Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  Hubert, who had inhaled his pipe, raised his head from the pillow. “You have all gone mad,” he said faintly, and lowered his head again.

  I’d like to be able to say that this was a tense, decisive moment. But it wasn’t; not for me. I’d had five pipes now, and had begun to float away: I saw my grassy plain again.

  It was sinking into twilight, and the Soldiers Three were there. They were walking fast through the grass, looking as I’d seen them a hundred times before: all of them hung with cameras and camera bags, wearing their fatigues.

  They were laughing and looked happy; but I knew that they were going to die, and a terrible vertigo gripped me.

  Volkov was kind to me that night. He helped me through the attack of nausea which is the usual reaction to opium in a first-time user.

  Like me, Dmitri continued to live at the Royal; his room was one floor down from mine. He saw me back there, when we finally emerged from Madame‘s, holding me by the arm all the way. The nausea got worse, and as soon as we got to my room, I rushed to the bathroom to throw up. When I came back, Volkov was sitting in the rattan chair beside the bed.

  “Hit the sack, Harvey,” he said. “I will sit with you for a while.”

  I said there was no need, but he held up his hand. “Just stretch out, man, and don’t argue. A bad trip is a bad trip. Go with it; don’t fight it: float. I will sit awhile.”

  I pulled off my boots and lay down on the lumpy double bed. Speaking was now difficult, and Dmitri seemed to understand this. The air-conditioning was still off, but the ceiling fans were working, and I blessed them: I was pouring with sweat. Dmitri turned off the bedside light, leaving one lamp lit on the writing desk; then he lay back in his chair in the half-dark, taking out his cigarettes. He didn’t attempt further conversation, but I was glad he was here.

  It was now about ten o‘clock. For some time I was aware of Volkov a few feet away, smoking and staring in front of him, apparently deep in thought. Then I drifted into sleep, and had terrifying dreams, none of which I remember.

  I woke suddenly, and thought I was still on the mattress at Madame Delphine’s. I found my head was clear; but I had no idea how many hours had gone by. Volkov still sat here, smoking. He’d never been a big man, despite his physical toughness, and in those first seconds of waking he looked to me almost frail.

  I peered at my watch, and found that it was nearly one in the morning. He’d been sitting here for three hours.

  My God, Count, I said. You didn’t have to stay all this time. Go to bed.

  “That’s OK,” he said. “Somebody had to see you through this, tovarich. After all, we took you to Madame’s den. Your first and last visit, I presume.”

  I was inclined to think so, I said.

  “Probably wise,” he said. “You are not the junkie type. Unlike me. I am a junkie for everything.”

  Including trouble, I said. Would he really go to Kompong Cham tomorrow?

  “Yes, I will go,” he said. “You want to come, Harvey?”

  No thanks, I said, it was too much like Russian roulette to ride the roads now. More your game than mine, I said—but I think you should skip this one, brother. So should Mike and Jim. It smells bad.

  He smiled. “Sensible as always. You are no doubt right, Harvey. Yes, it gets worse. Last week, two American correspondents tried to drive down Highway 1. New here. They put a notice on their windshield that says: ‘Don’t Shoot. Press.’ Jesus. They only got as far as Neak Luong and have not been seen again, poor bastards. Khmer Rouge have executed them, for sure. Khmer Rouge are even worse than Viet Cong: they do not seem to play by any rules at all. It’s bad now: it’s creepy.” He stretched and yawned. “You are a words man, Harvey; you can avoid some of this. But getting shot at on daily basis is my game, you know this. Bloody bureau chief in Hong Kong keeps riding me, for one thing. Last week I sent only four hundred feet, and bastard asked on phone did I take the lens cap off. So I go—and so does Jim. Mike doesn’t need to—but always he wants to push his luck a little further, and I can’t allow him to do this on his own. Besides, he has said the big story is at Kompong Cham, and he is generally right.”

  He stood up. “You should sleep, brother. Can you manage to do this now without bad dreams?”

  I said I was sure I could, and got up and saw him to the door. He paused outside, standing in the deserted corridor with its dim green walls.

