Dispatches (30 page)

When we were down to a hard core of six or seven, we’d talk tired, stoned talk about the war, imitating commanders who were always saying things like, “Well, Charlie’s dug in there pretty good, but when we can get him out where we can see him we find we’re getting some real decent kills, we got Charlie outgunned for sure, only thing is we can’t kill him if we can’t see ’cause Charlie’s always running. Come on, we’ll take you up and get you shot at.” We talked about a discotheque we were going to open in Saigon, the Third Wave, with a stainless-steel dance floor, blow-ups of the best war photographs on the walls, a rock group called Westy and the KIA’s. (Our talk had about as much taste as the war did.) And we’d talk about LZ Loon, the mythical place where it got dark so fast that by the time you realized that there wouldn’t be another chopper in until morning, you’d already picked a place to sleep for the night. Loon was the ultimate Vietnam movie location, where all of the mad
colonels and death-spaced grunts we’d ever known showed up all at once, saying all the terrible, heartbreaking things they always said, so nonchalant about the horror and fear that you knew you’d never really be one of them no matter how long you stayed. You honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Few people ever cried more than once there, and if you’d used that up, you laughed; the young ones were so innocent and violent, so sweet and so brutal, beautiful killers.

One morning, about twenty-five correspondents were out by the Y Bridge working when a dying ARVN was driven by on the back of a half-ton pick-up. The truck stopped at some barbed wire, and we all gathered around to look at him. He was nineteen or twenty and he’d been shot three times in the chest. All of the photographers leaned in for pictures, there was a television camera above him, we looked at him and then at each other and then at the wounded Vietnamese again. He opened his eyes briefly a few times and looked back at us. The first time, he tried to smile (the Vietnamese did that when they were embarrassed by the nearness of foreigners), then it left him. I’m sure that he didn’t even see us the last time he looked, but we all knew what it was that he’d seen just before that.

That was also the week that Page came back to Vietnam.
A Scrambler to the Front
by Tim Page,
Tim Page
by Charles Dickens. He came a few days before it started, and people who knew about his luck were making jokes blaming the whole thing on his return. There were more young, apolitically radical, wigged-out crazies running around Vietnam than anybody ever realized; between all of the grunts turning on and tripping out on the war and the substantial number of correspondents who were doing the same thing, it was an
authentic subculture. There were more than enough within the press corps to withstand a little pressure from the upright, and if Flynn was the most sophisticated example of this, Page was the most extravagant. I’d heard about him even before I came to Vietnam (“Look him up. If he’s still alive”), and between the time I got there and the time he came back in May, I’d heard so much about him that I might have felt that I knew him if so many people hadn’t warned me, “There’s just no way to describe him for you. Really, no way.”

“Page? That’s easy. Page is a child.”

“No, man, Page is just crazy.”

“Page is a crazy child.”

They’d tell all kinds of stories about him, sometimes working up a passing anger over things he’d done years before, times when he’d freaked a little and become violent, but it always got softened, they’d pull back and say his name with great affection. “Page. Fucking Page.”

He was an orphan boy from London, married at seventeen and divorced a year later. He worked his way across Europe as a cook in the hotels, drifting east through India, through Laos (where he claims to have dealt with the Spooks, a little teen-age espionage), into Vietnam at the age of twenty. One of the things that everybody said about him was that he had not been much of a photographer then (he’d picked up a camera the way you or I would pick up a ticket), but that he would go places for pictures that very few other photographers were going. People made him sound crazy and ambitious, like the Sixties Kid, a stone-cold freak in a country where the madness raced up the hills and into the jungles, where everything essential to learning Asia, war, drugs, the whole adventure, was close at hand.

The first time he got hit it was shrapnel in the legs and stomach. That was at Chu Lai, in ’65. The next time was during the Buddhist riots of the 1966 Struggle Movement in
Danang: head, back, arms, more shrapnel. (A
Paris-Match
photograph showed Flynn and a French photographer carrying him on a door, his face half covered by bandages,
“Tim Page, blessé à la tête.”
) His friends began trying to talk him into leaving Vietnam, saying, “Hey, Page, there’s an airstrike looking for you.” And there was; it caught him drifting around off course in a Swift boat in the South China Sea, blowing it out of the water under the mistaken impression that it was a Viet Cong vessel. All but three of the crew were killed, Page took over 200 individual wounds, and he floated in the water for hours before he was finally rescued.

