He paused, drawing on his bent cigarette, expecting me to be impressed.
I made a suitable grunt; but to tell you the truth I found his respect quaint, considering the life he’d led himself. He was revealing things not just about Aubrey Hardwick but about himself—rather as people tend to do when they speak of a parent or a lover. Uncle Aubrey was a figure from that War of wars which had loomed over both our childhoods, and which dwarfed the present conflict as legend always dwarfs reality. For Mike, Hardwick was a survivor out of legend: a flesh-and-blood artifact of whom he’d always be in partial awe—legendary though Langford himself might have become in the eyes of others. I wonder if it’s always like this, as eras give way to one another? A hall of mirrors: reality emulating some previous legend, and then itself becoming legend, while not quite believing it can be so—transfigured only by death. There’s a pathos about it, don’t you think?
Mike was continuing to talk. “So I did what I could for the old boy. I even used to believe I was doing some good, in a way. Helping to stop the Communist takeover in Asia. Now you’ll think I’m a hawk, or naive, or both. Well, I was bloody naive in the sixties, Harvey, that’s for sure.”
You’ve changed your views, then, I said.
“Oh yes,” he said. “I’ve changed them, all right.” He expelled smoke with a slow, regretful hiss.
“I used to believe that the Americans would save Vietnam; save Cambodia,” he said. “Well, we know now what a joke that is, don’t we? The South’s fighting for its life, and there’s no hope left. Nixon promised the South that he’d back them all the way with money and arms, and never see them defeated. Now Nixon’s gone, Congress is breaking all the promises: so the South’s finished. And you know what they’re going to do in Cambodia. They’ll shoot through soon and leave these people for dead: leave them to the Khmer Rouge. Even the arms and the food will stop. And the politicians and the spooks will go and start a new game, after that. Aubrey’s getting ready: you heard. Bloody sickening, mate.”
I’d no reason to doubt the feeling behind his words. Yet the odd thing was that they were spoken with the same lack of emphasis—even casualness—as always. He would always be like this: always the mild detachment, I thought, so that you wondered how strongly he felt about anything. I never heard him sound bitter or enraged: it was what was most attractive about him; it was why so many people liked him. He seemed to have been born unable to get angry or overinvotved—and yet what he was actually saying now was totally at odds with that. In made him the enigma he still is to me.
We know all this, Snow, I said. But come on, what can you do? It’s just about over now. The Lon Nol lot were too corrupt, too disorganized. They’re beaten.
He leaned towards me, and put both hands deliberately on the table. In him, the action was as arresting as a more violent gesture would have been in someone else. His voice remained low, but now I thought I heard a hint of vehemence in it. “No,” he said. “They’re not beaten, Harvey. That’s the lie that’s being put out so that they can be finally left in the shit. But they’re still holding most of the provincial capitals—right? And that’s where most of the population is now: the towns are crammed with refugees from the Khmer Rouge—people who are there because they’ve had a taste of what’s coming. If the Yanks did a real airlift, the Government could still win. Don’t you see?”
I looked at him dubiously, but I wasn’t going to argue. He leaned back again, stubbing out the tortured cigarette, and seemed to relax. “Maybe you think it’s a government not worth saving,” he said. “And I don’t think much of it, either. But the ordinary Khmer troops are still fighting like tigers for their families and their homes and their temples.” He gestured vaguely towards the drive. “It’s all so hopeless, but they’re so bloody brave. They know this government’s all they have. Yes, it’s rotten; but it gives them a chance against tyranny. Because what’s coming is real tyranny, mate: so much worse you won’t believe it. We’re not talking about the North Vietnamese any more: they might have been tolerable, by comparison.”
You think so? I said.
“I bloody know so.” He pointed at our fellow correspondents around the pool. “But these guys don’t know, the Government here doesn’t know, even their military brass don’t know—and Aubrey doesn’t know. He really does have a lot of links here that go back a long way: the high officials and the military and a lot of the royal family are his buddies, from his days as a diplomat here. But he’s too old to go into the field himself, and he’s got no field agents who can possibly get near the Khmer Rouge. No one can penetrate them.”
