Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  It was a great relief. For all three of us, in that moment, it was very important that these objects remain around our necks. They’d been with us since the old days in Vietnam, and we saw them as part of the special luck that had helped us survive through the years, while so many of our friends were now dead. They could not be replaced. Yes, we were very superstitious, very sentimental, since so little remained constant in our lives. If you had asked us point-blank did we truly believe that our lucky charms warded off death, we probably would have said no; but in a childish corner of our minds, we believed that they did. And the childish corners of men’s minds have a strange power, I think: they fill simple objects with meaning, and make the past live on in the present. Such things become remarkably important, when you find yourself a prisoner. A prisoner has nothing; he is stripped as bare as an animal, and human beings cannot tolerate being bare. Surely that’s why we furnish our houses and ourselves with objects that give us comfort, in the loneliness of the universe.

  Our charms were the last physical link that Mike and Dmitri and I had with what we’d been. They were part of what had made us ourselves. My boots and clothing are gone, my Rolex is gone, and my camera too, I thought; but I still have my tiger’s claw. Already I was thinking like a prisoner.

  Dressed in our thin, baggy uniforms, we stood waiting to see what would be done with us next. Dmitri smiled at the nearest soldier, offering him a cigarette. I’ll have ham and eggs and coffee, he told him. Please ring room service, comrade.

  The soldier took the cigarette, but he looked at us warningly as we laughed. It would be Dmitri’s last joke for some time, because now things began to get worse.

  They set about tying our hands again: this time in front of us, and without linking us.

  Not so tight, fuck you. Dmitri spoke in English, squinting through the cigarette he could no longer remove from his mouth, staring hard and without fear into the face of the soldier working on his wrists. The man looked up and seemed to understand; I was afraid of what he would do. But he simply went on tying the knot, and did not seem to tighten it as viciously as before.

  Then another of the soldiers came up to Dmitri, carrying a bunch of checked Cambodian scarves. He blindfolded Dmitri with one of them, and then did the same to Mike. Dmitri and Mike were red-faced from the heat in the way that fair Europeans become; their yellow hair stuck out like straw over the scarves, and their light green uniforms had dark patches of sweat. They looked like boys in pajamas too small for them, ready for a game of blindrnan’s bluff. In other circumstances, it would have been comical.

  What is this? Goddamn it, what for? I heard Dmitri shout.

  But the soldiers didn’t answer him. It was my turn to be blindfolded now, and a cold wave went through my bowels and scrotum. As I lost sight of the world, I didn’t doubt that they were going to execute us. Listening, my face running with sweat under the scarf, I heard other voices speaking Vietnamese, and guessed that some more soldiers had arrived. Both my elbows were gripped by hands, and I was ordered to march.

  I walked inside darkness, feeling only the soft dust under my feet. I wasn’t ready to die; I loved my life, and I loved Lu Ying, and I could not bear the thought that I would not get back to her. I began to pray. At the Church of England school I was sent to in Hong Kong, I had received Christian instruction, even though my father was a nonbeliever, his only values based on Confucianism. He wanted me to fit in, and he was tolerant of all religions: he said being C of E would help me to get on. So that is what I put on forms when asked my religion; but I had never really taken it seriously. Now I found to my surprise that I believed in God, although I didn’t imagine him as being very much like the Church of England God we’d been taught about. I had no idea what God was like, but it somehow helped me to pray to him.

  We marched for some time through dust, but then I felt it give way to a much harder surface—an oxcart path probably—filled with sharp stones. I had not often gone barefoot, and I found this very painful. Both my feet were soon cut in a number of places, and I could scarcely hobble along; but the hands gripping my arms forced me to do so. This went on for perhaps a quarter of an hour.

  Then I heard one of the soldiers order us to halt, and at the same time I heard a motor running. The hands under my arms were half lifting me now, and I was helped into what I knew was the back of a truck, and pushed down onto what felt like a sack of rice. Then I heard Mike say: Jim? Is that you, mate? Dmitri?

