Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Well, there could be no gospel version of anarchy. Coming from a country where the police were public servants whose remit was to preserve public order, Prideaux could only admire journalists like Vic Agusan as day in and day out they presented the ironic and entirely proper spectacle of the public trying to keep the police in order.

  Below the surface the joke stopped abruptly. The roll of journalists who had vanished or been found dead was lengthy: over thirty in only the last five years. MIAs and KIAs, as he thought of them, for his sojourn in Manila was doing odd things to Prideaux’s sense of the past.

  Some time after turning forty he had begun to see his private history in a new way. Unsatisfactory now was the conventional list of milestones which anybody might tot up; less interesting, too, the inexorabilia of psychoanalytic theory. Quite the contrary: it seemed to him the things which had affected his life most radically had been absences rather than actual events. His recent lack of a wife, even of a companion, echoed through his days with far greater resonance than would a plausible (but always hypothetical) account of why. Why did one lack things? Why did one lack money, for example? There was no end to the answers, no combination of which had a fraction of the explicatory power over a life as did penury itself. Or aloneness. Which law of chance said it was inevitable that by the age of forty one would have met a suitable mate? Or did this mean most people became flexible as time ran out, willing to make strange compromises while still pretending to an ideal partner? In any case that was certainly one of Prideaux’s absences. But lately he had become convinced that the most formative absence of his entire life was missing Vietnam.

  When he was seventeen Prideaux was a bright English public schoolboy who had already won himself a place at Cambridge. Instead of leaving school at once and filling in the intervening year profitably he had elected to stay on and safely bask in the pleasures of status. It was an error of vanity, one he thought he deserved by way of reward for having overcome years of being dismissed by peers and teachers alike for a certain angularity of mind, a waywardness which occasionally bordered on the mildly outré. This, in that last mandarinesque year of his schooldays, he expressed with perfect conventionality by espousing (in a school whose last collective political thought of the faintest radicalism had coincided with the Repeal of the Corn Laws) a brand of Socialism a little to the left of the Labour Party. The stuffier teachers dutifully pretended to be provoked by this and Prideaux spent much time haranguing serious bespectacled boys in his study over large and fragrant teas of buttered toast, Battenburg cake and Earl Grey. Revolution was quite often mentioned by this young exquisite, now a weird combination of mandarin and firebrand.

  If he achieved little in these long wasted months, this odious young man began at last to be aware of events outside Britain. He was conscious that US troops were being sent to South Vietnam in increasing numbers. In his first term at university came the battle of la Drang Valley. It was November 1965. The war had not yet become a great issue in the British press and the sketchy television news coverage must have made a particular impression on him, like the first time a musical infant hears somebody sing or play a note on a piano. Suddenly, everything conspired at once to make the growing distant war embody forms of loss and longing he never knew he had. This wasn’t the death of boys his own age, it was Morte d’Arthur. Or it was a monstrous crime committed by imperialist capitalist lackeys against defenceless peasants who only wanted to shake off the yoke of foreign oppression. Or else it represented real life in contrast to the anaemic dreamworld in which he found himself boredly cloistered. Whatever else, it was a golden time for deeds of valour and comradeship. It was a nexus of principled opposition, of marching and speechifying and delivering exhilarating denunciations of stone age dons in tweed jackets. Girls could be met at parties and bedded within the hour just on the strength of shared opinions about Vietnam. On the basis of a beard, loons and a peace button total strangers could meet and exchange a vague simulacrum of the complex hand choreography of ‘daps’ with which black GIs were greeting each other in Vietnam. Solidarity was all. Ritually-slapped palms echoed around the world wherever the right-thinking met.

