River Of Time

by Jon Swain

  Flak jackets and helmets were discarded and the crew, beaming with boyish pleasure, lined up next to the damage for a perfect album snap.

  Walking about Phnom Penh that evening, I visited the press briefing centre at the Groaning Table Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge; a collection of trestle tables spread beneath an enormous banyan tree in the grounds of Colonel Am Rong’s headquarters just off Monivong boulevard. Pinned to the bulletin board was a war communiqué of the Cambodian High Command. Never known for the volume of its information, the notice today was a single sheet of paper and particularly succinct. It said, ‘A convoy of five cargo ships, two petrol tankers and three ammunition barges has anchored at the port of Phnom Penh after passing up the Mekong without incident.’

  I did not dare show the scruffy piece of paper to the crew. Though, by now, if I knew them at all, they were probably too plastered to care.

  Desertion

  In early 1975, the wars in Cambodia and Vietnam were coming to their final and cataclysmic ends. The decisive act in Cambodia was the mining of the Mekong in the approach waters to Phnom Penh, preventing shipments of rice and ammunition from reaching the capital. The port had always been one of the most exciting places in the city; now it ground to a halt as the shipping dried up. Stripped of their purpose, the biscuit-coloured buildings along the river front looked sad and forlorn.

  Ironically, one mined barge that sunk to the bottom was bringing cases of wine up the river for Walther von Marschall, the West German ambassador. This caused quite a chuckle; the ambassador, an astute observer of the political scene as well as a connoisseur of fine wines, was a favourite with the foreign press. Soon he packed his bags and left, together with most of the western diplomatic corps, with the notable exception of the Americans and the French.

  I well remember the day of the final British exodus. Up to then, we had been writing frivolous stories about the British, such as ‘Plucky Moira’ and ‘Brave Beatrice’ – the Foreign Office and UN secretaries who stayed on in Phnom Penh when the embassy had advised all British nationals to leave – because of the ‘uncertain’ security situation. They were the sort of trivia beloved of Fleet Street editors. ‘“I’m not frightened,” says embassy girl left behind in threatened capital,’ was a typical headline in the Daily Mail.

  An RAF Hercules came from Singapore on a final evacuation flight. As people began to clamber aboard, clutching the single suitcase each was allowed, a salvo of rockets hit Pochentong airport. There was pandemonium. Everyone dived for cover. The exception was Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Dracopoli, the defence attaché, who stood resolutely on the tarmac, the epitome of the unruffled British soldier in a tight spot.

  These were some of the lighter moments. Those of us who had been covering the war for any period of time watched as the terror crept ever closer; the despair of the people became daily more visible. Everyone knew in their bones that Lon Nol had lost the war: the unscrupulous generals in their Mercedes; the cyclo-drivers carrying the wounded to hospital; the blind soldier-minstrels wandering the streets; the legless cripples; the fortune-tellers; the women grappling with unaffordable food prices; the shopkeepers; the soldiers; the bargirls. When lightning split the spire of the shrine on the top of the little Phnom hill, the fortune-tellers said it was a bad omen. The city had changed, too: the old French bars were replaced by brash haunts covered in rabbit wire, as in Saigon.

  Yet amidst the confusion and suffering, the harried, hungry refugees and the emaciated, starving children, ordinary life had to go on as if no danger threatened.

  The city brimmed over with absurdities, among them a bush of marijuana, almost as big as a Christmas tree, at fifty cents; a cinema was showing a Swedish film whose publicity advertised it as ‘un vrai sexy – cent pour cent d’une qualité sérieuse’. Our guides giggled like children at the novel sight of journalists making the dangerous airport run in helmets and flak jackets. At the O-Russey open air market in the central area, women in long coloured sarongs slowly went about, doing their shopping among the flying splinters of the falling rockets. Ten rockets at least were coming in every day, but the women had no choice but to go outside if they were to feed their families. Food was now so expensive and in such short supply that some families were selling their children. There was a brisk and illegal trade in Cambodian babies to families in the West.

