Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  Perhaps I should explain how I’d been lured into this situation.

  It was now November, and ever since June, the Communists had been building up their offensive in the Iron Triangle. The Triangle was their main sanctuary, and the headquarters of one of the VC Military Regions: riddled with tunnels, teeming with mines. It was a place of scrubland and marsh less than sixty-five kilometers north of Saigon. The Viet Cong were clearly poised to make their big attempt on the capital from there; so General Westmoreland had put in the 173rd Airborne to flush them out. You see the crucial nature of the story; and for some time Langford and Feng had been trying to persuade me that I should cover it at first hand. Now they’d finally shamed me into it. They’d got word of a big offensive by the Airborne this week, and Jim Feng and I were hoping to put together a television piece for ABS and Telenews that would make a splash. Volkov, who wasn’t about to be scooped, had come along too.

  The noise of the Huey’s motors discouraged talk, and the half-dozen American troops in the cabin showed little inclination for it anyway. They stared ahead of them, and when they glanced at me they did so without curiosity; or perhaps they didn’t see me. They were tough, highly trained volunteers in the Airborne, but some looked very young to me. One of them, a boy with red hair, had a bad case of adolescent skin eruptions. He was on his way to possible death in the next few minutes, so he had his own thoughts; and I had mine.

  “I said: You sure will make a fuckin’ big target, Aussie.”

  The man beside me was calling above the noise of the motors, leaning forward to look at me sideways, chewing gum. He was a sergeant called Tom Breen, with a hard, beak-nosed Irish face. He’d been assigned to me as a sort of unofficial guardian, and despite the nuisance this must have been, he was very friendly and polite.

  “This is going to be a hot one,” he shouted. “And that moth erfuckin’ Charlie is everywhere down there. So listen, Aussie. Hit the ground and run when we get down, and follow me close, OK? Or you may step on a mine.” He nodded cheerfully, and pulled on his helmet.

  The Huey was dropping now, heading into the nauseating spiral of a combat landing. As if I didn’t feel nauseous enough already. When it leveled out, the GIs were on their feet, shouldering packs and weapons; it hovered a few feet off the ground, and they began to jump out the doors.

  I did the same, running and stumbling, following Sergeant Breen with deep devotion, suddenly very glad of my helmet and flak jacket. Small-arms fire was coming from a tree line up ahead, and I was conscious of a nasty zinging and cracking in the air. The sergeant threw himself flat, shouting an order I didn’t hear; the troops were all doing the same, and I followed. Some were digging with entrenching tools, like frantic gardeners. This was the dry season, and the ground was red and powdery.

  I burrowed into it, feeling deep love for it, and I hoped the little furrow I’d found would protect me. I got dizzy with the smell of the dust and the noise of the gunfire, and I prayed not to faint. The GIs had opened up with their M-16s, and the machine guns in the hovering gunships were pouring fire into the tree line. They did this until nothing came back.

  Sergeant Breen shouted to the troops around us to cease fire. The terrible noise stopped. The VC either were all dead or had melted away: it had seemed very quick. The sergeant turned and grinned at me, still chewing his gum. “One LZ secured,” he said.

  I discovered now how my heart was pounding; I was covered in sweat, and checked to see that none of it was blood. It was quiet now, and I was aware of a distant crump and boom: artillery fire from the American bases at Bien Hoa and Ben Cat, trying to clear the Triangle of the Viet Cong.

  We camped with the Airborne that night: a company of about a hundred men. We bedded down on ponchos on the dry ground behind a little hill, the troops all around us in sleeping groups. The Soldiers Three soon slept, but I didn’t; I lay slapping at mosquitoes and thinking of the next day, when we’d go out with the company on a search-and-destroy mission.

  Midmorning. We’d marched for an hour with nothing happening, passing through old rubber plantations and areas of light scrub, not far from the Saigon River. It was a place of spindly, white-trunked trees, and stands of leaning bamboo. There were patterns of leaf-shadow on the pink, powdery ground, but not enough shade to matter. It was hot; hot.

