Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

“Yes, in the White Rose,” Jim says. “What a place that was, the old White Rose. Wild.” He grins at Kennedy, then turns to me. “Everyone used to be there—even the Russians.”

  “Well, it’s all gone now,” Kennedy says. “And so is Mike.” His tone remains entirely neutral.

  “I hope not,” I say.

  “Oh I don’t know,” Kennedy says. “He had a good time.” His pleasant, hard expression hasn’t changed, and at first I’m a little shocked. But then I realize that what he’s said has been a kind of epitaph: probably the best that a man of his kind knows.

  2.

  Journalists based in Bangkok call this place the Newsroom, Harvey tells me. What its Thai name is remains a mystery. It’s somewhat like an American diner: a structure on the lines of a railway car, serving cheap Thai meals. It sits on the edge of a square off Ratchadamri Road, opposite a canal called Klong Mahanak.

  This is a district of up-market bazaars and big new department stores, where the British and American embassies are located. Late-model cars and Japanese motor scooters are parked around the square. A number of international news organizations have their offices in the district, and the Newsroom has become a foreign correspondents’ lunch club.

  British Telenews, where Jim Feng is bureau chief, is housed in a modern glass building here in the square, next to a row of shophouses with washing hanging from their balconies. And it seems that Mike Langford bought a house in this district, which I’ve yet to visit. It’s a little way along the klong, Harvey tells me: the only property Mike ever owned.

  Harvey and I are seated on stools at one of the white Formica-topped tables, facing each other. We’ve finished our lunch and are drinking coffee; Jim Feng has gone back across the square to Telenews. But Harvey’s prepared to stay on: he tells me he has most of the afternoon free.

  Prosperous Bangkok still has some hearty Asian odors, and there’s a somewhat ill-smelling urinal just inside the entrance of the Newsroom; but once in the diner itself, this is forgotten. The food’s good and the coffee’s excellent, brought to us by young Thai waiters in white shirts and trousers. The long, narrow compartment, with its two rows of tables, is clean and bright, with music coming from a radio at just the right volume. The heavy heat is reduced by portable electric fans fixed upside-down in the ceiling, and a faint rumor of the urinal’s odor is kept at bay by the scents of fresh flowers, hanging from the lamps. On a counter at the far end—the frontier hiding the kitchen—a telephone rings at intervals.

  The calls are mostly for the correspondents and news photographers here: London, New York, Sydney and other cities around the world summon them up the aisle between the tables. Sitting behind the counter, the Chinese proprietress cries out their names and holds up the phone; when no one responds, she writes down messages. She’s a plump, smiling matron in a purple blouse and upswept spectacles, and Harvey tells me she’s a millionaire property investor. Her Mercedes sits in the square.

  I now ask Harvey Drummond the direct question that I wasn’t prepared to put to him with Jim Feng here. What’s his personal opinion about Langford’s disappearance? Does he agree with Jim that Mike’s still alive?

  Harvey takes off his glasses and polishes them with his handkerchief. Exposed, his large, fish-like gray eyes are sorrowfully blank; his freckled bald head is fortress-like yet vulnerable. “Maybe not,” he says, so quietly I only just hear it. “He could be, but lately I don’t feel optimistic.”

  I ask him why not.

  “Just a feeling, Ray. I’m afraid our friend Paul Carr was right: the odds are against it.”

  We both sit silent for a moment. Then Harvey says: “You want to know why he did it—why he went over the border. Nobody really knows: but I’ll give you my opinion. He went to get back into the past.”

  I wait for him to explain.

  “Cambodia was Mike’s adopted country,” he says. “He fell in love with it; a lot of correspondents did. Mike more than most: and he wanted that life back. Just about everything and everyone he cared about was there, including the woman he was in love with: I believe you know that. And now that the Communists had won, he was locked out of the two countries he’d made the whole point of his life. Thailand could never replace Cambodia and Vietnam for him: he didn’t give a stuff about Thailand. So as Carr was asking, why did he stay here? Because this was the closest he could get: Thailand was his window on Cambodia. And he could also keep in touch with those Free Khmer of his, at Camp 008 on the border.”

  “Paul Carr didn’t seem too enchanted with that involvement,” I say.

