River Of Time

by Jon Swain

I brought to Phnom Penh next to no clothes but a few books and the usual immutable paraphernalia of the journalist in those days – an Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter and a camera. Going to Indo-China, I felt I was following my deepest instincts, drawn by some inner compulsion. Ever since my teens, this corner of Southeast Asia had seemed to me mysterious and oddly poetic; now here I was in its most enchanting city, able to be myself without being under obligation to anyone for the first time since I had left public school.

  I explored the friendly little city – a perfect fusion of French and Asian cultures – feeling I had arrived in a world of new dimensions where all my dreams could come true. All the accumulated restraints of western life could be abandoned in the primitive simplicity and beauty of Indo-China. I’d had a reasonable amount of luck – loving parents, a good education in Britain – but I was determined to make my way as a foreign correspondent without the string-pulling that marked many such careers. Here I would be able to say my goodbyes to the gaucheries of my youthful self and be free for the first time in my life.

  I arrived with a young man’s conceptions about the glory of war and believing firmly in the chivalrous ideal. I had read widely; I had grown up on Buchan, Conrad, Forester, Henty, Wren, but also on books about World War Two and France’s own wars in Indo-China. The need to confront a life-threatening situation was strong. I itched to know, albeit with trepidation, how I would react on the borderland of death. Would I behave like a staunch Buchan hero or panic and run away?

  I already had an Indian upbringing which gave me a feel for life in a colonial environment. Until 1953 I grew up in the first years of independent India, but my parents’ life was even then pure British colonial. I was much more seduced by the French version, based I believed, in simplistic terms, on the system of the three Bs – Bars, Boulevards and Brothels. Of course there was much more to it than that; and this helped make Indo-China so appealing and intriguing to me when I finally arrived there.

  The French backed their colonial ideals by imposing on the natives of Indo-China their own ideas about education, culture and religion. Their rule often turned out to be brutal. But making a comparison of the French and British colonial systems, Lyautey – that enlightened Marshal of France, who had played a heroic part in France’s conquest of Tonkin, the northernmost region of Vietnam – once said that the British had the advantage over the French in that the people they sent to the East ‘are usually gentlemen’. However, he went on to say: ‘We have one over you. We are less exclusive in our contacts with Orientals, and less obsessed by social and colour prejudices.’ And it was true. A French army officer walking down the street with his native wife and métis children in tow was commonplace in France’s colonies. The English frowned on intermarriage, isolated themselves in ‘Whites Only’ clubs and tended to regard their colonial subjects as belonging to a lower social order. But in Indo-China, the French colonised down to the very roots of life so that even the poor ferryman on the Mekong might once have been a Frenchman – sometimes the man painting at the top of the ladder and the man holding the bottom of the ladder would both be French. In the hidebound India of the British Raj, an Englishman would never have deigned to such ‘lowly’ jobs. This difference of approach, French and British, was very evident in Cambodia where, for instance, a French institution like the Lycée Descartes across the tree-lined avenue from Le Royal was, when I arrived, a delightful racial mixture of walnut-brown Cambodian and white French children.

  Le Royal soon became home, its courteous staff under Monsieur Loup, the patron, as familiar as my colleagues. It was also a place where the foreign community, particularly the French, congregated. Each day saw long-legged French girls grace the pool. Their presence conjured up an irresistible atmosphere of hot sex and ice-cold drinks. La Sirène, the outdoor restaurant, served fresh Kep lobster, crab and delicious fish called Les Demoiselles du Mekong. A permanent fixture was a bronzed bald-headed and muscular Frenchman who swam fifty lengths of the pool first thing in the morning. He was Doctor Paul Grauwin, who as the médecin-chef at the siege of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 was one of the heroes of that terrible battle which lost France its Asian empire. This modest hero had made Phnom Penh his home and ran a medical clinic in the town.

  The westerners – particularly many of the 3000-strong French community – were inured to the fighting; indeed, the war added a certain frisson to lives spent in cosy white villas behind high walls. The French had, on the whole, a healthy distrust of journalists, most of whom were Americans, and they received them dubiously, sometimes with overt hostility. They associated them with bad news and chaos; and in a sense they were right to do so. These Frenchmen believed that the communists were winning the war in Vietnam, not just because of the failings of the United States army, with its bad habit of substituting firepower for manpower, but also as a result of the wide access to the battlefield that the US accorded to journalists.

