Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  Then, on the fifth afternoon, at about four o‘clock, they came.

  There was a low, white gray sky, and we didn’t see them. But you never do; they fly too high. The Trail was taking us out of the open into a small forest when we heard the explosions. They must have been many kilometers away, but they shook the earth under our feet, and I knew instantly what they were. I’d heard that whump-whump-whump coming from around Phnom Penh, as the Americans carpeted the Khmer Rouge forces: but always a good way off. This was closer, and its volume was frightening.

  Captain Danh shouted an order, and the unit moved quickly into the shadow of some palm trees. They threw themselves flat, and Mike, Dmitri and I did the same. The earth here was pinkish and bare and dry as biscuits, and covered with dead leaves. I will never forget that earth, because a few moments later it heaved under us.

  It heaved in a huge spasm, and I found myself hugging it as though I were clinging to an upturned boat; then a roar engulfed us unlike anything I’d ever known. I’d never imagined such a sound. It was not a sound, it was something beyond sound; it opened up a gaping hole in the world and in my head, making my mind cry out in terror, making the whole world rock and sway. The palms and bigger trees nearby were bending like grass. This is not right, this is not war, nobody should be doing a thing like this, I said, and I pissed my pants. I was very ashamed: in all my years of covering action I’d never done such a thing. So I felt better when I learned later that many of the NVA soldiers did the same, in their first B-52 raid.

  Now, as the sound died away, we were all staring at each other, serious and amazed. There were no more explosions; the bombers had passed on. I found that I was shaking uncontrollably, and saw that Mike and Dmitri were shaking in the same way. Captain Danh, lying close by, was looking across at us with an expression of cheerful sympathy; he saw our condition, but made no comment. He pushed back his old-fashioned sun helmet with its red star; then he smiled, and sat up.

  We are lucky, Mr. Jim, he said. That was not really very close. One kilometer closer, and maybe we would have no eardrums.

  The pot was big, and of black iron. The soldiers cooked their rice in it every morning and evening, and they sat around it in a circle with their metal dishes and ate from it together: Captain Danh included. In the mornings, there wouldn’t be much talk, but in the evenings they’d talk and laugh quite a lot, lingering over their canteens of hot tea. They were doing this now.

  Darkness was falling, and their faces reflected the flames from the low fire on which the rice was cooking. Most of them, including Captain Danh, had taken off their bush hats and sun helmets. Their assault rifles were beside them; they were always alert; but they seemed unconcerned about the bombers. They were in constant radio contact with other groups, and seemed to know when raids were happening; apparently everything was quiet this evening, and they were listening to a newscast from Radio Hanoi on a shortwave transistor radio.

  We were camped in a clearing, in the sort of forest that was common here: almost like parkland, with spindly, white-trunked trees that looked like birches, palms and stands of bamboo, and spaces of the pinkish dry earth. As usual at mealtimes, Mike and Dmitri and I were sitting apart from the group. We squatted against a clump of tall bamboo that rose like a wall behind us, watching the little circle around the fire. Soon, we knew, a soldier would bring over our helpings in metal dishes. Our hands were never tied now, on the condition that we stood and sat exactly where we were supposed to, and made no unexpected moves. But we always felt a little sad to be segregated from these men we marched with all day.

  This evening, the feeling grew much stronger. We spoke about it together; we all felt it. Why could we not eat with them?

  This will no doubt seem strange and absurd to you; after all, we were prisoners, and regarded as enemies. But the feeling had partly been strengthened by the B-52 raid. No doubt prisoners begin to grow childish; but the fact is, with the raid still fresh as a thing we’d all shared, we felt that we were no longer simply prisoners, but temporary members of Captain Danh’s unit. And waiting for our rice, exiled from the cheerful ring around the fire, we grew more and more sad and resentful. We should be able to eat around the pot, we said.

