River Of Time

by Jon Swain

  Every building of any size was flattened – mainly by bombing from B52s and Phantom jets and shells from the eight-inch guns of American ships offshore. La Vang basilica, one of the most beautiful cathedrals in South Vietnam, was a broken shell with a splintered statue of Christ among the rubble.

  The tourist party from Saigon gazed in shock and silence at the broken shell of the cathedral, but after a while other instincts prevailed. Timidly at first, then with undignified abandon, they posed for family snaps in front of its bullet-spattered walls and amid the piles of rubble in its blitzed interior.

  Outside, in the sunlight, a gaggle of barefoot urchins, refugee children of the war, stamped their tiny feet up and down and chanted ‘You, Numbah One’, evidently hoping to cadge a few piastres. The visitors moved on to study other ruins.

  One of the party was Monsieur Benoit, a Frenchman from Toulouse, who was on a trip down memory lane. In 1953, he had fought near Quang Tri with the French army against the Viet Minh. It was a fact he made sure nobody forgot. Now he was hoping to catch a sight, a sound, or a particular smell that would conjure up his lost youth.

  He was a jovial fellow, who harboured an acute dislike for all things American. In spasms of anger, he would accuse the United States of a whole spectrum of crimes, from cutting down the tall trees lining Saigon’s boulevards to sabotage of the Anglo-French Concorde project. The destruction of La Vang basilica was the last straw. ‘Partout où ils vont, ils sèment de la merde.’

  Most of the twenty-five others on the tour were secretaries at the American embassy in Saigon. Bespectacled, middle-aged career women with a conservative outlook and with a deep-rooted belief in the nobility of what America had done in Vietnam, they went to Quang Tri to express their solidarity with the anti-communist struggle. ‘We want to see with our own eyes the extent of the damage,’ they said. ‘The Vietnamese are beautiful people and it saddens us enormously that they aren’t allowed to live in peace.’

  There was also a chubby American contractor. He proudly told me that he had been stationed in Cu Chi, near Saigon in 1965. ‘I’ve never dared go back,’ he said. ‘I’m scared stiff I might be recognised. One day, you see, I was shacking up in this house in a village when six gooks walked in. I guessed they were ’Cong and I grabbed my M14, put it on automatic and blew them clean away.’

  As the jet glided over central Vietnam, he said, ‘Wow! Very beautiful lakes you have there, very blue.’ Jacqueline’s mother, Regine, who had accompanied me on this strange and disillusioning tour of her battered homeland, turned to him and said: ‘Those aren’t lakes. Those are B52 bomb craters.’ Her voice silenced his boasting.

  Dalat was another exit from the war. The solitude and cool bright weather of the old French hill station, 190 miles north of Saigon, was a relief from the hubbub and heavy damp heat of the capital. The magnificent alpine scenery reminded me of another world. Here, during a period of calm, I went with Jacqueline, walked the mountain paths, ate some of the best French food in Asia at the L’Eau Vive, run by an order of giggling, guitar-playing Catholic nuns; and stayed in the ex-Emperor Bao-Dai’s palace, now a hotel. So much of Vietnam was in ruins. But in Dalat you would not have known. Standing on my balcony in the half-light, looking across the little lake to the empty hills, I understood more than ever why Jacqueline did not want to leave.

  Two hours from Saigon, at the mouth of the Saigon river, was a very different Vietnam – the beach resort of Vung Tau. The GIs went there for in-country rest and recuperation, the Saigonese for weekends. The beach was magnificent, extending for a couple of miles. The closed area reserved for GIs was sealed off with barbed wire. On the drive down, it was not unknown to pass bodies of Viet Cong laid out in lines beside the road like trophies at a big game shoot. They had been shot during the night and were there to serve as a warning to the populace. But once at the beach, surfing through the waves, no one thought any more of guns.