  Prideaux graduated in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive, that resounding tactical surprise whose psychological effects on America so completely outweighed the military defeat the NVA supposedly suffered. The war was lost; the war went on. Prideaux hung fire. He was not an American, he told himself and others, and he certainly wouldn’t help them if he were. Yet where else was there to be at that moment? He indulged in journalism, flew to Stockholm and interviewed some draft-dodgers. His great coup was to unearth a deserter from the US Marines now living under the name of his new Swedish wife. Time passed, carrying Prideaux with it. By now he was a war groupie: Ruff-Puffs, klicks, Spooky. Even as he opposed it the war engulfed him. K-bar, A Shau, Bouncing Betty, Ben Tre… Ben Tre… destroy it to save it. By now, too, enough time had gone by for the early years to be casting a rotten, nostalgic glow. Marble Mountain, M-14s, hot LZs. He knew he would have recognised the cool, wet earthenware smell the red laterite soil exhaled at dawn, the ubiquitous stench of barrels of burning excrement soaked in jet fuel, the taste of C-rations corned beef hash. Outstanding. Airborne all the way.

  It is very strange for a young man to long for war even as he watches pictures of other young men filing out of C-130s unshaven and hollow-eyed, or choppered back to base in body bags. Stranger still if they are not his countrymen and it is not his war. What are we to think about someone who identifies with ‘the allies’ but sides with the enemy? Nothing much; other than to presume that such things are quite common and merely evidence of the muddle of hormones and cultural inheritance which make young men everywhere willing to fight men they don’t know at the behest of men who don’t know them. A conspiracy of confusion from which myths sprout like headstones. Why didn’t Prideaux get closer? He could have become a war correspondent and drunk life to the lees in the foxhole of his choice. He could have become part of that non-combatant elite who combined the hardbitten knowingness of grunts with classy non-chalance: Honkers, Saigers, Pnompers. He could have attended briefings in JUSPAO with weary and cynical disbelief then hitched a Huey into the boonies for a taste of the real raw: fragging, Grateful Dead, Morrison, Zappa, the killing box. In 1970 he joined as script consultant a film unit off to Indochina to make documentaries and wound up writing three films. There at last he was ineffectually shot at by child soldiers rendered blind by US steel helmets which fell to mid-nose. He went to Saigon, walked Tu Do as if he’d known it as an old hand in some previous incarnation (it did, too, feel remarkably familiar), photographed large-scale pilfering in the overcrowded port.

  But already it was lost. Men were still dying, hooches still burned, but the great withdrawal had long since started. It was lost to him. He kept hearing, ‘That was way back, when? Sixty-six, I guess. Shoulda seen it. Un-fuckin’-real.’ Some time ago at an unspecified but always invocable moment it had been the real war, real Vietnam. Boys had lost their lives within forty-eight hours of leaving Fort Benning. Prideaux lost his watch to a snatcher in Cholon. They made the films. One was of US troops on the ground in Cambodia’s Svay Rieng province, right there in the Parrot Beak area at a moment when the American administration was swearing hand on heart that none of its troops had ever violated Cambodian neutrality. A second documentary concerned the money-changing rackets run mainly by a handful of Indian families in South Vietnam itself. Filming in the first was entirely open; the second relied on a good deal of concealed camera-work with ultrafast film so the eye could plainly catch the constant riffle of notes changing hands in dark huts, the faces of GIs freely laundering military scrip (which in theory was not legal tender off-base) into regular greenbacks. In weeks of filming, tons of money flew between brown and white fingers in a dozen currencies, some of which – Chinese, Burmese, Indian – were supposed to be worthless outside those countries. Both films were widely shown and praised and both won prizes. Pri
deaux’s scripts were adjudged ‘hard-hitting’ in that way which is especially irritating to film makers who know they were unable to tell the half of it. (‘It’s been going on for years, for Chrissake. Only now that it’s practically over can we get a watered-down version of stuff like this shown. Mustn’t send Mr and Mrs Porch Swing, Idaho, into cardiac arrest’.) Not now; then. It was always Then: back then, back when the real killing was being made, was going on, when a whole culture was formed and grew out of its founders like a private club.

