by Arnold Zable
‘Watch your step, be vigilant, hold on to your bag or a passing motorcyclist will whip it off you before you fucking know it.’ Always someone ready to offer advice to the novice.
At dusk people took to the roofs seeking relief from the heat and humidity. The shadows were lengthening, the night settling. The city was pervaded by an uneasy sense of waiting. I slinked by, wary, having missed the curfew.
Military police patrolled in jeeps. The city was choked with the displaced, those uprooted by the fighting in provincial towns and villages. After curfew, some slept on the footpaths under makeshift shelters or out in the open. Entire families were huddled against walls, limbs intertwined, curled up and sleeping. Mangy dogs sniffed through the refuse. Couples lay face to face, smoking opium from elongated pipes that extended mouth to mouth between them. Children nestled against adults or lay alone, coiled within themselves like foetuses. Solitary individuals lay stretched out on their backs, staring at the heavens.
A cluster of men squatted over a card game in the shadows. Their listless eyes looked through me, longing for sleep, for oblivion. There was no way to enter this improvised city of phantoms and no way to shield myself from the odour of an abandoned humanity. In the morning they would be gone, dispersed across the city, an elusive army of survivors.
When at last I reached my destination, the house of the war correspondent who had invited me to stay with him, I banged on the door, and called out to the sleeping figure I could see through the barred windows. I knocked until I realised he was lost to a pill-induced stupor, to several hours of respite from the turmoil that was his daily reality.
‘Hey, you want to see the war? Hop on board, mate. No worries. We don’t have far to travel!’ A big-hearted daredevil, more boy than man in appearance, he wore his naivety like an identification tag. He held fast to his persona, seeming to know instinctively that his air of innocence was what protected him.
We had met on my first day in Saigon and, over a drink, he’d told me that he had left Australia four years earlier at sixteen, and had journeyed overland with a thirst for adventure. As soon as he crossed the Thai border into Indochina he knew he had found his nirvana. Like so many, he had fallen for the allure of the live-for-the-day mentality and adrenaline rushes that war induces.
He rode his motorcycle from Vietnam to Laos to Cambodia and back as if there were no borders and no tomorrows, taking charcoal temple drawings into Saigon where he sold them as souvenirs to US soldiers. He had picked up languages and dialects with the keen ear of a guileless traveller and had worked as an interpreter. He felt an affinity with the people and now aspired to be a photojournalist.
I climbed aboard and rode behind him, buoyed by his confidence as he careered to the outskirts of the city and beyond, past munitions depots and bases, and mile upon mile of military hardware. A landscape of khaki and rust, the colours of occupation, relieved by clumps of palms, oases of monsoon greens, glimpses of rainforest.
All was rushing past, countryside blurring, farmers hauling produce by the side of road, military vehicles moving to and from the city. And we were singing, invigorated by a sense of invincibility, bumping over ruts and potholes, forgetting that out there life and death were dancing, the body count mounting.
The following day chance meetings led me to an apartment, a safe haven for US soldiers who were contemplating desertion. They sat cross-legged on the carpet and talked, as if in one voice, of their fears and uncertainties. They called the Vietcong ‘Charlie’, the slang name for the enemy. Or the more derogatory ‘dink’ or ‘gook’, and ‘slant-eye’ for good measure, names born of fear of the unfathomable other.
Their comrades, the soldiers told me, were using speed and cocaine, acid, dope, or plain beer and spirits, anything to alter or deaden the reality. It was the height of a war that had been fought far too long and had spawned far too many casualties, with no dividend. The men knew full well that back home the anti-war movement was gathering momentum, and that many who had once supported them were now growing weary of the fight. And they knew that if their luck ran out they would return as corpses, or as maimed pariahs.
They were grunts, the lowest on the rungs of the military hierarchy, foot soldiers, some still teenagers, their eyes shot through with fear and wonder, like animals mesmerised by spotlights, not knowing where to run, where to hide, where to find refuge. They had been shoved onto choppers, lowered into forest clearings, their bodies weighed down by military hardware, their faces painted for night battle. They had tramped through jungle and paddy and crawled through elephant grass, stinking of fear and swamp water.
