Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  There was a false hope of peace in Cambodia in that week of my arrival. A cease-fire was hoped for, arranged between Hanoi and the Americans as part of the Paris peace accords. But it wouldn’t happen. Out in the countryside, a new group of Communists had taken over from the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong: and these were native Khmers.

  Sihanouk had called them les Khmers Rouges; but most Cambodians simply called them les autres: the Others. No one knew anything about them. They wore black, like the ‘Viet Cong, and when we covered engagements with them, we seldom got close enough to see their faces. They belonged to the dream at the edges too; but now they were moving to the center.

  I’d been out of Indochina for nearly seven years, Harvey said. When I came back, all highways led to the war.

  3.

  HARVEY DRUMMOND

  Pick any highway, I was told: all of them go to the war. I thought it was a joke, at first.

  But what my colleagues were telling me was true: everyone of the highways that radiated out from Phnom Penh would take you to the front. The struggle had come down to keeping them open, so that the city wouldn’t die. This was a war over highways.

  Will there ever be another war like it? One you could go to by taxi? On my first day there, I was taken by air-conditioned Mercedes.

  The Mercedes belonged to Mike Langford. It was black, somewhat elderly, but still handsome; he’d named it Black Bessie, after some long-ago pig on the family farm. He’d bought it cheap, he told me, from a Chinese businessman who’d recently departed Phnom Penh: one of the many members of the merchant class now fleeing the country. But I couldn’t help seeing the Mercedes as a sign of Mike’s mature success: one of the few obvious rewards he’d allowed himself.

  On the evening of my arrival he’d come out to Pochentong Airport in Black Bessie to meet my plane. He’d come alone, since Jim Feng and Dmitri Volkov were both out of town, and I was touched.

  I’d learned from Mike’s letters that both Feng and Volkov had continued to work in Indochina over most of this time; but for Dmitri, there’d been a break of nearly two years. He’d married an American, an employee of the U.S. State Department based in Saigon; when she’d been moved back home, he’d gone with her to Washington, and had given up covering combat. But the marriage had ended, and for the past six months he’d been back in Cambodia, covering for CBS again. Trevor Griffiths was here as well, Mike said, after working for some years in Europe; Griffiths too had been married and divorced. Mike of course had never married. Correspondents aren’t good marriage material; the way of life’s against it, and I seem to be an exception. I hoped that Jim Feng would be luckier; according to Mike, he’d just become engaged to a young Chinese woman in Singapore.

  There were soldiers manning sandbag emplacements all around the terminal, and the Caravelle that had got me here from Saigon kept its engines turning over for an immediate takeoff. No civil aircraft now stayed in Phnom Penh overnight, since Khmer Rouge rocket attacks on the airport were frequent. This put a certain chill in me; but I still looked forward to a reunion with my Saigon brothers. Walking across the tarmac, I tried to imagine in what way Langford would be changed by the years. But the figure waiting at the customs barrier looked exactly the same.

  He stood among a small crowd of anxious-looking Cambodians who clutched outward tickets for the Caravelle. The edge of middle age didn’t seem to have made a mark on him; I saw with immediate envy that the mane of yellow hair remained as thick as a twenty-year-old’s. I was rather conscious of hair lately; in an era that had brought in a fashion for wearing it as long as a medieval courtier‘s, mine was going fast. Langford’s hair, I noticed, was still cut short by current standards, with only the sideburns worn longer as a concession to the seventies.

  “Harvey,” he said, and put out his hand. “What took you so long to get back?”

  He grinned and winked, comically contorting one side of his face: the exaggerated country wink that always conveyed a message. This one said: You’ve been wasting your time all these years; there’s no other story; no other place to be. And for him of course this was true.

  I’d followed his career over the past seven years through his letters and his published work. He was getting more and more famous, and he’d been briefly lured out of Indochina to cover other conflicts for leading magazines: the Chinese-Indian clash on the border of Tibet in 1967; the street fighting in Belfast in 1969; the civil war in Jordan in 1970. But he only did it for the money, his letters told me; they’d been interesting interludes, nothing more. There was only one war that mattered.

