Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  We were asked to check all the items, and then to sign a list that identified them. We also had to sign the statement that Danh had spoken of. As we did this, Volkov looked up, his pen poised, and asked a question.

  Where are our cameras, Captain?

  Danh’s face became blank. They have been confiscated by the People’s Liberation Army, he said. They are not strictly your property, but tools of the imperialist press. They will now serve the Liberation.

  He and Dmitri stared at one another in silence. I had the impression that Danh had made this speech for the benefit of the other officer, and that it was not something he was comfortable with; anyway, I like to think so, because for me Danh will always be a good man, and one I will not forget.

  Finally Dmitri shrugged, and signed the paper. When he had done so, Danh smiled, wrinkling up his forehead in the way he had. I will miss our debates, Mr. Dmitri, he said.

  Dmitri managed a small sardonic smile of his own: the first that had appeared since his illness. Then he said: You are the first Marxist ever to say so, Captain. Also the only nice one I have met, as a matter of fact.

  Danh now turned to me again. Mr. Jim, you are fond of the old poets of the T‘ang, he said. I too. But you should know that our revolution also has its poetry. I have something by our best poet for you, translated into English. Take it with you, and think of us when you read it.

  He handed me a piece of that cheap lined paper of theirs, like something from a child’s exercise book, on which I glimpsed some lines written in ballpoint pen. I began to thank him politely, but he was already turning away and standing up. The other officer did the same, and we all got to our feet too.

  We are quite near Highway I here, Captain Danh said. Not far from Svay Rieng, where there is a Lon Nol Army post. Three of my men will escort you there, leaving shortly. I wish you all safe passage, and bonne chance.

  It was odd: it was all ending very quickly, and I didn’t want it to be so fast. Why was this? Perhaps because we seemed to have lived with these men for months, not ten days or so, and I found I would miss them—all except Lenin—and was sad to think of what might happen to them.

  At this point the officer with the cigarette holder leveled the Japanese camera at us and told us in Vietnamese to look at him; then he took a flashbulb picture. Captain Danh came and stood next to us, and we all posed for another.

  For our records, Danh said, and the flash went off again. We all laughed, looking at each other. Only Lenin, standing by the door again, didn’t laugh: he watched with an empty face.

  Sometimes I think I would exchange some of my best still pictures for a copy of that one photograph I have never seen. Presumably it must exist somewhere—perhaps in some file in Hanoi. The last picture ever taken of Mike and Dmitri and me, together with Captain Nguyen Van Danh! I like to think that Captain Danh survived the war, and became a teacher: but they say it’s the good ones who die, and I fear he will have been killed on some battlefield in South Vietnam.

  There is no sadness like the sadness that fills you when you look at the faces in such a photograph. They are not older, as they would be in life, or faded, as they are in your memory. They are real—real all over again. And that pierces; pierces. No; perhaps I couldn’t bear that picture. Better that I never see it.

  I still have the poem Captain Danh gave me. This tattered piece of paper is the only thing that proves I was ever there, on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Here it is, Ray: I brought it for you to read. It’s about two soldiers meeting on the Trail. To tell you the truth, I didn’t bother to look at it for some time; I thought it would be just propaganda. When I changed back into my own clothes, preparing to leave the bunker, I pushed it into a pocket of my shirt, and forgot it. I only found it when we got back to Phnom Penh.

  It is the first time we meet—

  What is your name, what is mine?

  Where do you come from, where do I?

  Close to each other—we are brothers.

  A glance without a word is enough:

  Our eyes meet and want to speak;

  Our brown clothes dyed with the same root

  Silently tell our affection ...

  This noon, up there on the pass,

  Lulled for a few minutes,

  Sharing a water pipe,

  You take a puff, then I.

  An instant after, we go our ways,

  You to the plain, I up the hill:

  Your heart and my heart

  Heavy with feeling:

  Oh, the fish in water.

  3.