Who can we trust, the eyes seemed to ask, who can we believe, who knows what is going on, who is profiting, who is being saved, who protected, who being conned or deluded? You cannot comprehend what we have seen, what we have endured, what we have been doing. You are not one of us. You are free to come and go, you lucky bastard. You have been spared the horror.
You have to be in it to know that war is literally shit, a chaos of rotting bowels, fevers and quagmires, infested with platoons of mosquitoes. You can’t stop the infernal itch. You weep from wanting to be clean. You sprinkle powders, apply oils and ointments, yet still you can’t cleanse yourself of the dirt, or get rid of the stench. We’re going mad, the eyes told me, tipping into insanity.
We did not bargain on seeing things that will haunt us forever: the shredded bodies of comrades, the corpses of nameless enemies, and the fear and suspicion in the eyes of the villagers we thought we were protecting. This is why we are holed up in this apartment, in hiding, waiting for an escape from the death and disfigurement that stalks us. So now we roll joints and pass them from one to the other. There is always one on the go, brother. You are welcome to join us.
They inhaled deeply, filled the room with their smoke, and obsessed over the morbid details, Vietcong landmines that activated as soon as the unsuspecting foot was lifted, mines that bounced chest height with shrapnel, mines that exploded horizontally, tearing apart the lower body. The talk followed the route of the joint, one voice coalescing into the next, until there was little distinction between one and the other.
‘It’s a fucking lottery, brother. One false move and then the medics save what is left of you,’ said one voice. ‘Then they ship you home with a pension to replace your legs, and a fucking medal to replace your penis,’ said a second. ‘To a country where no one wants to know you,’ added a third.
‘And not even here are we safe, hidden away in the city. Charlie is everywhere. Charlie is in the street. Charlie is the rickshaw driver, the waiter serving behind the bar counter. Charlie is the gook slinking by in a hat posing as a peasant, a street vendor. Charlie is the dink eyeing you wherever you go. Charlie is on the take with one hand reaching for your wallet, and the other itching to kill you. Charlie is everywhere, watching, waiting.’
Of my many encounters in Saigon, there is one that most haunted me. An American correspondent, distressed by what he had witnessed, had set up a refuge for street boys. A loose arrangement as I recall it: rooms strewn with straw mats, wicker chairs, sleeping bags and blankets.
The boys, dressed in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, ranging in age from perhaps seven to seventeen, roamed Saigon in thongs or bare-footed, doing business with allied soldiers in their fast-talking street spiel: ‘You want something, man? You want shoeshine? You want dirty picture? You want tailor make shirt? Hey man, you want woman, number one girl, very soft, very beautiful?’
In between missions they gathered in the refuge, played cards, boasted of their exploits, schemed and argued, shared trade secrets and contacts, and slept. I observed them late one night, sprawled on their mats in random postures, stretched out, curled up, filling out the room with their restless movements. Bui doi, the boys were called, ‘the dust of life’, but in this moment of blessed sleep they were a brotherhood united by common circumstance, living a semblance of family life in a transient haven in a warring city where the bonds of civility
had been strained beyond the limits.
A boy of fifteen, one of the residents of the refuge, his watchful eyes darting about, taking in everything, guided me through the streets of Cholon, the Chinese quarter, towards the Saigon River. Finely attuned to the streets, he walked with a swagger, chest puffed out in exaggerated machismo.
He led me past buildings fractured and bullet marked, evidence of the fierce fighting two years earlier when the Vietcong rose up in a frenzied attack that came to be known as the Tet Offensive. We walked past pizzerias, kerbside eateries, flower stalls, street markets, and through alleys where deserters in pith helmets and peaked caps traded in US Army supplies; past bars that catered to every taste, every persuasion, of the occupying armies. Grunts leaned on jukeboxes drawling country and western, Johnny Cash and Elvis, Are you lonesome tonight. Will you still love me tomorrow? Doris Day crooning My heart longs for the black hills, the black hills of Dakota, the Rolling Stones intoning You can’t always get what you want, and the grunts singing along in unison, as if responding to the lead of a Baptist preacher.