  Volkov, Feng, Langford and I were in a platoon at the rear, led by Sergeant Breen. Jim and Dmitri were burdened with the heavy sound cameras they carried on their shoulders—an Auricon and an Eclair—and were sweating heavily under their American helmets. They seemed cheerful, but I pitied them, lugging those big machines through the heat together with their other gear: they practically had to be trained athletes to manage it. Next to them, marching like prisoners in chains, were two young Vietnamese soundmen, tethered to the cameras by leads. This was the bondage that Langford was free of, having gone over to stills work: he traveled very light. In addition to his Leica, which he used for wide-angle work, he had a backup Nikon around his neck with a teiephoto lens, his camera bag, and that was all. He wore no flak jacket, and no helmet either: just a cotton Australian army hat he said was lucky.

  My head ached from the weight of my helmet, and the heat began to seem malignant to me, like a secret weapon of the Viet Cong. No people here; no bird calls, and I didn’t like the silence. It was a place of old VC bunkers, apparently cleaned out. The GIs muttered and joked, trudging with their heavy loads of web gear and their weapons.

  “Hey, man, you ready to kick Charlie’s ass?”

  “First you gotta find ass to kick.”

  When the firing broke out, it was like some utterly excessive fireworks display. Land mines had gone off, and hidden machine guns opened up at the same time. I would grasp after some moments that the lead platoon had walked into a VC ambush, just up ahead.

  The noise was terrific. The lead platoon was being cut to pieces, it seemed; olive-clad figures in helmets fell and screamed and cried and swung their automatic rifles, toy-small with distance, in a flat, sunlit space between the trees. Shouted orders and exclamations rose around me but they made no sense. I stood still: an idler at an enormous accident. The troops were flattening themselves on the ground and burrowing in, and finally I gathered my wits and did the same, fear closing around me like a sheath of ice.

  I looked around and saw Feng and Volkov and their soundmen lying flat too; but not Langford. Nikon at the ready, its long lens raised like a refined weapon, he was running towards the scene of the ambush, together with a small number of GIs who were led by a lieutenant. He dodged and twisted like a football player carrying the ball; when a fresh burst of machine-gun fire halted the GIs, who flattened themselves and opened up with their M-16s, he threw himself to the ground a few yards to one side and in front of them, getting off shots all the time with the Nikon. Then, when they began to move on, he was off again too, dodging, weaving, hitting the ground and rolling, seeking anything that gave him cover: even the bodies of the fallen. He was quite uncanny: very graceful and controlled, seeming always to know where the fire was coming from. I suspected that he saw himself as magically invulnerable; and because I was more frightened than I’ve ever been in my life, I was gripped by an unworthy emotion. I half resented him, and I remember thinking: He“s not a photographer, he’s a bloody soldier; he’s hooked on this.

  Lying beside me, Feng and Volkov were shooting film, and at the same time watching Mike’s progress.

  “That goddamn maniac,” Volkov said. “He sure can cover a firefight.”

  Jim Feng stood up. “They’re moving,” he said, and hoisted his camera on his shoulder..

  He was right. The company had begun to move forward again, and we moved with them, approaching the sunny zone of chaos ahead. I deeply desired not to have to do this; but to have been left behind would have been worse.

  Then came a time when I was running, not knowing where I was running to. The VC had opened fire again: bullets whined and cracked; mines continued to explode and earth to sho
wer; the Americans shouted and cursed. Bodies of the wounded and dying were ahead of us, in the clearing. I was no longer Harvey Drummond; I was an anonymous dreamer, the landscape of whose dream kept maliciously breaking up, while he tried to get back to the place where he’d left his real life behind. Pebbles and pink dust and emerald leaves were all in bits, in disconnected fragments, bright and precise, flying by me. I’d lost the Soldiers Three, and badly wanted to find them.

  Helicopter gunships had now appeared over the trees, insidiously throbbing, searching like intelligent insects, spraying the invisible VC with fire. Other choppers were dropping smoke grenades to mark the VC position, and lurid orange and yellow clouds began to fill the clearing, making it like an outrageous fairground. I heard screams, and a man calling: “Doc! Doc! Jesus, help me!” Another GI sat against a tree with one of his legs blown off, perfectly conscious, staring at the red stump and bright white splinters of bone; he had a long jaw and light, amazed eyes, and I’ll never forget him.

  Now I was behind the trunk of a fallen tree, and found Langford and Feng and Jim’s soundman sheltering there. No sign of Volkov or his soundman.