  Three years ago, a New York publisher had brought out a book of his Vietnam photographs, with a text by a well-known American correspondent. It had included not only scenes of battle, but other pictures showing the plight of the peasants in the countryside, and the tribes of the displaced in the shantytowns and streets of Saigon. It had attracted a good deal of favorable attention in most of the major newspapers—and also praise from the antiwar movement, which eventually used some of his pictures as propaganda. Last year a book on the war in Cambodia had followed, with pictures of equal power. Some of the reviews had treated his collections as art, as well as documentary—which I suppose they are, now that one looks at them again. And a leading New York magazine had recently run an interview and a story on him, dwelling heavily on his reputation for unusual risk taking, and elevating him towards the edge of that plateau inhabited by celebrities.

  But he had no wish to be there, apparently. Another photographer would have proceeded to enjoy the fruits of such success, basing himself in New York or London. Langford had spent time in both capitals when his books were launched; but then he’d come back to the war, and he’d based himself now in Phnom Penh. He was under contract here to a big American newsweekly, and his pictures often made its cover.

  Cambodia was his home, he said.

  At seven o‘clock the next morning, the Mercedes rolled down Highway 5.

  Its air was nicely cooled, “Tupelo Honey” was playing on its tape deck, and an icebox sat in the back, filled with bottled orange juice. So this was the way my colleagues went to war in Cambodia. It made me laugh; and I have to admit that my laughter was euphoric.

  Don’t misunderstand me: I didn’t like the sound of this war, which was said to be killing more correspondents than any other in history. But I’d just come out of a London winter, my grateful body was clad in light cotton clothing again, and the big warmth of Asia surrounded me; I was back, and it put me on a high, that morning. So too, if I’m honest, did speeding down a highway towards the action in Langford’s Mercedes, with “Tupelo Honey” coming over the speakers.

  Van Morrison was a favorite with the brothers, Mike told me: he was especially good for playing on the way to a firefight. So were Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Rod Stewart. I savored this information, which had the same importance for me as learning some vital news source; it tuned me in to their lives again, and after seven years away I yearned to be tuned in. We journalists love the ephemeral, and there’s no hunger so exquisite as hunger for the ephemeral; now Van Morrison belongs forever to the war in Cambodia, and the clear sunlight of the dry season. I wouldn’t be this high in an hour or so, but the moment lives on, its fragile structure built on air, like all our best moments.

  We were headed towards a battle. Mike’s sources had told him of a probable engagement between Cambodian Government forces and the Khmer Rouge, about sixty kilometers northwest of the city. We were driven by a thin, brown-faced Cambodian of middle age called Lay Vora, whose crisp white shirt and navy trousers made him look quasiofficial. He had a thick cap of wrinkled black hair and many wrinkles in his forehead from perpetually raising his eyebrows; he smiled a lot, his eyes wistful and kindly, and had the permanently concerned air of a good family man. Vora was Langford’s driver-interpreter—and also his landlord, I’d discover. He and his family lived in a three-story house near the Old Market, and they sublet the top floor to Langford. Mike and
I were sitting next to him on the old-fashioned bench seat; in the back were two correspondents who were strangers to me.

  Bill Wall was an American who was bureau chief here for the U.S. newsmagazine Mike took pictures for, and who wrote the stories the pictures accompanied. The other man was a BBC correspondent called Godfrey Wardlaw. He’d arrived here the night before as I’d done, and had struck up a conversation with Langford and me in the bar of the Hotel le Royal: the unofficial club for correspondents, where I’d taken a room. Langford was generous with both. lifts and information; he often helped new-comers like Wardlaw with a story, and he’d invited him along today.

  “Got a cigarette for an old Digger?” Mike turned to Bill Wall, beggar’s palm outstretched.

  Wall shook a cigarette from his pack and held it across the seat back. He was a thin, wiry man of around forty, his sandy hair crew-cut like a Marine’s. His large, slightly protuberant brown eyes had a humorous gleam, as though permanently alert for the punch line of a joke. Leaning forward, he spoke in my ear.

  “This compat-riot of yours just gave up smoking,” he said. He came from Kentucky, and elongated his words in the musical Southern way. “Will you ask him to take it up again, Harvey, for God’s sake? It’s bankrupting me keeping him in cigarettes.”