  Typical were two little Cambodian girls I got to know – Tiep Bunnary, aged seven, and six-year-old Salroth Thida – due to be adopted by a couple in Britain. Their short lives were already scarred by tragedy. Tiep’s father had been killed early in the war, and her mother had cancer and had been given six months to live. Salroth’s mother had disappeared a few months before, on a visit to a Khmer Rouge zone, and was presumed dead. An aunt who then looked after her and her six brothers and sisters had died of a heart attack, leaving her father, a wretched army lieutenant earning £5 a month, responsible for seven children.

  At first, he did not want to talk about it, embarrassed. Then he said he felt he had no choice but to sell his entire family. ‘I love each of my children very much, but I cannot feed them properly. It is heartbreaking to hear them cry out with hunger at night. For their happiness, I wish them all to be adopted.’

  A few days before I met them, a rocket burst on the roof of the house, tearing a jagged hole in the ceiling and killing Salroth’s best friend. The two girls spoke only two words of English – ‘Okay’ and ‘Bye-bye’. Their broken English and the tears made this scene unbearable. They were being adopted by Kenneth and Margaret Elder, a thirty-nine-year-old engineering works foreman and his wife from Cleveland in the north of England, decent folk with the best of motives, I am sure. But at the time, it was sickening to see the terrible choices being forced on Cambodian families. They were being broken up and sold, like at an auction, brothers and sisters separated and scattered across the globe to find new owners as if on a whim. I worried, too, because I had detected signs of western arrogance and a sense of cultural superiority in these adoption programmes, an unjustifiable belief that somehow we Europeans in the West were more capable of caring for and loving children than impoverished Asians. In this case, it was an uncharitable thought. But I imagined the two little girls growing up in the coal-smudged drizzle of a north of England town instead of the breathtaking greenness of Cambodia. But, in view of what happened, I wish more children had got out, and especially these two little girls.

  It was all a wasted effort. The Elders never got Tiep Bunnary and Salroth Thida. There were months of form-filling and large sums to be paid in bribes for exit visas and passports, and the Cambodian authorities even demanded that the prospective parents’ income had to be at least twice Britain’s national average. By the time these arcane formalities were complete, it was too late. Phnom Penh fell and the children were deported into the countryside by the Khmer Rouge. It is doubtful whether they survived.

  The hospitals were heaving with the wounded. Preah Ket Mealea, the main hospital, had four surgeons to operate on 1500 surgical cases, and each day, another hundred casualties arrived from the fighting. There were not enough beds to go round. Many of the wounded lay on straw mats in the corridors. Some of the wounded spent six months on a mat with suppurating wounds, eventually dying. In a sophisticated western hospital, they would probably have been discharged within two weeks. The standard of surgery was often appalling and there was virtually no post-operative care. The surgeons were in such a hurry that they amputated as a matter of course. Wounds burst open so often that they had to be held together with wire. The Olympic Stadium was converted into a casualty receiving centre. But as the wounded poured in by the lorryload the operating triage system was overwhelmed. A sea of stretchers covered the grounds. The dead piled up with the wounded. Young doctors and medical students knelt over the bodies in the intense heat, choosing who was worth operating on, who could wait for surgery, who was a wasted effort.

  Here, one day, I watched Cambodia’s best surgeon Trang Ky operate on a sold
ier with a gaping stomach wound. Today, it might seem a ghoulish thing to do. But I needed to know how a surgeon coped in these circumstances. There was a suspicion that an unexploded M79 grenade might have lodged inside. Without caring a jot for his safety, Ky plunged his hands inside the man’s belly and poked about in the mangled tissues. It was the hottest month of the year and very sultry. There was no air-conditioning and rivulets of sweat slid down his face. He protected the upper part of his body with a flak jacket, but his hands and arms were fully exposed. As he pulled a silvery string of intestines out of the wound and dropped it like slops in a bucket, he recited Shakespeare, Ariel’s song from The Tempest.

