Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  He drained his brandy, and signaled for two more. They had both drunk quite a few now, Langford says; Aubrey’s voice had taken on a rhetorical boom, and was very faintly slurred. “Let’s see,” he said. “You’re twenty-nine, didn’t you say?”

  Langford hadn’t said; but he nodded.

  “Then you’re old enough to remember the maps where most of the world was colored imperial red. Yes? You’re of the last generation of children of the British Empire. Do you remember your Kipling?“‘Take ’old o’ the Wings o’ the Mornin‘,

  An’ flop round the earth till you’re dead;

  But you won’t get away from the tune that they play

  To the bloomin’ old rag over’ead.‘ ”

  He laughed, picked up his brandy, and raised it. “No longer true, alas. Here’s to the Empire on which the sun is finally setting. How can the Brits know what we feel, we children of the old Dominions? It was always like unrequited love; and now the beloved is departing!”

  It was impossible to tell whether this was satire or sentiment, Langford says; but he drank the toast. He makes no record of his own sentiments at this point; nor of what he said in reply. But he registers no objection to that “we”; and I believe I catch a whiff of the books in the sleepout.

  Hardwick glanced at his watch. “We’ll talk again, Michael.” He stood, swaying. “My God, I’m tiddly. Haven’t the stamina of you young chaps. Oh, for a dose of your lovely youth, that will take you to so many bloody marvelous things.” His hand on Langford’s shoulder, he began to negotiate a path for them towards the door.

  Uncle Aubrey was the envoy of the future, smiling at the entrance to the world. He swung the door open and Langford hurried through, without a second’s thought.

  4.

  The combined Telenews-ABS office was in a ferroconcrete building that Langford describes as smelling of ink and latrines, standing on a rise in Peck Hay Road.

  Aubrey’s friend Arthur Noonan, the ABS bureau chief, was an elderly, permanently drunk Australian of huge girth and flaming complexion. He flew the national flag by appearing always in elastic-sided bush boots, and was usually to be found in the bars or at the Tangl-in Club instead of in the office. An efficient Chinese accountant and his staff handled the administration. Noonan took Langford to the York for a long, alcoholic lunch, delivering a hoarse lecture about the conditions of the job; after which, Langford says, the chief had little more to do with him.

  Transient Australian and British broadcasting correspondents were the aristocrats here, Langford found: a cameraman was given the use of a small desk in a corner as a favor. But he sat there in a state of bliss, savoring his good fortune. He’d been hired on trial as a stringer, with the freedom to travel to any country in the region.

  —I’d have taken a table in the toilet, if they wanted. It all seems too good to be true.

  —Jim Feng’s teaching me how to use two different cinecameras: the heavy Auricon, which you use with a soundman, and the little, springloaded Bell and Howell. I like the Bell and Howell: it lets you move easily, without a soundman.

  —Jim’s very courteous and generous with his time. He went to a British school when he arrived in Hong Kong at the age of fourteen; he speaks English well but a bit too correctly, and he uses American slang as well as British. No sweat, he’ll say, in that Hong Kong-British accent: it amuses me. His real name is Feng Ming Chi: he took the name Jim to Anglicize himself. Remembering what Aubrey told me about his background, I sometimes feel a bit sad for him—but he always seems in good spirits.

  —Singapore’s basically a rest place for correspondents: a service station, not a news center. The focus is further east: Saigon, Vientiane; Phnom Penh. There’s a Telenews office in Saigon, and Jim spends most of his time up there, when he’s not in Borneo. He took me to Sarawak lost week, and we filmed some Indonesian prisoners being brought in. But no fighting; it’s all pretty quiet there.

  —I’ll be glad when Jim thinks I’m ready to cover in Vietnam : I want to get up there soon. I’m afraid the war there may not lost.

  “They say that revolution’s what’s needed in Southeast Asia—that only Marxist dictatorship will deliver the people from their cycle of misery,” Aubrey said. “This is very sad nonsense, Michael. The lessons of the French Revolution seem to have been forgotten.”

