Sweet Caress

1. THE VIETNAM SCRAPBOOK

Lockwood was not entirely accurate: I wasn’t wholly ‘on’ at all. Sentinel Press Services had grudgingly agreed to take me on as a stringer but only for a trial month for which I would be paid $200. I would also have to pay for my own transportation out to Vietnam and my accommodation once I arrived in Saigon. And no expenses. I could only agree. Sentinel did have a small permanent bureau in Saigon, Lockwood said, with a staff of three, including a photographer. ‘They did take a bit of persuading, Amory,’ he said, knowingly, and I wondered if Lockwood or the Daily Sketch were underwriting my meagre paycheck. One photographer is never enough, I said, surely. I think Lockwood was trying to make me understand the brutal realities of the situation but I was already excited. I didn’t care — I was going to my war. I negotiated one further condition in the light of these restrictions — and the fact that I was hardly being paid at all. I don’t know why I insisted but it was one of the smartest moves I ever made in my life, as it turned out. I told him I would license my photos to Sentinel for first-use but I would retain the copyright. That shouldn’t be a problem, he said. Just make sure we get all your best stuff, here. I think by then Lockwood was assuming I’d go out there, have my short adventure, then suffer and be miserable, flush the idea out of my system and come home, having proved myself. I think he calculated I’d last a couple of weeks and $200 was a small price to pay for getting me off his back. How wrong he was.

When I arrived in Saigon I started keeping an intermittent journal, filling it with my impressions and thoughts and sticking in some of the photographs I took. I think I already had the idea that I might make a book out of this experience.

Saigon, Vietnam, 1967. From Vietnam, Mon Amour.

I was sitting in the Saigon press centre yesterday listening to the new IO give us the latest KIA and MIA¹ facts, thinking that he looked a bit like Xan, and simultaneously remarking on the dozens and dozens of empty seats — someone had told me there were 700 journalists in Vietnam; where the hell was everybody? Then Mary Poundstone slipped into the plastic chair beside me. Her face was taut, her lips thinned.

‘They won’t renew my visa,’ she said. ‘Bastards. Let’s go and get a drink.’

So we went to the rooftop bar at the Caravelle Hotel² and ordered two gins and tonic with lots of ice and found a table some distance from everyone else. Mary and I had met up again shortly after I had arrived in February (1967) having last seen each other in the Vosges mountains in 1944. I knew what she’d been up to in the interim. She had become even more of a legend since then — books of reportage, two collections of short stories, a cluster of prizes, lionisation by a new generation of writers — but in Saigon the two of us began to spend a lot of time together, seek each other out at the press briefings, so much so that we became known to the press corps as the ‘Old Gals’. I was fifty-nine, Mary was sixty-four — by some way the oldest journalists in Vietnam.

Right from the outset she started giving me advice over what to wear: khaki, white or beige masculine clothing — pants and shirts — with one feminine touch. Wear combat fatigues when you go out with the troops but don’t look like a soldier or a fashionable woman when you’re in town or at the bases. Add a bright scarf, a brooch, bangles, she advised. I decided to go the earring route and chose a pair of small gold hoops, about an inch in diameter, that I wore all the time — my trademark — even with a tin helmet. My ‘look’ was khaki chinos and a white T-shirt under an untucked, multi-pocketed cotton drill shirt, mostly tan, sometimes denim, sometimes linen, with epaulettes. Truong,¹ my driver, found me a tailor on Cong Thanh Street who would run me up half a dozen of these pseudo-military shirts for a pack of 200 Salem cigarettes.

Truong, my driver. Without whom. .

The SPS bureau is in a house on a narrow side street called An Qui Alley, about a block away from Time’s offices. The bureau chief is a grumpy, officious man called Lane Burrell. The two assigned journalists, the ‘staffers’, are Ron Paxton and a young woman with the unlikely name of Renata Alabama, the photographer. Lane Burrell told me that I was only ‘attached’ to SPS and that if ever asked I should say I was working for the London Daily Sketch. He’d do what he could to expedite my accreditation, however. He said, ‘What did you ever do to Lockwood Mower? Boy does he love you.’ I’m almost certain Lockwood is paying my way out here. Lane seems happy enough with the arrangement but I don’t think Ron and Renata are particularly pleased at my arrival and I suspect I won’t ever win them over.²

Burrell, Paxton and Alabama live in a roomy three-bedroom apartment above the bureau offices. As part of SPS’s conditions I have to find my own place to live. I checked out an apartment above a French restaurant on Nguyen Van Thu Street, on the bad side of the Saigon River. The restaurant is called Le Mistral de Provence and that’s what made me rent the two-room apartment — memories of Charbonneau. No hot water, no air conditioning, a bed, two plastic chairs and a table and a bathroom with a shower that dripped rather than ran. It cost $50 a month.

When I arrived at Tan Son Nhut airport and stepped off the Pan Am flight from Hong Kong it was the heat that almost drove me back on the plane. I’d never experienced heat like that, furnace hot and wet at the same time. Like being dry in a warm sea. Like being wet in a dry desert. I could never quite describe it properly. Also I’d never seen so many aircraft in one place, hundreds, it appeared, civilian and military, single-seaters, four-engine Boeing jetliners — Pan Am, Cathay Pacific, PAL, Flying Tigers — Phantoms, DC-3s, and on and on — landing, taking off, parked seemingly haphazardly in ragged rows, as if casually abandoned by their pilots who’d walked away looking for a bar.

There is a curious, unspoken class system working here amongst the journalists. ‘Staffers’ versus ‘stringers’. Staffers are serious professional journalists; stringers are wild cards, eccentrics, fools, war-lovers, freaks, potheads, dangerous. There’s a celebrated stringer called John Oberkamp (an Australian) who has been here since 1965 and has been wounded in action three times. He and some friends rent a big house on My Loc Street — near Tu Do Street (where all the bars are) — that is known as the ‘Non-Com Hotel’. It’s like a just-under-control-twenty-four-hour nightclub. Lots of drinking, music, drugs — and, most valuably, information, contacts, rumours.

There’s still a strong prevalence of the French colonial days in Saigon, despite the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of Americans in Vietnam. And you can eat very well in the old style if you can afford it, and find it. I remember the other day I went to the café at the Hotel de la Poste and I asked for a whisky.

The waiter said, ‘Do you want a bébé? Or a grand bébé?’

‘What’s a bébé?’

‘A small whisky.’

I made contact with Lily Perette at a MACV briefing, and she claimed to remember me from Paris in ’44. ‘No, no, absolutely. You got me assigned to Patton. I interviewed him, thanks to you. Made my name.’ The young enthusiast I recalled from the Hotel Scribe had turned into a lean, mannish, somewhat bitter, but respected journalist. She wore a short-jacketed denim suit and smoked small cigarillos more or less constantly. She makes up the contingent of ‘Old Gals’, here in Saigon. Not that Lily’s old — she’s in her late forties — but most of the dozen or so women journalists and photographers here in Vietnam are young, almost all in their twenties. Lily, Mary and I are relics from the past, from other, older wars. She suggested we go out on the town — have a meal and then show up at the Non-Com Hotel for some fun.

‘Aren’t we too old for the Non-Com?’ I said as we headed there in a taxi.

‘They don’t fucking care,’ Lily said. ‘And we don’t fucking care. The main thing is that they know what we need to know — the units that like journalists.’ She was now writing for a magazine called Overseas Report that was perceived to be too left wing, and had found it difficult to gain new accreditation. ‘They keep saying no to me,’ Lily said, ‘so I’m going to take matters into my own hands.’

I have to say I did feel a bit old in the Non-Com Hotel, however, as I wandered through its rooms, the music blasting out, the mood raucous and edgy — and self-regarding: the place was full of people burnishing or developing their own myths. A lot of these young men — they were mainly men, the stringers — seemed to be high on the war, excited to be relaying atrocity stories, weird GI rituals, and the sheer thrill of choppering-in to a firefight near the DMZ. The air was bulky with acronyms.

