Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  Only the special sadness of the war in Cambodia could have produced couscous night. There was nothing like it in Vietnam.

  The Pagoda was on Monivong Boulevard: the city’s main thoroughfare. You had to knock to be admitted, as you did at most Phnom Penh restaurants, and you were then frisked for weapons by a Government soldier. Langford, Feng, Volkov and a number of other correspondents and photographers met there each Saturday, hiring a private room.

  The room’s an odd one, like something out of another century. We sit in semidarkness around a huge circular table which fills the compartment almost completely. This, combined with dark, wood-paneled walls and weak lamps on brackets, gives the place an atmosphere that’s claustrophobic, privileged and illicit: a London club crossed with a Triad headquarters. Unsmiling Chinese waiters in white shirts and black trousers stand like sentinels around the walls, watching us. Later, when my mind is rearranged, their expressions will come to seem contemptuous; even malevolent.

  Things are quiet just yet, around the table. Everyone’s more or less sober, and the couscous stew hasn’t come in. The Nurseryman, I’m told, is in charge of the couscous, and is still out in the kitchen supervising its preparation. Who the Nurseryman is and why he’s involved with the cooking is information that’s being held back from me; my colleagues are getting a childish pleasure out of being mystifying.

  Opposite me, Mike Langford, Jim Feng and Dmitri Volkov are drinking cognac and soda and playing the Match Game. On my left, Trevor Griffiths and Bill Wall are deep in conversation about the Paris peace accords, and the cunning of Henry Kissinger. On my right is Roger Clayton, a young Australian correspondent whom I met in the bar at the Royal tonight and took pity on; he’s been sent here by a Sydney paper on his first overseas assignment, and has the youthful novice’s longing to make contact with the inner circle of the press here. He treats me with gratifying deference; he’s still romantic about meeting the veterans, which reminds me of my own early days, and makes me sentimental. I hope he won’t prove an embarrassment like Wardlaw; but his square face appears both reliable and inoffensive, framed by mouse brown hair worn at the new near-shoulder length and nicely barbered, making him look like a well-groomed hippy.

  He’s been especially impressed to discover that I’m a friend of Langford‘s, whom he holds in some awe. This week, Langford has once again made the cover of his international news magazine, with a picture of the little boy with the flag, taken seconds after he fell; the other small boy is seen stooping to pick it up. It’s caused anger and pity around the world, with quite a bit of press comment, and this adds to Clayton’s professional reverence. On the way here from the Royal, he kept asking me questions about Langford,. How many times had he been wounded? What was his secret of survival? Were his pictures really intended as an indictment of the war?

  He now wants to ask Mike these things, and to get his views on the American bombing, and the current state of the conflict in the countryside—but an attempt at this sort of interview has met with a discouraging response from all three cameramen. The Match Game, it’s made clear, is more important: in fact, paramount. I can see that Clayton’s disconcerted by this; like many of the younger journalists now, he’s a moral crusader, and has expected that the cameramen will immediately want to discuss the big issues. He’s also the sort who looks for heroes, and the three are not behaving as he expected.

  Soiled Cambodian banknotes lie on the table: the game is played for money, as all their games are.

  “Eight,” Volkov says. “I say eight.”

  He and Feng and Langford raise fists in which they’ve concealed their chosen number of matches, staring at each other like poker players. The Match Game, which I find boring, and which for them has the seriousness of ritual, involves each player starting with the same number of matches, and each displaying a number of them in every round; the aim is to guess the total number of matches still in play.

  “Seven,” Langford says.

  He and Volkov look blankly at each other, and I’m struck by a vague yet perceptible physical resemblance that’s developed between them in their maturity, and which wasn’t there in their youth. It isn’t that they’re both blond; nothing so obvious. It’s like a family resemblance, and I wonder whether their common occupation over the years could have produced it.

  “Ten,” says Jim Feng, and then the matches are counted. Noisy laughter; Jim gathers in the banknotes.