  “I have favor to ask you,” he said. He fumbled in his shirt pocket, and produced a sealed envelope. “I want you to keep this for me.”

  I took it doubtfully, and he said: “Duplicate key. If anything happens to me tomorrow, or any time, I want you to take charge of small wooden box under my bed.”

  Of course, I said. But just don’t let it happen, Count. What’s in the box?

  He smiled again. “My life is in it,” he said. “Send it to the person whose address is inside this envelope.”

  And that will be Linda, I said.

  His smile vanished. His eyes became cold in a way that quelled me; he could still create that effect. “You are very clever bastard, Harvey,” he said. He turned without speaking again, and went off down the empty, high-ceilinged corridor, raising his hand without looking back. ‘

  I was still affected by the opium. Because of the uncertain power supply, the shaded lamps along the walls gave out an ominously faint light, and Dmitri seemed to walk through this light into another dimension of time: into an indistinct region whose exit was always retreating. He walked quickly, as he always did, in the navy shirt he so often seemed to wear. He passed a tone, white-coated Cambodian room boy; his figure dwindled; then he turned a corner and disappeared.

  I stood looking at his envelope with mixed feelings: compassion, and that secret irritation we have when a responsibility is thrust on us unasked.

  THREE

  THE COMMON POT

  1.

  JIM FENG

  One thing I want to make clear, Ray: I don’t blame Mike for what happened at Kompong Cham. We both wanted to go with him, Dmitri and I: we made a free choice, like we always did.

  But as we rode up there in the Government chopper that morning, I had a bad feeling. I believe in my sixth sense; it has always got me out of tight spots in battle; yet I couldn’t really justify this feeling today. I knew Mike’s information was always reliable, and that he would have assessed the situation carefully. I trusted him.

  But the situation wasn’t good, up there. For nearly a year now there had been reports of clashes in Kompong Cham between the Khmer Rouge and the North Vietnamese, and it was beginning to be suspected that the Khmer Communists were rebelling against their allies, and wanting to push them out of Cambodia. The village people in the province were growing angry about the Vietnamese Communists sheltering in their villages to try and avoid being bombed—and a few months ago, when some villages had been destroyed, the Khmer Rouge had led the villagers in a protest. This was said to have brought on clashes between the two Communist armies.

  Mike said he’d like to find out whether this friction was still going on. He even talked about going a little way on to the east bank of the Mekong—which was all in Communist hands now. This would make a very good story, but it was one for a print correspondent, I thought, rather than a photographer. And it crossed my mind that Mike might want to report on the situation to Aubrey Hardwick. He still had dinner with Aubrey, when the old man was in Phnom Penh.

  All of it worried me. It looked as though the Khmer Rouge would take Kompong Cham city at any time, and to cover there now was unwise. I’d no wish to do it, in the light of day. I wanted to stay alive. I had Lu Ying to come back to now, and this had changed me.

  I remember the taxi driver clearly, even though I never knew his name. I remember this man only because he got killed for the sake of a day’s fare.

  But he knew the chances he was taking. Some of those guys would drive you to Hell for a few dollars, and he was of that type. A young Khmer, with a lot of wavy hair and a face
that was amused all the time. Western shirt and trousers, but a red-checked Cambodian krama hung around his neck. He drove us fast, in a battered green Peugeot, and he tried to join in our conversation, even though his English was very bad.

  We’d hired him in Kompong Cham city and were headed southwest, on Highway 7. It was very hot that morning; there was no air-conditioning in the Peugeot, and our shirts were soon soaked with sweat.

  April in Cambodia is the last of the dry months before the monsoon: a time of great heat, when the earth is baked hard, and the water is gone from the paddies. Not a time I like. Kompong Cham is red soil country, and the red dust blew across the bitumen of the highway in the hot wind, and came through the open windows. There was a red-brown haze over everything: banana trees and palms looked shabby in it, village huts looked withered, and the paddy fields on each side of the road were cracked and crazed like crockery, waiting for the rain. When everything has been harvested, open country like that is more exposed than usual; you can’t take cover in the rice. That’s a thing you think about, when you’re about to film a firefight.

