Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  —For a moment his face got dark and set, and I saw that he’d be capable of considerable rage. He finished his beer and sat back, pouring another from the bottle.

  —When Lon Nol overthrew Sihanouk, we came in from the border and helped to form the Republic, he said. Then the Free Khmer was dissolved, since its aims were supposed to have been achieved. We believed we had an honest government now, to resist tyranny. A mistake—as I’m sure you’ll agree, Mike.

  —I wouldn’t want to criticize your government, I told him. They’re facing tough odds.

  —You’re very polite, he said. He leaned forward to pour me another beer, looking at me from under his brows. But I’m sure you know the truth, he said, like all Western correspondents. I tell you, I’m ashamed of my government; ashamed of most of our generals. Phnom Penh never gives us enough equipment or enough troops—to get them, we must use any means we can, legal or not. But some commanders claim salaries for ghost soldiers, and use the money to build air-conditioned villas for themselves. You know this. They even sell ammunition to the enemy—and they make their own troops pay for their rice. They take money from the pay of poor peasants who are dying for us; from men like those you helped this afternoon. I’m a fool if I ignore these things.

  —I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. It was peaceful, down in the darkened camp. Low voices, sometimes a laugh. A young soldier had begun to play a flute: a Khmer folk melody. I could see him sitting by a fire with a circle of friends around him, men and women, their faces quiet. He was a dark Khmer with a mop of curly hair; he played with great feeling, and the melody was so beautiful, climbing into the dark, it brought tears to my eyes. I loved Cambodia, just then.

  —Chandara glanced at my face; then he pointed to the group by the fire, and his voice became gentle, its anger gone. A country is only as good as its ordinary people, he said. And these are good people. My young men and women are brave, and will fight to the end. If the Americans don“t desert us, it’s only our corrupt leaders who can cause us to lose this war.

  —It was fairly extraordinary for a commander to be speaking to a Western correspondent like this on first meeting, and I decided now to be frank.

  -Yes. But you know what a lot of the correspondents are saying, I told him. if that’s how the Lon Not leaders are, can the Communists be worse? At least the Communists are dedicated.

  —He looked hard at me without blinking, and I wondered if I’d gone too far.

  —I’ll try to answer you honestly, he said. You think to choose between President Lon Nol and les Khmers Rouges is to choose between two evils: I know. It’s a choice between the corrupt and the fanatical. But I have to say to you that it’s better in my opinion to choose the corrupt—even though I detest them. The corrupt are merely weak and vicious; they want to drink their brandy and have parties with their bar girls and wear nice uniforms. They love themselves, and have no sense of duty. But they also have no ideology. That means they have no wish to control our minds or our lives; no desire to destroy our religion. They are not fanatics. Under fanatics, there are no loopholes—they close them all.

  —He looked out at the dark, and at the orange sparks of the cooking fires: only the faces near to them could be made out now. We have some knowledge of the Khmer Rouge leaders, he said. They are ex-students, who studied in Paris. Marxist intellectuals: a product of the West! But they recruit young people here who have no education—boys and girls from remote regions, ignorant and suspicious of the world beyond their villages. And these Paris intellectuals are telling them that the world outside is a bad world, and has to be destroyed. They urge them to cruelties: to blood lust. Before, I was fighting the Vietnamese invader. Now I must fight my own people: simple people, infected with a virus.

  —I asked him what he’d do if they won.

  —If the Khmer Rouge win, he said, the Free Khmer must revive and form a Resistance. We’ll fight a guerrilla war from the border, just as the Communists have done. There’ll be no choice: no compromise with the Khmer Rouge will be possible—and no hope of mercy. Ly Keang knows this: she knows what they can do. They murdered her father.

  —This surprised me. I thought he died in action, I said.

  —No, he said. They murdered him. But Ly Keang will tell you about this herself, when she’s ready. Not me. Well? Will you think about helping us?

  —stared at him, and he smiled: his expression was lighthearted now. You say you won’t leave Cambodia: that this is your home, he said. Good! If the country falls, you can join us: join the Free Khmer.

