Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  He fraternized a good deal with the child thieves and hawkers on Tu Do. Most of them were war orphans; some had been injured by bombs and shrapnel, and we all felt pity for them. But at the end of a hard day their insect persistence could be maddening; no foreigner could move without their chanting persecution. Yet Langford encouraged them with money and gifts much more lavish than the reluctant alms the rest of us gave; he even bought them clothes in the markets. I still hear them shouting after him: “Mr. Mike! Mr. Mike!” They’d sit outside our door at the Telenews office in the Eden Building, just around the corner from the Continental on Nguyen Hue Boulevard; they waited for him to come back from his trips to the Delta. Our Vietnamese secretary would chase them away, but they’d just reappear. Some of them would hang about for days—and it seemed to me that greed for handouts couldn’t entirely account for this. They seemed genuinely devoted to him.

  When he came up the steps onto the terrace, most of his child followers had fallen away. But the boy with the papers and the girl hawker with her tray were still with him. They’d be driven off eventually by the Chinese waiters, but for a while they’d probably be tolerated, together with other invaders from the square: the old Chinese fortune-teller with the wispy gray beard; the leg-less soldiers selling sentimental landscape paintings; the shoeshine boys. As Mike moved towards my table the two children left him, going off across the terrace in different directions.

  The boy was simply a beggar: his bundle of newspapers was a pretext, and we called him the Newspaper Boy. He went crying his tattered wares from table to table, holding out his hand: he had a whining, jarring voice, and people shook their heads. But the girl was a genuine peddler, her flowers always fresh and attractive, and her American cigarettes—no doubt liberated from a PX store—low—priced. She went jerking and hopping among the tables on the single crutch, holding out a gardenia, smiling at Vietnamese businessmen in pastel suits, at their wives and mistresses in their Paris gowns, at Western embassy officials and correspondents, at U.S. Army officers in their khaki service dress and gold and silver insignia. Most of these people ignored her, or waved her away; but the American officers dug into their pockets, their faces kindly and uneasy.

  Watching her closely for the first time, I saw that she wore a rubber sandal on her good left foot; her right leg was bent and twisted sideways, and the withered bare foot protruding from her dingy white pantaloons was a mere nub of flesh. And not for the first time, I was struck by the beauty of her face, which was framed by shoulder-length hair. It was heart-shaped, shining with intelligence and life, and simply perfect: the sort of fragile beauty that makes you want to smile and weep. Fragile! That little creature must have had a strength to survive that we can only guess at. A lot of the correspondents used to notice her; a lot of us found the sight of her hard to bear, and got uselessly angry about the war. I didn’t know her name; she was generally called the Girl with the Withered Leg.

  Mike sat down opposite me and signaled to a Chinese waiter who stood beside one of the terrace’s yellow pillars. His hair gleamed like a big brass helmet, and he had a new sort of stillness, leaning back in his wicker chair. It seemed to me this evening that there was a subtle difference about him. He wasn’t quite the same man as he’d been six months ago: not the same man that I’d met in the Happy Bar.

  But anyone who has the sort of success he was now enjoying gains a different aura, I suppose—at least in the eye of the be-holder.

  He’d given notice at Telenews in that week. He was going freelance, to specialize in stills photography.

  I’d no doubt that he’d make a living: he’d already begun to establish quite a reputation. As well as his film coverage for Telenews over the past few months, he’d managed to go out on his own account and get photographs which he’d sold through Magnum, the big photo agency here; Paris Match and Life magazines had both bought some. They were great pictures. He was born to do stills work; he always wanted to freeze the moment. Well, they’re putting his moments into coffee table books on the war now.

  You could get breaks very fast then, in Vietnam. The international agencies and magazines were desperate for pictures, and they’d pay anyone who was crazy enough to hitch a ride on a chopper and get dropped into battle. A lot of semiamateurs were doing it; and quite a few of them were killed. There were some pretty crazy stringers around town, some of them carrying weapons as well as cameras. Most didn’t last. Mike became professional very quickly: he was always cool. And the breaks got bigger and bigger.