  “He wins every time. He plays good mind games, the Crazy Jim,” Volkov says. He grins: the stretched grin that I remember. Like Langford, he carries no extra weight, and still looks fit; but he’s slighter than I remember, and unlike Mike, he’s begun to age a little. There are lines that look like strain around the mouth, only half hidden by his mustache, and the blue Tartar eyes have faint, bruise-like shadows under them. Remembering Bill Wall’s anecdote, I wonder if Dmitri has an opium problem. By contrast, Jim Feng seems almost unchanged. Perhaps his face has a new seriousness; perhaps his almond eyes are a little narrower; but that’s all. I’m the one who’s changed most, in the comfort of Europe: they’re all making jokes about my baldness.

  So here they are again: the Soldiers Three. I wonder if that silly name’s still used, or forgotten. Looking at them across the table, it’s possible to see them through young Clayton’s eyes, and to understand his awe of them. They’ve survived covering combat for such a long time. Volkov has had two years out of it during the period of his marriage, but has otherwise filmed battle continuously since the early sixties; and Langford and Feng have survived over seven years of continuous coverage in Indochina. This is more action than most soldiers ever see. The American troops in Vietnam did only one-year tours, and most of the war photographers there didn’t tempt fate for much longer than that: they got out because they were burned out, or on the edge of breakdown, or believed they’d soon die. Or else they did die. If you wanted to be superstitious, I tell myself, you could say that the odds against the three must have run out long ago. They’re still quite young, of course, by normal standards; but like athletes they live by their reflexes, and their age, like that of athletes, is measured on a scale that’s more pitiless than the one that applies to the rest of us.

  They still have their talismans, I notice. It‘a stuffy in here, despite the overhead fan, and Volkov has his shirt open over his chest: I can see that he still wears his Saint Nicholas medal, and it touches and somehow saddens me.

  They’ve finally taken pity on Clayton, and begun to talk shop to him.

  “Do you know what some of these freelance stills guys get for a picture now? Fifteen U.S. dollars,” Jim Feng tells him. He smiles, and shakes his head.

  “Right,” Volkov says. “So on a bad day, that might be all they’d make. They risk their asses for fifteen dollars. War-nuts, definitely. Not professional. For that money, you have to really want to be at a bang-bang.”

  “Are many being killed?” Clayton asks.

  Volkov stares at him. “Every other week,” he says. “Haven’t you heard?”

  “But you keep on covering,” Clayton says.

  “You show me a better war,” Volkov says, and the others laugh.

  “You attend by taxi,” Volkov says, “and you’re back around Hotel Royal swimming pool in the afternoon, eating shrimp salad and drinking French wine. That’s my kind of war. The only trouble is, some don’t come back through gates at sunset.” He pauses, st:aring. “We sit by nice swimming pool and watch,” he says. “As shadows get long, people go quiet. Anyone who doesn’t walk up drive of the Royal by then is usually dead. Being press doesn’t help you here. Khmer Rouge don’t have rules.”

  Mike is pouring us all more cognac. “We’ve lost a lot of mates,” he says. “We lost a terrific lady two months ago: a correspondent for the London Telegraph. Helen used to ride the roads wherever they’d take her, and she was in Khmer Rouge country. She and her Cambodian driver haven’t been seen since.”

  Volkov is grinning at me. “Hey, Harvey,” h
e says. “It’s great to have you back, bald one.”

  “Which reminds me,” Jim Feng says suddenly. “Pheng died today, out on Highway 4. Mortar shell.”

  “Mon Dieu,” Volkov says, and looks into his cognac.

  Langford frowns. “Pheng? That Cambodian stringer? Oh, shit. Not Pheng. He was such a nice bloke.”

  “They are all nice blokes,” Volkov says.

  “I liked Pheng,” Jim says. “May he be in peace.”

  The three sit silent for a moment, hands clasped in identical attitudes, staring at the table.

  At this point the Nurseryman comes in, followed by Chinese waiters carrying covered dishes, and everything becomes noisy. Inside the noise, Trevor Griffiths is muttering like a conspirator in my ear—revealing to me at last the secret of the couscous: this un-Chinese dish of meat stew and semolina that’s the centerpoint of the evening. The Nurseryman laces it with marijuana, he says: grass of the highest quality, grown on the balcony of his apartment. Hence his nickname.