  Jacqueline and my job at Agence France-Presse opened up a fascinating and intriguing Franco-Vietnamese milieu, usually closed to most English journalists. I found that there was still a real bond between the French and the Saigonese based on a common education. French influence was especially strong among the older generation, still imbued with French thought, while the young Vietnamese were enthralled by French films; their favourite film stars were Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo. There were the usual distractions like the Club Nautique where people waterskied on a tributary of the Saigon river, but there was also another ‘scene’: philosophical discussions as on the Left Bank of Paris, an underlying sense of Marseilles-style decadence which was attractive, and many other possibilities, a sense that in sultry Saigon anything could happen, and it often did. The best of the French resented the intrusion of the Americans. Still, once a fortnight they used to take on the US or Australian army at rugby. They liked their parties, especially the traditional New Year’s Eve ‘Light at the End of the Tunnel’ party, put on with the spooks of the Saigon CIA station.

  One French figure I got to know well was Monsieur Jean Ottavj, the proprietor of the old Hôtel Royal. A Corsican, he had spent more than thirty years in Saigon. There were more important and more influential French people about – the diplomats, the planters, the businessmen – but there was none who was kinder. For a while, his hotel was home to myself and a few other British journalists. Monsieur Ottavj was an opium addict and his crinkled face was parchment-white. He liked to relate how he had once smoked with Monsieur Graham Greene. ‘Un homme très particulier, un vrai gentilhomme,’ he used to say. He lived on the premises. In the afternoons the upstairs corridor reeked; the sickly-sweet, unmistakable odour of opium leaking from the gap under his bedroom door.

  Ottavj, who was touchingly superstitious, attributed the war to the imminent end of the world. ‘Nostradamus a tout prévu,’ he used to say to us with his knowing look. In his last years he confused Greene with the fictional newspaperman, Thomas Fowler, hero of his Indo-Chinese novel, The Quiet American. ‘Monsieur Greene, pourquoi a-t-il tué l’Americain?’ he asked us. Ottavj had a special fondness for the English, which started when a Mrs Simpson used to bring a group of demure English ladies up from Singapore to Saigon for thés dansants at his hotel in the 1950s.

  When he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur, we organised a dinner in his honour. It was attended in an exceptional gesture by Brooks-Richards, the British ambassador at that time and a former member of Special Operations Executive, and continued over calvados until well after curfew.

  Then there was Dominique, patron of the Valinco restaurant. After a good lunch at his place, what remained of the afternoon was spent in torpor. As he sat, pastis in hand, at the bar, next to a bust of Napoleon, he looked the part of the seedy Corsican adrift in the tropics. There was always a Gitane in his mouth and a woman in the background, but Dominique was really in love with the patronne of La Casita, one of Saigon’s finest French restaurants, as many journalists were in love with her delicious and untouchable daughter Mireille. Early in the war, the patronne’s first husband, a Frenchman, had been shot dead by the Viet Cong while out duck-shooting amid the reeds on the other side of the Saigon river. Relations between Dominique and Madame tended to be volatile; I remember the day she rushed into his restaurant, her beautiful face distorted with rage, hurled dozens of plates at the wall, then, without a backward glance, stormed out into the street. She chose suddenly to marry a dull Swiss working for the Red Cross and disappeared to Africa, where it was rumoured she had opened a new Casita in Kinshasa (I have never found it). Poor Dominique was inconsolable. To block the sorrow, he downed an enormous quantity of pastis. But like Jacqueline, like Monsieur Ottavj, Saigon was his life; it was impossible to imagine him in any other place. I met him years later in Corsica; he was a forlorn man.

  Months of war went by. In April 1972, the North Vietnamese launched their big Easter offensive, overrunning Quang Tri and rolling down almost to the gates of Hué. North of Saigon, too, on Highway Thirteen to An Lo
c, the fighting was fierce. The last American combat troops had been withdrawn by now, but US officers were still in the field advising the South Vietnamese. Sometimes they died. On 19 June, Lieutenant-Colonel Burr McBride Willey was killed by a rocket on Highway Thirteen. Moose, his faithful grey mongrel dog who was always at his side, was killed too. He had been a man to admire and respect; brave, decent with a conception of duty which responded instinctively to the needs and welfare of the South Vietnamese soldiers and put new heart in them. At this juncture, when the Americans were going home, Willey’s death was even more a sad and useless waste. Another American legend, John Paul Vann, who had foreseen the disastrous consequences of the US involvement in Vietnam was also killed that year, when his helicopter crashed on a night mission in the Central Highlands.