  The Life spread was what did most to set him on his way internationally. After he sold a set of pictures to Paris Match, one of the people from Life went out to the airport to grab him when he got off an American transport; he’d been covering a big battle in the Central Highlands. The American 101st Airborne had just begun to engage units of the North Vietnamese Army there, and Mike told me that Life offered him $500 for first look at what he had. That was a lot of money then. They gave him a four-page spread, and the cover: great action pictures, taken in situations of extreme risk, when most of the platoon he was with were wiped out. He caught American GIs on the rim of death, as he did with the ARVN troops; he got the expressions on their faces in those moments. They were pictures you didn’t forget: it had something to do with his magic use of contrasts, and the way the faces were transfigured. The cover picture showed a GI kneeling next to a mortally wounded buddy in the big battle of the la Drang Valley, his face blind and haggard with despair. You remember it? One of the great images of the war.

  Mike had just got back from the Delta; he’d only been home to Villa Volkov for a quick shower and change, he told me. He swallowed his beer now in a few gulps; then, stretching his legs, he looked around the terrace at the well-pressed, laughing evening crowd with their faint odors of aftershave, cigars and perfume.

  “It’s all a bit unreal,” he said. “Isn’t it, Harvey?”

  I am not a brave journalist; I avoid covering battle unless it’s absolutely necessary, and dodging bullets generally results in a bad story, in my view. I leave that to the cameramen. But I’d been in the field enough to know what he was talking about. A few hours ago, he’d been in sweaty fatigues, probably up to his knees in mud, filming the South Vietnamese as they died among the reeds of the Delta, his ears full of the hammering of automatic weapons. Now, here he sat on the Continental Shelf, shaved and showered and ready for a good dinner. And few of the people at the tables around us, other than fellow correspondents, would have guessed where he’d just been. Yes, it was unreal. Even though the war was half an hour away, a lot of these people assumed that war correspondents barely moved from the Tu Do bars and restaurants except to file. And indeed, one canny New York newspa perman operated in just that way, and never saw a shot fired during his term, except by the White Mice in the city. But he was unusual.

  It was full night now. The pavement hawkers down on Tu Do, squatting under the tamarinds beside their little glass cases of goods, had lit petrol lamps that glowed and flickered uncertainly in the dark, and the crippled girl had sold most of her flowers and cigarettes. She moved to a table a few feet from ours, holding out her gardenia to two middle-aged men in collars and ties and tropical lounge suits whom I placed as officials from the French embassy. One of them waved her away without looking at her.

  Perhaps she didn’t see this, or perhaps she chose not to. She continued to stand and smile, holding out the flower, and the official looked up at her. He was a heavy man in spectacles, the lines of whose yellowish face had been drawn and set by years of administrative severity. He now reprimanded the girl in rapid French, ending with: “Allez! Allez!”

  She began to shift backwards, wielding her crutch, but the official signaled to one of the old Chinese waiters, who shuffled forward. The official raised his voice and began to speak even more rapidly, pointing to the girl. But now Langford stood up, and moved across to the table. He took hold of the man’s shoulder in its pale blue linen, and bent over him. His expression w
as pleasant, but his grip must have been very painful, because the man winced and frowned, his eyes widening. The Chinese waiter stood hesitating, looking at them both, wearing the blank smile with which some Chinese cover embarrassment or perplexity.

  “Don’t be like that, old fellow,” Langford said. “She just wants to sell you some flowers. They’re very cheap. Why don’t you buy some?”

  He continued to hold the man’s shoulder, his face brought almost level with the other‘s, and people at nearby tables were turning to stare. The official glanced across at them; then he looked up at Langford and attempted to remove Mike’s hand, saying something low and vehement in French that I didn’t catch. His expression combined anger and outrage with a dawning alarm that surprised me: an alarm presumably caused by what he saw in Langford’s face. I expected him to shout for the management; but he didn’t. The second French official muttered something I couldn’t hear, beginning to look around for help.

