Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  Many of the soldiers lay prone on their ponchos, dozing with their rifles beside them. It was the first time Langford had seen them show absolute exhaustion. Captain Trung and he smoked, easing their aching bodies and slapping at mosquitoes, at first saying little.

  “We will eat well tonight,” Trung said. He pointed: in the yards outside the houses, clusters of soldiers had lit pottery stoves of unglazed clay, on which they were cooking in purloined woks and pans. They had killed some pigs and chickens. The charcoal smoke from the stoves mingled pleasantly with the pungency of Vietnamese cigarettes. Underneath, faintly, was the stench of sewage.

  Langford told Trung he was sorry about Tho. He had liked him, he said.

  “I am sorry too. He was a good soldier. We will carry his body back to base, for burial.” Trung was still looking at the soldiers grouped around the stoves; their laughter floated across, together with the murmuring of hens and the calling of birds from the swamp. He gestured towards them.

  “These are mostly village boys,” he said. “They get poor pay, and no R and R like the Americans. If they die, their families get no pensions. They see their sisters and girlfriends become hootch girls for the GIs. It is not easy to tell them why they fight and die.”

  Langford offered him a fresh cigarette. As Trung bent his head to Langford’s lighter, he looked up at him with open curiosity. “You do not have to be with us,” he said. “My men wonder why. Why you are not eating ice cream in the field with the Americans, and flying back to Saigon for a shower and change in the evening. I really cannot tell them.” He blew out smoke, continuing to look at Langford. “They like you. You have marched very well, these last three days: I was afraid you would not be able. Claudine has said you will be different, but I didn’t believe her. I have seen no other correspondent do such a thing. One has tried last year, I heard, but after a day he grew ill, and was taken out by chopper. Were you once a soldier? I hear Australians are good jungle fighters.”

  No, Langford said. He was just a cameraman.

  Trung leaned back against the trunk of the banana tree, looking at Langford now with a mocking expression. “You will go out with the Americans next time, I think.”

  Yes, Langford said. He had to cover every aspect of the war. But he hoped he could come out again with Captain Trung’s company.

  “You still have not told me why.”

  Langford told him that Western news services seemed to give all their coverage to the Americans. He thought television audiences should see what the Army of South Vietnam was doing. It’s your war, he said. Your country. Isn’t that right, Captain?

  Trung nodded slowly. “Yes—it is our war. And Americans say we do not fight. They say our commanders are dishonest. I am sorry to admit that in many cases this is true. There are commanders who live on bribes, and steal the pay of their troops. Saigon soldiers. But we are not all like this.” He smiled suddenly, and the smile transformed his thin face. “Come out again with us soon, since you are crazy enough. You will be welcome. And please—call me Trung.” He stretched, sniffed the cooking odors, and picked up his helmet. “Now we will eat—and tonight we sleep under cover. But we will not be allowed to sleep for long, I think.”

  Langford stared at him. Did he mean they’d come back?

  “They always come back, Mike. So do not take your boots off when you sleep.”

  FOUR

  SAIGON TEA

  1.

  So far off now, 1965! It begins to seem almost as far as 1848. Yet neither of these years is as distant as we think: unfinished roads stretch from them both, and run to where we stand.

  Langford’s typescripts from the sixties lie in front of me: old shot-lists for his television film stories; reports on Vietnamese political figures which might have been for his own use, but which I suspect he wrote for Aubrey Hardwick; some short statements for international magazines, to go with his pictures. The pages are yellow and fraying at the edges, like the holland blind in the storeroom; even the paper clips that hold them together are beginning to be stained with rust. And this pierces me with sadness. Absurd: but I don’t want to see these papers grow so old. I have the superstitious feeling that the more they do, the more Mike dwindles—and will soon vanish. Already they give off the same aged perfume as the journals of Robert Devereux.

  But this sad odor, coming up from the past’s deep shaft, isn’t what I ought to be attending to, if the Saigon of 1965 is to be entered. Sadness isn’t how it was, back then.

  Harvey Drummond has given me a color photograph he took at the front of Villa Volkov.