He was silent for a moment, and I saw that the legend, the surrogate father, was being rejected.
“He won’t listen to me,” Mike said. “Aubrey’s living in the sixties. He thinks it can go back now to the way it was under Prince Sihanouk: his favorite time in Cambodia. He remembers the nice young students he knew then, who’ve grown up to be cadres. He believes that bullshit he and his Foreign Affairs mates are putting out about Khmer Rouge intellectuals. He’s not in touch.”
Well, we’ll all be gone soon, I said.
“Not me,” he said.
Surely he wasn’t serious about that, I said.
“I’m staying,” he said. “With Ly Keang.” His voice remained unemphatic.
Why? For Aubrey? You’re crazy, I said. Get out: bring Ly Keang with you.
He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he looked towards the drive, speaking so softly that I had to strain to hear. “It’s not for Aubrey,” he said. “It’s for us; for Cambodia.” He looked at me. “Ordinary people get used and abused all the time in this world —I learned that when I was young. And I’m on no one’s side but theirs now, Harvey: the ordinary people here.”
He drained his cognac and soda. “It’s bloody politicians who’ve destroyed this country, isn’t it, Harvey? And some of them have never even seen the place. The farmers back home are right: never trust a politician.” He grinned without amusement. “There’s no way you can use people and save them at the same time,” he said. “That’s not the way.”
So what is the way? I asked.
“Fight with them,” he said. “That’s what I’ve decided. That’s where Aubrey can still be useful: he can get us some of the help we’ll need. The arms. The underground backing. We’ll need all of it we can get.”
I suddenly felt as though I were dreaming. His manner was so normal: almost happy. And yet what he was saying was unreal.
We? I said. We?
“Colonel Chandara’s outfit,” he said. “The Free Khmer. Ly Keang and I are going to be with them when they regroup: probably on the Thai border. This is my country now, mate. I’m staying to fight.”
I sat and stared at him: I’ve forgotten now what my next speech consisted of. Helpless remonstrances, no doubt: useless efforts at making him see what I considered to be his madness.
A few seconds later, the Khmer Rouge Bloodbath Song rose from a few tables away: looking across, we saw that the singers were Bill Wall and a couple of British correspondents. Bill was looking in our direction, beckoning to us to join them. Standing to obey, I found that I’d become fairly drunk. Langford had too, I think.
So the scene begins to distort and fade: the dark garden, the empty blue oblong of the pool, the strings of colored lights in the trees, the light tropical suits and dresses, the white and brown faces, and the old hotel’s ranks of secretive windows, whose closed nineteenth-century shutters had once hidden French colonial intrigues and boredom and adulteries, and were now hiding the more frantic intrigues and ringing phones and quick fornications of my colleagues of the international press, who had made the Royal hum like a beehive for these past five years. Soon (if I can allow myself a moment of elegy for this lost period of my life) the humming would stop, and we too would be gone; soon, any night now, we too would be nothing but after-images, hanging in the air of the old Hotel le Royal: the important ringing of our phones stilled, our jokes and all our wi
ld urgencies and deadlines as archaic and faintly ridiculous as the concerns of the French planters. But for now, and perhaps for the last time, here we were, seated at our small round table, singing into each other’s faces while a dubious and uneasy Chinese waiter watched us. The tune was “She was Poor but She Was Honest”:Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath
When the Khmer Rouge come to town?
Yes, there’ll be a dreadful bloodbath
When the Khmer Rouge come to town ...
Langford sang well: he had a natural, pleasing voice. Opposite me, his face grew a little red, and a sheaf of yellow hair fell across his forehead. Watching him, I said to myself that his notion of belonging here was nonsense. He’d never looked more like a country Australian, and I decided that the declaration he’d just made to me was the product of a mood; a fantasy. After all, most of us were a little deranged, in that month.
