Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  The others in the car had gone quiet, and I suspected that Wardlaw and I weren’t alone in being nervous. And yet to have said anything would have been absurd, since absolutely nothing was happening. This was the sort of war that only Langford was used to, I thought: he’d virtually trained for it in his patrols with the ARVN in the Delta. No wonder he was happy here, and no wonder he got such great pictures: Cambodia was made for him. Bill Wall was looking frequently at the countryside: glances which were intended to appear casual. “Cheer up, buddy,” he told Wardlaw. “This’ll be a good bang-bang. You’ll probably get a hell of a story. Snow will get us in and out. That’s his specialty.”

  On the tape deck, Jerry Lee Lewis was singing “Shake, Rattle and Roll”; Mike was devoted to old Jerry Lee, and he suddenly turned the volume up to full, grinning as though he’d made us a present. We all began to rock to and fro and feel more cheerful; all except Wardlaw, that is. The noise was tremendous. Vora was smiling and nodding as he drove, and he and Bill Wall and I began to sing along. But Wardlaw sat rigid, his face sweating. “This is insane,” he said.

  We came to a checkpoint, and Mike turned the music off. Four Government soldiers in khaki caps and baggy fatigues, holding M-2 carbines, stood by a bamboo hut at the roadside. More soldiers squatted in the shade of a flame tree; there were women with them, in the dark cotton sarongs and blouses of the countryside, some holding infants: wives who followed their husbands to the front. A Chinese noodle seller in a straw hat was doing business with soldiers and a small group of peasants at his tricycle stall, and a number of motorcyclos were parked nearby: all of them here to serve the press. When the Peugeot pulled up behind us and disgorged its load of correspondents, the cyclo boys began immediately to negotiate.

  “My God,” Wardlaw muttered. “It’s like bloody Waterloo. Do these battles have spectators?”

  “The motorcyclos will take the press the rest of the way, for the right money,” Langford said. “The taxi won’t go any further.”

  “But we will?”

  Langford looked at him again. “That’s what vve’re here for,” he said. “I want pictures. But you can wait here, if you like.” His voice was polite, and more or less neutral.

  Wardlaw’s mouth tightened. “I’ll come.”

  Vora had been speaking in Khmer with the road guards. Now he came over and told us that the command post here was two kilometers down the road. “They expect an attack soon,” he told Mike. “Captain Samphan is there. We can go.”

  The temporary command post, when we reached it, proved to be a thatch-roofed peasant hut flying the Cambodian flag. A little grove of coconut palms extended behind it; a few fowls picked among discarded water jars. There were no local people here except for a single small boy in black shorts, seated on a buffalo at the roadside: he chewed a blade of grass, and watched proceedings. A number of Jeeps were parked on the road, which still ran straight and high here, with a ditch on each side. Armored personnel carriers stood in a field off the highway, and groups of soldiers with mortars were digging foxholes there, in the brown earth. The country continued to be open and exposed, but some two hundred yards away the road went up a low rise, and entered a copse of trees. I didn’t like those trees. The deceitfully beautiful blue hills were still on our left, but closer now.

  We all got out of the car except Vora. It was still only about eight-thirty, and not yet hot. The quiet was broken by the murmuring of the troops here, and by the static on a field radio in one of the Jeeps; Khmer voices came over it in sudden chattering surges. Two motorcyclos arrived, carrying our fellow correspondents. Only three of them had made the trip: two American stills photographers in one motorcyclo, and a very fat, fair-bearded English correspondent in a bent and broken panama hat, riding in another. They shouted and laughed like tourists, and called out greetings to Langford and Wall.