  He and Langford were walking around Boat Quay together, following the curve of the river that the Chinese call the Belly of the Carp. I hear Aubrey pitching his voice above the hubbub: engines; horns; bicycle bells. They met to take these walks often, Langford says, in the early mornings before work; and once again he records Aubrey’s remarks with remarkable faithfulness. Yet he never makes clear the purpose of their meetings—or whether they had any purpose at all. Nor does he make any judgment or comment on Aubrey’s discourses—even though they seem like the discourses of a mentor.

  “Revolution does not spring from the people, but from power-drunk and obsessive intellectuals who despise the people,” Aubrey said. “Such creatures always move immediately to limit freedom. Yet you can’t create freedom out of unfreedom, can you? The intellectually rigid seem never to take that in.”

  Langford pictures Hardwick halting in the shade of a banyan, running a hand over his head’s whitish blond stubble. Musing on the river and its traffic, his well-pressed, faded khaki bush shirt like a relic of colonial Malaya, Hardwick seemed to belong here, Langford says, in a way that most transient Europeans didn’t.

  “You should study the French and Russian revolutions,” Aubrey said, “if you’re to cover what’s going on in this part of the world. Revolution: colonizing Europe’s most poisonous departing gift to Asia! The irony is that it’s largely been left to the Americans to deal with the effects of the poison. But the military intervention in Vietnam is only what you see: a good deal goes on under the surface. And the stakes really do matter.”

  Now they had turned into Chinatown, and were moving down its narrow, teeming gullies, under strings of paper flowers. The throaty voice grew confiding, competing with the wail of Cantonese singers from radios, and Aubrey took Langford’s arm, guiding him around piles of rotting vegetables.

  —He talked about a hidden war in Indochina, not known to the public. Cross-border operations; a secret American air war in Laos. And he said that this secret war would decide the outcome of the open one.

  “There are pretty big changes coming in this part of the world,” Aubrey said. “And they won’t all go our way. I’m speaking of Australia, Michael. We must learn when to adapt and when to resist, or be swallowed up. That’s where you could be involved: you could be very valuable, if you wanted to be. You’ll soon see what I mean when you get to Vietnam. Now thac our troops are arriving to back the Americans, the balloon’s going up there: and I can tell you in confidence, we’re going to be ten times more involved in this war than most people think. You’re off to Saigon soon? Good. I can give you a few contacts there. So can Donald Mills: he’s going there next month as Second Secretary. He’ll be briefing Canberra on the situation in Vietnam as lit develops. You do see the importance.”

  He stopped, and let go of Langford’s arm—which Langford says he found something of a relief; he wasn’t used to these old-fashioned intimacies. Aubrey took out a notebook and began to write down an address.

  “It’s very important you look up this lady,” he said. “A French Vietnamese friend of mine from Paris days—very dear to me, and a brilliant woman. Claudine knows everyone in Saigon. Her husband runs a trading company, and has connections on both sides: there’s a bit of a mystery about his whereabouts just now. Whatever you do, look her up immediately: she’ll be expecting it. And keep in touch with Mills: he’ll give you a lot of leads. You’ll be able to help him too, if you feel inclined. Let him know from time to time the way you see things going in the country: a cameraman‘s in a wonderful position to do that. Just give him the flavor and feel—I know he’ll be eternally grateful.”

  —I said I’d tr
y to help where ! could, and that I appreciated all he’d done for me.

  “You’ll show your appreciation eventually, dear boy, I’ve no doubt of it,” Aubrey said. “There’s a quid pro quo for everything in this life: haven’t you noticed that yet?”

  THREE

  THE DELTA

  1.

  I have in front of me a picture of Langford with Jim Feng, taken somewhere in Vietnam in 1965. No details are given on the back. They’re seated in the topless Jeep they called the Big Budgie, pulled over at the side of a highway.

  Both men are in combat fatigues. Jim Feng is laughing: long hands resting on the wheel, long head thrown back, long horse teeth gleaming, backswept hair shining and perfect—a Chinese army officer in an old newsreel. Langford is pointing at him, his face in profile miming shock-horror: a lost joke.

