War Baby Read online

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance of fictional characters to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Originally published by Hodder and Stoughton, a division of Hodder Headline PLC London and by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Revised edition copyright © 2013 by Colin Falconer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author and publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  eISBN 978162120616

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to express my gratitude to Australian photographer Tony Ashby, who spent ten years of his life in places other people would not have spent ten minutes; Belfast during the Troubles, Beirut during the civil war, Sarajevo during the siege. He obtained stunning images at great personal risk. I thank him for the time he has taken to describe his own perspectives and experiences.

  I drew extensively on the personal accounts of many other war correspondents for insights into the nature of the job and the characters and motivations of the men and women who do it.

  However, this is a work of fiction, and it is not to be inferred that any of the characters portrayed in this book bear any relation in their actions or personalities to any foreign correspondents or combat photographers, now living or dead.

  Chapter 1

  Jajce, Bosnia-Hercegovina

  October 1992

  ‘It was right about then that I knew we were going to die.

  ‘I don’t remember being afraid. I remember being frustrated. We had come through so much and just when I thought we’d made it, there was death, coming out of the mist right at us.

  ‘There were four of them and they all wore brimless olive wool caps. I knew they were Chetniks because of the long hair and beards they all wore. They were carrying Kalashnikovs and they had Bowie knives in their belts and one of them had an RPG strapped to his back. The air was so still I could hear them flick off the safeties with their thumbs from a hundred yards away.

  ‘I thought about that goldfish in its little plastic bag. Strange how the mind works. I felt as sorry for that stupid fish as I did for the rest of us.

  ‘Someone waved a white flag in the air and shouted something at them in Serbo-Croat. But I knew it wasn’t going to do any good. I could see Ryan’s face. It was the first time I’d ever really seen him afraid. You know how I knew? There was no excitement in his eyes. I never remember seeing Ryan without that dreamy, almost ... well, homey look on his face when there was danger. But then I suppose he was only ever worried about himself before.

  ‘He shouted something, I don’t know what it was. Then I felt this pain in my hip. I tried to scream but I couldn’t get my breath, and we were bouncing down the slope and every time the wheels bounced it was like an electric charge shooting through my body. I tried to jump clear but I just couldn’t move.

  ‘And then I felt myself falling. When I hit the ground the pain was unbelievable. I didn’t know what to do. There was this white light behind my eyes and my whole body went rigid. I couldn’t breathe. It felt like I lay like that for hours but it couldn’t have been more than a minute, I guess. When the spasm passed I didn’t care about dying any more. I just wanted to get away from the pain and lie there in the cold mush of leaves and sleep.

  ‘I could hear the Chetniks calling to each other on the track, the crunch of their boots on the frozen mud. They sounded really close. Then I heard the gunfire, and someone screaming. I remember trying to shout something. God knows why. If they’d heard me they would have shot me, too.

  ‘And that’s all I remember. I suppose I must have passed out. I didn’t find out what had really happened until much later.’

  Seventh Regiment Armoury, Park Avenue, New York

  30 April 1995

  ‘You’re not doing the story justice,’ Dave Crosby said. ‘It’s like skimming through a novel and just reading the last page.’

  ‘The lady here was asking me about Ryan,’ Webb said. ‘I tried to answer her question. I’m sure she doesn’t want to hear the whole sordid story.’

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ Wendy Doyle said. ‘Sordid stories are the only ones I’m interested in.’

  Crosby caught the eye of a black-jacketed waiter moving among the tables and signaled for another Scotch. ‘I wish he could have been here tonight.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’ve got such long faces,’ Doyle said, in her harsh Belfast brogue. ‘If anyone should miss him, it’s me. I was the only one here who slept with him.’

  Webb picked at the tablecloth. ‘Actually, there’s something I think I have to tell you all.’