  Cambodia’s always been a paradise for potheads, since its use is legal here: middle-class Cambodians often employ it in cooking, and are said to be mildly stoned a good deal of the time. But this will be the first time I’ve ingested it in food, and I have some misgivings; I haven’t even smoked the stuff since I left Indochina. The waiters are setting out the dishes on the wheel that revolves in the center of the table, while the Nurseryman gestures and supervises. His name is Hubert Whatley, and he turns out to be the bearded English correspondent I shared the ditch with on Highway 5 three days ago. In our confined chamber he seems larger than life, especially standing up. His sandy hair and beard are overabundant; he’s tall, and his curving belly is impressive: he must weigh nearly twenty stone. His voice is a fine, penetrating bass, the accent Yorkshire crossed with BBC.

  “Couscous!” he cries. “Gentlemen! Your dish of dreams is here! Bon appetit!”

  He shakes my hand and young Clayton‘s, bending over us while voices and laughter rise in a sudden wave, and spoons clatter. “We met in busier circumstances, Harvey—I hope I didn’t crowd you in that drain. But let me explain to you both, since this is your baptism at the Pagoda. Only one of these dishes is garnished with my lovely herb. You must therefore partake of every dish before the fairy visits you. Understood? Splendid.” He straightens up, and raises a hand in blessing over the table, his bass filling the compartment. “Go to, gentlemen, and may all your dreams be weird ones.”

  We spoon the stew into our bowls; the wheel revolves and delivers fresh dishes; our laughter and talk rise explosively, and the Chinese waiters watch us from their places around the walls.

  Griffiths jerks his head at them, muttering. “They’re agents of the bloody Lon Nol Government: I have that from a very good source. So watch what you say, mate.” He takes a giant mouthful of couscous. Chewing, waiting to get his hit, he seems to be listening for some distant sound. Like me, Trevor’s now balding, and he’s compensated by growing a curling black Welsh beard that tickles my left ear as he delivers his confidences. “All our talk goes back to the Government,” he says. “Don’t doubt it. And our beloved President Lon Nol would be glad to find an excuse to expel me, Harvey, since my reports show up his incompetence and corruption.”

  “I see you still have your conspiracy theories, Trevor.”

  He frowns, the beard giving him the somber, worrying authority of a biblical prophet. “So will you, after a few weeks here, Drummond. Let me give you one example. The spokesman at the Government’s military briefings is a happy incompetent with no regard for reality. Every area he tells us is secure turns out to be a death trap. The man’s directly responsible for the killing of journalists.” His beard opens in a bitter black-and-white smile. “His name is Colonel Am Rong.”

  I start laughing, and find I can’t stop. Clearly, I’ve now eaten of the magic dish; and I enter a vacuum. The vacuum is very dark, lit only by the lamps around the walls, and inside it, the talk I hear is sometimes muffled and sometimes of huge, ringing significance.

  Young Clayton is giggling helplessly. “What’s in this?” He peers into his bowl, and leans back, giggling again.

  “Cambodia’s already lost,” Griffiths is saying. “Lost, and we all know it. We’re here to watch the end. That’s why they posted you here, isn’t it, comrade? To join us around the corpse. Don’t look for the Cambodia you used to know, Harvey—it’s gone. The war criminals Nixon and Kissinger have destroyed it. In order to keep it safe from Communism, the B-52s bombed this country’s heart out last year, killing any number of innocent villagers. Thirty-seven thousand tons of bombs. Nice clean work, flying at a great height; then they went back to their bases in Thailand and Guam.”

  The years haven’t put out Trevor’s fire, I see: his dark eyes shine and insist in the old way, and his paper-white face works with the old inner fury. But as I watch, his face becomes a huge Assyrian mask, with glossy black beard and ringlets, filling my vision. I resent this effect of the couscous, which is potentially terrifying, and I try to resist it. But the merciless Assyrian king who is Griffiths continues to sit in the darkness in front of me, his eyes flashing anger and death and pillage: he seems to wear a high, cone-shaped cap. And the king seizes a glass, and raises it to the table at large.