In bars for blacks, brothers greeted each other with ‘dap’ handshakes and jived to gospel and Motown songs that were taking on new meanings. Ben E. King performing There is a rose in Spanish Harlem, John Lee Hooker strumming the ‘Hobo Blues’, Odetta singing Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, Jimi Hendrix obliterating fear and loathing with manic electric guitar riffs. The black grunts were figuring it out, thinking it through, and asking questions: why are we stuck in this hellhole fighting Charlie when, come to think of it, no Charlie ever called me honky, no Vietcong ever called me nigger?
Vietnamese songs flowed from eating houses, from roadside stalls and from transistors dangling on handlebars, accompanied by the smell of frying food, of incense and camphor smoke, the chime of temple bells and the incessant drone of the traffic. And there were moments of grace: a girl running from an alley, exuberant, trailing a kite made of newspaper. The kite soared then fell. The girl bent over to recover it. The kite lifted, struggled and, regaining momentum, rose above the rooftops. A boy on crutches, leg amputated above the knee, dribbled a soccer ball with his intact leg, frowning in concentration.
Girls played jacks on the pavement; women plucked chickens and hauled water, gossiping, getting on with the business of living. A woman sat on a wooden stool on the pavement, oblivious to the chaos around her, stroking the hair of a grandchild, picking through the scalp in search of vermin. Woks glistened with slices of fish jumping about on hot oil like frogs leaping in and out of the sunlight.
The boy took me into an eating house. He grinned at the cooks and waiters and the scantily clad waitresses, and strutted about like a seasoned performer. Once seated, he drew out a wad of tobacco and a tin containing squares of newspaper. He laid them on the table and worked methodically. I had never seen anyone roll a cigarette with such speed and dexterity. One flick of the wrist and he was settling back, puffing like a veteran, straining his voice above the tumult to recount a story in the serviceable English he had acquired in his dealings with the occupying army.
He spoke without emotion, pausing to inhale and then blow smoke rings, following their progress with his eyes, but always on the lookout, guided by instinct, the imperatives of survival. His face was alternately young and ancient, of a boy cynical before his time, but a boy nevertheless. Come to think of it, he was not much younger than the grunts I had smoked with a night earlier.
Two years ago his village was bombed, he said, pausing to puff, to wave to an acquaintance making his way past the table. I strained to make out his tumble of words, the rapid-fire patois propelled by youthful bravado. The village was on fire, he seemed to be saying, and he was running from the flames, sprinting to the edge of the forest, stopping at the trees to look back at the ducks and pigs scattering, water buffalos bellowing, horses screaming, and houses exploding, his one of them.
He talked so fast the images seemed to trip over each other. One moment the house was there in full view—the thatched roof, the doorway to his homecomings—and the next, it was turning to blacks and greys, reducing to the hues of a photographic negative, breaking down into cinders and ashes.
The boy, pausing, looked back long enough to know that he would never again see his parents among the living. They had become, as would one day be revealed, two of the millions of Indochinese killed, displaced and wounded within a decade, the great majority of whom were rice growers, handlers of livestock, tenders of orchards and market gardens, carers of children. Civilian fodder caught in the crossfire.
And as he talked, I was transported back ten years and thousands of kilometres to a single-fronted Victorian terrace in an inner Melbourne suburb. Late at night woken by my mother crying out Mama! Mama! It happened more than once, this dream accompanied by the cry of Mama! Mama!
One night I crept from my bedroom along the linoleum passage, and stopped by the door of the front bedroom, straining to listen to my mother’s urgent Yiddish whispering as she told my father of a village on fire and her running from the flames with her brothers and sisters as, one by one, they fell, leaving her the only one running.
