment, as it was known. John had told me that units were based here at Nui Dat from time to time. I edged closer – mechanics were checking the Hueys, and a petrol tender had rolled up so there was a fair bit of distracting activity going on – and I could see a couple of two-ton trucks heading out to pick the unit up.
I wondered if I could sneak a photo, then I thought, no, better to ask. I went towards one man, an officer, but stopped as soon as I heard the voices around me as they spoke to each other. These men weren’t Australian – they were British. I heard cockney accents, Lowland Scots; one man was a Geordie. I crouched down and pretended to fiddle with my knapsack straps. Yet they were all wearing SASR unit patches, yellow and beige, and a couple of them even sported the regiment’s caramel berets. As the men turned and made ready to climb into the approaching lorries I could see the shoulder flashes saying ‘Australia’. Th
ese manifestly non-Australians were clearly making every attempt to be Australians.
The senior officer who’d been in the jeep, who was wearing neatly pressed olive-green fatigues, approached and the men climbed to their feet and straightened up in a notional stand-to-attention as he had a few words with them. I backed off, carefully. What was going on here? The two-ton trucks stopped, the men were dismissed and they hauled themselves on board. As the senior officer headed back to his jeep he passed close to me.
‘Hello, Frank,’ I said. ‘Small world.’
Frank Dunn froze, then turned. I could practically hear his astonished brain working. He managed a thin smile.
‘Amory,’ he said. ‘Bloody hell.’
He came over to me and kissed me on the cheek, to his credit.
‘May I ask what you’re doing here?’ he said, stepping back and looking me up and down. ‘Love the headgear.’ I now rather wished I wasn’t wearing John’s bush hat.
I explained. ‘Picking up a colleague’s stuff.’ I held up the gunny bag. ‘He’s MIA.’ I paused. ‘More to the point: when did you join the Australian Army?’
‘I’ve left the army,’ he said, bluntly. ‘I’ve retired.’
I looked at him – he had no badges of rank, no identifying name above his breast pocket; he was dressed as a soldier, but that was all. Yet those men had stood to attention as he came up to them.
‘Some retirement,’ I said. ‘Why are all those British soldiers pretending to be Australians?’
‘They’re on secondment to the Australian Army – as observers.’
‘Come on, Frank. I’ve been out here for well over a year. I was married to a soldier. I’m not a fool – they’re straight out of combat.’
Frank Dunn linked arms with me and walked me towards his jeep.
‘I’m only going to say this once, Amory. Let me be clear. You came to Nui Dat, you picked up your friend’s bits and pieces, and then you went back to Saigon. You didn’t see them. You didn’t see me. You certainly didn’t talk to me. Understood?’