A Distant Land

by Alison Booth

  After a while the freelance cameraman Kim arrived, grinning and bowing as he always did. His boyish stature belied his thirty-four years. Somewhere he had a wife and two children, whom Jim had never met. Like many Cambodians and Vietnamese, Kim made Jim feel too large, with huge hands and feet, and shoulders that got in the way. Kim was a talented photographer, good at spotting something that might tell a story, although so far he’d found nothing to capture the imagination of the world as Eddie Adams’ photograph had done. Adams’ picture of the Saigon police chief shooting a Vietcong prisoner in the head during the Tet Offensive had appeared on the front pages of newspapers all around the globe. Kim sometimes talked of how he wanted to get an image like that. It wasn’t so much that he was aiming to make his name, he said, though there’d be no harm in that. But it was more that he wanted the war to stop. A dramatic photograph that somehow conjured up all there was to say about the horror and the pointlessness of war wouldn’t do that, but it could help galvanise support against it.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Jim said. ‘You look like a cat that’s got the cream.’

  ‘Ha, ha, very good,’ said Kim. ‘Cat that got the cream, yes, that’s me.’ He explained that he’d been to one of the briefings given by the military. There he’d learnt of a new offensive that was about to take place some fifty miles south-west of Phnom Penh, along Highway Four. ‘I will go there,’ he said in his heavily accented English. ‘I’ll take the car. I wish to see how far the paratroopers have got. Maybe get good photos. Big fighting. Human interest.’

  Jim sighed. He doubted there was much point in going out there for a few more photos of wounded soldiers, or dead soldiers. ‘I don’t think it’s worth it,’ he said.

  ‘I’m going anyway,’ Kim said, smiling. He brushed a small speck of dust off the front of his maroon polo shirt, before checking the pockets of the black trousers he always wore in spite of the heat – the automatic gesture of the heavy smoker.

  For a moment Jim hesitated. Kim usually had an excellent intuition for what to run with. Clearly he’d heard enough at the military briefing to make him think the risks were justified. ‘Okay,’ Jim said. ‘I’ll come with you.’ The little squirm of excitement in his stomach made him realise how restless he’d been feeling in the office the last few days.

  Dominique looked up, disapproval blazing from her deep blue eyes. ‘You have just said you didn’t think it was worthwhile,’ she said. She took another cigarette out of the packet on the desk and lit it from the one she hadn’t quite finished.

  ‘Just for a quick reconnaissance,’ he said. ‘There and back in a day. We won’t bother to take much. Only Kim and his Leica. And my notebook of course.’

  After checking his wallet for his press card, Jim collected a bottle of water. He thought about taking a pack of C-rations but decided not to bother. On the way out he glanced at the wall-clock. It was just after nine-thirty. Today had been earmarked for dealing with the latest contract for the sale of news services, which had arrived at last. It would take at least a day to go through, but tomorrow would do to make a start on that.

  This is madness, Jim thought. Madness for me to be walking down Highway Four alongside a lunatic photographer who’s already used up a whole roll of film taking shots of the burnt-out trucks. Madness to be heading towards the front lines, when we really should be going the other way, back towards the rear base, back towards the car we left there only twenty minutes earlier.

  The midday sun beat down on Jim’s head and shoulders. He rolled up the sleeves of his dark blue shirt and wished he’d worn shorts instead of trousers. Sweat beaded his face and trickled down his neck and between his shoulder blades. He became aware that the gunfire had ceased and the highway seemed strangely deserted. That there were no peasants around was understandable; this had been a battle zone less than an hour ago. That there were no soldiers apart from the dead and wounded – Vietcong mainly – seemed odd. There was no evidence of any South Vietnamese Army people, who must all have been up ahead. Amazing how soon you got used to seeing dead bodies. The trick was to avert your eyes and, if you were too late, pretend you were seeing dead livestock, the carcass of a sheep or cow, rather than a human body. That didn’t stop the images turning up in your nightmares though. Nothing could prevent that.