  JIM FENG

  Late in the morning, they sent us off towards Highway I in the care of Doc and Lenin. We were sorry that Lenin had to be with us: we even wondered if he might do something to prevent our getting away. But we agreed that this was unlikely: he would follow his orders, whether he liked them or not.

  Before leaving, we had shaken hands with all the others, at the entrance to the bunker. To be leaving them gave me a lonely feeling. And I was surprised to see the expressions on the faces of the soldiers; they smiled, but something else showed through: a wistfulness. Weary held Mike’s hand for a long time: he had not forgotten how Mike had carried his pack. He looked very weak, with his thin body and the drooping, old man’s eyelids in his boy’s face, and somehow it came to me that he would not live long. But perhaps not many of these young men will live long, I thought, and I said a prayer for them inwardly, asking that they be protected on the battlefield.

  As we walked away, Captain Danh waved to us from the entrance of the bunker, standing straight and still in his sun helmet with its red, enemy star. It was a wave like a salute; he stayed there until we turned a bend in the track, and I said in my heart: Take care on the battlefield, Captain—and watch out for Lenin.

  Now here we were, walking in our good American jungle boots and fatigue trousers again: Mike in his green cowboy shirt, Dmitri in his navy blue one: all as before, like time wound back—except that each of us had lost about ten kilos, and our clothes were very loose. I still had to use a stick to help me, and the ulcer still throbbed, but it was wonderful to have the boots, which felt at first very heavy and strange; and because I had nothing to carry, not even a camera bag, I felt light and free and irresponsible. I kept looking with affection at the Rolex on my wrist. That no one had stolen it impressed me very much.

  Doc marched in front of us, Lenin behind. There had been no rain that day, and it was clear and hot, with pools of water everywhere, the red soil moist and steaming but not sticky. We had left the Trail, and were walking along a shady cattle track in an area of occasional villages and half-flooded paddy fields—in one of which the peasants were already planting young rice shoots, as though in a country at peace. It was fairly open country, with distant blue hills in the east: the country of the Parrot’s Beak.

  Doc told us it would take about two hours to get to Highway 1, and that they would leave us as close as they could to the town of Svay Rieng, which was still held by the Cambodian Army. But we would have to make our own way to the Cambodian military post up the highway, hoping that we met no Khmer Rouge.

  At noon, we stopped for a brief rest. Then we went on, and at around two o‘clock we came to a deserted village.

  Just a few of the usual houses on stilts, with banana and mango trees nearby, and a pond with lotus flowers. And nobody here; nothing. No dogs. There must have been fighting here, and the people had fled. Doc and Lenin stopped to discuss the situation, in the shade of a banana tree. As they did so, we all suddenly heard the distant boom of artillery, and lifted our heads.

  Lenin frowned and spoke rapidly to Doc; I could not follow it all, but he seemed to be saying that there must be an engagement here between the Lon Nol forces and the Khmer Rouge—and that he and Doc should now leave us.

  Doc seemed to argue against this, but Lenin became quite fierce, speaking even more quickly, his voice raised and hectoring. He shot quick hostile glances at us.

  Finally Doc turned to me and spo
ke slowly in Vietnamese, his expression uneasy and ashamed. We must leave you here, he said. We cannot go further, or we may be captured by Lon Nol forces. I am sorry. If you continue west, you should soon come to Highway I.

  He pointed; then he shook hands with each of us in turn. Remember us in friendship, he said. Bonne chance.

  We thanked him for all he had done for us, while Lenin stood on one side, fingering his Kalashnikov impatiently, his eyes narrow and contemptuous. I held out my hand to Lenin as well, but he ignored it and turned away, muttering something I didn’t catch.

  We watched the two of them go, and then looked at each other. We did not waste time discussing Lenin’s action, or the fact that we had been left so far from the highway; we knew without speaking that we must plan our next move quickly. Over the years, we’d become accustomed to communicating with a minimum of talk, in situations like this. Finally Mike pointed towards a grove of small trees, in a westerly direction. Over there, he said. We’re too exposed.