They were getting worse each time, and Page gave in to it. He left Vietnam, allegedly for good, and joined Flynn in Paris for a while. He went to the States from there, took some pictures for Time-Life, got busted with the Doors in New Haven, traveled across the country on his own (he still had some money left), doing a picture story which he planned to call “Winter in America.” Shortly after the Tet Offensive, Flynn returned to Vietnam, and once Page heard that, it was only a matter of time. When he got back in May, his entrance requirements weren’t in order, and the Vietnamese kept him at Tan Son Nhut for a couple of days, where his friends visited him and brought him things. The first time I met him he was giggling and doing an insane imitation of two Vietnamese immigration authorities fighting over the amount of money they were going to hold him up for, “Minh phung, auk nyong bgnyang gluke poo phuc fuck fart, I mean you should have
heard
those beastly people. Where am I going to sleep, who’s got a rack for Page? The Dinks have been mucking about with Page, Page is a
very
tired boy.”

He was twenty-three when I first met him, and I can remember wishing that I’d known him when he was still young. He was bent, beaten, scarred, he was everything by way of
being crazy that everyone had said he was, except that you could tell that he’d never get really nasty again when he flipped. He was broke, so friends got him a place to sleep, gave him piastres, cigarettes, liquor, grass. Then he made a couple of thousand dollars on some fine pictures of the Offensive, and all of those things came back on us, twice over. That was the way the world was for Page; when he was broke you took care of him, when he was not he took care of you. It was above economics.

“Now, would Ellsworth Bunker like the Mothers of Invention?” he’d say. (He wanted to rig loudspeakers around the Lower House and along the park facing it and play the freakiest music he could find as loud as the equipment would permit.)

“On your head, Page,” Flynn would say.

“No. I ask you, would William C. Westmoreland dig the Mothers or wouldn’t he?”

His talk was endlessly referential, he mixed in images from the war, history, rock, Eastern religion, his travels, literature (he was very widely read and proud of it), but you came to see that he was really only talking about one thing, Page. He spoke of himself in the third person more than anyone I ever knew, but it was so totally ingenuous that it was never offensive. He could get very waspish and silly, he could be an outrageous snob (he was a great believer in the New Aristocracy), he could talk about people and things in ways that were nearly monstrous, stopping short of that and turning funny and often deeply tender. He carried all kinds of clippings around with him, pictures of himself, newspaper stories about the times he’d been wounded, a copy of a short story that Tom Mayer had written about him in which he got killed on an operation with the Korean Marines. He was especially vain about that story, very proud and completely spooked by it. That first week back, he’d had things brought
around to where he could remember them again, remembering that you could get killed here, the way he almost had those other times, the way he had in the story.

“Look
at you,” he’d say, coming into the room at night. “Every one of you is
stoned
. Look at you, what are you doing there if it isn’t rolling a joint? Grinning, Flynn, grinning is sinning. Dope is hope. Help! Give us a bit of that, will you? I ain’t doin’ no evil, give us just a toke. Ahhhhh, yesh! It
can’t
be my turn to change the record because I’ve only just come in. Are any birds coming by? Where are Mimsy and Poopsy? [His names for two Australian girls who dropped over some evenings.] Women is good, women is necessary, women is definitely good for business. Yesh.”

“Don’t smoke that, Page. Your brain is already about the consistency of a soggy quiche lorraine.”