  Until now, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers had not been real to us: they had simply been the People Over There. We had seen them only as prisoners, or the dead. Once, after covering a battle in the Vietnamese Highlands with the Americans, I had watched U.S. officers examine the body of an NVA soldier and go through his effects. It was the first time I had covered action against the North Vietnamese, so he was the first NVA soldier I’d seen at close quarters, and he had stayed in my mind. He’d looked so very small. All he had was his pack, and there was nothing inside it but a change of underwear, some letters from home, and a sad little plastic packet of rice. Such a small amount of rice, I thought, how could it sustain him? Now, I saw that these soldiers of Captain Danh’s liaison team were the same. He and his men had very little of anything; they managed on the bare essentials, and although we didn’t forget what sort of regime they fought for, we couldn’t help admiring their hardiness, and being touched by their poverty and simplicity, now that we saw it for ourselves.

  We’d already begun to be familiar with all the members of the team. Except for Captain Danh, they were all a lot younger than us. They didn’t tell us their names, so we made some up. The medic, with his open boy’s face and a big cap of hair cut straight across the forehead, was of course called Doc. A tough-looking man with slit eyes, who carried the field radio, was called Lenin. One with glasses and a sensitive face was the Professor; another, with heavy eyelids, prone to malaria, was called Weary; and there was a quiet, handsome one with a broad face, whom Mike called Prince. A stocky, cheerful man who always carried the rice pot on his back we called Turtle, because the pot looked like his shell.

  And we were getting to know the small habits of these men whom we’d never truly know. Turtle joked a lot, nudging his comrades in the ribs; Prince stared into space, as though remembering lost love; Lenin squinted and watched people, and sometimes picked his nose; Doc repeatedly pushed back his fringe of hair from his forehead; the Professor bit his nails and reread letters from home. They marched always in groups of three: Doc, Weary and Lenin; Prince, Professor and Turtle. Captain Danh told us eventually that this was the NVA practice: three-man teams, who supported each other as comrades. Strange, I thought, they are like us: Mike, Dmitri and me.

  Some of them had begun to show small signs of being friendly. Doc and Turtle would now and then smile at us as we marched, and it’s hard to convey what a smile means when you are in the hands of the enemy. They had begun to try and communicate with us in Vietnamese, telling us the names of objects and laughing when we pronounced them. When Mike spoke whole sentences—which he did quite well—most of the team clapped and laughed; and when I revealed that I knew more Vietnamese than they’d thought I did, many of them grew quite warm to me. They knew very little of the world we came from: when I tried to explain to them that I shot film for television, they couldn’t understand, although they pretended to, and I guessed that none of them had ever seen television.

  Tonight they were cooking pork soup and cabbage leaves to add to the rice: ingredients they’d got from a friendly village nearby, together with some bunches of bananas and palm-sugar juice. This was considered an unusually good meal, and the faces in the firelight were especially cheerful as they waited for it to cook. Our mouths watered. Hunger was gnawing at our guts as usual: we thought about food nearly all the time.

  Suddenly Mike stood up. He walked away from the wall of bamboos and approached Captain Danh, while we watched in surprise: he was breaking the rules.

  The captain turned and looked at him. He was standing by the pot while the men squatted, his face reflecting the flames of the fire. Mike smiled at him, but the captain kept a stern expression, and the men looked up in surprise. Lenin, who had been stirring the soup with a wooden spoon, sto
pped stirring.

  Excuse me, Captain, Mike said. We’d like to eat with you. Can we do that?

  You will be brought food in a moment, Captain Danh said. You should wait where you are.

  No, no, Mike said. I mean we’d like to sit here around the pot. We don’t feel good about being separate. It seems unfriendly.

  For a moment, his eyes getting wide, the captain said nothing, and stared.

  z Stooped a little, standing there in the too-small green uniform that left his shins bare, Mike looked a bit like an overgrown boy asking for a treat. All of us feel this way, he said. We’re sharing everything else. We even got bombed with you. Can’t we share the meal from the pot with you?