I stood in a corner of one room, lit with blue neon, sipping at a can of beer, smelling the pungent reek of marijuana, the Rolling Stones telling everyone to get off of their cloud, thinking — this is different, this is why you came, my dear. This is why you’re not at the Northern Meeting in Inverness taking photographs of bagpipers.

‘Hi.’

I turned. A young man stood there in a silk collarless shirt. It was blue, everything in that room was blue, including our faces. He was small and handsome, this blue man, with big candid eyes — something elfin about him.

‘I’m John Oberkamp.’

‘Amory Clay.’

We shook hands. He had a noticeable Australian accent, I registered, as he asked me what I did and who I was stringing for. He said he was a photographer himself, currently unattached to any magazine or newspaper, though when the conversation turned, as it always did, to cameras and techniques, I realised he was something of an amateur. He could load film and press the shutter release but that was about it, I concluded. He brought me another can of beer.

‘Could you get me some kind of a job at Sentinel? I just need some validation.’

I said it was very unlikely; even I was deemed surplus to requirements.

‘Surplus to requirements.’ He repeated the phrase a few times. ‘Story of my life.’

I lit a cigarette. ‘Why can’t you get accreditation?’

‘Because there are too many fucking stringers in this town. Kids buy a camera, just jump on a plane in Europe, fly over, think they’re “war photographers”.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve been here for over two years, my pictures have been published in Life, in Stern, in the London Observer, but I can’t get accredited.’ He looked at me closely. ‘Do you mind if I ask you how old you are?’

‘Not at all.’ I told him.

‘You don’t look that old.’

‘It’s this blue light, takes years off you.’

He laughed at that.

‘It’s pretty fucking amazing that you’re here,’ he said. ‘I mean that’s really cool, someone like you.’

By now I realised he was very stoned, a thought confirmed when he touched my breasts. I gently removed his hands.

‘You’re not my type,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’ But I was thinking: intriguing, wild, irresponsible, sexy.

He nodded. ‘Surplus to requirements. . Have you ever seen action?’ he asked abruptly.

‘Yes.’

‘Doc Tri, Rockpile? Highway One?’

‘Second World War.’

‘No shit?’

‘Shit.’

‘That is completely amazing. Amazing. Can I kiss you?’

The evening at the Non-Com Hotel did provide me and Lily with information about a unit that had a reputation of being journalist-friendly, even woman-journalist-friendly. Lily suggested we team up — print and camera — and put in a joint request to MACV as if it came from both Sentinel and Overseas Report and she might just be able to sneak in unobserved. We applied and were accepted and four days ago we were flown in a Caribou transport plane up to An Boa — ‘Sandbag City’ as it was known, a huge airbase and firebase up north by Da Nang.

Before we left, Truong drove me to a rackety emporium in Hy Kiy Street where I could buy, on the black market, a helmet and flak jacket that fitted me. ‘Où allez-vous, madame?’ he asked. We tended to speak in a mixture of French and English. I told him. ‘Ce n’est pas good place,’ he said. ‘Beaucoup dangerous.’ I could see his concern. I told him it was my job but I wouldn’t take any risks.

The night before we left, Lily and I had a meal in the Majestic Hotel, treating ourselves. She had been in Cuba and Algeria, she told me, and she wondered if it was the reports she filed from there that made MACV think she was some kind of communist. She was eager for our trip; I could see she still had that ardour and driven ambition of the true correspondent, driven also by the fear of being left out, missing out, somehow. I didn’t have that kind of zeal, that much I was sure of, and I thought of Truong’s anxiety and wondered again about my actual motives for coming. Now I was here in Saigon my vague thoughts about finding myself, needing a new war so I could reassess my old self, seemed a bit woolly and pretentious. Maybe, I thought, I was just as driven and ambitious as Lily Perette and was hiding it from myself. Did I want that adrenalin rush; did I still worry that I was missing something, just as much as Lily, I wondered?

An Boa is a ‘firebase’ — in so much as it is home to batteries of long-range artillery and vast numbers of helicopters — but that appellation gives a false impression. The place is huge, square miles of it, with its precincts and streets, just like a city, even though one constructed out of sandbags, cinder blocks, chipboard sheeting and corrugated iron. We queue for food in a giant cafeteria for T-bone steaks and a choice of six ice creams; shower in tiled bathrooms; sleep in bunkers — ‘hooches’ — with ceiling fans; buy six-packs of beer at the PX.

At night, though, the mood changes and the war comes calling, but distantly: we can hear the thud of far-off mortars, see multicoloured flares falling beyond the invisible perimeter. The dugga-dugga-dugga of helicopters passing over, low, wakes you in your ‘rack’. Lily Perette has dysentery and is being flown back to Saigon to hospital. So I’m on my own.

I climb into the Huey helicopter and squeeze in behind the gunner. A section of ‘D’ Company, 1st Battalion, 105th Infantry Brigade, joins me. My hair is tucked up under my helmet and I’m sitting on my pack and my two cameras — a Nikon and a Leica — are in my musette bag along with six rolls of 35 mm Ektachrome film. We are going to a ‘Country Fair’, so called. ‘D’ Company choppers into a village in the Que Son Valley, surrounds it, searches for suspected Viet Cong amongst the inhabitants and any caches of weapons or ammunition that might be hidden, and then departs. Country Fair operations, as their name suggests, are routine and usually safe, which is why I chose to come along. The village is called Phu Tho, anglicised to ‘Pluto’. ‘Is there life on Pluto?’ some joker asks as we take off. It is 5.45 a.m.

In the pearly morning light, mist evaporating from the meandering rivers and the creeks, the sky hazing into blue, Vietnam looks very beautiful. Only the scars, the bulldozed brick-coloured scabs on hilltops and ridge-ends of abandoned firebases and observation posts, mar the abundant, lush greenery. Looking closer I see areas of felled or flattened trees, and occasional clusters of rimey, water-filled bomb or shell craters, like pustulant ulcers. The green landscape seems primordial, untouched — but of course it isn’t.

Arriving at Phu Tho village, Que Son Valley, 1967.

Soon we swoop down with our reverberating clatter towards the rice fields around Pluto. The men leap out of the Hueys that then soar up and peel away, having disgorged their human load. As we hover closer to the earth I lean out past the gunner and — click — grab my first photo. Pluto’s Country Fair has begun.

The men fan out, sloshing through the rice fields, plodding along the low causeways, and the village is quickly surrounded. Captain Durado goes into the village with the interpreter and the 200 or so villagers are led out — women, old folks and children are separated from the young men. They settle down on their haunches, patiently, uncomplainingly, waiting for this rude interruption to their daily lives to be over. The men of ‘D’ Company occupy the village, the dog handlers set their German shepherds loose, sniffing out tunnels and buried bunkers, for any sign of VC or NVA presence.

Off to the Country Fair. Que Son Valley, 1967.

Midday. It’s hot and wet. Clammy and hot. All the village haystacks have been set on fire and the smoke curling from them seems reluctant to climb into the sky.

I ask Captain Durado why he gave the order to burn the haystacks as doesn’t that rather signal our presence in the valley? He says he gave no such order — the men did it themselves, it’s something they seem to like to do, almost a habit, a rite de passage, I infer. I wander away and sit on the edge of a drainage ditch and eat my C-rations — ham and lima beans and a can of fruit cocktail — then smoke a cigarette.

‘Excuse me, ma’am, but — if you don’t mind me asking — what the fuck are you doing here?’ A GI sitting along from me cannot contain his curiosity.

I explain that I’m a journalist. It’s my job. ‘Just like you,’ I add.

‘Yeah, but I didn’t ask for this job.’

General laughter at this.