  “Come in, Harvey,” Mike said.

  He smiled as though we were meeting in the street, and put a calming hand on my shoulder. The air around me became almost normal, and the dust I lay on was real dust. I huddled beside him, shaking uncontrollably as though from a chill. I’ve never been so glad to see anyone, but I found I couldn’t speak: partly from lack of breath, partly from a paralysis in my throat. Langford looked at me and saw my state. But there was no condescension in his expression, and no judgment; just serene concern. He seemed to have no fear himself, and yet he treated my fear as a reasonable phenomenon. This was a courtesy he’d extend to many others, in the years to come.

  Super Sabres had arrived, roaring in over the treetops to drop napalm, and American artillery fire had begun to locate the VC position. We crouched lower as the ground shook; Langford spoke into my ear over the noise, his hand still on my shoulder as though steadying a horse, and I realized he was giving his whole attention to helping me regain my control. “No worries now, mate,” he was saying. “The game’s just about over. The Yanks have called in their backup, and the VC aren’t going to hang about. We just have to sit tight and wait for the whistle.” He squeezed my shoulder once and then let it go.

  I managed to speak, and asked where Dmitri was; I was worried that he’d been hit.

  Mike pointed across the log, and I saw the Count as though in some sort of vision: one that often comes back to me. He came jogging towards us out of a great screen of orange fire, like a man running out of Hell, his small soundman beside him, their silver umbilical cord connecting them. But as they neared us, I understood that it wasn’t fire they ran through at all; merely another cloud from a smoke grenade.

  They came in beside us, and Dmitri laid his camera down. I heard the harshness of his breath, and saw how his chest heaved. He pulled off his helmet, and his rope-yellow hair was damp with sweat.

  Mike passed cigarettes to him and to the soundman. “You OK, Count?”

  Volkov pointed a finger at him. “I am never coming out with you again, Langford. You draw fire.”

  Jim started laughing; then Langford and Volkov joined in. As the three looked at each other, I saw something between them that overrode jokes and competition: something unspoken that belonged purely to the field, close to the beating of those wings they’d once again eluded, once again captured on their rolls of film. I had a childish gladness that we were all here; but it wasn’t to last.

  Langford stood up. I saw Jim’s lips move, questioning him; but a gunship had come over low, and I could hear nothing. Then I heard Langford say: “Need a few more shots.”

  “Better wait, Snow,” Volkov said. “VC are still there.” But Mike had gone.

  Soon no more fire came from the trees where the VC were located. American voices became distinct in the clearing, talking or crying out, and the medical evacuation helicopters with their red crosses were coming in over the treetops for the wounded. But Langford didn’t return, and Jim and Dmitri began to frown and mutter. They got to their feet and consulted; then they disappeared.

  A short time later they came back carrying Langford between them. Dmitri held him under the arms; Jim Feng had his legs, and also carried his cameras. Sergeant Breen was walking beside them, talking into a field radio, and the thudding of the medevac choppers was the only big sound left.

  My first impression was that Mike was dead. He was limp, and his whole face was covered by a shining red screen of blood that oozed and moved; it left only the white nose uncovered. His hat was gone, and there were gobbets of blood in his hair as well.

  “Shrapnel,” Volkov said to me. His pale eyes, looking briefly at me, had a hostile appearance; his face was pinched.

  They laid Langford gently on the ground beside the fallen tree. Sergeant Breen was saying something about a medevac chopper, but not much clear speech comes back to me; I seemed to be half deaf. Then the three of us were alone with Mike, who lay still. His eyes were open, staring blue out of the red mask; there was a dark, soggy patch behind his left ear. Volkov knelt down, pulled off his sweat-scarf, and began to dab at the blood on Mike’s face. The two Vietnamese soundmen stood side by side, looking on with sober expressions.

  Jim Feng’s prominent front teeth were bared in what looked like a grin; his eyes were unnaturally wide. “I will see what is happening about the chopper,” he said. “We have to get him out right away.”

  Langford’s lips were moving. I dropped to my knees beside Volkov and we leaned close, straining to hear.

  “Somebody find my lucky hat,” he said.

  He’d be wounded many more times, over the years; but never as seriously as that first time. He’d taken a piece of shrapnel in the brain.