  They chose to forget that the French, too, had lost their own war in Indo-China, despite the heavy restrictions they had placed on the movement of members of the press. Accordingly, they tended to be stand-offish and to resent the intrusion of Anglo-Saxon journalists into their territory. It was difficult to argue with them for they had been living in a haven of peace. And now their comfortable world was fragmenting as the Vietnam war spilled across the borders into this exotic backwater. Some of the French, particularly the rubber-planters, who had previously lived in Vietnam, were seeing their agony unfold all over again.

  Before 1970, few countries in Asia were so united by their leaders as Cambodia was behind Prince Norodom Sihanouk. His little kingdom was still a marvellous oasis of peace. It was a deceptive calm, however. Parts of the peasantry had been radicalised by the years of resistance against the French. There was a deep-rooted dislike among them for anyone and anything to do with the towns, which they saw as the fount of corruption and oppression. These stirrings of rural discontent finally boiled over into a peasant uprising in northwestern Cambodia which Sihanouk’s army crushed ruthlessly.

  By now Cambodia’s neutrality was heavily qualified; it was being tragically abused by both the Vietnamese communists and the Americans. The port of Kompong Som (in those days called Sihanoukville) was the entry point for military supplies from North Vietnam transported through Cambodia to the communist forces in South Vietnam. In 1969 President Nixon authorised the savage and secret B52 bombing of the sanctuaries of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese communists just inside Cambodia’s borders with South Vietnam, less than seventy miles from Phnom Penh. The dream of Cambodian neutrality dissolved.

  In March 1970, while Sihanouk was abroad, he fell victim to a coup d’état organised by his right-wing Minister of Defence, General Lon Nol, which deprived him of his position as Head of State for Life. Petulantly, he allied himself with his enemies, the tiny group of Cambodian communists known as the Khmer Rouge whom he had previously sought to destroy, and with Ho Chi Minh and the communists of Hanoi. Lon Nol took Cambodia into the Vietnam war on the side of South Vietnam and the United States, and that was the beginning of disaster. The unity of Cambodia disintegrated in a bitter, inglorious war. Five years of carnage were followed by bloody revolution, famine and foreign occupation. The aftershocks are being felt to this day.

  Lon Nol gave the Vietnamese communist forces forty-eight hours to leave. They ignored him. A wave of anti-Vietnamese sentiment swept the country, reflecting the deep, ages-old enmity between the two ethnically and culturally distinct peoples. It was cynically stirred up by the Lon Nol government.

  Thousands of Vietnamese whose families had lived in Phnom Penh for years, even generations, sheltered in improvised camps, in churches, in schools, for protection from Cambodian anger. Upcountry, thousands more Vietnamese men and women were massacred, their bodies cast into the Mekong to float downstream past Phnom Penh and Neak Leung. A French Roman Catholic priest stood by his mission on the banks of the Mekong day and night, weeping and trying to count the bodies. Soon
afterwards, his throat was slit by the communist guerrillas.

  By the time I arrived, the irrationality of the war was already apparent. Lon Nol, the coup leader, was emerging as a weak vassal. His American patrons were incapable or unwilling to control the corruption, waste and incompetence of his army commanders. The army was outgeneralled by the Vietnamese communists. A combined American and South Vietnamese drive into eastern Cambodia to destroy the North Vietnamese (NVA) and Viet Cong sanctuaries helped protect the US withdrawal from South Vietnam but was a disaster for Cambodia. The war spread across the land as the NVA were driven from the border areas and melted deeper into the interior of the country for security. One by one, the provinces fell to them and their Cambodian communist allies, the Khmer Rouge, or became totally insecure. In no time at all, Phnom Penh was cut off from much of the countryside and there was often skirmishing on its outer perimeter.

  Though they were looking into the abyss of civil war, the Cambodians retained a sense of fun. On Proclamation of Republic Day in October 1970, when the Lon Nol government formally abolished the monarchy, Phnom Penh seethed with life. There were fairs everywhere and the city exuded a sense of continual and mischievous rejoicing. Food was not exorbitantly priced; the pavements were not yet the long dormitories of sleeping people they were later to become; the cafés were full; the milling crowds were smiling and gentle-eyed; the very air they breathed seemed to ring with laughter. Phnom Penh was an abidingly pretty city; absurd as it would later seem, its people were then filled with hope.