  —I thought he was joking; I laughed and shook my head. Then I looked down at the camp again. The flute player had stopped, and our voices were very distinct, on the verandah. The whole point about my work is to stay uninvolved, I said. A correspondent can’t be involved.

  —But the formula was sounding more and more feeble to me lately, and Chandara seemed to know this. He smiled now as though I were a slow child. Mike, you are coming to middle age like me, he said. And this is the time when we must find true purpose in our lives. As a Buddhist, I know it’s time to start acquiring merit. Maybe you should know this too.

  —Half joking, I asked him how he could be a Buddhist and a soldier at the same time.

  —He laughed. Because I’m not a monk, he said. Only they can follow the Eightfold Path. I’m a man of passions, you can see that. But Buddhism’s tolerant of people like me. It only asks that we live our lives as well as we can. And this is what the Khmer Rouge threaten too. They used to pretend to respect Buddhism, just for propaganda; now they mock it, and desecrate the pagodas and say there is no spirit: that human beings are only clay. That’s how we know they are people of darkness, who’ll destroy goodness. If the mass of the people aren’t good, what hope is there for our lives?

  —We talked of other things for a time. A soldier brought us some fresh bottles of beer, and we sank quite a few, in the end. I began to feel pretty happy, and I think Chandara did too. It was so dark now that, when he spoke next, lying back in his chair, I could barely make out his expression.

  —Perhaps Cambodia won’t fall, he said, against all the odds. But if it does, I’m hopeful that you’ll be with us. No need to answer now. Battle is at the center of your life, even if you don’t use a gun: I know this. And I think you may be more of a soldier than I am. I’m a soldier only because it’s necessary: I hope in the end for peace. I know that my family are waiting for me, up there in Phnom Penh; I wait to see them. I long for my wife, I long to feel my children put their arms about my neck when I pick them up, and to smell their hair and skin. This is the greatest thing in life: not fighting. But what about you, Mike? Forgive me for being personal. You’ll go back now to your empty apartment that Ly Keang tells me about. Maybe you should be married. Time you had children of your own, at your age.

  —He sipped his beer, and watched me over the rim of the glass. He’d really become quite drunk, and so had I. If you want to become Cambodian, he said, and make this your home, you should perhaps look at Ly Keang. She greatly admires you. She’s a fine girl.

  —He’d surprised me again, and I answered carefully. Yes she is, I said. But I hardly know her. She’s closer to my friend Dmitri Volkov.

  —She sees death in your friend, he said. She sees life in you. So do I.

  —He raised his glass to me and smiled, as though what he’d just said had been quite ordinary.

  5.

  Harvey looks out through the grille, hands folded.

  “Kompong Cham,” he says. Then he stops; staring into the white afternoon.

  “Kompong Cham in that April just wasn’t a place to be,” he tells me. “It was expected to fall at any time. All the Government held any more was a buffer zone around it. So for Mike to urge that the three of them go up there—”

  Turning back to me, he spreads his hands palms upwards. Then he expels breath through his lips so that they bubble, and drops his hands to the table. “I didn’t offer to go with them,” he sa
ys. “Not many correspondents would have. And I’m not gung ho, Ray—as I’ve told you.”

  He stops, staring at me for a moment, as though expecting a question.

  “Oh shit,” he says softly. “I’m not saying that Mike lured them up to Kompong Cham irresponsibly: of course not. But in a way, he was challenging Dmitri. There was a sort of extra rivalry between them at that time. For no good reason—they weren’t in direct competition any more, now that Mike had given up film work. But they all played that game, those bloody cameramen, even when there was nothing to be gained. It was the way they were.”

  He raises a hand to rub his bald crown, and then takes off his glasses. Exposed, the large, fish-like eyes are sorrowful, and he sighs.

  “This time it was different,” Harvey says. “It’d be another two years before Phnom Penh fell—but for me everything began to be over, in that April and May. The war was coming to its climax, we all knew that: and when it reached it, nothing could be the same again. We knew that too.”

  He suddenly smiles. It’s a benevolent smile, but not really directed at me: he’s far off inside himself.

  “We’d lived inside that war for so long,” he says. “What the bloody hell were we going to do without it?”