  We’d learned that there were two Government battalions a few kilometers down the road from the city, which the Government still held. This seemed safe enough: we had a combined force of a thousand men in front of us. When we reached the rear battalion, we found nothing happening: a line of trucks, buses and APCs stood halted here. The commander told us that the other battalion was four kilometers up ahead; it had made no contact with the enemy, and we could join it if we wanted. So we got in the car and went on.

  The road was empty; once a peasant on a bicycle passed, and that was all. No children about, which was always a bad sign. We came around a bend, and found the other battalion: another halted line of trucks and buses. But as soon as we got out of the taxi we saw that they’d run into trouble. Wounded soldiers were lying in two of the trucks, with medics attending them. No gunfire, though: all quiet. It was nearly noon, and the heat made you dizzy.

  The battalion commander was standing by a Jeep, talking to a young sergeant in a helmet who was operating a field radio. The commander was a thin, elderly man in glasses and a cap and camouflage fatigues. He looked worried, like a schoolmaster whose school was getting out of control. Dmitri held a conversation with him in French; then he turned to us and explained.

  The battalion had been hit a few minutes before. The Khmer Rouge were somewhere up ahead, and they’d attacked with B-40 rockets, machine guns and mortars. The Government troops had mortars and machine guns in the trucks, but had not had time to respond with them; they’d been forced to defend themselves with their automatic rifles, and had taken quite a few wounded. There was a lull now, and they were setting up their mortars in the paddy field beside the road, and digging foxholes there. The sergeant was calling in air support.

  Mike and Dmitri and I moved into the dry paddy field behind the troops, leaving the taxi driver to wait for us by the commander’s Jeep. We got under a small clump of mangoes and banana trees that would give us some protection. With two battalions at our back and air support supposedly coming, we thought we’d be reasonably safe, and we began to concentrate on checking our cameras. It was hard to concentrate, the heat was so great now. Dmitri and I had decided to travel light, with no sound recordists; we’d brought clockwork Bell and Howells, with tape recorders on our belts for sound. Mike had his usual Leica and Nikon.

  The Khmer Rouge suddenly opened up from a long line of trees on the far side of the rice field. The noise was shattering: the treetops bent as though in a high wind, and shells exploded quite close. At intervals there would be the scary cluk-cluk-cluk of a B-40 rocket on its way, and one of these rockets hit a bus on the road dead on. The survivors, covered in blood, came stumbling and crawling out, and I got some footage of them. The Khmer Rouge couldn’t aim straight at the Lon Nol force from so close; instead they were putting the rockets into the air and dropping them.

  It’s not a battle I like to remember. The hot wind was still blowing, and the red haze mingled with the gunsmoke to make everything vague, like a painted battle instead of a real one. The Lon Nol troops were putting mortar fire into the trees for all they were worth; but after about an hour the Khmer Rouge hadn’t budged and were still firing back, and more and more buses were retreating with the wounded. The trucks coming up with replacements seemed to make little difference. There were now many dead and wounded in the rice field and on the road, and the numbers of soldiers still fighting seemed much fewer. Cries and moans came through the red and blue haze, close and far off.

  I shot some good film; we all did. But mortar shells had begun to explode closer to our clump of trees, and now we lay flat, no longer trying to film, just hugging our cameras to protect them from flying earth. We had a quick conference, and decided to get back to the taxi. Then we’d try and retreat down the highway to the other battalion.

  In a lull in the firing, we ran for it. Buses and trucks were making off down the road, retreating towards Kompong Cham with the dead and wounded. There weren’t many vehicles left here. Someone was shouting orders; a few voices sounded in response, but their tone was faint, like the voices of people who know they’re lost.