  In a corner of my studio at the Hôtel Le Royal stood a mysterious rucksack and a camera bag. They had been there for some time; unclaimed, forlorn and seemingly forgotten. Often I wondered about the owner. One day I asked my colleagues and was told they belonged to a handsome young French photographer, Claude Arpin, who had gone missing in eastern Cambodia a few days before my arrival. I soon learned that Arpin was one of a whole group of journalists of all nationalities who had disappeared in the chaotic first days of the war, when there were no front lines and a road that was secure in the morning often changed hands without warning in the course of the day.

  Among them were two Frenchmen: Guy Hannoteau, a writer I had met in Chad six months before and whose intelligence and sense of adventure I greatly admired; and Gilles Caron, who had made his name as a brilliant action photographer in the 1968 Paris riots. Sean Flynn, the photographer son of Errol, enticed back from a holiday in Bali by the outbreak of the Cambodian war, had also vanished down the same road. Two decades later, they are still missing. Proportionally more journalists were to lose their lives in Cambodia in those early, desperately dangerous weeks of the war than in any other conflict since World War Two.

  I never met Arpin. He was captured and is presumed dead, though nobody quite knows precisely how he was killed. But over the next few years I felt his shadow. He was the apotheosis of those young French men of action in the difficult post-war years who were prepared to risk their lives for their beliefs. It was as if they felt a burning need to assuage France’s shame of her 1940 defeat and the Occupation by deliberately seeking tests of skill and courage under the skies of Indo-China and North Africa. A former soldier in the French colonial paratroops who by conviction had supported the cause of Algérie Française and had been imprisoned for his role in the army revolt against Général de Gaulle, he had come to Vietnam to become a war photographer. He was an angry man, at odds with France’s de-colonising period. Like the others, he was lost one hot day on Highway One, looking for a battle to photograph.

  Highway One, the old Route Coloniale, runs parallel with the Mekong from Phnom Penh down to the ferry crossing of Neak Leung, then on through the rice-rich province of Svay Rieng to the Vietnamese border to Saigon. Ordinarily, it was a journey of no special moment. But it was on this road beside the Mekong where so many journalists were taken prisoner, that some of the bloodiest early engagements of the war were fought, and where I first experienced being under fire.

  The advance of the Vietnamese communists from their sanctuaries in eastern Cambodia had brought their columns to within fifteen miles of the eastern suburbs of Phnom Penh. Now the Cambodian army, under General Dien Del – perhaps its best general, a man with a merry sparkle in his eyes and a lovely wife – was mounting an advance to roll them back. Dien Del had set up his headquarters in a pagoda on the Mekong river bank. Frustrated at having to cover the war from the daily military communiqués issued by the High Command spokesman, Major Am Rong (an unfortunate name in the circumstances), whose favourite phrase was ‘Aucun incident significatif’, I was chafing to go out into the field. Bernard agreed, provided I could get a lift with a battle-seasoned correspondent who would keep an eye on an enthusiastic newcomer and make sure my eagerness did not become a liability.

  We set off in the afternoon and, as it became too late and dangerous to drive the short distance back to Phnom Penh, we spent the night in a white pagoda under the eyes of the thoughtful Buddha.

  Tiny lights darted outside, fireflies among the trees. Children like little burnt almonds appeared from nowhere, their eyes wide with wonder at the sight of a group of long-nosed strangers. We slept on the floor. The night was hot and tense; the mosquitoes came in clouds. Dawn was on its way when I awoke. The horizon over the Mekong was streaked with red. We splashed ourselves with river water and wondered what the day would hold. Dien Del gave orders for the advance and his troops moved down in single file on each side of the narrow road, backed by a couple of half-track personnel carriers. We followed, while the children and their mothers stared bleakly after us. Dien Del’s intention was to reach Neak Leung that evening. The soldiers were in gym shoes, grenades hanging like apples from their belts, and lugging bundles of rice. Most shouldered AK47s, the weapons of the Viet Cong, and some had Mat49s, French machine-pistols. As a talisman, they wore on a string around their necks a carved ivory image of the Buddha to deflect the bullets. For many, as for me, it was to be our baptême du feu. For what seemed an eternity but was actually only a couple of hours we moved down the road. Sunlight filtered through the trees. The road was lonely, but the soldiers walked nonchalantly, while I felt a mounting anticipation and excitement. Much of their training had been conducted by the French military mission in Phnom Penh, but they showed a singular lack of military precision as they ambled along the road.