  We both answered him to say that we were here, and my heart lifted when I found that my brothers were with me still. If we were going to die, we would die together. The truck roared into gear, and we were moving off through the night.

  I guessed that we were running on an old rubber plantation road, and I began to hope that we were simply being taken to another location, and would not be shot. After all, they could have done it anywhere on the path, if that was the intention.

  We rode for perhaps an hour. I had no way of knowing in which direction we were going, but I guessed it to be further east, towards the border. When the truck pulled up, I was helped down to the ground, which I was glad to find was dusty, not stony. I hobbled on my cut feet, blindfolded still. I could hear frogs croaking, and the soldiers murmuring in Vietnamese; then my blindfold was removed.

  We were in another village, with just one or two sluggish lights showing in the stilted houses. Mike and Dmitri were in front of me, looking back and grinning. The truck had gone, and our original three soldiers were with us: no one else.

  We were led up the steps of one of the houses, about ten feet above the ground, and came into a large, dark room where one of the soldiers lit an oil lamp on a table. There were straw mats on the floor, some wooden chests, and sacks of rice stacked against one wall. There were also four beds here, with mosquito nets. We sat in a row on one of the beds, while a soldier stayed at the door, gun trained. A short time later, a very old and bent Cambodian woman in black pajamas came in with bowls and cups and baskets of steaming rice on a tray. She smiled in a friendly way and spoke in Khmer, urging us to eat. We found we had not only rice, but eggs with soy sauce, and tea.

  We devoured it very fast, while the soldier stood in the doorway with his AK-47, ignoring us. We seemed to be allowed to talk now, and we began to discuss our position in low voices, and to speculate on what they would do with us. But we didn’t have time to talk for very long.

  Another NVA soldier came into the room. He was dressed in the same green fatigues as the others; but instead of a cotton hat, he wore the old-fashioned, colonial-style NVA sun helmet, with the red star of Communism on the front. Even without the pens in his top pocket, his bearing and the authority in his expression would have made me certain that he was an officer. He took off his sun helmet and stood in the center of the room, looking at us. His expression was serious but not intimidating. He was light-skinned, shorter than any of us, but tall for a Vietnamese and strongly built. He was perhaps in his late thirties, and had a serious, intelligent face.

  We all stood up, and waited. When he spoke, it was in English; and his English was that of a well-educated man, if a little stiff.

  I am commanding officer here, he said. My name is Captain Nguyen Van Danh. I hope that you have eaten sufficiently?

  We said that we had.

  Have you any complaints of your treatment?

  We hesitated. Then Mike said: No complaints. But we’d be glad of some sandals. And some shaving gear.

  I will do my best, the captain said. Sandals are in short supply: so are razors. But you must certainly have some.

  He frowned at our cut feet. A medical attendant will deal with your feet, he said. Then, without turning around, he called a command in Vietnamese.

  A second soldier appeared at the door carrying two rucksacks, which he brought over to a chest in a corner and emptied out. All our belongings lay in front of us: cameras, tape recorders, clothing, boots, wallets, personal papers and documents. Even my Rolex was there.

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sp; I believe these are your possessions, the captain said. He produced a notebook and a pen. I want you to examine these things, and be sure that nothing is missing.

  We went through the articles and he made us name them all, listing them in his notebook. When we said that everything was there, I asked him when it would be returned to us.

  The captain looked at me as though considering his answer. Before he could reply, Dmitri said: What my friend means is, Captain, when will we be released?

  The captain’s face became blank. I cannot answer that at present, he said. The decision cannot be made yet whether to release you or not. You are accused of being in the employ of the CIA. Your position will be studied. You are prisoners of war, in the hands of the People’s Liberation Army, and you will be treated correctly. Now I think you will need sleep.

  He turned and left the room, giving us no opportunity to answer.