  The Cambodian troops were squatting in what shade they could find: most of them near the coconut grove. There were perhaps a hundred of them: company strength. The officers stood beside the Jeeps and the fortress-like APCs. I’d never seen an army quite like it: in other circumstances I might have laughed. They were all essentially cheerful, smiling and laughing as Cambodians generally do. Their motley uniforms were fantastic, almost festive, and I saw what Langford had meant about their equipment. Only a few had helmets and combat boots; most wore berets or cotton bush hats. For footgear, they had rubber shower sandals or tattered gym shoes; some were barefoot. They wore American fatigues many sizes too big; old French uniforms; even jeans. Some combined a fatigue shirt with black pajama trousers rolled up to the knees. All wore the krama, the checked Cambodian peasant scarf that can double as a turban, and all had sacred Buddha amulets hung in pouches around their necks. These, I’d learn eventually, would render them invulnerable in battle if their thoughts were pure. They were going to need them. Their weapons were just as fantastically varied: M-2 carbines; M-16 and AK-47 automatic rifles; French rifles from World War Two; pistols; submachine guns. Some of the combat troops were women: girls in their teens. And there were also boy soldiers.

  I’d heard that young boys were being recruited now, as the situation worsened, but I’d assumed that this meant teenagers: I couldn’t believe that the children in front of me would be sent into combat. Many of them were no older than ten, and their old French rifles looked bigger than they were. They wore floppy olive fatigues and green berets, and all their large dark eyes shone with bright expectancy, like those of a team of little boys waiting for the start of a football game. Some were playing, climbing up the palm trees, shouting and throwing down coconuts; but most were grouped around a stocky old sergeant in a cotton bush hat, faded green fatigue shirt, pajama trousers and sandals, who appeared to be in charge of them. Weathered face dark brown and rock-like, gold teeth clenched on one of the local cheroots of hand-rolled tobacco, he smiled down on his troop with fatherly affection.

  An officer in a green beret and sunglasses now came out of the house and walked slowly across to the Mercedes, his eyes on Langford. This was Captain Samphan, the company commander. He was young, tall, and stylish in well-cut American fatigues, a yellow scarf at his throat. Like his men, he was protected by magical Buddhist amulets that were knotted into the scarf. On his hip was a pistol I recognized as a .38 Magnum: he must have had very good connections to have got hold of it. Captain Samphan was something of a dandy, I thought: one of those officers common both here and in Vietnam, who played it like film stars, posing for the press and leading their men into battle only when the cameras were rolling. The other correspondents hurried to intercept him, the bearded man in the broken panama in the lead; but he waved them away, coming up to Langford with his hand extended, speaking in English with a French accent.

  “Hello, Mike. You are just in time,” he said. “We are expecting a little action very soon. We have had trouble at first light with the Khmer Rouge. We now think they are in those trees.”

  He pointed to the rise up ahead, and the sinking feeling began in my guts again.

  Wardlaw, notebook out, abruptly asked the captain why he took such small boys into battle. His voice had a note of reproof, but Captain Samphan answered him courteously.

  “We have not enough men, as you perhaps ‘know,” he said. “And these boys are so very keen. If we don’t take them with us, they will only cry.”

  Wardlaw stared at him, wordless. The three other correspondents had come up to stand behind us, listening, and the bearded man in the panama was scribbling in his notebook, breathing heavily. He must have been feeling the heat with all that weight to carry about, but he looked quite cheerful and relaxed. Catching my eye, he winked.

  “Any casualties yet?” Langford asked.

  “Fortunately, no,” Captain Samphan said. “We were not within range when they fired on us. Now we intend to advance. I advise that you keep back, and look for cover if necessary.” He turned away, and called an order to a group of young officers standing by a Jeep.

  No
w the warm air was full of shouts and movement. The officers were getting some of the troops into formation, ready to march up the road. Everything became very distinct, in a way I remembered all too well. Langford, Wall, Wardlaw and I still stood by the Mercedes, and Vora remained at the wheel. Captain Samphan was walking fast across the road in the middle distance, ordering some of the troops into the paddy field. The boy soldiers, shouldering their huge French rifles, were assembling near the rear of the line, their sergeant beside them. But one of them, who appeared to be about twelve, was standing at the head of all the troops, holding the Cambodian flag. Its device was the towers of Angkor Wat—emblem of Cambodia’s days of ancient glory—and it fluttered in the light breeze. The boy’s beret was at a jaunty angle, and his face had a cocky expression: teacher’s pet, chosen for the most privileged of all duties. Another order was shouted, and the troops marched directly up the road behind the boy with the flag.