2.
HARVEYDRUMMOND
Aubrey Hardwick proved to be wrong: the Khmer Rouge didn’t break through in the next few weeks. The city held on through February, and all through March as well.
It was April that brought the fall; and even then, it came as a surprise. Most of us were still imagining that defeat might still be a few more months away. We can never believe in any absolute end, I suppose; we’re never quite ready.
I know that was Langford’s frame of mind. If it hadn’t been, he’d never have come to Saigon with Jim Feng and me.
We made the short flight there on Thursday, April 10th, intending to return to Phnom Penh in forty-eight hours—and the reason we went was that it now seemed certain Saigon would fall first. It could now only be weeks—perhaps days—before the North Vietnamese Army reached the capital. Nobody knew what would happen then; there was still talk of a truce.
Our bureau chiefs were pressing us to go, of course, but that wasn’t what gave the trip its principal urgency. We’d given the war a good slice of our lives: we wanted to be there at the end.
Showered and changed, Mike, Jim and I sat in the same old green wicker chairs on the Continental terrace, drinking beer.
It was five in the afternoon on Friday. We were surrounded by familiar figures from the press corps and the foreign embassies; our drinks were brought to us across the tiles by the same aged Chinese waiters. But beyond the terrace’s low stone wall, nothing was the same. The Army of North Vietnam was moving south at terrific speed, and everything was going down in front of it. Sometimes there’d apparently been no resistance. The Communists were now about half an hour’s drive away, on Highway 1. No one had imagined that the end would arrive so quickly.
We’d just got back from covering a battle at Xuan Loc: a province capital where the Army of South Vietnam was trying to make a final stand. We’d gone in the back of a military truck to a point as close as we could get: a South Vietnamese artillery position in a hamlet where long-range shelling was going on. Mike had taken pictures; Jim and I had done a filmed interview with an ARVN military spokesman. The spokesman had said that Xuan Loc was crucial, and that the ARVN would hold it. But we knew they wouldn’t. Nothing would hold any more.
Hue was gone. Da Nang was gone. Kontum, Pleiku, Nha Trang and Cam Ranh were gone, as the North Vietnamese military machine came south. These were places that were meant never to fall: towns which the vanished American Military Command had sworn never would fall, and from where we’d reported times without number. Now they’d gone down within days of each other. Resistance was crumbling by the hour, and out on Tu Do Street, beyond the terrace, the refugees were streaming by: in battered cars, on bicycles and on foot. Peasants in black pajamas walked with middle-class families in Western dress, all of them carrying their toddlers and babies. All wore the same expressions; all carried baskets and suitcases and sad plastic airways bags crammed with possessions. Some pushed barrows. Malignant brown gusts of wind churned up choking dust about their feet.
How can I explain to you what Saigon was like, that afternoon? The smells were still petrol and diesel fumes, cordite, nuoc mam and spices. But it seemed to me that a new and larger odor lay over everything, permeating the whole city. It was the odor of human fear: a little like seaweed, or perhaps dying flowers. I can still smell it.
There was the usual traffic jam in the square, but a new sort of rage could be heard in the blaring horns and voices. Above the din hung impotent Government propaganda banners in red and yellow. Everything leaned and moved like the sails of a yacht, fast yet slow, fast yet slow: and as in bad dreams, the appearance of things remained slyly unchanged. But at the deep, hot core of the din, everything was changing.
Correspondents were now being visited in their hotel rooms by beautiful young Vietnamese women from wealthy families, who offered their bodies and then begged to be transported to America; Europe; Australia. One had knocked on Bill Wall’s door the week before, with a briefcase in her hand. She had opened it up, and it was jammed with a hundred thousand U.S. dollars in cash. All she asked was to be taken out, Bill said. She wept when he refused.
