Highways to a War (25 page)

Volkov smiled. “Bullshit will get you nowhere, Snow. But be careful, or you will die with your Captain Trung.”

Griffiths looked up quickly.

“No he won’t: shut up, Count. Also, accept my apology. I shouldn’t have spoken about your family like that.”

Volkov waved a slow hand.

“Accepted. I also have said personal things which I withdraw.”

Such animosities were never maintained. We were all superstitious, at Villa Volkov.

At first, to tell you the truth, I thought Langford rather ordinary—apart from his risk taking, that is. And in many ways he
was
ordinary: ordinary at the personal level, I mean.

But I soon came to notice two things that weren’t quite ordinary about him: his unchanging calm and gentleness, and the impression he gave of having a secret life. I’m sure the air of secrecy wasn’t conscious; he was never pretentious. It was simply an atmosphere he created around him, probably without knowing it.

Well, there was a secret life, we know that now. But in those days I didn’t take seriously the things that people like Trevor Griffiths had to say about Mike’s association with Donald Mills at the Australian embassy. Mills was the resident spook for ASIS, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, with the spook’s usual cover of Second Secretary—but I never believed that he was running Mike as an agent. You’d see them drinking on the Continental terrace from time to time, and sometimes Aubrey Hardwick would be with them when he appeared in Saigon; so maybe Mike gave them a few personal impressions of the way he saw the war as going on the ground, and of some of the Vietnamese leaders he filmed interviews with for ABS—interviews that I usually conducted. No great harm in that, from a cameraman; or so I thought at the time.

I think his real secret life was more innocent, and at the same time more subtle. I believe it revolved around Claudine Phan. Whether he and she were ever lovers is something I don’t know either; and I don’t think anyone knows, because nobody dared ask him. For someone so easygoing, he could be quite intimidating when he closed up on you. Personally, I doubt that he and Madame Phan were ever sexually involved. She was a good deal older than he, and I see them as friends: genuine friends. They stayed friends all through the next ten years, and I find that a lot more interesting than a simple affair. Mike would never talk about her, except in the most general terms. His relationship with her was something separate in his life, existing in some private bubble. What their intimacy was based on I’ve no idea. No doubt she was some sort of Saigonese guide and confidante—but I don’t really know what vital links held them together. All I do know is that she was important to him.

Another feature of Langford’s character, which I see as being linked to his secret life, was his preoccupation with the outcast, the vulnerable, and those who were fighting for doomed causes. Some of my more cynical colleagues put it more simply: he was forever trying to help losers.

What they were mainly referring to of course was his deepening sympathy for the Army of South Vietnam. Unlike Griffiths and Volkov, Langford never grew heated in argument: his voice remained soft. But in our drunken or stoned discussions at Villa Volkov and in the Happy Bar, he came back and back to his claim that although some ARVN companies avoided battle, others were fighting heroically—and the Americans were denying them credit for it. He didn’t rail, he remained good-humored; but it became a near-obsession with him. The ARVN were taking much higher losses than the Americans, he said—a fact that wasn’t generally acknowledged. They fought the Viet Cong on the Viet Cong’s terms, and no one brought them pizzas in the field.

“The Yanks call them gooks and slants,” he said. “They don’t see them as human beings. They say that they’re all cowards, and that their women are all whores. That’s not bloody true. Smart-arse correspondents help to put that sort of thing around—the sort that are always propped on bar-stools along Tu Do, and don’t go out in the field.”