‘No, what I mean,’ he goes on, ‘is that aren’t you a little bit—’

He never finishes his predictable question because all heads turn to look, turning to the sound of popping gunfire from the treeline across the rice fields from where we are sitting. Everyone starts swearing and grabs their weapon. I jump into the drainage ditch and scurry along it, heading for a wooden culvert. Shouts and orders ring out. Captain Durado is standing on the culvert ordering his men to take cover. Whump! Whump! The first mortar shells explode and Captain Durado leaps into the ditch beside me. The villagers begin to scream and scatter aimlessly, heading for obscuring vegetation — nobody tries to stop them. Now there’s a steady rattle of enfilading fire from the treeline. Now we are firing back with more intensity. I think I can see where the shooting is coming from but I can’t spot the enemy. Suddenly I’m back in Villeforte in the Vosges mountains.

Captain Durado is joined by his radio operator who twiddles with dials and switches on his machine. Hiss of static, voices.

‘Maybe we shouldn’t have set fire to the haystacks,’ I say to no one in particular.

Captain Durado is young — twenty-five or twenty-six, I’d say — with a light moustache. He is swearing profanely as he unfolds a map and peers at it. Squinnying over his shoulder I see that it has various coordinates and names scribbled on it in capital-lettered blue biro: ANIMAL, ABODE, JUDY, BEER, PARIS, CITY.

‘Twenty-five Judy,’ Durado calls into the handset handed to him by his operator. ‘Proximity to enemy three hundred yards. Twenty-five period one. D-three period two. Zone fire.’ He blinks and shakes his head as if he’s suddenly remembered something. He stands up and yells at his sergeant: ‘Get some guys round the back by the bridge!’

The mortar shells are coming over with more frequency but landing short in the wet rice fields which robs them of their effectiveness, flinging up columns of muddy water, and spattering us with mud droplets.

I move away from the captain, heading further up the ditch, now filled with ‘D’ Company grunts answering fire with fire, blasting away with their CAR-15s at the invisible enemy in the treeline. Back by Captain Durado’s position by the culvert the mortar fire appears to be more accurate. There are shouts of alarm as the blasts creep closer and erupt on the causeway. Stones and earth begin to fly around. A pebble pings off my helmet.

Then I hear our artillery going over, called in by Captain Durado from some distant firebase — a brake-screeching sound mingled with a vibrating swooshing in the air — and, in one giant rippling volley, the whole treeline across the fields is obliterated by the exploding shells. The mortaring stops abruptly. There’s a few popping rounds from AK-47s then another salvo erupts. Smoke drifts away. There are no more trees. Silence. ‘D’ Company begins to whoop and shout; men stand up, light cigarettes, the mood one of sudden, relieved jocularity. Fuck, shit, hell, motherfucker, gooks, way to go, man.

The Country Fair operation at Pluto hasn’t been quite the saunter in the park that was envisaged. I climb on to the banked causeway between the rice paddies and feel my legs trembling. My mouth is dry and I crave the syrupy sweet fruit cocktail that had been in my C-ration. The last accurate mortar rounds had caused casualties, it transpires. Three wounded in action and one killed in action. I walk over to join the group looking down on the dead man — the dead boy, I see — as we wait for the corpsmen to arrive. He has been blown out of his refuge in the ditch and his body lies awkwardly at the fringe of the paddy field. The blast has ripped his clothing and webbing from his body, leaving only his trousers and boots, and his skinny white torso is revealed. He has vivid ginger hair and this is what makes his body look so incongruous. A pale, freckled redhead lying by a paddy field in South East Asia, his back a small crater of mangled ribs, flesh and protruding organs. I think about taking a photograph but the idea revolts me. Somebody throws a poncho over him. I make a decision — no more combat missions. The men are right: I’m too old. One visit to Pluto is more than enough warfare for me.

I was sitting in the rooftop bar of the Caravelle Hotel with a dry martini, smoking a cigarette, looking through my contact sheets that I had produced in the small darkroom I had managed to create in a little-used lavatory on the top floor of the SPS building. Back to school — shades of Amberfield and Miss Milburn, the ‘Child Killer’. We had been sending film off to labs in Hong Kong and Tokyo where they were developed, printed and transmitted by satellite to the New York office. But now we could print our own (black and white only) we could send them down the wire, with a short-wave drum printer, so we could be up there with AP and UPI in terms of speed. Even Renata Alabama was grateful. From my point of view it meant I could keep copies of photos I liked — I had my own record and my own little, growing archive. My book was taking shape.

I had a new plan, after my experience at Pluto’s Country Fair. I was going to ignore the field — the combat zones and flashpoints, the search-and-destroy missions — and stick to the bases. My idea was to take pictures of the soldiers, the grunts, off duty. When you saw them shed their carbines and flak jackets, their helmets and ammo packs, you suddenly realised how young these soldiers were — teenagers, college kids. They became youngsters again, not menacing, multi-weaponed warriors, anonymous in their bulky armour.

South Vietnam, 1967. From Vietnam, Mon Amour.

And I also started travelling out to the countryside with Truong, taking photographs of the people of this small beautiful country we were visiting as if I were a tourist and not part of the media sideshow of an enormous military machine. I was a war photographer but the book I had in mind would have no war in it.

I looked round at the screech of metal chairs being pushed back against terrazzo tiles and saw the large group of people who had been sitting behind me make their noisy, bibulous exit from the roof terrace. My eyes flicked over the messy detritus of their table — the bottles and the glasses, the ashtrays and the empty cigarette packs, abandoned newspapers — even a book.

I called out: ‘Hey! You’ve forgotten—’ but it was too late, they’d disappeared.

I wandered over to the table and picked up the book. It was French and I felt that shiver of ghostly shock run through me as I read the title and the author’s name.

Absence de marquage by Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau.

Vietnam. The noise of frogs, deafening, in the back garden of the Green Tree coffee shop on Binh Phu Street. Truong introducing me to his family, bowing to me as if I were visiting royalty: Kim, his wife, his two tiny daughters, Hanh and Ngon. A thirty-foot high metal hill of malfunctioning useless air-conditioning machines in a field by Bien Hoa airforce base. The Saigon police in their crisp bleached uniforms — the ‘white mice’. The press escort officer who looked like Montgomery Clift. Endless rain in August. The massive percussion of the B-52 strikes — felt ten miles away, a trembling, an uncontrollable flinching of the facial muscles. The tamarind trees in Tu Do Street. The rich Vietnamese kids in their tennis whites at the Cercle Sportif. Black-toothed women at the Central Market selling US Army gear. ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’, a song by the Animals. Motorbikes. Australian troops playing cricket. Beautiful villas on the coast at the foot of the Long Hai Hills — built by the French, decaying fast, empty. Women in conical hats sifting through the waste of US Army rubbish dumps. The smell of joss sticks, perfume and marijuana — Saigon.

I was walking past a bar in Tu Do Street, coming back from my tailor, when I saw a girl sitting outside a shack called the A-Go-Go Club. She was an ordinarily pretty bargirl, her hair teased and lacquered, but there was something about her pensive mood as she sat there dreaming of another life that made me stop and surreptitiously remove my camera. She was wearing white jeans and a white shirt — maybe ready to go on her shift. I snapped her — she never noticed.

‘Shouldn’t you ask permission, first?’

I turned round to see John Oberkamp standing there. He was in jeans and a tight, ultramarine, big-collared shirt.

‘I suppose I should have,’ I said. ‘Do you know her?’

‘She’s my mama-san. Come and meet her.’

