Highways to a War (34 page)

“Got a cigarette for an old Digger?” Mike turned to Bill Wall, beggar’s palm outstretched.

Wall shook a cigarette from his pack and held it across the seat back. He was a thin, wiry man of around forty, his sandy hair crew-cut like a Marine’s. His large, slightly protuberant brown eyes had a humorous gleam, as though permanently alert for the punch line of a joke. Leaning forward, he spoke in my ear.

“This compat-riot of yours just gave up smoking,” he said. He came from Kentucky, and elongated his words in the musical Southern way. “Will you ask him to take it
up
again, Harvey, for God’s sake? It’s bankrupting me keeping him in cigarettes.”

“I had no choice, Bill,” Langford said. “Vora’s have run out.”

Vora took one hand from the wheel to hold a lighter to Mike’s smoke, his face composed and tolerant, like a wise father’s. “He has taken my last one,” he said. “I wanted to buy a special begging pack for him, and keep it in the glove box. But he will not allow: he said it would make him smoke more.”

Only Godfrey Wardlaw didn’t laugh. He was lanky, pale and serious, with dark, bushy sideburns and a handsome Che Guevara mustache. He’d not been in Southeast Asia before, and he seemed unusually quiet, staring out the window; I assumed he was simply taking things in.

Highway 5 ran towards Thailand, through a wide, flat country of low horizons: a blue line of mountains far off in the west; tall white clouds in the east. It was known as the Rice Road, since much of the rice that fed Phnom Penh came down it from the western province of Battambang. Now, it seemed, the Khmer Rouge were constantly attempting to cut it, and battles took place on it almost daily. But the war was hard to believe in, and nowhere to be seen. January’s a delightful month in Cambodia: the dry season, and not yet too sticky; the time of the rice harvest, with the landscape not yet bleached out. A gentle breeze was blowing, and the high, spiky heads of the sugar palms waved and glittered above the paddy dykes. When you see the sugar palms, they say, you know you’re in Cambodia. Black-clad young women in checked turbans moved in the rice fields wielding sickles; brown-faced grandmothers held infants and baskets beside the road, smiling as though all was well.

And of course, all was not well. We were now some fifty kilometers or so out from Phnom Penh—just past the old ruined city of Oudong—and here, Mike told us, Highway 5 stopped being officially secure. Yet knowing this made no difference to my morning joy.

Highways! How they lead us on: we for whom the present is everything, yet never enough! Highways have always brought me joy: highways on which we move at speed, and which go out across flatness to some edge that’s beyond the possible, as this one was doing. A line of very distant treetops could be seen there against the sky, and the complex cone of an old Buddhist stupa sitting quietly on a rise, like a power plant from some alien technology. Only out there, on that edge to which we were speeding, was I promised all the answers I never seem to find: out there, where the world would at last change. It’s an edge I often see in dreams: the only place where we ever actually reach it. Langford has appeared in a number of these dreams, since he disappeared. The highway runs at night then, with far, tiny lamps strung along its utmost edge. I see Mike going there on foot, to a final windy rim: a place where he belongs. I know he has his being there, in the dream: he’s one of those people who do. Then he disappears.

“When’s Volkov getting back from Saigon?”

Bill Wall was still leaning forward, speaking to Mike. “You can bum his cigarettes, then,” he said.

“He’ll be back next week,” Mike said. “Then Jim Feng will have to worry about being scooped again.”

“The Count’s real manic lately—a lot more manic than usual. That fouled-up marriage, I guess: I think it hit him hard. He still does a great job, but I worry about the number of pipes he smokes at Madame Delphine’s.” He turned to me. “One evening recently, the Count smoked thirty pipes.
Thirty:
that’s the truth, I swear. Trevor Griffiths and I had to carry him to his room in the Royal, and he didn’t surface for two days. He was
out
of it, boy.” He began to laugh. “On the second day we got concerned, and I went up and called through the door. I asked did he want to be told if anything big broke. Never let it be said I’m not charitable.” Wall lay back in his seat, trying to stop laughing; finally he went on. “And this dying little voice came back through the door:
‘Go away. I have no laundry.’
Dmitri thought I was the goddamn
room
boy.” His laughter now was ecstatic; he wiped away tears. But Godfrey Wardlaw still wasn’t laughing; he frowned faintly, as though in disapproval of our frivolity.