  “I had no choice, Bill,” Langford said. “Vora’s have run out.”

  Vora took one hand from the wheel to hold a lighter to Mike’s smoke, his face composed and tolerant, like a wise father’s. “He has taken my last one,” he said. “I wanted to buy a special begging pack for him, and keep it in the glove box. But he will not allow: he said it would make him smoke more.”

  Only Godfrey Wardlaw didn’t laugh. He was lanky, pale and serious, with dark, bushy sideburns and a handsome Che Guevara mustache. He’d not been in Southeast Asia before, and he seemed unusually quiet, staring out the window; I assumed he was simply taking things in.

  Highway 5 ran towards Thailand, through a wide, flat country of low horizons: a blue line of mountains far off in the west; tall white clouds in the east. It was known as the Rice Road, since much of the rice that fed Phnom Penh came down it from the western province of Battambang. Now, it seemed, the Khmer Rouge were constantly attempting to cut it, and battles took place on it almost daily. But the war was hard to believe in, and nowhere to be seen. January’s a delightful month in Cambodia: the dry season, and not yet too sticky; the time of the rice harvest, with the landscape not yet bleached out. A gentle breeze was blowing, and the high, spiky heads of the sugar palms waved and glittered above the paddy dykes. When you see the sugar palms, they say, you know you’re in Cambodia. Black-clad young women in checked turbans moved in the rice fields wielding sickles; brown-faced grandmothers held infants and baskets beside the road, smiling as though all was well.

  And of course, all was not well. We were now some fifty kilometers or so out from Phnom Penh—just past the old ruined city of Oudong—and here, Mike told us, Highway 5 stopped being officially secure. Yet knowing this made no difference to my morning joy.

  Highways! How they lead us on: we for whom the present is everything, yet never enough! Highways have always brought me joy: highways on which we move at speed, and which go out across flatness to some edge that’s beyond the possible, as this one was doing. A line of very distant treetops could be seen there against the sky, and the complex cone of an old Buddhist stupa sitting quietly on a rise, like a power plant from some alien technology. Only out there, on that edge to which we were speeding, was I promised all the answers I never seem to find: out there, where the world would at last change. It’s an edge I often see in dreams: the only place where we ever actually reach it. Langford has appeared in a number of these dreams, since he disappeared. The highway runs at night then, with far, tiny lamps strung along its utmost edge. I see Mike going there on foot, to a final windy rim: a place where he belongs. I know he has his being there, in the dream: he’s one of those people who do. Then he disappears.

  “When’s Volkov getting back from Saigon?”

  Bill Wall was still leaning forward, speaking to Mike. “You can bum his cigarettes, then,” he said.

  “He’ll be back next week,” Mike said. “Then Jim Feng will have to worry about being scooped again.”

  “The Count’s real manic lately—a lot more manic than usual. That fouled-up marriage, I guess: I think it hit him hard. He still does a great job, but I worry about the number of pipes he smokes at Madame Delphine’s.” He turned to me. “One evening recently, the Count smoked thirty pipes. Thirty: that’s the truth, I swear. Trevor Griffiths and I had to carry him to his room in the Royal, and he didn’t surface for two days. He was out of it, boy.” He began to laugh. “On the second day we got concerned, and I went up and called through the door. I asked did he want to be told if anything big broke. Never let it be said I’m not charitable.” Wall lay back in his seat, trying to stop laughing; finally he went on. “And this dying little voice came back through the door: ‘Go away. I have no laundry.’ Dmitri thought I was the goddamn room boy.” His laughter now was ecstatic; he wiped away tears. But Godfrey Wardlaw still wasn’t laughing; he frowned faintly, as though in disapproval of our frivolity.