Her name was Quyen and she worked in this bar and also at Bien Hoa airbase as a cleaner. She seemed fond of Oberkamp; when she said ‘John, he numba-one man,’ she seemed to mean it. Oberkamp called her ‘Queenie’. We strolled in and ordered a beer. It was mid-afternoon and the place was quiet, the bargirls sitting around in their tiny lurid miniskirts and bikini tops, chatting, smoking, reapplying their make up, waiting for the cocktail-hour rush. Oberkamp told me he finally had accreditation — he was now a recognised stringer for a Melbourne-based newspaper, the Weekly News-Pictorial, and was now spending much of his time with the 1st Australian Task Force at their base, Nui Dat, south-east of Saigon. He came up to the city as often as he could to be with Queenie. He kissed the top of her forehead — ‘My little lady’ — and she hugged herself to him. By coincidence I ran into her again two days later at Bien Hoa where she was polishing the boots of some Air Cavalry gunners. She looked different, hair wild, uncoiffed — a servant, not an object of male fantasy — humble and hard-working. ‘You tell John I love him,’ she said to me. ‘Beaucoup, beaucoup love.’

Two photos of Queenie. From Vietnam, Mon Amour.

For some reason I can’t bring myself to read Charbonneau’s book. Absence de marquage has been sitting on my bedside table for two weeks, now. I know where this dread comes from: without thinking I read the blurb on the back — it was one of those large-format, pale cream, soft-covered French novels, just lettering on the front, no illustrations. Absence de marquage was the story of a young Free French diplomat — called Yves-Lucien Legrand — in New York during the Second World War, so the blurb informed me, and his doomed love affair with a beautiful English woman, a photographer, Mary Argyll.

I actually felt a squirm of nausea in my throat when I read this and dropped the book as if it were burning hot. Mary = Amory. Argyll = argile, the French for clay. A roman à Clay, then, I said to myself — not amused.

Of course it has to be read, and I have skimmed through it looking for those passages that concerned ‘Mary Argyll’, my alter ego, my doppelgänger. . It’s disturbing to read a fiction when you know all the fact behind it. I’ve been consuming it in small sips, as it were, reading a paragraph here, half a page there, only to realise that Charbonneau was recounting episodes of our time together wholly unaltered in any degree, apart from the names of Yves-Lucien and Mary. Here is Charbonneau describing Mary Argyll after their first night together:

Mary Argyll was one of those almost-beautiful women, a not-quite-beautiful woman. But, for Yves-Lucien, that was precisely what made her, paradoxically, more beautiful than anyone he had ever encountered. Beautiful women were boring, he thought; he needed something other than mere perfection to interest him. Her nose was a little too prominent and she should have paid more attention to her hair, which was dark brown and straight, and as a result of this negligence could often look lank and ungroomed.

He loved her body, naked, however. She was so slim that her ribs showed but her breasts were full and generous with small perfectly round nipples. Her feet were a little too large, another imperfection he cherished as it made her seem sometimes graceless and awkward, particularly when she wore her highest heels. Yves-Lucien found this ungainliness un peu loufouque and extremely exciting, sexually.¹

My breakthrough as a photographer in Vietnam has occurred with the publication of this photograph of a Huey pilot waiting for his mission briefing. It made the front cover of three magazines and was syndicated to over forty other magazines and newspapers, worldwide. I have to admit I saw its potential as the image was printed. The suspended man, the shades, the ‘danger’ arrow, the can of beer — all perfect juxtaposition. Once again the photograph stops time (in monochrome); the historical moment, with whatever freight it carries, ideally frozen.

I garnered fees of over $3,000 at the end of the day but, more importantly, it saw my name being bandied about — requests came in for more, similar images — and I have suddenly become aware of the commercial dividend of working in a war zone with the eyes of the world upon you. Your accreditation was extra-valuable, not just because it gave you access, took you places other photographers couldn’t go and made you sometimes a unique witness, but also because all that could be turned into cash. This was (I was learning fast) another edge to the stringers’ hunger for action — there was money to be made for putting yourself in harm’s way.

To my surprise, Lockwood was very excited by the response to my ‘Pilot in his Hammock’ photo. I received a rare Telex from him: more of the same, please, now, now, now. People were growing tired of towering GIs and cowering peasants; Zippo lighters firing thatch; muddied wounded being medevac’d — show us the hidden human face of Vietnam, Lockwood urged. I was way ahead of him.

But encouraged, and finding doors were opening as a result of my new reputation, I resumed my tour of the bases — Long Binh, Bien Hoa, Da Nang — and their backstreets and byways. I even went to visit Oberkamp at Nui Dat and saw the little sandbagged, cinder-block hooch that he called home, now, out on the airport perimeter — but he wouldn’t let me take any photographs of the Australians. ‘The Aussies are mine,’ he said, and he wasn’t joking.

I was in Hong Kong when the Tet Offensive broke out in January 1968. I watched the simultaneous mass assault on some thirty South Vietnam towns and cities as I sat in my room in a hotel — the Royal Neptune — that looked out over Kowloon Bay, seeing the faces of the TV reporters I knew, ducking and wincing, under the roar of incoming fire in Hué, in Khe Sanh, in Saigon itself. They were that close.

I had needed a holiday, a break of some sort, as I’d now been in Vietnam for nearly a year. In the GPW bureau in Hong Kong I could call my family and have a proper conversation — Annie was thinking of doing postgraduate work; Blythe was playing in London pubs in a folk group called Platinum Scrap.

I had a long conversation with Blythe and there was something about the flat tone of her voice that worried me.

‘Is everything all right, darling?’ I said. ‘Boyfriend trouble?’

‘How do you know I’ve got a boyfriend? Did Annie tell you?’

‘Educated guess. Is he nice?’

‘Tall, blond, talented, wicked.’

‘Sounds good to me. Is he nice as well?’

‘Only four adjectives, Ma. You know the rules.’

But she seemed to have brightened up, now she’d told me and we chatted on about her band and the awful pubs they played in.

While I was in Hong Kong I was also able to sort out the financial mechanics of the new success I was enjoying as a result of the prominence of my photographs of young soldiers. I was in almost daily telephonic correspondence with a counter-cultural Californian entrepreneur who wanted to license one of my photos to put on a T-shirt. His name was Moss Fallmaster.

‘I’m thirty, tall, skinny, I have a beard. I’m pretty sure I’m gay.’

‘I don’t quite understand.’

‘Of a homosexual persuasion.’

‘Oh. Good for you. So’s my uncle.’

‘Well, isn’t that wonderful! So, I’m on your side, Amory, I won’t rip you off. If I win, you win. We’ll make a fortune.’ (I never made the fortune that Moss Fallmaster promised me. However, the deal still provides me with a diminishing but still welcome dividend.)

He bought the rights to the photo he was after for $1,000 with a ten per cent royalty for me on every $2 T-shirt he sold. He printed them up with an ambiguous caption that caught the mood of the time: ‘Never Too Young To. .’

The ‘Never Too Young To. .’ photo.

I had vowed never to go back into combat again but, to our general consternation, after the cataclysm of the Tet Offensive seemed to have died down, so the Mini-Tet arrived in May ’68 — and right on our doorstep. You could stand on the roof terrace of the Caravelle in downtown Saigon watching the gunships strafing the streets of Cholon a mile away.

Mary Poundstone, back in Vietnam, fully accredited to the Observer, said it reminded her of Madrid in 1936 when the Falangist forces were dug in right in the heart of the University district. You left your hotel — the Ritz, by preference — and caught a bus to the front line. Meanwhile, here on the roof of the Caravelle in 1968, we sipped our martinis, smoked our cigarettes, and watched the lambent roseate jewels of tracer arc into the evening sky.

I had Truong drive us into Cholon — Mary came with me, it was her insistence — as close as we dared. Truong would take us down narrow side streets, drop us off and we would creep forward to join whatever unit we could find, US or ARVN. I was very nervous but I could see all Mary’s old war fever return, her passion fired again. Tracer, machine guns, mortars, RPGs — she loved it, perversely; her dander was up.

At one stage, a few days ago, we took shelter in a ruined house during an airstrike. The fetid air in the room seemed to physically shudder from the percussive force of the bombs. We huddled in a corner, backs to a wall.

‘Mary,’ I said, ‘what are we doing here? Are we insane? We’re two old ladies.’