  It was enough to break the tension. There was awkward laughter around the table. There were too many ghosts at the banquet tonight, the twentieth anniversary reunion for former Vietnam war correspondents. Sixty-eight empty chairs, one for each of their number who had not come back from that stricken, hot land. There were name-cards on the linen, in gold calligraphy, a roll-call of honour: Flynn, Burrows, Cantwell, Fall and the rest.

  Twenty years to the day since tank number 843 ploughed through the gates of the Doc Lap Palace. Now they were all gathered one last time in the mock-Tudor drill hall of the old British fort, with uniformed Marines guarding the doors. It was a stiff but somehow appropriate setting for their self indulgence; silver and crystal glittered under the huge chandeliers, the vast hall was hung with red, white and blue bunting. Old Glory hung above the podium.

  Anyone who hadn’t been there would be forgiven for thinking our side won, Webb thought.

  Their numbers were drawn not only from the United States, but from Britain, France, Germany, Australia, Japan; all those who received an accreditation from MACV had been extended an invitation. The old guard were greyer now, thicker at the waist, and most wore suits; only a few rebellious souls, like Crosby, had showed up for the night in their old camo’s. They had dined on poached salmon and chicken and listened to the speeches made about them with a sort of sad pride.

  Now the talking was done and the three of them were huddled around the spill of bottles and glasses on their table, reliving their dusty triumphs, like the ageing members of a champion football team at the clubhouse bar. There was Webb, the only Britisher in the group, tall, greying, a soft-spoken rebel in khaki shirt and jeans; Crosby, playing to the hilt his legendary status as the oldest combat photographer still working, a greying ponytail hanging over his camo’s, his tanned skull polished smooth - as he would have it - by so many close shaves; and Lee Cochrane, the youngest of the vets from the House of Horrors, now a hotshot bureau news chief for one of the networks, looking more like a corporate lawyer in his double-breasted suit and button-down. His only concession to the past was the WA pin in his lapel.

  Wendy Doyle was in kindergarten when they were chasing medevacs. She had been one of the guest speakers at that night’s dinner, an inspired choice, or so it seemed to Webb. She had followed Crosby onto the podium and had spoken about the changing role of war correspondents, of how the Vietnam generation had been the first and last journalists allowed to cover a war freely and chase the battle lines.

  They were indeed a select and endangered group. Doyle herself had won acclaim for her reports from Somalia and Bosnia, and her words had made them feel part of a continuum, a little less like relics from a futile past.

  ‘Where’s this famous bottle of Bushmills?’ Doyle asked Webb.

  Webb reached under the table and retrieved a brown paper bag. H
e took out the bottle and held it up. ‘Ryan gave it to me before he left for Bosnia. I’ve been saving it for an appropriate occasion.’

  ‘It’s probably tea,’ Cochrane said. ‘Ryan never shouted a round in his life.’

  ‘Check the seal,’ Crosby said. ‘It could be cold urine.’

  ‘Three-year-old cold urine at that,’ Cochrane said.

  Webb called over the drinks waiter and asked for five whisky glasses. He cracked the seal and sniffed carefully at the contents. ‘Smells all right,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that pasted on the back?’ Crosby asked him.

  ‘It’s something Ryan wrote,’ Webb said. He handed the bottle to Crosby who read it, shook his head and passed it without comment to Cochrane.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said.

  The waiter arrived with the glasses and Webb poured two fingers in each. They raised their glasses but waited for Doyle to drink first.

  ‘She swallowed it,’ Cochrane said, ‘so it can’t be too bad.’

  ‘For cold urine,’ she said, ‘it’s quite smooth.’

  ‘Like him,’ Crosby said. ‘What was that Oscar Wilde story? The Picture of Dorian Gray. Somewhere out there, there’s an oil painting of the bastard. He’s bald, wrinkled, with a beer gut and smoker’s cough.’

  ‘So back to the story,’ Doyle said.

  ‘And this time,’ Crosby said, ‘start at the beginning.’

  Webb shook his head. ‘The beginning,’ he said. ‘The beginning was the first time I ever saw him nearly get himself killed. And that was three minutes after I first met him, right outside the apartment in Saigon.’