We now watched two cars stalled at right angles, a dozen yards away: a battered blue-and-cream Renault taxi with an ARVN captain in the back, and a long black Ford driven by a man I placed as a drug dealer, in white suit and sunglasses. He and the taxi driver and the captain waved their hands and screamed at each other, their faces distorted with a rage that looked psychotic. Then a pistol shot made us jump. Leaning out of the taxi’s window, the captain had drawn his Colt .45 and had fired into the bonnet of the Ford.
Mike threw back his head and laughed. “Shot him between the headlights,” he said, and Jim laughed too.
But I couldn’t laugh. My throat was dry, and sweat sprang from the palms of my hands. Even machines had to be punished now; and what everyone was thinking of was flight. It was in their faces, all of which seemed to look inward. Everyone was thinking the same thing: you could hear it, pulsing in the air. Where, where can I run? Who will save me?
We’d listened to many rumors, that afternoon: rumors of what would happen when the Communists arrived. Everyone predicted a massacre of civilians-like the one that the Communists had carried out in Hue in 1968. The first people to be killed, it was predicted, would be civil servants—and foreign journalists like us. And there were stranger rumors. All single women would be made to marry Communist soldiers—and the painted fingernails of bar girls would be torn out. There were also rumors of reprieve: the American B-52s would come back, and save the South at the eleventh hour. The Americans would not desert them.
Jim Feng suddenly spoke to me, gazing out at the crowd. “How much longer, Harvey?”
It wasn’t the first time we’d discussed this question, and I knew he was asking now for a reappraisal.
Maybe a week or ten days, I said. It all depends on how hard the ARVN will fight for the city. Or maybe President Thieu will pull off a deat—although I doubt it.
Jim turned to Mike, his eyes narrow and sharp: almost elated. “We should stay, Snow,” he said. “We should stay for the bitter end, when the NVA get here. You too, Harvey.”
I shook my head. Beyond the call of duty, I said. I doubted that there’d be a single correspondent in town when the NVA arrived. The rumors could be wrong, I said, but I’d rather not put them to the test. All the big outfits were making their plans to evacuate already: Telenews too. No one wanted to be stood against a wall. Neither should you, Jim, I said.
But Jim shook his head, and leaned forward earnestly. “It won’t happen, Harvey. A lot of journalists are pissing their pants over nothing. The North Vietnamese won’t execute news people. We know what they’re like, Mike and I: they’re disciplined. They play by the rules. Isn’t that right, Mike?”
Mike nodded. “I’d trust them,” he said. “Although I wouldn’t trust the Viet Cong. But I won’t be staying, Jim. I can’t wait here that long. Things could go down at any time in Phnom Penh. I have to get back to Ly Keang.”
Jim leaned back in his chair and sighed, beer in hand, his expr
ession resigned and wistful, his legs in their faded khaki trousers and highly polished boots extended in front of him. His white shirt was beautifully ironed as usual, and his slicked-back hair shone. But I suddenly saw the deep lines in his cheeks, and the worn look about the shrewd and humorous almond eyes; and I was looking at a double image. The young Jim Feng of a decade ago was sitting here too, in one of these same wicker chairs, in the time of Rolling Thunder.
“Sure, Snow, I understand,” he said. “You’ve got to be with her. But we spent a lot of years covering this war, didn’t we? A lot of our youth. A pity, not to see the curtain. Dmitri should be here too.”
“Yes, he should,” Mike said.
They were silent for a moment. Then, half humorously, half with sudden concern, Jim said: “Jesus, Mike. No more firefights. What will we do when there are no more firefights?”
He left us a little after this. Duty called him to dinner with one of his chiefs from Telenews, in town on a visit from London before the office closed down.
Mike and I sat on. He was looking out over Tu Do with a distracted eye, and the question he asked me now showed that his thoughts were with Ly Keang.
“Did you check with the AP office, Harvey? Anything new from Phnom Penh?”
Highways to a War Page 46