What Was I Thinking: A Memoir

by Paul Henry

  ‘There’s no airport tax here,’ I said. ‘You’re just going to take the $25 and keep it, aren’t you?’

  ‘Airport tax, $25,’ repeated the local extortionist.

  ‘I’m the only person standing here, there’s no toilet, no gift shop, you can’t buy a knick-knack or anything. The whole place is bombed. It’s cold. Where is my $25 going?’

  ‘There’s your plane out there. If you want to be on it, $25 airport tax.’

  So I slammed $25 down on the counter as hard as I could, and the official picked up my bags and threw them out of the building onto the runway where they burst open, scattering my belongings everywhere. He and his colleagues stood by laughing while I gathered everything up.

  That was $25 well spent.

  Back in Phnom Penh journalists at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club told me there was a big story at Pailin, which was run by Pol Pot’s former number two, Engsari. He had his own army of about 6000 armed militia working for him, operating mainly around the border with Thailand.

  It sounded like the wild west.

  I thought that if I went there I might find the trail that led to Pol Pot himself. Why wouldn’t he want to speak to me?

  At a town called Batdambang I found a young man who spoke English and offered to pay for someone to fill in for him while he came along with me to help out and be my translator.

  We hired a Toyota ute with a driver. This was a part of Cambodia that still showed all the effects of Pol Pot’s destructive regime. There were mortar holes in the road as big as spa pools. There were also lots of mines still in the ground, so you followed tracks where people had walked as the safest option.

  We were headed for a village where I had been told fighting was going on. As we approached I could see people laying mines, which was against every law you could think of. The UN had sent people into Cambodia to clear the mines for years and here were people effectively coming along behind them laying new ones.

  The road narrowed to one lane. On either side was low dense bush which I had been told would almost certainly be mined. Suddenly we came to a clearing where there were tanks firing on the town.

  Against his instincts, I persuaded my interpreter to attempt to talk to the soldiers who were engaged in this conflict. I sat down on a box of ammunition and waited while he tried and failed dismally to convince someone to come out of his tank and be interviewed.

  We explored a little more and found a group of about 12 people who had fled from the village and they told us terrible stories of the rapes and killing that had been going on. There was a Time magazine journalist there and when I told him we planned to keep going in the general direction of the village, he knelt down and he held my legs and said: ‘I’m going to be the last person to ever touch your legs. You are not seriously going down there are you?’

  ‘I’m just going to see what it’s like just a bit further down.’

  ‘You are either brave or very fucking stupid. There is no way you’d get me any further down there. We are pulling out.’

  ‘Are you going to take these people with you?’ I asked.

  ‘All of these people will be dead within half an hour,’ he said. ‘We’re going, we’re out of here now.’ And with that he was off. My driver was worried that if we went any further and the road got any narrower, we wouldn’t be able to turn around, which was something we might need to do in a hurry if people started firing at us. Driving off the road wasn’t an option.

  ‘If you drive off the road, you go over a mine, you’re all dead,’ he said.

  I didn’t believe that. I thought you would just be wounded and die later.

  ‘Tell him we’ll go just a little bit further down the road,’ I told my interpreter.

  So we drove painfully slowly and carefully along. There was a lot of gunfire and a lot of movement in the trees. Then even I saw sense.

  ‘Okay, we can turn around here,’ I said, and as we were about to do so an old man ran out of the bush carrying a sack with blood pouring out of it. It turned out to contain bits of his grandson that he had gathered up after the boy had been killed by a mine.

  We got the old man on the back of the ute and kept going. As we drove away we could sense people coming behind us ready to kill us, but they were moving slowly. It was war in slow motion because no one wanted to stand on a mine or set off a booby trap. We got back to the clearing where the villagers were.

  ‘Every one of these people I want on the back of this ute, get these people on the back of this ute now,’ I said. The interpreter was terrified. He was gingerly helping an old woman up.