  Harvey sits studying me with his arms folded. “Most of the press corps made a hero out of Mike; but not everyone was a fan,” he says. “Certainly not brother Carr—who’s a good journalist, but a somewhat sour little turd. There are quite a few types like that who are critical of Langford: mainly the sort who don’t like being shot at. They say he was too gung-ho; callous; a war-lover—all that stuff. And there was another side to Mike that bothered one or two people.” He draws his big finger slowly around the rim of his coffee cup. “It’s a long time since you really knew him, isn’t it?”

  “Over ten years,” I say. “Except that we kept up a correspondence.”

  Harvey nods. “Mike was a bit in love with secrecy,” he says, and watches me as he says it.

  “He was like that as a kid,” I say, and wait for him to elaborate.

  But he doesn’t; instead, he asks me another question. “You know about the association with Aubrey Hardwick? And Donald Mills? Is there stuff on that among his papers? Right: well, Donald Mills is based here in Bangkok,” he says. “I think it’s important you talk to him. I can give you the address of his office. He and Aubrey left the foreign service and set up a PR business here, with an end in Melbourne. Mills is the Bangkok end; Aubrey handles Melbourne, apparently. It’s called Pacific Consultants. I believe they represent Asian corporations that do business in Australia. Take care of their corporate images, as they say in the trade.” His smile grows sardonic, and still he watches me carefully. “Mills is always drinking in the Foxhole,” he says. “I think he gives more time to drinking now than he does to PR. He might have a few things to tell you about Mike—he might even have some theories about what happened. Especially if you catch him when he’s nicely primed.”

  He leans back and stretches, giant hands reaching towards the ceiling. “Time to go,” he says. “I’d better do a stroke for ABS. We’ll meet here again tomorrow, Ray, if you like.” But then he shoots another question at me. “Are you really going to put Mike’s memoirs together if he doesn’t come back? He was always talking about those memoirs.”

  I say I probably will.

  “Good,” Harvey says. “I’m sure you’ll do it well. Mike goes on fascinating people, and I believe I can see why—aside from the obvious reason of the achievements as a war photographer. When somebody attractive or daring or both is cut off in their prime, there’s always the tendency not to accept: it; and in this case, people don’t have to. He’s simply disappeared; he may not be dead after all; so we can all go on convincing ourselves he’ll come back—like Baldur.”

  He smiles, getting up from the table, and I wonder for a moment if he’s mocking Mike’s fate. But I’ll find as I get to know him that humor is never far off with Harvey, even over things for which he cares deeply. It’s one of his methods of keeping regret at bay, and of being reassuring. He seems to look for ways to placate life.

  From the table where Harvey and I have made a habit of sitting, we can look across the road to the canal. A row of little market stalls is strung along the bank there, under giant tropical trees for which I have no names.

  The Newsroom has windows at table level for its full length down both sides, fitted with white-painted iron grilles instead of glass. Orange-striped blinds are drawn halfway down these grilles, protecting us from the sun, and out beyond the blinds is the white glare of Bangkok: a city choking on the exhaust fumes of its squadrons of new cars; a city nev
er touched by the war. But in here, Harvey and I are oblivious of Bangkok and of Thailand: we’ve now become mental inhabitants of those two closed countries on the other side of the border.

  We’ve met here every day this week, matching Harvey’s memories with what I feel able to share with him from Langford’s audio diary. Sometimes Jim Feng joins us, but he can seldom stay for long: running the Telenews office gives him less free time than Harvey seems to have as ABS correspondent here. Often, when Harvey hasn’t any appointments, he and I linger here through much of the afternoon, over beers and many cups of coffee. Both of us are caffeine addicts: not the only thing we turn out to have in common.

  I like good talk and a good talker, and Harvey has more than a journalist’s feeling for a story: he has a nineteenth-century relish for words, and for the story inside the story. It’s he who does most of the talking, but without my promptings and speculation he wouldn’t continue at such length; he’s never a bore. And Langford’s life and disappearance is a topic we never seem to exhaust. I suppose this is because it puts out so many stems and branches—becoming in the end Harvey’s story as well, and Jim Feng‘s, and Dmitri Volkov’s, and the story of the war itself.

