The Reckoning

by Chonghaile, Clár Ní;

  Two months after I left Korea, when he fired General Douglas MacArthur for his gung-ho insubordination, Truman said the aim was always to prevent conflict spreading. “So far we have prevented World War Three,” he said. In some ways that is all we did then and all we have been doing since. I wonder how long we have to keep preventing it, Diane? All the best, most enduring stories contain the rule of three – three characters, three temptations or three tests. Must this not also be the case with the human story – surely the greatest tale ever told? Does this strike you as absurd? Perhaps but somewhere deep inside, I believe this and I am glad that I will not be around for the conclusion of this particular triptych.

  I had another more personal reason for wanting to go to Korea. I had, to some degree, made my peace with Robert’s suicide but it was a false armistice. I did my damnedest not to think about it but curiosity could not be so easily dismissed. I yearned to experience something of what he had endured. I did not presume I would find all the answers in Korea but I dared to hope for some kind of revelation, that I might then bury in the deep hollow of my brain where I had hidden the act itself.

  The Korean War was a nightmare to cover. I stayed for six months – long, tedious days waiting for permission to travel to the battlefields while trying not to catch the eyes of irate US generals, who did not want to see any journalists, much less female ones, buzzing around their troops. Shortly after I arrived, US soldiers recaptured the port of Inchon, took Seoul and pushed past the 38th towards Pyongyang, their furthest incursion into the north. I covered the advance, finding champagne bottles still on the bar of the Russian commissar’s building in Pyongyang. These bubble-filled sentries stood under a portrait of Stalin who seemed to be glaring balefully down at the evidence of his allies’ sudden reversal of good fortune. He needn’t have worried: barely six weeks later, Pyongyang had been retaken by the Chinese, who probably found the same bottles of champagne to welcome them. I left with the American troops just hours before the city was retaken, watching in bemused horror as the retreating soldiers set fire to petrol dumps and stores, hoping to delay the Chinese advance. It was a ping-pong war, Diane, but the truly dreadful fighting was mercifully short. It was more or less over by the time I left in February 1951 and peace talks were soon to begin.

  What did I learn from my first real war assignment? I learned that I was what people call brave but this was simply because I did not fear death as much as I should. I learned that peeing on the side of the road is nothing. I learned that drinking water from rice paddies is not good for your stomach. I learned that appropriate clothing is critical for an army’s success as I watched US soldiers shiver on their push to the Yalu River. I learned that lying to please a leader never ends well and that if intelligence officers had dared to tell MacArthur the truth – that the Chinese were already in the country as he pushed his forces north – many lives might have been spared. I learned that ‘home by Christmas’ is never something you want to hear. I learned that what I was doing was what I was born to do. That raises a lot of uncomfortable questions for us both, I know. But it is the truth.

  And what did I learn about Robert? I glimpsed his warscalded features again in the exhausted faces of too-young soldiers. I heard echoes of his dry wit in the banter that filled the mess tents at night. I remembered the torment of his nightmares when I woke, sweating and tear-stained but with no arms to hold me. I understood more but I knew it was not enough. As I said before, Diane, war is personal. And I was still not a fighter and that made all the difference.

  Have you seen the monument to the Korean War in Washington? Imagine; I don’t know if you have ever been to Washington DC. It seems such an irrelevant gap in my knowledge and yet our whole story is encapsulated in that lacuna. How can I feel any connection when I know so little about you? That’s a mystery for smarter minds to ponder, I think.

  I read a newspaper article about the monument when it was dedicated a couple of years ago. The steel statues of the platoon on patrol gave me goosebumps. Anxious, tense faces, waterproof ponchos stretched over backpacks, uncertain steps and the last soldier looking over his shoulder, face haggard, mouth slightly agape, as if about to say something. In my opinion, the memorial captures the paradox of war perfectly – ordinary people asked to do extraordinary things. The fact that the figures patrol in a manicured park of disciplined trees adds to the feeling of displacement. The whole thing embodies that sense of being in a parallel universe where all the rules have changed and the ground is no longer necessarily stable under your feet.