There was some truth in this, of course; but most of us remained repelled by the Saigon regime’s networks of graft, and by the ARVN colonels and generals who were busy becoming black market millionaires instead of fighting. Listening to Langford plead the cause of the few honest commanders, and of the ordinary troops on the ground, I began to understand that beneath his calm, he was a peculiar kind of dissident and nonconformist: one whom I began to see as well-meaning but naive. His thinking and his positions were never really political; they were tuned to some other wavelength, and he fitted into no easy mold. The fashionable position among journalists like Trevor Griffiths was to deplore both the Saigon Government and the American involvement, and to see the North Vietnamese as liberators; but Langford didn’t hold this view. He seemed to take the justice of the South Vietnamese struggle for granted—but at the same time he grew more and more disenchanted with their American allies. He liked the Americans; he got on well with them when he was attached to one of their units; but he condemned their air strikes on Viet Cong-held villages. He shot footage of the effects of these strikes, which ABS didn’t want to run: mothers weeping over the bodies of their children; old people wandering in shock. So in this he agreed with Griffiths, and not with Volkov. The war could only be fought on the ground, he said, as the ARVN were doing—not by the destruction of farming people from the air.

Some in the Happy Bar were amused by his insistence about this; others were reluctantly impressed. Even Griffiths didn’t argue very much; he just shook his head and smiled with raised brows. Because of Langford’s obvious liking for the Vietnamese, and because he shared the dangers they faced—which none of us was prepared to do—his view was respected. If the truth’s told, few of us correspondents had very much to do with the Vietnamese people at all, and fewer still learned their language, as Langford was doing. He’d already become a lot more involved with the country than we had; he seemed bent on forming a bond with it, and I wonder now if this might have been one of the reasons for his affair with Kim Anh.

Of course, she was one of the outcast, to begin with. I’m not being cynical: this was a powerful brew for him, and I’m sure he was utterly sincere.

 

 

 

I first learned about his involvement with her on an evening when he and I met for a drink on the Continental terrace. That was quite late in the year; about October, I think.

In those early days of the war, the Continental Palace Hotel was still locked in a colonial reverie. Its yellow arches, its pillars and its latticework, its little interior garden with the ceramic elephants and the falling petals of frangipani, would seemingly never change. The aged, shuffling Chinese waiters who’d been there since before World War Two would always be there; and beside the grand staircase in the lobby, plump Monsieur Loi in his white suit would always be bowing to arriving guests. The war was a noise in the background, which eventually must go away. He always used to find a room for me: I wonder what happened to Monsieur Loi?

I sat waiting for Langford in my deep wicker chair over a chilled aperitif, close to the low stone wall that was the frontier on Tu Do Street. The terrace—or the Continental Shelf, as it was known to the press corps—was Saigon’s axis: our rendezvous and refuge after a hard day in the field, just as it had been for generations of scribes and diplomats before us, and before that for the French rulers and planters. It was raised a few steps above the pavement, its privileged black and white tiles a zone nominally forbidden to the beggars, child thieves and hawkers beyond the wall. But they kept invading, and a row of boys hung over the wall now and shouted and pulled faces at me with macabre vigor, hands reaching out as though to clutch me.

It was seven o‘clock. Twilight was coming on fast, adding its thickness to the effluvia at ground level: petrol fumes; fish sauce; camphor smoke. Everything was the color of paper, which was the color of the heat; nothing was natural. Chaos ruled on Tu Do and the square beyond the wall: my ears rang with the cacophony made by military trucks, armed Jeeps and motor scooters. The Saigon Cowboys roared by on their Hondas, masked in criminal sunglasses, looking for watches to snatch.

Now I sighted Langford, walking up Tu Do Street towards me. It’s a memory with the unaccountable staying power some small things have, while bigger incidents get vague.

Neat and spruce in his green TV suit, hair held in place by that cream he always used (he remained in the 1950s, where Bryl creem was concerned), he was coming past the old French Opera House, accompanied by a jigging crowd of street kids: his outcast tribe. Two of them held his hands, walking on each side of him, and I’d seen these two before: they both worked the front of the Continental. One was a small boy of about ten, carrying a bundle of newspapers. The other was a crippled girl I thought to be about fourteen: she was hobbling on a single crutch, a tray of cigarettes and flowers hanging about her neck. For her sake, Langford walked slowly, smiling down like a fond young father.