  Jim watched Kim pull a packet of cigarettes from his back pocket. He lit one, letting it dangle from his mouth as he changed his film. It was while he was stowing the plastic canister in his shoulder bag that the silence was torn apart by gunfire so close that Jim jumped with the shock of it. From the jungle on the left he could hear the M-16 rifles of the South Vietnamese Army screeching on full automatic, and from the other side the slower pounding of the North Vietnamese Army’s AK-47s. After this came the unmistakable popping of a grenade round followed by the thudding of the explosions as they landed. Jim dived for the ditch next to the road, pulling Kim down with him.

  Someone began screaming. More gunfire, before the sound suddenly stopped and there was silence. Even the birds had stopped calling. Jim’s ears began to ring and his heart was pounding, a metronome measuring out his dwindling mortality. Painfully, in short sharp gasps, he struggled to get air into his lungs. Lifting his head, he could see the dry red dirt forming the banks of the ditch and, a few feet away, the bloodied twitching leg of a wounded NVA soldier. No more than a boy, fourteen or fifteen perhaps, he lay on his back with one hand over his eyes. Cautiously Jim stood up just as the AK-47s began another burst. In the instant before he dropped down again, he saw the bullets stitching through the dust along the side of the road.

  After this came another silence, broken at last by the chirrup of a cricket. Red dust drifted through the air before settling over patches of darkening blood and the mangled bodies that had been lying there for hours, he guessed. His stomach churned and he swallowed the excess saliva. Turning onto his elbow to look behind, he saw only centimetres away a brown arm that had been cut off just above the elbow. At once he retched, and spat onto the ground a trickle of yellow fluid and traces of his breakfast croissant, before wiping the back of his hand across his lips.

  Yet this was no time to be squeamish. He gestured to Kim and mimed his plan of worming a way along the bottom of the ditch. They needed to get moving north-east, back to the rear base, along the channel running parallel with the road.

  Kim sat up and brushed red dust off his camera lens before putting on the lens cap; you might have thought he was unperturbed if you hadn’t seen the shaking of his hands. Pulling out his cigarette packet again, Kim raised an eyebrow at Jim, who shook his head and pointed to the NVA soldier a few feet away. Kim removed two cigarettes from the crumpled pack and lit them both before giving one to the wounded boy.

  ‘We need to get out of here fast,’ Jim said. ‘Back the way we came.’

  ‘Di di di,’ said Kim. The words you heard everywhere in this crazy war. Hurry hurry hurry.

  A slight movement attracted Jim’s attention, a figure in a white shirt and tan shorts crawling along the ditch and around the bodies bloating in the sun. This man’s longish red hair and pale freckled skin were unmistakable. It was Mark McFadden, a correspondent for a Canadian newspaper.

  ‘What’s going on down there?’ Jim said.

  ‘Ils sont morts,’ Mark said, glancing at Jim with glazed and unrecognising eyes, before resting his face in the dust. Even from three metres away Jim could smell the reek of fear and sweat. Behind Mark was another man whom Jim knew slightly, a Japanese freelance photographer, Michio Tanaka. In his mid-thirties, Michio was one of Kim’s friends – and his competitor. Normally a dapper man, he looked as dishevelled as Jim felt. One lens of his gold-rimmed spectacles was cracked, his white linen shirt was ripped along a side seam and his black cotton trousers dusty and torn.

  ‘What’s happening at the front?’ Jim asked.

  ‘Same as here only worse,’ Michio said. ‘We’ve
got to get out.’

  ‘Couldn’t agree more,’ Jim said. ‘The SVA might have invited us here but the NVA sure as hell haven’t.’

  Jim began to lead the way along the ditch, in the direction from which they’d come that morning. Soon the ditch became a gully that seemed to be veering away from the highway although broadly parallel with it. The air felt thick and heavy. Sweat stung his eyes the way salt water could when you were surfing. He felt desperately thirsty and his lips were beginning to crack, and he thought with longing of the bottle of water he’d stupidly left in the car.