  After my stint in Korea, I returned to Paris, where I remained based until 1963. I spent my 30s working feverishly while friends got married and settled down. I had no desire to do either. I relished my role as the eccentric, educated single woman, who could balance a dinner table and regale the other guests with fantastical tales from foreign lands. I was, in many ways, in my element. It was me, but not me, and yet more me than I had ever been.

  I continued to travel: to Algeria to cover the nationalist rebellion that would eventually threaten the destruction of the French Republic; to Hungary for the 1956 revolt and several times to Berlin. In 1953, I covered the trial in Bordeaux of 25 ex-SS men and 11 Frenchmen accused of the 1944 Oradour massacre when an entire village was wiped out in retaliation for the kidnapping of an SS officer. Men were shot in the legs and then burned to death while women and children were locked in a church that was then set on fire. Anyone who tried to escape was gunned down. I thought I was ready to hear the testimonies but my notes were so smudged by teardrops that I sometimes had difficulty reading them. It brought it all back. Some days I could hear Robert’s anguished voice rising from the corners of the courthouse, asking me again if what we did was justified by what they did. At night, I lay gasping for breath in my narrow hotel bed, overcome with fresh terror as I remembered the completeness of our collective fall.

  The key witness, the only woman to escape the blazing church, was so ill she could not take the stand and the judges had to cluster around her chair to hear her frail voice whisper that she had come out from the “crematory oven”. My stories from that trial pulse with a desperate, futile anger. I was partly frustrated with myself, with my inability to find the right words to persuade the world that these voices were a warning for the future, not simply an indictment of some distant past that belonged solely to ‘the monsters’.

  But my time in France was not all doom-and-gloom: despite my refusal to be stereotyped as a ‘women’s issues’ correspondent, I was not above covering the frippery that was the film festival in Cannes, or indeed the marriage of Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco. We are none of us perfect and in any case, glamour and gore are rarely mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite, in fact.

  In May 1955, Evelyn finally came to visit me. We had not seen each other since I gave you up and I had heard little from her although I received two or three faded postcards from India, which were sent to the Gazette in London, undoubtedly after she had seen my byline. She never wrote personal messages on the cards – just a few lines from Indian philosophers she had come across along the way. I took the postcards to mean that I was not forgiven but that I had not been cast out entirely.

  I enclose one of those enigmatic cards. I love the picture because it is so Evelyn – two pink elephants covered in silks and jewels rearing at each other. She told me the picture was meant to represent our feud.

  “Bizarre, melodramatic and absurd,” she said dryly.

  On the back of the postcard, she had written: Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside.

  I now know that those lines were from Ramana Maharshi, a Hindu holy man who retreated to the mountains after a near-death experience aged 16. He became something of a guru, attracting big-eyed, gullible followers to his hillside retreat. One of the many philosophies he advocated was self-enquiry as a way to banish ignorance. Forgive me, I am simplifying here, but essentially the idea
was to concentrate the attention on the source of the self, the fountain of all thought. I may be maligning the great man but I understood the quote to mean that Evelyn still thought I was being selfish and blind to the consequences of my own actions.

  When I asked her, she nodded but said only: “If the cap fits, my dear.”

  When she wrote to say she was coming to Paris, I was relieved that she had found a way to live with my decision but I was also nervous. I had become so comfortable in my new identity and I feared that if I opened the portal by meeting someone from my past, I could be sucked back. I had worked so hard to forget it all, to forget you. It was the most enormous act of deliberate delusion. I blanked you from my mind and if at times you came to me in my dreams, warm arms around my neck, laughter in my ear, I cast those images off as you would a nightmare. Like Henry after the war, I gave you no oxygen and so you could not survive.