  Hark, hark! I hear

  The strain of strutting chanticlere

  Cry, Cock-a-doodle-doo

  It was his way of releasing tension. Suddenly he pulled out a jagged lump of metal and, uncertain whether it was a bomb, rushed out of the theatre and hurled it from the balcony to the wasteland below. It was the tail-fin of a 60mm mortar and non-explosive, but the operation might have cost him his hands.

  I tried to visit this wounded soldier every day. He was making a slow but steady recovery from the hideous wound. Ky said it was a miracle he had survived at all given his condition and the fact that it had taken a day to evacuate him from the battlefield and bring him in. There is a medical rule that the chance of survival from a stomach wound decreases by at least fifty per cent if surgery is delayed by more than twelve hours. But many Cambodian soldiers had the constitution of oxen. Anaemic almost from birth, through disease, their bodies were often better equipped to endure the trauma of major surgery than westerners and they could survive being pepped up with less blood.

  Which was just as well. There was a desperate shortage of blood. And, when a newly arrived and well-meaning western surgical team gave a twenty-one-litre transfusion to a woman bleeding heavily, as it would have done in any European hospital, it used up the hospital’s entire supply, with fatal consequences for the other casualties bleeding in the corridors.

  The woman died of her wounds that night. I felt her death personally; I had accompanied her to the hospital from where she had been hit by a rocket on the city perimeter. Her husband was killed instantly. She was rolled in a rush mat and dragged onto Highway Five. Don McCullin photographed her terribly wounded body as she lay on the road, punctured with shrapnel, with blood so thick that it stuck on her clothes like jelly.

  Everyone involved felt very downcast. Ky’s brave operation on the soldier also proved a tragic waste of time. He was making a fair recovery, sitting up in bed and with such a vigorous will to live that he would probably pull through. Then Phnom Penh fell. The Khmer Rouge tipped him out into the street where he surely perished; I hope quickly and painlessly, but I doubt it. He deserved a better end. He was an example of the tenacity with which ordinary Cambodians held on to life amid the disintegration of their country and culture.

  The hospitals were just one indication of the misery hanging over Phnom Penh. Malnutrition was another; a rapidly spreading cancer which the governments of Cambodia and the United States failed to recognise. We saw it most clearly at the Cambodiana, an unfinished structure, which was to have been a luxurious hotel, one of Sihanouk’s last follies before his overthrow. It stood in a garden on the banks of the Mekong and was jammed solid with refugees who had erected scores of shelters in its lobbies. Dr Penelope Key, a nutritionist from Newton Abbot in Devon who had worked among refugees for eighteen months, ran a clinic here. She dealt with thirty or forty cases of kwashiorkor – severe starvation – a day. She did not even see the worst cases, because the children died. ‘After four years of deprivation of proteins and vitamins, the children have got to the state where they are on the brink of a precipice,’ she said. ‘Many are falling over. Every child here is a disaster who has no future as long as the war goes on.’

  Then, selecting a baby at random, all belly and matchstick bones, she popped him into the weighing basket. He weighed 14.71b, the weight of an average British baby at six months – but this child was four years old. Even so his condition was still not yet desperate enough for Dr Key to admit him to her special malnutrition centre at Tuol Kork in the suburbs. Word of this centre spread like wildfire through the foyers of misery in the city. Desperate mothers, whose husbands had been killed, or were in the army and could not provide enough money to feed the family, were abandoning their babies at its gates.

  One sad day, I accompanied a US congressional delegation which spent eight hours in Phnom Penh to evaluate the wisdom of pouring in more military aid. It visited Dr Key’s malnutrition centre. One member, Bella Abzug, stood in the middle of the cots of dying children and began to cry. She left still in tears. But few Cambodians were sophisticated enough to understand the finer points of the debate in Washington over whether to continue to support the corrupt and crumbling government of Lon Nol. By now, boys who could hardly support the weight of their equipment were being forced to fight.

  All the animal vitality that had made even the poorest peasants seem as noble as their magnificent ancestors at Angkor had been extinguished by the war; the grotesque, shrivelled children at Dr Key’s clinic reminded me of the last withered fruit on a stricken tree.