  Today, Harvey has brought me his notes and archives, stowed in an airways bag.

  “Here· you are, Ray: for a ghostwriter-cum-historian. A journo’s relics of Indochina: plus bits of my aborted Vietnam novel.”

  Pushing the bundle of papers across the white Formica, he gives me a smile that attempts lightness, but doesn’t quite succeed. There are two fat folders of typescript and written notes, and a bulging, quarto-sized envelope containing press releases, news clippings and photographs: a journalist’s memorabilia, together with pieces of his unfinished book.

  “You see, brother, I suffer from Journalist’s Paralysis,” he says. “It’s a condition that explains why so many of us have unfinished novels in our desks. We live inside things like the war in Vietnam, and novelists don‘t, on the whole: they tend not to have the stomach for it. And we know in the end that it’s impossible to bring it back as it really was. So we give up; we get paralyzed; the pages lie in the back of the desk and turn yellow, and we go out and get pissed instead. Take it back to your hotel; keep it as long as you need. One or two things there might throw some light on Mike, and the way we all were.” He raises his hand for the Thai waiter. “Let’s have a beer, this time.”

  And now he begins to talk about Cambodia.

  Cambodia was different, Harvey said. You have to understand that, for a start. It wasn’t just Mike Langford who loved it; all correspondents loved it. All through the sixties, the war scarcely affected Cambodia—and Phnom Penh not at all. How can I tell you what Phnom Penh in the sixties was like?

  A short ride on Royal Air Cambodge ferried us there from Saigon, leaving behind an occupied city whose virtue was lost: tangled in barbed wire, roaring with traffic and military convoys, fearful of VC bombs, filled with American troops and their attendant legions of beggars, touts and prostitutes. Coming out of this, you found yourself in a city of charmed peace, in a kingdom that had once reached to Malaya. Old Phnom Penh, which no longer exists, which will never exist again, was a French city on the Mekong colored Mediterranean pink and cream. Although it was the capital, it was only of modest size. Not a big population; very little traffic. Tamarinds and flame trees lined its grand, half empty boulevards, and its handsome old French villas had walled gardens. The cooking was still French, the restaurants excellent, and the coffee, pastries and bread a delight. It was how Saigon must have been before the war. Intimate little nightclubs featured female Cambodian vocalists singing French-style love songs. The phones worked. Journalists loved it.

  And we’d come into a land that tugged at our collective memories : a strange yet half-known country with alphabetical writing and familiar, spicy foods, recalling not only France but regions outside geography: regions that tantalized the mind, almost recalled and yet not, like a whole mislaid life. The people too were oddly familiar. Instead of the delicately made, hardworking, worldly ‘Vietnamese, we found here a brown-skinned, strongly built, wavy-haired, pleasure-loving people who laughed easily at our jokes, and whose faces hinted at an antique India, and the Malay archipelago. The men had a coarse-grained handsomeness that sometimes seemed more Western than Asian, and the women were beautiful: figures from Indian frescoes. And no one harassed or badgered us, Harvey said, as the street hordes let loose by the war were always doing in Saigon. There was corruption and greed among the Cambodian ruling class, and in the Palace circles presided over by Prince Sihanouk; but there seemed to be very little cupidity in the ordinary people. They were farmers, knowing little or nothing of business; they left that to the enclaves of Chinese and Vietnamese. Even the Khmer bar girls were shy and amateurish: country girls, still wearing the traditional sarong, who wanted to be friends.

  What lay under the surface of things we frankly didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. The Cambodians seemed to realize that life was to be enjoyed, we told each other; and they wanted us to enjoy it too. They didn’t try to deceive us, or cajole, or work angles. They wanted to be friends, and they lived in a country at peace.

  Peace in the boulevards, Harvey said, with so little traffic that sometimes it seemed that minutes went by before a car passed. Peace in the squares and the narrow lanes, where hibiscus and bougainvillea climbed over sleepy walls. Peace in the deep green country beyond the town’s edges, where the big rivers met: the Mekong, the Bassac, and that other strange waterway called the Tonle Sap, which in spring flows backwards. A river city. Hot silence; and Phnom Penh’s noises were the muted, magic sounds that come to you in a doze: an afternoon siesta where you’re having good dreams.