  I lay stretched on the bed in the most peaceful state I’d known since our capture, which now seemed days ago. I was so tired that I floated as though in delirium; but I was comfortable. A medical orderly had painted our feet with Mercurochrome, and my cuts gently throbbed. Mike and Dmitri, already asleep, lay in beds nearby. We had the mosquito nets drawn, and it was a luxury not to be bitten.

  For a short time, the three of us had talked, even though we were almost too tired to speak. Our meal had given us strength and revived our spirits; so had our interview with the captain. But our most likely fate now, we decided, was to end in a prison camp on the other side of the border: and that wouldn’t be something we’d survive very easily, from what we’d heard of those camps. We had to convince the Vietnamese that as war photographers, we were neutral. And we had to somehow prove that we weren’t CIA.

  Mike was snoring; Dmitri scarcely seemed to breathe. In my heart, I spoke to them both as though they were my blood brothers. Sleep, I said. Rest, brothers.

  I was kept awake for a little longer by the sound of military trucks passing somewhere outside the village, the whining of their motors telling me they were old, and heavily loaded. Even when I slept, they got into my dreams: they seemed to be moving by at intervals all through the night.

  By blindfolding us, the Vietnamese had taken great trouble to conceal from us where we were. But I felt certain we were in country near the Vietnamese border, since this was probably the only region where the North Vietnamese Army would still be coming inside Cambodia in any numbers. All their forces were pulling back over the border now, in accordance with the Paris peace agreements. I would prove to be right: what I was hearing was the NVA’s supply trucks, moving down a section of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  I hear it still, in my head: a sound that’s now part of history.

  2.

  JIM FENG

  We were held in the village for only one night. The next morning, we were taken away with Captain Van Danh’s patrol.

  There were only seven soldiers in the unit, and we marched with them on a track whose surface was sealed with crushed stones, its bed of packed red earth. It looked not much better than an oxcart path: but we were walking on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  So few people ever saw the Trail, except from the air. It was a fact and yet not a fact: a rumor. And it wasn’t one trail, but many: a network of roads and tracks that ran for thousands of miles. It came over razorback ridges; through mountain corridors and jungle; across flooded rivers. Thousands died to build it: of malaria, dysentery and exhaustion, as well as from air attacks. Its flimsy pontoon bridges were all the time bombed and all the time remade, and its convoys of trucks and bicycles never stopped coming, bringing their troops and their arms in an endless flow from the North. The Trail was what won the war; and now that the war’s over, I suppose it will exist soon only in memories, and in North Vietnamese soldiers’ songs. So it’s sometimes difficult to believe that we marched on it, Mike, Dmitri and I. But we did; and for me it’s a great thing to have done, despite all the sadness of what happened.

  As I’d guessed, the village where we’d slept had been close to a point where a branch of the Trail came through Cambodia. A hundred kilometers or so to the southeast, it would pass into South Vietnam through the Parrot’s Beak: the section of the border that points at Saigon. This was where the patrol was headed: they’d been posted back to Vietnam, they said, and were taking us there with them. Captain Danh told us that we’d cross the border somewhere near Highway 1, but he wouldn’t say what they planned to do with us then: only that he was joining a larger unit.

  Along the Trail at intervals, we passed way stations guarded by a few NVA soldiers: groups of little huts whose roofs were camouflaged with palm fronds. Arms and food were stored there; trucks could be hidden from air attack, and sometimes there were vegetable plots to supply the convoys. I’ve learned since then that further north, where the Trail went through the jungles and mountains of eastern Cambodia and Laos, it was far more impressive than in this section. It had become a two-lane highway, and some of the main control points were as big as villages, with barracks, fueling stations, dispensaries, shop facilities and comfortable rest houses. Hidden from the air by the jungle canopy, the convoys of trucks moved bumper to bumper, like traffic in a city at peak hour, their headlights at night making glimmering chains in the blackness.

  But there wasn’t much traffic on our branch of the Trail, since the Delta provinces it led to weren’t where Hanoi’s troops and supplies could yet be concentrated. Also, the border region here was an open country of paddy fields and light forest—so that trucks would easily have been seen from the air. Traveling by day, it was safer to go on foot, as we were doing. Trucks moved at night, and even then their numbers here were few.