  The Americans acted quickly and generously. He was transported on a medevac chopper to their field hospital at Long Binh, and Jim and Dmitri and I were allowed to ride along with him, crammed in with the wounded GIs. The Vietnamese soundmen got a ride back to Saigon, to dispatch the film.

  The medics had given Mike a shot, and he was unconscious all the way. The Army surgeons at Long Binh operated immediately, despite all the badly wounded troops they had to attend to. We waited in one of the bars at the base, not wanting to go back to Saigon until we knew the worst.

  But although the American surgeon we spoke to that evening was reassuring, he couldn’t give us final answers. The wounds to Langford’s forehead that had put all the blood on his face were superficial, he said. But the wound above the ear had been more serious. Here, a small piece of shrapnel had entered the temporal lobe of the brain. The temporal lobe could take a lot of ill treatment, he said; they’d removed the fragment, and in his opinion the area it had entered wasn’t one where fundamental damage would have been done. But they could only be certain about this when Mike’s responses were tested, over the next few days. They’d keep him here as long as was necessary; no less than a week. Then he’d be taken to their hospital in Saigon for convalescence.

  There was nothing more we could do; Mike was still unconscious. At first, we felt hopeful. But back in Villa Volkov that night, we began to sink into gloom.

  Perhaps we were affected by fatigue; but we decided the surgeon had been giving us false comfort. Privately, I felt little hope at all. Shrapnel in the brain! It threatened the seat of reason; of memory and dreams.

  Dmitri sat in his leather chair nursing Marshal, his face as serious as the monkey’s. “Snow has gone out one time too many,” he said. “Jesus. Just when he was hitting the top with his work. I did warn him, as a matter of fact. You heard, Jim.”

  “We must hope,” Jim said. “No use to think about it tonight.” His face was blank, his voice toneless. He sat very still, smoking one cigarette after another.

  “Hope?” Dmitri said. “Our brother will live as bloody vegetable, most likely. What hope is there in that?”
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br />   “No,” Jim said. His voice was stern. “Remember he asked for his lucky hat before passing out? The brain was working, Count.”

  Volkov looked up with faint eagerness. “True,” he said. “Yes, true. You have heard, Harvey—he did ask for the hat.”

  The request for the hat was discussed at length, and Dmitri swung now to absolute optimism, jumping up from his chair so that Marshal made a leap onto the coffee table. “You’re right: Snow is the lucky type,” he said. “Yes, gentlemen! The hat will have saved him; I feel it.”

  Most combat cameramen, undergoing the risks they do together, regard one another as brothers. They used the term often, in Vietnam.

  Unlike us correspondents, who could pick and choose our risks, they had no choice. Any week could be their last, and it made them sentimentalists as well as superstitious; it made for a bond, even when they were in competition. But even allowing for that, the way in which Feng and Volkov were affected by Mike’s wounding seemed to me to have an extra intensity; and I found I was affected in something of the same way myself. Believing as I did that he’d sustained irreparable brain damage, I shared in a yearning sadness that went beyond sadness. It simply wasn’t tolerable to us that Langford might die, or be wiped out mentally.

  Until now, I’d merely been mildly amused by the attraction he had for people: men and women alike. His unusual risk taking, his quick success, and his blond, country-style good looks were what accounted for it, I thought-nothing more. As I’ve said, I’d seen him as rather ordinary. But now that I’d been with him in action, I knew there was something more.

  It’s not easy to put into words. It had something to do with the soft-spoken, uncanny amiability which had made me feel safe behind the log, up in the Triangle. It was something he extended to everybody: a sort of low-key yet vital affection; a calm concern. But this wasn’t all. Most of what I sensed about him now was crystallized in my recollection of his unconscious face as he lay on the stretcher in the medevac chopper, on the way to Long Binh. Dead white, the blood cleaned away from it, the heavy eyelids closed under their high-arched brows, it had become a different face. It resembled a piece of nineteenth-century sculpture, I thought: one of those pieces deriving from classical antiquity. It was a face that tended to change a lot: did you ever notice that? He could appear plain or good-looking; tough or sensitive: sensitive to the point of being feminine. I don’t imply anything in particular by that. But there are certain apparently ordinary faces which grow extraordinary as you look at them-and Mike’s was one of them.