  ‘Just fucking throw her on and get out of here,’ I yelled. Against all common sense I also tried to get through to Radio Pacific to describe what was happening, which would have been brilliant radio, but I couldn’t get a signal and really there were other claims on my attention. Just as we had got everyone on the vehicle and started to turn around, bullets began buzzing around us, fired by people we couldn’t see from inside the bush. We got everyone back to the main highway, where we just dropped them off. I know they would all have been killed if we hadn’t been there to get them out of danger.

  Our next destination was Pailin, which was just as dangerous. This was the last hurrah for the Khmer Rouge, whose numbers had been whittled away to a tiny fraction of what they had been. Engsari controlled this part of the world with his private army during the day, but the Khmer Rouge would come out at night.

  The driver left us when we got there and I was left with my satellite phone, a briefcase full of cigarettes and money to bribe my way out of problems, and my interpreter, who was no less scared than he had been. We fetched up at a bombed-out hospital which a girl of about 14 was running as a hotel. She rented us a ward.

  My interpreter was more scared of getting malaria than any thing else. It would have been fatal for him, not because he would have died from it but because it would have prevented him from working. So when we went to bed we were wrapped up in mosquito nets like two mummies. I was using my briefcase full of money as a pillow and the ambient temperature was approximately a million degrees.

  ‘Are you frightened, Mr Henry?’ said my interpreter in the dark.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m wary. How about you, are you frightened?’

  ‘I’m very, very frightened.’

  ‘Fear will achieve nothing,’ I said. ‘There’s no point in being frightened but tell me if you were frightened, what would you be frightened of?’

  ‘Where do I begin?’ he said. ‘I can hear the gunfire, I can hear the screaming. Can you not hear those things?’

  ‘Yes, I’m aware of those but you must never think that screaming is necessarily just down to people being shot.’

  ‘I’m frightened of mosquitoes.’

  ‘Now that’s reasonable, let’s worry about mosquitoes.’

  There was another long silence before he spoke again.

  ‘What are you thinking, Mr Henry?’

  ‘I’m thinking there could be a radio award in this for me,’ I said. Which was true. I spent a lot of time in foreign parts worrying about having a great award-winning story that no one would ever hear because it was so hard to get them out and on air. At other times, I started to tell people stories and ended up not telling them the truth of what happened simply because it was so incredible I couldn’t expect them to believe it.

  An example of something in that category occurred this night in the hospital. As we lay there, we heard horrible screaming. It was clearly a young person’s voice and it was very close.

  ‘We need to go and find out what’s happening here,’ I said.

  I guess the interpreter was more scared of being on his own than of whatever we would find so he followed along behind. I took my cigarettes with me, just in case. This was a system I had developed for defusing tensions. No matter what, someone will always let you take out a cigarette if you say you want one. It’s a good way of buying time. And if you can offer someone a cigarette you for
m a small but useful bond.

  All of a sudden, as we walked along outside in the near dark, we were confronted at gunpoint by the Khmer Rouge. There was a gun at my chest. My interpreter was knocked to the ground and a bayonet held at his throat.

  The only edge you can have in a situation like that is novelty value. You play on the fact that these people would not have been expecting to bump into a white man. Just as when someone has a heart attack and there is a golden hour in which they can be saved if they get medical attention, in a case like this there is a golden minute. If you’re still alive after a minute, you have a good chance of surviving.

  ‘Just don’t say anything,’ I yelled at my interpreter, who was whimpering quietly on the ground. I figured that shouting at him almost made me one of them. I also noticed the screaming had stopped, so these were presumably the people who had been responsible for it.

  ‘I’m lost,’ I said to the Khmer Rouge. ‘Do you speak English?’

  There was no reply.

  ‘Do you smoke?’ I said. Every second was like an hour. I told them I was staying quite close but had got lost in the dark. While I was saying this I reached into my pocket. I felt these men bristle as I did so, but they relaxed when they saw I was only getting my cigarettes. I slowly opened the cigarette packet and pulled a few out. I put one in my mouth and offered the leader of the group one.