  His glance was both joking and confidential: a look that I’d seen other Australians use. He gestured with his hands, holding them palms upward, seeming to welcome whatever life might put in them. I’d seen Mike charm so many people like this, from customs people who would help get his film out to officials who would give him information. Would it work with an NVA officer?

  Captain Danh stared at him a little longer. So you want to eat rice with us, he said. He was still serious, and I thought he would now order Mike back. But suddenly he smiled too; and instead of answering, he held out his arm at full length towards the circle of men around the pot, his hand open, all the time looking at Mike. He nodded, still smiling; then he said: Please.

  Dmitri and I stood up, looking at each other. As we walked towards the pot, I had a surge of gladness; and when I found the captain smiling at us too, this gladness made my throat swell.

  How can I explain to you the feeling that night, as we sat in the circle around the rice pot? You will find it strange. You’ll also perhaps think it false, remembering all the stories about prisoners and hostages who in their fear and weakness begin to love their captors. But it wasn’t like that. We weren’t afraid of Captain Danh and his men; we weren’t kissing arse in the hope of release; we had simply begun to like them. And since we were officially neutral, these feelings didn’t make us feel compromised.

  Squatting down together, we filled our dishes, and for a time, everyone just ate. The heat was still heavy, but the sky was clear; looking towards the north above the dark tops of the trees, I could pick out the star we call in China the Herd-boy. Far away twinkles the Herd-boy star, I thought: a line from one of the old poems my father used to read to me. For some reason I’d begun to think in Mandarin again; usually I think in English. From somewhere in the bamboos, a night-bird kept making the same call; now and then a group of monkeys chattered in alarm. There were no other sounds.

  Turtle belched, and everyone laughed except Captain Danh, who ate without expression. He was sitting directly opposite me, and I stealthily watched him: it was like trying to understand a strict schoolmaster. I’d begun to suspect that our fate was in his hands: that he could turn us over to his superiors, or else set us free at the border. When I thought of being in some prison camp in Hanoi it made me sick with dread, and I would study Captain Danh’s face for clues to his likely intentions. He had taken his helmet off, and a lock of his thick hair fell across his forehead. In the firelight, his face had a bronze tinge, and was deeply shadowed—which could have made it threatening, but didn’t. He had a habit when he smiled of raising his eyebrows and wrinkling up his forehead: his face then became very warm. His eyes were set wide apart, and he had the sort of gaze that did not shift from your face when he spoke to you. Two kinds of men do this, in my experience: those who are dishonest and unusually calculating, and those who have the sort of honesty that will not allow them to compromise. Captain Danh seemed to be of the second kind; but how could I be sure?

  He had spoken to us very little until now, except about practical things. And I had to remind myself that like all NVA officers, he would also be a dedicated Marxist cadre, no doubt with a fanatical devotion to his cause, and a fanatical hatred of the West. The evening before, he had sat down with his men and conducted some sort of political session, obviously aimed at boosting their morale; it had ended with the singing of a patriotic song. But he had not been very authoritarian about it: the six young soldiers had been relaxed and casual: laughing, exchanging jokes and cigarettes and even clowning with each other like schoolboys. They obviously respected him without fearing him. Captain Danh didn’t seem like a fanatic; but his reserve could be hiding it.

  Mike rubbed his belly, grinning at Turtle across the fire, and spoke in his rough Vietnamese. This is good, he said. Then, in English: Bloody good pork, mate.

  All the soldiers laughed; they always laughed when Mike spoke Vietnamese, and Turtle repeated his phrase with amusement: Bluddy good pok!

  Captain Danh spoke to Mike in English. I think this is not as good as the food you are used to, he said.

  Mike said that he was quite used to this food; that he had often eaten similar army rations in Vietnam.

  But those would have been American rations, Captain Danh said.

  No, Mike said. They were South Vietnamese rations.

  Captain Danh raised his eyebrows. And what did you think of the Army of South Vietnam? We hear the Americans have a low opinion of them.