  At first we kept hoping that we’d ride in one, instead of walking. But Captain Danh told us that the trucks were heavily loaded, and our patrol would go all the way on foot: it was less than ten days’ march, he said. He didn’t talk much about the unit’s function, except to say that it was part of a liaison team that helped to secure the Trail, working in cooperation with the local villagers.

  A liaison team could be doing a lot of things; we all knew that. When we talked it over, Mike said he believed that Captain Danh’s unit was connected with COSVN: the secret Central Office for South Vietnam the Americans were always looking for, which was supposed to be directing the war. He’d heard that COSVN was located just a few kilometers north of here, in the rubber plantation area called the Fish Hook. And he thought that the team’s real function would very likely have been to negotiate purchases of arms from corrupt Lon Nol commanders on the west bank. It might also have been involved in the rubber trade, he said. The Communists sold rubber to the Lon Nol forces, and the Lon Nol Government sold it abroad: they added a lot to their treasury that way. Mike had a lot of information like that. Some of it probably came from Aubrey Hardwick; and I would guess that Aubrey’s sources were his friends in the CIA.

  We were dressed and equipped just as the soldiers were, except that we carried no weapons. We wore our green cotton uniforms and cotton bush hats, and carried our packs and our cotton tubes of rice as they did. And Captain Danh had kept his word: we had Ho Chi Minh sandals on our feet. When we’d first put these on, we’d felt as though we were flying. But with our feet half-bare, we constantly feared a bite from the small brown krait which the soldiers called cham quap. It looks just like a dried branch, and the men were always watching the ground. Many North Vietnamese soldiers died from the krait’s bite, they said. The medic carried snakebite capsules—but this didn’t reassure us very much.

  The team’s diet was extremely basic: small portions of rice, shreds of dried meat and fish; a few vegetables. Most of their provisions they got from the way stations; but sometimes they got supplies from the villages we passed through. They always paid for the food; they never plundered. They ate only twice a day, morning and evening, and marched for very long periods without breaking to rest. By carrying such light gear, they covered many more kilometers a day than Western s
oldiers could have done. But the weather was still very hot and humid, with little rain, and this made the march tiring. The gear we carried consisted of one canteen, a rolled-up hammock, a light nylon poncho, a mosquito net, a single change of fatigues and underpants, a metal dish, a small towel, and a fragment of soap. To clean our teeth we used splinters of bamboo. We washed in streams off the track, and filled our canteens there or from springs, adding purification tablets.

  Captain Danh didn’t say much to us at first, but he was always courteous and considerate. He gave us a small ration of Vietnamese cigarettes each day which I suspected were from his own store, and he lent us his own cut-throat razor to shave with, since no other was available. It was very blunt.

  There isn’t much to tell about the first four days of the march. We walked a little apart, always with one or two of the soldiers behind us. We were with these men, yet not of them: we were even made to eat our meals separately, sitting at a distance. It was only on the fifth night that we began to know them better.

  That was when we were allowed to sit with them around the rice pot. The story of our march really begins there.

  The woodland areas we passed through now were full of splintered trees and bomb craters—some new, some dating from the B-52 bombing of three years before. The craters were enormous: thirty feet or more across. Some of the craters had filled with water, and had turned into ponds where villagers kept ducks. Sometimes we passed ruined, deserted villages with smashed and burned-out houses that had never been reoccupied, where half-wild dogs snarled at us.

  Here in this Vietnam border country was where the war in Cambodia had begun. The Americans had carried out their secret bombing raids here, trying to hit the Viet Cong sanctuaries; and this was where the American and ARVN forces had invaded in 1970. Now the B-52s were bombing here again; but during those first few days, no bombs fell in our vicinity. The important convoys they were seeking weren’t here but further north, behind us. Once we heard low thunder from the north and felt a faint trembling in the earth, and we guessed that it came from the Fish Hook.