  On Evelyn’s first evening, we walked from my apartment in the Marais towards the Jardin des Tuileries, picking our way through the traffic and skirting any awkward subjects with equal care. I kept up a breathless patter, filling any silences with titbits of history, gossip and throwaway observations about the landmarks we passed.

  When we were finally seated on the terrace of a café in the shadow of the Louvre museum, our cigarettes lit and beaded glasses of rosé blushing in front of us, there was no way to stall any longer.

  “I’m so delighted you came. I did so hope we could still be friends,” I said.

  “Of course, we are still friends, Lina,” Evelyn sighed. She had aged noticeably since I last saw her. The Indian sun had taken its toll and the death of her beloved father just a few months before had etched the wrinkles even deeper. But the fresh lines and new patina of sorrow somehow enhanced her beauty, giving her an otherworldly air.

  “But don’t take that to mean that I feel any better about what you did. I still believe it was wrong and it bothers me enormously that you will only see that for yourself when it is too late. There is nothing I can do now. You’ve made your bed, Lina. It just makes me so mad that you refuse to accept the obvious.”

  I tried to smile. I spoke to reassure her and maybe to reassure myself.

  “It’s not that I don’t understand but I believe I did the right thing, the only thing, Evelyn. Don’t you see that I am happy or as close to happy as one can reasonably expect? Can’t you see that I’ve made a success of it all? I would be dead now if I hadn’t left. And who knows, maybe she would be too. I couldn’t be a proper mother then, Evelyn. I did this for her too.”

  Evelyn’s lips bent in a wry smile.

  “You were always very good at excusing your actions,” she said. “It’s not your most endearing quality, I have to say, Lina. Still, I do understand how terrible everything must have seemed then. I just…”

  She paused. I couldn’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses.

  “I’m 36, Lina. I will never have a child and while I never thought I wanted one, I now feel a little shook by this reality. Oh, I’m sure it’s just my biological clock ticking and there’s nothing I can do about that, not given my preferences. But this sadness or whatever it is makes it even harder for me to understand why you gave her up. But that’s not even my main concern. I’m just so worried that this whole thing is waiting to explode in your future, like one of those bloody bombs they keep finding underground in London. I don’t want to be the one holding your hand when you realise years from now that you gave up the one thing that made life worth living. Because I care about you too much.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral although every word she said was screaming its echo in my brain. “I did the right thing,” I repeated.

  “Ah, but Lina, what you are forgetting is that it was not just your decision to make,” she said quietly, taking off her glasses as the sun dipped below the buildings opposite. “Have you realised that yet? And if you think my questions are uncomfortable, and I can see in your face that you do, what will hers be like? Because you might have to answer to her one day.”

  She looked at me for a long moment and then waved the waiter over and ordered another bottle of rosé. We didn’t speak of you again during that visit. But her words echoed through the years and probably played their own part in driving me to seek you out a decade later in Brighton.

  When I said goodbye to Evelyn a week later at the train station, things were almost back to normal between us.

  “I’m so relieved to see that your efforts to reinvent yourself have spared some of the Lina I loved,” she said, hugging me hard. “I promise never to bring up your decision again, unless you want to. I’ve done my duty as a friend – I’ve told you what I think and that will not change. I’m going to take a leaf from your book and move on.”

  She smiled, too brightly.

  “After all, I have my own problems to deal with. I’ve got to find a job, for heaven’s sake. At my age. In England, which as far as I can tell is as petty-minded and smug as it ever was. So damn grey and so damn full of smog. And still marked by those bloody bomb craters, even now. And we have teenagers to contend with and those horrible jeans everyone insists on wearing. Do you know they are even going to introduce new laws on drinking and driving? Apparently, successfully completing a tongue-twister and walking in a straight line is no longer bloody good enough. Oh Lord Lina, I am really going to miss India. Maybe I’ll head back there sooner than we think.”

  She tossed her cigarette to the ground and climbed the steps into the carriage.

  “Au revoir, Lina,” she said, delivering an ironic salute before she disappeared.