  Mike and Jim Feng moved into this house of Dmitri’s soon after Mike’s arrival in Saigon, contributing to the rent. Harvey stayed there too, whenever he was in Saigon. It’s one of a row of two-storied French colonial villas, dingy white, with a long roof of orange tiles. The street entrance is secured by an iron grille with a narrow door in it, and shaded by a big, spreading tamarind growing by the curb. In the picture, Langford, Feng and Volkov are standing under the tamarind with Monsieur Chen, the Sino-Vietnamese manager who’s the Count’s chief supplier of marijuana, and who also (according to Harvey) would procure girls for Dmitri, sometimes at half an hour’s notice. His oblong head is brutally crew-cut, and his bent, handmade cigarette is clenched between gold-filled teeth. Not a man to fool with, Harvey said. The three cameramen, smiling at the camera for their picture, are wearing identical green safari suits.

  Is this a joke? Partly; but they‘re, fond of these outfits. These are what they call their TV suits, styled by Mr. Minh of Tu Do Street, the correspondents’ tailor. The cameramen wore them not in the field but when filming or carousing around Saigon. With special slots and pockets in the sleeves for pens, notebooks and cigarettes, they were much sought after by television journalists who did stand-up pieces to camera. Harvey had one. Soon they’d be imitated all over Asia, and by fashion designers in the West; but this was in the future.

  The picture gives off a vibration of the sixties: last decade of the trio’s youth, and of fashionable derangement Its newfound, illegal drugs are as easily available in Vietnam as coffee or tea; its new music roars insolent and prophetic from the Count’s big speakers, and the figures in their TV suits stand bathed in the light of a life of lost action, lost laughter, lost excess: a life whose memories I seem chosen to preserve.

  2.

  HARVEY DRUMMOND

  When I miss Saigon, I miss Villa Volkov.

  It was on Cong Ly Avenue, which ran parallel to Tu Do Street; a good residential address, and very central: five minutes in the Big Budgie from the center of town. Volkov had made the place into a sort of fraternity house for bao chi, and it was famous among scribes and photographers for the quality of its dope: the premium stuff called Cambodian Red, unfailingly supplied by Monsieur Chen.

  Villa Volkov was where we got our nerves together, coming in from covering battle; where we all recharged; where we made the jokes only we could understand, and where we looked for the meaning of Vietnam, always Vietnam, before we floated away and didn’t care any more, stoned out of our brains, carried on thunderous waves from the Count’s stereo system: the Beatles; Del Shannon; Jerry Lee Lewis; the early Stones.

  There were often transient correspondents camped there. You stumbled over them in the living room in the mornings; they lay on canvas cots in the hall. It was rather like living with a circus troupe—an effect that was reinforced by the presence of Dmitri’s animals. He had three cats, a parrot, and a monkey called Vice Marshal—named after Air Vice Marshal Ky, the Prime Minister. Dmitri claimed there was a likeness, but I could never see it. I called the creature Onan the Monk: he was forever masturbating on the bookshelf, frowning in disapproval at himself. I think he was permanently spaced out from breathing the apartment’s air.

  I was a paying guest, coming and going at intervals, since my wife and I maintained an apartment in Singapore. When I was in Saigon for long spells, and missing Lisa, the scene at the villa was a compensation. It
was a scene that would last until 1970, when Dmitri, Mike and Jim moved their base to Phnom Penh. The villa was on the old colonial scale, with a vast sitting room whose louvered doors had brass handles, many big bedrooms, and a bathroom the size of a hallway, with a bath like a whaleboat, a French hosepipe shower and bidet, brass taps that were Parisian antiques, and a blue, child-high storage jar from the Arabian Nights standing mysteriously in a corner. The rent was expensive, but we could well afford it.

  Like most of the foreign press, we were changing our dollars for piastres on the black market, through an institution known as the Bank of India. This consisted of two very nervous Indians in a tiny office in the Eden Building on Nguyen Hue Boulevard. They were located conveniently on the same floor as the Telenews office, whose facilities Mike, Jim and I were sharing. They faced prison if they were ever caught by the wrong authorities, but their web was said to involve both Peking and the CIA, and the steady inflation of the local currency was making them wealthy—as well as giving great satisfaction to us. Lying on his vast double bed in the mornings, clad in a black silk kimono he’d acquired in Tokyo, the Count would call out regularly through his open door, reminding us of our good fortune.