‘We’re not old — we’re wise. We’ve lived, we’re experienced, that’s why we should be here. Not like these potheads running around trying to get their million-dollar wounds. That’s not for us. We see things clearly.’

After that I’ve only been up once again. I’m beginning to feel my luck is running out.

I was in a newish bar in Tu Do Street called Marlon ’n’ Mick’s — perhaps to lure in both rock fans and film buffs. It was always dark and only played American soul music, which was why I patronised it. I was becoming an uncritical admirer of Aretha Franklin.

Then John Oberkamp came in with a friend, a lanky Englishman, who was introduced as another photographer called Guy Wells-Healy. They were both stoned, but functioning, looking for ‘poontang’. Wells-Healy found his tart but John Oberkamp was plainly more interested in talking to me, waving away the circling bargirls impatiently. I made him drink a quart of Coca-Cola and we went and found a booth where we, with an undergraduate earnestness, discussed the art form we both practised. I started with my usual broadside — that there were only thirteen types of photograph — but I could see he wasn’t willing to engage.

He took out a pack of Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes — twenty immaculate ready-rolled marijuana joints that retailed for $3.50 on the streets of Saigon — and suggested I try one. I held up my Scotch and water and told him that this was my chosen means of intoxication. But he wheedled away at me so eventually I agreed to join him in his joint.

I did it, not because I wanted to smoke marijuana but, for the first time since Sholto’s death, I was aware of being attracted to a man. How does this happen? I wasn’t looking for it — but it creeps up on you and, if you’re honest with yourself, you can’t ignore it. From the first second of meeting Oberkamp in his Non-Com Hotel I had felt that little frisson of interest in him. There was something lithe and unpredictable about John Oberkamp that I responded to. It might have been his smile, or the way he’d touched my breasts that night (so I knew he was attracted to me). I wanted to get high because I fully intended that to be the excuse I would offer for making love with him, shedding all responsibility. Not my fault, Your Honour, he drugged me. I desired John Oberkamp that night and I didn’t want to pretend that wasn’t the case, didn’t want to do the sensible thing and back off.

So I smoked his cigarette and felt good — but I had been feeling good with the whisky, anyway — maybe I felt better. Who knows? My theory about intoxication is that it all depends on mood and inclination. If you are thus inclined, a sip of Madeira will do the job for you. If you’re not, a bottle of 70-proof bootleg gin won’t work. And of course we had the added ingredient of the old war-zone aphrodisiac. If you stepped outside Marlon ’n’ Mick’s and listened hard you could hear the muffled thump of explosions as the Mini-Tet offensive played itself out in Saigon’s distant suburbs. We were safe in our Tu Do bar but not far away ordnance was being delivered and people were dying. It concentrated the mind on the here and now.

We sat close together in our booth listening to Dionne Warwick walking on by and, in the way that two human beings who are sexually interested in each other — and in very close proximity — understand exactly what is going on, neither of us needed to say anything. Messages had been sent and received.

‘I don’t have anywhere to stay tonight,’ John said, taking my hand.

John Oberkamp. Saigon, Vietnam, 1968.

‘I have an uncomfortable daybed in my horrible flat, if you’re interested.’

‘I might well be. Can we check it out?’

And so we left, after a final drink, and wandered back to my place and one thing led to another, as we both intended it should, and John Oberkamp and I made love several times over the next twelve hours.

In the afternoon — we rose late — I had Truong drive me to MACV for the ‘five o’clock follies’ press briefing. John wandered off to pick up a plane heading for Nui Dat.

We kissed goodbye, chastely, and John said he’d be back in a week. I said fine — you know where to find me — and off he went, glancing over his shoulder, giving me a wave. I felt a warmth that I hadn’t experienced in a long time. I had no illusions — it was the classic Saigon encounter — but I had needed it. John Oberkamp was the first man I’d slept with since Sholto. Some personal sexual Rubicon had been crossed, as far as I was concerned, and I felt pleased and strangely fulfilled. Sholto’s ghost laid to rest.

As it turned out I was sorry that he’d gone back to Nui Dat because that evening I had a Telex from the New York office informing me that one of my photographs — that I’d called ‘The Confrontation’ — had won the Matthew B. Brady Award for war photography. It was an honour that brought with it a cheque for $5,000.

I went out on the town with Mary Poundstone and a couple of other photographer acquaintances — we went up one side of Tu Do Street and then back down the other, and wound up with a bunch of AP staffers in the bar of the Majestic — and in the course of the evening we duly drank ourselves into an agreeable state of quasi-insensibility. But all the time I was thinking: I wish John Oberkamp were here. It would have been altogether better with John.

Mini-Tet was more or less over by the end of May. As the fighting in the suburbs fizzled out I came to realise that what had disturbed me as much as the nightly show of flares, artillery and the throbbing pulse of helicopters passing over, had been the sense that the city had been surrounded by the Viet Cong and the NVA. There had been fighting in the north and in the south; in the south-east of the city and the north-west and so on round the compass. It seemed unreal — this is the capital, what’s going on? — but a little further thought was destabilising. If they’re everywhere, if they’re this close, how long can we realistically hold out? What happens the next time. .?

‘The Confrontation’, winner of the Matthew B. Brady Award, 1968.

I visited areas of Cholon where the street battles had been fiercest and took photographs — none of which were ever used. Restaurants were open; the streets were a honking gridlock of traffic and shoppers, and then you’d come across a shattered building, pitted, scorched and blasted apart; a gaping shell crater steadily filling with rubbish or the carbonised remains of an Armoured Personnel Carrier. And there was a strange reek in those streets that seemed to cling to your clothes and hair when you went home at night — like a sweet brackish perfume of smoke, cordite, charred wood, decomposing bodies, gasoline — that you could still smell when you woke in the morning.

Even in early June at night from the roof bar of the Caravelle you could see the flares going up and the nervy chatter of a machine gun sending its looping beads of tracer up into the black sky. First-time visiting journalists were very impressed as they sipped their drinks. I heard one Englishman say that he felt like Lord Raglan on the heights of Balaclava.

I was in my makeshift darkroom in the bureau checking my supplies of developer, stopper and fixer when Renata Alabama peered in the door and said, ‘There’s some crazy Australian out here insisting on talking to you.’

I hadn’t seen John since our night together — a week ago — and I felt that breathless rush of anticipation as I went downstairs and along the corridor to reception, running my hands through my hair and wishing I’d put on some lipstick that morning. Fool, I said to myself — you’re not sixteen years old.

But I could see at once he was in a state, ill at ease. We shook hands — Renata was hovering, curious — and he asked if we could go somewhere quiet where we could talk properly. I picked up my bag and we left, heading down the street to Bonnard’s, a French-style café where they played American Forces Radio at low volume — you could talk without raising your voice.

We took our seats, ordered coffee, I lit a cigarette.

‘I’ve missed you,’ I said. ‘Silly me.’

‘Queenie’s run away. Run away home.’

‘Well, you know what these—’

‘She’s pregnant.’

‘Bargirls get pregnant, John. Occupational hazard.’

‘She says it’s mine.’

‘Come on—’

‘It can only be mine, she says.’

I felt a weariness of spirit descend on me. Fool, I rebuked myself for the second time in ten minutes. You were a one-night stand, old lady. I tried to reason with him but he didn’t want reason.

‘You can’t be sure it’s yours.’

‘Yes I can. She wouldn’t lie to me.’

‘What’s it got to do with me?’ I asked, letting some cynical steel into my voice. I was, I had to admit, a little hurt.

John explained. He knew where Queenie’s parents lived, in a village called Vinh Hoa on Highway 22 north out of Saigon, on the road to Tay Ninh. He needed someone who spoke French to be able to explain the situation to them — Queenie’s parents spoke French, she was proud of that, which was how he knew. I could see the panic rising in him so I said: whatever I can do to help, just tell me. He wanted to go directly to Vinh Hoa — he was sure Queenie would be with her parents — also he wanted me to bring my photos of her as a means of identifying where the family lived.