Her dream echoed the stories told by the ex-partisan who regularly came to the house to reminisce with my parents about their shared past on the borderlands of eastern Poland and his exploits in the forests as a fighter. He talked of the ambush that had claimed his comrades, how he had run, legs bleeding from bullet wounds, driven beyond pain and panic by a desperate will to survive. And to prove his point, he had lifted the cuffs of his trousers, allowing us to see the scars that ran like ploughed furrows beside his shinbones.
This is how war appeared in my youthful imagination: a chaos of ambushes and burning forests, buildings exploding, a constant running and dodging, thoroughfares clogged with people, horse-drawn carts laden with belongings, planes diving low, randomly strafing men, women and children fleeing in collective panic. The images became a part of my being, contained within that overarching memory of my mother recounting her dream of horror.
The burning village could have been her slum neighbourhood in the city of Bialystok where she spent much of her childhood. It could have been Bransk or Grodek, Bielsk, Orly, or any one of the towns and hamlets in the borderlands of Russia and Poland where her ancestors had lived for half a millennium.
In time her dreams entered mine, spawning my own recurring dream of a forest clearing enclosed by trees behind which I hid with my older brother, the two of us gazing in terror as bodies were cast into the flames by sinister figures. The dream invariably ended with the flames lighting up our faces, both of us being discovered, and the figures advancing towards us.
I had been brought up on tales of war and its brutalities, had absorbed them from memorial albums that were compiled post-war by survivors as an act of homage and restoration. ‘Memory books’, they were called, each one dedicated to a particular city, town or village, with bilingual texts in Yiddish and English, and photos of the time before their destruction, of characters and institutions, streets and buildings, familiar landmarks. And accounts of their obliteration, with the names of each victim, and images of mass deportation, sites of slaughter, entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble.
Perhaps this legacy was why I had embarked upon my journey to this war-torn country. No one had ordered me to go. No uniform bound me. No one even knew I had undertaken the journey. I needed to see it for myself. And now that I had been there, and had seen the mayhem and horror, I needed to get it out on paper, to expunge it.
Yet there was something else, a feeling of unease that I first sensed when riding pillion passenger behind the young adventurer, carried along by his energy and captive to the paradox: the allure of war despite the horror, the exhilarating danger that drew some correspondents back into the fray, like addicts. They no longer knew whether they were witness or voyeur, critic or accomplice. I felt that unease again on my post-curfew walk, past the makeshift pavement shanties. I was an outsider after all,
an intruder into a community bound by misery, moving by in the shadows.
And just days later, I was out and about in Phnom Penh, free to sit as I now did at a window table by the Tonle Sap River, at liberty to move around or to leave, unlike the haunted grunts gone AWOL, unlike the people of Saigon moving about an occupied city, and unlike the ‘dust of life’, that brotherhood of street boys.
I felt uneasy too at the memory of the boy who had given me his story. He had recounted it with bravado and abandon, his voice barely rising above the din of competing voices, whirring fans and the clutter of dishes. And when the meal was over, in a gesture that brooked no protest, he had insisted he pay. He pulled out a wallet, and shelled out the notes with a flourish, leaving a tip for good measure.
I left the Phnom Penh teahouse well after nightfall, returning to the riverbank and that enclave of houses above the water, where, as prearranged, I met the fisherman. He untied the ropes and rowed out. One hundred metres from the banks he started the outboard motor and put-putted to the confluence of two massive waterways, the Tonle Sap and the Mekong. He cut the engine, laid out the nets and, when he was done, settled back with a cigarette.
The night was given over to the faint hoot of steamers and barges, the distant lights of the city. The fisherman heated a pot of rice, fish and vegetables over a primus stove. And when we had finished eating, he took out a bamboo flute and leaned back against the canvas shelter.
The notes were hesitant at first, as if waking from slumber. The fisherman’s eyes were fixed on the water, the rhythm of his playing dictated by the boat’s movements. In time, the distinction between flute and water, bamboo and breeze vanished, and all that remained was the flow of the notes—a melody that belonged to streams and rivers, outside and beyond history, beyond the scourge of contending armies, beyond the stench of camps and shantytowns housing the displaced and exiled. Beyond the madness.