  A dream was what it was, Harvey said: a good dream with a bad one at its edges, waiting to invade. You know the kind? Even in your sleep, you know the other’s waiting: there’s the sense of something out on the perimeter; something you can’t quite see. You know that if it breaks in, the terrible will arrive. Well, it finally arrived in Cambodia when the sixties ended.

  He drained his beer, and looked out through the grille. Over by the klong, a boy in bright orange trousers and a blue shirt was squatting in the sun by a stall, sorting bunches of long green vegetables.

  We used to say Cambodia wasn’t serious, Harvey said. We saw it as a country of make-believe: our land of Holiday. Bloody nonsense, of course, and we half knew it—but we didn’t care, in the sixties. Phnom Penh was our place to escape to from Saigon and the war: our capital of pleasure, and of opium trances at Madame Delphine’s. And Mike Langford more than anyone believed in the good dream of Cambodia. He knew about the bad dream, waiting on the edges, but he wanted to believe that the good dream would continue. I think he was like a sleeper who wakes up and can’t bear the dream to end, and goes back to sleep to try and get inside it again. We never can—right, brother? But he wouldn’t accept that.

  The bad dream had been there all the time, of course, up in the jungles on the eastern border. That was where Prince Sihanouk had allowed the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong to maintain sanctuaries inside the country: bases for their drive on South Vietnam. Sihanouk was a little prince of pleasure, whose main interests were directing films, broadcasting five-hour speeches to his people, and playing in his jazz band. His family and his court were also said to run some of Phnom Penh’s brothels, and to control its gambling. But he’d declared himself a Socialist prince, and a neutralist; he’d turned against the Americans, removing Cambodia from the American camp. He was a cunning politician, and he already saw the North Vietnamese Communists as winners. Perhaps he tried to forget that the sanctuaries existed up there in the jungle, and put them out of his mind.

  Meanwhile, we scribes used to hunt for evidence of them: they were the great mythical scoop of the sixties for Indochina correspondents. But no one ever saw them, although I believe Mike Langford and Dmitri Volkov once got pretty close. And the U.S. Command in Saigon grew mo
re and more obsessed with them. They claimed that the headquarters of the North Vietnamese organization known as COSVN was located there too, in those border jungles: the Central Office for South Vietnam, from which (so they said), the whole Communist war effort was being conducted. Their B-52s began secretly bombing inside Cambodia, in an effort to knock out the bases, and perhaps to knock out COSVN as well: the ultrasecret nerve center of the war. But they didn’t succeed; and COSVN was never found.

  Did it even exist? I still wonder. Like so much else about Cambodia and the war itself, COSVN was a secret inside a secret. The sanctuaries and the unofficial bombing both had an existence on the level of rumor, and the Central Office in the jungle lay in the realm of legend: a final secret at the heart of things, tantalizing the Americans. Perhaps if it could be found and rooted out, all the agonizing problems of the war in Vietnam could at last be solved, and victory achieved. This haunted the minds of their Special Forces men, their top military commanders and their CIA operatives—as well as the minds of humble scribes like me.

  Alas, the dreams of the 1960s had to come to an end, Harvey said: everything changed with the new decade. But by then I’d been moved out of Asia: ABS had sent me to London. The devious little prince was overthrown, and went into exile with his patrons in Peking; the kingdom became a republic; the Americans and the South Vietnamese Army were sought as allies, and briefly invaded to clear out the sanctuaries. They didn’t succeed; but when they pulled back across the border, the real war in Cambodia had begun, and the news media caravans rolled into Phnom Penh as they’d done into Saigon.

  I wasn’t with them: it was a war I’d yet to see. I read about it in the newspapers, like everyone else, or in letters from Mike; he was always a great letter writer. It wasn’t until 1973, in the last week of January, that ABS sent me back to Asia. They based me in Singapore again, but I was expected to spend as much time as necessary in Phnom Penh. Lisa, who now had a job in London as a research assistant at the BBC, wasn’t very happy about this; but she promised to join me in Singapore if the war situation dragged on. It certainly did: I’d be covering in Indochina for the next two years.