  “Just think, gentlemen! Every time we wake up, we’ve made money!”

  The phone was in Dmitri’s bedroom, but we were allowed full use of it: his bedroom door always stood open in the royal manner, except when he had a girl there. The lease was in his name: he dealt with Monsieur Chen. The place was owned by a Paris company, and Chen and his wife managed it and doubled as servants, living downstairs. When Monsieur Chen came upstairs with his latest batch of Cambodian Red (or failing that, with Delta Green), he carried it in a plastic shoulder bag lettered Air Vietnam, smiling the broad smile of a benefactor. He had many interests, buzzing around Saigon on a Vespa motor scooter, and was sometimes seen at the door downstairs paying off the White Mice: the small, corrupt, unloved Vietnamese police who patrolled the city in white uniforms, with .38 revolvers on their hips and gun belts many sizes too large for them.

  Feng, Volkov and Langford were always together in those days. At times they’d go out into the field together as well, unless Mike and Jim were trying to scoop Volkov, or vice-versa. Then there was no mercy. But they’d cooperate to save each other sweat, when the stories weren’t too big: they’d even tell each other where the action was breaking. “This is only a small one, Count,” Langford would call, as he and Jim passed Volkov’s door with their cameras. “No need to get on your bike.”

  They went in for practical jokes, which at times could be trying. Langford in particular had a juvenile addiction to these. Once, when stoned, he got hold of an American smoke grenade and threw it onto the awning above the front door, filling Cong Ly Avenue with orange smoke. The White Mice arrived, but Monsieur Chen placated them with money. On another occasion I woke in my bed to find that a trail of lighter fluid had been poured along the sheet towards my face; Langford, urged on by Volkov, crouched next to me with his Zippo lighter aflame, ready to set the trail off.

  It was Trevor Griffiths who started calling them the Soldiers Three. He didn’t exactly do it fondly; there was always a touch of acid with Griffiths, and the reference to Kipling was deliberate. He saw them as too gung-ho; they were treating the war as a boy’s adventure, as Trevor saw it, and had no political awareness: a common failing among cameramen. But the Soldiers Three were having too good a time in those days to care what Griffiths thought, and the nickname backfired: it came to be used admiringly rather than mockingly. This must have irritated Griffiths; but he did have the grace to be amused as well. After that first little incident in the Happy Bar, he and Dmitri had patched things up; and now Griffiths valued the quality of the Count’s hash supply too much to want to be persona non grata at the villa.

  My bedroom was at the back, over the garage where the Budgie was kept. I looked down onto a lane of noodle sellers and clothing stalls and some sort of tinsmith’s. The old blue wooden shutters were always ajar, and when I woke in the morning, I’d hear the hawkers’ cries and the banging of metal, accompanied by faint French-Vietnamese pop music from Madame Chen’s kitchen downstairs, where she’d be cooking us a breakfast of eggs, hot rolls and coffee. I’d hear Dmitri shouting passionately into the telephone to someone at CBS, and smell the lingering tang of last night’s Cambodian Red in the apartment, and know I was back in Saigon.

  Sometimes the radio in the sitting room would be tuned to American Armed Forces radio, and Madame Chen’s genteel ballads from downstairs would be drowned by the rapid babble of the disc jockey, and the thud of rock and roll. The disc jockey had a regular dedication for the listening GIs: “To all you guys out there, groovin’ on the danger.” We all found this wildly funny. “Hullo,” Volkov would say, looking deadpan at some newly arrived correspondent. “Are you groovin’ on the danger, buddy?”

  Villa Volkov: the sitting room. I remember the walls ballooning, pushed out by humidity and by a big sweet cloud of cannabis, the frontier of the Land of Other long ago crossed. Jim Feng, Trevor Griffiths and I were imprisoned by Volkov inside a single Elvis Presley ballad—“Can’t Help Falling in Love”—which he insisted on playing over and over again.