‘Hang on,’ I said, remembering. ‘There’s still fighting on Highway 22.’

‘Very sporadic. They’re mopping up. It’s only thirty clicks up the road, anyway — an hour, max.’ He wouldn’t stand for any caution. ‘Traffic is flowing. I checked.’

‘I’ll try and get hold of Truong.’

‘We can’t wait. I’ve got my bike with me. Come on, Amory — it’s very important. You owe it to me.’

I bridled at this: I owed him for a fuck?

Then he leant forward and kissed me and I forgave him.

‘She’s carrying my child. I can’t just let her vanish. I’ll never find her if I don’t go immediately. It’s now or never.’

He was right, I supposed, or so I thought as we walked back to the bureau. I wanted to take one precaution — I insisted — we had to tape BAO CHI¹ in large letters to his bike.

‘Of course, anything,’ John said. ‘We can tape it to the leg shields.’ He pointed at a dirty old red and white motorbike, paint smirched and flaking.

‘What kind of bike is this?’ I asked.

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I just like to know these things.’

‘It’s a Honda Super Cub.’

‘You meet the nicest people on a Honda.’

‘Ha-ha.’

I went into the office and found what I needed — I also put my camera in my bag (a Paxette, a 35 mm miniature, a solid little thing) — and taped a piece of card with BAO written on it in black marker on one leg shield and CHI on the other. John kick-started the motor and I climbed on the small pillion behind him. There was an aluminium handhold between the seats but I felt safer with my arms around him.

‘You don’t mind if I do this?’ I asked.

‘I don’t mind.’

We set off and I hugged myself against his damp sweaty shirt. It was cheap cotton and had a pattern of red clipper ships in full sail on it. I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling like a teenager again. It was proving to be the strangest day, with my emotions veering around from soft and silly to cynical and uncaring; and my sense of adult responsibility seemingly switched off — what was I doing on this bike with Oberkamp heading off to Highway 22? It was as if I was in some hallucinatory state.

John seemed to know where we were going. He had a street map folded up in a pocket that he consulted from time to time, pulling into the side of the road for a few seconds to get his bearings. We took back roads to avoid the traffic jams at Tan Son Nhut airport and finally pulled on to Highway 22 about four or five kilometres north of the city limits. I was very pleased to see it was busy — military and civilian vehicles going in both directions. ‘Highway’ was something of a misnomer, though: a two-lane strip of potholed tarmac with wide dusty verges heading through a scrubby landscape and the occasional grove of coconut palms. It was a hot and hazy day — I wished I’d brought a hat.

But half an hour up the road we were the only vehicle moving. I tapped John on the back and he pulled in.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked

I pointed to my right where, about two miles away, a converted Dakota known as a ‘Spooky’ was flying in a tight pylon turn. Then there came a noise like a chainsaw as its Gatling gun opened up from its position in the gaping side door.

‘There’s a problem,’ I said. ‘Where’s all the traffic? What’s the Spooky shooting at?’

‘They’re just mopping up. I checked with CIB,¹ I told you. We’re heading west. All the trouble’s in the north.’

Then, as if to back up his reassurances two cars sped down the road towards us.

‘See? We’re only fifteen minutes away, I reckon.’

‘OK, let’s go.’

After about another mile the vegetation became sparser and over to the left I saw a flat expanse of semi-dried-out lake come into view, that had drained away or been half-evaporated by the heat. Parked on the near shore were three US Army personnel carriers, their crew sitting in the shade cast by their high sides. I was pleased to see them, made John stop and took a few photographs and gave them a wave as we puttered off. One of the soldiers jumped to his feet and shouted something at us, making crossing motions with his hands, but he was quickly lost to sight as we turned a corner. I tapped John on the back and he brought the Super Cub to a halt, once again.

‘Those GIs,’ I said. ‘They were telling us not to go on.’

‘We’re almost fucking there!’ he protested, pointing.

Up ahead, I could see a wooden shack by the roadside, roofed with palm leaves and with some rickety market stalls set out in front of it on the verge, ready to trade with passing vehicles — except there was no produce laid out.

I slipped off the bike and stepped into the middle of the road, looking up and down the shimmering tarmac. All traffic had disappeared and we were quite alone on Highway 22 again. Far in the distance the Spooky was banking into its pylon turn, looking for targets. I shaded my eyes, feeling the sweat trickle down my spine, listening.

‘Come on, Amory!’ John shouted and just at that moment I saw something move in the roadside shack.

The first shots hit the tarmac about ten feet in front of me. I felt the sting of bitumen chips hit my forearms and as I turned and ran heard the flat firecracker noise of several AK-47s open up and sensed the burn and tug of something hitting my right calf muscle. We ran into the undergrowth and crouched down. The Super Cub lay incongruously on its side. A bullet pinged off its front fork and tall puffs of dust erupted around it.

I looked down at my right leg. My chinos had a tear at the calf and blood was spreading. I rolled the trouser up and saw a neat three-inch furrow torn along the surface of the muscle. I felt no pain.

John pulled off his shirt and ripped off a sleeve — with remarkable ease — and bound it round the wound, knotting it tightly. The gunmen in the shack were now spraying the undergrowth, randomly searching for us. We were safe for the moment if we kept our heads down. Then I heard the roar of engines from the APCs from the lake, heading up the road towards us at full speed. The firing stopped and I raised my head to see three people run from the roadside shack and pelt into the scrub, just before the palm-frond roof was shredded into a thousand swirling pieces as the.50 calibre machine gun on the lead APC hosed the building. Some internal structure must have shattered because the whole shack half-collapsed with a creak and what sounded like a sigh and a thick cloud of dust rolled across the road. We stepped out of the undergrowth, hands up, just in case, as the lead APC lurched to a halt and its commander, sitting in the turret with the machine gun, began to swear at us colourfully.

I had my little war wound — that was now beginning to throb. And, now we were safe, John pulled on his one-sleeved shirt, righted the Super Cub and declared his intent to drive on to Vinh Hoa.

‘Are you completely insane?’ I yelled at him.

APCs by the parched lake. Highway 22, Saigon, 1968.

He hugged me, kissed me quickly on the lips to halt my protestations and said, ‘I’ll be back tonight. I’ll come to your place. I’ll bring Queenie.’

‘No, John, don’t go,’ I said, angrily and grabbed his arm. But I released it when I saw the look in his eye. Mad, unreachable.

‘I don’t advise it, sir,’ the lieutenant commanding the APC squadron said, dryly.

‘I’m a journalist,’ John said. ‘I’ll be safe. Don’t worry.’

‘Oh yeah. One of those fuckin’ crazy journalists. You’ll be fine, man. Go for it.’

His men laughed.

John climbed on to his bike, started it, smiled, gave me a thumbs-up and motored off down the road, flinging out a final wave as he dwindled away into the wobbling heat haze.

I waited in for him that night, but he never came. The next day he was posted as missing in action — villagers in Vinh Hoa said he’d been taken prisoner by a cadre of retreating Viet Cong, no doubt the ones who’d fired at us from the roadside shack. I wasn’t too worried: journalists were quite frequently captured but usually well treated and released after a few days, the reasoning being that they would speak favourably about their captors — good propaganda.

A week went by, and there was no sign of John Oberkamp and his Honda Super Cub.

Two weeks later I had a letter from his mother, Mrs Grace Oberkamp, from Sydney. John had written to her about her forthcoming grandchild and had given her my address, for some reason. It seemed to me a strange precaution, as if he had a prescient worry about what might happen to him. I was suffering from retrospective worry, also, recalling that moment alone on Highway 22 just before the shooting started. If those VC had been better shots I would have been cut down there and then, I was now realising. Annie and Blythe orphaned. I felt sick — genuinely shaken up — but these thoughts and images haunted me in the days after John disappeared. I could close my eyes and see myself fall, feel the bullets hit.