  The picture-like most of the others Mike: left me—is a black-and-white news-style photograph, six inches by eight. So the Budgie’s flamboyant blues and yellows can’t be seen, and the fabled vehicle looks like any other dilapidated Jeep with the top cut off. The photograph is typical of a good many others taken at this time: pictures that Langford and Jim Feng and their CBS competitor Dmitri Volkov shot of each other for amusement in the field, in periods of waiting. They’re laughing in nearly all these pictures.

  Vietnam in the sixties was the peak of their youth. Middle age and the war in Cambodia were scarcely visible on the horizon, and laughter was like breathing. But Vietnam was also the place where their youth casually vanished. It vanished while they shot the action; vanished while they joked. Jokes were their food: more necessary than whiskey, or the many other stimulants the region and the period had to offer. They were high on everything, in those years, but their greatest high was risk: that sprint along the near edge of death they never tired of repeating.

  The surviving combat cameramen who were Langford’s friends continue to chase stories, in their middle age—but the big story is over for them. They linger in Hong Kong; Bangkok; Singapore. Each year, their cumbersome gear has been getting a little heavier for the cinecameramen to carry, and the stills photographers find their wind growing shorter, their reflexes slowing. They’re like those aging gunmen in the Western movies that Mike and I watched in the little cinema in New Norfolk, on Saturday afternoons. It’s time for them to hang up their irons.

  But how can they do that? The greatest high of all will be gone then: the one presided over by Dis, commander of the dead, whose other name is Meaning.

  He arrived in Vietnam in the May of Rolling Thunder, coming in, as everybody did, through Tan Son Nhut.

  The Pan American Boeing 707 banked as it prepared to land, leaning at an angle that passenger aircraft didn’t usually attempt: a precaution against Viet Cong snipers on the ground. The landscape tilted on its side, filling the whole porthole, and Langford was looking at flat, sack-brown spaces, thin dark lines of trees and long silver canals, rushing upwards. The plane dropped lower, returning to the horizontal, and the airfield appeared.

  In this year, the United States Military Assistance Command in Vietnam had transformed a sleepy civil airport into one of the busiest on earth. Lined and teeming and glittering with aircraft, Tan Son Nhut had become a military citadel, with taxiways, highspeed turnoffs, operations buildings, mess halls and barracks, its air-conditioned PX stores and commissaries carrying every necessity of American life from ice cream to stereo systems. Aircraft landed and took off without cease, so that seldom less than a dozen were airborne at one time. Concrete runways stretched to the horizon.

  The 707 taxied in between rows of screens painted military green, where pierced-steel planking flashed in the sun. Scores of American servicemen in olive fatigue caps and T-shirts tended Phantoms, Thunderchiefs and Super Sabres: fighter-bombers molded so exquisitely for speed that they seemed to breathe not death but exhilaration: lovely darts, crafted to puncture reality’s barrier, and then go on. Beside them were Hercules transports like winged barns, and the helicopter transports and gunships of the new age: the Shawnees, Hueys and Chinooks that were changing the style of war.

  Tan Son Nhut was the imperial platform from which the war was being directed. From here, the United States had just launched Operation Rolling Thunder: the full-scale bombing of the North which was intended to end the struggle. But it would not end the struggle; the war was merely beginning.

  Coming down the gangway, squinting in the blinding heat that rebounded from the tarmac, greeted by smells of aviation fuel and the roar of afterburners, Leica around his neck, camera bag over his shoulder, Langford was entering his future: that war whose remorseless sequences would devour the rest of his life.

  The Big Budgie’s blue and cream color scheme was intended to advertise the fact that it was no longer a military vehicle. According to Jim Feng, this dissuaded the Viet Cong guerrillas in the city from bombing it. Or he hoped that it did: you could never be sure. He kept the Budgie parked in the garage of the Continental Palace Hotel on Tu Do Street, where he and Langford were sharing a room.

  At the wheel of the Budgie now, with Langford beside him, Jim drove with hair-raising skill, swinging and weaving through Tu Do’s evening traffic. Both men wore garlands of wild jasmine, sold to them by child hawkers who worked the front of the Continental. Four of these street children rode in the back of the Jeep: three boys, and a long-haired teenaged girl who was crippled. A single crutch propped on the seat beside her, she sat up proudly, a tray slung from her neck displaying her wares: cigarettes and flowers.