  Except for the marching feet and the static on the field radio, there was a large quiet. I was wet from perspiration now as though I’d jumped into a pool. I looked around for Langford, who’d been at my elbow, and found that he’d gone. Then I saw him. Following his usual practice, he was going forward with the troops instead of seeking cover, walking fast beside the ditch that ran along the edge of the highway. He was dressed in a dark shirt and olive fatigue trousers, but was bare-headed; as usual, he carried a Leica and a backup Nikon. The two American photographers moved not far behind him, getting off some quick shots. As I watched them, they took cover behind one of the APCs in the paddy field; and at that moment, the firing began.

  The noise was shattering: the hidden Khmer Rouge had opened up with mortars from the trees, and the Cambodian mortar platoons in the paddy field began to open up in response. Bill Wall and I looked at each other; there was too much noise to speak. He pointed to the ditch and I nodded and tapped Wardlaw on the shoulder. His face was white and oily: he looked dazed. I beckoned for him to follow, and then ran for it.

  When we got to the ditch and rolled in, we found the bearded man already in occupancy, lying on his side. He grinned at me, still with a remarkably sanguine expression, and I wondered if he knew that some of his bulk rose like a whale’s above the level of the ditch. Behind me I could hear a squeezed voice saying: “Christ almighty,” and knew that it was Wardlaw. I looked at a slight cut on my thumb and remembered I’d done it in the kitchen of our flat in South Kensington, opening a can two days ago: a harmless wound of peace, in a now-unreal country, filling me with nostalgia. After a time, although the noise continued, I raised my face just above the ditch to see what was happening.

  In the tropics, the pane through which we view reality is very thin. The colors are so unnaturally bright; they can suddenly cause the pane to seem to dissolve. The world becomes two-dimensional; a tapestry behind which something else waits to announce itself. This was happening now, and I fought against vertigo, knowing I might never get out of here. On the road, in a blue screen of gunsmoke, the troops were marching on with suicidal directness, firing towards the tree line as they went. They seemed to have no notion of taking cover in the paddy field; Langford was right, they were fighting a medieval battle. A man not far from me was crawling towards the ditch, dragging a shattered leg. Already the brown road was littered with bodies; but the boy carrying the flag was still marching at the head of the line: a gallant little page who bore a charmed life.

  But then he fell, and it would have been like a child pretending to be killed in a schoolyard game except for his limp, small stillness, and the blood that spread from under him. The troops marched around him, firing their automatic weapons. His green beret had come off in the dust, and one half of my mind expected his mother to come and gather him up. Instantly, another little page raced forward to pick up the standard, raising it high and proudly marching as the other had done: an image repeating itself. I found myself stupidly cursing under my breath.

  There were wild shouts of command; I saw Captain Samphan waving his pistol, and the troops at last began to turn into the paddy field and take cover behind the dykes. The mortar fire went on relentlessly, and showers of earth went up. Then I heard Langford’s voice, and looked up to see him crouched at the edge of the ditch.

  “Get to the car,” he said. “We’re in a bit of trouble.”

  Now we were all in Black Bessie, where Vora appeared to have been sitting all the time. The cabin was full of heavy breathing and the stink of our sweat. The other correspondents had followed our example, and were already making off in their motorcycles, but the boy on the buffalo was still here at the roadside, staring as though at a passing circus.

  Vora turned on the ignition, but the motor didn‘t start. We waited in terrible patience, and he tried again. It started, but he . didn’t put the car into gear; he watched Langford inquiringly, apparently awaiting orders. I sat between them; Langford still had the passenger door open. “Not yet,” he said. He was squinting, watching the two motorcyclos disappear.

  “Let’s go, man,” Bill Wall said to him. “This ain’t a healthy scene. They’re being overrun.” His voice was calm but urgent.