  He was seated in a massive, throne-like leather armchair of 1930s vintage. Here he had control of the turntable, which was on a table next to him. Vice Marshal sat frowning on an arm of the chair, occasionally reaching out a small black hand to caress his master’s face. Volkov kept putting the needle back to the start of the record again, smiling like someone cooking a perfect omelette. The rest of us were sprawled on cushions scattered about the floor’s raffia matting. On a coffee table near at hand were cigarette papers and a commonly owned sandalwood box filled with Monsieur Chen’s precious herb. Pasted on the side of the box was a headline from a magazine: What are you afraid of? The room was getting dim, but no one turned on the lights. Through the open shutters of one of the front windows, I could see green sky, the top of the tamarind tree, and a ferroconcrete balcony across Cong Ly Avenue, overgrown with potted plants, where small Vietnamese figures moved about, leading useful family lives.

  Dmitri had been in the Central Highlands today, covering some heavy action, and had changed into his black kimono: with his wavy blond hair and Tartar face, it made him look like a medieval boyar. Where the kimono gaped over his chest, his lucky charm could be seen: a chain to which was attached a medallion of Saint Nicholas that had been brought out of Russia by his grandmother. All the cameramen were superstitious; all of them. had some emblem or other without which they believed they’d immediately be killed. Jim had a Cambodian tiger’s claw, and Mike had a brass belt buckle with the Communist star: these were taken by the Americans from captured North Vietnamese soldiers, and were greatly prized.

  Elvis was at fairly low volume—or else I was becoming deaf from the effect of the grass. The Beatles had sung “Eight Days a Week,” Del Shannon had sung “Keep Searchin‘,” the Stones had sung “Little Red Rooster,” and I’d managed to slip in one of my Gregorian chants. We all contributed to the LP collection, bringing records back from Singapore and Hong Kong. The others got off on my chants when they were stoned, but I hadn’t been able to convert them to my Artur Schnabel Schubert Impromptus. And for now, we were stuck with Elvis, whom I was fond of, but not fond of enough to hear ten times in succession. Dmitri’s lips moved devoutly as he sang along under his breath, a joint suspended in his upraised fingers.

  “Wise men say

  Only fools rush in ...“

  Jim Feng passed me another joint that was going from hand to hand; I took a drag, holding the smoke in my chest in the recommended way, and when I let it out, things had changed even more. I didn’t really share the general devotion to grass in Villa Volkov, it made me paranoid; but not to smoke it seemed like an unfriendly act. I found the Count watching me now with his open-mouthed smile and pale blue czarist stare, the pupils so small it gave him the look of a fanatic.

  “Loo
k at the Harvey. He doesn’t really approve of these illegal substances. No no, man, he says, take it away, don’t rape me. But then he blows his mind anyway. You are a bloody puritan, Harvey.”

  Jim Feng laughed quietly: a monotone chuckling. But Trevor Griffiths didn’t join in. He sat with his hands flat on the floor, looking at Volkov, blue chin set, tangled black hair falling on his forehead to meet his heavy eyebrows. In the room’s twilight, his face looked more corpse-white than usual. He’d been up to the Central Coast area for the past week, doing a story on the American air strikes there. He’d mentioned this to me before we began to smoke, his dark, significant stare and compressed lips warning me that he was holding in check a tide of righteous anger. Trevor’s anger, like his humor, was never far below the surface.

  Now he spoke to Dmitri with artificial politeness, his resonant Welsh voice coming from his chest. “Do you think, Count, that this doleful and crude dirge of Elvis’s might soon be changed? Giving way, perhaps, to the subtlety of Bob Dylan?”

  Volkov gazed down on him, reclining in his leather throne; he toyed with his medallion. “Greatest thing the King has ever done,” he said, and reached for the needle again.

  “I beg you to change it,” Griffiths said, “before I smash it.”

  Volkov raised his eyebrows. “It must have been a busy day, Trevor; you sound tense. I take it you filed the assassination?”

  “Assassination?” Griffiths’ eyes widened in alarm; hands still flat on the matting, he began to push himself up from the floor. Then he saw Volkov begin to laugh, and lowered himself again. “You bastard, Count.”

  It was the oldest of correspondents’ jokes, but it still worked. We were all terrified of being scooped in Saigon now, since so much was breaking every day. Griffiths had been out of town for a week, and in Prime Minister Ky’s new military government, anything seemed possible—especially to Trevor, who had placed the elegant Air Vice Marshal high in his pantheon of villains, close to Lyndon Johnson.