  Almost a quarter of a century later Prideaux was still able to surprise in himself a wistful yearning for retroactive membership of that club, the vast majority of whose members had never wanted to join, whose list had long ago closed and could now only dwindle. It seemed he was nostalgic for times unshared, for comrades he never had; whereas what had happened was that he had once been twenty, and his being twenty had coincided with the great issue of the times. Recalling those times still transported him to territory rich in ghosts, echoing with dated jargon. Yet it was not always reassuring since it came with reminders of failure. Why had he not? Not when the time was ripe? Physical fear? Cowardice? Maybe; maybe also an instinctual sense which would always tell him that no matter what one did to seize the moment it had always already passed with a flash of wings, trailing behind it a purposeful smudge as it roared towards some far-off scene of action. The sidelines, the edge of things; that seemed to be Prideaux’s ordained place as the shuddering air grew still.

  Documentaries, documentaries.

  Three years after the fall of Saigon in 1975 Prideaux turned thirty. What his twenty-year-old self would have thought an enviable career well begun had taken on the manic inconsequentiality of all TV work. Enough of the schoolboy didact remained in him to resent finding himself part of the entertainment industry, coasting on a reputation which now appeared outdated, even fraudulent, so quickly were those intense years of confrontation and revelation being left behind. He had tried to follow the two films which made his name with one they had shot in Bangkok on the back of the other productions. This was going to be gaff-blowing of a far more emotive kind, a story he had got wind of in Saigon, the one they couldn’t ignore.

  It was about a racket run by an ex-Master Sergeant who had resigned the service after two tours of duty in Vietnam, having sniffed out a better line of business. This was catering for the needs of troops on R&R in Bangkok. The advantage the American had over the Thais was that he knew his countrymen better than they did and understood that a few of them – a very few – would pay well for something which went beyond the usual strip-joint menu. He had spotted in the ragged hordes of war orphans sleeping on pavements and in parks a potential source of income. He bought a van and sprayed it pink and blue: jolly pastel shades on which floated solid red and yellow balloons trailing jaunty strings. The name of the ex-Master Sergeant’s company, Toytime, was stencilled in white letters on both side doors. The van would deliver to clients’ apartments – even sometimes to international hotels – refugee children who had been picked up off the streets, given a bath, a square meal and clean T-shirts and knickers before being whisked off to a party. The kids couldn’t believe their luck. Some hours later, in response to a phone call, the same van would call with collapsible packing cases to collect their bodies. It was a straight cash deal. Toytime delivered the goods and disposed of the evidence. Nobody complained because there was nobody to complain.

  Prideaux had some good stuff, including the ex-Master Sergeant’s identity and military record. He filmed the van arriving and two children about eight years old being handed over at a door by the Thai driver. He filmed the van returning and two large cartons being carried out of the house. The van doors slammed, the camera followed at a distance through a rain-spotted windscreen which melted and refracted jewels of neon streaming past on both sides. Despite being a stock piece of ciné vérité this not very brisk chase somehow managed an atmosphere which was becoming the Prideaux hallmark, that of a faint intangible sadness like the pursuit of a fading dream. The sequence ended abruptly when armed Thais in uniform surrounded the camera car at some traffic lights. Between their encroaching torsos were a couple of glimpses of the pastel van with its gay balloons vanishing down a turning beside a klong. Next came an abortive interview with a bland senior officer of the Thai Traffic Police whom Prideaux believed was in the ex-Master Sergeant’s pay. Their conversation was intercut with shots of the same officer in plain clothes behind the counter of a shop selling pilfered US matériel. The officer was taking an order in Thai for fifty M-60 grenade launchers, two thousand grenades and forty M-16s. ‘No problem,’ said the English subtitles. ‘What about Claymores?’ The camera, which was shooting from a car parked opposite, picked up a lot of shine from the shop window, plus reflections of passers-by, and intervening traffic added to the problem. But again and again there was no doubt of the officer’s identity as light caught his speaking face behind the pane. The mike was concealed on the customer’s belt in a pouch for sunglasses. It crackled and rustled but the words were clear and intelligible to the Thai who later did the transcription and translation. When the camera panned back to take in the shopfront itself the name above it read ‘Royal Thai Road Safety Campaign’. The implication was obvious. This Thai officer was involved in rackets. If he openly brokered stolen US military equipment why mightn’t he be protecting all sorts of renegade Americans such as the managing director of Toytime? How else would he get his supplies brand new and still slippery with Cosmolene?