Mrs Oberkamp said that in his letter John had been concerned about his possessions and that if anything happened to him she was to contact me. Would I be so good as to gather up his bits and pieces and post them on to her? She would be eternally grateful and would reimburse me for all expenses incurred.

And just at that moment the first copy of my book arrived. Vietnam, Mon Amour (Frankel & Silverman, 1968). I knew the title wasn’t original but it served my non-combat photos admirably. Moreover, its appearance caused something of a stir in the press corps. A good number of the photographers working in Vietnam had books planned, I knew — we often discussed them — but I was one of the first to be published, beaten only by Jerry Strickland of UPI and Yolande Joubert of Paris Match. Even Renata Alabama looked at me with new respectful eyes, asking if I could put a word in for her with Frankel & Silverman. I should have savoured the acclaim — and the overt envy — but I was suddenly aware that whatever ‘amour’ there had been between me and Vietnam was swiftly diminishing.

I kept thinking — and, what was worse, dreaming — about that moment when I’d stood alone in the middle of Highway 22, south of Vinh Hoa, in the eerie stillness, apart from the distant drone of the Spooky gunship doing its pylon turn. It stayed in my head like a film loop, a scene from an unfinished movie. I had my three-inch bullet graze, nicely scabbed, now, and I had my shiny new book with its glossy photos. I was aware of my good luck, the good fortune, that had led me to this position. But I knew I wanted to go home — to Scotland, to Barrandale.

However, there was a last task to be done, a final deliverance of duty to John Oberkamp. I managed to hitch a ride on a Royal Australian Air Force Hercules that was making the short hop from Saigon to Nui Dat where I showed Mrs Oberkamp’s letter to the base’s senior PEO.

‘Oh, yeah, Oberkamp,’ he said. ‘Any news?’

There was no news, I said.

He drove me out to John’s sandbagged hooch near the perimeter by the main runway and showed me in. He said he’d be back in thirty minutes to pick me up. Inside there was a metal bed with a Dunlopillo mattress, some half-drunk bottles of rum and bourbon, about a thousand cigarettes, an electric fan and a gunny sack filled with dirty clothes. Under the bed was a cardboard box that contained a dozen paperbacks, two cameras and John’s trademark bush hat with its cryptic slogan — ‘BORN TO BE BORN’ — painted on the front in coral-pink nail varnish. Pinned to the wall above the bed, I was pleased to see, was one of my ‘Never Too Young To. .’ T-shirts. That was it — he travelled light, did John; this was small cargo for a man who’d been in Vietnam since 1965. I dumped the dirty clothes on the bed and filled the gunny sack with the books and cameras and anything else personal that I could find (two Zippo lighters, an ashtray from the Hilton Hotel in Tokyo, a few rolls of undeveloped film). I kept the bush hat for myself and pulled it on my head, tucking my hair in under it.

I decided not to wait for the PEO and so set off, strolling back towards the control tower and the administrative buildings, John’s gunny bag over my shoulder. It was mid-afternoon and the sun was burning through the milky sky, a blurry, brassy disk. I smelt rain coming.

I heard the chugging clatter of helicopter engines and paused to see a couple of RAAF Hueys coming in low over the perimeter fence to dust down next to a waiting ambulance with medics standing ready by a gurney with a drip rigged, waiting for some casualties. I wandered over.

The Hueys landed, the rotors stopped and the men inside began wearily to disembark. The medics ran forward and carried two body bags into the ambulance before returning with the gurney for another soldier, seemingly unconscious, both legs bandaged from ankle to thigh. A jeep pulled up by the ambulance and a senior officer stepped out. He talked to the medics as they carefully loaded their grim freight of suffering humanity on board the ambulance. I saw him touch the shoulder of the wounded man.

I was close to the disembarked soldiers now — some standing, some sitting on the ground, all of them smoking — and I recognised that air of filthy, blank exhaustion about them that comes upon soldiers after hours of combat, of being under fire. I’d seen it before — most notably at Wesel in 1945 — and once seen, never forgotten. Their clothes were damp and dirt-ingrained, the green cotton drill dark and blackened from the grime and sweat. They carried an assortment of weapons — FN rifles, M16s — I even saw one man with an AK-47 — enough to tell me that these men were not regular Australian Army; this must be the Australian SAS — the SAS Regiment, as it was known. John had told me that units were based here at Nui Dat from time to time. I edged closer — mechanics were checking the Hueys, and a petrol tender had rolled up so there was a fair bit of distracting activity going on — and I could see a couple of two-ton trucks heading out to pick the unit up.

I wondered if I could sneak a photo, then I thought, no, better to ask. I went towards one man, an officer, but stopped as soon as I heard the voices around me as they spoke to each other. These men weren’t Australian — they were British. I heard cockney accents, Lowland Scots; one man was a Geordie. I crouched down and pretended to fiddle with my knapsack straps. Yet they were all wearing SASR unit patches, yellow and beige, and a couple of them even sported the regiment’s caramel berets. As the men turned and made ready to climb into the approaching lorries I could see the shoulder flashes saying ‘Australia’. These manifestly non-Australians were clearly making every attempt to be Australians.

The senior officer who’d been in the jeep, who was wearing neatly pressed olive-green fatigues, approached and the men climbed to their feet and straightened up in a notional stand-to-attention as he had a few words with them. I backed off, carefully. What was going on here? The two-ton trucks stopped, the men were dismissed and they hauled themselves on board. As the senior officer headed back to his jeep he passed close to me.

‘Hello, Frank,’ I said. ‘Small world.’

Frank Dunn froze, then turned. I could practically hear his astonished brain working. He managed a thin smile.

‘Amory,’ he said. ‘Bloody hell.’

He came over to me and kissed me on the cheek, to his credit.

‘May I ask what you’re doing here?’ he said, stepping back and looking me up and down. ‘Love the headgear.’ I now rather wished I wasn’t wearing John’s bush hat.

I explained. ‘Picking up a colleague’s stuff.’ I held up the gunny bag. ‘He’s MIA.’ I paused. ‘More to the point: when did you join the Australian Army?’

‘I’ve left the army,’ he said, bluntly. ‘I’ve retired.’

I looked at him — he had no badges of rank, no identifying name above his breast pocket; he was dressed as a soldier, but that was all. Yet those men had stood to attention as he came up to them.

‘Some retirement,’ I said. ‘Why are all those British soldiers pretending to be Australians?’

‘They’re on secondment to the Australian Army — as observers.’

‘Come on, Frank. I’ve been out here for well over a year. I was married to a soldier. I’m not a fool — they’re straight out of combat.’

Frank Dunn linked arms with me and walked me towards his jeep.

‘I’m only going to say this once, Amory. Let me be clear. You came to Nui Dat, you picked up your friend’s bits and pieces, and then you went back to Saigon. You didn’t see them. You didn’t see me. You certainly didn’t talk to me. Understood?’

‘Understood.’

‘I’ll drop you off at the CIB.’

‘Thanks.’

Even though we made our fond farewells — Frank asking for news of the girls, how I was coping out here, kissing me goodbye — I knew I had made a mistake. I should have kept my mouth shut.

I was upstairs at my desk in the SPS bureau trying to draft a resignation letter to Lane Burrell. Seeing John’s paltry collection of possessions had depressed me — a whole young existence subsumed by some dirty laundry, damp-swollen paperbacks and a couple of cameras. It had been no life for John and it was no life for me — and it was time I brought it to a dignified end.

Renata rapped on the door frame. She looked a little alarmed.

‘You’d better come down, Amory.’

I followed her to the reception area to find a US master sergeant with an MP brassard on his arm and two smart ARVN military police acting as escort.

‘Amory Clay?’

‘Yes. What’s this all about?’

He glanced at the sheet of paper in his hand.

‘Your visa has been rescinded. You are illegally in this country. You are under arrest.’