  Occasionally he paused, to make sure the other three were still behind. Mark had looked as if he might go to pieces but he was still there, crawling after Kim and in front of Michio. Behind them, probably half a kilometre away now, came the renewed hammering of the AK-47 automatic rifles and the answering screaming of the M-16s, and then a series of explosions that had to be mortar attacks. The sun was shifting overhead, altering the shapes of the shadows cast by the jungle. The pounding of the guns receded as they half-ran, half-crawled along the gully. Sometimes the deep shadows seemed to Jim’s fevered mind to be black pyjama-clad people, and at other times he imagined them to be figures in military clothing. But mostly he could see them as they were, flickering patches of darkness and light.

  When it was too dark to see their way along the gully, they rested in a hollow off to one side. Jim found sleep impossible, disturbed by his fears and a miscellany of strange sounds, of rustling as insects and animals made their way through the jungle, and once the voices of people walking along the trail. Guerrillas of course; at night this forest belonged to the guerrillas. And in the small hours, renewed artillery fire.

  At last, after the firing ceased, Jim dozed. When he awoke, he saw green light filtering through the foliage and his three companions looking stunned, as if overnight they’d forgotten where they were. His mouth felt so dry he could hardly swallow, and his body ached from lying on the hard ground. Only as he struggled to sit up did he see the reason for the startled expressions of the others.

  Three soldiers stood at the edge of the hollow, three soldiers wearing the belted green uniforms of the North Vietnamese Army. The casual way the tallest guerrilla lifted his rifle made Jim hold his breath, and his heart began to flap within his chest. With his AK-47, the youngest soldier motioned Jim and his companions out of the hollow and pushed them into a row in the centre of the trail. Jim felt a rifle butt knock his thigh, or perhaps it was the sandalled foot of one of the soldiers. He shut his eyes and muttered a quick prayer.

  Cautiously Jim opened first one eye and then the other. The three NVA soldiers gestured with their rifles, miming that the journalists should drop everything they were carrying – cameras, binoculars, wallets and even their watches. Jim removed his wallet and put it on the ground in front of him. He struggled to loosen his watch strap, his hands like clumsy tools over which he had little control, his breathing so rough it seemed to rasp the walls of his throat. With an unsteady hand he placed the watch next to his wallet.

  ‘Nha bao,’ Michio said, pointing to the three cameras and making scribbling movements with one hand, as if he were writing in a notebook held in the other hand. ‘Journalists. Nha bao.’

  The soldiers kept their rifles trained on the four while speaking rapidly among themselves in Vietnamese. They looked little more than boys, Jim thought. Too young to be making decisions about who should live and who should die. Eventually the unusually tall Vietnamese – whom Jim mentally christened The Leader – said, ‘American?’

  ‘Canadien,’ Mark said, tapping his chest. ‘Anglais,’ he said, gesturing to Jim. ‘Cambodgien.’ He pointed to Kim, and then to Michio. ‘Nippon. Japonais.’

  He’d spoken in French rather than his fluent Vietnamese, and Jim wondered why. It could have been fear or it could have been that he didn’t want to be identified as working with the South Vietnamese. He’d identified Jim as English too. Jim was travelling in Indochina under the British passport he’d acquired under patriality while a Rhodes scholar. They’d agreed earlier that it wouldn’t make sense to mention his Australian nationality given Australia’s involvement in what many of the Vietnamese called the American War.

  ‘Nha bao,’ Michio repeated. ‘We are journalists.’

  Ignoring him, one of the soldiers pulled a rubber poncho out of his pack and spread it on the ground. He arranged the journalists’ possessions in the centre and then rolled them up. Like Dad wrapping a pound of sausages in Cadwallader’s Quality Meats, Jim thought as he watched the boy attach the bundle to the bottom of his pack. We won’t see these things again.

  ‘Nuoc. Water,’ said Kim, smiling.

  There was something special about Kim, Jim thought, that allowed him to smile in the most adverse circumstances, while he could only grimace and run his tongue over his parched lips.

  ‘Nuoc,’ Kim repeated, still smiling. ‘Nha bao.’

  The soldiers conferred briefly before giving the captives tin pannikins full of water. It was warm and had a metallic flavour to it. Jim tried to swallow down his dread with the liquid but it refused to go away.