  After an awfully long time — at least two seconds — he put his gun down, put his hand in his pocket and took out a coin, which he gave me as he took the cigarette. At that moment I knew everything was going to be all right.

  ‘Just get up and start to walk back down the path,’ I said to my interpreter. As he did so I took out my matches and lit our cigarettes. ‘Have a good night,’ I said to the gunmen. I turned and walked a few steps before stopping and handing him the packet, which was half full. Then we walked back to the hospital, wrapped ourselves up again and eventually got to sleep.

  When I got back to Masterton I went to a jeweller and had that coin put on a chain. I wore it for a while but stopped because the last thing an obsessive-compulsive person needs is a fucking lucky coin.

  Not long after, I gave up on the search for Pol Pot, even though I had been able to find out where his base was. The main reason I gave up was that two people whose judgement I trusted told me with absolute certainty that if I persisted I would be hunted down and killed before I got there. If I had thought I would be killed on the way back from seeing him, I probably would have continued but there really didn’t seem any point if I wasn’t even going to lay eyes on him.

  The enigma of Pol Pot drew me to Cambodia. When I went to southern Sudan I didn’t have a story in mind but I was fascinated that this was the site of the longest-running civil war in Africa — a conflict that would endure for more than two decades. There were Muslim/Arab Africans in the north, largely supported by the government, persecuting the Christian Africans based in the south.

  I also wanted to cover the relief effort there and was travelling with a couple of people from World Vision. I went on an aid flight in an ancient Hercules that even the New Zealand Air Force would have spurned. To save money they don’t land and they don’t use parachutes when making drops of Unimix, which is a food that has been developed for people with malnutrition. They double bag the food and fly as low as they can before letting it fall. That’s quite safe because it’s desert so there’s nothing to hit. Pilots in such areas tend to be flyers who can’t get work for regular airlines — ageing alcoholics, in other words.

  From the plane I looked down on the parched landscape where hundreds of thousands of people faced imminent death by starvation. You’re so low you can see their faces as they look up and often they don’t know whether the plane will drop food or bombs — save their lives or end them.

  Inside Sudan, I stayed in a compound with aid workers. I couldn’t work out how to convey to an audience what it means when you say 300,000 people are facing death. The figure is so large it’s incomprehensible. I decided to make it a story about one person. I found an eight-year-old girl, called Acolgern. Her whole family was dead, and the extent of her possessions was a string of beads her mother had given her. I just followed her for a day as she waited patiently in queues to be given a handful of Unimix.

  People walked for days to get to this camp when they heard there might be food. I watched stick figures hobbling out of the horizon, with barely any will to live left by the time they arrived. Sometimes it was simply too late and they sat down under trees to die. There wasn’t enough food for the people and there weren’t enough aid workers to help everyone who needed it. In many cases the people had faced starvation before. They were brought back to health to go through the whole cycle again while their country was being fought over.

  They were very powerful stories. They were about people living their lives simultaneous with ours. They look up through their dying eyes and they see us fly over in business class. Our lives are all totally intermeshed even though we may never meet.

  A New Zealand journalist, of course, had less life-threatening but equally pre-occupying concerns. The huts where we slept were home to termites that fell on you and bit you unless the large lizards who also shared the huts got to them first and ate them. When they got a bit much I moved outside to sleep, on a pile of sticks because you needed to be above the ground away from the snakes. The only trouble with sleeping outside was the hyenas, so you had to weigh up a lot of things when you were deciding where to sleep.

  The rain came while I was there waiting to get out. Everything turned green, everyone was able to drink and the guinea-worm eggs hatched in the water. So as they consumed the life-saving water, people also swallowed guinea worms which grew in their bodies, feasting off such nourishment as they could provide and then exploding out of them, usually through their faces or arms. People with guinea-worm wounds were everywhere.