  Chapter 2

  Saigon, December 1969

  ‘I have made arrangements for the correspondents to take the field .. . and I have suggested to them that they should wear a white uniform to indicate the purity of their character.’

  - attributed to Union General Irvin McDowell during the American Civil War.

  The gagging stench of gasoline and the gamy smells of rotting fruit and Southern noodles; camouflaged warplanes, rockets slung under their wings, shirtless technicians crawling over the cockpits; a banshee scream as a droop-nosed F-4 Phantom roared from the runway. Heat like a physical blow, taking the breath away.

  Just the day before he had been in Surrey, grey and cold.

  O’Leary was at the terminal to meet him. Webb had known him from school. While he struggled through a cadetship at a minor Surrey newspaper, O’Leary had taken up a scholarship at Oxford and then got a job at Reuters in the City. When he heard O’Leary had been posted to the Saigon bureau Webb got the idea to take this gamble himself, the biggest of his life. He wrote to him, asking for help, and to his astonishment O’Leary wrote back, saying that if he could find his way to Saigon, he would help him find lodgings and work. He spent his entire life savings on a one-way air ticket to Saigon.

  So now they drove into the city in a babyshit-yellow Mini Moke, past decaying French villas with green shutters, sandbagged army posts, billboards of oriental girls drinking Coca-Cola, and canals as flat and black as bitumen. The streets were a buzzing, screeching, choking tangle of Hondas, bicycles, old Dodges with immense tail fins and tiny Renault taxi cabs held together with pieces of wire. Gangs of siclo drivers gathered on the street corners, while war veterans with twisted stumps of limbs scuttled along the pavements like crabs among the reeking piles of garbage.

  Here I am; no tangible means of support, no job, nowhere to live and fifty-four pounds to my name.

  ‘I envy you,’ O’Leary said.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yep. Tell me what you know about Vietnam.’

  ‘Practically nothing.’

  ‘Well, treasure the moment.’

  Webb shook his head. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because right now you understand more about this place than you ever will again.’

  * * *

  It was known as the Hashish Hilton.

  It was an ancient French villa, whitewash peeling from the walls in flakes, with green shutters and a red-tiled roof. It was two minutes’ walk from the US Embassy, a five-minute siclo ride from downtown. The front door opened onto the street, to a riot of two-stroke motorcycles and belching army trucks, and there was an alley on the other side lined with noodle shops.

  ‘I’ve organised for you to stay here,’ O’Leary said. ‘A spare room came up last week.’

  ‘That’s lucky,’ Webb had said.

  ‘For you, maybe. Not for the guy who had the room. He was a stringer for the Post and the New York Times'

  ‘Was?’

  ‘Two bullets in the chest. They’ve evacuated him back to the States. Hope you have better luck than he did.’

  He heard shouts from inside. ‘Over there!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Corpsman!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There!’

  ‘Where?’

  As they walked in, it stopped and the occupants of the room broke into hysterical giggles. O’Leary looked at Webb and shrugged.

  A lunatic asylum, Webb thought.

  The air was sickly sweet with dope. A Jimi Hendrix riff played on the stereo: ‘All Along the Watchtower’. On the walls there were posters of Lenny Bruce, Jimi Hendrix and a Playboy centrefold with the blackened face of a dead Vietnamese woman superimposed on her shoulders. In the corner was a low table with a bronze Buddha and lighted incense. A flare chute had been draped from the ceiling. A monkey was masturbating on the bookcase, next to a spent artillery casing that had been upturned for use as an ashtray.

  Two men were sitting on cane chairs by the window, passing a small bamboo opium pipe between them. A third man was crawling along the black and white tiled floor, as if it were vertical, using the black tiles as handholds.