  The road ahead was now absolutely empty. It was raised above the level of the dried-out rice fields here, running high and straight across the flat yellow circle of the land like a roller coaster track at a fairground, and I suddenly realized how exposed we were. The fields here had been harvested, and were faded and empty; clumps of ragged palms and bananas and a few thatched huts were the only features visible for miles. Behind us, churning up pale brown dust at the road’s edge, were a Cambodian Army truck and a motorcyclo carrying two fully armed Government soldiers in helmets, seated side by side, like a comic war toy. Even some of the Cambodian troops went to war by taxi, it seemed; it was that sort of crazy army. Close behind them, following us as it had done since Phnom Penh, came an ancient Peugeot taxi carrying a number of our fellow correspondents. It seemed they often followed Langford’s Mercedes; knowing how good his contacts were, they counted on his leading them to the action.

  Vora spoke suddenly. “Contested area,” he said. His face had grown serious, and he kept his eyes on the road.

  Wardlaw’s frown deepened, and he leaned forward to Mike. “What does he mean?”

  “The road up ahead,” Mike said. “It’s empty. And see those village houses? They’re closed up, and even the dogs are gone. The Khmer Rouge are here. You’ll get to know signs like those, mate, if you come out often.”

  “So how much farther do you intend to go? I’m not particularly anxious to become a statistic,” Wardlaw said.

  The familiar sinking feeling I’d known in Vietnam was entering my gut: Wardlaw’s nervousness was making me nervous. Langford had turned around to look at him.

  “You said you wanted to get close to the action,” he said. His voice was neutral, and for a moment his gaze became empty and almost cold. His eyes seemed a paler blue than I remembered, and I noticed as well that the look of boyishness I thought I’d seen the night before had been a superficial impression: his face had grown older and harder, especially around the mouth.

  “Of course,” Wardlaw said. “But it’s a matter of how close, isn’t it? Whether we have reasonable protection.”

  Langford raised his eyebrows. “Protection? There isn’t any,” he said. “It’s a movable front here, and the Government troops aren’t very good at protecting themselves. They still tend to operate as though it’s the Middle Ages: they haven’t had a serious war since then. The troops are brave—they’ll fight to the last man. But they’re not properly trained or equipped, and the North Vietnamese and the VC have been slaughtering them. Now the Khmer Rouge are doing the same. And the Yanks have left them to flounder, as you know. All they give them is air support, and that’s not enough.”

  His expression had taken on the remote, almost fervent seriousness that I remembered from Vietnam days, and I wondered whether
the Khmer Republic’s army had replaced the Army of South Vietnam as the underdog whose cause he championed. But then his seriousness vanished. He grinned, and extended a hand across the seat to touch Wardlaw’s shoulder, and his voice became soothing: the voice of the sympathetic Langford of our younger days. “Relax, old fellow,” he said. “I’ve got word that the commander out here has the Khmer Rouge pinned down. He’s a friend of mine. And he’s not the type who gets his people killed through stupidity.”

  “Not like some,” Bill Wall put in. “Hell, sometimes we know more than the troops do. Once we went down the road ahead of them, and took a village. They followed us in. Not a shot fired.”

  We all laughed again; but Wardlaw still looked tense. He was conscious of his dignity, and was trying to mask his feelings to preserve it. He took out a handkerchief, and wiped his face. He’d told me the night before that he’d never been in a war zone, and I began to be sorry for him: the situation he now found himself in clearly wasn’t what he’d bargained for.

  It wasn’t what I’d bargained for either, and with every kilometer the car covered, it was getting worse.

  No sound of gunfire yet; no sign of battle: but the emptiness of that raised, exposed highway was eerie. It had now become a very frightening ride, and chills began to run through me.

  This wasn’t at all like Vietnam. There was no U.S. Army here, with its friendly amenities for correspondents and its carefully defined limits within which we could operate. I’d begun to understand that no one was in charge here. The war in Cambodia had a nightmare vagueness, and this dry, huge, empty, yellow-and-green dish of land, under these towering clouds, was the axis of that vagueness, hiding the black-clad Others. I’d done my homework, of course, and Mike had briefed me the night before. I knew that a lot of journalists were dying on the highways, and that those who’d been taken prisoner hadn’t been seen again, since the Khmer Rouge apparently executed anyone they seized. But the reality hadn’t crept up on me until now. I always face reality too late: a fact which Lisa had pointed out to me before I left London. Thinking about her now only added to my ruefulness, so I stopped.