  The sanitary conditions were appalling. The toilet was a pit that you tried desperately to avoid using. The first time I went to try and crouch on it, the smell was too much and I suddenly found I didn’t need to go. The second time, I got a bit closer, but the same thing happened again. Likewise the third time. The fourth time, I simply had to use it. I was crouching almost ready to go when bats flew out around my arse.

  When it came time to leave, we were to meet a plane at Bahra-Ghazal. There was a severe fuel shortage and this would be the last one to fly for several months. I did not want to miss it. We waited and waited and there was no sign of the plane, which first had to pick up some people about four hours’ drive away.

  ‘Get on the UHF,’ I said to one of the aid workers waiting with us. ‘Where is this plane? I don’t hear it.’

  You can hear planes from a long way away in the desert. Finally we got through and found the plane had crashed. We learnt the pilots thought they could take off again, but they wouldn’t be able to land because of damage to the front of the plane.

  I said something that you don’t often hear: ‘I would rather get on a plane that I know can’t land than stay in this fucking country a minute longer. Tell them not to take off. We’re coming.’ They said they would wait three hours but after that they had to leave whether we were there or not. So began a panicked drive across the desert to get to our plane.

  At one point we were passing through a small village of a few huts and there was a beautiful, beautiful woman, 19 or 20, glistening in the sun and the heat, completely naked and washing herself down with a gourd using water from a fresh puddle. In the middle of the war and famine and ghastliness it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. As we drove past she lifted this gourd up and the water tumbled down over her breasts, down between her legs to the sand.

  We carried on driving and I kept begging the driver to go faster. We were driving through the ruins of people’s lives — every village seemed to have been bombed or burnt. Finally there was a speck on the horizon that eventually turned into a plane.

  When we saw the dama
ge it looked like the plane had no chance of taking off. Its tail was up in the air and its nose was buried in the desert. There was a large number of people standing around looking at what would probably be their new home because there was no way this thing was ever going to move.

  ‘Get all of the baggage out and ready to load,’ I said. ‘If nothing else, for a moment in time, let us at least imagine we are leaving on this plane.’

  I walked over to the pilots.

  ‘How bad is it?’ I said. ‘It doesn’t look too bad to me.’

  ‘I reckon if we weight down the back and pivot it we might be able to lift the nose and take off,’ one said.

  ‘Well, that’s all that matters, isn’t it?’ I said encouragingly.

  I got on the plane and one of the pilots stood at the back and pointed at the heaviest of the people standing around.

  ‘You, you and you,’ he said. ‘You’re all coming to Kenya.’ They obligingly got on. There were no seats in the plane, just half-arsed benches and webbing to hang on to. The pilot climbed in last.

  ‘It could be iffy,’ he said. ‘Wind your limbs through these ropes.’

  And miraculously we took off. The noise inside this thing was fantastic, the vibration was extraordinary but it lumbered into the air. The people who were being relocated went pale.

  It was a perfect flight and not long before we could see our destination. Then an alarm started to sound and a mechanical voice began to repeat ‘landing gear, landing gear’. The co-pilot got out of his seat, got a broom, opened a hatch in the floor and poked the landing gear, which had got jammed, to force it down. Then he turned to us.

  ‘This is going to be a very rough landing,’ he said redundantly. ‘It’s not going to be a crash landing, it’s going to be a rough landing. What I want you to do is get out of the plane with urgency when we stop.’ I was happy to go along with that.

  The plan was to have the plane going as slowly as possible before its front hit the ground. Recovering alcoholics or not, the pilots pulled off a perfect landing, but we still seemed to be going very fast when the nose crunched into the ground and started shaking everyone around wildly. It was uncomfortable but nothing could overwhelm the joy of knowing that we were in Lokichoggio, Kenya, and there was even the possibility of a poor-quality shower before the end of the day.