  But now the first official fumbled in his jacket, drew out his wallet, and threw some notes across the table to the girl. She smiled radiantly, and placed a big bunch of flowers next to him. Then the Chinese waiter came to life and shouted and waved at her, and she began to hop away.

  “Thank you, monsieur, that’s generous of you,” Mike said. He let go of the official’s shoulder and straightened up, his expression still pleasant.

  “Leave us, monsieur.” The official had spoken in English. He was holding his shoulder, and his face was pale. In front of those watching from other tables, he hadn’t wanted to appear too miserly to buy flowers from a crippled girl. But it was also plain to me that Langford had frightened him; that he’d sensed a potential for violence that he hadn’t wanted to deal with.

  Langford came and sat down again; he winked at me and said nothing. The incident had been ludicrous and quite funny; but it had shown me that there was something under his calm veneer that I hadn’t suspected: a hidden anger of some kind.

  You should be that little girl’s manager, I said to him.

  “I’m going to be, mate.” He sipped his beer without enlarging on this, watching her hop and jerk towards the steps. As though sensing his glance, she turned around and waved to him. Her eyes shone with affection, and her smile was a small flash of light.

  “I’m planning to get her leg fixed up,” he said. He spoke abruptly, as though making a confession. “I’m negotiating to send her down to Sydney. There’s a top orthopedic specialist there I’ve found out about.”

  That’s going to cost, I said. Where’s the money coming from?

  “I’ve got a bit together,” he said. “And I’m talking to an Australian charity organization here. They’ve given me a rough idea of what’ll be involved. A few more sales to Life and I should be almost there. And this specialist can really do a lot for her. I’ve been on the phone to Sydney.” He leaned forward, one hand raised for attention: undemonstrative in every other way, he was a great one for gesturing. “They can actually rejuvenate that shriv eled leg with a set of operations. It won’t be perfect, but it’ll be much stronger. They’ll straighten it out in a cast Then they’ll fit her with a special boot and she’ll be able to walk without crutches. How about that, Harvey?”

  If it’s true, it’s great, I said. I’ll kick in. And we’ll pass the hat around at the villa.

  “Terrific, mate.” He smiled, sitting back again, and poured us more beer. Then he added casually: “I’m also planning to marry her.”

  I could find no words at all in answer to this: I simply sat and looked at him.

  While I did so, the Newspaper Boy sidled up to our table. Holding his bundle of papers with both hands, he stared at Langford accusingly, lower lip pushed out. I couldn’t like him; I was prevented by his permanently sullen air and his rodent-like face with its black fringe of hair reaching to the eyes. Other child beggars thought they had to be winning, or at least entertainingly aggressive; not the Newspaper Boy. All I could feel was pity for his filthy shirt and shorts, and his sore-encrusted legs.

  “Mr. Mike? I am going now. But I need money for pantaloons,” he said.

  Mike and I both laughed, amused by this archaic word that had survived in Vietnam beyond its century. “Pantaloons? But I got you some clothes last week,” Mike said.

  “Yes, but now I am needing pantaloons,” the Newspaper Boy said. He didn’t smile when we laughed; instead his unpleasant voice rose to a wail. “I am needing them now, Mr. Mike. I need pantaloons!”

  Mike fumbled in his pocket and produced some piastres, which he pushed into the gray, out-thrust hand. “Okay, okay,” he said. “Make sure you buy them.”

  The Newspaper Boy retreated, watched by a severe Chinese waiter.

  “He won’t buy them, of course,” Mike told me. “He’s probably been ordered to get money for drugs, poor little bastard.”

  I’d now gathered enough resolve to ask him about the girl.

  Had I heard him correctly? Did he really intend to marry a child?

  “She’s not a child,” he said. “She’s eighteen, although she mightn’t look it.”

  Even so, I said. Was he serious?

  He lit a cigarette, and at first didn’t answer. His gaze went past my shoulder to the crowds flowing by beyond the wall. “Her name’s Kim Anh,” he said. “Years ago the Viet Cong bombed her village because they weren’t getting cooperation from the head man. She was only a kid then. It killed her whole family except for a sister, and did that to her leg. Now she lives with a collection of people on the edge of Cholon, in one of those shanties made out of sheet-metal pallets. I go out there and visit her. There’s a man who says he’s her uncle: he seems to be in charge of her. I don’t trust him. I think he creams off her takings. I reckon if it weren’t for her leg, he’d have her set up as a bar girl. I have to get her out of there.”