  HARVEY DRUMMOND

  The opium lamp stood beside me, on its brass tray. It was an oil lamp, made of copper and heavy glass to focus the heat, and it gave off a warm golden glow. An antique: a lamp from the nineteenth century, still burning here in Asia, at Madame Delphine’s. There was also a warm golden smell: it made my mouth water.

  A little marijuana I could handle; couscous nights I now half enjoyed; but opium I’d always drawn the line at. Yet here I was, on an evening in the last week of April, naked except for a sarong (as the ceremony at Madame’s required), stretched on my back on a floor which was a single huge mattress, my friends lying in the dimness around me.

  The majority of journalists only had a pipe occasionally; but Langford, Dmitri Volkov, Jim Feng and Hubert Whatley now came at least once a week to Madame’s. Langford seemed unaffected by it, just as he was unaffected by alcohol, and by every other physical stimulus and stress: he had the constitution of a bull, and kept his intake within bounds. So did Jim Feng. But rumor had it that Volkov and Whatley were lately coming here even in the lunch hours, and were well on their way to becoming addicts. They came to numb themselves to what was outside: the bombing, the ruined countryside, the people half crazed from grief, rocking the bodies of dead children on their laps. Tonight I wanted oblivion too, if opium would give it to me.

  The atmosphere of the city had become unnerving. I would have gone anywhere, that evening, rather than stay in my room in the Hotel le Royal. The power had gone off again: the fans had stopped working and the room was stifling. The continuing artillery fire outside the city was causing the building to vibrate, and once there was a huge crash in the bathroom. I’d run in there, my heart thudding: I thought a rocket had scored a direct hit. But it was only the manhole cover in the ceiling: it had fallen down into the bath.

  The Khmer Rouge blockade of the Mekong was now preventing all but a small number of supply ships and tankers from getting up the river. Most supplies were being brought in by air. The Rice Road to Battambang had been cut, petrol was running out, electricity cuts were constant, and we were told that Phnom Penh currently had enough food and fuel to get through three more weeks. Beyond the city, the bombing by the invisible B-52s went on: massive and terrifying, targeting the army of Khmer Rouge guerrillas there, but often hitting villages as well. The American aim was to stall the Khmer Rouge’s dry-season offensive: an offensive directed against Phnom Penh itself, and already reaching its suburbs. The received wisdom at the Press Center was that the city would fall by August.

  I was lying on the straw smoking-mat. It was my turn; time for my first pipe. Madame Delphine squatted on her thighs beside me, the lamp putting big shadows on her fleshy, French-Chinese face, her eyes shining like black olives. Madame was like a nurse; she could almost make you believe this was good for you. She didn’t smile much, she was middle-aged and stern, but she had a sort of matronly charm, and the Nurseryman claimed to be in love with her. Careful as a surgeon, she held the opium bead over the flame on its needle, and then coaxed it into the pipe. Muttering in French, she brought the stem to my mouth, urging me to draw.

  “Tirez! Tirez!”

  I inhaled, and the opium bubbled like sugar on a hot plate. Then I rolled off the mat to make way for Jim Feng, and a heavy tingling went down to my toes. It brought with it love of the world and my friends; love of the world inside me. I lay bathed in yellow delight, my head on a little leather pillow.

  There were many smoking rooms in that dark family house; I found it a confusing place.

  Madame Delphine’s was in a lane off Monivong Boulevard, smelling of open drains: a Cambodian house on stilts, entered by a set of wooden steps, all in darkness from outside except for a single electric bulb, as a precaution against the police. The walls in our smoking room were hung with Cambodian straw mats worked in gold and chocolate, and a big, dim mosquito net hung above us like a cloud. No ceiling: through the net, from our mattress floor, we were looking up at the beams of the roof, and at fans that were slowly turning: the power supply was back. A radio was playing somewhere, turned down low. Quiet voices floated from adjoining rooms: the voices of French businessmen, Sûreté operatives, correspondents, and diplomats from the various Western missions. No Cambodians: this was a den for foreigners.