  I will be forever grateful to that woman, Diane. She knew the worst of me and yet she never cast me off. One must never underestimate how difficult it can be to stay friends with someone. The effort is all in the act of loving.

  I stayed in Paris for another eight years. I had my share of flings but there was no one of any note. Pretty men and cheating men and earnest men. They all fell short or made me fall short and neither outcome was acceptable for any length of time. A rather sad résumé of my 30s but I was happy enough with my lot.

  I would have to leave Europe to find love again. But that was still some way down my road, if you can pardon the ludicrous literary notion that we are travelling down a well-defined route towards an actual destination. Before I could find love again, I had another war to cover and a secret to discover.

  CHAPTER 21

  I arrived in Saigon in September 1961 and it was in that city, later that year, that I discovered the secret that had tormented Robert. I never expected to find my dead husband’s ghost roaming that sweaty, edgy town. I believed I had made my peace with what he had done. I had assumed my role in it, I had paid the price, and I had forgiven us both for our failures to believe enough in each other. But there is always more forgiveness to bestow. There is always room to understand more, if you can bear it.

  When I got to Vietnam, the US was preparing to jump to the next level of engagement. A big push by the Viet Cong to take Phuoc Vinh had convinced the US to send more advisors and President Kennedy had swung his full support behind South Vietnam’s leader, President Diem. By the end of 1961, there were over 3,000 US military personnel, still euphemistically called advisors, in the country and we knew it was only a matter of time before there were more boots on the ground.

  The Communist insurgency had taken control of large parts of the southern countryside, leading the US to adopt its so-called strategic hamlet programme, which sought to create secure villages that would be safe from guerrilla attack or infiltration. The programme was not a success but we were not yet in a morass. It was still just a mess in 1961 but already many observers were saying the war would last a long time and there would be no good ending, even if Diem had been dubbed “the Winston Churchill of Asia” by Vice President Johnson.

  I was among the first wave of journalists to show any sustained interest in Vietnam. The war was not yet a guaranteed headline-grabber
but I had persuaded McNeish that it would be in our interest to get an early view from the ground rather than wait for all hell to break loose, as we knew it would. The military coup against Diem in 1960 had piqued news editors’ interest, not least because of the massacre of hundreds of civilians, including a group who charged the presidential palace walls at the urging of one of the coup leaders. My strongest argument was that whatever was going on over there was not yet a full-blown war and so I should be perfectly safe. I had followed France’s doomed war against the Viet Minh rebels through the late 40s and early 50s and so I felt something of an armchair expert. I’m sure McNeish was as sceptical as I was about my baseless, uninformed assertions, but sometimes everyone needs just the merest hint of plausible deniability.

  Because of my early arrival, I avoided the worst of the US military restrictions on journalists – the five o’clock follies and all that nonsense came much later. By and large, we were free to cover what we wanted, although travel outside the main cities was dangerous. I spent most of my six months in and around Saigon, talking to residents and politicians and trying to determine how far down the rabbit hole this war would take us. Some of those articles were reprinted in Beyond the Battle, which my publisher decided to issue after my second novel was released in a bid, I suppose, to give my fiction a ring of authority and to build a new following among non-fiction readers. I agreed with the idea at the time but when the book came out, I blushed as I read these examples of ‘my early work’. The rage and naiveté on display in my articles are both uplifting and mortifying. I still believed then that knowledge could be a deterrent; I believed the pen could sheath the sword.

  Vietnam was something of a reporting watershed for me. I was 41 and, in some ways, already a relic: a print journalist in an increasingly visual world. I brought a camera with me but I was never very good at taking pictures. I found the lens drew attention to my presence in a way that a notebook never did. I felt conspicuous, which made me uncomfortable, and you could see that anxiety in my badly framed, unstable pictures. Taking photographs seemed like such an intimate intrusion. I felt like I was stealing people’s souls. I was hardly the best person for this new world of televised, access-all-quarters news.