The road ahead was now absolutely empty. It was raised above the level of the dried-out rice fields here, running high and straight across the flat yellow circle of the land like a roller coaster track at a fairground, and I suddenly realized how exposed we were. The fields here had been harvested, and were faded and empty; clumps of ragged palms and bananas and a few thatched huts were the only features visible for miles. Behind us, churning up pale brown dust at the road’s edge, were a Cambodian Army truck and a motorcyclo carrying two fully armed Government soldiers in helmets, seated side by side, like a comic war toy. Even some of the Cambodian troops went to war by taxi, it seemed; it was that sort of crazy army. Close behind them, following us as it had done since Phnom Penh, came an ancient Peugeot taxi carrying a number of our fellow correspondents. It seemed they often followed Langford’s Mercedes; knowing how good his contacts were, they counted on his leading them to the action.

Vora spoke suddenly. “Contested area,” he said. His face had grown serious, and he kept his eyes on the road.

Wardlaw’s frown deepened, and he leaned forward to Mike. “What does he mean?”

“The road up ahead,” Mike said. “It’s empty. And see those village houses? They’re closed up, and even the dogs are gone. The Khmer Rouge are here. You’ll get to know signs like those, mate, if you come out often.”

“So how much farther do you intend to go? I’m not particularly anxious to become a statistic,” Wardlaw said.

The familiar sinking feeling I’d known in Vietnam was entering my gut: Wardlaw’s nervousness was making me nervous. Langford had turned around to look at him.

“You said you wanted to get close to the action,” he said. His voice was neutral, and for a moment his gaze became empty and almost cold. His eyes seemed a paler blue than I remembered, and I noticed as well that the look of boyishness I thought I’d seen the night before had been a superficial impression: his face had grown older and harder, especially around the mouth.

“Of course,” Wardlaw said. “But it’s a matter of how close, isn’t it? Whether we have reasonable protection.”

Langford raised his eyebrows. “Protection? There isn’t any,” he said. “It’s a movable front here, and the Government troops aren’t very good at protecting themselves. They still tend to operate as though it’s the Middle Ages: they haven’t had a serious war since then. The troops are brave—they’ll fight to the last man. But they’re not properly trained or equipped, and the North Vietnamese and the VC have been slaughtering them. Now the Khmer Rouge are doing the same. And the Yanks have left them to flounder, as you know. All they give them is air support, and that’s not enough.”

His expression had taken on the remote, almost fervent seriousness that I remembered from Vietnam days, and I wondered whether the Khmer Republic’s army had replaced the Army of South Vietnam as the underdog whose cause he championed. But then his seriousness vanished. He grinned, and extended a hand across the seat to touch Wardlaw’s shoulder, and his voice became soothing: the voice of the sympathetic Langford of our younger days. “Relax, old fellow,” he said. “I’ve got word that the commander out here has the Khmer Rouge pinned down. He’s a friend of mine. And he’s not the type who gets his people killed through stupidity.”

“Not like some,” Bill Wall put in. “Hell, sometimes we know more than the
troops
do. Once we went down the road ahead of them, and took a village. They followed us in. Not a shot fired.”

We all laughed again; but Wardlaw still looked tense. He was conscious of his dignity, and was trying to mask his feelings to preserve it. He took out a handkerchief, and wiped his face. He’d told me the night before that he’d never been in a war zone, and I began to be sorry for him: the situation he now found himself in clearly wasn’t what he’d bargained for.

It wasn’t what I’d bargained for either, and with every kilometer the car covered, it was getting worse.

 

 

No sound of gunfire yet; no sign of battle: but the emptiness of that raised, exposed highway was eerie. It had now become a very frightening ride, and chills began to run through me.

This wasn’t at all like Vietnam. There was no U.S. Army here, with its friendly amenities for correspondents and its carefully defined limits within which we could operate. I’d begun to understand that no one was in charge here. The war in Cambodia had a nightmare vagueness, and this dry, huge, empty, yellow-and-green dish of land, under these towering clouds, was the axis of that vagueness, hiding the black-clad Others. I’d done my homework, of course, and Mike had briefed me the night before. I knew that a lot of journalists were dying on the highways, and that those who’d been taken prisoner hadn’t been seen again, since the Khmer Rouge apparently executed anyone they seized. But the reality hadn’t crept up on me until now. I always face reality too late: a fact which Lisa had pointed out to me before I left London. Thinking about her now only added to my ruefulness, so I stopped.

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.