  We got across to the trees and then walked between them, in the thin bars of shadow cast by their trunks. Moving into a small gully, we heard a loud buzzing of flies.

  Bloody hell, Mike said, and put a hand to his nose.

  Dmitri cursed softly, and did the same. I was a little behind him, hobbling along, and he turned as I came level. Don’t look, James, he said; but I looked.

  The upper part of a man’s corpse lay on the red earth, in the bars of light and shadow, hacked in half at the waist. Just the upper half: there was no sign of the lower part or the legs. He was Cambodian, and almost certainly a Lon Nol soldier, since he wore an olive American-style military shirt, a checked krama about his neck. No weapon lay near; they would have taken it. His eyes were open and glaring, his lips set in a snarl of agony that made the face like an animal’s. Huge gleaming brown entrails protruded from this half-body, looking not like part of a human being but like tubing in the engine of an old car: they were black with the flies whose hum seemed louder and louder here. The smell was very bad. I have seen many dead, and grown much too used to it, but this body was different: not just because of what had been done to it, but because of its mystery, in that spot. Some old shell casings lay about, but there wasn’t any other sign of a firefight having taken place here; no other bodies. Why was just this one soldier here? And why was half of him missing?

  We discussed this, and Mike said: Maybe dogs ate the rest of him. And maybe the Khmer Rouge ate his liver.

  We looked at him, and he said: For strength. Some Cambodians do it, on both sides. A faint spasm crossed his face: the nearest thing to fear I ever saw Mike show. This is a bad place, this gully, he muttered, and pulled his bush hat over his eyes. Let’s move.

  We continued to walk west, in a direction we hoped would get us to Highway I: the highway that ran straight to Phnom Penh, and back to our other life. The Khmer Rouge held many sections of it now, but if we got to the Lon Nol army post near Svay Rieng, we’d be saved: the Cambodians would contact our embassies, and put us on a chopper to the city. At present, though, we didn’t even know where we were.

  We wanted to find a village and ask directions; but there was no sign of life. We suspected that all the inhabitants here had fled from the B-52s, or else from the Khmer Rouge. Now and then the rumble of artillery continued to sound from the northwest, and despite the danger, we decided our best bet was to head for it, since at least this gave us a chance of contacting the Cambodian Army. So we continued in that direction along the red cattle track. And all the while, as we walked, we were glancing out of the corners of our eyes for the black figures of the Khmer Rouge. They were near; they must be near: but we didn’t say so to each other.

  Soon we saw a thatch-roofed farmhouse up ahead, and assumed it would be empty. But as we came up to it, two men and a woman came from behind a clump of banana trees at the side of the house.

  They were peasants, the men wearing black pajamas, the woman a black sarong and blouse. The men had the red-checked krama hanging about their necks; the woman wore hers as a turban. She was young, with a handsome, sullen face which showed no animation at all when she looked at us. The men were young too, with shocks of long hair; they looked at us with interest, but not with friendliness, I thought. One was short and stocky—a dark-skinned, tough-looking Khmer type—while the other was taller, with a more Chinese face. They looked like Khmer Rouge, in their black clothes; but of course, the Khmer Rouge dressed like the peasants. And these men weren’t armed, so that at first I wasn’t worried.

  I was the only one of us who spoke any Khmer, so it was up to me to deal with them. I asked them where we were, and how we could get to Highway 1.

  They said nothing for a moment; then the stocky one asked some questions in return. I noticed that one of his eyes was slightly crooked, rolling outwards to the corner. Who were we? he asked. What were we doing here?

  I told him we were correspondents for the Western press; that we’d wandered off the highway and lost our transport, and wanted to get back to Svay Rieng. I began to sense something I didn’t like, and didn’t feel inclined to tell them our true story.

  The man with the crooked eye frowned, as though suspecting me of lying. The tall one was frowning too, and so was the woman. And these frowns put a cold, shivering jolt through me.