  A bullet in the head and a shallow grave in some jungle clearing wasn’t the future he’d planned for himself. He thought of the Phnom Penh hotels thronging with journalists dispatching telegraphs and starting rumours. He and the others would be the subject of those now.

  He’d known this could happen and yet he’d been prepared to take the risk. To face danger, to face death. But now it seemed like such a bloody stupid way of going when there was so much else he wanted to do with his life.

  He shut his eyes. Images of Zidra progressed through his mind, as if he were flicking through a photo album. Zidra driving him up to the park on the promontory to eat lunch not quite two weeks before. Zidra sitting on his jacket on the vivid green grass, surrounded on three sides by deep blue sea flecked with whitecaps. Zidra laughing like a schoolgirl as he’d hurled the uneaten chips high into the air for the seagulls to eat.

  Zidra whom he’d loved for half his lifetime now.

  Chapter 11

  Wispy beard, bandana tied around his head, he had to be labelled Jimi Hendrix. Naming him was a distraction from the pain, as the soldier yanked Jim’s arms behind his back, forcing the elbows together. The Leader barked out instructions, suddenly older, his smooth skin acquiring lines commensurate with his responsibility. The youngest soldier grabbed hold of Jim’s shoulders and fastened him with ropes to Kim.

  ‘This man Fourth Brother,’ Kim muttered. ‘Does what he’s told. He’ll tie us all up, you’ll see. Human column.’

  Fourth Brother shoved Kim hard enough to quieten him. Jim winced as the ties bit into his arms.

  ‘Di di di,’ The Leader hissed. Hurry hurry hurry.

  Marching feet, humming insects forming an aura around them, trail rising as they stumbled on. Passing minutes, passing hours, how much time was left? Jim’s toes hurting. Heels rubbed sore by the leather shoes. A leech on his right ankle, growing fat on his blood. Impossible to brush it off with the heel of his left shoe. And impossible to brush off the fear. It was embedded too deep in his heart.

  Later the pain faded into insignificance as thirst took over. Count your paces: how many seconds to a step; how many steps to a kilometre? Concentrate hard, keep your apprehension at bay. The path rising more steeply now, and his concentration going, replaced by a vision of a bottle of iced water, beaded with condensation.

  Cold clear water.

  They could have shot us right away, he thought, remembering Huê´ and the mass graves. Thousands of South Vietnamese civilians executed during the Tet Offensive. They could have shot us right away but they didn’t. First they’ll cross-examine us and then they’ll shoot us. He shivered, in spite of the heat blanketing him. Would he be courageous under interrogation? Or torture? He didn’t know. It was easier to be brave
when looking after others than when looking after yourself.

  In the late afternoon the party stopped to rest. Jimi Hendrix unfastened the ropes binding the journalists together, his nose wrinkling at the stench of sweat and fear. Jim stretched out on his side, against the bank of red earth at the edge of the clearing. A feast for leeches, but he was too tired to care. We look like four corpses, he thought. Like those on Highway Four yesterday.

  The Leader and Jimi Hendrix headed off along the trail, leaving Fourth Brother in charge. ‘Nuoc,’ Kim said loudly. ‘Water.’

  Fourth Brother ignored him and moved a few metres away. Squatting on the ground, he lit a cigarette, all the while keeping his rifle trained towards them. Mosquitoes were starting to bite. Jim felt several of them pierce the fabric of his trousers and there was nothing he could do about his exposed neck. He watched a black ant labouring up the bank, over small stones and twigs, around leaves. Heading for the underbrush. It knew where to go.

  Darkness; forgetfulness that was suddenly invaded by strange dreams. Upwards, onwards, pursued by who could guess? Demons from the past, demons from the present. Forcing an escape, he woke and felt something knocking into his leg. Ten or so figures in miscellaneous military garb formed a semicircle around them. One soldier directed another kick at his thigh. We are exhibits in a zoo, Jim thought, and scarcely human. He looked around. The Leader and Jimi Hendrix were nowhere in sight. Fourth Brother was still squatting on the ground but he’d put down his rifle.

  ‘American,’ the soldier accused, and aimed a kick at Mark as well.