  “What are we waiting for?” Wardlaw shouted. His voice was on the edge of hysteria. “For Christ’s sake will you fucking go?”

  Langford ignored him, and spoke to Vora. “Okay, go,” he said. “Wait for me at the checkpoint. Give it an hour.” He slid out and slammed the door, and Vora accelerated away.

  Bill Wall leaned forward from the back and spoke to Vora. “He’s staying?”

  Vora smiled. “Good trick. The other photographers think he goes-they go. Then Mr. Mike gets a scoop.”

  “Jesus,” Wall said. “Good trick? Can he also do the trick of getting out of here? These people are history.”

  As we drove off, I looked back to see that the troops that were left had regrouped in the paddy field behind the APCs. Captain Samphan was there, standing by one of the armored cars, and I watched Langford walk up to him. Explosions were continuing in the paddy field, but they began a conversation as though on a quiet street.

  I fully believed that the two of them would die there.

  When we got back to the checkpoint, it was like returning to a haven of changelessness, last seen a long time ago.

  The four road guards, the flame tree, the bamboo hut, the Chinese noodle seller: all in place, in a whirring, strengthening sunlight that was innocent of gunfire. But the motorcyclos had gone, and so had the two Peugeot taxis—no doubt carrying our colleagues back to Phnom Penh.

  We walked to a palm-thatch farmhouse a little way down the road. It was built on stilts, like most Cambodian farmhouses, and we went up steps onto a simple front verandah. The peasants were either in hiding or had run away, and we settled down here to wait for Langford. Vora the driver seemed not to be worried about him: he had a confidence in Langford’s skills as though they were supernatural. Murmuring to me softly, his confiding smile and the concerned wrinkles on his brow creating gentle reassurance, Vora explained. Mike had been given a nickname by the troops: did I know this? He was called MeanSamnang, the Lucky One. This was because he always came away untouched from the heaviest firefights; he always survived, and he’d survive again today. He was not like other photographers: he was Mean Samnang. And Vora nodded at me happily, as though no more need be said. But although I refrained from voicing the fact, I didn’t share his certainty.

  The verandah had reed mats spread about, which the others lay on, and a sacking hammock was slung in one corner; I tossed a coin with Bill Wall for this, and won. Lying in it was very welcome; I was unnaturally tired, and floated off. There was a smell like hot straw, and the voices of the others came from a distance. When I closed my eyes I saw the little boy with the flag again, his death rerun like a film clip. I’d write about it, of course, for the voice-piece I’d be doing for ABS by radio-telephone circuit this afternoon; but thinking about framing it in words filled me with disgust.

  An hour or so later, the humm
ing of a Jeep sounded on the road, and I heard the others say that it was Langford. Filled with relief, I got out of the hammock to greet him.

  The Jeep, driven by the old sergeant in the bush hat, stopped just long enough to let Mike out, and then swung around to go back up the highway. Mike climbed the steps without speaking, and unloaded his cameras and camera bag on a mat. Vora smiled broadly at him, and Mike put a hand on his shoulder, keeping it there while he greeted the rest of us, being just as friendly to Godfrey Wardlaw as to everyone else. Then he looked at Bill Wall, extending his hand with finger and thumb crooked.

  Bill sighed, and shook out a cigarette and lit it for him. “Jesus, Snow,” he said. “You have to be very lucky.”

  “They lost about half the company,” Langford said. “But the Khmer Rouge pulled out, in the end. Samphan’s a good commander.”

  His face had an expression of meditative peacefulness I can only describe as dreamy. He didn’t speak again, and no one attempted to make him do so. He lay in the hammock, smoking, and I had little doubt that he was coming down from some enormous height: from that escarpment near death where he’d lingered with Captain Samphan.

  I also began to suspect that it was a place where he needed to be.

  4.

  HARVEY DRUMMOND

  Couscous night at the Jade Pagoda.

  A mutual therapy session for emotionally dislocated correspondents. A station for the dressing of psychic wounds. A trapdoor into trance.