  The bombardments were so intense that journalists abandoned their rooms at the top of Le Phnom, which were fully exposed to rocket and artillery fire, for those on lower floors. Monsieur Loup, the proprietor, offered the higher rooms for US$5, but even at that knock-down price he had few takers. We rose with the sun and worked all day. The heat at night was suffocating and the electricity was always failing. We learned to write by torch and candlelight and our nights were disturbed by more gunfire and bombardments than ever.

  At the beginning of March, Lon Nol, whom the Americans had never liked but found themselves saddled with, was persuaded to leave the country in the hope that his departure would facilitate a ceasefire. The US began last-minute negotiations with Prince Sihanouk, in Peking, which came to nothing. Inexorably, as the end drew near, our Cambodian friends and acquaintances looked towards us westerners for comfort and reassurance. There was the staff at the hotel; the telegraphists at the post office who worked tirelessly throughout the hot nights, getting our stories out to the world on an antiquated telex machine; the doctors and nurses; the shopkeepers; the cyclo-drivers; the girlfriends we had accumulated over the years, the Cambodian journalists and helpers who risked their necks working for the western press, often for a derisory reward.

  One day, a delicious cyclo-girl called So Pheap connected with my earliest carefree days in Phnom Penh in 1970, came to see me in Le Phnom and told me she was pregnant. ‘Bébé Jon,’ she said, rubbing the tummy blossoming underneath her sarong. I was sure I was not the father of her child. Still, I had retained a special fondness for her and we had stayed in touch whenever I was in Phnom Penh. However, I soon divined that her real reason for coming round to see me was a visceral fear of what lay round the corner. She sensed departure in the air and needed support. We westerners spelt safety. I did my best to reassure her but I knew I was lying.

  Many Cambodian friends and acquaintances were as worried as she was. The US embassy was peddling the line that a Khmer Rouge take-over would be accompanied by communism, anarchy and wholesale slaughter. This was the ‘bloodbath theory’; regrettably pooh-poohed by many western correspondents who saw it as a deliberately over-gloomy assessment to serve America’s political interests and try to salvage US honour. There were a few who did not want to believe the string of Khmer Rouge atrocities.

  It inspired the poet James Fenton, who was then writing for the New Statesman, to compose a ditty which we sometimes sang round the pool of Le Phnom. ‘Will there be an awful bloodbath when the Khmer Rouge come to town,’ it went, to the tune of ‘She was poor but she was honest’. These were eerie occasions of forced jollity and horseplay in the pool. Its unfiltered water was badly in need of a change but that did not stop one girl photographer making love to two men on the sam
e night, one in the deep end, one in the shallow, to general applause. The war had become so ugly, and engendered such hatreds on all sides, that I always believed it would end nastily, though nothing prepared me or anyone else for the horrors in store.

  The sudden evacuation of most of the diplomats at the French embassy, flown out on only two days’ notice, leaving a skeleton staff behind, came as a sharp psychological shock. France’s ties with Cambodia went back a long way and their leaving compounded the city’s sense of isolation. One surrealistic day, I watched Louis Bardollet, the delightful first secretary at the embassy and an aficionado of Chantal’s, as he packed in his villa. He fussed around a sitting-room cloudy with Gauloise smoke, supervising the packing of numerous objets d’art he had accumulated in three years of service in Phnom Penh. Occasionally, he stopped his pacing to hammer out a tune on a piano with two broken notes. Not far away, the killing went on. The dull thump of the artillery was clearly audible, an evil noise drowning out the piano.

  At the 482 fumerie, now frequently shut down because of a tightened curfew and threats of violence from the soldiers manning a check-point at the top of the dark lane, Chantal was looking lost and sad. She urged caution, pointing affectionately at the photographs of Kent Potter, Kate Webb and myself which she had faithfully kept pinned on her wall during all these turbulent years. Kent had been killed in Laos, Kate had been captured by the Viet Cong and later released. I was the only unmarked survivor of this founding trio. The wheel of fortune was turning and Chantal suggested my turn might be coming to suffer a malheur. ‘Fais attention, Jon,’ she said, touching my hand. I did not think about it again, but soon I would have cause to remember her words.