  Could he and she communicate? I asked. Did she understand much English?

  He looked faintly embarrassed. “No—she doesn’t speak much English at all. We have to manage with my bit of French and Vietnamese.”

  But look here, brother, I said. Do you really think you’re in love with her, when you can only just communicate?

  I’d kept my tone tactful, I believe; but his face grew closed and stubborn, and he looked at me from under his brows, drawing on the cigarette. “I know her, Harvey,” he said. “Talk’s not the only way you get to know someone.” Then he looked away over the wall again, at the passing Vietnamese faces lit by the petrol lamps, and the whirring and blaring traffic jam. “I want to look after her,” he said.

  At this point I made reluctant noises of approval: there seemed nothing else to do. She was certainly exquisite, I said; I could see why anyone would fall for her. And I asked him when they planned to marry. Yet even as I asked it, the question somehow seemed fantastic; unreal.

  “There’s no rush,” he said. “First she has to have the operations. And I’ll wait about a year—let her grow up a little. My friend Madame Phan has offered to take her in. She has a number of Vietnamese girls working in her villa who’ve: been orphaned like Kim Anh. She can work there and be looked after until we marry. She’s a Catholic: she’ll want a proper wedding.”

  I saw him in a dark blue suit, as he would have been in Tasmania. I saw Kim Anh in her wedding dress, and the stiffly posed photographs. Yet I couldn’t believe in what I saw.

  We sat silent for a time, and crowds of drunken GIs passed beside the wall, clowning and reeling, headed down Tu Do towards the bars near the river, where neons spelled out Chicago, and Fifth Avenue A Go-Go. One of the soldiers called out: “Diamond pussy! That’s what I want tonight, ole buddy: diamond pussy!”—and I wondered whether Langford could actually save Kim Anh from the future.

  As though hearing my thoughts, he repeated what he’d said before, the cigarette between his lips, his voice muttering and fervent. “I have to get her out of that shantytown in Cholon, Harvey. Every time I go out there, or look for her here along Tu Do, I wonder whether I’ll find h
er this time. Whether she’ll appear again.”

  I asked him why he thought this way. Why shouldn’t she reappear?

  “Oh, I don’t know, mate,” he said. “What you really love usually disappears, doesn’t it?”

  It was an odd thing to say, I thought. He saw Kim Anh as ephemeral; perhaps not quite real. I’ve wondered since if he saw the other women he’d loved in the same way.

  4.

  HARVEY DRUMMOND

  It was cold in the helicopter, with gusts of air coming through the open doors. We were coming in to a hot landing zone, and this made me even colder. I crouched among the American troops on the chopper’s floor, nursing the heavy helmet they required me to wear into battle, and encased in one of their flak jackets.

  Westwards through the door a dark green roof of forest rolled towards Cambodia: to the border country known as the Parrot’s Beak. The Beak was where the Ho Chi Minh Trail came through: where North Vietnamese guerrillas entered the south, to join forces with the Viet Cong. The tip of the Beak was only fifty-five kilometers or so from Saigon, and surveying this region added to my sense of foreboding. As Trevor Griffiths liked to point out, the North Vietnamese Army kept on coming, down that trail which was many trails: men and women on bicycles, in trucks and on foot, in those comic colonial sun helmets of theirs. Nothing seemed to stop them. The Americans were bombing the Trail daily, but it didn’t even slow them down.

  Going into a battle zone wasn’t something I’d ever had any taste for, as I think I’ve made clear. I’d been to a number of American bases in the past year, and had witnessed a little incoming fire as a matter of professional honor; but this was different. I’d not been threatened with a serious firefight until now. The Soldiers Three had talked me into this, and I cursed them. I wished they were here to complain to; but they were on other choppers in the formation.