  The Americans are wrong, Mike said. The ARVN stay in the field as long as your troops do, and mostly they fight just as hard. Now that the American troops have gone, they’re fighting even harder. They stopped your army at Hue last year, didn’t they? And now they seem to be stopping you at An Loc.

  He said this with a pleasant expression, sitting quite still as he spoke, his eyes not moving from Captain Danh’s. Danh studied him for a moment, and the circle of firelit faces watched Mike too, not understanding what he’d said.

  For this they needed help from American bombing. And I don’t think they will win the war, Danh said. His voice wasn’t argumentative: it was low and thoughtful. They will not win because they have nothing to believe in, he said.

  And what do your troops believe in, Captain?

  Dmitri Volkov had spoken up, and my stomach was clutched at by unease. The Count was so likely to say unwise things, even in our present situation.

  My troops?

  Captain Danh looked around the circle of listening young men, whose frames were so delicately made that they scarcely appeared capable of bearing any sort of hardship at all. They know very little about politics, he said. Often they have marched for hundreds of kilometers; they have been bombed until they feel crazy; they are half starved, and homesick for their villages and their families. But they believe in their country.

  And you think in the end that this will be enough? Against B-52s?

  Dmitri sat hugging his knees, grinning at Captain Danh across the fire. Please, Count, I thought, don’t make trouble.

  All the bombs the Americans drop will make no difference, Danh said. His voice stayed quiet, and he didn’t seem annoyed. You know, they don’t kill many of us, these bombs. We have learned how to avoid them. Malaria kills more of us on the Trail than the B-52s do: we call it the jungle tax. So the Americans are deluded. They sit in the sky like gods, pressing buttons. But when we shoot them down over Hanoi, they don’t look like gods. Wars are won on the earth, in the end—and this is our earth.

  He smiled. But I think you will not like hearing this, he said.

  I spoke up now, before the Count could. As news photographers, I said, it wasn’t our business to like or dislike the war: we just recorded it.

  The captain frowned. But Mr. Mike and Mr. Dmitri represent the American press and television, he said. He seemed to mistake our given names for family names, as Vietnamese often do. Or perhaps—being an educated man—he was aware of our custom, but still chose to address us in this way. It may have amused him.

  So they also represent the American government, he went on. And you, Mr. Jim: you represent the British government in the same way. Isn’t that true?

  No, I said. And I tried to explain that the American and British television networks and magazines we worked for were independent, and n
ot owned by governments. We showed what was happening in our pictures and film stories whether it was good news for the Americans or bad, I said.

  You risk your lives, Danh said, and narrowed his eyes. Why would you do that if you are on no side?

  It’s our living, I said.

  You do it just for money? Danh looked from one to the other of us.

  Money and fun, Dmitri said.

  And you have no beliefs?

  Beliefs? Sure, I have plenty of beliefs, Dmitri said. Too many. My friends will tell you that. But beliefs have nothing to do with the job. Beliefs are private, Captain.

  I found that I was gripping my elbows tightly as I sat; I had become very tense. This discussion surely had a purpose, and if Dmitri went too far, he could lose us whatever chance we had of freedom. A spark snapped in the fire, and we all turned our heads; it was that quiet.

  Please explain to me, Danh said. Are you saying that you would report the truth about battles won by our forces?

  We do it all the time, I said.

  Not like Radio Hanoi, Dmitri said.

  Danh appeared not to hear this; or perhaps didn’t wish to. He turned to Doc, who sat beside him, and whom I guessed to hold a higher rank than the other soldiers. He spoke quietly to him in Vietnamese, while Doc nodded; I could understand almost nothing, but I gathered that Danh was repeating what we’d just said. Lenin was listening intently, his eyes glinting and fixed. Then the monkeys chattered again, in the dark wall of trees and bamboos, and Danh glanced towards the sound and smiled. He had the sort of smile that stopped things from being too serious.