  Towards the end of 1972, I was recalled to Paris, my assignment over. I resolved it would not be for long. I toyed with applying for a job in Fleet Street. But I knew I had to return to Indo-China. I had passed the best times of my life there; I had been at the centre of the world and I had found harmony between myself and outside events. There was also the unresolved matter of Jacqueline.

  The lure of Indo-China was that of a young enchantress. I was bewitched and could no longer resist. It was impossible to imagine that I could ever be happier. So one day I handed in my notice to Agence France-Presse and caught a plane back to Saigon as a near-penniless freelance. The BBC World Service promised that its Vietnamese Service would take three pieces a week from me, and that was it. This provided a weekly income of twenty-one pounds, about enough to take care of my rent. I was confident the rest would look after itself.

  By the time I got back to Saigon early in 1973, the Americans had declared that the Vietnam War was over. On 28 January, Dr Henry Kissinger and Hanoi’s Le Duc Tho had signed the Peace Accords in Paris. The plea from President Thieu that there could be no peace until there was a full withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam was overruled. There was to be a ceasefire in place.

  It had been a long war, and now the Americans wanted to wrap it up. The first American casualty of the war had been Tom Davis, a twenty-five-year-old adviser, killed as long ago as December 1961. He had been ambushed in the Plain of Reeds, west of Saigon. A shot pierced his head. It was his first Christmas away from his wife and baby daughter in Livingston, Tennessee. Since then, more than 55,000 Americans had died – half of them seventeen or eighteen years old – and 200,000 had been wounded. Davis’s name had been long forgotten.

  The last American troops pulled out. Prisoners were exchanged, and Kissinger said: ‘It is clear that whether this agreement brings a lasting peace or not depends not only on its provisions, but also on the spirit in which it is implemented.’ The Vietnamese continued dying at the rate of more than 1000 a week. The grieving went on. A closer scrutiny of this sad piece of arithmetic showed that more Vietnamese were being killed in the post-ceasefire fighting than GIs had been sacrificed by the US in a decade of full-blown war.

  The statistic did not escape President Thieu. The world, he told his people in a broadcast from his palace, had washed its hands of Vietnam. It no longer cared.

  South Vietnam’s national war cemetery at Bien Hoa, twelve miles from Saigon, covered many acres of ground between a crowded four-lane American-built highway and a cement works. It held more than 12,000 soldiers’ graves, a fraction of the nation’s war dead. But every day it grew larger, as ten new graves were dug. The air was loud with the wailing of widows and the crying of children, and through the sobs could be heard the dull ‘thud-thud’ of spades digging more graves for the next day’s bodies. The ceasefire failed to change the complexion of this cold corner of Vietnam.

  The cemetery is still there today, unkempt and overgrown, its graves desecrated by the communists after their final victory in 1975. Many of the dead ARVN soldiers had their photographs engraved on the headstones. The communists smashed these with rifle butts, even shooting out the eyes – a dismal testimony of the hatred generated by more than thirty years of war.

  One day I travelled up to the Central Highlands, a place of hypnotic beauty, 300 miles north of Saigon. I wanted to find out how the ‘peace’ looked for the typical soldier in the 1.1 million strong army of South Vietnam. I found that the war was as sad and brutal as ever, despite the official ceasefire and US departure. It was also a good deal more dangerous. After the US withdrawal, ARVN could no longer rely on the vast array of America weaponry to get it out of trouble. Its soldiers had to fight every battle on their own and for the first time in years ARVN generals had to be mean-minded, drastically limiting the use of artillery and air-supported armour as back-up.

  In the Central Highlands, I flew by helicopter from Pleiku to Tango Four, a South Vietnamese firebase clinging to a rain-soaked ridge north of Kontum city, on the fringes of communist-controlled territory. I stayed several days. It was held by the second battalion of the 23rd Ranger Group.

  At six in the morning, the outlines of the firebase were dim and hazy. The soldiers, wet and cold, were just emerging from bunkers ankle-deep in muddy water. The guns were hushed. Then, as the layers of early morning mist faded and the day got underway, so too did the war. Fifteen rangers shouldered M16 rifles, machine guns, packs, ammunition; and, with hardly a word of farewell, slipped out of the camp. Seconds after they had passed beyond the safety of the barbed wire perimeter and bamboo palisade (a quaint hangover from the Indo-China war), the patrol vanished like a green serpent into the jungle.