“Nonsense, utter nonsense. Why don’t you roll a five-handed joint while I prepare a steamboat for this ugly, filthy roach?” He’d jab his misshapen left index finger at you to underline key words, taking the conversation wherever his old child’s whimsey took his thoughts, planning projects which ranged from full-scale guerrilla ops in New York City to painting the front of the hotel in Day-Glo colors in the belief that the Vietnamese would love it. “They’re all stoned all the time anyway,” he’d say. If any girls showed up, he’d tell them lurid stories about the war, about the Middle East (both he and Flynn had caught a couple of days of the June War, flying down from Paris for it), about venereal diseases he’d had, talking to them the way he’d talk to anybody. He only had one way of speaking, it could have been to me or the Queen, it didn’t matter. (“What do you mean, of
course
I love the Queen. The Queen’s a very lovable bird.”) If he was too absorbed to talk, he’d stand in front of a full-length mirror and dance to the Doors for an hour at a time, completely lost in it.

When Saigon became quiet again during the third week of May, it seemed as though the war had ended. Nothing was happening anywhere, and I realized that after seven months straight of this I needed some time out. Saigon was the place where you always noticed how tired your friends looked anyway; a place needs a lot of character for that, and in Saigon you could look perfectly marvelous one day and then perfectly terrible the next, and friends were telling me about it. So while Flynn went up for a month with the 4th Division Lurps, walking point on unearthly four-man night patrols through the Highlands (he came back from that one with three rolls of exposed film), I left for a month in Hong Kong, followed by practically everyone I knew. It was like moving my scene intact to more pleasant surroundings, a recess session. Page came over to buy expensive toys: more cameras, a fish-eye lens, a Halliburton. He stayed for a week and talked of nothing but how awful Hong Kong was, how Singapore was much, much groovier. When I got back to Vietnam in early July, he and I spent ten days in the Delta with the Special Forces, and then we went to Danang to meet Flynn. (Page called Danang “Dangers,” with a hard g. In a war where people quite seriously referred to Hong Kong as “Hongers” and spoke of running over to Pnompers to interview Sukie, a British correspondent named Don Wise made up a Vietnam itinerary: Canters, Saigers, Nharters, Quinners, Pleikers, Quangers, Dangers and Hyoo-beside-the-Sea.)

Page’s helmet decor now consisted of the words
HELP, I’M A ROCK!
(taken from another Zappa song) and a small Mao button, but he didn’t have much chance to wear it. Things were still quiet everywhere, fini la guerre, I wanted to leave in September and it was already August. We went out on operations, but all of them were without contact. That was fine with me, I didn’t want contact (what the hell for?), that
month in Hong Kong had been good in a lot of ways, one of them being the leisure it offered me to recall with some precision just how awful Vietnam could be. Away from it, it was a very different place. We spent most of August on China Beach sailing and goofing, talking to Marines who’d come down for in-country R&R, coming back in the late afternoons to the press center by the Danang River. It was perfectly peaceful, better than any vacation could be, but I knew that I was going home, I was short, and a kind of retrospective fear followed me everywhere.

In the bar of the press center, Marines and members of the Naval Support Activity, all information specialists, would gather after a long day in the IO Shop to juice a little until it got dark enough for the movie to start outside. They were mostly officers (no one under E-6 was allowed in the bar, including a lot of combat grunts whom many of us had tried to bring in for drinks over the past year), and there was a constant state of mistrust between us. The Marines from the Combat Information Bureau seemed to like most civilian reporters about as well as they liked the Viet Cong, maybe a little less, and we grew sick of their constant attempts to impose Marine order on our lives there. That winter, you’d return to the press center from places that were too terrible to believe, and a lot of our tack would become impaired in transit, causing stupid quarrels over things like tee shirts and shower clogs in the dining room and helmets worn in the bar. We’d walk in now from China Beach and they’d all look at us, wave, laugh harshly and ask us how it was going.

“We’re winning,” Flynn would say cryptically, smiling pleasantly, and they’d smile back uncertainly.

“Look how nervous Page makes them,” Flynn said. “He really makes the Marines nervous.”

“Freak,” Page said.

“No, honest to God, I mean it. Look, the minute he walks
in they sort of shy like ponies, they move just a little closer together. They don’t like your hair, Page, and you’re a foreigner, and you’re insane, you really spook the shit out of them. They might not be sure of how they feel about this war, some of them may even think it’s wrong, some of them may dig Ho a little bit, they’re not sure about a lot of things, but they’re sure about you, Page. You’re the enemy. ‘Kill Page!’ You wait, man. Wait, Page.”