He fraternized a good deal with the child thieves and hawkers on Tu Do. Most of them were war orphans; some had been injured by bombs and shrapnel, and we all felt pity for them. But at the end of a hard day their insect persistence could be maddening; no foreigner could move without their chanting persecution. Yet Langford encouraged them with money and gifts much more lavish than the reluctant alms the rest of us gave; he even bought them clothes in the markets. I still hear them shouting after him:
“Mr. Mike! Mr. Mike!”
They’d sit outside our door at the Telenews office in the Eden Building, just around the corner from the Continental on Nguyen Hue Boulevard; they waited for him to come back from his trips to the Delta. Our Vietnamese secretary would chase them away, but they’d just reappear. Some of them would hang about for days—and it seemed to me that greed for handouts couldn’t entirely account for this. They seemed genuinely devoted to him.

When he came up the steps onto the terrace, most of his child followers had fallen away. But the boy with the papers and the girl hawker with her tray were still with him. They’d be driven off eventually by the Chinese waiters, but for a while they’d probably be tolerated, together with other invaders from the square: the old Chinese fortune-teller with the wispy gray beard; the leg-less soldiers selling sentimental landscape paintings; the shoeshine boys. As Mike moved towards my table the two children left him, going off across the terrace in different directions.

The boy was simply a beggar: his bundle of newspapers was a pretext, and we called him the Newspaper Boy. He went crying his tattered wares from table to table, holding out his hand: he had a whining, jarring voice, and people shook their heads. But the girl was a genuine peddler, her flowers always fresh and attractive, and her American cigarettes—no doubt liberated from a PX store—low—priced. She went jerking and hopping among the tables on the single crutch, holding out a gardenia, smiling at Vietnamese businessmen in pastel suits, at their wives and mistresses in their Paris gowns, at Western embassy officials and correspondents, at U.S. Army officers in their khaki service dress and gold and silver insignia. Most of these people ignored her, or waved her away; but the American officers dug into their pockets, their faces kindly and uneasy.

Watching her closely for the first time, I saw that she wore a rubber sandal on her good left foot; her right leg was bent and twisted sideways, and the withered bare foot protruding from her dingy white pantaloons was a mere nub of flesh. And not for the first time, I was struck by the beauty of her face, which was framed by shoulder-length hair. It was heart-shaped, shining with intelligence and life, and simply perfect: the sort of fragile beauty that makes you want to smile and weep. Fragile! That little creature must have had a strength to survive that we can only guess at. A lot of the correspondents used to notice her; a lot of us found the sight of her hard to bear, and got uselessly angry about the war. I didn’t know her name; she was generally called the Girl with the Withered Leg.

Mike sat down opposite me and signaled to a Chinese waiter who stood beside one of the terrace’s yellow pillars. His hair gleamed like a big brass helmet, and he had a new sort of stillness, leaning back in his wicker chair. It seemed to me this evening that there was a subtle difference about him. He wasn’t quite the same man as he’d been six months ago: not the same man that I’d met in the Happy Bar.

But anyone who has the sort of success he was now enjoying gains a different aura, I suppose—at least in the eye of the be-holder.

 

 

He’d given notice at Telenews in that week. He was going freelance, to specialize in stills photography.

I’d no doubt that he’d make a living: he’d already begun to establish quite a reputation. As well as his film coverage for Telenews over the past few months, he’d managed to go out on his own account and get photographs which he’d sold through Magnum, the big photo agency here;
Paris Match
and
Life
magazines had both bought some. They were great pictures. He was born to do stills work; he always wanted to freeze the moment. Well, they’re putting his moments into coffee table books on the war now.

You could get breaks very fast then, in Vietnam. The international agencies and magazines were desperate for pictures, and they’d pay anyone who was crazy enough to hitch a ride on a chopper and get dropped into battle. A lot of semiamateurs were doing it; and quite a few of them were killed. There were some pretty crazy stringers around town, some of them carrying weapons as well as cameras. Most didn’t last. Mike became professional very quickly: he was always cool. And the breaks got bigger and bigger.