  Our taxi driver was still sitting behind the wheel of the Peugeot: seeing us, he got out, and began to hurry over. The young sergeant in the helmet was still here too, standing beside his Jeep and speaking into his field radio; but there was no sign of the battalion commander. Dmitri asked the sergeant in French where the commander was, and the man told him the commander was dead. His face was perspiring and blank; he seemed to be in a dream. A folded-up letter showed in the top pocket of his shirt, written in Khmer in blue ballpoint: I wondered if it was from his wife, and whether it would ever be answered.

  The taxi driver pulled at my sleeve. His expression was like a scared boy’s. We go! he said. Go! Go! Go!

  As well as shell fire, I could now hear the crack of AK-47s, but I told him to wait. Mike was speaking rough French to the sergeant, asking what had happened to the air support. The sergeant said he kept asking for it, but could get no response. He was getting no response from the other battalion, either.

  We all looked at each other.

  Merde. In that case we are fucking well in for it, Dmitri said. His voice was very dry and quiet, and I knew he was right. We had never been in a position as bad as this.

  We go, the taxi driver said. He was clasping his hands and looked pleading, as though he might weep.

  Dmitri put a hand on his shoulder, while looking at Mike and me. The man is right, he said. Let’s go.

  We ran for the taxi.

  It’s difficult to explain the confusion of battle to those who haven’t been in one: a lot of the time, no one’s sure what’s happening. The mortar shelling had stopped, but sporadic bursts of automatic rifle fire went on from both sides. The taxi driver accelerated away, Mike sitting in the front, Dmitri and I in the back, but just as we were about to turn the bend, there was a rattle of automatic fire from somewhere in the rear that seemed quite close, and bullets began to hit the car. One shattered the back window, but no one was hit.

  Keep going, I heard Mike call. Step on it!

  But one of our tires was punctured: the car was slewing everywhere, and the driver had slammed on the brakes. As it halted broadside across the road there was another burst of fire and we all began to come out the doors, looking for the ditch. I ran towards it in a crouch, keeping my camera high in one hand and rolling through the dust at the verge. Once in the ditch, I got my head down; Dmitri appeared quickly beside me, panting hard.

  When there was a break in the firing, we peeped over the edge and saw the stalled Peugeot with its doors open. The driver still sat at the wheel, slumped forward and still. The back of his head and his red-checked krama were soaked with dark blood, and I knew for certain that he was dead. The firing had stopped, and now Mike appeared, crawling up the ditch to join us. We three crouched against the crumbling red earth, not daring to
speak or make any sound.

  I smelled the dry Cambodian dust, and buffalo dung nearby. We looked at each other, and our thoughts were exchanged quite clearly. We were together and alive and glad of it, even if we should only live for a few minutes more, or half an hour. Dmitri was next to me; Mike on the other side. I saw that Dmitri’s lips were cracked, and his lips and the cracks in them seemed precious. Mike had a cut from shaving on his chin, and I wanted to laugh at this. These feelings may seem strange, and are difficult to explain; but now that Lu Ying and I have had our daughter, I can say that the same sensations are experienced when you look at your first infant: at its skin and hands and feet.

  We never found out what happened to the remnants of the battalion. I imagine they made their escape down the road, and that the Khmer Rouge then withdrew, having achieved their victory. But this wasn’t something we knew at the time, since we didn’t put our heads up to see. We went on crouching in the ditch, not daring to show ourselves, and expecting at any moment to see Khmer Rouge troops appear above us.

  After about twenty minutes, when it went on being quiet, we crawled on our bellies in an easterly direction. Then we held a conference in whispers. Because it was quiet didn’t mean that the Khmer Rouge weren’t still out there; they could be anywhere, we said. But we decided that we’d risk walking east to Kompong Cham when evening came. We wouldn’t walk on the highway; we’d go through the fields here on the southern side, using whatever cover we could.

  At sunset we set out, our shadows long in front of us. Maybe we should have waited until dark, but we’d emptied our canteens, and were very thirsty. So we took a chance. We walked for perhaps half an hour across the cracked earth of the paddies, and on dusty red cattle paths. At first we saw no sign of life except for some buffalo; it was as though the countryside had been emptied. Then, as dusk began to fall, we saw the lights of a cluster of thatch-roofed buildings, just off Highway 7.