  Its departure was watched with anxiety. Tango Five, the nearest outpost on a hill across the valley floor, had been heavily shelled during the night. Communist pressure in the sensitive Kontum area was mounting and the chances of the patrol returning intact to base were slim.

  One member of the patrol was Pham Van Nu. He had been presented to me as the typical, simple ARVN soldier in the field. It was a reasonable choice. Like the majority of the garrison, Nu was a teenager, a boyish nineteen-year-old with a winning smile, one of a family of nine. His father, a policeman, had been assassinated by the Viet Cong. His mother struggled to raise the family alone. It was a common tale.

  Nu said he had already served two years in the army, and his ambition was to survive long enough to see real peace in his country. It seemed a natural sentiment and doubtless it was shared by countless communist soldiers in the vastness of the jungle all around.

  Major Xuong, Tango Four’s commander, said that daily patrols were vital. The North Vietnamese were in great strength in the area and would bring up their guns and shell the outpost unless countermeasures were taken.

  Tango Four presented a totally different picture from the spic-and-span camps at the rear. The soldiers’ uniforms were torn and tattered; boots, vital in this rugged terrain, were holed or simply non-existent. Home for Nu and his friends was a grubby foxhole in the malaria-ridden jungle or a bunker in a squalid outpost with the rats and the stars for company.

  They were allowed only seven days of home leave a year; their pay of about ten pounds a month, plus a special rice allowance, was insufficient to buy the essentials of life. If they were thrifty or lucky, the few piastres saved from it might keep their sisters off the streets or pay for their younger brothers’ education.

  What depressed them most was that, once drafted, they were in the army for life. Unlike American GIs, there was no light at the end of the tunnel, no magic demob day.

  For much of the morning, the garrison of Tango Four worked tolerably hard. They cleaned their weapons, dug bunkers or felled tall trees outside the perimeter. The trees were to be used as roofing for the new and deep bunker Major Xuong had ordered to be dug in the centre of the camp. The present bunker’s roof had crumbled away in the rain.

  Other occupants of the camp, however, suspected that the commander’s young and attractive wife lay behind this enterprise. The major had won considerable respect by smuggling her onto the base. With the breeze softly stirring her pink pyjamas, she brought a welcome
touch of femininity to a drab and spartan camp. There was no trace of animosity over her presence, but the Rangers were saying that the deep bunker would be used to make what they called Number One Love.

  Midday came. Everyone took a short break for lunch. The men ate squatting on the brick-red ground. Major Xuong and the officers ate in a tiny, plaited-bamboo hut with ammunition boxes as chairs. Then, as the major poured tea out of an exquisite porcelain teapot into exquisite thimble-sized cups, shooting broke out in the jungle below.

  The effect was electric. The camp’s mortars opened fire, its radios crackled and salvos of high-explosive shells from the big guns protecting Kontum city sighed overhead, to burst with angry roars in the forest.

  It was an illuminating thought that every shell fired in the war cost as much as thirty pounds, considerably more than Major Xuong or any of his officers earned in a month.

  By and by, members of the ambushed patrol drifted into the camp, drenched in sweat, almost insensible with fatigue. They carried a soldier wrapped in a hammock, suspended from a pole. This sad bundle was Private Nu. He was not quite dead, but he was close to it. Blood oozed out of a deep head-wound caused by a mortar bomb which had blown up in his face. He breathed with great difficulty, in short rasping gasps.

  Nu lay there on a makeshift bed in the open air as the camp’s doctor worked like a madman with his pitifully inadequate medical supplies. Once, I detected a ghost of a smile play over his pale lips. Then it was gone. For hours he hovered between life and death, awaiting the arrival of a helicopter to evacuate him to the field hospital only eight miles away. It ought to have come. They always used to during the big American war, when choppers were two-a-penny and every American soldier knew that he was never more than a thirty-minute chopper ride from an operating table if he was hit. But the priorities were often different now. This was an all-Vietnamese war and choppers were luxuries. None came.