  Little Renault taxis painted blue and cream like the Budgie —aged survivors from the French days-scurried and buzzed and hooted among U.S. Army trucks and big-finned Chevrolets and Fords from the 1950s. The traffic jam was permanent, complex, and brutally loud. Trishaws the French had called cyclos were pedaled through pandemonium by wiry men in straw hats and nineteenth-century sun helmets, their bells ringing like alarm clocks. These and an insect swarm of bicycles, motorcyclos, and Italian and Japanese motor scooters moved in hundreds down Tu Do Street’s narrow channel. At its top end were the red brick Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace and the white, baroque public buildings of the French, with their orange-tiled roofs. At the bottom end, near the Saigon River, where the Budgie was now headed, was the newly expanding zone of bars catering to the American troops.

  Even though Rolling Thunder was beginning to strangle it, Saigon still had echoes in this year of a dozing town in Provence. Stuccoed colonial buildings with French shutters and overhanging balconies were painted in pale pastels; fading enameled advertising signs fastened to moldering walls were still French: Michelin; Pernod; Le Journal d‘Extreme-Orient. But above dark doorways, new signs and neons were appearing: Chicago Bar; Saigon Express; Massage; The Bunny. Bougainvillea flared and climbed on concertinas of barbed wire thrown up by the Americans to protect clubs and hotels from Viet Cong bomb attack. Lines of spreading tamarind trees with bright green feathery leaves and dark trunks whitewashed at the bottoms survived like afterimages from the street’s colonial days, when its name was rue Catinat.

  The jeep was nearing the river, and now every second doorway seemed to be a bar. Tu Do here became a carnival alley, its primary odors beer, urine and perfume. GIs in cotton khakis or Hawaiian shirts wandered in the humid heat: coarse and alien giants, white and black, badgered and pursued by a race of refined, ivory-skinned gnomes who waved mutilated limbs at them, or tried to sell them copies of Time, and Stars and Stripes.

  One of the street children on board the Budgie was a crew-cut nine-year-old with an old man’s face and a Batman T-shirt. He leaned out now and snatched a camera from the hands of a young GI on the curb who was taking a picture. Then, fast as a gull, he dropped from the Jeep and raced into the crowd. The soldier shouted after him, his pink, outraged face more childlike than his attacker’s. But Jim Feng drove on, glancing at Langford deadpan, with raised eyebrows.

  “That kid is lightning,” he said. Then he yelled sternly at the remaining child passenge
rs. “Off, all of you! I told you, no more stealing when you ride the Budgie!”

  He slowed in front of a neon that said Texas Happy Bar, and the children began to drop off. Racing into the crowd, the boys called cheery farewells. “Sorry, Mr. Jim!” “Goodbye, goodbye!” “You Number One Saigon man!”

  The girl peddler with the tray jerked after them on her single crutch, jaunty and confident in the traffic, and Langford stared after her. Her face was exquisite, he says, framed by her shining black hair: a flower. He’d never seen a face so beautiful. But one foot was twisted and withered to a mere flap of flesh. It was hard to look at it.

  “Welcome, brother, to the Pearl of the Orient.”

  Harvey Drummond had a gentle, ceremonicrus air, and his well-modulated voice was a professional broadcaster’s. He extended a huge hand to Langford, swinging around on his barstool. He was thirty-five: an Australian Broadcasting Service correspondent who divided his time between Saigon and Singapore, often doing television news stories for which Jim Feng shot the film. From behind their glasses, enlarged gray eyes asked Langford to prepare for jokes. He was wearing the type of safari suit currently popular among correspondents in Asia, and doomed to become a sartorial cliché in the next few years: olive, with huge patch pockets and epaulets.

  Langford and Feng took stools on either side of him, and Harvey signaled to one of the two white-shirted Vietnamese barmen. His large finger was seen immediately: seated, he was as tall as some of the men here who were standing, being somewhere around six feet six. At first glance, he resembled a truck driver, or perhaps a mercenary soldier. But his shoulders were stooped and sedentary from years over a typewriter; his monumental head, with its high, balding forehead, curly brown hair and Victorian side-whiskers, was that of an old-style Anglican cleric, and there was a touch of clerical sing-song in his voice.