Spectacles

by Sue Perkins

  Both:

  Is that your cock hand, Ian?

  Because we were following the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the content of the show was naturally very WAR heavy. Everywhere we went, we were encouraged to discuss WAR and all things WAR related. The problem was, whereas the programme-makers might have been keen to talk WAR, the Vietnamese contributors (many of whom had served with the Viet Cong) weren’t. It was extraordinary. It was almost as if the conflict had never happened. The locals we met wanted to talk business, the future, the Western world. The Vietnamese were well and truly done with WAR.

  But the Americans weren’t.

  One of the interviews that stays with me most from that trip (sadly heavily edited for transmission) was one we did with a couple of guys who’d been in the Mistys – a US Air Force squadron tasked with disrupting Viet Cong supply lines along the HCM Trail during the war. Flying low, they would identify potential targets, then direct in fighter strikes. These men, now in their sixties, spoke with such emotion and such candour – a world away from the Top Gun cocks-out bravado we’re used to seeing on our television screens. There was no rootin’ or tootin’. No fist pumps. No ‘Yee-haw’. They were thoughtful and humble and more than once their eyes filled with tears as they told their story.

  Every day these two men would set out in their planes. Their regular tour took them over a particular mountain top and thence down into the valley beyond. Every day, on that mountain top, they would see the same kid, in his teens, rifle in hand, on sentry duty for the Viet Cong. Every day they would look down at the kid, and the kid would look up at them. They saw each other at the beginning of each and every day, these sworn enemies, and yet, for months and months on end, they failed to fire upon each other. They could have blasted that kid off the rock. The kid could have fired a shot that punctured their fuselage and brought them down. They didn’t. He didn’t. Some telepathic agreement existed from the get-go – that one would not hurt the other. Every other plane, and every other man further down that valley, was fair game. That kid killed other pilots. Those pilots killed many, many other kids.

  After the war ended some Mistys returned to Vietnam, not only looking for news of missing comrades but also, in a spirit of reconciliation, to meet those who had once been their targets. In the course of this, the two pilots came face to face with that boy on the hilltop. They learned about his family and about those he had loved who had not been so lucky in the face of the American arsenal. It was an emotional exchange. They still keep in touch.

  That conversation brought home to me so clearly how heavily the Vietnam War hangs in the American psyche, and how lightly it is worn by the Vietnamese. For the Americans, I guess, it remains the unwinnable war, or at least it was until Afghanistan and Iraq exploded again.

  Even though a map was never forthcoming, I do know that we passed from Vietnam into Laos the next day. I didn’t need a piece of paper to tell me that – the landscape did it for me. I have never experienced an atmospheric and visual change quite like the one that greeted me at the border – like two different worlds stitched together by nothing more than a makeshift barrier and a security kiosk. In crossing that line, we passed from revving motorcycles, shops and high-pitched chatter into an ancient land of peace and tranquillity. Buffalo wallowed in red mud at the side of the road. Dense forest stretched as far as the eye could see. Even the light was softer, clouded by the breath of the myriad trees beneath.

  Laos is a land with a deep contradiction at its heart. Its enduring beauty is forged by horror. The reason the trees have not been felled in their millions, like they have in Vietnam, is that is unsafe to do so, due to the tons of unexploded ordnance that remain in the ground from the WAR. In essence, those exact same bombs are safeguarding the beauty of the natural environment. How screwed up is that?

  We were joined at the border checkpoint by five government shadows, representatives of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, the only legal political party in the country. The head dude looked a little like Fu Manchu, but less jolly. He had grey pegs for teeth and zero laughter lines – I imagine because there had been no laughter in his branch of the LPRP. Ever.

  As with their neighbours over the border, the Lao people don’t dwell on what has been. They are resilient and resourceful. Every village we visited had houses built on stilts. Those stilts were made from empty shell cases dropped from American war planes. On the roadside small teams of women with wicker baskets picked shrapnel from the bushes. To venture even a metre from the cleared track is to take your life in your hands. Only a week before, a family of four had been blown to smithereens while playing in the land at the back of their house only a stone’s throw from where we were passing.

  We got out of the car on a whim and went to talk to the women. We wanted to know what that kind of exhausting and hazardous work felt like to do. As we approached, the government officials got out of their vehicles and approached them too. We asked the women a question. They waited for Fu Manchu to answer it. They repeated his answer, which was then translated for us.

  They told us just how much they loved their work.

  Despite constantly being around the props of WAR, none of these experiences had been especially dangerous, so the team decided to up the ante. This was, after all, as I had learned to my cost in Alaska, a show called The World’s Most Dangerous Roads. The next morning Ian informed us that were heading off to the Sepon Mine, where we’d shadow a private UXO (unexploded ordnance) clearance team.