  ‘Welcome to the Hashish Hilton.’ One of the smokers held out a large brown hand flecked with golden hairs. He had thinning sandy hair and a downturned moustache. ‘Dave Crosby, from the AP,’ he said. ‘Glad to know ya. This is Mike Prescott from UPI. The young fella attempting to climb the floor by the more difficult eastern face is Lee Cochrane. LA Times' He pointed to the monkey. ‘The guy on the bookcase thrashin’ the stoat is a reporter with NBC. Wouldn’t worry about shaking his hand, though.’

  ‘Hugh Webb.’

  ‘Who you with, Hugh?’

  Webb shrugged, in an effort to express a lifetime’s gamble. ‘Freelance,’ he said.

  ‘Hell, why not. It’s a war anyone can join in. Welcome to sunny Saigon.’

  O’Leary pulled up two wicker chairs and they sat down. Crosby passed Webb the pipe. ‘Have some wacky tobacky.’ When Webb hesitated, he said: ‘Better get used to it, kid. You won’t survive the Nam without it.’

  As Webb drew cautiously on the pipe, Prescott said: ‘This toke is in memory of Billy Joe Zane, photographer, formerly of Charleston, Carolina, late of the Hashish Hilton, Saigon. May God and Life magazine bless him and his sucking chest wound.’

  ‘Amen,’ Crosby said.

  ‘You realize you are now in a war zone, Hugh?’ Prescott said.

  Crosby aped astonishment. ‘A war zone? Is that why people keep shooting at me?’

  ‘You didn’t know?’ Prescott said, playing along.

  ‘Well, I’ll be dipped in shit. I thought they just didn’t like me. I guess that makes me feel a lot better about myself. Thank you, Prescott.’

  Webb stared at them. But these guys are my heroes, he thought. I’ve seen Prescott’s combat photographs in the British newspapers, read Crosby’s byline on reports from Hill 875 and Khe Sanh and Con Thien. I’ve only been off the plane half an hour and here they are sitting in the room with me.

  And they’re idiots.

  Lee Cochrane had frozen to the floor, was screaming that he couldn’t get down. The monkey had finished masturbating, leaving an unfortunate residue in the ashtray.

  I can’t stay here, Webb thought, panicked.

  ‘Rent is
fifty thousand piasters a month split six ways,’ Crosby was saying.

  ‘Six?’ Webb said.

  ‘There is one other member of our band you have still to meet. One Sean Ryan. A subject from one of your colonies.’

  ‘Three things to remember about Ryan,’ Prescott said. ‘One, if you want to live, don’t go in the field with him. He’s got a death wish. Two, if he makes a bet with you, take it. The guy gambles on insane shit, and always loses. Three, if you get yourself a girlfriend, don’t take her anywhere near Sean. When women get around him, they just goo up and melt like ice-cream on a hot tank.’

  ‘There’s only about one woman in Saigon I bet Ryan couldn’t roll,’ Crosby said, ‘and there she goes.’

  They all looked out of the window at the same time. A siclo trundled past, steering a hazardous path among the motorcycles and military trucks. There was a novice in the shaded front seat.

  At that moment Sean Ryan walked in.

  ‘What woman?’ he said.

  Webb looked up, and for a moment he thought he recognized him. Ronnie Ryan, Sean’s father, had been part legend, part joke; the hero of countless bad Hollywood pictures, the pirate hero in tights and sword who always got the girl.

  Ryan was a youthful version of his father, with shoulder-length jet-black hair, ice-blue eyes, a drooping black moustache and a perfect set of powder-white teeth. His shirt was open to the third button, and there were hippy love beads nestled in the thick mat of hair on his chest.

  He was a big man, over six feet tall. For all his good looks he had an execrable choice of clothes: why would a man in a war zone choose to wear an orange and green Hawaiian shirt, and lilac pants?

  He saw the siclo disappear behind an olive ARVN truck belching black diesel. ‘Top sort,’ he said.

  ‘If you can score with her,’ Prescott said, ‘I’ll give you three hundred bucks.’

  ‘But she’s a nun,’ Ryan said.