  This is just peasant caution, I told myself: they have good reason to be cautious. But I knew. They were exactly what I feared they were.

  The tall one spoke now. You are Americans?

  No, I said, we were not Americans; and I explained what we were.

  The two men continued to examine all three of us from head to foot, without saying anything. The woman stared away across the fields. Then the tall man pointed to the west, across the paddy fields. The highway is there, he said. Just across the rice field. You can walk up it to Svay Rieng: not far. But there is a battle there: it is dangerous for you to go there.

  Thank you for your help, I said. We’ll go on and take our chances.

  I explained to Mike and Dmitri what had been said, and their faces brightened.

  The highway is just across this paddy? Then let’s go, Dmitri said. Our troubles are over, brothers. He laughed, and punched Mike’s shoulder, and Mike smiled. Dmitri hadn’t laughed for a week, and he sounded out of practice; his malaria was gone, but he still looked frail. I tried to look happy too, but my bad feeling wouldn’t go away. I could feel the eyes of the three peasants examining us still, and I knew I would not be easy until they were well out of sight. If Dmitri and Mike had sensed anything, they didn’t show it.

  We walked away. As we did so, I knew that the peasants were watching us go, although I didn’t look behind; and I felt a cold tingling in my back, and a shriveling in my scrotum. But I hobbled forward, saying nothing to the others, and praying I was mistaken.

  We walked across the paddy, on top of one of the dykes. Most of the field was dry; there hadn’t been enough rain here to fill it. On the other side, on top of the last dyke, was a belt of trees. In such a situation, trees on the skyline take on many meanings, and you are not sure which meaning to believe. Quiet against the sky, they are a decoration in a book, or a pleasant park to create peace; they are perhaps a refuge from danger. But then again, they are the treacherous cloak that hides danger itself. Which were these trees?

  We moved among them, in their shade. Don’t look back, I told the others. I didn’t like the feel of those people.

  I know, Mike said. But they’re not coming behind us: I checked. Stay cool. Just keep moving.

  Then, coming out of the trees and down a bank, we found Highway 1. Its gray bitumen ribbon ran straight and empty, with woods here on the eastern side, and more paddy fields on the other, stretching into the distances of the southwest. No traffic; but up ahead, by a bend, were some thatched roofs.

  I don’t remember what we said, but we all began to feel great hope. Side by side, the three of us began to walk up the highway: northwest, in the direction of the roofs, and of
Svay Rieng. It was good to feel the hard bitumen under my boots. I could tell the others wanted to go fast, and I did all I could to hurry.

  We passed the houses, which were silent, and turned the bend. Up ahead now, some four hundred meters away, where the road ran into blue hills on the horizon, were a group of military trucks and armored personnel carriers, with soldiers standing beside them. We stopped, and narrowed our eyes in the heat: a shimmer rose from the bitumen, and the soldiers and vehicles seemed to dissolve and re-form in the air, like a dream. They didn’t seem to see us. But we could make out their helmets and their olive battle dress: no black pajamas.

  Government troops, Mike said, and we looked at each other; then we all began to smile, and found we were embracing, laughing. Watching Mike hug Dmitri, the two of them laughing into each other’s faces the way they did when they were young, I found myself saying, Thank God, thank God; but whether I said it aloud or to myself I’m not sure.

  We needed a white flag, we decided; Dmitri had a white handkerchief, and he tied it to a stick and carried it held high. We walked on towards the soldiers, in the middle of the road. As we got nearer, we saw that one of them was watching us through field glasses. We waved, and I called out, Kassat, kassat —which means “press”—but I think we were still too far away to be heard.

  At that moment there was the sound of an AK-47, coming from somewhere in front of us, in the trees on the eastern side of the road. Crack-crack-crack: there’s no mistaking the sound of that damned Kalashnikov.

  I did what I’d done so often in the past: threw myself flat, and crawled towards the ditch on the western side of the road. Mike did the same, and we crouched there, panting. But where was the Count? We peered through the grass above the ditch.