  Blissful sighs came from out of the dark on all sides; the pipe bubbled. I could just make out the motionless shapes of my colleagues. They all spoke on a calm, purring note I’d not heard before: the voice of opium. No one spoke aggressively; no one sounded tense; every remark hung in the dark as something to meditate on. Time slowed to the ooze of honey, and often after someone had spoken it seemed to me that an hour went by before anyone replied, although it might have been two minutes. Sometimes the voices went away to somewhere else, and I no longer heard them. Madame Delphine came and went, her lamp creating big shadows, and after my second pipe, I found that I was in two places at once.

  I was still in the smoking room, but I also saw a wide plain stretching away: an empty place of dry white grass and low bushes, going towards a green sky. I neither liked nor disliked it; it was simply there, inside me. At the same time, I could hear Hubert Whatley speaking. His voice was very distinct, entering my head as though through an amplifier.

  I opened my eyes and turned towards the sound: I could just make out his face and beard, and the great white hills of his naked chest and belly, rising on the other side of Volkov. He seemed to be replying to something that Dmitri had said: a remark I hadn’t heard; a gap on the tape.

  “Soon, dear boy, yes. Soon they’ll close the Mekong. But we still have our Cambodia for a little while longer. A country one saw in visions before one ever came here. The B-52s are dropping their bloody tonnages on Paradise.”

  After perhaps ten minutes, Jim Feng spoke. “True, Hubert: Paradise. Greatest supply of cheap grass ever seen, and prettiest women.”

  Soft laughter; but the Nurseryman wasn’t to be deflected from his theme. A little while later, he resumed.

  “Soon we’ll be the only ones who remember the magic peace. Our crass colleagues arriving here now never knew that peace, did they, gentlemen? The French planters drinking coffee at their curbside tables. The caravans of oxcarts coming in from the country, with all the country’s fruits. Upswept shafts like the prows of boats. Straw piled on their awnings; the kids and dogs trotting beside them. Was it always noon when they came?”

  A long silence followed: nobody answered, and I wondered if his rumbling voice would go on. It went on; speaking to itself.

  “Yes: the noon hush. No guns to break it then; no sound of bombers. Just the oxcarts, coming into town in lines a mile long.”

  We all lay watching the carts, and hearing their creaking in the heat.

&nbs
p; Madame Delphine had arrived with fresh pipes, and the Nurseryman, grunting, rolled onto the mat by the lamp.

  “Ah Madame,” he said. “Je t‘aime. Je suis ton esclave.”

  “Je vous en prie, Monsieur,” she said. “Ça suffit! Vous êtes trop galant.” But her impassive face showed faint amusement.

  “Alas,” he told us. “I am in love with Madame, but she has eyes only for Snow.”

  Turning the opium ball on its needle, Madame Delphine glanced at Mike. “Il est plus beau,” she said. And for the first time she smiled faintly.

  But Langford now had gone deeper into trance, unconscious of what was being said. Arms at his sides, curved blond shards of hair lying on his forehead, he was looking up into the mosquito net, dead-white face in profile. And his face had suddenly become a statue‘s, empty of expression and even of life: a phenomenon I remembered seeing only once before, when he was wounded in Vietnam. He was suddenly no longer himself, but someone else.

  As I watched, he turned his head towards Volkov and came back again, his eyes refocusing and reflecting the flame of the lamp.

  “I’ve got something for tomorrow, if you don’t want to retire just yet, Count,” he said. He spoke slowly, as though in his sleep. “I’m going up to Kompong Cham. Taking a Government chopper. You and Jim could come. There’s room.”

  “Kompong Cham?” Volkov said. “You are serious?”

  “Yes, I’m serious,” Langford said. “There’s a risk—but that’s why it’s a good story.”

  They peered, heads turned towards each other. Then Mike smiled, and Volkov let out a hiss of laughter. He nodded once, as though agreeing to a crime, and looked across at Jim.

  “I’ll come,” Jim said.

  Kompong Cham, fifty miles to the northeast, was an important city: a crossroads on the Mekong, strategically vital. Any action there was worth covering. But nearly all of Kompong Cham Province had now fallen to the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge, and the rest was going fast. The city itself was said to be about to fall.