  “Gentlemen! I give you the Stratofortress: the majestic B-52!” His voice blares like a trumpet, and his speech has ‘bardic rhythms. “Imperial America’s answer to Nelson’s ships of the line! The supreme vehicle of death! Flies as high as fifty thousand feet, with a range of twelve thousand miles. Bombs inside; bombs under the wings. Beautiful as an eagle. At that height, it can’t even be seen: you know nothing until the bombs arrive. The crew of a B-52 are innocent: they see not what they do. But down here, villages disappear into chasms, trees go down like grass, and the noise can make you lose your mind. Terrible beauty, brothers!”

  He drinks and then turns to me, slumping back in his chair. He seems to have become Trevor again: the high cap is gone and his voice is quieter, sad. “They did their work well here, mate: they destroyed the countryside. So now we have a million refugees in Phnom Penh.”

  “But these are also refugees from the NVA and the Khmer Rouge. And the bombing has saved the city. ‘You know this, Griffiths.”

  It’s his old opponent Volkov speaking. Dmitri’s voice seems to come from a great distance, and his face—like others around the table in the dark—is just a disc. “I too have hated the bombing,” he says. “Yes, I hated it. But it kept the Mekong open, didn’t it? It has kept Cambodia from going under to North Vietnam. It has saved the people from being collectivized, and religion destroyed and Buddhist monks butchered—which Khmer Rouge have promised to do. Already they occupy the temples in regions they take over. Already they torch the villages.”

  But Griffiths ignores him: he won’t be diverted from giving me my briefing. “This is the Nixon Doctrine at work, Harvey. It’s called Leave Them in the Shit. First they invade-to clear out the sanctuaries, they say. So the North Vietnamese are pushed in from the border to the heart of the country. Then the Yanks pull out again and tell the Cambodians: Carry on, fellers, it’s your war now. We’ll just bomb. And the result? All that’s left now is Phnom Penh and the big towns: the Communists have the countryside. But Lon Nol and his generals are still getting rich on bonjour—so they like to have the Mekong and the highways open. The supply of cars and brandy must be kept ftowing—eh, chaps?”

  Under his oratory, and under Volkov’s as well, there’s a note I hear now that I didn’t hear in Saigon: a sound of genuine pain. He turns to Bill Wall, and speaks in a quick aside. “Sorry, Bill; sorry to have spoken ill of your nation and your president, but you know it’s all true.”

  Bill Wall sighs, toying with a glass of the cognac that we’re recklessly continuing to drink with the couscous. “Sing your song, Trevor, don’t mind me. You know I got no time for Tricky Dick. And some of what you’re saying is right. But when anyone asks for peace, those Khmer Rouge wo
n’t even negotiate. So who are the war-lovers around here?”

  Langford speaks, his soft voice only just reaching me. “The Cambodians need help on the ground, Harvey, and they’re not getting it. It’s true that some of their generals are on the take, and living it up in Phnom Penh. But there are some good commanders.”

  “Just like Vietnam,” I say.

  “Just like Vietnam,” he says. “And the ARVN have done all right there, lately. Now that the American troops are pulling out, I believe the ARVN will hold the line—and it could be like that here. These troops are fighting for their lives: there’ll be no mercy if they lose. They know that. But a lot of them are in despair.” He’s addressing Griffiths now, pointing a finger at him. “Their confidence got worn down in that first year of the war, when the Americans pulled out. They’re very simple people; they’re not tricky. They thought the Americans would back them to the hilt; they thought they’d stay, and they don’t understand why they didn’t. Nor do I. But they still have real patriots here.”

  “Oh shit,” Griffiths says. “Patriots. Those Lon Nol Army of ficers of yours? Is that it, Snow?”

  “No,” Langford says. “Not the officers. The ordinary troops: the men and the women. They’re what matter. They’re what always matter.”

  He says no more, and there’s a silence. What he’s said has been obvious; even innocuous; yet something is causing everyone at the table to look at him. Was it something in his voice? Time’s projector has jammed; we’re all fixed in stillness. I look down at my hand on the table and can’t move it, and look back again at Langford. His face, in the light of one of the wall lamps, seems suddenly like a fanatic’s: stony and angelic. Or is it the effect of the couscous?

  The silence, which has set around us like jelly, is finally broken by Jim Feng. “Well, whichever way it goes, the people pay.”