I am writing this down, sitting on my suitcase, somewhere in Tan Son Nhut airport. This hut has a mud floor and no furniture. The door is locked and an ARVN MP is standing outside it. I’m being deported and I know exactly why — because of what I saw the day before yesterday at Nui Dat. Unwittingly, I now share a secret — but a secret no one wants me to share, hence this unseemly rush to have me out of the country.

The master sergeant who took me into custody told me the bare minimum as he allowed me to return to my apartment and pack up my belongings — following orders, highest authority. I sit here feeling frightened and glad. Glad to be leaving — that was planned — but frightened by this exhibition of absolute power. My visa had six more months to run — I had renewed it on my return from Hong Kong. My accreditation was solid. I was being rushed out of this country as if I had the plague. On whose orders? Frank’s? I doubted it. No, Frank would have told someone important about our meeting at Nui Dat; then that information would have gone up the chain of command until a decision was made. Get her out. I’m waiting for a Pan Am charter to Hong Kong where I’m to stay in transit until I’m put on a BOAC flight to London. I am not being charged for any airfares.

FINAL THOUGHTS ON LEAVING VIETNAM

John Oberkamp had more scars on his body than Sholto. Maybe that was what attracted me to him — he reminded me of Sholto in some way. Not physically, but some quality of alertness, of curiosity. Just the loose-limbed, supple way he carried himself. There is still no news. No reports of his capture.¹

Truong returned just as I was leaving the apartment with my MP escort. He foolishly tried to grab hold of me and bundle me into his Renault. ‘No, Truong, no!’ I shouted. ‘I’m all right. Don’t worry. I’m going home.’ He began to sob, his hands over his face.

The name of the master sergeant who escorted me out of the country was Sam M. Goodforth. He was burly, unsmiling, florid — as if he’d just stepped from a hot bath — with a close crew cut. I remember his name because it was printed on a plastic rectangle over his left breast pocket. Goodforth — go forth.

After John Oberkamp had motored off up the road to Vinh Hoa, one of the APC crew replaced John’s makeshift bandage with a proper field dressing. ‘You ought to get that properly cleaned up,’ he said. ‘I heard Charlie puts shit on their bullets.’ The lieutenant called in a medevac helicopter for me — as a favour — and it was to be my last trip in a Huey helicopter in Vietnam. I was designated as a ‘lightly wounded casualty (civilian)’. I was choppered back to base hospital in Saigon. That’s how I feel now, on leaving — a lightly wounded casualty (civilian).

And as I sit here, worried, uncomfortable, a bit miserable, a bit angry at this summary, enforced departure, I ask myself if I’d done the right thing in embarking on this Vietnam adventure, leaving my home and my family behind to go on some half-thought-out mission to prove something to myself, to discover something of myself. What did I learn that I didn’t already know? Quite a lot, actually. And I took some good photographs and made a book of them. And made some money. And I met and loved another man. . I don’t think I can blame myself for wanting to do what I did — and I don’t think Annie and Blythe blame me, either. It is my life, after all, and I have every right to live it to the full. Oh yes, you keep saying that to yourself, don’t you?

I can hear voices outside the door — American voices. Is it time to leave? Am I finally going home?

*

And that was the end of my Vietnam Scrapbook, but not entirely the end of my Vietnam experience — it travelled with me a few thousand miles. I arrived at Heathrow on the Hong Kong flight early in the morning. As I crossed the tarmac apron towards the airport building two police officers intercepted me and led me to an unmarked car parked nearby. I reminded them that I had a suitcase on board; I was told it would be brought to me.

I was driven through early-morning London, the streets still pretty much empty, to St John’s Wood, north of Regent’s Park, to a block of mansion flats with its own underground car park. I was taken to a service apartment on the fourth floor where I was greeted by a sour-faced, heavily built young woman in a puce suit and sensible shoes. She showed me into a sitting room with brown upholstered furniture and a gas fire and offered me a cup of tea and biscuits. If I wanted to use the toilet, she said, I should ring this bell, pointing at a bell-push by the door. And then she locked me in.

I drank my tea and ate my digestive biscuits and an hour after I had arrived my suitcase was delivered. I waited. At lunchtime I was provided with a round of ham sandwiches and a glass of orange juice. I dozed on the sofa for most of the afternoon. I deliberately didn’t ask my guardian what was going on. Supper was a round of cheese and tomato sandwiches and a glass of orange juice. I stretched out on the sofa again and slept for a troubled few hours.

Very late in the night I was woken by puce-suit and led down a corridor to another room with a dining table and six chairs. Another cup of tea was served. After ten minutes or so I heard voices at the flat’s front door and moments later two young, suited men came in and introduced themselves as they took their seats opposite me: Mr Brown and Mr Green. They were in their thirties; one was dark and solid (Mr Green), the other languid and corpulent with fair, thinning hair (Mr Brown). Both of them were, no doubt, educated at expensive private schools and were graduates of excellent universities. They had polite middle-class accents. They could have happily read the news on the BBC.

MR BROWN: Lady Farr. Your professional name is Amory Clay.

ME: That’s correct.

MR GREEN: We won’t detain you much longer. Our apologies for your wait.

ME: I’m keen to return home. May I ask why I was detained in the first place? I’m not aware of having done anything wrong.

MR BROWN: We had to detain you because of what you thought you saw at [consults notebook] Nui Dat airbase, Vietnam.

ME: I really can hardly remember anything at all.

MR GREEN: We will assume, for your own sake, that you will remember nothing at all.

ME: Of course. I promise.

MR GREEN: Nothing. Ever. For your own sake.

ME: I repeat — I promise.

MR BROWN: Because if you so much as breathe a word. .

ME: I promise. Nothing.

MR BROWN: Excellent.

And then they both gave tight little smiles and we stood up. Brown asked if I had any money and I said only American dollars. He gave me a £10 note that I had to sign a chit for and I was then shown back to the front door by puce-suit where my suitcase was waiting for me.

I travelled down in the lift alone and stepped out into the first glimmerings of dawn in St John’s Wood. I hailed a passing taxi and asked to be taken to an all-night café. This proved to be in Victoria bus station where — beneath blazing fluorescent light — I ate, and hugely relished, a greasy breakfast and drank many cups of strong tea.

But I was feeling increasingly strange as I sat there in the refulgent cafeteria considering what had just happened to me in the last forty-eight hours or so and I realised I had experienced this sensation before but I couldn’t remember when. That sense of fearful powerlessness; of other forces suddenly taking over the direction of your life that you had chosen; of being completely out of your depth in what you thought was familiar society. And then I remembered. My ‘obscenity’ trial over my Berlin photographs, all those decades ago — sitting in the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court pleading guilty when I knew I was innocent; learning that my photographs were to be destroyed; being admonished and humiliated by the judge.

When you encounter the implacable power of the state it’s a deeply destabilising moment. In an ordinary life it happens very rarely — maybe never, maybe once or twice. But your individual being, your individual nature, seems suddenly worth nothing — you feel expendable — and that’s what frightens you, fundamentally, that’s what makes your bowels loosen.

When the world was stirring I telephoned Blythe at her flat in Notting Hill but there was no reply. So I tried Annie at her student hall of residence at Sussex University.

‘Ma! I don’t believe it! You’re back! How wonderful, why didn’t you tell us?’

‘Yes, it is wonderful and all very sudden, but I’m here to stay, my darling. No more travelling.’

We spoke some more and I told her I’d tried Blythe with no success. Annie said to keep trying — she hadn’t moved. I had a powerful need to be hugged, close and hard, by someone I loved. I telephoned again, but there was still no reply so I hailed another taxi and was taken to Ladbroke Grove, to a peeling stucco four-storey house with twelve brimming dustbins outside it. I rang the bell for Blythe’s flat and eventually a bleary, long-haired American came to the door. Was Blythe in? I’m her mother. Sorry. Blythe’s been away for weeks. Gone on a long holiday. I couldn’t take any more and began to cry.