  One of the most telling shots in this short documentary was a quick cut of an international aid agency’s Bangkok Field Director who spoke a few glowing sentences about Toytime as, he believed, ‘typical of the small and as yet uncoordinated efforts on the part of caring people to ease the lot of perhaps the most overlooked and defenceless casualties of this appalling war’. This showed that not only did the scrawny old fool not have the first idea what Toytime was up to but that the ex-Master Sergeant’s business could flourish openly with the connivance of corrupt authorities and ignorant charity directors.

  ‘Can’t touch it, John.’ How many mouths had he watched frame these words as they munched in London restaurants or dribbled smoke in offices? ‘I mean, Christ almighty, what a story. I can’t wait to see the rough cut. If it was up to me, of course, it would go out prime time, triple star rating, required viewing. Move over Panorama and World in Action. But I know those guys upstairs. The bottom line is no way.’

  After they had seen some clips from the the rough cut and the lights had come up, leaving the mouths shaken and troubled, they changed to a different tack, as if relieved at finding a rationale for turning the film down.

  ‘You know it’s going on and I know it’s going on. Enough to make you puke. Those poor little. But there’s no… actual… proof. Is there? Really, John? When it comes down to it? What you’ve got – and I must say I think you’ve done an absolutely brilliant job, Christ, some of that footage – what you’ve got is a certain amount of very suggestive circumstantial evidence and a certain amount of hearsay, but you’ve not got the clincher.’

  ‘Like a kid actually being fucked to death or throttled till her eyes pop? You mean if I had that you’d go with it? Put it out and hang the consequences?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, John. I only meant we could cover ourselves. Legally, morally.’

  ‘Supposing I tell you I’ve got that footage?’

  The mouths always opened at this point. ‘Aw, Jesus.’

  ‘Does that mean you’ll show it?’

  ‘No, of course it bloody doesn’t. Look, I understand what it’s like. You’ve become emotionally involved in this thing and who can blame you. If it’d been me I don’t think I’d ever sleep again. But you know as well as I that if you’re going to do investigative documentaries you’ve got to show the crime being crimed. By and large. That’s what was so ace about Parrot’s Beak and Money Men. That’s why you got the awards, John. They’re absolute models of
how to do it. Here’s what’s happening. Here’s your allegation in words. Here’s more visual proof. Boom. But in this thing you’ve got a crime that’s far too horrible and, let’s face it, too minority to be shown. Most viewers wouldn’t even stand for it being delicately hinted at, still less our Head of Docs. Not now. Not a chance. Perhaps in twenty years. But not now… Have you really got it on film?’

  Of course Prideaux didn’t have it on film, but of course the entire business of legality was an irrelevance. Once out in the polished roar of Great Cumberland Place he knew in his heart this was right. Certain stones were inherently untouchable. This was 1971 and the Americans were washing their hands of Vietnam. Nobody back home in the States wanted any more painful revelations about what really had gone wrong, what really had happened. They wanted oblivion. They didn’t even want to see their own boys arriving home. And England, pusillanimous little England, would go on supporting them to the bitter end, not rocking the boat. His eyes filled with tears of frustration, not unmixed with a sentimental rush on behalf of the nameless victims even then, like as not, speeding to their first and last party in new knickers and T-shirt.

  So fuck TV, there was always the Press. But there wasn’t, for all the same reasons. For a while it looked as though the Sunday Times might run it in ‘Insight’, backed up by carefully-chosen stills from The Film No-one Would Show. But this, too, fell through. Vietnam was either too long ago or too recent, the mouths couldn’t agree on that in between their gulps of wine or instant coffee. In any case the timing was wrong. So it was even for ‘Footnotes’ since Private Eye was currently distracted by libel actions.