  The only visible signs of the war were the blackened spars of houses burnt down in earlier fighting. The ambush came suddenly, scattering troops in all directions. One moment there was stillness. Then there was a burst of noise and confusion. A 75mm recoilless rifle opened fire from the brush beside the road. There was a boom and shudder of air. Guns spat around us. I dived behind a tree. There was shooting all around me now and it no longer mattered where it came from. It was close and it hammered at the brain. The tree I crouched behind seemed suddenly wafer thin.

  For more than an hour, the battle swirled to and fro. The Viet Cong had spotted us and the earth nearby rose in little spurts. Then, without warning, the gunfire subsided. The Viet Cong had pulled back. There had been only a few of them, a suicide squad left to block the Cambodians’ advance, to give the main VC force time to complete its withdrawal. The story spread that they were chained to their weapons to ensure they would fight to the death. It was nonsense. They were highly motivated, deadly soldiers; one could not help but admire their courage, if not their ideology.

  This was my first brush with death. An intense physical exhilaration swept through me at still being alive. Our advance took us down to the river bank of the Mekong and I stripped off and plunged in, the first of many cleansing dips in the great river. I savoured the coolness of the water, then walked back along the bank to the car. I tripped over the body of a dead Cambodian soldier and inquisitiveness got the better of revulsion. I lingered beside the corpse, puzzled at the look of composure and serenity on the young man’s face and the dark stains on the olive-green uniform. All the time, the Mekong was sliding by, a powerful but
paradoxical image of tranquillity. I never knew the dead soldier’s name, but I thought afterwards about this human debris in the field and suddenly realised I had turned a corner in my life; in an important sense, I had come of age. I remembered the warning from my godfather, who had won an MC with the Eighth Army in North Africa, that the most dangerous time in war was nearly always the first few weeks. The newcomer was prone to inordinate risk-taking, convinced he was invincible, certain that the bullets that split the air were always intended for someone else. No two trees are quite alike, and for years I could remember precisely the rain-tree with its spreading branches behind which I hid on that clear, hot May day. It was later felled on the orders of the Khmer Rouge, who had the entire avenue of trees along Highway One cut down for firewood, at the same time preventing the peasants from using them as shade from the hot glare of the sun. This destruction caused large parts of the road to cave in through soil erosion.

  The front was close to Phnom Penh; so close indeed that a thirty-minute drive in almost any direction provided a grandstand view of the war. Journalists could ride out, catch an unpleasant whiff of cordite in their nostrils and be back at Le Royal for breakfast by the pool. Indeed, it took less time to get to the front line than a Londoner takes to drive to work through the morning rush-hour traffic.

  The days were not always eventful. I even found time to start Cambodian language lessons. Somehow, my progress was sadly limited to the Cambodian proverb, ‘Mean touk mean trey, mean luy mean srey’ (‘Where there is water there are fishes, where there is money there are women’), which was always greeted with smiles which broke the ice.

  But it was on one of those morning sorties that I felt the jagged edge of fear and saw the war in all its misery and waste. The Viet Cong had cut off the road from Phnom Penh to the provincial town of Takeo. The Cambodian army was trying to reopen it, as it did almost every morning. Villagers told the commander of the little task force that the Viet Cong were dug in at the village of Tran Knar just up ahead. The dyke road rose several feet above the rice fields, so advancing troops had little or no cover from the men lying in ambush in their bunkers. Here, in the myopic tradition of World War One, the Cambodian advance was led by a standard bearer, a boy of seventeen with overlong hair, whose sum knowledge of military matters was three days token training at a recruiting depot before his dispatch to the front. Bravely, he marched ten paces ahead, his battalion’s flag born triumphantly aloft as he had been instructed to do on parade. He marched straight into the waiting guns of the Viet Cong. The air crackled with gunfire and the boy’s body leaped into the air as if it had been hit by a truck and fell in a crumpled heap on the tarmac. As the soldiers scattered, the major who had given him the job turned away, ashamed to show his grief in front of his men. Bullets cracked through the air and pinged off the road but the major did not seem to notice. He ordered two stretcher-bearers to recover the dead boy and the yellow flag at his side. They scampered up the bank onto the road under covering fire from the others, half-scooped and half-pulled the body and the blood-splashed flag off the road and scurried like beaten dogs to safety.