  Liza:

  What’s going on?

  Me:

  Apparently we’ve got to go and stand on some bombs.

  Liza:

  He’s not giving up, is he?

  Me:

  Nope. He won’t stop until we’re actually dead.

  Liza:

  [pause] I don’t want to stand on bombs.

  Me:

  Neither do I.

  Liza:

  Well, I’m not doing it. I mean, I’m not Ross Kemp.

  So Liza, rather wisely, opted to stay at the base of the mine, whereas Lady Schmuck here crawled up a vast pile of rubble to meet the head of the UXO team.

  Me:

  [breathless] So who is this guy anyway?

  Ian:

  He’s an ex-special forces Swede called Magnus.

  I immediately perked up. Magnus is a name that automatically invokes excitement in me. I have never met an underwhelming Magnus. This Magnus certainly did not disappoint. He was eleven feet tall, cooler than a skinny dip in Naimakka and with a body that looked like a thousand hammers wrapped in velvet.

  I noticed that whenever he got close, my skin flushed and my voice shot up an octave. Damn – what is it about us women? The more remote and unreachable a person is, the more we want to save them. And so the more stubborn Magnus was with his answers the more I fell into his sex web.

  Me:

  So, Magnus, where have you worked?

  Magnus:

  Everywhere. Everywhere that is hell. Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo. Sudan was the worst …

  His eyes are trained on the ends of the earth as he speaks.

  Me:

  Do you get to go home much?

  Magnus:

  Home?

  Me:

  Yes.

 
Magnus:

  Ha! [A single, mirthless laugh] I don’t really ever go home.

  I bet you don’t, you damaged Nordic mega-hunk.

  Magnus:

  I have a cabin in the woods. It is very simple. Sometimes I return there. Alone.

  [Take me there! Take me there, you nomadic, lost soul!]

  Me:

  Do you … do you not have a partner?

  Magnus:

  No. A wife. Once. But there is no room for love when you face death every day.

  [I am in love with you! I am IN LOVE WITH YOU, you remote, disconnected mess of a man.]

  Magnus:

  But …

  He holds the pause for what seems like minutes. I lean into him expectantly.

  Me:

  Yes?

  Magnus:

  I do have …

  Me:

  Yes … [I whisper breathlessly]

  Magnus:

  … a cat.

  And with that our relationship is over.

  Now the possibility of a romance had disappeared, I was far more able to focus on the job in hand. Magnus walked me up what appeared to be a mountain of aggregate. We then took a cordoned-off path to the left, overlooking a large depression in the ground.

  I stared down.

  It is one thing to read that Laos is the most bombed place on the planet (over two million tons of ordnance were dropped on it by the Americans during the Vietnam War); it is quite another to see it with your own eyes.

  In the crater down below was one of the most depressing sights I’ve ever seen.

  A small clearance team was painstakingly working, not only horizontally, across the ground, but vertically down to the horrors beneath. The first layer had revealed unexploded phosphorus bombs, pineapple ‘bombies’ and 250-pounders, the second layer 500-pounders, then, going deeper still, all the way to the vast 3,000-pounders. The scale of the work, and its grindingly slow and meticulous nature, was beyond imagination. Magnus stood at the top of the ridge and calmly informed me that approximately 25 per cent of Laos’s villages are still contaminated with unexploded devices from wartime raids, which rained death from the sky, on average, every eight minutes, twenty-four hours a day for nine years.

  Ian looked pleased – he had got WAR chat – whereas I felt saddened to my core. For all the team’s hard work, it was clear this project was a mere drop in the ocean.

  And, then, just at the very point I needed to laugh, I looked back down to see Liza staring up at me, holding a pillowcase she had just personalized with a felt-tip pen. It simply read, ‘I AM NOT ROSS KEMP.’

  By now, Ian had figured that out of the two evils presenting themselves to him –

  spending another week with us lunatics

  serving time in an Asian prison for our murder

  – the latter was preferable. Now that his plan to blow us up had failed, he decided that the next best thing was to drown us in a river. That morning we woke to find an old man in orange robes coughing on the steps of our hostel.

  Me:

  What’s he here for?

  Ian:

  A monk’s blessing.

  Me:

  Oh. What for?

  Ian:

  It’s D-Day.

  I had no idea what D-Day involved, but it sounded like something I might want to get blessed for. Liza and I were duly seated on plastic chairs outside our rooms and wrapped casually in thin skeins of cotton by the monk’s second in command.

  A large bucket of water was placed beside us.

  The monk approached, hacking. His skin was like greaseproof paper. There was more muttering. We respectfully bowed our heads in prayer. Now was not the time for ‘Love Hangover’.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, the acolyte threw the entire bucket over us. And then, as soon as it had begun, the ceremony was over.

  Me:

  Do you think there was any element of the religious about that?

  Liza:

  It was like he was washing a step!

  I got up. The water had fairly and squarely sluiced my groin, and nowhere else. I had a blessed vagina. Finally, I had a blessed vagina.

  We spent the next hour in damp knickers, driving to the top of a hill. Below, a river raged. We drove down again until we arrived at its banks.

  Laos river crossings are often perilous, as the riverbed can be uneven and pocked with bomb craters. Instead of the depth being consistent all the way across, you can find the rock from beneath giving way so you end up totally subsumed by water. The traditional way to undertake a river crossing by car or bike is always to walk it first, bamboo stick in hand, prodding into the murk beneath and gauging the depth. Only this way can you be sure that your car won’t sink into a surprise hole.

  We stood at the water’s edge. It’s fair to say neither Liza nor myself was raring keen to take part in what amounted to an Asian wet T-shirt competition. I drew the short straw (again). I slowly waded into the current, stick in hand. To the left of me I could see villagers eviscerating a chicken, and seconds later its alimentary canal floated past me like a bloody question mark. I had barely gone three or four metres when my footing disappeared, and I was plunged in up to my neck. Our guides sat on the bank muttering and shaking their heads. Even Fu Manchu, our communist watchman, seemed keen that we proceed no further – unless the thumbs-down sign means something totally different in that part of the world.

  Ian, however, sensed this had the potential to become a properly Dangerous Road and excitedly shouted encouragement from the bank. He finally had the chance to literally kill two birds with one stone.

  I found my footing again, but a mere ten metres in my stick was spirited away by the current. I could feel the rip tugging at my shins. I pressed my toes into the wet rocks underneath to steady myself, but there was simply no way I could carry on without being swept downstream.

  ‘I can’t tell how deep it is out here!’ I yelled as I inched my way back to the safety of the bank. Ian said nothing, but simply stared at us. It felt a little like a dare. And, as you know, I can’t resist a dare.

  ‘Come on, let’s do this,’ I said in a voice not unlike that of Jason Statham.

  Ian carried on staring, before lifting his arm and waving us on.

  ‘Is that your cock hand, Ian?’ we chimed in unison.

  We slammed the doors shut. The engine purred into life.

  ‘Whatever happens,’ said Liza, brightly, ‘we laugh. OK? However bad it is, we just laugh and laugh.’

  So we did.

  Liza put the car into first, hit the biting point and then stepped hard on the accelerator. We launched into the water. First the tyres were slicked, then coated, then submerged. For a while it felt like they had no traction at all, and that we were merely floating. The water came up to the window on one side, but we kept on laughing – my hand on Liza’s hand like an aquatic Thelma and Louise. We laughed all the way until the tyres gained purchase again and we were safe on the other side. Fu Manchu’s face broke into a smile as he stared across. Thumbs up. Thumbs up. And on we went.

  Me/Liza:

  Ah, if there’s a cure for this

  I don’t want it [Do you think they use pigs as currency here?]

 
Don’t want it.

  If there’s a remedy

  I’ll run from it, from it. [I don’t know where I’ve got it from, but I’ve got a terrible rash on my arse …]

  Our go-to guy in Laos was a man called Huang, whose main contribution to the project came in the form of an unfeasibly giant tub of cashew nuts (hereafter known as Huang’s nuts). When I say giant – I mean, it was a foot-and-a-half Tupperware tube. You could lose your arm in there. After the endless inedible tangle of street noodles, they were a welcome change – although, as the week wore on, and the more nuts were eaten, the harder it was to get those remaining from the bottom. In the end you were mainly dredging up hard commas of other people’s skin and bacteria.

  As we ventured further into the jungle, approaching I DON’T KNOW WHERE, the roads became skinny. The hills got steeper and the car grumpier. We made it to the outskirts of a tribal village, whereupon we got stuck in a giant pothole. The engine screamed as we tried to rev our way out of it, but the wheels were embedded in thick red clay. We got out and pushed, but our flip-flops sank deep in the goo. The tyre tracks filled with buffalo piss, with mozzies skating on the surface. In the end we had to get the government guys to help us back to some hardcore where the wheels could get purchase.

  We puttered past the village – by the wooden stilt houses, a family of pot-bellied pigs, a cluster of chickens. As we left the clearing, the track became treacherous again and we slowed to a near standstill. Suddenly out of the forest came two men, bare-chested, skin gleaming, carrying baskets full of chicken guts. Both had large, sharp machetes in their hands. Liza was driving. They approached my side of the car. One raised his machete.